Suzie Q, 2011 by F. Scott Hess (b. 1955)
Inside the bowl, the two goldfish are making a Pisces sign, head-to-tail and very still. Penelope sits and peers into their world. There is a little sunken galleon, a china diver in a diving suit, pretty stones and shells she and her sisters have brought back from the sea.
Aunt Jessica and Uncle Roger are out in the kitchen, hugging and kissing. Elizabeth is teasing Claire in the hallway. Their mother is in the W.C. Sooty the cat sleeps in a chair, a black thundercloud on the way to something else, who happens right now to look like a cat. It’s Boxing Day. The evening’s very still. The last rocket bomb was an hour ago, somewhere south. Claire got a golliwog, Penelope a sweater, Elizabeth a frock that Penelope will grow into.
The pantomime Roger took them all to see this afternoon was Hansel and Gretel. Claire immediately took off under the seats where others were moving about by secret paths, a flash of braid or of white collar now and then among the tall attentive uncles in uniform, the coat-draped backs of seats. On stage Hansel, who was supposed to be a boy but was really a tall girl in tights and smock, cowered inside the cage. The funny old Witch foamed at the mouth and climbed the scenery. And pretty Gretel waited by the Oven for her chance. . . .
Then the Germans dropped a rocket just down the street from the theatre. A few of the little babies started crying. They were scared. Gretel, who was just winding up with her broom to hit the Witch right in the bum, stopped: put the broom down, in the gathering silence stepped to the footlights, and sang:
Oh, don’t let it get you,
It will if they let you, but there’s
Something I’ll bet you can’t see—
It’s big and it’s nasty and it’s right over there,
It’s waiting to get its sticky claws in your hair!
Oh, the greengrocer’s wishing on a rainbow today,
And the dustman is tying his tie . . .
And it all goes along to the same jolly song,
With a peppermint face in the sky!
“Now sing along,” she smiled, and actually got the audience, even Roger, to sing:
With a peppermint face in the sky-y,
And a withered old dream in your heart,
You’ll get hit with a piece of the pie-ie,
With the pantomime ready to start!
Oh, the Tommy is sleeping in a snowbank tonight,
And the Jerries are learning to fly—
We can fly to the moon, we’ll be higher than noon,
In our polythene home in the sky. . . .
Pretty polythene home in the sky,
Pretty platinum pins in your hand—
Oh your mother’s a big fat machine gun,
And your father’s a dreary young man. . . .
(Whispered and staccato):
Oh, the, man-a-ger’s suck-ing on a corn-cob, pipe,
And the bank-ers are, eat-ing their, wives,
All the world’s in a daze, while the orchestra plays,
So turn your pockets and get your surprise—
Turn your pockets and get-your surpri-ise,
There was nobody there af-ter all!
And the lamps up the stairway are dying,
It’s the season just after the ball . . .
Oh the palm-trees whisper on the beach somewhere,
And the lifesaver’s heaving a sigh,
And those voices you hear, Boy and Girl of the Year,
Are of children who are learning to die. . . .
From Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow.
Untitled, 1959 by Saul Steinberg (1914-1999). From The Labyrinth.
From It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946. Directed by Frank Capra; cinematography by Joseph Walker and Joseph Biroc. Via FilmGrab.
“”A Little Girl’s Xmas in Moderan”
by
David R. Bunch
from Moderan
IT WAS in Jingle-Bell weather that Little Sister came across the white yard, the snow between her toes all gray and packed and starting to ball up like the beginnings of two snowmen. For clothing she had nothing, her tiny rump sticking out red-cold, and blue-cold, and her little-jewel knees white almost as bones. She stuck up ten stiff fingers, and she said, “Daddy! Something is wrong at my place! Come see!” She lisped a little perhaps and did not say it all as precisely as grownups, because she was just past four.
He turned like a man in the bottom third of bad dreaming; he pointed two bored eyes at her. Damn the kid, he thought. “What the hell deal has Mox got us into now?” he said. And he sang the little rhyme that made the door come open. Then as she stepped toward him he saw the snowballs on her feet. They were melting now, making deep furrows in the green rug spread across his spacious thinking room. The tall nap, like flooded grass now along little canals bending away from her feet, was speckled white here and there with crumpled paper balls. His trial plans and formulas peeped out like golf balls.
Coming back across the iron fields of nightmare that always rose to confront him at such times, he struggled to make the present’s puzzling moment into sense. Damn the kid, he thought, didn’t wipe her feet. All flesh, as yet—her own—and bone and blood, and didn’t wipe her feet. The snow melts!
He motioned her to him. “Little Sister,” he began in that tired dull-tinny voice that was his now, and must be his, because his larynx was worked all in gold against cancer, “tell me slowly, Little Sister. Why don’t you stay in your plastic place more? Why don’t you use the iron Mox more? Why do you bother me at all? Tell me slowly.”
“Daddy!” she cried and started to jig up and down in the fits that he hated so, “come over to my place, you old boogie. Something needs fixing.”
So they went across the big white yard to her place, past Mother’s place, past Little Brother’s place, with her snow-hurt limping and naked, and him lumbering in strange stiff-jointedness, but snug in a fire-red snuggie suit of fine insulation with good black leather space high-tops. Arrived at her place he whistled at the door the three sharp notes. The door moved into the wall and Mox the iron one stood sliding the iron sections of his arms up into one another until he had only hands hanging from shoulders. It was his greeting way. He ogled with bulb eyes and flashed his greeting code. Continue reading ““A Little Girl’s Xmas in Moderan” — David R. Bunch”
If the fable of “The grasshopper and the ants” was amended so that the world ended before the turn of winter, then the grasshopper would have been wiser and the moral would have vindicated him. In a story, the location of the ending is very deliberate.
From David Berman’s December 1994 essay/poem/riff “Clip-On Tie,” which could be read as a Christmas story, if you like.
The Bathos, 1764 by William Hogarth (1697-1764)
“Pat Hobby’s Christmas Wish”
by
F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was Christmas Eve in the studio. By eleven o’clock in the morning, Santa Claus had called on most of the huge population according to each one’s deserts.
Sumptuous gifts from producers to stars, and from agents to producers arrived at offices and studio bungalows; on every stage one heard of the roguish gifts of casts to directors or directors to casts; champagne had gone out from publicity office to the press. And tips of fifties, tens and fives from producers, directors and writers fell like manna upon the white collar class.
In this sort of transaction there were exceptions. Pat Hobby, for example, who knew the game from twenty years’ experience, had had the idea of getting rid of his secretary the day before. They were sending over a new one any minute—but she would scarcely expect a present the first day.
Waiting for her, he walked the corridor, glancing into open offices for signs of life. He stopped to chat with Joe Hopper from the scenario department.
“Not like the old days,” he mourned, “Then there was a bottle on every desk.”
“There’re a few around.”
“Not many.” Pat sighed, “And afterwards we’d run a picture—made up out of cutting-room scraps.”
“I’ve heard. All the suppressed stuff,” said Hopper.
Pat nodded, his eyes glistening.
“Oh, it was juicy. You darned near ripped your guts laughing—”
He broke off as the sight of a woman, pad in hand, entering his office down the hall recalled him to the sorry present.
“Gooddorf has me working over the holiday,” he complained bitterly.
“I wouldn’t do it.”
“I wouldn’t either except my four weeks are up next Friday, and if I bucked him he wouldn’t extend me.”
Pat’s new secretary was about thirty-six, handsome, faded, tired, efficient. She went to the typewriter, examined it, sat down and burst into sobs.
As he turned away Hopper knew that Pat was not being extended anyhow. He had been hired to script an old-fashioned horse-opera and the boys who were “writing behind him”—that is working over his stuff—said that all of it was old and some didn’t make sense.
“I’m Miss Kagle,” said Pat’s new secretary. She was about thirty-six, handsome, faded, tired, efficient. She went to the typewriter, examined it, sat down and burst into sobs.
Pat started. Self-control, from below anyhow, was the rule around here. Wasn’t it bad enough to be working on Christmas Eve? Well—less bad than not working at all. He walked over and shut the door—someone might suspect him of insulting the girl.
“Cheer up,” he advised her. “This is Christmas.” Continue reading ““Pat Hobby’s Christmas Wish,” a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald”
Untitled (3 Sum, Gumball?), 2019 by Raymond Pettibon (b. 1957)
Christmas, 1983 by Alexander Aksinin (1949–1985)
Zora Neale Hurston’s hand-drawn Christmas card (1926). From Fannie Hurst’s papers at the Harry Ransom center in Austin, TX. Via the Ransom Center’s Instagram account.
“The Ghost Ships: A Christmas Story”
by
Angela Carter
Therefore that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forebearing of labor, feasting, or any other way upon any such account aforesaid, every person so offending shall pay for every offense five shillings as a fine to the county.
Statute enacted by the General Court of
Massachusetts, May 1659, repealed 1681
‘Twas the night before Christmas. Silent night, holy night. The snow lay deep and crisp and even. Etc. etc. etc.; let these familiar words conjure up the traditional anticipatory magic of Christmas Eve, and then — forget it.
Forget it. Even if the white moon above Boston Bay ensures that all is calm, all is bright, there will be no Christmas as such in the village on the shore that now lies locked in a precarious winter dream.
(Dream, that uncensorable state. They would forbid it if they could.)
At that time, for we are talking about a long time ago, about three and a quarter hundred years ago, the newcomers had no more than scribbled their signatures on the blank page of the continent that was, as it lay under the snow, no whiter nor more pure than their intentions.
They plan to write more largely; they plan to inscribe thereon the name of God.
And that was why, because of their awesome piety, tomorrow, on Christmas Day, they will wake, pray and go about their business as if it were any other day.
For them, all days are holy but none are holidays.
New England is the new leaf they have just turned over; Old England is the dirty linen their brethren at home have just — did they not recently win the English Civil War? — washed in public.
Back home, for the sake of spiritual integrity, their brothers and sisters have broken the graven images in the churches, banned the playhouses where men dress up as women, chopped down the village Maypoles because they welcome in the spring in altogether too orgiastic a fashion.
Nothing particularly radical about that, given the Puritans’ basic premises. Anyone can see at a glance that a Maypole, proudly erect upon the village green as the sap is rising, is a godless instrument. The very thought of Cotton Mather, with blossom in his hair, dancing round the Maypole makes the imagination reel. No. The greatest genius of the Puritans lay in their ability to sniff out a pagan survival in, say, the custom of decorating a house with holly for the festive season; they were the stuff of which social anthropologists would be made!
And their distaste for the icon of the lovely lady with her bonny babe — Mariolatry, graven images! — is less subtle than their disgust at the very idea of the festive season itself. It was the festivity of it that irked them.
Nevertheless, it assuredly is a gross and heathenish practice, to welcome the birth of Our
Saviour with feasting, drunkenness, and lewd displays of mumming and masquerading.
We want none of that filth in this new place.
No, thank you.
As midnight approached, the cattle in the byres lumbered down upon their knees in homage, according to the well-established custom of over sixteen hundred English winters when they had mimicked the kneeling cattle in the Bethlehem stable; then, remembering where they were in the nick of time, they hastily refrained from idolatry and hauled themselves upright.
Boston Bay, calm as milk, black as ink, smooth as silk. And suddenly, at just the hour when the night spins on its spindle and starts to unravel its own darkness, at what one could call, elsewhere, the witching hour —
I saw three ships come sailing in,
Christmas Day, Christmas Day,
I saw three ships come sailing in
On Christmas Day in the morning.
Three ships, silent as ghost ships; ghost ships of Christmas past.
And what was in those ships all three? Continue reading ““The Ghost Ships: A Christmas Story” by Angela Carter”
Maybe an hour ago, browsing in a used bookstore, I opened a worn and some might say dirty copy of Iain Banks’s 1985 novel Walking on Glass. The very first page of this old book was inscribed with the following:
Have a weird Xmas ’90
John
This copy of Iain Banks’s 1985 novel Walking on Glass—a 1990 Abacus trade paperback printed in London, the embossing on its cover yellowed by wear on its cover and back near its spine—this particular copy was addressed to no named person, its inscription signed by a name so anonymous we apply it to unidentified cadavers and prostitute clients.
I take myself to be the unidentified person being addressed by the identified generic John, wishing me weird wellness, a ghost of Xmas past.
Earlier this year I made the tragic mistake of not pulling the trigger on first-edition hardbacks of Banks’s first two novels, The Wasp Factory and Walking on Glass. I hadn’t read Banks at that point, and my familiarity with his work came almost entirely of his proximity to the J.G. Ballard titles I routinely perused. I ended up reading and loving The Wasp Factory this summer (reviewed it here), and the blurb on the back of Walking on Glass promising further perversions intrigues me too, of course.
Today, I also came across a first-edition, first-U.S.-printing of Roberto Bolaño’s opus 2666. It was marked at a third of the original cover price and has never been read. I could not leave it behind.
I actually traded some books in today, including my trade paperback of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things. I had recently reread the novel in anticipation of Yorgos Lanthimos’ film adaptation, and, during that reread, oddly came across an inexpensive pristine first edition of the novel while browsing for something else. Maybe a week or two after finding that hardback of Poor Things, I found a hardback first edition of Gray’s 1990 novel Something Leather. Unlike Poor Things, which features lots of art and typographic adventures, Something Leather is pretty standard (apart from a few chapter heading illustrations)—but it does have a lovely cover under its cover:
Maybe a week after that, I was browsing with my son, who wanted a collection of Harlan Ellison short stories. I was shocked that we couldn’t find any—I had given away two mass market collections to some students maybe seven or eight years ago in a purge. Apparently a lot of it is out of print, but a “greatest hits” collection is coming out this spring. Anyway, I ended up finding hardback editions of Robert Coover’s Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? Denis Johnson’s novel Fiskadaro.
The Johnson is a British edition, Chatto & Windus, and while it’s hardly my favorite novel by him, I found its form too attractive to pass (and it was, like, cheaper than a beer in the same bookstore). I also picked up a book by Lewis Nordan, a slim collection of short stories called Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair. I picked it up because I love those horrid lovely wonderful gross stylish Vintage Contemporaries editions, and then acquired it based on the blurb, which compared it to Flannery O’Connor, Ellen Gilchrist, and Harry Crews. Here it is next to my Vintage Contemporaries copy of Denis Johnson’ Fiskadaro:
I hope you have a weird Xmas. And I hope that John, wherever they are, has a weird Xmas too.
Curled Nude on a Stool, 1983, by Euan Uglow (1932-2000)
Helena, 2020 by Stefan Zsaitsits (b. 1981)
Biblioklept 