The Outlet: the Blog of Electric Literature

CLUCK CLUCK

pantaloons

Being my mini-memoir for readings at which everyone

but my two friends is younger than 32.

[for Raymond Federman]

On the road

She’s pushing 50 plus, don’t ask. No more Southern Comfort orgies, existential funhouse trips, Kundalini embraces in grottos, poetry benders, and slightly protected sex, she’s busy trying to be the heroine of the story, a third person.

But I wasn’t sold on third person, so I asked you, Mickey, should I speak in the first person, tell the story as if I had lived it? You’d just finished an MFA program in creative writing. You knew everything. The glass over your displayed stamped degree was fresh. Already, you were teaching Oates and Boyle wannabes about arcs and resolutions. I asked you, novel or something vaguely biographical? You said: Write a memoir. Put your life in the first person. Make it up if you can’t remember it make it shocking or pathetic but don’t tell anyone and above all, make people laugh hard and weep easily. Look in the display windows at Barnes and Nobles. It’s all about memoir, displays of courage amidst adversity. It’s about people overcoming, surviving all sorts of shit. I know you can do it, you said, I know an agent. You were licking your lips when you said that. You and your 20 and 30 something MFA friends were drinking Michelob. You’re still drinking. I see you in the audience, little bro. I should learn from you, selling your first novel to Random House.

She was pulling more than 50 years after her. Distillization, even on a modest scale, seemed daunting. Heaps of shit to recount and re-invent. Yes it’s overwhelming, I said to you, but one must try, I understand, I am told. Your wan, bulimic girlfriend with the belly button ring was in the kitchen fixing something like Vegan tofutti with soy cheese; her skin was blinking like strobe lights. Must’ve been glitter. My skin is dry with furrows like clay from the Paleolithic Age. I was trying a new skin cream from Aveda at the time, I think. Now it’s “facial sculpting” cream by some company owned by a dermatologist in New York. Your girlfriend Zappa drinks bottled water, 12 Evians per day. She’ll never run dry until the mother of all tsunamis comes along to get all of us who are still alive. The Greenland icebergs are sagging, falling flat into the ocean up there, like dead breasts. Time to leave coastal areas.

So as I was saying to all of you dear young things, she the older woman was somewhere I forget. Already I’ve misplaced her, losing my memory and hers in tandem. At least, I should give her a name. I was considerate enough to give you and your girlfriend names. How about Melanoma? Okay okay, I’m kidding, nothing to joke about, stop jumping up and down and screaming. You’ve been trying to make me see this or that ever since you could formulate sentences. You with the cherub cheeks, Kirk Douglas dent in your chin, from the maternal grandfather, always wearing your hair so short nobody like me would ever want to run her fingers through it. Good idea. Keep me at a distance.

This is getting complicated psychologically and I only have so much time, she thought. I can’t possibly go everywhere in one story. I’ll look for somewhere to start. Which reminds me of a chicken.

Why did the chicken refuse to cross the road? Take those i-pods off, please please, birdbrains. Focus your eyes and take something to clear your sinuses. The traffic is belching like a behemoth with botulism, choking on fumes from a caravan of SUV’s, slouching toward Orlando and Miami, palm trees and parking lots under a navel orange smiley face. Would you cross a road under these circumstances? Look at the drivers with their cellular pacifiers. They are everywhere but here, you know. The solipsists would run you down and scamper off with their lawyers. Mommy, mommy —- I want to see Poopoo the Penguin! Didn’t you cry when Mickey Mouse died? Oh, you didn’t know?

So Melanoma okay Melody sat on the curb of a road that winds like a tapeworm from west to east or east to west, depending on who’s telling the story. So maybe she’s in Missouri, where I’ve never been. I need to consult my friend Alla in St. Louis. Hang on. Okay, I can dance the Google too! Seems the road starts down there somewhere, but it’s hard to follow and I can’t get in touch with Alla who’s in Orlando with the boys I just recalled.

Melody was bereft, tuneless. Bereft of what? And what’s her song? you ask. Too many facocta questions for nothing, no reason. Why questions? Knock it off, I say, I’ve always been bereft of my senses, according to many. Stop being hyperbolic, you said dramatically. I think it’s a love song by that Hebrew hater Wagner…. Liebe strom-unt-drung something whatever. Au secours! Courage, mes enfants! Awesome! Wunderbar! Chocolat! She also likes that Nancy Sinatra song about walking boots.

So where was I? On the curb, the stingy, gritty curb of existence, hard on the ass, as usual on the rim of it all, the ledge of success, well to tell the truth far from the ledge but about to fall off, floating on the circumference of meaning, riding a cycle around my self, skirting it in my pink pantaloons with white satin ribbons. Huh? pantaloons? Where did you get them? You asked. You said: too many images confuse me and when you add abstractions, you totally lose it, you know you lose us. You’re like a planet in another solar system called Chaos. You don’t follow the rules and you’re much too self-indulgent to get anywhere, you said. You were emulating the minimalists, as you’d been taught to do. You accused me of swimming unconsciously in streams of consciousness, told me I’m passé with an accent. May a tsunami weep over you, I didn’t say, being somewhat mature. I realized you were upset with me. You usually never simile! But I digress of necessity, as necessity invents digression and digression is the mother of invention.

There were very essential pantaloons in my past, in Melanoma’s history, they suddenly bloom large enough to see hanging on a clothesline in the backyard of a vine-choked stone house in Funafuti, the capitol of the isles of Tuvalu, in which I’ll dwell circa 2019, pantaloons hanging as symbols of the teenage girl’s coming of age in the early 60′s, past the hoola hoop stage, at one of those times (during the last century) when girls who’d teetered over the edge of puberty twittered about wedding nights, wondering what they’d wear to bed and oh wow, what would he feel like, Before i-pods and all that techno stuff kids think they can’t live without. Do girls still do that? Melody wondered, particularly girls with pins in their tongues and tattoos of stars on their breasts?

So pantaloons are important in my mini-memoir I think, Melanoma insisted. The heat was loud that Sunday. Flat, hopeful voices singing dour hymns wafted futilely across the landscape of corn and wheat. No, not both, you boob. Choose. And don’t use all of those adjectives and adverbs! Okay, corn, though this wasn’t Iowa. It was (as understood) uncomfortable on the curb and the donkey was panting. Yes, the donkey, she always shows up (footnote: e.g., see Novack’s “Interview with Self”), the ass drops by. She had an ass, always did, came by it naturally, naturally. It was drooping from the burdens of years of sitting on itself. Asses don’t last. You will learn. Okay, you and Raymond Federman mistrust metaphors. I can’t help it they drop by without even ringing bells. Should I call the cops?

Melody lusted suddenly for King Kong the supermarket of all supermarkets. Henry had insisted she acquire a cell phone so she could consult him while she shopped. Okay, Henry, she would say into the phone. I’m by the carrots. Do you want any? No? Oh please, not okra. You know I loathe okra! . . . . So now I’m by the fish and there are some elegant yet tragic baby octopuses, fresh from Santorini, glistening with Greek salt shine, even. And Henry would reply with incredulity: What the fuck, are you kidding? Yuck!

I was nearing a coma from the heat. I’d left the Bombay gin behind, of necessity, having fled with startling alacrity. The cops. They would find all of us under the beds with our leaflets. I’d had it with Henry anyway. Had IT, if you know what I mean or even if you don’t, this is gritty realism. This memoir is authentic and exciting, full of tragedies. But talking about failed relationships is boring, at my age, at least. Being 20 something, maybe you think I can teach you something. Forget it. You couldn’t take my life, take it and make something of it, like a lesson in perseverance. You wouldn’t know what to do with it. It’s much too messy, you’d say. Knowing you, you’d reduce it drastically, deleting the most succulent bits, like those references to crème brulee, fatty pastrami, pistachio nuts, and long boned loin lamb chops. Now Melody forgets even what Henry looked like though he was everything to her, the sun, the moon, the stars, the big screen television and especially the waterbed, particularly when it leaked, threatening instant death by electric shock. Once they flowed together, bounced in harmony to the beat of some band or other. He was meaningful.

Sitting on the curb with my fat ass. We were both thirsty and there was no grass left. So you want I should suddenly have a realization that will change my life or something dramatic should happen. Well it did. A big white SUV with LALA plates rear-ends my ass and takes off, tires squealing, gas fuming. Dang dang, no fuckin transportation now. That’s silly, you say. But where was Melody going?

Melody was seeking her next song, the one after Henry, who was always the same chords, the same beat outside the bedrooms. She was delirious from the sun, a mass of discordant notes and hair, aimless. Nobody ever listened to her. She would often say: You’re not LISTENING. And she would frequently get no response, frequently because she’d forgotten to open her mouth to utter her questions. I want to make a difference, I would often say. And you would ask suspiciously, a difference in what? To what? How different? Jeez, you gave me headaches, always did, as if you were listening, which you weren’t. You were always too busy. Always. Hang on. That’s someone else’s American father I’m remembering.

But that’s no matter. I see this guy up the road, let’s say a latish 40′ish dish full of sinews, trying to hitch a ride. Nobody picks up hikers you should know, no longer, after Ted Bundy. Nobody refers to a guy as a dish. This guy is waving four signs at the passing vehicles. One of them says: IS ANYONE GOING TO TENNESSEE? Another states: FORMER LINGUISTICS PROFESSOR NEEDS RIDE TO TALLAHASSEE. The third sign reads: ANYWHERE WILL DO. And the fourth sign asks: HOW ABOUT SASKATEWAN?

On this road, everyone’s going east. The former professor imagines that he has a choice. Melody finds that endearing.

You will go anywhere, anywhere but here. Understood. I know that. In that, we are alike. Melody will go anywhere. She wants to overcome everything by walking away, riding donkeys, getting ON with her life, getting unstuck from the same rhythms and notes.

So why a former linguistics professor? You ask.

He’d had enough of the language of uttered and written words. He wanted to carve mountains out of molehills, I reply. That’s the answer, I can’t help it, I add, walking into the closet.

This is an excerpt from a longer work that appears in The Journal of Experimental Fiction

- New Yorker Carol Novack is a former criminal defense and constitutional attorney and recipient of a writer’s award from the Australian government. She’s a frequent collaborator, the author of a poetry chapbook, and publisher of Mad Hatters’ Review. A selection of short writings, “Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack,” will be published in 2010 by Crossing Chaos. Recent works may or will be found in numerous journals, including 5_trope, ActionYes, American Letters & Commentary, Caketrain, Diagram, Exquisite Corpse, Fiction International, Gargoyle, Journal of Experimental Fiction, La Petite Zine, LIT, and Notre Dame Review, and in many anthologies, including “Online Writings: The Best of the First Ten Years,” “The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets,” and “The &Now Awards: the Best Innovative Writing.” See her blog for further information.

Jeffrey, Vincent, Jeffrey and Vincent’s Father, and the Woman in the Photograph

trashfamily At a party, sitting at the dining room table, Jeffrey talks shit to James, asserting that he’s a poser, he’s wrong if he thinks he’s cool, and that, generally, he’s a piece of shit. James sits across from Jeffrey, nodding his head. Jeffrey loses his virginity to a freshman in his best friend’s parents’ bed a couple weeks later, at another party, and the following week, with his best friend on the line, silent and listening in, breaks up with her on the phone. After she hangs up, his best friend laughs and covers his face with his hand. He says that Jeffrey is “so crazy.” Another one of Jeffrey’s friends acquires two pairs of boxing gloves, and for weeks, his friends spend their days after school using the boxing gloves to beat the shit out of each other. Jeffrey attends the first two of these meetings–both times managing not to box–then begins going straight home after school, letting his voicemail answer his friends’ calls, until he finds himself in a situation where both his friends and the two pairs of boxing gloves are present. Jeffrey is pressured into a boxing match with a taller male, never lands a solid punch, and just after the match ends and his opponent is walking away, Jeffrey punches him hard on the back of his head. His friends make fun of him for at least the next month.

Jeffrey’s parents begin thinking about divorce, and do so by Thanksgiving Day, the process culminating in an episode where Jeffrey sits alone downstairs, clenching the armrests of the green leather recliner, sweating and short of breath, listening to his mother upstairs in her bedroom go insane while his father says nothing. By Christmas, Jeffrey has moved into the basement and begun using a separate entrance. He and his friend smoke marijuana behind the school parking lot the day after Christmas Break is over, and James appears from behind some bushes with Robert, who Jeffrey heard once brought a sawed-off shotgun to a church parking lot where a group of kids were supposed to fight and yelled something about killing everyone. James pushes Jeffrey a number of times, calls him a “little girl,” calls him a “bitch,” moves his face close to Jeffrey’s face and “forces” Jeffrey to say that he’s a “little bitch” and that he won’t talk shit on James again. Robert sometimes interjects, calmly, and almost softly, something about notes, passed around in class, that reference Jeffrey’s shit-talking. Jeffrey keeps swallowing involuntarily. He convinces both of his parents to let him switch to a public school that’s closer to his house and does not make any friends there. He discovers the rave scene and tries ecstasy for the first time, eventually resulting in his mother, about a year later, finding over 30 hits of LSD in his car and sending him to live with his father. Jeffrey is grounded and can’t move his bowels for a week. He becomes ill, and during the worst of it, is overcome with sweating and fever, lying in bed with the space heater turned on high, thinking that, in order to move his limbs, he must first activate in his body a number of strings, levers and pulleys that he can actually see. Shortly after he’s ungrounded, Jeffrey drives to his friend’s house, and since his friend isn’t there, decides to wait. His friend pulls into the driveway with James in the passenger seat of the car. Jeffrey runs out the back door and through the neighboring back yard and types to his friend, on “AOL Instant Messenger,” a half hour later, that he saw James in the passenger seat of his car and ran away, and his friend replies that he is a pussy, that he’s laughing, that James and another kid are there, and that they are all laughing.

Jeffrey begins to occasionally wear pajamas to school. This progresses to wearing pajamas and eating LSD at school almost every day. In the middle of his junior year of high school, he wins the school art competition with a black and white photograph of a cactus that he colored with colored pencils while high on LSD. At parent teacher conferences, the photography teacher tells Jeffrey’s mother that Jeffrey has a “gift,” and his mother beams, Jeffrey sitting beside her, and a week later, walking into another party, this one hosted by friends from his old high school, and seeing James standing right there, at the top of the stairs. Jeffrey avoids James until James approaches and says not to worry, that he’s not going to beat him up, and that he’s sorry, because it must suck to have to wear diapers whenever he’s around. James grins and laughs and Jeffrey watches him.

He takes college classes between his junior and senior year of high school so he can graduate at the end of the first quarter of his senior year, and shortly after it begins, the media reports that two airplanes are flown into the World Trade Towers in New York City. All students are let out early. On Jeffrey’s last day of class, no one has any idea that it is his last day of class. He moves into a house with a couple from the rave scene and one day snorts ketamine and inhales nitrous oxide using a large pink balloon while concurrently smoking marijuana, exhaling the marijuana smoke into the nitrous oxide-filled balloon and then rapidly inhaling and exhaling until both the marijuana smoke and nitrous oxide are gone, causing his vision to malfunction and him to perceive the living room he’s sitting in as a compact disc sounds when it skips–a number of frames rapidly replacing each other, so fast that it becomes less and less of a comprehensive sequence and eventually something like a vibrating, silver fractal. The following morning he finds out that the girl he lives with has moved out in the middle of the night.

Jeffrey moves back into his mother’s house and gets a job as a security guard. He is hospitalized three times: once for a skateboarding accident, once for a snowboarding accident, and another for an affliction called “epiditimytis” that is so embarrassing to him that he can easily recall its name after he moves back from Portland, where he moved with a friend, worked at Wendy’s, and attended his freshman year of college.

The summer before his sophomore year of college, Jeffrey drives to Arizona with the same friend to visit another friend, and on the last night of his stay, blacks out from alcohol consumption. It isn’t until the middle of his sophomore year, at a house party, that Jeffrey finds out about that night; how he followed a man and his girlfriend around, accusing them of stealing his hat, until the man slapped him, Jeffrey punched his face, and the man and his girlfriend ran away. It is, coincidentally, at this same house party that Jeffrey sees James again, this time walking through the front door and directly at him, saying to Jeffrey that he had wanted to talk to him, that he’s sorry, that he’s been an asshole, and that he wouldn’t have known what to do if he was in Jeffrey’s situation. Jeffrey says that it’s okay. He acquires a girlfriend, moves into a big house with cheap rent and some people, grows marijuana in the attic, dresses up in a suit, and hosts a cocktail party. James and a large blond man are there, and in the kitchen, the large blond man turns to Jeffrey and tells him that he’s a little girl. He says it again. Jeffrey’s girlfriend says to the large blond man that Jeffrey is her friend and that she wants him to be nice to Jeffrey. Jeffrey says that he isn’t a girl and looks to his right and sees, as if in slow-motion, James staring directly at him, gradually forming a wide, toothy grin.

Jeffrey applies to a study abroad program in the south of Holland and breaks up with his girlfriend on the way to the airport, then flies in to Amsterdam, and on his second night there, after smoking marijuana and taking both sleeping and anti-anxiety pills, faints in the bathroom of his hostel, comes to, and spends over five minutes trying to find the light switch. He calls his ex-girlfriend on the third night, takes a train south on the fourth night, and over the course of that year, blacks out over 20 times from alcohol consumption, smokes marijuana on a daily basis, and spends many weekends dancing to techno, high on MDMA, speed, marijuana, alcohol, or a combination of these at all night “squat parties” that last until noon or 2PM the next day. He sleeps with a number of foreign women, concluding with a German who he becomes romantically involved with, and after moving back to the States, graduating with a degree in psychology, and acquiring a job at a reality television show in Portland, he moves in with her, then breaks up with her after three months. In a gesture of emotional support, his father, who’s in Portland on vacation, offers to take Jeffrey out for a night of drinking with his friends. Jeffrey obliges. After initial introductions are made that night, the first thing one of his father’s friends–an overweight, bearded man in a Hawaiian shirt–does is point at a female bartender and say to Jeffrey, “See that bitch over there? I fucked her on the stairwell of The Hilton last night.” Jeffrey averts his eyes, nods his head and says “Nice.”

Using the internet, Jeffrey acquires a job teaching English at a school in Seoul, buys his plane ticket, calls the school two days before his scheduled flight and tells them that his father has died; that actually he won’t be able to come to Seoul. After moving out of his apartment and into a shared housing situation, he goes home the following Christmas to visit his mother and has sex with a girl he’s known mostly over the internet. He has nobody in Portland. The day after Christmas, he walks into a coffee shop with an old friend and immediately sees James, right there, sitting to the right of the doorway, and his friend is friends with James, so they all sit together. While Jeffrey’s friend buys a cup of coffee, Jeffrey and James talk, a little, about their current housing situations and cultural differences between Europe and the United States. James also says that he installs flooring. Jeffrey’s friend comes back with a coffee and a crossword and suggests they do the crossword together. Jeffrey, his friend, and James all work on the crossword for awhile, then Jeffrey and his friend leave after saying “Bye.”

Upon his return to Portland, Jeffrey finds in his mailbox an envelope containing a professional, black and white photograph of a woman piggybacking his father, both of them grinning into the camera, and in a large cursive font printed underneath, the word “ENGAGED!” Three months later, after the woman in the photograph bears a child named Vincent, she, Jeffrey and Vincent’s father, and Vincent relocate to Kansas City. The woman in the photograph works at a number of law firms, supports Vincent’s father as he makes his way through medical school, and has an affair with a coworker who once impressed Vincent, then 5 years of age, with his soccer skills at a company party to which the woman in the photograph took him. She buys Vincent a bird. A year later, while roughhousing with a friend, the bird viciously attacks the friend in an attempt to protect Vincent, the episode culminating in his friend in a fetal position on the floor, screaming and crying as the bird pecks the shit out of him. Vincent and the bird develop a very close relationship; the bird trusting only Vincent and, sometimes, Vincent trusting only the bird, until the bird flies away the month Vincent enters the fifth grade. It is during this same month that, one day in his back yard, he and his friends expose their pubic hair to each other; the first friend saying “I got a forest,” the second saying “I got a meadow,” and Vincent saying “I got grass.” His face appears increasingly nervous as the day goes on, but Vincent is, to his credit, socially average, and does enjoy hosting the occasional sleepover. During dinner at one of the sleepovers–his friend, his father and the woman in the photograph at the table as well–he spills water on his slice of white bread, immediately soaking it and turning it into a translucent, paste-like substance, and his father stares at him. His father says “Eat it.” As Vincent eats its, he gags a number of times, and no one says anything as they watch.

At the beginning of sixth grade, he suddenly notices that he isn’t as obviously more talented than the rest of his Little League baseball team as he used to be. His confidence begins to diminish after a number of episodes, and he finally breaks down after he pitches his first home run: as the batter runs the bases, Vincent begins to cry, and his father jogs to the pitching mound, takes him off the field, drives them home at a frightening speed, and says, when they walk through the door of their home, “Sometimes… I hate you.” He has three violent experiences: the first after jumping into a pool and accidentally landing on his friend’s older brother; the older brother responding by punching him in the face and Vincent responding by acting like he didn’t notice that he was punched in the face; the second after throwing a rock from the end of a soccer field at a classmate standing at the other end of the soccer field, the rock hitting him on the forehead, knocking him out, causing severe bleeding, and his school to call 911; the third after picking up a large clump of dirt, yelling “Curveball!,” throwing it, from almost 20 feet away, directly into an older classmate’s open mouth, and the older classmate chasing Vincent down, pinning him, and laughing while crumbling handfuls of dirt onto Vincent’s face while he screams.

Vincent attends seventh grade in Denver, Colorado, after being moved, yet again, by his father (reasons obscure), discovers, at a more detailed level than ever before, sex, and in a game where he and his new classmates describe it only through gesticulation, Vincent, for his turn, jumps into a large playground tire, then jumps up and down rapidly. A lot of classmates laugh.

He acquires his first girlfriend in the summer before his eighth grade year, and one night in a movie theater, she tells his two friends that she really wants Vincent to finger her, and doesn’t understand why he hasn’t yet, and Vincent’s friends take him out of the theater and urge him to finger her. Vincent never does, but later lies to his girlfriend that his father beats him on a regular basis; the lie partly a consequence of his friend’s stories of being beaten by his dad on a regular basis. Vincent lies again in his freshman year of high school–this time to his entire social circle–that his family tree consists mainly of Native Americans from the Iroquois tribe, and throughout that year, continues to lie about a broad range of subjects. Everyone begins to joke about Vincent in secret, and then suddenly the joking is open and communal, and Vincent quickly develops a compulsive urge to avoid societal interaction.

His father and the woman in the photograph separate in the middle of his freshman year of high school, and shortly thereafter, the woman in the photograph asks Vincent if he wants his father around anymore. Vincent says that he does not want his father around anymore. The woman in the photograph divorces Vincent’s father and explains to Vincent that, in Kansas City, she slept with a coworker, that she confessed this to his father 11 years later, and that he quickly retorted by telling her that he had been having an affair with a local politician. The woman in the photograph cries as she recalls more detailed information, and Vincent’s face remains neutral the entire time. Later, among a new circle of friends, he exploits the information that the woman in the photograph gave him, further legitimizing his recently developed persona as “fucked-up.”

He has sex for the first time in the guest bedroom of his house in his sophomore year with an eighteen year-old telemarketer unaffiliated with his high school who he met at a “college party” to which a group of seniors had taken him. During the latter part of his sophomore year, his father often shows up at his house uninvited–still having the garage door opener and keys. One day, his father arrives while Vincent is masturbating on the couch in the living room, and having no pants on or blanket to cover himself with, Vincent runs up the stairs as his father walks in, and continues running until he gets into the upstairs bathroom. His father yells, “What are you doing?” Vincent yells “I’m sick.” When his father shows up uninvited on another occasion, a day after Vincent has an argument with the woman in the photograph that ends with her sobbing and running out the front door, his father steps through the doorway, stares at him, repeatedly yells “What the fuck is your problem,” grabs Vincent’s jaws and cheekbones and pushes hard, causing Vincent to fall into the couch and spill the glass of orange juice he’s holding. Five minutes later, his father asks him for a hug.

Vincent’s father leaves the house after he gets his hug, drives to his newly acquired condo, drinks 4 40 oz. bottles of Pabst, calls the woman in the photograph, and after she doesn’t answer, leaves a voicemail saying that he wants to die. That night, he sits in front of his computer and discovers that the media’s reporting that a global pandemic called Megaflu is threatening international security and shutting down airports everywhere. He sighs, lies down on his couch, and closes his eyes. After five minutes, he runs to the bathroom and vomits into the toilet. Vincent’s father returns to work the next day, and over the course of the next three months, he lays off every single one of his employees due to diminishing investor confidence, then lays himself off, sells his kit airplane, his Hummer, and liquidates the majority of the rest of his assets, with the exception of his mini-yacht. He applies for unemployment and claims every week until his benefits run out, additionally consuming, almost every night, 4 to 7 alcoholic beverages, but manages to write a book called Putting the Pedal to the Metal: The Service/Quality System For High-Octane Corporate Performance, which is, via Vincent’s father’s connections in the corporate world, quickly picked up by MacMillan of Canada, initially receiving positive reviews and generating average sales, but soon being accused of being, basically, a copy of a book that had come out twenty years previous (published, ironically, by MacMillan of Canada) called Firing On All Cylinders: The Service/Quality System For High-Powered Corporate Performance. His book never profits and is not reprinted.

Vincent’s father spends the next 7 years existing in relative obscurity, living off his retirement fund and social security checks, sometimes drinking alcohol all day and walking a block to the nearby pub at night, where he sits alone, often pretending as if he’s talking on his cell phone or having a text message conversation with someone; glancing, sometimes, to his left and right, and sometimes getting cut off by the bartender, until, after one night at the pub, he wakes up–somehow already screaming–in an antiseptic white and pale yellow room as a number of quickly moving humans secure his wrists and ankles to a stretcher with metal restraints. He cannot see after this incident. He is hit by a bus and killed, and his funeral is the first instance that Jeffrey, the woman in the photograph, and Vincent are all located under one roof. As they say goodbye to each other after the funeral is over, they plan, vaguely, on meeting for dinner next month, or sometime soon–whenever, perhaps; all of them simultaneously anticipating the event with a powerful sense of dread, concurrently feeling sick of themselves, sick of society, sick of the world, and asking themselves “Why can’t I just be left alone?”

- Brandon Scott Gorrell (b. 1984) is the author of a novella, MY HAIR WILL DEFEAT YOU (3:AM, 2010), and a poetry book, DURING MY NERVOUS BREAKDOWN I WANT TO HAVE A BIOGRAPHER PRESENT (Mummuu House, 2009). He has a blog. He lives in Seattle.

Something is written in the state of Denmark

tumblr_koxkpa6LiC1qz66gdo1_400 There’s a touching story in Jackie Wullschlager’s wonderful, illuminating biography Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller. In it, a seventeen year old H.C. Andersen enters a school in the town of Slagelse where all his classmates are six years younger. When asked by the headmaster to locate the city of Copenhagen on a map—a town just 57 miles away and where he had recently lived for three years—he is unable. Imagine that. Andersen, probably the single most recognizable Danish author of all time, was for a time the class idiot to a bunch of eleven year olds.

But it’s that story of the iconic figure of H.C. Andersen which I find compelling in a discussion of contemporary Danish (and American) literature. The question, you see, is where is it? Who can locate it on the map? It’s alive and well, of course, this thing called Danish literature. Denmark supports its authors and its publishers, and it has its individual champions here in the states—Garrison Keillor and Paul Auster come to mind. Jonathan Rich of The Paris Review. Or Jeffrey Frank of the New Yorker (who recently, together with his wife, produced new translations of Andersen’s work). Then you have your regular posse of translators, a noble breed that’s too often overlooked by academics and media alike. Without translators, there would be no. such. thing. as. world literature.

Every now and again, a Danish author will break through in the United States. Think Peter Høeg (Smilla’s Sense of Snow) or, more recently, Martin Ramsland (Doghead) and Peter Fogtdal (The Czar’s Dwarf). But like so much of international literature, it’s backburnered in favor of the homegrown stuff. It’s been a while since a Danish author broke through in the way that, say, Swede Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) or Norwegian Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses) has broken through.

Why is that? It’s certainly not for lack of quality authors. Part of me wonders whether it’s a reverse Andersen effect: it’s now us who can’t locate Copenhagen on the map. Historically speaking, Denmark has always been a powerful force to be reckoned with in Europe—and especially in Scandinavia. But since the end of World War II, when globalization’s engine really started to heat up, Denmark has lagged behind in the self-promotion department. Swedes and Norwegians—much larger land masses to the north—tend to usurp visibility in this area. Perhaps the lesson here is that when you think you’re small, you are small.

Denmark is a nation of only around 5.5 million people, but it’s a leading cultural light in western culture (the cartoon fiasco notwithstanding), very much on par with all of Scandinavia. With its self-sustaining environmental policies, its copacetic, slightly more relaxed way of life and its brilliantly altruistic social welfare programs, Denmark is a role model to other nations. (Sadly, I can envision that privatization will strip the country’s social welfare programs bare in another generation. Am I being cynical?)

In such an environment, it’s no surprise that Danish authors have produced—and continue to produce—terrific material. Stuff worthy of world circulation. According to Open Letter Press’s blog Three Percent (although it’s not original to them), only, that’s right, “3 percent” of the total number of books published in the United States are translated. That’s a whoppingly low number—and perhaps proof that U.S. literature is indeed “insular,” as Horace Engdahl of the Swedish Academy notoriously suggested?

- K.E. Semmel is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in Ontario Review, the Washington Post, Aufgabe, The Brooklyn Review, The Bitter Oleander, Redivider, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. He is the Publications & Communications Manager of The Writer’s Center based in Bethesda, MD, an independent nonprofit literary organization that offers over 300 workshops in writing annually. For his work with Simon Fruelund’s fiction he has received a translation grant from the Danish Arts Council. He has translated two of Fruelund’s books. The completed manuscript is called Civil Twilight & Other Stories.

Adventures, As Yet Unsurpassed, of The Visionary Idiot

BobDylanSmileyBuzz “Forget the self-indulgent quest for happiness or self-knowledge associated with Byronic heroes” relays the The Longman Anthology of British Literature, in paraphrase of a warning once delivered by Thomas Carlyle, “strive instead to improve society and practice greater artistic control; know your work and do it.” Here is the conflict that inhabits the core of the novel Jane Eyre. In an age of technological and social upheaval, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane served for readers as a surrogate self in navigating the terrifying possibility and fantastic voids along the tracks of Victorian England. Her story held particular relevance for a marginalized class of independently-minded women for whom few options existed in line with the status quo. Not solely that of oppressed female, her persona encompasses the roles of outsider and rebel, one who seeks both peace of mind and betterment of the world in which she lives, while ranging beyond the pale of existing societal structures in private relation to a preternatural voice from on high. In her audience Jane famously believes as she follows the path of her conviction from outsider at Gateshead, to visionary idiot in the attic, to impassioned devotee of Rochester, to affianced lover, to runaway, to obstinate equal, to blissful domestic companion—at which time, alas, she takes mannered leave of her conjured audience. In this mold, Jane Eyre may be seen as prototype to a similar sort of character, both romantic and craft-driven, of an age obviously different, though not as obviously similar, to Bronte’s own. I’m referring to an age in which citizens were similarly propelled to resist the status quo, albeit at much higher volume: the 1960s in the United States, and, in particular, one surrogate, taken as an emblem of changin’ times.

What fascinates about Bob Dylan is that he is himself the hero of the novel happening all around him, as the creation of Robert Zimmerman, Suze Rotolo, Dave von Ronk, John Hammond, among however many others, a work of collaborative fiction enabled by newly ascendant media, his “back pages” as cherished and sifted through by today’s seekers as were Jane Eyre’s in hers. In this mode, Dylan serves as surrogate for those who feel their voices have been marginalized, an in the flesh, heart-rent stray from pre-established modes, a pleasure-seeker and a social critic. Of course, differences are myriad and likely indicative of those between Victorian England and late 20^th century America (Dylan, the construct, all foreground, no background), although it should be noted that both periods mark the ascendancy of a nation as global cultural center, wealth producer, and technological innovator.

On the level of language and narrative, echoes abound; it seems Bronte and Zimmerman draw from the same archetypal well to paint their masterpieces. Consider the following:

Locked in the departed patriarch’s chambers, Jane speaks of receiving “a herald of some vision coming from another world,” while cognizant that the matron Mrs. Reed considers her to be “a precocious actress… a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous duplicity.” Meanwhile, the disliked Miss Abott sees young Jane as “a sort of infantine Guy Fawkes,” suggesting the inflammatory Dylan of “Masters of War.”
In her desolation, Jane imagines “a preternatural voice to comfort [her], or… some haloed face, bending over [her] in extreme pity” and for solace relies on “loving and cherishing a faded graven image”: her Woody Guthrie, it could be said.
When the wind blows outside Lowood, Jane wishes “the wind to howl more wildly”: Dylan, “All Along The Watchtower,” voice and instrumentation ascending, “The wind began to howl.”
With Helen Burns (echo of poet Robert Burns?, eternally young visionary, an inspiration for Dylan) Jane speaks of “a visionary brook”: Dylan sings of sitting so contentedly to watch the river flow.
Jane learns to see from Helen that the school principal “Mr. Brocklehurst is not a god”: Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma, I’m Only Bleeding,” “Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.”
“Externals,” Jane recognizes, “have a great effect on the young”: no rock star hasn’t taken that lesson to heart.
Just like a tried and true performer, Jane reflects on entering Lowood: “the ruddy gloaming, the licensed uproar, the confusion of many voices gave one a welcome sense of liberty.”
To Jane, Rochester sings in foreshadow, “For Might and Right, and Woe and Wrath, between our spirits stood…”: Dylan, “Idiot Wind,” “The howling beast on the borderline that separates you from me.”
On fleeing her true love, the heroine sees the future as “an awful blank: something like the world when the deluge was gone by”: sings Dylan, “Down in the Flood,” a break up song, “Crash in the levee, mama/ Water’s gonna overflow.”

Of Jane Eyre and the patchwork, mercurial figment of Bob Dylan, a more structured and considered argument could be made. Suffice it to say that universal figurations of youth that Bronte captures, Dylan set in fragments to the urgent music of “now.” To give greater weight to Bronte’s work—as a student of literature, after all—Dylan is the sort of figure that a young Jane Eyre might have dreamt.

- Jeff Price is the Associate Editor of Electric Literature

Tramp

lady and tramp kissing About fifty years ago, David Markson wrote a pair of hard-boiled detective novels set in Greenwich Village, Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Dead Beat. The books read like beat-flavored Spillane, and within the private eye character of Harry Fannin you can see the beginnings of the voice, form, and preoccupations of Markson’s later innovative novels, Readers Block, Vanishing Point, This is Not a Novel, and The Last Novel. “Tramp” is an excised narrative that examines Markson’s core themes: literature, art, music, philosophy, pop culture, sex, and death.

Tramp

A text derived from Epitaph for a Tramp, David Markson, 1959

Old devil-may-care Harry. Dreamed of fair women.

Her face was like something sketched in charcoal on coarse gray paper and then abandoned in the rain.

This hotel on lower Bleecker. The Watling. Found a lampswitch and shed a little light on the subject. The walls were a drab schoolroom brown. Snow White was in the outside corridor now, but she was so tight that even on a level keel she was bumping into dwarfs all over the forest.

The girl’s clothes were scattered among the debris as if she’d been caught in a cyclone without enough safety pins. Her torn brassiere was on the floor. Observant Fannin.

Okay, okay, you’re a famous writer and the disciples cluster around you like flies.

She could even look beautiful waking up. Garbo. Anna Magnani. Dietrich. Wendy Hiller. Maria Menghini Callas. Get rich wishing. Edna St. Vincent Millay? Bess Truman? The siblings Bronte, maybe?

All the things you do, the way sex is the most important part of half of them.

A paperback Book of Quotations on the stand next to the chair, tried that, stabbing a page at random.

A mighty fortress is our God, said Martin Luther.

She’s just a broad, is all. Just a broad wants some kicks. Bet the hand, Harry Fannin.

Her face was the color of ice cubes. The corners of her mouth twitched. Then her face melted and she began to shake. She did not sound like the first girl you’d pick to share a rooftop with when the dam broke.

Work out your salvation with diligence, said Gautama Buddha.

Man’s chicks are his castle. Monuments won’t wilt, won’t shrink, won’t shiver.

Guys with a notion they wanted to be artists who didn’t shave because they thought you were halfway there if you looked the part. Explained why he liked Hemingway so much.

Sophisticated young uptown ladies slumming with their toothbrushes in their pocketbooks. Girls in grimy sweatshirts with the complete works of Dylan Thomas under their arms when what they needed were cartons of Rinso.

Just like the philosopher. Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes. How curious. The life of man in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Thomas Hobbes.

No dream, Fannin. All very real. You’re the writer. So write. There was a typewriter with a sheet of paper in it.

She had abortions. Not one, two.

Rolled, squirmed, even slud, like in “he slud into third base,” from the collected writings of Jerome Herman (Dizzy) Dean.

The bohemians. The intellectuals. The really accomplished Mexican painters, like Orozco and Tamayo—Tamayo and Tamayo and Tamayo, seeps in the petty paste from plate to plate.

A set of yellowing bone china which Pocahontas had gotten as a shower gift from the girls at the wigwam. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s favorite bronze candlesticks, the one he wrote Hiawatha by the glow of. Everything else had that same twenty-seven-tenants-and-still-holding-its-own look.

She had twenty-four dollars in bills and an uncashed paycheck from the publishing house. She was a pretty girl. She was a redhead, with freckles and green eyes, and she had lovely high breasts.

It didn’t take Dashiell Hammett to figure that much of it without going down. It was as easy to read as a scrawl in a latrine.

Probably busted in on the middle of his favorite Bach cantata.

The book was a gay little thing by Thomas Mann called The Magic Mountain. Gave her the Reader’s Digest version.

Once upon a time he had also wanted to be Johnny Ringo or Wild Bill Hickok and ride a big white mare. The White Horse Tavern, then a coffee shop down on Macdougal. Knew a girl once who was crazy about white blouses.

She came apart again. All she’d say was that she thought they were amusing. This one had good legs—watched them until she turned into the lobby.

It’s nice when other people make your decisions for you.

Hell no, Fannin would be home reading witty lines out of his Bartlett’s Quotations and waiting for some potted dame to climb the stairs and fall into his lap for the big romp in the hay.

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees, said Emiliano Zapata.

There was a TV set in the corner. See if the place ever shows any more outward trace of your personality than an iron lung.

She had picked up the brassiere from the floor.

He reached the curb being so weary of the stupidity of the unenlightened masses that it was killing him.

She taught grammar school and you wouldn’t mistake her for Moll Flanders in the darkest bedroom in town. You can be doddering, bald and approaching senility and still feel awkward in front of an old-maid school teacher. Had wondered more than once if she were a virgin.

Men and women everywhere, make sure today of the salvation of your souls. Are you living a spiritual life or a carnal life? Be saved now!

Quitter Fannin. Rapidly discouraged, beaten in a nonce. In a thrice? Managed all of about eight inches in the time it takes to roast a small hen. The rolling Fannin gathers no moss. Being the lightheaded lad again.

The writer. Calling it Fannin Grows Up. Never mind the editorial comment either. It kills the motive for anybody else. He already had his notebook out.

Very important! Every Tuesday and Thursday, nine to eleven, be sure to have an experience!

The place looked as inviting as the rumpus room at Buchenwald. A well-clipped poodle was sniffing the sawdust.

Who the hell did you have in mind, W.C. Fields? Guys like, say, Einstein, Gandhi, Adlai Stevenson, Toscanini, Willie Mays—people like that, you know? It would have been like asking Bronco Nagurski if he was sure he could lift a football with all that heavy air in it.

He looked like something the Mau-Mau had left behind as a warning. Two or three nervous-looking little tables on legs carved so delicately they would probably collapse under the weight of an empty shot glass.

Hate to begin hot days with guesswork.

The dishes and silver were all Woolworth’s pride, the upholstery smelled vaguely of insecticide and old sin, and there were seven different watercolor views of the same flower pot on the wall, all executed by that color-blind old lady who turns them out for every furnished apartment in the world.

There was another siren. Sublimated it, that’s the word.

A book called Under the Volcano was the property of Ned Sommers, and two or three re-issue Bix Beiderbecke records had A. Leeds scrawled on their jackets.

Cambridge History of English Literature. Could see the full set on the wall behind him, along with what looked likeevery other juicy bit of bedtime reading from The Nicomachean Ethics to The Coming Forth of Osiris Jones.

Passed the rear of the Women’s House of Detention and that gave him a few more ideas. Anyhow, it’s an important experience for a writer.

Most of the wall space was taken up with weird, leering African masks, and there were Chinese lanterns hanging from the ceiling like Yuletide at the Mao Tse Tung’s.

He was sweating badly and his face was flushed. The shoelace he had tripped over was still swinging loose. He stared at the cuffs as glumly as a stripteaser confronting a low thermometer.

Probably part of it was the temperature. Maybe there was cool air on Annapurna or Orizaba.

Come see Fannin electrocute himself.

There were only eight or ten windows looking out that way, but sooner or later someone’s favorite aunt was going to open one of them to sprinkle the geraniums.

Paused to dig the stars. Dig the big hand approaching the nine and the small hand touching the one. Chapter three, book sixty-four, verse nineteen, brought to you by Welch’s Grape Juice.

Forty-one, all the way from the Cloisters down to the Battery and back, all between roughly two and three-thirty in the morning. The Bird blew there once, man. Charley Parker in the flesh.

He was reading a paperback called Sidewalk Caesar by someone named Donald Honig. That morning’s Tribune was folded back to Red Smith.

She put in the scotch first and then had to into the kitchen for the ice. The drink would have been just right for a teetotaling Lilliputian.

So Thomas Hobbes says the life of man in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Win one for Hobbes. You can do it, Fannin.

Her arms were clasped around her calves and her head was pressed forward, and a Modigliani or a Gauguin could have done something remarkable with her.

The same…same old Harry. The Second Coming could have waited.

Death by water. The fire sermon— The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ.

The sheet was twisted low across her thighs and her hands lay motionless at either side of her, upturned and curled like dead things in the wake of the plague.

There was a fraction of a second of absolute stillness, as expectant as if Mitropoulos had just lifted his baton. That Bach canata came back instead. Two wrong endings of the same double feature.

Life was going on. You couldn’t be sure exactly why.

-William Walsh

In addition to work forthcoming in QUICK FICTION, ANNALEMMA, NIGHT TRAIN, and ARTIFICE, William Walsh’s stories and derived texts have appeared in NEW YORK TYRANT, LIT, PANK, KILL AUTHOR, ROSEBUD, CAKETRAIN, JUKED, McSWEENEY’S INTERNET TENDENCY, and other journals. My first book, Without Wax, was published in 2008 by Casperian Books, and a book of derived texts called Questionstruck was released earlier this year by Keyhole Press. In spring 2010 Keyhole will release a story collection of mine called Ampersand, Mass.

An Extremely Normal Man

paper man An extremely normal man walks past a park bench, a stoplight, a pigeon, a dog, etc. So certain is he of these objects that he can think about other things as he walks, which is why he fails to notice when the world becomes paper. He’s agonizing about something in his briefcase.

Only as the snowflakes fall more thickly does he discover they’re not snowflakes at all but rather scraps of paper. He looks up to locate the delinquents responsible for this prank . . . and finds that the trees are flat, two-dimensional, made of brown paper. The sky beyond has no depth. He sits on the park bench to relieve his trembling legs; it crumples beneath him, throwing him onto the stiff, papery grass. The pigeon takes flight, flapping its impossible paper wings. The stoplight changes: a circle of red paper miraculously replaced by a circle of green, as though large, powerful fingers switched them while he blinked. The dog is now a paper dog. As it runs toward him through the falling snow, its fur sounds like the pages of a book being flipped. This begs the question—and he looks down at his hands. They are indeed made of paper, carefully—even tenderly—cut into the proper shape. The dog sniffles kindly at his paper shoes.

The wind strengthens. It sucks up the grass. Piece by piece, it yanks the dog’s paper fur off its body. Soon the dog is just a half-ear, three paws, and a tail taped to a stick. The trees blow away. A panel of the sky blows away, leaving a rectangular gap beyond which emptiness can be seen. The man holds tight to himself. Another panel of the sky vanishes, revealing more emptiness beyond. Coming apart at the, he thinks, but never completes the thought, for his arms are pulled off, his head, his—and soon all that remains of the entire world is a few pieces of wood, awkwardly nailed together to resemble the shape of the human body, floating in the universe.

Helen Phillips is the recipient of a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the 2008 Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the 2009 Meridian Editors’ Award, and a Ucross Foundation residency. Her work has appeared in Salt Hill Journal, The Mississippi Review, Small Spiral Notebook, Faultline, The Brooklyn Review, L Magazine, and The Hotel St. George Press Literary Magazine, among others, and is forthcoming in the anthology American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Thompson. Her book And Yet They Were Happy is forthcoming from Leapfrog Press in 2011 (www.leapfrogpress.com).

Reading in Albania, Part 2

Contrasts-of-Albania In the end, I also brought the Lonely Planet’s 30 pages on Albania. Also the out-of-print 1996 Blue Guide to Albania. I read them on the plane to Rome. The Lonely Planet reassured me that Albania is lovely now, all safe and beautiful, really, very safe, don’t worry, well, of course, except perhaps for Tropoja district, and Bajrum Curri – you might not want to go there. This was of course, exactly where I was headed. For comfort, I turned to the Blue Guide, usually a bastion of ancient history, which informed me in no uncertain terms that women should NOT travel to the north of Albania, and that for pregnant women, it was a death sentence. It said that travelers typically move with dynamite in their luggage to get past the landfalls, and that the only hotel in Bajrum Curri doubles as the mortuary, with dead bodies in the hallway a distinct possibility.

But this guide is from 1996 – the height of a horrendous financial collapse and ensuing trouble in Albania. I decide to ignore it. I am going to the mountains. They called me years ago. I am late.

Travelers typically move with dynamite in their luggage to get past the landfalls, and the only hotel in Bajrum Curri doubles as the mortuary.

I will find this Alfred Selimaj I have read about on the internet, and if I don’t, I have packed a tent. It’s not that I’m so confident. It’s just that I’m sure of my ultimate unimportance. Who would bother to murder me? And anyhow, from Edith Durham, I know the rules of murder in the highlands, and the laws of hospitality. I decide to ignore the travel guides, and travel by what little I know. And anyhow, I have knitting needles.

The end of the story? I shouldn’t have worried. Albania is beautiful, and the Albanian people are the kindest, most tolerant and generous I have ever encountered. The knitting did indeed come in handy. On the second night of my stay with the Selimaj family, Alfred came into the kitchen to find his mother and me sitting happily at the enormous table, both with hands full of knitting, identically posed with yarn wrapped around our necks and fingers. This is knitting, Albanian style, as Sose insisted I do it. I had the grace to blush. And the Edward Lear? One of Alfred’s numerous cousins was a young boy named Mund. It became a game between us that if he found me sitting anywhere, he would pull out my notebook, push a pen into my hand, and demand “Scroo-te!” DRAW. I drew him elephants being chased by mice, a soccer game, a hot air balloon, several tigers, and at least one rabbit skiing downhill. A peacock. And the Kosovar poetry of Azem Shkreli? On my first day, lolling about on a green flat island of tiny alpine flowers between two streams of impossibly blue water, overlooked and guarded by my beautiful mountains, I opened and read:

A day appeared

Not to bring you here

Not to take me away

And settled on my brow.

It arrived secretly

Neither brighter

Nor darker than the others.

It just happened

That simple day

And passed and took root

Somewhere at the end of silence.

Catherine Bohne lives in Brooklyn, and has begun rather doggedly frequenting Albania. She has worked at the Community Bookstore of Park Slope Brooklyn since 1995, and owned said bookstore since 2001. Lots of information is available about her online, accompanied by more than a few regrettable photographs. You can follow her doings at the “Messing About” section of www.communitybookstore.net, or the (coming soon) journal section of www.journeytovalbona.com.

Reading in Albania Pt. 1

albania11 “Once, only, I was awakened suddenly, by something falling on me – flomp – miaw – fizz! – an accidental cat had tumbled from some unexplored height, and testified great surprise . . . .”

– Edward Lear in Albania

In three days, I am getting on an airplane, and going to Italy, with the firm intention of traveling further, by boat, to Albania. Repeat after me: I am going to Albania. Repeat after me, repeat, because . . . NO ONE goes to Albania. But I am. In three days.

Why am I going? I am going because some months ago, I started reading Lawrence Durrell’s dreamy and lyrical account of living on Corfu in the 1930s (Prospero’s Cell). Corfu, of course, is one-and-a-half miles off the coast of Albania, which in turn made me remember a certain scene from my childhood. Cue: Me. Eleven years old and just able to raise chin over the rail of the boat, on which my father, mother, and I—bundled up like refuges against the January chill—are crossing, from Brindisi (in Italy) to Greece. The boat, little better than an African Queen-style inelegant chugger, pulls remorselessly away from the Italian coast. It plods and chumms away, down the Adriatic. With a child’s concentration, I stand at the rail watching the world move past. Civilized Europe falls away. The landscape shifts to weird green craggy mountains, waterfalls . . . darkness. Silence. Mountains, forests. No sound. No lights. No people. “Dad,” I whispered, “What is that?” Staring at the dark green silence of the place. My father, taller than I could see at the time, answered from his comforting height: “That’s Albania, Catherine. No one can go there.” And my little eleven year old heart thought: I’ll go there.

So now I am. I have an $82 airmiles ticket, and not much else beyond that. There are no guide books to Albania. No friendly Rough Guide, or Tony Fodor’s. So: to prepare for going, I have been reading High Albania by M. Edith Durham. After a certain amount of admirable philosophical and historical reflection, the author of this 1909 account begins: “I left Scutari at 5 a.m, piloted by a native who [knew that] The Vali, at that hour, would still be asleep.” The Vali, of course, being the Ottoman police. Quaint, strange, out of date, but Edith Durham remains (as she was during the first half of the 20^th century) the authority on the region. From her I learn the ancient rules of blood feuds. An eye for an eye, until some mediation can occur, at which point fancy knitted socks can be appeasing. I am also reading Edward Lear in Albania, by, well, Edward Lear. The father of nonsense verse spent his life as (did you know this?) a landscape painter, and as Italy became clichéd, set off in 1848 for wilder climbs. And where could be wilder than Albania? He had a hard enough time trying to sketch: every time he put pencil to paper, a dervish would leap up yelling “Scroo! Scroo Shaitan!” [It draws, the Devil Draws!], but he found that if he wore a fez, the natives would at least stop throwing rocks at him. I am thinking that perhaps I need a fez, but I know this is 100 years out of date.

But what can I do? A hundred years of history have intervened, but they haven’t been prolific of literature. I’ve read Ismail Kadare: The Siege is a wonderful book, but set in the 1400s – I know how Skanderbeg felt about the Ottomans. (“Poorly” is an understatement).

I am heading off to a land that time seems to have forgotten. I’ve been reading the history, but what do I take to arm myself? Well, remembering my Zia Francesca in Croatia, who, it’s true, knitted cabled and bobbled socks to amaze, I bring a book on knitting fancy socks. And because they’re small and might impress, or be appropriate, two Green Integer Books: Heart of Darkness, which I ought to have read already, and Blood of the Quill, poetry from Kosova. Further, because ten years ago, Jason Goodwin reported that All Albanians know it: Childe Harold (Byron died in the fight for Greek Independence – but his troops: Albanian.) According to Goodwin, the Albanian people haven’t forgotten him yet. Also, a book on sailing (I’m going to the mountains, but am also contrary by nature), Tudge’s The Tree, and The Lighthouse Stephensons by Bella Bathhurst . . . . To make sure, no matter what I meet, that I don’t forget earth, and sea, and light.

I am amused, and I am frightened. But I am answering the long-ago and now-again call of those mountains. It’s taken me a long time to remember. But I am going. I AM going.

Six Meditations On Re-Reading

By Wythe Marschall
1.

When I read, I try to read quickly, swimming across a river of ink. It is only later that I can return and wade more slowly, learning its depths, and whirlpools and fords, oxbows and overhanging cypress branches, and look for life in the riverbed—where the juiciest ideas and quotations often wait, buried like crayfish, for some alien hand to pull them up.

Reading a history, the history of anything, I encounter all sorts of strange names—toponyms (where is Palestrina, where Palestina, where the Palladium?) and demonyms (who were the Messipians? the Nvikhs?). On first sight, these names bounce right off my eyes, jumping off the page only long enough to demonstrate their foreignness before falling back into a blur of letters that, in the contemporary American orthographic world, just don’t go together.

But each time I encounter these same strange names, they acquire a little more meaning, body, sound, importance, and (of course) familiarity. Like a ghostly, only sometimes-visible family, they become part of my own idiolectic orthography. I can now tell you, for example, about a specific man named Mastarna, who was perhaps also a man named Servius Tullius, and why you might want to know about him or them. Among other reasons, he/they purportedly invented the census—a way to read a whole society at once.

At one point, thanks to reading various fragmentary histories, I could wax vaguely poetic about 弘法大師, Kobo Daishi, founder of Shingon Buddhism. Now all I recall is that he is familiar, part of a family of characters in the general history of Japanese religion; his name is part of a family of signs that I recognize. The words I once read about him have blended together so that they do not—cannot—conjure the man, the historical person, but only the solid impression that such a man existed.

My Kobo Daishi mosaic, I could say, is smeared with silt. I have not read of him in years. The only “fact” I now recall about him is that he liked founding little shrines all over western Japan, and I remember that because I lived it, in very small part. In one of his shrines, on a slope of Miyajima, a holy mountain in the bay of Hiroshima, I looked into the dancing heart of a flame that has burned since the master himself was alive, circa CE 806. Now it’s herds of overly friendly, goatish little deer who rule Miyajima. They’ll eat your phone out of your pocket, if you let them.

Like learning a new language, learning history consists of scanning the same symbols over and over again until they speak. And even as you hear them, they are already changing. Seeing a deer stumble unexpectedly out of the woods once made me think of Bambi, a terrifying work of art. Then I went to Miyajima. Now deer make me recall monks and forgotten facts about esoteric Buddhism. Reading books has changed how I read the world, but the world has effaced what I’ve read.

While first-reading, I make marginal notes, skip around or (in novels) re-read the pages I last read each time I pick a book back up. Reading becomes a mosaic, a challenge that simply cannot be completed to perfection, but can and should be tackled with vigor. My jumps within texts and between texts are motivated by excitement. Excitement is nonlinear.

Often, I think, we are taught in school—and proceed to teach our students—that to read is to create a list of mental bullet points which will be useful on a test. In fact, a first-reading seems to create in my mind not an analysis, not a bullet-pointed outline of any sort of cogent argument, but a feeling—a textual music of words and impressions.

But re-reading consists not only of approaching the same information again, but doing so after the brain has had time to pore over its first, imagistic impression of a text. How long does the brain need? I don’t know and don’t presume to hypothesize. Probably depends on the brain and the material being re-read. Everybody Poops is a fine book, but we probably don’t need as long to “get” it and develop its themes in our own lives (pooping, poop) as we do after reading, say, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (meaning, ethics/aesthetics, logic, whathaveyou).

When I go back to a line of thought again and again—say, the conversion of the pagan Roman Imperium, to the two competing strains of orthodox Christianity (Nicene and Arian), and to various Gnostic churches during the fourth century CE—I seem to mysteriously understand the first readings at once upon starting the second. It is as if my brain had waited to see if I would ever really need to understand why the Council of Nicaea was convened, or if I was only bluffing during my first reading.

The process of re-reading can certainly help solidify data—names, dates, themes—but it is the river in toto—the theme, the reason to have started pursuing a story in the first place—that we really want to understand, all of a sudden, when we read. The river is the reason that I re-read, not its tributaries (trivia).

And yet, of course, knowledge is never attained to some perfect degree. The river, a different river each time it’s stepped in or even gazed at, continues to move millions of gallons of water, millions of data, millions of words, forward in time. Translations are corrupted; Wikipedia is fallible—and yet we read and re-read. The river never freezes; it’s never clean. And yet, eventually, trying to pick up in Text Z where we left off from Text A, we dive back into the ink.

Wythe Marschall can be found here.

Pynchon, Paranoia, and Prophecy

pynchon-thomas-gravity1 “A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself—its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened—that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Thing only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable…” –Gravity’s Rainbow

What could this possibly mean?, is among the first questions a reader has to ask on opening a novel by Thomas Pynchon. His concerns ought to be familiar: sexual promiscuity, mind alteration, popular history in lyric form. What MTV has been jump-cutting about for a few decades now, that blissful-bright amnesia pill, favored by the young and their imitators. And, oh, yeah, paranoia, the loss of God, cultural imperialism, the clash of civilizations. The water-worn pebble of the Left and what gets swept under the smiles of the Right. Not to forget gender-bending, corporate greed, and the never-ending pursuit of some elusive thing. Do the rockets that military industrialists hawk have anything to do with the pitch of a population’s sexual frenzy? Pynchon writes serious books, hysterical in their intent, laughing madly and coolly prescient. The kind of laughter that knew what your next thought would be thirty-five years ago—way back when you were however many cigarettes more willing to believe.

It’s not the kind of endorsement that anybody seeks, but in DT Max’s March 9^th article in The New Yorker on the late David Foster Wallace, there is an anecdote about Wallace’s first encounter with Pynchon’s V. The comparison made is to Dylan’s happening on the songs of Woody Guthrie. (And is this weird?: the first person to suggest to then-folk-scene-hanger-on Bob Dylan that maybe somebody ought to, you know, “start a whole new genre,” try putting some poetry and rhythm to those old song structures—as dramatized in David Hajdu’s Positively 4^th Street—was this fellow named Richard Fariña, who, get this, was a very close friend of Pynchon’s at Cornell, and whose own story can only have augmented his friend’s obsession with rocket-falls and the hair-raising randomness of fate… so a guy might think on noticing the dedication of Gravity’s Rainbow… heavenly design, freak chance, or is it, hey, some kind of sinister conspiracy?)

Pynchon has made a career out of wrestling with those questions. Inherent Vice, his latest novel, offers a continuance of that incantatory brand of brilliance, behind the fake moustache and cheap suit of Noir. (Famously elusive to the media eye, Pynchon and disguise have always been a fit.) Playing at genre is the serious novelist’s way of circling the wagons to defend their medium, while the YouTube natives pound their drums and spirit new media arrows into the sky. With Pynchon, though, you never quite know: He might be rooting for those laying siege. This is the same novelist who, circa 1966, posited a secret network of isolates, connected through W.A.S.T.E. tubes, in the nearly reader-friendly The Crying of Lot 49.

Did the concepts for craigslist, Facebook, Twitter appear to Thomas Pynchon in a dream? Like a missile whose scream is silent until it hits, his work marks the parabolic curve of how we got from there to here.

***

In the early spring this year, I was asked by a glossy, fashion-focused magazine to write a retrospective on the work of Thomas Pynchon. The caveat being that I had only (about) 500 words. What I came up with was the preceding, which, for some odd reason, they never got back to me on. A polite way of saying, ‘get lost.’ Well. Okay. –Jeff

Jeff Price is the Associate Editor of Electric Literature