Tortuga, 1951 by Jacobo Borges (b. 1931)
A panel from Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days by Al Columbia, Fantagraphics Books, 2009.
A few panels from “What an Interesting City!” by Julie Doucet. Published in Dirty Plotte #5, May 1992, Drawn & Quarterly.
Untitled, 1970 by Lucas Samaras (1936–2024)
“The Raid”
by
John Steinbeck
I
It was dark in the little California town when the two men stepped from the lunch car and strode arrogantly through the back streets. The air was full of the sweet smell of fermenting fruit from the packing plants. High over the corners, blue arc lights swung in the wind and put moving shadows of telephone wires on the ground. The old wooden buildings were silent and resting. The dirty windows dismally reflected the street lights.
The two men were about the same size, but one was much older than the other. Their hair was cropped, they wore blue jeans. The older man had on a peajacket, while the younger wore a blue turtle-neck sweater. As they swung down the dark street, footsteps echoed back loudly from the wooden buildings. The younger man began to whistle Come to Me My Melancholy Baby. He stopped abruptly. “I wish that damn tune would get out of my head. It’s been going all day. It’s an old tune, too.”
His companion turned toward him. “You’re scared, Root. Tell the truth. You’re scared as hell.”
They were passing under one of the blue street lights. Root’s face put on its toughest look, the eyes squinted, the mouth went crooked and bitter. “No, I ain’t scared.” They were out of the light. His face relaxed again. “I wish I knew the ropes better. You been out before, Dick. You know what to expect. But I ain’t ever been out.”
“The way to learn is to do,” Dick quoted sententiously. “You never really learn nothing from books.”
They crossed a railroad track. A block tower up the line a little was starred with green lights. “It’s awful dark,” said Root. “I wonder if the moon will come up later. Usually does when it’s so dark. You going to make the first speech, Dick?”
“No, you make it. I had more experience than you. I’ll watch them while you talk and then I can smack them where I know they bite. Know what you’re going to say?”
“Sure I do. I got it all in my head, every word. I wrote it out and learned it. I heard guys tell how they got up and couldn’t think of a thing to say, and then all of a sudden they just started in like it was somebody else, and the words came out like water out of a hydrant. Big Mike Sheane said it was like that with him. But I wasn’t taking no chances, so I wrote it out.”
A train hooted mournfully, and in a moment it rounded a bend and pushed its terrible light down the track. The lighted coaches rattled past. Dick turned to watch it go by. “Not many people on that one,” he said with satisfaction. “Didn’t you say your old man worked on the railroad?”
Root tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Sure, he works on the road. He’s a brakeman. He kicked me out when he found out what I was doing. He was scared he’d lose his job. He couldn’t see. I talked to him, but he just couldn’t see. He kicked me right out.” Root’s voice was lonely. Suddenly he realized how he had weakened and how he sounded homesick. “That’s the trouble with them,” he went on harshly. “They can’t see beyond their jobs. They can’t see what’s happening to them. They hang on to their chains.”
“Save it,” said Dick. “That’s good stuff. Is that part of your speech?”
“No, but I guess I’ll put it in if you say it’s good.”
The street lights were fewer now. A line of locust trees grew along the road, for the town was beginning to thin and the country took control. Along the unpaved road there were a few little houses with ill-kept gardens.
“Jesus! It’s dark,” Root said again. “I wonder if there’ll be any trouble. It’s a good night to get away if anything happens.”
Dick snorted into the collar of his peajacket. They walked along in silence for awhile.
“Do you think you’d try to get away, Dick?” Root asked.
“No, by God! It’s against orders. If anything happens we got to stick. You’re just a kid. I guess you’d run if I let you!”
Root blustered: “You think you’re hell on wheels just because you been out a few times. You’d think you was a hundred to hear you talk.”
“I’m dry behind the ears, anyway,” said Dick.
Root walked with his head down. He said softly, “Dick, are you sure you wouldn’t run? Are you sure you could just stand there and take it?”
“Of course I’m sure. I’ve done it before. It’s the orders, ain’t it? Why, it’s good publicity.” He peered through the darkness at Root. “What makes you ask, kid? You scared you’ll run? If you’re scared you got no business here.”
Root shivered. “Listen, Dick, you’re a good guy. You won’t tell nobody what I say, will you? I never been tried. How do I know what I’ll do if somebody smacks me in the face with a club? How can anybody tell what he’d do? I don’t think I’d run. I’d try not to run.”
“All right, kid. Let it go at that. But you try running, and I’ll turn your name in. We got no place for yellow bastards. You remember that, kid.”
“Oh, lay off that kid stuff. You’re running that in the ground.”
The locust trees grew closer together as they went. The wind rustled gently in the leaves. A dog growled in one of the yards as the men went by. A light fog began to drift down through the air, and the stars were swallowed in it. “You sure you got everything ready?” Dick asked. “Got the lamps? Got the lit’ature? I left all that to you.”
“I did it all this afternoon,” said Root. “I didn’t put the posters up yet, but I got them in a box out there.”
“Got oil in the lamps?”
“They had plenty in. Say, Dick, I guess some bastard has squealed, don’t you?”
“Sure. Somebody always squeals.”
“Well you didn’t hear nothing about no raid, did you?”
“How the hell would I hear. You think they’d come and tell me they was going to knock my can off? Get hold of yourself, Root. You got the pants scared off you. You’re going to make me nervous if you don’t cut it out.” Continue reading “Read “The Raid,” John Steinbeck’s story of labor and violence”
A page from Prison Pit, Book One by Johnny Ryan, 2009, Fantagraphics Books.
“St. Lazarus Contemplating the Image of a Goose” by Maxon Crumb. From Weirdo #9, January, 1983, Last Gasp.
Study of a Right Hand, 1588 by Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617)
August 15, 1914 Diaries, from Franz Kafka: Dreams, Diaries, and Fragments (1994) by Robert Andrew Parker (1927-2023)
Kafka’s diary entry for 15 Aug. 1914 (trans. by Martin Greenberg with Hannah Arendt):
15 August. I have been writing these past few days, may it continue. Today I am not so completely protected by and enclosed in my work as I was two years ago, nevertheless have the feeling that my monotonous, empty, mad bachelor’s life has some justification. I can once more carry on a conversation with myself, and don’t stare so into complete emptiness. Only in this way is there any possibility of improvement for me. Continue reading “August 15, 1914 Diaries, from Franz Kafka: Dreams, Diaries, and Fragments — Robert Andrew Parker”
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.
