“Fladry” — Ed Skoog

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“Fladry”

by

Ed Skoog

Fladry: a line of rope mounted along the top of a fence, from
which are suspended strips of fabric or colored flags that will flap
in a breeze, intended to deter wolves from crossing the fence-line.

USDA National Wildlife Research Center

I am weak and edible. Some human quality
stays weird, alien to the wild, outsiders,
bad sport with spooky habits not just fladry—
other enchantments against order, house paint,
yard art, border fences and the tunnels under borders,
the amen, the wedding ring, the flavored condom.
The wolves are back. I’ve seen them, seen the fladry
ranchers tie, red flags’ flutter to puzzle or annoy,
folk-work tendered back from wood-shadow,
more each year, abjured with clover.
What I like most about the first shot of bourbon
is how it feels like letting go of a grudge.
In the dream, I kill my friend and bury him
lime in the church basement between sump pump
and broken fireplace. On my knees I tile
red stone back to mosaic. Soldiers beat me up
and called me names in my own language,
this one, the one Whitman used to soothe
the dying, limbless, the bleeding, the infected.
Beat me with fists slight more stone
than the shape that holds this pencil.
A house is held together by shapes.
And yet in the ongoing negotiations between
the world where I hold my son and
famine, bombings, hate, prosperity—
two notes, octaves apart
attenuate what’s hidden inside your body
to the invisible. It might help remembering
shadows and not hours. Infinity
also has the contour of a children’s game.
Infants remember fladry, safe in the car seat grasping,
grasping. Some forces are enormous and move
against you, and when you pretend they aren’t
there, surge. Some swing on a hinge
which at night sounds like don’t look back,
don’t look back. Anyone can tie fladry.
See it out riding. I go out at French-horn dawn,
boots in mud, string fladry at intervals,
each tongue labeling the field, calling
beyond language. And if fladry bears
the conditions of a spell, redness of the flag,
the measure between them, it’s flapping
which charms the wolf away, for a term.
Warnings to keep the flock from the wolf’s belly.
Messages for ourselves. See it from there,
turn overall and plaid flannel; we would
tear our own fur to cross these lines.

A put-upon frogman with too little oxygen vs. his angry father in Markus Werner’s novel The Frog in the Throat

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The hero of Markus Werner’s 1985 novel The Frog in the Throat is Franz Thalmann, a disgraced, divorced, defrocked clergyman, who lives ashamed and diminished, yet nevertheless resilient in a philosophical recalculation of his life. There’s a major complication to Franz’s reevaluation though: the memory (or ghost?) of his stern father Klement turns up as a literal (or is it just metaphorical?) frog in his throat. Klement presents as a tragicomic, pestering apparition who ventriloquizes his son—and the novel—with rural grumbles. He milks cows, rants against modernity, and accuses Franz of having betrayed the world he was born into. In Michael Hofmann’s translation, Werner’s prose is crisp, dryly mortified and quietly savage: intimate cruelty turned into a dark, pinprick comedy about guilt, family, and the stubbornness of provincial life.

The voices of son and father drive The Frog in the Throat. These voices collide in bursts that never find harmony. There are ten punchy chapters: Thalmann the Younger takes the odd chapters; Daddy Klement narrates the even ones. Franz’s chapters are philosophical, discursive, and given to a choppy, aphoristic rhythm. (Franz does, however, declare at one point, “Well. I’m not a philosopher, am I. I’m a put-upon frogman with too little oxygen.) Klement’s sections are denser and earthier, but, for all their ravings and rantings, somehow easier to digest. The voices prickle and stick, evoking that ancient tale, a failure to communicate. This is not a duet, not a dialogue.

Franz, helming the novel’s odd chapters, takes the lead. Here’s childhood, adolescence, nascent adulthood, distilled into fragments:

Obedience. Belief. Suffering. Instructions followed. Expectations fulfilled. Said yes and please and thank you and three bags full, sir. Controlled stray impulses. Cleaned teeth, ditto ears. Swilled elderberry syrup. Studied the Good Book. Knew mastery and eventually self-mastery. Did what was dinned into me, and eventually started doing some dinning of my own. Shoveled snow. Madonnified women. Got in shape. Fiddled. Suffered. Was afraid. Could barely stand Father’s glower. Rarely laughed. Prayed. Fed swine. Visited libraries. Mucked out the cowshed. Dogmas, apologias, ethics. Kissed Helen. Struggled for purity. Homiletics, catechesis, liturgy. Forswore eggs. Was afraid. Was good. Marriage. Ministry.

Franz betrays Helen not in a torrid tryst or a meaningful long-term affair with an extramarital soulmate. It’s a one-off, an almost comically ordinary lapse. It’s not a fling; it’s a thing that happens—and yet it detonates his life, initiating an existential crisis in Franz-as-preacher:

Once it’s been understood that our existential crisis is first and foremost a crisis of our senses, then in spite of metaphysical obfuscations we can see the therapy: The extension and promotion of sensuality. An expansion of the realm of the senses. Humanity will only have a future if we are successful in establishing a new Age of Tulips. The individual sets aside his gloom as soon as he feels his body is a house of joy. A precondition for this is moral enfeeblement, because morality has seen its role for thousands of years as an impediment to French kisses. To put it briefly: Traditional morality impedes sensuality.

Franz’s desire for sensuality is undercut by an intellectual airiness, a quippiness of the spirit. Our man is full of aphorisms:

Castrate the fathers, gag the mothers.

and

I say again, gladly: Happiness is remote.

and

Cleared out the attic, threw all the rubbish away. My concern: The head empty of rubbish and without level crossing attendant will produce badness.

and

Humor, though. Almost eludes description. Strangely adorable bastard child of love and wistfulness.

You can throw a small dart in this short book and find a nice line from Franz. (I plucked most of these from very early in the novel, before too much of the (non)plot develops.)

But back to our Franz’s claim that “Traditional morality impedes sensuality” and thus human joy requires “moral enfeeblement” — a problem for a one-time theologian.

In contrast, Franz’s father Klement expresses an earthy sensuality in each of his chapters; he milks his cows and reflects on their udders, their calfing, their literal breeding. His bovine reflections drift into memories of his family, sketching out the often painful history of his children. We also come to see that, like his son, Klement is an outsider. He doesn’t quite fit in at the local pub. The other patrons can’t comprehend his contempt for the modern world.

Some of the finest moments in The Frog in the Throat happen when Franz wanders into a theme that Klement, grumbling from the cowshed, will half-pick up on in the next chapter—less a conversation than a comic game of misheard telephone. These echoes and prefigurations create a thematic tone, however discordant. Take for instance middle-aged Franz, feeling as if he’ll never really mature:

I’ll be fifty soon and I wonder what being grown-up will feel like. Was I grown-up when I turned twenty-two? For a bet, then, I ate a coffee cup. No problem. My stomach was equal to the challenge. Today, I poke at my sauerkraut. An un-grown-up way of behaving, only confirming one’s suspicion that being grown-up, like everything else, is a passing condition.

And a chapter later, Klement confirms Franz’s intuition:

People remain a mystery, you can read a hundred books and you’ll be no closer to understanding them, that’s my view, and when I was younger, I always used to think: When I’m older, I’ll work it out. You see, when you’re young, you see old fellows with white hair, and you think: They may be old and knackered, but they have experience of life, they’re not floundering like us, and maybe they have wisdom. And suddenly you’re old and gray yourself, and you realize that’s all you are, old and gray and just as clueless as you ever were, and so I say: No one’s got the secret. I often think we should view everything from above, we should look down on the world from way up high, and who knows what we would see, what connections, what never-guessed bridges and linkages, or then again maybe not. What a tangled mess, what a confused jumble, I don’t know.

Perhaps the two preceding passages might give a prospective reader the incorrect impression that The Frog in the Throat is a dour novel; it is not. It is often quite funny and quite moving. It’s easy to identify with Franz’s groping questions, and as the book progresses, we come to see under Klement’s anger a wounded pathos. Perhaps the father’s name is not ultimately ironic; perhaps there is a mercy in his haunting his son. Maybe Franz sees the past with new eyes (or, rather ears) through his father’s visitation. But I’m inclined to agree with translator Michael Hofmann in his introduction, when he suggests that “reconciliation is out of the question, but equally there is no possibility of not laughing.”

Synthesis between father and son was never the goal of this novel, let alone a metaphysical coherence. Rather, Werner seems to express his own literary ambitions most directly near the end of the novel, when his antihero Franz declares his admiration for novels that

…are subversive, making clear that their authors, in writing them, did so to avoid doing something far worse…the books that crackle subtly, the semi-house-trained powder kegs of books, the incautious, unconsidered, and if you like erroneous ones…

I’m not sure that The Frog in the Throat is a powder keg, but it does crackle subtly.

I have perhaps overshared Werner’s prose in this review. The truth is I just really loved the way his sentences stack up. And I must again applaud translator Michael Hofmann’s work here; his new  translation of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz was one of my favorite reads in recent memory. So I’ll share one last stack of sentences, again from a Franz section. It’s a passage I dogeared, perhaps thinking it exemplary of the novel’s sharp pacing and shifts between pathos and dark humor:

In the morning I’m miserable, at night I’m scared, and during the day I am at pains not to attract attention, putting one foot in front of the other, forming sentences, combing my hair, leaving tips for the waitstaff and buying five tomatoes and answering the telephone in my best and brightest voice, reading this and that in the newspaper, not killing myself, showering regularly. And I give advice to people and listen to them and feel moved by their confidence in me. I sit around, I drink, I brood, I pat myself down for flaws and find many and each evening I say: Starting tomorrow I’m going to get a grip on myself.

—but really it’s that last clause there hanging from the colon that I most connect to. For tomorrow, I too will get a grip on myself.

Highly recommended.

 

 

Sunday Comix

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A one-panel gag by Jay Lynch (as “Phil Space”) from Gothic Blimp Works #3, 1969, the East Village Other.

“Parents and Children,” a very short story by Alberto Savinio

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“Parents and Children”

by

Alberto Savinio

translated by Richard Pevear

Today, at the table, my daughter complained to her mother and me about the antipathy that we, her parents, show towards her friends of both sexes, and had shown to her little playmates when she was still a child. She added: “I make a point of not inviting my friends to the house, knowing so well how badly you’ll treat them.”

I was about to deny it, but I didn’t. My daughter’s words had enlightened me. They had clarified a feeling in me that until now had been obscure. And what they clarified most of all was the analogy that suddenly appeared to me between this feeling of mine and an identical feeling which for some time I had recognized in my daughter: the antipathy she has for my and her mother’s friends.

We’re at the table, as a family, united in love, and behind that veil, we are mute enemies on a silent battlefield.

The reasons for this war are the same: the will to affirm yourself, the will to deny your neighbor and, if possible, to annihilate him. Whoever it may be. Even your own father, even your own child. And if the will to annihilate your own father or your own child rarely reveals itself, that is not because it isn’t there but because it is overlaid by another will: that of affirming yourself through your own father or your own child and, beyond that, through relatives, friends, through all those who are or whom we believe are part of ourselves, an extension of ourselves, a development of our own possibilities.

At the table, my daughter’s words had revealed this usually hidden and silent will at one stroke.

Nobody spoke. We all felt the pricking of conscience under our seats.

Which of us is entirely alone? Each of us has a maniple, or a cohort, or even an army of persons by means of which he reinforces himself, extends himself, expands himself. The force of association is that much greater in the young, the more recent is the discovery in themselves of this force, its usefulness, its possibilities.

Hence that most strict, most active, most fanatical jealousy that unites my children to their friends (parts of themselves), and to their teachers, and to all that constitutes their “personal” world; hence the jealousy, though more loose, that unites me to my friends—I who also know how to fight alone; I who also know not to fight; I who am also aware of the vanity of fighting.

There are four of us at the table: a family; and behind each of us a little army is drawn up—invisible.

Rarely does the presence of this militia manifest itself; rarely does this militia have occasion to manifest itself. So complex, so various, so different, so contrary are the feelings in the heart of a single family: that mess.

But any reason at all, and the most unexpected at that, can spark a clash or even a most cruel battle. And the invisible troops go into action.

The most indirect of combats. The armies, here more than elsewhere, are passive—and indifferent—instruments. But this most indirect of combats, fought by invisible armies, is in truth the most direct of combats, fought between the most visible adversaries: husband and wife, parents and children.

The combat between parents and children is more bitter, because the children bring to it an enormous load of personal interests, a whole future of them; and the parents for their part have to defend themselves, defend the field against the threat of dispossession, against the “humiliating” danger of substitution.

And if the war between parents and children almost never ends in a fatal way, that is because at a certain point, when the battle is about to get rough, the parents and children separate; the children abandon the parents and go their own way; they understand the uselessness, the absurdity of combat with adversaries with whom, at bottom, they have nothing in common.

The battle between parents and children—the not always silent battle between parents and children—though ended not by the victory of one of the parties, but by a peaceful abandoning of the field, has its epinicium in a closer, more profound, more passionate union of the parents.

If silver anniversaries and golden anniversaries are celebrated, with even greater reason we should celebrate the new and more solemn anniversary once the children, having become adult, having left their training period behind, having become conscious of the need for a different strategy, abandon the parents and set out on their own way, towards the only true and fruitful battles, which are those that are fought between people of the same generation.

Because matrimony, that poetic song of generation (if the pun be permitted), is a pact bound with sacred ties between a man and a woman of the same generation, against other generations, against other people, all of them, including their own children. Once the children leave, the
union between husband and wife is purified of its practical reason (procreation); it withdraws into its own pure reason; it enters into the condition of poetry.

One point remained obscure to me. Why this antipathy of mine for my daughter’s friends, little men and women whom I do not know and have almost never seen; why this antipathy of my daughter’s for her mother’s friends and mine, men and women whom my daughter rarely sees, and with whom she has no common affections, feelings, tastes, interests?

I understood.

Friends, in this case, are a way of playing off the cushions (a term from billiards).

The empire of the good, in spite of so many transmutations of values, and though the reasons that first established that empire have weakened greatly and are becoming more and more confused—the empire of the good still has so much force, so much authority, that it does not allow a son to say, or even think, “I dislike my father,” nor a father to say, or even think, “I dislike my son.” But there is antipathy between fathers and sons. And even hatred. All the more antipathy, all the more hatred, insofar as the conditions for antipathy and hatred are much more frequent between those who love each other and who are united not only by love but by a common life, by common means, by a common affection for people and things, by common habits. Antipathy and hatred do not exclude sympathy and love, just as sympathy and love do not exclude antipathy and hatred. On the contrary. A strange cohabitation, but cohabitation all the same. And they either alternate, or one gains the upper hand over the other, or one hides the other—hides behind the other, as most often happens, despite the will to the good that we put into it, that we know we should put into it, that we feel a duty to put into it—that we sense the convenience of putting into it. And there is antipathy and hatred—there is “even” antipathy and hatred—of children for parents and parents for children behind love, behind great love, behind the greatest love; but since this antipathy and hatred cannot be given directly and openly to those it is destined for, the antipathy and hatred go, by an automatic transfer, and unbeknownst to the interested parties, to those who represent the “continuation” of the children, the continuation of the parents: to the friends of the children, to the friends of the parents.

The deepest ground of the drama of passion.

Sept. 11 — Nicola Verlato 

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Sept. 11 by Nicola Verlato (b. 1965)

Birthday stacks | Not really a blog about Biblioklept turning nineteen

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A few weekends ago we did the take-your-kid-to-college thing, made the ninety-minute SW drive to Gainesville, FL to move our daughter into her first place on her own. She’s living in the same apartment complex her mom lived in, only under a different name. (The apartment complex has a different name. Not my daughter or wife — although I guess my wife has something of a different name, having taken my own last name up as hers.) There was some nostalgia, some weird feelings, etc. But mostly excitement, followed by backache, muscle ache, and an intense week of schlepping even more stuff around my house, cleaning, painting, refinishing, etc. as we repurposed our daughter’s room into an office and my wife’s old office into a studio space for our son.

This process displaced many many books. The house was already littered with stacks, with at least two established semi-permanent piles of incoming volumes and TBRs and etc., but somehow all the furniture relocation led to an entire bookcase heading south and west of Biblioklept World Headquarters. I culled what I could and vowed to get to the rest later. And here we are.

I started this blog on 9 Sept. 2006, nineteen years ago today. I don’t think I would have remembered this connection, even though I’ve blogged about Biblioklept’s birthday several times before, if I hadn’t heard the local sportscaster on his local morning-commute sports show give a shoutout to his wife, whose birthday is today. I thought, Oh, that’s Biblioklept’s birthday too.

(The local sportscaster’s wife is his second wife, or maybe third, I’m not really sure. But he used to be married, way back in the gay nineties, to the news anchor. They were our little big town’s version of a celebrity couple, maybe. (I remember I took a date to Barnes & Nobles and then the Chili’s by the Barnes & Noble — these places are long gone — and I saw the sportscaster and his anchor wife bickering in the Chili’s parking lot before I ate fajitas or whatever.) The sportscaster’s news anchor wife had an affair with the weatherman, a bold blond surfer specimen who frequently wore suspenders on air. This affair was something of an open secret, and I think some of the people involved were fired, or shuffled to different networks. It’s like the most low rent version of prime Fleetwood Mac you could imagine.

Anyway, the anchor and the weatherman are still married. He still does the weather and she’s the mayor of the city now. Her ex covers local sports on TV, the web, and the radio. I listen to his show in the mornings as a diversion from reality. It’s not very good, but it’s better than the complacent centrism of NPR. I haven’t been able to listen to music on morning drives in decades (I would have to pull the vehicle over and weep); I cannot follow audiobooks or even podcasts in the mornings; I take the inane meaningless chatter for aural breakfast. Today was the sportscaster’s current wife’s birthday. And Biblioklept’s.)

So well and anyway, I thought, I should do some kind of birthday post for the blog. So again, here we are. (Or maybe you have wisely left by this point.)

How about those promised stacks, those totem poles that keep getting moved from room to room? Here’s one:

What these books have in common is that some of them used to be in a bookcase that is now in Gainesville and I don’t know where to put them. All the B.S. Johnson books came from a B.S. Johnson jag I went on a few years ago, and they ended up tucked away — can’t stick them on the shelf of American postmodernists, right? And Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry? What an amazing novel? How have I not reread it. I got the Tim Tebow and Werner Herzog books for Christmas and I read them both. José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night is maybe my richest reading experience of the past year.

Here’s another picture of a stack of books:

I got another copy of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway a few weeks ago, which I think led to me pulling out some Woolfs (Wolves?); everything else here seems random, chaotic, emblematic maybe of my self-disgust—what am I doing with all these books? Of course I want to own a hardback first of Angela Carter’s Wise Children, even if I can’t find a proper home for it, right? And why wouldn’t I snap up every Alasdair Gray novel I come across? I think all these Evan Dara books were stacked up in the same missing bookcase that the B.S. Johnson books were stacked in; now they are loose, reminding me of the novelist’s diminishing career. Do I really need to hold on to Permanent Earthquake? The novel is terrible and the book itself is a cheaply-bound print-on-demand thing. It makes me feel sad. The Lost Scrapbook is amazing.

I was 27 when I started this blog.

What am I even doing here?

The Gordon Lish books were almost certainly smashed up against the B.S. Johnson and Evan Dara books — I think I wasn’t sure where to shelf them. I have been very mad at Gordon Lish for a few years now for reasons I promised not to divulge but which basically have to do with his being a flaming asshole. I finished Markus Werner’s novel The Frog in the Throat a week ago and the ending made me tear up. It’s a novel about aging and failure and fear; it’s very, very funny. The late great David Berman once said that Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers was his favorite novel. I loved it and I suppose I’ll refuse to read another Robert Stone novel. (Why?)

For some years, David Berman kept Biblioklept on the blog roll of his blog Menthol Mountains. That’s like the proudest I’ve ever been of anything that ever happened on this blog. I miss him.

Last stack — not really the last stack, there are at least three others, but I’m getting tired of this, in several senses:

John Keene’s collection/semi-novel Counternarratives is one of the best things I’ve read in forever. He refracts history through these layered polyphonic fictions that pull truth from the margins. My favorite piece in the collection reads like a riff on Melville’s Benito Cereno. I read Leonora Carrington’s novel The Stone Door, realized I misread it, then read it again. I have about four tabs open attempting to properly review it, but alas! I don’t know. I keep failing to find a grip into Di Benedetto’s The Suicides; maybe it’ll take soon. I started reading Antoine Volodine’s Mevlido’s Dreams around 12:30am this morning. It’s much funnier so far than I would have imagined. I’d mislaid the novel maybe a year ago; it was in a pile in the back of a bookcase that is now south and west of here.

I don’t have a way out of this post. I’ll do this blog at least one more year. Odysseus did twenty years, right? That’s a ridiculous stupid fucking sentence, the previous one.

This summer has been the weirdest one of my life, but it’s over now, right?

Vessels — Josh Dorman

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Vessels, 2021 by Josh Dorman (b. 1966)

Mass-market Monday | Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo

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Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed, 1972. Avon Bard Books (1978). Cover art by Andrew Rhodes (not credited); no designer credited. 256 pages.

A perfect novel. Reed’s five-novel run from ’67 to ’76 is astounding (the later stuff is good too).

From Mumbo Jumbo:

…Faust was an actual person. Somewhere between 1510 and 1540 this “wandering conjurer and medical quack” made his travels about the southwest German Empire, telling people his knowledge of “secret things.” I always puzzled over why such a legend was so basic to the Western mind; but I’ve thought about it and now I think I know the answer. Can’t you imagine this man traveling about with his bad herbs, love philters, physicks and potions, charms, overcharging the peasants but dazzling them with his badly constructed Greek and sometimes labeling his “wonder cures” with gibberish titles like “Polyunsaturated 99½% pure.” Hocus-pocus. He makes a living and can always get a free night’s lodging at an inn with his ability to prescribe cures and tell fortunes, that is, predict the future. You see he travels about the Empire and is able to serve as a kind of national radio for people in the locales. Well 1 day while he is leeching people, cutting hair or raising the dead who only have diseases which give the manifestations of death, something really works. He knows that he’s a bokor adept at card tricks, but something really works. He tries it again and it works. He continues to repeat this performance and each time it works. The peasants begin to look upon him as a supernatural being and he encourages the tales about him, that he heals the sick and performs marvels. He becomes wealthy with his ability to do The Work. Royalty visits him. He is a counselor to the king. He lives in a castle. Peasants whisper, a Black man, a very bearded devil himself visits him. That strange coach they saw, the 1 with the eyes as decorations drawn to his castle by wild-looking black horses. They say that he has made a pact with the devil because he invites the Africans who work in various cities throughout the Empire to his castle. There were 1000s in Europe at the time: blackamoors who worked as butlers, coachmen, footmen, pint-sized page boys; and conjurors whom only the depraved consulted. The villagers hear “Arabian” music, drums coming from the place but as soon as the series of meetings begin it all comes to a halt. Rumors circulate that Faust is dead. The village whispers that the Black men have collected. That is the nagging notion of Western man. China had rocketry, Africa iron furnaces, but he didn’t know when to stop with his newly found Work. That’s the basic wound. He will create fancy systems 13 letters long to convince himself he doesn’t have this wound. What is the wound? Someone will even call it guilt. But guilt implies a conscience. Is Faust capable of charity? No it isn’t guilt but the knowledge in his heart that he is a bokor. A charlatan who has sent 1000000s to the churchyard with his charlatan panaceas. Western man doesn’t know the difference between a houngan and a bokor. He once knew this difference but the knowledge was lost when the Atonists crushed the opposition. When they converted a Roman emperor and began rampaging and book-burning. His sorcery, white magic, his bokorism will improve. Soon he will be able to annihilate 1000000s by pushing a button. I do not believe that a Yellow or Black hand will push this button but a robot-like descendant of Faust the quack will. The dreaded bokor, a humbug who doesn’t know when to stop.

“One of These Days” — Gabriel García Márquez

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“One of These Days”

by Gabriel García Márquez

translated by J.S. Bernstein

Monday dawned warm and rainless. Aurelio Escovar, a dentist without a degree, and a very early riser, opened his office at six. He took some false teeth, still mounted in their plaster mold, out of the glass ease and put on the table a fistful of instruments which he arranged in size order, as if they were on display. He wore a collarless striped shirt, closed at the neck with a golden stud, and pants held up by suspenders. He was erect and skinny, with a look that rarely corresponded to the situation, the way deaf people have of looking.

When he had things arranged on the table, he pulled the drill toward the dental chair and sat down to polish the false teeth. He seemed not to be thinking about what he was doing, but worked steadily, pumping the drill with his feet, even when he didn’t need it.

After eight he stopped for a while to look at the sky through the window, and he saw two pensive buzzards who were drying themselves in the sun on the ridgepole of the house next door. He went on working with the idea that before lunch it would rain again. The shrill voice of his eleven-year-old son interrupted his concentration.

“Papá”

“What?”

“The Mayor wants to know if you’ll pull his tooth.”

“Tell him I’m not here.”

He was polishing a gold tooth. He held it at arm’s length, and examined it with his eyes half closed. His son shouted again from the little waiting room.

“He says you are, too, because he can hear you.”

The dentist kept examining the tooth. Only when he had put it on the table with the finished work did he say:

“So much the better.”

He operated the drill again. He took several pieces of a bridge out of a cardboard box where he kept the things he still had to do and began to polish the gold.

“Papá.”

“What?”

He still hadn’t changed his expression.

“He says if you don’t take out his tooth, he’ll shoot you.”

Without hurrying, with an extremely tranquil movement, he stopped pedaling the drill, pushed it away from the chair, and pulled the lower drawer of the table all the way out. There was a revolver. “O.K.,” he said. “Tell him to come and shoot me.”

He rolled the chair over opposite the door, his hand resting on the edge of the drawer. The Mayor appeared at the door. He had shaved the left side of his face, but the other side, swollen and in pain, had a five-day-old beard. The dentist saw many nights of desperation in his dull eyes. He closed the drawer with his fingertips and said softly:

“Sit down.”

“Good morning,” said the Mayor.

“Morning,” said the dentist.

While the instruments were boiling, the Mayor leaned his skull on the headrest of the chair and felt better. His breath was icy. It was a poor office: an old wooden chair, the pedal drill, a glass case with ceramic bottles. Opposite the chair was a window with a shoulder-high cloth curtain. When he felt the dentist approach, the Mayor braced his heels and opened his mouth.

Aurelio Escovar turned his head toward the light. After inspecting the infected tooth, he closed the Mayor’s jaw with a cautious pressure of his fingers.

“It has to be without anesthesia,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because you have an abscess.”

/>   The Mayor looked him in the eye. “All right,” he said, and tried to smile. The dentist did not return the smile. He brought the basin of sterilized instruments to the worktable and took them out of the water with a pair of cold tweezers, still without hurrying. Then he pushed the spittoon with the tip of his shoe, and went to wash his hands in the washbasin. He did all this without looking at the Mayor. But the Mayor didn’t take his eyes off him.

It was a lower wisdom tooth. The dentist spread his feet and grasped the tooth with the hot forceps. The Mayor seized the arms of the chair, braced his feet with all his strength, and felt an icy void in his kidneys, but didn’t make a sound. The dentist moved only his wrist. Without rancor, rather with a bitter tenderness, he said:

“Now you’ll pay for our twenty dead men.”

The Mayor felt the crunch of bones in his jaw, and his eyes filled with tears. But he didn’t breathe until he felt the tooth come out. Then he saw it through his tears. It seemed so foreign to his pain that he failed to understand his torture of the five previous nights.

Bent over the spittoon, sweating, panting, he unbuttoned his tunic and reached for the handkerchief in his pants pocket. The dentist gave him a clean cloth.

“Dry your tears,” he said.

The Mayor did. He was trembling. While the dentist washed his hands, he saw the crumbling ceiling and a dusty spider web with spider’s eggs and dead insects. The dentist returned, drying his hands. “Go to bed,” he said, “and gargle with salt water.” The Mayor stood up, said goodbye with a casual military salute, and walked toward the door, stretching his legs, without buttoning up his tunic.

“Send the bill,” he said.

“To you or the town?”

The Mayor didn’t look at him. He closed the door and said through the screen:

“It’s the same damn thing.”

Skull of an Ancestor — Gely Korzhev

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Skull of an Ancestor, 1991 by Gely Korzhev (1925-2012)

Sunday Comix

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A “Dirty Duck” strip by Bobby London. From Air Pirates Funnies #1, July 1971, Last Gasp.

Mass-market Monday | John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

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The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, 1939. Penguin Books (1979). Cover design by Neil Stuart. 502 pages.

While it is not fair to call The Grapes of Wrath underrated I think it continues to be under-read. There’s something corny and beautiful I love in Steinbeck’s prose, and while the novel is not without its problems, it remains a sympathetic and convincing depiction of people — laborers — resisting the dehumanizing machinations of capital. Here is Chapter Twenty-One, one of the many stand-alone intercalary vignettes that flesh out the Joad’s saga–

The moving, questing people were migrants now. Those families which had lived on a little piece of land, who had lived and died on forty acres, had eaten or starved on the produce of forty acres, had now the whole West to rove in. And they scampered about, looking for work; and the highways were streams of people, and the ditch banks were lines of people. Behind them more were coming. The great highways streamed with moving people. There in the Middle- and Southwest had lived a simple agrarian folk who had not changed with industry, who had not formed with machines or known the power and danger of machines in private hands. They had not grown up in the paradoxes of industry. Their senses were still sharp to the ridiculousness of the industrial life.

And then suddenly the machines pushed them out and they swarmed on the highways. The movement changed them; the highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed them. The children without dinner changed them, the endless moving changed them. They were migrants. And the hostility changed them, welded them, united them—hostility that made the little towns group and arm as though to repel an invader, squads with pick handles, clerks and storekeepers with shotguns, guarding the world against their own people.

In the West there was panic when the migrants multiplied on the highways. Men of property were terrified for their property. Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man must do before he fights. They said, These goddamned Okies are dirty and ignorant. They’re degenerate, sexual maniacs. These goddamned Okies are thieves. They’ll steal anything. They’ve got no sense of property rights.

And the latter was true, for how can a man without property know the ache of ownership? And the defending people said, They bring disease, they’re filthy. We can’t have them in the schools. They’re strangers. How’d you like to have your sister go out with one of ’em?

The local people whipped themselves into a mold of cruelty. Then they formed units, squads, and armed them—armed them with clubs, with gas, with guns. We own the country. We can’t let these Okies get out of hand. And the men who were armed did not own the land, but they thought they did. And the clerks who drilled at night owned nothing, and the little storekeepers possessed only a drawerful of debts. But even a debt is something, even a job is something. The clerk thought, I get fifteen dollars a week. S’pose a goddamn Okie would work for twelve? And the little storekeeper thought, How could I compete with a debtless man?

And the migrants streamed in on the highways and their hunger was in their eyes, and their need was in their eyes. They had no argument, no system, nothing but their numbers and their needs. When there was work for a man, ten men fought for it—fought with a low wage. If that fella’ll work for thirty cents, I’ll work for twenty-five.

If he’ll take twenty-five, I’ll do it for twenty.

No, me, I’m hungry. I’ll work for fifteen. I’ll work for food. The kids. You ought to see them. Little boils, like, comin’ out, an’ they can’t run aroun’. Give ’em some windfall fruit, an’ they bloated up. Me. I’ll work for a little piece of meat.

And this was good, for wages went down and prices stayed up. The great owners were glad and they sent out more handbills to bring more people in. And wages went down and prices stayed up. And pretty soon now we’ll have serfs again.

And now the great owners and the companies invented a new method. A great owner bought a cannery. And when the peaches and the pears were ripe he cut the price of fruit below the cost of raising it. And as cannery owner he paid himself a low price for the fruit and kept the price of canned goods up and took his profit. And the little farmers who owned no canneries lost their farms, and they were taken by the great owners, the banks, and the companies who also owned the canneries. As time went on, there were fewer farms. The little farmers moved into town for a while and exhausted their credit, exhausted their friends, their relatives. And then they too went on the highways. And the roads were crowded with men ravenous for work, murderous for work.

And the companies, the banks worked at their own doom and they did not know it. The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads. The granaries were full and the children of the poor grew up rachitic, and the pustules of pellagra swelled on their sides. The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line. And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.

Sunday Comix

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Art from “Tomb of the Space Gods” by Alexis Ziritt; from Space Riders #3, June 2015 by Alexis Ziritt (artist), Fabian Rangel, Jr. (writer), and Ryan Ferrier (letterer)Rory Hayes. Published by Black Mask Studios.

“The Last Untamed Writer in America,” another William T. Vollmann profile

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Photograph of William Vollmann in his studio by Ian Bates

Late last week, The Wall Street Journal published “The Last Untamed Writer in America,” a profile of William T. Vollmann. The piece begins with its author Alexander Nazaryan politely refusing breakfast scotch from Vollmann, who is hosting Nazaryan at his studio (a converted Mexican restaurant):

It was breakfast time at the Sacramento, Calif., home of the novelist William T. Vollmann, which meant time for scotch. Out came two gold-colored shot glasses, modeled after 50-caliber rounds, a gift from a relative to the gun-loving writer. Despite gentle pressure, I stuck to my coffee, so Vollmann poured himself only a perfunctory nip of the Balvenie DoubleWood 12. “This will get me buzzed up,” Vollmann said. Then he added, ruefully, “I can hardly drink at all anymore.”

The piece has some interesting quips from Vollmann, but it doesn’t really expand on Alexander Sorondo’s long essay “The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann’s Battle to Publish an American Epic,” from this spring–notes on Vollmann’s cancer, getting dropped by his publisher Viking, and finding a home for his epic A Table for Fortune with Skyhorse, an iffy group that has published books by RF Kennedy Jr. and Alex Jones. A lot of the notes will be familiar with those tuned into the myth of the Vollmann (guns, drugs, sex, volume, etc.), but it’s kinda sorta interesting to see how the conservative Wall Street Journal frames Vollmann. They play up Vollmann’s enthusiasm for guns and note that he is not an author to be “cowed by sensitivity readers”; they even get a quote from him decrying “people who want trigger warnings.” And yet even when Vollmann professes a tinge of patriotism, he deflates it immediately:

“I love America because it’s my homeland, and I love Americans,” Vollmann says. “What I dislike is the whole hypocritical American exceptionalism. We do all these dirty, crummy things.”

There are some cool photos by Ian Bates accompanying the article, which you can read unpaywalled here.

A visit to Cormac McCarthy’s “enormous and chaotically disorganized personal library”

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Photograph of Cormac McCarthy’s living room by Wayne Martin Belger

The September/October issue of Smithonian Magazine includes a visit to the late Cormac McCarthy’s house in New Mexico. The piece is by Richard Grant, who explains how the visit came about:

I was invited to the house by two McCarthy scholars who were embroiled in a herculean endeavor. Working unpaid, with help from other volunteer scholars and occasional graduate students, they had taken it upon themselves to physically examine and digitally catalog every single book in McCarthy’s enormous and chaotically disorganized personal library. They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.

It’s a long feature and contributes more information to McCarthy’s biography than I would have thought (please, Josh Brolin, give us McCarthy’s full story about “drinking wine with André the Giant in Paris”). Grant also focuses heavily on the scholarship going into cataloging McCarthy’s library. Grant describes “looking through a batch [of books to be cataloged] about Cistercian abbeys, violin makers, metaphysics, meta-ontology, the incest taboo and the material foundations of ancient Mesopotamian civilization.” We learn that McCarthy owned at least thirteen editions of Moby-Dick. Scholars found uncashed royalty checks to the tune of ten grand bookmarking William Faulkner’s niece’s memoir. Grant also shares some of McCarthy’s annotations, like this one:

In his copy of The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style, McCarthy penciled his opinion of slip-on dress shoes: ‘disgusting.’ Further down the same page, next to a sentence praising shiny-buckled monk-strap shoes, he wrote, ‘yet more horror.’

The photographs by Wayne Martin Belger are likely to particularly interest McCarthy nerds. My favorite of the batch is a slip of paper in McCarthy’s handwriting, posed atop a Wittgenstein volume. The slip includes what appears to be a rough budget, notes on “Spengler’s number,” and a short grocery list:

“TARTAR SAUCE

CELERY SALT.”

I also dig Belger’s photograph of McCarthy’s gun barrel schematic; check out the piece for more:

Photograph of “Gun books and catalogs including a schematic, hand-drawn by McCarthy, of a plan to make a gun barrel” by Wayne Martin Belger

Another Dalloway

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Virginia Woolf’s modernist classic Mrs Dalloway is getting a centennial update from publisher NYRB. The new edition is edited by literary critic Edward Mendelson, who makes a persuasive case for his version of the text in the book’s afterword, an essay with the appropriately flat title “The Text of This Edition.” “This edition is an attempt to provide the least bad, perhaps, among many possible editions,” Mendelson writes, before appending after a semicolon: “other editors will rank it more harshly.” I imagine it’s hard work to tidy a giant.

As a point of comparison, I pulled out the HBJ mass-market paperback of Mrs Dalloway that I read at least three times years and years ago; there’s no front or back matter, no intro or afterword, not even a credit for the lovely art. I (a version of myself) had scribbled “symbol is not universal” in the narrow margin of page 41; underlined “narrower and narrower” on page 45; boxed a paragraph catching salmon freely on page 152. Two photographs fell from the book — a picture of my wife and my infant daughter, c. 2008; the other, a picture of my wife and her eighteen-years-younger brother, also an infant in the picture, also held by wife, c. 1998. Those are probably the years I read the book. The older person made more scribbles, I think. What I most remember of the novel Mrs Dalloway is the WWI veteran, Septimus; I recall his anguish as a throbbing (organizing) pulse in the novel’s so-called stream-of-consciousness style. I remember generally enjoying the novel, but preferring Woolf’s Orlando; I remember a sort of sneer on the face of a fellow grad student after this declaration. Orlando is a more fun book, a picaresque sci-fi gender jaunt. I suppose Dalloway is more, like, important.

As another point of comparison, I pulled out the 1990 HBJ trade paperback of Mrs Dalloway that I picked up at the beginning of the summer at a Friends of the Library sale. I wrote in a post about those acquisitions that, “…I’ll be happy to trade out the cheap mass markets of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse I’ve had forever in favor of these HBJ Woolfs (Wolves?)” — but that’s not true. I’ve decided I love the cheap mass market Dalloway. (A sixteen-year-old picture of my wife and daughter falling out of it didn’t hurt.) This 1990 edition features a 1981 introduction by novelist Maureen Howard. She voices her intro in the first-person plural, an unfortunate choice that we employed on this blog in our earlier years, insecure as we were. The occasion of Ms Howard’s introduction is, I think–we think, we mean–the fiftieth anniversary of the novel’s publication, although that math doesn’t add up. I dig Susan Gallagher’s cover art.

The cover for the new NYRB edition features a “specially commissioned” cover that pays “tribute to the original designs by Hogarth Press.” The publisher notes that forthcoming “new editions of To the Lighthouse and The Waves [reprinted] in celebration of their respective centenaries” will also get the cover updates. These editions are also Mendelson edits.

I mostly know Mendelson as the editor of Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays, and as the author of “The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49.”

NYRB’s edition of Mrs Dalloway publishes next month.

Mass-market Monday | Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma

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The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839, Stendhal. Translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. Signet Classics (1962). No cover artist credited. 502 pages.

I have fond memories of reading Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. These memories turn out to be faulty, or perhaps more accurately, not indicative of the experience I had of actually reading the book. I went back and read the riffs I wrote nine years ago on the novel, and words like “boredom” and “slog” pop up. From my last riff on the novel:

Balzac was a great admirer of Charterhouse, as was Italo Calvino, and countless writers too. Indeed, the novel is, I suppose, a cult favorite for writers, which makes sense: Stendhal crowds each page with such psychological realism, such rich life, that every paragraph seems its own novel. I’ll admit that by page 400 or so I was exhausted though.

I’ve noted here a few times that Charterhouse is a “Modernist” novel; perhaps “proto-Modernist” is the term I need. (Again—I’m sure that countless lit critics have sussed over this; pardon my ignorant American ass). And yet Charterhouse also points back at the novels before it, the serialized novels, the epistolary novels, the romances and histories and etceteras of the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries. My favorite lines of the novel were often our ironic narrator’s brief asides like, “Doubtless the reader grows tired…” or “The conversation went on for hours more in trivial detail…” or “The letter went on for pages more after the same fashion…” (These aren’t actual quotes, dear reader, but I think I offer a fair paraphrase here). Stendhal’s modernism, or Modernism, or proto-Modernism, or whatever, is his wily irony, his winking at the novel’s formal characteristics. My own failing, then, is to perhaps want more of this. As I wrote last time I riffed on it, what I suppose I want is a postmodern condensation of The Charterhouse of Parma, such as Donald Barthelme’s 1968 story “Eugénie Grandet,” which parodied Honoré de Balzac’s 1833 novel Eugénie Grandet. 

Screenshot 2016-07-25 at 5.08.00 PM

How much of Balzac’s novel is lovingly leapt through right here?!

This wish of mine is of course my failure, not the novel’s.

The Charterhouse of Parma is undoubtedly an oddity, a work of genius, often thrilling, and often an utter slog. I suppose I’m glad that I finally finished it after so many years of trying, but I’m not sure if I got what I wanted out of it. The failure is mine.

I’ll close with the novel’s final line though, which I adore:

TO THE HAPPY FEW