From Plays in One Act:
The Cuban Swimmer by Milcha Sanchez-Scott. A young Cuban-American girl participates in a competition to swim across the Pacific Ocean, while her family paces her in a boat, shouting encouragement and advice through a megaphone while bickering and loving one another. Condescending broadcast professionals provide a supercilious chorus. The girl runs into all kinds of problems; oil slicks, exhaustion. But she can't get out of the water or she's disqualified.
I'd love to see a successful production of this; it would take some technical imagination, since we have a boat, the water level, and the ocean floor to create onstage.
The play ends with a miracle. Art is one place in which we can have miracles.
Excerpts from Slave of the Camera by Sam Shepard. An actor working on a movie in New Mexico tells us in gripping monologue about difficult men: his frustrated father, a racist rando in a truck stop restroom, and a friend who seems to have some version of a good life figured out (a life which includes a polycule, dumb but pleasing hobbies, and weaving the flax of film appreciation into the gold of life appreciation). Each of these guys emerges so distinctly you can practically tell them apart by smell. Each is an object lesson. It's hard to be human; and at best, one in three figures out how to do it.
The Pleasure of Detachment by Perry Souchuk. An unseen narrator says stuff like "The difference between anxiety and desire is that desire is influential," and "The audience's rehearsal is life outside the play." Meanwhile, a woman straps herself into a bed and, while casually flirting with an awkward young man, muses about the way her moment-to-moment observations flow into the running stream of her thought process. This reminds me of Albee's abstract non-crowdpleasers like Box, and of Peter Greenaway's films, employing narrative content to abstract purpose. A chamber drama for connoisseurs.
The Boundary by Tom Stoppard and Clive Exton. Like a tiresome Monty Python sketch, but drier. Two dictionary editors find that their office has been broken into (or so it seems) and their files are all out of order. Words and their definitions have been scrambled. Meanwhile, each of them becomes convinced that the other has murdered Brenda, their troublesome collaborator with whom they've had a long-running romantic triangle. In the end, it turns out Brenda is alive, but of all the indignities that have befallen their lexicographic enterprise, her compulsive malapropisms have done the most damage.
Perhaps it's because I'm put out with Stoppard for joining J. K. Rowling's League of Celebrity Transphobes, but I found this a trivial exercise in cleverness. Stoppard's best work is clever but rich with human compassion. This was the husk of cleverness, all dried up.
Placebo by Andrew Vachss. A maintenance man helps a frightened boy in his building by inventing a light box that will drive away imagined monsters. Then the man figures out that the boy's therapist is a child abuser, and makes another device which he will use to kill the therapist. I recall reading a comic book adaptation of this, illustrated by Klaus Janson, a former artist for The Punisher, a similar exercise in revenge porn.
From Best American Short Stories:
Proper Library by Carolyn Ferrell. A dazzlingly multifaceted story following a young man's day in and out of school and home. He's black, he's gay. He cherishes his siblings and his adoring, concerned mother. He values learning, but it's unclear whether his attainment can match his ambition. He's tempted by lust for a school-skipping "bad boy," and tormented by homophobes (the life-warping effects of bullying become clear; there's no shaking it off when it's a continuous erosion, from any direction, at any time). He's loaded down with other peoples' responsibilities, because everyone knows he cares too much to leave a need untended, except perhaps his own needs. He narrates his story in an awkward but sensitive argot. "I am in silent love with a loud body."
Birthmates by Gish Jen. A salesman in a dying branch of office computer tech has booked into the wrong hotel for a sales conference. He's Asian-American, and the kind of go-getter who's leveraged his boss's slurs into a promotional opportunity instead of a lawsuit. His optimistic ambition motivates him to trundle into an unforeseen variety of humiliations and challenges. Along the way, we learn that his marriage has ended, and he still can't wrap his mind around why. If at first you don't succeed to have a baby, try, try again, right? Why did she have to get bogged down in grief instead of popping back up? Loser mindset. Makes no sense.
He enjoys a possible career breakthrough at the conference, but business success is a provisional victory in a world of tiered injustices. The final sentence reveals just how much horror, sorrow, and implacable injustice he is struggling to deny.
From Calling the Wind:
Willie Bea and Jaybird by Tina McElroy. Willie Bea is a friendly, spirited working class woman who is pitied by her peers, because baby hasn't got back. In a demographic that prizes a voluptuous posterior, Willie Bea just isn't marriage material. And yet, she manages to draw a handsome, responsible, charming husband. Oh, they love each other. But Willie Bea makes the classic mistake of bragging to her best friend (whose rump is up to code) about what a tender lover her husband is. It's a simple story, but it traces the melancholy of the unbeautiful and the joys of working people with attentive compassion.
Screen Memory by Michelle Cliff. A mixed-race movie star is drying out in a hospital, and recalling her past. She was raised by her grandmother, a domineering black supremacist who never stopped judging everything and everyone, and judging harshly. The careful process of finding freedoms and encouragement from better mentors takes our heroine, step by caution step, to show business. The story is told in precise vignettes, hallucinatory scrambled fragments, snatches of song, plot summaries for ludicrous movies. It's the kind of thing that could easily collapse in a muddle, but Michelle Cliff maintains clarity, gentle wit, and a subtle narrative tension, while layering emotional richness and density of incident. Magnificent storytelling.
From The Outlaw Bible:
On the Yard by Malcolm Braly. We spend a rainy afternoon in the prison yard with three provisional friends, as they try to do under-the-counter business and while away the time. At nine pages, this is a generous excerpt for this book, and I'm grateful; time spent with these mean, frustrated men is time productively spent. Our central figure, Chilly Willy, is really smart; too smart to let that fact be known. His observations on the sociopolitics of prison life are acute, unsparing. His shrewdness makes one hope he gets out of prison and puts his talents to some better use than crime.
Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver. An anguished, keening, problematic aria on the subject of Black manhood brought low. Enslavement and emasculation are woven together in a lamentation of unmanning. Cleaver's pitying contempt for the enslaved and subjugated resembles Kanye West's similarly unhinged rhetoric on the same subject. Still, Cleaver calls Black men and women to aspire to, and labor for, a better world, a right world, where Black people are able to live at their full potency. He demeans his ancestors, marring his cry for a virtuous struggle. It's hard to address the enormity of slavery's crimes while maintaining focus, but victim-blaming only compounds the problem.
In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott. Abbott sketches the soul-ruining experience of solitary confinement. It's horrifying, but I'm not sure he manages to say anything that will change many minds. The kind of reactionary who approves of solitary will probably read an account of such hellish punishment and think, "good."
Sketches by Ken Kesey. An evidently nonfiction account of working at a hospital. The seeds of his most famous book are here, as Kesey becomes fascinated by patients' harrowed faces, while developing a distrust for nurses.
Life In Prison by Stanley "Tookie" Williams: Williams describes the claustrophobia, loneliness and helplessness of imprisonment in ways that make it sound like my concept of Hell; unable to move or to secure one's own safety. Cool, lucid, no theatrical rhetoric, and none needed. My theoretical pro-incarceration reactionary might find this account more stimulating to one's fellow feeling.
Cool Hand Luke by Donn Pearce: Remember in the movie when Luke wins a grotesque, disturbing egg-eating contest? Here, it's full meals getting wolfed down, culminating in stewed prunes when everything else in the mess hall has disappeared. We also learn how Luke earns his nickname. Told in a cheerful, yarn spinning fashion, this, like Orange is the New Black, is almost too much fun. You may find yourself wishing you were in prison with these robust characters.
The Family by Ed Sanders: an account of how Charles Manson trolled mystical, occult, self-help and sci-fi books for ideas; not in search of a finer, truer way to live, but for sound bites and sales techniques he could use for snowing the suckers. Today he'd be studying crypto and Qanon, and with the internet he could win over the desperate and weak-minded all over the world.
Short Eyes by Miguel Piñero: An excerpt from a play in which Clark, a child molester (a.k.a. Short Eyes), tries to explain his compulsions and actions to Juan, a patient, quiet fellow prisoner. Clark doesn't try to perfume his deeds the way that old self-romanticizer Humbert Humbert did, and at the end of his distressing account of serial abuse he pleads with Juan to try to understand him. Juan retorts "If I wasn't trying to, I would have killed you... stone dead, punk..."
The excerpt is forwarded by Marvin Felix Camillo, who worked with convicts in Sing Sing (of which Piñero was one) to develop original theatre. Camillo contextualizes the creation of the play and the production, and rightfully insists that Piñero was not merely an efficient transcriber of prison life, but an artist who transmuted his prison experience into insightful works of imagination and craft.
The Sexual Outlaw by John Rechy: Rechy, who wrote the first excerpt in this book, an excerpt that dazzled me, returns to tell us about the street-hustling life, the ebb and flow of hustlers and johns, the myths about the trade (often created by lying cops and amplified by credulous media) and the twisty möbius strip of self-loathing and gay pride that ripples all through the scene; what lures young men to this trade, and what paths they take when they leave.
Hardcore From the Heart by Annie Sprinkle. Performance artist Sprinkle synopsizes the endless struggle, or dance, between eroticism, art, and the law. Her mystical enthusiasm for sexual performance and practice runs afoul of the cops, again and again, climaxing in a love affair with a defense attorney; a sensible synthesis.
Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg: If one must have a swingin' Sixties spoof of ribald literature I suppose it might as well be as witty as this. A grotesque lover seems to wish Candy (as in Candide) ill, but her light touch keeps her out of trouble. She's clean until she's filthy, and then she's very filthy indeed. Candy's best-known progeny might be Little Annie Fanny; I'm fonder of Phoebe Zeitgeist.
Period by Dennis Cooper. Not to be confused with fellow literary troublemaker Robert Coover, Cooper writes pellucidly about alluring boys who get into terrible trouble. The boys in this all-too-brief excerpt rob a jewelry store. It's not certain whether their bigger problem is legal peril or their desire for one another. "There shouldn't have been anyone in the world that important. It killed him." In a Cooper novel, it probably will kill him, directly or indirectly.
City of Night by John Rechy: Hello again, Rechy! This time he tells us the (fictional?) story of a young lady who associates with male hustlers; dating them, rooming with them, and getting very angry with them, an anger that seems to well up from some subterranean resentment. Her story takes a surprising but logical twist, and then our hero is left alone again, dodging the violent street gang known as the LAPD, and fearing that his life will end up, and possibly end, on skid row.
Shirts & Skin by Tim Miller: Miller (or a fictional protagonist; it's not contextualized in this excerpt) relies on safe sex practices as a basic survival tactic. He's a gay man in the 90s who's torn between irrepressible desire for men and utter dread of the disease. He navigates sex with an HIV-positive lover with pragmatic caution and a wealth of tenderness. I understand this differently now that I'm trying to negotiate fear of a different disease in a careful but safe fashion. How else to be life-affirming, but to live life and protect it simultaneously?
From Interzone:
What Cindy Saw by John Shirley. Cindy is a little girl who suffers from the conviction that the world of our perceptions is a facade, which she calls "the shell," over the real truth of life. She pokes around and discovers a secret underground environment from which all aboveground behavior is controlled. This subterranean realm is a secularized gnostic metaphor, yet is worked out in particularized physical and practical details. Also, Ambrose Bierce and Phillip Dick are down there, playing cards, which might be putting too fine a point on it, but certainly signals that we are in a realm of signs and portents.
Finally, Cindy takes charge of the world, or at least the part of it that concerns her, and turns out to be much worse for everybody than the systems that used to run everything. Her individual liberation from gnostic controls is not the happy ending most phildickian narrative presents.
The Object of the Attack by J. G. Ballard: a beloved astronaut is on track to become a right-wing totalitarian President of the United States, and a mysterious young mental patient is using outlandish, ritualistic tactics to bring about the astronaut's assassination. The case involves art, symbolism, illusions, and a collision between a powerless nobody and the most powerful people on earth. As is often the case with Ballard, the plot refuses to model reality. Stagecraft as reality manipulation wouldn't really allow people to achieve the ends these characters are pursuing, but they do allow Ballard to imagine the motivations and ideas that provide the field of struggle for ambitious people and those who would stop them. The astronaut starts a pseudo-Christian religion and produces Hollywood entertainments, while the assassin works with obscure landscape art and physical illusions to reengage the world for which the opponents struggle; he also uses jerry-rigged flying machinery to defeat a grounded aeronaut from above. The detective on the case, tasked with tracking down the assassin and foiling his schemes, decides to allow the young man to take his best shot. We needed this spirit in 2016; we may need it in 2024.
Something Coming Through by Cherry Wilder: Mr. Wheeler is in "a strange city" on a mission to free his stepdaughter and her activist lover from political imprisonment before they are executed on inflated charges. The boredom of diplomatic efforts, the polite absurdity, the outbursts of manic fervor create a Kafkaesque impression of hopelessness, but there's a factor slowly working in Mr. Wheeler's favor: toxins in local building materials, which inspire hallucinations and euphoria; seeming spiritual visions that reshape the officials' perspective on the case. Swallows, commonplace birds in the area, take on great spiritual import. At the end of the story the prisoners are freed, but local children kill a swallow for sport. In short, don't expect systemic change; compassion wins this round, but pointless cruelty still controls the board.
The next installment of this series will be the last. Phew!
