“Daniela de Montecristo” — Roberto Bolaño

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“Daniela de Montecristo”

by

Roberto Bolaño

translated by Chris Andrews

from Nazi Literature in the Americas

Daniela de Montecristo

Buenos Aires, 1918–Córdoba, Spain, 1970

Daniela de Montecristo was a woman of legendary beauty, surrounded by an enduring aura of mystery. The stories that have circulated about her first years in Europe (1938-1947) rarely concur and often flatly contradict one another. It has been said that among her lovers were Italian and German generals (including the infamous Wolff, SS and Police Chief in Italy); that she fell in love with a general in the Rumanian army, Eugenio Entrescu, who was crucified by his own soldiers in 1944; that she escaped from Budapest under siege disguised as a Spanish nun; that she lost a suitcase full of poems while secretly crossing the border from Austria into Switzerland in the company of three war criminals; that she had audiences with the Pope in 1940 and 1941; that out of unrequited love for her, a Uruguayan and then a Colombian poet committed suicide; and, that she had a black swastika tattooed on her left buttock.

Her literary work, leaving aside the juvenilia lost among the icy peaks of Switzerland, never to appear again, consists of a single book, with a rather epic title: The Amazons, published by Quill Argentina, with a preface by the widow Mendiluce, who could not be accused of restraint when it came to lavishing praise (in one paragraph, relying solely on her feminine intuition, she compared the legendary poems lost in the Alps to the work of Juana de Ibarbourou and Alfonsina Storni).

The Amazons is a torrential and anarchic blend of all the literary genres: romance, spy novel, memoir, play (there are even some passages of avant-garde dramatic writing), poetry, history, political pamphlet. The plot revolves around the life of the author and her grandmothers and great-grandmothers, sometimes going back as far as the period immediately following the foundation of Asunción and Buenos Aires.

The book contains some original passages, especially the descriptions of the Women’s Fourth Reich—with its headquarters in Buenos Aires and its training grounds in Patagonia—and the nostalgic, pseudo-scientific digressions about a gland that produces the feeling of love.

Mass-market Monday | William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses

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Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner. Vintage Books Edition (1971). Cover photo by Robert Wenkham. 383 pages.

Go Down, Moses is my favorite William Faulkner text (some say it’s a collection of stories, but I think it’s a novel). “The Bear” might be the best thing he wrote. Read the opener, “Was.” 

From “Was”:

Isaac McCaslin, ‘Uncle Ike’, past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any more, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one

this was not something participated in or even seen by himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac’s father’s sister and so descended by the distaff, yet notwithstanding the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor, of that which some had thought then and some still thought should have been Isaac’s, since his was the name in which the title to the land had first been granted from the Indian patent and which some of the descendants of his father’s slaves still bore in the land. But Isaac was not one of these:-a widower these twenty years, who in all his life had owned but one object more than he could wear and carry in his pockets and his hands at one time, and this was the narrow iron cot and the stained lean mattress which he used camping in the woods for deer and bear or for fishing or simply because he loved the woods; who owned no property and never desired te since the earth was no man’s but all men’s, as light and air and weather were; who lived still in the cheap frame bungalow in Jefferson which his wife’s father gave them on their marriage and which his wife had willed to him at her death and which he had pretended to accept, acquiesce to, to humor her, ease her going but which was not his, will or not, chancery dying wishes mortmain possession or whatever, himself merely holding it for his wife’s sister and her children who had lived in it with him since his wife’s death, holding himself welcome to live in one room of it as he had during his wife’s time or she during her time or the sister-in-law and her children during the rest of his and after not something he had participated in or even remembered except from the hearing, the listening, come to him through and from his cousin McCaslin born in 1850 and sixteen years his senior and hence, his own father being near seventy when Isaac, an only child, was born. rather his brother than cousin and rather his father than either, out of the old time, the old days.

When he and Uncle Buck ran back to the house from discovering that Tomey’s Turl had run again, they heard Uncle Buddy cursing and bellowing in the kitchen, then the fox and the dogs came out of the kitchen and crossed the hall into the dogs’ room and they heard them run through the dogs’ room into his and Uncle Buck’s room then they saw them cross the hall again into Uncle Buddy’s room and heard them run through Uncle Buddy’s room into the kitchen. Where Uncle Buddy was picking the breakfast up out of the ashes and wiping it off with his apron. “What in damn’s hell do you mean,” he said “turning that damn fox out with the dogs all loose in the house?”

“Damn the fox” Uncle Buck said. “Tomey’s Turl has broke out again. Give me and Cass some breakfast quick we might just barely catch him before he gets there.”

A gifted writer is likely to rise above what he takes to be his aesthetic principles | John Barth

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It goes without saying that critical categories are as more or less fishy as they are less or more useful. I happen to believe that just as an excellent teacher is likely to teach well no matter what pedagogical theory he suffers from, so a gifted writer is likely to rise above what he takes to be his aesthetic principles, not to mention what others take to be his aesthetic principles. Indeed, I believe that a truly splendid specimen in whatever aesthetic mode will pull critical ideology along behind it, like an ocean liner trailing seagulls. Actual artists, actual texts, are seldom more than more or less modernist, postmodernist, formalist, symbolist, realist, surrealist, politically committed, aesthetically “pure,” “experimental,” regionalist, internationalist, what have you. The particular work ought always to take primacy over contexts and categories. On the other hand, art lives in human time and history, and general changes in its modes and materials and concerns, even when not obviously related to changes in technology, are doubtless as significant as the changes in a culture’s general attitudes, which its arts may both inspire and reflect. Some are more or less trendy and superficial, some may be indicative of more or less deep malaises, some perhaps healthy correctives of or reactions against such malaises.

From John Barth’s 1980 essay “The Literature of Replenishment.”

Without Even Looking — Nigel Van Wieck

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Without Even Looking by Nigel Van Wieck (b. 1947)

Mid-August riff; some books acquired, etc.

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The last two weeks flew by. My kids went back to school this week; they are attending the same school for the first time since elementary school, high school,my own dear mother, that school, and I am relieved, if only temporarily from driving duties. We are making pizzas in an hour or two to celebrate the first Friday of their school year (we make pizzas every Friday as a nifty fridge clearing activity, but let’s not ruin the sparkle). My own semester starts the week after next and I realize that I need to do something more with my summers now that my children are so much older than they were when they were little children, when I was with them all summer, or if I wasn’t exactly right there with them I was hovering in the background.

I am on track to read fewer novels, or books, or whatever, than I read in July of this year. I finished Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s third novel American Abductions and liked it very much, or liked the experience or feeling of reading it, whatever that means, and I owe it a proper review. In July I read Katherine Dunn’s debut novel Attic and loved it. I couldn’t find her 1971 follow-up Truck in any of the used bookstores I frequent, so I ended up listening to it on audiobook. Maybe it was the narrator’s narration but I found it disappointing, but I still appreciate its grime and its abjection and its picaresque energy. I also checked out some Stephen Dixon e-books from my library; I read a handful of fucked up stories (a piece called “The Intruder” was especially weird) before digging into his 1988 novel Garbage. I read the first half of Garbage last night and I don’t even know how to describe it—it’s sort of like wandering upon some forgotten gritty 1970s American exploitation film made by an insane but focused auteur. But it’s also very normal in a way I will not explain. It’s uncanny.

I purged about thirty paperbacks last week at my local used bookstore and ordered a copy of the latest Antoine Volodine novel, Gina M. Stamm’s translation of Mevlido’s Dreams. A recent reading of Volodine’s Radiant Terminus left me hungry for more of that sweet gross post-exotic flavor. I went to pick up the Volodine today and ended up with two hardbacks. I admit that the blurb on the back of Thomas Sullivan’s 1989 novel Born Burning sold me; it compared his previous novel to William Gaddis, John Barth, and Kurt Vonnegut. I also snapped up a first-edition hardback 1985 edition of William S. Burroughs’s novel Queer, which I fear was quite underpriced, although I don’t fear that too much. (All my sweet purged paperback credit is gone!)

I am ready for the summer to end.

“The Rest of the Novel” — Stanley Elkin

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“The Rest of the Novel”

an essay by

Stanley Elkin

collected in Pieces of Soap

For conveying ideas, novels are among the least functional and most decorative of the blunt instruments. (Could this be a universal truth, some starry, operative mathematical principle? Most stars are decorative too, of course, their function merely to peg the universe in place like studs in upholstery, servicing the elegancies, strumming its physics like a man with a blue guitar, fleshing all the centripetals and centrifugals, stringing the planets like beads, some beautiful pump of placement, arranging night, moving the planetary furniture, and fixing the astronomical data, but less useful, finally, in the sense that a handful more here or a dollop less there could make as much of a never mind as corks or rhythm, less useful, finally, than mail or ice cream.) And if, a few times in a way, novels like Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast or Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath come along to legislate, or raise a consciousness or two, or rouse a rabble, to make, I mean, what history or the papers call a difference, why that’s decorative, too, I think, a lip service the system, touching the bases like a superstitious braille, pays art—like, oh, the claims made a few years back for the “We Are the World” folks when it was really the Catholic Relief Services already on site during the Ethiopian famine that did the heavy lifting.

Well it’s not the novelist’s fault. Not that they don’t deserve some of the blame, leaking encouragement like someone paying out line to fish, some of your have-cake-and-eat-its like a little miracle of the loaves. And there are still a few big mouths who stake claims for the ameliorative shamanism of—hark! this is interesting: not the book so much as the writer—the practice of fiction—the loyal, Nutso Art Jerk Groupie, like some devoted cultist, the last Deadhead, say, worrying like holy beads the shoelace on his wrist he thinks is a bracelet making confrontation with an Elvis Presley impersonator.

Isn’t it pretty to think so, though? To take oneself as seriously as one’s readers sometimes do? To believe, if only briefly, and if only by the light off the gloss of the brittlest mood swing, in the justice or even the palpability of one’s cause, to Don Quixote principle, any principle, and raise to the level of purpose what in the final analysis is only what given egos, fashionably or not, fashion or no, frozen in mere season’s hipped au courantness, perceive as beauty. Continue reading ““The Rest of the Novel” — Stanley Elkin” →

Old Man Reading — Vincent van Gogh

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Old Man Reading, 1882 by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)

Mass-market Monday | Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes’s P’s Three Women

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P’s Three Women, Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes. Translation by Margaret A. Neves. Avon Bard (1984). No cover artist credited. 136 pages.

Gomes’s only novel got a reprint from Dalkey Archive back in 2012 with a new introduction by translator Margaret Neves, who notes that in “Portuguese, the title of this book is Trés Mulheres de trés PPPés. The expression “p-p-p” means chitchat, bla-bla-bla. Hence, three women and their chitchats. In addition to echoing the narrator’s first initial, the term is lightly condescending to the women, just like P himself.”

Annie Reading — Lucian Freud

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Annie Reading, 1961 by Lucian Freud (1922-2011)

Read “Among the Beanwoods,” a short story by Donald Barthelme

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“Among the Beanwoods”

by

Donald Barthelme

The already-beautiful do not, as a rule, run.

I am, at the moment, seated.

Ireland and Scotland are remote; Wales fares little better. Here in this forest of tall, white beanwoods, the already-beautiful saunter. Some of them carry plump red hams, already cooked.

I am, at the moment, seated. On a chair in the forest, listening. I will rise, shortly, to hold the ladder for you. Every beanwood will have its chandelier scattering light on my exercise machine, which is made of cane. The beans you have glued together are as nothing to the difficulty of working with cane, at night, in the dark, in the wind, watched by insects. I will not allow my exercise machine to be photographed. It sings, as I exercise, like an unaccompanied cello. I will not allow my exercise machine to be recorded.

Tombs are scattered through the beanwoods, made of perfectly ordinary gray stone. All are empty. The chandeliers, at night, scatter light over the tombs, little houses in which I sleep, from time to time, with the already-beautiful, and they with me. We call to each other, at night, saying “Hello, hello” and “Who, who, who?” That one has her hips exposed, for rubbing.

Holding the ladder, I watch you glue additional chandeliers to appropriate limbs. You are tiring, you have worked very hard. Iced beanwater will refresh you, and these wallets made of ham. I have been meaning to speak to you. I have set bronze statues of alert, crouching Indian boys around the periphery of the forest, for ornamentation. Each alert, crouching Indian boy is accompanied by a large, bronze, wolf-like dog, finely polished.

I have been meaning to speak to you. I have many pages of notes. I have a note about cameras, a note about recorders, a note about steel wool, a note about the invitations. On weightier matters I will speak without notes, freely and passionately, as if inspired, at night, in a rage, slapping myself, great tremendous slaps to the brow which will fell me to the earth. The already-beautiful will stand and watch, in a circle, cradling, each, an animal in mothering arms — green monkey, meadow mouse, tucotuco. That one has her hips exposed, for study. I make careful notes. You snatch the notebook from my hands.

The pockets of your smock swinging heavily with the lights of chandeliers. Your light-by-light, bean-by-bean career.

I am, at this time, prepared to dance. The already-beautiful have, historically, danced. The music made by my exercise machine is, we agree, danceable. The women partner themselves with large bronze hares, which have been cast in the attitudes of dancers. The beans you have glued together are as nothing to the difficulty of casting hares in the attitudes of dancers, at night, in the foundry, the sweat, the glare. Thieves have been invited to dinner, along with the deans of the great cathedrals. The thieves will rest upon the bosoms of the deans, at dinner, among the beanwoods. Soft benedictions will ensue.

I am privileged, privileged, to be able to hold your ladder.

Pillows are placed in the tombs, together with pot holders and dust cloths. The already-beautiful strut. England is far away, and France is scarcely nearer. I am, for the time being, reclining. In a warm tomb, with Concordia, who is beautiful. Mad with bean wine she has caught me by the belt buckle and demanded that I hear her times tables. Her voice enchants me. Tirelessly you glue. The forest will soon exist on some maps, a tribute to the quickness of the world’s cartographers. This life is better than any life I have lived, previously. I order more smoke, which is delivered in heavy glass demi-johns, twelve to a crate. Beautiful hips abound, bloom. Your sudden movement toward red kidney beans has proved, in the event, masterly. Everywhere we see formal gowns of red kidney beans, which have been polished to the fierceness of carnelians. No ham hash does not contain two beans, polished to the fierceness of carnelians.

Spain is distant, Portugal wrapped in an impenetrable haze. These noble beans, glued by you, are mine. Thousand-pound sacks are off-loaded at the quai, against our future needs. The thieves are willing workers, the deans, straw bosses of extraordinary tact. I polish hares, dogs, Indian boys in the chill of early morning. Your weather reports have been splendid. The fall of figs you predicted did in fact occur. There is nothing like ham in fig sauce, or almost nothing. I am, at the moment, feeling very jolly. Hey hey, I say. It is remarkable how well human affairs can be managed, with care.

The Magdalene Reading — Rogier van der Weyden

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The Magdalene Reading, 1445 by Rogier van der Weyden (c. 1399-1464)

Selections from One-Star Amazon Reviews of Iain Bank’s novel The Wasp Factory

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[Editorial note: The following citations come from one-star Amazon reviews of Iain Bank’s novel The Wasp Factory (which I thought was great). More one-star Amazon reviews.]

Crap

drivel

childish

twaddle

well written

I am baffled

absolute tosh

talented author

load of rubbish

Science function.

an unusual story

Distastful content

mild teenage drivel

making me feel sick

positively disgusting

This book is diseased.

potential to be terrific

supposed great author

had to delete this book

I am missing something

is self indulgent and nasty

I had not hear of Iain Banks

I read this almost to the end

sticking their heads on poles

making me feel physically sick

sitting in a a bar with half drunks

I am a high school English teacher

Deeply distasteful dystopian drivel

an ugly Freudian post-modern sack

I hated this book and wish I never read it

soul destroying book makes me feel icky

Woof ! Creepy ! I read 2 pages … no more.

a skilled writer delivering pointless awfulness

At the top of the list of worst books I’ve ever read.

The characters had absolutely no redeeming features

I thought it would be a horror tale that would be great for Halloween

I couldn’t relate to any of the characters in the story. As a matter of fact, I didn’t like any of them.

well written, well constructed and kept me gripped page by page – but it was a loathsome experience

a sordid study of a grubby psychopathic personality of no merit or interest at all

I ordered this product and ended up with a Cuban poetry book. :(

I would burn my copy if I could. Unfortunately, it is electronic,

I bought it because it’s a story about psychopath. Well its not!

Miserable characters, childish writing, and pointless violence

Perhaps reading should expose us to such things but

I like mysteries, including murder mysteries, but

I’ve rarely had this negative reaction to a book

there are enough crazies in the real world

easily the worst book I have ever read

gratuitous tripe sweeps nation

I’m stupider for having read it

why am I reading this horror

I absolutely hated this book.

Found it a thoroughly book

violent, mad and depraved

Misogynistic, pretentious

This book is simply BAD

im glas i only bought one

I ploughed diligently

difficult to empathise

lacklustre last chapter

don’t waist your time

contains sick cruelty

blowing up animals

vulgar and uncouth

our book group

our Book Group

excellent prose

Drunks beware!

Poorly written

straight fiction

twisted mind

Well written

book club

unpleasant

I feel used.

I hate it!

Enjoy.

Dinah Brooke’s Death Games (Book acquired, 8 Aug. 2024)

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I broke down and bought an inexpensive copy of Dinah Brooke’s 1976 novel Death Games from an internet vendor. I absolutely loved her 1973 novel Lord Jim at Home, which never got a U.S. release (until a year or two ago). Death Games did get a U.S. release—I guess because it involves the Vietnam War?—and was reviewed by Jane Larkin Crain in The New York Times. She wrote:

Pornographic brutality dominates this distasteful tale of carnage, corruption and colonialism in Indochina, starring young, beautiful, demented Elspeth Waterhouse, who pursues her impeccably detached tycoon of a father from Bangkok to Vientiane to Saigon, hungering after his recognition and love. Also featured are maimed and traumatized American war veteran who conducts an unlikely affair with Elspeth and Veronique, Waterhouse’s business associate and mistress, whose son is relegated to boarding school so that she may go globe‐trotting with her lover. . .

Death Games . . . largely dispenses with the mechanics of plot, pacing and characterization. In the course of a very short novel, scenes of debauchery, rape, murder, cannibalistic fantasy, suicide, bloodshed follow so quickly one upon the other, with so little sense or modulation…

I think Crain hated it!

Who are the postmodernists? | John Barth

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Who are the postmodernists? By my count, the American fictionists most commonly included in the canon, besides the three of us at Tubingen, are Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Several of the critics I read widen the net to include Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, different as those two writers would appear to be. Others look beyond the United States to Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and the late Vladimir Nabokov as engendering spirits of the “movement”; others yet insist upon including the late Raymond Queneau, the French “new novelists” Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, Claude Simon, and Claude Mauriac, the even newer French writers of the Tel Quel group, the Englishman John Fowles, and the expatriate Argentine Julio Cortázar. Some assert that such filmmakers as Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Alain Resnais are postmodernists. I myself will not join any literary club that doesn’t include the expatriate Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and the semi-expatriate Italian Italo Calvino, of both of whom more presently. Anticipations of the “postmodernist literary aesthetic” have duly been traced through the great modernists of the first half of the twentieth century—T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, André Gide, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Miguel de Unamuno, Virginia Woolf—through their nineteenth-century predecessors—Alfred Jarry, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallamd, and E. T. A. Hoffmann—back to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615).

On the other hand, among certain commentators the sifting gets exceedingly fine. Professor Jerome Klinkowitz of Northern Iowa, for example, hails Barthelme and Vonnegut as the exemplary “postcontemporaries” of the American 1970s and consigns Pynchon and myself to some 1960ish outer darkness. I regard the novels of John Hawkes as examples of fine late modernism rather than of postmodernism (and I admire them no less for that). Others might regard most of Bellow, and Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, as comparatively premodernist, along with the works of such more consistently traditionalist American writers as John Cheever, Wallace Stegner, William Styron, or John Updike, for example (the last of whom, however, Ihab Hassan calls a modernist), or those of most of the leading British writers of this century (as contrasted with the Irish), or those of many of our contemporary American women writers of fiction, whose main literary concern, for better or worse, remains the eloquent issuance of what the critic Richard Locke has called “secular news reports.” Even among the productions of a given writer, distinctions can be and often are invoked. Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map. John Gardner’s first two published novels I would call distinctly modernist works; his short stories dabble in postmodernism; his polemical nonfiction is aggressively reactionary. Italo Calvino, on the other hand, began as an Italian new-realist (in The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1947) and matured into an exemplary postmodernist (with e.g., Cosmicomics, 1965, and The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1969) who on occasion rises, sinks, or merely shifts to modernism (e.g., Invisible Cities, 1972). My own novels and stories seem to me to have both modernist and postmodernist attributes, even occasional premodernist attributes.

One certainly does have a sense of having been through this before. Indeed, some of us who have been publishing fiction since the 1950s have had the interesting experience of being praised or damned in that decade as existentialists and in the early 1960s as black humorists. Had our professional careers antedated the Second World War, we would no doubt have been praised or damned as modernists, in the distinguished company listed above. Now we are praised or damned as postmodernists.

From John Barth’s 1980 essay “The Literature of Replenishment.”

“Dangeresque,” a very short story by Diane Williams

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“Dangeresque”

by

Diane Williams

Mrs. White at the Red Shop showed me the beady-eyed garment, but I can’t pay for it. I’m broke! I already own a gold ring and a gold-filled wristwatch and I am very uncomfortable with these. My eyes sweep the garment and its charms.

I am tempted to say this is how love works, bury­ing everyone in the same style.

Through a fault of my own I set off as if I’m on a horse and just point and go to the next village.

This village is where flowers are painted on the sides of my house—big red dots, big yellow balls.

At home, stuck over a clock’s pretty face, is a note from my husband to whom I do not show affection. With a swallow of tap water, I take a geltab.

By this time I had not yet apologized for my actions. Last night my husband told me to get up out of the bed and to go into another room.

My husband’s a kind man, a clever man, a patient man, an honest man, a hard-working man.

Many people have the notion we live in an age where more people who behave just like he does lurk.

See, I may have a childlike attitude, but a woman I once read about attempted a brand new direction with a straight face.

Mass-market Monday | Stanley Elkin’s The Living End

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The Living End, Stanley Elkin. First Warner Books printing (1980). Cover art by Don Ivan Punchatz; cover design by Gene Light; cover type by Richard Nebiola. 141 pages.

An excerpt from The Living End:

God gave a gala, a levee at the Lord’s.

All Heaven turned out.

“Gimme,” He said, that old time religion.” His audience beamed. They cheered, they ate it up. They nudged each other in Paradise.

“What did I tell you?” He demanded over their enthusiasm.

“It’s terrific, isn’t it? I told you it would be terrific. All you ever had to do was play nice. Are you disappointed? Is this Heaven? Is this God’s country? In your wildest dreams-let Me hear it. Good-in your wildest dreams, did you dream such a Treasury, this museum Paradise? Did you dream My thrones and dominions, My angels in fly-over? My seraphim disporting like dolphins, tumbling God’s sky in high Heaven’s high acrobacy? Did you imagine the miracles casual as card tricks, or ever suspect free lunch could taste so good? They should see you now, eh? They should see you now, trembling in rapture like neurological rut. Delicious, correct? Piety a la mode! That’s it, that’s right. Sing hallelujah! Sing Hizzoner’s hosannas, Jehovah’s gee whiz! Well,” God said, .1 that’s enough, that will do.” He looked toward the Holy Family, studying them for a moment.

“Not like the creche, eh?” He said.

“Well is it? Is it?” He demanded of Jesus.

“No,” Christ said softly.

“No,” God said, “not like the creche. just look
at this place- the dancing waters and indirect lighting. I could put gambling in here, off-track betting. Oh, oh, My costume jewelry ways, My game show vision.

Well, it’s the public. You’ve got to give it what it wants. Yes, Jesus?”

“Yes,” Jesus said.

“It just doesn’t look lived in, is that what you think

“Call on someone else,” Christ said.

“Sure,” God said.

“I’m Hero of Heaven. I call on Myself.”

That was when He began His explanations. He revealed the secrets of books, of pictures and music, telling them all manner of things-why marches were more selfish than anthems, lieder less stirring than scat, why landscapes were to be preferred over portraits, how statues of women were superior to statues of men but less impressive than engravings on postage. He explained why dentistry was a purer science than astronomy, biography a higher form than dance. He told them how to choose wines and why solos were more acceptable to Him than duets. He told them the secret causes of inflation-“It’s the markup,” He said-and which was the best color and how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. He explained why English was the first language at Miss Universe pageants and recited highlights from the eighteen-minute gap.

Mary, wondering if she showed yet, was glad Joseph was seated next to her. Determined to look proud, she deliberately took her husband’s hand. So rough, she thought, such stubby fingers. He explained why children suffered and showed them how to do the latest disco steps. He showed them how to square the circle, cautioning afterwards that it would be wrong.

He revealed the name of Kennedy’s assassin and told how to shop for used cars.

Gravity’s Rainbow annotations (so far)

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img_4025

I’ll be adding to these and then doing more the next time (?!) I read Gravity’s Rainbow.*

Pages 82-83: The White Visitation, etc.

Page 103: Black Markets, King Kong, etc.

Pages 148-49: Preterite/Elect, Lurianic Kabbalah, Uncanny X-Men, etc.

Page 203: Rainbows, Fuck-yous, Plastic Man, etc.

Pages 204-05: Paper, mise en abyme, a silkenness of girls, etc.

Page 256: “Real America,” Hughes contra Whitman, BANZAI!, etc.

Pages 257-58: The War, nimbus clouds, Zoot Suit Riot!, etc.

Page 299: Tannhäuser, horny expectations, etc.

Page 364: Knights and fools, dendrites and axons, etc.

Pages 412-13:  Ouroboros, organic chemistry, tarot, etc.

Page 419: Innocence, experience, Wm Blake, Wagner’s Ring cycle, etc.

Page 539: Critical Mass, Weismann’s tarot reading, Rilke, hymns, etc.

Pages 627-28: Optimum time, barrage balloons, Wall of Death, etc.

Pages 712-13: The Man has a branch office in each of our brains. We might be freaks, but We are not doomed and We are not Their pets.