Business Trip (24 pages), Fuckin’ Battery Park Crackheads (28 pages), Five Stories (39 pages)

Travel with Louis on the train to Ottawa. Hang out with junkies in Montreal, Louis’s home turf. Check out the crackheads in NYC’s Battery Park. All for only 75 cents an adventure. Louis has a gift for making the trivial seem astonishing, the mundane feel new and exciting, and the just plain stupid seem funny and almost beautiful. One of my favourite stories is the one Louis tells on the inside front cover of each of these 3 tiny books: “This book was prepared on a computer with a word processing program. The fonts chosen from those available were CG Omega (bold and italicized) for titles, CG Times for the text. Page number was added using the program. After the text was edited and put in order, the margins were set to slightly less than 1/6 the size of an 8 1/2″ x 14″ legal sheet of paper, with the text in the bottom righthand corner of the paper. If the story was 40 pages long, it would need 10 pieces of paper printed on both sides. Two sets of ten squares were drawn side by side, symbolizing the sides of each page. On each square the numbers of its two pages were written.” It’s such trivial stuff, yet the way Louie does it, it almost sounds important. Not all of Louis’s stories take such benign material as their subjects. In one story he talks about a conversation he had with a friend who had been in Bosnia and had seen what was going on in the war there: “One time someone he knew was mourning over the body of their mother, who lay there freshly killed by a bombing run. An American journalist ran up with a camera and started enthusiastically offering them $50 to let him take a picture of her – her face was blown right off. My friend told me he pulled the journalist away, he and some other people tried to tell him to just keep to himself, this was a very solemn time, many people had just died.” Whether the story is about war, or about how Louis puts together his little books, there is a sense of innocence that tells you Louis really believes in what he’s doing; he doesn’t have to shout or rant or be clever about how he tells his tales. As Louis himself puts it in his “About the author” blurb: “All the stories I write are true stories, as I’m way too busy to sit around making stuff up.” (KS)

chapbooks / publisher: Spontaneous Productions / main creator: Louis Rastelli / 75 cents each plus two stamps / box 1232, succ. Place d’Armes, Montreal, Que. H2Y 3K2

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