"Richard Hell moved to New York City in the late sixties, a seventeen-year-old runaway from Kentucky, and began a career as a poet. In 1973, he and his childhood friend Tom Verlaine founded Television, a seminal rock band that, alongside the Ramones and the Patti Smith Group, spearheaded a new kind of musical attitude being heralded across lower Manhattan, one centered on a brash physicality and no-frills instrumentation that produced a visceral, cathartic effect."
"What is now thrown around as a starry-eyed declaration of free will began as a violent pledge-if you don't give me what I want, I'll take it anyway. A few moments later, Falstaff offers the money to a maid instead, and Pistol, rebuffed, makes another, not so famous announcement: 'This puncke,' he proclaims, 'is one of Cupid's carriers.'"
Richard Hell, a seminal punk musician and poet, wrote 'Godlike,' which has been reissued by New York Review Books Classics twenty-one years after initial publication. The novel transposes a notorious affair between nineteenth-century French poets to 1970s New York City. Hell moved to New York as a seventeen-year-old runaway from Kentucky and began his career as a poet. In 1973, he co-founded Television with childhood friend Tom Verlaine, a seminal rock band that, alongside the Ramones and Patti Smith Group, pioneered a new musical attitude in lower Manhattan characterized by brash physicality and no-frills instrumentation. The novel explores themes of sex, violence, punks, and self-determination, echoing similar motifs found in Shakespeare's 'The Merry Wives of Windsor.'
Read at The New Yorker
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