An acid trip down memory lane.
If Alan Ginsberg, or any of the famous Beat Poets, were alive today, they would probably be best friends with Stephen House.
The full text of House’s latest monologue The Ajoona Guest House is currently available online as a chapbook and is a little gem. Chapbooks are interesting. They are small books, usually self-published and more often than not poetry, which are delivered traditionally as hand-stitched pieces of paper, or in our current digital world, as a PDF.
After the premiere performance of The Ajoona Guest House in Adelaide, directed by Rosalba Clemente, this performance monologue is touring Australia, though its content I believe has a global appeal. House has an increasingly large body of work and has won a raft of awards for his poetry and plays. He has a natural and engaging style that works both for performance and reading, though I do suggest if you can’t get to see House perform The Ajoona Guest House monologue live you read it out loud; it brings the atmosphere of the story to life with engaging clarity.
The energy, smells, and sounds of modern India and the India of the ‘60s and ‘70s jump from the pages of this chapbook and drop us into a world of memory driven by the sensual, sexual and confronting world the mature artist experiences in the current India, and the India he experienced as his younger self. It is a journey filled with excitement, discovery, death and danger. It has an underlying need to find closure through experience, both past and present, which has a provocative and sensual core. It activates the power of memory through experience, re-experience, regret, and hope. For the baby-boomers of the world, it is a flashback to a time where we explored and experimented, often with no thought for the consequences, as we found more and more ways to expand and enhance our reality with mind-altering experiences and substances. For the current generation who is searching for motivation, they are given a window into how memory shapes us as we grow and how our past experiences and influences shape our future.
This is a piece of literature that has several homes. It is a short story, a play, and a revisiting of the world of beat poetry; it exists comfortably in all three worlds. As I said at the beginning of this review, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs would have all been on Stephen House’s invitation list to a backyard BBQ. Well worth a read.
Reviewed by Adrian Barnes
This review is the opinion of the reviewer and not necessarily of Glam Adelaide.
Distributed by: in case of emergency press
Released: July 2022
RRP: $10.00
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