Untitled, 1947 by Suzanne Van Damme (1901-1986)
A page by Charles Burns from BLAB! no. 2, Summer 1987, Monte Comix Productions.
February 10, 2022
Ever since I started keeping my diary of remorse, my remorse has evaporated. The answer to a personality problem or spiritual malaise is to keep a diary of it because then the quantity you are quantifying seems to disappear. Therefore I should go on to keep a diary of other troubling quantities. Such as Diary of Lassitude, Lack of Motivation, Failure to Act, etc.
The lockdowns start and stop and then I go back and forth to my odd and unlikely hometown. I see that my interest in my volunteer job (of monitoring justice in the New Orleans criminal courts) is largely prurient. For this I should have remorse but don’t. When I get my docket in the morning I compare it to all the other dockets, pining that they are more exciting. Judge DeBoes has murders, rapes, and kidnappings on his docket today, not to mention a case of False Personation (???), Malfeasance in Office, and False Imprisonment, but I am not assigned to his courtroom. My consolation however is that today I am in the courtroom of the piping mad personality-ridden Judge Hollingsworth.
The defendants in New Orleans always have names like:
Jockward Jones
Curry Carter
Stokes Meilleur
King Malveaux
Narvelle Perrin
Bingo Fox
Margaret LemmonierAnd the judges have names like that too.
Talk about a vanished world. The grandiose criminal court building. The old-time bars and cafés amid the greenery.
From “Diary of Remorse.” Published in Paris Review, no. 241, Sept. 2022.
Initiation, 1999 by F. Scott Hess (b. 1955)
A panel from The Adventures of Jodelle by Guy Peellaert (art) and Pierre Bartier (script), Le Terrain Vague, 1966. English translation by Richard Seaver, Grove Press, 1967. Reprinted by Fantagraphics, 2013.
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)
Biblioklept 