My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, 1962 by David Hockney (b. 1937)
“Neglect”
by
Joy Williams
from 99 Stories of God
The Lord was asked if He believed in reincarnation.
I do, He said. It explains so much.
What does it explain, Sir? someone asked.
On your last Fourth of July festivities, I was invited to observe an annual hot-dog-eating contest, the Lord said, and it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever witnessed.
NEGLECT
The Signing of the Declaration of Independence, 2022 by Sandow Birk (b. 1962)
The Slaughter House 5, 1987 by Donald Rodney (1961–1998)
“One Train May Hide Another”
by Kenneth Koch
(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)
White Squad V, 1984 by Leon Golub (1922–2004)
Multi-Vortex National Disaster, 2020 by Hilary Harkness (b. 1971)
Illustration for Dostoevsky’s Karamazov, 1923 by Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959)
Sex and/or Mr. Morrison
by
Carol Emshwiller
I can set my clock by Mr. Morrison’s step upon the stairs, not that he is that accurate, but accurate enough for me. 8:30 thereabouts. (My clock runs fast anyway.) Each day he comes clumping down and I set it back ten minutes, or eight minutes or seven. I suppose I could just as well do it without him but it seems a shame to waste all that heavy treading and those puffs and sighs of expending energy on only getting downstairs, so I have timed my life to this morning beat. Funereal tempo, one might well call it, but it is funereal only because Mr. Morrison is fat and therefore slow. Actually he’s a very nice man as men go. He always smiles.
I wait downstairs sometimes looking up and sometimes holding my alarm clock. I smile a smile I hope is not as wistful as his. Mr. Morrison’s moonface has something of the Mona Lisa to it. Certainly he must have secrets.
“I’m setting my clock by you, Mr. M.”
“Heh, heh . . . my, my,” grunt, breath. “Well,” heave the stomach to the right, “I hope . . .”
“Oh, you’re on time enough for me.”
“Heh, heh. Oh. Oh yes.” The weight of the world is certainly upon him or perhaps he’s crushed and flattened by a hundred miles of air. How many pounds per square inch weighing him down? He hasn’t the inner energy to push back. All his muscles spread like jelly under his skin.
“No time to talk,” he says. (He never has time.) Off he goes. I like him and his clipped little Boston accent, but I know he’s too proud ever to be friendly. Proud is the wrong word, so is shy. Well, I’ll leave it at that.
Continue reading ““Sex and/or Mr. Morrison” — Carol Emshwiller”
Swinging Monkey, 1965 by Brett Whiteley (1939-1992)
I picked up my daughter’s assigned summer reading today — Steven King’s On Writing and Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. It’s not exactly clear to me if she’s supposed to, like, read, the Strunk & White, although I recall actually reading it when I was around her age, but I also enjoyed reading the thesaurus. The bookstore had a used copy of Penguin’s hardback edition with illustrations by Maira Kalman for only a few bucks more than the cheap paperback copies, so I got it for my daughter. I have the same edition at my office.
I finally found a copy of Jim Dodge’s 1990 novel Stone Junction. I’d been looking casually looking for it for a few years now, and was pleased to find it in a Canon edition (although the big sticker over the tarot card on the cover is kinda bewildering). If you’re interested in Pynchon’s intro you can read it here. There’s an excerpt from the beginning of the novel here.
I didn’t really mean to pick up Steve Erickson’s third novel, Tours of the Black Clock (1989) but then I did. I mean I went to the Erickson books, picked this one out, started to read the back cover, read the sentence “Cutting a terrifying path from a Pennsylvania farm to the Europe of the 1930s, Banning Jainlight becomes the private pornographer of the world’s most evil man,” and decided I wanted to read it.” I finished Erickson’s second novel, Rubicon Beach (1986) a few days ago and his first, Days Between Stations (1985) a few weeks ago and I guess I want more of that particular flavor.
“Happiness”
by
Sylvia Townsend Warner
‘The bathroom’s the awkwardest feature,’ said Mr. Naylor, of Elwes & Sons, house agents, ‘being situated on the ground floor. People don’t like ground-floor bathrooms. You might say, they just won’t hear of them.’
‘No, I suppose not. Yet …’ Lavinia Benton broke off.
‘I know what you were going to say, Mrs. Benton. You were going to say, Why not convert the dressing room upstairs, leaving the bathroom for what one might call a playroom, or a children’s lounge, or a study, if there happened to be no family. Once we’d got the bath out, it could be called ideal for that, being so inordinately large for a bathroom. But then the pipes would have to be carried upstairs. Think of the plumbing, Mrs. Benton! Prohibitive! No buyer would contemplate it, not for this class of residence—it isn’t as if this were one of those old oak jobs. And I understand you don’t want to let the estate in for any extra expense. So there we are, I’m afraid. Back where we started from!’
Mr. Naylor had, in fact, scotched a snake that wasn’t there. Lavinia’s ‘Yet’ had been provoked by the reflection that an increasingly large acreage of southern England was occupied between 7.30 and 8.30 a.m. by people resignedly bathing on ground level. Not so resignedly, either, since there are always buyers for bungalows. Both Mr. Petherick, of Petherick, Petherick & Sampson, and Mr. Cox, of Ransom & Titters, had already explained that Aller Lodge, the late Miss Esther Jeudwine’s brick-built, two-storey residence in sound repair, would have been easy enough to sell if only it had been a bungalow. All a matter of social psychology, thought Lavinia who, as a columnist on superior Women’s Pages, was accustomed to making something out of not much; a mass apprehension of being surprised with no clothes on, which if not primitive, since primitive man had other and more pressing things to be surprised by, must certainly go a long way back, being later reinforced by class distinction—the wealthy are draped, the poor go bare—and Christianity’s insistence on modesty; for though a fakir can be venerable in a light handful of marigolds, an archdeacon can scarcely leave off his gaiters. In short, the discomposure of being surprised with no clothes on is, like the pleasurability of possessing a virgin, one of the things long taken for granted—and really even more of an idée reçue‚ being subscribed to by both sexes alike. Yet here was this mass apprehension, fortified by tradition, smoothed by acceptance, part of the British way of life, suddenly ceasing to function when brought into bungalows, where the hazards that might justify it—housebreakers, mad dogs, cars out of control, voyeurs, private detectives, almost anything, in fact, except the atom bomb—would be much more on the cards. But one must remember that bathrooms being so recent an introduction, public opinion could not have made up its mind about them yet, and was bound to be rather hypothetical.
Lavinia became aware that Mr. Naylor was observing her with sympathy, but at the same time giving little coughs. Of course. The poor man wanted to go.
Continue reading ““Happiness” — Sylvia Townsend Warner”
Grown Upstalking, 1972 by Barry Flanagan (1941-2009)
Nooly Nostrildamus, the back cover illustration from Plop! #4, 1974 by Basil Wolverton (1909-78)
Detail from City of Tells, 2004 by James Drake
We were about an hour north of the border, driving a rented car from Quebec City to a hiker hostel our friends own in Maine, when I got a text from my uncle: “It seems your favorite author has died…” (The ellipses were part of his text.)
At first, I thought he meant Thomas Pynchon, who is 86, which is pretty old. I opened Twitter and realized he meant Cormac McCarthy, who is also my favorite author, who died at the age of 89 about a week ago.
It may be unseemly to bring up another author, Pynchon, in an ostensible eulogy for McCarthy (to be clear, this is not a eulogy, this is a riff)—but I found my reactions to the non-news of Pynchon’s non-death and the true-news of McCarthy’s true-death revealing, insomuch as my reactions revealed how I thought about these two writers’ latest and last works. Simply put, I felt a sharp, ugly pang at the thought that there might not be one last Pynchon novel in the author’s lifetime, one last big, baggy, flawed, majestic synthesis of the artist’s oeuvre to capstone the grand career.
Cormac McCarthy published his big, baggy, flawed, majestic capstone last year and titled it The Passenger. It confused and irritated many reviewers and readers, who were likely expecting something other than a sprawling and elliptical summation of the philosophical and aesthetic preoccupations of McCarthy’s previous work. (I made an indirect argument for The Passenger as the elliptical summation of the philosophical and aesthetic preoccupations of McCarthy’s previous work in a series of riffs.) The subsequent release of Stella Maris, a short, spare novella composed entirely in dialogue further befuddled many readers. Neither sequel nor coda, Stella Maris is a cold satellite orbiting The Passenger’s strange sun. Or maybe Stella Maris is The Passenger’s incestuous sibling; the very nature of its publication as a separate text deliberately invites us to read the novels intertextually. And then to read the sibling novels intertextually with/against the McCarthy family of novels.
A proper eulogy (which this riff is not) would remark at some length on the McCarthy family of novels. Such a eulogy might demarcate the novels by both time and location, perhaps separating the early Southern novels (The Orchard Keeper, 1965; Outer Dark, 1968; Child of God, 1973; Suttree, 1978) from the later Westerns (1985’s Blood Meridian up through No Country for Old Men, 2005). Such a eulogy might also point to the commercial success and film adaptations of All the Pretty Horses (1992), No Country for Old Men, and 2006’s The Road. There’s even a segue there, I suppose, to mention McCarthy’s own efforts at screenwriting (The Gardener’s Son, 1976; The Counselor, 2013) and stage writing (The Stonemason, 1995; The Sunset Limited, 2006). Another segue presents itself: one might suggest that these screen and stage efforts need not be situated in McCarthy’s oeuvre. The eulogist might then attend himself to sorting McCarthy’s work into tiers: Blood Meridian and Suttree; The Crossing and The Passenger; everything else. But this riff is not a eulogy.
A eulogy, which this riff is not, should ideally contain a kernel of grief. Like most of his readers, I did not know Cormac McCarthy except through his work, and I feel gratitude for that work—for Blood Meridian and Suttree in particular, but also for The Passenger, which, as I’ve stated above, serves as a perfectly imperfect final marker for a fantastic and rightfully-lauded career. There’s no grief then; McCarthy wrote everything he could possibly write.
He was still writing at the time of his death, of course. Director John Hillcoat revealed just a few weeks ago that he was co-writing the screenplay for a Blood Meridan adaptation with McCarthy. Hillcoat, who adapted The Road into a 2009 film, did know McCarthy, and was working with him, again, and thus might feel a grief personal and professional, a grief and love that licensed him to author a eulogy for his friend, which he did here. I have no such license.
As my wife finished the drive from Quebec to Maine, I scrolled through Twitter, where readers and authors shared their thoughts on McCarthy’s passing. We soon arrived at our friends’ hostel, a large, comfortable old house not too far from the Appalachian Trail’s northern terminus. Years ago, one of these friends became infected with Blood Meridian, obsessed with its bombastic language. I spied his worn copy on the shelf, next to the copy of Suttree I had given him, which he still hasn’t finished. I vaguely recall toasting “Cormac” over some too-strong IPAs that night.
We drove back to Quebec City the following afternoon. (It is nice to visit one’s friends and see the hiker hostel they operate, but a hiker hostel is not a comfortable place for a family who is not hiking.) A day or two later we strolled Rue Saint-Jean outside of the Old City, where I visited four used bookstores. I can’t really read French, but I enjoy looking at book covers and simply looking at what’s in stock at a particular place. I ended up buying a used copy of François Hirsch’s French translation of Blood Meridian that I found for about eight U.S. dollars. I read the “legion of horribles” passage in Hirsch’s translation, and while my French vocabulary is awful, I know the book well enough to have enjoyed the experience. “Oh mon Dieu, dit le sergent” even made me crack up.
I was far from Florida and my home and my laptop in my home, so I did not write any riff on the death of Cormac McCarthy. I recycled old posts I’d written, reading and editing them from my phone, finding some of my early reviews pretty callow. My 2008 first-read review of Blood Meridian is particularly bad; the book clearly overwhelmed me. I’ve read it many, many times since then. The “review” I wrote of No Country back in 2007 is so bad I won’t even link to it. Like most great writers, McCarthy’s work is best reread, not read.
And I reread so much of his work this year. The Passenger left me wanting more McCarthy–not in an unsatisfied way, but rather to confirm my intimations about its status as a career capstone. I reread All the Pretty Horses in the lull before Stella Maris arrived. I went on to reread The Crossing (much, much stronger than I had remembered), Cities of the Plain (weaker than I had remembered), The Road (about exactly as I remembered), Child of God (ditto), and The Orchard Keeper (as funny as I had remembered but also much sadder than I had remembered).
This riff has been too long and too self-indulgent; it was not (as I promised it would not be) a eulogy for the great dead writer, but rather blather on my end—a need to get something out of my own system. If I were younger and more full of foolish energy, I’d probably take the time to rebut McCarthy’s detractors, critics who take to task both his baroque style and dark themes. The truth is I don’t care—I’ve got the books, I’ve read them and reread them, and I know what’s there and how it rewards my attention.
I’ll end simply by inviting anyone interested in McCarthy’s work to read him. And then I’ll really end, here, now, end this riff, with a Thank you to the void.
Biblioklept 