I've expanded the scope of this
"reviewing short story anthologies" project by adding a couple more
anthologies: Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short
Stories, Ed. Clarence Major, and Dangerous Visions, Ed. Harlan
Ellison (a "classic" science fiction anthology upon which I gorged as
a teen).
From The Outlaw Bible:
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs: Gonzo, performative account of sex. There’s a lot of butter in this pastry, but celebrations of carnal love were arguably revolutionary acts at the time, and Bangs unleashes the same flavor of psychedelic sweat that perfumes the urgent rock criticism for which his name is the name brand.
Complete by Patti Smith: An ecstatic evocation of erotic magic qua musical performance qua sex. Smith shuffles identity options like tarot cards; a womanly Walt Whitman containing mutually exclusive multitudes. I could feel John Knox and Jonathan Edwards screaming in my cerebrum as I read this lusty pagan invocation. Suffer, boys.
For more Patti Smith poetry, in
convenient audio format, check out: http://www.ubu.com/sound/smith.html
L'anarchie flier by Patti Smith: A manifesto demanding that rock radio
maintain its indie integrity and play the real music, man, the music of the
people, instead of selling out to huge financial interests.
Decades after she wrote this, a
morning show DJ I knew told me how fired up he was about the fresh talent he’d heard
at a recent music festival.
“Are you gonna play them on your
show?” I asked.
“Naw, we have to play off a list
they send us,” he replied.
Then Clearchannel (now iheartmedia)
bought his station and fired all the off-mike people a few weeks before
Christmas. Sorry, Patti Smith, you lost.
Paradoxia by Lydia Lunch: Dirty grimy sexy adventures between a
drug-loving klepto who may or may not be Lunch herself, and a Bad Boy who’s
obviously trouble. Leather-jacket rough erotica. Hallway knife-humping. Outlaw
indeed!
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk: Tyler Durden’s organization is
even more of a Bro Terrorist Network than in the film; forget “You have to
fight”; all recruits to Project Mayhem are ordered to kill someone. A big
contrast with my fight club, where the first rule is have fun and be safe.
The second rule of my fight club is
that you guys gotta eat all this pizza, cuz I’m not taking any home.
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller :The narrator accompanies a guy from
India around Paris, including that most representative emblem of civilization,
the brothel. A scatological misunderstanding (the Indian guy poops in the bidet)
becomes the central motif of the narrator’s conversion to amoral nihilism.
Miller’s case for this conversion is flimsy. It turns on raw speculation; what
if the whole universe is just poop in a brothel bidet? To which one can
respond, yeah, and what if it isn’t?) but I find his prose rich and seductive
in a way his ideas aren’t.
Ask Dr. Mueller by Cookie Mueller: Mueller costarred in the classic
underground cinematic provocation Pink Flamingos, and this is a
behind-the-scenes account that surprised me. The surprise is just how normal
and level-headed everyone is; the characters in this film are grotesque
monsters, but the performers are civilized and charming. The only unreasonable
person in the story is Mueller’s mom, who tries to stop Mueller from letting
her baby appear in the film. Happily, Mueller’s baby did make her screen debut
as Noodles, a name which sadly does not appear in any baby name
book. Such stardom may not be the most divine gift a mother can give, but
it’s a start.
Pimp by Iceberg Slim: Slim shows us a night in a dangerous
brothel, where a stew of lusts and yearnings keeps everybody swirling like
bladed, bleeding tops. Frightening, but Slim’s prose is zesty and enthusiastic.
Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz: A young man is
either getting raped by a delusional motormouth, or participating in
full-immersion BDSM edgeplay. Wojnarowicz ain’t showing his hand, but he shows
plenty else. Woj led a short, intense life and wasn’t afraid to take readers
into the pains and pleasures he knew in his allotted time.
What did I do? by Larry Rivers: As a painter, Rivers deftly
rethinks the genre of portraiture, and in this evidently
autobiographical excerpt he delineates a time when he was
trapped in alcohol, and an utterly worthless husband/father. Glimpses of his
creative process whiz by, but it’s the human cost of alcoholism (and unhappy
early marriages) that registers. Rivers sits in strip clubs wishing he was a
better father to his kids. Compulsive wasted energy. Go check out his
paintings; dunno if he shaped up as a family man, but at least in his art he
was able to salvage some value from his life.
American Splendor Anthology by Harvey Pekar: Pekar wrote comics, and this
one’s a squirmy account of a confrontational appearance on David Letterman.
While his collaborations with underground cartoon master R. Crumb, who’s a
virtuoso draftsman, brought Pekar to the world’s attention, he’s worked with a
real grab-bag of artists, one of whom illuminates this anecdote, and the
awkward figures in this comic are like monumental primitive sculptures snarling
at each other.
Don Quixote by Kathy Acker: It’s never possible to tell how
sincere Acker is being; her brand of faux-naif faux-confessional is endlessly
slippery. So this rant about how the musician Prince should be the President of
the United States is a tough one to pin down; taken straight, it’s as doltish a
bit of neo-romantic populism as you could find. The lightest of editing could
transform it into a pro-Trump editorial, which proves that its arguments
are utterly invalid, but Acker’s real point may be an endorsement of
Prince/Acker’s performative show-biz over the clammy pieties of the politicking
class. RIP, Prince and Acker.
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr.: Another account of
substance-abusing street hustling. This time the protagonist is a pretty drunk
woman who grifts a naive Navy boy. Naturally he falls in love with her,
and she's not sure how best to strip-mine his wallet and break away clean. Low
key prose, very different in manner from the
hyperventilating expressionism of Requiem For a Dream, which was my
only previous encounter with Selby.
Tin Pan Alley by Barney Rosset: This story rips the lid off
depressing dive bars; it’s pretty straight-ahead prose, but if you ever feel
the urge to hang out in a crummy bar strictly for the low-life atmosphere, you
might prefer this lo-cal literary substitute. The single most interesting thing
I found in it is the observation that the bar's low-grade Pan-European decor
creates a nowhere/everywhere pocket dimension in Chicago; a pomo observation in
a drably realist account.
An American Dream by Norman Mailer: A gorgon of an ex-wife hurts a man’s
feelings, so he goes into a mystically sexual fugue state and strangles her to
death. Seems to me that this little daydream crawled out of Mailer’s spank
bank. The woman is portrayed with no surfeit of compassion; while
representation does not equal as endorsement, there’s little evidence
that Mailer was trying to raise awareness of domestic abuse. This smells more
like revenge on an ex, although the prose has a practiced swagger that reminds
us that Mailer was once a lauded Hemingway aspirant. He was also sufficiently
prolific that the editors of this collection probably could have found a
less repellent excerpt, but I guess that wouldn’t be very Outlaw of them.
People who like compassionless portrayals of men hurting women will enjoy
adding this story to their own personal spank banks.
For some reason I read the novel
from which this thing is excerpted at a way too early age. I remember a lot of
enthusiastic descriptions of rectal romance and the protagonist proving his
manhood to another guy by getting drunk and balance-walking on a balcony railing.
Norman Mailer! He's a Great Writer, kids.
From Best American Fiction of the
Twentieth Century:
The Other Woman by
Sherwood Anderson: A successful man is about to marry a seemingly perfect
girl, but is compelled to dally with a plain, earthy married woman who
works at a newsstand. The subtle twist ending leaves me in agony for everyone
involved. Anderson’s neurotic fiction always puts me in mind of David Lynch,
although Douglas Sirk is probably a more direct cinematic descendant.
The Golden Honeymoon by Ring Lardner: A chatty, henpecked nonsophisticate
takes his wife on a glamourless vacation and gets stuck with some boring
companions. You might feel like you’re stuck with a bore yourself if you read
this, but there’s a wit at work. Sometimes it’s the guy telling the story being
witty, and sometimes it’s Lardner himself having fun at his protagonist’s
expense. Once I gave up on trying to figure out why this was in an anthology
with Best in the title I found it pleasant enough. It probably packed more punch
before its sell-by date; now it feels like Dave Barry by way of Norman
Rockwell, which isn't terrible, but.
Blood-Burning Moon by Jean Toomer: Now this is a lot more like it. A
pretty young African-American woman is in love with two men; one a wealthy
white guy who yearns for the days of slavery, and the other a black man with
anger issues. It’s hard to see how this could go wrong, but guess what: it
does. Toomer (a cult figure of the Harlem Renaissance) works a powerful
spell; the entire night in this southern sugar-cane town is like a tightly
strung guitar that resounds at the slightest movement. People are emotional
pinballs coruscating though a vivid landscape where animals seem to understand
what's happening better than humans do, until the end when an ofay mob
becomes a dumb bitter beast performing a pagan blood sacrifice. Toomer
understands the petulant chimp-brained resentment that energizes racism. Scary
insights, gorgeous storytelling.
The Killers by Ernest Hemingway: A source text for hard-boiled
noir storytelling, with the core of mystery and despair that makes Hemingway’s
best “iceberg fiction” (where 90% of what’s going on is hidden beneath the
waves) so compelling.
From Calling the Wind:
The Goophered Grapevine by Charles Chesnutt: Post-Civil War, a white guy considers buying an abandoned plantation (not far from where I live) but a former slave tries to scare him off with some tall tales about a curse on the property. The first time I read this, a few years back, I was too anxious about Chesnutt’s motivations for his whiteface performance (my understanding is that, at the time, he was in the closet to his readers about being black) to appreciate the cunning of the ex-slave’s storytelling. The second time through, I was able to see how the slave delicately mocks the way slavery commodifies human beings.
The Ingrate by Paul Laurence Dunbar: A slaveowner teaches a slave
to read, write, and do basic math, all so that the slave can be of greater
utility.
Then the slave escapes north and
joins the Union Army. The vicious punchline is foreshadowed by the story’s
title; it's a takedown of white supremist crybabyness, and, sadly, still
timely.
Mary Elizabeth by Jessie Fauset: A middle-class, married woman
quarrels with her husband, then listens with amused condescension to her maid’s
uncultivated tales of love and woe. Condescension vanishes, though, as the maid
reveals the depth of her losses. This motivates the wealthier woman to make up
with her husband in a drippily sentimental climax, but the real interest of the
story is the communication between women from different classes. The fact that
both women are African-American packs a lot of the race/class/gender issues that
still bedevil Americans into a tiny space.
From Dangerous Visions:
Evensong by Lester Del Ray: This is a skeleton in my closet. I
read an edited-for-time rendition of this story as a high school Forensics
team member in the Prose Reading event. It's exactly the kind of story a
16-year-old prog-rock fan would think is really deep. Basically, the
protagonist is a galaxy-spanning refugee from hostile humans who are desperate
to imprison him. Eventually the humans, who have conquored every nook and cranny
of the universe, capture him. He protests that "I am God!" and his
captor sneers "But I am Man." Wha'd I tell you? Super deep, dude.
Del Ray handles the thrilling Space
Opera stuff like a pro. One might perceive a measure of thematic depth in
the ambiguously pro/anti God/Human nature of the story. Del Ray's
afterword declares himself to be on the side of Humanity outpacing barriers and
boundaries, but don't dive into Intentional Fallacy just yet, dear readers: the
humans in his story are arrogant jerks, and there's no indication that their conquering
of Creation is a net gain for anything except Humanity's collective
self-admiration. Mostly, though, this story is E. E. "Doc"
Smith after a few Composition courses.
Flies by Robert Silverberg: Aliens rescue and heal an injured spacefarer, then send him home to earth with one "improvement," an increased sensitivity to others' emotions. This sensitivity turns him into a sadistic junkie for other peoples' misery, so he seeks out all his exes and torments them horribly. Everything I said about that Norman Mailer bit pretty much pertains to this. The women are portrayed with an unsympathetic counter-feminist loathing. Also, there's a heapin' helpin' of extra sci-fi window dressing that ain't essential to the story; it's just there to keep the geeks comfortable. Still, if it did anything to break ground for Octavia Butler's similar but richer Kindred series (another story of aliens improving humans), I'm grateful for that.
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