Four books by Dr. McCandless apart from this one were printed in his lifetime at his own expense. Unlike Poor Things he sent copies of the following works to the Scottish National Library in Edinburgh where they are catalogued under his pseudonym, “A Gallowa’ Loon”.
1886 Whaur We Twa Wandered
Verses inspired by places in Glasgow associated with the courtship of his wife. One of these (headed “The West End Park Loch Katrine Waterworks Memorial Fountain”) is quoted in Chapter 7 of Poor Things and is by far the best.
1892 The Resurrectionists
This five-act play about the Burke and Hare murders is no better than the many other nineteenth-century melodramas based on the same very popular theme. Robert Knox, the surgeon who bought the corpses, is treated more sympathetically than usual, so the play may have influenced James Bridie’s The Anatomist.
1897 Whauphill Days
Reminiscences of childhood on a Galloway farm. Though purporting to be autobiography, this says so little about the author’s father, mother and friends that the reader is left with the impression that he never had any. The only character to be described in affectionate detail is an atrociously harsh “dominie” whose approval of the author’s scholastic abilities never mitigated the severity of the beatings inflicted on him. The bulk of the book describes the delights of “guddling” trout, “running down” rabbits and smaller vermin, and “harrying” birds’ nests.
1905 The Testament of Sawney Bean
This long poem in “Habbie” stanzas opens with Bean lying in the heather on the summit of the Merrick, from which he surveys the nation which has both enticed and driven him into cannibalism. The year is 1603, shortly before the union of the crowns. Bean is suffering from food poisoning, for he has recently eaten part of an Episcopalian tax-collector on top of a Calvinist gaberlunzie. The symbolism, not the comedy of this intestinal broil is emphasized. In his delirium Bean harangues apparitions of every Scottish monarch from Calgacus to James the Sixth. Figures from Scotland’s past and future appear: Fingal, Jenny Geddes, James Watt, William Ewart Gladstone et cetera, with finally, “a poet of futuritee, | Who loses, seeks, finds Scotland just like me, | Upon that day.” Here it becomes plain that Bean and his hungry family (soon to be arrested by the royal army and burned alive in the Grassmarket, Edinburgh) symbolize the Scottish people. The main difficulty with the poem (apart from its great length and dull language) is knowing what the cannibalism symbolizes. It may represent bad eating-habits which Dr. McCandless thought were once common in Scotland, for he addresses the reader as if the Bean clan had existed. A little research would have shown him it is neither in Scottish history or legend, folk tale or fiction. It first appeared in the Newgate Calendar or Bloody Malefactors’ Register printed in London around 1775. The other stories in the book were factual accounts of gruesome English murders committed in what was then living memory. The Sawney Bean story was told in the same factual style but set upon a wild Scottish coast nearly two centuries earlier. It was a fiction based on English folk tales: tales told by the English about the Scots during centuries when these peoples were at war with each other, or on the verge of it.
I have described these four worthless books in detail to discourage others from wasting time on them. They do, however, prove that Dr. McCandless had no creative imagination or ear for dialogue, so must have copied Poor Things out of highly detailed diary notes. The manuscript burned by his wife would certainly have proved this.
From Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things.
In the final third of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance, the narrator, having departed the titular would-be utopian farm, enjoys some city time in a hotel. He takes a voyeuristic pleasure in watching people from his window, and elects to deepen the pleasure by ordering a drink: “Just about this time a waiter entered my room. The truth was, I had rung the bell and ordered a sherry-cobbler.” The explanatory end note for my Penguin Classics copy of Blithedale gives the following recipe: “A drink made with sherry, lemon juice, sugar, and cracked ice.” I decided to make a few.
A brief internet search resulted in dozens and dozens of recipes, all more or less the same iteration: long glass, crushed ice, sherry, simple syrup, citrus (oranges cited most frequently), fresh berries if you have ’em, and a straw. The straw is the kicker here. Here is a passage from Charles Dickens’ 1844 novel Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit that shows the titular hero’s delight with his first sherry cobbler (note Chuzzlewit’s ecstasy when he gets “the reed” to his lips):
‘I wish you would pull off my boots for me,’ said Martin, dropping into one of the chairs ‘I am quite knocked up—dead beat, Mark.’
‘You won’t say that to-morrow morning, sir,’ returned Mr Tapley; ‘nor even to-night, sir, when you’ve made a trial of this.’ With which he produced a very large tumbler, piled up to the brim with little blocks of clear transparent ice, through which one or two thin slices of lemon, and a golden liquid of delicious appearance, appealed from the still depths below, to the loving eye of the spectator.
‘What do you call this?’ said Martin.
But Mr Tapley made no answer; merely plunging a reed into the mixture—which caused a pleasant commotion among the pieces of ice—and signifying by an expressive gesture that it was to be pumped up through that agency by the enraptured drinker.
Martin took the glass with an astonished look; applied his lips to the reed; and cast up his eyes once in ecstasy. He paused no more until the goblet was drained to the last drop.
‘There, sir!’ said Mark, taking it from him with a triumphant face; ‘if ever you should happen to be dead beat again, when I ain’t in the way, all you’ve got to do is to ask the nearest man to go and fetch a cobbler.’
‘To go and fetch a cobbler?’ repeated Martin.
‘This wonderful invention, sir,’ said Mark, tenderly patting the empty glass, ‘is called a cobbler. Sherry cobbler when you name it long; cobbler, when you name it short. Now you’re equal to having your boots took off, and are, in every particular worth mentioning, another man.’
Anyway. Where was I? Oh, yeah—so I looked around for recipes. David Wondrich’s 2007 cocktail history Imbibe! gives a helpful baseline recipe by citing Jerry Thomas’s 1862 classic, How to Mix Drinks. From Thomas’s book:
Thomas doesn’t mention muddling the oranges, although pretty much every online recipe I read called for muddling.
So reader, I muddled.
Here is my variation on the sherry cobbler (or Sherry Cobbler, or sherry-cobbler). In the loose spirit of the cocktail, I made ours entirely of ingredients I already had at the house. These were for each cocktail:
–4 oz of sherry
–1/2 oz of simple syrup
–1/2 oz of maraschino syrup
–1 oz of sparkling water
–1 clementine (muddled)
–sprigs of mint
–blueberries
–crushed ice
The maraschino syrup was an afterthought after I’d mixed the cocktail and was about to pour it over ice—I wanted to get a pop of color at the bottom of the glass. The mint and blueberries were from our garden. The pic above is lousy; sorry—not sure why I didn’t move the dishcloth and maybe photograph the cocktails like, uh, not in front of my wife’s kombucha hotels.
So how was it? Pretty refreshing. My wife enjoyed it more than I did, although I’m not a huge cocktail guy. (I think it’s pretty hard, for example, to improve upon neat scotch , although I do like bourbon straight up in the hotter months).
I’ve always been fascinated by literary recipes, so I’m a bit surprised the sherry cobbler has evaded my attention until now, despite its having shown up in various novels I’ve read (including Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, as Troy Patterson pointed out in a remarkably thorough literary history of the cocktail at Slate years ago). I’m not sure I’d go out of my way to make a sherry cobbler again (not that I went out of my way to make these ones), but the basic cobbler recipe’s spirit is very close to my approach to making cocktails at home anyway—use what you have. In fact, the major difference between the sherry cobblers I made yesterday and the kind of cocktail I’d normally cobble together for my wife on a Saturday afternoon is the sherry—I’d usually use rum or maybe vodka. Anyway, the whole thing was fun, which is like, the point of cocktails.
[Ed. note–Biblioklept first published this post in 2018. Happy Thanksgiving!]
In Roberto Bolaño’s sprawling opus 2666 (specifically, in “The Part About Fate”), founding member of the Black Panthers/cookbook author Barry Seaman offers the following recipe during a lecture at a Detroit church–
The name of the recipe is: Brussels Sprouts with Lemon. Take note, please. Four servings calls for: two pounds of brussels sprouts, juice and zest of one lemon, one onion, one sprig of parsley, three tablespoons of butter, black pepper, and salt. You make it like so. One: Clean sprouts well and remove outer leaves. Finely chop onion and parsley. Two: In a pot of salted boiling water, cook sprouts for twenty minutes, or until tender. Then drain well and set aside. Three: Melt butter in frying pan and lightly sauté onion, add zest and juice of lemon and salt and pepper to taste. Four: Add brussels sprouts, toss with sauce, reheat for a few minutes, sprinkle with parsley, and serve with lemon wedges on the side. So good you’ll be licking your fingers, said Seaman. No cholesterol, good for the liver, good for the blood pressure, very healthy.
Thurston’s Rock n’ Roll Fantasy
Thurston Moore’s memoir Sonic Life kicks off in 1963 with his older brother Gene bringing home a 45 of the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie,” blowing open five-year-old Moore’s mind to the sonic possibilities of raw guitar power.
Moore describes the primal garage hit as the introduction to “a new current of electricity,” one that rewrites the “soundworld” of his earlier suburban life. Our narrator chases that current, finding it in its purest form in The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” a pre-punk anthem Moore’s band Sonic Youth would cover on their first full-length album, 1983’s Confusion Is Sex. Sonic Youth would also play “I Wanna Be Your Dog” live throughout their career and eventually perform it with Moore’s hero Iggy Pop.
Moore meets many of his heroes in his Sonic Life. It’s a goddamn rock n’ roll fantasy, albeit a fantasy filtered through the gritty reality of punk, No Wave, and smelly indie rock touring vans.
Sure, Moore meets some of the biggies, especially late in the memoir, as Sonic Youth reaches their sonic majority. He chats with Paul McCartney, professing a preference for McCartney’s brother Mike McGear’s stuff to the Beatles. Sonic Youth gets to back David Bowie on “I’m Afraid of Americans.” (Bowie later coos to Moore’s toddler daughter Coco). Moore tours and records with Yoko Ono.
But Moore’s eyes star starrier for the rough luminaries of the New York seventies scene he thrust himself into: Patti Smith, Joey Ramone, Richard Hell, Alan Vega, Tom Verlaine, Lenny Kaye, et al. He’s just as hot for contemporaries like the Minutemen, Black Flag, and Dinosaur Jr., and maybe even hotter for the bands that took Sonic Youth’s squeal to heart, like Pavement, Royal Trux, and My Bloody Valentine.
Sonic Life is larded with people, vibrations, art, life, a love of the weird. Sonic Youth were always as important as curators of the underground, channeling it to seekers of the strange, as they were as a musical act, and Sonic Life is the literary summation of that career.
Thurston’s Literary Fantasy
Any fan who followed Sonic Youth closely, especially in their nineties heyday, would attest that Thurston Moore was the band’s loquacious mouthpiece, a bit of tall charmed ADHD in verbal action, chatting up the world. Sonic Life is liquid, loquacious, loving. Literary protopunk hero Patti Smith populates the pages from the earliest chapters through the last.
Moore also works his decades-long sightings and meetings of William S. Burroughs into the book. Moore first spies Burroughs in 1977 in NYC at a Patti Smith show; decades later the band gets to hang with him a bit. (It’s unclear if Burroughs registers any of this.)
Kathy Acker’s spirit occasionally pops up; it’s clear she was a hero to Moore and his band, but she ghosts them at a planned joint performance in Rotterdam in 1985. The band reads passages of Blood and Guts in High School between songs, tearing out the pages and destroying the book.
Longtime Sonic Youth fans will anticipate Moore’s prose. Seemingly-oblique psychedelic expressions explode, artful phrases dash into each other, ultimately cushioned carefully into a comfortable syntactic register. The effect is not unlike much of Sonic Youth’s post-Sister output, which by turns twisted avant-garde experimentation into pop sugar and deconstructed classic rock riffs into punk scuzz.
Moore’s punchy prose is best summed up in the titles of his 71 chapters, most of them cribbed from song titles and lyrics (including his own): “Flaming Telepaths,” “Mere Animal in a Pre-Fact Clamour,” “Ecstatic Stigmatic,” “Secret Knowledge of Backroads,” “Latex Gold,” etc. The chapter titles are wonderful clues, sometimes direct, sometimes cryptic, always evocative. The prose generally hurtles along, with Moore’s verbal tricks wedged into easy, flowing configurations, but some of the tricks get tired. Particularly, Moore is particularly fond of “Particularly” as a linking expression. Too, we find the book peopled by characters who “could only laugh” at whatever absurdity life has conjured. An editor might have attended these repetitions, but I’m not sure if Moore’s best stuff ever came about via the hands of an editor. The book is generally well-written.
Experimental New York, Seventies and No Wave
Sonic Life begins in 1963, blasting the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie,” and ends in 2009 with Moore naming Sonic Youth’s last album The Eternal. There are moments outside of this neat chronology though. Discussing his family, Moore goes back a few generations, if only for a paragraph or two. He touches briefly on the dissolution of both Sonic Youth and his marriage to Kim Gordon in 2011. That’s not what the book’s about. Sonic Life compresses events before 1977 and events after 1994. The book is almost 500 pages long; Steve Shelley, who joined the band in 1985 and who most fans think of as “the drummer of Sonic Youth,” shows up around page 300. This isn’t a tour diary or a tell-all.
Instead, much of Moore’s narrative focuses on New York in the scummy seventies and early eighties. Dirt, crime, and drone rock rules. Glenn Branca, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, the last days of Sid Vicious. Difficulty making even the cheapest rents. No phones, No Wave, and his first stolen guitar. Moore documents an interstitial period in NYC history. He arrives after punk’s (non-)glory daze, too young to partake, too old to really fit in with the emerging wave of hardcore. Along with Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo, Moore shapes the noise and grime and angles and raw hope into something new–Sonic Youth.
Kim Gordon
Kim Gordon is a huge part of Thurston Moore’s life and a huge part of Sonic Life. She’s not exactly Moore’s muse, but he clearly looks up to her, as he, tall boy, looks up to so many of the people who people this memoir. Moore is frank in his description of Gordon as an artistic and musical partner, one whom he sometimes clearly grated on and at other times found himself astounded by.
In Moore’s telling, Gordon often felt outside of the band. Moore relates that when the band (working with Mike Watt under the name Ciccone Youth) were putting together the noises that eventually became The White(y) Album, Gordon felt herself out of sync with the band. She went to a mall and recorded a video karaoke cover of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” an artistic gesture that confounded and impressed Moore and the rest of the band, lending ironic license to their Pop Art leanings.
Fans looking for anything gossipy in Moore’s memoir about his marriage and divorce from Gordon won’t find it. His focus is on Gordon as an artist and musician. Indeed, much of duo’s communication was rooted in the actual songs they wrote and played. In one of the book’s stronger passages, Moore details creating a punk poster that appropriated the image of a naked young Latina from a calendar he’d found. He scrawled some would-be feminist slogans over the image and hung it in their house. Gordon didn’t say anything at the time. However, when the band rehearsed their new song “Flower” (which would appear on 1985’s Bad Moon Rising), Gordon began singing Moore’s slogans as lyrics: “Support the power of women / Use the power of man.” But Moore then added her own words:
There’s a new girl in your lifeLong red wavy hairGreen, green lips and purple eyesSkinny hips and big round breastsHanging on your wall
Moore ends the chapter by noting that “the two of us never talked about it outright, only through our songwriting. It wouldn’t be the last time that music was the mode of dialogue in our relationship.” Throughout Sonic Life, he heaps praise on his ex-wife as an artist, intellect, musician, and mother, but she ultimately remains a cipher–like the other members of Sonic Youth.
Lee Ranaldo
Moore credits Ranaldo as the better musician and guitar player throughout his memoir, but for the most part he’s a blip in a book of nearly five hundred pages. Maybe that was Ranaldo’s choice—maybe he asked his musical partner of three decades if it was okay to share certain stories and Ranaldo said No.
Richard Edson
Richard Edson was the first drummer of Sonic Youth. Moore credits him with suggesting “the music would be far more effective if there was some semblance of an arrangement, guitars locking into a rhythm so changes could be audibly established.” Moore seems to receive this basic concept of songwriting as a revelation.
Edson went on to star in Stranger Than Paradise and Do the Right Thing, although most people would probably recognize him from a bit part as one of the garage guys in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He also had a bit part in Desperately Seeking Susan, a film featuring Madonna.
Madonna
Madonna wasn’t in Sonic Youth, but she floated in the same circles (and even briefly dated Swans frontman Michael Gira).
Moore brings up Madonna more than Lee Ranaldo or Steve Shelley.
Bob Bert
Moore spends a paragraph or two of Sonic Life implicitly apologizing to Bob Bert, whom Sonic Youth as a whole treated pretty shabbily. They fired and rehired him a few times. He gets more air time than Richard Edson or Steve Shelley (but not as much as Madonna).
Steve Shelley
Steve Shelley’s drumming made Sonic Youth Sonic Youth. He continues to play and record with Thurston Moore, so maybe the lack of words on Shelley in Sonic Life was by way of Shelley’s own request.
Our Band Could Be Your Sonic Life
Michael Azerrad’s 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life devotes a skeptical chapter to Sonic Youth. The editorial position of that history of indie bands in the eighties seems to posit that Sonic Youth were art rock prima donnas who eventually yoked a bevy of underground bands into major label harnesses. Azerrad’s book is really about real-life social networks and overlaps and DIY—Black Flag, SST, The Minutemen, Dischord, seven inches and tapes, and touring! touring! touring! Sonic Life doesn’t exactly duplicate Azzerad’s indie serial, but it does further authenticate it.
Range Life
Michael Azerrad’s 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life, at least in my memory, tends to dwell on touring: stinky vans, unpaid gigs, hard lodging. Moore doesn’t elide this aspect of the band’s identity, but neither does he dwell on it. Moore focuses on the energies on the stage, calling the band a “sonic democracy” — and really, here, I take back what I said above. They are not ciphers but sonics, musicians making the vibrations come alive. What else could we want?
Einstein A Go-Go
Thurston Moore includes the Einstein a Go-Go in a very short list of “clubs that welcomed the underground scene into their chambers, each with [their] own distinct environment.”
Einstein’s was an all-ages club that existed from 1985 to 1997 in Jacksonville Beach, FL. You could go there and dance to wild music for like a five buck cover, and you could see all kinds of cool bands play for maybe eight or ten bucks. I was there pretty much every Friday and Saturday night between ’95-’97 (and sometimes just hung out outside and walked the beach if I didn’t have the cover). Kids wept when it closed. I got to move, leave for college, words that now, as I type them, seem so cruel.
Sonic Youth played Einstein’s with fIREHOSE in the fall of 1986. This performance left a weird little dent in the city that could be felt a decade later by bands who had seen (or at least claimed they had seen) Thurston, Watt, Kim. There were always the older kids who had seen the band, or they had heard about it from older kids who had seen the band…this was called “a scene.”
The Faircloth family who ran Einstein’s were great people. Bands didn’t want to come to Florida; still don’t, really. The Faircloths made sure the bands were comfortable, had good lodging, good food (fried chicken!), leading to a pipeline of bands coming through — 10,000 Maniacs, Flaming Lips, They Might Be Giants, Alex Chilton, Ween, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr., Primus, The Replacements, Jane’s Addiction, Nirvana…
By the time I was old enough to go to the all-ages club, the major indie acts that had passed through had graduated to Bigger Times. But I got to see so many great second-wave indie bands: Archers of Loaf, Polvo, Sebadoh, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Luna, the Swirlies, Superchunk, and so many, many more.
My stupid high school band got to play there a few times too. We were too loud and used weird tunings on the cheap guitars that we kept swapping between songs in lieu of actual songwriting.
Better than that, at Einstein’s I got to dance to the music I wanted to dance to through an incredibly loud speaker system, including Sonic Youth “hits” like “Teenage Riot,” “100%,” and “Bull in the Heather.” Some of that feeling of fucked up dancing reverberates still in Sonic Life.
Punk Breaks, Major $$$, Nirvana, Ecstatic Peace
Where does it all go? Well, you know. Punk breaks. Nirvana breaks. Sonic Youth signs to a major label, opens for Neil Young, and later makes enough money touring on Lollapalooza to build their Echo Canyon studio on Murray Street. They start their own label, SYR, releasing some of their more avant-garde projects. Opportunities expand. All of their equipment gets stolen. Moore and Gordon have a kid and move to the burbs. They still keep an apartment in NYC; Gordon is there the morning of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers. A plane engine crashes on Murray Street; thankfully, Sonic Youth producer and bassist Jim O’Rourke escapes, though not unharrowed. O’Rourke leaves the band and is replaced by Pavement’s Mark Ibold. Sonic Youth releases their last studio record, The Eternal, on indie Matador, having fulfilled their contract with Geffen. Moore begins an affair with Eva Prinz, an editor at Rizzoli. In 2011 he and Gordon divorce and Sonic Youth is kaput. Moore and Prinz marry and start a poetry imprint, Ecstatic Peace Library. He claims to have found his own ecstatic peace.
Radical Compression
As I mentioned above, Moore’s memoir focuses on the late seventies and the eighties. He condenses the band’s last twenty years (and the last ten of their sixteen studio albums) into about 100 pages, just a fifth of the book. And that’s probably for the better; Sonic Youth, while not exactly overexposed, were pretty well documented in print and film and web by the onset of the mid-nineties.
The radical compression is wonderfully effective at times, giving the book a clipped, propulsive rhythm and allowing Moore’s humor to shine through. A standout is Ch. 66, “Latex Gold,” the first chapter of the book’s final sixth section. It begins in 1996 with a Pacific Rim tour with the Beastie Boys and Foo Fighters. Moore and Gordon have enlisted Thurston’s sweet mother Eleanor to help out with Coco (and see a bit of the world). She gets hurt in the mosh pit, trying to take photographs, and ends up wheelchair-bound, but ex-Germs, ex-Nirvana Foo Fighter Pat Smear takes up her cause, making sure she doesn’t get left behind when everyone heads to a flea market in Jakarta. A page later, the band plays Late Night with Conan O’Brien; a few paragraphs later, Moore is remixing Yoko Ono, then playing guitar with Patti Smith. Then the band is on The Simpsons: “It was the single mainstream cultural event that we’d find ourselves identified with across the world.” A paragraph later, Moore is seated on a couch between Lou Reed and Jim Carroll watching a rough cut of The Basketball Diaries. Moore praises DiCaprio’s performance; Reed describes the film as “Fucking terrible” and leaves immediately. On the next page, Moore is driving an aging, overweight, and likely insane John Fahey around a series of gigs in the northeast. Fahey greets Moore at his motel room door one morning, fully nude, Fahey’s cracked CDs strewn across the floor. Moore tells Fahey he could be selling the CDs at their gigs. Fahey offers Moore to take as many CDs he wants. By the end of the ten-page chapter, Sonic Youth are backing up David Bowie at the Thin White Duke’s Madison Square Garden birthday bash.
End Hits
I really loved reading Sonic Life. It’s not a perfectly-written or balanced book, but it feels real. Moore forges a fascinating tone, at times deeply apologetic, particularly to the best friend of his teenage years, Harold Paris, whom he eventually alienates to the point of a break up in the mid eighties. The memoir is filled with conciliatory gestures and admissions of punk snottiness, whether it’s Moore apologizing for a nasty music review he wrote in his one semester of college, conceding that his brattiness to mentor Glenn Branca was likely misplaced, or expressing regret at getting in Dee Snider’s face to flip the bird at a Twisted Sister concert. Moore doesn’t try to spin his divorce from Kim Gordon; his recollection of his affair with Eva Prinz is brief, blunt, and frankly loving. Perhaps the most fascinating example of his zen reflection in the memoir is his take on the 1999 theft of all of Sonic Youth’s musical equipment while on tour in California. The band relied on racks of guitars in alternate tunings for their sound; the theft struck me as devastating at the time. Moore affords the episode just a few spare paragraphs, concluding that although he would miss his Fender Jazzmaster, he “embraced the liberation of losing things, being stripped of attachments” — a chance to “reignite” their musical mission. What did Moore feel at the time though? He doesn’t tell us, but the outlook he provides suggests wisdom and emotional maturity.
Mixtape
I made a mixtape based on the chapter titles and content of Sonic Life. I enjoyed listening to the music as I read Moore’s memoir, revisiting old gems and hearing cuts I haven’t heard in ages, along with a few tracks and artists new to me. And that’s what I think Moore and Sonic Youth always did best—expand a taste of the weird and the noisy, share the sonic love.
It’s been half a day and no one has taken a hit of anything stronger than the vodka and Coke Burroughs is nursing. These days, at seventy-seven and post-triple bypass, Burroughs is taking a break from the opiates. The conversation, however, is free to range where Burroughs no longer does.
It takes a brave man to try and trade drug stories toe-to-toe with William Burroughs, and Cronenberg makes only a perfunctory attempt. “I tried opium once, in Turkey, and there I felt like I had a hideous flu, you know? It was like I was sick.”
“You probably were! It can be very nauseating. You had just taken more than you could assimilate.”
“I did take LSD once,” Cronenberg responds. “It was a great trip. It was a very revealing experience to me, because I had intuited that what we consider to be reality is just a construct of our senses. It shows you, in no uncertain terms, that there are any number of realities that you could live, and you could change them and control them. It’s very real, the effects it left.”
Burroughs nods patronizingly, although he was more of an opiate man.
Talk then shifts to over-the-counter drugs one could abuse, which included the availability of codeine in Canada, opium cold-and-flu tablets in France, and “in England,” says Burroughs, “they used to sell Dr. Brown’s Chlorodine. It was morphine, opium, and chloroform. I used to boil out the chloroform.”
“I was chloroformed once,” says Cronenberg, “as a kid, when they took out my tonsils. I still remember what happened when they put this mask over my face. I saw rockets shooting. Streamers of flame, rockets. . . . I can still see it. And that sickly smell.” He makes a face. After discussing insects, gunshot wounds, and snake bites all day, were finally onto something that can gross out Cronenberg.
“I hate general anesthesia,” says Burroughs. “Scares the hell out me. I had to have it when they did the bypass, but I knew where I was. I knew I was in the hospital having an operation, and there was this gas coming into my face like a gray fog. When I cracked my hip, they put a pin in with a local. A spinal. Of course, it ran out and I started screaming.”
“I was in a motorcycle accident where I separated my shoulder,” says Cronenberg. “They took me into the operating room and gave me a shot of Demerol.”
“Demerol,” says Burroughs, brightening a bit. “Did it help?”
“I loved it. It was wonderful.”
“It helps. I had a shot of morphine up here somewhere,” he says, pointing to the top of his shoulder near his neck, “from my bypass operation. She said, ‘This is morphine.’ And I said, ‘Fine!’ ” Burroughs drags out the word in a sigh of bliss. He closes his eyes in an expression of rapt anticipation. “Shoot it in, my dear, shoot it in.” I ask Burroughs if the doctors and nurses at the hospital knew who he was. “Certainly,” he drawls. “The doctor wrote on my chart, ‘Give Mr. Burroughs as much morphine as he wants.’”
From “Which Is the Fly and Which Is the Human?” a 1992 profile in Esquire by Lynn Snowden. The occasion for the article is the release of Cronenberg’s film adaptation of Naked Lunch.
A moth joke from Norm Macdonald’s memoir Based on a True Story
A moth goes into a podiatrist’s office. The podiatrist says, “What’s the problem?”
The moth says, “Where do I begin with my problems? Every day I go to work for Gregory Vassilievich, and all day long I toil. But what is my work? I am a bureaucrat, and so every day I joylessly move papers from one place to another and then back again. I no longer know what it is that I actually do, and I don’t even know if Gregory Vassilievich knows. He only knows that he has power over me, and this seems to bring him much happiness. And where is my happiness? It is when I awake in the morning and I do not know who I am. In that single moment I am happy. In that single moment, before the memory of who I am strikes me like a cane. And I take to the streets and walk, in a malaise, here and then there and then here again. And then it is time for work. Others stopped asking me what I do for a living long ago, for they know I will have no answer and will fix my empty eyes upon them, and they fear my melancholia might prove so deep as to be contagious. Sometimes, Doc, in the deepest dark of night, I awake in my bed and I turn to my right, and with horror I see some old lady lying on my arm. An old lady that I once loved, Doc, in whose flesh I once found splendor and now see only decay, an old lady who insults me by her very existence.
“Once, Doc, when I was young, I flew into a spiderweb and was trapped. In my panic, I smashed my wings till the dust flew from them, but it did not free me and only alerted the spider. The spider moved toward me and I became still, and the spider stopped. I had heard many stories from my elders about spiders, about how they would sink their fangs into your cephalothorax and you would be paralyzed but aware as the spider slowly devoured you. So I remained as still as possible, but when the spider again began moving toward me, I smashed my wing again into my cage of silk, and this time it worked. I cut into the web and freed myself and flew skyward. I was free and filled with joy, but this joy soon turned to horror: I looked down and saw that in my escape I had taken with me a single strand of silk, and at the end of the strand was the spider, who was scrambling upward toward me. Was I to die high in the sky, where no spider should be? I flew this way, then that, and finally I freed myself from the strand and watched as it floated earthward with the spider. But days later a strange feeling descended upon my soul, Doc. I began to feel that my life was that single strand of silk, with a deadly spider racing up it and toward me. And I felt that I had already been bitten by his venomous fangs and that I was living in a state of paralysis, as life devoured me whole.
“My daughter, Alexandria, fell to the cold of last winter. The cold took her, as it did many of us. And so my family mourned. And I placed on my countenance the look of grief, Doc, but it was a masquerade. I felt no grief for my dead daughter but only envy. And so I have one child now, a boy, whose name is Stephan Mikhailovitch Smokovnikov, and I tell you now, Doc, with great and deep shame, the terrible truth. I no longer love him. When I look into his eyes, all I see is the same cowardice that I see when I catch a glimpse of my own eyes in a mirror. It is this cowardice that keeps me living, Doc, that keeps me moving from place to place, saying hello and goodbye, eating though hunger has long left me, walking without destination, and, at night, lying beside the strange old lady in this burlesque of a life I endure. If only the cowardice would abate for the time needed to reach over and pick up the cocked and loaded pistol that lies on my bedside table, then I might finally end this façade once and for all. But, alas, the cowardice takes no breaks; it is what defines me, it is what frames my life, it is what I am. And yet I cannot resign myself to my own life. Instead, despair is my constant companion as I walk here and then there, without dreams, without hope, and without love.”
“Moth,” says the podiatrist, “your tale has moved me and it is clear you need help, but it is help I cannot provide. You must see a psychiatrist and tell him of your troubles. Why on earth did you come to my office?”
The moth says, “Because the light was on.”
Drew Lerman’s comic strip Snake Creek takes us into the world of best pals Roy and Dav, weirdos among weirdos in Weirdest Florida. Their adventures and misadventures are both absurdly comic and zanily tragic, calling to mind George Herriman’s Krazy Kat strips and Samuel Beckett’s pessimism, Walt Kelly’s primeval Pogo and Robert Coover’s jivetalk, all rendered in kinetic black ink four-panel doses. I’ve been a big fan of the strip for a few years now, and Lerman’s latest collection Escape from the Great American Novel is his best work to date, a fun, messy, spirited send-up of the relationship between art, nature, and commerce.
Escape from the Great American Novel is a novel in just over 150 strips, spanning the end of August, 2019 through the beginning of August, 2021. If you reflect on those dates for a minute, you might recall that we squeezed in a lot of history there. Many of the (so-called) real-life tensions of that tumultuous time bubble up (and occasionally erupt) in the zany, myth-elastic world of Snake Creek.
Things begin simply enough, with Dav seeking to reclaim his “status as a reader of books.” Our protagonist simply wants to dig in to fine literature, but news of approaching Hurricane Dorian blocks his book time. Lerman is a Miamian (a Floridian like myself), and although the world of Snake Creek reverberates with massive streaks of irreality, it is nevertheless also beholden to real-life forces of nature. Ever the slackers, Dav and Roy are ill-prepared for an impending Cat 5. Lerman lays out a comedic scene that might be familiar to anyone who’s tried to buy batteries and water and plywood at the last minute:
The early Dorian episodes of Escape usher in a critique of capitalism-as-religion, or capitalism-as-philosophy (as opposed to, say, the naked reality of exploitation both of people, animals, and natural resources). Short on capital or material, Dav and Roy concoct a plan to forge receipts, totems of capital that might ward off the angry Nature God Dorian. Lerman sneaks in a reference to the erstwhile hero of William Gaddis’s 1955 novel The Recognitions, the forger Wyatt Gwyon:
The storm passes, post-hurricane sobriety settles in, and Dav finds himself reflective: Just what is he doing with his life? And, maybe more to the point, what can he do to extend that life into immortality? His solution, immediately ridiculed by friend Roy, is to commit himself to writing The Great American Novel:
Dav’s quest takes a solipsistic turn. He plays the tortured artist, his ambition a block to his actual progress in writing The Great American Novel. Lerman satirizes the over-inflated but self-defeating ego of the artist who aspires to surpass all the great works came before him. While the pratfalls of a would-be tortured artist is not a particularly fresh subject matter, Lerman brings vitality to his depiction of Dav’s struggle against the anxiety of influence. If we enjoy mocking Dav, it’s because we understand and empathize with him. Who doesn’t want to contend with the greats?
Dav’s quest also takes a turn away from his shenanigans with Roy. The pair’s riffing has always been the heart of Snake Creek, but Lerman keeps his partners apart for much of Escape. Dav’s dive into writing (or preparing to write, or preparing to prepare to write) distract him from Roy time. Initially, Dav chugs out reams of pages in the thrill of early enterprise. His ego swells, inflated by the grandeur of his illusions:
Only a few strips later, we find Dav’s illusions deflated. “S’all trash!” he declares over the mess of his nascent manuscript. Roy tries to help Dav. Snake Creek folk are all riled up over the plans of some “ollie garx” and the people are protesting. Roy rightfully recognizes potential inspiration here. He can bring his pal back to earth. “Sum sorter politicka thing” is happening, and that might be the inspirational grist Dav needs, right? But Dav rejects him: “I do not wish to know about anything that happened on this earth.” It might be hard to change the course of earthly life with that attitude. Instead of heeding Roy’s advice, Dav falls deeper into navel-gazing, imagining his future success, and generally doing anything except writing.
Dav’s dithering with the typewriter leaves Roy loose and “roving.” An amiable fellow, Roy soon takes up with two Russian oligarchs, Lev and Igor. This nefarious pair wishes to drill for oil in Snake Creek, destroying the weird paradise for profit. They plan to use charismatic, naïve Roy as their mouthpiece, a trusted liaison to the Creek community who can convince the locals on board to “drill baby drill.”
Lerman’s satire of these “ollie garx” and their relations with Roy is riddled with great gags. The oligarchs give Roy bald eagle eggs, which he proceeds to fry up to Dav’s dismay. They take him golfing and try to get him into Ayn Rand. They explain their anti-nature views—Mother Earth isn’t a caring mother but a devouring father who must, in oh-so Freudian terms, be eliminated. (Lerman, who always sneaks literary allusions into his strips, can’t resist referencing Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying during this exchange.) In one of my favorite exchanges in Escape, the oligarchs try to explain to Roy why his main talking point to convince the Snake Creek denizens to drill should be the promise of jobs:
“But people hate jobs” — yes. And it is ideology, but you’re not stupid, reader, although the oligarchs might think you are. Their attempted seduction of sweet Roy plays out against Dav’s egotistical self-seduction into a fantasy of literary greatness in the twin threads of Escape from the Great American Novel. There are meditations on art, immortality, capitalism, and the role of our native environs. There are throwaway jokes on Harold Bloom and arguments over the better English translation of Camus’ L’Etranger. There are drones and fecal preoccupations and a nice ACAB reference; there are anarchist swamp folk and bombs! And there are puns. I hope you like puns.
The strips collected in Escape from the Great American Novel span two years that often felt in “real time” like an eternity. Many of us were separated from friends and family over these months. Lerman’s gambit, intentional or otherwise, is to keep his central characters separated, which adds real tension to a comic novel that otherwise might be a loose collection of funny riffs. As I stated before, Roy and Dav are the heart of Snake Creek, so when Lerman finally reunites them the moment is not just cathartic, it’s literarily metaphysical. For all its sardonic jags, ribald japes, and erudite allusions, Escape from the Great American Novel is in the end a sweet, even heartwarming read (Dav and Roy would find a way to mock this sentiment, I’m sure). I loved it. Highly recommended.
Escape from the Great American Novel is available in print from Radiator Comics.
I finished John Crowley’s 1976 novel Beasts this morning. Loved it.
Beasts is not quite 200 pages, each of its nine chapters centering on a different character’s perspective. Crowley’s writing is rich and poetic here, as readers of his 1981 opus Little, Big might expect. In that novel, likely his most famous, Crowley conjures a vast, deep, detailed world; Little, Big is big big.
Beasts is little big: each of its nine chapters might be read as a short story in which we get a glimpse from one perspective at a balkanized, dystopian post-USA. A species of genetic hybrid called leos are corralled on reservations or outright hunted by the militant Union for Social Engineering; what remains of the Federal Government vies for control with various Autonomous zones; utopian cultists try to hide from the world; slavery has returned under the guise of contractual indentured servitude. A mutant fox, the trickster Reynard, plays kingmaker behind the scenes. The nine chapters refuse to explicitly connect the pieces of the world the present; that is the job of the reader. As Joachim Boaz puts it in his excellent, thorough review of the novel,
Beasts embodies a fascinating dialogue between nature and civilization, man and animal… Do not expect a straightforward narrative for many chapters function more as mood pieces. Each is part of a mosaic of images, characters, and philosophies that struggle to survive, or are altogether snuffed out, in a rapidly collapsing Old Order.
That imminent collapse is where Beasts leaves us, its final line a utopian promise: Shall we begin?
The day after that he experienced what at first he thought might be some variation of déjà vu. He’d finished lunch and stood at the door of a corner restaurant, able to see, at a severe angle, the lean elderly man who frequently appeared outside Federal Hall holding a hand-lettered political placard over his head for the benefit of those gathered on the steps. He, Lyle, was cleaning his fingernails, surreptitiously, using a toothpick he’d taken from a bowl near the cash register inside the restaurant. The paradox of material flowing backward toward itself. In this case there was no illusion involved. He had stood on this spot, not long ago, at this hour of the day, doing precisely what he was doing now, his eyes on the old man, whose body was aligned identically with the edge of a shadow on the façade of the building he faced, his sign held at the same angle, it seemed, the event converted into a dead replica by means of structural impregnation, the mineral replacement of earlier matter. Lyle decided to scatter the ingredients by heading directly toward the man instead of back to the Exchange, as he was certain he’d done the previous time. First he read the back of the sign, the part facing the street, recalling the general tenor. Then he sat on the steps, with roughly a dozen other people, and reached for his cigarettes. Burks was across the street, near the entrance to the Morgan Bank. People were drifting back to work. Lyle smoked a moment, then got up and approached the sign-holder. The strips of wood that steadied the edges of the sign extended six inches below it, giving the man a natural grip. Burks looked unhappy, arms folded across his chest.
“How long have you been doing this?” Lyle said. “Holding this sign?”The man turned to see who was addressing him.
“Eighteen years.”
Sweat ran down his temples, trailing pale outlines on his flushed skin. He wore a suit but no tie. The life inside his eyes had dissolved. He’d made his own space, a world where people were carvings on rock. His right hand jerked briefly. He needed a haircut.
“Where, right here?”
“I moved to here.”
“Where were you before?”
“The White House.”
“You were in Washington.”
“They moved me out of there.”
“Who moved you out?”
“Haldeman and Ehrlichman.”
“They wouldn’t let you stand outside the gate.”
“The banks sent word.”
Lyle wasn’t sure why he’d paused here, talking to this man. Dimly he perceived a strategy. Perhaps he wanted to annoy Burks, who obviously was waiting to talk to him. Putting Burks off to converse with a theoretical enemy of the state pleased him. Another man moved into his line of sight, middle-aged and heavy, a drooping suit, incongruous pair of glasses—modish and overdesigned. Lyle turned, noting Burks had disappeared.
“Why do you hold the sign over your head?”
“People today.”
“They want to be dazzled.”
“There you are.”
Lyle wasn’t sure what to do next. Best wait for one of the others to move first. He took a step back in order to study the front of the man’s sign, which he’d never actually read until now.
RECENT HISTORY
OF THE WORKERS OF THE WORLD
CIRCA 1850–1920 Workers hands cut off on Congo rubber plantations, not meeting work quotas. Photos in vault Bank of England. Rise of capitalism.
THE INDUSTRIAL AGE Child labor, accidents, death. Cruelty = profits. Workers slums Glasgow, New York, London. Poverty, disease, separation of family. Strikes, boycotts, etc. = troops, police, injunctions. Bitter harvest of Ind. Revolution.
MAY 1886 Haymarket Riot, Chicago, protest police killings of workers, 10 dead, 50 injured, bomb blast, firing into crowd.
SEPT 1920 Wall St. blast, person or persons unknown, 40 dead, 300 injured, marks remain on wall of J. P. Morgan Bldg. Grim reminder.
FEB 1934 Artillery fire, Vienna, shelling of workers homes, 1,000 dead inc. 9 Socialist leaders by hanging/strangulation. Rise of Nazis. Eve of World War, etc.
There was more in smaller print fitted onto the bottom of the sign. The overweight man, wilted, handkerchief in hand, was standing five feet away. Lyle, stepping off the sidewalk, touched the old man, the sign-holder, as he walked behind him, putting a hand on the worn cloth that covered his shoulder, briefly, a gesture he didn’t understand. Then he accompanied the other man down to Bowling Green, where they sat on a bench near a woman feeding pigeons.
From Don DeLillo’s novel Players.
Set in a remote future and composed in an English nobody ever spoke or wrote, this short, swiftly paced tale juxtaposes preliterate fable and Beckettian wit, Boschian monstrosities and a hero with Huck Finn’s heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy. It is a wrenchingly vivid report on the texture of life after Doomsday.
The setting is near what was known – until 1997, when cataclysms wiped us out – as Canterbury, England. It is about 2,000 years after that disaster. The mostly dim lights of human life who survive are slaves to the obsessions of their invisible rulers. From generation to generation, they labor ceaselessly, under close surveillance, to disinter by hand the past that lies buried beneath tons of muck – mangled machines, mysteriously preserved bits of flesh, indecipherable fragments of writing. The rulers dream of uncovering the secret of secrets – the key to the power that enabled the giants of yesteryear to create a world in which boats sailed in the air and pictures moved on the wind.
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, ‘Your tern now my tern later.’ The other spears gone in then and he wer dead and the steam coming up off him in the rain and we all yelt, ‘Offert!’ The woal thing fealt jus that littl bit stupid. Us running that boar thru that las littl scrump of woodling with the forms all roun. Cows mooing sheap baaing cocks crowing and us foraging our las boar in a thin grey girzel on the day I come a man.
In the autumn, I went with my mother to visit Mario, who was now living in a small town near Clermont-Ferrand. He was teaching in a boarding school. He had become great friends with the school’s headmaster and his wife. He said that they were extraordinary people, very sophisticated and honest, the kind of people you could only find in France. In his small room he had a coal stove. From his window you could see the countryside covered in snow. Mario wrote long letters to Chiaromonte and Cafi in Paris. He translated Herodotus and fiddled with the stove. Under his jacket, he wore a dark turtleneck sweater that the headmaster’s wife had made for him. To thank her, he’d given her a sewing basket. Everyone in the town knew him. He stopped and chatted with everyone and he was asked by all to come home with them and drink “le vin blanc.”
My mother said, “How French he’s become!”
In the evenings, he played cards with the headmaster and his wife. He listened to their conversations and discussed educational methods with them. They also spoke a long time about whether or not there had been enough onion in the soup served at dinner.
“How patient he’s become!” my mother said. “How patient he is with these people. With us he never had any patience. Whenever he was home, he thought we were all so boring. These people seem even more boring than we are!”
And she said, “He’s patient with them only because they’re French!”
From Natalia Ginzburg’s 1963 memoir Lessico famigliare, in translation (under the title Family Lexicon) by Jenny McPhee.
Frank Cauldhame, the narrator of Iain Banks’s 1984 debut novel The Wasp Factory, is a teenage psychopath. Frank lives with his eccentric father on an island in rural Scotland. He is an unregistered person with “no birth certificate, no National Insurance number,” nothing to officially prove his existence. He enjoys this unofficial existence, patrolling his island, which he protects through various rituals.
One of these rituals is to construct and maintain “Sacrifice Poles,” and when we first meet Frank, he is “making the rounds” of these talismans: “One of the Poles held a rat head with two dragonflies, the other a seagull and two mice.” Frank has to keep plenty of dead animals on hand for his ritual defenses, and he kills them by slingshot, air-gun, explosives, and even an improvised flamethrower. (Readers sensitive to depictions of animal cruelty, or just cruelty in general, may wish to avoid The Wasp Factory.)
Another of Frank’s rituals consists of sacrificing a live wasp to the titular Wasp Factory (“beautiful and deadly and perfect,” in our narrator’s words). Frank has devised the Wasp Factory as a bizarre death trap built from “the face of the old clock which used to hang over the door of the Royal Bank of Scotland in Porteneil.” Once introduced to the Factory, the poor wasp can fall prey to one of a dozen different deaths, including the Boiling Pool, the Spider’s Parlour, the Acid Pit, or even “the rather jocularly named Gents (where the instrument of ending is [Frank’s] own urine, usually quite fresh).”
Frank’s urine becomes an important motif in The Wasp Factory. We learn fairly early that he is a “unique eunuch,” supposed victim of a dog bite accident that has left him forever unmanned (and deeply misogynistic). Our lad must piss sitting down, a shame he accepts with a hateful forbearance. Urine flows throughout the novel, an abject magical potion.
Indeed, Frank’s rituals frequently call for the most abject residues and excretions for the magic to work. Consider the Naming Ceremony he performs for a new weapon he’s purchased:
I smeared the metal, rubber and plastic of the new device with earwax, snot, blood, urine, belly-button fluff and toenail cheese, christened it by firing the empty sling at a wingless wasp crawling on the face of the Factory, and also fired it at my bared foot, raising a bruise.
Parts of me thought all this was nonsense, but they were in a tiny minority. The rest of me knew this sort of thing worked. It gave me power, it made me part of what I own and where I am. It makes me feel good.
Were it not for the animal cruelty, Frank’s rituals, no matter how abject, might be the stuff of antic children’s games–playing war, building dams, shooting pellets at cans, and so forth. But the ritualized animal murders are part and parcel of Frank’s most sadistic crimes. He is a serial killer.
Frank confesses his crimes early in The Wasp Factory, and the Scribner trade paperback edition uses his confession as copy on the back of the book to entice would-be readers, so I don’t think I’ll spoil much by sharing it:
Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim.
That’s my score to date. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again.
It was just a stage I was going through.
The punchline there at the end is indicative of the dark humor that pervades The Wasp Factory. The edition I’m quoting includes blurbs from negative reviews as well, again highlighting Banks’s mordant glee with the monster he’s conjured. “Rubbish!” declares The Times of London; “There’s nothing to force you, having been warned, to read it; nor do I recommend it,” warns The Scotsman.
Elsewhere, Banks’s humor is earthier, as when Frank recounts some of the early days of his homeschooling at the hands of his ex-hippy chemist father:
For years I believed Pathos was one of the Three Musketeers, Fellatio was a character in Hamlet, Vitreous a town in China, and that the Irish peasants had to tread the peat to make Guinness.
There’s also a sweet streak to the book as well as Frank himself, who, despite his psychotic behavior, is a genuinely caring person at times. His relationship to his only friend, a dwarf named Jamie, is damn near tender; Frank perches Jamie on his shoulders so that the latter can better see the awful punk bands at the local pub.
Frank also cares deeply for his older brother Eric. In the first line of the novel, we learn that Eric has “escaped”; we soon learn he’s escaped from a psychiatric ward he’d been sent to after terrorizing the town folk. Eric’s insane crimes also involve animal cruelty: burning local dogs; force-feeding children worms.
The plot of The Wasp Factory is actually quite simple: What will happen when Eric comes home? Banks keeps the pot boiling through a series of phone calls Eric makes to Frank. We come to see that while Frank might be a psychopath, he is not insane in the way that his older brother is. (A late reveal in the novel that explains the cause of Eric’s insanity is one of the most disgusting pieces of prose I’ve ever read (I write this in admiration.)) In the meantime, Frank attempts to break into the office door that his father has always kept locked.
These twin plots—prodigal son coming home, daddy’s secret locked door—drive the action of The Wasp Factory (oh, and Frank’s basement is full of explosive cordite, too). The book’s real weight comes not from the plot, but from Frank’s narration. He’s a perceptive intelligence, and tuning into his voice is by turns mesmerizing and horrifying.
Not everyone will enjoy The Wasp Factory, as I’ve tried to make as clear as possible in this review. To borrow from The Scotsman, “There’s nothing to force you, having been warned, to read it.” And even admirers may find the twist ending a bit dated and the final moments of Frank’s deep reflection a bit rushed. But Banks does give the reader a conclusion, when it might have been so much easier to leave his characters (and readers) in a noncommittal fuzz of ambiguity. There’s a point of view here, even if it disturbs. The Wasp Factory is a truly fucked up coming-of-age novel, an abject anti-Huckleberry Finn whose narrator makes Holden Caulfield seem perfectly well adjusted. Not for everyone, but I loved it. Recommended.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1975 volume The Wind’s Twelve Quarters collects seventeen short stories, offering, as the author puts it in her foreword, “a retrospective” of her career to date: “a roughly chronological survey of my short stories during the first ten years after I broke into print.” Le Guin adds that The Wind’s Twelve Quarters is “by no means a complete collection” of her short stories to date, and that the book does not include “fiction which doesn’t fit under the headings Fantasy or Science Fiction.” In addition to her foreword, Le Guin offers brief introductory notes to each of the seventeen tales.
For me, these introductions were often as interesting as the stories themselves. In her introduction to “Semley’s Necklace,” for example, Le Guin declares that the “candor and simplicity” of this early story exemplifies the “romanticism” characteristic of her early work — a mode that has “gradually become something harder, stronger, and more complex” as her career developed. In her introduction to “The Good Trip,” she tells us that her “only strong opinion about drugs (pot, hallucinogens, alcohol) is anti-prohibition and pro-education” but also admits that “people who expand their consciousness by living instead of by taking chemicals usually come back with much more interesting reports of where they’ve been.” In her intro to “Nine Lives,” which was originally published in Playboy in 1968, Le Guin laments that it appeared “under the only pen name I have ever used: U. K. Le Guin,” and that it is “surprising to me to realize how thoughtlessly I went along with them. It was the first (and is the only) time I met with anything I understood as sexual prejudice, prejudice against me as a woman writer, from any editor or publisher; and it seemed so silly, so grotesque, that I failed to see that it was also important.” In her introduction for “A Trip to the Head,” Le Guin describes a dark bout of writers block she experienced over a period of two years living in England. Giving herself permission to write “A Trip to the Head” released the block:
There is a kind of story which I would describe as a Bung Puller. The writer for one reason or another has been stuck, can’t work; and gets started again suddenly, with a pop, and a lot of beer comes leaping out of the keg and foaming all over the floor. This story was definitely a Bung Puller.
“A Trip to the Head” is one of the very few examples in the collection where the introductory material outweighs the tale it introduces. The story starts promisingly enough:
“Yes, this is Earth,” said the one beside him, “nor are you out of it. In Zambia men are rolling down hills inside barrels as training for space flight. Israel and Egypt have defoliated each other’s deserts. The Reader’s Digest has bought a controlling interest in the United States of America/General Mills combine. The population of the Earth is increasing by thirty billion every Thursday. Mrs Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis will marry Mao Tse-Tung on Saturday, in search of security; and Russia has contaminated Mars with bread mold.”
“Why then,” said he, “nothing has changed.”
—but then Le Guin makes good on that “nothing has changed” idea, even as, paradoxically, her story’s undefined protagonist transforms through a series of identities. “A Trip to the Head” is a postmodern experiment that doesn’t really succeed, unless, of course, you count that its creation unblocked our author.
And it’s a good thing Le Guin broke her block: some of her strongest work came after “A Trip to the Head,” including The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and the first two Earthsea novels. Most of the stories in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters that came after “A Trip to the Head” are quite strong. 1971’s “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” part of Le Guin’s Hainish universe, tells the story of SPACE MADNESS! and a murderous empathic jungle. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) is a successful morality experiment (or “psychomyth,” to use Le Guin’s term). “Omelas” proposes a utopia where “millions [are] kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment.” In her introduction, Le Guin attributes this riff on the scapegoat to William James’s essay “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (although she concedes that she first read the scenario in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov). “Omelas” is a highlight of The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, as is 1974’s “The Day Before the Revolution,” which details a day in the life of the aged anarchist revolutionary Odo. “The Day Before the Revolution” serves as a kind of prologue to The Dispossessed, a move that appears elsewhere in the collection.
The opening story, “Semly’s Necklace,” is quite literally the prologue to Le Guin’s first novel Rocannon’s World (1966). “Winter’s King” (1969) was the spark that led to what many consider Le Guin’s finest novel The Left Hand of Darkness (published later the same year). 1964’s “The Word of Unbinding” and “The Rule of Names” preceded the Earthsea novels that Le Guin would begin in the late sixties. While these germinal tales are intriguing, its clear the Le Guin, ever the anthropologist, would like to do more than her limited canvas can hold. These tales are most notable as ancillary material to be situated in the worlds that Le Guin would go on to conjure in a much wider scope.
Some of the best stories in the collection are self-contained, even as they point to Le Guin’s developing larger themes and goals as a writer. “The Masters” (1963) is a lovely dystopian riff on power, control, and knowledge (“The theme of this story is one I returned to later, with considerably better equipment,” Le Guin remarks in her intro, adding, “It has a good sentence in it, though: ‘He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God'” — that is a good sentence!) 1970’s “Things” imagines the paranoia of a promised apocalypse, with a brickmaker turned boatbuilder and a widowed weaver providing their own imaginative resistance to the coming onslaught. 1962’s “April in Paris” is a lovely oddity—a romantic time traveling tale with a sentimental happy ending:
The alchemist and the interstellar archaeologist went first, speaking French; the Gaulish slave and the professor from Indiana followed, speaking Latin, and holding hands. The narrow streets were crowded, bright with sunshine. Above them Notre Dame reared its two square towers against the sky. Beside them the Seine rippled softly. It was April in Paris, and on the banks of the river the chestnuts were in bloom
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters is not a great starting place for anyone interested in Le Guin’s worlds. Interested parties would do better to start with The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, or The Left Hand of Darkness—but interested parties are probably aware of that. The book is better suited for folks like me—folks who tore through the Hainish cycle and the Earthsea books and collections, and still wanted a little more. The Wind’s Twelve Quarters is ultimately most interesting as a document of a writer coming into the prime of her powers, and, as such, is indispensable for hardcore Le Guin fans.
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I want to comment on the themes and style of William Gaddis’s fourth novel, 1994’s A Frolic of His Own, and I’d like to do so without the burden of summarizing its byzantine plot, so I’ll crib from Steven Moore’s contemporary review of the novel that was first published in the Spring 1994 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction. Although he initially protests that the “plot is too wonderfully complex to summarize,” Moore nevertheless offers a concise precis. Moore writes that A Frolic of His Own
…concerns an interlocking set of lawsuits involving the Crease family: Oscar, a historian and playwright; Christina, his stepsister and married to a lawyer named Harry Lutz; and their father Judge Thomas Crease, presiding over two cases in Virginia during the course of the novel. The story unfolds by way of Gaddis’s trademark dialogue but also by various legal opinions, brilliantly rendered in the majestic language of the law.
Law, one of the major themes of the novel, is announced in its opening lines: “Justice? —You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.” A Frolic of His Own delves into the intersection of justice, law, art, theft, and compensation, all while foregrounding language as the mediating force of not just these nebulous concepts, but the medium, of course, of the novel itself. “What do you think the law is, that’s all it is, language,” the exasperated lawyer Harry declaims to his wife Christina.
Language is always destabilized and destabilizing in A Frolic of His Own. Gaddis lards the novel with mistakes, misinterpretations, and muddles of every mixture. Characters repeatedly fail to communicate clearly with each other, their dialogue twisting into new territories before they’ve mapped out their present concerns. A Frolic reads as linguistic channel surfing, an addled mind constantly turning the dial before a thought can fully land.
The effect of this linguistic channel surfing at times stuns and overwhelms the reader, approximating the noise of modern language that Gaddis’s heroes so often rail against, even as they participate in and create more of this noise. It’s worth sharing a paragraph in full to offer a sense of what Gaddis is doing in A Frolic of His Own. Here, Christina takes a phone call from her husband Harry, while her brother Oscar (who is slowly going mad) watches the evening news:
—Has Harry called? And when it finally rang —We’re fine, did you get to that new doctor? Well whatever you call him, you… I know that Harry but you’ve simply got to make time, if you don’t you’re going to end up like… that’s exactly what I mean, he’s sitting right here waiting for the evening news to whet his appetite for supper, I mean I can’t take care of both of you can I? Scenes of mayhem from Londonderry to Chandigarh, an overweight family rowing down main street in a freak flood in Ohio, a molasses truck overturned on the Jersey Turnpike, gunfire, stabbings, flaming police cars and blazing ambulances celebrating a league basketball championship in Detroit interspersed with a decrepit grinning couple on a bed that warped and heaved at the touch of a button —because they offered him a settlement Harry, almost a quarter million dollars but of course he insists on going ahead with the case or rather Mister Basie does, he was out here for… what? The Stars and Bars unfurled in a hail of rocks and beer cans showering the guttering remnants of a candlelight vigil—but if you can just try to be patient with her Harry, you know her mother just died and she’s been in an awful state trying to… to what? Oscar will you turn that down! that now she wants you to help her break her mother’s will? I don’t see what… well they never really got on after her mother was converted by that wildeyed Bishop Sheed was it? a million years ago convincing her that it was more exclusive with Clare Luce and all that after the wads of money she’d been giving St Bartholomew’s with these millions of Catholics jamming every slum you can think of if you call that exclusive, she…—Look! Christina look! Placards brandishing KEEP GOD IN AMERICA, MURDERER come quickly! and caught in the emergency vehicles’ floodlights towering over it all the jagged thrust of —that, that Szyrk thing that, look!
The noisy force of mass-mediated language threatens to overwhelm the reader, whom Gaddis challenges to make meaning of his mess. Later, Christina sums up the problem: “I mean you talk about language how everything’s language it seems all that language does is drive us apart.” Naive Oscar, whose multiple lawsuits initiate the plot of A Frolic, tries to clarify the problem of language in his own way too: “—Isn’t that what language is for? to say what you mean? That’s why man invented language, isn’t it? so we can say what we mean?” But the events that Gaddis arranges in his novel suggest that the answer is, Not quite. There’s only one language all Americans understand—money:
—You want to sue them for damages, that’s money isn’t it?
—Because that’s the only damn language they understand! …Steal poetry what do you sue them for, poetry? …Two hundred hours teaching Yeats to the fourth grade?
Oscar’s complaint is the apparent plagiarism of his Civil War play Once at Antietam by a major Hollywood studio that has turned it into a “piece of trash” called The Blood in the Red White and Blue. Gaddis includes large sections of Oscar’s play in A Frolic of His Own, often having various characters (including its author) stop to make critical remarks. Here, Gaddis has actually cannibalized parts of a play he wrote in the late 1950s after he’d finished The Recognitions. He was unable to get Once at Antietam produced or published. In a 1961 letter, he admitted that “Now it reads heavy-handed, obvious, over-explained, oppressive,” adding that there might be some value somewhere in the work “but the vital problem remains, to extract it, to lift out something with a life of its own, give it wings, release it.” A Frolic of His Own may, on one hand, “release” Gaddis’s old play, but it denies it any life of its own. The play is bound within the text proper, incomplete, riddled with elisions, terminally unfinished.
It also comes to light (via a lengthy legal deposition) that Oscar (and perhaps the younger Gaddis?) has plagiarized large sections of his play, notably from Plato’s Republic. Oscar pleads that his plagiarisms are justified—they are art. But in A Frolic of His Own, “it all evaporates into language confronted by language turning language itself into theory till it’s not about what it’s about it’s only about itself turned into a mere plaything.”
Language is, of course, Gaddis’s plaything, and his novel repeatedly underlines its own textuality without the preciousness that sometimes afflicts postmodernist writing. For all his innovations and experimentation with form, Gaddis here and elsewhere is at his core a traditionalist like his hero T.S. Eliot. And like Eliot, he seeks to pick up the detritus of culture and meld it into something new, all while attacking the hollow men who run America. There’s more than just crankiness here: There is howling and bleating and often despair. There’s no justice for our characters, but at the same time, they hardly deserve any. For all their apparent cares and worries, these rich, venal, petty characters are ultimately, to borrow a phrase from another book, careless people, leaving messes for others to clean up (often quite literally). The satire bites; it’s rightfully mean-spirited, caustic, and bitter.
As such, A Frolic of His Own, for all its humor, is often very bleak. It also becomes increasingly claustrophobic. The characters get stuck in their language loops; the only way out seems to be madness or death. Gaddis’s writing had long evoked suffocating domestic spaces, whether it was the paper-stuffed 96th Street apartment shared by Bast, Eigen, and Gibbs in 1975’s J R or the haunted house of 1985’s Carpenter’s Gothic. A Frolic of His Own takes the madness to another level, setting the stage for the monolingual stasis of his final work, Agapē Agape.
Even if its cramped quarters are often gloomy and crammed with sharp objects, there’s a zaniness to the linguistic channel surfing of A Frolic that propels its fractured narrative forward. “The rest of it’s opera,” repeats Harry throughout, calling attention to the novel’s satirical histrionics. “It’s a farce,” repeats Oscar, pointing to both his own legal cases and his family history. As A Frolic progresses, its farcical twists become more and more bizarre, yet Gaddis always ties his loose ends. The modern world he satirizes is absurd, but it is real.
The realism Gaddis evokes in A Frolic centers around food and shelter. The action is confined primarily to the dilapidated old Crease estate, with its family (in ever-shifting configurations) frequently trying to feed themselves: “We’ve got to get some food in the house” becomes a mantra. Poor privileged half-siblings Oscar and Christina can hardly shop for themselves, let alone cook.
They are very adroit at drinking, however. As the novel careens towards madness, the half-siblings respond by hitting the booze. Consumption runs throughout the novel, presaged in its domestic-but-dooming epigraph, a recollection of something Thoreau said to Emerson while they were walking:
What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey.
Gaddis was fond of repurposing language, and first used the lines in his first novel, 1955’s The Recognitions. The last line of the epigraph, which finds the seeker become prey to his own dream, seems to me now to further highlight A Frolic’s themes of consumption—taboo consumption: cannibalism.
Very early in the novel, the narrator calls attention to Oscar’s copy of George Fitzhugh’s 1857 defense of slavery, Cannibals All! The phrase “cannibals all” is then inverted near the very end of the novel, when a former lawyer, in the hopes of perpetrating an insurance scam, wedges his foot in Oscar’s door: “they’re cannibals Mister Crease, they’re all cannibals,” the former lawyer insists, referring broadly to the insurance industry (he’ll later extend the term to those working in the real estate market in particular and humanity in general).
These direct inversions—cannibals-all/all-cannibals—bookend A Frolic of His Own, neatly encasing the metaphorical cannibalism that runs through the novel. Gaddis depicts a “dog eat dog” world (full of literal dead dogs) ruled by venal consumption. Family members cannibalize family members, law cannibalizes art, texts cannibalize texts. “When the food supply runs out and the only ones around are your own species, why go hungry?” interjects the narrator of a nature documentary that Oscar watches absentmindedly. Harry puts it succinctly:
That’s…what this whole country’s really all about? tens of millions out there with their candy and beer cans and this inexhaustible appetite for being entertained? Anything they can get their hands on…
Gaddis depicts a world where all attempts at culture and art are ultimately cannibalized and excreted by capital. In one of the novel’s goofiest and meanest gags, an entrepreneur seeks to exploit the highly-publicized death of Spot, a dog trapped and then zapped in an ugly postmodernist sculpture. The huckster, capitalizing on the public’s love for Spot, creates “Hiawatha’s Magic Mittens…labeled ‘Genuine Simulated Spotskin® Wear ‘Em With The Furside Outside.'”
“Hiawatha’s Magic Mittens” might seem like a throwaway joke, but the joke is nevertheless part of the novel’s theme of cannibalized culture. Those familiar with the legend of Hiawatha may recall that in many versions, Hiawatha practices ritual cannibalism until he is converted by the Great Peacemaker Deganawida. After his conversion, Hiawatha ceases to eat human flesh and strives for mutual aid and cooperation.
Gaddis also evokes the Hiawatha of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, itself a cannibalization of sorts of the mytho-historical Hiawatha. Gaddis grafts the oft-cited opening line of “Hiawatha’s Childhood,” “By the shores of Gitche Gumee” a few times early in the novel. The poem seems to loll and roll around in Oscar’s skull; as his alcoholic madness increases, the poem’s trochaic tetrameter infects his thoughts. The result is some of the most beautiful prose in the book (even if the lines are intended as half-parody). Consider the following passage, which begins with Oscar watching the sunset on the wetlands around his crumbling estate, takes flight into the poetic cannibalization of Longfellow’s lines, and winds up in the jumble of Oscar’s fish tank (I strongly suggest reading the passage aloud to hear the trochaic tetrameter):
Neither the red scream of sunset blazing on the icebound pond nor the thunderous purple of its risings on a landscape blown immense through leafless trees off toward the ocean where in flocks the wild goose Wawa, where Kahgahgee king of ravens with his band of black marauders, or where the Kayoshk, the seagulls, rose with clamour from their nests among the marshes and the Mama, the woodpecker seated high among the branches of the melancholy pine tree past the margins of the pond neither rose Ugudwash, the sunfish, nor the yellow perch the Sahwa like a sunbeam in the water banished here, with wind and wave, day and night and time itself from the domain of the discus by the daylight halide lamp, silent pump and power filter, temperature and pH balance and the system of aeration, fed on silverside and flake food, vitamins and krill and beef heart in a patent spinach mixture to restore their pep and lustre spitting black worms from the feeder when a crew of new arrivals (live delivery guaranteed, air freight collect at thirty dollars) brought a Chinese algae eater, khuli loach and male beta, two black mollies and four neons and a pair of black skirt tetra cruising through the new laid fronds of the Madagascar lace plant.
Forgive the long quote. Or don’t. As the novel swerves to its gloomy end, the poem overtakes Oscar’s consciousness, the transcendental beauty of Longfellow’s vision cannibalized by the chainsaws of “land developers,” the real fauna replaced with Disneyfied simulations to send him off to drunken troubled dream. Dreamy Oscar:
…made a bed with boughs of hemlock where the squirrel, Adjidaumo, from his ambush in the oak trees watched with eager eyes the lovers, watched him fucking Laughing Water and the rabbit, the Wabasso sat erect upon his haunches, watched him fucking Minnehaha as the birds sang loud and sweetly where the rumble of the trucks drowned the drumming of the pheasant and the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah gave a cry of lamentation from her haunts among the fenlands at the howling of the chainsaws and the screams of the wood chipper for that showplace on the corner promising a whole new order of woodland friends for the treeless landscape, where Thumper the Rabbit and Flower the Skunk would introduce the simpering Bambi to his plundered environment and instruct him in matters of safety and convenience by the shining Big-Sea-Water, by the shores of Gitche Gumee where the desolate Nokomis drank her whisky at the fireside, not a word from Laughing Water left abandoned by the windows, from the wide eyed Ella Cinders with the mice her only playmates as he turned his back upon them with his birch canoe exulting, all alone went Hiawatha.
Many contemporary reviewers suggested that A Frolic of His Own was Gaddis’s most accessible novel to date, and it might be. Whereas J R and Carpenter’s Gothic are composed almost entirely in dialogue, Gaddis provides more stage direction and connective tissue in A Frolic. There are also the fragments of other forms: legal briefs, depositions, TV news clips, Oscar’s play…Some of these departures can exhaust a reader. Gaddis’s parodies of legalese are full of jokes, but the tone of the delivery can lead one’s mind’s eye to glaze over. Oscar/Gaddis’s play is problematic too, but in a rewarding if confounding way: Is it supposed to be, like, good? The answer, I think, comes in its cannibalized version—I mean the cannibalized version that Oscar watches over broadcast television. When he finally sees The Blood in the Red White and Blue, Oscar experiences a wild array of emotions, both positive and negative—but his feelings are real.
A Frolic of His Own is not the best starting point for anyone interested in William Gaddis’s fiction, although I don’t think that’s where most people start. It is rewarding though, especially read contextually against his other works, in which it fits chaotically but neatly, underscoring the cranky themes in a divergent style that still feels fresh three decades after its original publication. Highly recommended.
Illustration for Dostoevsky’s Karamazov, 1923 by Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959)
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