Time Indefinite Sublime

One of the ways in which we, the cleverest monkeys, are fortified against a totally debilitating and final remorse and woe is that we have been enabled to recognize those to whom is attached the obscure meta-denominativity of charismatic allure. Two of their gambits include the ability to remove us from the present time, and to connote death.
In 1978 my friend Paul and I rode our bicycles from Raleigh to Chapel Hill, some twenty-four miles, to attend what would be the penultimate performance of The Contenders, a talented group of musicians to whom were devoted earnest and mature admirers. The more evident elements of the band’s work included virtuosity, suppleness, and friendship.
Paul and I had dinner (I’m inclined to say it was at Pyewacket, though I may be confusing that evening with another in which I behaved selfishly and miserably with Margaret, an innocent paramour from Romance Languages at the University). There was no opening act at Cat’s Cradle, and Paul and I secured the front row center table, at which we drank pitchers of beer and smoked Wee Willem cigars late into the night.
There were four musicians in the band that night; Walt Hyatt, one of the founders, had gone awandering to look for slightly new sounds; Steve Runkle was a friend of Paul’s, and at halftime, we visited with him for a while and he unwittingly inhaled deeply one of my cigars; the other knights were Jimbeau Walsh; Tommy Goldsmith; and desChamps Hood. The performance was excellent; there was stomping and dancing and shouting of course, but also a forlorning sort of enjoyment from the fans.
At 2AM Paul and I pushed off and began our ride back to Raleigh; it was still very warm, humid, and very dark. In the morning he was taking some kids out to Umstead Park for a nature hike, so he slept for an hour in a chair in my house. That night we saw the band again, in Raleigh, their last performance.
Some years later Jimbeau became seriously ill with a heart affliction, moved to Hawaii, and became a sort of minister. Tommy Goldsmith became a newspaper reporter in Nashville and Raleigh; Steve’s life ended with lung cancer in 2001; Walt boarded the Valujet that crashed into the Everglades in 1996; and Champ became an enormously respected fiddler working with Lyle Lovett and Toni Price in Austin, before dying of cancer in 2001.
The devotion they invoked preceded the melancholic account of their demises, and there are people today who continue to regard The Contenders as magnificent, and as good as any of the bands that achieved a broader sort of fame. Put another way, one may wonder if the future, vivid, dramatic grief accounts for the lyrical force of their compelling presence years ago in North Carolina. Intuitively ad wisely, Lauren Elkin, MAITRESSE, in Paris, appears to be locating the same savor of allure in Charlotte Gainsbourg. I would say, in reverse, but the essence of their charismatic force of appeal exists outside of time, and therefore does not proceed, and does not revert, and is not to be thought of as in the past.

done because we are too menny

I walk in wonderment
along seashores, streets, and
city boulevards;
among crowds at sporting or theatrical events
puzzling how it is
that the minds and hearts and souls
of the people I there see
are not asweep with the awareness
that Sue,
in Jude the Obscure,
contained more sexual longing
than had
any previous character
in world literature.

Some men build

I haven’t seen Richard Miles for nearly forty years, since we were students together at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 1969-1971. One winter evening he hosted a social event at the house in which he lived. As I recall, he had been preparing, masterfully, a beef stew with a connoisseur’s wealth of strange ingredients; he had had it on the stove for three days. He served martinis. He had picked us up in his BMW 2002. The thirty or so persons present shifted into pairs and groups throughout the rooms, and included not just students and faculty from the Workshop, but various characters from around Iowa City: doctors, lawyers, neighbors. That evening was the occasion of my initial underestimation of both the excessive influence and splendor of martinis.
There were too few pieces of tableware. The person to whom I was then married and I ate stew together from a handled pot, and we’d had to share a spoon; we drank martinis from jelly jars.
At other times, I found peyote quite amusing; sleep deprivation is a magnificent sort of trans-departure; and a few years ago during three episodes of cardiac arrest and the associated blows of ‘otherness’ that is sometimes connected with metaphysical transition, I was an eagle awing. These differentiated swoons had their only precedent that night in Iowa, when the bits of conversation I overheard sounded like Fitzgerald talking to himself while writing GATSBY, and felt like what Stravinsky may have been integrating while pre-composing his first notions of THE RITE OF SPRING. When Dick drove us back to our quonset married-student housing borghetto near the stadium, the appearance of the lights of the city and the flickering light-ripples on the late-night river suggested a welding of two types of imagination and one form of practicality from which ever since my concept of the surety of metaphor has derived.
It has been noted before, probably many times, that the more accomplished and ambitious writers at Iowa were sluiced into careers as millworkers at colleges all over America and that they supped with an unsavory eagerness at the troughs of publishers’ fancies. Other persons who lived in Iowa City for two years, and who merely regarded the enterprise as a free, two-year opportunity to attend a rich banquet with very smart, temporary lovers, or an immersion in literary criticism rather than creative writing, proceeded to madhouses, or genuinely unique callings, or they subjected themselves to courageous or dangerous paths: Reza Aslan, David Milch, and many others now safely outside the Tupperware of Writing.
[But Iowa City was grand; I loved it. I sat on the bench for Manchester United!]
Dick had gracious manners. Very Vermont. It was evident that he was up to something else. Kathleen Fraser told me she thought he might be “into stocks and bonds.”
A brief biographical note states:
Richard Miles was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania in 1945 and moved with his family to Arlington, Vermont in 1949.He attended The Hotchkiss School and graduated from The University of Vermont with a B.A. in English and from the University of Iowa with an M.F.A. in Poetry. In the summer of 1975 Mr. Miles started the Aspen Writer's Conference and Workshop with two friends, Peter Sears and Kurt Brown. In 1979 Mr. Miles stopped teaching to publish The Evener, a draft horse magazine. At this time he also took up commercial stonework. On moving to the coast of Maine in 1997 and building a studio, he was able to concentrate the sculptural essence of his walls and chimneys into smaller outdoor pieces. Mr. Miles continues to teach poetry at The University of Maine Machias. He feels that the stones, too, have a voice if not consciousness.

VOW

In the unnecessarily neglected second volume of his trilogy, Fred Exley imagines his obituary: “His companion, Mrs. Mary Pcolar of West Leyden, related it had been a horrible death and that Mr. Exley had not died well.”
I am the age where I do not proudly describe the narratives all around me, but have found that many stories are telling me: viz, cancers of various sorts, cardiac arrests, and accidents have reaped several of my coevals, friends, and amoureux. I do not know the tenor of their last six weeks, but I am pleased to know very well the kind of life that was led by my uncle Dick. He built the boat shown here, aport in Buffalo, in 1957. He was on a cruise from Ithaca, through the Erie Canal, and out to the far western waters of Lake Erie. I believe he had no specific destination in mind, and I like to imagine him vaguely following winds and currents in Pigeon Bay, Ontario Province. He was not well enough to sail alone, so he took a companion, the hale and obviously considerate buddy in the dark hat. The trip involved much heroic and excessive drinking, ceaseless smoking, and doubtless women enticed in boatyard bars along the way. He actually had a slot machine on the boat to amuse his guests on his many parties. [Dick’s tell: when the boat was launched, he’d had his girlfriend christen the boat with a bottle of champagne; that is to say, not his wife, who doubtless somewhere in the far boathouse skulked.] He returned to Ithaca around Labor Day, and died a couple of weeks later.
It is quite natural to prefer a leave-taking of such robust, reckless, and insouciant spirit, to his several brothers’ bedbound inebriations of pharmaceuticals with cancer, pneumonia, and dementia. The latter were good men in their own way, and did a good enough job too, with their dying. In any case, few of us have the opportunity or courage to make a real choice in the matter of our going, but I do believe it is important to delude ourselves that we would punch our vanity in its nose, and die well.
Michael Jordan, a basketball player, capitalist, and sometime piece of shit, preferred not to speak on matters of race, or to diminish the burden of his brothers by, let us say, investing other than nominally in that community; he was usually uncomfortable in speaking on behalf of his race, and has been indicted as having a somewhat imperfect record in this regard. And in a somewhat similar way, bakers from Cleveland and carpenters from Boston were "uncomfortable" hopping off the transport boats at Omaha Beach, though they managed quite well enough to obscure their conceits in the face of urgency.
Pusillanimity and timidity scum the waters in which we all swim.
When I have the feeling that I am beneath the underdog, gasping with the blues, I can make bluebirds twitter and sunbeams dance by recalling that in 1970, George C. Scott rejected an Oscar and called “the whole thing is a goddamn meat parade.”
I now self-medicate by recalling that George C. Scott called most awards and therefore the vanities of gutless men, basically a meat parade.

Stade Brestois 0 Metz 0 (19 JAN 2010)

Some years ago, a set of odd circumstances allowed me to walk through Carl Sagan's house, about which there is much to be said. It was beautiful, and is famously situated at the precipice of one of Ithaca's more frightening gorges. When people were expressing frustration that the sky in Mars was not blue, as so it had first seemed, Carl said: “What I would urge on you is an increased tolerance for ambiguity.”
Similarly, we must all somehow learn to love scoreless ties.
AC Brest retains it strong hold on second place in the second division, and cranes its neck toward 'promotion.'
3 questions à Bruno Grougi
Jeudi soir, le Stade Brestois a parfaitement démarré l'année 2010 en s'imposant face au Havre signant ainsi sa cinquième victoire consécutive. Un succès auquel Bruno Grougi a largement contribué en inscrivant le but égalisateur et en offrant, sur corner, le deuxième à Nolan Roux. Mais le vainqueur du trophée UNFP du meilleur joueur de décembre apprécie avant tout la prestation collective de l'équipe et l'état d'esprit du groupe qui font que Brest est second aujourd'hui et peut nourrir des ambitions légitimes pour la poule retour...

Delmore Schwartz

It was formerly so that merit and grace could be estimated in short fiction by the reader’s experiencing the prose with a full memory of every element in the story: character, character names, characterizations; the path, the scene, the savors: the whole effect. At some point after a war – let us say that it was ninety years ago and in the 1960s – the author replaced cuddling his or her writing with fucking his or her writing; it was observed that there was something intriguing and beautiful about the implosion of the language cathedral; and immanent in every text was a thesaurus, a concordance, the New York Review of Books, and a cocktail party bully. Literature became a chameleon on a mirror.
Thereafter fiction became a wobbling pivot, and a vortex of profusional prospects.

No one wrote better than Delmore Schwartz, before his several-decades of parlous decline, or wiser spies of Gotham made:
IN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES
THE WORLD IS A WEDDING
A DREAM OF WHITMAN PARAPHRASED, RECOGNIZED,
AND MADE MORE VIVID BY RENOIR
but Schwartz had foreseen such literary congresses, implosions, and monumental reflexivities. Ever we tend to or must heap upon the broad ashlands the visionaries who undermine our temples. If we cannot recognize ourselves in his 1930s failures and persons who sell themselves snake oil, perhaps all we deserve is the blanked rubbing alcohol of Carver and the Carveroids, who play at junior high hops.

The Celtic Bretons

Brest 2 – Le Havre 1
14 January 2010. Today, in large measure thanks to the chevalier effusif Bruno Grougi (my main man), Brest defeated Havre AC in Ligue 2 football; the cordial boys are now tied for first in the division with Caen (38 points) assuring themselves of promotion to Ligue 1 next year, as Grenoble and Boulogne seem fated to relegation back down to Ligue 2. Relegation is a word of terrible beauty, and I often wish I had the power to relegate certain vain people to the monkey league.
Brest (Breizh, Breton, Brittany) is a beautiful oceanside city. In 1945 my father boarded a ship in Brest, at the conclusion of the war, bound westward across an again-benign Atlantic. In Paris he and a buddy had stolen an abandoned German motorcycle and had joyridden up and down the boulevards. I do not know if one can steal an unowned motorcycle; perhaps he was the just first of his platoon to realize he could easily abscond with it. Later he bumped into Marlene Dietrich shopping in a store, and she signed a program he happened to be carrying. She vanished, and he returned to Ithaca, where he resumed his craft as a printer, stole no motorcycles, and never even considered watching a Dietrich movie. But he did discover boats.
Much of Kerouac’s book SATORI IN PARIS takes place in Brest, where Jack had gone to find his people. He did not go the village of Kerr’och (as I did), and he did not learn that his ancestors had lived in and departed a town very near Brest for North America. Kerouac: house on a hill.
When I was in Brest in 1991 I took a nap in the park quite near the bay, and I spent a few vague and sleepy moments regarding the very beautiful Plougastel Bridge. The English call them boatyards, the French call them marinas. My feelings about that are mixed.
Breizh was one of the six Celtic nations of antiquity, and the Celts had a skewed way of looking at and doing things; they made much of brass, and built a fabulously complex, allusive language; their architecture was stout, and their seafaring was undomesticated. The Breton Celts tried to make large circles in the earth with stones (cromlechs!) where pi equaled three point zero. That endeavor was naive and poetic and pure, and one might prefer to live in a world where they had actually succeeded, and had rendered a hale song people in Wales and Romania and the Mississippi delta could now understand.

August Macke

August Macke 1887-1914
Lady in a Green Jacket

When we were young, our embryonic critical acumen attributed to some of our art-making friends qualities they did not really possess or would ever realize. The monstrous harvest of the First World War culled artists whose early work we regard with especial grief (Gaudier-Brzeska, Macke). Artists who lived many years, Matisse and Braque are two, voyaged through periods and stages and styles, almost to appear to have become different persons.

August Macke presumes he’ll live for decades, and that on the other side of his many years of painting he may become an actor, or a wanderer, or a playwright. But here his spirit and gut clench, fearing that she will be run headlong into a subservient role, hobbled by weak men, and bound fatally to the cowardice that has been imposed upon her blood. In Tunisia he saw a street beggar, a girl of fourteen, pick the pocket of a British tourist, then swing the wallet in front of the victim’s eyes with a gay hoot, before scampering out of sight. In Lyon, Tsiganes rambled in packs, as on the high seas seeking sluggish clippers, rolling the drunks, in this way: with choral songs of pleasure and accomplishment. The breadbaker’s shop is burned to the ground by his one moment of negligence, after which he hies his family to Paris, where he learns pastries of the most delicate kind, destined only for the bellies of the plutocrats. In mines and pits souls wither into grease, scriveners rot, men pound rocks to gravel, women desiccate. August Macke brings the mallet down, beats a rhythm of forgiveness and betrayal, and frees the vassals, feet in the boulevards dance, the bellows of the throng can from a distance sound only like song. In 1913, August Macke foresaw Paris in May of 1968. He added the enzyme luciferase (from fireflies) to pigments, and,
so that girls could say to the boys in bars
who fan their feathers,
perm their hair,
glisten their muscles,
and swell their codpiece:
fuck you!,
August Macke invented green.

French football

Oddly, I was waking from peaceful dreams, in Ithaca, last week, and found that I had been turned into a zealous fan of European football, and since then have become warmly attached to the Fox Soccer Channel, on which I can watch numerous live and recorded matches from England, Italy, and throughout the world. I had been thinking that all I cared about was the New York Mets (since 1962), European cycling, and ocean sailing, so I had not expected that my enthusiasm would so quickly turn into that queer sort of dependence I have for the three other sports - if "sports" is what they are.
It then became what some people call incumbent upon me to establish a "side" with which I could park my aspirations for greatness and invest my remotest and least expressible strains of romantic energy. French, that would be; and a town in which I have spent some time. Paris, to me, means Metro exhaust and riding on the top level of RERs (I saw a baseball game being played in the Bois de Boulogne, but no football) and Fougeres, Tintineac, Carhaix, Villaines la Juhel, Mortagne au Perche, Belleme, and Nogent le Roi have teams too minor. Loudeac (my Onhava, my Ithaca) is too beautiful, just altogether too beautiful. Therefore Brest, a Second Division team with nice-looking boys with strange names, a town with exquisite bridges, and presently residing in a strong second place.
Now I feel safe.

Daisy Miller for our time

SOLVEIG DOMMARTIN

Charley is my darling....

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. If they were dreams, he was being chased by small, vile men who were sneering and barking and dripping bile from holes. He then realized that he was even smaller than they, and that all the margins of his bearings were locked in hopeless, oily quicksand. From a window above, a rayshaft of dim light upon his eyes descended. Into it he imagined that he climbed. As the last remnant of dream-awareness was lost, he lay upon his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.

John Marino Open 1984

Exposed cables, toe clips, Bell helmets. 1984.
From the Far East we'd ventured to Hemet California to race in the John Marino Open, an 800 mile straight-through event. This image reveals the secret of my career: I am wee second in the draft, as often I was with Dan and David, gigantic Canada Geese first in the vee.

Geneseo 1966

KRYS POWELL, CATHERINE PREZZANO, BOB MOORE, and unidentified
Installed trees, raw landscaping, building without character.
Present tense.
Pre-cancerous.
Never afterward bored.

Kate

AKIBA, NADIA, and MIRIAM: Battery Park, NYC

I have mentioned that my friend Kate has been sending me long letters and emails for over 35 years. By these I have felt privileged.
Some years ago, she had taken some of her schoolkids on a field trip to the New York Stock Exchange, and afterward in Battery Park they came upon a model who was taking a break in the Park.

Yesterday, she made epical remarks that portrayed her being in the world, which she is, in about the way I imagine Neruda observing Santiago from the back of a taxi.

Pannonica THE JAZZ BARONESS

When wandering half-lost around the lakes of upstate New York in my familiar reverie, I imagine structures of thought that incontrovertibly, for the moment, explain the way in which Pannonica’s motivation and devotion form no part of the reasons that found her crossing the Atlantic for New York City and her confirmation with Thelonius Monk. Shucking Rothschild, boarding the lifeboat, the caravansary wended through Bohemia and Persia, she sat alone at a table near the stage in the Raffles bar.
The lakes are long, and narrow, and very deep, similar to the shape of that group of souls who adore Proust. Shore roads dip into ravines and bend around vineyards and woodlots and fields of corn and hay, but taken on the whole length, are long and straight. Taverns situate themselves along the routes, attracting those persons with a couple of hours to spend, smoking and drinking and regarding the grapefields sloping down almost to the water. Many people who work in cities almost never have a day in which they may so idle.
It would not have been called courage.
I would never have quite expected that a small expatriate community of louche hedonists, deeply bored, would have found themselves over a matter of years coming together in a decommissioned 19th century resort hotel in Rose Hill, New York, Onondaga County, similar to tuberculosis sanitaria in Lake Placid, Saranac, or elsewhere in the Adirondacks. I had been by there a few times over the years, and was impressed by the stillness of the buildings on the hilltop road: tennis courts abandoned, bandstand gray. On a summer day they would gather a few of their number and drive the couple of miles to an inn overlooking Skaneateles Lake, to spend the long hours of the warm afternoon occupying a table or two at the corner of the patio deck that had the least view of the blue lake below. There they would drink wine and cocktails to cloud the edges of the cocaine and opiate derivatives that were their chief means of conveyance. I could not see that they ever very much extended their conversations past half-observations and notions and wry, satirical remarks. They were there in the off-season as well, within, quite near the fireplace; in different combinations, dressed in their slovens, having, I could only imagine, the same epically obtuse conversations, in shadows and in fogs, year after year.
For I had repeated my visits there, over many years. In the late 1980s it was on my bicycle. Later I drove a friend’s borrowed Alfa. Alone, as I was all but a few times, I would sit at the bar on the other side of the eight-foot length of extravagantly polished bowling lane, and extract bits of information from the owner, the host, who seemed indifferent to my presence there – though there were two canvas-sling high stools there, presumably for that purpose – about the group at the obscured table or near the fireplace. Over the times I would take a nod from one or two of them, meeting in the men’s room or at the bar, but no more. They were mostly from Canada, the expansive highway of literary critics and satirists; one or two were from France, or perhaps Denmark. Something had collected them. One fellow was barefoot, brownskinned, and his clothes, only lightly different from the scruffs worn by them all, was made entirely of deerskin: he was a disaffected Mohawk. He read Marx.
The cell was extremely thick and tightly closed. For a few years, I had learned from Sam, they had developed a whole-foods cooperative, and had distributed flours and ciders to small groups all around the lakes. They apparently had not foreseen or noticed that it was becoming an enterprise, but when that evidence was unmistakable, they had closed the business, and had cleared out the stock and staples.
Eight miles up the lake from this isolated, hilltop inn, Skaneateles village lay clean. It is a town of some wealth, with grand, well-tended houses; photographers, jewelers, musicians, restaurants. The town had welcomed a social-religious commune in 1843, and erected a school for fugitive slaves. But something of a vogue was started there, too, after the Second World War; matriarchs and patricians would rent or lend an attic apartment or room to writers and scholars, musicians and artists who were off-tune, oblique, or afflicted with languid impermanence. There these souls would knit and unknit equations, or trill their autisms of a phrase that would not coalesce into a sonata. They would stroll around the town streets or by the lake, whither they might gather in single pairs. They might take a job, briefly, before their practical incompetence washed over them and hied them back to their room.
But what did the tribal, static vagrants in Rose Hill unfurl with the hours of their lives? Certainly they slept and made meals; there were expansive porch discussions with coffee and toast; there was reading until dawn in single rooms. They perfected indolence; they were practitioners of this facility with a fabulous virtuosity. Had they ever sought to name the thing, they might have said the making of nothing was the very purest form of peace.
Among the musicians there was ceaseless chatter, good-natured or sharp, and Manhattan was a warren of lives and souls and isles of shoals, rooms that sealed out moonlight. Her cats were intoxicated with catnip, and her veterinarian bills were mountainous. Among them all she showed her smile of surpassing authenticity, but in the way that only those who have lost freedom know the way in which it fills the heart and lungs, only those without courage know the fits and starts of blood that does not smoothly flow. Abjuring the whole continent of Rothschild, Pannonica’s moral aspiration was freed to inhabit a fine world, where originality was one’s own, by having found the right place to be: near the perfect, and present at the creation.

Saul Bellow THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH

Jarmusch, Amis, & Hitchens has been for twenty-five years the firm on which I steadily rely to defend myself against the institutional morals offenses and crimes against nature that scour my ship of speed and grace with vicious barnacles, so that I have to wonder why the elder two principals pressed themselves to an uncharacteristic declamation christening Bellow’s book the Great American Novel, a overwrought attribution without which I could have done. The unimpeachable lyric greatness of THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH cannot be absolute though, because its howlers and breaches roil the still waters. The unimpeachable lyric greatness of THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH does not contravene one of my favorite opinionated assumptions, that like remarks, “invention” is not literature. Novels are authors, and novelists are (only) conning when they place an awful rut in the dark mudded road bearing down upon which a carriage carrying a fleeing bride portentously hurtles. Published versions of this number in the millions-upon-millions, obscuring the sun, and in some novels, Vienna sausages in their can convey the chance artfulness has of setting the hot dogs rolling down hillsides, pell-mell, screaming with delight at (imagine!) a Beethoven Tenth Symphony. Cat runs away.
Bellow’s growlers and imperfect structure have no analogue in the pristine latter novels of Henry James, which admit no brute awakening from the granite-hard dream of literature.
Bellow’s pastiches, ornamentations, and vignettes elude the pine telegraph poles from which their progress must depend; his tone poems and impressionistic pastel clouds pair a reader with zephyrs and carousels; the human heart is unfurled and delaminated, warm flames of flickering fires rest the sentiments in contented apposition. Augie’s brother Simon is hanged from trees, and holds up signs; with the skill of a burglar he fashions himself a veterinarian and rids Chicago of its plaguing cats; the sordid vanities harked upon our betters thread through his apostles in Cleveland; Augie is rent and gouged, flensed and fellated by rapacious birds; yon bistro reserves the table ronde for his streams of workers exiting cold factories where no mirths form. An electric train anticipates the wild colors that develop out of watching a hundred shades of grey emerge from the ablurring house and factory structures along the way. In the cemetery jesters and fools spangle tombstones with kites and kite tails and kite strings. Remove to Mexican arroyos or even Callisto? Nothing simpler. I had a drug store send her up some breakfast. The poles moor clouds of grace an author has confected, it is true. But that way puppetry lay, as well as the more basic equations of construction.

Christina Stead THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN

The Arcadia in which I folded into my warm and willing arms the unearthing bloom of mescaline and Eros and transfiguring language was a small leafy green village in upstate New York, 1965-1969, yclept Geneseo. It was peopled by numerous wiggling, unidentified phantoms, and by my particular band of allies, a variety of hot house flowers born months after the Second World War, picking up the flavor of the Beats, observing the inchoate affectations of the hippies, and foretasting the dark age of morbid untime that characterized the 1970s, and then the Eighties. And then the decade preceding the millennium, followed by the ten years that found themselves both flatulent and anesthetized subsequent to the millennium.
Before the freeze at Kent State, among us it was compulsory to carry around certain books (though not in backpacks – then how? and ourselves, were we completely unhydrated?). These were to show themselves to be most-evidently outside the curriculum, cool, and to possess or at least imply the grandest (though putative) transpondences. Chief among these were McLuhan, Malcolm X, CALL IT SLEEP, and Robert E. Morrison’s PRIMITIVE EXISTENTIALISM. But it had not been evident to us that professors of literature also carried (in briefcases) certain books from which their serial years of library scholarship precluded a native, and personal, and true excitement. Professor Dante Thomas (yclept, dismayingly, by his colleagues, “Dan,”) was enthralled by and occasionally mentioned Christina Stead’s THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN. That novel had appeared in 1940 and had immediately hidden itself under the bushes of backwaters and remaindered lists. But: in 1955/1965 Randall Jarrell wrote an essay and introduction: Heinrich Schliemann! Lord Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin! Howard Carter!
I had not known that such other deaths had undone so many books I now must remember with diminished affection.
The secret heart of greatness of such books obscured and created my pesky wondering – before I had recognized it as such – about where the novel can be said to be truly located.
It gives me more satisfaction than perhaps it should that I found that this core-place was where I first thought it was, and where any author should put it: in the gently swaying tone that emits from the admixture of the dimmest evocations of diction and lexicography, the heartbeat rhythm of nerves and blood in harmonic bop dancing, and the lullabification effected by senses swooned in the jazzing of bits of many beauties. People fall off bridges or espy assurance in the face of their beloved or behated, but those storylines have never moved me, or ever seemed anything but scriptwriting (monkey-with-typewriter). Flames and bits of light and distant thunders accrue, in paragraphs and sentences and chapters, until half-reading and half-sleeping you feel what Stead was up to, and it rests in your hand like a weightsome brass charm, the thing she has confected: the location of any group’s adhesion is the Apache language. Persons belonging to the one group presented in the book will go on each to join another cluster, or even a sweep of bands, but an author has devised a bit of craft to fix in time and tongue the moving x-ray he or she will title and proffer for kin-readers. The motif-strains of Stead’s literary arrangement dominate characterization, eventualities, time, and bookish notions of actually existing, so beautifully and thoroughly, that one thinks of the most elegant writers of all, recalling that their brilliance usually resides in digressions and an attribution of lyricism. Eschewing the like of Pollitry is an unbreakable code described as if it were our pre-freudian memory, that occurred usually before the age of four, as oceanic feelings of immensity, planets coming together slowly, suppressing all the familiar senses: the oceania of life and death described by oneself and simultaneously by proxy.
Lyricism is the infinite chord left over from the making of the stars. We rhyme with Stardust, a song composed by Hoagy Carmichael with lyrics by Mitchell Parish. As Burgess says in a foreword to TITUS GROAN: context is everything.

Paul McComas UNPLUGGED

Dayna Clay slowly becomes aware of her responsibility as the arranging sensibility in Paul McComas’ novel UNPLUGGED, but has been afforded, let us say, perhaps a slight insufficiency of tools, for she otherwise possesses the wit to realize that the single significant sweep of equanimity toward which she aspires can be achieved only by integrating far-flung genres and dissimilar media; but she must for the moment be coaxed like a beef cattle along the single corral gates of story. It is her loss, as a character-entity, that the book’s resolution follows the last page of text with the white page of the face of the good Paul McComas; yet this is not at all deleterious effect, since McComas’s goal has been advanced and achieved, and he has had much to say. The argillaceous prose-fiction Dayna-entity is unfortunately deprived of her own afterflowering, and is severed from McComas’ subsequent night-thoughts. Still, one will wonder why Dayna was given a savant’s precision and wisdom, if she was only going to take two steps across the room, when she might have sailed to Byzantium, and wandered cross Patagonia, rusticated in a Venice café, and encouraged Matisse to use a little more white pigment.
One step across the room is doubtless the primary necessary expedient if it prevents the principal from trembling the trigger bar that alerts the bullet meant for one’s head, but the broad life promised her is stunted by her believing that the rest of her life - when she could be appreciating that memory is a process – is a monkey replacing one story with another.
To his great credit and in fulfillment of the promise he has made to us to unleash in the form of a novel the James within him, McComas has made Dayna Clay an artist, whereas the sniggling Paul Auster has simply and nominally declared that some character or other is an artist and by means of that endorsement, he expects us to jump on his fucking smelly trolley of a novel.
Auster arranges sentences in exactly the same way I would suppose he has violently swung a razor-sharp, mountainman’s axe to cut in half a Milky Way: with thundering declaration that the meaning of a sentence can be no more than the sum of the meaning of its words. Build a model of the Taj Mahal with uncooked spaghetti. At age fifteen, he stuffed a green pepper with ground beef, onion, tomatoes, rice and cheese, in just the way he had, the night before, for the first time, approximated coitus. This is a world without color or people of color. What do boxes in a closed warehouse do when no one is around? They defy their own destiny and besmirch the glory of their far-bound treasures, by having convinced themselves that everything will be okay as long as Regent Auster comes along and makes of themselves smug little piles and other similar, consequential, and bloodless boxes. Auster’s redemption is always only effected by paraphrase, which is not the land of wisdom, art, love, health, multiplicity, the human senses, assurance, courage, rebellion, the glories, the graces, intuition, or metaphor. Paraphrase is some old shit-chestnut you got from one of your credentialed elders. Result: Flaubert, Mailer, and Faulkner fling themselves hand-in-hand off a high cliff, supplying by picture a joke that hath ne’er been before told.
As aspects of the whole of his work, these campfire tales, McComas’ DUBLINERS, will have the warmth we locate in our family members, which we have held close to our hearts prior to our having set our own course for Yoknapatawpha, Paris, or Ramsdale. These are the places where englysshe swirls clouds and thunder into song and rhapsody-waltzes. Sincere independence of spirit is always detectable only in the implications and the digressions, as it must be, and its means reside in semiotic, implicit harmonies. McComas’ real (and next?) work is Molly’s ULYSSES, the popular music starlet who matured her accessions by means of the most austere privacy, and was perceived generally by many people as an artist who invented a field.