prose fiction

In relative terms - and those are the only terms there are - New York City can very efficiently swamp a person’s innate sense of isolation and being at the center of all things perceived, by way of crowding crowds, refuse in the streets, and rackets, whether it is the last few months of the 1760s or the last few months of the 1860s or the last few months of the 1960s. Arthur Polk was a contemplative man, who, though but a function in an office space behind a back office on Wall Street, felt that he might have actually, beneath it all, been aspiring, in twilight hours or when dead asleep, to better things. Arthur did not know if the medium of these things was artistic, or religious, or in some undesignated way metamystical, but he allowed himself to feel fairly certain that it was in that general vicinity of the process that mingles the restless heart and the wandering mind without regard to lucre.

Several misfortunes constellated upon, or around, or above, or within him one humid August Wednesday afternoon, among them an inevitable but nonetheless stomach-dropping amatory collapse, his insight that his manager, Simon Legree, would for many years to come retard Arthur’s any advancement in the firm, and a certain vague presentiment of broadly generalized, and lethal, hopeless desperation. These tribulations in very short order had built themselves into a vision of what he could only assume would be the signal catastrophe of his entire lived-out life. He had then, in that obscure state of numb intoxication, barely known what was the reason he fetched from beneath his cot the rucksack that had gone entirely unused since he had departed Richmond, Virginia for New York City four years before, and that four years before that, wandering the Blue Ridge Mountains, had delivered to him what he did not know then were to be his last feelings of exultation and true Arthurness. Into the pack he placed implements of personal hygiene, a book, and stuffs of clothing. He wore canvas-and-leather shoes, and these he rode north like a hawk on a zephyr, hard by the Hudson. As the moon began to rise and the sun began to set, he glimpsed behind him the physical location of the grand bubbling hub of the New York political and neighborhood jurisdictions, and ahead of him his eyes and blood and heart embraced several million trees.

In a way, his goal was Port Oswego, on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, for there his dear sister had gone to reside as the superintendent of an orphanage. Arthur presumed that his skill at living off the land was off-form, and that a week or ten days of forage and sleeping in hayricks or on piles of grass would tire him onto vexatious exhaustion, and repose with Sister Sissy was bound to be necessary. He foresaw there staring out at the watery horizon towards where Canada lay, and confecting out of the free blown clouds, the useful plots and rollicks that would compose the next spell of his life.

This walk then, this pilgrimage, was a time for foraging in the wide open spaces of his mind and soul, for personally clarifying the messes he disliked calling values, and on the first three days following streams and hollows into the Catskills, as a tethered bird freed, he daydreamed riotously, becoming dizzy with liberty and drunk on chlorophyll. The widest expanses of possibility and self raged and sang, the sun and stars above offered him the keys to the Arthurian kingdom and realm. This reign, he realized, was mapped out as the whole State of New York.

Across the meadows, brambling through the woodstands, hopping little chops of creeks. Before he had decided for himself conclusively that it was a broad and penetrating sound, the force that lay itself upon him like a fog, and wrapped him in a subtle counterpane of the most delicate form of pressure, had put him in mind of something from the city. So vague - it might have been an aroma; the highly sensitive taste buds at the tip of his tongue, and some technically imperceptible sway of the follicles. If he was not mistaken, the topsoil and the leaves of yesteryear were conveying to some of his internal nerves, a distant disturbance, one that might have resembled a thousand Apache hooves gathering far out of hearing.

And so he paused for contemplation and consideration, perhaps too aware that he hadna time for such conditional reveries in the city, where moving hurriedly from spot to spot was compelled by gritty white men unknown. South of the city of New York, there is a beach that looks out over the ocean, and on Sundays men and women and children made weary and mean by Capital’s cheese-grating of Labor, imagine that the long horizon of the sea has in some way caused them to elude their mortal fate as dust. If a person possesses a fabulous and monumental courage, or idiopathic recklessness, or has fallen under the swoon of opium or the sort of nervous mad herding that impelled the characters of the monstrous dying called the Children’s Crusade (1212 AD, legendary version), he may as Polk, eschevvie himself to that plage, and Wednesday noontime sink into the warm sun’s sleep of distant dreaming make-believe. Of such a mind Arthur now partook, assaying the distant clues of that impression, and that weakened force of substance he had not yet been able to identify.

Polk slept. Dusk was coming, and he believed that he would not spend the night in this copse. He rose himself and gathered his leather shoulder satchel, and pulled his felt cap around hard down his ears and brows, and would leave the distant bass drums behind, forever a movement of beef hooves or slipping of techtonic plates, or perhaps the overflowing of a far river ‘pon a swamp unknown. Had it been starlings to make this thrush of beating noise, he reckoned that there would have had to be two million wings.

Hardtack is made by bakers accidentally, in the course of their daily toil, and in the city he often had fairly sustained himself on the giveaways breadman Pieta left inside a vase for his seizing and a fashion of delectation. A last obdurate biscuit warmed in his closed palm, and sweat and creekwater in a cup made for him the repast that would carry him quite cheerfully to sunrise, to a robin’s egg, perhaps, or – these events were not uncommon – a egg of a chicken.

He located blackberries, and thought his path through clamor and woe had been finally justified, when his lips made a little skipping into a smile as he recognized the “wild cherries.”

When Polk crested a certain hilltop, leaving behind him the queer distant tumult became impossible, as he placed in the fixed point of his internal compass’ walking track for a very distant horizon, what he should have called the source of the afternoon’s gentle obscurity. It was a cloud of dust he saw, half-lit in resolution, half-banked ‘gainst rainclouds, but it could portend nothing else but a community of persons, of an unprecedented scale for such sylvan vales and pasture fields as these.

The most efficacious objective correlative for depicting the will-crushed aftermath of those persons surviving the Civil War remains the scene of the straggle of worn and tattered soldiers broken apart from and trailing a group that may have formed to head back together horseless to their hometown. These soldiers of woe were often either exhausted from despoliation or injury, or so mentally advanced onto ruination, that all that remained of their conscious mind was the half-ability to drag along behind the path of their fellows. Upon such Polk came: the dusty and the muddy, ill-shod for earth mid the wildlife, and arrived too late for the whole playing of the bands. And when eighteen souls in pairs or small groups had grown into fifty or more of what he realized were now not soldiers but variegated mountebanks on their way to some strangeness-jamboree or fiesta (Morris Dancers, maybe?) Polk realized consequentially and simultaneously that exactly half these col porteurs were women; girls, rather.

In an act of quite unusual independence, Mary had followed Polk to New York from Richmond, and though they had taken separate rooms, and she had found a position serving food in a middle-earth establishment in the Bowerij, off Houston Street, she was as attached to him as an electron. Her devotion and attraction to Polk were quite conventional, and in a nervous, religious way she had concluded that she just couldn’t live without him, but as the days turned into weeks turned into months turned into years, she began to achieve relations with certain of the people who are correctly and habitually best described as “denizens”; relations that shifted like the seasons themselves truly past the joshing where it had naturally begun towards the affectionate and strangely mutually-dependent, she had found it necessary from a heathen and dark, yet humane place within her, to succor tramps and brothel workers with hours of port or sherry by a candle in the darkest corner of her rooms off Houston Street. And these relations drew the pale of the Ephysians down upon anything in Polk that she might have thought he had there to give. These fondnesses and succursuses for the bowered bums evolved into intimacies which neither frightened nor surprised her, in ways no magic of her mind may have before conceived, and thus made confident by being for the first time in her life a “natural,” (than which there is in most estimations no grander soaring of the blood) she gripped to her midnight-to-dawn hours with the falling angels, noticing but not troubled by the realization that her representative communion by way of her friends’ customs had become for her juice and kef, more properly perceived as alcoholism and opiate-addiction. Her relief was also free, and she pictured and much-loved herself as an otter hoopling through the thickets and brambles of Richmond, but gliding and slithering into the ponds of New York and swimming gracefully and silently out of sight.

Otherwise was it seen by Arthur Polk, whose imagination in the stars of his dreaming bore more than similar traces to his culture’s general approval of piety and churchy decency. But this difference of opinion about Mary’s habit (and expressions of this were sometimes convivial and concupiscent) had not occurred to him for two years, that is, until he one day espied an exchange of greasy bills between her and a friend he otherwise had occasion to know was a trollop-for-hire. Thereafter the gulf between them was broadened by suspicion and doubt, daily, until in wrenching and grievous pain, in his jaws and brain he burst in exasperation, as she dispassionately and coolly said the equivalent of “Okay then, well, take care of yourself, Arthur” turned away and found his visage and patterns of behavior wholly vanquished and, apparently forever, vacated from her mind.

It then took but the slightest looking-away during what had been conversation for Legree’s detachment to mirror the whole of Polk’s life in its future as barren and misguided, and the woes and griefs of any aspiration Arthur ever may have had, to gape out before and below him like the Grand Canyon he had never known towards which he had been walking. He relived this now in the darkling woods and fields of straw, and remembered that he had gathered his roughened-up valise in a sort of stupor, and had found himself four days awalk toward Lake Ontario, nearing Iroquois rivers and longhouses. His mind was racing with peace, if there is such a thing.

The faces of the road-girls glowed, mostly with sweat, and their countenances were brightening as they all together approached the din, which coalesced into what he finally recognized were tunes, each note of which was transfigured as through a bolt of lightning. As he topped a hillock he looked down upon the impossible, an encampment of legions; a pungency of smoking campfires; an harmonic sway waved across the headtops as over a field of grain. For Polk, apperception existed out of time, as it will indeed tend to do in catastrophic and instantaneous events, the exhilaration of sexual deliverance, and supernatural revelation. His arms stretched out into an open geometry of salutation and the relief aspects of discharge, opening as to commit ingestion.

Yet his head felt cleaved by that lightning, and unsensed by the thunder, and a moment of illumination receded as a pinprick of Venus at dawn. It was raining. He was, he realized, in a happy state of mind; and then his feet recommenced their familiar gait, and near the edges of the swarm he picked a jagged route across, until he slipped into the woods and, never looking back, let, behind him, the babel groan its peaceful way into the arms of its mother.

During that night, he might have said that he had dreamed about the large boulders and rocks on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, for he knew that sunsets there behaved in a way he had not known in the countryside around Richmond, or in the angled shades of the city of New York, with its tall buildings and smudge fires from the many rooftop coalstove-like modern devices. Rays came from the sinister side, the western expanse of gathering evening clouds, and something in this obliquity made the environment of dream feel like home at last gained. In two days time he broached across the salt flats outside Syracuse, and the next day’s traverse of drumlin and dale showed before him the lakeside browns of the village by which his sister had grown bored, but whose people had come to know her as among the core solids of the mass.

Four years of supporting finance in the hubbub had unfit him for the wood mill into which he slipped as a junior sawyer, yet even this much seeing and feeling filled him with as much inspiration as fatigue. September and October in a hovel seemed like grace, and though he would take a room at the inn for the maelstroms of snow time, the setting of the whole removed him from the unrest of the metropolis hard by the ocean and the Hudson River. It was, by contrast, another figure that roused him to the keenest peek, and he formed in his mind the conceit, if conceit it was, that it appeared to him that everyone in this town rode a horse. Polk in tremens saw the sloughing off of his skins of memory, and a book of history he had picked up seemed to suggest to him that the concept of the Renaissance may have felt tangible even to those who were experiencing it; and it was rather precisely this fashion that permitted nations of persons to imagine that persons had at about the same time briefly inhabited the moon above, in its cold, singular, and only-imagined majesty. Souls in a massive boogie, rustling the very air above them into sweeps and clouds of motion and harmony, emerged in his vision as he graded wood and ate venison jerky, as he crawled out of a burrow to greet the innkeeper’s raven-haired daughter with the most timid of futile chirps and cheeps. Around his memory of his tramping exodus, a glow of golden vibration had formed, which included a mighty chorus of approval and participation; and for the accident of egress he had developed the gratitude and fondness one might have for a departed benefactor’s unexpectedly generous testamentary bequeathment. It would even have been presumed that he was astonished by his own genial fellowship inside tavern windows that lit a patch of the ice and cold and black, black street out of doors.

In this town thereafter, he married, he fathered, he died, still a quite young man. If those who in peace and darling sweetness would have taken the measure of his soul’s passage, and could both reweave the carpet and see the figure in the design, and even beyond that play back the internal voice of his transcriptive and narrating inner recitation, they would revisit another day a year or two on, when he sat by the shore, and realized that he had heard sprechen between the swells of those cacophonous melodies in the meadow of clamor, and that a caller had been leading the people in a vast folk dance, a vernacular waltz of communion, and that the caller’s rasp had signaled a yasgur. By this iteration clarified, Polk would have been unfazed, for he knew of Iago’s brother Iazgu, nothing.

Reep

Mark Reep: art and writing, here

Some years ago I spent a long, hot, blue day sailing on Cayuga Lake with a new friend. After taking the measure of the loveliness of the lake and after adjusting our perspective to the horizon and the line of hilltops, and after the third beer and second sandwich extracted from the icebox, we found that we didn’t really have that much in common, and our conversation slipped into argumentation, which was then, as now, his chief dialectic, and which was then, the act I performed, or found myself performing, when I realized that the person with whom I was speaking was just too easily assuming that he was going to be able to get the better of me; in his opinion, in all matters.
I will always maintain that he is a good man, if for no other reason than having a son with a woman eighteen years older than he, and seeing that child through to college, another eighteen years after the parental relationship had foundered. Stout fellow! But his idea of proving his point (he worked in Cuban sugar cane fields in the 1980s, and formed cells of radicals all over central New York State whose worked hovered just below militant vandalism) consisted in the main of shrieking: “You mean you don’t think America is also a dictatorship?” In return, I would begin to analyze by means of spurious accusations, aloud and somewhat belligerently, that his motives in all his activism lay in Freudian sumps within himself, remarks that preceded, for both of us, those long minutes of silent brooding and painfully trying to eke out the killer retort.
There are those who will say that sailing washes away all sins.
The boat cut long reaches and vectors up and down the lake. One napped, the other reclined desultorily at the tiller.
The sun began its fall toward the western horizon, and we pointed the bow toward our port, as the wind began to fall.
Now there was less splash against the hull, and no fluttering of the mainsail. We dropped the jib.
I have always found it difficult to explain the tenderness inherent in rapprochement, as it seems to be one of those inflections of the human will that is sustained by the natural goodness of people who are not naturally cruel, or invidious, and who are through no credit of their own, the fruits of cultures that have settled around the very pole of benignity (after eons of anguish and rage). Perhaps Vincent and I merely thought that we did not care to witness the trashing of our acquaintance without further, more conclusive evidence of antipathy. Though it came to nothing and we met only one or two times more, the last hour of our conversation was an odd thing: constructive.
We worked together, in language and by fair trade, to conclude that it is a beneficial strategy to adhere to a salty execration of those persons with whom we disagreed, and never forgive them their trespasses, though under normal conditions they could blithely get away with all kinds of shit, uncontested. The corollary of this was that we excuse ourselves from meeting standards to which we hold others accountable, and it is in this way that I graft myself as stripling to sapling, to the idea that there is only one cardinal rule about good writing, and there is nothing I can do within my soul that will ever allow me to approximate that imperative.
Vincent and I declared that we would rather be certain (and badly-behaved), than polite (and pusillanimous).
Somerset Maugham famously remarked that there are only three rules to writing a novel, but nobody knows what they are. I have misunderstood this for forty-five years, for what he was really saying was that there are three rules; there are exactly three; and whatever they are, there is not one less or one more than three.

Cit: Good writing has lucidity, force, and ease. (Edmund Wilson, upstate New Yorker.)

With which compare: The rich, euphuistic satire by which sentences resemble brambles tying knots in brambles (this, is my pond).

We matured out of the time we realized we were of the language, or literary, or the bookish sort, into those who formed opinions to wield against feeling vanquished in nowheresville. With brutish book reviewers and literary critics like me I would board a sailing ship and hound white whales, but I don’t believe I’d share toast and jam with those of whom I am egregiously suspicious, those who offer comment on prose fictions without mentioning their own stakes. Reviews are about reviewers.

Nor was I born to kingly manners, or to play left at Wrigley. By character and habit I gathereth hordes and embrace mosaic stars. I choose environments in which there are fugues and flourishes, a thousand miles on the road, and thunderstorms.

Mark Reep makes constructs. Prose gem-boxes, by which I mean to commend them at the highest order. Conventions of elegant structure are acquitted purely (the selection of detail is unexpected and wise; the energy form is like breeze on pond; basic verities sculpt one another in a candy bowl) but these are the least of his accomplishments. A reader is granted access by detecting in her or his soul the sound of natural language, and before we deform English with artifice, its conveyance in our heart runs alongside a panther in the sunshine, and it is transparent, and it has the suppleness of a dancer, and no element of it is hard-driven or ridden, bandied or bopped: hence, lucidity, force and ease. The heart beats the rhythm of illumination; equivocation falls away, and we take this stuff personally.
Intelligibility is not a value any more than paraphrasability, or the knack of reducing an episode of “I Love Lucy” to fifteen words for TV Guide. The single point of access to Mark’s vignettes lives in the shadows, the spaces between the landmarks. It is there our sentiments of memory and association can thrive, not limited to but enhanced along the self-evident axis of the story line. His is the aesthetic of the glimpse. Ezra Pound’s haiku, “In a Station of the Metro”

The apparition of these faces,
Petals on a wet black bough

may tell you more about the Paris underground railway in 1912 than any extensive transliteration. In a sense, Reep’s prose is imagist in nature, but instead of being divorced from journalistic scene descriptions, it actually thrives in stories that can be elucidated by those with a pure grasp of expository prose. There’s a great trick in this, almost as if the author is asking you to look at horizontal and vertical black and white patterns, yet see with your inner heart’s eye, the colors and textures that are implied within. There is quite a long history of trusting the sensibility of the artist to reveal truth within, that may rest apart from intention, if intent was ever there in the first place. Mary Shelley, writing Frankenstein, knew she was plumbing aspects of the soul that no one could rightly understand until Freud and Jung and Marx came along to provide their coherent explications, and in the early 1960s Dylan told Baez he didn’t know what this shit means [his lyrics] but eventually somebody would figure it out. Nothing is so mysterious as the plain truth directly stated.
And so again the contradiction, aptly expressed by His Grouchoness, declining acceptance by standards that would embrace himself: this imagist writing defies the deconstruction literary theory with which I fuck the stars, and presents instead, without the bramble pits in which I tangle, the point of the exercise, which I will call for the moment, time-travel. Maybe a horse dies, maybe a girl drives a car, but a reader will have taken himself or herself to a place he or she may seem to have remembered, to a place that exists only in their deepest self-actualization: in their hands the gift of being able to understand yes, or to be able to understand no, the sensitivities that one writer has offered. The clarity of the truth (perception and expression inextricably one, and kind-hearted) should not be obscured by limpidity of prose, though that too has a value with which one may confront the rabble of crowds. The residing place of the works’ sensibility is in our assumption that a magnetic resonance imaging machine would reveal in the prose elements of kindness, and a sympathetic heart, without which it could not exist. With which compare the black evil beast of Paul Auster, for whom storyline alone is assumed to be enough to capture a walnut he has found and wishes to place in our (obeisant, obsequious) hand. Reep’s prose pieces convey so much more from the underwater: fishes, kelp beds, currents, and other evidence that craftsmanship here means what it did for many artisans in the 16th Century: this axe is meant to last my lifetime, and contains everything I know about form, expression, and function. This woodsman’s mentor is here, his wisdom and something that came to be known in later centuries as pride, a sentiment of which he had no knowledge at all. This axe was to be complete, and it could be nothing less than comprehensive; that is, it was rich with the inferences associated with his deepest memory of learning axecraft from men who had in turn derived the skill of axe-making from generations before. The Modern Age taught men shortcuts, and firms and companies and consortiums and rafts of wage-slaves made axes that barely eked themselves inside the definition, and the appearance of axehood was all that was required (hence Auster).
I happen to live in the satire of euphuistic embroidery, but what I admire more truly, is the Wilsonian prose Reep writes. Lucidity reveals the generous soul within, as well as the more fundamental truth behind the storyline; it also divulges the essential goodness of a writer who is making a gentle offering of a peek inside the Grail cup rather than scurrying legions of comedians around a picnic table. Force bespeaks the sinuous, natural beauty of a ballet dancer or a second baseman, for whom excessive movements or contemplation create only falls and outs. Ease is the vibrating tone that rhymes a true story with the beneficent hum of natural, human and stellar harmonics.

Bartleby the Scrivener

Some years ago I attended a piano concert at Wells College in Aurora, New York. There were eight pianos on the stage. Elsewhere in the history of musical performance and theatrical circus-mongering, there have been numerous occasions when such concerts have been held (oftener in the eighteenth century); sometimes there are twelve pianos, and sometimes there are eighteen. These concerts are called “monsters.”

Some of the keyboards endure four hands, and the warm-armed bodies of page-turners and the principal persons themselves populate the stage with something that might resemble a throng, if not a rabble. Inevitably, the music as a whole seems to exist entirely for the rousing. This is a not entirely involuntary kayaking down fabulous whitewater cascades. One may be forgiven for leaving the concert hall seeming to possess the feeling of complete inclusivity and fulfillment.

I am suggesting that it is a useful, if ultimately an indefensibly pointless exercise, to finally press one’s sensibility and view of literature to the point of making a form of declaration in which is identified what might be called the seminal American work of writing. Normally, if I am drinking martinis on the rattaned-deck of a motor schooner on a bright blue day in the Mediterranean with a spontaneous cluster of blowsy and fun graduates of Oxford University, and graduate students from the University of Toronto Department of Comparative Literature and Media Studies, and University of Paris literature dropouts who have decided that busking on the boulevards is, as we learned to say in 1968, more relevant, I proffer and foment upon them Gatsby, than which nothing more beautiful, lyrical, and knowing has ever been found (ever I quoth). But I am uncomfortable thereby neglecting all of American literature that existed prior to the country’s headlong fall into usury and cinema, and in a more thoughtful milieu (sherries) will mention "Bartleby the Scrivener," who saw what was coming, and preferred not to be any part of it.

Fugues and crescendos, torrents and floods, starbursts and comets, tender kisses and ‘round the worlds, Benito Cereno and Billy Budd, Queequeg and Starbuck, Pierre or the Ambiguities and Isabel, pi and om, Herman Melville contained multitudes too, and made for us the concordance of ubiquity, of sentiment, and of martial execrations that leads us out of the perplexing bramble of thickets into which we are all born dumb.

One of the benefits of becoming walking-lost in a large city about which you have no geographically-orienting knowledge, is that wandering loose vectors perhaps in the direction of your chief known (hotel) landmark, you may see blossom before you an expanse of park, and that may have been the last thing on your mind as you sought to mouse-trail the canyon streets, or gain a useful vista from the middle of a large intersection crosswalk. These parks (speckled throughout Paris, riverside in New Orleans, and curious lowlands in New York) may have been institutionally landscaped, but botanical growth and neglect can have formed bowers and groves that equal the hyper-designated installations in formal estate gardens, and, perhaps overwhelmed by outbursts of chlorophyll and moist shades from the sun, a wanderer may swing and swoon in the delusions of the American counterpart of Roman Fever (Daisy Miller, always and forever our Beatrice). If one has been thinking of Melville, then, these swings and swoons will include transcendentalism, gender politics, spurious redemptions, cetology, discontinuity and partially overlapping non-simultaneous events, revenge and orality, factitious familiality, black despair, the art of violence, Quichottism, ontology, boats and fishing, ordeal, galvanization, Orion, and the world as an orphanage. Then everybody dies, except for the one wise orphan: thyself.

West Ham United has lost six in a row (27 March 2010) and shudders towards relegation. One of the ways in which I feel myself related to Pierre, or the Ambiguities, and Ishmael (yclept), and the dying scrivener, is that they have joined me on the island off the coast of Chile, while all the other persons whose spirit resides in novels have been unable to sustain my love, and have perished in the wreckage of the ship. Becky Thatcher – and, let’s face it, she is Dolores Haze, and Pia Zadora, and Buddy on the ABC show “Family” – never really unbridles the boys’ from their scampish delinquency; there is a single muffled kiss in PORTRAIT OF A LADY; and Candace “Caddy” Compson, felt by Faulkner to be the sole source spring of THE SOUND AND THE FURY, never quite steps into the light, as I so wanted her to do. Banished, punished, all but forgotten: relegated. All that remains are Billy Budd the beautiful and the soul under the counterpane, but even these cool cats retain a fervid glimpse of aspiration and will bale the bilges. Bartleby alone abdicates from personality, function, and partiality, and adheres to a humanitas uncorrupted by intentionality. He is as pure as a gem-like flame.

Perhaps, in 1978, We Should Have Been Listening More Closely to Tommy Goldsmith

Custard Pies at Ten Paces

I used to believe that I’d mature out of my peevish resentment of those devotees of DeLillo, Paul Auster, and the many other writers whose work I find gutless, overwhittled, and small.
(While holding onto my devotion to Exley and Edmund Wilson.)

I’ll regard it as good fortune that I find I am maintaining my opinion that those writers are weaklings and effete connoisseurs who huddle together in the muddling puddle of gathering what strength they may by reciprocating to one another attestations of value and quality, like chameleons on a mirror.
(While I lead the audacious and harum-scarum imperial guards into peppy brothels and salacious bars.)

In academic and institutional settings I have always tipped toward whistle-blowing rather than the expedient and gentler suggestions that might lead to a quieter and collegial remediation of problems.
In the literary wars I find that I have decided to plant my feet in my own particular trench, and in a churlish, indiscriminate, and clamorous way continue without contrition to fling brickbats at the people I shall forever call the scrawny chickens of the literary barnyard.

To whom I say: get the hell out of Dodge.

***JOHN ENGLAR OF TORONTO***

Photo credit, Kevin Konnyu

Interviewer: We’re speaking today with the editor of Ulysses’ Friezes. This is part of a series of interviews with the writers of literary weblogs who were born shortly after World War II.

PM: Hi there Jack.

Int: I suppose it’s safe to say, finally, that you’re in a position to look back and evaluate your literary life. Any outstanding regrets?

PM: To put it in proper context, I should mention that I feel thirty-one, but I guess it’s not altogether foolish to review one’s life at the age of sixty-three. But regrets? No. To have been twenty-one in 1968, and to have gone to graduate school in 1969, I’m of the era of people who were role-oriented rather than goal-oriented, as McLuhan said, and we learned from Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday that regrets are strictly for rubes.

Int: Well then, if no regrets, how about bad mistakes?

PM: No, not really. It should be obvious that persons I have wronged would cite numerous examples that will contradict me. Cultural anthropologists realize that significant advances in the human psyche are made only after times of trial, in those latter years or decades of calm and repose. It’s then that people have the disposition and leisure to acculturate their feelings, conclusions, and creative expressions.

Int: I’m not sure I understand that.

PM: Well, you’re prejudiced in favor of comprehension.

Int: Is that why most people find your writing obscure and dense?

PM: Those descriptions’ll do. There is also rarefied, muddled, lotus-eating, ostentatious, and sick. I can write a sentence that’s as straight as a ­­­ramrod, but I’m really only feeling full of beans and truly part of the human comedy when I’m writing on a reckless wing. It’s kind of like driving drunk. It’s stupid, sure, but if you find yourself in a Porsche on the roads high over the lakes and vineyards of upstate New York on a sunny summer day, you’d have to be a real shitstick to drive safely.

Int: Okay, I get that. But what if you hit a deer, or God forbid, a child?

PM: Drunk drivers also miss children.

Int: I don’t get that.

PM: Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree, and I’ll go further than that and agree with myself that you’re kind of a sissy.

Int: You write a lot about sissies, and the lack of courage.

PM: It’s a topic that sustains me. Sort of like food.

Int: So, you have no regrets, and haven’t made any mistakes?

PM: I think I said that I haven’t, but the sorts of people you’d feel safer trusting could list lots of mistakes. I will give you this, though. For the past few years I’ve had a faint but unpleasant sense that I’ve forgotten to do something. Normally, at this point, women will say “I forgot to have children!” and men might say “I could have been a contender” but in my case, I am starting to develop a clearer sense that I might have failed to go a bridge too far in journalism, and I now think I could have written a biographical appreciation that might have flown on to the pages of The New Yorker, or even some lesser pub. I still work at, desultorily.

Int: What would that be?

PM: Well, I hate to say it, but I don’t think you’re really interested.

Int: Excuse me?

PM: You seem to be treading water, waiting for me to contradict myself so you can drill me. Which, by the way, wouldn’t be particularly hard to do.

Int: Hmm. I probably shouldn’t have let you come to that conclusion. Unprofessional of me. I guess I was annoyed by your calling me a sissy.

PM: Have you not been afraid of stuff in your life?

Int: Snakes, cancer, that sort of thing?

PM: No, more having yourself for deep company when you’re at the moment of your death.

Int: I don’t think about that very much, except in terms of leaving an inadequate level of security for the two kids I have in college now.

PM: I’ll take a wild guess here. I expect you’d be shit-pooping afraid to arrive in Sao Paolo after midnight and have to find a safe hotel, but wouldn’t give a thought to going up Omaha Beach in 1944.

Int: Hmm. Let me ask you about your journalism again.

PM: Shoot.

Int: What were you going to write about, but seem to have abandoned?

PM: It was a biographical appreciation.

Int: And?

PM: I’m not specifically reluctant to talk about it; the narrative is very interesting. But I would have to layer it quite profusely with a sort of remorse relating to my trepidation about doing the subject justice.

Int: Isn’t that a regret, per se?

PM: Let me leave that to you to decide. Where do your kids go to college?

Int: Colby, and the University of Rochester.

PM: You couldn’t find any more expensive schools?

Int: Even if it’s not exactly a regret, would you mind telling us about your biography?

PM: Biographical appreciation.

Int: Right.

PM: There are two parts to the preface: one addresses the fact that I never seem to really get going on this writing, and the other concerns the central figure, who seems to have done something almost impossible, something that opposes all my understanding about the process of aspiration. The former says something unflattering about me and my soul, and the latter renders a pigment of fantasy upon the narrative that I’d prefer it didn’t have. I’m not sure you’re going to care for my treatment.

Int: Okay. Who is the “central figure”?

PM: It is a person named John Englar. He is from Toronto, which explains more than I expect you would allow it to. I met him in 1987 in France, and we spent ten straight hours together. Then I never saw him again.

Int: How old were you in 1987? What were you doing in France?

PM: Englar would have been in his early twenties. I was forty. We met during the Paris-Brest-Paris bicycle event, a randonnee, which is 750 miles. It is ridden within ninety hours, straight through three nights, in the rain, with no sleep, and in an exalted state of very considerable enervation. We rode together up and down the hills of Brittany. At one point we stopped at a café for some coffee. The young fellow working alone in the café was very bored, without necessarily being sullen. The lattes tasted – let me say this now - absolutely heavenly to me, but for Englar, his had been inadequately scalded. He carried his cup back to the fellow, who re-prepared it properly, exposing I would guess a bit of chagrin for having been caught trying to foist a second rate beverage on what he took to be a couple of undiscerning barbarians. Englar’s insouciance doing that had impressed me deeply, and made me feel a better man for having simply shared his company. You might say I admired him breathlessly. We sat a while at the table; he told me he was going to Ireland after Paris to study for three weeks at a prestigious confectionary college in Dublin. When we were riding again, he said he was going to open a coffee shop in Toronto. I think I said something along the lines of “oh, that’s nice,” and then he gently and generously corrected me “no, it’ll be a special coffee shop.” Then he described visions. Were you there when that little kid in Portugal saw the Virgin Mary? I was.

Int: So then he opened a coffee shop in Toronto?

PM: First, let me settle upon you my most withering look. There, now I feel better. No, nothing so trite as that. Open a coffee shop in Toronto is one of the things he did, but his chief accomplishment – unique in my experience – was to take each element of the vision he had articulated, and bring it to exhaustive fruition, making an impact on the zeitgeist, defining a culture of freethinkers, and resurrecting an aura the modern world assumed it had lost forever, from the days when Zelda Fitzgerald jumped into the fountain, and Dean Moriarty sped down the two-lanes, when Mark Rothko discovered balance, and when Shakespeare wrote the twentieth sonnet.

Int: I have to say, you’re making it pretty hard to believe. This is a young kid on a bike with an idea that’s not even particularly original.

PM: I understand that. It takes a bit of research. And I’ll provide your editor with some resources that will illustrate what I’m trying to describe. When the mosaic is taken as a whole, you’re looking, not only at a unique character, but standing in awe at the sheer impossibility of dreams that have been actualized. We’re not used to that. His vision of “special” contravenes just about every square inch of land upon which you stand.

Int: So he opened a coffee shop.

PM: Ufff. I’m going to go get a beer.

PM: Okay then. In part: He sponsors a bicycle racing team that has achieved notable success and some comical notoriety. Some years ago he created a figure 8 velodrome in Toronto and Vancouver that has as much legendary allure for cyclists as we might suppose Harry’s Bar in Venice has for nascent authors. He is by many people credited with inventing the Alleycat Scramble, which is an affair of lunacy now held in many of the major cities in the world. He has made a place where bike couriers’ half-mad culture is churchy. He has feared nothing, which doesn’t sound unusual except that he’s the only person I’ve ever met for whom that is true. He has fulfilled his destiny by assuming responsibility for every bit of his innate charisma. The only other person who has done that, Eddy Zieba, is also a cyclist, imagine that. But the reason an extensive biographical appreciation needs to be written – and I happen to lack the vigor to do so – has to do with his iteration of these details, and more, and his describing the ambiance that now exists, twenty years before they came into full existence. In precise detail. It is raining, and we’re riding between Loudeac and Carhaix. And he speaks the very words that will be written twenty years later by culture critics, restaurant reviewers, bicycle journalists, and Sunday newspaper feature writers. He describes a place that photographers will later document, in chilling, exquisite detail. Actually, it was more like this. We’re riding along together over the terrain that was the territory of those strange creatures, the Breton Celts.

Int: France.

PM: Look at this photograph. It’s a great photograph, yes?

Int: It’s nice.

PM: This young woman is reading the newspaper in a Toronto Coffee Shop. Jet Fuel Coffee on Parliament Street. She has found a place where she can have a coffee, read the paper, maybe smoke a cigarette, and be herself alone. You might even say, there are no boyfriends around to distort her. A photographer takes her picture from the street, through the glass window of the shop. Just a second before she realizes the photographer is a friend of hers, Kevin Konnyu by name, she lays a scornful look on whoever it was that was interrupting her; whoever it was who slashed a rip into her privacy.

Int: And?

PM: This is what John told me in the rain near Carhaix. Bike couriers will hang out there, the Apaches of Metro Toronto; it’s an art gallery; the music is immersive and vaguely anamnetic. Jack, listen to me now: he used these very words. Women can go there and read the paper in private. John says: “I would found an institution where any strong, independent woman could read the newspaper and drink her coffee and not be messed with.”

Int: He said “I would found an institution”? That’s fairly impressive, and I completely doubt it. Though don’t you think some people will conclude that maybe it’s your memory that has filled in the blanks, and makes you remember things that he didn’t actually say, based on the things you’ve read years afterward?

PM: I’m quite sure some people have hearts void of faith and minds lacking the ability to believe in intuition, or in the mystery of art.

Int: But it wasn’t an artwork, which allows those things, it was the factual occasion of two guys riding bikes. And, come to think of it, it wasn’t the vision of the Virgin Mary, either.

PM: You’re sure about that?

Int: My business has as its principle tenets, corroboration, the laws of physics, an examination of motive, and paraphrasability.

PM: No room for the mystic?

Int: But you’re not saying Englar was a mystic. You’re saying, basically, that he foretold the future.

PM: I am saying that John Englar foretold the future. Yes.

Int: Maybe he just had a dream and got lucky and it came pretty nearly true? Doesn’t that describe a hundred coffee shops in North America?

PM: Maybe you need to look a little more closely at the picture of the woman with the newspaper. Who do you suppose provided her with the cathedral of such an eminent place in which to be private? Private.

Int: I think you’re getting a pretty long way from the intention of this interview, which was, I thought I had understood, to ask you about your thoughts looking backward; to give you a chance to describe your regrets, or what you’ve learned.

PM: I am looking back. I see that I’ve been surrounded by weaklings and cowards and by profoundly insipid people. When I look for heroes, if that’s a word we can use, I see only five or six souls who have followed a flight path like the goddamned swallows of Capistrano, from vision through to achievement. Paul Campbell is one. Stacy Schiff. Jim Jarmusch. If Englar had foreseen himself as a theatrical impresario, we would now be experiencing the moral thrills that we have had to pretend we’re getting at Stratford, or the O’Neill Theatre, or the Old Vic. If he had wanted to make the perfect cupcake, people would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars and fight wars for his cupcakes, the way the Dutch in 1637 went absolutely batshit for tulips. If he had...

Int: Okay, okay. But the fact remains, he opened a coffee shop, and the one he described in 1987 and the one he owns now in 2010 are not the same, provably, except in your recollection.

PM: Provably. Well, that’s not where the charismatic live, is it? Alice B. Toklas said that when she met Gertrude Stein for the very first time, a bell went off, signifying genius. Nobody else in the room heard that bell. So there was no bell, eh?

Int: All we know for sure is that Alice Toklas claimed there was a bell.

PM: And I am reporting to you that John was describing the coffee shop that was going to exist with all the verisimilitude of describing a coffee shop that might have existed back in 1955 in Greenwich Village. I have made the mistake of sharing with you my feelings of having missed something, which is as close as I was going to get for you to your “regrets” or “mistakes.” People tell me I’m getting older. I missed the opportunity to become a trans-ocean sailor, and I erred in failing to play squash racquets all my life. I missed the opportunity to watch John Englar cleave through the semi-bohemian culture of Toronto like a saint, and to write about him in a way that might give people a little more courage, and an increased tolerance for the sheer beauty of recklessness.

Int: Well, our time is at an end. Thank you for speaking with me today.

PM: Oh heck, I’ve got more time.

Int: Well I have another appointment, so I’ll be saying goodbye now.

PM: You don’t seem to have been able to suppress your skepticism about John Englar.

Int: My feelings don’t have any bearing on what you have to say.

PM: Yeah, that’s the idea, but you’re skepticism is kind of callous, isn’t it? Englar represents many of the things that seem to frighten you: liberty, transgressive daring, and good-nature.

Int: Oh whatever!

PM: Isn’t your job to elucidate information, not pass judgment?

Int: You’re dissatisfied with our conversation?

PM: I’m dissatisfied with your hidebound lack of imagination.

Int: Is the interview over?

PM: Fucking right it is.

NOTES:

Jet Fuel Coffee website

Photographic tour of Jet Fuel

Enjoy the work of photographer Kevin Konnyu

(it's amazing)

from various Toronto newspapers (attributis perdutis)

Founding owner John Englar (known to regulars as Johnny JetFuel) holds culinary, pastry and chocolatier papers but limits his wares to coffees, lemonade, and home-baked muffins and danishes. (The Cabbagetown landmark is patterned after the original Parisian coffee stands that sold only strong lemonade and even stronger coffee.) Order your drink hot or cold.
...
Check out the elegant vintage Italian coffee machine, the art exhibited on the walls and the jerseys of Englar's bicycle racing team, the first pro outfit in Canada . No surprise, then, that the regulars include a robust blend of bike messengers, along with writers (including Michael Ondaatje), artists and dancers who derive equal kicks from the company and the caffeine.
John Englar, the small, skinny, unshaven guy behind the bar, wouldn't want it any other way.Nor, it seems, would his motley mix of customers, who've been coming here to Parliament Street, just north of Carlton, for nearly a dozen years.

John Englar, the owner of Jetfuel, is an avid cyclist himself and has played an active part in the cycling community of Toronto.In 1986 he started the Alleycat Scramble streetracing series with a friend, which attracted qualifying cyclists from around the world.John also designed the world's only portable velodrome figure-8 racetrack where the Human Powered Rollercoaster and Alleycat races were held in Toronto and Vancouver.

John Englar, now owner of the Jet Fuel Coffee Shop in Cabbagetown but then an ex-courier living on the Toronto Islands, was seeking to enhance the local winter carnival.
He started by clearing a figure-eight track on one of the frozen coves, then challenged bike couriers to race there.Thirty showed up.

If you’re serious about your coffee, then it’s time you steered your attention toward the next bike courier you see, and follow him - over rough terrain, avoiding oncoming traffic, through bank lobbies - to his unofficial headquarters. It’s a given that you’ll wind up - perhaps not right away, but eventually - on Parliament Street, just south of Carlton.

Now, a coffee shop has to be superlative for us to suggest it's worth stalking a messenger over, but the now-classic Jet Fuel Coffee makes the recommendation easy, especially if you're not afraid of coffee with attitude.

"Do one thing and do it well" could be the mantra of Jet Fuel. The high-voltage experience begins right at the doorway, where clusters of smokers hang loose, lattes in hand, bantering at a feverish pitch. Step into the raw coffee shop and you’re greeted with a small, pumping art-gallery-ish space, offering simple, quality coffee, and not much more. You can get a Jet Fuel coffee (a latte), read the papers (there's plenty of room), and just chill. It's the brainchild of John Englar, whose aim is to pare things down and to have a little fun on top of it.

Jet Fuel wasn't born overnight. Jet Fuel started life in the late eighties as a sandwich truck, servicing the film industry. It was the film crews that named Johnny-Jet Fuel-Englar. Later, Englar’s first coffee bar location (that didn’t bear license plates) would be a 200 square-foot coffee bar within a bike store. The size of a postage stamp with two monstrous speakers on each wall. "It was like walking into a set of headphones!" says Englar.

When Jet Fuel opened in the current location in ë92, it was instantly a cool place to hang out, sanctioned by local couriers that made it their unofficial headquarters. But you didn't have to be a messenger to enjoy the nonconformist ambiance, good caffeine; at here, the emphasis was on slackerism and customers who knew each other’s regular time-slot.

There remains a strong connection between coffee and cycling: Years ago, Englar and his cycling friends (soon to become a cycling team) started what was basically a series of illegal rally-cat night races. An all-out no-rules series of races, that grew out of proportion to the extent that Dunhill Tobacco sponsored the races on a national level. Tracks were built for a figure-eight velodrome, and the entire track would be shipped to the next race destination.

Over the next six years, the Jet Fuel cycling team would develop, and become pro. In fact, this weekend, the team takes on the Wall Street Criterium; Jet Fuel was one of the eight teams of riders invited to race down Wall Street at break-neck speeds, taking hairpin turns "with a cobblestone curve". Taking place on a course laid out on New York City’s Wall Street, the weekend’s Criterium has Wall and Water transformed into a daylong festival of pro-racing attractions.

Jet Fuel (the racing team) is indeed headed for bigger competitive action. Team captain, Andrew Randall (the guy making your latte), was a previous national champion, taking the Jet Fuel team to the Pro Road Race in San Francisco - headquarters to Lance Armstrong’s team.

Closer to home, the plaudit-heaped Jet Fuel (the coffee shop) continues to be a standard on top-ten cafe lists. The messenger harmony doesn't trouble the friendly groups of coworkers that come to relax their highly-caffeinated selves. Music depends on who’s manning the shop. But even though it’s Jet Fuel - and not Un-leaded - you will not feel self-conscious here if Rancid isn't in your iPod shuffle. - D.E.

The cities of the world today are filled with two kinds of people, bike couriers and everyone else: Those who spend their lives trying to avoid danger and those who actively devote theirs to seeking it out. Those who pedal and those who drive. Or worse still, walk.

Couriers aren't alone in their dedication to living on the edge, but risking life and limb - theirs and ours - to deliver a parcel?

Maybe in the beginning they were a bunch of pedestrian-hating, car-eating psychos, but couriers have flourished in the pandemonium of postmodernity. Surfing the city and its traffic instead of waves, they are uniquely adapted to the discontinuity and chaos of the urban landscape..

So perhaps it isn't surprising that corporate culture has discovered courier culture; outlaws and bandits, each using the other for its own purposes..

In this case that means the Dunhill Alley-Cats Scramble, a winner-take-all bike race that will be run tomorrow and Saturday at 1401 Yonge St., on a figure-eight track designed and constructed especially for the occasion.

But the Scramble is more than just a race - it's the most visible and best financed celebration of courier culture ever held in Toronto. In addition to the main event, there will be a lineup of messenger bands - see Club Crawl column, below - and what organizers affectionately call ``the Mini-Nightmare Trade Show.'''

``Bikes, bands and beer,'' declares Alley-Cats founder and driving force, former courier and pastry chef, John Englar, 33. ``Plus, we have a cigarette sponsor. Can't get much worse than that. But really Dunhill's been f---ing great. They haven't bothered us at all.

``Of course, some people think we've sold out. We have. We're just trying to take this thing to the next level.''

In fact, Scrambles have been held in cities across Europe and North America for a decade. The difference is that most were illegal. But not this time. No racing through the streets, shooting the holes and running the lights. This time it'll be indoors, safely hidden from nervous middle-class eyes.. And stop signs..

From a messenger's point of view, this is a mixed blessing: ``Playing in traffic is what it's all about,''' Englar observes. ``Being a pro-floater. You don't follow any line of traffic. You shoot the diagonal.. That's the rush, going for the super-run. It can be very amusing and totally fun, or turn you into a complete mother------.'''

These days, however, Englar definitely seems to be having fun. Five years ago he opened the Jet Fuel Coffee Shop at 519 Parliament St., and the less aggressive existence suits him fine. Besides, his cafe is a gathering place for couriers, which means he can stay in touch with his buddies..

At the corner of Aberdeen Ave. and Parliament St., opposite John Englar's diehard Jet Fuel Coffee Shop, Starbucks is expected to open in March. It may anger Jet Fuel regulars who think cultivated rudeness is a vital part of the coffee experience, but it is a bit of stable ordinariness the street could use. Certainly Starbucks won't threaten Jet Fuel, the street's incumbent coffee shop king, with its art shows, occasional readings and backyard parties that are part of the its eclectic identity.

Now I've known owner John Englar since about 1992, when he first opened (across the street, south of Carlton, upstairs, with four stools and coffee for two bucks). I may not be precisely a regular, but I have been drifting in there on and off for more than 15 years; for the six years or so when I lived in Cabbagetown I was there a lot. And I would still say the service can range from "quizzical to withering" (as I wrote in a little Enroute magazine piece about it). So I don't know who qualifies for kid-glove treatment, and I don't really care.

I like the coffee in the tall glasses with the tall spoons kept in the glass Barbicide jar on the counter, and the art shows, and John's deadly sense of industrial design and all things stainless steel. I like the loose newspapers lying around. I love the lemonade. I enjoy being able to run into a certain sort of friend (dancers, cyclists, Islanders, Cabbagetowners, journalists, activists). I find it comforting that it obstinately stays the same, like my beloved Chalet Bar.B.Q. on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal that was so much part of our family life for 35 years that we held my brother's funeral there.

Nobody has to love Jet Fuel. If you don't, the east end has a wealth of great coffee shops to patronize instead. But I cherish the element of ritual and familiarity, and if the barista doesn't know who I am, well that's okay. I know where I am, and that's enough.

519 Parliament, at Winchester, 416-968-9982. John Englar’s long-running cycle-savvy java joint has a reputation for serving attitude alongside its joltin’ cups of joe. But who cares, when an expertly executed espresso goes for a buck? Bonus: since it sponsors a road racing team, it also sells Jet Fuel cycling jerseys.

John Englar of Jet Fuel Cafe on Parliament Street. He started with four chairs, selling $2 coffees. Now he has a whole bunch of chairs and sells $3 coffees.

PLUS: silent auction of original art by John Englar made out of the boards from the Human Powered Rollercoaster with treatment of misfit bike parts. John will deliver the art to your door the next day. Bring your chequebooks!