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.
“A Parkersburg Vocabulary”
by
David Berman
Sad Fingers (sad-fin-gurs) n. Nostalgia for an old area code. Ex: “He has sad fingers.”
Hoxter (hock-stur) n. A fellow who lacks the energy to live up to his own sociopathic heritage.
Roycambellside (roy-cam-bul-zid) adv. or adj. To be in the vicinity of Roy Campbell.
Blue Emberton (blu-embr-tun) n. A wealthy man who subsidizes his own murder, often through the employment of an idle hoxter.
Dratchell (dratch-II) n. A piano tuned to the shadows cast on a vacant lot.
Cloud’s Index (klowdz-in-dex) n. Spiral-bound notebook listing the names of people who have never returned Fred J. Cloud’s phone calls.
Pollygosters (poli-gos-turz) n. Tiny candy construction hats tossed out to children from the Persevering Light Pencil Company’s float during the Clown Baking Days Parade.
Dorchester Reproach (dorch-est-ur reap-roach) n.: Dismay at the enthusiasms of poor people.
Multipulchomy (mul-tee-pulko-mee) n. The performance of plastic surgery on a crowd; first tested at Parkersburg Civic Center in July of 2006.
Disinfecting the Toy (dis-sen-fect-in thu toy) v. The nightly pond-side ejaculation of subdivision security guard Jimmy Food Hill onto the head or back of a swan.
Quadriplegic Beekeeper (kwad-ruh-puh-lee-gic beak-eaper) n. Door County slang for an ineffective person; a poor employee.
Galsworthy Rideout (gals-wurthy rye-dout) n. A locally-built electronic circuit that allows pinball machines to speak in contractions.
Acroplarf (akro-plarl) n. 1. German aspirin manufacturer’s waltz, usually played on an upright dratchell. 2. Suicide pact written by teenagers on parchment paper with goose quills.
Emberdome (embur-dom) n. An arena built on the Techwood Industries campus for the purpose of crushing employee suggestions.
Door County Hum (dork-ownty hum) n. A sensation often experienced by area men while wearing bathrobes; that they have suddenly been transformed into little terrycloth churchbells, inside of which their balls jingle jangle when they walk.
Tohapaxno’s Bias (toe-ha-pax-noze bi-us) n. The bothersome late-night invocation of Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, by Mixed Emotions bartender, Jim Tohapaxno.
Hobbledehoys (hobbul-dee-hoiz) n. Crowd-control tacos distributed by Parks and Rec. Department vans during the state butterfly census.
Polish Infinity (poal-ish in-fin-uh-ti) n. 1. Cologne imprinted on an empty elevator. 2. The nowhere vibe of a new megastore. 3. The EKG of a boulder or large stone.
There used to be an odd, popular, and erroneous idea that the sun revolved around the earth.
This has been replaced by an even odder, equally popular, and equally erroneous idea that the earth goes around the sun.
In fact, the moon and the earth revolve around a common center, and this commonly-centered pair revolves with the sun around another common center, except that you must figure in all the solar planets here, so things get complicated. Then there is the motion of the solar system with regard to a great many other objects, e.g., the galaxy, and if at this point you ask what does the motion of the earth really look like from the center of the entire universe, say…the only answer is:
that it doesn’t.
Because there isn’t.
From How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ, 1983.
“The Disappointment”
by
Aphra Behn
1
One Day the Amarous Lisander,
By an impatient Passion sway’d,
Surpris’d fair Cloris, that lov’d Maid,
Who cou’d defend her self no longer ;
All things did with his Love conspire,
The gilded Planet of the Day,
In his gay Chariot, drawn by Fire,
Was now descending to the Sea,
And left no Light to guide the World,
But what from Cloris brighter Eyes was hurl’d.
2
In alone Thicket, made for Love,
Silent as yielding Maids Consent,
She with a charming Languishment
Permits his force, yet gently strove ?
Her Hands his Bosom softly meet,
But not to put him back design’d,
Rather to draw him on inclin’d,
Whilst he lay trembling at her feet;
Resistance ’tis to late to shew,
She wants the pow’r to say — Ah!what do you do?
3
Her bright Eyes sweat, and yet Severe,
Where Love and Shame confus’dly strive,
Fresh Vigor to Lisander give :
And whispring softly in his Ear,
She Cry’d — Cease — cease — your vain desire,
Or I’ll call out — What wou’d you do ?
My dearer Honour, ev’n to you,
I cannot — must not give — retire,
Or take that Life whose chiefest part
I gave you with the Conquest of my Heart Continue reading ““The Disappointment” — Aphra Behn”
Catherine Foulkrod’s Don’t Cure Me is out early next year from McSweeney’s. Their copy:
A new king is being crowned, doctors are on the verge of a massive medical discovery, society is financially and socially segregated by the platelet-count numbers of constant blood tests, and the world is divided into three geographical regions: school, clinic, home. In this lyric sci-fi thriller, a sick young woman is our heroine, and a handful of lone wolf degenerates of the invisible class challenge the medical establishment’s understanding of a debilitating disease to riveting effect. Based on the true history of the autoimmune disorder thrombocytopenia—and the daring experiment of one medical student who isolated the disease in the blood—Don’t Cure Me is a novel dressed in style and plot twists. This book asks: how does the way women are expected to hold their bodies give them heightened powers? If one’s true worth could be codified and trivialized down to a decimal number, would you tolerate it? Are numbers always violent? What does triumph look like in a world that requires people to live segregated by gender and class?
And here’s Deb Olin Unferth’s blurb:
I read this heart-stopping psychosexual medical drama at the edge of my seat, and in the time I spent away from it, I felt it calling to me in its strange language. The story feels daring, both futuristic and of the past, and takes place in a surreal hyper-world and also in the world we know. Is the woman at its center a Frankenstein’s monster-bride, hovering between life and nonlife? Or is she, shockingly, just like everybody else? This mad and brilliant thriller made me consider all social contracts, all technology, all desire.
Rex Stuart (T.2s) had made a pile as the star of the soap opera Sorrows and Trials. He’d set up his film company to cater to the streaming market. Right now, Afro-Futurism is hot. He asked his agents to name a Black writer who could write a series for his company. Secretariat’s name came up. Someone said he’d read his novel Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (1969), and it ended with AI running things. Before the end of the day, Secretariat received a call from Rex Stuart. He said that he had a proposition for Secretariat. It could be a rewarding trip for him to come to Los Angeles. Secretariat picked up his ticket at United. A limousine was waiting for him at LAX. He checked in at the Beverly Hills Hotel. This would be his third stay at the hotel. He remembered that his rooms had fireplaces. Stuart met him in the restaurant. He wasn’t the matinee idol who’d thrilled millions by portraying the polo-playing playboy of Sorrows. Jowly. A paunch. Otherwise, he’d aged gracefully. Something was different about him. He had a beard. Secretariat spotted him and joined him at his table. He had a copy of Yellow Back that he wanted Secretariat to sign.
“Interesting work. I can see why the critics call you Sun Ra and George Clinton, Afro-Futurism’s fathers. Artificial intelligence is running things, leading to the elimination of 9-to-5 drudgery. You had that in your novel that was published in 1969.”
Yes, Secretariat thought, that was before my idealism went sour.
Stuart then said, “Well, it’s upon us. This Afro-Futurist stuff is trending. What do you think of it?”
Secretariat saw it as another academic scam—an excuse for professors to lure students into empty classrooms by offering something snappy to those who grew up on Star Wars. They could write long papers with the usual obscure references. Professors could attend conferences, sample good food, sightsee, and make dates.
“It’s popular, but the Afro-Futurists are missing an opportunity,” Secretariat said.
“How is that?”
“They could use the popularity of space-travel films and art to introduce Black and Brown kids to sciences like astrophysics. After a Black astrophysicist lectured, he was surrounded by Black and Brown kids. They hadn’t been taught that such a field was open to them. They were told that the football field, the basketball court, and the criminal court were the only areas open to them.”
Stuart gave Secretariat an odd look. “Something to think about. I don’t know whether you have seen—” Stuart mentioned a spate of films that carried the Afro-Futurist label. “We’d like you to try your hand at writing one for us.” Stuart mentioned an amount of money that would pay his family’s bills for a couple of years. All Secretariat had to do was write a treatment. Others would develop the story; he could withdraw his name from the production if he didn’t like the result.
Their drinks arrived, followed by a gorgeous meal. The next morning, he returned to Oakland.
Read the full excerpt from Ishmael Reed’s forthcoming novel The Terrible Fives at the Evergreen Review.
A panel from Crumple by Dave Cooper. Published in Zero Zero #20, Sept.-Oct. 1997, Fantagraphics Books.
One might argue—and justly—that many male writers are also represented by only one book or one group of poems. I would answer first that the damage done the women is greater because women constitute so few of the total in anthologies, classes, curricula, and reading lists at any level of education. Moreover, the real mischief of the myth of the isolated achievement, as it is applied to the “wrong” writers, is that the criteria of selection are in themselves loaded and so often lead to the choice of whatever in the writer’s work will reinforce the stereotypical notion of what women can write or should write. Some unpleasant possibilities:
If a woman writer presents herself as a public, political voice, delete this aspect of her work and emphasize her love poems, declared (on no evidence) to be written to her husband—Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
If a woman writer is frank about heterosexuality, delete any of her work that depicts male inadequacy or independent female judgment of men—Aphra Behn.
If a woman writes homosexual love poetry, suppress it and declare her an unhappy spinster—Amy Lowell.
If you still have trouble, invent an (unhappy) heterosexual affair for her to explain the poems—Emily Dickinson.
If a writer is openly feminist, delete everything of that sort in her work and then declare her passionless, minor, and ladylike—Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea.
If she is not easy to edit, writes ten-act plays about women going to war to rescue their men, plays about women’s academies becoming more popular than men’s academies, and endless prefaces about men, women, sexist oppression, and the mistreatment she herself endures, forget it; she’s cracked—Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle.
If she writes about women’s relationships with women and “women heroes” (in Hacker’s phrase), print a few of her early lyrics and forget the rest—H. D.
If she writes about women’s experiences, especially the unpleasant ones, declare her hysterical or “confessional”—Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton.
If she carefully avoids writing about female experience and remains resolutely detached, polished, impersonal, and nonsexual, you may praise her at first, then declare her Mandarin, minor, and passionless—Marianne Moore.
From How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ, 1983.
“Eleanor” by Eric Drooker. Published in Drawn & Quarterly #2 (vol. 2), Dec. 1994, Drawn & Quarterly Publications.
“Fictional Exits”
by
Alasdair Gray
Because of a mistake (though I do not know whose) someone was shut in a windowless room with nothing to look at but a door which could only be opened from outside, a lavatory pan and a wall poster showing the face of the nation’s ruler. After imagining a great many dealings with this official the prisoner tried to find pleasure in a landscape behind the face. This first soothed by its suggestion of spaciousness, then annoyed by its completely tame nature. On one side wellcultivated farms receded to a distant line of blue hills, on the other was a seat of government, a cathedral, university, and very clean factory and workers’ residential block. There were no clumps of forest or winding rivers to explore; the bland distant hills clearly contained no ravines, torrents, cliffs, caverns or mountain passes, they were a mere frontier, shutting off the horizon. Though designed to advertise a sunnier world than the electrically lit cell, the poster showed the inside of a larger jail.
On the brink of melancholy madness the prisoner found a pencil on the floor behind the lavatory pan. When this had been carefully nibbled to a sharp point it might have been used to draw anything on the whitewashed walls: faces of friends, bodies of lovers, the scenery of great adventures. Not able to draw these convincingly the prisoner carefully drew a full-size copy of the room’s unopenable door, with one difference. The drawn door had a key in the lock, and it could be turned. Then the prisoner turned the lock, opened the door and walked out. Though describing how fantasy works this is a realistic story. Free will being the essence of mind, everyone who feels trapped must imagine escapes, and some of them work. New arts and sciences, new religions and nations are created this way. But the story of the door can be told with a less happy ending.
A blind man living alone in a municipal housing scheme heard people breaking through his front door, so phoned the local police station. While he was asking for help the housebreakers got to him and knocked him down. They were policemen who had mistaken his door for the door of someone they suspected of selling dangerous drugs without a licence. The mistake was discovered when one of the housebreakers lifted the telephone receiver and found he was talking to a colleague. He told the colleague in the police station not to worry, because the blind householder would be stitched up. So the blind man was summoned to a court of law and charged with assaulting the police while they were trying to do their duty.
In Britain all emergency phonecalls to police stations are recorded twice: once by the police stations for the use of the police: once by the British telecommunication company for the use of the caller. The blind man’s defence lawyer played the Telecom recording to prove that his client was innocent, pointing out that stitched up was slang for arrested on false evidence. The police witness agreed that stitched up meant that in criminal slang, but explained that in police slang it meant properly arrested with no hint of falsehood or perjury in the procedure. The sheriff on the bench (magistrates are called sheriffs in Scotland) believed the police witness, since our nation will sink into anarchy if magistrates distrust the police. So the blind man was fined, but not imprisoned, as would almost certainly have happened in an old-fashioned fascist or communist nation.
Like the sheriff on the bench my sympathy is mainly with the police. Opening a door with the big key (which is police slang for sledgehammer) is a desperate deed, even if you think someone behind the door is wicked, and that if you grab them fast enough you may find proof of this. Nearly all our experience and education, besides the natural law of do-as-you-would-be-done-by, teaches us to handle doors gently. They are usually quiet, unthreatening, protective creatures. Some of our dearest joys and most regular functions have been made easier by them, so smashing one MUST feel like punching a face, or bombing pedestrians from an aeroplane in broad daylight. We may earn a wage by doing it, we may believe we are defending decency and justice by it, but we cannot help feeling abnormally excited, so mistakes are inevitable. I also sympathize slightly with the blind man, for I am not one of those who think everyone in a municipal housing scheme deserves what is done to them. The man’s blindness may not have been his own fault, and may have stopped him seeing he ought to live in a better part of the city. But he should certainly have used his imagination, which would have let him see in the dark.
The big key unlocked the blind man’s door in 1990 when Glasgow was the official Culture Capital of Europe. The story was not reported by the press. I give it here because the police, like the prisoner in my first story, found themselves in a terrible situation but imagined a way out. They created a fictional exit which worked.
Biblioklept 