Category: Riffs

Idiots get respect out here, they’re believed to be in touch with invisible forces | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 24-26

BibliokleptLeave a comment
Nagymező Street, the Radius Film Theater (Radius Filmszínház)

Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.

Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.

Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.

Notes on Chapters 19-20 | The needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact.

Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.

Chapter 24: Another fairly long chapter for Shadow Ticket. I’ve been over-summarizing in these notes, and maybe I’ll keep over-summarizing — at this point doing these notes has been my second reading of Shadow Ticket. I would say though, that we’ve reached a point well beyond the novel’s quick change glamour, its bilocative split — or its bait n’ switch, if you feel that way. The novel initially presents as a hardboiled noir send-up in the dark American Heartland only to pivot (or bilocate, to misapporpriate a term from Against the Day) to Central Europe where there’s preparation for a war on (moron). Hero Hicks fades, just a little, in the background; a larger cast steps up.

But Hicks is still the heart of Ch. 24, which begins at Egon Praediger’s office in Budapest, where the ICPC detective is snorting soup spoonfuls of cocaine while ranting about his inability to catch Bruno Airmont. Egon fears he’s wasting his talent “not on an evil genius but on an evil moron, dangerous not for his intellect, what there may be of it, but for the power that his ill-deserved wealth allows him to exert, which his admirers pretend is will, though it never amounts to more than the stubbornness of a child.” Oh man–wonder if that sounds like any evil moron of recent vintage? Egon would rather face off against a worthy villain, a “Dr. Mabuse or Fu Manchu,” references again underlining Shadow Ticket’s lurid pop Goth bona fides.

Hicks then runs into Terike, “just emerging from her latest run-in with the authorities over her motorcycle, a 500 cc Guzzi Sport 15″ — which more on this transport later. On the way to the bike, Hicks finds that he has somehow “percolated through“ Terike, who has performed some kind of metaphysical quick change. He apports, I guess.

1937 Moto Guzzi GTS 500 with matching sidecar

For Terike, the Guzzista “is a metaphysical critter. We know, the way you’d say a cowboy knows, that there’s a fierce living soul here that we have to deal with.” As we should expect now in Ole Central Europe, this bike is spooky, and Terike is a superhero on it: “she can go straight up the sides of walls, pass through walls, ride upside down on the overheads, cross moving water, jump ditches, barricades, urban chasms one rooftop to the next, office-building corridors to native-quarter alleyways quicker than a wink.”

Hicks rides along in the sidecar. (A bit later we’ll see a charming pig, a spirit animal, really, riding sidecar–perhaps there’s a link between Hicks and Pynchon’s other pigmen, like Seaman Bodine or Tyrone Slothrop (or the unfortunate Major Marvy.) Their mission: deliver a batch of experimental vacuum tubes “specially designed for the theremin” to “Club Hypotenuse,” a “cheerfully neon-lit” venue featuring a rotating dance floor and “not just one soloist on theremin but a half dozen, each expensively gowned tomato with more or less identical platinum bobs, waving their hands at these units and pulling music out of some deep invisibility, swooping one note to the next, hitting each one with pitch as perfect, Terike assures him, as the instrument’s reigning queen, Clara Rockmore. The joint effect of these six virtuoso cuties all going at once in close harmony is strangely symphonic.”

(Forgive me if I let the quote linger too long, the image is just too lovely.)

At Club Hypotenuse we get a bit of background on Terike, her rejection of her bourgeoisie upbringing, and recent Hungarian political struggles, before meeting yet another character, freelance foreign correspondent Slide Gearheart (he uses the alias “Judge Crater” at the bar. We last heard the name back in Ch. 18, but Crater, icon of the disappearing act, will pop up again). Slide lets Hicks in on a lead he has to cheese heiress Daphne Airmont’s whereabouts; he also gives our P.I. some advice about (not) fitting in to Hungary: “…best stick to English and there’s a chance they’ll take you for an idiot and leave you alone. It might help if you could also pretend now and then to hear voices they don’t. Idiots get respect out here, they’re believed to be in touch with invisible forces.” 

But Slide’s bigger note for Hicks is a soft warning to prepare him for the reality that you can never really go home.

Chapter 25: “Things pick up a day or two later when Slide reports that Daphne has been sighted at the Tropikus nightclub, in Nagymező utca, the Broadway of Budapest.” (This is I suppose the inspiration for the use of the photograph of Nagymező Street used on the cover of the first edition of Shadow Ticket.)

Daphne sings a song and then she and Hicks dance together.

So–I have really neglected Shadow Ticket as a song and dance routine. I think if you’ve read Pynchon you’d expect it; it’s a bit more prevalent here, the singing and dancing, in Shadow Ticket I mean, then in some of the other novels, but it’s certainly what you’d expect. The songs probably deserve their own whole blog or something to deal with (which I will never do); the dancing — well the dancing — I think something I should’ve highlighted much earlier is that Hicks is a really good dancer. Like fucking excellent. He’s a magician who goes into “one of those hoofer’s trances” in the previous chapter while dancing with Terike to the theramin orchestra. That notation — of the trance state — is given for various characters in Shadow Ticket who achieve a kind of short-term perfection outside the physical realm. (It’s the drummer Pancho Caramba (and like, Pynchon, c’mon man, that’s too much, name wise) — it’s the drummer Pancho Caramba in Ch. 25 who goes “into this kind of trance” at his drum kit, enchanting his audience.)

Most of the chapter is the dance and the dance-within-the-dance between Hicks and Daphne. There are Gothic-tinged allusions to their past in Wisconsin–his saving her from the “North Shore Zombie Two-Step” of forced psychiatric hospitalization, incurring a “Chippewa hoodoo” debt as her caretaker in perpetual.

We also start to get Daphne’s backstory with Hop Wingdale, the jazz clarinetist she left home for. She’s followed Hop and his band the Klezmopolitans around Europe, but is worried that the ill-fated lovers “need to relocate before it’s all Storm Trooper chorales and three-note harmony.” Daphne again underlines Shadow Ticket’s departure point — a big ugly change is gonna come. Hop is (rightfully) worried about Papa “Bruno’s invisible hand…” though. “Awkwardly enough,” he tells Daphne, “it turns out more of your life than you think is being run on the Q.T. by none other” but her pops.

The phrase “on the Q.T.” — meaning quiet (or “on the quiet tip,” as I thought way back as a teen encountering it) — shows up a few times in Shadow Ticket. It’s phonetically doubled in the word cutie, which shows up more than a few times in Shadow Ticket.

Chapter 26: Another longish section by Shadow Ticket standards, and less breezy than the novel as a whole.

There’s a lot of Daphne-Hicks and Daphne-Hop stuff here — more bilocations, maybe? — in any case, our boy Hicks gets himself more wrapped up than he intended to. After Daphne urges him to help hunt down Hop, who’s kinda sorta left her, he reminds himself of his mantra “No More Matrimonials! Ever!”

By the end of the chapter our American idiot is wondering if “wouldn’t it be a nice turnaround to bring some couple back together again, put the matrimony back in ‘matrimonial’ for a change, instead of divorce lawyers into speedsters and limousines.” Here, I couldn’t help but think of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film revision to Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice; PTA ties a neater bow on the narrative by letting its lead P.I. Doc Sportello restore the marriage of musician Coy Harlingen.

Anyway, we get Daphne and Hop’s origin story: “Talk about meeting cute. You’d think she’d have known better by then. It was in Chicago a few years back, still deep in her teen playgirl phase.” General gunplay shatters Daphne’s double aviation cocktail. She’s smitten with his woodwind serenades.

1917 recipe for aviation cocktail.

This chapter is chocked full of motifs and mottoes we’d expect from Shadow Ticket in particular at this point and Pynchon in general: invisibility, inconvenience, Judge Crater, “Who killed vaudeville?,” etc. It’s also pretty horny, with Hicks and Daphne finally consummating their meet cute from years gone by. Sorry if I’m breezing through.

I’m more interested in a specific exchange.

Carl Jung’s house in Kusnacht, Switzerland: VOCATUS ATQUE NON VOCATUS DEUS ADERIT —  “Called or not called, the god will be there.”

Daphne hips Hicks to something she saw “once, in one of these mental fix-it shops I kept getting sent to, up on the office wall was a motto of Carl Jung—Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit. I said what’s this my Latin’s a little rusty, he sez that’s called or not called, the god will come.”

The end of Ch. 23, at least in my guess, seemed to obliquely reference Jung’s Answer to Job, with the narrator suggesting that a trinity can only truly operate as a whole in the form of a stealth quatro — it’s phantom fourth piece balancing out the visible trio in the foreground. The reference to Jung here is not oblique but direct and maybe I will do something more direct with it down the line.

Of course the thing that comes to save Daphne isn’t “the god” but that Big Gorilla Hicks. He notes that, “Your old pals from the rez think it’s spoze to be a critter” who shows up to save the day. In a moment of vulnerability that I take to be sincere, Daphne asks Hicks if he didn’t think that she might actually be insane and should be returned to the hospital and not set free. His reply is a repetition of one of the novel’s several theses: “You were on the run, that was enough.”

Phantom gearbox | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 21-23

BibliokleptLeave a comment

Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.

Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.

Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.

Notes on Chapters 19-20 | The needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact.

Chapter 21:

We move from trans-Atlantic passage to Central Europe pretty quickly. Hicks’s spy handlers Alf and Pip (and like at this point I don’t think he fully realizes Alf and Pip are his handlers on whatever shadow ticket he’s picked up) — Hicks’s spy handlers Alf and Pip leave Hicks on the train while they depart into Belgrade, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

In the Quarrenders’ place emerges Egon Praediger, claiming to be of ICPC — the International Criminal Police Commission (not the Insane Clown Posse Crew), progenitor of Interpol (not the dour 2000s band, but the ICPO). Egon produces “a jarful of cocaine crystals” and grinds up some fat lines — “a routine known around Chicago as ‘hitching up the reindeer,'” the narrator informs us. While ingesting the coke, Egon eventually discloses the shadow ticket Hicks is working: “as you pursue the elusive Miss Airmont, we keep the shadow on you day and night, hoping that Bruno at a moment of diminished attention will make some fateful lunge.” (In another nod to Shadow Ticket’s Gothic motif, the narrator tells us that Egon pronounces the name Bruno Airmont “the way Dracula pronounces the name Van Helsing”).

It turns out that the Al Capone of cheese is the ICPC’s “most sought-after public enemy,” wanted for “criminal activities including murder, tax evasion in a number of countries, [and] Cheese Fraud.” For the terrible crime of counterfeiting cheese, “the International Cheese Syndicate,” or “InChSyn,” want to lock up Bruno. In a cocaine thrall, Egon riffs a bit at the sinister implications behind the scenes: “Cheese Fraud being a metaphor of course, a screen, a front for something more geopolitical, some grand face-off between the cheese-based or colonialist powers, basically northwest Europe, and the vast teeming cheeselessness of Asia.” Egon’s ranting here echoes the academic discussions of cheese back at the Airmont compound in Ch. 13, when discussion turns to breaking into the Asian markets: “How the heck do we create a market for dairy products in Japan short of invading and occupying the country outright? Taking away their tea or sake or whatever it is they drink and forcing them to drink milk like normal human beings?”

(Going back to Ch. 13 to find these lines, I realized that I’d neglected to include a Gothic reference in my riff on that chapter, where cheese is described as “a strange new form of life that was deliberately invented, like Doctor Frankenstein”).

Egon’s coked-up rant culminates in another of Shadow Ticket’s prophetic warnings of the Next Big War to Come. A glistening, entranced Egon declares:

“This is the ball bearing on which everything since 1919 has gone pivoting, this year is when it all begins to come apart. Europe trembles, not only with fear but with desire. Desire for what has almost arrived, deepening over us, a long erotic buildup before the shuddering instant of clarity, a violent collapse of civil order which will spread from a radiant point in or near Vienna, rapidly and without limit in every direction, and so across the continents, trackless forests and unvisited lakes, plaintext suburbs and cryptic native quarters, battlefields historic and potential, prairie drifted over the horizon with enough edible prey to solve the Meat Question forever…”

To repeat a claim I made in my last riff: Shadow Ticket is a bridge novel between two of Pynchon’s masterpieces, Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow.

And, to repeat another claim I’ve been making throughout these notes, as Hicks moves eastward, Shadow Ticket’s supernatural elements come closer to the foreground. He’s en route to Budapest, where, according to Egon, there “carouses a psychical Mardi Gras in every shade of the supernatural no matter how lurid.” We learn that “Budapest just at the moment is the metropolis and beating heart of asport/apport activities, where objects precious and ordinary, exquisite and kitsch, big and small, have been mysteriously vanishing on the order of dozens per day.” The “asport/apport” motif was first announced back in Ch. 4, via ex-vaudeville psychic Thessalie Wayward. Whereas folks back in Wisconsin were far more skeptical about — or at least reticent to openly speak about — the spooky stuff, Central Europe doesn’t try to deny it.

The chapter ends with Egon giving Hicks a present: a brand new type of pistol called the “Walther PPK.” 

A photograph of the Oktagon, circa 1930

Chapter 22 begins in the Oktogon, a major intersection in Pest. Here, Hicks (and the readers) meet two new characters: Zoltán von Kiss, “once an echt working apportist, lately more of a psychic celebrity detective,” and motorcycle courier Terike who downplays her role as Zoltán’s “Glamorous Assistant.” Hicks is intrigued by Terike, and when she departs with “Szia!” — Hungarian for hello/goodbye, he responds with a “Hope so.” The pun is low hanging fruit but our boy Pynchon loves to eat from that tree.

Zoltán, or “Zoli,” as he prefers to be called has a mission for Hicks. But before getting into that (and a demonstration of his psychic and telekinetic powers), he distinguishes metaphysical Central Europe from concrete America:

“You are a practical people, Americans, everyone is either some kind of inventor or at least a gifted repairman. I myself have grown to rely too much on the passionate mindlessness which creeps over me just as an apport is about to arrive or depart. I am painfully aware of how much more exposure I need to the secular, material world.”

The phrase “passionate mindlessness” recalls Mindless Pleasures — a working title Pynchon used for what would become Gravity’s Rainbow.

mindless-pleasures

But onto that mission: Hicks will assist in the recovery and return of “the crown jewel of tasteless lamps… known in underworld Esperanto as La Lampo Plej Malbongusto.” (Zoli’s ever-inflating description of the lamp’s tastelessness is pure Pynchon.) Again, we get an echo of the Airmont compound back in Ch. 13, where Hicks stumbled into “an excessive number of electric lamps… Some are unusual-looking, to say the least, and few if any in what you’d consider good taste.” 

While the tasteless-lamp bit is, on the surface very goofy, it nevertheless highlights the novel’s concern with what can be seen and what remains unseen; with what casts a shadow, and with what is immaterial. Zolti posits the lamp’s recovery in language that approaches a holy restoration: “even the most hopelessly ill-imagined lamp deserves to belong somewhere, to have been awaited, to enact some return, to stand watch on some table, in some corner, as a place-keeper, a marker, a promise of redemption.” I think the notion here is beautiful answer to a rhetorical question posed in the opening nightmare of Gravity’s Rainbow: “Each has been hearing a voice, one he thought was talking only to him, say, ‘You didn’t really believe you’d be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you…‘ Pynchon is for the preterite; even the ugliest light-bearer is poised for redemption.

Hicks and Zoli eventually make their way to “a neighborhood of warehouses, corner taverns, cafés and hashish bars, metallic shadows, sounds of mostly invisible train traffic” and into speakeasyish spot “turbulent with kleptos conferring in Esperanto, featuring a lot of words ending in u (‘Volitive mood,’ comments Zoltán, ‘used for yearnings, regrets, if-onlys…’)” (When I was young my mother had a friend who was a member of an Esperanto society. The notion of an invented language fascinated me; I also recognized, even as a child, that it was a doomed project. I love that Pynchon includes a few nods to L. L. Zamenhof’s utopian linguistic project, and highlights the “yearning” behind the invented grammar.) After some funny business by a vaudevillian magic act trio called Drei Im Weggla (secret agents themselves, we’re assured parenthetically) and a nonviolent showdown with “Bruno Airmont’s deputy Ace Lomax,” Hicks fulfills his mission with Zoli.

Chapter 23 sees Hicks reunite with the Quarrenders. Pips has performed a quick change glamour, to Hicks’s admiration. She tells him it’s, All part of the craft, give whoever’s watching something blonde and shiny to fix their attention, then should one need to disappear, simply get rid of it and fade into the mobility.” Like Terike and the other sleight-of-hand artists of Shadow Ticket, Pips understands the value of posing as the “Glamorous Assistant.” Later in this chapter we’ll meet another spy, Vassily Midoff, of whom we’re told “Impressions of what he looks like also vary widely. Not that he’s invisible, exactly, people see him all the time, but they don’t remember that they saw him.”

Alf soon (literally) materializes and complains of an exhausting morning at the “Crossword Suicide Café.” Alf then goes on to detail how “an unemployed waiter named Antal Gyula steps in to what was then known as the Emke Café,” committed suicide, and left a “farewell note in the form of a crossword puzzle he designed himself, whose solution will reveal the reasons he did the deed, along with the names of other people involved.” The puzzle remained unsolved, a “crypto bonanza potentially and yet just as easily somebody’s idea of a practical joke.” The note is zany and sinister, silly and sad, utterly Pynchonian but also, like, totally real.

1937 Böhmerland 603cc Langtouren

The chapter ends with the “nightclub apport trio Schnucki, Dieter, and Heinz, seated one behind another on a Böhmerland Long Touring motorcycle, ten and a half foot wheelbase, red and yellow paint job, riding patrol…” The spectacle upsets Vassily Midoff, who senses a fourth “invisible rider” at the motorcycle’s stern. He hits the high road, “spooked…back into invisibility,” the narrator noting that “for a trinity to be effective, and not just a set which happens to contain three members, there must be a fourth element, silent, withheld. A fourth rider, say, working a phantom gearbox…” 

Perhaps the invisible fourth rider alludes to Carl Jung’s Answer to Job, which argues for a unified, reconciled quaternity, and not a trinity; a symbolic totality that acknowledges the shadow (ticket?) suppressed by the idealized triad. In Jung’s schema, the fourth element completes the cycle by restoring what has been excluded, granting wholeness rather than perfection. The phantom rider becomes an embodiment of that hidden completion, an invisible force that trails behind the spectacle of the three visible figures, suggesting that beneath their exuberant surface rides the unacknowledged presence that makes the whole thing work. (Or perhaps threatens to undo it.)

Ghostly crawl | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 15-18

BibliokleptLeave a comment

Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.

Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.

Chapter 15 opens proximal to Xmas time, presumably 1931, still–although it’d take a reread for me to pin down the timeline better. Hicks is in the grip of mild paranoia, feeling like he’s the target of some unknown They. The feeling is a haunting: “light as delusional bugs, the ghostly crawl of professional finger-eye coordination, somewhere above and in the distance, tightening in on whatever is centered in its crosshairs, which at the moment happens to be Hicks’s head.” 

Christmas bugs?!

Hicks’s paranoia is well-placed. He’s “handed a parcel wrapped in festive red-and-green paper whose design features Xmas trees, reindeer, candy canes, so forth. Ribbon tied in a big bow. Something to do with Christmas” by miscreants claiming to be “Santa’s elves.”

Skeptical Hicks denies the supernatural, natch, despite the “ghostly crawl” that’s come over his aspect this haunted season. The so-called elves protest that they are cousins of Billie the Brownie, an historical mainstay of Milawaukee’s Schuster’s Department Store Christmas spectacles.

(I’ve tried not to overload these riffs with too many of Pynchon’s Milwaukee/Milwaukee-proximal references–like, I couldn’t leave Les Paul out when I riffed on Ch. 8, but I didn’t include his reference in the same chapter to Árpád Élő, the Hungarian-American physicist who taught at Marquette in Milwaukee for four decades, during which time he developed the Elo chess rating. Anyway, the point is — for a breezy novel, Shadow Ticket is still pretty dense. Pynchon enjoys fat in the right proportion.)

Anyway, addressing Hicks as “Schultz,” the elves deliver an Xmas package and evaporate into thin air. Then who appears? “Damn if it ain’t the same sawed-off Bolshevik striker Hicks didn’t manage to kill that fateful night not so long ago,” who we learned of back in Ch. 4 (recall Hicks felt some kind of metaphysical interjection prevented his striking down the protester). He warns Hicks to dispose of the package posthaste, insinuating it’s a time bomb.

Hicks steps into Wisebroad’s Shoes in order to use their, yes, X-ray machine. The narrator informs us that, “One of many interesting facts about Milwaukee is that along with the Harley-Davidson motorcycle and the QWERTY typewriter keyboard layout, it’s also the birthplace of the shoe-store X-ray machine.” I have to admit I thought at first that the ridiculousness of such an apparatus struck me as a goofy Pynchonian invention. But shoe-fitting fluoroscopes were like a totally real twentieth-century thing.  (One of the shoe clerks attests that he prefers Brannock devices as X-rays “don’t pick up fat, and fat’s the key, see.”)

The X-ray riff here ties into Shadow Ticket’s themes of mad science, glow-in-the-dark wonders, and strange rays, like those Dr. Swampscott Vobe was said to experiment on his psychiatric patients (Ch. 14) or the irradiated “Radio-Cheez” that helped establish the Airmont cheese fortune (Ch. 13).

Instead of a bomb in the package, Hicks and the shoe clerks see something closer to a face when they peer into the fluoroscope’s lens. The scene is another moment of anxious dread, horror even, woven into the comic zaniness:

“Despite a certain blurriness, Hicks realizes it is inescapably a face, not unchanging and lifeless, like you’d get from a severed head for example, but instead gazing back with its eyes wide open and holding a gleam of recognition, a face he’s supposed to know but doesn’t, or at least can’t name. Mouth about to open and tell him something he should’ve known before this. The window he never wanted to have to look through, the bar he used to know enough not to set foot inside of.”

Hicks disposes of the package in Lake Michigan, where it explodes.

Later, Hicks, haunted and depressed, finds some solace in April. But they both know he won’t keep the girl, even as he dreams of them as partners on the move, “teamed up against each day and its troubles.”

The chapter ends with Hicks trying to pick up the thread of why those elves delivered the bomb to him, and why they called him Schulz. Uncle Lefty isn’t really much help. Hick checks in with the anarchist bombsmith Michele “Kelly” Stecchino, a character who could fit in neatly in Against the Day. Kelly suggests that “an explosion, not always but sometimes, is actually somebody with something to say. Like, a voice, with a message we aren’t receiving so much as overhearing.” He then advises Hicks to get out of town, suggesting a trip to Italy. Hicks protests that Italy’s, “Fascist dictatorship, Professore,” and anarchist Kelly needles him back, asking “What makes you private dicks any different?…Study your history, gabadost, you started off, mosta yiz, breakin up strikes, didn’t ya, same as Mussolini’s boys.” Again, one of the major conflicts in Shadow Ticket is Hicks realizing which side of history he wishes to be on. Hicks then checks in at the Nazi bolwing alley, New Nuremberg Lanes with his old associate Ooly, who thinks that the bomb “don’t feel local. Somethin’s on the way around here, bigger than a gang war.” That would be a World War. Finally, Hicks checks in with Lew Basnight (who was in Against the Day); Lew tells him that what he’s “after is an Overlooked Negative.” Is that something an X-ray could catch? Hicks tells Lew that he was “always what I was hoping to be someday” — and I don’t think he meant it as mere flattery.

Chapter 16 sees the action move out from Milwaukee (much to Hicks’s chagrin). His employer seems to agree with everyone else that he should get out of town for his own health and safety, and the agency sends him to New York (Hicks picks up on the fact that his travel stipend is decidedly a one way sum).

April’s gangster beau Don Peppino sends one of his enforcers along too to suggest he hits the bricks. (The goon tries to hip Hicks to how one might take a “grape so harsh and bitter you’d never make wine from it alone—but when you blend it with other grapes, sometimes only a couple percent, suddenly a miracle” — but Hicks protests that he’s “Only a beer drinker.” The scene is a sweet repetition of sorts of Mason and Dixon’s discussion of grape people and grain people in Mason & Dixon.)

Hicks then goes through some goodbyes with April. I realized that one of my favorite bits in Shadow Ticket is that April always addresses Hicks with a different, sweet-but-pejorative nickname — “Chuckles,” “damned ox,” “Fathead,” “Einsteins” (plural), and my favorite, “ten-minute egg.” They depart in a sweet noir phantasia at Union Station.

Chapter 17 is a relatively short chapter (especially given the sprawl of Chapter 15, which, let me say, I’m sorry that I went on so long about it — part of what I’m trying to do is reread the book by writing about it and tie some themes, motifs, etc. together — I know it went on long. But it was a long chapter, chock full of Important Stuff) — sorry, Chapter 17 is a relatively short ditty, with Hicks’s train moving east through “Depression Pittsburgh, a ghost city” and then “entering deeper into the night run, having left behind and below what neon still shone, the Hoovervilles, the ghost-city light, hobo gatherings around trackside trash fires, stray auto headlights gliding briefly alongside the tracks, some fractional moonlight through the windows plus a few dim electric lamps in the observation car, deserted at this hour except for Hicks.” Reviewers and critics will rightly point out that Shadow Ticket is a detective noir; it’s possible to overlook the Gothic horror underpinnings of that genre though. Pynchon often foregrounds this Gothicism, as in the lovely description above. 

Solitary in the observation car, Hicks is approached by “a Pullman porter, whose name, as he’s quick to point out, isn’t George but McKinley.” The reference here is to George Gibbs, a nineteenth century naturalist who, in the parlance of Twain, lit out for the Territory to study, among other things, indigenous languages in the Pacific Northwest.

Our Pullman porter “McKinley Gibbs turns out to be running a sideline in race records“; after riffing on politics with Hicks, he slips a few records out for our PI to peruse, including “Blind Blake, ‘Police Dog Blues.’”

We are then told that “McKinley brings it over to the club-car Victrola, puts it on. Before bar three Hicks is about to topple into a romantic nostalgia episode. ‘I’ve heard this. Not on a record, not in a club, but…'”

Presumably the referent for the “it” McKinley possesses is “Police Dog Blues” — but the “romantic nostalgia episode” reveals a different song. The vocalist? “It’s April. Natch.” We get another of Pynchon’s songs, including another of April’s nicknames for Hicks — “dimwit of my dreams” (rhymes with “strange as it seems”). But Hicks’s “romantic nostalgia episode” (American Gothic, I say) is pure reverie. He awakes — no record, no McKinley. Did either ever exist?

Chapter 18: Hicks makes it to New York and does a “courtesy drop-by at the New York branch of U-Ops, which he finds slightly west of Broadway beneath a neon sign featuring a pair of eyeballs electrically switching back and forth between bloodshot vein-crazed and lens-blank pop-bottle green.” The lurid eyeball image mixes nineteenth-century Gothicism with twentieth-century pop. Connie McSpool, on the U-Ops desk, ribs Hicks: “You just missed Judge Crater, he was in here looking for you.” Joseph Force Crater was a New York Supreme Court justice who infamously disappeared and, for a decade or two, was known as America’s “missingest” person. (Maybe surpassed, at the end of the twentieth century, by Jimmy Hoffa.) Shadow Ticket–and Pynchon’s oeuvre in general–features many characters “pulling a Crater.”

Chapter 18 concludes with Hicks overwhelmed, in true Pynchonian fashion, by a shadowy (tickety?) They. There’s “something weirdly off about Gould Fisk Fidelity and Trust,” the “bank” he finds himself at, getting an unexpected ticket to Europe and two-weeks pay. The reference here is to Black Friday, 1869, where big money boys Jay Gould and Jim Fisk tried to hijack the gold market in a Gilded Age financial thriller. Another fragment, maybe, from Against the Day.

The chapter ends with Hicks at “Club Afterbeat up in Harlem,” complaining to Connie McSpool that someone “wants me 86’d clear out of the U.S.A.” 

We’ll get to that ejection soon.

 

Glows in the dark | Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Ch. 1-7

Biblioklept2 Comments

Let’s start with the epigraph:

“Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney…perhaps not.”

—Bela Lugosi,
in The Black Cat (1934)

Dr. Vitus Werdegast, Bela Lugosi’s character in The Black Cat, gives this line to mystery novelist Peter Alison (portrayed by David Manners). Here is the scene:

Pynchon is not the first to sample this line.

The epigraph for Shadow Ticket highlights a concern with the metaphysical that Pynchon has shown throughout his novels. The epigraph encapsulates this concern, ties it to the talkies, the American Gothic tradition, and wedges in a slice of absurd (and drily-delivered) humor early on.

Chapter 1; the novel’s first line:

“When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line.”

Shadow Ticket is set, thus far and for the most part, in Milwaukee Wisconsin in early 1931. For about half a century, The Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad ran from Chicago to Milwaukee, roughly a long the coast of Lake Michigan. It ceased operations in early 1963.

(Even went through Kenosha, kid.)

The opening paragraphs introduce us to Shadow Ticket’s hero Hicks McTaggart and establish a snappy, hardboiled style reminiscent of films of the thirties and forties (or films of the Coen Brothers that pay homage to those films).

“Everybody is looking at everybody else like they’re all in on something. Beyond familiarity or indifference, some deep mischief is at work.”

These lines append the postprandial scene of a noontime explosion. We get paranoia and a whiff of the supernatural — that “deep mischief…at work.”

“Pineapples come and pineapples go,” declares Hicks’s boss Boynt Crosstown, dismissing the explosion. (Perhaps the name Boynt Crosstown evokes “Burnt Cross Town”?)

Pineapples, slang for grenades specifically or explosives more generally, pops up repeatedly early on in Shadow Ticket.

“…local multimillionaire Bruno Airmont, known throughout the dairy industry as the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile…this one’s more about his daughter Daphne…Seems your old romance has just run off with a clarinet player in a swing band.”

Daphne Airmont, Runaway Cheese Heiress: an early MacGuffin or possible red herring to look out for. One of many, many of Pynchon’s female characters on the run.

Detail from Apollo and Daphne by Pollaiuolo, c. 1470–1480

(Parenthetically, I suppose, because it’s of such minor note, but there’s a mention of one “Zbig Dubinsky” — surely, Shirley, a minor character? — but the name seems to echo the Coens’ film The Big Lebowski.)

“Getting sentimental, kid, better watch ’at, once.”

A warning from Hicks to his protege Skeet Wheeler, a “flyweight juvenile in a porkpie hat.” We’ll see more of Skeet’s apparent sentimentality when he pockets a ball bearing from an exploded REO Speed Wagon. The line would be a throwaway for me, except that it is the first instance of the word kid in the novel. We see it pop up frequently in several forms, including kidding and kiddies. In Ch. 1, Skeet refers to his “snub nose service .32″ pistol as a “Kids’ Special.” We learn that Skeet is tapped into the “kid underworld—drifters, truants, and guttersnipes, newsboys at every corner and streetcar stop—who in turn have antennas of their own out.” The system of littler kids reporting to bigger kids, etc., reports Skeet to bigger kid Hicks, is “like Mussolini.” (Hitler will show up soon.)

“‘…New watch, I see.’

‘Hamilton, glows in the dark too.'”

The first of (by my count) four specific references to things that glow in the dark. I’ll remark on them in turn, but the other three are Hicks’s hair gel (Ch. 3), a jello salad served at the Velocity Lunch diner (Ch. 5), and a pair of novelty vampire fangs (Ch. 7).

In Pynchon’s books, and in particular in Against the Day and Mason & Dixon, there is a concern with the invisible world, which might be taken as the metaphysical world, or, the supernatural-but-not-baloney world. Perhaps these novelties that glow in the dark point in that direction?

Chapter 2 begins at the crime scene, the scene of an exploded bootlegger’s hoochwagon (the aforementioned REO Speed Wagon).

The “kid” motif develops with references to “Federal kiddies that nobody’s ever heard of,” “Chicago Latin kids,“ and “German storm kiddies.“ A page or two later soda jerk Hoagie Hivnak (of a certain “adenoidal brashness”) laments that his Ideal Pharmacy “was no place for kids, the words ‘soda fountain’ would send mothers all over town into fits, worse than ‘opium den.'” No more coke in the sodas for the “Leapers and sleigh riders” to enjoy.

Hoagie moves the plot forward, telling Hicks to “Track down Bruno Airmont wherever he’s got to.”

Chapter 3: We meet Hicks’s special lady, April Randazzo. She’s a femme fatale, folks, a singer-dancer making the late night speakeasy scene. Hicks and April seem like a suave match, but we learn that she has a fetish for married men: “A gold-accented ring finger has the same effect on April as a jigging spoon on a Lake trout, especially when kept on while kidding around, good as a framed copy of a marriage license hanging up on a love-nest wall.” 

Note the kidding around there; perhaps Pynchon teases kidness as the illusion of a romanticized time of faux-innocence, an idealized (and ironized) notion of primeval purity. “Any town but this one / Couldn’t we be kids again” croons April in “what’s gotten to be her trademark ballad, backed by a minor-key semi-Cuban arrangement for accordion, saxes, banjo-uke, melancholically muted trumpet.”

Oh and before I forget, our glow-in-the dark fetish for this episode is delivered from Hicks’s “hip flask from which he pours not hooch but some slow green liquid, rubs it between his hands, runs both hands through his hair as an intensely herbal aroma fills the room…” (21). Hicks attests that his hair jelly “Lasts for days, glows in the dark” (21).

(Parenthetically–we get our first two Pynchon songs in this chapter, one from Hicks and one from April (as cited above.) The chapter ends with Hicks getting nudged again, this time to visit his Uncle Lefty, a retired cop.)

Chapter 4 starts at Uncle Lefty and Aunt Peony’s house. They, sorta, raised Hicks; like his protege Skeet (and every other hero), Hicks is an orphan.

Uncle Lefty has prepared a special “Surprise Casserole [in which] Hicks can detect sport peppers, canned pineapple, almost-familiar pork parts marinated in Uncle Lefty’s private cure, based on wildcat beer from a glazed-crock studio just across the Viaduct.” Here, a pineapple is a pineapple. But it can still be part of a surprise.

Uncle Lefty’s name is a bit ironic. He opines: “Der Führer,” gently, “is der future, Hicks. Just the other day the Journal calls him ‘that intelligent young German Fascist.’ ”

Aunt Peony is more sympathetic. We learn that her words have taken on an edge as her marriage advanced, “as if some maidenly spirit, searching and pious, has set out on a trip Peony has no plans herself to make, toward a destiny quietly lifted away from her when she wasn’t looking.” Unlike Daphne (and April?), Peony failed to make her escape in good time.

We learn of Hicks’s fresh-out-of-school job as a strikebreaker. This job would generally make him on the wrong side in Pynchonian terms, but the novel extends some heartstrings his way, pulling him over to the light. Hicks, it seems, would not turn a Pinkerton villain the likes of which Pynchon castigated in Against the Day. His road to Damascus moment happens when his “lead-filled beavertail sap” disappears before he can decimate a striking “truculent little Bolshevik.” The metaphysics of this disappearing object has a profound effect on our hero.

A bit later in the chapter, Boynt offers a through-a-glass-darkly description of Milwaukee, Cream City USA, evoking, “Hitler kiddies, Sicilian mob, secret hallways and exit tunnels, smoke too thick to see through, half a dozen different languages, any lowlife thinks they can turn a nickel always after you for somethin, there’s your wholesome Cream City, kid, mental hygiene paradise but underneath running off of a heartbeat crazy as hell, that’s if it had a heart which it don’t.” 

There’s the invisible world, but it might sometimes glow in the dark.

Chapter 4 segues into Chapter 5; Uncle Lefty tells Hicks to talk to ex-vaudeville mentalist Thessalie Wayward. They meet at Velocity Lunch, a cafe where “Today’s Special [is] a vivid green salad centerpiece the size and shape of a human brain, molded in lime Jell-O, versions of which have actually been observed to glow.” Hicks is hoping to learn more about the metaphysical disappearance of his beavertail sap–what divine hand intervened to prevent his killing another person?

Thessalie teaches him about ass and app: “Asported. When something disappears suddenly off to someplace else, in the business that’s called an asport. Coming in at you the other way, appearing out of nowhere, that’s an ‘apport.’ Happens in séances a lot, kind of side effect. Ass and app, as we say.”

After some speculation on this “unnamed force,” Thessalie sends Hicks out again, this time to “Talk to Lew.”

That Lew, as we see in Chapter 6, is none other than Lew Basnight, one of the many heroes of Pynchon’s opus Against the Day (which, so far, Shadow Ticket feels very much akin to). Lew’s chapter is beautiful, short and sweet, a kind of elegy for Western phantasia. He was already late to the Manifest Destiny goldrush: “Didn’t even get out there till late in life, after years of dancin the Pinkertonian around what only a couple of old-timers were still callin the Wild West anymore. Hell, I’m ready to go back…”

Pynchon then extends Lew’s fantasy of returning to a mythical Old West via “lucid dreaming… flown in from strange suburban distances, past radio antennas and skyscrapers, down the gloomy city canyons, skimming echo to echo, banking into the Dearborn station, flown invisible, ticketless, right onto the Santa Fe Chief. And away. Away, so easy…” An escape from the Modern world. Invisible, ticketless–that’s the fantasy.

Lew’s episode ends with a warning to Hicks not to become “another one of these metaphysical detectives, out looking for Revelation.”

In Chapter 7, Hicks takes his (his?) gal April to Chicago to see Dracula. April’s smitten by Bela Lugosi, and “Soon she is sending away to Johnson Smith down in Racine for a set of Glow-in-the-Dark Vampire Choppers, 35¢ postpaid.”

A paragraph later our hero is getting some bad news about his (his..?) gal April and one Don Peppino Infernacci. “April Randazzo is in fact the promised bride of evil,” we learn; Infernacci (good golly that name, Pynchon, chill) is “lord of the underworld.” 

Infernacci could be Hades, but April doesn’t strike me as a Persephone. But we’ll see.

Detail from Proserpine, 1882 by Rossetti

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a frenetic, vital reimagining of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland

Edwin Turner4 Comments

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another takes Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland and sets it ablaze, reshaping its abstract paranoia and fractured narrative into something both deliriously immediate and ominously timeless.

The bones of Pynchon’s original are still present: a family broken by state violence; a daughter growing up without a mother; a father caught between shame and reluctant resistance. In PTA’s feverish recasting of Vineland, Zoyd Wheeler becomes Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a former “Rocket Man” revolutionary burning out the past in a haze of weed smoke. Frenesi Gates is reimagined as Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a revolutionary addicted to the sexual thrill of power. Prairie Wheeler morphs into Willa (Chase Infiniti — and like wow jeez that’s a Pynchonian name the young actress has there, isn’t it?). And villainous Brock Vond is warped into Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a grotesque embodiment of authoritarian menace. Timelines collapse into themselves, Reagan-era dread transposes into our own disturbed now. Vineland is set in 1984; in One Battle After Another, PTA shows that we’ve never really moved on from that dystopian year. PTA condenses Vineland’s sprawling flashbacks and absurd digressions into an action-forward narrative that’s far more linear yet equally dizzying. The result is enthralling.

The film’s plot might be distilled simply from its title. One Battle After Another follows the trajectory of most of Pynchon’s fiction: individual resistance to authoritarian evil. In PTA’s film, that resistance takes the form of the French 75, a loose clandestine revolutionary group to which Bob and his partner Perfidia once belonged. There’s really no retiring for French 75 agents though, and soon Willa is tangled in the same web her parents sought to sunder in their radical actions. Penn’s maniacal Colonel Lockjaw hunts her down. She’s on the run, and so is papa Bob.

Pynchon’s novels frequently contrast Us vs Them systems — preterite vs. elect; misfits vs. authoritarians; freaks vs. the Man. And like Pynchon’s work, One Battle After Another shows the invisible overlapping and hierarchical confusions these Us/Them systems engender. The French 75’s sympathies directly correlate with the values of the immigrant community in Baktan Cross, the fictional sanctuary city Bob and Willa take refuge in. The de facto leader of these immigrants, Francisco (Benicio Del Toro), aids Bob in his fevered search for Willa. Francisco’s zen calm offers a counterbalance to Bob’s mania. Another Us group are the Sisters of the Brave Beaver (One Battle After another is crammed with Pynchonian vagina jokes), weed-growing nuns who offer Willa a brief safe harbor.

These disparate pockets of rebellion resist the tyranny of the modern racist capitalist system, embodied by Colonel Lockjaw and the military forces he commands (seemingly without any government oversight). We first meet Lockjaw running a migrant detention center — one of many timely PTA updates to Vineland — and his weird, forced, masochistic machismo plays out on the screen with a mix of menace and despair. For all his power and evil though, there’s yet another Them he isn’t part of. That would be the Christmas Adventurers Club, a shadowy cabal of elites on a racist mission to rid the world of “freaks.” Lockjaw would do quite literally anything to become a member of this club; his drive to to become even more Them propels the narrative while showing that Us-Them systems rely on hierarchies to perpetuate oppression.

One Battle After Another zigzags through a whirlwind of absurdity, suffocating paranoia, and frantic action. The film balances chaotic humor with a darker exploration of the emotional impulses that underlie power and attraction. Colonel Lockjaw’s obsessive fixation on Perfidia (arguably the film’s closest connection to Vineland) underscores the irrational power dynamics of obsession and control. PTA frames their relationship—along with Lockjaw’s obsession with Willa—as a twisted mirror reflecting the power imbalances that define both the personal and the political in Us-Them systems. PTA’s films have always explored systems of exploitation that grind people down and the outsiders who try to navigate them; One Battle After Another is, thus far, his most sustained, howling effort in this vein.

The film is gorgeous, too, as fans would expect from PTA. Michael Bauman’s cinematography conveys frenzied energy without sacrificing cohesion or clarity. There are several outstanding set pieces, including a beautiful sequence in which Bob does his best to keep up with a trio of skateboarders traversing rooftops at night, their figures silhouetted against the flames of a riot below. The film’s climactic three-car chase scene is particularly magnificent, its every twist and turn symbolizing not just physical pursuit, but deeper spirals of control, conflict, and paranoia. It made me physical ill. (That’s high praise.)

And while, yes, One Battle After Another is a bona fide action film, it’s still larded with strange little morsels that we’d expect from a PTA film — the image of Lockjaw licking his comb before taking it to his hair, his face contorted in anxious hope, or Bob, in his threadworn bathrobe, shoplifting a pair of cheap sunglasses. (Parenthetically, while the bathrobe is on my mind — Battle plays as a sinister inversion to The Big Lebowski. I will file the pair away for a future double feature.) One of the film’s funniest moments comes from Willa, who, despite being apparently subjugated by Lockjaw, nevertheless delivers the kind of crushing blow that can only come from a teen: “Why is your shirt so tight?” Indeed, Chase Infiniti’s portrayal of Willa is a revelation. In a movie crammed with paranoia and plot twists, she imbues in Willa a kind of moral force. She’s not an anchor exactly, because nothing is steady here. But maybe she’s the string you follow through the labyrinth.

One Battle After Another is almost three hours long, but it never drags, thanks to the tight direction and enthralling plot. Long-time PTA collaborator Jonny Greenwood’s score also keeps the film moving at a quick pace. The score is ever-present — something that usually irritates me in a film — but here the music provides emotional cohesion. It’s also just really fucking pretty.  Frenetic drumming and altered pianos meet up with swelling strings that suggest sirens, banshees. Take “Mean Alley,” for example, which initially greets the ear as if the guitar is out of tune, but then coheres into beautiful dissonance. And although Greenwood’s wall-to-wall score leaves little room for the needle drops we might expect from a PTA joint, the film deploys Tom Petty’s “American Girl” in a moment of transcendent bliss that brought a tear to my eye.

Pynchon has always soundtracked his novels. Pynchonwiki gives close to 400 musical references for Vineland, but I don’t think any of these tracks ended up in One Battle After Another. My giving this data is a weak way of transitioning to the sentence, This is a film inspired by Vineland, not an adaptation of it. And while PTA captures the soul of the book, the vibe, or spirit, or whatever you like to call it, is decidedly different: darker, edgier, uglier. He captures the same strange humor and frustration of Vineland, but it’s amplified here with a chaotic energy that matches our current moment.

It’s also instructive to compare One Battle After Another to PTA’s earlier Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice. While Inherent Vice was a hazy sunsoaked journey through the disorienting aftereffects of the muddled sixties, One Battle After Another feels darker, more urgent, as if the timeline of history has compressed itself into an unyielding present. Both films deal with the fracturing of the American dream, but One Battle After Another does so with a sharper edge, drawing clearer political parallels. In some ways, PTA’s Inherent Vice is closer to Pynchon’s Vineland in tone and theme, less angular, more forgiving.

With both of his Pynchon films, PTA foregrounds a sweet final note, a belief in love as a sustaining force against Them. To borrow my favorite lines from Pynchon’s opus Gravity’s Rainbow: “They are in love. Fuck the war.” In his adaptation of Inherent Vice, PTA pulled a loose thread from the novel to neatly weave back into a prettier picture. He allows Doc Sportello to restore the heroin-addicted musician Coy to his family. One Battle offers a similarly fractured, imperfect restoration of family, a rewriting of rat-sins answered on the ghost of radio waves. He cleans up Pynchon’s messiness, but doesn’t sacrifice the deep danger that underwrites radical love.

One Battle After Another feels dangerously prescient, or, more accurately, a diagnosis of the big ugly now. In PTA’s Inherent Vice, there was an underlying fractured partnership between Us and Them; weirdo Doc Sportello tried to find some kind of brotherhood of man with The Man, Detective Bigfoot. No humanity can be extended to Lockjaw — not even from the club that will refuse him. They are unforgiving of any perceived impurity. The themes of mass surveillance, state violence, and detention resonate deeply in today’s climate. The recent death of Assata Shakur—possibly one inspiration for Perfidia Beverly Hills—adds a haunting layer to the film’s exploration of systemic oppression, the ways in which the state seeks to control and erase voices of resistance. The political urgency is palpable, and will undoubtedly alienate a large section of the genpop normies that Warner Brothers has heavily advertised the film to. Some folks will always root for Them.

But fuck Them. One Battle After Another is a triumph, a dizzying, chaotic masterpiece that never loses its grip on the present—one battle after another, all too real, all too important. See it on the biggest screen you can.

A review of Gisèle Prassinos’s collection of surreal anti-fables, The Arthritic Grasshopper

BibliokleptLeave a comment

img_7667

I can’t remember which particular Surrealist I was googling when I learned about Gisèle Prassinos. I do know that it was just a few weeks ago, and I’ve had an interest in Surrealist art and literature since I was a kid, so I was a bit stunned that I’d never heard of her before now—strange, given the origin of her first publication. In 1934, when she was 14, Prassinos was “discovered” by André Breton, and the Surrealists delighted in what they called her “automatic writing.” (Prassinos would later reject that label, and go as far as to declare that she had never been a surrealist). Her first book, La Sauterelle arthritique (The Arthritic Grasshopper) was published just a year later.

1-work
Prassinos reading her work to the Surrealists; photograph by Man Ray

 

I somehow found a .pdf of one of her stories, “A Nice Family,” a bizarre little tale that runs on its own surreal mythology. The story struck me as simultaneously grandiose and miniature, dense but also skeletal. It was impossible. Surreal. I wanted more.

Luckily, just this spring Wakefield Press released The Arthritic Grasshopper: Collected Stories, 1934-1944, a new English translation of a 1976 compendium of Prassinos’s tales, Trouver sans checher. The translation is by Henry Vale and Bonnie Ruberg, whose introduction to the volume is a better review and overview than I can muster here. Ruberg offers a miniature biography, and shares details from her letters and visits with Prassinos. She situates Prassinos within the Surrealists’ gender biases: “For a young writer such as Prassinos, being involved with the surrealists would have meant gaining access to resources like publishers, but it also would have meant being fetishized and marginalized.” Ruberg characterizes Prassinos’s tales eloquently and accurately—no simple feat given the material’s utter strangeness:

Taken collectively, their effect is a piercing cackle, a complete disorientation, rather than an ethical lesson. The politics of these stories are absurdist. They upend the world by making children dangerous, by reanimating the dead, by letting the carefully tended domestic deform, foam, and melt. No social structure holds power in the world of these stories—not on the basis of gender, or nationality, or class. The force that reigns is chaos.

Let’s look at that reigning chaos.

In “The Sensitivity of Others,” one of the earliest tales in the volume, we get the sparest narrative action seemingly possible: A speaker walks forward. And yet dream-nightmare touches impinge on all sides and on all senses. The opening line shows a world that is never stable, and if monsters and other dangers lurk just on the margins of our narrator’s shifting path, so do wonders and the promise of strange knowledge. Here’s the tale in full:

img_7666

I still have no idea what to make of the punchline there at the end, but those final images—a father, a faulty library, a power failure—hang heavy against the narrator’s trembling walk.

Many of Prassinos’s anti-fables conclude with such apparent non sequiturs, and yet the final lines can also cast a weird light back over the previous sentences. In “Photogenic Quality,” a dream-tale about the act of writing itself, the final line at first appears as sheer absurdity. A man receives a pencil from a child, whittles it into powder, blots the powder on paper, and throws the paper in the river (more things happen, too). The tale concludes with the man declaring, “Brass is made from copper and tin.” It’s possible to enjoy the absurdity here on its own; however, I think we can also read the last line as a kind of Abracadabra!, magic words that describe an almost alchemical synthesis—a synthesis much like the absurd modes of transformative writing that “Photogenic Quality” outlines.

img_7664

You’ll see above one of Allan Kausch’s illustrations for The Arthritic Grasshopper. Kausch’s collages pointedly recall Max Ernst’s surreal 1934 graphic novel Une semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness). Kausch’s work walks a weird line between horror and whimsy; images from old children’s books and magazines become chimerical figures, sometimes cute, sometimes horrific, and sometimes both. They’re lovely.

img_7663

Surreal figures shift throughout the book—monks and kings, daughters and mothers, deep sea divers and knights and salesmen and talking horses—all slightly out of place, or, rather, all making new places. Even when Prassinos establishes a traditional space we might think we recognize—often a fairy trope—she warps its contours, shaping it into something else. “A Marriage Proposal,” with its unsuspecting title, opens with “Once upon a time” — but we are soon dwelling in impossibility: “the garter snake appeared in the doorway, arm in arm with the snail, who was slobbering with happiness.” Other stories, like “Tragic Fanaticism,” immediately condense fairy tales into pure images, leaving the reader to suss out connections. Here is that story’s opening line: “A black hole, a little old woman, animals.” At five pages, “Tragic Fanaticism” is one of the collection’s longer stories. It ends with a four line poem, sung by five red cats to the old woman: “Go home and burn / Darling / You’re the only one we’ll love / Trash Bin.”

I still have a number of stories to read in The Arthritic Grasshopper. I’ve enjoyed its tales most when taken as intermezzos between sterner (or compulsory) reading. There’s something refreshing in Prassinos’s illogic. In longer stretches, I find that I tire, get lazy—Prassinos’s imagery shifts quickly—there’s something even picaresque to the stories—and keeping up with its veering rhythms for tale after tale can be taxing. Better not to gobble it all up at once. In this sense, The Arthritic Grasshopper reminds me strongly of another recently-published volume of surreal, imagistic stories that I’ve been slowly consuming this year: The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington. In their finest moments, both of these writers can offer new ways of looking at art, at narrative, at the world itself.

I described Prassinos’s tales as “anti-fables” above—a description that I think is accurate enough, as literary descriptions go—but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something that we can learn from them (although, to be very clear, I do not think literature has to offer us anything to learn). What Prassinos’s anti-fables do best is open up strange impossible spaces—there’s a kind of radical, amorphous openness here, one that might be neatly expressed in the original title to this newly-translated volume—Trouver sans checher—To Find without Seeking.

In her preface (titled “To Find without Seeking”) Prassinos begins with the question, “To find what?” Here is a question that many of us have been taught we must direct to all the literature we read—to interrogate it so that it yields moral instruction. Prassinos answers: “The spot where innocence rejoices, trembling as it first meets fear. The spot where innocence unleashes its ferocity and its monsters.” She goes on to describe a “true and complete world” where the “earth and water have no borders and each us can live there if we choose, in just the same way, without changing our names.” Her preface concludes by repeating “To find what?”, and then answering the question in the most perfectly (im)possible way: “In the end, the mind that doesn’t know what it knows: the free astonishing voice that speaks, faceless, in the night.” Prassinos’s anti-fables offer ways of reading a mind that doesn’t know what it knows, of singing along with the free faceless astonishing voice. Highly recommended.

[Ed. note–Biblioklept originally ran this review in August of 2017.]

A review of Taking Care, Joy Williams’ debut short story collection

BibliokleptLeave a comment

img_2446

Let’s begin with a paragraph from Joy Williams’ story “Winter Chemistry.” Let’s begin with this paragraph because I think it makes a better argument for reading Joy Williams’ story “Winter Chemistry” than I ever could. Here’s the paragraph:

Judy Cushman and Julep Lee had become friends the summer before when they were on the beach. It was a bitter, shining Maine day and they were alone except for two people drowning just beyond the breaker line. The two girls sat on the beach, eating potato chips, unable to decide if the people were drowning or if they were just having a good time. Even after they disappeared, the girls could not believe they had really done it. They went home and the next day read about it in the newspapers. From that day on, they spent all their time together, even though they never mentioned the incident again.

The paragraph is a perfect little short story on its own, the second part of its second sentence deployed in a simple, casually devastating manner (“they were alone except for two people drowning just beyond the breaker line”). There’s a wonderful ambiguity to the whole passage, an ambiguity most resonant in the second “they” of the fourth sentence—what is the referent of that “they”? The drowned victims? Or the girls who witnessed the drowning, inert, snacking?

Stripes of ambiguity like this one run throughout the sixteen stories in Joy Williams’ 1982 debut collection Taking Care. Williams’ characters—often young girls or young women—cannot quite fit what they immediately perceive into a coherent schema of the phenomenological world.

In the opening story, “The Lover,” for instance, Williams portrays a woman dissociating, told in a present-tense, free indirect style that trips into our hero’s troubled mind:

The girl wants to be in love. Her face is thin with the thinness of a failed lover. It is so difficult! Love is concentration, she feels, but she can remember nothing. She tries to recollect two things a day. In the morning with her coffee, she tries to remember and in the evening, with her first bourbon and water, she tries to remember as well. She has been trying to remember the birth of her child now for several days. Nothing returns to her. Life is so intrusive! Everyone was talking. There was too much conversation! … The girl wished that they would stop talking. She wished that they would turn the radio on instead and be still. The baby inside her was hard and glossy as an ear of corn. She wanted to say something witty or charming so that they would know she was fine and would stop talking. While she was thinking of something perfectly balanced and amusing to say, the baby was born.

There are over a dozen exclamation marks in “The Lover,” deployed in artful disregard for the conventional creative writing advice that eschews using those pointed poles. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a story use exclamation marks so effectively: “There was too much conversation!” Williams evokes her character’s emerging anxiety as it tips close to mania. We never discover a cause for her dissociation and neither does she. We get only the fallout, the effects, sentences piling together without a clear destination other than dissociation. She tries to find some kind of an answer, calling up an AM radio show called Action Line to talk to the Answer Man:

The girl goes to the telephone and dials hurriedly. It is very late. She whispers, not wanting to wake the child. There is static and humming. “I can’t make you out,” the Answer Man shouts. “Are you a phronemophobiac?” The girl says more firmly, “I want to know my hour.” “Your hour came, dear,” he says. “It went when you were sleeping. It came and saw you dreaming and it went back to where it was.”

A later story in Taking Care, “The Excursion,” returns to the themes of dissociation we saw in “The Lover.” In “The Excursion,” a girl named Jenny is unstuck in time. Her consciousness reels between childhood and adulthood; memories of her parents compound with adult experiences with her lover in Mexico. The result is startling, disorienting, and often upsetting. (And again, Williams deploys her exclamation marks like artful verbal pricks).

“The Lover” and “The Excursion” are probably the two most formally-daring stories in Taking Care, but their ambiguous spirit is part and parcel of the collection as a whole. Consider “Shorelines,” a rare first-person perspective story, which begins with the narrator trying to set order where there is none:

I want to explain. There are only the two of us, the child and me. I sleep alone. Jace is gone. My hair is wavy, my posture good. I drink a little. Food bores me. It takes so long to eat. Being honest, I must say I drink. I drink, perhaps, more than moderately, but that is why there is so much milk. I have a terrible thirst. Rum and Coke. Grocery wine. Anything that cools. Gin and juices of all sorts. My breasts are always aching, particularly the left, the earnest one, which the baby refuses to favor. First comforts must be learned, I suppose. It’s a matter of exposure.

“I want to explain,” our unnamed narrator declares, but her mind seems to wander away from this mission almost immediately. Who is Jace, and where has he gone? We never really find out, but we do get puzzling, upsetting clues, like this one:

It has always been Jace only. We were children together. We lived in the same house. It was a big house on the water. Jace remembers it precisely. I remember it not as well. There were eleven people in that house and a dog beneath it, tied night and day to the pilings. Eleven of us and always a baby. It doesn’t seem reasonable now when I think on it, but there were always eleven of us and always a baby. The diapers and the tiny clothes, hanging out to dry, for years!

Is Jace the father of the baby? Is he the narrator’s brother? The tingling ambiguities remain as the story concludes, the narrator still waiting on a return that may or may not happen.

What makes Williams’ ambiguities resonate so strongly is her precise evocation of place. Her stories happen in real physical space, the concrete details of which often contrast strongly with her character’s abstracted consciousnesses. “Shorelines” is one of several Florida stories in the collection, and Williams writes authoritatively about the Sunshine State without devolving into the caricature or grotesquerie that pervades so much writing about Florida. (As a Floridian, nothing annoys me quite so much in fiction as certain writers’ tendencies to exoticize Florida).

“Shepherd” is another of Wiliams’ Florida stories. (And one of her dog stories. And grief stories. And unnamed-girl-hero stories). It is set in the Florida Keys, where Williams lived for some time—her early career was in doing research for the U.S. Navy Marine Laboratory in Siesta Key, Florida. (Williams’ best-selling book is actually a history and tour guide of the Florida Keys). “Shepherd” is a sad story, one of the most basic stories in literature, really: Your dog dies. The story is ultimately about perception. After the dog’s death, the girl’s boyfriend cannot comprehend her grief. He scolds her:

“I think you’re wonderful, but I think a little realism is in order here. You would stand and scream at that dog, darling.” …

“I wasn’t screaming,” she said. The dog had a famous trick. The girl would ask, “Do you love me?” and he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. Everyone had been amazed.

While most readers will sympathize with the girl, her boyfriend’s perspective introduces an unsettling ambiguity. And yet Williams, or at least her character, resolves some of this ambiguity in what I take to be the story’s thesis:

Silence was a thing entrusted to the animals, the girl thought. Many things that human words have harmed are restored again by the silence of animals.

Taking Care is a bipolar book. Florida is one of its poles. Maine, where Williams grew up, is the other. “Winter Chemistry” (originally published in a different version as “A Story about Friends”) is a Maine story. In “Winter Chemistry,” two teenage girls, bored, play at something they don’t have the language for yet. Their game entails spying on their chemistry teacher, whom they both maybe are in love with. The girls may not comprehend what their emerging sexuality entails, but they do feel the physical world. Consider Williams’ evocation of Maine’s winter:

The cold didn’t invent anything like the summer has a habit of doing and it didn’t disclose anything like the spring. It lay powerfully encamped—waiting, altering one’s ambitions, encouraging ends. The cold made for an ache, a restlessness and an irritation, and thinking that fell in odd and unemployable directions.

The story propels the aching duo in “odd and unemployable directions” — and towards an unexpected violence foreshadowed earlier in the summer, as the two munched chips on the beach, watching a pair of swimmers drown.

In “Train,” Williams gives us another pair of girls, Danica and Jane. They are traveling from Maine to Florida, traversing the poles of Williams’ Taking Care. They explore “the entire train, from north to south” and find most of the adults drunk, or at least getting there. Jane’s parents, the Muirheads, clearly, strongly, definitively out of love, are in a fight. The adult world’s authority is always under suspicion in Taking Care. And yet the adults in Williams’ stories see what the children cannot yet see:

“Do you think Jane and I will be friends forever?” Dan asked.

Mr. Muirhead looked surprised. “Definitely not. Jane will not have friends. Jane will have husbands, enemies and lawyers.” He cracked ice noisily with his white teeth. “I’m glad you enjoyed your summer, Dan, and I hope you’re enjoying your childhood. When you grow up, a shadow falls. Everything’s sunny and then this big Goddamn wing or something passes overhead.”

“Oh,” Dan said.

The theme of caretaking evinces most strongly in the titular story. “Taking Care” seems to be set in Maine, although it’s not entirely clear. The story focuses on “Jones, the preacher,” who “has been in love all his life”; indeed, “Jones’s love is much too apparent and it arouses neglect.” Jones takes care of himself only so that he can take care of others. His wife is diagnosed with cancer; his daughter, in the midst of a nervous breakdown, has run away to Mexico, leaving Jones to care for her infant daughter, his only grandchild. The story is devastating in its evocation of love and duty, and ends although its ending is ambiguous, it nevertheless concludes on an achingly-sweet grace note.

Jones’s enduring, patient love is unusual in Taking Care, where friendships splinter, marriages fail, and children realize their parents’ vices and frailties might be their true inheritance. These are stories of domestic doom and incipient madness, alcoholism and lost pets. There’s humor here, but the humor is ice dry, and never applied as even a palliative to the central sadness of Taking Care. Williams’ humor is something closer to cosmic absurdity, a recognition of the ambiguity at the core of being human, of not knowing. It’s the humor of two girls eating chips on a beach, unable to decide if the people they are gazing at are drowning or just having a good time.

I enjoyed many of the stories in “Taking Care” very much, and especially enjoyed the stranger, more formally-adventurous ones, like “The Lover” and “The Excursion.” I look forward to reading more of Joy Williams’ work. Highly recommended.

[Ed. — we first ran this review in March 2019.]

873 words from Stephen Dixon’s 1991 novel Frog, followed by 469 words on Stephen Dixon’s 1991 novel Frog

Biblioklept2 Comments

Here are 873 words from Stephen Dixon’s long looping loopy lucid antilaconic 1991 novel Frog; the words are a segment of the ninth chapter, “Frog’s Brother”:

Alex was the only passenger on the freighter. His father’s patient called his son in England and asked as a favor to the man who’s treated his family’s teeth for forty years if he could take Alex aboard free. Alex was in London then, wanted to get back home, had little money, could have borrowed plane or ocean liner fare from his parents or Jerry, wanted the experience of being on a freighter during a long crossing. Though he got free passage, he asked to work without pay at any job the captain wanted him to. He’ll clean latrines, even, he said in his last letter to Howard. Anything the lowest-grade seaman does, just to get the full feel of it and perhaps seaman’s papers for a paid trip later. He was a newsman turned fiction writer. Two months after the ship disappeared a parcel of manuscripts arrived at their parents’ apartment from England by surface mail. Maybe the manuscripts he didn’t much care about. Maybe the ones he cared most about he took with him on the ship. Howard read the stories and vignettes soon after and then some of them every three or four years till about ten years ago. He never found them very good, but Alex was just starting. Two diaries and some oriental figurines in the parcel also, and lots of letters from his parents, brothers, friends. He’d traveled around the world. Saved up for three years to do it. Did it for a year. A prostitute in a dilapidated hut in a small village outside Bangkok. Why’s that experience come to mind first? It was in a letter to Howard, not the diaries. He searched the diaries for it, thinking an elaboration of it might be interesting, revealing, sexually exciting. She was fourteen years old. That made Alex sad. She asked him to marry her. She said she’d be devoted, would learn to cook and make love American, bear him many children if he wanted, all boys if he wanted (she knew how), would return to grade school. He gave her his silver ID bracelet, pleaded with her to give up prostitution. Then he did it a third time with her the same day and came back the next. Talk about hypocrisy! he said. What’s the trick of turning a customer into a suitor? he asked. But one who’ll be good to her and an adequate provider. If he knew, he’d give it to her. Sent her a pearl necklace from Manila. If he got a venereal disease from her he’d worry more about her than himself. He might go back for her before he leaves for India, or send for her once he gets back to America, and maybe even marry her when she comes of age. Keep this between them just in case it does happen. Taught English to Malaysian businessmen for a month. Met two old men in New Guinea—Canadians—who were living the primitive jungle life. They were good friends of his till they tried to drug and rape him. He’s afraid he had to kick them both in the balls to get out of there and then steal their canoe to get back to town. Fell in love with a witch. Read Proust’s Remembrances in five nearly sleepless days, an experience that’s left him dreaming of the books every night for the last six weeks. A Goan fortuneteller told him his trip would end badly. He said to go home by plane, don’t sail. Remind him when the time comes, for the man wouldn’t take any money. Had a fifteen-year-old girl in Nairobi. What can he tell Howard?—he likes young girls. It’s more than just the way their hair blows and breasts point and bellybuttons dimple and thighs are so even. Maybe it’s because of all the girls who barely let him pet them when he was a teenager. Rode a camel through part of the Sahara. Ate lizard, locusts, grasshoppers, grubs. Never felt very Jewish before till he started hitting all the old synagogues and Jewish cemeteries he could find in the Orient and Middle East. Wait’ll he gets to Poland and Prague and also tries to look the old families up. He’s afraid it’s converted him, but not to the point of wearing a skullcap. Hitchhiked with a sixteen-year-old sabra through Turkey and Yugoslavia, though she might have been younger. When she had to go back she said she thinks he got her pregnant—her device wasn’t put in right a few times, she was so new at it. He told her he’s heard that one before, but if she has the baby and the calendrical configurations fix it as his, or just if she still says it is, he’ll love and provide for it, adopt it if she wishes and take it to America with or without her or emigrate to Israel if she prefers, marry her if that’s what she wants—she’s quite striking and clever and potentially very artistic and smart. He’s written what he thinks is fairly decent work recently, he said in his last letter. He’s glad he’s found something he wants to do for the next twenty to thirty years, has Howard?

The titular “Frog’s Brother” is Alex. (“Frog,” by the way, is “Howard,” the protagonist of Frog.) Alex’s freighter goes missing in the North Atlantic; the ship is never recovered nor are lifeboats. No bodies. The only evidence of the disaster is absence.

In this absence, Frog imagines and reimagines Alex’s death at sea in different looping cycles; these reimaginings are also framed within Frog’s attempt to accurately recall his receiving the news that his brother Alex is lost at sea–was it by phone, that he received this awful news? in his other brother’s apartment? what were the specific conditions of this heartbreak?

Imagining and then reimagining the specific details of a horrifying, horrible, horrendous event is the rhetorical gist of Dixon’s 1995 follow-up to Frog, Interstate, a fucked-up eight-way riff on the narrator’s daughter’s murder by way of random highway violence.

I have read around 120 of Fog’s near 800 pages, and many of those pages feature the same rhetorical and narratological techniques or repetitions with differences that were so off-centered in Interstate: fraying phrases, looping tics, paranoid passages. In the absence of the one thing, Dixon’s narrators pony up iteration after iteration, something after something. But the narrators know that there’s not enough somethings to ever even come close to approximating everything. The iterations sharpen and highlight the beauty of the absence’s abyss.

That abyss was real, or true, or True, for Stephen Dixon, whose brother “Jimmy, a magazine writer, died in 1960 when the freighter he was on in the North Atlantic disappeared,” as the New York Times reported in Dixon’s 2019 obituary. The Times obituary continued: “Mr. Dixon felt that he was continuing his brother’s work. Jimmy Dixon had a short story published after his death.” If Jimmy Dixon was prototype to Alex Frogbrother, what are we to make of the fantastic paraphrase of his letters, above? The passage reads like a bizarre failed adventure tale, something we might expect from William T. Vollmann, who, with his heart of gold, tried to “free” sex workers. It’s also quite queasy when it comes to sex (a constant I’ve noticed in Dixon): “What can he tell Howard?—he likes young girls,” our narrator flatly, grossly reports.

The saddest and realest bit might be this though, the admission that “Howard read the stories and vignettes soon after and then some of them every three or four years till about ten years ago. He never found them very good, but Alex was just starting.” But Alex was just starting. The last bit of the section, “He’s glad he’s found something he wants to do for the next twenty to thirty years, has Howard?” seems both boon and curse, a door that opens and shuts simultaneously, cursing our Stephen Dixon, our Frog, to write write write write write write write write write…

 

 

Lucky day | Stray thoughts on the announcement of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Shadow Ticket

Biblioklept5 Comments
Panel from Nancy, Ernie Bushmiller, 23 Oct.1954

For about a decade, a common social media joke (common enough among a certain stripe of nerd) has run something like, Thomas Pynchon seems to be writing the U.S.A. reality right now; another common (enough) social media rejoinder amounts to something like, No way Pynchon would write this reality—too sloppy, too lazy, too obvious. Too stupid. 

I just deleted an entire paragraph on Too stupid. I think we’re all attuned to the unfunny absurdity of the zeitgeist, and I think that as zany and goofy as Pynchon is in his byzantine plots, he wouldn’t muck with, say, RFK’s kid’s brain worm telling him to remove fluoride and bring back the plague. Just too stupid! And the stupidity is all bound up in evil, cruelty, pain. I hate it! Maybe you hate it too. The news, whatever “the news” means, seems to be uniformly bad. One might apply this statement throughout history, I suppose, so maybe I just mean: It (all of it) just gets worse.

So I take any good news as a gift.

And on Wednesday morning there was some, at least in my book, very good news: Penguin Random House announced a new novel from Thomas Pynchon. I had not expected another novel from Pynchon, who will turn 88 next month. If I’m really honest, I might have expected, like, a different headline about Pynchon.

The new novel, to be published this fall, is titled Shadow Ticket. Shadow Ticket is a rad title for a novel! I’ve had it rattling around my head. Pynchon has a history of using phrases from his novels for titles of future books, but as far as I can tell by searching ebooks, the phrase shadow ticket doesn’t appear in his published oeuvre. Simple internet searches for the phrase return publisher Penguin Random House’s announcement of the novel Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon; the OED database has nothing. Unlike inherent vice or leading edge, shadow ticket seems to have no clear corollary to the uh, real world.

Perhaps the title might be a reference to the shadowy voyage of the novel’s purported protagonist, Hicks McTaggart, whom the blurb (presumably penned by TP) declares finds himself “shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline.” I suppose that’s one kind of shadow ticket.

There’s a lot of predictably Pynchonesque picaresquery in the blurb: an “heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune,” “swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists,” and pastries. The novel is set in 1932 and the blurb notes that Hicks will find himself “entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies.” The blurb also tells us that Hicks is “a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye” — one of Them, or at least, a one-time agent of Them. Perhaps Shadow Ticket might read as a bridge between Pynchon’s grand opuses on the emerging 20th-century—the critique of labor and capital in Against the Day segueing into the explosion of Gravity’s Rainbow. 

But we’ll just have to wait. The announcement for Shadow Ticket came on a week of lucky days for me, or lucky-feeling days, I suppose I mean. I watched my alma mater’s basketball team win the national championship for the third time on Monday night — I’d watched almost all of their games since November — and woke up on Tuesday feeling elated (I also won my work’s March Madness pool). News of forthcoming albums by bands I’d loved in my youth like Pulp, Stereolab, and Tortoise also gave me that odd feeling of something to look forward to, something on the horizon that wasn’t just more horrible shit.

And I can wait in hope, I suppose, or at least in absurd appreciation like Sluggo in Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy strip of 23 Oct. 1954, who finds surreal intercession in the form of a potted plant descending from the heavens to land upon his bald crown. I too wish I could crack this walnut.

Eight notes on Stephen Dixon’s novel Interstate

Edwin Turner1 Comment

1,  It upset me deeply, reading Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate. It fucked me up a little bit, and then a little bit more, addicted to reading it as I was over two weeks in a new year.

2,  What is it about, Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate? I mean, you probably won’t like it, but that wasn’t the stupid rhetorical question that led this point. (And also but maybe like, you will like it.) Interstate was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award. It didn’t win. The NBA’s website’s one-sentence summary fucks up: “In the author’s first novel since Frog, a Finalist for the National Book Award, a father mentally replays, in eight variations, the shooting of his daughters on an interstate highway.”

3,  There is (or is it are?) one too many esses in the NBA’s summary of Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate—there are two daughters, plural, but only one is shot, and shot tragically, awfully, fatally—and really, as its variations play out, it’s not entirely clear if anyone was shot, if anyone was even on the highway, if anyone was even real. Are all the so-called events of the novel simply (there’s no simply about it) in the narrator’s imagination? “…but there I go again, the world’s easiest and most desirable copy out, the dream,” muses the narrator at one point. Not even a dream though, it’s all just words.

4,  It’s all “just” words, and if someone told me they read and hated Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate, I’d shrug and ask if they made it all the way through all the words and still hated it. If someone told me that they made it all the way through Interstate and found it to be a strange and unappealing writing experiment, I’d mildly agree with them, and then tell them that I loved that particular flavor and if they didn’t like that particular flavor, well, cool.

5,  If someone read all the words in Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate and concluded that it seemed like an ambitious and highly-achieved creative writing exercise — writing experiment, rather — I’d likely initially agree and then hedge a bit before mumbling something like, I don’t think it was an exercise or experiment on the author Stephen Dixon’s part. It might make for experimental reading, but I think he absolutely knew what he was doing; this wasn’t practice or exercise — it was the real thing.

6, I have, thus far, done a lousy job, not even really a job, of describing the force of language in Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate. Normally I’d crib a few choice passages—and to be clear, Interstate s fat and juicy with choice passages—but we are talking about long, twisty, tangled passages, sentences that go on for pages, sentences that find the predicate verb sundered for a few paragraphs from its eventual object, sentences that move us through thought, how divergent thought can be how, how imprecise, indirect, yet still sharp and often painful. An easy, lazy comparison would be to liken Dixon’s paragraphs to Thomas Bernhard’s (although Dixon denied the influence, much like William Gaddis did in his final novel)—there’s a different flavor here but our guys are working in a similar mode. (Think too of László Krasznahorkai or Gabriel García Márquez or Faulkner or Mauro Javier Cárdenas or any number of practitioners of the long paragraph). John Domini, in his contemporary review in the Portland Oregonian (reprinted in his excellent collection The Sea-God’s Herb) does a better job of describing Dixon’s style than I can do:

Characters talk themselves through backwaters of memory (sometimes creating comic relief) or sail into dreamy what-ifs, all in order to put off some looming and drear inevitability. In conversation, one may mention an important insight that he or she has to share, then spiral away through a half-dozen distractions before revealing what matters. The format feels like a natural fit to the shuttered claustrophobia of worry and loss. So do the jam-packed paragraphs, sometimes running several pages without a break. Better still, these blocks of talky phrasing flicker with light, even (every now and again) with happier possibilities.”

(Maybe I just wanted to quote that lovely phrase of Domini’s, “blocks of talky phrasing flicker with light.”)

7,  “Better still, these blocks of talky phrasing flicker with light, even (every now and again) with happier possibilities,” Domini wrote of Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate. The last of Dixon’s eight Interstates is an unexpected gift — a happy ending, or, rather a banal ending, a plain ending, an ending without tragedy or comedy or epic heroism. An ending where everyone gets to bed in time to fit in a little light reading before shuteye. It sounds hokey when I write it out, but there’s nothing trite about the conclusion. The reader purchases this moment of catharsis from all the terror (and horrifying comedy, which I’ve neglected in this riff and will continue to neglect) — the reader purchases the cathartic conclusion from the preceding horror.

8,  I wonder how I might have reacted to Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate if I had read it, say, when it was first published, back when I was a junior in high school. Or how would I have reacted to it ten years after that, not yet a parent? (And writing these thoughts out now, I realize that, more than anything by Bernhard or Krasznahorkai or Faulkner or the other Dixon I’ve read, Interstate most reminds me of (at least at this moment that I write) of Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. I’ve watched It’s a Wonderful Life once a year for the past four decades, finding it strangely different every few years — first baffling and even a bit scary, then boring, then exasperating, infuriating even, then schmaltzy, sentimental, ludicrous, and then magical, endearing, heartbreaking, perfect–I’ve veered off course, where was I?) I wonder how being a parent has colored my psychic engagement with the novel Interstate? I was not so much manipulated by the tragedy of losing a child through violent, chaotic, meaningless death but rather the more banal tragedy the novel repeatedly engages — losing a child through half-neglect, through half-listening, through selfishness, through an inability to focus on now — not really so much losing a child but losing out on connections, memories, time you’ll never get back. It fucked me up, Interstate, and I don’t think I’d like to go down its road again — but I loved it. Very highly recommended.

Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories in reverse, Part IV

Biblioklept3 Comments

Previously,

Stories 40-36

Stories 35-32

Stories 31-28

27. “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby” (Amateurs, 1976)

This is probably the first essential story in Forty Stories—maybe at the end of this silly project I’ll put together something like Fifty Stories, whittling down Sixty Stories and Forty Stories. Here are the first few sentences:

Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he’d gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn’t pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging. He said he’d think about it but it would take him a while to decide.

Colby finally settles on Ive’s Fourth Symphony.

“Some of Us” showcases in a non-showy way the best of Barthelme—absurdity balanced by syntactic restraint; surreal humor weighted in the visceral specter of impending violence. It’s a very, very funny story, and while I think it resists simple allegorical interpretation, it’s nevertheless a little parcel of domestic fascism in practice. Great stuff. Read “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby”  here.

26. “Pepperoni” (first published in The New Yorker, 23 Nov. 1980)

Published over four decades ago, “Pepperoni” is a depressingly prescient riff on what happens when capital decides to take over journalism. Newspapers become just another widget, a slice of pepperoni, a trifle, a nothing to sell and sell and resell:

Financially, the paper is quite healthy. The paper’s timber-lands, mining interests, pulp and paper operations, book, magazine, corrugated-box, and greeting-card divisions, film, radio, television, and cable companies, and data-processing and satellite-communications groups are all flourishing, with overall return on invested capital increasing at about eleven percent a year.

Despite the vertical integration, all is not well: “But top management is discouraged and saddened, and middle management is drinking too much.” Barthelme’s hyperbole is jaunty in 1980, where the paper’s “editorials have been subcontracted to Texas Instruments, and the obituaries to Nabisco, so that the staff will have ‘more time to think.'” But in 2024 it reads as a grim warning about the gross intersection of capital and journalism. Read “Pepperoni” here.

25. “Sentence” (City Life, 1970)

I mean what if I just…

Or a long sentence moving at a certain pace down the page aiming for the bottom-if not the bottom of this page then some other page-where it can rest, or stop for a moment to think out the questions raised by its own (temporary) existence, which ends when the page is turned, or the sentence falls out of the mind that holds it (temporarily) in some kind of embrace, not necessarily an ardent one, but more perhaps the kind of embrace enjoyed (or endured), by a wife who has just waked up and is on her way to the bathroom in the morning to wash her hair, and is bumped into by her husband, who has been lounging at the breakfast table reading the newspaper, and doesn’t see her coming out of the bedroom, but, when he bumps into her, or is bumped into by her, raises his hands to embrace her lightly, transiently, because he knows that if he gives her a real embrace so early in the morning, before she has properly shaken the dreams out of her head, and got her duds on, she won’t respond, and may even become slightly angry, and say something wounding, and so the husband invests in this embrace not so much physical or emotional pressure as he might, because he doesn’t want to waste anything-with this sort of feeling, then, the sentence passes through the mind more or less, and there is another way of describing the situation too, which is to say that the sentence crawls through the mind like something someone says to you while you are listening very hard to the FM radio, some rock group there, with its thrilling sound, and so, with your attention or the major part of it at least already rewarded, there is not much mind room you can give to the remark, especially considering that you have probably just quarreled with that person, the maker of the remark, over the radio being too loud, or something like that, and the view you take, of the remark, is that you’d really rather not hear it, but if you have to hear it, you want to listen to it for the smallest possible length of time, and during a commercial, because immediately after the commercial they’re going to play a new rock song by your favorite group, a cut that has never been aired before, and you want to hear it and respond to it in a new way, a way that accords with whatever you’re feeling at the moment, or might feel, if the threat of new experience could be (temporarily) overbalanced by the promise of possible positive benefits, or what the mind construes as such, remembering that these are often, really, disguised defeats (not that such defeats are not, at times, good for your character, teaching you that it is not by success alone that one surmounts life, but that setbacks, too, contribute to that roughening of the personality that, by providing a textured surface to place against that of life, enables you to leave slight traces, or smudges, on the face of human history-your mark) and after all, benefit-seeking always has something of the smell of raw vanity about it, as if you wished to decorate your own brow with laurel, or wear your medals to a cookout, when the invitation had said nothing about them, and although the ego is always hungry (we are told) it is well to remember that ongoing success is nearly as meaningless as ongoing lack of success, which can make you sick, and that it is good to leave a few crumbs on the table for the rest of your brethren, not to sweep it all into the little beaded purse of your soul but to allow others, too, part of the gratification, and if you share in this way you will find the clouds smiling on you, and the postman bringing you letters, and bicycles available when you want to rent them, and many other signs, however guarded and limited, of the community’s (temporary) approval of you, or at least of it’s willingness to let you believe (temporarily) that it finds you not so lacking in commendable virtues as it had previously allowed you to think, from its scorn of your merits, as it might be put, or anyway its consistent refusal to recognize your basic humanness and its secret blackball of the project of your remaining alive, made in executive session by its ruling bodies, which, as everyone knows, carry out concealed programs of reward and punishment, under the rose, causing faint alterations of the status quo, behind your back, at various points along the periphery of community life, together with other enterprises not dissimilar in tone, such as producing films that have special qualities, or attributes, such as a film where the second half of it is a holy mystery, and girls and women are not permitted to see it, or writing novels in which the final chapter is a plastic bag filled with water, which you can touch, but not drink: in this way, or ways, the underground mental life of the collectivity is botched, or denied, or turned into something else never imagined by the planners, who, returning from the latest seminar in crisis management and being asked what they have learned, say they have learned how to throw up their hands; the sentence meanwhile, although not insensible of these considerations, has a festering conscience of its own, which persuades it to follow its star, and to move with all deliberate speed from one place to another, without losing any of the “riders” it may have picked up just being there, on the page, and turning this way and that, to see what is over there, under that oddly-shaped tree, or over there, reflected in the rain barrel of the imagination, even though it is true that in our young manhood we were taught that short, punchy sentences were best (but what did he mean? doesn’t “punchy” mean punch-drunk? I think he probably intended to say “short, punching sentences,” meaning sentences that lashed out at you, bloodying your brain if possible, and looking up the word just now I came across the nearby “punkah,” which is a large fan suspended from the ceiling in India, operated by an attendant pulling a rope-that is what I want for my sentence, to keep it cool!) we are mature enough now to stand the shock of learning that much of what we were taught in our youth was wrong, or improperly understood by those who were teaching it, or perhaps shaded a bit, the shading resulting from the personal needs of the teachers, who as human beings had a tendency to introduce some of their heart’s blood into their work, and sometimes this may not have been of the first water, this heart’s blood, and even if they thought they were moving the “knowledge” out, as the Board of Education had mandated, they could have noticed that their sentences weren’t having the knockdown power of the new weapons whose bullets tumble end-over-end (but it is true that we didn’t have these weapons at that time) and they might have taken into account the fundamental dubiousness of their project (but all the intelligently conceived projects have been eaten up already, like the moon and the stars) leaving us, in our best clothes, with only things to do like conducting vigorous wars of attrition against our wives, who have now thoroughly come awake, and slipped into their striped bells, and pulled sweaters over their torsi, and adamantly refused to wear any bras under the sweaters, carefully explaining the political significance of this refusal to anyone who will listen, or look, but not touch, because that has nothing to do with it, so they say; leaving us, as it were, with only things to do like floating sheets of Reynolds Wrap around the room, trying to find out how many we can keep in the air at the same time, which at least gives us a sense of participation, as though we were Buddha, looking down at the mystery of your smile, which needs to be investigated, and I think I’ll do that right now, while there’s still enough light, if you’ll sit down over there, in the best chair, and take off all your clothes, and put your feet in that electric toe caddy (which prevents pneumonia) and slip into this permanent press hospital gown, to cover your nakedness-why, if you do all that, we’ll be ready to begin! after I wash my hands, because you pick up an amazing amount of exuviae in this city, just by walking around in the open air, and nodding to acquaintances, and speaking to friends, and copulating with lovers, in the ordinary course (and death to our enemies! by and by)-but I’m getting a little uptight, just about washing my hands, because I can’t find the soap, which somebody has used and not put back in the soap dish, all of which is extremely irritating, if you have a beautiful patient sitting in the examining room, naked inside her gown, and peering at her moles in the mirror, with her immense brown eyes following your every movement (when they are not watching the moles, expecting them, as in a Disney nature film, to exfoliate) and her immense brown head wondering what you’re going to do to her, the pierced places in the head letting that question leak out, while the therapist decides just to wash his hands in plain water, and hang the soap! and does so, and then looks around for a towel, but all the towels have been collected by the towel service, and are not there, so he wipes his hands on his pants, in the back (so as to avoid suspicious stains on the front) thinking: what must she think of me? and, all this is very unprofessional and at-sea looking! trying to visualize the contretemps from her point of view, if she has one (but how can she? she is not in the washroom) and then stopping, because it is finally his own point of view that he cares about and not hers, and with this firmly in mind, and a light, confident step, such as you might find in the works of Bulwer-Lytton, he enters the space she occupies so prettily and, taking her by the hand, proceeds to tear off the stiff white hospital gown (but no, we cannot have that kind of pornographic merde in this majestic and high-minded sentence, which will probably end up in the Library of Congress) (that was just something that took place inside his consciousness, as he looked at her, and since we know that consciousness is always consciousness of something, she is not entirely without responsibility in the matter) so, then, taking her by the hand, he falls into the stupendous white puree of her abyss, no, I mean rather that he asks her how long it has been since her last visit, and she says a fortnight, and he shudders, and tells her that with a condition like hers (she is an immensely popular soldier, and her troops win all their battles by pretending to be forests, the enemy discovering, at the last moment, that those trees they have eaten their lunch under have eyes and swords) (which reminds me of the performance, in 1845, of Robert-Houdin, called The Fantastic Orange Tree, wherein Robert-Houdin borrowed a lady’s handkerchief, rubbed it between his hands and passed it into the center of an egg, after which he passed the egg into the center of a lemon, after which he passed the lemon into the center of an orange, then pressed the orange between his hands, making it smaller and smaller, until only a powder remained, whereupon he asked for a small potted orange tree and sprinkled the powder thereupon, upon which the tree burst into blossom, the blossoms turning into oranges, the oranges turning into butterflies, and the butterflies turning into beautiful young ladies, who then married members of the audience), a condition so damaging to real-time social intercourse of any kind, the best thing she can do is give up, and lay down her arms, and he will lie down in them, and together they will permit themselves a bit of the old slap and tickle, she wearing only her Mr. Christopher medal, on its silver chain, and he (for such is the latitude granted the professional classes) worrying about the sentence, about its thin wires of dramatic tension, which have been omitted, about whether we should write down some natural events occurring in the sky (birds, lightning bolts), and about a possible coup d’etat within the sentence, whereby its chief verb would be-but at this moment a messenger rushes into the sentence, bleeding from a hat of thorns he’s wearing, and cries out: “You don’t know what you’re doing! Stop making this sentence, and begin instead to make Moholy-Nagy cocktails, for those are what we really need, on the frontiers of bad behavior!” and then he falls to the floor, and a trap door opens under him, and he falls through that, into a damp pit where a blue narwhal waits, its horn poised (but maybe the weight of the messenger, falling from such a height, will break off the horn)-thus, considering everything very carefully, in the sweet light of the ceremonial axes, in the run-mad skimble-skamble of information sickness, we must make a decision as to whether we should proceed, or go back, in the latter case enjoying the pathos of eradication, in which the former case reading an erotic advertisement which begins, How to Make Your Mouth a Blowtorch of Excitement (but wouldn’t that overtax our mouthwashes?) attempting, during the pause, while our burned mouths are being smeared with fat, to imagine a better sentence, worthier, more meaningful, like those in the Declaration of Independence, or a bank statement showing that you have seven thousand kroner more than you thought you had-a statement summing up the unreasonable demands that you make on life, and one that also asks the question, if you can imagine these demands, why are they not routinely met, tall fool? but of course it is not that query that this infected sentence has set out to answer (and hello! to our girl friend, Rosetta Stone, who has stuck by us through thick and thin) but some other query that we shall some day discover the nature of, and here comes Ludwig, the expert on sentence construction we have borrowed from the Bauhaus, who will-“Guten Tag, Ludwig!”-probably find a way to cure the sentence’s sprawl, by using the improved way of thinking developed in Weimer-“I am sorry to inform you that the Bauhaus no longer exists, that all of the great masters who formerly thought there are either dead or retired, and that I myself have been reduced to constructing books on how to pass the examination for police sergeant”-and Ludwig falls through the Tugendhat House into the history of man-made objects; a disappointment, to be sure, but it reminds us that the sentence itself is a man-made object, not the one we wanted of course, but still a construction of man, a structure to be treasured for its weakness, as opposed to the strength of stones

Is good if not great.

24. “The Temptation of St. Anthony” (Sadness, 1972)

After rereading this one, the thought that dominated my stupid brain was, How the fuck did an editor allow DB to use the word “ineffable” four times in this short story? He uses a version of the word here, in this nice little excerpt in which one of the things that St. Anthony did was the passive doing of being mugged:

 There was the ineffableness I’ve already mentioned, and there were certain things that he did. He was mugged, for example. That doesn’t happen too often here, but it happened to him. It was at night, somebody jumped on him from behind, grabbed him around the neck and began going through his pockets. The man only got a few dollars, and then he threw St. Anthony down on the sidewalk (he put one leg in front of the saint’s legs and shoved him) and then began to run away. St. Anthony called after him, held up his hand, and said, “Don’t you want the watch?” It was a good watch, a Bulova. The man was thunderstruck. He actually came back and took the watch off St. Anthony’s wrist. He didn’t know what to think. He hesitated for a minute and then asked St. Anthony if he had bus fare home. The saint said it didn’t matter, it wasn’t far, he could walk. Then the mugger ran away again.

If not essential, “St. Anthony” is a robust and colorful example of DB riffing in his prime. Read “The Temptation of St. Anthony” here.

Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories in reverse, Part III

BibliokleptLeave a comment

Previously,

Stories 40-36

Stories 35-32

31. “Sakrete” (first published in The New Yorker, 25 Sep. 1983)

“Sakrete” is a silly little domestic riff about garbage can theft, rats, and an alcoholic trying to work with concrete. It’s not a very good story and I have no idea why it was included in Forty Stories. I do like that it shows a general respect for garbage cans and garbage collection (very interested parties should check out Stephen Dixon’s excellent novel Garbage). Here is the last paragraph, the highlight of the story:

 There are now no garbage cans on our street—no garbage cans left to steal. A committee of rats has joined with the Special Provisional committee in order to deal with the situation, which, the rats have made known, is attracting unwelcome rat elements from other areas of the city. Members of the two committees exchange secret grips, grips that I know not of. My wife drives groups of rats here and there in her yellow Pontiac convertible, attending important meetings. The crisis, she says, will be a long one. She has never been happier.

30. “Porcupines At The University” (Amateurs, 1976)

Another trifle—am I regretting this project, this rereading of Forty Stories? The stories in Sixty Stories are so, so much stronger—and those stories were organized chronologically. Going backwards through these is not really going backwards through time, through the artist’s anti-maturation, but rather just, like, making it more difficult to find one’s place in a book. “Porcupines” is a goof on academia that — and I say this as a compliment — at best reads like an alcoholic’s surrealist riff on a college film. Skip it!

29. “The Catechist” (Sadness , 1972)

This is a good story, “The Catechist.” But also a very Catholic one, without being, like, small-c catholic. There’s a bit of narrativizing here that Barthelme would eventually dispense with in his dialogues, the form that he would eventually settle on for his short stories. I say “settle on” but Barthelme died quite young, or, it seems to me, at 45, quite young—dying at 58. Barthelme died from throat cancer, probably a result of his alcoholism (pure conjecture on my part, this last clause):

The catechist reads from his book. “The candidate should be questioned as to his motives for becoming a Christian.”
I think: My motives?
He says: “Tell me about yourself.”
I say: “I’m forty. I have bad eyes. An enlarged liver.”
“That’s the alcohol,” he says.
“Yes,” I say.
“You’re very much like your father, there.”
“A shade more avid.”

28. “Lightning” (Overnight to Many Distant Cities, 1983)

This is a great story. Or at least a very good story, unexpectedly so, written a mode approaching near-realism or even near-dirty-realism. Was Barthelme flexing his muscles in the mirror after having read a story by Raymond Carver? Probably not, but I like to imagine it (I imagine his muscles beefier and musclier than they likely were). “Lightning” has a fairly straightforward ( and unBarthelemesque) plot:

Edward Connors, on assignment for Folks, set out to interview nine people who had been struck by lightning. “Nine?” he said to his editor, Penfield. “Nine, ten,” said Penfield, “doesn’t matter, but it has to be more than eight.” “Why?” asked Connors, and Penfield said that the layout was scheduled for five pages and they wanted at least two people who had been struck by lightning per page plus somebody pretty sensational for the opening page. “Slightly wonderful,” said Penfield, “nice body, I don’t have to tell you, somebody with a special face. Also, struck by lightning.”

The story is ultimately a romantic comedy, with reporter Edward finally finding his “face”:

People would dig slant wells for this woman, go out into a producing field with a tank truck in the dead of night and take off five thousand gallons of somebody else’s crude, write fanciful checks, establish Pyramid Clubs with tony marble-and-gold headquarters on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse. What did he have to offer?

He finds something to offer. This is probably the best one yet in Forty Stories (in reverse, anyway).

6 Nov. 2024

Biblioklept3 Comments

Like a lot of US Americans I didn’t sleep too well last night. I went to bed too late and I rustled myself into some form of consciousness way too early. A veteran of past election eves, I did not overimbibe, but still felt groggy enough and well just plain like well disconcerted discombobulated discouraged enough to cancel meetings with my classes for the day. I didn’t have anything to give.

While I was in no way shocked by the results of the 2024 elections, I am nevertheless big-w Worried about all the things that may unfold, quickly, and without organized opposition, in the next six months. As has been the case for most of the presidential elections I’ve voted in, I voted against a candidate instead of for a candidate. I knew in Florida that my vote probably wouldn’t matter too much anyway.

I made myself go outside of my house into “Florida,” into Northeast Florida, which is, of course, also inside of my house, Florida, but I went outside early to take the air and look around. It was also garbage day in the neighborhood. I had a can with some nasty double-bagged rotten Jack O’Lanterns. We carved them on Halloween night and they wilted to a gray and black fuzz swarmed over with pestilence. I had to scrape their guts into the garden bed and hose the whole mess down. It’s not supposed to be this hot here this time of year, only it is and it has been, like regularly, consistently, predictably for well over a decade. The Florida air I stepped out into was gross: sticky, muggy, humidity near ninety percent and maybe 82° at nine in the morning. It did not feel like summer nor fall, but some other gross fifth season. None of this was colored by mood.

My mood was and is grim. I knew that voting for the incumbent’s proxy was simply kicking a can down the road; I knew that I was endorsing a system I had no belief in and that no one else I knew really seemed to believe in. I think I wanted just a little bit of the latter half of the 20th century to trickle down to my children, who are no longer really children. But it felt like a gross summer’s eve on this fall morning, and I remembered that climate change, which is to say global warming, which is to say the warming of the earth’s habitable surface as the result of fossil fuels—this so-called “climate change” didn’t even seem to be a blip in this election cycle. Again: kicking the can down the road, whistling past the graveyard, etc. Ostriches don’t really bury their heads in the sand though, and we all gotta know that the bill for the twentieth century is way past overdue.

But ostensibly this is a blog about literature or art; I don’t think anyone comes here for me to rant. So what am I reading?

I have been reading two books (three, really, or maybe more) and auditing two books. Audiobooks first: I am about half way through Dan Simmons’ Fall of Hyperion and I want to quit. I liked Hyperion but this one is just…I don’t have anything to say about it, except that I am sympathetic to Simmons’ anti-imperialist critique and I’m generally simpatico with his appropriation of the Romantics into a sci-fi epic (although, like, where the fuck is Blake?)—but the first book Hyperion was much better. Maybe it’s because he had a form to steal (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). I listen to this book in waking hours: driving, cooking, chores, etc.

The other audiobook is a fantastic rendition of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I do not listen to this book during waking hours; I fall asleep to it (or to Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians or to Sleep’s Holy Mountain or something else). Specifically, I’ve been falling asleep somewhere between chapters seven and eight this week. I love this book so much. I love the film version that came out like ten plus years ago, with Gary Oldman as Smiley. I used to love falling asleep to that film. I don’t actually know what happens in the narrative.


The two books I switch between before falling asleep to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy:

Olivier Schrauwen’s Sunday and Joy Williams’ Breaking and Entering.

Sunday is a true graphic novel: that term, “graphic novel,” a marketing gambit I’m sure, gets appended to pretty much any cartoonists’ self-contained work of, say, fifty-plus pages. But a lot of what we (and we includes very much me) call graphic novels are really short stories in comix/cartooning form. Schrauwen’s effort is a real novel, a real graphic novel a la allah ah lah lah From Hell or Jimmy Corrigan. It’s really fucking great, and if this weren’t a low-effort I am writing this for me and not you post, I would tell you why I think it’s really fucking great (I would describe the story, the so-called story, such as it is; I would riff on all the motifs; I would get lost in the coloring. I would I would I would…)

The other book I’ve been reading, the one I read after I read a chapter of Sunday and before I fall asleep to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is Joy Williams’ 1988 novel Breaking and Entering, which is about a strange young couple who, like, break and enter and then live in other people’s houses. These other people are snowbirds, although I don’t think Williams actually employs the term: people who own houses on the barrier islands of Florida’s Gulf Coast which they, like, inhabit only a scant season or two a year. Breaking and Entering is very, very Florida, crammed with weirdos and tragedies, farcical, ironic, and thickly sauced in the laugh-cry flavor. I’m not sure exactly where it’s set, but I do know that I do know the general area—again, the barrier islands, skinny shining strips of weird between the Gulf and the Tampa Bay. Not my haunts, exactly, northeastern Florida man that I am, but still the locus of so many of my fondest memories, the places I return to, where my family is, where the cars and boats stacked up in the streets of Pass-a-Grille and Treasure Island and St. Pete Beach after the once-in-a-century storms that happen several times in a season, after Helene, after Milton, where the houses faltered folded soaked, where the snowbirds can defer their false falls and warm winters in favor of safer stabler climes, where the locals pledge a future allegiance against the heat, the water, the wind, the salt. A future against the future.

Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories in reverse, Part II

BibliokleptLeave a comment

Previously,

Stories 40-36

35. ” Overnight to Many Distant Cities” (Overnight to Many Distant Cities, 1983)

In Hiding Man, his 2010 Barthelme biography, Tracy Daugherty notes that Barthelme’s collection Overnight to Many Distant Cities was not particularly well-received by critics. Reviews were a mix of bafflement and derision, as Daugherty has it, which fits the tone near the end of Hiding Man: a career winding-down—Barthelme a happy father, content with a teaching gig, and committed to a new form for his stories, now pared down to spare and often oblique dialogues. Daugherty relays a detail from a rejection letter from Barthelme’s (one-time) champion at the New Yorker, Roger Angell: “Well, maybe we’ll learn to read you. It won’t be the first time that happened.”

In my estimation, Barthelme’s later stories do not diverge too radically from his earlier work. The techniques may have evolved (or devolved, if you like), but collage and pastiche are still a major mode, domestic themes prevail, and Our Bard is ever the ironist.

Barthelme sprinkles vignettes throughout Overnight to Many Distant Cities (like Hemingway’s In Our Time); its title track, coming at the end of the collection, is a travelogue in vignettes with our narrator and his family visiting places like Paris, London, Copenhagen… The story is essentially a series of anecdotes and arch asides (“Asked her opinion of Versailles, my daughter said she thought it was overdecorated”), and, as Barthelme’s wife Marion disclosed in Daugherty’s book, some of the material was directly drawn from their honeymoon in Barcelona (“In Barcelona the lights went out”). A taste:

In Stockholm we ate reindeer steak and I told the Prime Minister… That the price of booze was too high. Twenty dollars for a bottle of J&B! He (Olof Palme) agreed, most politely, and said that they financed the Army that way. The conference we were attending was held at a workers’ vacation center somewhat outside the city. Shamelessly, I asked for a double bed, there were none, we pushed two single beds together. An Israeli journalist sat on the two single beds drinking our costly whiskey and explaining the devilish policies of the Likud. Then it was time to go play with the Africans. A poet who had been for a time a Minister of Culture explained why he had burned a grand piano on the lawn in front of the Ministry. “The piano,” he said, “is not the national instrument of Uganda.”

Is it essential Barthelme? Of course not. But it’s nice enough.

34. ” The Film” (first published as “A Film” in the The New Yorker, September 26, 1970)

A nice little story that never quite transcends it’s marvelous opening lines:

Things have never been better, except that the child, one of the stars of our film, has just been stolen by vandals, and this will slow down the progress of the film somewhat, if not bring it to a halt. But might not this incident, which is not without its own human drama, be made part of the story line?

I just went back and read the last lines though, and they are also very good:

Truth! That is another thing they said our film wouldn’t contain. I had simply forgotten about it, in contemplating the series of triumphs that is my private life.

33. “110 West Sixty-First Street” (Amateurs, 1976)

An ugly tragic domestic comedy in just over a dozen paragraphs: Paul and Eugenie are trying to get over the death of their infant by going to erotic films. It doesn’t work; they take up cruelty–

“You are extremely self-righteous,” Eugenie said to Paul. “That is the one thing I can’t stand in a man. Sometimes I want to scream.”

“You are a slut without the courage to go out and be one,” Paul replied. “Why don’t you go to one of those bars and pick up somebody, for God’s sake?”

“It wouldn’t do any good,” Eugenie said.

32. “Captain Blood” (Overnight to Many Distant Cities, 1983)

So like one of my favorite things that Melville does in Moby-Dick is turn the whole thing into a drama, a play that is taking place in the narrator-cum-Ishmael’s consciousness, with Starbuck and Stubb milling and mulling on various decks, soliloquizing. And while the Captain Blood of “Captain Blood” is no Ahab, he’s still a compellingly goofy brooder:

Blood, at dawn, a solitary figure pacing the foredeck. The world of piracy is wide, and at the same time, narrow. One can be gallant all day long, and still end up with a spider monkey for a wife. And what does his mother think of him?

This isn’t Barthelme at his best—that stock was poured into Sixty Stories—but it’s still the jaunty, boyish fun flavor that I want when I dip into his stuff.

Riff on some Friends of the Library Sale acquisitions

Biblioklept1 Comment

I ducked out of work maybe a little bit early on Friday and filled a brown paper bag with books at a Friends of the Library sale.

I picked up some hardback first editions of books I already own in cheaper formats–Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, Denis Johnson’s The Laughing Monsters, P.D. James’s The Children of Men, and Ben Marcus’s Leaving the Sea. I also got hardcover editions of Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, Amy Hempel’s Sing to It, Atticus Lish’s The War for Gloria, and Eugenio Corti’s The Red Horse.

I also grabbed some duplicates or alternate paperback editions of books I already own, including an academically-oriented edition of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, and William Faulkner’s Light in August. I gave the Calvino to my son; the Stein is for a colleague. I’ll give Light in August to a student. (I got the same edition of the Faulkner at the last Friends of the Library sale I went to; my son claimed it.) I’ll also probably offer the Bourdain memoir to a student. I’m pretty sure we have a copy of Kitchen Confidential somewhere around the house. I couldn’t pass up on the cheap mass-market copy of Melville’s White Jacket. I mean, just look at this cover—dude’s wearing a white jacket—

The book also bears a stamp claiming it originated (in a sense) at the old Melville Manse, Arrowhead:

I also couldn’t resist letting a paperback copy of Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport take up a lot of real estate in my paper grocery bag. The hype has died down enough for me to perhaps eventually sink into it. The edition of Alan & John Lomax’s American Ballads & Folk Songs is kinda beat up, but it’s got a lovely cover:

I was also attracted to this strange edition of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. It’s a 1987 hardback from the Soviet house Raduga Publishers, featuring a full-color portrait of Gogol and blue (?) page headings. The translation is by Christopher English and the book was printed in the U.S.S.R.—I’m not really sure who the intended audience was.

Albert Cullum’s The Geranium in the Window Sill Just Died But Teacher You Went Right On was another oddity I came across. Ostensibly a children’s book, The Geranium ultimately seems aimed at teachers. It features illustrations on every other page, each one by a different artist; many are remarkable, like this one by Stanley Mack–

There were a few titles, not pictured in the image at the top of this post, that I grabbed to cram into my bag simply because I had extra room at the end. I can usually offset the ten dollar bag fee by identifying a handful of pristine trade paperbacks that my local used bookstore will take for trade credit. So maybe I’m not, like, really offsetting the ten dollar fee so much as redirecting it toward obtaining more books.

There were plenty of titles at this particular sale that I would’ve crammed into the bag maybe ten or fifteen years ago—lots of books by Haruki Marukami, who has never been my guy, Jonathan Lethem (who I once really loved), Michael Chabon, Irvine Welsh, and even Chuck Palahniuk (there was a time when I was younger and had a broader range of friends that I could’ve given Palahniuk titles away easily). But I ended up imagining some younger person showing up to the sale, maybe today, Saturday, filling up a bag with titles that promised something beyond the YA formula stuff that makes up their current literary diet.

And if I imagined a younger person growing their library, I also imagined some of the older people whose collections had clearly ended up at the sale. Beyond the obvious airport thrillers and glut of titles by fiction factory Authors™, there were sets of strange, off-brand looking fantasy series in hardback, a seemingly-full run of Agatha Christie mysteries (also in hardback), Westerns no one will read again. Other people’s oddities ended up here; their children had no place for them, having subscribed to their own burdensome addictions.

I’ll have to give away all these books I’ve acquired at some point. But there’s joy in that too.

 

Riff on July 2024 reading, etc.

BibliokleptLeave a comment

I experienced the middle weeks of July 2024 as simultaneously rapid and static. Doldrums should never be so frenetic. If this decade were a novel I would’ve put it down several chapters back. I try not to obsess over things I cannot control. I try to get away from screens. I try to go outside, but the feels like heat index here in north Florida goes over a hundred and five every day. (At least it’s raining again and nothing is on fire.) So I try to read more (and actually write more).

This July I read some great stuff.

I finished Katherine Dunn’s first novel Attic a couple of days ago. The book is seriously fucked up—like William Burroughs-Kathy Acker fucked up—an abject rant from a woman in prison in the mode of Ginsberg’s Howl. The narrator seems to be an autofictional version of Dunn herself, which is perhaps why Eric Rosenblum, in his 2022 New Yorker review described it as “largely a realist work in which Dunn emphasizes the trauma of her protagonist’s childhood.” Rosenblum uses the term realism two other times to describe Attic and refers to it at one point as a work of magical realism. If Attic is realism then so is Blood and Guts in High School. I need to read her second and third novels (Truck, 1971 and the posthumous Toad) and then go back and reread Geek Love, which I remember as being Gothic and gross but also whimsical. (I don’t sniff any whimsy in Attic.)

There are eight stories in Oğuz Atay’s story collection Waiting for the Fear (in translation by Ralph Hubbell); I’ve read the first five this summer, including the long title story, which is especially good, as is the opener “Man in a White Overcoat.” Atay’s heroes (I use the term loosely) find their antecedents in Kafka’s weirdos. Or Paul Bowles. Or Jane Bowles. I should have a proper review up near the end of October when NYRB publishes Waiting for the Fear.

I had picked up Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s third novel American Abductions earlier this summer and finally started it a few nights ago after finishing Attic. Each chapter is a run-on sentence that has made me want to keep reading and reading, running on with it. The novel is, at least so far, both challenging and entertaining; it is not difficult, exactly, but rather engrossing. Sometimes I’ll find myself a bit lost in the layered consciousnesses, layers (layerings) of speech in Cárdenas’s sentences—especially when I find myself startled by an image or a joke or idea—and then I’ll wade backwards again and pick up the rhythm and keep going. The plot? I’ll steal from the Dalkey Archive’s blurb: “American Abductions opens in a near-future United States whose omnipresence of data-harvesting and algorithms has enabled the mass incarceration and deportation of Latin Americans—regardless of citizenship.” But that’s not really the plot; I mean, this isn’t a third-person dystopian world-building YA thing. The novel, at least its first half, is about a family, daughters Ada and Eva and their father Antonio, a novelist who was abducted by the titular abductors (the Pale Americans!). It’s also about writing, how we construct memory in a surveillance state, and, I suppose, love.

I reviewed Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s latest novel The Son of Man (in translation by Frank Wynne) in the middle of July, although I think I probably read it in late June. In my review I suggested that The Son of Man “is ultimately a novel about the atavistic transmission of violence from generation to generation.” I also highly recommended it.

I went on a big Antoine Volodine binge a couple of years ago which stalled out before I got to (what I believe is) his longest novel in English translation, Radiant Terminus. I finally started into it a few weeks ago (in translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman), and I think it might be Volodine’s best work. In my longish review, I declared Radiant Terminus “an astounding novel, a work that will haunt any reader willing to tune into its strange vibrations and haunted frequencies. Very highly recommended.” I think it’s a perfect starting place for anyone interested in Volodine’s so-called post-exotic project.

Denis Johnson’s The Stars at Noon was one of two novels I revisited via audiobook this month (the other is Portis’s Gringos, which we’ll get to in a moment). I honestly didn’t remember much about The Stars at Noon other than its premise and the fact that its narrator was an alcoholic journalist-cum-prostitute in Nicaragua. It hadn’t made the same impression on me as other Johnson novels had when I went through a big Johnson jag in the late nineties and early 2000s, and I think that assessment was correct—it’s simply not as strong as Angels, Fiskadoro, or Jesus’ Son. As an audiobook though I enjoyed it, especially in Will Patton’s reading. (His narration of Johnson’s perfect novella Train Dreams is the perfect audiobook.) I guess the audiobook came out in conjunction with Claire Denis’ 2022 adaptation of the film, which I still haven’t seen.

The collection of Remedios Varo’s writings On Homo rodans and Other Writings is another book I read earlier in the summer but didn’t write about until July. I was fortunate enough to get a long interview with the translator, Margaret Carson, and I think the result is one of the better things Biblioklept has published this year.

I picked up Dinah Brooke’s “lost” novel Lord Jim at Home in late June, and then read it in something of a sweat over a few days. In my review, I wrote that

Lord Jim at Home is squalid and startling and nastily horrific. It is abject, lurid, violent, and dark. It is also sad, absurd, mythic, often very funny, and somehow very, very real for all its strangeness. The novels I would most liken Lord Jim at Home to, at least in terms of the aesthetic and emotional experience of reading it, are Ann Quin’s Berg, Anna Kavan’s Ice, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and James Joyce’s Portrait (as well as bits of Ulysses).

Gringos is the other book I “reread” via audiobook this July. Charles Portis wrote five novels and all of them are perfect—but I think Gringos might be my favorite. David Aaron Baker’s reading of the novel is excellent. He conveys the dry humor of narrator Jimmy Burns as well as the cynical sweet pathos at the core of Portis’s last novel. Highly recommended.

So well I guess July is over; the kids will be back in school again soon, and so will I. The air here will remain swamp thick, humidity that starts cooking you the minute you venture out of the desiccating AC that licensed growth on this weird peninsula. It might let up by November. Maybe because I’ve spent my entire adult career as a teacher I have always thought of August as the end of the year, not December. And some years I feel melancholy at this end, this pivot away from freer hours. But writing this on the last day of July, I think I want a return to routine, to something I can think of as a return to normalcy, the kind of normalcy that makes me appreciate the weird fucked up oddball novels that I do so love to hang out inside of.

On Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard, pp. 277-354 (Hitler’s head, Stalin’s brain, Blue Lard’s end?)

BibliokleptLeave a comment

Previously on Blue Lard…

pp. 1-47

pp. 48-110

pp. 111-61

pp. 162-87

pp. 188-222

pp. 223-76

The following discussion of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard (in translation by Max Lawton) is intended for those who have read or are reading the book. It contains significant spoilers; to be very clear, I strongly recommend entering Blue Lard cold.

I’ve had too many false starts with this last (for now) riff on Blue Lard that I’ve ended up rereading the last 100 or so pages maybe four times now. When I first started this ridiculous series of riffs–way back in February!–I promised to surf Blue Lard’s wave; I have not done that. I’ve bogged myself down in summarizing. I’ve found myself reading Wikipedia entry after Wikipedia entry of the various Soviet luminaries–politicians, artists, writers, scientists, etc.–who lard the end of the novel. I’ve tried to figure out the ending by going back to the epistolary beginning. I’ve tried, I suppose, to flesh out the thesis I arrived at in the last riff I did, where I suggested that “Blue Lard is hypersurreal, shocking, deviant. But it’s also more balanced and nuanced than a first go-through might suggest, not just absurdist shit-throwing and jabberwocky, but an accomplished analysis of the emerging post-Soviet era.”

So well where were we? Or rather, where are we? The novel’s final section begins with Hitler loading his family, his bodyguard, his lover Khrushchev and a retinue of ninjas into his private plane. They abscond with the cache of blue lard and make their way to Germany to meet up with their old pal Hitler, irking Beria and his murderous allies.

On route to Hitler’s Berghof, Stalin’s wife Nadezhda reads aloud the first act of  a new play by Konstantin Simonov, A Glass of Russian Blood. The play seems to be an allegory framing the Soviet intelligentsia as literal bloodsuckers, vampires feasting on the proletariat. Khrushchev dismisses the play’s subject as “fashionable rancor”; Stalin is more charitable, remarking that “Every writer has his ups and downs.” As usual, I found myself going down a rabbit hole, trying to glean a possible critique of the Simonov’s journal Novy Mir in particular and Soviet literature in general. This is not the way to read Blue Lard. Meanwhile, unconcerned with absurd theater, Stalin’s daughter is hungry; she declares she’d like to eat a unicorn. (In one of the earlier translations of Blue Lard I read, Max includes a footnote explaining that he’s substituted unicorn for the original tyanitolkai (тяни-Толкай) in the interest of readability.)

Back in Moscow, Beria is trying to track down Stalin and the missing blue lard. He’s also ordered the torture of Andrei Sakharov who’s been condemned for, as his torturer notes, suggesting that “Time is a head of cabbage and all events are just aphids eating their way through it” — a complete rejection of Soviet communism’s teleological conception of historical materialism.

Sakharov’s torturer is Alexander Khvat, who the narrator informs us was “the lead investigator on the case of the sinister saboteur Vavilov who’d devoted his life to cultivating ‘quick ergot’ and using it to infect Kuban wheat.” The historical Vavilov, which is to say our historical Vavilov, was an agrinomical geneticist who tried to use science to feed the world.

But Sorokin’s critique doesn’t seem to be aimed at Soviet communism alone; rather, he seems to condemn the brutal stupidity and close-mindedness of those who fear what they do not comprehend. Blue Lard’s absurdity and violence critiques power—and the fear of loss of power that consumes those who hold power.

Stalin’s crew passes over the great Prague Wall which separates the West from the East, the Third Reich and its partner the USSR, and soon arrive at the Berghof:

The long, unusually smooth tarmac of the airfield was reminiscent of a frozen mountain lake and ran up against a granite statue of Hitler’s head, carved from an entire mountain by the efforts of Arno Breker and six thousand French and British prisoners.

The Hitlers (the führer has married mistress Eva in this reality) and the Stalins kiss their hellos and with their accompanying entourages head to yet another of Blue Lard’s many, many feasts. (The narrator notes that “Meanwhile, in the plane, Ajooba, Sisul, and the ninjas were quickly and professionally strangling the airplane’s crew” — the adverb professionally there is marvelous.)

Just as he does with Stalin, Sorokin renders Hitler in kitschy pop-glam strokes:

Hitler put his unfinished glass down on a tray held up to him by an SS servant, then, opening his long arms in the narrow sleeves of a dark-blue frock coat, lace cuffs spilling out of them, walked over to Stalin, his high-heeled shoes with their golden spurs loudly knocking against the marble. Eva followed him, her thin body nestled snugly into a leopard dress.

Tacky-glam of Hitler of Blue Lard is also a bit of a carnivore, unlike the vegetarian of our own historical record. “The table was covered primarily in meat-based hors d’oeuvres, as the Führer couldn’t stand fruits and vegetables,” the narrator notes. But he’s still an animal lover. When he pets his dog Blondie, his hands sparkle and crackle with electric energy. This Hitler shoots electrical beams from his fingertips, a talent that helps him win WW2.

Blue Lard’s final sequence in Hitler’s Berghof is full of depravities and (soap) operatics. Hitler essentially rapes Vesta, while her mother Nadezdha watches through a keyhole. Stricken, Nadezdha makes a call to her on-again-off-again lover Boris Leonidovich—presumably Boris Pasternak (we encountered his clone, author of the thirteen-stanza poem “Pussy” in the first section of Blue Lard), who chastises her for the sin of “pleonasm” (!) after she accuses him of cheating on her with “that jester… that clown… that idiot” Shklovsky (presumably the literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky).

Then all kinds of shit goes down. I’ve gotten bogged down in over-summarizing again; not my intention. The final strands of Blue Lard twist about like fragments of old spy films or war films—double crosses, unclear intentions. Heinrich Himmler shows up with just a few pages left in the novel, a thousand-pound mutant (Jabba to Hitler’s Emperor? Did Sorokin, like, get mad coked up and watch Return of the Jedi and write Blue Lard?)

It all ends, or doesn’t end, with Stalin injecting blue lard into his brain, which then expands and expands and expands:

Iosif Stalin’s brain gradually filled up the entire universe, absorbing its planets and stars. After 126,407,500 years, the brain turned into a black hole and began to shrink. After 34,564,007,330 years, the brain had shrunk back to the original size of Iosif Stalin’s brain. But the mass of the leader’s brain was 345,000 times greater than the mass of the sun. Then Stalin remembered about the pear.

And opened his eyes.

And now we are back where we started, a hundred years or so from Stalin’s then-present. An old, old man with a thick rural accent, he attends to the bratty recipient of Boris Gloger’s letters. In fact, he gives the brat the missive from Gloger dated 2 January (2048) that initiates Blue Lard—we are in a strange loop. (Is this an endorsement or refutation of the aphids-in-a-head-of-cabbage theory of time?) The letter’s recipient, Gloger’s “tender bastard,” tosses it to the ground after just a few sentences or two.

He’s more interested in the outfit he’ll wear to the Easter ball, a special outfit Stalin has apparently tailored: a mantle composed of blue lard. So rise again.