“The Question,” a very short story by Stuart Dybek

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“The Question”

by

Stuart Dybek

A mime is climbing stairs. He climbs reluctantly, each leaden step an act of resignation, which may explain why, despite his effort, he’s not ascending. He no more wants to reach the top than a man mounting another kind of stage—a platform where an executioner stands waiting with an ax.

Or perhaps the executioner is seated in a portable director’s chair, puffing through a slit in his hood the cigarette meant for the condemned while stropping the blade of a guillotine that has just failed the cabbage test.

Or perhaps the stairs lead to a hangman tying a knot with the care that his wife expended just that morning braiding their daughter’s hair.

The mime climbs and climbs, but cannot conquer the three-step flight that peaks in the space reserved for him in the mercy seat.

Or perhaps … but wait!

There’s been an error in interpretation. The mime isn’t climbing. All along he’s been marching in place. Still, from his body language, not to mention the look engraved on his face, it’s clear that misinterpretation is not to be confused with a stay of execution.

Okay, then the mime is marching—marching down a buzzing, fluorescent corridor in the bowels of a prison, toward a gurney for an operation that requires only an anesthesiologist and a chaplain.

He is marched at dawn across a deserted square to a send-up of pigeons, and takes his place against the riddled wall that faces an unshaven, disheveled firing squad. Their hungover master of ceremonies, a captain, smelling of women, stands sipping menudo from a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup, sheepishly aware that he has just smoked the cigarette prop. Instead of a sword, the captain raises a blood-red parasol that theatrically pops open. Instead of a sidearm to deliver the coup de grâce, he’s holstered a cell phone that is carrying on its own nonstop, one-way, outraged conversation. As for the blindfold, well, each member of the audience seems to be wearing it. On further inspection, each soldier in the firing squad is wearing one, too. And yet, despite the disordered proceedings, and just before the Ready, aim, etc., command, the captain remembers to ask, “Any last words?”

The Besieged Color — Suzanne Van Damme

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La Couleur Assiégée (The Besieged Color), 1947 by Suzanne Van Damme (1901-1986)

Portrait of Isaku Yanaihara (Detail) — Alberto Giacometti

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Detail from Portrait of Isaku Yanaihara, 1956 by Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966)

Sunday Comix

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A page from Man from Utopia by Rick Griffin, San Francisco Comic Book Company, 1972.

The Orator (Detail) — Magnus Zeller

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Detail from The Orator, c. 1920 by Magnus Zeller (1888-1972)

Posted in Art

Read “A Society,” a short story by Virginia Woolf

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“A Society”

by

Virginia Woolf

This is how it all came about. Six or seven of us were sitting one day after tea. Some were gazing across the street into the windows of a milliner’s shop where the light still shone brightly upon scarlet feathers and golden slippers. Others were idly occupied in building little towers of sugar upon the edge of the tea tray. After a time, so far as I can remember, we drew round the fire and began as usual to praise men—how strong, how noble, how brilliant, how courageous, how beautiful they were—how we envied those who by hook or by crook managed to get attached to one for life—when Poll, who had said nothing, burst into tears. Poll, I must tell you, has always been queer. For one thing her father was a strange man. He left her a fortune in his will, but on condition that she read all the books in the London Library. We comforted her as best we could; but we knew in our hearts how vain it was. For though we like her, Poll is no beauty; leaves her shoe laces untied; and must have been thinking, while we praised men, that not one of them would ever wish to marry her. At last she dried her tears. For some time we could make nothing of what she said. Strange enough it was in all conscience. She told us that, as we knew, she spent most of her time in the London Library, reading. She had begun, she said, with English literature on the top floor; and was steadily working her way down to The Times on the bottom. And now half, or perhaps only a quarter, way through a terrible thing had happened. She could read no more. Books were not what we thought them. ‘Books’ she cried, rising to her feet and speaking with an intensity of desolation which I shall never forget, ‘are for the most part unutterably bad!’

Of course we cried out that Shakespeare wrote books, and Milton and Shelley.

‘Oh yes,’ she interrupted us. ‘You’ve been well taught, I can see. But you are not members of the London Library.’ Here her sobs broke forth anew. At length, recovering a little, she opened one of the pile of books which she always carried about with her—‘From a Window’ or ‘In a Garden’ or some such name as that it was called, and it was written by a man called Benton or Henson or something of that kind. She read the first few pages. We listened in silence. ‘But that’s not a book,’ someone said. So she chose another. This time it was a history, but I have forgotten the writer’s name. Our trepidation increased as she went on. Not a word of it seemed to be true, and the style in which it was written was execrable.

‘Poetry! Poetry!’ we cried, impatiently. ‘Read us poetry!’ I cannot describe the desolation which fell upon us as she opened a little volume and mouthed out the verbose, sentimental foolery which it contained.

‘It must have been written by a woman’ one of us urged. But no. She told us that it was written by a young man, one of the most famous poets of the day. I leave you to imagine what the shock of the discovery was. Though we all cried and begged her to read no more she persisted and read us extracts from the Lives of the Lord Chancellors. When she had finished, Jane, the eldest and wisest of us, rose to her feet and said that she for one was not convinced.

‘Why’ she asked ‘if men write such rubbish as this, should our mothers have wasted their youth in bringing them into the world?’

We were all silent; and in the silence, poor Poll could be heard sobbing out, ‘Why, why did my father teach me to read?’ Continue reading “Read “A Society,” a short story by Virginia Woolf” →

Pink Devil (Detail) — Jean-Michel Basquiat

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Pink Devil (Detail), 1984 by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)

“Some Dread Disease” — Flann O’Brien

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“Some Dread Disease”

by

Flann O’Brien

from

The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman

Keats and Chapman once called to see a titled friend and after the host had hospitably produced a bottle of whiskey, the two visitors were called into consultation regarding the son of the house, who had been exhibiting a disquieting redness of face and boisterousness of manner at the age of twelve. The father was worried, suspecting some dread disease. The youngster was produced but the two visitors, glass in hand, declined to make any diagnosis. When leaving the big house, Chapman rubbed his hands briskly and remarked on the cold.

‘I think it must be freezing and I’m glad of that drink,’ he said. ‘By the way, did you think what I thought about that youngster?’

‘There’s a nip in the heir,’ Keats said.

Sunday Comix

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From “Catholic School” by Penny Moran. Published in Wimmen’s Comix #15, 1989, Rip Off Press. Reprinted in The Complete Wimmen’s Comix, Vol. 2, Fantagraphic Books.

Sewing Machine — Leonor Fini

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Sewing Machine, 1978 by Leonor Fini (1908-1996)

Two by Nancy Lemann (Books acquired, early March 2026)

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NYRB is reissuing Nancy Lemann’s 1985 novel Lives of the Saints next month. Her most recent novel, The Oyster Diaries is a sort of sequel to that early cult novel. From Geoff Dyer’s introduction to Lives of the Saints:

I want to believe that there is always a trail, however faint, leading readers back to a book that, like a hiker lost in the wilderness, is on the brink of perishing. But where does the trail start? In 2020, one of my undergrads at the University of Southern California told me that her mum was a writer. Good for her, I thought. The following week, my student said I’d really like her mum’s writing and offered to bring in a book by her. Um, okay. At the end of the semester, she gave me a harmless-looking paperback called Lives of the Saints, published in 1985 by Louisiana State University Press. I put this little book on a shelf in my office and forgot about it.

In 2023, the writer Heather McGowan texted to tell me about a “bonkers” novel by someone called Nancy Lemann that she was sure I’d like. I ordered it online. Didn’t look very promising: a print-on-demand book published by Louisiana State University Press. But, after the book arrived, I started reading and within half a dozen pages was as besotted as the narrator, Louise, is by Claude, one of the family of “saints” (the Colliers by name) whose lives—and a death—swim around her in a cocktail- and heat-soaked New Orleans. She adores Claude for his generosity, kindness, and wisdom (the three are synonymous in her view), and also because he’s on the brink of dereliction and collapse—as are many people in the book. She hangs on his every word, but these words, delivered in the family’s “curious deadpan” and often unfolding in the midst of binges or their hungover aftermath, are nonsensical, “idiotic.” She can’t stop listening to them, and I couldn’t stop reading them, or those of Claude’s little brother, a boy actually called Saint who, out of nowhere, announces, “There’s a certain meteorite in the sky, and it’s all made up of plasma.” Oh, and let’s not forget Mrs. Stewart, “an intelligent woman” who tells Louise that the thing she remembers most vividly from her youth is either “that little red hat which I wore in the summer of . . . 1912” or the “shoe sizes her friends wore in 1910.” Mrs. Stewart gets on with her daughter-in-law Julia because they happily spend “many hours talking about details of girlhood attire, and other lame-brained elements of clothing through the decades.”

Fatal cause | Emily Dickinson

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Declaiming Waters none may dread –
But Waters that are still
Are so for that most fatal cause
In Nature – they are full –

Departure — Paula Rego

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Departure, 1988 by Paula Rego (1935–2022)

“The Mushroom Drink of the Borgie Well” | From Captain John G. Bourke’s Scatalogic Rites of All Nations

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“The Mushroom Drink of the Borgie Well”

from Scatalogic Rites of All Nations

by

Captain John Gregory Bourke

The following paragraph deserves more than a passing mention:—

“The Borgie well, at Cambuslang, near Glasgow, is credited with making mad those who drink from it; according to the local rhyme,

‘A drink of the Borgie, a bite of the weed,
Sets a’ the Cam’slang folk wrang in the head.’

The weed is the weedy fungi.”—(“Folk-Medicine,” Black, London, 1883, p. 104.)

Camden says that the Irish “delight in herbs, … especially cresses, mushrooms, and roots.”—(“Britannia,” edition of London, 1753, vol. ii. p. 1422.)

Other references to the Siberian fungus are inserted to afford students the fullest possible opportunity to understand all that was available to the author himself on this point.

“Agaricus muscarius is one of the most injurious, yet it is used as a means of intoxication by the Kamtchadales. One or two of them are sufficient to produce a slight intoxication, which is peculiar in its character. It stimulates the muscular powers and greatly excites the nervous system, leading the partakers into the most ridiculous extravagances.”—(American Cyclopædia, New York, 1881, article “Fungi.”)

Agaricus muscarius. “This is the ‘mouche-more’ of the Russians, Kamtchadales, and Koriars, who use it for intoxication. They sometimes eat it dry, and sometimes immerse it in a liquor made with the epilobium, and when they drink this liquor they are seized with convulsions in all their limbs, followed by that kind of raving which attends a burning fever. They personify this mushroom, and if they are urged by its effects to suicide or any dreadful crime, they pretend to obey its commands. To fit themselves for premeditated assassination they recur to the use of the ‘mouche-more.’ A powder of the root, or of that part of the stem which is covered by the earth, is recommended in epileptic cases, and externally applied for dissipating hard, globular swellings and for healing ulcers.”—(Cyclopædia, Philadelphia, no date, Samuel Bradford, vol. i. article “Agaric.”) Continue reading ““The Mushroom Drink of the Borgie Well” | From Captain John G. Bourke’s Scatalogic Rites of All Nations” →

“The Birds” — Emmy Bridgwater

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“The Birds”

by

Emmy Bridgwater

from

Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (ed. Penelope Rosemont)

“The Birds”

One

He pulled the blanket over and he drew up the blind. The yellow mice rushed into their corners. The spiders ran behind the pictures. The lecture began on Christ the Forerunner. Only the very young mice sat still to listen. The blackbirds flying near the window passed the word to each other. “Come on. Here we may find something. Something to put our beaks into.” Snap went the window cord; down came the blind. The birds, disappointed, did the best they could. They flew nearer and nearer the windowpane. It was dangerous. It wasn’t worth it. But they wanted to get the news—to be the first to know—to pass on the news. What had come to the lecture on Christ? Did one still lie under the blankets? The spiders laughed into their hands to think of the birds outside all twittering and over-anxious.

Two

As she walked into the garden the birds flew down to her pecking at her lips, “Don’t do that,” she cried, “It’s mine. I’m alive you know.” “Well, why don’t you wear colors?” She heard them talking. “Dead people walk, but they don’t wear colors. They scream and they talk too.” The birds went on chattering about dead people. They all perched up on the holly bush but they didn’t peck the soft berries. They just stared down at her. All of them stared with their little black beady eyes. They were looking at her red lips.

Three

“Sing a song for the King. Come on, now sing.” The child was shy to start, but her mother, standing behind her gave her a little push which startled her into opening her mouth and she began, “Wasn’t that a dirty dish to set before the king?” “Begin again dear,” whispered her mother, “at the first line,” “O.k. ma,” and she chanted, “Four and twenty black… oooh,” for a peacock had walked in front of her and spread out its tail and croaked “Frico. Frico.” The little girl went very white. “Frico. Frico,” she said. The birds, who had been sitting on the cornice as part of the decoration, flew down into the court and circled about the heads of the King and Courtiers, fluttering as close as possible. All the people flapped their hands helplessly. Suddenly the little girl pointed at the King. “You must get out of here,” she said in a grown-up voice. “This is their Palace.”

Morning — John Koch

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Morning, 1971 by John Koch (1909–1978)

Night — John Koch

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Night, 1964 by John Koch (1909–1978)