We have the right to convey the fictive of any reality at all | Gil Orlovitz

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We have the right to convey the fictive of any reality at all–and there is nothing that is not real—by any method we wish, and to have as our goal, if we so opt, only that we maintain the reader’s tension, the solitary indication, itself mercurial, of a work-of-art event.

Syntax being nothing more nor less than the codification of selected usages, we may alter syntax or reject it wholly.

We may compose the fictive in such a manner that the result is ambiguous, baffling and sometimes altogether impossible significantly to paraphrase-but so long as the piece seizes and holds the reader, a basic meaning, impossible to state in language as we know it, has been established, a meaning that belongs to a time series of seizing-and-holding.

The notion, we submit, of clarity, remains simply a notion, real enough, of course, under whatever category it is sub-sumed, but of no universal vigor, necessarily, nor marked by socalled objective truth; clarity is a notion identifying a particular social agreement in a one-to-one sense as to what construct evokes similarity of analysis.

Empirically all that is demonstrable is that we experience as creator or audience a series of perceptions. Now, if we set forth that demonstration in the fictive in such a fashion as to generate and sustain tension in the reader whether or not he is mystified by the significs, we have met the sole possible criterion.

We are not of course here in any way concerned with the alleged scalar values of a given fiction-the notion of value belongs to ad hominen pleaders usually involved in depressing or elevating a status for economic reasons—just as we cannot in any way be concerned with the alleged scalar values of the given reader. Fiction and reader are conjoined, and may not with any sense be disjunct if we are trying to penetrate the nature of the esthetic.

Such being the case, I believe we can with some innocence look at the choices of the contemporary avant-garde herein, and digest them according to our lights or chiaroscuras.

We need remember only how much more we usually discern if we take the trouble, to begin with, to clean our own canvasses-within reason.

—Gil Orlovitz

Gil Orlovitz’s introduction to The Award Avant-Garde Reader (1965).

Reification #91 — Dario Maglionico

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Reification #91, 2024 by Dario Maglionico (b. 1986)

Mass-market Monday | Robert Coover’s The Public Burning

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The Public Burning, Robert Coover. Banatm Books Edition (1978). No cover designer credited. 661 pages.

A 1977 Book Ends column in The New York Times offers a fairly succinct blurb for The Public Burning:

The Public Burning is a blend of fact and fantasy, using dozens of real and fictional names. Among the real persons named in this “metafiction” are President Eisenhower, Senator Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Edward Teller, Walt Disney, Cecil B. DeMille, former prosecuting attorney Irving Saypol and Judge Irving Kaufman. About one‐half of the novel narrated by Vice President Richard M. Nixon…

The Book Ends piece, which appeared a few months before the book’s publication (and notes the difficulties the book found securing a publisher brave enough to put it out), includes a brief interview with Coover about The Public Burning:

“I had the idea for the book 11 years ago. I thought it would be a novella and not a book of over 500 pages. I felt that the event was something that had been repressed. If you mentioned the Rosenberg case, people were turned off or young persons didn’t know what it had been all about.

“Their execution — plus the prevalence of old‐fashioned American hoopla—gave me the central metaphor for the book. In 1968, I was looking for a narrator. After Nixon was elected President, he served that purpose. He had been a participant in the background of the Rosenberg case. As President, he was powerful, pious and pompous. I needed a clown act to intersperse with the circus act. And so Nixon became the clown. Clowns are sympathetic when you get to know them.”

The Public Burning was the first book I read by Coover, and I read it when I was too young to fully appreciate it; I think I simply wasn’t soaked enough in its history. Revisiting it, even in brief today, reminded me that it’s likely as relevant as ever, and that its diagnoses of the first half of America’s twentieth century is up there with Gravity’s Rainbow or J. R.

Read “Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers,” a short story by Gabriel García Márquez

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“Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers”

by

Gabriel García Márquez

translated by Gregory Rabassa

Now we had her there, abandoned in a corner of the house. Someone told us, before we brought her things – her clothes which smelled of newly cut wood, her weightless shoes for the mud – that she would be unable to get used to that slow life, with no sweet tastes, no attraction except that harsh, wattled solitude, always pressing on her back. Someone told us – and a lot of time had passed before we remembered it – that she had also had a childhood. Maybe we didn’t believe it then. But now, seeing her sitting in the corner with her frightened eyes and a finger placed on her lips, maybe we accepted the fact that she’d had a childhood once, that once she’d had a touch that was sensitive to the anticipatory coolness of the rain, and that she always carried an unexpected shadow in profile to her body.

All this – and much more – we believed that afternoon when we realized that above her fearsome subworld she was completely human. We found it out suddenly, as if a glass had been broken inside, when she began to give off anguished shouts; she began to call each one of us by name, speaking amidst tears until we sat down beside her; we began to sing and clap hands as if our shouting could put the scattered pieces of glass back together. Only then were we able to believe that at one time she had had a childhood. It was as if her shouts were like a revelation somehow; as if they had a lot of remembered tree and deep river about them. When she got up, she leaned over a little and, still without covering her face with her apron, still without blowing her nose, and still with tears, she told us:

‘I’ll never smile again.’

We went out into the courtyard, the three of us, not talking: maybe we thought we carried common thoughts. Maybe we thought it would be best not to turn on the lights in the house. She wanted to be alone – maybe – sitting in the dark corner, weaving the final braid which seemed to be the only thing that would survive her passage toward the beast.

Outside, in the courtyard, sunk in the deep vapor of the insects, we sat down to think about her. We’d done it so many times before. We might have said that we were doing what we’d been doing every day of our lives.

Yet it was different that night: she’d said that she would never smile again, and we, who knew her so well, were certain that the nightmare had become the truth. Sitting in a triangle, we imagined her there inside, abstract, incapacitated, unable even to hear the innumerable clocks that measured the marked and minute rhythm with which she was changing into dust. ‘If we only had the courage at least to wish for her death,’ we thought in a chorus. But we wanted her like that: ugly and glacial, like a mean contribution to our hidden defects.

We’d been adults since before, since a long time back. She, however, was the oldest in the house. That same night she had been able to be there, sitting with us, feeling the measured throbbing of the stars, surrounded by healthy sons. She would have been the respectable lady of the house if she had been the wife of a solid citizen or the concubine of a punctual man. But she became accustomed to living in only one dimension, like a straight line, perhaps because her vices or her virtues could not be seen in profile. We’d known that for many years now. We weren’t even surprised one morning, after getting up, when we found her face down in the courtyard, biting the earth in a hard, ecstatic way. Then she smiled, looked at us again; she had fallen out of the second-story window onto the hard clay of the courtyard and had remained there, stiff and concrete, face down on the damp clay. But later we learned that the only thing she had kept intact was her fear of distances, a natural fright upon facing space. We lifted her up by the shoulders. She wasn’t as hard as she had seemed to us at first. On the contrary, her organs were loose, detached from her will, like a lukewarm corpse that hadn’t begun to stiffen.

Her eyes were open, her mouth was dirty with that earth that already must have had a taste of sepulchral sediment for her when we turned her face up to the sun, and it was as if we had placed her in front of a mirror. She looked at us all with a dull, sexless expression that gave us – holding her in my arms now – the measure of her absence. Someone told us she was dead; and afterward she remained smiling with that cold and quiet smile that she wore at night when she moved about the house awake. She said she didn’t know how she got to the courtyard. She said that she’d felt quite warm, that she’d been listening to a cricket, penetrating, sharp, which seemed – so she said – about to knock down the wall of her room, and that she had set herself to remembering Sunday’s prayers, with her cheek tight against the cement floor.

We knew, however, that she couldn’t remember any prayer, for we discovered later that she’d lost the notion of time when she said she’d fallen asleep holding up the inside of the wall that the cricket was pushing on from outside and that she was fast asleep when someone, taking her by the shoulders, moved the wall aside and laid her down with her face to the sun.

That night we knew, sitting in the courtyard, that she would never smile again. Perhaps her inexpressive seriousness pained us in anticipation, her dark and willful living in a corner. It pained us deeply, as we were pained the day we saw her sit down in the corner where she was now; and we heard her say that she wasn’t going to wander through the house any more. At first we couldn’t believe her. We’d seen her for months on end going through the rooms at all hours, her head hard and her shoulders drooping, never stopping, never growing tired. At night we would hear her thick body noise moving between two darknesses, and we would lie awake in bed many times hearing her stealthy walking, following her all through the house with our ears. Once she told us that she had seen the cricket inside the mirror glass, sunken, submerged in the solid transparency, and that it had crossed through the glass surface to reach her. We really didn’t know what she was trying to tell us, but we could all see that her clothes were wet, sticking to her body, as if she had just come out of a cistern. Without trying to explain the phenomenon, we decided to do away with the insects in the house: destroy the objects that obsessed her.

We had the walls cleaned; we ordered them to chop down the plants in the courtyard and it was as if we had cleansed the silence of the night of bits of trash. But we no longer heard her walking, nor did we hear her talking about crickets any more, until the day when, after the last meal, she remained looking at us, she sat down on the cement floor, still looking at us, and said: ‘I’m going to stay here, sitting down,’ and we shuddered, because we could see that she had begun to look like something already almost completely like death.

That had been a long time ago and we had even grown used to seeing her there, sitting, her braid always half wound, as if she had become dissolved in her solitude and, even though she was there to be seen, had lost her natural faculty of being present. That’s why we now knew that she would never smile again; because she had said so in the same convinced and certain way in which she had told us once that she would never walk again. It was as if we were certain that she would tell us later: ‘I’ll never see again,’ or maybe ‘I’ll never hear again,’ and we knew that she was sufficiently human to go along willing the elimination of her vital functions and that spontaneously she would go about ending herself, sense by sense, until one day we would find her leaning against the wall, as if she had fallen asleep for the first time in her life. Perhaps there was still a lot of time left for that, but the three of us, sitting in the courtyard, would have liked to hear her sharp and sudden broken-glass weeping that night, at least to give us the illusion that a baby … a girl baby had been born in the house. In order to believe that she had been born renewed.

Plagiarism

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Early life

California

Lawman and marriage

First gunfight

Marriage to Urilla Sutherland

Death of Urilla Sutherland

Lawsuits and charges

Pimping arrests in Peoria

Wichita, Kansas

Dodge City and Deadwood

George Hoyt shooting

Move to Tombstone, Arizona

First confrontation with the outlaw Cowboys

Becomes deputy sheriff

Town marshal shot

Shibell election

Loses reappointment

Behan wins election

Relationship with Sadie Marcus

Interest in mining and gambling

Facing down a lynch mob

Stagecoach robbers kill two

September stagecoach robbery

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

Charged with murder

Cowboys’ revenge

Vendetta ride

Life after Tombstone

Idaho mining venture

California

Later relationship with Josephine

Fitzsimmons-Sharkey fight

Klondike Gold Rush

Saloon ownership and gambling

Life in Los Angeles

Movie connections

Last surviving brother

Hollywood pallbearers

Privately buried

No regrets

Ron Loewinsohn’s Magnetic Field(s) (Book acquired, 20 Sept. 2024)

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I finally came across a copy of Ron Loewinsohn’s 1983 novel Magnetic Field(s). 

First three paragraphs, which I read a few minutes ago in a sweat:

Killing the animals was the hard part. “All you’ve got to do,” Jerome had told him, “is keep your cool. There isn’t anybody else’s cool you’ve got to keep, and there isn’t anybody else who will keep yours.” The first time it happened—he had already gone with Jerome five or six times—they were in this backyard when this little black dog (a Scottie?) started yapping up at them and he froze in the first moment and in the next felt his body want to move back over the fence, the way they’d come. But Jerome had simply reached down to pick up a brick that formed part of a kind of border around some flowers—it was all one smooth motion—and bashed in the dog’s head with one good one, and then gave it one more to make sure, the second one making an awful sound as it went into what was left of the dog’s head. There were just these four little legs attached to this furry black body, and where the head had been was just this turmoil of hair and blood and meat and one piece of jagged bone and one eye where it shouldn’t have been, not even not looking at anything, just there; and he looking down at it till Jerome touched him on the chest and then motioned toward the window with one jerk of his thumb.

The first time he’d had to do it himself, they had just stepped into this backyard at the end of the driveway and suddenly there was this big setter—just as surprised as they were. He started to feel himself wanting to turn back out of there, hearing the blood rushing in his ears and thinking he did not want to do this as he reached back, his hand closing around the cold shaft of the tire iron in his back pocket. Behind him Jerome had stopped. He reached out his left hand, offering “something” to the dog, which leaned forward to check it out at the same time that it began to pull its lips back away from its teeth. He brought the tire iron out and down in one sweeping arc into the animal’s head. It actually made a dent in the head and felt something, at first, like hitting a rolled-up rug, except that now there was this dog lying there with its different legs crumpled under it or sticking out in a way that nothing that was alive would lie that way. He just stood there a long moment, looking down at that furry body, hearing himself breathing and hearing the dog not.

Killing the animals was the hard part because they tended to get under his skin; they reminded him of him. Their bodies were complicatedly thick, so that hitting this skull was nothing at all like hitting a rolled-up rug, or a log, things that were solid, the same all the way through. They were made of all those layers of skin and bone and organs, all of which he thought of as easily bruised, especially the organs. They moved like him, they wanted things, they wanted, and they were scared and furious.

Ozymandias — Alasdair Gray

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Ozymandias, 2017 by Alasdair Gray (1934-2019)

Man is doomed to constantly fabricate new agonies for himself | On Dino Buzzati’s novella The Singularity

Edwin Turner3 Comments

Two years after it was first published in Italy, Dino Buzzati’s 1960 novella Il grande ritratto got its first English translation by Henry Reed under the title Larger Than Life. This year, NRYB issued a new translation of Il grande ritratto by Anne Milano Appel under the title The Singularity. This is the second new English translation of a Buzzati book from NYRB; last year saw the publication of Lawrence Venuti’s translation of Buzzati’s most famous novel, Il deserto dei Tartari, published as The Stronghold (in lieu of the more recognizable title The Tartar Steppe).

It makes sense, from both a cultural and a marketing stance, that Il grande ritratto would find new life as The Singularity, a term that refers to the hypothetical point where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, which in turn triggers a dramatic existential change for humanity. AI slop abounds on the internet; misinformation replicates and mutates; we are told that the chatbots that frustrate us so frequently are an inevitable part of a future that no one seems to want. A sci-fi novel called The Singularity is pretty zeitgeisty.

The scant plot of The Singularity builds to the revelation of an artificial intelligence, part of a military science project perched high in the Italian Alps. I don’t think I’ve necessarily spoiled the grand reveal; both its title and its publisher’s blurb declare The Singularity “a startlingly prescient parable of artificial intelligence.”

Perhaps it’s this prescience that makes the central sci-fi conceit of The Singularity seem a bit dated. There’s a creakiness to Buzzati’s staging of his grand portrait of an artificial intelligence. The novella is more compelling in its initial chapters, which ignite a mood of slow-burning dread, the kind of Kafkaesque foreboding he served up in his superior novel Il deserto dei Tartari.

That slow-burn starts with a certain Professor Ismani, “who had always had an inferiority complex with respect to figures.” He and his much younger wife, the archetypal innocent Elisa (who “had not gone beyond middle school”) agree to undertake a mysterious journey up the mountain to “Experimental Camp of Military Zone 36,” where Ismani will join a scientific project he knows nothing about. As they zig and zag up the mountain, chauffeured by their military liaison, Ismani and Elisa (and the reader) gather crumbs about their destination. “So many mysteries,” a soldier tells them, at a penultimate stop. “If they at least told us what it is we’re guarding. I mean, let’s call it what it is, a kind of prison.”

In response to all this anxious foreboding, we are told that “Ismani felt the return of apprehension and dismay, the feeling of being insignificant in the face of immense, threatening things, a panic that he had once experienced in the war.” None of Ismani’s time in the war comes to bear on the narrative itself. Indeed, Ismani is thrown to the reader as a decoy; initially presented to the audience as the potential big-brain hero of a sci-fi thriller, he ends up a background ghost.

We eventually achieve the summit, where the natural splendor is overrun by the enormous complex that houses the titular singularity:

But the cliffs were no longer visible, nor could any vegetation be seen, or land, or flowing waters. Everything had been invaded and overwhelmed by a tangled succession of buildings similar to silos, towers, mastabas, retaining walls, slender bridges, barbicans, fortifications, blockhouses, and bastions, which plunged in dizzying geometries. As though a city had crashed down the sides of a ravine.

But there was an exceedingly abnormal element that gave those structures an air of enigma. There were no windows. Everything seemed hermetically sealed and blank.

From this moment, more or less, the best bits of The Singularity come not from sci-fi plotting but rather philosophical asides that add weight to the pulp narrative. Most of these are delivered by the handful of scientists who haunt the experimental camp. One of these scientists repeats the mantra, “Language is the worst enemy of mental clarity.” In their attempt to author an artificial consciousness, these scientists decreed that their singularity would have “No language,” for “Every language is a trap for the mind.”

Here in their “little kingdom, hermetically closed off and apart from the rest of the world,” the scientists have created a “machine made in our likeness” which “will read our thoughts, create masterpieces, reveal the most hidden mysteries.” Through hints, intimations, weird noises, and other creaky trappings of pulp horror, we come to learn that the singularity might not be, like, sane. As one of our (maybe not like exactly sane either) scientists declares, “before we knew it we had lost the reins, and all that was left for us to do was to record the machine’s behavior.”

In a move that would surprise no one familiar with the tropes of Gothic romance, we come to learn that the singularity’s consciousness is based on a beautiful dead woman. The whole operation is powered by a mysterious glowing egg. Indeed, The Singularity is perhaps most interesting if approached through a feminist lens. As it rushes to its climax, Elisa the innocent takes over the role of hero. She somehow learns to speak the strange “language” of the pre-lingual singularity, and through conversation, comes to understand that the singularity views herself as a desiring machine. The singularity wants a body; specifically a female body; specifically a body that can be desired by a male body and bear offspring.

Ultimately, The Singularity feels less like a novella than it does a short story stretched a bit too thin. Buzzati adroitly crafts an atmosphere of suspense and foreboding, but the characters are underdeveloped. Like a lot of pulp fiction, Buzzati’s book often reads as if it were written very quickly (and written expressly for money). Still, Buzzati’s intellect gives the book a philosophical heft, even if it sometimes comes through awkwardly in forced dialogue. Anne Milano Appel’s translation is smooth and nimble; it’s a page turner, for sure, and if it seems like I’ve been a bit rough on it in this paragraph in particular, I should be clear: I enjoyed The Singularity.

Like many of the modernist writers of the twentieth century, Buzzati intuited a future in which technology would become increasingly self-propelled, mutating unchecked in the notion of a progress wholly divorced from the needs of the human spirit. In our own era, we see con artists and hucksters banging the drum for “artificial intelligences” to “read our thoughts, create masterpieces, reveal the most hidden mysteries” for us. The results have been utter shit. Buzzati’s mad scientist isn’t so much prescient as he is simply describing the human condition then, when he declares that “man is doomed to torment himself, he doesn’t see the consolations offered to him, right there, within reach, he has to constantly fabricate new agonies for himself.” We can fabricate the agonies, but we can fight them too.

Mass-market Monday | Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories by Herman Melville

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Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories by Herman Melville, Herman Melville. No collection editor credited. Bantam Books (1989). No cover designer credited. Cover is a detail of Ships and an Approaching Storm Off Owl’s Head, Maine, 1860 by Fitz Hugh Lane. 278 pages.

I read Bartleby in 10th grade and took up I prefer not to as a mantra that I’d throw at poor dear Ms. Hall any time she asked me to do something I didn’t want to do, which was often. I never returned the book at the end of the year. I’m not sure if there is another book in the household, apart from old children’s books, I suppose, that I have read so many times.

I wrote about Bartleby here.

I wrote about Benito Cereno here.

Here is Billy Budd, but just the punctuation:

, , – , – – ‘ – . , , – , . ” ” . , – , . . , , – ‘ ( ) , . . ; , . ; , , . , , . . – – , , – – . . , – – , , , , , , – . , . . . ; ; . – – , , – – , ” , ” ” ” , . , , . . , , , , . , , , , – , , , – , . ‘ , – – – , . . . ; , , . , ‘ – . . , – , , . ‘ , ‘ , . , , . , , . , – – ” . ” – – – – , – , . , , , , , – – , . , . , , . , , . . , ‘ , , ‘ , , , – , . – . ; , , , . ‘ . , – . , , , , , , . , ; : ” , , ‘ . ” ” , , ” , ; ” , . . ” ” , ‘ , . . , – . , , . . ; . ; , . ; , – . , , , ‘ , ‘ , – , . – – , , – – . , – , – – – – . . , . , . , , . , , – – , . . ‘ , ; . ; ‘ . , , – – . , , – – , , . , , ‘ ; ! ” . ” , ” , ; ” , , ! – – – – – , ” ‘ . ” ! ‘ , . , . ; ; , , , , . – – ‘ ? , ” ‘ , ” ; , – – – – ! – – , ” , ” ‘ – . – . , . , – – ‘ . ” . , , – – . – ‘ ; ‘ . – ‘ . ‘ , , , , , , , . , ‘ , – – , – – ; , , – . , , ” – , – – . ” ” , ! ” , , . , ‘ . ; . ‘ , , . , , , , , ‘ , , , . . . , . , , , , . , , , . – – – . , – – . : ‘ ; , – , . , ; , , , , , , . – , ‘ , . ; , , , , , , . , – ; . , , , , . , ‘ – . . – . – . . , , . . , , , , – ‘ , – ; , , , , ; . – – – , , . , , , , , ” , , ‘ . ” ” ‘ ? 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, ‘ – ? ” ; ‘ , . , , . ‘ . , – . ‘ , – . – , . , . , – – . – . , , – ‘ , . , – – , ; – – – , . , , . . ; ; , ‘ , . . , . . ; , , – . , , , ‘ , . , , . . ; , . – – – – ‘ ‘ . , , . , , – – . ‘ , , , , ; , , ; . ‘ – – – , – , , – , . , – . , . , ‘ – , , . , , , , , , ; , ; , , . : – , , . . , ‘ , . , . , , ‘ , . . ‘ , . – , – – . , , , ; . ‘ – – ‘ ‘ . – , , – – – , – – . , , , , , , , – – ‘ , , . , , , ; – – . ‘ – , , , ; , , . ‘ , ‘ , , , – . – . , , , , ‘ , , . ‘ . , . . – . , , – , . , , , ; , . ‘ , ; ‘ , . . , ‘ – , . , ? , . . ” , ? ” . ” , , , ‘ . ” , . – , . , , . , – – , – . ; , , , , , ‘ . – , ‘ . , – , ‘ ” – – – – . ” – , . , , , – ‘ , ? , ‘ ; , , , – – , , ; . , . . . ‘ , , , , , , , . , , – ; , ‘ , , . . , , , – , – , . , . , ‘ . , , ” , , . ” , , , ” , ” ( – – – ) ” . ” ” ! ” , ; ” ? , . ” ” ? ” ; , ” , , . ” ” , . . . ” ” ‘ ‘ , . ” , , . ; – , , , . , – , . ‘ – – . , , , , , – . , – – , , , . , , , . . , , , , , , ” , ! ! ” . , , , , ‘ . . , ” , ” ; , , , ; , ” , ! ” ” , ? ” . , , – – – – , – – . , , , , ; – . , , , ” ! ” – – ? , , , , , ? – ‘ , ‘ ” ” ? , , ‘ , ? , , , , , . , , , ‘ – – – , , . . , , , , . , , , ? – . , . ‘ . ? , . ” . ” . , , , ” , – – – – ‘ . . , , – – – , , ” ” – – , . ” ” , ” , ” – – – , , , , . ” ” , , . , , , . , , , . . . . ‘ . . ? . ” . . , , , . , . , , : ” : . ” ‘ , ‘ . . . , , , . , , . . . . . . . , . . : ‘ , , . : , . , , , ; , – , , , , – – – – . , , , , ” . ” , , , ? , ? ? ? , , ; ; , , . , . , . ? ” ” ? , , – . – – . , , , . ‘ , , , , . , . ; ‘ , , , , . – . , – – , , , , , . , , . ? , , ? . , . , . ‘ . , , ‘ . ‘ . , , , , . , , , , , . , – – . , , – – . ! , – – , , . , ‘ ; , ; ‘ , , . , , . , , . , , . , – – – ‘ – ‘ . – – , – – , – – , ‘ . , , , , . ‘ . – , , , , , . ‘ – – – – – – – , , , , . – – , , – – , – – , – – ; ( ) . , ‘ . , . , ; , , . ; ? ‘ ? , , ” , ” . ‘ , , , , , , ; , . . . , – – ‘ ; – ; , , . , , . , . ; , , , . – , , – ‘ , , . , – ; , . – , , , , , ” , ; . ‘ . , ” ; . – – ; , , , , . . , . , , . , , , , , , – – ; , – , ‘ ; , , , , – , . . ; – . ‘ . , , , . ” ! , ” ; ” , ‘ ? , ! ” ; , . , , . : ” , . ‘ . – – – ‘ – – – – ? ” ” ? ” , . ” , ! ” , ” ” ; ; ” , , , ‘ – – ” , : ” – – – , ‘ – – , , – – ! ” , , ; , , ” – ‘ ‘ – – – ! ” – . ” , ‘ ? ” – ‘ . ; ” , , ? , – – . ” ” , ” , ; ” . ” ” , ? ” , – , ; ” ‘ ! ” . , ‘ , ‘ , , – , , , , , – , . . ; . , , , . ? , ? ? . , – , . ‘ , , . , . . , – , , . , , . – – – , ; , , . , . , , , , . ‘ , , , , , . , , – , , , , . . , . , – . , , , , – , . . , , ; , , , . , . ‘ , ; , , ” ‘ , ? ” ” ? ” . ” , . ” ” , ” , ” ? ” ” , . ‘ – , ‘ – ! ” , , , , , ‘ , ‘ , , , . . , ‘ – – , , ‘ , ” . ” . . , . , – . ‘ , . , , , . ; ‘ . , , , , . ? – , – – – , , , ‘ , . , . , ; , ; , , . , , . . ‘ . , , , , , . , , ; ; – – – , – – , . , – , , , – – – , ; . . , , , , , . , . ‘ – , ; – , . . , , . , , , , . , , , , . . , , . ‘ , . . – – . . , ” – . ” , , . , . . – – , , ; , . , ‘ , , ‘ – , , , , – – , . ‘ , – , , , . , ‘ , , ‘ – , . ‘ , , , . ( ) , , , . , – . , , ‘ . , . , , ‘ . , – – – – , – ; , . . – – – – – . ( – – ) , , . , , , , , , . , , , – . . ‘ , , . – , . , , – – , , – , – – , . – – – . – – ; , , , . , , ‘ , . ‘ – ‘ , , , – – . , . , , , . , , , , ” ? , – – ? ” , , , , , . , , , , , , , , ‘ . : ” , ; . ” , . ( ) , . , . , , , , , . , , . , ‘ ‘ . , . , , : ” , , ‘ – – ” ” ! ” , , , . . , – , . , – , . . , , . , – , , , , ‘ . , , , , , , , . . , ‘ – , , , , . : ” . . ” ” . , – ” ” , ” ; ” – – – – , ‘ , ‘ ? ” ” , ; , . , . ‘ , ‘ ‘ ? – . . – – . ” , , ‘ . ‘ , , . ‘ – – , , , , ‘ , ; , . ‘ , , ‘ , , ‘ – , , , . – – , , , . , ” ‘ , ” , ‘ . ‘ ” – , ” ‘ , : ” , – – , ? , . , ” , ” . , , – – – – . ” ” , ! ” , . , – – – – – , , , . , , . ‘ , ; . , – – – ‘ – – , – – , – . , – , – ‘ , , . – – – – . . , , , ‘ . , – – . , ; . , – . – , , ‘ – ; ‘ ; ‘ , ‘ ; ; , ‘ . , . , ” – – , ‘ ? ” ” , . ” , ” . ! ” , ” . ” ‘ – , – . . ” ? ” ” , . ” ” . . . . . , . . . – – – – , , , . ” , , , . . , ‘ . ‘ : , , , . ‘ . . – – . ” , , ” ; ” , . – – , – – – , ; ” . – , , , . . , – . . ‘ , , . , . ; – . ” , ! ” , ‘ , ” ! . ” ; ; , , , , – ; , , . ‘ , , ‘ . , , , ” , . , . ” , , ‘ , – – , . , , , . ‘ , , – – – ; , . , . ” , ” , ” ! , . ” . , . . . . , ? ; . , , . – ( ) , . . – – , , ” . ” . ” , ” , ” . . ” – – – , – – , , ‘ , , ” , , ” . , – , . ‘ , . ‘ . ” ? ” . ” . . ” ‘ , , . , , . , ‘ , , – – ” ! ! ” ‘ , , , . . , – – ” ! ! ” , , . , . ” ; , ” , ” ” ( ) ” , ” . , , . ” , ” – – ” . – . , . , ” , ” . ” . , , ? – , , . , , , , . . ? , . ? , , . . . ; ‘ . . . ? , ? . . , , ‘ . . , , , . . , , – – – . . , , . ; , , . . , , – . ‘ , , . , ; , , , , . . , , – , , , . . , , – ; . ‘ , . . – . , , , , . ‘ , ‘ . , , . , , , , . – – , , , , . – , . , , . , , , , , ‘ . , , , . . , ‘ , . , , – ; – , , ‘ . – . , , , , , , , ‘ – , – . , ‘ . , . , , , ” . ? ” . : ” . , – – . ‘ . ” ” , , ” , . ” , ! ” , . – , , ” , . – – . . . . , , , ! ” – , , ‘ – – ‘ , ” , . ” ( , ‘ ) ‘ . . . ; ‘ – . ‘ – – – – – , , ; , , , . . ” , ” . ” – – . , , ? ” ‘ , , , , . , , . , . ” . ? ? , ” . ” . , ‘ , , . – – , , ‘ , ‘ . ” , , , . , . , ‘ . . ; : ” – – ‘ , – – , , . ” ” , ” ; ” . , ; , , ‘ , ‘ . ? – – – – – , ” . ” ‘ , – – . ” , , , . , , , . , ” , ” , , ” , , . ” ; , , , , ” , . ” – – – – – , – – , , . , ‘ , . , . , , , – . ‘ , , . , – – ; , ‘ ; . . , – , . . , , . , , , ‘ . : ” , ; , , , , – – – – , , , – – – . , ? , . , , . , . , , . ” : ? . . : ? , , – – ‘ , ? ‘ ? – , ? – – ? . , , . . ? , . , , ‘ , ‘ ? , – . ? . , . . . . ? , . : , . ” . . . ? , ‘ , . ” , ; . ” , , . , , ? ” , . , ; , . ” , . – – – – – ‘ – , . , , , . – ” ” , , ” , ” . . ” ” , . , . . ? . – – . ‘ – – – – . , . ‘ – , , ? . . ‘ , , . , . , ‘ , . ‘ – . ” , , – – – – . ; – – . ” ” ? ” , , . ” , , . , ” ( ‘ ) ” – ; ; ? – – – – , . , ‘ , , . , . . ? . . ? . – – – . . , – – . , . , , , . , , . . , . ” , – , . ‘ . , , , , , , . , – , , – – ‘ – ‘ . . . – – , – , , – . . . , . , . , – , . , ” – . . , . , ‘ . – . ” , – , . , , . – , – – – – – . ; . . – , – – – – . – – , . ‘ . ‘ . , . . . ‘ . , , . , , , ‘ . , , , , . . , , , ‘ , . ‘ . , , . , ; , . ‘ – – ; , ; – – . – , , , . ; , , – – . – , ; – , . . ; – – ; ; . . , . ‘ ‘ . , , . . , , , . ‘ – . , , , – – . , . , , ‘ , , – – – ‘ – , . , , . ‘ – – – . , . ; ‘ . . . – – . ; , – , ‘ , . ‘ , , , . . – . , – – – , , ; , , . ‘ , , , ‘ . . , , – . – ( , , ) , ‘ . , – , – . . – , . . – . – , ‘ . , , ‘ , ‘ – – . . , . , – , . ‘ , . , , , , , , ‘ , . . , , , , , . , . , ; , . . , , – . , , ; , , , , . , , , , ( – ) , , , , , ” ” ( ) ” ? ? ” ‘ , , – . , , – ; . , ; – – . – – – ‘ . , . . ‘ . . , ; , ; , . , – , , ; . ‘ ( ) . , , . , – – . , . ? ; . , – , , – – – . , , . , . . , . ‘ . . , , – – , – – . – , – , . , , . – – , – – – . – . , – . , – . – , . , . , . ‘ , . . , , , – – ” ! ” – – – ‘ ; – , , ‘ . , ‘ , – – ” ! ” , . , , ‘ – , – ‘ . , , , . , ‘ , , , ; , , . , – , , ‘ , . , , , , ” – , ” – – , , , , ” , . . – – ‘ – – , . – – – – . ” ” , ? ” ” , . . ” ” , , ? ” ” . , . – , . , , . ‘ , , – – , – – , ? ” ” . ” ” , . , . ” ” , , ” , ” ‘ , ? ” ” , . , – : – – – . , – – , . , ” , ” – . , . ” . , ‘ , . – , ; , . – , ‘ . , , ‘ ‘ . , . ” , , . ” – , ; , . , – – – . – , ‘ . , ‘ , , – , – ‘ , . . . , , – , , . , – . , – , . , – – ‘ – ; – , ‘ , . , . . , , . . – , . , , ‘ . , – , ; , . , , . , , . ” , ” , ” , ; – . ” . , . – . ‘ . , , , , . . – , . – ‘ . . ; . . ‘ , . . – , . – – . , , , ‘ , , , – ; , ( ) – . – , . ; , , – – ‘ . – . . , . , . , . . , , . , , – – ” , . ” , ‘ , – , , ‘ , . , , , , . , ‘ , , , . : – – ” . . . . , ‘ – – , ‘ , ; , , – . ” , ‘ , . ” , , – , , – , , , ‘ . , & , . , , , . , . ” . . . . . . ” , , . . . , – . – – , – . . ‘ , , . , . , . , , , , , , ; , . ‘ . – ‘ , . – – : – ! ‘ ; ‘ ‘ . – ‘ – , – – – – – , ‘ , ‘ . , , , ; , . , , . ‘ – – ‘ . , ; , , ! . – – ‘ ? ‘ ; . ? ? , ? ; ‘ . – – ! ‘ , . . . ‘ , . , , ‘ . . , ? , , , .

“Football Weather” — Paul Carroll

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“Football Weather”

by

Paul Carroll

As a kid I tried to coax its coming

By sleeping beneath light sheets

Weeks before

The funeral of the summer locusts in the yard;

Then when Granny peeled down the crucifix of

     flypaper that dangled from the ceiling of the

     kitchen

Magic wasn’t needed any longer

To fill the air with pigskins.   The air itself

Acrid, lambent, bright

As the robes of the Chinese gods inside their

     house of glass

In the Field Museum by the lake.

Even practice could be fun—

The way, say, even sepia photographs of old-time

     All Americans could be pirates’ gold

Like my favorite Bill Corbus, Stanford’s “Baby-

     Face Assassin” crouching at right guard, the

     last to play without a helmet on—

And the fun of testing muscles out 

Like new shoes; the odor of the locker room

     pungent

As the inside of a pumpkin;

And the sting of that wet towel twirled against

     bare butt by a genial, roaring Ziggy, Mt.

     Carmel’s All State tackle from Immaculate

     Conception Parish near the mills;

And then the victory, especially the close shaves,

     could feel

Like finally getting beneath a girl’s brassiere

She’ll let you keep

Unhooked for hours while you neck

Until the windshield of your Granddad’s Ford V-8

Becomes filled by a fog

Not even Fu Manchu could penetrate.   Jack,

Next football weather my son Luke will be in high

     school,

Bigger than I was and well-coordinated—but

Couldn’t care a plenary indulgence

If he ever lugs a pigskin down the turf

Or hits a long shot on the court.   At times, I wish he

     would.

So he might taste the happiness you knew

Snagging Chris Zoukis’ low pass to torpedo nine

     long yards to touchdown

And sink archrival Lawrence High

45 years ago come this Thanksgiving Day.   Still,

He has his own intensities

As wild as sports and writing were for us:

Luke’s the seventh Rolling Stone,

His electric guitar elegant and shiny black

As a quiet street at night

Glazed by rain and pumpkin frost.

“Ordinary Nudes,” a very short story by Stuart Dybek

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“Ordinary Nudes”

by

Stuart Dybek

  She stands before the full-length mirror that’s framed by the bedroom door, observing how her nipples, navel, and the delta of copper hair, which has grown back at the confluence of her thighs, shimmer in the dusky light. Her reflection dimples and ripples like the surface of a pond where fish rise to feed on a mayfly hatch. Imagine his wonder when in the years to come he’ll realize that she was not to be confused with ordinary nudes—not some nymph frolicking along the shore, or goddess ascending from sea foam, or ballerina poised to wade into her morning bath. Those photographs she let him take, kept in a drawer, beneath his underwear as if hidden in the depths, will age as she does.

Friday the Thirteenth — Leonora Carrington

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friday-the-13th-leonora-carrington

Friday the Thirteenth, 1965 by Leonora Carrington (1917-2011)

Lutz Seiler’s Star 111 (Book acquired, early Sept. 2024)

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I have a big pile of books recently acquired that I haven’t made enough time to attend to; the most recent of these is Lutz Seiler’s Star 111, forthcoming in English translation by Tess Lewis from NYRB. Here’s their blurb:

Star 111 (the name of a popular East German transistor radio) begins with the world turned upside down. It is the fall of 1989. The communist government of the GDR is losing its grip on power. Carl Bischoff, a very young man, trained as a bricklayer, now a college student, is abruptly recalled by his parents to the small town in the middle of nowhere where he grew up. His hardworking unprotesting parents inform him, that with the border open, they intend to leave the country and check into a West German refugee camp. Will Carl to look after the house and take in the mail? They promise at some point to be in touch.

Deserted by his parents, Carl has no idea what to do. Then he packs the family car and heads to Berlin, where he joins a group of squatters led by a shepherd with a goat. Carl participates in the anarchic life of an anarchist commune, and keeps his distance too. He has all sorts of things to learn about himself and others. He is hungry for sex and love and sometimes simply hungry. He worries about his parents. He wants to be a poet.

Star 111 is a story about unforeseen ends and new beginnings, about different kinds of families, biological and improvised, and one innocent young aspiring poet in pursuit of experience at a moment in history when everything is about to change and nobody knows how. A tender, entrancing, and comic tale of youth and adventure, it is a book that looks back on the history of our time to ask the most fundamental of questions: what does it mean to lead a good life?

 

Just asking | David Foster Wallace

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“Just Asking”

by

David Foster Wallace

First published in The Atlantic, 2007

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?* In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?

In the absence of such a conversation, can we trust our elected leaders to value and protect the American idea as they act to secure the homeland? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Patriot Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?

FOOTNOTES:
1. Given the strict Gramm-Rudmanewque space limit here, let’s just please all agree that we generally know what this term connotes—an open society, consent of the governed, enumerated powers, Federalist 10, pluralism, due process, transparency … the whole democratic roil.

2. (This phrase is Lincoln’s, more or less)

The Scalphunters | An excerpt from an early draft of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

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The Spring 1980 issue of Northwestern University’s literary journal TriQuarterly included an early version of a chapter from Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian. The TriQuarterly excerpt, published as “The Scalphunters,” is essentially Ch. XII of the finished 1985 Random House publication of Blood Meridian with some minor differences.

Consider, for example, the following paragraph–the seventh paragraph in “The Scalphunters” —

When the company set forth in the evening they continued south as before. The tracks of the murderers bore on to the west but they were white men who preyed on travelers in that wilderness and disguised their work in this way. The trail of the argonauts of course went no further than the ashes they left behind and the intersection of these vectors seemed the work of a cynical god, the traces converging blindly in that whited void and the one going on bearing away the souls of the others with them.

McCarthy significantly expands the passage in his final revision, underscoring Blood Meridian’s theme of witnessing:

When the company set forth in the evening they continued south as before. The tracks of the murderers bore on to the west but they were white men who preyed on travelers in that wilderness and disguised their work to be that of the savages. Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings. The trail of the argonauts terminated in ashes as told and in the convergence of such vectors in such a waste wherein the hearts and enterprise of one small nation have been swallowed up and carried off by another the expriest asked if some might not see the hand of a cynical god conducting with what austerity and what mock surprise so lethal a congruence. The posting of witnesses by a third and other path altogether might also be called in evidence as appearing to beggar chance, yet the judge, who had put his horse forward until he was abreast of the speculants, said that in this was expressed the very nature of the witness and that his proximity was no third thing but rather the prime, for what could be said to occur unobserved?

Perhaps the most jarring difference though is that in “The Scalphunters” McCarthy refers to his erstwhile protagonist not as the kid but as the boy. Here’s a longish passage from The TriQuarterly edit to give you a taste of that flavor:

Brown let the belt fall from his teeth. Is it through? he said.

It is.

The point? Is it the point? Speak up, man.

The boy drew his knife and cut away the bloody point deftly and handed it up. Brown held it to the firelight and smiled. The point was of hammered copper and it was cocked in its blood-soaked bindings on the shaft but it had held.

Stout lad, ye’ll make a shadetree sawbones yet. Now draw her.

The boy withdrew the shaft from the man’s leg smoothly and the man bowed on the ground in a lurid female motion and wheezed raggedly through his teeth. He lay there a moment and then he sat up and took the shaft from the boy and threw it in the fire and rose and went off to make his bed.

When the boy returned to his own blanket the ex-priest Tobin leaned to him and looked about stealthily and hissed at his ear.

Fool, he said. God will not love ye forever.

The boy turned to look at him.

Dont you know he’d of took you with him? He’d of took you, boy. Like a bride to the altar.

Read “The Scalphunters” here.

“The Darlette” — Henri Michaux

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“The Darlette”

by

Henri Michaux

translated by Richard Ellmann

The Darelette is found in dry and sandy terrain. It is not a plant but an agile beast, corseted and boned unlike any insect, fat as a rat and long as one, if the tail is included.

If a man jumps on her last segment (there are three), it may well break if the animal has not arrived at adult age.

Since the inside, under walls as thick as a little finger, does not contain any essential organs, the wounded beast continues her walk with her abdomen pounded to jelly and her walls breached. She is a beast who fears no one, eats snakes, and goes to suck the udders of cows which do not dare move.

The ditch spider makes war on her successfully; it winds around her, overwhelms her with threads; as soon as she is paralyzed, it pumps her out completely through the ears.

Her rosy ears and her eyes and her internal organs are the only tender parts of her body.

It pumps her out completely through the ears.

Mass-market Monday | Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker

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Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon. Penguin Books (1973). Cover design by David Pelham. 268 pages.

Here is the first paragraph of Star Maker:

ONE night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill. Dark heather checked my feet. Below marched the suburban lamps. Windows, their curtains drawn, were shut eyes, inwardly watching the lives of dreams. Beyond the sea’s level darkness a lighthouse pulsed. Overhead, obscurity. I distinguished our own house, our islet in the tumultuous and bitter currents of the world. There, for a decade and a half, we two, so different in quality, had grown in and in to one another, for mutual support and nourishment, in intricate symbiosis. There daily we planned our several undertakings, and recounted the day’s oddities and vexations. There letters piled up to be answered, socks to be darned. There the children were born, those sudden new lives. There, under that roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life than either alone.

More David Pelham covers here.