An Ode to Goad
Because inspiration is complicated.
When I started writing in January, I committed publicly and privately to penning a piece a week. I liked the roundness of it, and for a while, it worked fine; when you’re in the flow, you can’t understand why you put such strict limits on yourself. When you smash against the dam, you can’t believe you ever wrote anything at all.
This past fortnight, I’ve not had much inspiration. I’m not sure I’ll summon much now. But a once-immense source is fully, wholly, and undeniably dead, at 65, from undisclosed cause.
Jim Goad, it’s been reported, has passed away.
This is no obituary. Perhaps that’d be nice; I’ve seen an alarming absence of them out in the wild, and write-ups of his storied career have been relegated to fringe sites. Revolutionaries are often glazed over. Instead of enjoying the fame and acclaim themselves, it’s dispensed to their talented inspirees who, while still doing good work, don’t have to be quite so radical. In the ‘90s, Jim was an immutable pillar of transgressive writing; he was to Gen-X misanthropy what John Waters was to Boomer decadence - the culture’s logical conclusion. His zine, Answer Me!, inspired an infinity of imitators, and crossed every line before any of them had a chance1. More famous, widely-lauded counter-culture figureheads got to be Nirvana and R.E.M. and The Smiths and Brian Eno and Sonic Youth, but Jim was The Velvet Underground - with even more Nico.
Arguably too much; Jim didn’t make it easy to love him. Even if you managed, he wouldn’t want it. At least that’s how he behaved - goad by name, goad by nature. His autobiography – Shit Magnet, written in prison – is misleading in every respect apart from details of his life. Nobody could dispute his life was full of ‘shit’, but ‘magnet’ misplaces the blame. Jim, at every opportunity, ran headlong into ‘shit’. He couldn’t help himself. Often it landed at the feet - and on the face - of people who didn’t deserve it. For all the hell he faced in adulthood where the nuns could no longer reach him, it’s hard to point the finger in any direction other than squarely between Jim’s eyes. He was abusive, arrogant, baiting, and hard to take. In life as he was in text.
I read a lot as a kid, and much less as a young man. I blame the teachers; schools made books seem lame. Under their demoralising guidance, novels became morality tales. When they weren’t that, they were objects of detached study. The inexplicable magic of the written word was dissected into the mechanics of metaphors, similes and structures, left useless like piles of amputated limbs. Everything was soft and friendly, at a time when I was growing sick of either. It’s like they wanted me to hate reading. When I wanted frightening, they overlooked Lovecraft and King in favour of sanitised vampire novellas. When I wanted drama, I got a 16th-century playwright I already knew about. When I wanted funny, I was shown the exact same 16th-century playwright.
‘Wit’, to the educating classes, is synonymous with Shakespeare; they can’t wait to tell you how parcel-tongued the old limey could be. I believed them, until I heard something like “Sell while you can, you are not for all markets!” and swiftly realised English teachers, cradling their splitting ribs at the front of the class, are the biggest squares in the history of four-sides.
I was 19 when I bought a second-hand copy of Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto in a despairing third-rate bookshop. I didn’t know what I was buying, and I don’t know now why I picked it. I only remember how intense it sounded, and the disbelief of reading it. Opening the book to a wall of slurs, and turning the page to find another, and then another. Turning and turning and turning, wading through the bile until he finally made a point. Before I knew it, I was finished.
For 200-odd pages, Jim took to sacred cows like oxen in Apocalypse Now. It was like hearing Napalm Death for the first time, or watching Irreversible; the fury was hypnotising. Run-on sentences of unfettered, unallowed abuse. I’d never read anything like it. I still haven’t. His please-no-one attitude, in a time of tiresome please-everyone writing, was a geyser of replenishing sulphur. His cruelty, made crueller by his wit, renegade mastery of language, and unbelievable talent for turn-of-phrase, were a bolt of black lightning through my sleeping heart. For American writers, I set him next to Melville, Hemingway, and Twain. His ability to invert was second-to-none. He’d make you hate what you loved and love what you loathed. With just English, he could make a hot stack of syrupy pancakes sound as foul as medical run-off, and make the drunk skank busy getting her chunder all over the dive-bar dancefloor smell like your beloved bride on your wedding night.
I didn’t know you could write like that. I didn’t know you could be that mean.
Goad was the Shakespeare those nerds promised me – a writer who wrote as viciously as human beings think. His barbs, whipped mercilessly at the guilty and the innocent and the bystanders, were medium-shattering glimpses into his, and our, ugliness. Reading him, you saw the worst of yourself, staring back from the page, read aloud in an even meaner voice. It was like the bathtub crank he described in his accounts of work-knackered poverty. I was hooked, and my parents couldn’t afford rehab.
If you find it hard to look past the violence and the spite and the mud and the blood and the beer, I understand; Jim said and did things that repulse even me, the chairman of his fan club. Yet, despite everything and all his best efforts, I can’t shake that warmth, nor deny the effect he had. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time and it changed my life. When I started writing, I made a rule to be honest, and as generous with my worst features as I could be. It’s quite easy - and amazingly tempting - to make yourself look good. It’s also dull, and not what words are for. His work is a reminder of what language is capable of, of what a writer can do when he sets his mind to it. His are the only words that make me wince.
That might be the only compliment he’d have ever accepted.
And if you haven’t read ‘Ode To Bucky Goad’, do yourself a favour and do. Even if you think Jim Goad is the worst guy in the world. In fact, especially if you do. It remains the only piece of writing to have reduced me to tears.
Perhaps this is an obituary.
I would tell people he's one of my favorite authors, but a total asshole. A brilliant mind with a bipolar personality. Best enjoyed from a distance, as personal interactions tended to arouse his unjustified ire.
He's finally somewhere he doesn't have to endure other people.
“…who wrote as viciously as humans think…”
Yes, exactly. That is what drew me to Goad’s writing, and before that, zines in general. And after that, the first generation of blogs. Unfettered, unmediated writing. It’s rare and when you stumble upon it in its highest form, it lifts you off your seat.
He was a giant asshole who later sunk into a parody of himself and his most odious views, but as a writer, he was unmatched in the 90s. He made Palahniuk and that whole cohort seem silly and unnecessary.