Drawings by Raymond Pettibon. From Weirdo #13, Summer, 1985, Last Gasp.
“Wash”
by
Stuart Dybek
In a slip that is the only thing pink about the day, she strains from the décolletage of a third-story window. Rain beats her with an intensity reserved for glass while she reels in the pulley line hand over hand, a shoulder strap down, a breast nearly slipping free as clothespins drop from between her teeth, just before she disappears into white furls, fighting in the sheets as the L streams by with its cargo of eyes.
All you’ll ever know of her is what you’ve already learned about hanging out wash.
Two new titles this October from indie powerhouse Dorothy: What Remains by Brais Lamela (in translation by Jacob Rogers) and Denise Rose Hansen’s Blue Sunset.
Here’s Dorothy’s description of What Remains:
Shifting between the present and the archival past, New York City and the remote mountains of Negueira de Muñiz, What Remains follows a young scholar’s journey into a forgotten episode of the Franco regime, uncovering both the tragic history and the still-present afterlife of a forced resettlement project in the Galician countryside of the 1950s.
Like the hybrid works of Valeria Luiselli, Nathalie Léger, and Cristina Rivera Garza, Galician writer Brais Lamela’s prize-winning debut novel blends fiction, memoir, essay, and archival research to set history in conversation with contemporary reality. The result is a work of striking intimacy that explores, with subtle prose and arresting imagery, the complexity of modern migration and the legacy of twentieth-century colonization.
Dorothy compares Hansen’s Blue Sunset to Ann Quin; I’m there:
At a conference somewhere in Europe, Maja meets the Author. Haunted by a recent tragedy, she leaves with him unexpectedly to his home on the Italian coast, where she wanders into the rhythms of his life, observing the world through the lens of his days. Yet everywhere over their new and tender intimacy hangs the knowledge that soon she will have to return home to Copenhagen, site of her devastating loss. With echoes of Virginia Woolf and Ann Quin, Denise Rose Hansen paints with spare, deft lyricism the complicated landscape of grief and yearning that Maja crosses over on her journey toward something new.
“On the Train”
by
Gene Wolfe
When I look out the window, the earth seems to have become liquid, rushing to flow over a falls that is always just behind the last car. Wherever that may be. The telephone poles reel like drunks, losing their footing. The mountains, white islands in the fluid landscape, track us for miles, the hills breaking to snow on their beaches.
The entire universe can be contained in three questions, of which the first two are: How long is the train? And from what station does it originate?
I do not remember boarding, although my mother, who was here in the compartment with us until a moment ago, told me she recalled it very well. I was helped on by a certain doctor, she said. I would go up and down the cars looking for him (and her), but one cannot thus look for a doctor without arousing the anxiety of the other passengers or exciting their suspicions. Certainly, however, I did not get on at the station of origin; my mother told me that she herself had already been riding for over thirty years.
The porter’s name is Flip; he was once my dog, a smooth fox terrier. Now he makes our berths and brings coffee and knows more about the train than any of us. He can answer all the unimportant questions, although his answers are so polite it is hard to tell sometimes just what he means. My wife and I (all the children we helped aboard have gone to other cars) would like to make him sit with us. But he threatens to call his uncle, the Dawn Guard.
I have formed several conjectures concerning the length of the train. It is surely either very long or very short, since when it goes around a curve (which it seldom does) I cannot see the engine. Possibly it is infinite—but it may be of a closed as well as an open infinity. If the track were extended ever westward, forming a Great Circle, and all that track were filled with cars, would not the spinning earth rush past them endlessly? That is precisely what I see from the window. On the other hand, if straight trackage were laid (and most of it does seem to be straight) it would extend forever among the stars. I see that too. Perhaps I do not see the engine because the engine is behind us.
At every moment it seems that we are stopping, but we continue and even pick up speed. The mountains crowd closer, as if to ram us by night. I lie in my berth listening to the conductor (so called because he was struck by lightning once) come down the car checking our tickets in the dark.
“St. Lazarus Contemplating the Image of a Goose” by Maxon Crumb. From Weirdo #9, January, 1983, Last Gasp.
I picked up a copy of Gene Wolfe’s 1972 novel The Fifth Head of Cerberus on Friday afternoon. I’d been hoping to find a more interesting-looking edition, but the Tor Essentials hardback with an introduction by Brian Evenson fit handsomely and handily in my hands, and I haven’t had any luck hunting old Wolfes lately. After reading and then rereading his wonderful 1975 novel Peace a week or so ago, I found myself wanting more of that weird flavor. And while Cerberus isn’t as masterful or achieved as Peace, it is similarly confounding, a puzzle that baits its reader via any number of rhetorical feints, traps, false doors.
I used the term novel above to describe The Fifth Head of Cerberus. I think that is the appropriate term, although cursory research will show you that the book comprises three novellas. I had known or understood this going into reading Cerberus, but somewhere I had read that the novellas worked together (intertextually? metatextually?) to cohere into a novelly-novel. I dutifully skipped Brian Evenson’s introduction — which I promise I will read when I begin re-reading Cerberus later tonight — and dug into the title tale on Friday night.
Like Peace, I think Cerberus is best experienced as raw as possible. The great pleasure of reading Wolfe is the disorientation; his narrators will deliver stacks of details at any time that may or may not be of the profoundest importance to the “truth” or “reality” of the narrative; meanwhile, the reader is trying to adjust to the strange (but not-that-strange) world Wolfe is conjuring in his prose. Is this here and now? The past or the future? Are we in alien lanes or human spaces? I think neatly summarizing the work denies a potential reader the pleasure (and challenge) of engaging with the work. To be clear, these novels (Peace and Cerberus) do not rely on gimmicky “spoilers” for their power, but rather work as strange metadetective narratives, where the reader plays the role of investigator.
But a reader will want something more concrete, eh, a little something beyond vague gesturing. Here are some elements that The Fifth Head of Cerberus engages with all three of its pieces: colonialism, cloning, slavery, patricide, twinning, mimesis, adaptation, immortality, vision questing, dream worlds, anthropology, espionage, crime, punishment. And precursor/postcursor texts: Crime and Punishment, Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner (especially As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury), Le Guin’s Hainish novels, the Vietnam War, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, J.G. Ballard, The Vorrh, À la recherche du temps perdu, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fables, Melville’s Benito Cereno (or Pierre or The Confidence Man), Conrad, Pale Fire, Borges (really any Borges, but like especially “Pierre Menard”), any number of “the accounts of the pith helmet and puttee expeditions of the Victorians” (as one of the narrators of the third piece of Cerberus, the key text V.R.T. puts it), Kavan’s Ice, Kafka of course, mythology (all), etc., etc., etc.
But perhaps just a few broad strokes to draw a potential reader in. The first and eponymous piece, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, offers what seems to be a boyhood memoir shaped by a sinister father and a colonial world. The second piece, “A Story,” by John V. Marsch, recasts (and simultaneously complicates and simplifies) that world in a primeval dreamworld vision quest. The novel coheres (this is not the correct verb) through its final, discursive, intertextual section, V.R.T., which both reveals and confounds the previous narratives. V.R.T. offers fragments — reports, lists, transcripts, notebooks, testimony — that reverberate and loop and replay the motifs and mysteries of the previous sections. The reader’s basic questions — who is this person? — is this a person? — collapse into a more unsettling one: who gets to authorize who someone is? Thus identity is never stable, but a production, narrated, copied, inherited, imposed, revised, never quite secured. More thoughts after a second visit.
Study of a Right Hand, 1588 by Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617)
August 15, 1914 Diaries, from Franz Kafka: Dreams, Diaries, and Fragments (1994) by Robert Andrew Parker (1927-2023)
Kafka’s diary entry for 15 Aug. 1914 (trans. by Martin Greenberg with Hannah Arendt):
15 August. I have been writing these past few days, may it continue. Today I am not so completely protected by and enclosed in my work as I was two years ago, nevertheless have the feeling that my monotonous, empty, mad bachelor’s life has some justification. I can once more carry on a conversation with myself, and don’t stare so into complete emptiness. Only in this way is there any possibility of improvement for me. Continue reading “August 15, 1914 Diaries, from Franz Kafka: Dreams, Diaries, and Fragments — Robert Andrew Parker”
Untitled (Self-Portrait) by Anna Kavan (1901-1968)
“Time and Again”
by
Breece D’J Pancake
Mr Weeks called me out again tonight, and I look back down the hall of my house. I left the kitchen light burning. This is an empty old house since the old lady died. When Mr Weeks doesn’t call, I write everybody I know about my boy. Some of my letters always come back, and the folks who write back say nobody knows where he got off to. I can’t help but think he might come home at night when I am gone, so I let the kitchen light burn and go on out the door.
The cold air is the same, and the snow pellets my cap, sifts under my collar. I hear my hogs come grunting from their shed, thinking I have come to feed them. I ought to feed them better than that awful slop, but I can’t until I know my boy is safe. I told him not to go and look, that the hogs just squeal because I never kill them. They always squeal when they are happy, but he went and looked. Then he ran off someplace.
I brush the snow from my road plow’s windshield and climb in. The vinyl seats are cold, but I like them. They are smooth and easy cleaned. The lug wrench is where it has always been beside my seat. I heft it, put it back. I start the salt spreader, lower my shear, and head out to clean the mountain road.
The snow piles in a wall against the berm. No cars move. They are stranded at the side, and as I plow past them, a line falls in behind me, but they always drop back. They don’t know how long it takes the salt to work. They are common fools. They rush round in such weather and end up dead. They never sit still and wait for the salt to work.
I think I am getting too old to do this anymore. I wish I could rest and watch my hogs get old and die. When the last one is close to dying, I will feed him his best meal and leave the gate open. But that will most likely not happen, because I know this stretch of Route 60 from Ansted to Gauley, and I do a good job. Mr Weeks always brags on what a good job I do, and when I meet the other truck plowing the uphill side of this road, I will honk. That will be Mr Weeks coming up from Gauley. I think how I never met Mr Weeks in my life but in a snowplow. Sometimes I look out to Sewel Mountain and see snow coming, then I call Mr Weeks. But we are not friends. We don’t come around each other at all. I don’t even know if he’s got family. Continue reading “Read “Time and Again,” a short story by Breece D’J Pancake”
Palm Lovers Arranged by the Sky by Hawk Alfredson (b. 1960)
Diane Williams’ newest collection I Liked Rex is forthcoming this September from NYRB. I think folks either like what Williams is doing or don’t (or don’t know about her and what she’s doing). I like what she’s doing very much. Here’s NYRB’s jacket copy; after that, a selection from the collection, “I Did Trip Over a Very Small Boy” —
Diane Williams is one of the great masters of the American short story: her tiny, coruscating tales are among the most tender, funny, peculiar, and searching works in all of contemporary literature. I Liked Rex explores sex, love, marriage, and all that comes after; it is a book about living, but more importantly, about how to be alive. Williams’s genius lies as much in what is left unspoken as in what is laid out on the page; behind images of startling beauty and strangeness, entire chamber dramas of the heart unfold, and the pleasure of these sphinxlike tales comes from their unremitting mystery, which is the same mystery fundamental to life and to love. A collection of rare originality and daring, I Liked Rex is a complete and utter delight.
“I Did Trip Over a Very Small Boy”
by
Diane Williams
I did trip over a small boy who fell down and cried and I feared very much that I had kicked him.
He must have been wondering about the mon-ster—me—even after his rescue.
But whose glass was I holding? And which bitter drink had I just tasted when Mother said, “Damn it all!”—and laughed? My mother rarely laughs in my presence.
“I want my wife!” I shouted. I surprised myself. “We’re leaving!”
She was back behind the Wassermans and the Cordells, and that little boy I’d knocked down was with them too, speaking softly. His mother had to bend quite low to listen—his legs, I fig-ured, were no more than a foot long.
First, we had to dodge so many people. I was, however, bound by the low ceiling in Mother’s house, and I feel like a giant in her house.
I heard my wife, Jacquenette, say to Dale Cordell, “All right, then,” and this was jarring because she often says that just before bed, where I can grab her, for starters, and then clamp down. But I don’t really mean clamp down—I mean something much nicer.
In bed, my feet found hers and she said my hand was too heavy and that it hurt her hand to hold mine, so she petted my arm, and I thought that that might serve me.
But I want to try again soon to get a better result, when I’ll go rung by rung to different stages.
Too early, the next evening, Jacquenette looked to be asleep in bed.
“Did I disturb you?” I said, and I advanced with care.
The buffeting noise—perhaps it was a flight of birds I heard through the open window—dis-tracted me.
And yet I did set everything into motion by doing some light tapping on her body that did not cost me anything—my brushless style.
My thoughts were: What do you feel if I do this? If I do this? If I do this?
Still, what about my wife’s face? Its shining surface would repay me for my efforts.
You know, I’d much rather note scenes of ev-eryday life around the house—speak to neighbors, dust.
Odd thing—our oatmeal took twice as long as usual to cook this morning.
I don’t think it liked the pot.
Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville, 1852. Signet Classics (1964). No cover artist or designer credited. 408 pages.
The cover artist is Milton Glaser.
The world is forever babbling of originality; but there never yet was an original man,
A panel from “Pixie Meat” by Tom De Haven, Gary Panter, and Charles Burns. Published in Snake Eyes #1, 1991, Fantagraphics Books.
“Texas”
by
David Berman
first published in Caliban #8, 1990
Along the inner stream I found a hive split open.
I was deep in the country, where they said
I would find swollen dogs and trees covered in dust.
I found a house with windows and a door.
Once a man stumbled into the barn with a fresh axe wound.
I let him clean it out with vodka, then he pulled out
a red gun and told me he was gonna put me in the ground.
The sound made a hundred crows rise out of the field.
I remember sleeping by the pond,
waking up to see crumbled bees on the lips of a brown dog
standing over me.
I just lay there
trying to measure the diameter of its eyes.
I used to think I went there for the everchanging scenery,
or for the way the days just pass away.
They had told me Texas sat on the land,
harvests and oil, ten dimes to the dollar,
one star,
but those aren’t the things I saw.
I couldn’t walk an unbroken line there.
The window sill was a frame,
the state was a house,
and the doormat was on fire.
Biblioklept 