The Belly of the Beast

The new Poets & Writers. Page 125. (This is way back in the "recent winners" listings; past the eternally optimistic "deadlines," heading in the direction of the slightly tawdry "contests," the suspect "personals" and "rentals," the downright unsavory "services.") The bottom half of the page is an advertisement for a graduate program in creative writing; no great surprise there, the pages of this magazine are filled with them, and it's not that the ads shock me with their quantity, I'm well aware that this country is multitudinous with writing programs, it's just that seeing all their disciplines, all their addresses, all their distinguished faculty and recent distinguished guests, it's like putting a face to a name, names to a number. This one, the ad I'm looking at on page 125, has a quote from Flaubert: "Writing is a dog's life, but it's the only one worth living." This is not surprising either; many of these ads are appended with quotes that seem to attempt to summarize a theory, a sensibility, a philosophy; NYU's ad, for example, has E.L. Doctorow, "A book begins as a private excitement of the mind" (an onanistic approach to writing if ever there was one!). But this, the Flaubert's dog one, this one features a photograph of a dog, or, rather, either the right half of a photograph of a dog, or a complete photograph of only the hindquarters of a dog that is lying on some sort of white sheet, as if it's participating in a tasteful erotica shoot, a languid dog, all stretchy leg and lazy tail, perhaps reminiscent of the ubiquitous anonymous women's bodies, all skirts and boots, that have been haunting the jackets of every work of fiction by a young woman about the travails of young women since flying earflap girl ran away from us on the cover of Melissa Bank. And someone—the photographer springs to mind first, or perhaps the dog's owner (Whose dog is this? Is this stock photography, or was this shot especially for the James A. Michener Center for Writers?)—has tossed the manuscript of a novel onto the animal's left side. The words on the manuscript pages are difficult to read in the photograph, but, squinting, the title page appears to read A Blessing on the Moon, by Joseph Skibell, who graduated from Austin in 1996 (so it was not stock?). The printed sheets have fallen apart loosely, some limning the dog's belly, some pushing down toward the darkness between its legs; the top right corner of what looks like it might be page 11 has gotten itself tucked inside the dog's left knee, seeking fur, and warmth, and crotch. A pencil has been placed on the manuscript's cover page, so we are certain that this is a static shot, not one of action, but still, I wonder, is this what Updike was talking about? Must we lie down with the books we want to write like this, like a love between animals and objects, the tasteful pornography of the domesticated and the inanimate, dogs and pages quietly searching out comfort from each other amid the cold air, the bright lights, the ice cubes, the satin sheets?

The Art of the Novel #3 / The Art of Love #1

It's been weeks and I still haven't gotten over the little sentence tucked away in the middle of Updike's essay in the New Yorker on the late works of great authors. I include it here with the preceding two sentences as context:

Hawthorne's inability to carry forward and complete, "The Ancestral Footprint" was, in Adorno's term, a "catastrophe" for him personally. His struggles to find the key—the handle—demonstrate what a precarious feat it is to write a novel, organizing a host of inventions and polished details into a single movement toward resolution. Like sex, it is either easy or impossible...

Does this simile hold up? Am I screwing the wrong book?

So It Begins

At a coffee shop not far from my house, to the right of the cash register, a small clipping from, I believe, The New York Post has been taped to the back of the espresso machine. It's not an original article, but rather a wire service feed from Reuters; the headline reads: "KILLER CHIMPS ATTACK TOURISTS." Someone—the coffee shop employee who must have originally cut out and taped up the article, perhaps, or a coffee shop customer?—has scrawled on the clipping with what appears to have been a ballpoint pen, to the left of the headline, the following words—which, like the headline, are all in capital letters:

SO
IT
BEGINS

On the bottom edge of the clipping, also in all caps, and in what appears to be a different hand, someone has also written these words, all forced together as if it might be a domain name rather than the title of a film:

BATTLEFORTHEPLANETOFTHEAPES

Further complicating the understanding of this marginalia, this palimpsest, is the matter of punctuation. To the left of the letter "B" there are symbols that look like two exclamation marks, bending to the right in the wind, with two additional symmetrical vertical lines shooting down from the double periods, a mirror of the lines above them, twin masts reflected in a lake; to the right of the letter "S" are similar figures, except these look like two bars leaning to the left off the tops of two right-angled exclamation marks, or like two bangs, twice the usual length, that have been cleanly shot by an invisible bullet right through their middles. Perhaps these glyphs are meant to indicate exploding French quotation marks? Maybe they're intended to be a fusion of Spanish and English and French, indicating exclamation, quotation, and bracketing all at once? I don't know the answer to this, nor can I fully explain why the former graffito is so funny, but the latter is so completely not, other than to wonder if perhaps it is a matter of becoming something, rather than just pointing at something, which seems to be a more interesting variation of the old writing-workshop saw to show and not tell, a useless piece of advice if ever there was one; and it also might have to do with voice, perhaps specifically the commonplace of the ominous Lord of the Rings or Star Wars voice, intersecting culturally here with another Hollywood cliché, the random smattering of strange and foreboding isolated incidents seen occurring all over the world that always opens those wonderful movies about the apolcalypse; but even more than these, maybe that great little three-word tag wins because of punctuation, or lack thereof, because it could have so easily been followed by an ellipsis—such an abused mark!—one that ought to be reserved for a trailing off, a "tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther" trailing off, or an actual elision, but all too often seems to be an incompetent conveyor of sense, of seriousness, or an inadequate stand-in for a full stop?

In the University Library on a Wednesday night after the semester has ended

In the library on a Wednesday night after the semester has ended, you try to find an isolated table, but cannot escape the diversity of life that the library shelters in all seasons. The woman with red pants hidden behind a carrel twenty feet away cannot stop herself from burping over and over again. Occasionally, she murmurs, “excuse me” to the otherwise silent wing of the library. A wild-haired man with headphones zips past on his way to the bathroom, never to emerge.

You close your eyes in concentration. You can feel the weight of the pen in your hand. You are listening for the burping woman in the red pants – what could she have eaten? balloons? – when you hear a sudden disembodied voice declare, “Holy shitfucking fuck.”

You whirl around looking for a man in distress. The voice came from somewhere in the aisles of German literature, but you hear no footsteps, no creaking chairs, no other sign of human existence. You think of the story of the PhD student whose laptop – with the only copy of the thesis he’d been working on for four years – was stolen while he was in the hallway, talking on the phone. He put up posters pleading with the thief to email him the files. “Keep the computer,” he wrote in one desperate message, “but, for the love of God, give me back my thesis.” You don’t know if he ever got it back, or if he started over again or if he dropped out of school. You wonder how he felt leaving the library that night after all the fraught and pointless conversations with the staff and security, walking away from everything he’d written into the night.

The worst part of you envies him.

In the library, the ghostly voice does not come back. Life on the 9th floor returns to normal. You shift in your seat uncomfortably, holding tightly to your pen. The woman in the red pants burps.

The Art(lessness) of Fiction

A number of years ago, I read a novel in manuscript form, one that had begun life as a screenplay. The novel had been written by a sibling of a celebrity, and it was, I believe, the worst thing I have ever read. The writing was abysmal at every level, from spelling to sentence construction, theme to stage directions, subject-verb agreement to plot—which, with names and details changed, went something like this:

The story opens with two men driving around the desert, drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes. The weather is lousy. The desert appears to be rather near New York City. One of the men, called Pigeon, is rather feminine; his companion, Hambone, is masculine. Pigeon and Hambone drive and drive and drive. While they are driving, they talk, for the most part—with occasional digressions regarding vegetarianism, hermaphroditism, and the apocalypse—about how they hate women, as women are all either lesbians or deceitful, if not both; the men also discuss how much they would like to have sex with numerous women, both simultaneously and also cumulatively. This dialogue is interspersed with flashbacks to episodes from their shared past of colorful, complex sexual escapades and drug use. After a while, Pigeon and Hambone find what appears, at first, to be an abandoned farm; they are then surprised to discover that the farm is actually inhabited by an ancient prophet, who tells them, angrily, that Hambone is the Antichrist. He begins to chase them. Pigeon and Hambone drive away from the prophet in haste. A rabid bunny appears in the front seat of their car; the bunny bites Hambone, who blacks out.

Hambone wakes up two years later. All women on the planet are dead, due to a viral infection that only affected women. Most men have turned gay. The world has become, as far as Hambone can determine, a nightmarish, dystopic gay sex paradise, a world full of sadness, pornography, and explosions. Many of the remaining straight men—those who, under these conditions, did not turn gay, or undergo sex changes, and subsequently become transsexual prostitutes—commit suicide. The preserved bodies of dead women are whored out by morgues.

Hambone encounters two gay men, Shakespeare and Listerine, who have hybridized Christianity and Islam into a new strain of millenarianism. The nihilistic practice of their amalgamated faith involves blowing things up. Hambone joins them in their quest; together, they blow up a number of important landmarks. During a shootout with the authorities, Listerine is killed; Hambone finds tickets to Argentina in the dead man's shirt pocket. Hambone, alone, flies to Buenos Aires.

Later that same day, Hambone takes a bus tour of the pampas for fun. At a rest area, he leaves the bus and wanders out into the plains by himself for a while. Jetpack-clad policemen appear, hovering on the horizon; Hambone runs; the flying cops give chase. A sculptor named Rocky appears, pulling Hambone into a secret cave in the ground, saving him. Hambone and Rocky drive to New York on Rocky's motorcycle; there they cross paths with Pigeon, who has become a transsexual prostitute. Feeling ashamed, Pigeon commits suicide. Hambone and Rocky return to Argentina. Hambone confesses to Rocky that he loves him, even though he, Hambone, is straight. The two men fight each other with spears for some time; Rocky, after both men are exhausted from their spear fight, reveals a number of things to Hambone: that he is actually a she, the last woman alive on Earth; that she loves him; and that she is the second coming of the Christ.

Off in the distance, Hambone and Rocky can hear the sound of approaching jetpacks.

(The novel, to the best of my knowledge, has never been published.)