The Unarchivable

Notes and Remixed Notes on "A Monster's Notes"

2010-03-23T06:21:00.000-07:00

Still Alive!
Some Notes on Laurie Sheck's "A Monster's Notes"

To call something "notes" means it isn't finished.

A preparation for something else, or a work in progress.

Or

It means I know this is less than perfect. It means the piecemeal composition is acknowledged, should be applauded.

"And to my horror (for I had read the books which now all but crowded us out of the apartment) I discovered I knew nothing whatever about the grueling, mundane business of making form out of fragments." -- Frederick Exley, "A Fan's Notes"

"Form connotes and carries with it expectation." -- Ander Monson, "Fragments: On Dentistry"

It means this is less than perfect, and hence more real. The crude shape a virtue. The rough edges. Texture over all.

In Laurie Sheck's novel, "A Monster's Notes" (Alfred A. Knopf: 544 pp., $28), Victor Frankenstein's creation is alive and well and living in New York.

Mary Shelley's creation has come unstuck in time. He lives in New York or did until recently. He passes Tower Records, a Duane Reade drugstore. He takes notes on the news, developments in science. He reads abandoned books, is privy to whole correspondences, is a historian of his own loneliness.

The novel's first part is "Ice Diary"; the second is "Dream of the Red Chamber"; the last is "Metropolis/The Ruins at Luna." But the best parts of the book are in the "notes" -- lyric essays on time, space, leprosy, art. On Albertus Magnus, on John Cage. The sinews of this odd and unwieldy creature.

"I didn't seek to find her," Sheck writes in her preface, "wandered instead within and among her fragments of language -- notebooks, drafts, journals, fictions, letters, essays, and found there whole worlds spinning like planets, lived in their cold light and burnings light, wondering where I was, where they might take me. Curious, I heard a monster's voice, and out of some sharp need I followed."

Mary Shelley's stepsister Claire's letters, invented, real. Hesitant, aborted:

"So even liberty is a prison xxxxxxx and xxxx"

Much in that manner.

Writing is revision, or a kind of madness. Claire's cross-outs (xxx) resemble the stitches on the monster -- they are words left suspended in the air of the page.

When does a poet (Sheck is one) become a novelist? Sensationally great novels by poets: James Lasdun, "The Horned Man"; Robert Kelly, "The Scorpions"; John Ashbery and James Schuyler, "A Nest of Ninnies"

Ashbery and Schuyler trading off lines initially.

"On the first notebook's pages," Sheck writes in the preface, "she penciled in a left-hand margin, and there Percy Shelley left his comments and marks. Picture two hands moving side by side, she writing 'creature,' he (in some impulse of tenderness, kindness?) crossing it out, replacing it with 'being.'

Reading "Frankenstein" afresh: I see it as a commentary on (and twisted how-to kit for) the novel, that magpie form. A restlessness of form. A series of letters by an Arctic-bound explorer to his sister gets taken over by Victor Frankenstein's life story (a tangled affair in itself), which dissolves the artifice of correspondence for most of the book. And, at one point, Frankenstein's narration gets dominated by a soon-to-be one-sided dialogue with his creation.

We unthinkingly refer to the monster as "Frankenstein," understandable when the frame is so crooked, and creature and creator present themselves with equal eloquence.

Sheck embeds texts or, rather, lets them slip into and out of the pages; she compounds the vertigo. Characters write letters about books that they're translating; they quote passages, which are in fact like passages from one world to another.

The text as body.

Any line could serve as a metaphor for Sheck's project and process, such as:

"[Lady Su Hui's 'Xuan Ji Tu shi' is] a poem composed of 841 characters woven into a five-colored tapestry and arranged in a perfect square. Reading it, there's no need to start at the beginning or move straight to the end. Instead, it can be entered anywhere."

Or:

"Of Archilocos we have not one single work entire and most of the context's fallen away".

As the monster explains: "You worked to make the parts of me combine to form a new, amazing being."

More where that came from.

A commonplace book, a cover version of "Frankenstein," a epistolary novel. A commentary on revision, translation -- what lives in the margins.

"Where do you end and I begin?"

The fiction of "A Monster's Notes" is framed (as a found text) by a letter, dated June 30, 2007: "This is to inform you that the final closing on your building at East 6th Street was successfully completed . . . [Y]esterday afternoon as I made my last walk-through, I found on the second floor a shorter note, a manuscript wrapped in a rubber band, and an old computer. . . ."

It's the monster's handwriting. He muses: "And Clerval, that gentle man who everyone thought dead -- in fact he traveled east as he wanted. Even now I sometimes picture his hand moving in patient transcription as day after day he translated the 'Dream of the Red Chamber' in his house at the foot of Xianghan Hill. . . . " Clerval was Victor Frankenstein's faithful friend, destroyed by the monster in Shelley's novel, but here living in China, translating "The Story of the Stone," or "A Dream of Red Mansions," or "Dream of the Red Chamber."

"Dream of the Red Chamber," 18th century. Unfinished by the author, who is Cao Xuequin, or is he. Commentary by "Red Inkstone," who might also be Cao.

Originally published anonymously.

Unfinished by the author and hence potentially perfect, endlessly expandable in the mind.

Question for the reader: Why start what cannot stop?

Partial list of books never completed by their authors but published: Charles Dickens, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood"; Robert Musil, "The Man Without Qualities"; Walter Benjamin, "The Arcades Project."

"Those days in the graveyard I traveled across many pages which frequently ended in mid-sentence -- the books I found were mostly torn -- so my travels were wayward, random, disrupted, though maybe the mind mostly travels in this way."

"The whole issue of the unfinished is a living idea," writes the monster.

"[S]omething unfinished changes," he continues. "That means it's in a certain way alive."

As Sheck demonstrates, the lyric essay is a kind of Frankenstein's monster, equipped with parts sliced out of others, stitched up with genius and white space:

"Claire. Air. Care. Clear. Claire."

"If I could see intervals as well as objects. . . ."

"How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow!" -- "Frankenstein"

"Architecture of oblivion, its drifts."

"Winter darkness pulls over like a monk's cowl, enclosing us in worlds where strange things take place, where anything can happen, where the mind goes where it's never gone before, and stays." -- Gretel Ehrlich, "The Future of Ice"

I started this review before finishing the book, in the form of notes. I didn't know I was writing the review yet. I have another file just as long.

Fungibility of the notebook mode. Juxtaposition is easy, at times even arbitrary; effects perhaps no less revelatory or pungent.

"As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionally large. After having formed this determination and having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began." --"Frankenstein"

Cut and paste.

When am I writing this sentence?

Page 271, in its entirety: "The monks in their patchwork rags . . . and I a patchwork . . . the workings of each mind a patchwork, each self roughly stitched as you stitched me."

The energies of "A Monster's Notes" are not incompatible with those of the Web. Thought for future development: Unruly, genre-leaking books like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's "Dictee," Ishmael Reed's "Mumbo Jumbo" and David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress" might seem merely reflexive today, when we write in fragments, when our blogs and Twitter feeds and Facebook pages are de facto lyric essays, Frankenstein creations.

The intricacies of Shelley's life (who was Claire?) unclear to me till I went to Wikipedia. Sheck also embeds into her book Wikipedia, Google searches, Unknown Hosts, Redirections. All this webwork.

"The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion. . . . With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet." --"Frankenstein"

R. e-mails me that our friend J. has to take blood pressure medication because she drinks too much coffee, which makes me laugh. But also that J. "had this horrifying story about recently running into a crime scene near her house where a man had been cut into little pieces in a box." Which makes me think I will never get to sleep. I do, but in the middle of the night a storm centers itself overhead. I am not dreaming and now I understand the term "rolling thunder," the noise caroming like a ball in a roulette wheel, a ball the size of 20 baseball stadiums, a wheel with a diameter the length of Manhattan. Car alarms go off. I silently count the seconds before, or is it after, lightning penetrates the armor of the venetian blinds, to scrape my eyes and shock the bedsheets silver. —Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2009

Remixed Notes on "A Monster's Notes"

I.
“Good idea the repetition. Same thing with ads.” -- Joyce, "Ulysses"

Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died 10 days after giving birth to her.

“This is ordinary. I was a body coming out of another body that died. That died because of my body.” -- Laurie Sheck, "A Monster’s Notes"

“This was scant said but all cried with one acclaim, nay, by our Virgin Mother, the wife should live and the babe to die.” -- "Ulysses"

I don’t know which file contains my review in the form of notes and which contains my notes for the review in the form of notes.

Bloomsday now. Still writing this.

In the midst of putting together this monster I get an e-mail from R., who writes that our friend J. has to take high-blood pressure medication because she drinks too much coffee, which makes me laugh. But also that J. “had this horrifying story about recently running into a crime scene near her house where a man had been cut into little pieces in a box.”

The fiction of poet Laurie Sheck’s novel "A Monster’s Notes" is framed by a letter, dated June 30, 2007: “This is to inform you that the final closing on your building at East 6th Street was successfully completed. . . . [Y]esterday afternoon as I made my last walk-through, I found on the second floor a shorter note, a manuscript wrapped in a rubber band, and an old computer. . . .”

Page 271, in its entirety: ". . . The monks in their patchwork rags . . . and I a patchwork . . . the workings of each mind a patchwork, each self roughly stitched as you stitched me."

“Winter darkness pulls over like a monk’s cowl, enclosing us in worlds where strange things take place, where anything can happen, where the mind goes where it’s never gone before, and stays.” -- Gretel Ehrlich, "The Future of Ice"

Fungibility of the notebook mode. Juxtaposition is easy, at times even arbitrary; effects perhaps no less revelatory or pungent.

On Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog, Tom writes: “Ed Park's notes on 'A Monster's Notes' by Laurie Sheck: ‘I started this review before finishing the book, in the form of notes. I didn't know I was writing the review yet. I have another file just as long. Fungibility of the notebook mode. Juxtaposition is easy, at times even arbitrary; effects perhaps no less revelatory or pungent.’ [His notes weren't really revelatory for me -- what do you think?]”

I think you’re wrong.

And we’re not done yet.

II.
“The whole issue of the unfinished is a living idea,” writes the monster in his “Notes on Eva Hesse.” “[S]omething unfinished changes. That means it’s in a certain way alive.”

“Save your screams until you see its face.” -- movie poster, "It’s Alive!" (1974)

“It’s such a gamble when you get a face.” -- Richard Hell, “Blank Generation” (1977)

“Years later when I got smallpox it was as if that hatred was finally writing on my face. Scrawling all over it. That it had been waiting all those years. . . . My ugly, ruined face.” -- Mary Shelley to stepsister Claire, "A Monster’s Notes"

Clerval was Victor Frankenstein’s faithful friend, destroyed by the monster in Shelley’s novel, but in “A Monster’s Notes” he’s living in China, translating "The Story of the Stone," or "A Dream of Red Mansions," or "Dream of the Red Chamber," 18th century, originally published anonymously. Unfinished by the author, who is Cao Xuequin, or is he. Commentary by “Red Inkstone,” who might also be Cao.

Unfinished by the author and hence potentially perfect, endlessly expandable in the mind.

Partial list of books never completed by their authors, but published: Georges Perec, "53 Days." Ralph Ellison, "Juneteenth." Jane Austen, "Sanditon." P.G. Wodehouse, "Sunset at Blandings."

Nabokov, "The Original of Laura," to be published.

J.G. Ballard, "Conversations With My Physician," never to be published. David Foster Wallace, "The Pale King," to be published.

Title of Musil book: "Posthumous Papers of a Living Author." Published.

“[E]very book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.” -- Roberto Bolaño, "The Savage Detectives"

Read that some scholar said the unfinished fragments of stories on the late Roberto Bolaño’s computer could be read as having conclusions -- they ended, sometimes mid-sentence, in a way that made as much sense as if he’d actually finished them. Now mortality shapes them, a hidden theme emerges.

Where did I read this thing about Bolaño’s abbreviated works? Real? A dream?

Note to self: Take better notes.

Open up the paper: “Roger L. Kay, one of the most prominent analysts of the PC industry, described the new generation of machines as “Franken-products,” a reference to the monster cobbled together from various parts.” -- New York Times, June 7

Cao Xuequin’s "The Story of the Stone." Five volumes in the Penguin Classics edition. I bought Volume 1 during my weekly lunch-hour book-buying allowance, at my old job, circa 1996, at Tower Books on Broadway at 4th Street, New York.

Sheck’s monster passes TOWER RECORDS in New York.

Found Volume 2 in a box in front of a store in Cambridge, Mass. I thought it would go on like this, with me finding further installments at used bookstores, stoop sales, Salvation Army shelves. But it stopped there.

“A darkbacked figure scanned books on the hawker’s cart.” -- "Ulysses"

Found in an old folder of mine, notes for an abandoned novel, April 30, 2000: “I believe the Korean War has never ended, just as I believe the 1999 Stanley Cup finals, between the Sabres and the Stars, continues to this day.”

Next page is from a New Yorker piece, dated Sept. 30, 1996, author and article unknown: “Under the narrow legal definition of the term, Tigar found, the only national emergency even hypothetically still in existence in 1969 was, strangely, the Korean War. ‘We argued on appeal that no rational person could think the Korean War was still going on in 1969,’ Tigar explained. ‘The Tenth Circuit agreed, and dismissed the whole case.”

It seems I read 318 pages of Volume 1 of "The Story of the Stone." The bookmark is a business card from Taj Mahal Indian Restaurant, where I used to eat lunch once or twice a week. On the front I’ve written either “locus of history” or “loans of history.” On the back I’ve scrawled some unfamiliar words that I’ve encountered in the book: cangue, flocculus, incrassation, camlet. And this plaintive question: “Why does one begin to read an unfinished novel?”

“Jia She led a cultured life and never did anything.” -- "The Story of the Stone"

The bookmark at P. 178 of Gretel Ehrlich’s "The Future of Ice" is a ticket stub for the Neil LaBute play "Fat Pig."

“If 'The Story of the Stone' is a sort of Chinese 'Remembrance of Things Past,' it becomes doubly important to us to know as much as we can about the author’s life.” -- from David Hawkes’ introduction

Sheck’s Mary: “My days spent imagining his parts.”

Sheck’s monster: “I tried to piece together what I could. The lost Atlantis of her.”

“What words will you cut?” -- "The Story of the Stone"

Cut as in incise. But I’m reading it, now, as abandon.

III.
Strike-throughs, slashes. Brackets and underlinings. Double-strike-throughs. Question marks. Different typefaces. Obelus and ellipsis.

Words and names dissected, syllable by syllable. Silent letters identified. “The silent ‘e’ in hide, the silent ‘i’ in pain and recoil. The silent ‘g’ in sign.”

“If I could see intervals as well as objects...”

“It’s in the silence after you feel you hear. Vibrations. Now silent air.” -- "Ulysses"

“But it must be stressed that metaphor is not a completely successful or controllable means of communication. We employ inadequate language always.”

Mistyped: “meataphor.”

"I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame." -- "Frankenstein"

The lyric essay is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, equipped with parts sliced out of others, stitched up with genius and white space.

Where a man had been cut into little pieces--

“Those days in the graveyard I traveled across many pages which frequently ended in mid-sentence -- the books I found were mostly torn -- so my travels were wayward, random, disrupted, though maybe the mind mostly travels in this way.” -- "Frankenstein"

Another novel by a poet, Robert Kelly’s "The Scorpions" ends mid-sentence. As does "A Monster’s Notes."

List of books in "A Monster’s Notes" includes Mungo Park’s "Journal of a Journey in Africa."

Mungo Park disappeared in Africa.

As did his son, who went to find him.

“The Japanese word ‘oku’ means not only ‘north’ but also ‘deep,’ ‘inner,’ ‘the heart of a mountain,’ ‘to penetrate to the depth of something or someone,’ ‘the bottom of one’s heart,’ and ‘the end of one’s mind.’” -- "The Future of Ice"

“Sometimes I feel my own body turning into words, my skin a living network of words.” -- "A Monster’s Notes"

I misread “netsuke” for “network.”

Error.

“Claire” and “Cerval” both have “err” in them, or “air.”

“My head aches, I’m tired all the time and clumsy. My right hand’s not working right, I drop things for no reason.”

“BE SUSPICIOUS OF ANYTHING.” -- NYC MTA poster, quoted by Sheck

Meditation on themes suggested.

I mistyped “meditation” as “mediation.” “Thems” for “themes.”

Meditation on themes suggested by Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein."

On spaces created.

My notes written on the endpages, on the upper margins, on a torn sheet of a publicity letter, on a dry-cleaning receipt, across four different files on my laptop. Words in the air.

In China (relates "A Monster’s Notes") every scrap of writing is sacred, to be collected and burned. Words in the air.

Are these my real notes or the ones I will publish? Which version has more energy?

“Twenty-four-hour-a-day sun and I’m living in a skin turned inside out.” -- Gretel Ehrlich, "This Cold Heaven"

Sheck’s novel acknowledges Google searches. Wikipedia. Redirections. All this webwork.

"A Monster’s Notes" is an uncommonplace book. A site for revision, translation, error, confusion, melancholy. Limits of this method. Book is over 500 pages long, not without longueurs. (Could it have worked at 100 pages, at 50?) But heft becomes crucial to the experience. To exhaust the metaphors and the monster.

A mirror, an instant replay, “the automatic relation to himself of a narrative concerning himself.” ("Ulysses")

Sheck: “I’m reading and she’s listening.”

Every line potentially last or first.

-- Ed Park
Bloomsday 2009
New York City

American Fantastic Tales: A Cento

2010-01-11T08:26:00.000-08:00

The cautious reader will detect a lack of authenticity in the following pages. I am not a cautious reader myself, yet I confess with some concern the absence of much documentary evidence in support of the singular incident I am about to relate. It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer.

I am the most unfortunate of men. When I was eight years old my father was killed in the war, and my mother was broken-hearted. My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable. What began as a game, a harmless pastime, quickly took a turn toward the serious and obsessive, which none of us tried to resist.

What can I do? There is only one thing.

I don't know why I should write this.

I don't want to.

I don't feel able.

I'm having trouble remembering things. Small things, like where I put my keys, for instance.

It's fortunate I've dabbled a bit in psychiatry. I have faithfully served Yuggogheny County as its district attorney, in cases that have all too often run to the outrageous and bizarre. I should think the evidence was clear enough to corroborate my story, but I suppose I should have expected the reception it received from the police.

Aside from my teaching, I had for some years been engaged in various anthropological projects with the primary ambition of articulating the significance of the clown figure in diverse cultural contexts. I was interested in original sin and had dabbled in esoteric philosophy; my remote ancestors had been Salem witches. I owed the formation of my character chiefly to accident. I shall not pretend to determine in what degree I was credulous or superstitious. I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.

I read of it first in the strange book of Von Junzt, the German eccentric who lived so curiously and died in such grisly and mysterious fashion.

And then one afternoon ----

That afternoon, Mother introduced us to the man who was to be Father's successor in the household, and to his three children, who were to be our new brothers and sister, and we shook hands shyly, in a state of mutual shock.

Twilight was settling over L.A.'s Koreatown, the lights of the stores clicking off, the lights of the restaurants and bars flickering on. An inner voice warned me: Don't go! I walked up, and I walked down, and I walked straight into a delicately dying sky, and finally the sequence of observed and observant things brought me, at my usual eating time, to a street so distant from my usual eating place that I decided to try a restaurant which stood on the fringe of the town. It was in this sector of town, known generally as the East Side, that the brewers and tanners who made our city's first great fortunes set up their mansions. Their houses have a northern, Germanic, even Baltic look which is entirely appropriate to our climate. Of gray stone or red brick, the size of factories or prisons, these stately buildings seem to conceal that vein of fantasy that is actually our most crucial inheritance.

"As a matter of fact," the real estate agent snapped, "it is."

I found myself sitting in the library, and again sitting there alone. It seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream. The manuscripts were as I had left them, undisturbed. I sat at the table, slid on the cloth gloves, and began to read, following the first text with the index finger of my right hand, the second with the index of my left, my head turning from one text to the other. It had clearly been copied from a photocopy, and originally composed on a typewriter. I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. It was then that I first came face to face with myself -- that other self, in which I recognized, developed to the full, every bit of my capacity for an evil life.

Night had fallen without sound or ceremony when I came out again. The silence pursued me like dumb ghosts, the still air held my breath, the hellish fog caught at my feet like cold hands. It was a female figure, dressed in black. She was seated on one of the lower steps of the scaffold, leaning forward, her face hid in her lap, and her long disheveled tresses hanging to the ground, streaming with the rain which fell in torrents. The flower heads were heavy with sodden, brown-edged petals and their stalks bent wearily as if cognizant of the fact that their lives were held by a tenuous thread that was soon to be snapped between the chill, biting teeth of an early frost. I was compelled to make a drawing of it, almost against my will, since anything so outré is hardly in my line.

On the worst possible stretch of dirt you can imagine, I blew a tire and discovered that my spare had leaked empty. In the darkness one of the computer banks began humming. For the smallest fraction of a second no sound issued from it but its own mechanical hum. The sparkle faded and died. There was silence on the line. Have you ever been on the phone, canceling a credit card or talking to your mother, when all of a sudden -- with a pop of static -- another conversation bleeds into yours? No longer a world of material atoms and empty space, but a world in which the bodiless existed and moved according to its own obscure laws or unpredictable impulses. My travels were at an end, for here was the end of the machine.

—Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2009

(For solution, click here.)

"High and Low"

2009-05-05T18:35:00.000-07:00

[Review of a 2002 production of Don DeLillo's Valparaiso, Blue Heron Arts Center, NYC]

Ten minutes after we were airborne a woman asked me for my autograph.
—Americana (1971)

"Fame requires every kind of excess," Don DeLillo wrote in Great Jones Street (1973), the rock-and-roll novel par excellence. Nearly 30 years later, when a real music-world has-been gets second-active by giving an MTV crew carte blanche around the manse, that last word might be access. In the Rude Mechanicals' whip-smart staging of DeLillo's play Valparaiso (through August 18), Michael Majeski (Matthew Lawler), inadvertent world traveler turned instant celebrity, tells the first of many interviewers how to reach him: "I'll give you some numbers you can call. Home. I have home. I have here. I have my private number for here. I have my secretary when I'm away."

The syntax snaps satisfyingly, at once fresh and familiar; as in much of DeLillo's work, talk is performance, not to mention incantation, habit, falsehood. The invasion begins, encouraged and desired by the ones who will be its victims. The word-thirsty world initially learns of Michael because of the foul-ups that turned his simple business trip to Valparaiso, Indiana, into a voyage to the end of the earth, routing him to Valparaiso, Florida, and finally Valparaiso, Chile. ("They called me Miguel," he reports proudly. "I'm learning Spanish on tape.") Despite the heavenly toponyms, his twin journeys—geographic, then public—spiral into an infernal descent, in which grids of systems dice identity into a scatter of sound bites. (Lest this seem preposterous: Last week it was reported, with requisite snickering, that a couple who bought airline tickets online for a vacation to what they thought was Sydney, Australia, found themselves in a same-named northern town, "one of the worst industrial waste sites in Canada.")

Published in 1999, Valparaiso was less a coda to his 1997 Cold War omnium gatherum Underworld (which ended with the word "Peace") than a dry run for The Body Artist (2001), a slim work of calibrated radiances that presented language as erasure, a text for nothing. Thankfully, the talented Mechanicals (under Hal Brooks's direction) dust off the play's hidebound glories with a blast of pure oxygen, conveying menace and humor with remarkable assurance. Act II's assorted content providers thrum with hilarious life, and the sexual confessions (and offstage couplings) crystallize the self-fertilizing nature of the mass-media beast. There is the Brit reporter who takes up fencing poses while commanding, "Give me faster!" and a vérité-shooter (both Andrew Benator) who seduces Michael's wife, Livia (Elizabeth Sherman), a nursing-home physical therapist and "part-time unpublished poet" whose fame-craving matches her husband's. There is the soft-touch telejournalist (Kate Nowlin) who rigorously stage-manages Michael's narrative ("But first take us back"), exposing the play's recursive heart. There is ABC Australia and a morning radio show originating in either Detroit or Seattle.

And then, for all of Act II, there is nationwide television personality Delfina Treadwell (Carla Harting), a thimble-sized Oprah Ricki Raphael, who deconstructs, on air and with playful savagery, not just Majeski's story but the man himself. Effortlessly moving from come-hither banter to monstrous contempt, Harting makes Delfina convincing as both mother confessor and torture-room interrogator, and the Majeskis bask and unravel in her pertly demonic presence. She's aided by cynical sidekick Teddy (David Fitzgerald), who delivers his acid contributions while thumbing through magazines—a brilliant offhand gesture of mediatainment at once bored and self-absorbed.

Delfina is always "on," literally—"I'm live, I'm taped, I'm run, I'm rerun," she says, a poster girl for the tube's sham immortality. "Everything is the interview," says one of Benator's characters. The production smudges the line between stage and spectator, from the Negativlandish soundscape that precedes the play ("Please turn your cell phone off immediately. There is no one on the other side of the phone") to Delfina's calculated leap into an audience member's lap, consists almost entirely of interviews. On the page, Valparaiso can seem static, its satire appropriately nasty but a touch obvious. Embodied Rudely, with its boundaries blurred, the play now has a discomfiting directness. It works both as entertainment and a critique of its ingredients: the poses, the meaningless hunger, the glib banalities.

During the chat show's occasional commercial breaks, a chorus of airline attendants intone security queries and emergency instructions like a fearful mantra—a more sinister variant of the way a daughter in White Noise's post-nuclear ménage takes dreamy solace in the words Toyota Celica. "Then place the mask," they say, not completing the sentence. The last words spoken adumbrate even this fragment: Then place—a final dislocation. The mask in question is the plastic visage of televisual fame, or else the suicide shroud that our ostensible hero had in fact cobbled (out of dental floss and an airline-blanket wrapping) during his trip south. Only at the end does the play's opening image (an enigmatic video projection) scan intelligibly, as surveillance footage of a suffocating man; after two hours of hairpin banter and coruscating vernacular, all becomes wordless once more. With this energetic and frightening production, Valparaiso adds to the surfeit of proof that no writer better isolates than DeLillo our idiot grammars and makeweight pieties, our drivetime phoners and daytime talk, our American magic and dread.

—The Village Voice, August 13, 2002

Review of "Jandek on Corwood"

2009-04-12T19:49:00.000-07:00

Jandek on Corwood
Directed by Chad Friedrichs

As with much outsider art, biography is as crucial to Jandek's legend as the actual output. Since 1978, the enigmatic musician has released 33 records through the equally secret Houston-based Corwood Industries. In theory, the stuff is great: insect corpses glued to staff paper, or atonal marathons of ghostly koans and mental-ward blues, performed over gangrenous guitar. One could also justifiably situate Jandek's music right at the border of the listenable—which begs the question: would anyone but a journalist find the Jandekalogue worth wading through?

Chad Friedrichs's doc has too many rock-crit talking heads, too often saying the same thing based on scant information—though Voice contributor Douglas Wolk is eloquent on the sense of an ending he derives from the last song on each Jandek album, a pseudo-finality waiting to be trumped by the inevitable next release. Katy Vine actually tracked down the reclusive Texan, and her fascinating account of an immaculately dressed man, refusing to talk about the music but inviting her to a bar (where his similarly attired colleagues are) is diminished by the pedestrian visuals (cufflinks, glass of beer). A recording of John Trilbee's 1985 interview for the first issue of Spin is graced with a shot of a telephone. (What we see doesn't do justice to perhaps Jandek's true aesthetic achievement—album cover art as unified and resonant as the Smiths' or Belle & Sebastian's.) "Your review of Ready for the House [debut album] was the inspiration and force behind the continuation of Corwood Industries," he wrote to music writer Phil Milstein years after the fact, and one senses that the outsider knows how to play the publicity game better than was imagined. Though a clumsy portrait of the artist, Jandek on Corwood inadvertently serves as a mirror on the critical faculty itself. —Ed Park

[Some version of this appeared in The Village Voice, in November 2004

Stories Are About Stories (II)

2009-03-15T21:00:00.000-07:00

In last month's column, I pointed out some recent short stories that shine a light on their own construction. This month, we begin with David Marusek's clever epistolary yarn, "Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz," in which the whole motivation behind the writing is tied up in the odd, repetitive title.

But then, every bit of correspondence, from a terse business e-mail to a tear-soaked confession on lavender-scented stationery, is a narrative with built-in motivation. Something is desired, whether it's the removal of a credit-card charge, or the return of a lover, or simply an expiation of the writer's guilt for not having written in so long. To effectively amuse or upset or inform, the writer must bear the recipient in mind, gauging tone and structure accordingly. The pages of the letter work like frames, fixing aspects of the relationship between writer and reader: their respective locations, the level of intimacy or enmity, the time since the last communication. Such considerations make the letter a sturdy form for the short story writers.

In the introduction to "Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz," collected in "Getting to Know You" (Del Rey: 269 pp., $15), Marusek relates how elements of the plot had fermented in his head for years. It was only after attending a literary panel, in which magazine editors read "actual cover letters they had received from aspiring authors desperate to break into print," that he figured out how to write the story.

"Yurek Rutz" unfolds as a letter from one David Marusek to Gardner Dozois, longtime editor of "Asimov's Science Fiction." Marusek, "a borough zoning code examiner" whose literary career is a secret to his Fairbanks neighbors, accepts a strange commission by a not-quite widow named Emma Rutz: She wants him to compose her husband's epitaph. The rate: a thousand bucks for four lines.

Marusek confesses to Dozois that he writes to him "with grave misgivings" and to "pass along a certain questionable proposal." (Every letter is motivated.) Emma's husband, the eccentric Yurek Rutz, is ailing from Alzheimer's; Marusek learns that Yurek is distinctive only in his deeply narcissistic yearning for immortality. If Yurek's plan to keep himself cryonically preserved for future resurrection doesn't pan out, he's happy to achieve immortality via the world of letters. He's not a writer himself -- which is where the author steps in. Marusek will get a hundred dollars (from the Yurek Rutz Fund) every time he works the soon-to-be-deceased egotist's name in a published story. (Perhaps Marusek means to poke fun at those well-intentioned authors who agree to name a character after the highest bidder for a charity auction.)

Thus the letter to Dozois, replete with multiple instances of Rutz's name, becomes, in fact, the story itself (which Dozois, in the real world, published) -- a loop that's appropriately gimmicky and satisfying all at once.

As the title hints, Japanese writer Yasutaka Tsutsui's U.S. debut, "Salmonella Men on Planet Porno" (Pantheon: 272 pp., $21.95), bursts with wildly surreal situations. It too contains a loop story of sorts, "Rumours About Me," in which anything that happens to Tsotomu Morishita, the everyman protagonist, gets bruited by the mass media. One evening, the TV news notes that Morishita has been turned down for a date by a co-worker, then reports that "[a]ccording to well-informed sources, Morishita went straight to his apartment after work today, and is eating a meal that he prepared himself." It's a spryly absurd reduction of the very concept of narrative: It's literally what happens.

If nothing really happens, is it a story? It is -- if the frame is there, if the cameras are rolling, if anyone is paying attention. Narrative is in the eye of the beholder, and the simple fact of being observed changes the nature of the subject. Initially Tsotomu assumes that he hallucinated his appearance on the nightly news. Then the morning paper hits, with the headline "Morishita Rejected Again."

Any paranoid is a complete storyteller. In his version of the world, he's of utmost importance, the beleaguered point around which grand conspiracies (detected as the faintest whisper, a clump of bleached letters on a billboard) swirl. It's no great feat these days to satirize celebrity culture or the solipsistic virtual existences we create online, and by letting his conceit float in the realm of the fantastical, Tsutsui digs deeper. He externalizes all of Morishita's grandiose suspicions (triggered, we imagine, by his bungled attempts to woo the secretary), thus showing how a paranoid's auto-narration can work as an insanely incessant fiction.

The headlines alone are worth the price of admission:

"TM BUYS A TAILORED SUIT IN MONTHLY INSTALMENTS!"

"TM SLAMS CO-WORKER FUJITA OVER PAPERWORK ERROR."

"SHOCK! MOZZA'S SEX LIFE!"

When the world stops caring -- any narcissist's greatest fear -- the story ends.

The standout piece in "The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy" (Del Rey: 400 pp., $16), edited by Ellen Datlow, is also one of the collection's shortest. Jeffrey Ford's masterly "Daltharee" begins:

"You've heard of bottled cities, no doubt -- society writ minuscule and delicate beyond reason: toothpick-spired towns, streets no thicker than thread, pinprick faces of the citizenry peering from office windows smaller than sequins."

It's a sly strategy: "You've heard" slips us instantly into Ford's universe -- part of us always wants to appear in the know, so of course we've heard of those tiny worlds.

The city of Daltharee is one of these enclosed municipalities, and by the second paragraph Ford is already multiplying his conjurer's trick, giving us vertigo by presenting a miniature (a short story) about a miniature (a world that can easily fit atop a kitchen table). A conversation recorded by scientists (who are presumably the same size as us) reveals the inhabitants of Daltharee pondering the nature of their world, wondering if anything exists outside the glass.

The creator of Daltharee, the wayward scientist Mondo Paige (world on a page), is then reflected in the figure of the narrator himself -- or does Ford mean Ford himself? "Daltharee" ends on an exhilaratingly nightmarish note, with stories sprouting everywhere we look: "Each idea I have is a domed city that grows and opens like a flower. I want to tell you about cities and cities and cities named Daltharee." The narrator becomes his narration.

—Los Angeles Times, Nov. 20, 2008

Stories Are About Stories (I)

2009-03-15T20:55:00.000-07:00

In two installments, Astral Weeks samples intriguing tributes to Henry James, Philip K. Dick and others in new story collections.

By Ed Park

"By excluding almost everything," Steven Millhauser recently wrote about the short story, "it can give perfect shape to what remains."

In his dazzling story, "The New Structure," which Harper's published earlier this year, Millhauser effectively leaves no remainder. He conjures a fantastically proliferating setting -- an air-conditioned nightmare of seamless consumerism, a vast subterranean mall that is also a smoothly acquisitive corporate entity -- which our unnamed narrator describes with a mixture of muted distress and sheer awe. But "structure" also refers to the unorthodox construction of Millhauser's story itself, with its uneasy voice of communal anonymity and comfortable claustrophobia. Just as the company comes to dominate the town, psychically, financially and geographically (buying up houses, turning the living rooms into offices), hardly a paragraph goes by in which the vast "Under" is not lovingly detailed. Nothing exists here that is not a response to Millhauser's setting; it is all setting. The structure, in short, is the structure.

And some of the best stories, I'll argue, are about stories. It's an admittedly somewhat tautological conclusion that I've reached over the last few months, during which I've consumed little fiction outside of short stories. For my next two columns, then, I've shaken up five recent and forthcoming collections, of interest to Astral Weekers, and rolled out a gem from each. What connects them is their playful interrogation -- sometimes subtle, sometimes glaring -- of the short story form. They jolt us into fresh ways of reading.

John Langan's "On Skua Island," from "Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters" (Prime: 256 pp., $24.95), kicks off with a twist on Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw." Langan's version of James' first sentence reads: "The story had held us, round the dinner table, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was weird, as, on a February night in an old house with a strong storm howling off the ocean, a story should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till the eight of us adjourned to the living room with our drinks." The narrator is a Langan stand-in, an academic and scribbler of weird tales himself, and the conversation in this seaside house quickly turns to the popularity and metaphorical resonance of various horror-story staples: ghosts, vampires, werewolves, zombies and mummies.

Those last lurchers are deemed the least in tune to modern times, its inception as raggedy-bandaged curse-bearers perhaps a guilty response to Britain's imperial legacy. Throughout this early sequence, lightly shaped by the Langanian "I," the banter is witty and informed, like a sophisticated Halloween cocktail party, or if the endlessly categorizing employees of the record store in "High Fidelity" had worked at a used bookstore instead, just outside Salem or Sleepy Hollow.

The impossibility of telling a modern-day mummy story is suggested, and since only a fraction of the narrative has passed, we know that a challenge has been set -- a beautiful, artificial drama-heightener -- and will be met. Soon enough one of the other guests (a previously tight-lipped archeologist named Nicholas) begins his tale.

Now the narration is all Nicholas', and any coziness the evening once held dissipates entirely. Early in his career, he had visited a remote island ("north-northwest of the Shetlands") to investigate some mysterious, rune-covered ruins at the even more mysterious behest of British intelligence. Digging at the site, the team uncovers an ancient sword above an equally ancient female body -- shrunken, and not all there.

In his careerist lust to make his name, Nicholas concentrates on his translation of the runes, even as violent nighttime raids deplete the armed retinue accompanying him. (He, and the other soldiers, suspect Russian interlopers.) Langan's decoding of the old story will shed light on his uneasy present circumstances, and the recounting of this legend represents yet another level of narrative, fixed much deeper in the past.

A mummy story, of course, is what we get, but the supple way Langan sets up the climax is just as responsible for the success of "On Skua Island" as its bursts of gore. By making the early conversation so believable (and even agreeable), and by acknowledging the weight of literary history (i.e., the seeming impossibility of telling a convincing modern-day mummy story), the author makes the Skua Island plot more gripping than if it had simply been presented straight, a grisly but safely fictional rendering of things that go bump in the night. What would initially appear to be distancing effects let Langan sneak up close and -- you can't believe it's happening -- grab you by the throat.

One of the head-spinning high points in Philip K. Dick's 1962 alternative-history masterpiece, "The Man in the High Castle," comes when we learn that, just as Dick's book imagines a world in which the Axis won World War II, an author in the world of the novel has imagined what the U.S. would be like had the Allies been victorious. (In a further destabilizing touch, the world of that interior book, "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy," doesn't entirely correspond to "real" post-war U.S. history.) One of the standout pieces in Benjamin Rosenbaum's first collection, "The Ant King and Other Stories" (Small Beer: 224 pp., $16), does Philip K. Dickian self-consciousness one degree better by recognizing what a trusty trope alternative history has become for science fiction writers.

"Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes,' by Benjamin Rosenbaum" -- yes, the name is part of the title -- begins with the author's fictional avatar sharing a flight with the Raja of Outermost Thule. This world differs radically from ours, in technology and thought: zeppelins are used for air travel, and the Raja mocks the idea that "the events of the world were produced purely by linear cause and effect . . . How fanciful!" And this "Rosenbaum" isn't quite the Rosenbaum whom we think is authoring these pages. The story's Rosenbaum is the "plausible fabulist, Benjamin Rosenbaum" -- a pen name "taken from The Scarlet Pimpernel": "The name is chosen ironically. As a sort of challenge to myself, if you will. Bearing the name of a notorious anti-Hebraic caricature I must needs be all the prouder and more subtle in my own literary endeavors."

The fictional Rosenbaum, then, is a science fiction writer plying his trade in a parallel world, returning from the hilariously named convention Plausfab-Wisconsin ("the World's only Gynarchist Plausible-Fable Assembly"), with an assignment "to construct a plausible-fable of a world without zeppelins." Offered a different commission by his new friend the Raja, Rosenbaum suggests other, more esteemed writers he might contact -- Karen Despair Robinson, or "the great Sir Esau Asimov."

Even a casual science-fiction fan might find such in-jokes diverting, but what Rosenbaum -- the "real" Rosenbaum -- is doing goes beyond satire. As pirates, giant spacecraft, shootouts and other action-packing elements disrupt the baroque chat of the opening, Rosenbaum, the plausible fabulist, muses that if "by some unlikely chance" he survives his rapidly deteriorating plight and finishes his plausible fable of a zeppelin-less world, "I resolved to make do without the extravagant perils, coincidences, sudden bursts of insight, death-defying escapades and beautiful villainesses that litter our genre and cheapen its high philosophical concerns." He will strive to create a higher grade of plausible fiction, just as our Rosenbaum is trying to subvert the standard situations of science fiction. That the lofty goals exist cheek-by-jowl with rather fun fight scenes lets him have his cake and eat it too.

But the real punch line is that the story "Benjamin Rosenbaum" wants to write -- full of "high philosophical concerns" -- isn't what we're reading. We're simply getting the "Biographical Notes," a hilariously fast-paced para-text to an invisible document. It's a story about the impossibility of stories.

—Los Angeles Times, Nov. 2, 2008

Next column: Story time continues, with narcissism, paranoia and snow globes.

Panic and emptiness!

2009-03-12T18:58:00.000-07:00

Music of the mind
In 'Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me' and 'Master of Reality,' classic rock groups take their listeners to fantastic places
By Ed Park

Astral Weeks Pop Quiz: Name the piece of music responsible for these flights of fancy:

Example one: "About fifteen minutes [in] . . . I have entered a different reality and am in a strange part of the universe where you can sit on the tail of a flaming guitar and fly through the sun. It's fantastic."

Example two: "[I]t starts with just a one-string riff which late at night, everybody asleep, sounds like the world being born or something. It only lasts for a second. But it's this one note just sitting there. Do you even know what I mean? When I got to that point it was like I was flying so high above your world and I was so free. . . . "

Example three: " 'Now comes the wonderful movement: first of all the goblins, and then a trio of elephants dancing. . . . [L]ook out for the part where you think you havedone with the goblins and they come back,' breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end. Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world. After the interlude of elephants dancing, they returned and made the observation a second time. Helen could not contradict them, for once, at all events, she had felt the same, and had seen the reliable walls of youth collapse. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins were right."

The first two passages come from recently published novels: Martin Millar's "Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me" (Soft Skull: 222 pp., $13.95), a charming autobiographical novel with the band's epic 1972 Glasgow show as its life-defining event; and John Darnielle's brief, intense "Master of Reality," the fictional diary of a troubled Black Sabbath acolyte (Continuum: 102 pp., $10.95). (The songs in question above: "Dazed and Confused" and "Lord of This World.")

The third passage -- "panic and emptiness!" -- comes from E.M. Forster's 1910 novel, "Howards End," and describes Helen's vivid responses not to any sort of proto-heavy metal, but to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. (Though perhaps this "sublime noise" is proto-heavy metal?) In all three, shimmering worldviews and entire universes are born or destroyed.

What is it that makes us respond narratively to music, far beyond what the lyrics (if any) might indicate? ("The notes meant this and that to her, and they could have no other meaning, and life could have no other meaning," Forster's Helen thinks, after the concert.)

Spontaneous conjuring -- shapes and colors, creatures and deities, fantasy and recollection -- is commonplace. So are long-lasting associations, for melodies weave into a life to such a degree that they can emerge, years later, as if on a hair trigger. Millar's and Darnielle's books effectively capture this two-sided ability, featuring narrators who built their teenage alternative realities on tenacious, life-changing sounds, sounds that echo down the decades.

Millar is a Scottish writer whose two recent U.S. titles ("The Good Fairies of New York" and "Lonely Werewolf Girl," both from Soft Skull) mix fantastic creatures with contemporary settings. For some reason those books haven't quite clicked with me, but "Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me" makes me want to try again. Form does not follow function here -- despite the narrator's Zep obsession, the novel doesn't try to replicate the sprawling grandeur and virtuosic excess of the band's music. Instead, it unfolds in irresistibly short chapters ("Short enough for your limited attention span") and simple prose. (Toward the end, Martin explains his revision process: "If I find any fancy adjectives have crept in I replace them with small words like 'nice' and 'big.' ") This makes for an entertaining -- and at times quietly sad -- story that winds up saying a lot about teenage angst, middle-age angst, the ecstasies of fandom, the virtues of " Buffy the Vampire Slayer," how to judge literary contests (Answer: Give the award to the most attractive entrant) and the pants styles of yesteryear.

The novel toggles between the narrator's present-day London conversations with his friend Manx (a single mom with lingering postpartum depression) and episodes filled with the anxiety and embarrassment of being 13, when the promise of hearing -- and seeing -- your heroes perform could make everything right. Awkward Martin has a close friend (Greg), an unwanted admirer (violin-playing social misfit Cherry), a hero (charismatic Zed) and a hopeless crush on the titular Suzy (attached, alas, to Zed).

Martin and Greg have their own secret fantasy world, like a game of "Dungeons and Dragons" without any rules -- a realm of sorcerers and orcs that the music of Led Zeppelin (equally informed by the blues and Tolkien) intensifies. Martin and Greg, "joint masters of the Fabulous Dragon Army of Gothar," fight the Monstrous Hordes of Xotha, and the two friends await reinforcements from Atlantis, the only other region that has held out against the enemy.

So: Why can't they get girlfriends? Actually, they can: Cherry, deemed even less socially redeemable than Martin, wants to join them, but she's insensitively rebuffed. (Millar is excellent and clear-eyed when it comes to the small brutalities of adolescence.) Though the book's construction seems casual, Millar expertly maneuvers his characters toward the climactic Led Zeppelin show (with young Martin imagining actual zeppelins materializing over Glasgow, bearing prematurely dead icons like Jimi Hendrix) and presents how the event resonates in each of their interconnected lives -- complicating some things, clarifying others. Even readers who last listened to "Houses of the Holy" during the Reagan administration will find much to enjoy here. For 200 pages, Glasgow circa 1972 shimmers like a vision of Atlantis, a lost world.

John Darnielle is the single constant behind the group the Mountain Goats and arguably the most rewarding lyricist working today. Taking into account his prolific wordsmithery ("Laugh lines on our faces / scale maps of the ocean floor") and affinity for horror both cinematic and literary ("Heretic Pride," the most recent Mountain Goats album, has song titles naming Fu Manchu creator Sax Rohmer and H.P. Lovecraft), it shouldn't come as a surprise that he'd contribute to Continuum's "33 1/3" series of short books pegged to iconic albums. But "Master of Reality" departs brilliantly from the typical "33 1/3" format, not just by choosing fiction over criticism or recording history, but in its structural gambits and unwavering sense of purpose.

(Following on the heels of Carl Wilson's fascinating, probing 2007 Celine Dion book, "Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste," "Master of Reality" makes me think that the "33 1/3" line should devote itself to albums that aren't critical darlings -- the insights are fresher, the risks more worthwhile.)

Like one of Lovecraft's shattered narrators, teenager Roger Painter is writing from the other side of sanity -- or what we on the outside would call sanity. It is October 1985, and he is keeping a journal for his social worker, Gary, at the psychiatric center where his stepfather has deceitfully deposited him. His personal effects have been confiscated, and when the book opens his entries are terse bursts of all-caps rage. The words are all Roger's, writing toward an uncomprehending, withholding captor -- or god. "If you want me to focus you should let me do it the best way I know how!" writes Roger, in a conciliatory mood. "You should at least give me back Black Sabbath MASTER OF REALITY. It is my favorite."

Roger patiently explains what Black Sabbath means to him, and what makes the band unique: "Ozzy, he is the singer, he was singing about witches and wizards and corpses. . . . But there were barely any stories. Not like in Rush songs, where there is a wizard or whatever, there will be a whole story, like a Robert A. Heinlein book." The songs are direct in a way that most art isn't, at once frightening and exhilarating. Ozzy Osbourne's voice "doesn't sound like anybody else's, and also it sounds kind of like you know him. Like, when Robert Plant is singing for Led Zeppelin you can't really think you're ever going to see that guy at the arcade and play doubles on Galaga with him." (Some of Millar's characters would disagree.)

But it all falls on deaf ears, and Roger's situation resonates with the album's title: Who masters this reality? The asylum setting channels Roger's writing into an impassioned articulateness, words to ward off panic and emptiness -- yet his depressing fate shows how Gary literally holds all the keys. Then the thing splits open. Darnielle jumps ahead: Here is Roger, 10 years later, writing to Gary in complete sentences and brushed-up grammar but with not one iota of rage displaced. He listens to Sabbath from this new perspective -- call it wisdom -- but whether Gary ever gets the letter (in both senses of the verb), we'll never know. Darnielle's lost world stays lost, and it's a powerful, excruciating chronicle.

—Los Angeles Times, September 7, 2008

Lovecraft and Hubbard

2009-02-07T00:31:00.000-08:00

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril
By Paul Malmont
Simon & Schuster, 361 pp., $24

Usually literary cameos make me grit my teeth (look—it’s Frank Lloyd Wright talking to Millard Fillmore!), to the extent that I now require round-the-clock dental care. But Malmont's breezy pulp pastiche, set in '30s New York, charmingly riffs off authorial personae and lets the era's imaginative fictioneers take center stage: H.P. Lovecraft, a pre-Scientology Ron Hubbard, Shadow author Walter Gibson, Doc Savage mastermind Lester Dent, and Chester Himes are all present and itching for adventure. Malmont plays fast and loose with the facts (Hubbard was not, alas, a pallbearer at Lovecraft's funeral), but biographical fidelity is trumped by the air-conditioning qualities of the book's rapid page flip quotient.

—First appeared, in slightly different form, in The Village Voice, June 6, 2006

Review of "The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island"

2009-01-19T18:58:00.000-08:00

The Joy of Operating Manuals

New Kitchen musical celebrates the poetry of instructions for outmoded appliances

An immediate wistfulness permeates the first exchange in Ben Katchor and Mark Mulcahy's wondrous new musical, The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island. Gingin, an adorable, notably unwed Gotham grad student (Mollie Weaver) receives a random call a from long-tressed (but body-hair-inhibited) Kayrolian stevedore, Samson (Mulcahy). But even before their biographical details fall into place,the drolly conversational opening holds an inexplicable ache. When Samson (visible behind a scrim but thousands of miles away) asks how he sounds on his new phone, his perfect-stranger interlocutor answers along a stately, descending melody: "You sound pretty clear/Yeah, you sound pretty clear."

Their words aren't just "the pleasantries surrounding a wrong number," as someone later puts it, but carry a hopeful erotic charge, the absurd longings of anonymity. And the far-flung tale that writer-director-designer Katchor and composer-actor Mulcahy spin in the next two hours, for all its delightful flights of fancy, makes good on this emotional connection. Appropriately, Gingin's would-be swain is Immanuel Lubang (Ryan Mercy), connoisseur of a secret genre of poetry—the instruction manuals of outdated home appliances, literature he dubs the "anonymous productions of the mid 20th century." (The Botulax can opener, the Normelton toaster oven, the Gumsol electric toothbrush: Katchor has great fun crafting the cryptic syllables of faded commerce.) Lubang, whose fresh-faced enthusiasm recalls that of Rushmore's Max Fischer, isn't alone in his love of this fugitive form of prose poetry; aficionados meet regularly to give readings from, say, the translated instructions to a Japanese blender. Such abstractions intimate a "world in which man lives with his machines in peace."

Emotional projection—onto faceless callers, onto useless words—is thus one of the show's dearest themes, illuminated with humor and tenderness. And like a shifting landscape of desire and whimsy, the leisurely drawings of cartoonist Katchor are projected onto a triptych of screens, images that respond antically to create a Manhattan of penthouse suites and Macedonian coffee shops and a Kayrolian tropical limbo of mutated crocodiles, smokestacks, and lonely brothels.

The marquee-meriting "slugs" denote not some viscid gastropod, but the small lead ingots placed inside modern-day devices to give them "the impression of heft and worth" they lack due to miniaturized advanced technology. The lead is mined by third-world robots, and transferred from dock to rail by men on Kayrol Island, who are paid in date nut leaves. Another projection: Western journalists fill the news with stories of their tragedy, but the perception isn't shared by the workers, who are rendered by Katchor in beach-casual and apparently only have to walk 20 feet, one small slug on each shoulder.

Katchor's comic-strip art translates into three dimensions. The clarity of plot points and jokes, of fanciful urban microhistory and cogent reductio ad absurdums, is amazing for such a densely written work. Lubang makes Gingin's acquaintance after getting hit by a glob of ice cream while walking on the sidewalk below her family's penthouse balcony; Gingin's apologetic, well-to-do electrolysist stepfather Dr. Rushower (Tom Buckland) invites him up. When Gingin, mortified by news reports of the slug bearers' poverty, later refuses contact with any appliances, Dr. Rush-ower underwrites a mission to get his daugh- ter out of her slump—and perhaps into the arms of a mate—by sending her and Lubang to Kayrol to spread the joys of "consumer fiction." Slug Bearers doesn't miss a beat as it takes on political commentary that's as deft as it is nonjudgmental, silly as it is serious.

The supple four-piece band moves easily from gonzo calypso to lounge jazz, and keeps the soundscape uncluttered even when cutting loose. Lubang introduces him and his appetite for instructions with a discursive, propulsive song that's like Don McLean's "American Pie" but with the phrase "see figure seven" as a dramatic high point, and his attempt to convert the Kayrol workers has the rumbling energy of a church revival. He and Weaver are sweetly appealing leads, Buckland is sportingly avuncular, and Michael Wiener and Joshua Bishoff provide memorable comic turns in the supporting roles.

As much as the milieu is pure Katchor (brilliantly developed from a "Julius Knipl" story in Metropolis magazine, and later collected in his book The Beauty Supply District), the more surprising achievement may be Mulcahy's—not just his lively and varied score, but also his multiple stage roles. Who could have anticipated such an extroverted and enjoyable second career? Miracle Legion, Mulcahy's old band, had a late-'80s heyday, sounding like a more plangent R.E.M.; his more recent solo albums are at once more confessional and hermetic. But here he proves an avid showman, playing with chameleon relish a cynical industrialist and Gingin's overweening shrink, who semi-sambas as he unreels his diagnosis. And in Mulcahy's main role as Samson, he's a sunnier version of his contemplative recording persona. Explaining the lure of the persuasive radio jingle that brought him to work from a neighboring island, he asks, "How could anyone with ears resist?" As they say in the movies, this one had me at hello.

—The Village Voice, March 16, 2004

Favorite SF/speculative fiction reads of 2008

2009-01-11T17:31:00.000-08:00

1 It's not every day you read a lost bit of 19th century science fiction—from New Zealand, no less. "The Great Romance" (University of Nebraska) appeared in the 1880s in two (or more) installments by a writer known only as "The Inhabitant." It's the disjointed yet fascinating chronicle of John Hope, a man of the 1950s who is catapulted first into the 22nd century, and then to Venus. The white-knuckle ending is all the more tantalizing because no conclusion to the story has been discovered. It's a cliffhanger for the ages.

2 Benjamin Rosenbaum's "The Ant King and Other Stories" (Small Beer Press) contains invisible cities and playful deconstructions of the form. In "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, With Air-Planes,' by Benjamin Rosenbaum"—yes, his name is part of the title—the author imagines a world whose technologies and philosophies differ wildly from ours. The result is a commentary on the state of the art that is itself the state of the art.

3 In The Next Thing," published in May in Harper's, Steven Millhauser conjures an air-conditioned nightmare of seamless consumerism, a vast subterranean mall that is also a smoothly acquisitive corporate entity—a structure his unnamed narrator describes with a mixture of distress and awe. But "structure" also refers to the unorthodox construction of Millhauser's story, with its uneasy voice of communal anonymity and comfortable claustrophobia. The structure, in short, is the structure.

4 "Other Worlds, Better Lives" (Old Earth) collects Howard Waldrop's long short stories: inspired alternate historical mash-ups in which Thomas Wolfe and a young J.D. Salinger share a zeppelin flight with Fats Waller, or the bright lights of Paris' artistic set (Alfred Jarry, Marcel Proust) help Méliès make a movie about the Dreyfus case. The most satisfying tale, "A Dozen Tough Jobs," transposes the labors of Hercules to 1920s Mississippi.

5 Charles Fort started as a journalist, took a swing at pulp fiction and the social realist novel, and wound up an idiosyncratic interrogator of established wisdom. His books (which Theodore Dreiser championed) can warp one's worldview as much as a library full of science fiction. Jim Steinmeyer's short, fascinating biography, "Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural" (Tarcher/Penguin), is a fine introduction to this American iconoclast.

6 Martin Millar's "Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me" (Soft Skull) toggles between the narrator's present-day London conversations with his friend Manx and his anxious, embarrassed memories of being 13, when the promise of hearing—and seeing—his heroes perform could make everything right. Awkward Martin and his friend Greg have their own fantasy world—a realm of sorcerers and orcs that the music of Led Zeppelin intensifies. By the end of this entertainingly sad book, Glasgow 1973 shimmers like a lost world, echoing with the strains of "Misty Mountain Hop." —Los Angeles Times, Dec. 7, 2008

Donald E. Westlake

2009-01-11T14:10:00.000-08:00

GOD SAVE THE MARK
By Donald E. Westlake
Forge/Otto Penzler Presents, 268 pp., $14.95

Fred Fitch, the gullible narrator of Westlake's 1967 novel, receives 300 grand from an uncle he's never met—and then his problems really begin. Sniped at, seduced, and ceaselessly solicited, Fred wises up just enough to keep his life, not to mention his loot. A neighbor fishes for some Fitch funding to self-publish his neglected masterpiece, Veni Vidi Vici Through Air Power, a book that asks one burning question: What if Julius Caesar had had access to a couple of biplanes? Fred himself recalls—or foreshadows—Charles Portis's Dog of the South übernebbish, Ray Midge, prone as he is to wonderfully absurd digressions that you can't help but read aloud: "I wanted to call him Ralph, I really wanted to call him Ralph. I wanted to start my answer with Ralph and end my answer with Ralph and put Ralphs in here and there in the middle of the answer, and answer only in words which were anagrams of Ralph."
—June 29, 2004, Village Voice

On New Order's "Run"

2008-12-26T17:49:00.000-08:00

"Answer me," begins New Order's "Run," the song that threaded itself through my head during my last months at my old job. "Why won't you answer me?"

I liked New Order as a teenager; 1989's Technique (on which "Run" makes its home) was the last album of theirs to hold my interest. Now that song was in heavy mental rotation, as it never had been before, outlasting all the theoretically more exciting youngbloods. I want to find out why.

In 2006, things were going downhill at the office and everyone knew it. People were jumping ship at alarming rates; more alarming was the number forced to jump. "Run" isn't quite an office song—not the way Fountains of Wayne's "Hey Julie" ("I've got a desk full of paper that means nothing at all") or the Modern Lovers' "Government Center" ("a lotta lotta lotta nice desks and chairs, uh huh!") are explicitly about the joys and terrors of the workaday word.

But "Run" was my theme song, and I didn't even know what it meant. It has the virtue of being intimate yet ambiguous, and the music is a thrilling mix of guitars and machines. Even the title is up for grabs: a directive to flee, or simply to hit the treadmill? The lyrics are among the most potent in the New Order canon, admittedly a songbook in which much sounds tossed off (a trait I admire).

Maybe it takes fifteen years of not hearing the song—of being swept along by the airtight weave, or not thinking about it at all—but "Run," I'm realizing, is a horror story of sorts, an incident of amnesia in the corridors of power: "I don't know what day it is or who I'm talking to." It's not far from there to the land of This is not my beautiful house/This is not my beautiful wife. "I can't recall the day that I last spoke to you." A guitar figure just this side of sour tears through it all again and again. There is tremendous violence—and freedom—in this line: "You work your way to the top of the world/Then you break your life in two."

The epigraph to Personal Days comes from "Run"; that last couplet seemed appropriate for a book in which the brutality of downsizing was dramatized in the broken structure itself—the voice changing, dramatically, twice.

The penultimate verse seems to hold a measure of hope—"I haven't got a single problem now that I'm with you"—but do we believe the speaker? (The last line, tellingly, is "What do you want me to believe?")

I'm getting the sinking feeling that the singer is talking to a ghost—or the singer is a ghost, just like in New Order's story-song "Love Vigilantes."

Without giving too much of Personal Days away, I'll just say that the idea of the ghost in the machine is significant, if not central to the novel. Quick sample from the book: "Our machines know more than we do, Pru thinks. Even their deficiencies and failures are instructive...."

New thought about the title: Is "Run" a command for a computer—or from one? And what is the program?

—from Book Notes at Largehearted Boy, July 2, 2008

Video directed by Robert Frank:

"Authors Pick the Best"

2008-12-17T20:49:00.000-08:00

A massive graphic novel called "Bottomless Belly Button" -- I'm not going to tell you who wrote it, because that was part of the experience -- arrived in the mail incognito, and the cover didn't name the author, or at least not in a way that was immediately legible. I opened the book and did not recognize the style -- scratchy, intimate, sad. (Later I would learn that I had indeed seen some of this artist's work online, but I didn't make the connection at first.) I read on and tried not to read too much, tried to savor this familiar yet odd chronicle of nuclear family meltdown, with one of the members -- the artist's stand-in? -- depicted as a frog. I wanted to ration "BBB" like Charlie Bucket does with his chocolate bar. I couldn't help myself -- I kept reading, small revelations everywhere, thanks in part to this accidental anonymity.

—Louisville Courier-Journal

"Books We Love"

2008-12-17T20:47:00.000-08:00

A single page of Don Paterson's collection of aphorisms, "Best Thought, Worst Thought," contains enough philosophical conjecture, elegant bile, and cold hard truths (or facile lies) to power three regulation-length novels. The misanthropy on display here alternates with humor, or simply merges with it ("You've made a blog ... Clever boy! Next: flushing"), making for irresistible sampling. Some of the aphorisms read like surreal microfictions ("Sex is better in dreams as the prick has an eye"), others like entries in a journal intime. Just when he has you chuckling, he'll whip out a line that reads like a freshly translated fragment from a distant epoch ("Imagining the worst is no talisman against it"). You get the sense that Paterson both stakes his life on every sentence and wants to distance himself from it almost before the ink has dried, and these impulses give the book its perfect rhythm. As he puts it, "A style is a strategy of evasion."

—Salon

"A Year in Reading"

2008-12-17T20:46:00.000-08:00

Reviewing two very good rock and roll novels - Martin Millar's Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me and John Darnielle's Master of Reality - I finally cracked open Lewis Shiner's Glimpses (1993), an amazing, sustained performance, which I savored over the course of a month or two - the chapter as nightcap. In contrast, I basically inhaled the University of Chicago Press's three republished Parker books by Richard Stark. They came in the mail one day; I opened up The Outfit, just to see what it was like (I was very busy and had no time for pleasure reading), and read into the wee hours. A few chapters in, I realized I'd started with the second book in the series, but it didn't matter. There was simply no stopping me. After it was over, I read The Hunter and The Man With the Getaway Face. Now I'm just waiting for spring and the next batch of reissues.

—The Millions, Dec. 11, 2008
A Year in Reading: Ed Park

I Think I Need a New Heart

2008-11-22T19:09:00.001-08:00

Mulholland Drive began with a car crash, then inscribed the statuesque blankness of Laura Elena Harring's Rita with Hollywood dread; the new hostages-and-hankies drama John Q. also gets things rolling with automotive disaster, and when Harring materializes a few scenes later, the optimist may feel a certain dream-state tingle before she reverts to anonymity. What lingers is the dread. The movie is The Negotiator refashioned around Helen Hunt's "fucking HMOs!" outburst in As Good as It Gets, with Denzel Washington and a team of alpha males on hand to offset the hysterics, not to mention the Larry King Live-caliber discussions on the sorry state of medical coverage.

When economically beleaguered family man John Quincy Archibald (Washington) can't get his suddenly dying son, Mike, onto the heart-donor waiting list, he grabs a gun and locks down the ER. "This hospital's under new management now," he announces. "Free medical care for everybody." The hostages—including James Woods's transplant surgeon, a truth-to-power medical resident, a pregnant woman, and a soul brother—develop severe Stockholm syndrome, and as news spreads about what "John Q." represents, his implied last name forms a sea of support surrounding the wall of blue. (And when he vows, "I will not bury my son—my son will bury me," as police multiply outside, the line echoes journalist Peter Noel's immortal cover-line challenge in these pages: "If a cop kills my son, I will kill the cop.") The reiteration of Mike's blood type, B-positive, is hardly subliminal in its prescription for hard times.

After a sinuous, irresistible turn as Training Day's heart of darkness, Washington is in default dignified mode here. He capably embodies the hero's transformation from doughy dad to man of action, amid the movie's shameless button-pushing and cheap religious overlay. Though better acted than Extreme Measures (surgeon Hugh Grant discovers where spare parts really come from), and with a broader social vision than Untamed Heart (Christian Slater gets simian thumper, Marisa Tomei), John Q. represents a creative dead end for the organ-transplant movie, a genre that perhaps begins at the height of glory with Eyes Without a Face.

—The Village Voice, 2/19/02

"Guided by Voices"

2008-08-12T19:27:00.000-07:00

I. Pythagorean Theorem
The twin spirits of Sigmund Freud and L. Frank Baum, both born in May 1856, preside over Mladen Dolar’s invigorating and elegant new study A Voice and Nothing More. The father of psychoanalysis and the children’s fantasist par excellence each published his most famous book—The Wizard of Oz, and The Interpretation of Dreams, respectively—in 1900, and brought to the public’s mind, intermittently at least, the curious nature of that most common yet elusive of human expressions.

In Baum’s dream-redolent story, the wizard (Oz himself, “the great and terrible”) wields power through his voice—now thunderous, now calm—while a screen conceals his frail body. Dolar devotes a whole chapter of his book (part of MIT’s Zizek-curated “Short Circuit” series) to “Freud’s Voices.” The classic analytical model, the analysand lies on the couch and speaks, with the (silent) analyst out of sight. The analyst, he writes, “assume[es] this silence as the lever of his position, thus turning the silence into an act.” In other words, the analyst’s silence becomes as potent as the wizard’s booming voice, almost magically directing the flow of the patient’s speech, shaping it, imposing interpretation.

Through a Lacanian ear-horn, Dolar listens to the way the voice (“a bodily missile which has detached itself from its source…yet remains corporeal”) has asserted itself, or evaporated, over the centuries, and thrillingly arrives at the very root of philosophy itself. Both the Baumian and Freudian setups, for example, owe something to the idea of the acousmatic voice, the “voice whose origin cannot be identified.” (“I am everywhere,” Oz tells his audience.) Michel Chion first elaborated on the concept in 1982’s The Voice in Cinema—tracing it back to the mother’s voice, heard omnidirectionally in the womb—and Dolar notes that the word (acousmêtre) has its roots in the Acousmatics—per Larousse, “Pythagoras’ disciples who, concealed by a curtain, followed his teaching for five years without being able to see him.”[61] This practice enabled them to concentrate on his voice in the absence of his body, the better to concentrate. If Pythagoras is indeed history’s first philosopher, then from the beginning philosophy has concerned itself with the split between mind (for which voice will substitute) and body.

It’s Toto, Dorothy’s dog, who accidentally tips Oz’s screen, revealing the “little man,” in reality a mere ventriloquist. Like a cultural dogcatcher, Dolar chases down another pooch with an even more iconic relation to sound: The gramophone-listening Nipper, whose depiction eventually became the logo for HMV. As Nipper (who died before he was painted) searches for the ghost in the machine, the illustration solves the problem of how to depict sound graphically. (The shattered glass of “Is it live or is it Memorex?” might be a close second.) “The acousmatic master is more of a master than his banal visible versions,” Dolar writes, and we might note that Nipper first appeared in advertising in that Baumian, Freudian year of 1900.

Other highlights from this brief but dense cultural history include the hiccoughs that interrupt Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, the concept of the “voice of reason” and the voice’s persistent superior status to written law, and why Stalinist leaders sometimes sounded like they didn’t understand what they were reading.

II. The Portable Carrie Bradshaw
Once you read Dolar, your ears turn into satellite dishes, picking up signals from all over the culture. What does it mean that some of the most popular TV shows today, like Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy, frame each episode with voiceover? Is this laziness, à la Adaptation and real-life screenwriting coach Robert McKee, or does it tap into each viewer by simulating her own “voice of reason”? Does it function as a built-in variation on DVD commentaries (in which aural marginalia stands in for secret knowledge)? (And why is it that, as I type these rhetorical questions, I “hear” them the way viewers heard Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw recite generalizing sentences from her column in Sex and the City, the show that started kicked off this recent trend?)

III. Pull My Jetée
If Freud and Baum are twins, a similar case might be made for Jack Kerouac and Chris Marker. Robert Frank’s 1959 film Pull My Daisy (featuring Kerouac’s hilarious, shaggy-dog narration) and Marker’s La Jetée (1962) clock in at 26 and 27 minutes; hoary relics of slightly different avant-gardes, both films were finally released on DVD this year. Various Beat players appear in Daisy, but Kerouac is outside it, providing all the words (indeed, none of the sound from the set is recorded at all), slipping into different characters’ voices from time to time, veering from (“The Lower East Side has produced all these strange, gum-chewing geniuses,” he has Allan Ginsberg muse) to Dada-ready riffs. (A pan over a kitchenette elicits a catalog oof roaches, ending, “Chaplin cockroaches, peanut butter cockroaches! Cockroach cockroach! Cockroach of the eyes! Cockroach, mirror, boom, bang—Freud, Jung, Reich.”)

Marker’s science-fiction tale couldn’t be more different. Still photos pass before our eyes, and the squawking looseness of bohemian life is miles away from La Jetée’s ruined post-WWIII setting, where a crucial experiment is taking place underground. Likewise, the voiceover sounds like that of a stern god (despite the advent of time travel, chronology remains tragically fixed) rather than of Kerouac’s playful Pan. But think of the new subterranean worlds that might emerge if you laid the nearly synchronous soundtrack of one atop the other.

IV. The Empty Orchestra and the Drowsy Chaperone
“Karaoke makes no one marginal,” write Zhou Xun and Francesca Tarocco in their recent book Karaoke: The Global Phenomenon (Reaktion). As opposed to the godlike quality of voiceover (or in-the-know DVD commentaries), then, karaoke (literally “empty orchestra”) sounds a little like democracy. (On Broadway, the musical The Drowsy Chaperone is introduced and narrated by “Man in Chair,” a devout fan of the gleefully formulaic ersatz-’20s entertainment we’re about to see—but essentially a spectator like us.)

Xun and Tarocco turn up some curious facts (Japanese magazines feature karaoke etiquette columns; “90 per cent of the Filipinos sing well,” according to one leader) as they dutifully chart the phenomenon’s rise worldwide, but too many dull anecdotes clog the narrative, and the authors lack Dolar’s incisive way with connections. Karaoke is both exhaustive and already out of date. It doesn’t cover the hypersuccess of a program like American Idol (essentially karaoke to the millionth power), which has found a strange mutation in two new television programs, The Singing Bee (CBS) and Don’t Forget the Lyrics! (Fox). Unlike Idol, these shows emphasize knowledge over emotion; contestants need to sing the right words to chestnuts of various genres.

Passionate vocalizing adds entertainment value—but then so does out-of-tune wailing. Neither determines whether you take home the purse. (You could probably just recite the lyrics.) A flubbed line in Idol can be salvaged by inspired improvisation, but on these shows you get sent home. Interestingly, though these contests would seem to eliminate the hierarchy of voice over writing (which Dolar asserts in his “Voice of Ethics” chapter), in the end they maintain the status quo. Though logically the challenge would be the same if competitors wrote out the words to “Fortunate Son” or “Have You Seen Her?,” few televised challenges outside of Final Jeopardy have a written component. The title of The Singing Bee alludes to its spelling-bee format, but this reminds us that a spelling bee isn’t simply a spelling test. The vocal component is theater—but theater is the only thing worth watching.

When words elude the contestants of Don’t Forget the Lyrics!, they try to commune with the collective memory by riding the rhythm, searching for the great jukebox in the sky or their own internalized iTunes playlist.

VI. Blending bloodlines of greatness
I caught both of these singing shows on TV, but I caught much more of them on YouTube, that brilliant Library of Babel that elevates fresh paradigms on a weekly basis. On YouTube, you can find Wizard People, Dear Reader (2004), a beautifully sustained voiceover creation by Brad Neely. (Neely is now best known for “Washington, Washington,” his viral rap cartoon in which the father of our country is imagined to be multiply endowed.) In Wizard People, Neely recorded a commentary track for the first Harry Potter movie; going beyond the fizzy snark of Mystery Science Theater 3000, he took the time to craft an actual character, an older-sounding Potter fanatic who actually has nearly all of the facts wrong. This leads him to invent backstory, mangle names, and generally turn J.K. Rowling’s universe into his own. (Further adding to the textured confusion, he apparently thinks he’s recording some sort of audiobook.)

Recall Kerouac cataloging unseen cockroaches, and then marvel as a flotilla of dragonflies (at the start of ““Chapter 28”) launches this non sequitur, an elucidation of the unseen that is actually a fabrication of what is not even remotely there: “Harry is totally disinterested in the next challenge…as his mind’s eye daydreams. He sees himself dressed as a conquistador…arriving on the coast of an undiscovered America. He mingles peacefully with the natives, and trades secrets of magic with their shamans. He makes friends, blending bloodlines of greatness…He learns to slay deer with laser beams from his eyes.”

Though Neely hasn’t done voiceover recently, he’s attuned to the dementedly “contaminated” pleasures floating around YouTube, mildly illicit shorts like a series of redubbed G.I. Joe PSAs (the originals were shown with Saturday morning cartoons of yore) and snippets in which a James Earl Jones soundalike reconceives Darth Vader as a total jerk. “I like the stuff that feels like the fruit of a good idea instead of the stuff that feels like an audition piece,” Neely tells me.

“Sometimes I want to buy the rights to a forgotten movie and redub it,” he says. “But maybe not. I think that half of what makes voiceover work so delicious is the theft. Somehow the taking is part of the thrill, in both making and seeing. If you buy the rights, you take the sweet out of the dessert.”

Synching your voice—or voices—to megabucked cultural product is pirate karaoke, now with a web-ready reach greater than the film or show being reimagined. This impression of anarchic energy holds true as long as we forget that these pieces flourish under the benevolence of the Google-owned YouTube.

VII. Coda: Dummy Text

Every emission of the voice is by its very essence ventriloquism. —Dolar

You’re the only thing about him that seems to have a soul. —Mary to Otto, ventriloquist’s dummy, in The Great Gabbo (1929)

He became a fanatic about the mysteries of the East. He believed you could separate a man from his soul. —a former assistant to the hypnotist/ventriloquist known as the Great Virelli, in Devil Doll (1963)

Occasionally the doll will say something that you have not heard before. —Dennis Alwood, consultant on the film Magic (1978), speaking about the “spontaneous schizophrenia” that all veteran ventriloquists have experienced onstage

In bicameral men…volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a neurological command, in which the command and the action were not separated, in which to hear was to obey. —Julian Jaynes, On the Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

—Ed Park

(Original version of piece that appeared in Modern Painters)

A note on Wendy Lee's HAPPY FAMILY

2008-08-03T20:59:00.000-07:00

“Lee’s sure-footed debut locates the raw nerve connecting two social phenomena—China’s one-child law and the adoption of Chinese babies by American parents. Hua, Lee’s stranger in a strange land, speaks in a soft but firm voice from the ineradicable margin.”

—Ed Park, author of Personal Days

The Sure Thing

2008-07-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

In this satire, everything is an object lesson—even sex

By Ed Park

Petroleum Man

By Stanley Crawford
Overlook, 238 pp., $23.95

No one captures the mind of a control freak like Stanley Crawford. The narrating paterfamilias of Some Instructions (1985) organizes his directives to wife and children in perfect deadpan, a very funny mix of precision and clueless self-regard in which even the most mundane chore gets amped to metaphor. Item II.6, "Large and Small Toys," advises his son: "See your toys, which are both the toys of your room and the toys of your Childhood, as representatives of the larger objects which you will have to manipulate later in life, so that in manipulating them now, in reduced scale, you can slowly build up the experience necessary to manipulate them later in your life, in true scale."

Petroleum Man, Crawford's zippy new satire, expands II.6 into a worldview. Whereas the prescriptive figure in Some Instructions leads a simple life revolving around home and garden, here the voice is one of fantastic wealth buttressing a monstrous ego, and Crawford proves an adept bard of blowhard. The novel consists of 30-odd missives written over the course of several years by Leon Tuggs—engineer, industrialist, author, and unapologetic champion of things—to his grandchildren, Fabian and Rowena. The letters, composed while traveling by private jet to such far-flung spots as Taipei and Warsaw, remark upon the identical presents he's bestowed to each, on the occasion of various milestones: a painstakingly constructed model, ranging from 1:24 to 1:8 in scale, of a vehicle he's used over his long and eventful life. (The jacket bio for Crawford's equally car-fixated 1966 debut, Gascoyne, tells us that the author himself once owned at least three of the machines Tuggs mentions: the 2cv, the Rover, and the 1933 Packard.) The nuances of the models (kept safe from their fingers in glass cabinets) are lost on Fabian and Rowena, of course, and their indifference leads to swapping, attacking, and selling the little two-of-a-kind pieces. Regrettable—but Tuggs has had the foresight to maintain a secret duplicate collection for each grandchild, thus assuring the future elimination of any gaps.

Tuggs's fortune comes from the development and universal popularity of the Thingie^®, an object so nebulously defined that the reader keeps trying to come up with a real-world analogue—some inconceivable cross between a Post-it and Microsoft Office, perhaps. The fun and the terror of Petroleum Man is in watching Tuggs bend the world to his law of things—objects gain in complexity, the environment exists to be exploited into thingdom, and eventually we humans, "with all our things, become the natural world itself." He takes great pride in his first book, General Theory of Industrial Sex, "which posits . . . that civilization is based on the male piston and the female cylinder, the male bolt and the female nut," and even his initial encounter with his wife-to-be is remembered as "intense hormonal activation at first sight." Authorship itself becomes purely mechanical: A later Tuggs book, A General Theory of Mobility, is constructed by nine ghostwriters and nudged up the bestseller chart "by the fact that I suggested that I would be very pleased if every last one of my tens of thousands of loyal employees would buy a copy at the full retail hardback textbook price by means of painless electronic paycheck deductions." Crawford's perfect title would have been Things, if Georges Perec hadn't already taken it 40 years ago.

Car talk: Stanley Crawford
Photo: Don Asner

Many molecules of truth emerge ("People like their billionaires to make occasional displays of frugality," "money is in effect the most successful and longest lasting and longest surviving god that humankind has ever created"). But these invariably spin out into gonzo positions designed to chafe "liberal democrats" like son-in-law Chip or do-gooder wife Deirdre, who's rebelled by setting up a feminist encampment that morphs into a "manure-strewn organic farm." (Lest we confuse maker with model, we note that Crawford, who lives in New Mexico, has written of his own farming experiences in A Garlic Testament.)

Tuggs's increasing isolation allows a distant note of sorrow to gain in volume, but it's still hard to imagine his ironclad sense of superiority tumbling anytime soon ("my ego . . . assures me that deep down I am both right and know I am right"). "Things will never let you down," insists the genius behind the Thingie^®. Tuggs remains worlds away from knowing, as the heroine of Crawford's incantatory Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine (1977) put it so matter-of-factly, that "things grow, things die, is it."

—The Village Voice, March 8, 2005

Arthur C. Clarke's Down-to-Earth Legacy

2008-07-18T16:47:00.000-07:00

The revered author, who died Wednesday at age 90, could step from the edge of science fiction into metaphysics.

By Ed Park

In Carter Scholz's 1984 epistolary jeu d'esprit "The Nine Billion Names of God," an author named Carter Scholz submits a curiously familiar tale to a science fiction magazine. "Plagiarism occurs in science fiction as elsewhere," the incensed editor replies, "but I've never before seen anyone submit a word-for-word copy of another story, let alone a story as well known as Arthur C. Clarke's 'The Nine Billion Names of God.' "

In Clarke's original 1953 classic, Tibetan monks use a supercomputer to sort through permutations of characters to arrive at the name of God—at which point, in an elegantly chilling sentence, the universe ceases. The writer in Scholz's amusing cover version claims to have developed a random-text generator that, to his shock, spat out a verbatim copy of the Clarke story.

Seriously equating Clarke with a form of divinity surely would not have pleased the author, who died Wednesday at age 90 and left explicit instructions that no religious ceremony accompany his death. (For good measure: In what was possibly his last interview, in BBC Focus magazine last December, he said the greatest danger humanity faced was "Organised religion polluting our minds as it pretends to deliver morality and spiritual salvation.") Yet he was one of the genre's presiding deities, a member of the Golden Age's "Big Three," who still cast their shadows across the field. (That trio's other two members, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, predeceased Clarke.) Scholz's dizzying little tower of a story can be read as a tongue-in-cheek take on the anxiety of influence, inventively recycling and repeating other tales—not just "The Nine Billion Names of God," but also Asimov's "The Last Question," Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and another Clarke text, "The Longest Science-Fiction Story Ever Told."

For all Clarke's hard-SF bona fides -- background in physics and mathematics, chair of the British Interplanetary Society, inspiration to scores of astronauts, thinker-upper of geosynchronous orbit, etc.—a ghost in the machine lingers, a persistent aura of mysticism. Most famously, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which featured the menacing, omniscient spacecraft computer HAL. In "The Nine Billion Names of God," the supercomputer imported from New York to Tibet hastens the quest for knowledge and expedites the end of everything.

Science and magic

Locus magazine marked Clarke's 90th birthday recently with testimonials from fellow writers, a brief reminiscence by Clarke and a reprint of the aforementioned Focus interview, which he concluded with the line for which he'll be remembered for as long as there is remembering: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That maxim has the ring of scientific truth to it: These words will reach my editor's screen as swiftly as if viewed through a crystal ball in Oz. But one might detect a cautionary tone in that line, or even a secret atavistic wish. Indeed, in Clarke's work, advances can look an awful lot like regression. At the end of "2001," astronaut David Bowman transforms into the Star Child.

'Childhood's End'

Clarke judged Childhood's End to be the finest of his nearly 100 books (along with The Songs of Distant Earth). It was published in 1953, the same year as "The Nine Billion Names of God," and both works begin in science and dissolve into metaphysics. Childhood's End (at least in the original version; a new beginning was substituted in 1990) kicks off with some Conradian scene-setting ("It was quiet here beneath the palms, high up on the rocky spine of the island") and an escalating space race between America and Russia (the latter team led by an engineer named Konrad). Then giant alien spaceships hover above the Earth's cities—their mere presence implies a power far greater than that of any nation, or of mankind as a whole. The possibility of war vanishes (Clarke was writing this not too long after World War II), and we never see these characters again.

It's a brilliant prologue, a sucker punch to rattle the reader's complacency. Our assumption of what this book might be about—militaristic SF—vanishes in about the amount of time it takes for humanity to realize that it's not the center of the universe, not even close. The spacecrafts are like Swords of Damocles, their unseen inhabitants (the Overlords) the last word in passive-aggressiveness. By refusing to lash out or even punish the small but vocal minority of disgruntled humans, the Overlords emphasize the planet's insignificance. In the meantime, freedom from want is established, cruelty to animals abolished.

When the seemingly benevolent Overlords finally reveal themselves, they turn out to look like traditional depictions of the devil, a legacy of some distant and disastrous visit—and this is just the start of further mind-bending revelations. Childhood's End is a true novel of ideas, an inquiry into what happens to human nature in the face of utter futility. Clarke balances the cosmic scope with an intimate, often epigrammatic voice. All of mankind's religions fail in the face of the more advanced Overlords, but ultimately the new chain of command is a surrogate belief system, just as messy and senseless. Was Clarke simply giving us a few more of the nine billion names of God, an elaborately imagined self-destruction kit? Supremely enigmatic, Childhood's End bears an unusual prefatory note that seems appropriate for the man who created those memorably mysterious monoliths: "The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author."

—Los Angeles Times, March 20, 2008

Last Men Standing

2008-07-09T07:51:00.001-07:00

By Ed Park

Kurosawa & Mifune
July 26 through September 12 [2002] at Film Forum

"I did a scene where I had to kill 30 people at once," Toshiro Mifune remarked about Akira Kurosawa's Sanjuro (1962), one of 12 offerings in Film Forum's seven-week "Kurosawa & Mifune" series. "I was young then, but I thought my heart would explode." Though most identified with the ronin sword slinging of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961), Mifune at his peak was never just a pretty face or an action hero; physically imposing and able to unleash vortices of rage, he could also accommodate more nuanced vigor—conscionable deception, soul-deep laughter. In Kurosawa's hands, he was grandly human: not just vanquishing bandits but grappling with the dictates of fear and the maddening logic of responsibility.

The legendary director (1910-1998) didn't discover his legendary actor (1920-1997): Mifune, who came to Toho Studios looking for work as cameraman ("I don't want to be an actor. I don't want to have to rely on my face to make money"), had already received top billing in his very first picture, as a gangster in 1947's Snow Trail. In their first true pairing, Drunken Angel (1948), Mifune is a tubercular yakuza eaten up by disease and his own gang, in a literal Tokyo backwater that breeds mosquitoes, a repository for the detritus of squandered lives. Though there's an overload of illness as metaphor, Mifune ably locates the tragic tone, and Kurosawa favorite Takashi Shimura (best known as the lead in Ikiru) is wonderful as the gruff but caring doctor. For Stray Dog (1949) Mifune replaces hoodlum swagger for the panicked despair of a stammering military vet turned cop whose stolen gun has been used in a series of crimes; monitoring the status of the Colt's seven bullets is both snappy noir scorekeeping and a foretaste of Seven Samurai's body-bag accounting. Realizing the killer is a fellow ex-serviceman, whose rampage was triggered by the theft of his knapsack, the humiliated Mifune acknowledges both his connection to the criminal and the necessity of moral choice. (Stuart Galbraith IV, in The Emperor and the Wolf, his massive new book on the director and star, writes that the demobbed Mifune was so poor after the war that he took his two air-force-issue blankets and made them into a suit.)

Also included from this fertile era are Kurosawa's justly famous jidai-geki, or period pieces. Despite its imposing castle set and lavishly armored players, Throne of Blood (1957) is less an epic than a gorgeously concentrated nightmare, a Noh-inflected Macbeth that subsumes Mifune's capacity for subtlety into its darkling scheme, the way the omnipresent fog swallows warriors and woodland alike. (The new print intensifies Throne's crepuscular, death-haunted milieu until it treads upon the border of the unreal.) The following year's The Hidden Fortress consequently feels all the more luminous, giving full CinemaScope to the ripping yarn of a disguised princess, Mifune's loyal general, bumbling farmers, and hidden treasure. And the jaunty, cynical Yojimbo, with its Mancini-land score and Mifune's itchy mercenary, is enjoyable if a bit one-note; the better sequel, Sanjuro, manages to be both lighter than air and ultimately more serious than its predecessor, giving more time to the camellias that give Mifune's Sanjuro his name than to the blink-and-you'll-miss-it showdown.

Back in contemporary dress, The Bad Sleep Well (1960) is Kurosawa's unofficial Hamlet, an intricate revenger's tragedy that doubles as a critique of corporate corruption. Opening with a bravura wedding sequence and ending with a sycophantic bow to a replaced telephone receiver, the film has its longueurs, but Mifune's buttoned-down avenger is a compelling portrait of righteous obsession foundering on unpredictable reality. Three years later, Kurosawa adapted an Ed McBain novel for the brilliant High and Low. Mifune is Gondo, an up-by-the-bootstraps shoe company exec who lives high above the city. Learning that his son has been kidnapped, he's prepared to pay; when it's discovered that the wrong boy's been nabbed, the kidnapper insists that Gondo pay up anyway. Though some prefer the original Japanese title (Heaven and Hell), High and Low maintains the altitudinal relation (the villain is a denizen of the city's lower depths, most vividly depicted in the nighttown of "Dope Alley") while suggesting the brows of its bisected narrative: The first hour is a taut moral drama; the second, a nail-biting tale of detection. (As in all these films, Kurosawa's trademark "wipes"—still used by George Lucas—give the stories a page-turning rhythm.) High and Low contains the series' single transgression from carefully composed black-and-white: a startling stream of pink smoke shooting out of a distant incinerator that signifies the chase is on.

There is no color in Red Beard (1965), Mifune's final collaboration with Kurosawa, though director and star experimented with various dyes and bleaches. Mifune is the eponymous doctor, head of a clinic for the poor, willing to break some bones (with physician's precision) to rescue a sick girl trapped in a brothel. The film is a bildungsroman (heartthrob Yuzo Kayama is the arrogant young physician who comes to share Red Beard's philosophy), an extended treatment of Kurosawa's ongoing concern with life seen through the lens of sickness, and a deft weave of numerous plotlines that add up to a Dickensian microcosm so rich one doesn't care to leave.

Mifune—and perhaps Kurosawa—would never reach such heights again. With slight exceptions, the actor's career would run on fumes, sinking to the ignominy of playing Lou Diamond Phillips's Eskimo father; his once proud form would succumb to Alzheimer's and other medical problems. Red Beard is a last stand, with Mifune's doctor-hero an argument for compassion, fallible but unstoppable, and radiating something like pure charisma.

—The Village Voice, Tuesday July 7, 2002

"The Outsiders: John MacGregor Unlocks Henry Darger's Unreal Realms"

2008-02-16T14:52:00.000-08:00

John MacGregor has been on every page of Henry Darger's novel. There are 15,145 of them.
photo: John MacGregor

Permit me to be terrified.
—Klee on Van Gogh

What do we want from Henry Darger? Born in Chicago a century and a decade ago this month, the consummate outsider artist and writer is the subject of a monumental new book by his posthumous Boswell and indefatigable champion, John M. MacGregor, and of two exhibits at the American Folk Art Museum, which opened its Henry Darger Study Center this month. Virtually anonymous in his daily life, he has become, in the years since his death in 1973, an index of our fears and ambitions, an alchemist, a litmus test, an urban legend, a cautionary tale. Some records from the Lincoln Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, where he passed most of his teenage years, give his name as "Henry Dodger"—a fitting slip for this most elusive of culture heroes. The nature of the labyrinthine, practically infinite work he left behind has bred countless misconceptions, and has lent everything in his narrow life—from his career as a dishwasher to his meteorological obsessions—the flavor and inevitability of myth.

Darger lived most of his life on the north side of Chicago, spending his last 31 years at 851 Webster Avenue, in a large third-floor room. The artist Nathan Lerner bought the building in 1956. Lerner was a photographer and educator associated with Moholy-Nagy's New Bauhaus in Chicago, as well as the product designer responsible for the first sponge mop and the honeybear bottle. His enduring legacy, however, has its roots in the kindness he showed toward his aged, reclusive tenant, whose presence some of his younger residents didn't exactly cherish. Lerner (who died in 1997) kept Henry's rent low, even knocking off a quarter of the $40-a-month tab at Henry's suggestion.

"Henry considered Nathan a guardian, a father," says Lerner's widow, Kiyoko (who holds the copyright to Darger's works). Henry always addressed him as "Mr. Leonard," and Kiyoko thinks that his obsessive Catholicism made him avoid saying the Jewish name. The Lerners once threw him a birthday party, and helped him find a nearby nursing home toward the end of his life, when the trek up the stairs became too much. Yet for all the years he lived under their roof, they never knew of his double life, let alone predict his future fame.

The story used to end—or begin—like this: After Henry died at the nursing home, Lerner and one of the other tenants started to dispose of the contents of his amazingly cluttered apartment, wisely stopping upon discovering hundreds of paintings, beautiful and unspeakably strange, bound in huge books. The scroll-like compositions were unlike anything ever seen before, antic with nightmare weather, enormous flora, and young girls sporting penises. Along with vibrant storybook vistas were scenes of discomfiting (if masterfully orchestrated) violence: Men known as Glandelinians subjected the children to strangulation, blasphemous crucifixion, and anatomically accurate evisceration. Also in the room, packed in trunks, was more than a half-century's worth of writing, including the sub-rosa magnum opus that his artwork illustrated. (At 15,145 pages, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion—or the Realms, for short—is the longest known work of fiction ever written.) Our entry into Darger's private world is a matter of luck, then, and marked with the guilt of trespass.

This is the original sin as I first heard it, more or less, in a lecture MacGregor delivered at the American Psychiatric Association's 1995 conference in Miami; it also appears in numerous articles (a Times headline from '97 ends, "Secret Until Death"), as well as in the first English-language book devoted to Darger (Michael Bonesteel, 2000). But MacGregor's 720-page Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal (Delano Greenidge Editions)—the product of 12 years of research and writing—puts forth a revised standard version. His room was opened, and his oceanic creation uncovered, while Henry was still alive at the home run by the Little Sisters of the Poor; when told about the discovery, he said, "It's too late now."

MacGregor wants to know: Too late for what?

Henry Darger is an improbable, wrist-wrecking page-turner, and John MacGregor is, in a profound sense, a mystery writer. In six books and numerous lectures and articles, the 61-year-old art historian and former psychotherapist has helped define the field of outsider art—a province that sometimes seems overrun by backwater visionaries and Magic Marker graphomaniacs. But in choosing his subjects, MacGregor leaves the freak show behind and articulates the mystery of what such creations might mean to their creators. He has noted that "factors other than the purely aesthetic must be involved if I am to write; puzzling questions must emerge from a creative process under extremely unusual circumstances."

Hence his attention to the drafting-board fantasias of Achilles Rizzoli, architectural assistant to God; the incest-laden needlework of an early-20th-century psychiatric patient known as the Lace Maker; and (in Dwight Mackintosh: The Boy Who Time Forgot) the obsessional figurations (and strands of indecipherable cursive) of an autistic septuagenarian. His unpublished monograph The Flowers of Spirit-Land deduces the provenance of a collection of progressively more intense flower paintings that eventually bloom into full-fledged abstract expressionism avant la lettre (1863)—an art-historical cul-de-sac inhabited and abandoned by a Spiritualist in the grip of automatic painting.

None of these cases, though, is as vast, as saturated with wonder—and as prone to public hostility—as the life and work of Henry Darger. "I have been so fortunate to study him in peace and quiet," the media-averse MacGregor tells me, "away from the frenzy that is now developing around him—actually sitting in his room getting to know this man who no one ever knew."

The path to that room began in Montreal, where MacGregor was, born. His father worked for the railroads as a welder; his mother was a secretary for the United Church of Canada. An only child, the young MacGregor developed an intense interest in painting, setting up his own studio at 13, and still has that muscle memory when he looks at what's on the canvases at the museum, a sense of how the brush must have moved.

He entered analysis at 18, abandoning painting around the same time; later, he completed a training analysis and did research stints at such venerable psychiatric institutions as Topeka's Menninger Foundation and the Hampstead Clinic in London, where he knew Anna Freud. (He recently began his third tour through all of her father's collected works—an activity, he jokes, that he performs every 20 years.) After studying art history at McGill, MacGregor went on to Princeton, where he initially kept under wraps his curiosity about the juncture of psychiatry and art. But his adviser—the legendary Chinese-art scholar Wen C. Fong—convinced him otherwise. Though he finished his dissertation, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, in 1978, over a decade passed before it was published. Despite the lapse, it was hailed as a landmark when it appeared—the first scholarly study of both notorious "mad" artists (like the parricidal Bedlamite Richard Dadd) and public attitudes toward insanity and creativity.

By the time Discovery appeared, MacGregor had already entered the Realms of the Unreal, as Darger called his fictional world. In 1986, a museum curator flew him to Chicago to introduce him to Nathan and Kiyoko and their singular trove. Enraptured, he wrote Nathan a letter eight days later, expressing his desire to undertake long-term research with an eye to writing the first book on Darger. "Nathan had looked for years for somebody to cover Darger—psychiatrists, critics—but nobody was prepared to commit the kind of time that was needed," says MacGregor. "I was the first person to come along who was really willing to put in some time."

Henry Darger: "It’s too late now."
David Berglund

Gaining their trust wasn't easy. Kiyoko Lerner recalls that at first, "Nathan felt John was very academic," and perhaps not the best person to capture "the conflict between God and Henry." But MacGregor's persistence paid off; he says that after assuring Nathan that he had no intention of tracking down any possible Darger relations—which might have meant contesting the rights to the artwork—there were no more obstacles to his access. MacGregor grew close to the couple. An interview with Nathan forms Henry Darger's foreword, and MacGregor was visibly moved last month when he heard, moments before his talk began, that he was in fact about to deliver the American Folk Art Museum's inaugural Nathan Lerner Annual Lecture. (One of the first slides he projected, as chance would have it, was a snapshot of him and Lerner.)

Maintaining his home base in San Francisco, MacGregor would take the train to Chicago once or twice a year, for a month or two each time, house-sitting whenever the Lerners went on a trip. He would come armed with a specific research goal: "I'd go to the room, copy out what I needed, and then go home."

This enforced distance helped him stay afloat in the sea of Darger's writings, which, he argues, are written with skill, imagination, and even occasional humor. (MacGregor's book includes numerous excerpts of Henry's writing, which bear this statement out; most startling is the character/creator interplay—pure Don Quixote—as when an Angelinian colonel discovers the writings of one Henry Darger.) No discussion of the paintings can afford to ignore this narrative, or Henry's own complex psychological makeup, which infuses every part of the story—from the gruesome, protracted warfare to the dragonlike creatures known as Blengins. Aside from the reams of the Realms—13 immense volumes, densely typed—MacGregor had to contend with Darger's 5084-page autobiography (History of My Life), a 10-year daily weather journal, assorted diaries, and a second work of fiction, provisionally entitled Crazy House, of over 10,000 handwritten pages. (Written after the Realms, it takes that epic's major characters—the seven Vivian sisters and their companion/secret brother, Penrod—and places them in Chicago, with the action unfolding during the same years as that of the earlier book.) MacGregor estimates that he's read two-thirds of the Realms, scrutinizing certain sections in their entirety, and methodically scanning the rest for any significant plot or tonal surprises. "I've been on every page," he says, and notes that a thorough reading would have required a full year per volume.

For psychiatric purposes, the material is of an unusually pure grade. MacGregor points out that Darger generated far more sheer wordage than one would find in the verbatim transcript of 10 years of psychoanalysis. Indeed, the Realms' basic conflict—between the monstrously evil Glandelinians, who enslave and torture children, and the Angelinians, whose Christian goodness is epitomized by the seven brave Vivian sisters—practically demands this treatment. In his fictional world, Darger was able to achieve an astonishing psychic split, so that the demands of the glands were in epic struggle with codes of angelic morality. Has there been a better model of the constant conflict between id, ego, and superego?

The central wound of Darger's life was the loss of his mother, who died of puerperal septicemia right after giving birth to his sister. Darger was not yet four; the sister was put up for adoption by his harried father, who would eventually give up raising his increasingly unruly son. Darger never knew, or claimed never to have known, his mother's name (or his sister's); MacGregor has discovered that it was Rosa or Rosie—and also that Henry was in fact her third child. (The previous two may have been illegitimate; it is also possible that Darger's parents were not legally married.) MacGregor's detective work yielded information on Darger's admitting physician and diagnosis ("self-abuse"), and he sheds light on the atrocious conditions at the Lincoln Asylum, where a truly grotesque scandal broke out during Darger's stay: a child ravaged by rats, a doctor who died after attempting self-castration, a teacher who used inmate corpses for anatomy lessons, referring to the deceased by name.

The boundless violence of the Realms starts to become more explicable; the inhumanity reads like sublimated reportage. Poring over MacGregor's meticulous and moving study (the endpapers are photos of Henry's room), one thinks of the beginning of The Good Soldier: This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

At the start of the first Nathan Lerner Annual Lecture, entitled "The Aronburg Mystery: Murder in the Realms of the Unreal," John MacGregor warns the audience that graphic details lie ahead, and says, "Feel free to leave if you find it more than you wish to put up with."

No one bails, though several listeners shake their heads during particularly stomach-churning patches. In his lecture, MacGregor explores the connections between the disappearance of Darger's photo of Elsie Paroubek, a girl who was kidnapped and murdered in Chicago in 1911, and her counterpart in the Realms, the child martyr Annie Aronburg. Both girls, real and fictional, are conflated with Darger's real sister—and with the fictional, orphanage-destroying tornado known as "Sweetie Pie," whose story overtakes the last 4878 pages of Darger's History of My Life. Patiently building up his argument, MacGregor proposes that the Glandelinians' obsession with disemboweling children has its roots in the young Darger's loss of his mother due to his sister's birth. Their attacks on the inner body can be seen as repayment in kind. The horror takes on a tragic cast.

All the violence in Darger's work helped refine MacGregor's concept of the artist. "That stuff is scattered all over the Realms, so I was hitting it for years," he says. "I think the most important thing it did was to make me take very, very seriously Darger—to stop seeing him as a folk hero or something, and realize that this was a man with pretty serious problems. No question he could have been dangerous."

Chicago-area scholar Michael Bonesteel, who edited and introduced Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings, recalls meeting MacGregor in the mid '90s while researching their respective books. "I think he considered himself the senior scholar," he says. Though they agree on a number of points, Bonesteel objects to "his take that in his heart Darger's a serial killer. . . . I think there's no question that he has a mental illness—but I don't really think it's as severe as perhaps Dr. MacGregor would see it."

"Is John MacGregor a controversial figure?" asks Brooke Davis Anderson, director and curator of the American Folk Art Museum's Contemporary Center, who has worked closely with MacGregor in establishing the Darger study center. "Yes. Because in his public speaking about Darger, he often presents him as a known murderer and pedophile. And these are things that we don't know." But Anderson admits that she hasn't actually heard these accusatory lectures; rather, "the controversy has been born mostly out of a feeling by audience members that it's unfounded and that it's a bit inflammatory."

But has MacGregor ever made such claims? He denies it. At the "Aronburg" lecture, he read aloud from a 2000 Times article by Sarah Boxer: "Mr. MacGregor has suggested that Darger murdered her."

"It bluntly states that I thought Darger was a kidnapper and murderer of Elsie Paroubek," he says, his frustration audible. "I've never made such a wild and unprovable statement." He then cites and dismisses a Wall Street Journal piece for a similarly misleading take.

Journalists sometimes like the pose of knowledge as much as the knowledge itself (perhaps explaining why one of the Realms' fictional Henry Dargers is a reporter). In a 1997 Slate piece, for example, Larissa MacFarquhar dismisses MacGregor thus: "Despite the fact that virtually nothing is known about Darger's inner life, MacGregor (typically, for a critic of outsider art) writes confidently about how compulsive Darger was. . . . MacGregor careers from the vulgar Freudian to the idiosyncratically bizarre—for instance, 'The trauma of [Darger's mother's] death was represented in his later life by an obsessional preoccupation with weather.' " She writes confidently about how nothing is known, when in fact Darger left behind a virtual report card of his mental state; what's vulgar is her knee-jerk reaction to anything with the whiff of Vienna.

That same year, Time's Robert Hughes attacked a statement by MacGregor ("psychologically, Darger was undoubtedly a serial killer"), calling it "a wildly irresponsible judgment, since practically nothing is known about [Darger's] character, and in any case, he never harmed a fly." It is Hughes's verdict that is wildly irresponsible—first for not pausing to consider the meaning of "psychologically," and second, for assuming intimate knowledge of a life he in fact knows little about. (As a boy, Darger did, in fact, exhibit a marked aggression toward younger children, and once slashed a teacher seriously enough that his father had to foot a hospital bill.)

I think something curious and heretofore unacknowledged has been taking place, an unconscious disavowal on the part of some viewers and critics—a phenomenon that could make for a chapter in The Discovery of the Art of the Insane. Through misquoting, mishearing, and misreading, people have turned this careful scholar into a veritable Kinbote, a moral scapegoat to whom can be assigned all the darkest theories—as if he were the one who had applied the delicate wash of watercolor blood at the base of a severed head, or imagined the force-feeding of body parts to children. What do we want from John MacGregor? Perhaps this: to saddle him with all our deepest anxieties about the possible actions of Henry Darger, so that the madman-scholar can be rejected with a show of presumptuous indignation. It is the secret expiation required to enjoy Darger without tears.

Anyone who has read MacGregor's Discovery is aware of his sensitivity and impeccable scholarship—then again, as he points out, the book was reviewed mainly in psychiatric rather than art publications. His shorter pieces exhibit an immense sympathy with the mentally handicapped. He says that studying Darger has made him "a slightly more accepting person—accepting of myself, accepting of others, accepting of Henry." Rather than judge Darger on moral grounds, MacGregor seeks to understand the whole person—the art and the life, the consumable colors as well as the anguished cogitations of the most desperate loneliness.

What he does find morally objectionable is the traffic in outsider art, including Darger's. "I have nothing to do with dealers, and all that kind of business," he says. "This art was not created for the purpose of being sold or bought—it was not created to be art at all. The wishes of the artist should be respected."

When one curator I speak with suggests that MacGregor has toned down his previous indiscretions for his Darger tome because "he has a book to sell," I'm reminded that he only grudgingly agreed, at the behest of his lawyer and publisher, to take any royalties on Henry Darger. (The book, completed in November 1997, has had a tortuous road to print: legal wrangling with Kiyoko Lerner, and the dismay of publishers who would not consider bringing it out unless he drastically cut his thousand manuscript pages. "I was clearly hopeless about it," he says.) In the past, he's given his royalties on books to Creative Growth, an Oakland program that teaches art-making to disabled adults. This is a frugal man, who at times seems to have an almost holy regard for art's existence outside of commerce. It's no coincidence that the copyright page bears Henry's incantation:

All the Gold in the Gold Mines

All the Silver in the world

Nay, all the world,

Cannot buy these pictures from me.

Vengeance, thee terrible vengeance

On those who steals or destroys them.

Occupying pride of place at the American Folk Art Museum's main Darger exhibit, in a vitrine by the foot of the crucifix-shaped space, is the sole remaining spine from one of the three books in which Henry Darger originally bound his paintings. The paintings were cut free by Lerner, in order to be exhibited more easily. What's left on the bone are scraps of color: tantalizing shreds of landscapes, part of a child's head.

As Brooke Anderson explained at a Darger symposium in March, it's "symbolic of future research." If Darger is the tree falling in the forest that happened to make a sound, then this is the trunk, an invitation to dendochronology: by matching the detached artworks to the stubs, an order can be established for the creation of at least some of the paintings.

In Chicago, Darger's room was maintained (with some alterations) until 2000, when Kiyoko Lerner decided to sell it to Michael Lerner, a real estate developer who is Nathan's son from his first marriage. The room's objects—from the boxes of paints and old National Geographics to the fireplace tiles and sink—were acquired by Chicago's Intuit center, which plans to re-create the space. If Darger's native city gets the shell, then New York has acquired the pearl: the written and graphic material, which form the basis for the Henry Darger Study Center. Kiyoko Lerner had negotiated with several other institutions, including Atlanta's High Museum of Art and the Milwaukee Art Museum, before reaching an agreement (also in 2000) with the American Folk Art Museum. According to Anderson, the museum bought 26 paintings for $1 million and received the archive as a gift from Lerner, with the understanding that it would be conserved and available for scholars. It contains all of Darger's written material (50,000 pages), which will be available on microfilm in the fall, and a trove of 3000 pieces of graphic ephemera, including the salvaged scraps that served as Darger's ur-material: depictions of girls from magazines and comic strips, which he painstakingly incorporated into his compositions.

Brooke Anderson says the museum is looking for two doctoral candidates, one in art history and one in literature, to become fellows at the center. ("Someone who likes to read!" she says.) The main tasks will involve marrying the images to the text and developing a catalogue raisonné; given the plethora of material, countless other projects await. Lytle Shaw recently published an essay (in Cabinet) on the moral accounting found in Darger's weather journals, and Michael Bonesteel is helping prepare an abridged edition of Darger's novel, a project that he predicts will take years.

As for MacGregor, he's leaving the field of outsider art entirely, after finishing a book this year on the mechanomorphic art of Frank Travis, a schizophrenic Canadian artist. "I've done what I wanted to do," he says of his sojourn along the border of the mind and what it makes, and through the realms of Henry Darger in particular. "I don't want to repeat myself. I'm walking away from the match, after I've just won Wimbledon." At 61, it's not too late for him to return to his other passion, East Asian art and archaeology; the Han dynasty awaits, as does a trip lecturing on the Orient Express. And so the man who never entered the room at 851 Webster without saying "Hello, Henry" is at last bidding farewell.

—Village Voice, April 17 - 23, 2002

"Shadow and Act"

2008-02-16T10:52:00.000-08:00

“I’ve just checked the number of your Google hits, and read your Wikipedia entry,”[296] runs a frank greeting in William Gibson’s “Spook Country.” This is what translates as fame today: a foothold in the ether, an identity composed by a faceless committee of unknown size. Gibson famously coined the term “cyberspace” in his reality-crashing, paradigm-shifting 1984 debut, “Neuromancer,” and his conception of its “consensual hallucination” rings more true than ever, over two decades later, as we pursue terminally framed existences teeming with hyperlinks and blogs, worlds of warcraft and second lives.

The Googlee in question is Hollis Henry, singer for a defunct ’90s cult band (perfectly named The Curfew) and now a journalist working on a story for a shadowy magazine, Node, that hasn’t put out an issue yet. (It’s variously and hilariously described as a would-be “Wired,” generating sub rosa buzz by its very anti-buzz.) Cults, shadows, secrets: in other words, Gibson country. Hollis is in the mold of Cayce Pollard, the logo-allergic “coolhunter” of Gibson’s previous novel, 2003’s “Pattern Recognition.” Both of these appealing heroines—curious, charismatic, and essentially chaste—share DNA with Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas, all of them women on the verge of nerve-wracking conspiracies in which “possession of information amounts to involvement.”

The ostensible topic of Hollis’s article is a holographic artist who painstakingly constructs virtual-reality celebrity death scenes at their actual locations. Things quickly escalate, and she finds herself ploughing the dark in search of a nebulous shipping container. The artist explains to Hollis how his project suggests that “the world we walk around in would be channels” if everyone had her own VR helmet, tuning in only to what she wanted to see. (“We’re all doing VR, every time we look at a screen,” he says—Gibson has axioms to burn.) “Spook Country” overlays two other frequencies, two other protagonists, the connections between the three channels initially unclear. Milgrim is a code cracker and addict dependent on Brown, a violent man who might be CIA; their quarry, Tito, is a Cuban-Chinese (“indeterminately ethnic”), a preternaturally limber young man whose family has roots in counterfeiting and intelligence and whose actions are guided by the spirits of Santería. Needless to say, everyone’s questing for the enigmatic container, wherever it might be.

“Spook Country” is an oblique sequel to “Pattern Recognition,” or better yet its antic anagram, expanding themes and re-upping a few characters. Here again Gibson gives us a present (more precisely, early 2006—Tower Records lives!) in which the skies are the color of steel, no matter the city, and the outlines of a chaotic future can be discerned. Sentence for sentence, few authors can equal Gibson’s gift for the terse yet poetic description, the quotable simile—people and products are nailed down and blissfully lit as in some platonic ideal of the catalogue. An ex-bandmate now rocks a “Bladerunner soccer-mom look," a “Bluetoothed bouncer” patrols a bar, and when Gibson registers a “delirious surge of graffiti, a sort of street-fractal Hokusai wave,” the phrasing is itself a delirious surge of pleasure-center prose.[100]

Still, mystery abounds, myriad paranoias pulsating underneath the immaculate surfaces. (Hollis sometimes visualizes a “Mongolian Death Worm”—the “mascot” of her anxiety—burrowing beneath the dunes of her consciousness, not to mention nodding to the amplified annelids of Frank Herbert’s “Dune.”) Gibson continues to unofficially tout all things Apple, but in “Spook Country” this product placement has a twist: iPods are used to ferry deceptive data, and at one point Tito imagines what would happen if you could “crack its virginal white case like a nut, and then draw forth something utterly peculiar, utterly dire, and somehow terrible in its contemporaneity.” Even the sleekest products can host demons, crackling with as much potential malice as the anonymous-looking container at the heart of this story.

Hollis learns that “Node” magazine is a project of Hubertus Bigend, the zeitgeist-infiltrating force behind Blue Ant, a Belgian-based advertising enterprise that calls itself the “first viral agency,” except when it doesn’t. “He doesn’t want you to have heard of him,” one of his minions tells Hollis, and he operates on the principle that secrets “are the very root of cool.” The irony is that readers of “Pattern Recognition” have already heard of him, and there’s something deliciously sinister in the fact that it’s the antihero who forms the most obvious link between Gibson’s two most recent books. In the earlier novel, Bigend funded Cayce’s search for the source of haunting film fragments appearing on the Web; here we learn (spoiler alert) that he successfully harnessed that sublime (whose online scholars represented “the first true freemasonry of the 21st century”) to sell shoes.

Googling “Hubertus Bigend” in real life leads you to a discussion board where Gibsonites muse, a bit futilely, on the significance of his somewhat scatological name. This reviewer wonders if his odd moniker is an allusion, or at least a fortuitous parallel, to a minor character in another labyrinthine book concerned with (among other things) art and imitation and money, by another William G.: William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions” (1955). When Bigend explains his philosophy to Hollis by saying “Everything is potential,” she responds, “Everything is potential bullshit.” In Gaddis’s book, the odious Recktall Brown collaborates with an art critic to deal in expensive forgeries, including paintings by one of the book’s few true artist, Wyatt Gwyon (who only, alas, paints in the manner of the Old Masters). For all of Gibson’s lavish products, he’s given his main moneyman a name that resonates with the toilet. Anything that can be sold instantly loses its cachet, a point brought home again when Bigend suggests to Hollis’s ex-bandmate Inchmale—another adult-toy name—that they sell a Curfew song for a Chinese car commercial.

To follow the flow of “Neuromancer,” with its vigorous, carpet-pulling tempos, you have to read the landscape for clues. As the titular character (or cipher) says, “In the patterns sometimes you imagined you could detect in the dance of the street. Those patterns are real.” Was “Pattern Recognition” itself a titular homage to “The Recognitions”? The title—the concept—drives the reader to enter into a state of apophenia, defined by Cayce’s father, Win, as “the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things,” a gift Cayce also has. Should we pay special attention, then, to the fact that a late-arriving adventurer in “Spook Country” is described as resembling William S. Burroughs—as is Win (who’d gone missing after 9/11) in “Pattern Recognition”?

More apophenia: Inchmale has retired to Buenos Aires; this year, New Directions published a 45th-anniversary edition of Borges’s “Labyrinths” with an introduction by Gibson, in which he calls the Buenos Aires native’s book a “singular” milestone in his reading life. It’s a collection in which books are the seeds for nightmares and vice versa, and every passage is lined with mirrors. (Perhaps the most potent Web prophecy before “Neuromancer” is Borges’s 1949 story “The Aleph.”) Despite its thriller trappings, “Spook Country” is a puzzle palace of bewitching proportions and stubborn echoes. Hollis’s band was the Curfew, which means it’s time for you to come inside.

—originally published, in slightly different form, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 5, 2007

"The Oblique Case"

2008-01-23T19:46:00.000-08:00

The Oblique Case:
A Note on
Y. Cheung, Business Detective

“My work otherwise might make a good magazine article, but—” He sighed.
—Harry Stephen Keeler, Y. Cheung, Business Detective

But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;
Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream
But topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

I
The tale of detection embraces contests of mind; the more devilish the design, roughly, the more successful the mystery. Perhaps the same impulse in the human imagination seeks out both puzzles and stories. Strange, then, that the “serious” reader should balk at fiction that seems cross-bred. A story that engages our sense of play is reduced to a toy—or worse, a machine, coldly contrived to spit out a result. The artifice is too apparent, and the writer is deemed an egghead (or a fool). Can such works be anything more than glorified parlor games?

This note concerns a single such parlor game, as played by two writers rarely mentioned in the same breath: Harry Stephen Keeler and Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. They were rough contemporaries, with the latter’s years transposed about a decade forward. Their legacies could not be more dissimilar: recent Nabokovian garlands include a biography of his wife and a second celluloid version of Lolita, while Keeler’s work remains obscure.

Stylistically they are at opposite ends of the spectrum, if not the universe. Even Nabokov’s interview responses read like prose poems, whereas no Keeler creation would be complete without stunningly awkward descriptions and breathless dialogue that barely has time to reflect upon itself. (It is possible we cherish one writer for his scruples, the other for his shamelessness.)

Y. Cheung, Business Detective (1939) and “The Vane Sisters” (written 1951; first published 1959) appear to be as different as their creators. The former is a novel about a Chinese American sleuth who takes on, as it were, two cases—one professional, the other cryptogrammatic. In Nabokov’s dozen pages, a professor of French learns of an acquaintance’s death, and reflects upon her theories of undead communication.

We are startled, then, to find at the heart of each story a “death message”—and to discover that both unlock to the same key.

II.
Y. Cheung, Business Detective is the fourth movement in the Marceau case. Its pages constitute Keeler’s last significant reworking of that bizarre cause célèbre. Though not his best-known title, it belongs to his most dazzling constellation. The fact that Cheung is the character to write “absolute ‘finis’” on the mystery suggests that we need to read Cheung in order to comprehend fully Keeler’s vision of the Marceau case.

Avoiding webwork jargon, we can split the tale in two. Story A is straightforward (if enjoyable) detective fare: Y. Cheung, “Locator of Business Leaks,” travels to Indianapolis at the behest of an old college friend, whose father’s construction company has been consistently underbid by its rival. The solution turns out to be a literal take on our hero’s title. Indeed, the same can be said of the word “solution”; the very words are loaded.

This plotline has a complication: Cheung’s grandfather has died, but his fortune will go to a cousin unless Cheung can do something so meritorious (within a week, naturally) that the family name will appear in 1000 newspapers. And in a vintage HSK catch, Cheung’s employer, Milford Harven, has publicly stated his belief in the superiority of the white race—and thus forbids Cheung to be credited, should he successfully plug the leak. (On a personal level, however, they get along just fine.)

Story B, enfolded in A, is entitled “Strange Romance”—the second of two short stories that André Marceau purposefully plagiarized in the weeks before his death. In a passage so convoluted as to be almost meaningless (and described so rapidly as to approach shorthand), it is explained how Marceau’s rendering of “Strange Romance” fell into Harven’s hands. Soon Harven sends the “Death Script” to Cheung, an amateur cryptographer. If Cheung succeeds at his day job, Harven says, the MS is his to keep.

Initially baffling, “Strange Romance” is a fairly preposterous piece of science fiction that stops a more agreeable story in its tracks. Gyles Kew, son of a famous astronomer, travels to Arizona upon his father’s death, and gazes at a verdant world galaxies away, through his father’s super-powerful telescope. He spies a beautiful woman, who occasionally dons a helmet; she displays three oddly decorated cards that correspond to those of an earthly Tarot deck.

Gyles falls in love with her, and is about to perform an experiment in celestial telepathy—when he is informed that, given the speed of light, her image is already a hundred years old. In an amusing touch of self-consciousness, Keeler has Cheung critique the story; he judges the style “so exalted that at times it is absolutely stiff-necked.” His interlocutor (a chief at a wire service) finds the story a “smoothly running, normally running tale”—but Cheung knows better. The unnatural prose (nonexistent locales, forced expressions, needless exposition) has led him to throw out a few red herrings and deduce that certain words were placed with acrostical intent. In an admittedly somewhat arbitrary fashion, Cheung isolates the first letters or words of the first 59 [FOOTNOTE 1] (and last 8) paragraphs to derive a final Marceau morsel—the murderee’s prediction of his own death. It concludes, “In the light of this fact, if my death ever occurs inexplicably there should be—of mystery—nothing whatever.”

And so the very words are loaded; a plagiarized potboiler has been altered; a dead man speaks. If we detect a spiritual shudder, we can keep in mind that the Book of Lamentations is acrostically configured[FOOTNOTE 2], or the popular (if unlikely) belief that the Greek word for fish unfolds as “Jesus Christ, the son of God, the Saviour,” thus explaining that particular Christian symbol. [FOOTNOTE 3]

III
Precise and dazzling where its precursor is slack, “The Vane Sisters” could fit seven times over within the confines of “Strange Romance.” On a gleaming spring day, the unnamed narrator, a professor, runs into D., a former colleague. D. mentions that Cynthia Vane, sister of Sybil, has died of a heart condition. The married D. had once conducted an affair with Sybil, who had been a student of the narrator’s. After D. broke off the affair, Sybil killed herself, but not before taking a disastrous French exam. On the last page of the booklet, she scrawled a suicide note, part of which read: “Death was not better than D minus, but definitely better than Life minus D.”

Told of Cynthia’s recent passing, the narrator muses on her “ingenious fancies” and “fondness for spiritualism.” She believed that the ghosts of dead friends shaped her living days; she saw meaning in puns and printer’s errors, and even encouraged a friend to pursue a “statistically insane” typo (“hitler” for “hither”) within old books. After a terrifying bout of insomnia, the professor merges into a slumber “full of Cynthia.” He seems about to experience whatever paranormal doings she once subscribed to; he is on the cusp of believing. But daylight banishes the night’s phantoms:

I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies—every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.

This final paragraph feels somehow unsatisfying, a vague conclusion to the previous perfectionist’s prose. But what the narrator doesn’t realize—and what the reader, hopefully, does—is that the Vane sisters, from beyond the grave, have in fact played a hand in the structure of his thoughts, in the very writing of “The Vane Sisters.” Taking the first letter of each word, we find an explanation to the whole story: “Icicles by Cynthia, meter from me, Sybil.” (Even reading it now, separated from the story, sends chills up the spine.) They have invisibly dictated content and form.

Nabokov eventually dismissed “The Vane Sisters” as something of a curio, but his dismay at its rejection by The New Yorker suggests more than cursory interest on his part.[FOOTNOTE 4] For its 1975 publication, he wrote: “This particular trick can be tried only once in a thousand years of fiction. Whether it has come off is another question.” Today it occupies the penultimate slot in his Collected Stories, where it can be read as a distillation of his art. It melds the metaphysical and linguistic concerns that inform all his novels, and that will flower freakishly in his masterpiece, Pale Fire.

IV.
The acrostical finish to “The Vane Sisters” is aesthetically justifiable (whether or not we find it successful); Nabokov has taken care to make the story thematically of a piece. Marceau’s acrostic, by contrast, delivers a thrilling jolt that nevertheless feels cheap.

The solution stamps the book as the latest ingenious take on the death of that notorious anti-nanist—but what does it have to do with the rest of the book in which it resides? A natural response might be to shake one’s head and mutter, not for the first time, “Keeler!” But upon reflection, the book seems more carefully wrought, its heterogeneity (15 chapters of A, then 14 of B, followed by 21 more of A) less a clever detour than an integral part of the story. A possible solution presents itself if we consider Cheung as a reflection on race.

As even a casual Keelerite knows, HSK populated his novels with Asian characters and lore (real or ersatz). Though he often slung slurs (and not always ironically), he remained fascinated not only with Eastern culture but with the tricky position of cheng-fong-gwai—ethnic Chinese who, having been brought up in Western society, are alienated from both cultures. (Of late, variations on this racial catch-22 have been a staple of “Asian American” fiction; it’s interesting that Keeler staked out this territory decades before its overdevelopment.) Y. Cheung, hero of his own story, is not only drawn with empathy, but also seems more fully realized than the typical Keeler protagonist—the bland WASP equipped with interchangeable first and last names.

Keeler sidesteps stereotypes to show, rather deftly, Cheung’s divided status. His mental acuity and good nature do nothing to prevent the casual, even unwitting insults of others. (The “color line” exists in Indianapolis, where Chinese are seen as laundrymen, waiters, or tong savages.) He doesn’t quite fit in.

To see how cheng-fong-gwai-ness explains “Strange Romance,” we must take a look at some eyes. Enough times to bear mention, HSK describes Cheung’s visual apparatus as “oblique”—a softer synonym for “slanted” that also means “indirect.” [FOOTNOTE 5]

It’s an unusual, even elegant word choice. Outside of its anatomical use, it suggests many things: HSK’s kaleidoscopic, multimedia approach to the death of André Marceau; his elusive attitude toward Asian people and culture; and the structure of Cheung itself. [FOOTNOTE 6]

For “Strange Romance” feels oblique, indirect, off the topic; it stands apart from the primary plot—not unlike the way Cheung, the cheng-fong-gwai, stands outside both white American and Chinese society. If we are to integrate Story B with Story A, then, we must show how Cheung loses his own solitude. The answer is love. [FOOTNOTE 7]

The Marceau Case and X. Jones—of Scotland Yard, in addition to being home-grown modernist tours de farce, are exceptional in the Keeler canon in that they dangle no girl as prize. She is back in place for The Wonderful Scheme of Mr. Christopher Thorne, a more conventionally told tale, and Cheung. One of Harven’s suspects is the secretary, Loa Marling, who is half-white, half-Hawaiian. By the latter inheritance, she claims Korean, Malayan, and Chinese blood, and her eyes have a “bare suggestion of obliquity.” Cheung, attracted and conflicted, speaks to her outside the office. To allay her fear that he’s a private investigator (and not “George Lee,” civil engineer), she asks him the probing question: “What—what is the neutral axis of—of an I-beam?” (Answer: “the entire planar cross-section lying at right angle to the so-called transverse cross section or I-cross-section...”)

As they talk, Cheung does not exactly lie, but he tailors the truth and conceals his purpose. In a gesture of friendship and private expiation, he gives her his book of Confucian sayings, his English translation penned over the Chinese characters. Cheung’s inability to reveal his real name and profession is a fine metaphor for his deeper identity issues—he’s an utterly sane “Mysterious Mr. I,” a puzzle even to himself. When he asks Loa if she’s happy (a propos having “Asiatic blood—in a white country”), the question applies as well to a man named Y. Cheung.

The Loa-Cheung chapters are rich (and loopily didactic) with musings on race and place; for our purposes, it may suffice to paraphrase Kong-Fu-Tse [FOOTNOTE 8]: the harmony of the world depends on that of states, which is built on that of families, selves, souls, thoughts, and the extension of knowledge. “Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things, and seeing them as they really were,” reads Cheung to Loa. Perfection of knowledge leads to that of thoughts, souls, selves, families, states, and the whole world.

With this philosophical palindrome in mind, we can return to “Strange Romance,” which now seems like a dark version of Cheung’s tale, made diminished and unreal. Its unhappy ending contrasts with the Keeleresque clinch (that Cheung, unsurprisingly, will deliver). Gyles Kew, consulting with a Phoenix occultist on the matter of the alien Tarot, improvises a story of “a Chinese girl astronomer who speaks no English whatsoever”—a triply fictional version (story-within-story-within-story) of the part-Chinese Loa. And his father’s “100 percent super-perfect focusing” telescope, which gives Gyles comely “proof of the multiplicity of world systems,” only visits heartbreak upon him, for whom astronomy is a hazy subject. It is a bleak inheritance.

On the track to claiming his inheritance, Cheung trains his eyes (or eye-beams) on “Strange Romance,” and discerns the I-beams that form the coded message. Or (to phrase it from a different architectural angle), he perceives the story, quite literally, in cross-section. The sheer mechanicalness of this conceit is prefigured not only by Cheung’s training as a civil engineer and his employment at bridge-construction company, but in the novel’s dedication to a professor at the Armour Institute of Technology, who taught Keeler “the theories underlying bridge design, and the mechanics of steel construction.” Now we can see “Strange Romance” more distinctly as a bridge: from Cheung to the rest of the Marceau books, and one that connects (rather than interrupts) the two parts of Story A, its minor-key plot and theme resonating with Cheung’s multiple plights. (Perhaps it corresponds to a bridge in a piece of music.)

Toward the end of the book, Cheung performs a curious demonstration for Harven’s employees. At one point, he adds potassium bichromate to a tumbler of tap water, turning it “a beautiful yellow.” The color is his color, of course. (Earlier in the book, we are given Harven’s assessment of “the character of the Yellow Man.”) By the novel’s conclusion, the mystery of Cheung himself will be “solved” by his romantic association with Loa Marling.

The investigation of things—leaks and manuscripts—has blossomed into all sorts of perfection. And as Cheung and Loa ride off into the sunset, or at least walk to their favorite park bench, Confucius has—and is—the last word of the Marceau case.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript Early in Nabokov’s U.S. residence (1940–1959), Dutton dropped Keeler; reading habits aside, it seems unlikely that VN had ever heard of the chronicler of London-of-the-West, let alone read him. Yet having finished Cheung, one comes to “The Vane Sisters” with new eyes, and a mind open to obliquity.

And I wish I could recollect that novel or short story (by some contemporary writer, I believe) in which, unknown to its author, the first letters of the words in its last paragraph formed, as deciphered by Cynthia, a message from his dead mother.

The acrostic supports this: one can read as incestuous two texts that derive from the same words (i.e., “Strange Romance”).

This is, of course, Nabokov’s (or the sisters’) grand hint to the reader. But could it be something more? A “yellowly blurred” recollection of a half-heard plot, perhaps, or something gleaned from a book review—a curiosity profitably misremembered, to find new life a dozen years later? Statistical insanities aside, some things can, it seems, be attempted twice in a thousand years.

FOOTNOTES:
1
Could he have been inspired by his doctor’s telephone number, Bittersweet 5959?

2
Each chapter consists of 22 stanzas; in all but the fifth chapter, each stanza begins with a consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. A number of the Psalms are similarly structured.

3
In City of God, XVIII, Ch. 23, Flaccianus produces a Greek manuscript, supposedly the poems of the Erythraean Sibyl; in one poem, the letters of the foregoing translation (IESOUS CHREISTOS THEOU UIOS SOTER) are each used to begin a line of verse—what we might term an acrostic “squared.”

4
His editor called the sisters at the story’s center “not worthy of their web”—i.e., less interesting than the author’s bright weave.

5
One confidently assumes that Keeler didn’t ascribe
to it a more negative definition, viz., “underhanded.”

6
Not to mention this indirect “note.”

7
Readers of Joyce’s Ulysses may recall one of its mu-
sical leitmotivs, the chestnut “Love’s Old Sweet
Song.” In at least one instance, each word of the title
appears on its own line, suggesting that Joyce wants
us to read it acrostically: LOSS.

8
Who ranks, we learn in Scheme, right up there
with Buddha and...Ouspensky!

9
The telescope’s position was fixed by Gyles’s fa-
ther, and the likelihood that he had observed the
extraterrestrial woman before his death lends a
tinge of pseudo-incest to Gyles’s infatuation.
(Pseudo-incest will also be revealed in Story A.)

—Keeler News, No. 30 (December 2000)

From "The Best Novels You've Never Read"

2008-01-05T00:27:00.001-08:00

DO EVERYTHING IN THE DARK, By Gary Indiana
In brief chapters, with the most scrupulously intense sentences—pitch perfect, pitch dark—this side of Renata Adler, Indiana conjures a hugely sad New York novel that feels at once state of the art and stunningly ancient. (It ends on September 8, 2001.) His epigrammatic wit makes the darkness bearable—don't we all know someone who could be described like this?: "If you ask Edie how she is, you don't have to say another word for at least an hour." —Ed Park

—full version of note that appeared in New York, May 28, 2007

Review of "Oulipo Compendium," edited by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie

2008-01-05T00:14:00.000-08:00

Amazing Rats
Ed Park

Writing, and possibly everything, is at some level a game. Herbert Quain, one of Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional fictioneers, defines a game’s features as “symmetry, arbitrary rules, tedium”; in another Borges creation, “The Library of Babel,” the game is unwinnable—unplayable, even: all books, all combinations of letters (even gibberish), already exist and are contained therein, but given the mathematically nightmarish vastness of the holdings, one cannot hope to locate anything meaningful. The work of the Oulipo, the Paris-based group of writers and mathematicians whose projects are described in this sumptuous Compendium, often seems Borgesian in spirit: cofounder Raymond Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 Poems (10 sonnets with corresponding lines sharing the same end-rhym, affording 100 trillion possibilities) could be a game devised by Quain. The Oulipo, whose name abbreviates the French for “Workshop for Potential Literature,” is a language laboratory in the truest sense. Texts, words, even individual letters are subject to an array of stresses and distortions. Generally, the resultant chimeras are abundantly playful, undercutting the insanity that lurks in the corridors of the Library of Babel.

The Oulipo Compendium consists mainly of a small encyclopedia, equal parts spellbook and bestiary, presenting vivid personalities, jaw-dropping lexical acrobatics, and hermetic arcana (meeting minutes, small-run fascicles). It begins with “Abish, Walter,” a non-member whose antic Alphabetical Africa crams the frame (chapter A’s words all begin with a, B’s with a or b, and so on to Z—from whence the march back, proscribing one letter at a time until, again, as alone are admissible). After many lucid and ludic entries, the funhouse closes tragically, with another sympathetic spirit, “Zürn, Unica”—anagrammist extraordinaire, schizophrenic, suicide. (Perhaps the Borgesian whisper of madness is never completely abolished.) The listings themselves constitute a work of art: a convoluted policier, or a skeleton version of the Petit Norbert—the true Oulipian encyclopedia conceived of in 1991 that seems destined never to be completed. (This book appends sections on Oulipian practices applied to the mystery novel, painting, and other genres.)

The Compendium showcases the incredible. Some entries get by on sheer conceptual chutzpah and feature tortured nomenclature (homovocalism, in which only one vowel is employed; liponymy, in which any word can be used only once; threnodials, consisting of hard-to-maneuever anagrams of “threnodials”—a word containing the dozen most common letters). Some yield jokes: the N+7 technique replaces a noun in a source text with the one found seven dictionaries hence (e.g., “To be or not to be: that is the quibble”). And some resemble teratological freaks: Dallas Wiebe’s “left-handed lipogram” allows only letters on the left side of the keyboard, and the resulting tale, rebarbative with octothorps (subbing for unattainable periods and commas), is as sinister as the imagined accident that might render one manually halved.

In the best selections, the formal constraints and the content are wrapped up together, as in the work of the late Georges Perec. His astonishing 1,247-word palindrome tracesits own inelegance; La Disparition (nimbly Englished by Gilbert Adair as A Void) is a novel written sans e, a lack that generates both plot and atmosphere; and his epithalamia restrict themselves to the set of letters created by the newlyweds’ names, so symbolizing the private language that marriage mints. Perec’s death brought Oulipian rememberances most affectingly Luc Etienne’s fugue in the key of the author’s name, “Ce Repere Perec,” a funerary ricercar setting every line in a grid formed by the title’s letters.

Queneau called Oulipians “rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.” They are would-be messiahs who build their own crosses, ancient mariners gunning for albatross. (In a French twist on this scene, the Compendium notes the unusual collocation of four silent es in a line of Baudelaire’s “L’albatros,” a poem comparing the captured bird to the empyrean poet trapped on this drab planet—then trumps it by citing, with deadpan erudition, the existence of “the 64 types of alexandrine determined by the positions within them of 0 to 4 vowels.”) Cigarettes, Harry Mathews’s only “purely Oulipian” novel, features a literal cross. A callow, masochistic writer allows himself to be crucified and tortured—an inscrutable, perverse action that occupies the center of the book. But it is this burden-bearer—freed like an Oulipian by self-imposed constraints—who becomes a writer, the gifted narrator who has composed the elegant book we’ve been reading and who will have hidden the combinatorial machinery that one suspects underlies the book’s structure.

Practitioners of gematria, by assigning numbers to letters and transposing equivalent word-sums throughout the Torah, have made dubious progress in revealing God’s message. The Oulipo has more fun, but one can’t shake the suspicion that a spiritual quest is afoot. This might explain not only their permutations and dream alexandrines, their absent es and mute-in-es, but their happy survival of nearly 40 years. Their rage to order valiantly battles what Borges calls “leagues of insensate cacophony”: the awful, written din of the universe, a sound indistinguishable from silence (or perhaps the borborygm of too much contemporary “creative” writing). One finishes the Compendium abuzz and amused, eager to see what creatures will next emerge from such prodigious alembics.

—n.b. from The Reader’s Catalog*, Winter 1999

*I am not even sure what this was.

"Lost chapter" from "Guided by Voice-Overs"

2007-12-31T07:17:00.000-08:00

IV. The Empty Orchestra and the Drowsy Chaperone

“Karaoke makes no one marginal,” write Zhou Xun and Francesca Tarocco in their recent book Karaoke: The Global Phenomenon (Reaktion). As opposed to the godlike quality of voiceover (or in-the-know DVD commentaries), then, karaoke (literally “empty orchestra”) sounds a little like democracy. (On Broadway, the musical The Drowsy Chaperone is introduced and narrated by “Man in Chair,” a devout fan of the gleefully formulaic ersatz-’20s entertainment we’re about to see—but essentially a spectator like us.)

Xun and Tarocco turn up some curious facts (Japanese magazines feature karaoke etiquette columns; “90 percent of Filipinos are good singers,” according to one leader) as they dutifully chart the phenomenon’s rise worldwide, but too many dull anecdotes clog the narrative, and the authors lack Dolar’s incisive way with connections. Karaoke is both exhaustive and already out of date. It doesn’t cover the hypersuccess of a program like American Idol (essentially karaoke to the millionth power), which has found a strange mutation in two new television programs, The Singing Bee (CBS) and Don’t Forget the Lyrics! (Fox). Unlike Idol, these shows emphasize knowledge over emotion; contestants need to sing the right words to chestnuts of various genres.

Passionate vocalizing adds entertainment value—but then so does out-of-tune wailing. Neither determines whether you take home the purse. (You could probably just recite the lyrics.) A flubbed line in Idol can be salvaged by inspired improvisation, but on these shows you get sent home. Interestingly, though these contests would seem to eliminate the hierarchy of voice over writing (which [Mladen] Dolar asserts in his “Voice of Ethics” chapter [in A Voice and Nothing More]), in the end they maintain the status quo. Though logically the challenge would be the same if competitors wrote out the words to “Fortunate Son” or “Have You Seen Her?,” few televised challenges outside of Final Jeopardy have a written component. The title of The Singing Bee alludes to its spelling-bee format, but this reminds us that a spelling bee isn’t simply a spelling test. The vocal component is theater—but theater is the only thing worth watching.

When words elude the contestants of Don’t Forget the Lyrics!, they try to commune with the collective memory by riding the rhythm, searching for the great jukebox in the sky or their own internalized iTunes playlist.

—Deleted from "Guided by Voice-Overs," Modern Painters, December 2007/January 2008

Review of Adam Rapp's THE YEAR OF ENDLESS SORROW

2007-12-06T06:07:00.000-08:00

The Year of Endless Sorrows
by Adam Rapp
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 403 pages. $15.

In Here Is New York, E. B. White discerns a trio of invisible cities overlaying Gotham: that of the native, the commuter, and the outsider who comes in search of fame, fortune, or freedom, Everybody in this last, romantic category “embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.”

Tell that to the Midwestern transplant who narrates playwright Adam Rapp’s debut novel, The Year of Endless Sorrows: “Eventually, Con Ed shut off the electricity in the common area, so coming home at any hour of the evening turned into a kind of silent horror film. We anticipated rapists and stranglers and giant kidnappers on every landing. . . . Stepping safely into the apartment carried with it a historical, emotional weight.”

The unnamed young protagonist—a fledgling fictioneer with an entry-level job at a Viking-like publisher—fits White’s description of “a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart,” except that he keeps his slowly growing manuscript in the empty freezer of his East Village walkup, and his main wound is the gnarly result of a hoops injury. Limping becomes “a kind of personal theatre,” and he tells anyone who asks that his book-in-progress is about “acute knee pain and the end of the world.” It’s a heartbreaking work of staggering.

Rapp immerses his wide-eyed scribbler in the mundane urban despair that White’s template leaves out: daily office inanities, bad roommate situations, and the less hygienic aspects of la vie bohème. (A small river’s worth of bodily emissions courses through the chapters.) Humming with verbal energy and anchored by a wry, melancholic narrator (think Murakami), The Year of Endless Sorrows manages to be several things at once: an overstuffed Künstlerroman, a pungent lit-world satire, and a backhanded valentine to the New York of the early ’90s. Set in roughly the same era and neighborhood as Rent, it depicts the artist’s life as one of resignation, status anxiety, if not so many dance numbers.

In fact, Rapp’s brother, Anthony, played the scarf-wearing painter Mark in Rent’s original and film versions. He’s reimagined here as the narrator’s younger brother, Feick, an actor whose swift rise to fame (via a dreadful-sounding Off Broadway smash) is the glittering reverse of his sibling’s descent into obscurity. The novel’s title initially scans ironically, amid the first-person-plural declarations of milk-fed normalcy (“We generally look like the people walking through the Indianapolis Metropolitan Airport on any given day”) and caricatures of East Coast literocracy (“I had to protect myself from the arch, homogenized pitch of her speaking voice and the predatory cut of her editorial pantsuit and her English degree from Brown with its concentration on the late twentieth century novel”). Surviving in the city on a tiny paycheck is rough, and Glenwood, best friend and fellow hinterland escapee, devises a mantra to help them stay put: “No westbound buses.”

Of course, the endurance test is completely self-imposed; our hero’s mom would be thrilled if he pulled up stakes and came back home. But when the downhill slide starts, and the city rapidly becomes more prison than promise, The Year of Endless Sorrows fulfills its title in earnest. It’s that rare first novel that finds its inspiration and grandeur in failure.

Though we never read a line of the narrator’s novel in progress, Year itself has a bracing purity to it, as a chronicle of time wasted, as the history of an abortion—as the sort of groping epic one imagines buzzing on the laptops of a thousand of his real-life Village (or Brooklyn) counterparts today. Even the occasional missteps feel right: The reach of a massive first novel about someone laboriously pounding out his massive first novel should exceed its grasp. Rapp’s maximalist style spins out lists and similes and variations at every opportunity; he means to dazzle us, and for the most part he does. The wit works best when hammered into the precise lunacy of early DeLillo: “Our dumbshow took on a strange Eastern European theatre quality when Lacy started meowing,” runs the description of a particularly memorable roll in the hay. Someone on the phone emits “a kind of Las Vegas jackpot laughter that kept topping itself as though she were being continuously and lovingly goosed with a pencil by a good pal.” And preserved for the ages is a conversation we’ve all had. Here our writer (not having known Feick was gay) meets his brother’s boyfriend—in the middle of a blizzard, no less:

“I’VE HEARD A LOT ABOUT YOU,” Ruben screamed.
“OH, NO,” I said.
“ONLY GOOD THINGS,” he assured me.

In Rapp’s electrifying 2003 play Stone Cold Dead Serious, the lead character in the first act hitchhikes from Illinois to New York to participate in the brutal, live-action component of a video game competition; he spends the second act immobilized and mute. The Year of Endless Sorrows features a cautionary tale in the form of a monster of inertia who insists that his roommates call him “the Loach.” Ostensibly a stand-up comic, this character is only funny in his appalling laziness and squalor. He claims he’s “too busy working on his material,” when “in reality he was too busy sleeping and farting and eating our food.” Forever marooned on the couch, he eventually loses the power of speech. Our narrator toils over his novel (an editor at his company is “enthusiastic”) but in the end it’s as though the malodorous settings and bad vibes of the city itself that loom up to silence him. Here is E. B. White’s New York with the seams showing, with the toilet backed up, with the incessant siren call of wherever it is you came from. —Ed Park

—Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2007

Review of BORN UNDER SATURN

2007-12-06T06:00:00.000-08:00

Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists
By Margot and Rudolf Wittkower
New York Review Books, $18.95

“Painting…was first invented, saith Patricius, ex amoris beneficio, for love’s sake,” writes Robert Burton in his 17th-century bestseller, that massive headrush of contradictions known as The Anatomy of Melancholy. “For when the daughter of Dibutades the Sicyonian was to take leave of her sweetheart now going to wars, ut desiderio ejus minus tabesceret, to comfort herself in his absence, she took his picture with coal upon a wall, as the candle gave the shadow, which her father admiring perfected afterwards, and it was the first picture by report that ever was made.”

The passage appears in the Anatomy’s final section, “Love-Melancholy,” and it’s a pithy template for the emotional component of the creative drive. Burton ransacks a library’s worth of classical reading for his treatise on the malady, though few painters appear in his pages. Nevertheless, his conception of melancholy, as well as his example-studded narrative technique, inform Margot and Rudolf Wittkower’s Born Under Saturn.

First published in 1963 and currently reappearing thanks to New York Review Books, the Wittkowers’ micro-informed study entertainingly dissects the pervasive image of the moody, alienated artist. Cautious and provocative, presuming to balance theory and anecdote but happily indulging the latter, Born Under Saturn reads like Vasari’s Lives of the Artists rewritten as an appendix to Burton—a colorful tour of eccentricity and genius, populated by all manner of rogues, gentlemen, penny-pinchers, hypochondriacs, and enduring masters. Every page has a diverting tale, and the cumulative effect is to set the reader’s mind reeling.

The stereotype of the artist as an emotional outsider—brooding or batty or what we would now call bipolar—was cemented in the Renaissance, as the profession detached itself from the sphere of craftsmen. But the book’s title (astrologically, Saturn was thought to preside over the birth of homo melancholicus) is a misnomer. For every account of a Piero di Cosimo boiling 50 eggs at a time while simultaneously heating his glue for practicality’s sake, or a Silvio Cosini, wearing a jerkin of human skin, the Wittkowers process all the available data to show that, in fact, artists were likely no more saturnine—or bizzaro—than anyone else. Burton implicated everything from solitariness to onions as a cause of melancholy, to the maniacal degree that it became a metaphor for the human condition. Similarly, Born Under Saturn, for all its lurid scenes, ultimately points to commonality, showing that artists behave as well or as badly as their noncreative counterparts.

Wittkowerian analysis can be thrilling. Elucidating how a famous line from Seneca (“there never has been great talent without some touch of madness”) has been misinterpreted by everyone from Dryden to Schopenhauer, the Wittkowers reveal how its meaning warped to suggest general insanity rather than the more limited Platonic furore of artistic inspiration. Nevertheless, as the authors write at the book’s close, “Misinterpretation is one of the great stimuli for keeping the past alive.” Though convincingly debunking the “mad artist” ideal, they recognize that “the notion…is a historical reality and by brushing it aside as mistaken, one denies the existence of a generic and deeply significant symbol.”

According to Joseph Connors’s introduction, Margot Wittkower wrote Saturn’s first draft, and Rudolf crucially “pulled it to pieces and put it back together again.” When he urged her to publish the book under her name alone, she reasoned that his stamp (he had been at the Warburg Institute and was a Columbia professor) would increase its stature. Nearly all the artists anatomized here are men, but per Burton, the origin of painting—a collaboration between the sexes—began with a woman’s sketch. It’s doubly fitting, then, that this new edition reverses the book’s bylines to give its primary writer her place in the sun.

––Ed Park

Feb. (?) 2007, Modern Painters

Review of Adam Roberts's GRADISIL

2007-12-06T05:29:00.000-08:00

Kinbote in Space
Astral Weeks/Ed Park

Sitting on the bookstore shelf, Adam Roberts’s new novel, Gradisil (Pyr: $15, 551 pp.), makes few appeals to the general reader. The title, in a hard-to-read Transformers font, suggests an epic story centering on hair-regrowth formula, and the curiously cropped cover illustration manages to make an explosion soporific. But if you just pick it up—perhaps with a furtive glance down the aisle—and read the first paragraph, something interesting happens:

Take this printed page, the very one you are looking at now. Take away all the letters and all the commas and the dashes, and take away the apostrophes, and leave only the full stops, the colons, the dots over the “i”s. You will have a star map, cartography that describes precisely the sky of my imagination. I want to go there, you’ll say. So do I.

That’s as elegant as invitations come. Roberts starts us off in the sky—in that blank canvas of so much science fiction—but simultaneously grounds us by evoking the visual, nearly tactile experience of reading. By the three-word finale, you might find yourself hooked.
Additionally, close readers of Vladimir Nabokov will detect a nod to VN’s late quasi-SF tale “Lance,” whose narrator sees his story’s “every dot and full stop” as describing a “kind of celestial star chart.” Coincidence? Maybe. But consider that, on Gradisil’s acknowledgments page, Roberts not only references a 1959 book called Theory of Wing Sections, Including a Summary of Airfoil Data but thanks, amidst the names of friends, one “Charles Kinbote”—the mad annotator who turns Nabokov’s Pale Fire inside out. (Near the novel’s end, Roberts swings a double reference to Look at the Harlequins!) Which is to say that Gradisil operates on multiple levels, and that its pleasures lie not just in its densely plotted particulars but also in its unconventional, playful construction.

Where Pale Fire features Kinbote’s commentary and other textual apparatus wrapped around John Shade’s 999-line poem, Gradisil gives us two heart-pouring memoirists, the adrenalized thoughts of a soldier freefalling thousands of miles from space (as his unprotected left hand withers away), 22nd-century pop song lyrics in three languages, and passages crafted using a futuristic argot in which the letter “c” has apparently been outlawed. And for all the seriousness in conception and technological accuracy (see Theory of Wing Sections, above), Roberts, the author of numerous parodies, including something called Dr. Whom, or E.T. Shoots and Leaves (“about a grammatically correct time lord”), leavens the proceedings with a wicked satirical thumbnail of a mumble-mouthed, war-mongering president, “tailored books” (classics in which the reader’s name is inserted), and awful poetry that could give the Vogons a run for their money.

At well over 500 tightly printed pages, the sprawling Gradisil has its longueurs, but for the most part Roberts (a professor of 19th-century literature at the University of London) keeps the pages turning with a skill for richly characterizing his generations-spanning dramatis personae. The title refers to the charismatic de facto president of the Uplands, a loose aggregation of Earth-orbiting homes. Gradisil Gyeroffy is a shrewd, three-steps-ahead politician and matter-of-fact maneater (in one case, almost literally), who motivates the freedom-loving Uplanders to provoke a galvanizing, seemingly unwinnable war with the territory-hungry Americans. (In a mind-bending touch, Roberts notes that one postbellum lawsuit “disputes the term ‘territory’…on the grounds that vacuum and emptiness is not territory.”)

Gradisil is heroine of the book’s long middle section, and even after death she generates much of the book’s drama. Perversely, she’s never a narrator: Most of what we know of her is via Paul, her rich husband (and former homosexual), whose admiration for his wife gets pushed to the edge by her adulteries and messiah complex; and Gradisil’s mother, Klara, who authors the novel’s compulsively readable first part.

It’s Klara, of course, who gives Gradisil her medicinal-sounding name; the odd word stems from her own youthful mishearing of Yggdrasil, the world-tree of Viking mythology. As a 13-year-old she listened to her father, one of the first homeowners in the Uplands, describe the Earth’s magnetosphere as a version of Yggdrasil, “its branches reaching into space”: “Then we could climb up, couldn’t we?” He’s seen as mildly nutty for championing the use of electromagnetic fields (rather than rocket power) to get into orbit, but history will vindicate him.

When her father is cold-bloodedly murdered by Kristen Janzen Kooistra, a grotesquely fat serial killer, teenaged Klara vows to avenge his death—think True Grit in space. This purest of motivations, coupled with the relative simplicity of the Uplands frontier at this point in the future (about 50 years from now), makes for an engaging novel in itself. (The similarity to Charles Portis’s classic Western resonates all the more when we realize Klara is penning her story as an octogenarian, just as Mattie Ross chronicles her youthful adventure from a distance of decades.)

It’s fun to watch Roberts build his universe, describing the outsider culture of the Uplands and conveying the exquisite sense of being out of reach, above it all. At the same time, he describes the hassles of housekeeping so far off the ground, and spacewalks have rarely been less romantically described: “[A]fter half a day you developed a form of habitude that enabled a sort of progress around the Station in a weirdly dangling-zombie style of perambulation.”

Klara’s section of Gradisil is a revenge story, but then so are Parts Two and Three, and the entire saga portrays bloodlust as an unquenchable but wearying human condition, like a futuristic version of Park Chanwook’s “Vengeance” trilogy. The moral quandaries multiply as political intrigues and death wishes snap into place; the Uplands become developed, just like “downbelow,” becoming just another field for commerce. By book’s end, the Gyeroffy family tree, for all its greatness, has grown into a twisted version of Yggdrasil, whose branches once promised so much possibility.

Review of Brian Aldiss's HARM and Nick Mamatas's UNDER MY ROOF

2007-11-24T05:44:00.000-08:00

Fifty years ago this month, the seminal British science fiction magazine New Worlds published a story emphatically if enigmatically titled “O Ishrail!” On board “the mental health ship Cyberqueen,” psychiatrists examine a man named Ishrail, who claims to be from a different part of the galaxy, although he looks and speaks like a human being. Ishrail once commanded a fleet of “interpenetrators,” starcraft made “not of steel but of mentally powered force shields” that somehow ride the “maze of stresses” (what the benighted still call outer space). He is a de facto prophet of things to come, an exile from a more advanced civilization — or else he’s just plain nuts. “Quite candidly,” one doctor explains, “there’s hardly a disorder in the book that isn’t present to a greater or lesser degree.”

Brian W. Aldiss, the author of that 1957 story, is now in his eighties, with dozens of books to his name. He vigorously remixes the old Ishraili conflict in a short, sharp new novel, “HARM” (Del Rey: 224 pp., $21.95). The title is an acronym for Hostile Activities Research Ministry, which you could call Orwellian if its operations didn’t seem so close to our paranoid present, drawing dark inspiration from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

“This was the time for seriousness,” Aldiss baldly announces, “for a war against terror.” In a Syrian hellhole, or possibly some isolated house in London, “HARM” tries to extract information from “Prisoner B” — full name Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali. He’s a comic novelist of mixed Indian ancestry, a second-generation Londoner with an Irish wife. (“I was born in Ealing,” he helplessly tells his interrogators.) He has Brit-lit bona fides: His first story was published in Granta and his latest book is intended as a Wodehousean amusement. But it contains a passage in which two tipsy lovers joke about assassinating the prime minister — enough to land Paul before his implacable torturers.

“HARM” reverses the formula of “O Ishrail!” Instead of wondering whether the hero is mad, we see how the Ministry’s absurd and hair-raising treatment opens a psychic fissure in Paul, causing him to imagine that he is on an entirely different world as a release from his wretched state.

Shortly after the imprisoned character recalls some lines from “Paradise Lost” (“The Stygian council thus dissolved; and forth / In order came the grand infernal peers …”[10]), a planet called Stygia blooms full-blown in his mind. This is the far future, when refugees from a wartorn Earth are deconstructed into molecular form to facilitate space travel. Once on Stygia, however, reconstitution goes awry; those colonists who survive lose their original identities and social relationships. Life on the new planet (with its six fragmented moons) becomes a grim, primitive mess of religious fundamentalism, political intrigue and the decimation of the native race, like a perverse mirror of our own world.

Aside from a few bursts of Joycean wordplay, “HARM” isn’t a book to enjoy. Indeed, Paul’s escapist fantasy sours from the start, with his Stygian alter ego, the thuggish Fremant, jailed and maltreated throughout. Aldiss deliberately brutalizes his prose to shatter any possibility of redemption, let alone beauty. The novel seethes with ugly set pieces (not just the torture scenes, but the sex scenes — even the loving ones), toggling between its earthly and alien settings with a horrifying seamlessness that gives the whole enterprise the shape of a fable.

Our daily news reports already seem like dystopian dispatches; instead of trying to trump the outrages, Aldiss uses science fiction to dramatize a mental meltdown. It’s no coincidence that the name of the spaceship bringing humankind to Stygia is New Worlds — the same as the magazine where many early Aldiss tales found a home. Like those future travelers, the decades-old conceit of “O Ishrail!” gets boiled down and hurled through time, and lands like a fresh insanity.

***

In his third novel “Under My Roof” (Soft Skull: 152 pp., $12.95 paper). Nick Mamatas works off a slightly different set of War on Terror jitters than Aldiss, aiming for humor rather than horror.

Here, Sept. 11 has been renamed Patriot Day; footage of the World Trade Center attacks, suppressed for years, is finally being broadcast. The collective tension has taken Daniel Weinberg, an unemployed Long Island autodidact, to the breaking point. “With every war,” Mamatas explains, “Daniel got more frantic … stay[ing] up all night and just walking around the dark kitchen and smacking his fist against the table.” Perhaps less ambitious than the planet-hallucinating Paul, Daniel declares his house and yard “free and independent from all law or governmental incursions of the United States of America.”

Daniel’s proclamation has some teeth: He’s managed to construct a nuclear warhead by harvesting the element Americium-241 from thousands of broken fire alarms heaped in the junkyard. Soon, the media, National Guard, and Homeland Security get interested in Weinbergia. The small Pacific island nation of Palau recognizes the new country’s sovereignty, and assorted dissatisfied Americans make the pilgrimage to 22 Hallock Road — hippies, nerds, “tax cheats, college kids who made up their own languages in their spare time, a woman who called herself Doctress Arcologia who wanted to build a treehouse outside my window.” Microstates spring up all across the country; “Brown University,” Mamatas writes, “was supposedly planning to secede next.”

“Under My Roof” is accurate, fast-moving satire that transcends mere target shooting by virtue of its narrator, Daniel’s 12-year-old son Herbie. The novel affectionately captures his age-appropriate cynicism and insecurity; at times, he’s a kindred spirit to the awkward protagonists of Daniel Pinkwater’s young adult novels. There is, however, one essential difference: Herbie can read minds. Mamatas lucidly and hilariously deploys his telepathy, allowing him to know all, see all and eventually transmit helpful information to allies in need.

It’s a parody of the surveillance and interrogation mania of the post–Sept. 11 era — the exact opposite of the excruciating and ultimately useless methods practiced in “HARM.” The scary thing about “Under My Roof” is that some readers might feel more secure being ruled over by a telepathic adolescent than by anyone currently in power.

[Originally appeared April 2007, latimes.com]

Interview with Gina Kim, director of NEVER FOREVER

2007-11-06T06:43:00.000-08:00

Sophie's Choices
By Ed Park

Gina Kim’s NEVER FOREVER, a hothouse of italicized emotion and pregnant pauses, received its world premiere at Sundance this year. Star Vera Farmiga, best known for her role in THE DEPARTED, told the New York Times it was “one of the most visceral love stories I’d ever read;” intensely present in nearly every frame, she’s as compelling a wit’s-end heroine as you’ll see on screen this year. Ed Park interviewed Kim via e-mail.

Cinevue: NEVER FOREVER’s "plot keyword" on IMDB is "interracial relationship"—a label that's pretty reductive and yet right on the money. On the one hand, you have the story of a well-to-do woman (Sophie, played by Vera Farmiga) whose successful, infertile husband (Andrew, played by David McInnis) has become suicidal and withdrawn, complicating her desire to become a mother. This leads her to hire someone to inseminate her, a situation that could certainly work as drama, without the element of race. But the story is deepened by the fact that Sophie is white and both her husband and her lover (Jihah, played by Jung-woo Ha) are Korean. (When Jihah tells her that Andrew resembles him, there's a little VERTIGO frisson.) Was the issue of race integral to the film’s conception, or did you have the dramatic kernel of the story first?

The race element was definitely one of the jumping-off points for NEVER FOREVER. The story came along when I started to teach at Harvard University. I had never lived on the East Coast before and was struck by how Boston lacks ethnic diversity. I became more conscious of my own race than ever before (having been born and raised in Korea, I had very little awareness of race). I became intrigued by how Asian people are perceived in the mainstream culture. I was always aware of how Asian women are overtly sexualized in American pop culture, but had very little knowledge about how Asian men are perceived. Most of them are completely de-sexualized, and are very rarely portrayed as subjects of desire. But of course there are exceptions, who often “happen” to be good-looking, successful professionals (lawyers, doctors etc.) who went to ivy league schools. When I investigated the distinction, I realized that it is a class issue more than anything else. Asian working-class men, who are poor first-generation immigrants, are often completely desexualized—unlike, say, Latino laborers. On the other end of the spectrum, the upper-class Asian men are the ones who are supposed to be desirable enough to get Caucasian women. I wanted to subvert this stereotype. Jihah is the poor immigrant, but I wanted to portray him as a sexually-charged man. Andrew is the perfect sexy Asian man but his sperm is weak and therefore, he is de-sexualized on the most basic level.

Cinevue: Were there films that influenced you in terms of tone or subject matter? Given NEVER FOREVER’s thorough melodrama and engagement with race, were you thinking of films like IMITATION OF LIFE or FAR FROM HEAVEN? Given the "secret patrimony" angle, were you giving a nod to all to the Korean soap operas that are so popular around Asia and the diaspora these days?

Douglas Sirk’s films influenced me greatly, as did some European films such as BELLE DE JOUR. But the most inspiring ones for me, in writing NEVER FOREVER, were Korean films from the 1960s. I was teaching Korean cinema at Harvard when I first conceptualized NEVER FOREVER. I was fortunate enough to get some 35mm prints of classic Korean cinema for the class screenings. I of course had seen all of them long ago, but when I watched them again to teach, I was impressed with how subversive they were, both aesthetically and thematically. Films such as MADAME FREEDOM (Han Hyong-mo, 1956), THE HOUSEMAID (Kim Ki-yong, 1960) and THE HOUSEGUEST AND MY MOTHER (Shin Sang-ok, 1961) moved me deeply with their vivid depiction of female characters. Each one is driven by her own desires and struggles for them. The endings of these films are often less than satisfying, but they inspired me nevertheless. I started to wonder what would happen if I put the same woman character in contemporary cinema without sacrificing her integrity at the very end. The result was a melodrama that strictly focuses on the psychology of a woman character, rather than the plot of a love affair itself.

Cinevue: This is a great role for Farmiga—she's in practically every scene, most of them intense if not downright traumatic, and we live for those few glimpses of her smiling. How did she come to be in your movie? What was it like working with her and with your other actors? (How did you find Jung-Woo Ha, who plays Jihah?) Often, she's plunged into scenes where every other actor is Asian/Korean—during the scenes with church members, was she aware of what was being said in the script?

NEVER FOREVER is not a dialogue-heavy film, so I was desperately looking for the right actor for the role of Sophie, someone who not only could ‘play’ the role but also ‘become’ the role. I first saw Vera in DOWN TO THE BONE and was blown away by her performance. She has the ability to disappear into the character she plays. So, I sent her my script and we met at a small café in Soho. I was convinced that Vera was the Sophie that I’d been looking for the minute she walked into the café. Vera is both transparent and mysterious. Her body always creates a cinematic tension within a frame. Her face is like a map with which we can explore a character’s heart. Thanks to her tremendous cinematic presence, I had a relatively easy time creating the Sophie character without having to explain much with dialogue. The chemistry between Jungwoo and Vera as two actors and fellow artists were beyond belief. They actually didn’t want to meet each other before the shoot so that they could retain the mystery until the first day of shoot. I wanted to shoot the sex scenes in a sequential order, so that we could exploit the awkwardness and tension in real life. Of course, it was extremely risky but it ended up beautifully working out. I could tell the intimacy growing between the two actors from one scene to another!

Cinevue Though Jihah is from Korea, he lives in Chinatown (rather than somewhere else in the metro area with a greater concentration of Koreans). Was this simply a practical matter, or a comment on Sophie's perception of "Asianness"?

It was to portay Jihah as a total outsider. He, of course, suffers from extreme isolation in the U.S. since he is an illegal immigrant. But he refuses to be part of the Korean (or Korean-American) community as well, and chooses to live in Chinatown. Things can be easier for him if he chooses to compromise. But he stubbornly goes his own way in terms of pursuing his American dream. I wanted Jihah to be a man of strong will, who is not afraid of loneliness and not willing to compromise his integrity by pretending to be someone other than himself.

Despite the full-bore melodrama, the film subtly shifts our sympathies, and even the plot is left with an erasure of sorts. The title is evocative and yet elusive; the delicate ending is fascinating in its ambiguity. In your mind, is there a clear narrative connecting what's happened in the movie to this final scene? (Semi-spoiler alert—maybe read this after you see the movie.)

I think it is quite clear that the baby in Sophie’s belly is Jihah’s, but I didn’t want to show Jihah, because it would diffuse the real question. For me, the real question was “Is she happy? Did she achieve what she wanted?,” not “Who is she with?”— which differentiates this film from the typical melodrama. (End spoiler alert)

In NEVER FOREVER, who Sophie ends up with really is not the point. In this context, NEVER FOREVER can be considered a coming of age story —a bildungsroman—more than a melodrama. For the ending, I wanted to make it clear that she fulfilled what she longed for, and therefore achieves happiness at the end. The best way to imply that is to make her pregnant again, since pregnancy has a different meaning for Sophie than it does for other typical female melodrama characters. For Sophie, the fetus is an agency that makes her realize what she really wants out of her life. It is her desire, dream, and ultimately, her life.

So, in the climactic confrontation scene with Andrew, when Sophie says, “This baby is mine,” she is not talking about motherhood but rather is explicitly expressing the desire to live her own life. The irony is that it all started as a sacrifice for her husband, but ended up becoming her self-fulfillment. In a way, Sophie became a whore by becoming a mother and ultimately, blurs (and hopefully negates) the boundary between the two stereotypes of women: the mother and the whore.

Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer and a former film critic at The Village Voice. He blogs at The Dizzies. His debut novel, Personal Days, is forthcoming from Random House next year.

(Originally appeared on Cinevue, the blog for the Asian American International Film Festival, July 15, 2007)

Piece on Sebald, Gaddis, and Bernhard

2007-09-28T05:28:00.000-07:00

THE PRECOGNITIONS
BY ED PARK
On the Posthumous Trail of W.G. Sebald and William Gaddis

Asked last October why he didn't translate his own books, the German-born British writer W.G. Sebald told an audience at the 92nd Street Y, in his meticulous English, Well, the main reason is that I started writing very late, in my mid forties, and I haven't got the time. Because I can already see the horizon looming. . . . Warm laughter met the typically Sebaldian reply: considered, droll, and ever with an eye to the end. But one could scarcely imagine how low that horizon hovered. Two months later, Sebald died in a car accident in Norwich, England. The news came down like some arcane punishment, ending the strange gifts that had appeared here at a steady clip since 1996. The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz: To reread them is to witness that immaculate style, those vast and intimate paragraphs as unpredictable and inexorable as nature. He discerned so acutely the mortal lining in things that any page of his oeuvre could have supplied his epitaph, or at least an epigraph for this piece. All his work is designed as a visit to the dead, he said of the writer and painter Peter Weiss. His own books were like paper reliquaries, admitting photos, news clippings, sketches by Stendhal, pizzeria receipts—everything save a single false step, even though one of the quiet anxieties of his sui generis creations is the implosion, under a drizzle of memory, of story and source. In German his title for Vertigo (Schwindel. Gefuhle.) conveys not just a feeling of dizziness but the swindle that shades all negotiations between the real and the imagined; the three long poems in After Nature, his newly published opus posthumous, anatomize the correspondence between the life and the work, the work and the world, the world and the life. Wary of abstraction, alert to history's detours and infernal turns, Sebald had the ability to consort with the unspeakable, such as the contention in Austerlitz, published last October and the last of his novels we will have, that somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins. In New York, half a century ago, in William Gaddis's The Recognitions (1955)—a debut novel dizzy with swindles artistic, monetary, and otherwise—a character wondered, Who could live in a city like this without terror of abrupt entombment? Almost exactly three years before Sebald's death, Gaddis passed away at age 75 at his home on Long Island. His career was the inverse of Sebald's late but meteoric rise, his four novels—the others are JR (1975), Carpenter's Gothic (1985), and A Frolic of His Own (1994)—surfacing every decade or so. They remain more revered than read, promising unknown ratios of frustration to amazement and setting the bar for authorial ambition. Stephen Dixon, himself a daunting if rewarding fictioneer, reveals in his latest novel, I., the mixture of awe and ambivalence Gaddis (ą clefed Fels) could provoke in budding penmen: A fantastic writer even though I only understand every other line he writes and am not even so sure about that. The Recognitions drew hysterical notices—called foul-mouthed and disgusting and evil (according to fire the bastards!, Jack Green's 1962 Gaddis defense). Since we've always hated failure in America, Gaddis went underground, making ends meet with corporate PR jobs for everyone from the army to Pfizer. Twenty years passed before his next novel, the even more audacious JR, which won the National Book Award; at 53 he was both advance guard and éminence grise, or greasy eminence, as that book's titular hero, an 11-year-old tycoon, would put it. JR's concerns about the impossibility of art under the sign of commerce float on an ocean of cranky, exuberant, anthropologically precise dialogue, unfolding in real time and elevating the comma splice to an art form, sometimes forgetting the comma for good measure. The result can verge on madness but never without music—viz., No no wait Major you're Vern wait you're knocking over the Dan Dan wait—and all of it ends with the acquisitive prepubescent's voice leaking out of an unattended phone: Hey? You listening . . . ? These days, it can be hard to tell. Jonathan Franzen recently revived the tradition of public hostility toward Gaddis in "Mr. Difficult," a self-aggrandizing New Yorker smackdown, shredding every Gaddis novel save The Recognitions and dismissing in a paragraph the long-awaited posthumous work Agapē Agape. (The Rush for Second Place, a new collection of occasional nonfiction, fares even worse.) He confesses to sounding a little Freudian in condemning the writing as anal-retentive, yet seems blind to what might be his own oedipal urge to dethrone postmodern literature's most imposing father figure. Like B.R. Myers grimly dissecting White Noise, Franzen turns a tin ear to JR's abundant humor, resorting to emetic formulae like Think of the novel as lover. As one of JR's lazier characters says of a work in progress vertiginously titled Agapē Agape: Hate it man like how can I hate it I mean I don't even know what it's about. It is hard to say whether Franzen even finishes the book; he gloats that he can't get past page 523 of JR's 726, then blithely dismisses the last ten pages. There are 956 pages in this book, wrote a Chicago Tribune hack of The Recognitions nearly half a century ago (quoted in Green), and I must confess that I did not stay until the last had been turned. Gaddis once remarked that Timesman Christopher Lehmann-Haupt admitted in his Carpenter's Gothic review to not having read JR, a book he had reviewed a decade earlier. (He actually called it virtually unreadable.) Little has changed, then; but this state of affairs may be appropriate: Gaddis's last blast, Agapē Agape, ultimately leads the reader back to The Recognitions itself. The new book, completed before he died, is as difficult and pleasurable as its title. It is many things: a gloriously messy précis of his decades-long obsession with the player piano and the sundering of the communal love (agapē) he believed it signaled; the materialization of a book by the same name that JR's Jack Gibbs toils over; and a feedback-leaking cover version of Concrete, a 1982 novel by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, whose novels Gaddis started reading late in life and whom Sebald acknowledged did mean a great deal to me, in more than one way. With one final draught of inspiration and a holy breath, Gaddis's ailing narrator abandons hope of writing his great scholarly treatise and instead fashions an address to his detachable self, a Greek notion of the soul that here turns out to be something very much like the reader, to whom he thrice implores, I've got to explain all this, because I don't, we don't know how much time there is. It unfolds as a single 96-page-long paragraph, a nod to Bernhard's similarly seamless novels. Our nameless American even takes the same mania-inducing medicine (prednisone) as Concrete's Rudolf, who is himself unable to finish, or even effectively start, his important study of the composer Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Agapē Agape may seem to reach us too late, after its author's death, but it actually comes at the proper time: posthumously. Player pianos required minimal input from the living: Their phantom hands could play back rolls perforated with the performances of composers now dead. Agapē registers, with similar fidelity, the contents of a frenetic mind. Some stretches pass so rapidly they read as palimpsest, with references ranging from Vaucanson's Duck to du Maurier's Trilby; the remnants of a triple-daughtered Lear plot are discernible. Though the piece swarms with the ghosts of a lifetime's research, Gaddis cuts back at the proper time. When one passage threatens to devolve into a gloss on Walter Benjamin's and Johan Huizinga's theorizings on authenticity, he spins it into a comic dialogue: Choose the fake, Mr. Benjamin. Absolutely, Mr. Huizinga!, ending with Positively Mr. Benjamowww! as the narrator accidentally sticks himself with a pencil, returning to the grim real world. The book's ceaseless motion suits its central obsession, the player piano, with its punched paper roll at the heart of the whole thing; an endnote in Gitta Honegger's recent Bernhard biography provides the term Rollenprosa, rolling prose—Hermann Beil's coinage for the Austrian's later style, also apt here. It all turns into what it's all about, prednisone turns his skin parchment-thin, and one can follow the paper trail through Gaddis's previous fictions: in The Recognitions, the currency counterfeiter Sinisterra's suit of paper and composer Stanley's cardboard practice keyboard; McCandless's note-swamped room in Carpenter's Gothic; the paper kingdoms of finance and law elaborated and epitomized by JR and A Frolic of His Own. Agapē rolls to a stop with a piercing sense of time running out—an emotional look backward, across the years and the thousands of pages, at the works of arrogant youth and the book I wrote then, my first book. Call it The Recognitions, which bore on its title page the alchemical ouroboros, the serpent devouring its own tail. A breathless epilogue to an immense body of work, an acid tirade all too human with sentiment, Agapē Agape could not have cut a more affecting path back to the source, a nearly 50-year course that affirms the ideal of the opus alchymicum, the work as self-generating recirculation. The Gaddis canon has gold, not paper, at its heart. — Right before his death, Gaddis incarnated his ever-mutating Agapē Project as a play for German radio titled Torschlusspanik, the fear of missed opportunities—literally, of closing doors. Sebald's After Nature begins with a bit of Torschluss, informing us that Whoever closes the wings/of the altar in the Lindenhardt/parish church will see Saint George, painted by and resembling the German artist known as Matthias Grünewald (1475?-1528). In the first of the book's three narrative poems, Sebald enumerates Grünewald's other self-portraits, and etches the known and envisioned contours of his shadowy life, from his wife's Jewish-Catholic conversion to his doppelgänger, a young waterworks artist named Mathis Nithart. The longest section, devoted to the Isenheim Altarpiece, Grünewald's masterwork, joins history and deft ekphrasis for an apocalyptic worldview that seems to bend time, extending from the early Christian era to the end of the world. The poet locates his second subject two centuries hence: Georg Wilhelm Steller, the gifted, arrogant German naturalist attached to Vitus Bering's Russian expeditions to Alaska. He would expire in the most remote geography, and his detailed descriptions of Arctic flora and fauna would be perverted into travel charts for hunters,/blueprint for the counting of pelts. When Sebald himself comes into view for the final poem, his restless, saturnine nature has been prefigured. Birds and mills, sickles and Saturn, forge connections between him and his surreptitious self-portraits, but the most significant recurrence is the town of Windsheim. Here Grünewald visits a workshop in 1525 (and meets an artist named Sebald Beham); here Steller is born in 1709; and here, in 1943, Sebald's mother takes temporary refuge—her husband off to war, and Nürnberg burning—realizing, for the first time, she is with child. Sebald, or the idea of Sebald, has entered the world. Though in his books he comes across as a modern nomad, abandoning (in Vertigo) a trip to Vienna for a sojourn to Venice and then Verona, Sebald was in fact a career academic in England long before his writing life. It was a state of affairs from which, at one point, he needed some way out, as he told an interviewer. He found the cure to this Torschlusspanik quite by chance in a German book called The Head of Vitus Bering. In a footnote he discovered Steller, with whom he shared Windsheim and initials. Favored to become chair of botany at Halle, Steller instead made for Russia, and perhaps his escape, as much as private coincidences, resolved Sebald to stray from purely academic writing. After Nature is in fact his first book (published in German in 1988), and though the patient verse approximates his later prose, the shattered lines and the lack of graphic material (photos, etc.) deepen or (we convince ourselves) anticipate his absence, and even the title takes on a calm prescience: To be after nature is to be dead. Fragments and images will land in his other works, such as the Chinese woman optician, whose gentle touch profoundly unsettles him, later immortalized in Vertigo. This dispersal and deepening over time suggests some private alchemy, and indeed throughout After Nature, as in The Recognitions, one encounters traces of that abandoned and derided science. Among the rare paints in Nithart's workplace is alchemy green. Steller, to comfort his dying patron, speaks of the light of nature, an alchemical conceit known as lumen naturae; his friend responds, all things, my son, transmute into old age. In Manchester, where Sebald studied, and where in 1966 he was appointed to his first academic post, the poet spends days on end reading the alchemist Paracelsus. The city itself, a husk of its 19th-century industrial might, separates elementally, smoke and sulphuric acid, salt and ashes, and becomes an alembic from which can only emerge a stunted Mancunian race. No, here we can write/no postcards, can't even/get out of the car, he says of the land near a nuclear power plant, where, in a new alchemy, slowly/the core of the metal/is destroyed. An engineer tells him, one thing always/the other's beginning. For the English-speaking world, After Nature is Sebald's alpha and omega, at once the first and last of his literary works, and a seedbed for his later projects. (On the Natural History of Destruction, his critical inquiry into post-war Germany's literary consciousness, will appear in 2003.) Gaddis, who began one novel with Money? and another with Justice?, once ended a film treatment (for IBM) with Gertrude Stein on her deathbed, where she asked "What is the answer?," and her friend professed ignorance. "In that case," she said, "what is the question?" Sebald, near the end of After Nature, under a lowering sky, writes, What's dead is gone/forever, then a shard from Lear: What did'st/thou say? More questions follow, and the section dissolves into Water? Fire? Good?/Evil? Life? Death? It's the one moment in his entire body of work where he gives the impression of losing control, and the effect is liberating and haunting. No elaboration of a metaphysics, just a helpless irresolution. These questions carry me/over the border.

—VLS, Fall 2002

Review of Linda H. Davis's CHARLES ADDAMS: A LIFE and Edward Gorey's Amphigorey Again, LATBR

2007-06-29T06:25:00.001-07:00

By Ed Park

Charles Addams

A Cartoonist's Life

Linda H. Davis

Random House: 384 pp., $29.95

Amphigorey Again

Edward Gorey

Harcourt: 264 pp., $35

What could be more preposterous than the cartoonist as babe magnet? In a one-page riff by “Ghost World” creator Daniel Clowes, a lovelorn words-and-pictures man hopes that rebranding himself as a suave “ink stud” will change his luck with the ladies. Oddly enough, would-be ink studs have a real-life model in Charles Addams (1912-1988), the legendary New Yorker artist responsible for indelible scenes of blackly comic menace (and possibly Christina Ricci's career). As recounted in Linda H. Davis' new biography, “Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life,” the thrice-married penman had numerous affairs (with women who mostly indulged his concurrent flings and spoke fondly of him afterward), even romancing the rarefied likes of Greta Garbo and Jackie Kennedy in the '60s. “I love Pugsley and Lurch, but my favorite is Morticia,” the latter said in 1964 about the Addams Family, his popular clan of grotesques, which had just been translated to television. “She and I have a lot more in common than you might think.”

The family's raven-haired, pale-skinned, perpetually slender matriarch was Addams' erotic ideal. His first two wives bore a striking resemblance to her, and in 1943 he told an interviewer, “I think maybe I'm in love with the young looking witch,” whom he had introduced to New Yorker readers five years earlier.

Perhaps the attraction to her flesh-and-blood avatars wasn't just physical: Morticia is one letter away from the person who sees you to your grave -- death and sex in one neat bundle. The former First Lady shared details about her husband's assassination. (“Do you know, she had his brains in her lap?” he marveled.) The day after Nelson Rockefeller expired in the arms of his 26-year-old assistant, Addams (who lived in a neighboring building) bedded her and began an affair, despite the 41-year age gap. (Devotees of Anthony Powell's “A Dance to the Music of Time” might here recall Pamela Flitton's rumored deathbed romp, but the connection is in fact even more direct: Addams had an affair with the pale, dark-haired Barbara Skelton -- the British writer and “femme fatale of the first rank” on whom Pamela is thought to be partly based.)

Addams' colorful love life suggests an unruly force at odds with Davis' respectful tone. She catalogues his conquests and his collection of antique weaponry but emphasizes his warm side -- there are a few too many interludes in which Addams is shown to be good with kids. She avoids psychoanalyzing her subject, who attributed his own lack of therapist gags -- that New Yorker staple -- to his “arrested intellectual development.” Addams claimed to have had a happy childhood; one admirer said the cartoonist had “more friends than anybody I've ever known.” Davis doesn't hazard a guess as to what might have linked his serial womanizing, taste for fast cars and the gift for the sinister he distilled in nearly 5,000 drawings. Nor does she explicate, in any revealing way, why Addams' work stuck in the mind, then and now.

Nevertheless, the biography engagingly details Addams' meteoric rise (he sold his first illustration to the New Yorker at age 20 and was soon in the fold), and his working method comes to life in the early chapters -- his preferred brand of drawing paper, his extraordinarily supple “wash” technique. Most captivating is the glimpse of the magazine's communal spirit: Cartoon ideas often came from other staffers, and the vetting process could be impressively specific. (“[Put them] all in robes;…fix bulging eye; not all bald; suppressed merriment,” read part of one elaborate editorial critique.)

Addams' only flaw, as Davis sees it, was his masochistic relationship with his second wife, Barbara Barb, whom he married in 1954. (His third wife referred to her as “Bad Barbara” to distinguish her from her predecessor, “Good” Barbara Day). An aggressive lawyer who looked like a “bimbo,” Barb circulated a fictitious snooty pedigree, lied about her age and could become physically violent with Addams (an African spear once came into play). She rapidly took over Addams' financial affairs, to the alarm of Addams' lawyer, and acted as agent for his artwork , an arrangement that would have repercussions long after their 1956 divorce. This hopeless entanglement, this “terrible dark passion,” is a disturbing but invigorating counterpoint to the sunny portrait Davis otherwise paints. One finishes the book entertained but with the nagging feeling that another narrative wants to emerge, like the Addams cartoon in which a pumpkin is being carved, creepily, from the inside-out.

Along with Addams, Edward Gorey (1925-2000) is the last century's great American illustrator of the macabre. Though they share the same terrain and have enjoyed continued posthumous appeal, no one would confuse their work or approach. Addams was wedded to the single-panel format that was the hallmark of his employer, and each drawing had to score a direct hit as the reader encountered it amid the magazine's myriad attractions. Gorey's productions, full of mystery, were themselves mysterious -- an idiosyncratic array of small-format books, some published by his own Fantod Press, ranging from the 30-page novel “The Unstrung Harp” (his droll 1953 debut, in which an author endures compositional agonies) to “The Awdrey-Gore Legacy” (1972), a thoroughly deconstructed ersatz Agatha Christie novel. Fed by silent movies, eclectic literature, ballet and Surrealism, Gorey conjured topsy-turvy moral tales and inconclusive adventures, conceived of certain works as installments in nonexistent series and wrote ingenious poetry and prose that tasted of a much earlier vintage.

“Amphigorey Again,” the fourth gathering of Gorey's numerous books and occasional jeux d'esprit, has weaker material than the earlier collections: “The Raging Tide's” Max Ernst-meets-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure vibe somehow flags before its 30 scenes are digested, and the 36 contortions of an enigmatic, eyeless creature that comprise “Figbash Acrobate” will try even the hardcore Gorey fan. But most of what's here is worth having. “The Other Statue,” purportedly part of something called “The Secrets,” is a classic Gorey mood piece. The meticulous draftsmanship crowding every frame, along with the hilariously overloaded cast of characters, contrasts with the void that is the story's central mystery: not the disappearance of a cherished heirloom (a wax thingy known as the Lisping Elbow) but the absence of a coherent plot. A seemingly linear narrative reveals itself as a string of evocative non sequiturs. There's rarely a punchline in Goreyland, just an elegant withdrawal into artifice -- here, a title card touting the next installment of “The Secrets,” “The Night Bandage.”

Though it's the drawings that hold us -- the theatrical poses, the bespoke furniture in penumbral mansions, the malicious topiary -- Gorey was also a unique literary stylist. He recounts the escapades of stand-in Edmund Gravel (“the Recluse of Lower Spigot”) first as a parody of “A Christmas Carol,” then in quatrains. He returns to the abecedary form twice in “Amphigorey Again” (not counting the suitably unfinished, Z-fixated closer, “The Izzard Book”), with rewarding results: “The Deadly Blotter” is a tiny detective tale of exactly 26 words. (“Alarming behavior. Corpse. Detective enters.”) The “Neglected Murderesses Series” of postcards by one Dogear Wryde features deadpan one-sentence bios that mix precision and whimsy for maximum tension.

“Dogear Wryde” was one of Gorey's many pseudonyms, and “Amphigorey Again” is dedicated “in fond collaborative memory” to 30 other such alter egos he employed over the years. A good portion of these noms de plumes, male and female, are anagrams of “Edward Gorey” -- Ogdred Weary, Regera Dowdy, et al. This pseudonym business could simply be silliness. But it could also be that Gorey, a lifelong bachelor and presumed celibate -- the sexual antithesis of Charles Addams -- collaborated with phantoms drawn from his own private alphabet because he had no one with whom to share his most intimate life.<

Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer.

Review of Philip K. Dick's VOICES FROM THE STREET, Los Angeles Times Book Review

2007-06-29T06:20:00.000-07:00

By Ed Park

Voices From the Street

A Novel

Philip K. Dick

Tor: 302 pp., $24.95

In “Search for Philip K. Dick” (1995), Anne R. Dick (the third of the visionary science-fiction writer's five wives) recalls a potentially life-changing response to “Confessions of a Crap Artist,” a mainstream novel he had finished in 1959. “Alfred Knopf, himself, wrote Phil a letter saying he was interested in publishing it if Phil would rewrite the last third making the female character more sympathetic,” she reports. “He compared the quality of Phil's prose to that of Salinger, Roth, and Mailer We were both thrilled with this letter. But Phil said, 'I can't rewrite this book! It's not that I don't want to, it's that I'm not able to!'”

In an alternate universe -- of the sort that Dick fluidly conjured in novel after novel -- Phil can do the rewrite. Encouraged by critics, he happily departs the precincts of science fiction, which had nurtured and released 10 of his books, and has a successful career producing highbrow, gently experimental fare. He reworks the territory of soured domesticity (à la Richard Yates and John Updike) in a working-class milieu anticipating Raymond Carver. Decades later, his oeuvre (like Philip Roth's) is lovingly enshrined in our national pantheon.

None of this happens in the real world, of course, save for that last outrageous twist: This spring, four of his best novels will appear in a Library of America volume edited by novelist and stalwart PKD champion Jonathan Lethem. Lauded in science-fiction circles, Dick (1928-1982) gained mass exposure after the movie “Blade Runner,” based on one of his books, was released the year of his death. His carpet-yanking virtual realities have been film fodder ever since -- most recently, Richard Linklater's stunning 2006 adaptation of “A Scanner Darkly.”

But mainstream acceptance was Dick's first novelistic ambition, one that took years to dispel. An early fan of “scientifiction” stories, Dick also read widely outside the genre. In 1940s Berkeley, beginning at age 19, he roomed in a converted warehouse occasionally occupied by literary figures like poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, with whom he struck up friendships. During this time, according to biographer Lawrence Sutin, he was inspired to steep himself in the classics (“I gained a working knowledge of literature from the Anabasis to Ulysses,” Dick wrote in a 1968 “Self-Portrait”), with special attention to modernists like Ezra Pound and John Dos Passos. Sutin notes that from 1951 to 1958, Dick wrote dozens of science-fiction stories and six√ science-fiction novels, all of which were published, and seven mainstream novels, none of which found a publisher in his lifetime. “Confessions of a Crap Artist,” written in 1959 and published in 1975, is a lean, semiautobiographical divorce drama that nimbly shuttles between points of view. The other surviving mainstream manuscripts gradually found their way to print, and with the publication of “Voices From the Street,” finished in 1953, we have a complete view of the path not taken.

At the center of “Voices” is Stuart Hadley, a handsome, New Yorker-reading 25-year-old and amateur painter who is languishing as a repairman at Modern TV Sales and Service. Called “Stumblebum” by his boss, Jim Fergesson, Hadley is a dreamer with unclear dreams. His marriage leaves him cold, and his wife's pregnancy intensifies his feeling that life has trapped him. (His solution: memory-obliterating pub-crawls.) Taking note of a natty young man, Hadley imagines that his bookcases hold “French novels in French paperback editions. Gide, Proust, Celine”~~[30]~~ A liberal sort with socialist Jewish friends, he's simultaneously attracted and repulsed by a group of holy rollers led by Theodore Beckheim, a charismatic black preacher -- and also by the “strong, calculating, ruthless, efficient” Marsha Frazier, who runs a haphazardly produced magazine called Succubus that turns out to be anti-Semitic.

Whereas “Confessions” had both a wrenching, violent climax and a sense of humor, “Voices” is obsessed with rage and race and is unremittingly bleak, a mood intensified by its chapterless format. The title suggests James Joyce's polyphonic “Ulysses,” but Hadley is a dominant, unifying presence. Though an early story line centers around an avuncular character named Horace Wakefield, hints of a Bloom-Dedalus dyad get snuffed early. The only deviations from Dick's patient, observant style are Beckheim's tour de force of a sermon and Hadley's violent, drunken ramble, reminiscent of Joyce's hallucinatory “Nighttown” chapter. (At times the novel reads like a hazy, low-rent version of Ayn Rand's “The Fountainhead,” with Hadley's inchoate ambition as above reproach as Howard Roark's will to power; Hadley's one-night stand with the fearsome Marsha is, troublingly, a more vicious version of Roark's rape of Dominique.)

The word “primordial” pops up frequently in “Voices,” and it's tempting to read this early book as a Dickian ur-text. Most fascinating is how Dick's major theme -- a playful, terrifying disjuncture between realities -- has leaked into this seemingly solid, realistically rendered setting. The book begins mock-epically, with store owner Fergesson opening up shop in Old Testament fashion (“his seventh day -- a cup of black coffee”). Promoted to manager, Hadley grapples with the dark thought that “he might suddenly blindly, burst out and destroy the safety of his microcosmos. In his archaic fury he might smash, demolish, pull down the only world in which he could exist.” He quickly becomes accustomed to “the permanent reality of the retail store,” but those dark forces swarm in and destroy the status quo. By book's end, he is carving out a second life, starting a whole new world from scratch.

Dick completed one other novel in 1953. “The Cosmic Puppets” (published a mere four years later) is a slim, intermittently spooky book, a minor entry in the PKD canon but one that functions as a mind-bending footnote to the gargantuan “Voices.” In it, New Yorker Ted Barton returns to his Virginia hometown to discover that everything has changed -- street names, houses, inhabitants. The local paper reports that he died as a 9-year-old, and he discovers that the current townspeople operate under a mutual, sustainable delusion. All Barton wants is to get back to the status quo -- a return to normalcy. What follows is a Zoroastrian freakout-cum-battle featuring golems, spiders, moths and gods. If “Puppets” is a lot more fun to read than “Voices,” that shouldn't diminish the real struggle suffusing the longer, lonelier shadow of a book. The struggle lies not just in Hadley's losing bargain with the real world but in Dick's changing notion of what sort of writer he needed to be.<

Review of POPEYE Vol. 1, Los Angeles Times Book Review

2007-06-29T06:16:00.000-07:00

By Ed Park

Popeye

I Yam What I Yam!

E.C. Segar

Fantagraphics Books: 182 pp., $29.95

“Be adequite,” wrote Lindsay Lohan, signing off on her heartfelt missive reflecting on the death of Robert Altman, her director in “A Prairie Home Companion.” The misspelling caused titters in the usual gossip venues, but for a reader of the new collection of E.C. Segar's original Popeye comics, Lohan's variant has its charms. From the start (1929), Popeye has entertained us as much by creatively mangling the language as by drubbing a wide variety of his opponents. Few sentences emerge from the mouth of the weirdly muscled old salt in anything close to standard English: “Insinuate” is “incinerate,” “coincidence” becomes “coincerdents,” and m's and n's tend to cross-migrate if they find themselves in the same word. In a pinch, Segar activates Popeye's most bewildering speech impediment, the replacement of t's with k's. Thus we have “personaliky,” “fisks,” and the oft-repeated “evil spiriks.” (Lohan could rent her idol's 1980 film adaptation for an effective audio version.) These deviations aren't especially funny the first time around or even the tenth, but by the hundredth you might find yourself marveling at this near-mythical sailor's odd charisma and the brisk inventiveness of his creator.

The genesis and success of Popeye, who still appears in newspapers, are as fascinating as his garbled speech. Elzie Crisler Segar, born in 1894, grew up in small-town Illinois, often working as a sort of backstage entertainer, accompanying silent films on the drums or operating the projector. After completing an 18-month comic-strip correspondence course, he went to Chicago to seek his fortune. A meeting with Richard F. Outcault -- creator of “The Yellow Kid,” the first comic-strip character -- led to a short-lived Charlie Chaplin-based comic strip in 1916. Segar followed this with a strip starring a diminutive WWI doughboy and a local feature called “Looping the Loop.” By the end of 1919, he was drawing a strip called “Thimble Theatre” for William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. This theater was to feature performances by a cast of thespians including Olive Oyl, but Segar shortly abandoned the conceit in favor of depicting the actors' offstage lives. The focus settled on Olive Oyl and her family -- father, mother, and stubby, money-mad brother Castor -- and Ham Gravy, her nondescript suitor. It took nearly a decade, or some 3,500 strips, for Popeye to swim into view.

Thus he doesn't appear in the first 100 or so strips in this gratifyingly dense collection (which kicks off a six-volume reprint project). The initial story line centers on Castor's unwanted pet -- the rare, doting “whiffle hen,” Bernice. She's boxy but endearing, looking like a displaced resident of Segar contemporary George Herriman's “Coconino County.” For a long stretch, Castor Oyl tries to kill off Bernice in nearly every strip, like a more murderous Ignatz Mouse. Once he's made peace with the indestructible fowl, Castor is offered dizzying sums of money for her by various competing agents. It turns out that stroking her head bestows gambler's luck, and Castor prepares to fleece a casino on distant Dice Island.

The date is Jan. 17, 1929. Castor spots Popeye and asks if he's a sailor. The one-eyed, rolled-cuffed, astonishingly ugly figure responds in five feisty words (“ 'Ja think I'm a cowboy?”) that perfectly announce his unshakable identity and suggest an entire lifetime already lived -- and lived hard. The menacing slouch, the anchor tattoo on a stubbly arm, the rather alarming puckering at the crotch of his pants -- Segar could be forgiven for not realizing that this grotesque whimsy would be his ticket to pop-culture immortality. (Segar would have less than a decade left to manage “Thimble Theatre”; he died of leukemia in 1938.)

Though Castor is calling the shots, Popeye proceeds to steal the show in the following episode, when Snork, a disgraced casino employee turned deranged pursuer, unloads 16 bullets into the stout seaman. “Snork at Sea” is a furious, page-turning tale utterly different in tone from the light-hearted adventures of Bernice or the subsequent pair of mystery stories in which Castor and Popeye play detective. It's a good indication of the flexibility that “Thimble Theatre's” format afforded Segar. As Coulton Waugh noted in his 1947 history “The Comics,” the bulletproof interlude “is the first hint that Popeye has entered the company of Paul Bunyan and other folk heroes invested with supernaturalism,” yet curiously he remains (unlike Superman) identifiably human. In his next appearance, after an absence of nearly six weeks, he's seen shooting craps, and he regularly gambles away anything he gets.

Perhaps the very name held the seeds of the hero's success: popular “I.” A man of little patience, immune to education and allergic to introspection, he nevertheless has an irreducible personal philosophy, one that removes the pesky cogito bit from Descartes√ and triples what's left: “I am what I am an' tha's all I yam!”

But what is he? Segar establishes Popeye as both an unbeatable warrior and a magnet for verbal abuse, thus granting him an instant moral dimension. He's called everything from a “shipwreck in the face” to a “dishfaced mud fence,” and if you scrutinize his features, you may start to see things you wish you hadn't. But his sheer ugliness becomes part of his appeal: There's a moment of comic-strip satori, several dozen pages in, when you realize the depth of emotion that's somehow conveyed by that perpetually sour, nearly immobile face, with the pipe jammed in at a fantastically steep angle.

Reading the saga from the start, it seems likely that the imminent Depression became a crucible for fans' ardor. Popeye is self-sufficient, at times fatalistic; he's a survivor, an admirable figure, with or without money. It's a strange experience to see Castor's Dice Island scam giddily unfold in the strips of March 1929, sacks of cash flying out the window as quickly as he can win them. And this is the beauty of such a comprehensive project: In the strip that ran on Black Tuesday, Castor and Popeye learn that they've invested all their Dice Island millions in a nonexistent “brass mine.” Popeye's reaction -- his mantra -- seems entirely appropriate: “Well blow me down.”<

Reality hunger

2007-05-05T16:25:00.000-07:00

*Sloane Crosley, copyright page, How Did You Get This Number

Sources, IV

2006-05-12T07:05:00.000-07:00

1. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
2. Ibid.
3. Dwight Garner, "Floating a Wild Plan and a Dead Man to Defeat the Nazis" (review of Ben Macintyre's Operation Mincemeat) NYT, 5/12/10

Sources, III

2006-04-27T08:33:00.000-07:00

6. P.G. Wodehouse, Bertie Wooster Sees It Through

7. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship

8. Paul Collins, "The Lost Symphony," in The Believer (Nov. 2004)

Sources, II

2006-04-23T06:24:00.000-07:00

4. Mark Leyner, Salon interview with Laura Miller, 1997

5. Chad Ochocinco with Jason Cole, Ocho Cinco (2009)

Sources VI

2005-08-14T19:04:00.000-07:00

1. Prefatory note, Lewis Shiner, Glimpses (1993)

2. Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

Sources V

2005-05-21T21:23:00.000-07:00

I. John Barth, "Lost in the Funhouse"

II. Interview with Daniel Clowes, Apr. 29–May 5, Time Out New York

Sources

2005-04-21T05:10:00.000-07:00

1. From the first page of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes (1912).

2. From the opening of W.H. Mallock's A Human Document (1892). This novel forms the source text for Tom Phillips's novel of erasure, A Humument.

3. "The Ridiculous Vision of Mark Leyner," NYT, 9/13/92