The Georgie Gust Exhibit

Wednesday, January 20, 2016: Status update: voice to text via mobile phone; please overlook typos and syntax: Here is a link to some of my literature as I transition from Amazon onto complimentary reading and book sites, freely available for anybody to read, download and or sell that's your fancy. I write what I write, and I invest 99% of my net worth on Wall Street, as volatile as the stock markets and world economy and outlook is. I am in fact one of the winners this year on Wall Street, while most individuals and institutions, not to mention the traditional hedge fund managers, they are all taking losses this year in 2016. I am however up 16% this year in 2016 and like my father, Wall Street wizard, has commented my expectations of the securities I purchase, buy and sell, my style is brilliant. I have been offered positions as CEO of several partnership corporations to invest up to $15 billion of other people's money. Bring in an excellent salary plus a 2% commission as a hedge fund manager. I declined all this offers. I purchased my first stock at age 11 for $100 of saved allowance money and brought in $25,000 a few years later, investing in the copper industry at the time. I continue to go against what has been recommended, to be in the markets at all, but I am and will remain there. I will win. I feel happy, winning, beating the Street, the S&P index, and I will continue to write, even if it means offering free PDFs of my literature self-published by choice with funds utilized for editorial hackwork and other self-publishing requirements. Leaving Amazon and most other traditional booksellers, Barnes and Noble, and so forth, I have set up a website which I will eventually publish my literary work, on booksshouldbefreeonline.com. For now, I await the downfall and loss of the business of selling art. Books SHOULD be FREE. And I assure you there will never be another book, which I do not provide to the world for free. My thoughts? They're free. This "loss" is a benefit. There is good in it. As a follower of this page commented recently, “Keep trucking brother. You're a gift to this world.” Thank you, LeeAnn. I will move on! I will move on! Thank you, thanks to all of you for making my time and my work worthwhile. I will be featured in several magazines for literature and film, having just won another audience award online, and I have done an interview with them with my loving wife’s assistance, and 4 of my books are up for a National Book Award. So I will “keep trucking.” All of you on this page inspire me. I need you to know that. In summary, I have had a falling out with my editors at the scam company out of Canada called Scribendi, and now Amazon, regardless of my last book being taken down. I will be removing my Amazon page and all other sale channels of distribution. Everything I do, artistically will before long be FREE. If you are for any reasons unable to find or have anything I produce artistically, I will ensure that I send you whatever it may be, even fine art, out of my pocket, or as many know, his means my trust fund, as my father and I, my dad, is the sole and primary trustee of my generous inheritance. Thank you. Thank you! Below is a link of starters. I have to get back toward now. I find failure, and going through the losses I have lost in my lifetime, a loss is real, Porcelain Utopia, my patents, my industry, my life, my work, my purpose. I carry on! I put a face on this disease, and I know it. I am real. I am visceral. I have nothing else to lose; rather I have nothing left that I would be unhappy to lose, for example, money on Wall Street as the world economy is currently in a state of severe volatile and uncertainty. I have been given three years of life to live, and as my wife told me on January 17th, my 40th birthday, she will (and I will) make it to 50! I just turned 40. I reek of success and resilience. I am proud. I am me. Feeling symptomatic but hanging in there, in here for the long the

Dear Readers, Fans, Friends, and Family here on Facebook and Twitter: To Stand One's Ground!

Email from Author Jonathan Harnisch to Amazon.com and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos:

Maureen, Dad: Since I am not permitted to invest or write, what is worth living for? Answer me! Otherwise, please provide me with a new editor, and at this point an important publishing house to eliminate this Amazon waste of time and put me on a pedestal, not a prison. No further discussion. Dad, please forward this to Jeff Bezos while I am symptomatic, here at 1:30 AM with the AMZN, Scribendi, etc., BS, pardon the French.

Reference ID: XXX XXX XXX

Please see the description of the book and the link to the interior on the final page, www.facebook.com/jwharnisch "The idea behind this short book is to include some of Jonathan Harnisch's old Facebook and blog posts about living with severe mental illness, cognitive decline and terminal physical disabilities. The writing captures the essence of what he experiences living with severe mental illness and physical disabilities." I am the owner of several blogs, more than 30. Look, I have had it up to my neck with the algorithms that Amazon.com uses justifiably to reduce or put an end to copyright infringement, which I fully understand. In the meantime, other individuals have often hacked into Amazon.com and sell MY work for their financial benefit, but you seldom punish them. I will say this, I write fictionalized autobiographical and sometimes straightforward biographical literature, praised across the globe, won awards, considered brilliant, featured in various magazines from Publishers Weekly to Writers Digest among others, even taught at the university level, moreover, when I was 15 in 1991 I assisted CEO Jeff Bezos, with the help of my father, who helped launch Amazon in 1994. If you will not accept that I might decide to post or publish my work, moreover my life story living with schizophrenia and other mental and physical illness and disability without getting a feeler for what my audience, online reaching over 100 million readers, then feel free to disable my Amazon account. I will then proceed to litigate. And I will win. Listen I do what I do, I get a feel for what works and what does not online and then publish accordingly. I know what I am doing. The bottom line is I have what is called life rights. I can't infringe upon the copyright of my life. Hence, would you suggest as a fix to this all-to-often matter of my alleged and accusatory plagiarism of my life by publishing all my work as public domain? Work with me here. 1.) You have the monopoly of bookselling and 2.) I refuse to publish traditionally. Fix this or remove me. Your algorithms are malicious, and your CEO is as his original and still running URL relentlesss.com seems fitting. That is all I have to say. You have attacked my character. I am appalled. My cell number is XXX XXX XXX or if you wouldn’t mind, please call my wife or write her at XXX XXX XXX or call her at XXX XXX XXX. Her name is Maureen. I am incapacitated and live with terminal illness, and I have as I said had it up to my neck with your ongoing accusations. My writing is original, and I refuse to "prove" it, much less to a computer, not even a real person. Waking up to another email like this that you have sent is appalling. Thumbs down to you. I am a sick and troubled man, and I put my LIFE, my full heart, and soul into my work, and you accuse me of fraud. You stole my patent for the interface for modern Internet shopping and then accuse me of theft and threaten to remove my account. Do as you will and audit me. I find your accusations and attacks malicious, and I need you to treat me with the same respect and dignity of which I deserve. I have spent millions of dollars since the 90s on Amazon.com. I have also sold my position of AMZN stock this year. I am one of the good guys here. I invite you to proceed, as you will. What you have done is undeniab

Author Jonathan Harnisch often writes about alter egos who live with the same mental disorders that he does, including schizophrenia and Tourette’s syndrome. The protagonist of this coming- of-age novel is Georgie Gust, a character who has appeared in the author’s previous novels as a sexual fetishist and even another character’s alter ego. For readers who may have explored other Harnisch novels, it’s best to think of Georgie as the blank canvas on which the author hangs his tales and not try to unify Georgie’s mythology.

Here, Georgie appears as an angry young man in the mold of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. He’s been banished by his alcoholic mother to a boarding school in Connecticut and we meet him during a suicidal episode in a graveyard. Georgie experiences his mental illness as a literal monkey on his back; he is also dangerously self-medicating. The prose is as electrifying as it is terrifying. “Out of the wild jungle one day, rejoining me in full costume, the horn-headed monkey returns to its residence in me,” Georgie says. “This time, it was going to try and kill me, the son- of-a-bitch.”

The majority of the novel concerns Georgie’s relationship with classmate Claudia Nesbitt, and hijinks with his buddy “Fitzie.” Georgie has thoughtful debates with his Catholic girlfriend about the nature of God and she encourages him to embrace his mental illness, even as his self- destructive nature threatens to destroy him. Much like the title character in Good Will Hunting, Georgie’s redemption is somewhat expedient, but the character’s voice is utterly compelling and Harnisch inhabits his troubled young hero with compassion and grace. A bittersweet postscript finds Georgie still struggling but determined to triumph: "The consciousness of life is higher than life, and the knowledge of happiness is higher than happiness,” he notes. “And, that’s what we have to fight against. I’ll continue from now on to fight.”

The author’s authenticity no doubt comes at great personal cost, but his writing is elevated by his personal experience. This story deserves an admiring audience.

-- BlueInk Review

In this slim volume of personal essays, the prolific New Mexico novelist, filmmaker and mental health advocate Jonathan Harnisch provides heart-wrenching insights into his long battle with schizophrenia. A gifted writer who has weathered seven suicide attempts and more than 30 hospitalizations, Harnisch speaks with chilling authority about “the shattered stained glass” of a disease whose terrifying hallucinations keep him from distinguishing between “what is real and what is not.”

As in Harnisch's earlier books—notably, his 803-page semi-autobiographical novel, Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography—the 40-year-old author's moods alternate between optimism (“I always do my best to keep things positive”) and bleak despair (“The old me disappears as I fall deeper and deeper into oblivion”), but his goals always remain clear: to burn off “the fog of schizophrenia” and put an end to the stigma associated with mental illness, and the maltreatment of its victims.

Harnisch's bio, as he relates it here, is fascinating. A privileged graduate of Choate and New York University's film school, he calls himself “an unemployed artist with a botched trust fund and a life that, in terms of conventional reality, doesn't actually exist.” Also diagnosed with an array of other “comorbidities” (PTSD, Tourette's Syndrome, autism, etc.), he writes, for self-therapy, only when sleepless and symptomatic, producing the raw, anguished, truth of a survivor. In his dark mood, he tells us he is friendless and cut off from family, reduced to having philosophical conversations “with the store clerks at the Quick Fix on Maple Street”; but later, he praises his loving wife and the company of their three dogs and seven cats.

What's “real?” What's imagined? In a life so troubled, we are left with few answers. But Harnisch's harrowing quest for clarity is undeniably real. Mid-book, he seems to address the demon of schizophrenia itself, with moving eloquence: “Love me, hate me, hurt me or kill me. I keep fighting.”

-- BlueInk Review

I opened two gifts this morning. They were my eyes. Good morning! It's another good day to have a great day!

I want to grow. I want to be better. You Grow. We all grow. We're made to grow.You either evolve or you disappear. 

— Tupac Shakur

Harnisch (Second Alibi, 2014, etc.) offers a novel that investigates the fractured mind of a schizophrenic.

“Let’s get the facts straight up front, to avoid any confusion later,” the author states at the start of this wild, candid book. “I am a person first, a human being, just like anyone else. Maybe a little different, that’s all.” That difference is a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and this extensive work explores the realities of mental illness through a whirlwind of fictional, narrative pieces and personal reflections. Along the way, it takes readers to places of depravity and confusion. Its characters include Ben Schreiber, a precocious but mentally ill youngster in Armani jeans, who explains his troubled life to the ever-calm Dr. C, after trying to rob a bank with a cellphone. Schreiber discusses his alter ego, Georgie Gust, a masochist and foot-fetishist, who’s wealthy enough to pay his neighbor Claudia to torture him; indeed, he seems capable of enduring any type of humiliation, so long as it doesn’t involve actually working. The first-person narrator regularly interrupts the proceedings to offer generally off-topic details: “(Parenthetical Pet Peeve) Commercials for unappetizing products shown at meal times…feminine hygiene products, jock itch, yeast infections, etc.” The scattered narrative uses diverse literary mechanisms, to say the least, mixing elements such as journal entries, a screenplay, a straightforward melodrama involving a Tourette’s sufferer at a private school, occasional celebrity name-dropping (“I met Joanna Cassidy, Dick Van Dyke, Robert Downey Jr, Mel Gibson, and others”), and a dapper figure named John Marshal, who, when asked his opinion of a party, responds, “I’d scarcely be a good judge of that…. My life is taken up with writing.” Making sense of it all in any traditional way, it would seem, isn’t really the point. From horrific scenes of child abuse (“She did. She raped me. My grandmother”) to glimpses of triumph (“I can start taking control of my life”), this long book’s many scenes of anguish and hope are difficult to take in, by any estimation. Whether readers will find the difficulty worthwhile depends largely on their tolerance for twisted tales.

A repetitive, explicit, fractured, lengthy and honest book, with an overall effect that mimics the confusion of its title.

Afflicted with schizophrenia, Tourette’s Syndrome and other mental illnesses, the prolific and gifted Jonathan Harnisch has transformed the harrowing raw material of his life into what he calls “transgressive fiction” in semi-autobiographical novels such as Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography and Living Colorful Beauty. With Second Alibi: The Banality of Life, he revisits the abrasive, triangular psychodrama of his brilliant, questing psychotic Ben Schreiber, Ben’s libertine alter-ego, Georgie Gust, and the sadistic temptress, Claudia Nesbitt, who torments them both, while also including a moving plea for understanding that stands apart from the disturbed fevers of his fiction.

“This is a story, I hope, about my coming to enlightenment,” Harnisch writes, and in that vein he enlightens us, too, about the fantastic terrors of schizophrenia: “What this life is like with the ups and the downs, the confusion, the love and the hate; the black and the white.” He tells us about his moods abruptly shifting 25 times in an hour, his suicide attempts and addictions, the grim realities of sleep deprivation and the fear that his beloved wife has been reading his mind.

Second Alibi toggles unpredictably between semi-coherent rage (Harnisch says he often writes when symptomatic) and cool detachment, and it deploys several forms: Harnisch’s sexually-charged fiction (Claudia is “a slow-moving serpent with a tongue of fire and the ass of a bombshell”); a 106-page screenplay featuring dialogues between Ben and his old antagonists, and with his life-saving therapist, “Dr. C”; self-lacerating entries from “Georgie Gust’s” 2005 diary, and the author’s clear explanations of his condition, apparently written at moments when his symptoms have subsided.

At times, Harnisch is energized by the very power of his illness. “The mind and the sickness is all so sublime,” he writes, “the heart of living, colorful beauty.” But in his most lucid moments, this brave and eloquent writer struggles mightily to escape the dark woods of madness: “As always, my journey continues, on and on.”

The author of this deeply moving portrait of a schizophrenic is afflicted himself with schizo-affective disorder, Tourette’s Syndrome and a few other things. Jonathan Harnisch even calls himself “the king of mental illness.” Given those obstacles, it’s a wonder he can write anything, much less a semi-autobiographical novel as fiercely intelligent and finely crafted as this one.

First, a caveat: At 803 pages, Harnisch’s cleverly named “alibiography” contains all the repetitions and anomalies you might expect from a writer with serious demons. There’s also some gibberish. Sample: “Make it and makeshift it. Prototype it! Grab it! Snag it!”

Little matter. The protagonist, a disturbed trust-funder named Benjamin J. Schreiber, who has a self-destructive alter ego called Georgie Gust boiling inside his head, may be the most compelling character in the literature of madness since A Beautiful Mind’s John Nash. Unable to cope with dark childhood traumas, reclusive Ben transfers his fears and obsessions to his extroverted creation, Georgie, who falls into the clutches of a cruel sado-masochist lover, Claudia Nesbitt. That means Ben suffers too, of course, and Harnisch’s depictions of inner torment are harrowing. When Ben tries to hang himself, the scene reverberates with authorial knowingness.

Ben descends into drug addiction. He tries to rob a bank in Pasadena. He spends years in a mental ward as “everything I don’t want to be.” Luckily, he also comes under the care of a gifted psychiatrist, “Dr. C,” who unlocks the secrets of his past and gives Ben hope. All he’s ever dreamed of—what the author obviously wants, too-—is some “seemingly impossible peace of mind, through complete honesty and self-love, by any means necessary.”

For Harnisch, those means seem to have included writing this powerful, heart-wrenching and clearly self-therapeutic book, even though his alter ego, Ben, feels obliged to apologize to the reader “for all the utter confusion, chaos and inconsistencies here within.” No apology necessary.

-- Blue Ink Book Review

Inspiration For The Happy Heart [We're In This Together] Reconciliation With My Father And Family | Monday, January 18, 2016, 5:00 AM (MST)