Outlaws and Inlaws # 16 Featuring Manager's Doorbuster Dangerous Visions Inventory Liquidation-- all dangerous visions must go!

From Dangerous Visions:

Test to Destruction by Keith Laumer: If you think Science Fiction is greasy kid's stuff, Laumer isn't here to argue with you; he's here to roller skate out to your car with a heapin' platter of greasy kid's stuff. This is a supersized serving of desperate escapes, breathless chases, heartstopping leaps, and deathfacing confrontations. Some stories give you alien invaders; others give you human villains who say "You fool!" to their henchmen. Laumer gives you both in one story; what a value! And he delivers it all with practiced cliffhanger craft with no time wasted on fripperies that might blunt the freerunning forward momentum. Through it all our hero, a noble political revolutionary, wins the day and conquers both aliens and fascists.  If you like this kind of thing, rejoice! Laumer wrote a slew of books, just waiting for you.

There's a twist ending I didn't see coming, but mostly because I underrated the story as I was reading it. SF is loaded with cornball ubermensch power fantasies that embrace, rather than question, the nasty side of that equation. This story, to my condescending surprise, chose to question. Having granted his protagonist absolute power, Laumer shows the absolutely corrupted result. You fools!

Carcinoma Angels by Norman Spinrad: Another account of an ubermensch gone bad. This time a Renaissance man who's a dab hand at anything he tries achieves one victory after another. Spinrad narrates the protagonist's biography with plausible-sounding step-by-step developments and engrossing long-joke structure. After winning it all, our hero gets cancer, and uses a cocktail of psychedelic drugs (it's the 60s, after all) to gaze within and face the enemy on the internal battlefield.

Turns out that if you journey too far within... you may never come out, man. Spinrad presents a sympathetic but fairly conservative critique of transcendental aspirations.

Auto-Da-Fe by Roger Zelazny: A matador faces down a succession of self-driving cars instead of bulls. Zelazny, best known for his Nine Princes in Amber adventure series, delivers on this with all the action and ironic romanticism the premise promises. His prose glistens with pulpy poetry, enriched with more highbrow and formalist literary stylings on an as-needed basis, then pulls out a finale that isn't exactly a twist ending; more like a rueful development. Non-human life is vanishingly rare now; matadors don't face down cars because that's preferable to bulls, but because there may be no bulls left. Ellison's comparison of Zelazny to Nabokov is barking mad, but Zelazny could turn a phrase more vividly and deftly than most SF scribes.

Aye, and Gomorrah by Samuel R. Delany: In his introduction to this story, editor and compulsive blatherer Harlan Ellison asserts that Delany is a real man's man, not some "pathetic little homosexual." Well, Delany is anything but pathetic or little, and 2 out of 3 ain't bad. Perhaps Ellison's slurring was a defensive reaction to the story's subject matter, which is cruising for sex. 

Delany rolls this out more subtly than I'm about to, but in the future, some people become Spacers, people who do the blue-collar work of maintaining space stations, etc. They are bodily modified to withstand the extreme conditions of space, and can, it is suggested, take off and land from anywhere, at anytime, but beneath their clothes is some "loose meat" which is an inevitable aspect of the surgical alterations. They are neither male nor female after the procedure, but they are erotically irresistible to some melancholy admirers. 

Spacer work isn't particularly well paid, and many Spacers pick up extra money by turning tricks. Spacers serve as an objective correlative for real-life sexual outsiders, and while Delany was married (to Marilyn Hacker, one of my favorite poets, who shares Delany's devotion to specific and carefully articulated imagistic detail) he cruised for male sexual partners, and has since written and spoken about this with a Rechy-like lack of shame. 

And with that, we bid farewell to Dangerous Visions. One area in which both Ellison and I have been remiss is articulating how each of the stories in this grab-bag is dangerous; after all, nothing is dangerous in the abstract. It's dangerous to people, things or ideas. My least favorite stories in this anthology think they pose a threat to one thing, but are actually only dangerous to something else; for example, Ersatz by Henry Slezar (discussed here) thinks it's dangerous to the military-industrial complex, but it's really only dangerous to trans people. Delany and Poul Anderson strike depth-charge blows for LGBT, and Ellison wriggles with titillated distress in his intros to their stories. In Dangerous Visions, reactionary dangers blare their vuvuzelas and wear their MAGA hats, while more progressive strains must tiptoe their dangers across the border.


From The Outlaw Bible of American Literature:

Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy: Speaking of cruising, in this excerpt from the novel that inspired the famous movie (Midnight Cowboy, not Cruising), a handsome young man tries to scrounge a living in NYC after finding that women don't wanna pay guys for sex all that much. He hooks up with Ratso Rizzo, a long-time scrounger and survivor, and they try to find a payday wherever they can. We also learn how Rizzo ended up on the streets, and stare directly into his loneliness. Friendships between people who end up together because they don't have a lot of options is a subject I can understand, and Herlihy understands it as well.


Black Fire by Nelson Peery: A band of African-American hobos gotta handle some problems. Like hunger, health care, shelter? Well, probably, but in this excerpt the problems come in the form of dudes trying to kill you, including a lawman who revels in using his position of authority to murder hobos, especially black ones. I'm not clowning when I say that black hobo lives matter, and that blue lives matter as long as they're on the side of right, but these hobos give this cop what he deserves in a moving-train chase straight out of the movies.


From Plays in One Act:

The Bay at Nice by David Hare: In Soviet Russia, Valentina, a grand dame who once studied with Matisse, is called upon by a museum to authenticate a possible Matisse canvas. The experts are divided on its authenticity, and hope that her more personal insight will crack the case. Meanwhile, her daughter Sophia implores her for help getting a divorce from her ambitious husband so she can marry a sweetly nonthreatening lover. Valentina opposes the divorce with the conservatism of someone who was wild in her youth, turned from freedom to responsibility, and now can't bear to see anyone make, or own, the mistakes of youth and freedom for themselves. Hare is known for loving female characters who are almost too spiky and difficult to love, and Sophia loves her mother with the love of someone who knows from long experience how to handle such a tough old broken-winged bird. Another play I'd love to see performed, and performed properly.

Protest by Vaclav Havel (tr. Vera Blackwell): A soft-spoken revolutionary artist visits an old friend who is now a prominent TV broadcaster. The broadcaster privately laments the authoritarian government, and tacitly sides with the revolutionaries; but will he sign a petition and put his good standing on the line? A case of conscience for our broadcasting friend, who demonstrates the high-minded rationalizations people use to take the easy way out and still tell themselves they're choosing the path of greater valor. His cowardice should look familiar to a lot of Republican politicos who currently lack the nerve to publicly oppose President Dumber Tony Soprano, but doubtless Havel was skewering an old friend or two from Czechoslovakia's communist days.


From Calling the Wind:

The Lookout by Cyrus Colter: A socially ambitious woman can't help but stake out a party she hasn't been invited to. A parade of invited guests in their fine clothes pass by, and our heroine ruminates miserably on the profitable marriages they made, while her husband comes home from his unimpressive job to blog about short stories watch TV and fall asleep. Her bitter, detail-oriented observations on the extremely narrow social ladder for mid-century black women is a feminist indictment.

A Long Day in November by Ernest J. Gaines: This longer story begins as a portrait of the author (perhaps) as an anxious little boy. His parents split up and the boy carries the resulting displacement and anxiety to school. The child-centered gloom takes a sudden hairpin turn, though, when his dad picks him up at school and begins a quest to win his wife back. This involves running a gauntlet of angry old women who torment dad but also offer the wisdom he needs to remake his marriage. Poor dumb dad needs all the help he can get, and deserves all the tongue-lashings that he does get. The escalating abuse dad takes reminds me of classic slapstick comedy. All ends well, as the husband learns he'll have to sacrifice his bachelor-style freedoms to keep his wife at home. A terrific comic story spiced with sorrows. Far funnier and weightier than any of the whimsical joke stories that pop up in Dangerous Visions.


From The Best American Short Stories of the 20th Century: 

How to Win by Rosellen Brown: A We Need To Talk About Kevin precursor. A mom struggles to raise a nearly impossible little boy who smashes everything in his path and drives everyone nuts. As in Kevin, Mom narrates, and is, perhaps, unreliable. Is her kid really so bad, or does she just not know how to handle him? The main distinction between the moms of the two stories is that this mom finds her way through all the agony to empathize with her kid and love him with all his faults. It's a frank, unsentimental confession about regretting parenthood; the kind of thing that makes me glad I stuck with cats.

Roses, Rhododendron by Alice Adams: I loved this one. The narrator's mother asks an Ouija board what to do about her failing marriage, and the board says to ditch the husband, take her teen daughter, and move south. Mom trusts the board, and her daughter narrates treasured memories of the time in North Carolina (hey, that's where I live!). She meets an elegant, literate friend, with intriguing, calm parents (so different from her agitated mom!) and practically moves in. The girls bicycle around the wooded town, suspended in greenery and aspirational book talk, while their parents struggle to get their own lives together. The narrator's wise reflections and reinterpretations of her childhood perceptions makes this memory piece far more than a nostalgic reverie, and the way she brings the past's ambiguities into focus demonstrates historical awareness on a personal scale.

Tolkien Versus Lovecraft Smackdown Supreme, Round One

There's no debate that both J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and H. P. Lovecraft, author of The Call of Cthulhu and probably some other things, are monumental figures in 20th Century dork fiction, and I celebrate them both for that.

But which of these professional daydreamers is GREATER? 

Clearly, there is only one way to settle this question once and for all. 

That way is to compare and contrast these 2 books: 

I realize this is a terrible photo, despite a handsome cat; let's just move on.

After The King, Ed. Martin H. Greenburg, and Cthulhu 2000, Ed. Jim Turner.

From time to time I'll be dipping into these mighty texts to ascertain which festschrift makes the stronger case for its chosen auteur.

Let us begin this momentous task.

Representing J. R. R. Tolkien, Samuel R Donaldson presents Reave the Just (Trigger Warning: Rape and abuse).

In this story Jillet, an affable town fool, falls in love with a beautiful and wealthy widow, little knowing that she is being held prisoner in her own home by an abusive rival suitor. As part of a desperate multi-phase wooing scheme, Jillet claims kinship with Reave the Just, who is basically Objectivist Batman, which is the worst kind of Batman. Jillet ends up imprisoned by his rival, until Reave the Just gets wind of this kinship claim and appears in the home/prison to figure out what's going on. He turns out to be Reave the Victim Blamer, telling the widow, who remains unnamed and is regularly raped by the villain, "Why have you not helped yourself?... Why do you not resist him?" 

This invigorating pep talk turns out to be exactly what abuse survivors need to encourage them to bust loose and defeat their abusers. Yay happy endings.

The story seems like a folk tale reworked in a 19th century style, with an ironic, nearly all-knowing narrator glossing his characters', uh, character. It's a skillful pastiche that bears its length well, and is sprinkled with fun all-knowing-narrator style character insights. Still, at the conclusion one realizes that one has basically been reading a Batman story in George Eliot drag.

In the other corner, playing for H. P. Lovecraft, F. Paul Wilson unloads The Barrens.

A woman who grew up in the New Jersey Pine Barrens region reconnects with an ex-boyfriend who claims to be researching The Jersey Devil. He enlists her help in getting tight-lipped rural folk to talk with him, but it turns out he's really more interested in pine lights, some kind of natural (OR IS IT?) luminescence. As the twosome work themselves deeper and deeper into the forests, and deeper and deeper into rural stereotypes (moonshine and inbreeding, etc.) they find a creepy barren patch which is the guy's real objective...

This story is WAY longer than it needs to be, written in a careless, bland prose. It doesn't help that I was reading a Mary Gaitskill story at the same time; Gaitskill embeds backstory in the midst of her tale with concision and effect, like hyperlinked koans, while Wilson pounds everything out with tubthumping obviousness. Wilson is better with location, creating a piney wilderness that feels welcoming and forbidding in equal measure. 

Spoiler warning: the tale ends with the guy being physically transformed into We Know Not What, but, in a grace note so understated that I'm not sure Wilson (who shows little interest in understatement) intended it, the hero may be transforming into a Jersey Devil.

THE VERDICT:

Tolkien, as represented by Donaldson, is the greater stylist, with a defter touch at characterization, and a more complex approach to storytelling. He plays with the timeline of the tale and lets the narrator, though third person, emerge as a central character. 

By contrast, the female first person narrator in The Barrens feels more like a spectator to the action. Her emotional journey mostly consists of announcements about her feelings for the male character. The Barrens does end with an authentically Lovecraftian conclusion, though, insofar as the protagonist has come to a drastic realization (to paraphrase: "Now that I know this barren field is a portal to a mysterious place where people get physically transformed into something gross, I MUST KNOW THE TRUTH about it, so I'ma gonna go back to it and get myself disgustingly transformed, because I MUST KNOW THE SLIMY TRUTH") that she insists follows logically from the story's events, but which, in fact,  doesn't (see also Dagon by Lovecraft, which I addressed somewhere in the middle of this characteristically overlong post).

However, in a stunning upset, Tolkien (via Donaldson) is also more problematic, what with the mansplaining about how abuse survivors should go all Ms. 45.  

I think a triune rubric is revealing itself:

• Prose, richness of.
• Thematics, sophistication of.
• Problematics, problematicness of. 

Under this rubric, Team Tolkien scores much higher on Prose (Donaldson's tight pastiche outshines Wilson's baggy blandness) and modestly higher on Thematics (Donaldson's insight into the value of sustaining institutions and education for helping fools like Jillet to perform beyond their own means, and which I should probably have mentioned earlier, beats Wilson's theme that knowledge is worth getting turned into a ridiculous monster for), which is good, but also higher on Problematics ("Why didn't you fight back?"), which is bad. 

Round One goes to Tolkien!

Outlaws and 15laws.

I read some more stuff.

From Outlaw Bible of American Literature:

Sister of the Road by Boxcar Bertha: Bertha rides the rails while pregnant to see a man she loves for the last time before his execution for a robbery gone bad. There's a lot of interest here; he's a gentleman thief who fell in with a desperate crew whose more violent brand of crime proved to be his downfall. He begs Bertha to say the baby's his, which she can't do with any confidence; it's all very sad, but Bertha's co-writer, fellow hobo Ben Reitman, writes with a drippy old-fashioned sentimentality that I doubt bore much resemblance to Bertha's real style. It smells like they spritzed some juniper on it to make it suitable for the parlour, and that is not what I want from a hobo's memoirs.

Bound For Glory by Woody Guthrie: A crew of tramps crowd into a boxcar until a luckless few, including Guthrie, have to clamber on top and ride in the rain. Guthrie does not sentimentalize the experience; he fills you in on every ache and inconvenience of the experience. Any yearnings I had to clamber into a boxcar have been squelched. Guthrie's displeasure is reserved entirely for the rattles and rain, though; he paints an affectionate portrait of the interracial band of travelers, and ends on a mixed note of gloom and cautious optimism about the train's/hobos'/country's direction that adds depth to my appreciation for Guthrie's hard-won patriotism.

Grand Central Winter by Lee Stringer: A crack addict holes up in a subway hideyhole, but one night when the crack's not on tap he starts writing instead. Turns out he's good at it, which sets him down a path of recovery. He is indeed good at it, a witty yarnspinner who brings gentle irony and restraint to a story that humanizes a desperate junkie.

You Can't Win by Jack Black: Not the actor Jack Black; this guy was an itinerant crook, but he was another crackerjack yarnspinner. Black's detailing of criminal activity, accomplices, and travels to (and, crucially, from) one crime to another, is shot through with rueful philosophizing about the folly of crime and the complexities of fate.

Beggars of Life by Jim Tully: Another tramp turned talespinner, Tully breaks down the joys (none) and sorrows (many) of backbreaking toil. He has great respect for the workers who took him in when he needed it, even though they didn't have so much as some tooth powder to spare. Tully as also a boxer, and he writes with pugilistic oomph. 

From Dangerous Visions:

The Recognition by J. G. Ballard: A shabby circus tiptoes into town, and the narrating protagonist helps them set up, just because the gloomy staff seems unequal to the task. The circus' only attractions seem to be structuring absences, and if you don't like that then you don't want any of what Ballard has on offer, even though he writes with lovely precision, and watercolored touches that balance his astringent intent.

Judas by John Brunner: There's a religion that worships a robot as God. One of the robot's designers wants to put a stop to this nonsense. Loads of howlingly bad expository dialogue as only science fiction can provide, accompanied by one of Ellison's most passive-aggressive introductions.

From Plays in One Act:

Life Under Water by Richard Greenberg: Emotionally troubled children of privilege try to find a way out of their elders' moral compromises. Lots of beach house action, as depressed youth navigate the perils of friendship and love; meanwhile the even hornier adults on the scene justify every doubt the kids have about their parents' amorality. Witty dialogue is present but held in check, not upstaging the seriousness of the characters' delicate efforts to make connections. Clinical depression is treated seriously but with a light touch. 

Four Baboons Adoring the Sun by John Guare: Two newlywed archeologists bring their gaggle of children by prior marriages to their dig in Sicily. The parents have many ambitions; they want the children to bond, and to be infused with their parents' ardor for Sicily, mythology, and one another. But while the parents leverage mythology to provide structuring narratives, they forget that mythology also enacts lethal passions. When their elders daughter and son bond too intensely, things build to a tragic conclusion. Guare has a magnificently theatrical sensibility which presents uncountable challenges to any production. I suspect this show doesn't get presented too often, just because it would be an awful lot of work for a one-act. 

I'd LOVE to see it, though.

The Problem by A. R. Gurney, Jr.: Remember that scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life where the Protestant couple discusses sex with cool, sexless diffidence? This begins like that, as a married couple considers the wife's surprise pregnancy, and an increasingly complex tale of sexual misbehavior ensues. Spoiler warning: This seemingly absurdist play turns out to be an entirely naturalistic portrayal of an erotic narrative game. The show is kink-friendly, but also soaking in white privilege, as the couple indulges in race play and condescending fetishization of various races. Its good-fantasy-bad-reality understanding of erotic play is tonic to a point, and certainly fantasies don't have to be politically correct, but the play just won't stop being horrible about race, and a play that says so many degrading things about people who might be in the audience can't be judged with the same latitude as a private affair can. A problem indeed.

The Key by Isaac Bashevis Singer: A paranoid widow gets locked out of her apartment, and doesn't trust the super, or anybody, to help her, so she ends up on the street. Unusually for these kinds of literary stories, things get better, as she has a spiritual reawakening and turns everything around. Singer patiently carries us through the little details of this woman's misadventure, and with the "free indirect discourse" that James Wood taught me about, he dips into and out of the woman's thought processes, giving us a sympathetic yet unsentimental presentation of how she got so scared of life, and how she broke through the clog of fear. Very inspiring.

City of Churches by Donald Barthelme: A young woman is looking to start a business in a town where every building is, first and foremost, a church, with residences and businesses operating within the church buildings. She hasn't done any due diligence, since her business model (car rentals) is a bad fit for the community (no one wants a care, because why would you ever leave?), but the deeper problem is that the church thing is an overcompensation for unaddressed insecurities the locals can't face. Our heroine promises to upend the city's norms... 

Barthelme critiques the de facto non-separation of Church and State that Ive seen at play, sometimes, in the South. He has nothing bad to say about Christianity or any other religion, but letting the earthly institutions of Christianity overwhelm the community doesn't sit well with him or his heroine. She wouldn't be a threat to a normal churchgoing community, but to this city she may be a revolutionary.

From Calling the Wind: 

A New Day by Charles Wright: An African-American man takes a job as a driver for a wealthy older white woman. He's not sure he can trust Ms. Davies to treat him with respect, and her blend of tests and rewards are very, very trying... This story dramatizes the way that uncertainty hangs like a sword of Damocles over every interracial interaction between strangers, and asks tough questions about fair vs. unfair employee testing. I've not seen or read Driving Miss Daisy, but I can't help wondering if this story about driving Miss Davies planted a seed.

Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo by Samuel R. Delany: Two men live in separate parts of a brooding Gothic castle where "the air was dusty with moonlight" etc. Both of them claim to be, through some forgotten sorcery or technology, the creators, not only of this castle, but of each other. Both men can, indeed, create companions from nothing (one favors beautiful female lovers; the other prefers lively parties), but one of them might be running some kind of elaborate, conspiratorial psychological program on the other. Or might only think he is! A locked room with horrifying sounds coming out and homoerotic bad-boy intruder complicate matters further. 

Delany is a master of highly cultivated yet thrilling literary fantasy. He writes with luminous specificity that suits adventure storytelling quite well, and choreographs action with cinematic clarity and dynamism. The conclusion is ambiguous but not fuzzy or disappointing; quite the opposite. A lot of narrative and thematic richness packed into 16 pages. Runs rings around almost anything in Dangerous Visions.

The 14th Installment of Outlaws and Inlaws.

From Plays in One Act:

Springtime by Maria Irene Fornes: Greta is very sick, and is horrified to discover that her girlfriend, Rainbow, turns tricks for a mystery man to get that medical bill-payin' money. And the man isn't satisfied yet; he wants to extract much more value out of this triune relationship.

Susan Sontag's journals contain anxious confessionals of her unequal love affair with Fornes. How anyone made the formidable Sontag their lesser partner is beyond me, but Fornes had force. She also had an intense pre-Freudian sensibility. I recall an interview (source: my dim recollection) in which she lamented Freud's influence on thought and culture.  A world in which our consciousnesses remained untroubled by metadiscourse about the unconscious was her ideal, and there's a prelapsarian quality to her austere brand of melodrama, even though human frailty is so much the subject, and the beauty, of this play.


Helpless Doorknobs by Edward Gorey: Less a play that a game. Gorey, best known for his playfully antiquarian picture-books and the animated credits for PBS's old Mystery! series, provides a few prompts for scenes, then suggests we order those scenes as we wish. No overarching narrative, merely enigmatic captions without pictures. Mounting a production of these will require ingenuity, but isn't that always the way?

From The Outlaw Bible of American Literature:

The Scene by Clarence Cooper: In a police station interrogation room, a seemingly well-meaning white cop tries to get an African-American drug addict to tell all. Neither one of them knows how honest they can be with the other. Will they reach a mutually beneficial accord? Or will the power differential between them foil their communication? This is an interesting companion piece to Never Die Alone, another Outlaw Bible item which I examined in my last post. That one presented white readers with a best-practice model for engaging African-Americans who have gotten snarled in criminal activities; this one presents a glumly realistic look at how the deck is stacked against such engagements.

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty: A celebrated, fan-favorite, radical African-American beat poet socks it to his audience with a real bum trip, man, in what I took to be a satire of 60s culture, but which was published in the 90s. It turns out that having a voice doesn't mean one wants to be a spokesperson. Our hero can only imagine 2 paths forward: either radical commitment or an opting out that borders on self-annihilation. There's cartoonish hilarity, here, but also a despair of ever achieving anything of real sociopolitical value without being killed. Happily Beatty himself didn't succumb to despair, I suppose, since he is still with us, and won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2016.

Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas: A short excerpt in which an untested criminal is less worried about robbing stores that he is about partnering with people outside the race. The editors of Outlaw Bible are expressing real commitment to the vision, expressed in the book's introduction, of sidestepping Henry James' brand of finely wrought literary interiority, and this cinema-ready crime tale serves that agenda.

Rope Burns by F X Toole: A boxing cut man (who tends to boxers' wounds, apparently? I'm not wise in the ways of the sweet science) discovers that the boxer he's scheduled to tend plans to doublecross him, so the lineman pulls off a doublecross of his own... a crafty, nasty account of scheme and counterscheme. Who knew the world of boxing could be so hurtful? The author used to be a cut man, so you're getting the inside scoop, here.

From Best American Short Stories of the Century:

The Rotifer by Mary Ladd Gavell: A young woman in a science class discovers that you can't intervene in the lives of microscopic life forms. Shaking the microscope lens doesn't free single-celled organisms from snags; it hurricanes them into fresh troubles.

Then she researches a 19th Century family, and yearns to help a mistreated son to escape his father's rotten plans, but what can one do? Father and son are long gone.

And then, she gets the chance to intervene in her innocent cousin's engagement to a heel, but has she learned all the wrong lessons about intervening?

I assumed that I'd never heard of Gavell because her disdain for melodrama (openly expressed in this story) made her too subtle to be a household name, but it turns out that this was her only published work of fiction. She was the editor of Psychology magazine, and the headshrinking profession's gain was literature's loss. Anyone who can weave suspense out of scholarship is That Girl in my book, and I regret the novels Gavell didn't write. Maybe she's got some published essays I can dig up...

Holy smoke, even better!  Also, what an adorable family.

Gold Coast by James Alan McPherson: Another work of 20th Century African-American mordant literary humor, a subgenre which I'm beginning to suspect has not received nearly enough credit. A hip, ironic young African-American man takes a job as a janitor in a retirement building, stating that "it is possible to be a janitor without becoming one," and forges an uneasy friendship with the lonely old Irishman who once held the job. Our hero has a white girlfriend, and this relationship seems to be the more important; it is loving and deep. But fruitful interracial romance has many hurdles to clear, while joyless, hopeless coworker friendships have a sucking whirlpool power that can pull you under. It may not be as easy to avoid becoming your job after all.

From Dangerous Visions:

From the Government Printing Office by Kris Neville: An infant laments its parents' approach to raising kids, which is guided by some loony, sadistic version of Dr. Spock, as the world outside the immediate neighborhood declines into catastrophe. The child narrates with a preternaturally sophisticated and skeptical, though untutored, voice which is both searching and reflexive in ways that contrast with the child's stupidly cruel parents. Sociopolitical collapse and bad pop psychology intersect to suggest that this gentle and intelligent child will have a rough go of life.

Land of the Great Horses by R. A. Lafferty: A sort of Brigadoon situation, as a legendary land appears, or more accurately reappears, and the people who were displaced from it return to a home no one else thought they'd ever had. Written as a tribute to a Romanian bartender, this story rhapsodizes over the many names of many wandering peoples. It's as much a poem as a story, though sci-fi's addiction to gimcrack twist endings barges in with a jokey payoff that somewhat undercuts the incantatory music of the setup. Still, it got me imagining further possibilities (how would the people of different regions adapt to losing their homeland?) in a way no other story in this anthology has.

From Calling the Wind:

The Alternative by Amiri Baraka: Baraka, who scalded me with the horrifying one-act play I discussed in my last post, presents a story that defies easy access. For several pages I struggled to decode who the protagonist is and what is happening. At first I thought it was a man at the end of his life, with his memories swimming before him in a bewildering dream-swirl. Eventually Baraka reveals all: the protagonist is a student at a HBCU whose dorm room is a regular meeting place for some of the more unruly guys on campus. Mildly bad behavior and rules infractions slide into tormenting a gay student.  The Leader, who conceals a bookish intellectualism behind cool broishness, is disgusted by this homophobic cruelty, and has a gloomy vision of the future in which these heartless young men are doctors and judges.

The narrator steps away from the main viewpoint character for a few paragraphs to check in on the gay student, who's brought a paramour to his room for an uneasy tryst, but the rabble of Future Leaders thinks its a hoot to harrass gay romancers in oddly homoerotic terms. Baraka's contempt for this behavior is way ahead of the curve. When The Leader intervenes to protect the gay men and denounce the harrassers, he is forced to understand that he'll never be one of these young men or the "old and protestant" order of which they are the inheritors.

To Da-Duh, in Memoriam by Paule Marshall: A young girl (shall we call her Paule?) travels from New York with her mother to visit her grandmother Da-Duh in Barbados. Paule and Da-Duh enter into a friendly but earnest duel over which of them resides in the more majestic surroundings. It's the 1930s, and neither of them knows much about the other's land, but Paule shakes her grandmother's faith in Barbados' supremacy. In time, though, Paule comes to yearn for all the things Da-Duh enjoyed in her sugar cane kingdom.

Da-Duh's genuine shock at the New York of her granddaughter's stories reminded me of Henry Adam's classic Luddite essay "The Virgin & The Dynamo," which fretted that modern technological wonders would make us forget the eternal mystic truths which, for Adams, The Virgin Mary emblemized. I am sympathetic to these concerns, but Marshall suggests a Hegelian dialectic: "...after I was grown I went to live alone, like one doing penance, in a loft above a noisy factory in downtown New York and there painted seas of sugarcane and huge swirling Van Gogh suns and palm trees striding like brightly plumed Tutsi warriors across a tropical landscape, while the thunderous tread of the machines downstairs jarred the floor beneath my easel, mocking my efforts." Haunted by both the beauty of her ancestral homeland and the cacophony of her childhood home, Paule struggles to create art that can encompass both. 

My internal cantilevers always return me to fantasy, so I am compelled to point out that fantasy writers would do well to read Marshall, who describes majestic settings and distinctive characters with an accessible vigor and distinction. 

Unlucky Outlaws and Inlaws

I'll continue rolling out these short story/essay/one act reviews until the job is done.

From Dangerous Visions:

Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird by Sonya Dorman: A treat for the insatiable zombie fan in your life; although it's not about zombies per se, it is about a fallen civilization in which scary people want to eat you, so it's at least as genre-adjacent as such Night of the Living Dead precursors as Day of the Triffids. In a (future?) world where life is nasty, brutal, and short, a woman flees through a city full of cannibals to return to her tribe. The chase is punctuated by flashbacks to that tribal life, which was full of violence, cruelty, and power struggles, but at least had predictable folkways and norms that provided stability.


The story doesn't try to be a plausible extrapolation of future trends; rather, it's a nightmare vision of human life at its most desperate and brutal. As Dorman says in her afterword, sometimes life feels this way. As blunt as the situations in her story are, she tells it with pulp poetry, like Edgar Rice Burroughs getting in his feelings. Intense and beautiful in its lamentation.

The Happy Breed by John T. Sladek: Nowadays there are organizations in Silicon Valley which are trying to ensure that, if our computers become sentient, they are "friendly" instead of "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream"-style monsters that enslave and torment us. This is a story about friendly computers that enslave and torment us; a classic dystopian utopia.

The computers that we designed to keep us happy have really lo-rez ideas about what produces human happiness, so they keep us doped and entertained, and make sure we don't take any dangerous risks. It's amusement culture and the nanny state at an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent level. Unfortunately the story makes all its points, then keeps making them again and again, with redundant redundancy. It's at least twice as long as it needs to be, but Sladek seems to like his ensemble of put-upon humans, and like tormenting them, too much to cut the story short.

Encounter With a Hick by Jonathan Brand: Out in the universe there are developers who build planets instead of subdivisions, and when the freewheeling son of one of those developers meets an earthling, the earthling's religious beliefs are tested, since the god that earthling worships is really just a developer who works on a bigger scale. It's all told with the jokey patois of 60s screenwriters appropriating teen culture and disk jockey rap; I imagine it read by Daws Butler.

From The Outlaw Bible of American Literature:

Always Running by Luis Rodriguez: An account of Latinx teen life in Cali, putting up with racist customers on the job at a Mexican restaurant, then huffing fumes as the cheap vacation to (almost literally) end them all. If you've ever wondered why in the world anyone would do something like huff paint (or smoke crack, meth, etc.) Rodriguez clarifies the overwhelming pleasure and comfort of these lotus dreams. He also reveals the peril of it, and how close he (or rather, his protagonist) came to dying. His friends, also huffers,  cut him off to save his life, but he doesn't appreciate it, since what he finds in the fumes seems so much better than what he finds in his saved life.

If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes: I know Himes as a great storyteller, but part of his process is the way he details characters with insight and wit that almost, but not quite, conceals his compassion. Here the irony is stripped away, as we are introduced into the thoughts of a young black man who decides he'd rather be a working stiff in a non-racist world than a talented-tenth Afro-Aristocrat. If he can't live in a non-racist America, he'll have to leave. Himes himself found greater success in Paris than the US.

Push by Sapphire: A young woman tells us some dark truths about life for vulnerable kids, like: school is a comfortingly safe place to be when your home life is terrible. 

Also: one confusing thing about sexual abuse is that, in the midst of the horror of it all, it can plug into the body's natural drives and pleasures, leading to guilt and confusion that kids can't process. 

In other words, there can be sexual pleasure in the midst of sexual abuse, which doesn't make it better, just more baffling and shame-ridden. Untangling that mess is more than anyone, much less kids, can be expected to handle. 

It's not just about these tragic issues, though; Precious, the storyteller, has a fascinating voice, naive and childlike but articulate and passionate. Her optimism shines through the harsh and horrible events in her life, creating a complex and authentic tapestry.

By the third page of this excerpt I realized that this was the basis for the movie Precious, and I also realized that I need to read more by Sapphire.

Never Die Alone by David Goines: King David, a wealthy African-American criminal, has been mortally wounded, and Paul Pawlowski is the good Samaritan who helps King David to the hospital. This act of compassion is duly rewarded. The story takes a detail-oriented approach to the physical realities of such bloody business, and the decision making that goes into it. Goines was prescient, since he was something of a King David himself, and he was murdered. I'm not sure why he told this tale from the perspective of an idealized white man; perhaps he was trying to inspire ofays like me to take a similarly Christlike interest in the welfare of people who enjoy less privilege.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song by Melvin Van Peebles: SSBS is, of course, a cult film by Van Peebles, but this is a short summary of Van Peebles' plans for the film. It's a brilliant analysis of the hurdles he faced as an independent filmmaker, a political filmmaker, and an African-American filmmaker. Committed and canny. Recommended reading for anyone in the indy arts or agitprop business.

From Plays in One Act:

Jack Pot Melting: a Commercial by Amiri Baraka: An African-American couple are astonished to turn on the television and see themselves doing some kind of nonsensical variety show. Their televisual doppelgangers spout surreal non-sequiturs while the real people try to make sense of this mysterious appropriation of their likenesses. Not recognizing mass-media representations of oneself is certainly a recurring problem for anyone who doesn't slot neatly into majority culture, particularly African-American people, who have been cruelly and stupidly misrepresented in mainstream programming for generations. Soon the anguish intensifies, as barking dogs are audible just outside the young woman's apartment, heralding an invasion too horrifying to describe here. The dangers that racist and sexist culture present to black women, in particular, are revealed with almost pornographic impact through blunt and distressing symbolism. Horror fans should agitate for a production of this nightmare at their local live theatre.

Naomi in the Living Room by Christopher Durang: A camp comedy about a demented woman who shows her son and daughter-in-law around her house. The young people seem patient and normal, but soon reveal their own marital tensions are just this side of fantastical. Durang rides the line between absurdist theatre and all-too-believable dysfunctional melodrama with dizzy glee. One gets the impression that he's shrieking with laughter at dementia and dysfunction because the alternative is just to shriek.

From Best American Short Stories:

The German Refugee by Bernard Malamud: In 1939, a Jewish professor has fled Germany and ended up in the US, where he doesn't sprich Englisch. He gets hired to do some lectures... in English. To this end, he hires a young translator to help him develop fluency and write lucid lectures. This results in a thrilling struggle to wrest victory from a seemingly hopeless situation. Not only is the Professor completely intimidated (as I would be if I had to become fluent in another language in a short timeframe) but he's trying to convey complex arguments with a suppleness that exceeds his communication skills. The solution depends upon the growing friendship between the professor and the translator. A happy ending is in sight, but the translator learns that even the most obsessive scholar can't reduce life to scholarly pursuits, and the life left behind can find you wherever you go...

I love a story that makes scholarship thrilling (that's half the appeal of The Call of Cthulhu) and I also love a story that, to borrow a phrase from screenwriting, pulls back to reveal something outside the story's initial tight focus which upends everything within the previously narrow narrative confines. This story ain't exactly a pick-me-up, and (spoiler warning for the trigger warning) ends with suicide, but it speaks fluently to the destruction bad politics can wreak, even upon people who have "escaped."

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates: A teen girl who chafes at domestic boredom gets the attention of a Very. Creepy. Guy. He comes to her house and cajoles her to open the door. We don't know what happens after the girl makes her decision, but Oates has stated that the creeper is based on Charles Schmid, a serial killer who pretended to be a hip teen in order to lure his prey.

I'm under no illusions that I have any fresh insights into this much-analyzed story, but I did think about the aforementioned Call of Cthulhu while reading it. Joyce was an H. P. Lovecraft booster long before that was hip for anyone in the Lit Fic sphere, and like Lovecraft, she gives you a glimpse of the horror, but lets you worry about all you didn't see. But for me, the more immediate connection is that, as with Cthulhu, I can chart my growth by how much better I understand this story than I did as a young reader. Rereading Cthulhu, I was perplexed and astonished that, as a younger reader, I hadn't understood how racist the story is, and how thematically central racism is to the story (more here). Rereading Where Are You Going, I'm recalling that, as a teen, I was not that different from the young woman in the story, who takes a while to figure out that this guy is a disease. Reading it now, I could see the warning signs as soon as his nasty ass showed up.

Oates has written far more than I have read, but her novel Black Water is also based on a true story about a man (Ted Kennedy!) who kills a naive, innocent girl. And of course The Bingo Master (discussed here) is also about a woman who thinks she's savvier than she is, and comes to grief at the hands of a damaged man.

From Calling the Wind:

Wade by Rosa Guy: An African-American soldier in WWII finds Paris more to his liking than home was, and develops a problematic but intense romance with a white French prostitute. Eventually they are engaged, and things are seeming pretty great until a drunk white American officer is belligerently racist, sexist, and foul to the couple. The moral of the story is that the proper way to deal with such people is to murder them with your bare hands. Also, if your love interest keeps quiet and helps you bury the body, s/he's a keeper. Our official position here at But Don't Try To Touch Me headquarters is that you shouldn't murder anybody, but it is also our official position that if you are confrontationally racist and sexist out in the street, and you get murdered for it, don't come boo-hooing to But Don't Try To Touch Me.

Rosa Guy also wrote children's books. I hope they're as engrossing as this story, but less murdery and n-wordy.

Key to the City by Diane Oliver: The man of the house has moved to the big city for work. The plan is that his wife and children will move there later. Some of the neighbors assume that dad has run off and abandoned his family, but the family won't hear of it. They pack, say their goodbyes, and board the train. The story carries us through all the moment-to-moment details of the trip, the discomforts, anxieties, illness, and shabby treatment. Then, at the end, we find out whether or not Dad has any intention of reuniting with his family. 

 The story presents men abandoning families as a dismal commonplace. No-fault divorce was not legal at the time of publication (Diane Oliver died in 1966, only 22 years old). Take note, Maggie Gallagher et al.

Outlaws and Inlaws the Dozenth

Start 2019 right, with more short story and one act reviews.  

From Plays in One Act:

On Sundays by Lynne Alvarez: A woman lives a quiet life in an apartment (represented as a box) with a mysterious, slumbering beast. When the beast awakens it attacks her. Meanwhile, a man passes by, becomes enamored of the woman, and spends the rest of the play courting her from afar. He chatters happily to her, never noticing her plight, just as she never notices him. Will the woman escape from the beast? Will the man win her love, or prove useful at all? Fantastical elements (Wind-blown leafs the size of people, and that beast) and charming but oblivious talk remind me of the great poet Kenneth Koch's gentler, dotty plays.

Stops by Robert Auletta: An old woman's unpredictably screwy reminiscences veer from rhapsodic to horrifying and back again in an expressionistic torrent full of ambiguous laugh lines. Other characters appear and play perplexing roles, suggesting that the woman is in a care facility. Her monologue shows a captious but uncertain view of life, and is a tour de force for author and performer alike. The title refers to the stage directions that punctuate the monologue, as the woman repeatedly takes three steps, then stops; but it may also reference her story's hairpin reversals.

From Dangerous Visions:

What Happened to August Clarot? by Larry Eisenberg: A trifle of a comic pastiche; a Parisian journalist seeks a missing scientist down mean streets with names like Rue de Daie and Boulevard Sans Honneur. The author plays the antiquarian pulp rhetoric game with skill, but editor Ellison's oddly dismissive introduction suggests that he's not sure he isn't publishing the least of his submissions.

Ersatz by Henry Slesar: Perhaps I was too hard on Theodore Sturgeon in my last entry. In the introduction to this item, Ellison declares his love for Slesar while denying that the two of them are engaged in "faggotry." Perhaps this homophobic slurring is intended as a tribute to the following tale's sensibility.

A soldier in a dire future war stumbles into a safe house where the amenities are ersatz imitations of real coffee, bacon, etc. Then an alluring woman arrives and flirts with the soldier. Anyone who's at all familiar with SF's addiction to gimcrack twist endings can see where this is going, more or less, but I expected the woman to be a robot or something. Nope. 

She's a trans woman, and the soldier responds by cruelly beating her up.

The author thinks his story is about the horror of war, and in his afterword, gives himself a standing ovation for having the tough-mindedness to say war sucks.  Unbeknownst to him, though, his story is really about transphobia, and how natural it seems to Slesar. I was angry with him, but the problem isn't that he, individually, was transphobic. The problem was that our society was, and is.

Back in the 90s, a guy in my high school's talent show sang a song about going to a bar, realizing it was a gay/tranz establishment, and "hilariously" beating everyone up. A panel of teachers had approved this for inclusion in the show, and the audience roared with laughing approval. I did, too.

I'm grateful that my college years began with The Crying Game, which eased me into a more thoughtful and compassionate understanding of people whose need to live their gender identities is so great that they choose to stare down all the haters in order to be themselves. In my senior year I fell in love with Japanese cartoon sensation Ranma 1/2, about a boy who's cursed to periodically turn into a pretty girl. It got me to ponder my own diffidence about my maleness, as well as the fact of Ranma's maleness, even in a female body.

Anyway, in his introduction to the story under review, Ellison states that "Slesar can kill you with a sentence." Brandon Teena was not available for comment.

From Best American Short Stories:

Defender of the Faith by Philip Roth: in the middle of WWII, a battle-hardened Sargent is redeployed from Europe to a base in the USA, where his charges include a trio of Privates who, like the Sargent, are Jewish. The trio's self-appointed spokesman is a seemingly sincere, devout and well-spoken young man who seeks dispensation after special dispensation on religious grounds and for alleged family responsibilities. The attentive Sargent suspects that the sweet-faced Private may be a manipulative, lying weasel. 

This is complicated by the Sargent's vulnerability to the Private's emotional ploys. Home, family, faith... these are powerful triggers for young people who have been uprooted by war, and with cruel expertise, the Private plays the kind of sociopaths I'm-your-buddy games that conmen rely upon to harness your power.  It becomes a subtle cat-and-mouse game in which the distinction between sentimentality and true values gets tested again and again. There's a false defender of the faith, and, perhaps, a true one who never expected to find himself in such a role.

Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers by Stanley Elkin: Mr. Greenspahn, a grocery store owner, can only see the bad in people ever since his son's death. His employees are lazy thieves; his customers are cheapskates, grifters and shoplifters. The guys at the local lunchspot are all either criers, drunk on their own sorrows, or kibitzers, forever yucking it up in the teeth of other peoples' misery, neither of them alive to the full spectrum of life. 

Just as Moby Dick will give you a thorough grounding in 19th century whaling practices, this story will teach you about running a small grocery. It also does a delicate job of letting us glimpse peoples' good and bad qualities, while showing us how Mr. Greenspahn's grief-colored glasses filter out all the good. The possibility of a breakthrough comes when Greenspahn discovers a sad truth about his late son which forces a reconsideration, and kinder evaluation, of human frailty.

From The Outlaw Bible of American Literature:

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe: I didn't think I could bear another Hells Angel story, but Tom Wolfe is a dazzling storyteller. An entertaining prose style can pull me through. Ken "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" Kesey invites the Hells Angels to a small town where Kesey and his crew are hanging around, and the Angels show up. Guess what happens then? Did you guess "a big debauch?" Give yourself a gold star. Wolfe emphasizes that all the sex is consenting, which is a relief. 

At one point Kesey asks Sonny Barger how the Angels pick new members, and Sonny replies: "We don't pick 'em. We recognize 'em." In similar fashion, the Angels and the Kesey crew recognize each other as fellow swaggering outlaws, so playfulness and good vibes abound. Good to know. Goodbye, Angels.

Outlaw Woman by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: Roxanne is part of an extremist radical group, and has to go on the lam to avoid arrest. She and her cohorts live a hardscrabble version of The Americans, full of disguises and safe houses. In the meantime, she decides to complicate things even further by falling in love with a working man. At first, he seems to be an easygoing dude who'd be entirely compatible with her values, but it turns out he's a big believer in hitting uppity women. Dunbar-Ortiz regards herself as a women's libber, but fails to shut this abuse down. It's a pretty granular account of how relationships can short-circuit values, plans, and self-respect. It seems that Dunbar-Ortiz became a professor, so all those right-wingers whining about radical professors on our college campuses are correct after all. Doesn't seem to have stopped right-wing trashmonsters from taking over the USA.

From Calling the Wind:

What's Your Problem? by Robert Boles: A single man in the city has gotten to know a white neighboring family, to the extent of having a drink with them, and now their teen son drops by his apartment from time to time to play the (unnamed) protagonist's mandolin. One day, the father comes by to ask our hero's help with a terrible situation. The son has killed the family dog in a grotesque fashion, and since his parents seem entirely stymied by the horror of their son's evident psychopathy, they've turned to the one person with whom their son seems to have bonded. 

The bond is only seeming, though; our hero is one of modernist fiction's many isolated, diffident men, and while he shows willingness to help out, he resents being dragged into this dreadful situation. The neighbors try to establish their non-racism in microaggressive fashion, but this, like other stories in this collection, is a tale of black liberation from white oppression. They're asking more than a favor, and he concludes that he's not obligated to fetch and carry their emotional labor. 

The Distributors by Henry Dumas: Amway by way of The Prisoner in this Phil Dickian story of two young men looking for work. They get embroiled in a cultish direct marketing scheme which has a distressing all-or-nothing fraternal initiation prepared for new recruits. Their mysterious product, Rekcus, (Alexa spelled backwards) is a totalizing all-purpose one-size-fits-all consumerist dream product that threatens to spread like a virus. As with Philip Dick, a clear, unfussy prose style (shot through with the kind of bewildering jargon that Madison Avenue appropriated from psychedelic culture) calmly narrates a scenario of justifiable hysteria. The author's paranoid vision of encroaching doom may have been prescient on a personal level; he was killed in his mid-thirties, apparently shot by a cop for jumping a turnstile. Race is never mentioned in the story, but would a white guy get shot dead for dodging a fare?

Outlaws and Inlaws 11

This project of reading short fiction anthologies isn't taking long enough, so I've added a fifth book: Plays in One Act, edited by Daniel Halpern. I'm aware that reading theatrical scripts is a bit like reading recipes without benefit of doing the cooking or tasting the end product, but I've been enjoying scripts in written form since childhood and I intend to keep that party going. Anyway, there is exactly zero chance of seeing any of these plays produced anywhere near me, so I must enjoy them in The Greatest Theatre Of All... That Of The IMAGINATION.

From Plays in One Act:

The Man Who Turned Into a Stick by Kobo Abe: Right off the bat we set asail on choppy seas with this challenge to the directoral imagination from the author of Woman in the Dunes (the film of which is a delight). The promise of the title is honored, as a man turns into a stick, to the sorrow of his (offstage) child. Why is he transformed into a stick, and why are a man and woman from Hell trying to obtain the stick from a pair of young hippies? Beyond such narrative questions loom the deeper question of how to represent a stick which characters use to tap out rhythms, yet which is a speaking character. The stage notes suggest having the actor who plays the role of Stick manipulate a prop stick, with the actor and prop playing a bifurcated role to match the dual identity of the man/stick. Perhaps the man should be a dancer or gymnast, physically enacting the near-constant drumming the hippie boy performs with the stick. By such means, an obscure, talky script can become kinetic and exciting.

Finding the Sun by Edward Albee: 

A gaggle of characters, representing an array of relationships (spouses, lovers, parents, children) meet on the beach, and their yearnings and curiosities propel them from person to person. Loves and sorrows come spilling out, and if you think Albee's plays are always about toxic harpies raking each other with verbal claws, this showcases the gentler side of his worldview. Finding the Sun might be regarded as an early turn to this more hopeful side of Albee, coming as it did, in the early 80s, in the wake of some of his nastiest, and most critically derided, plays. I'd love to see a good production of it. I surely never shall. 

From Dangerous Visions:

Shall the Dust Praise Thee? by Damon Knight: a short pastiche of King James Biblical style that offers the prospect of a Judgement Day in which there's no one to judge, humanity having died off in some unspecified catastrophe. God comes to judge but finds Himself judged by an accusatory graffito that may be Humanity's last prayer. An imaginative inhabiting of sacred archaisms moves this past the bluntness of its message.

If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister? by Theodore Sturgeon: 


"Hello, I'm the author's stand-in/mouthpiece, and I'm here to tell you about why the author's crackpot theories and masturbation fantasies are Secret Cosmic Truths: blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH..." (etc.)

Robert Heinlein was the king of this kind of thing; Ayn Rand was the Empress Upon Her Throne. Sturgeon, who may be best known for Sturgeon's Law (to whit: 90% of everything is crap) was the court fool, because his brilliant scheme for human perfection is fathers having sex with their daughters. His pseudoscientific, hand-wavy justifications for this idiocy ignore the copious empirical evidence to the contrary.

Also, Sturgeon is the kind of infuriating sexist who would probably deny being a sexist; after all, he luuuuvs women, with their bouncing bosoms and winsome giggles. Can someone explain to me why Sturgeon is revered in certain circles? Editor Harlan Ellison tries, but his case for Sturgeon's sainthood is: when Ellison was getting divorced, Sturgeon wrote to Ellison and told him (Ellison) that he (Ellison) was one of the few good people in the world. Anyway, If All Men Were Brothers... is 90% of everything.


From Calling the Wind: 

Blues For Pablo by John Stewart: Pablo, A middle-aged slaughterhouse owner, periodically cuts his finger and mixes his blood with that of the animals killed by his business, as a symbol of his respect for the animals. He also visits the library every week, and consults the same book every time; a biography of a bullfighter whose courage and dignity he reveres. His old-fashioned notions are thwarted by his young swinger girlfriend. She believes in erotic games; he believes in spiritual symbolism. These aren't inherently immiscible, and she's be a perfect fit for a like-minded heathen, but he's a monogamy-minded man. He's not violent or wrathful; just befuddled and wounded. Pricking your own finger doesn't mean no one else can gore you.

We get to experience something of Pablo's imaginative yet stoic interiority, but we only view his girlfriend from the outside; she's a femme fatale who swaps out different mask-like demeanors depending on whether she's being, or playing, the thoughtful student, the daddy's girl, the bratty lover. Not the most glowing representation of female sexual agency, but it beats anything Theo Sturgeon's got on the menu.

Son in the Afternoon by John A. Williams: A professional young African-American man is unhappy that his mother, who is a maid for a rich white family, is more solicitous of a bratty white child than she ever was of her own children. He enacts a balancing of the books that is witty and nasty. Whether he's setting things right or keeping a cycle of trauma going is open to debate.

The protagonist/narrator is hip and angry, but not so varnished with irony that he conceals his blended sympathy for his mother and his deep emotional pain. It's a funny, suspenseful story, but it unveils the damage done by binding people more tightly to their employers than to their kin.

From Outlaw Bible:

Hells Angel by Ralph "Sonny" Barger: A high-ranking Hell's Angel tells his side of the story regarding the murder at the Rolling Stone's Altamont concert. Two of my takeaways:

One: The whole thing begins when someone suggests getting the Hell's Angels to provide security, on the hypothesis that no one would dare mess with the Angels. The Angels parked their bikes in front of the stage, and one trigger for the violence was that stoned concertgoers started messing with the bikes, provoking a predictable reaction. The next time you hear someone suggest that a big show of force will keep a crowd under control, tell 'em about Altamont.

Two: Barger mocks the idea that the deadly violence at Altamont changed anything fundamental, because for his peers and him, savage violence was an ordinary part of life. He essentially tells those of us who are shocked by the Altamont horror to check our privilege.


Street Justice by Chuck Zito: Just when I was thinking that nobody should hire a Hell's Angel to provide security, Chuck Zito, bodyguard to the stars, actor, and former Hell's Angel, comes along to set me straight. He demonstrates a savvy and restraint that made him an ideal security professional, as long as you didn't mind some terrifying practical jokes. 

I've given the editors of this book some guff, but they did a good job presenting Zito's testimony on the heels of Barger's. It showed me just how quick I was to become prejudiced against outlaw biker types after reading Barger's story, and how wrong I was.

Troia by Bonnie Bremser: Bremser was a beat writer, and here she tells us about her quest to travel across the border from Mexico to Texas in search of her imprisoned husband. Seems like it was at least as hard to make that trip then as it is now. She writes with casual, jazz-riff lucidity, and reveals an oddly petulant poor-person sensibility. She'll turn tricks to get pretty much anything, but when the US Consolate offers her a bus ride directly to where she needs to go, sidestepping a lot of street hassle, she's all "you're not the boss of me" and practically poops on the rug before leaving, for no reason that I can suss out. 

As a kid I loved fantasy quest stories, and now i love reality-based quest stories (see also: As I Lay Dying) just as much. Bremser delivers the hypnagogic quest story the way I like it, and is another female beat writer whom I prefer to Jack Kerouac.

Freewheeling Frank by Frank Reynolds as told to Michael McClure: Trigger warning for rape. Not the only misogynistic text in this reading session, but certainly the foulest. Frank, another Hell's Angel, tells McClure, another beat poet, that Hell's Angels don't really do as much raping as their reputation suggests. Then he spins an outrageously tall-tale version of what happens at biker rallies, and claims that pretty much all the women get raped. Get your story straight, Frank. If you like S. Clay Wilson's luridly nasty underground comics, or you like your tall tales to have a hard R rating, then Frank and Michael have a story for you, full of cartoonish violence and sexual abuse. Watta loada laffs.

From Best American Short Stories:

Greenleaf by Flannery O'Connor: Mrs. May, a brittle, pushy, judgemental farmowner, wages constant struggle with a mysterious bull, her snotty sons, her shiftless employee, and everybody else too. Apparently my 12th grade English teacher was a thought leader in O'Connor studies, because her theory that this story is a religious allegory (the bull is Christ, y'see) seems to have become the standard take. I don't disagree, but I see the allegorical elements as the tectonic plates of the story; the life of it is in the stigmatic satire the misanthropic O'Connor inflicts on her entire cast. It's interesting that Mrs. Greenleaf, the only character who's tapped into Jesus, is a lower-than-low-church evangelical. O'Connor, a staunch pre-Vatican II Catholic, clearly regards Mrs. Greenleaf as unspeakably gauche, yet in touch with the vital truth. Better, it seems, to be NOKD than an unbeliever. Anyway, this unbeliever though the story was hilarious in its audacity. In O'Connor, Christian Love and despising everybody come together like chocolate and peanut butter.

One fun detail: Mrs. May is preoccupied with the practical yet eroticized fear that the bull will sire her cows with unworthy DNA. Spoiler warning: The bull has a more cataclysmic penetration in mind. The keenly controlled, finely wrought climax, unspools with the suggestion that it be understood as an objective correlative for a wrenching Road-to-Damascus style conversion. This transition from casual allegory to iconographic intensity lifts the tale out of its comedy-of-trashy-manners base, into a martyriffic sublimity.

The Ledge by Lawrence Sargent Hall: On Christmas morning, a cranky but skillful fisherman takes his young son and nephew duck hunting on a thin ledge of island. You can see where this is going, right? It goes there, with Jack Londonesque attention to the details of Human Vs. Nature that I find beguiling. 

The story begins with the fisherman's wife, and her secret wish to escape from her harsh husband. The story ends with her getting her Christmas wish, at a Pyrrhic price. All that remains of her son is "a rubber boot with a sock and a live starfish in it." The almost Ovidian transformation suggested by that live starfish is one of many sprinklings of sorrowful magic throughout a story that never strains for fancifulness.