Dear Jane, 2024 by Robin F. Williams (b. 1984)
“0”
by
David Berman
first published in Caliban #8, 1990
On the very first day Jah gave light,
and on the second he made the sun and the stars.
It wasn’t long before things were jumping out of the river.
Later there were some wars, mostly soft and bloodless,
with snow falling on the sleeping tanks
and pieces of field glued to their wheels.
No longer all right to eat our young,
we made the Empire State Building and threw things off it,
then drank sidecars and Harvey Wallbangers until 1961.
People were heard to say that the world doesn’t care,
that the walls don’t listen, and the stars only shine on us
because we’re in the way of their light,
but the world continued to spin on its sturdy axis,
and underneath the Christmas trees the trains still ran on time,
while people united in sexual congress let pride feed.
From “Mark 14:53-16:20” by Chester Brown. Published in Yummy Fur #14, January 1989, Vortex Comics.
“The Resurrection Morning”
by
Winifred Holtby
When Mr Barrow died, none of us knew quite what to say to Mrs Barrow. ‘Deepest sympathy in your loss’ perhaps was best, because you can sympathise with fortune as well as with misfortune, and loss may be good riddance of bad rubbish.
Not that Mr Barrow was exactly bad rubbish. The obituary notices called him a ‘prominent citizen of Kingsport,’ and he had been a town councillor and a sidesman at St Agatha’s Church, and left a tidy sum invested in War Loan and corporation stock. A pious man, the vicar of St Agatha’s called him, and sent a cross two feet by one, particularly handsome. Mrs Barrow, however, was not pious. After ten years of married life she had abandoned her belief in God. Her husband could insist upon her attending church, but he could not prevent her from sitting down whenever the rest of the congregation stood up, even during the Creeds. What he said to her after the services we never knew; but Mrs Barrow told me that if the Almighty was such that He could appreciate her husband, Mr Barrow was welcome to Him.
I watched her at the funeral. She was over seventy, a worn-out little woman in her new black. But she held her chin up and her hymn book in both hands, and sang with the perfect confidence of stalwart incredulity:
‘On the resurrection morning
Soul and body meet again . . .’
Of course there was no Resurrection Morning, and there was no God, and Mr Barrow was safely hammered down into his grand mahogany coffin with brass handles. Continue reading ““The Resurrection Morning,” an Easter story by Winifred Holtby”
“Pieces (III)”
by
Katherine Dunn
from the collection
Near Flesh
It was a numb, starless night in the jungle. They were dug in when the attack came, but Davey’s partner in the foxhole was killed by the first rattle of fire. When the small man in the black pajamas slipped into the hole, Davey knifed him and kicked him and then stood on the corpse, listening, waiting for more. At the first seep of dawn Davey sliced off the enemy’s right ear and buttoned it into his breast pocket. Then he dragged his buddy’s body back to the unit. Davey was eighteen at the time.
Later, back home, Davey’s mother found the ear wrapped in tinfoil in his drawer. She threw it out and screamed at him. He was drinking a lot and getting into fights, so it wasn’t just the ear that set her off.
After a while his war dreams sifted away and left only the one dream of the ear. The earless one wanted something from him. This was the message. Davey read about Eastern religions until he understood that the earless one couldn’t go to his heaven with a piece missing. He would wander the dreamscape forever.
Davey felt bad about it but other things were happening—heroin and politics and motorcycles and women. There were sojourns in the Veterans Hospital to sober up and read. There was some college time, several jobs. Sometimes he wouldn’t dream at all. Other times the earless one was with him every night for weeks. During one of those sieges he went to a refugee temple and asked the priest how to make amends. The priest said Davey would have to figure that out for himself.
He was thirty-three then. He worked clearing trails in the steep, wooded parks. The crew chief was a pacifist who’d spent the war in jail. The two became friends. Davey usually worked hard but mornings after a bender he’d flop in a grassy clearing and sleep. The chief understood and didn’t bother him.
One morning Davey took his sharpest ax and drifted away from the rest of the crew. He spread his left hand out on a tree stump. Breathing carefully he lifted the ax and cut off the smallest finger.
Lifting it, he offered it to the earless one. “Fair trade, man,” he said. “Peace, man.” He tossed the finger into the brush.
At the hospital he tried to explain why he was so happy. But the crew chief told the admitting nurse it was an accident on the job, that the wounded man was in shock, delirious. He whispered harshly into Davey’s ear, “Shut the fuck up. Workers’ comp won’t pay for spiritual atonement.” Davey shut up, but he couldn’t stop grinning.
From “Outstanding Young Men of America” by Paul Mavrides. Published in Zap Comix #16, Feb. 2016, Fantagraphics.
We — that is, my family of four — split a nice spring break between heatwaved Los Angeles and more temperate Santa Barbara last week. I managed to squeeze in a visit to The Last Bookstore, which I hadn’t visited since 2017.
I keep a little list of books and authors to search for; one of these is the long-out-of-print 1987 cult novel Xman by Michael Brodsky. I found it about two minutes in, under “B” (duh) in gen fic for the steep steep price of five U.S. dollars. I also picked up another James Crumely novel, part of the Vintage Contemporaries series.
We — that is my son and I — also visited Skylight Books (after an unexpected pilgrimage to the Figure 8 wall on Sunset — the mural from the cover of that Elliott Smith record — we were just walking by it and my son who is a Fan lost his shit). Skylight Books is very very cool, with a great selection of comix, art books, zines, &c., but I failed to pick anything up, mostly because I was hungry and cranky.
We also visited LACMA, where I was disappointed that the many of the paintings I had seen on my previous visit were not currently on display (including Georges de la Tour’s Magdalen with Smoking Flame which knocked my socks off when I saw it up close all those years ago).
There was a cool exhibit by the contemporary artist Tavares Strachan. One of the segment of the exhibit is a series of painted plates, several of which depict extinct species. I couldn’t help think of Thomas Pynchon’s riff on the poor dodo in Gravity’s Rainbow when I saw this plate:
“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?”
La Couleur Assiégée (The Besieged Color), 1947 by Suzanne Van Damme (1901-1986)
Detail from Portrait of Isaku Yanaihara, 1956 by Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966)
A page from Man from Utopia by Rick Griffin, San Francisco Comic Book Company, 1972.
Detail from The Orator, c. 1920 by Magnus Zeller (1888-1972)
“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), 1984 by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)
“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.
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, 1978 by Leonor Fini (1908-1996)
Biblioklept 