Untitled (Self-Portrait) by Anna Kavan (1901-1968)
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,
I read Gene Wolfe’s 1975 novel Peace a few weeks ago and then obsessively reread it. The adverb obsessively in the previous clause refers to a rereading that engendered more rereading, taking more notes, going on extratextual jaunts. In my brief write-up of the novel a few weeks ago, I suggested that Peace is
an American post-modernist classic that we would now talk about alongside novels of writers like Pynchon, Barth, Reed, Coover, Barthelme, etc., if the Publishing Industry and Academia didn’t have hangups about sci-fi and fantasy. And the novel is only sci-fi or fantasy in the sense that, like, Gravity’s Rainbow is sci-fi fantasy or Pricksongs & Descants is sci-fi fantasy or Chimera is sci-fi fantasy.
A rereading confirms this belief. (Another way to put it might be, and I’m not a fan of the phrase, is that Peace is what Tom LeClair (using DeLillo as an example) called a “systems novel.”)
But what is it about?
(This What is it about? is entirely the wrong question, but–)
Peace is a postmodern American Gothic ghost novel about houses, games, trees, extinction, alchemy, caves, mythology, aunts, suitors, simulation, bones, forgery, foreclosure, freaks, farming, modernity, murder, hell, eggs, apples, oranges, art, artifice, color, stags, birds, capitalism, rooms, storytelling…
Okay but like, what happens in Peace?
It is the story of Alden Dennis Weer, a boy-man-oldman-etc. unstuck in time and his relation to his family and community. There is a life|death story here, but its telling is really what matters — Peace is crammed with interpolated stories, tales without terminus. There are banshees and princesses and saints and rats and djinn and time travelers and men who are slowly turning into stone. And more more more. Peace is incredibly, powerfully rich, and its profusion of storytelling coheres into a maddening puzzle for the careful reader to tease out.
A proper summary of the novel Peace, of the life(death) of Alden Dennis Weer would require spoilers; I do not think great literature (or Great Literature if you like) can be spoiled, but I do think that part of the charm (and we can use that term charm in its occult sense here) of Wolfe’s novel is that the narrative consistently obscures/hides/buries significant plot elements while at the same time highlighting its thematic emblems in dazzling, baroque passages.
By way of a favorable comparison let me grab William Faulkner’s classic short story “A Rose for Emily.” Both Peace and “Rose” are thematically Gothic, but they are also formally Gothic, concealing mysteries through rhetorical techniques that do not present as obvious techniques. If we were to parse out and then jot down the timeline of “A Rose for Emily,” we might give such notes to a reader who has never read the tale; that virgin reader might then intuit the story’s central horror (and macabre joke) without the heady veil of confusion that usually attends a first reading — and then the story would simply be a freak in a show, labeled neatly, compartmentalized, subsumed into a more general order that paradoxically reinforces the normality of polite human relations, no alarms and no surprises. But that’s not how “A Rose for Emily” works and that’s not how Peace works. The Peace plot, conveyed through the shifty first-personeering of reliably unreliable Den, dares its reader to attend closely to quick flashes and flares that might otherwise be obscured in the dazzle of rampant storytelling. Our Peace is a murders (plural-ess) mystery; keep looking for clues in the coldest cases.
The prose is not cold. Wolfe’s sentences make a body tingle. Here (a version of) Den, Alden Dennis Weer, our narrator, describes his boyhood pocketknife before spiraling into a vision of creation restrained into simulacrum; the scene terminates in plastic, modern, postmodern infertility:
It was large, and stamped with the words “Boy Scout.” The scales were of simulated black staghorn, bringing to mind (at least to mine) the image of a simulated stag, his horns held proudly as those of any elm-deer, ranging the forest among the now-waking trees, trees whose leaves are dying with the summer in every color, like bruises, but bruises beautiful as the skins of races unborn, withheld from us because God, or destiny, or the bland chance of the scientists (whose blind, piping ape-god, idiot-god, we have met before; we know you, troubler of Babylon) has denied us the sight of all these scarlet and yellow—truly red, orange, russet-brown—races on our sidewalks, and all the wonderful richness of stereotypes we might have entertained ourselves with if only they had been permitted us: the scarlet people with tight fists and loose women, gobbling dialects, a talent for paintings done with chalk upon the sides of newspaper kiosks, and high abilities in the retail merchandising of hobby supplies such as tiny-toy jet engines, and model garbage trucks whose hungry rumps, trundled about the wooden tops of retired dining-room tables in basements, will devour the dross of train-station quick-eat restaurants; the orange people with their weird religion demanding the worship of sundials (as our own seems to others that of telephone poles), so that in friendly locker-room conversations, when we have at last and at the threat of certain legal pressures admitted them to Pinelawn and are discussing the round now past, they out with strange oaths. What is a wabe?
And all of them, since all the lands of this earth are occupied, must be from strange and farther countries, from Hi Brasil and the Islands of the Sun, from the Continental Islands and the Isles of the Tethys Sea. Only the rarest, the russet browns, belong here, native to St. Brendan’s land, and they are dying; the things they are famous for are not strange oaths, or ability at any art, or cunning in a trade, but alcoholism and gonorrhea and dwindling. They make good soldiers and that is fatal, just as is the bravery of the simulated stag, which will bring him to death, answering the call of the simulated war cry to meet bullets in the dry autumn woods and fall, his lungs hemorrhaging substitute blood at the edge of the potato fields. The imitation huntsman shouts and dances for joy, and then, having learned very well to shoot, but never to butcher, and being, in his own opinion, no longer of an age to carry heavy burdens, leaves him to rot and stink, the bait of plastic flies with fishhooks in their bellies. In time his flesh, torn by such fur-like foxes as remain, and by the teeth of curs, falls away, and only his horns and his celluloid bones remain, the prey of the boys’-knife maker.
I’ve painted myself into a corner here with such a chunk of Wolfe’s prose (my paint thinned with cold grey pink wine on this hot summer night). Sci-fi and fantasy aficionados already know the power of Wolfe’s prose, and his New Sun solar cycle has impressed readers of “serious” American postmodernism, who might be willing to peek into The Shadow of the Torturer and its sequels. Those novels, narrated by eidetic-memoried exile Severian are fantastic, and are probably Wolfe’s masterwork. But Peace shows imagination within postmodern American Gothic restraints; this is a novel that shows the slow painful choking extinction of the American Dream while at the same time showing that the Dream was always just a dream, a drift into nightmare, a notion, foggy or otherwise, corrupted even in its inception, bound to play out in a decaying reverberation that evinces again as a simulation, a ghost. Seek it out.
“Eleanor” by Eric Drooker. Published in Drawn & Quarterly #2 (vol. 2), Dec. 1994, Drawn & Quarterly Publications.
A panel from “Credo” by Richard Sala. Published in Drawn & Quarterly #2 (vol. 1), Oct. 1990, Drawn & Quarterly Publications.
El Esquilado Dormido, c. 1965 by Robin Ironside (1912-1965)
A page from Congo Chromo by Olivier Schrauwen. Published in Mome v. 17, Winter 2010, Fantagraphics Books.
A panel from “Pray for Pianoland” by Brian Blomerth. Published in NOW #4, Sept. 2018, Fantagraphics Books.
The Godmother, 2023 by Walton Ford (b. 1960)
The Underground Chud, 1913 by Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947)
“The Secret of Evil”
by
Roberto Bolaño
translated by
Chris Andrews
This story is very simple, although it could have been very complicated. Also, it’s incomplete, because stories like this don’t have an ending. It’s night in Paris, and a North American journalist is sleeping. Suddenly the telephone rings, and someone asks in English, with an unidentifiable accent, for Joe A. Kelso. Speaking, says the journalist and then looks at his watch. It’s four in the morning; he’s only had about three hours’ sleep and he’s tired. The voice on the other end of the line says, I have to see you, to pass on some information. The journalist asks him what it’s about. As usual with calls like this, the voice gives nothing away. The journalist asks for some indication, at least. In impeccable English, far more correct than Kelso’s, the voice expresses a preference for a face-to-face meeting. Then, straight away, it adds, There is no time to lose. Where? Kelso asks. The voice mentions one of the bridges over the Seine. And adds: You can get there in twenty minutes on foot. The journalist, who has had hundreds of meetings like this, says that he’ll be there in half an hour. Getting dressed, he thinks it’s a pretty stupid way to waste the night, and yet he realizes, with a slight shock of surprise, that he’s no longer sleepy, that the call, in spite of its predictability, has left him wide awake. When he reaches the bridge, five minutes after the appointed time, he can see nothing but cars. For a while he stands still at one end, waiting. Then he walks across the bridge, which is still deserted, and after waiting for a few minutes at the other end, finally crosses back again and decides to give up and go home to bed. While he’s walking home, he thinks about the voice: it definitely wasn’t a North American voice and it probably wasn’t British either, though he’s not so sure about that now. It could have been a South African or an Australian, he thinks, or a Dutchman, maybe, or someone from northern Europe who learned English at school and has since perfected his command of the language in various Anglophone countries. As he crosses the street he hears someone call his name: Mr. Kelso. He realizes straight away that it’s the man who arranged to meet him on the bridge, speaking from a dark entranceway. Kelso is about to stop, but the voice instructs him to keep walking. When he reaches the next corner, he turns around and sees that no one is following him. He’s tempted to retrace his steps, but after a moment’s hesitation he decides that it’s best to continue on his way. Suddenly the man appears from a side street and greets him. Kelso returns his greeting. The man holds out his hand. Sacha Pinsky, he says. Kelso shakes his hand and introduces himself in turn. Pinsky pats him on the back and asks if he’d like a whiskey. A little whiskey, is what he actually says. He asks Kelso if he’s hungry. He assures the journalist that he knows a bar where they can get hot croissants, freshly baked. Kelso looks at his face. Although Pinsky is wearing a hat, his face is a pasty white, as if he’d been locked away for years and years. But where? Kelso wonders. In a prison or an institution for the mentally ill. In any case, it’s too late to pull out now, and Kelso wouldn’t mind a hot croissant. The place is called Chez Pain, and in spite of the fact that it’s in his neighborhood (in a narrow side street, admittedly), this is the first time he’s set foot inside, and perhaps the first time he’s even seen it. Mostly he frequents establishments in Montparnasse with a dubious air of legend about them: the place where Scott Fitzgerald once ate, the place where Joyce and Beckett drank Irish whiskey, the bars favored by Hemingway and Dos Passos, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. Pinsky was right about the croissants at Chez Pain: they’re good, they’re freshly baked, and the coffee isn’t bad at all. Which makes Kelso think—and it’s a chilling thought—that this guy could well be a local, a neighbor. As he considers this possibility, Kelso is seized by a shudder. A bore, a paranoiac, a madman, a watcher with no one to watch him in turn, someone it’s going be hard to get rid of. Well, he eventually says, I’m listening. The pale man, who is sipping his coffee but not eating, looks at him and smiles. There is something intensely sad about his smile, and tired as well, as if it were the only way in which he could allow himself to express his tiredness, his exhaustion and lack of sleep. But as soon as he stops smiling, his features recover their iciness.
Our Ambassador has spoken of our Fourth of July and the noise it makes. We have got a double Fourth of July—a daylight Fourth and a midnight Fourth. During the day in America, as our Ambassador has indicated, we keep the Fourth of July properly in a reverent spirit. We devote it to teaching our children patriotic things—reverence for the Declaration of Independence. We honor the day all through the daylight hours, and when night comes we dishonor it. Presently—before long—they are getting nearly ready to begin now—on the Atlantic coast, when night shuts down, that pandemonium will begin, and there will be noise, and noise, and noise—all night long—and there will be more than noise there will be people crippled, there will be people killed, there will be people who will lose their eyes, and all through that permission which we give to irresponsible boys to play with firearms and fire-crackers, and all sorts of dangerous things: We turn that Fourth of July, alas! over to rowdies to drink and get drunk and make the night hideous, and we cripple and kill more people than you would imagine.
We probably began to celebrate our Fourth-of-July night in that way one hundred and twenty-five years ago, and on every Fourth-of-July night since these horrors have grown and grown, until now, in our five thousand towns of America, somebody gets killed or crippled on every Fourth-of-July night, besides those cases of sick persons whom we never hear of, who die as the result of the noise or the shock. They cripple and kill more people on the Fourth of July in America than they kill and cripple in our wars nowadays, and there are no pensions for these folk. And, too, we burn houses. Really we destroy more property on every Fourth-of-July night than the whole of the United States was worth one hundred and twenty-five years ago. Really our Fourth of July is our day of mourning, our day of sorrow. Fifty thousand people who have lost friends, or who have had friends crippled, receive that Fourth of July, when it comes, as a day of mourning for the losses they have sustained in their families.
I have suffered in that way myself. I have had relatives killed in that way. One was in Chicago years ago—an uncle of mine, just as good an uncle as I have ever had, and I had lots of them—yes, uncles to burn, uncles to spare. This poor uncle, full of patriotism, opened his mouth to hurrah, and a rocket went down his throat. Before that man could ask for a drink of water to quench that thing, it blew up and scattered him all over the forty-five States, and—really, now, this is true—I know about it myself—twenty-four hours after that it was raining buttons, recognizable as his, on the Atlantic seaboard. A person cannot have a disaster like that and be entirely cheerful the rest of his life. I had another uncle, on an entirely different Fourth of July, who was blown up that way, and really it trimmed him as it would a tree. He had hardly a limb left on him anywhere. All we have left now is an expurgated edition of that uncle. But never mind about these things; they are merely passing matters. Don’t let me make you sad.
From a July 4, 1907 toast Twain delivered at an American Society banquet in London.
“I Don’t Get It” by Robert Crumb, published in Mystic Funnies #1, Alex Wood, 1997.
Biblioklept 