Out, in #25

Past time for another dip into these anthologies.

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!

Outlaws & In-laws 23

I anticipate that this reading project will be concluded before journalists start writing about "Biden's first 100 days" if I can pick up the pace. 

From Plays in One Act:

The Last Yankee by Arthur Miller: Two men in a waiting room at a psychiatric hospital; their wives are patients. One of the men, with the confidence of the well-to-do, forces a subtly judgmental conversation with the more taciturn guy, the titular last Yankee (so called because of his blue blood ancestry, though he's a proud working class carpenter rather than an aristo). Finally, the last Yankee loses his temper and speaks his mind. Then he apologizes. After all, with his wife in the hospital, he's been a bit on edge... 

It's not about theatrical fireworks; the author of The Crucible and Death of a Salesman wants a surface of restraint laid over increasingly agitated class tensions. The play monochromatic by design. Can you ask people to leave the house and pay money to see two uneasy aging white men be restrained at each other? I am an uneasy aging white man, and I'm not eager to have such tasteful representation.

Tone Clusters by Joyce Carol Oates: A young man who is credibly accused of murdering a girl; his parents furiously insist upon their son's innocence. This is presented in the form of a jarringly formalist interview; the unseen interviewer shifts bewilderingly from Voice-of-God pronouncements on broad themes to direct questioning, all of which is accompanied by journalistic imagery on various screens surrounding the luckless parents. Oates' relish for the thrillingly distressing details of men murdering women gets an extended workout. 

This is the first of two plays to include notes on the acting style. The parents' dialogue is written in a tremblingly sincere fashion, yet Oates instructs "The actors must conceive of themselves as elements in a dramatic structure, not as 'human characters' wishing to establish rapport with an audience." Further instructions insist that the entire production need not provide an emotional connection between the distressing narrative and the production itself. Doubtless in any production the story will exert its gravitational pull on the audience's attention, which allows the cast to employ a wide range of alienation devices. Perhaps many texts could be produced in such a fashion, running narrative and production on separate tracks (Grotowski's Poor Theatre made a mission of it), but this text is designed for that. Oates' play could probably work with a more traditional presentation, though, because the subject is gripping; parents in denial of their child's (likely) crime.

A Bond Honored by John Osborne:"The acting style is hard to discover or describe... it must be extremely violent, pent-up, toppling on and over the edge of animal howlings and primitive rage. At the same time, it should have an easy, modern naturalness, even in the most extravagant or absurd moments."

This play, adapted from a play by one Lope de Vega (with which I have no familiarity) is an outlandish tale of a relentlessly confrontational, cruel, dangerous man who is piteously in love with his sister. His sister casts him out of her life, and he ends up in Moorish lands living as a nominally Islamic person. He's still the same wayward scumbag,  yet his hollowness starts to eat at him, and he has a confrontation with a mysterious shepherd who offers him a way out....

This play is wildly insensitive, and as intense as a welding torch. All the characters seem, at first, to be clearly defined types, yet as they constantly renegotiate their standing in life they reveal facets and possibilities that challenge the steady-state idea of personality. Beyond the power struggles, some of the characters consistently try to make life better for those around them, and they are rewarded accordingly. As with Marlowe's Faustus, this is a morality play in which the strong implication is that some people are truly lost souls, and cannot be saved.

From Interzone:

The Monroe Doctrine by Neil Ferguson: In the wake of Reagan's presidency, this author imagines Marilyn Monroe in the Oval Office; not the real, insecure and drug distorted Monroe, but a silver-screen dream of the wise fool who incandesces every room she enters, and wins people over with endless charm. It's a story where things flow; connections are loose, but Monroe's allure cuts through the haze and binds things. It's a dream of an end to confrontational politics, and a flip-side version of Trump's meat headed belief that his own larger-than-life personality is the key to solving intractable problems.

Angel Baby by Rachel Pollack: A high school girl has an overwhelming, traumatizing encounter with an angel, a masculine figure that tears the skein of reality and refocuses her life. She anticipates his return, and believes she must be ready for him... but how? There's no instruction manual for such a thing. Her waiting isn't at all passive; she's constantly seeking a companion to help her in this secret spiritual practice, and clues about what she should do to prepare for the angel's return. 

I'm reminded of Susan Sontag's journals, in which she laments the difficulty of finding companions who don't disappoint her with intellectual laziness. The story also recalls M. John Harrison's numinous story A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium: a rethink of all those fantasy tales in which someone from our world discovers a passage to a magical land. In Harrison's version of the trope, a small coterie of misfits tries to Qanon its way to a fantastical land which can allegedly be reached through hidden portals in modern London. Though they scramble to find, or to understand, those portals, they are immersed in modern quotidian life, seeking some barely accessible and poorly understood transcendence. Pollack is more merciful to her protagonist; the clue is in the title. 

From Calling the Wind:

Zazoo by Larry Duplechan: Zazoo, an adolescent "sissy," and his disapproving younger brother visit some family in the country, chief among them a cousin who is a budding man's man, strong and outdoorsy, a hunter, tough yet warm and compassionate. Zazoo is utterly smitten, and will endure the dirty outdoors, the indignity of exercise, the nausea of animal slaughter, and his brother's scorn, if it means he can bask in his cousin's masculine glory. The country setting is vivid, and renders Zazoo's loathings and yearnings equally vivid. Zazoo's brother idealizes and aspires to their cousin's easy masculinity, yet misses the easy acceptance, shading into grace, that the cousin offers to both the brothers. 

The climax of the story is an frank erotic encounter that could theoretically get someone in trouble, given the youth of the boys involved, but it plays not as pornography, but an expression of the cousin's easy nobility; a generous gift from one for whom everything comes easy, to one for whom everything comes hard. 

Guess Who's Coming to Seder by Trey Ellis: A dialogue in which the situation is revealed gradually, and elliptically; the reader is advised to keep notes on the cast of characters. A young Jewish woman is dating a young black man, and their families are meeting for Seder. Most of the adults in the room are on their best behavior, but the very oldest and the very youngest compete to see who can be the most hilariously terrible. The oldest lady wins that competition, having a lifetime's supply of prejudices and grievances to draw upon, as well as bratty petulance to match anything the kids throw at her. Embarrassment all around, and we see just how difficult it will be to merge these families... yet it's not hopeless, and one senses that Ellis is chuckling, if ruefully. At the end, a late arrival dovetails near-perfectly with the Seder ceremony; the latecoming boyfriend arrives in the role of Elijah and the day is saved.

From Best American Short Stories:

You're Ugly, Too by Lorrie Moore: A female history professor in a midwestern liberal arts college (Called Hillsdale-Versailles, a brilliant summation of the simultaneous grand aspirations and regional ordinariness that pervade small colleges) can't quite get her social/dating life together. Every boyfriend seems cool at first but lets her down hard, and her students can't understand her awkward whimsies (singing "Getting to Know You" in its entirety on the first day of class, for example). Her best friend is her sister in New York, but even that relationship has troubling riptides. Eventually our hapless heroine ends up at one of her sister's parties, getting set up with another absurdly unsuitable guy. 

This is a story full of jokes, and also about jokes; the ways we try, and fail, to use humor for its theoretical purpose: to communicate and connect. Moore is much funnier and more entertaining than most of the would-be funny genre writers whom I've been enduring in my other little blog series, yet her story is saturated with melancholy. Her heroine's jokes are witty, but don't land; she's trying to communicate with people who aren't wired to receive her signals. Instead of lightening awkward social situations, her jokes just make them weirder. At the climax, she embodies Freud's famous assertion that jokes express real aggression. "It was just a joke."

From The Outlaw Bible of American Literature: 

Dogs of God by Pinckney Benedict: Three truckers decend a sharp, long incline. One of them starts to slide. It gets hairy, then it gets scary. On the evidence of this excerpt, I dare say Pinckney Benedict teaches the reader as much about trucking as Melville does whaling. Also, the excerpt ends with a nice conflict over nervous smiles, and how easily our social cues, and interpretations of same, can go awry. I recently lost an uncle who hd been a trucker. He once told me he'd seen terrible things on the road, "but you drive fifty miles on, drive a hundred miles, and try to forget it." I wonder if he ever read Benedict.

Escape From Houdini Mountain by Pleasant Gehman: A brief excerpt, wickedly describing and deriding a blowsy down-at-heels woman. Purposefully mean, yet subtly appreciative. A möbius strip blending mockery and identification. Layered and forceful.

The Car by Harry Crews: A reminiscence about cars, the relationships that happened in and around the cars, the devoted labor that went into the cars (including more coats of paint than I would have imagined were necessary), ending with an explanation for the narrator's loss of faith in the transcendence of cars.

 

I find Crews hypnotic; he has a knack for perfect details, and prose that renders everything in a conversational yet extraordinary fashion.

Drugstore Cowboy by James Fogle: A trio of drug-addled thieves have accidentally killed somebody. In the wake of this disaster, their relationships get reshuffled, with ramifications for business, friendship, and romance. Being good, or bad, at crime is like being good, or bad, at any other employment. 

This Outlaw Shit by Waylon Jennings: Jennings shares anecdotes about country music as lived from outside the Nashville Sound. I like best his subtle interrogation of historical outlaws, whom he deems contemptible thugs, and "outlaws." I like least his ungentlemanly kissing and telling.

Love All the People by Bill Hicks: Like a lot of snotty Gen X white boys, I adored Hicks, and have only come to understand how problematic a fave he is after seeing my Twitter timeline overflow with Millennials itemizing his sins, most of which can be tracked back to his hurt feelings cloaked in flamboyant nihilism. Tell you what; I'll give up my Hicks when ya'll give up your favorite transphobic writer (you know the one.) 

Actually, reading transcriptions of Hicks' ranting, without the benefit of his snarling Texas voice, leaves me wondering why I thought so highly of him. Lashing out the way he does seems like a strong move, when one is weak; explains why so many weak and frightened people take Trump's childish tough-guy pretending seriously. But in these excerpts, Hicks lays into unworthy targets. Fantasizing about doing violence to dull pop singers isn't exactly punching up, no matter how unavoidable their tunes are.

Installment 22 Outlaws and In-laws

Little by little, we're nibbling our way through a batch of anthologies.

From The Outlaw Bible of American Literature:

Taxi Driver by Paul Schrader. Excerpted scenes from the screenplay for the legendary film reveal that it's rich in novelistic interior descriptions that all the "How to write a screenplay on your lunch break" books I read in Tarantino's 90s anathematized. More interestingly, it's a sharp look at gun fetishization. Travis Bickle at the gun range struggles to withstand the kick from the Colt he's using, "as if each recoil from the giant gun was a direct attack on his masculinity." Asked about his Vietnam service, he says "They'd never get me to go back. They'd have to shoot me first." Yet he's not walking a path of peace; he's planning to shoot rather than be shot. One slippery slope of gun preoccupation; seeing everything in terms of shoot or be shot. Just ask those fearful, racist "gun couple" twerps. 

Thieves' Market by A. I. Bezzerides: Early morning at the harbor, Nick, a weary truck driver waits for the banks to open so he can cash a check. Meantime, Tex, a sex worker he desires, keeps him company. She makes a sad but strong case that she's better off in this line of work than she was as a low-paid and sexually harassed office worker; as an independent businessperson she sets her own terms. If you've ever had to stay awake all night in a humble part of town, you'll feel that desperate buzz in your head, and that unwholesome film on your skin, all over again, reading this. Don't trust her, Nick!

Dark Passage by David Goodis: a guy goes to an underground cosmetic surgeon to get a new face. Once anesthetized, he dreams of circus acrobatics, and the dream has a perfect stunner of a punchline. I want to have lunch with the surgeon; I want him to say lines like "I have my own method. I perfected it twelve years ago. It's based on the idea of calling a spade a spade. I don't monkey around" while I enjoy a club sandwich.

Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow: a memoir. Jazz clarinetist Mezzrow laments the takeover of the jazz performance scene by mobsters. Having lived around it, instead of seeing daydream versions of it on the screen, he has zero sentimentality about organized crime, and makes it clear that the scene was a place of legitimate terror. He writes with a rich purple prose that's like salt-and-vinegar nuts; compulsive. "Nobody was safe in this funky jungle... they'd put their dirty grabbers on the one good thing left on earth, our music, and sucked it down into the mud with them."

Angels of Catastrophe by Peter Plate: Durrutti, a drug enthusiast with a serious police problem, tries to score a little something to take the edge off from a pair of gender-nonconforming entrepreneurs, then gets very much stoned and has what is probably a real conversation with an associate who casually confesses to helping kill a cop, the death of whom is causing Durrutti's most pressing issues. The so-called friend refuses to offer any help or advice in this matter, insisting on an every-man-for-himself rugged individualism that is of no earthly use. 

Once more I was intrigued by compellingly sketched side characters: the drug-dealing couple are a sympathetic, though unsentimentalized, trans pairing, struggling along and being the gruff goddesses they know themselves to be. Author Plate makes the cis mistake of being fixated on trans peoples' genitals, but seems to want to give affirming representation.

The Man With the Golden Arm: a peek into the mind of a guilty police captain. What's he guilty about? We don't find out in this excerpt, but "guilt like a dark bird perched forever near, so bald and wingless and cold and old, preening its dirty feathers with an obscene beak." Sounds bad! The captain is 100% committed to the carceral state, but has only just realized that, by his worldview, he deserves to be incarcerated. Perhaps one value of guilt-inducing religions is that they inoculate members against such late-in-the-day realizations. Of course you're just as bad as everyone else!

The Big Hunger by John Fante: Someone in town is filching laundry off the drying line, and the protagonist finds himself sneaking after his gun when he realizes the villain is filching his wife's underwear. This time what ensues isn't hard-boiled crime, but good clean humor, fit for the Saturday Evening Post. A pleasant change of pace that still manages some real suspense, but I'm not sure what landed it in a volume with Outlaw in the title. 

The Asphalt Jungle by W. R. Burnett: A cop browbeats, and beats, and terrifies, a (100% guilty) conspirator into rolling on his crew. It seems to help that they know each other, and have had a cordial relationship heretofore; makes the abuse more of a shock, and the mook more pliable. The cop is a bully, but he's in total control of himself, never giving in to any urge to brutalize for the sick joy of it; keeping his foe guessing and way off balance. 

The Getaway Man by Andrew Vachss: A getaway driver prepares for a big dangerous robbery, then does that robbery. He customizes the car, and functions as part of a tight-knit team. It's a grungy thrill ride, and a celebration of criminals with work ethics.

From Plays in One Act:

Prelude and Liebstod by Terrance McNally: (Content warning: suicide) A brilliant orchestra conductor oversees a performance of a Wagner song. Most of the play is his internal monologue, with interjections from such observers and participants as his wife; the singer; an instrumentalist; and a lustful fan. The conductor is a manic perfectionist, seeking orgiastic extremes of pleasure through exquisitely realized musical performance, and sexual adventurism. He's loveless, cruel, narcissistic and disgusted with life's inability to fulfill his cravings. He drives his performers to do their best work, but he's planned for this night to be his final achievement. In the time-honored fashion of overwrought opera and uninspired student writing, it ends with a surprise suicide. As doltish as I find shocker suicide endings, the play is a remarkable construction, with sick humor transitioning into near-tragic pathos and back again. The conductor's erotic memories go so crazily far, and his hopeless decadence is so unsustainable, that he's fascinating, even if, like me, you find him repellant, a conclusion that is by no means forced by the play. McNally (recently dead of Covid, sadly) lets you evaluate this flawed figure and consider whether it isn't better to be an easily satisfied mediocrity.  

Camp Cataract, adapted by Joseph McPhillips from a story by Jane Bowles: Harriet, difficult and anxious, retreats from her quarrelsome home life to a resort campground, on her family's dime. One of her sisters, Sadie, is a clueless daydreamer who wants Harriet back home, not because Harriet makes anything nicer, but because Sadie's sense of the fitness of things demands that family all in one place. Harriet's frantic navel-gazing monologues go down real smooth with Beryl, an adoring butch server at the camp cafeteria. Beryl tries to run interference when Sadie violates strict orders and shows up at the camp, trying feebly to woo Harriet back home so normal life, more lovely in Sadie's dreams than in reality, can resume. Bowle's work reminds me of Edward Albee and John Waters, so if you're interested in bringing a particularly acerbic variety of that sensibility to your local stage, consider this representation of bewildered lesbian hopelessness.

Waking Woman by Cassandra Medley: An African-American woman pays a visit to a recently widowed neighbor, but instead of offering more than cursory comfort, immediately proceeds to deliver a lengthy monologue about a local teen girl who is pregnant out of wedlock, thanks in large part to the girl's Mom raising the child without sexual information. A fond tribute to the storytelling prowess and complex social observations of African-American women, Waking Women is also an angry critique of the way abstinence-only education denies the chaotic complexity of human sexual urges, and causes more problems (and out-of-turn pregnancies) than it prevents. Religious fundamentalism is contrasted with a less doctrinaire and more accepting Christian faith. It doesn't play like a speech, but like a normal person who can't wait to tell us about a family tragedy in a comic mode. I bet it can really sing in performance.

From Calling the Wind:

Her Mother's Prayers on Fire by Don Belton: A mid-century female song-and-dance crew is poised for mass success, but it all may be about to shatter. Their success is due in part to talent and hard work, but also to criminal connections. Lifelong friendships are under strain, as the lead singer takes up with the group's new mobster manager, to the terror of her cohorts. Belton captures the complex ebb and flow of old friends who have worked and played together, and emotionally supported each other, for their entire lives, yet find circumstances testing their unity. The story is a hard stare at the way people can blow their lives up for a bad whim, or a bad man. 

Wings of the Dove by Hal Bennett: A great woman of the civil rights struggle is very old, enthusiastic about Reagan, and suspected to be not long for the world. A white preacher who was once active in civil rights alongside her, but has drifted into the big white church ghetto, comes a'calling, and invites himself to a dinner or three, reveling in soul food that he hasn't enjoyed in decades. 

I once reviewed a story called Orphan and the Mob by Julian Gough, and Gough's advice to writers was "don't copy Henry James; copy The Simpsons." I think both James and the Simpsons are worth having in your toolkit, but Hal Bennett was doing Simpsons-esque comedy back when the cartoon was a time-filler on Tracey Ullman. Sardonic characters bounce off one another, critiquing one another's folly without violating a sense of community; a community that vibrates with the energy of mutually assured mockery. I'm particularly fond of a lovably pretentious would-be chronicler who slips his own hobbyhorses into the mouths of others. In his account, people interrupt themselves to denounce The Color Purple with suspect timing and vigor. By the end of the story, the grand old woman is vigorously alive, announcing that "I have decided not to die after all," and the white preacher is still slurping at his fried chicken in a way that grosses everybody out.

From Best American Short Stories of the Twentieth Century:

Meneseteung by Alice Munro: In a nineteenth century Canadian frontier town, a woman writes pleasant poetry and enjoys a tentative courtship with a respectable businessman who doesn't really understand the poetry thing, but can speak learnedly about salt mining. The gossipy yet restrained local newspaper plays Greek chorus. 

I'm intrigued by the structure, which Munro divides into 6 discrete chapters:

1. The narrator describes a volume of 19th century poetry, with a biographical sketch of the poet.

2. A description, based upon contemporary newspaper accounts, of the rough and dusty frontier town in which the heroine lived.

3. An (imagined?) account of the heroine's chaste and diffident courtship by an entrepreneur in salt.

4. We learn about the courser side of town, which abuts the heroine's house. A distressing confrontation, possibly a crime. The owner of the salt mine comes to provide a harsh resolution, and attempts to deepen his acquaintance of the distressed poet.

5. Under the influence of nerve tonic, our heroine skips church and has a succession of visions which, Munro tells us, she does not mistake for reality--and that henceforth she will not mistake anything for reality. She is inspired to imagine, and begin planning, a richer kind of poem, less of the feminine motives and polite ironies which delineated her earlier verse; more of salt and terror and tonic visions.

6. A return to reportage from primary sources; specifically, the obituary column of the town paper. Tauntingly, hauntingly, we never learn if the poet ever wrote another poem corresponding to her new vision; only that she became the town eccentric.

The narrator's slippage from dutiful researcher to imaginative psychological storyteller, and back again, is a cunning trick Munro has used in other historical fictions, including Friend of my Youth, the first Munro story I ever read, which I cherish. Munro reconstructs entire lives with concision and intuition. 

From Interzone: The First Anthology:

Kitemaster by Keith Roberts: We're in an alternate version of our world, one where the military sets guards along a frontier border so that the demons don't get in. The way they do this is, they fly up on big kite apparatus and keep watch. So we observe a kite launching in the middle of a scary night storm. Meanwhile, the guy who runs the base hosts an authority figure on an inspection tour. Base commander gets drunk and reveals that he thinks the demons don't exist, and the whole story about demons is a sick hoax to keep people yoked to an authoritarian government. The inspection guy uses a secret radio broadcast linkup with the kite to reveal to the skeptical commander the strange secret of what the kite pilots are really up to...

This story finds the poetry of precise group activity and difficult mechanical operation by simultaneously describing actions in detail, and leaving connections between things loose, so we're unclear on exactly what's unfolding, but we get a keen sense of the atmosphere. There's also psychological insight; the base supervisor may hold the whole system in contempt, but he takes rightful pride in the diligence and skill of his team. This bifurcated job awareness is one I've observed and shared among working stiffs. Workers who strive for excellence, even when only they will notice, are too good for the common run of mass employers.

Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird Rounds 7, 8, & 9

Start here if you need a grounding in what I'm up to with this series. 

Round 7 (clang!). For Tolkien, it's Patricia A. McKillip with The Fellowship of the Dragon.

The Queen's harper/unworthy boyfriend has gone missing in a dragon's territory, so the Queen asks five childhood friends, each a tough, able woman, to bring him back. They must travel through a beautiful but  actively dangerous forest, and along the way the women face one sorcerous temptation after another. McKillip sets similar temptations for the reader; every page shines with gemlike sentences that lead one astray from the narrative, so inventive and lovely are they. My rule of thumb distinction between popular and literary fiction is that the former tries to plane every sentence so smooth that the reader glides easily to the next sentence, the next paragraph, never doubling back or pausing to ponder the meaning, or possible meanings, of a single strand of words. Literary fiction tends to require a more scrutinizing consideration of sentences as challenges; riddles and poems and koans embedded within the tapestry of the story. By this rule, McKillip is an unabashedly literary writer.

She is also an inventive and conscientious plotter, weaving fairy tale conceits and feminist friendship in a braid of antiquarian stylings and contemporary concerns. So far, this is my favorite story in this collection.

For Lovecraft, Kim Newman offers The Big Fish. I was aware that Newman writes fiction, but I knew him for his film criticism, generally centered on horror and arthouse film, two subsets with more overlap than is often supposed. He seems to have absorbed many lessons on vivid storytelling and fast-acting characterization from the flicker shows; The Big Fish is a gas.

During WWII, an LA detective is hired by a starlet to track down yet another crummy boyfriend. This one's a gangster who seems to have joined a cult. The cult will be recognizable to anyone who's read Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth, a tale about a town full of people who've bred with sea creatures, producing not beautiful mermaids but uncanny fish people. Lovecraft was writing about the alleged horrors of "miscegenation," because he was a racist twerp, but Newman begins his story with a sardonic denunciation of the USA's herding of Japanese-American people into camps (while letting Italian-American gangsters continue to strut around) that goes some way towards distancing Newman's story from Lovecraft's theme. For Newman, the horror that has imported itself from Innsmouth to LA is not intermarriage, but Dianetics. 

Newman writes a ripping yarn without over-relying on guys coming through the door with guns (though there is some of that). Also, he has the detective's subscription to legendary detective fiction magazine Black Mask get mixed up with equally legendary horror mag Weird Tales, in a cute acknowledgment of the genre-crossing going on in this story. Newman creates settings so vivid that the reader practically becomes an illustrator. I'll have to read more of Newman's fiction... after I read more McKillip.

For the New Weird, Kathe Koja offers The Neglected Garden.

Yet another lousy boyfriend tosses his girlfriend out, but she only goes so far as the backyard wire fence, where she ties herself to the broken rusty wire. She stays there, to the annoyance of the boyfriend, until she begins to change... the plant life merges with the catatonic woman, and she changes until she bears unexpected fruit.

I'm an old Swamp Thing enthusiast, so any story where people merge with plants has an allure for me. I'm also into anything where body horror becomes a means of emotional expression. This story nails the damage done by selfish men to the women who love them, and works as a revenge story that firewalls the woman from blame for the glorious horror which her wrath wreaks, in much the same was that BDSM submission fantasies permit the consideration of acts that one "mustn't" engage in.

VERDICT: Each of these stories is terrific, and I hate to pit them against each other in a cheap zero-sum game. But rules are rules. Here at But Don't Try To Touch Me, we take our responsibilities with the utmost seriousness.

I liked them all but I liked Fellowship Of the Dragon, with its animistic fairy tale setting and rambunctious ensemble, best, and since there is no distinction between my own personal preferences and Absolute Merit, Patricia A. McKillip wins Round 7 for the world's most famous philologist.

Is it already time for Round 8? Time flies in quarantine. 

For Tolkien, Harry Turtledove presents The Decoy Duck. Some (basically) Christian missionaries from (essentially) the Holy Roman Empire come to (more or less) Viking territory. The missionary's ace card is a handsome and devout young man who was abducted from this viking village as a child. His absolute devotion to his monotheistic faith fascinates the villagers and infuriates the chieftain, who permits the missionaries to live and do their thing more out of an inner core of decency than any desire to allow open discussion. The conflict between the chieftain and the missionary, both of whom are men of honor and virtue, is a conflict between two immiscible cultural value systems, and despite the mens' mutual, and earned, respect, something's gotta give, which means someone's gotta die. The conclusion feels inevitable, which does not lessen the tension that underlies the tale, and doesn't bring the tension to an end, since the conflict between the two men is by no means the final proxy war between two conflicting cultures.

I'm no expert, but Turtledove would probably make a formidable debater or lawyer; he crafts strong arguments for both sides of this conflict, and shows us the steps that might be taken to resolve the conflict; all that needs to happen is for someone to give up. There will be no brokering of a long-term accord. It's rather like a courtroom drama; compelling, but, with the exception of how things end, it never feels the way I want fantasy to feel; like a step into the unknown. I'm on the side of those who believe the jet fuel of fantasy is bold acts of imagination, but there's no room for such stuff in Turtledove's humane and carefully reasoned philosophical tale. What we get here is lucid, thoughtful historical fiction, and that's a good thing in its own way.

For Lovecraft, Joanna Russ writes I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket... But by God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph From Life!" The title is taken from the punchline of Lovecraft's story Pickman's Model, in which the big reveal is that an artist who paints monsters isn't indulging in flights of fancy, but is doing journalism. 

A kindhearted woman takes on the emotional labor of helping a young male coworker make an effort at romance with a bewitchingly glamorous woman. The young man needs help; he's socially clueless, discomfiting to everyone around him, helpless in matters of money or romance, yet arrogant (and foolish, thinking his passion for H. P. Lovecraft makes him superior to others). In short, he's me in the 90s, a fate I'd wish on no one. His compassionate coworker soon has cause to regret her offer to help the young man in his courtship, since he demands more and more of her time and attention. She doesn't quite understand his confused cries for help until it is much too late... The mysterious woman may be a localized expression of a cosmic power; perhaps she represents the temptation of cosmic horror literature to young people who can't quite hack it in the human sphere. People who opt out of life in favor of hikikomori consolations may be the true subject, here.

I've read enough vintage vampire stories to know that many of them are about dangerous lovers, in which the viewpoint character observes a friend being stolen away from their proper life by some wicked Other person. This is one of those, and it's fascinating in part because of Russ's reputation. Ask any midcentury SF fan or pro to describe Joanna Russ, and they'd say something like "bra-burning man-hater." That's certainly not the impression I get from this story. Compassion for the clumsy young man shines through,  even while diagnosing his shortcomings in clinical detail, and showing greater sympathy for the woman he ropes into holding his hand through his unwise courtship. It's left an open question whether or not the human race as a whole is better or worse off for the removal of unpleasant young men.

Speaking of people who seem to prefer tales of cosmic nihilism to life's more positive possibilities, The New Weird offers A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing, by Thomas Ligotti. A young man with a history of debilitating health problems is beguiled by the creepy muttering of his doctor... but did the doctor say anything? Was all that muttering coming out of the narrator's subconscious, and was it mere delusion that ascribed those words to the doctor? 

The young man finds his way to a town of strange folk parades and tight-lipped locals offering hostile hospitality. The conclusion is lavishly, yet icily, nasty. 

Ligotti takes the cosmic nihilism of Lovecraft and shears away the rubbery monsters and adventure tropes, which leaves stories of people having their minds shattered by direct perception of the dread hopelessness of existence. The first time I read one of his stories (in an anthology called 999) I was impressed. This is the 3rd or 4th I've read, and despite a surface narrative variety, a certain thematic sameness sets in. M. John Harrison also deals with enigmatic folk traditions that suggest something nasty beneath them, but where he leaves them as open signifiers, Ligotti weaponizes everything to the proving of his joyless point. He's the Jack Chick of cosmic nihilism, which is certainly a thing to behold.

VERDICT: Each of these stories is working to illustrate a philosophical conflict. Russ is the one who leaves the most play for ambiguity, and takes up the least of your time. She, and Lovecraft through her, get the laurel wreath for this round.

Round 9! For Tolkien, Nine Threads of Gold, by Andre Norton. Some kind of soldier-enforced tyranny is spreading terror throughout a fantasy kingdom, and a pack of children from various socioeconomic  backgrounds has taken refuge in an abandoned Hold. A sorcerous woman who grew up in the Hold makes her way back there, and becomes the children's caretaker. It soon becomes apparent that a malign magic threatens the Hold's inhabitants, and the woman must keep a careful watch over the children, while teaching them to work together for the good of all, and to settle differences in communal fashion, without sliding back into prejudices of their past lives.

It's a rich setup, and the Hold is full of hidden possibilities that the woman uncovers for the children. Norton has much to say about the challenges and rewards of raising children. Also, she uses em-dashes with defiant liberty.

I found it difficult to fully engage this story, but I think it's because I've never been responsible for children for more than a few hours, and I'd prefer to keep it that way. My own limited parameters are implicated in my muted reaction to this rapturously told and compassionate tale.

For Lovecraft (very much for him!) we have H. P. L. by Gahan Wilson. This story imagines Lovecraft having lived to an impressive old age and getting to enjoy the success which his stories achieved after his (in real life) early death. A young fan accepts an offer to visit Lovecraft (and his mysterious manservant), and a succession of startling discoveries follows. 

This story is quite fannish, and so eager to admire Lovecraft that it sidesteps the man's extravagant bigotries. I like to imagine (on the basis of a rueful late letter) that Lovecraft would have become more openminded and openhearted about human difference had he lived long enough, but this story takes things a bit too far in that direction, having Lovecraft speak out against xenophobia. It's a bit like the scene in the Annie musical that's a love letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt; had Harold Gray, the creator of Little Orphan Annie, lived to see the show, he would have jumped onstage and decked the actor playing Roosevelt, so passionate was the cartoonist's hatred (often expressed in the comic strip) for that President's socialist ways. 

The ending of H. P. L. is even more goofily fannish, as the Forces of the Cosmos essentially lift Lovecraft bodily up to heaven in a Rapture of one. Cmon. Maybe it's going for camp, I dunno. Wilson does himself more favors when he permits some of his trademark macabre elements to pop up, as when the mysterious manservant laments his one-of-a-kind physical complaint...

For the New Weird, it's the genre's poster child, China Mieville, with Jack. Jack Half-A-Prayer was a legendary, flamboyant hero-of-the-people lawbreaker, and now that he's gone, the narrator wants you to know about the role said narrator played in helping Jack along the way. This is set in a world where criminals are punished with surreal surgeries and nonorganic grafts, and our carceral state (or Britain's) is implicated for the way we make felons carry their crimes for the rest of their lives. It's a smart satire, told in the guise of a penny dreadful filtered through a pub tale, and even though I guessed the punchline a page or two before the reveal, it was still satisfying, in the manner of a skillfully crafted joke with an implicating satirical point. Mieville comes off as a Leftist Roald Dahl, which is dandy, but I don't see much family resemblance to the more ambiguous worlds that the earlier tales in this anthology offer.

Verdict: I enjoyed Mieville's satirical cartoon most, but Norton's might be the richest, with its ensemble of diverse kids facing slippery magical enemies with the aid of a compassionate and wise volunteer caregiver. Still, as David Denby says, "trust pleasure," no matter how blinkered, solipsistic, or culturally overdetermined, so I'll take the easy way out and declare the New Weird the winner by a nose.

What a thrilling competition! Each of our three contestants won a round! Keep reading this blog for more pulse-pounding reviews of stories about monsters.

Outlaws and In-laws Installment the 21-eth: Special Centering African-American Voices installment

Instead of the usual round-robin peeks into various short fiction anthologies, this time I'm only reading stories from Calling the Wind, an incredible selection of African-American fiction assembled by Clarence Majors.

Now is the Time by Cecil M. Brown: Jonah, a bookish aspiring standup comic, goes to the mansion of his friend and idol, a genius celebrity comic named Billy. Are they really friends? Sometimes they seem to have an equitability to their interactions, but Jonah's worshipfulness gives them more of a Boswell and Johnson vibe. That's a reference that Jonah would instantly get, and Billy wouldn't, but Jonah's thoughtful and academic approach to comedy hasn't served him well in his efforts to actually do professional standup; he's failing and he knows it, which is why he's come to the master. He needs to know how to tap into the real energy of great comedy.

Billy admires Jonah's book smarts, but has deeper insight into people, which is crucial to his success; he can figure out what makes the audience tick, and use that insight to work with them, bringing them around to hilarity. He's also a great mentor, guiding Jonah with compassion, clarity, and tough love. Billy's got his own problem, though, in the person of Tina, his beautiful white girlfriend who pitches a bratty tantrum that only goes further over the top as the story continues. Billy's balance and Tina's lunacy war away at one another as Jonah hunkers down; he's just here for affirmation and comedy tips, lady, don't yell at him! 

My only quibbles with this wonderfully engaging story are that the author, who may have taken himself as the model for Jonah, never gives us a persuasive glimpse of Billy's comedic power, and that he has a tendency to slip into redundancy, as though he fears he hasn't quite made his point, and needs to try again. Both Jonahlike tendencies. I'm quite fond of these characters.

Damballah by John Edgar Wideman: In the antebellum South, an enslaved man known as Orion is torn between his recollections of Africa and his life in the States. He's on a different wavelength from plantation culture, compelled by remembered words, beliefs, and practices, but everyone around him, whether white or black, mistakes his behavior for madness. A boy hears Orion invoke Damballah while catching fish, and is fascinated. He asks a Christianized enslaved woman about Damballah, and she punishes him for this pagan error. But the boy senses that the word has power that he needs. 

The hypocrisy and imperialism of the enslaver (who constantly flatters himself for being a great Christian, but also rapes women) perceives Orion's steadfastness as defiance, and cannot abide it. The murderous cruelty that results will be no surprise to anyone who's noticed history or the news, but the boy will retain the lessons of Damballah. It's a story of white supremacy being horribly cruel and murderous, but also a story of resistance, linked to cultural memory and defiance of colonialist culture. 

This story resonated with several others in this Calling the Wind, but I'd highlight its connections to The Ingrate, with an enslaver who thinks he's a wronged exemplar of righteousness, and The Education of Mingo, in which an enslaved man is caught between African and American frames of reference, with transgressive, liberatory, and catastrophic results.

Kiswana Browne by Gloria Naylor: Kiswana is a young woman out on her own for the first time, with a cheap apartment in a scruffy part of the city. Her wealthy and proud mother comes to give the place the white-glove treatment, and really tries to get her daughter to go back to being Melanie. Although this story is from the 80s, it replicates current tensions between liberals and the Left. Kiswana is all in for identity politics and uncompromising demands; her mom is an Obama style incrementalist. Naylor has sympathy and love for both of them, but comes down on Mom's side, regarding Kiswana as admirable but naive. Readers may judge for themselves. Anyway, while this might be the third story in a row to feature a woman as a killjoy, it's the first to suggest that the woman in question has a point, and the first to ace the Bechdel test.

"Recitatif" by Toni Morrison: Two girls, one black and one white, befriend one another in an orphanage. (While they're there, a woman who works in the kitchen falls... or was she pushed?) They go separate ways, but meet again at various stages of life. The white girl gets borne aloft on a cloud of white privilege, while the black girl has a more rigorous path. Things get contentious between the two women, as when they join opposite sides of a busing protest/counterprotest, and one of them keeps making signs that are nothing but sick burns on the other one; shades of online discourse. 

Eventually their ongoing reminiscences/arguments turn on the subject of that kitchen worker's fall, and a Rashomon/Marienbadian question about whether it was an accident or a crime; a crime in which one of the girls was implicated. Morrison doesn't go the perfectly respectable New Yorkerish route of leaving it entirely ambiguous, though; let's just say white people have a bad habit of recounting history in ways that sooth white people.

One fascinating irony; in the 60s the two former friends bump into each other at a truck stop, and the white lady doesn't want to be seen talking to the black lady, because she doesn't think race mixing is socially acceptable. Where are she and her white boyfriends going? To (allegedly) hang out with Jimi Hendrix. 

Morrison gives us a cutaway view of mid-century racial complexity that isn't entirely gloomy or sunny. The structure reminded me of Alice Munro, another legendary author who frequently uses core samples of a life to tell an expansive story in short form. Apparently this was Morrison's only published short story? It's a more plainspoken prose than some of her more mythopoetic books, and an all-too-timely take on the complexities of interracial friendships in the USA.

Girl by Jamaica Kinkaide: A flash fiction, this is mostly a quick survey of the kinds of advice a woman in the West Indies gives a girl. Lots of domestic wisdom, but also constant accusations regarding the girl's inherent "slut" nature, as well as some family planning tips  The girl is permitted two brief replies, neither of them the last word.

Chitterling by Henry Van Dyke: A rich white lady, who earns her money as a slumlord, takes a sad and shy black child under her wing and tries to Pygmalion some high culture into him. He's uncertain about all this, but the highfalutin' places she takes him are more pleasant than his crummy homelife (which is crummy in part because of the shabbiness of the building, which she owns). Will she instill in him an appreciation for opera and escargot? Does she actually like opera and escargot, or does she only endure them as lifestyle markers?

There's a lot happening here. There's a potent critique of well-meaning white attempts to uplift the less fortunate (all while maintaining and profiting from those ill fortunes). The woman's loneliness is a powerful factor in the cautious social dance between the two partners, and the cultural gulf between them ensures that this relationship can't last forever. 

In a brief coda, the narrator, who is the adult version of the boy, acknowledges that he has developed a taste for opera and escargot.

Jesus and Fat Tuesday by Colleen J. McElroy: A thoughtful third-shift orderly in a New Orleans hospital puts up with an ensemble of difficult companions. There's his Cajun coworker, who is friendly but dumb, full of bad schemes and soft bigotry. Then there's Maggie, a wayward drunk white woman, yearning for God, yearning for God to be kinder, yearning to share a bellyful of tales about the life that had led her, and would probably lead anyone, to delirium. Finally, a surprise appearance from the orderly's estranged sister, with bad news from home. Our protagonist is surrounded by sorrows, trying to help achieve some equilibrium without letting desperate people and hostile bigots drag him down.

The World of Rosie Polk by Ann Allen Shockley: Rosie and her little boy are part of a crew of migrant farm workers, traveling in the back of a mean man's truck from one farm to another, picking produce in the hot sun. They toil all day, live in crummy quarters, and the boss, who does the shopping, keeps tabs on how much the workers owe him. Guess what? No matter how much or how little you order from his grocery trips, you'll be in deep debt to him until you're dead. He's got it all worked out in his little notebook.

In other words, the crew members are, for all intents and purposes, slaves.

But on one job, which doesn't seem like it'll be any better than the others, there's a man living and working on the property who is strong and kind, and takes a liking to Rosie and her son. Will their makeshift romance lead to a happy ending, an escape from the cycle of toil and humiliation?

This story gave me flashbacks to temp jobs I had in my student summer days, grinding toil in the hot sun. Get me out! And get Rosie and her son out, too!

Mali is Very Dangerous by Reginald McKnight: This is a perfect companion piece to the story Lindsay and the Red City Blues by Joe Haldeman, reviewed here. Both are stories about a westerner in a culture shocking eastern land (Senegal, in this case) and following, against his better judgement, a shady tour guide/pimp/con man. This version is less lethal and arguably less xenophobic, but just as unsettling, with a punch line that I didn't see coming. The guide tries to sell the visitor a magical protection; is it for real? Hmm. Suspenseful and twisty. Stay home and read this story instead of going to dangerous places.

Outlaws and In-laws #20: COVID-19 Edition

Since I'm not doing anything, why don't I get back to these short fiction anthologies?

From Best American Short Stories:

The Way We Live Now by Susan Sontag: An unnamed man has contracted an unnamed disease (which is clearly AIDS). His friends are the ensemble of the piece, and they are given an equal emphasis, reminiscent of Jackson Pollock's all-over painting approach, which gave equal emphasis to each color in the painting. The friends' disparate efforts to surround the protagonist with love and support, while monitoring his health and healthcare, are shot through with friendship factions and personal neuroses around health and death. The detached narrator's reportage of intimate and anguished conversations is oddly reminiscent of group texts and chatrooms, though the story predates them both.

There's a brief discussion of sick peoples' right to be mean and unreasonable that perhaps grows from Sontag's own struggle with cancer, years earlier. I've read some of her published journals, and she became unusually misanthropic and harsh during a struggle with cancer, then mellowed out (for Sontag) once she was healthy again. 

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien: I've read this story 3 times now, and it never runs dry. The dialectic of the story is straightforward enough; a young Lieutenant in the middle of the Vietnam War is divided between his duty to the soldiers he leads, and his daydreamy yearning for some girl back home who just wants to be friends. The story shifts back and forth in time, and lets us know right away that at some point a soldier in the troop gets killed. The fact of the soldier's death is repeated like a drumbeat, a steady rhythm that replaces narrative uncertainty with destiny. O'Brien, like Sontag, has a warm (neither overheated nor icy) emotional temperature, and a controlled, Apollonian approach to narration. O'Brien is more prone to allusive loose ends; for example, the young Lieutenant's immediate response to his soldier getting shot and killed is to call in an air strike to level the nearby village. This is mentioned and forgotten. It's left to the reader to ponder the proportionality of this response.

As the title suggests, the story constantly itemizes things the soldiers carry, whether physical equipment or emotional baggage. This could be banal and cloying, but O'Brien cannily varies the frames of reference, building up an overwhelming sense of multiple, constant burdens, and how overwhelming they become in the aggregate.

From Calling the Wind:

The Education of Mingo by Charles Johnson: A country farmer named Moses buys a slave, a young man named Mingo. Moses doesn't really need a worker; he's just lonely, and wants a friend, or a son. He trys to mold Mingo as a son, but, in the traumatic removal from his African cultural setting, Mingo has become a blank slate, all too sensitive to his owner's real (as opposed to stated) views and values. Mingo becomes a lethal expression of Moses' id, and as neighbors start dying, Moses needs to decide what to do. 

Much is made of Mingo's intellectual subjugation to Moses, in ways that I'd find objectionable if it came from a white author, but Johnson drops subtle hints that Mingo's enactments of Moses' malevolent will may actually be a canny, willful rebellion. 

Anyway, Johnson gives good hillbilly, and inhabits 19th century white people with persuasive texture and insight.


Skat by Clarence Major: The editor of this extraordinary book offers an enigmatic short tale about a mixed-race couple taking a ride to Manhattan with a garrulous taxi driver. The story begins with some mystifying faux-exposition suggesting a whole world of unsettling backstory for the couple. Then the driver starts warning his passengers about the dangers of Manhattan, where bizarre superstitions and voodoo enslavement hold sway over everyone; at least, to hear him tell it. His account of widespread malevolence and superstition is checked and mated, however, when the African-American man of the couple offers a morsel of conspiratorial terror which he, apparently, believes to be true. Ordinary people terrifying each other by playing Can You Top This? with chilling conspiracy theories; Majors published this in 1979, well before the dawn of the internet as we know it today.

The significance of the title is never addressed. Scat singing, in which nonsense talk becomes musical pleasure? The nonsense the men of the story speak may well be a kind of musical entertainment. And, as they compete to spread dark rumors of Brooklyn and Manhattan, there's an element of fecal territory marking. 

From Outlaw Bible: 

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs: In this excerpt, a young man in a socialist country receives a summons to see Dr. Benway, a recurring Burroughs villain whom I can only ever imagine as Jack Palance, thanks to Cronenburg's cinematic tribute to the novel. Though Benway will only dance around the core of the situation, the young man is suspected of homosexuality, and subject to subtly degrading tests, with constant assurance that nothing is actually wrong. The way homophobia, even in nominally "accepting" cultures, undermines people is heightened by hallucinatory events which are revealed to be something more than one person's subjective reaction... Burroughs was brilliant at milking horror for comedy and vice versa, and at identifying the dislocations and irreality that burden outsiders in the postindustrial age.

Drawing Blood by Poppy Z Brite: A young man has a grotesque hallucinatory experience; the sink taps flow with blood and sperm, and his face is covered with lesions that grow as he stares at the bathroom mirror. Look, if you want a subtle evocation of AIDS, go read that Susan Sontag story. Brite, a writer of unimpeachable Goth credentials (see also) touches on the Romantic adoration for illness and death, then dismisses it with an angry insistence that untimely death not be sugar-coated.

The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon: a nebbish of a politician goes far with the help of his wife, a fixer who isn't above poisoning people and planting false stories to get her husband's career going in the right direction. She's a Borgia for the mid-Twentieth Century, and Condon's gleeful satirical voice leaves me wondering why he didn't just go after McCarthy directly, instead of inventing a wicked witch of a wife to lavish his wit upon. I suppose the point was to make McCarthy look even weaker by portraying him as dependent upon a woman's scheming. Since this sneering sexism led to a marvelous role for Angela Lansbury, I'll let it pass.

The Grifters by Jim Thompson: Lilly is one of Bo's most trusted employees but she's miscalculated, and now he's going to punish her. He's a hotheaded gangster, but she knows how to handle dangerous men. Their relationship shuttles from hot to cool, dangerous to protective, malevolent to respectful, lunatic to professional, and back. She's tough, and she can handle what he throws at her, but in the end we see the traumatized toll it all takes. Thompson respects Lilly, and shows her to be worthy of our sympathy.

The Big Kill by Mickey Spillane: A very different approach to strong criminal women, as Spillane gives us a concentrated dose of femme fatale with all the nuances, such as sympathetic qualities, filed off. Raymond Chandler took Dashiell Hammett's tough, poetic detective fiction and explored its humanistic potentialities (though often in a bigoted fashion) while Spillane made a fortune by jettisoning those thoughtful qualities and retaining only the concise violence and formalized intensity. What he sets out to do, he does very well. I've been reading pop novels lately, as a library volunteer who's curious about the books people check out, and I gotta say, a lot of best selling authors make Spillane look like Flaubert. He doesn't try to get away with as many shoddy shortcuts as the average pop writer.

From Plays in One Act:

Medusa's Tale by Carol S. Lashof: (Content warning: rape) A radio play, in dialogue and sound effects. Lashof gives voice to Medusa, letting her tell her own story. I don't know the source material well enough to evaluate how much Lashof found in classic literature and how much she invented, but the result of her labor is a tale of patriarchal cruelty. Poseidon rapes a young woman named Medusa in Athena's temple, and everybody blames the victim, even Athena, a warrior Goddess whom you might expect to stand up for violated young women. Medusa's paralyzing gaze isn't a weapon, it's a curse, a punishment for... well, for being raped. 

While the thematics illustrate contemporary feminist theory, the dialogue has a timeless stateliness and wit. I want more.

Can Can by Romulus Linney: North Carolina's pride brings us two stories of desperate romance. In one, a soldier on leave in France finds blissful, idealized (yet particularized and distinct) romance with a smart French girl. In the other story, a young bride-to-be from the moneyed set finds herself in love with a hard-living hillbilly woman. Neither story has anything to do with the other, except for a similar trajectory; Linney braids them together, and presents them simply. The four characters face us and tell their interlocked stories. While both stories come to sorrowful conclusions, the play ends with all four participants joyfully affirming that their romances were more than worth the sadness at the end.

A Life With No Joy In it by David Mamet: A man in his 50s and a woman in her 30s drink tea and converse; we are dropped into the middle of a conversation with no context. As he rants about the awfulness of postmodern art (a recurring Mamet bugaboo) and she rants about the awfulness of women's writing (another one) it becomes evident that they are reuniting. Family? Lovers? I'm not sure, but they've been reunited by a funeral, and the grief is giving them cause to contemplate the value of the lives they've been living, when they aren't railing against the rottenness of everyone around them. As polemical as it may be, though, Mamet allows the characters to exist as people, rather than functioning merely as mouthpieces, and as in his brilliantly evasive play Oleanna, different viewers will have differing opinions about these characters and their bitter judgements.

Chicks by Grace McKeaney: A kindergarten teacher loves her students dearly, but hungers for adult companionship. She decants all her thoughts and feelings, no matter how inappropriate, onto her charges (played, whether they like it or not, by the audience). It's a brilliantly funny and energetic portrayal of high-functioning loneliness, and a one-woman show that enlists the audience into becoming the supporting cast. McKeaney went on to write for Roseanne and St. Elsewhere. Today, Wikipedia is considering deleting her entry because she isn't notable. Clearly the route to notability isn't paved with brilliant theatre about lonely kindergarten teachers.

From Interzone:

After-Image by Malcolm Edwards: Nuclear war has began, but in one neighborhood of London the unleashing of all that destructive power has caused a strange, paradoxical event: the resident nuclear explosion is frozen in time, and with the right PPE, you can stroll partway into it and explore it as a location in space, rather than an event in time. This opportunity to examine the stages of nuclear destruction is a fine subject for an SF story, but Edwards ups the ante by making the protagonists engaging. One is anxiously contemplative and passive, while the other is an eccentric man of action who enlists his uneasy neighbor into an adventure. Yes, it's Gandalf and Bilbo, Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent, except we don't get to follow them on an extended picaresque journey, because the explosion becomes kinetic again and kills everyone.

The story clarified, for this American, the particular frustration that superpowers threatening to destroy all life on earth present for people who aren't stakeholders in the superpowers but are stakeholders, however modestly, in life on earth.