201. Sick reasons } to attend Pluto in Furs.

Jay Decay prefers Don’t Go in the House (1979) to The Shining (1980). Why? Because he’s deeply perverse. Perverse as the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”: 

And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.

 What’s the black cat’s name? Oh, yes—it’s Pluto.

I don’t mean to slander Mr. Decay by calling to your attention his perverse nature. No, rather, I intend to present his perverseness as the foundation for my argument that if you attend this year’s Necronomicon in Providence and count yourself as a true aficionado of horror, you’ll want to attend the reading he’s hosting at 6pm on Sat., Aug. 24. That’s the Pluto in Furs book release reading.

When you receive your Necronomicon schedule, you’ll see several other events scheduled for that time. If your passion is for alchemy & magic, I can’t possibly persuade you to skip the Dust, Ash, & Iron panel—nor would I try: that’s mere phantasy, I don’t need to know you. If you want to explore “M. R. James as weird fiction,” skip the Under the Ash-Tree panel, attend the Pluto in Furs reading, and I’ll deliver a witty and concise overview of James the weird. Or just read the essay I wrote on James’ collected for The Smart Set.

Lastly, at the same time as Mr. Decay’s Pluto in Furs book release reading is the Tor Books Nightfire release party. This may seem like a difficult choice, but it’s only a difficult choice if your taste is mainstream. Go, if you want, get a drink at the bar. Eat the confections on offer. Hear the authors you’re already familiar with read from their latest. If, however, your taste gravitates toward the genuinely strange, the new, the perverse—then come hear stories from the Pluto in Furs anthology.

Aside from myself, readers will include Gemma Files, Jeffrey Thomas, Clint Smith, Orrin Grey, and Richard Gavin. Copies of the anthology will be available. Afterwards, we’ll be glad to lead you to a local wine cellar where we might drink together from a pipe of Amontillado.

200. Three stencils for } the Mountain series.

[ 1. stencil gold ]

[ 2. stencil black ]

[ 3. stencil orange ]

199. Notes for first M talk } &.

Four phrases rearranged from “Capitol” so I might hear them together:

Magic circle of horses + one mother’s voice,

magic little river + magic funicular.

A line—“heaps of stuff being sold”—ties these phrases. Read, “Magic circle of horses [caesura] + magic funicular. / heaps of stuff being sold” and “+ one mother’s voice, [caesura] magic little river. / heaps of stuff being sold.”

Mother’s voice = magic little river. A magic funicular [a mountain train or the cable that draws a mountain train up and down the mountain] is like a river.

The poem’s formal tone is broken in the line that follows the second “heaps of stuff being sold.” Read, “the ones who seemed like dicks” and, four lines later, “dogs chilling in their roundabouts.”

“Capitol,” by Hannah Brooks-Motl, appears in issue 17 of Tupelo Quarterly. I’m perplexed by Henk Rossouw’s conclusion re. the “critique and careful hope” in the “superb ending of this poem.” Read, “magic from the bunker / or what’s coming but magic / said she”—bunkers, I suppose, are hopeful. Are “cautiously” hopeful. I sure hope to survive. I sure hope when I pop my little head out above ground there’s stuff (“heaps of”). Maybe the hope is in the phrase “said she”; the omega woman emerges, the last woman = magic: she’ll fix all this shit.

(In issue 18 of Tupelo Quarterly, by the way, is a new poem by C. S. Carrier, a scruffy brother-friend of mine from the Hartford days. He writes about stuff being gone.)

My “Notes for first M Talk” (Word For/Word issue no. 33) is a close read of Hannah Brooks-Motl’s poem “Of Sadness” from her book M (The Song Cave, 2015).

And in Word For/Word issue no. 33, a selection of Matthew Klane’s cut-up circular works. “The Other Pothole” recalls Sol LeWitt, er, rather, the cover design of MIT presses’ Incomplete Open Cubes; I’d call Klane’s piece “R to the Ople.” What do you get when you add r + ople? Hang the letter “l.” These pieces from a “summer-constructed daily practice junk mail collage” series. See issue no. 3 of ctrl + v, issue no. 56 of Fugue, and fall 2018 issue of Gasher for more (the Gasher collage stuff is the best of it, for my money).

Rosaire Appel’s Page Speaks series, made with crayon and ink on slightly yellowed paper that feature some kind of printer’s guide marks, is my favorite work in Word For/Word 33. Built around / over texts cut or grayed out, the orange and blue crayon scribbles are striking, enhanced by the black ink lines and smudges. I see staves, thought-balloons, and a snail’s shell. It’s lively.

[ Image from Page Speaks by Rosaire Appel. ]

198. “...put into a museum } rock & roll is over.”

Amusing sequence in documentary Westwood: Punk. Icon. Activist. Vivienne Westwood is reluctant to talk about Sex Pistols.

Cut to: Ext. Day. Victoria & Albert Museum.

Cut to: Int. Victoria & Albert Museum (textiles archive).

[Classical-ish music in background.]

Archivists wheel a cart of clothes to “The Clothworkers’ Centre”; place clothes on tables. They wear white gloves. Carefully unfold “Destroy” muslin shirt.

Voice over, Clair Wilcox, senior curator: …it’s one of the most important pieces Westwood and McLaren created.

Cut to: Clair Wilcox, tenderly touching “Destroy” shirt.

Clair Wilcox: The sleeves are very long and they fold back and then this would clip onto here so making it, um, more wearable, but the notion of distortion, the sleeves reminds one a little bit of a straitjacket.

Cut to: photo of Johnny Rotten wearing “Destroy” shirt.

Clair Wilcox: But it’s really all about the imagery so here you’ve got a swastika, an inverted crucifix, the word “destroy,” and then lyrics from the Sex Pistols, “I am an antichrist.” And what Westwood and McLaren were doing with these punk garments was “confronting society.”

Cut to: photo of Westwood in “Destroy” t-shirt.

Vivienne says, “We invented punk” [that is, she and McLaren].

I love John Lydon, love post-Pistols P.I.L. (1978 – 86), but his antics did get stagnant—Westwood says, “…and he hasn’t changed, from being that phenomenon, unfortunately, he should have changed to something else by now.” Hard to be an iconoclast icon—what change it would require to smash that icon!

To her credit, Westwood later observes: “We wanted to undermine the establishment. The swastika, all these things, meant we don’t accept the values of this older generation. We hate it we want to destroy it don’t want it. We were youth against age, that’s what it was. But, it had affected fashion such a lot. The hairstyles, even, my spikey hair, was in Vogue one month later. And I realized that we weren’t really attacking the system at all. It was being marketed all the time. I just realized that the real marketing opportunity was that the English society could claim how democratic and how free they were that somehow kids could revolt as much as that. We weren’t attacking the establishment. We were part of the distraction.”

Kate Moss coda

Vivienne Westwood [while she works at a top with an assistant]: “I think it’s going to look great. I’m going to put it on Kate Moss. [Cut to: Kate Moss, smiling.] She’ll look lovely in it.

Kate Moss: Those shows, they were so outrageous. You know, champagne is flowing, and we’d go out naked with lollipops [Cut to: topless Kate Moss on runway, circa 1994, eating a popsicle] and [Cut to: Kate Moss, circa 2014, in a shop (her shop?)] you know, just outrageous, but, but really glamorous at the same time. They were the ones who were [gasps] my god, so exciting.

Kate Moss: She’s a rebel isn’t she though, which attracts me [Cut to: Kate Moss, circa 1994], coming from Croydon we wanted to get out and she was, like, our queen.

Kate Moss: I remember the shows but I can’t remember which one; we were backstage and she said, “Kate, you know I’ve never been into girls, I could’ve got into you and then like hugged me she was like, I could have been her only lesbian lover [Kate Moss fist pumps] ka-ching!

197. After my eldest } left with a dog.

Arrived in Allentown during a thunderstorm. Crossed the 8^th Street Bridge (a bike rider in green claimed the right lane), drove past residences built in a style I’ve come to associate with what little of eastern Pennsylvania I’ve seen (Federal style?), along St. John St. between Zandy’s Steak House (housed in a peach-stucco “small, depression-era theater” and Double Decker Records, to the Allentown Art Museum (AAM).

The AAM is full of little surprises. Anton Woensom von Worms’ “Suitors of Mary” (1541), based on a story from the apocryphal Book of James; Hans Moller’s Matisse-like “Lemons” (1949); Maurice Richard Grosser’s “Red Cabbages” (1939); and Sidney Ed Dickinson’s “Mary and the Studio” (1924). A security guard played (at my request) four of Harry Bertoia’s sound sculptures—“expensive wind chimes,” he said—though he did not completely dismiss them; he was keen for me to hear how the sound came from the base and played the sculptures in a sequence meant to impress (the final sculpture clanged like church bells). I liked Jesus Rafael Soto’s “Multiple V” (1969) sculpture, which appeared to vibrate and Nelson Shanks’ portrait of “Nancy” (1974).

An exuberantly painted landscape by Franz Kline, a mural painted for the American Legion Post 314 hall and removed to the museum in 2016. I like Kline’s magnified black brush stroke paintings from the 50s; I didn’t like this, though I gather it’s a characteristic example of his work from the 30s – 40s. He’s from Allentown. The video about moving the mural is fantastic.

Upstairs, is Carl Joe Williams’ “Waiting” (2016); I wasn’t initially drawn to it—though colorful, it seemed flat. But: the scene, a man wearing a Nike sweatshirt and a woman seated with her baby, the sign “checks cashed” above her is full of radiating circles—halo-like around the subjects’ heads—and like ripples in water. AND, it’s painted on a twin mattress, the sort you find as detritus in economically depressed cities (Hartford, CT, where I lived for 7 years, for instance—maybe Allentown?). From Williams’ site I see he paints on doors, palates, fencing, and, television sets—but the mattress, that’s brilliant. Grossly intimate, awkward. Next to the Williams’ was Romare Bearden’s “Circe” (1978), which looked to me like wall-to-wall carpet. The image echoes Manet’s “Olympia.”

I was curious about Didier William’s “La Croix a Samedi” (2016)—it appears to be damaged. I asked a guard—he didn’t know. A spot where the wood look worn through. Compare it with “Mawon”—which is clearly not damaged.

When I left AAM, the sun was out, the sky blue, clouds cumulus and massive, and North 5^th Street was brilliant. Sorry to go.

My consolation: I caught a fantastic broadcast on WFMU—Vladamir Tarasov’s “Atto III: Drumtheater” from Experimental Sounds Behind the Iron Curtain. I put up the volume, rolled down the window, and basked in highway traffic, humidity, and Russian noise. 

196. Dead first sentences } re. Elif Batuman.

Elif Batuman claims the “American short story is a dead form” (“Short Story & Novel”). She defines the American short story as… what? Her dipstick is the Best American Short Stories series, specifically from 2004 and 2005. She evokes science—“In the name of…”—but does so idiomatically only. There’s no method to her argument. She feels that the American short story is a dead form because she’s annoyed by the majority of short stories she’s encountered; her essay is not an argument but an airing of pet peeves.

For example: “Nowhere is the Best American Barrage of names so relentless as in the first sentences, which are specific to the point of arbitrariness….” To clarify, she cites the first sentences of two stories, the first by Trudy Lewis, the second by Tom Bissell; here’s Lewis’s: “The morning after her granddaughter’s frantic phone call, Lorraine skipped her usual coffee session at the Limestone Diner and drove out to the accident scene instead.”

Most of Batuman’s pet peeves are elements of style subject to fashion. Lewis writes that first sentence because she’s seen others like it. Maybe she’s thought about it and decided she likes it, or maybe she hasn’t thought about it, but instead absorbed it. Either way, she identified a template. Batuman assumes Lewis (and other American short story writers) learned the template in an MFA program or by reading the Best American.

That a majority of American short story writers are bad at short story writing—or worse, are dull—is not evidence that the form is dead. If it’s evidence of anything at all, it’s that many people who write short stories don’t read enough of them and that it’s hard to write a good short story. But it’s much more cocktail-party exciting to declare something as “dead.”

Of the stories Batuman read in the two volumes of the Best American she perused for the sake of science, she found only one of interest. What stood out to me—and is unremarked upon by Batuman—is that story is a fantasy story, bordering on horror, and it’s written by an author who exclusively writes short stories (not a novelist promoting a novel by dashing off a short story; not a budding novelist writing short stories in workshop as some kind of practice). Fantasy isn’t bound by the strictures of realism and thus may, by accident or by design, avoid the clichés of realistic (AKA “literary”) short fiction. (Fantasy has its own clichés.) An author committed to the short story form is (hopefully) reading a lot of short stories. More, perhaps, than the novelist who dabbles.

(Please note, I do not mean to suggest that great short stories and great novels can’t come from the same author.)

The way Batuman dismisses that one interesting short story is to claim it’s not actually a short story, but “really novelistic plots crammed into twenty pages.” It’s bad science (and sloppy essay writing) to take data that doesn’t fit your claim and call it something else; her claim needs to be adjusted. The American short story isn’t dead. The American short story just isn’t obligated to read like Chekov anymore.

Batuman’s observations are funny. I only wish she didn’t insist they mean more than they do. But her observations are funny and maybe even sharp.

She ends her essay with a mini-manifesto, that will no doubt dog her forever: “Write long novels, pointless novels. Do not be ashamed to grieve about personal things.” (Setting up her declaration, she writes, “American novelists are ashamed to find their own lives interesting….”) She’s giving herself permission to shoegaze, and I dig it. Sure!

(Last night I opened up the March 4^th issue of The New Yorker [for which Batuman is a staff writer] and read the first sentence of Jonathan Lethem’s short story “The Starlet Apartment” and lo: “When Peter Todbaum and I were twenty-five, and three years clear of Yale, I lost track of him for a short while.” It’s a model of the Who What Where Why When & How first sentence Batuman finds so irritating—going strong, thirteen years after she published her American short story post-mortem.)