ON WEAK IN COMPARISON TO DREAMS (2023) BY JAMES ELKINS:

REVIEW ON SUBSTACK.

READ MY STORY IN THE METROPOLITAN REVIEW.

AND HERE IS MY POST ABOUT REVISING THE STORY:

HOW I REVISED I WON :)

GABY & ME BE ROMPING

YEAH I'M A BOXING COACH, WHAT'S IT TO YA?

1. GABY GONE

Gaby was off to the International Conference of Handsome Young Professionals in Mexico City. Of course I was skeptical of the ICHYP whose website brags,

there is not a greater agglomeration of handsome ambitious young men with money in the entire world!

I asked her, “you’re going to network? in Mexico?”

She responded, while hastily cramming her best outfits into a suitcase, “you never know where these guys can get you a job!”

“Why are you bringing so many bikinis?”

“Pool parties!”

I thought that was a good point, and anyway, nothing gets by me: I’m pretty much an undupable fellow, so I had no worries.

We celebrated the four year anniversary of the day we met, April 14th by re-enacting our first date: we had many drinks at the bar that usurped the now-defunct Hellcat Annie’s, and then I walked her over to a ruinous dilapidated spot on 50th and 11th and planted a sloppy frightening kiss on her amidst the tumbleweeds and errant debris.

Then I got on my knees and begged her to have sex with me.

She said no, and walked home.

The re-enactment is our yearly tradition. And I know it would spoil the verisimilitude, but sometimes I wish she would just capitulate to the sexbeg.

Anyway, the next day I drove her to the airport and waved goodbye.

Girlfriendless for the rest of the week, I was gonna have to thrust myself deep into male camaraderie.

2. REJECTION

Yes, I can be an ireful guy.

Let me describe to you one of the defining moments of my personal formation.

When I was in eighth grade, the quarterback of the varsity football team was a freshman who used to be my boogereating best friend in kindergarten. We’ll call him Stinky B.

I had intimate knowledge of what a sordid disgusting boogereater this fellow was; christlikely, magnanimously, I never told anyone. By the time he was in highschool it was too late to ruin his reputation, he was a God amongst mere mortals. His cosmos was not capacious enough for little old Harold.

After an eighth grade basketball game, I walked out into the hallway of the school we were playing at and Stinky B was standing with a group of some of the football players.

I walked over casually, I was going to brush right past them, and he goes,

“Hey, that was a great game.”

And he stuck out his hand to give me knuckles.

Obviously, I was both euphoric and surprised because objectively, I had not played a good game by any standard, let alone great. But euphoria took over my brain and I met his hand with a triumphant pound.

He said, “oh that wasn’t for you.”

He donned a look of mock-mortification and all his friends laughed and I turned around and the star of the team Rock Siciliano was there. The knuckles had been intended for him.

Oh reader, I dreamed of Stinky B’s grizzly murder nightly. It’s been fifteen years, and not a day goes by where I don’t fantasize about revenge.

That is a feeling that terrifies me: being small, being excluded. When I feel someone is trying to exclude me, I become a bloodthirsty mongoose of the mind, —I want them dead.

Literary readings often make me feel like that.

I had no plans, and I wanted to see what the Ops were up to, so I called up my buddy Otto F, —a comedian and fiction writer, —and he agreed to come with me to KGB.

One of the stars of the reading was Tony Tulathimutte of recent book-du-jour fame. I enjoyed his book Rejection and messaged him on Instagram to express my enjoyment. He did not answer me, nor even like the message. He is now my enemy.

I won’t say anything about his physical stature, but I will say that in the boxing event that me and Sean are trying to make happen which will pit literary stars against each other, it will be hard to find him a match-up. Unless Ocean Vuong is looking for a fight.

Tony’s reading was good and he got laughs (b*****d!). His work is very linguistically playful, but I think it also suffers from a certain cowardice, a drone’s eye view of immorality; he has no time for identifying himself with badness.

As subversive as it appears, it is still sanctimony.

He’s lacking the all-important principle of what Sean calls the self-merk. (By the way, who is trying to fight Sean Thor Conroe? Serious inquiries only.)

The I-to-world directionality of rottenness. An orientation which probably began with Montaigne. It’s hard for me to countenance a critique of the Other that doesn’t begin with Yourself.

Though of course, I could be hating out of personal vendetta. And I have been known to retract all critique as soon as I like somebody personally.

Otto F was a buoying presence throughout the whole event and we exulted in joyful mutual camaraderie to such an extent that I didn’t even freak out when a guy cut me in line to bark a drink from the surly bartender.

On the way home I gave Gaby a call. It was hard to hear her over the reggaeton and sounds of male giggling. I said, “where are you?”

She said, “networking! I’ll call you tomorrow!”

That girl is too ambitious for her own good.

3. IMBIBATION:THE BEGINNING OF JOY

The consumption of alcohol is an enormous part of male camaraderie.

Besides getting s*******d with Otto F, I got s*******d a few other times, with my other boys.

Just to catalogue how fickle and transmutable my perception of the world is, let me tell you my first impressions of the people I went out drinking with; firstly Eric and Lberg, both comedians. Eric I thought this string bean dork with these stupid jokey jokes I hope he drowns in the Hudson.

And then he invited me out for a margarita and was minorly flattering and now there’s nothing he could do to sunder my affinity.

Lberg I thought… well I won’t say what I thought because it was truly evil.

But one day Eric suggested that Lberg might be open to my friendship and now I recognize him for the earthy pearl he is.

The vibe was a bit funereal with them boys because somebody had anonymously mailed Lberg an English translation of Mein Kampf (1925) by Adolf Hitler, and he was spooked and morose.

He’s not the first comedian I know to receive that book in the mail. Somebody with a f*****g sick, twisted, f*****g fucked up mind is sending that to people as a prank and they better stop. NOW!

But I told them, “the vibe here is too funereal for me, boys” and I went to meet Ethan at my sanctuary, Local 42.

4. RINGO IS THE BEST BEATLE

I can’t imagine a haven more amenable to male camaraderie, —anywhere on this Earth, —than Local 42.

Me and Ethan were desperate to talk to some old guys at the bar. (By the way, Ethan is one of my few friends who I never initially had a negative opinion about; the negative feelings developed organically, over time.)

Two perfect seats opened up next to this mustached old regular who carries a walking-staff and kisses all the bartenders on the cheek. As we were about to swoop in, some turista nabbed it.

And both those guys proceeded to talk on the phone for the next hour and a half.

The mustached old regular would cover his mouth with his hand and whisper into his phone while his eyes darted around so he looked like he was ordering drone strikes. The only word I caught was, “when I was a kid…”

As I was getting a drink I heard this fellow who looked exactly like Ben Franklin tell the guy on the stool next to him, “there was a famous Irish writer named Joyce… You know him?”

And so I went back to my booth and said, “Ethan, we gotta sit next to that guy.”

Serendipitously, the guy on the stool next to Ben Franklin collapsed in a drunken pile and had to be dragged out of the bar, so we sidled up and took his place, eagerly.

The next stroke of fortune was I heard the guy say, “back when I lived in Ohio…”

I said, “you’re from Ohio?”

He said, “Youngstown.”

I said, “I’m from Steubenville.”

And we were off.

His name was Landon Jude Finnerty and he was a truck driver and a stagehand and a musician, —he’s a drummer but now his shoulders are too fucked up to drum so he can only play the guitar.

He was obsessed with The Beatles, especially Ringo, he really loved Ringo, and stopped listening to the radio when they started playing Nirvana.

Ethan, a connoisseur of every obscure band in the United States, started naming some of the stuff he likes and Landon was confused and disgusted.

The best thing about talking to a plastered lonely 70 year old at the bar is that they don’t really want you to say anything; anything you say, any question you ask, rather than show interest, just interrupts his monologue, so he doesn’t really take it into consideration.

Eventually, Landon told us about how the love of his life, Wanda Polishlastname died in a car accident in 1987 back in Youngstown, right after he moved to the city, right before she was supposed to come and live with him, and he wiped a tear from his right eye under his glasses, and then he turned to the bartender and said, “but I’m gonna marry you baby!” and then he got us all shots of Jameson and he restarted his monologue.

We really wanted Fernando to come and meet this guy. Because Fernando is a contrarian and also a quintessential 21st-century man, so we thought it would be quite a shock for Landon to communicate with someone like him.

(Fernando is my best friend if the primary criteria was mexicanness. He is also one of the first comedians I ever saw in the city. And I remember thinking this wimpy little f**k if this is the competition here I’m good!)

Fernando showed up and I asked him to tell Landon who his favorite Beatle was, and of course he goes, “obviously Ringo” and Landon just about had an orgasm.

It was time to get out of there so we got the bill. Apparently we had 19 of the $4 house beers. And I paid because Ethan just lost his job in a truly humiliating fashion because [redacted at Ethan’s request] and also I lied to him about how successful Tropicália was and he thinks I’m inordinately rich.

5. HE IS RISEN!

I headed back to Steubenville on Saturday to celebrate the resurrection of our lord Jesus Christ. And there’s no better place to do that than in one of America’s budding little theocracies.

There is a migrant invasion of domestic Catholics pouring into Steubenville, and I don’t mean to sound xenophobic, but they are plotting, and they envision a very specific future for this city.

I mean I got a copy of the local secular paper, the Herald Star just to see what’s going on.

The front page story was, “CROSS CARRIED FROM STEUBENVILLE TO WINTERSVILLE TO HONOR CHRIST” and then on the opinion page there was a full-spread opinion from the editorial staff entitled “HE IS RISEN!”

The battle for the future of Steubenville is raging in synecdoche in the mayoral election. We have a Catholic oligarch backed by Franciscan University versus a serial sexual harasser from a wealthy local family.

I said to my dad, “you know that guy is a sexual harasser?”

And he goes, “yeah and his brother tried to stick a bottle up a waitresses’s ass.”

To be fair to this candidate, a letter to the Editor from a friend of his did say, “I have admired [his] integrity and respect for everyone he meets for over 20 years.”

Really I came home to spend some time with my boy Lucky, my parents’ dog. He is an untrainable unruly carioca street dog that my mom bought for 5 reals from a homeless lady in Rio.

And you do get what you pay for.

He’s such a boy’s boy that all he wants to do is play with balls. He goes completely rabid. I bounced a basketball once outside, and he broke the screen on the window, jumped outside, assaulted me, took the basketball, and popped it.

Unable to play basketball, longing for Gaby, my penis too sore to keep masturbating, I went out drinking with Jacob Decker.

My neighbors and rivals the Larber Brothers were at the table next to us with their wives. Disdain was weighing down my arm like lactic acid but I managed to heave it up and wave and smile.

The older Larber is with this girl who I had a crush on in 7th grade. She was in 8th grade. We used to text, and I delusionally thought she liked me. Remember the QB from earlier, Stinky B?

Well one day this girl texted me, “OMG HAROLD THIS IS THE BEST DAY EVER!”

And I was ready for her love-confession.

But instead she goes, “I JUST GAVE STINKY B A HANDJOB!”

“Yay!” I said.

And now she’s with one of the Larber brothers, my bitter rival, who looks like an elderly baby. But maybe her type is elderly baby and I should respect that.

We sat in cordial close-quarter separateness for 45 minutes and then they left and I waved goodbye. I felt such a swell of generosity of spirit that I wrote them a note and left it in their mailbox,

That was fun. We should do it again sometime. :)

When I got home that night I was sick of boys, and I called Gaby.

She said, “omg Harold this has been the best conference ever, but I’m exhausted!”

“From what?”

“Oh you know, all that… talking.”

My garrulous girl. She’s gonna be so well connected!

* NOT EVERYONE CAN GO TO THE MOON

We are living in a Doofdom. There is a type that doesn’t seem to exist anymore: let’s call him the Serious Man. Men have abdicated their responsibility to the preservation of our (the culture’s) intellectual patrimony. The reasons for this may be myriad and difficult to pin down, but the truth of it is hard to argue.

Find me a man who really knows something; most of our intelligent stock have devoted themselves to professional corporate usury (mud; mire). The rest are rotting their brains with DraftKings boosts and video games.

I overheard an acquaintance talking about how he was so tired of rewatching Breaking Bad that he finally began to rewatch Mad Men.

Not everyone can go to the moon, but come on!

Even the supposed smart ones, our scions of tech and science and politics; most are unserious craven goofy spineless blobs.

This is not good.

Is there an antidote?

* BUMPING UGLIES

The narrator of Norman Rush’s National Book Award winning novel Mating (1991) is acutely aware of this man problem, and when she recognizes a serious man in Nelson Denoon, she literally crosses the Kalahari desert to be with him.

Nelson obliquely reminds our unnamed narrator of the paucity back in Dudville,

At moments everything seemed like a conspiracy against me, to force a choice, like Denoon’s theory of the characterological collapse of the male in the Western world, America in particular. As women get stronger and more defined, men get silly, violent, and erratic overall. I more than agreed… But why go on about this more than once, if the inner point was not to get me to feel panic about who else I could get if I abandoned Nelson, the clearsighted man, obviously one in a million, exempt from this piece of sociology.

The narrator of Mating is a 32 year old grad student whose name we never get.

We see her at a later point of her life and career in Mortals (2003) and we find out her name is Karen Ann Hoyt but,

Karen Ann hated her name, and that was because her mother, a simple person, at some point confessed to her that she chose Hoyt because it sounded like ‘hoity-toity’. And the name Karen Ann had been copied from some local subdebutante in the area who was always on the local news.

Karen Ann is living in Botswana in the 1980s and her anthropology thesis has just blown up: she was studying how food supplies affect fertility in hunter-gatherer tribes but found that the tribes weren’t as remote as she was expecting and her argument was otiose.

Rush’s characters are full of idealism that they try to impose on reality.

But obviously reality is always a pin in one’s balloon.

Thwarted by reality, an unserious person would take their popped balloon and go home grim & remorseful. Rush’s central characters have sturdier constitutions.

What makes them serious, settled people is their empirical and dialectical relationship to the world and each other.

Everything proceeds like in a Socratic dialogue: endless talk, endless thought, inching closer and closer to truth.

One thing the narrator of Mating cannot stand is lying,

I hate the mysterious, because it’s the perfect medium for liars, the place they go to multiply and preen and lie to each other. Liars are the enemy. They transcend class, sex and nation. They make everything impossible.

Lying interferes with the close attention required to pick up on another person’s “subtle bodies” a term that gives its name to the title of Rush’s last novel Subtle Bodies (2013),

But then her mother regularly declared that there was a mystical “subtle body” inside or surrounding or emanating from every human being and that if you could see it, it told you something. It told you about the essence of a person, their secrets for example. It was all about attending close enough to see them.

Nelson Denoon is not a liar (we and Karen become pretty sure: certainty qua certainty is not something you find in Rush’s novels but you have to become settled nonetheless, believing you have done your reasonable best to find the truth).

So basically this is the plot of Mating: our narrator hears that Denoon has started this matriarchal commune out in the middle of the desert called Tsau. She is bored, —not listless, none of the main characters in Rush’s novels are ever listless and if they are, they soon find a project to be convicted and immersed in, —and so she unwisely treks six days in the desert to find Tsau, and she does.

Her and Nelson become romantically involved and things in the commune start to break down (due mostly to masculine restlessness), so Nelson hastily tries to cross the desert on a mission to a neighboring town which fails drastically when he falls off his horse and breaks his leg. He has a mystical experience in the desert which alienates him from Karen when he returns. She ends up going back to the United States where she receives a cryptic message suggesting Tsau might need her.

Tsau might sound like a cult, but it’s really not.

It’s a marxist experiment in communal living founded by Nelson. Most of its inhabitants are poor women from the surrounding area who have been expelled from their tribes for various reasons.

There are men in Tsau but they can’t own anything and have no voting rights though they perform the most intensive physical labor (hence the ruinous restlessness).

The only makhoa (Setswana for whitey, plural) represented there are Nelson and Karen.

Tsau is a tremendous fictional construction. Rush gives us almost every conceivable detail about how the place works.

Karen isn’t supposed to be there. But her and Nelson tell everybody that she is an ornithologist who stumbled upon the place and she proves useful so they let her stay. But she asks herself, why does Nelson want her there,

Light broke. It was obvious. Denoon wanted to know what he had wrought at Tsau. What was Tsau, really? I was an almost ideal vehicle through which he could find out.

We end believing with the narrator that Tsau is a grand, noble, but ultimately failed experiment. Nelson can’t let it go, and that’s what ultimately dooms his love.

The conflict and collaboration between work and love is always acutely alive in Rush.

But the real glory of Mating is witnessing Nelson and Karen fall in love and stay in love.

In Subtle Bodies a character is eulogized with an excerpt from his beloved copy of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (which he bookmarked at page 847 hoping to savor the end).

Norman Rush has a Boswellian orientation toward the novel. It is clear that he believes capturing a personality in its minutest detail, writing a Life, is the task of the novelist, and many of his characters are actively engaged in that process.

Whatever Karen’s anthropology thesis was, it becomes a Life of Nelson Denoon. She lavishes keen, generous, hilarious attention on him the whole book. And that is the only type of attention that will be rewarded by the reveal of those all important subtle bodies, the truth behind the mask.

Here is the moment when she feels like their love is at its highest point in the sky, its perihelion (Rush’s style is extremely lucid careening propulsive; he sneaks in his erudition in the most fluid palatable ways),

I remember Denoon as now back at his workbench and holding a piece of glass up to the light. He looked absolutely beautiful to me at that moment, more beautiful than he ever had. This is a serious man, kept saying itself to me. Other men aren’t. What I was suddenly afraid of was that this moment was our perihelion, the closest we would ever approach or be, and that everything after this would transpire between bodies farther apart. I was thinking that if you looked back over the trajectory of every mating once it was over, there would be an identifiable perihelion. I couldn’t stand the idea that this was ours. I didn’t know why I thought it was, even. My eyes were hot. I had to leave. This is all hypothetical, I said, keeping it declarative and trying to keep any note of entreaty out. But I knew better.

What distinguishes Rush from his male peers of that generation is his ability to illustrate a nuanced, dialectical, capaciously accepting and private (a couple’s language becomes hermetic, they create their own idioverse: Rush’s coinage which means a closed-loop lexicon) picture of romantic love.

I’m generalizing of course, but it doesn’t seem to me that Roth or Updike or Cormac think that they can learn all that much from women, —except in a way that is alheial or occult.

Rush’s characters believe they can learn about reality from women, and they do.

And eroticism for those other guys becomes something mystical and perverse. For Rush, sex is just another part of the dialectic, a continuation of the conversation.

Nelson and Karen never stop talking, joking, discovering more about one another on a level of mutual respect that doesn’t preclude annoyance disgust embarrassment (this is what I mean by capacious: making room for disappointment past the ick),

He loved me. I shouldn’t be upset. Then he confessed for the second time he regretted giving me the impression when we were discussing Middlemarch that he’d finished it. Before I could remind him that he’d already confessed this he was going further, saying he’d never even begun it, that he knew what was in it only from what he’d picked up from other women discussing it. But now he was going to read it, he swore. Here a blur ensues. We went on to other things.

Here is when Nelson first says I Love You,

Something fell off a shelf in the middle of the night and when I said, What was that? he said The scales falling from my eyes. I love you.

* FOR ELSA, BEAUTIFUL AND GOOD, PERFECT FRIEND, WITH GRATITUDE

There is a not uncommon critique of Mating which jives with this One-star-take on Goodreads,

This man becomes the centre of her being and the motivation behind her every move - including walking solo across the desert, almost at the cost of her life. I tried to push through, but her internal scheming and obsession with this man became sickening, pathetic, and offensive to me as a woman.

(This seems to be the reaction of someone who unfortunately has never found a potential mate of desert-crossing worth.)

But I can see why somebody would find the following biological reductionism of the kind Karen Ann engages in a bit distasteful,

I had to realize that the male idea of successful love is to get a woman into a state of secure dependency which the male can renew by a touch or pat or gesture now and then while he reserves his major attention for his work in the world or the contemplation of various forms of surrogate combat men find so transfixing. I had to realize that female-style love is servile and petitionary and moves in the direction of greater and greater displays of servility whose object is to elicit from the male partner a surplus of face-to-face attention… Equilibrium or perfect mating will come when the male is convinced he is giving less than he feels is really required to maintain dependency and the woman feels she is getting more from him than her servile displays should merit.

Personally I find it thrilling and funny (it’s so obviously tongue-in-cheek: the contemplation of various forms of surrogate combat men find so transfixing); and this is a very smart, cerebral narrator acting irrationally and trying to justify her behavior by the most rational means possible.

When Nelson Denoon is in the hospital after his disastrous venture in the desert, Karen considers an insane plan for continuance,

This was connected with desperate fantasies I was having vis-a-vis his seed, assuming the worst had happened. It humiliates me to admit that I was wondering if I could get him erect and then get over him and capture his seed. I could only contemplate doing this if first I established I could get him erect.

Karen Ann is a hopeless romantic. And as we read more of Rush’s work, it becomes clear he is a hopeless romantic himself.

For good reason!

When he was 19 he walked into a building at Swarthmore College and saw a young woman chatting with a circle of potential suitors. He interrupted one of the young men’s questions and dunked on him, gave him a reading recommendation and walked away; Odysseus slaying Penelope’s suitors.

The young woman went back to her dorm room and told her roommate that she found the man she was gonna marry. And she was right.

That’s how Elsa and Norman met. They’ve been married for 70 years!

Norman Rush didn’t publish his first book, Whites (1986), until he was 53.

For those of you keeping track at home, that’s a very late debut. Which I think is an argument for the primacy of prose literature over any other art form. Precocity is the domain of music, poetry, and even comedy and the visual arts.

One jocund youthful day the afflatus might bong you and you’ll spit out some eternal jewel.

That’s pretty rare in prose literature (really only Frankenstein comes to mind as a counterpoint) because the name of the game is life experience and labor.

By his own admission Norman was wasting much of his time with over-Joycean stories,

James Joyce was a wondrous and calamitous influence on me. Interspersed along the way—having a family, running a book business, too much reading and drinking, and too much perfectionism. And then, chiefly and for much too long, I wrote agonizingly experimental stories that simply baffled editors.

Elsa told him,

She said to me, Consider maybe that there are some very smart people out there who are not interested in stories that require a seminar.

But the breakthrough came when he decided to write the first story of Whites in his wife’s voice, the voice he went on to use for Mating,

But the real model for the narrator—I've hardly tried to hide this—was Elsa. Her fearlessness of thought; her determination, almost to the point of parody, not to be deluded, tricked, deceived; her comic sense of life, and a totally empirical kind of intelligence, as opposed to Denoon's more theoretical intelligence. She's pretty much a straight lift.

He profusely dedicates Mating to her,

Everything I write is for Elsa, but especially this book, since in it her heart, sensibility, and intellect are so signally, —if perforce esoterically, —celebrated and exploited. My debt to her, in art and life, grows however much I put against it.

(He beautifully dedicates all four his books to her.)

The most uxorious (wife-obsessed), —and I think the best, —of his books is his follow up to Mating: —Mortals which was published in 2003.

Mortals is a re-telling of Paradise Lost from the very claustrophobic third person perspective of our Adam, Ray Finch, a Milton scholar slash CIA agent based in Botswana who is completely obsessed with his Eve: his wife Iris.

But like the narrator of Mating tells us,

One difference between men and women is that women really want paradise. Men say they do, but what they really mean by it is absolute security, which they can obtain only through utter domination of the near and dear and the environment as far as the eye can see, how else?

Ray is the ur-Man (and I use this phrase to suggest that across his four books, Rush is trying to paint the picture of the eternal man and the eternal woman, a primordial married couple in shifting guises like in Finnegans Wake, and I would not be surprised to find out that is exactly how he intended it; I was counting the chapters of all his books trying to find a pattern: Subtle Bodies is 53, Mortals is 38, Mating is 8, which adds up to 99; Whites which is a book of short stories doesn’t number any of the stories but on the title page there is a single number: 1. Across four books he has put out 100 total chapters. Serendipity is not so exacting.)

Ray is obsessed with control.

At the beginning of the novel he doesn’t realize that what is making Iris wicked & away, eager to wriggle out of his close scrutiny, is the fact that she loathes his job. She is tired of the lies and mystery necessary to his profession. And she is very lonely in Botswana.

Ray considers the problem that was very relevant to Adam in the garden,

The question of women as a subject came down to their unhappiness. And what was happening was that the general unhappiness of women was turning into a force and developing institutions and mandibles whereas before it had been a kind of background condition like the temperature, as he had thought, something that rose and fell within certain stable limits. He thought of his mother’s unhappiness. Iris was not what he would call a feminist and yet, if he was anywhere near understanding what was going on with her, she was part of this great unhappiness.

But the problem is that Ray is too trapped in his own patterns of thinking to do anything about her unhappiness in the real world.

To Iris at the moment, he is ineffectual and useless; one could even say unserious, which is the worst position for a husband to find himself in.

Iris is eager to be tempted.

Enter Satan: Dr. Davis Morel.

* A DIGRESSION ON WHITEY IN AFRICA

Mortals struggled critically from its own ambition.

The normally astute John Updike succumbs to a little jealousy in his review which leads him to the laughable claim,

Ray’s apologetic, I-hate-myself attitude about involvement with the agency seems, after September, 2001, rather dated; instead of being considered too meddlesome and sinisterly omnipotent, the C.I.A. appears to have been, with other national watchdogs, sound asleep at the switch.

What Updike doesn’t seem to realize is that the bumbling and needless nature of the CIA’s activities is exactly what makes it so pernicious, something Rush captures perfectly.

Updike and Rush are almost the exact same age. Mostly Updike confined his domestic work domestically to Pennsylvania and environs (and some of his work is very good).

But before we move on, let me quote you some parts of his attempt to represent another culture in his 1995 novel Brazil.

Rush wrote three books about Africa and not once got remotely as racial as Updike gets here.

Here is white girl Isabel checking out Tristão whose father has “pure African blood, as pure as blood can be in Brazil”,

Now she studied his face: the full Negro features were carved on a frame that had never known gluttony, with a childish shine to the prominent eyes, a rampartlike erectness to the bony brow, and a coppery tinge to his crown of tightly kinked hair…

And a couple pages later when they have their eternally incriminating lusty interracial bang,

If she was a virgin, f*****g her became religious, a kind of eternal incrimination. But his blood, helplessly pounding in the yam he carried before him… her white buttocks parted, showing a vertical brown lining between them, a permanent stain of skin around her anus, slightly disgusting him.

What do you think his yam is? Let me stop.

But it’s clear that Updike’s experience of another culture is an exotic toe-dip.

I don’t know for a fact, but I don’t think many real brasilians were consulted in the making of Brazil.

So what are Norman Rush’s African credentials?

In the mid 70s he was at a party and he and his wife got into a political argument with this dude. And if there’s one thing Rush couldn’t be more interested in it’s politics. He even spent two years in prison in his teens for dodging the Korean War draft.

But it turns out the dude was running the Peace Corps and he was looking for a husband/wife team who had been together for at least twenty years to place as directors in Africa.

They went to DC for the interview, treating it carelessly, and they crushed.

They were supposed to be placed in Benin, but they got their Bs mixed up and ended up at the Botswana guy’s desk. He loved them, and sent them off.

They spent five years from 1978 to 1983 working in Botswana. The work was daily and grueling. They took a single one week vacation in five years.

Rush didn’t write a word of fiction while he was down there but he filled up notebooks upon notebooks and when he got back home he was a different artist.

Whitey in Africa, or in any other culture is a trepidatious proposition.

But Norman Rush is a Great American Writer because of his engagement with Botswana rather than despite it. He recognizes the American yearn to remake the other in your own image; the pitfalls of Americans looking in other cultures to find themselves.

I actually knew about Botswana because in highschool after my French teacher Mr. Swaykus died, —and he was my favorite teacher after my English teacher Miss C died (yes, my two favorite teachers died before I was a Junior; 30% of the whole faculty), —we got a substitute who ended up staying on for the rest of the year.

His name was Mr. Leonard and he was from Boston, but he had lived for ten years in Botswaner (which is what he called it in his thick accent). He didn’t know any French at all, so he would spend most of the class regaling us with tales about Botswaner.

I remember thinking, If this goofball can spend a decade out in Africa, anybody can live anywhere.

He ended up getting fired at the end of the year which was very sad for me because I got a big kick out of him. He told me with tears in his eyes. He couldn’t believe it.

I had to really bite my tongue not to say, Well… you don’t speak any f*****g French.

The opening line of Mating is

In Africa, you want more, I think.

But Rush has no illusions about America’s complicated and often pernicious influence abroad. We are constantly faced with the tension inherent in the cultureclash.

Sometimes a lakhoa (Setswana for whitey, singular) acts foolish and Rush makes sure we’re mortified.

Here’s one half of a feuding couple in the story “Near Pala” in Whites describing what they did with a papaya tree that looked dead in their yard,

So we hauled and pushed on the trunk of the poor tree and strained and pulled it over—uprooted it, Gareth and myself. It was his idea: we must just straight off do this, get it over. Then, with the crash, the servants come out. They had funny looks on. Dineo said so quietly, ‘Oh, Mma, you have killed the male.’ We didn’t understand. It seems the pawpaw grow in pairs, couples, male and female. The male tree looks like a phallus—no foliage to it really. The female needs the male in order to bear. They take years to reach the heights ours had. Then the female died. The staff had been eating pawpaws from our tree for years. It was a humiliation.

Rush believes it is essential to familiarize yourself with the culture you are inhabiting. A frustration expressed by both Karen and Ray is the lack of a universal language, how tedious and frustrating it is to have to translate, interpret, communicate across gulfs.

It is part of the world-governing dialectic that Rush believes in: being confronted with strife or difference and re-evaluating your own behaviors and expectations.

The impulse is anthropological; you can clearly see that by the glossary of Setswana terms in the back of Mating and Mortals.

But there is a barrier against total immersion.

Some British actors by random accident end up in Tsau. They’re only gonna stay for a few days and they decide to put on some scenes from Shakespeare. Nelson Denoon has beef with the main actor who is brilliantly named Harold.

So he decides to put on a counter production of a style of theater he has been working on with the women in Tsau which is based strongly in local traditions.

It doesn’t go well, Karen is completely embarrassed,

I felt like shriveling and concurrently felt disloyal over my embarrassment, seeing myself as callowly identifying with the white West and turning my back on the person I lived with because his attempt to tease out and concretize the voice of the formerly oppressed was too hubristic for me, at least when I had to witness the attempt not en famille but in the company of educated members of the West cultured in ways I happened to be impressed by. We all love hubris in a mate but we prefer it to be in moderation.

As immersed as he’s been in the community, his show of complete submersion and integration is a total flop because he doesn’t have the right to the traditions and experiences of the people he’s devoted his life to championing no matter how much work he does on their behalf.

* SO LATE THEIR HAPPY SEAT

Ray Finch is a CIA agent in Botswana.

His bored wife Iris starts going to therapy with this newly arrived American, the handsome, upright, and intelligent Dr. Davis Morel, who is quixotically intent on ridding the Batswana of their Christianity.

Morel thinks Christianity is all a big lie. He is trying to convince people that Jesus was an apocalyptic Jew whose sole philosophy was that we could convince Yahweh to intervene in our corrupt human society by acting like little obedient babies.

He thinks Jesus’s mission is a failure,

The story of Jesus the Jew is the story of an experiment in mass psychology that fails. It fails. It is a complete story whose end features the disciples of Jesus denying him, and running away, and he himself, the poor man, asking Yahweh why he has forsaken him, why he has not come downstairs, alas, alas, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? are the hardest words to hear.

Paul is really the one who evilly adapted other philosophies and religions into the malevolent thing that become Christianity.

Morel thinks explaining that to people will divest them of their belief.

We get his whole theory in fascinating detail.

You do learn things in every Rush book (and what is a novel that teaches you nothing even worth?).

Like we get the story of Nongqawuse, a Xhosa woman who, inspired by a vision of Jesus, convinced the people in her tribe to kill all their cattle in order to bring about God’s kingdom on earth. It was a complete disaster and led to decades of famine. This is one of Morel’s examples of the bad influence of Christianity in Africa.

Ray Finch knows Morel is a problem before he even knows he’s a problem, and he starts spying on him.

Through a complicated series of events, Finch’s spying leads a UK-educated Batswana named Kerekang on an insurgency mission in the countryside, setting fire to cattle and property. Moronic CIA meddling goes horribly wrong.

The then-eminent Michiko Kakutani also had mixed feelings about Mortals,

We are stuck for the duration inside Ray's head, or rather, since Mr. Rush has opted for a stilted third-person narration, we are stuck inside a tiny, claustrophobic room with Ray, one of the most narcissistic, self-deluding and defensive heroes to come along in a while.

She’s right about most of this but wrong in giving these facts a negative valence.

For one, Ray is not supposed to be good. He is an annoying supra-uxorious American CIA agent in Africa who has needless beef with his brother and who metaphorically suffocates his wife.

But the success of this book lies in seeing Ray suffer through this morass and step into a more morally deft life on the other side.

And the narration is not stilted, it is painstaking and fastidious, it accumulates like Knausgaard, and the writing starts off deceptively simple and builds into something like a fluffless ornanity.

Which makes it so that when the narrative voice is beautiful, we don’t feel like we’re being taken on a lyrical flight of fancy, it feels like the most natural thing in the world. And it also allows for the sharpness of the dialogue to stick out like light in a chiaroscuro.

Here is a moment when Ray is overcome by sorrow later in the book,

His eyes were filling with tears. It was unusual. It was philosophical. It was a generic sorrow for human beings caught in situations like theirs, the three of them, humans making declarations they meant at the time and that got undone and swept away by perverse events, the perversity of the future as it arrived so clumsily, giantly, smashing things. That was what it was. Except for the part that was about self-pity, that was what it was.

Does this sound like the most self-deluded narrator ever like Kakutani suggests?

It sounds more like Proust to me, emerging into clarity.

Lucidity is obviously a virtue for Rush and the characters he wants us to see as successes achieve this.

Here is Ray and Iris having a conversation while she is in the United States with her sister, their first time apart in 17 years,

The love of a woman with a funny mind is the definition of paradise, he thought…

‘This is what I want,’ Iris said. ‘If I die first, this is what I want you to do. Take my ashes and put them in an urn on the coffee table and then every now and then lift the lid and shout the latest down into it, whatever is going on.’

‘Then you do the same.’

‘Don’t say it. I can’t stand if you die first. It’s worse if you die than if I do.’

‘Please don’t say that and please let’s not have this conversation when you’re there and I can’t hold you.’ Save you, was what he meant.

‘I’m wretched without you,’ she said, her voice very low.

The love of a woman with a funny mind is the definition of paradise. Can you imagine Updike writing something like that?

What comes through strongly in all of Rush’s writing is that he knows what it is to profoundly love and respect a romantic partner.

We know the entire time reading Mortals that Eve is going to eat the apple. Rush recognizes like we all should that the story of Eve’s transgression is about (to not mince words) Eve f*****g the devil.

But it is an excruciating process. Especially since we see how keenly Iris and Ray love each other. And they do, despite how annoying he can be.

Like Ray, we know she’s going to this brilliant, handsome therapist and she’s saying things like,

She sighed, turned, and said musingly, ‘Do you know that I don’t know if your penis is particularly large or not?’

It is, by God, he thought, outraged. But what was this. It was pure provocation.

She said, ‘You claim it is, but how do I know, really? I’m almost a virgin, I mean I was almost a virgin when I met you.’

He was agitated. He had to keep himself under control. The tone had to be light. This was new. He could say, ‘Gulp he said,’ but that was witless. Anxiety was doing this to her. She was flailing. She was being random.

I was pissed off on Ray’s behalf just reading that.

But she’s right! There’s nothing exactly wrong with what she’s saying. The provocation there is that she’s dealing in the truth. Her transgression is saying the things she’s not supposed to say out of benevolent-lying.

Rush is very attuned the comedy of sex. That exchange took place in a chapter called, “I Would Like to Reassure About My Penis.”

My favorite story in Whites is the last one, “Alone in Africa”.

Frank is an American dentist in Botswana whose wife is out of town. We know from an earlier story that his wife is an avid extracurricular seductress. Completely unlike Iris, she makes a sport out of cheating on her husband; that’s her cure to boredom and the nagging metaphysical questions of life.

Frank doesn’t know any of that, he’s never cheated on her.

But she’s alone on vacation in Europe and he’s all alone in his house and a young local woman shows up at his door under the guise of being his cook while his wife is gone. Really she wants to have sex with him for money. The woman is pushy and he decides, What the hell.

As the opening of Subtle Bodies tells us,

Genitals have a life of their own, his beloved Nina had said at the close of an argument over whether even the most besotted husband could be trusted one hundred percent faced with the permanent sexual temptations the world provided.

Thankfully there’s condoms in the house because his wife,

was a variestist who came up with fantasies that involved condoms. How many guys with postfertile wives would have condoms lying around in an emergency like this?

We know, obviously, that she really has condoms to betray him.

(Also this optimistic balance is alive throughout all of Rush’s work. Yes Frank’s wife is betraying him, but here is a little positive comeuppance just for him.)

But as they’re about to get down to business, the young woman, Moitse’s little sisters start making a racket outside, teasing her. Which draws the attention of the nosey superChristian next door neighbor.

Frank rushes to the door in his robe, condom still on his dick and the neighbor basically barges his way in. Frank is sure he’s gonna walk in and see the naked Moitse and her little sisters hiding under the kitchen table but when they walk in,

Moitse, fully dressed, was sitting at a stool by the sink. She had a towel across her knees and the bowl of sugar peas in her lap. On the floor, sitting facing her with their legs straight out, were her sisters. They were watching her face fixedly. She was showing them how to string peas. Each of the younger sisters was clutching a handful of peas. There were little piles of strings on the floor. Christie [the neighbor] was silent.

And just as Christie walks away from his house,

A draft stirred Frank’s bathrobe: out of the folds the condom dropped, like a fallen blossom.

But now Moitse is gone. She had to take her sisters home. We think. But as Frank lays down to go to sleep,

There was a scraping sound at the window above him, the sound of nails on the flyscreen. He recognized it. He sat up straight. She was back. She was back.

Characters in Rush always come back.

* FORTY DAYS IN THE DESERT

If I had to guess what Norman Rush’s favorite part in the bible is I would say that it’s the time Jesus spends in the desert before he begins his public ministry.

Nothing will reveal the truth about you to you like hunger desolation silence and suffering. Christ is tempted by the devil and it solidifies his mission.

The narrator of Mating ventures out into the desert and it solidifies her mission to get to Tsau and love Denoon. After almost giving up on her sixth day in the desert she decides to walk all night as long as her ox can handle it,

Night came and the idea of camping was unthinkable because, as I saw it, only impetus could save us. We had to reach Tsau. We would go with the water we had and forget about the last water point…

And the final reason for continuing was that a vulture couple had picked us up during the day and was following us. That was not what we needed. And vultures leave us alone during the night. They go someplace and roost. There was a chance, I thought, that something more attractively protomoribund than we two might detain them on the morrow.

Ray is also sent out into the desert because of the business he inadvertently initiated with Kerekang.

S**t goes totally wrong and he ends up the prisoner of a koevoet: a South-African counterinsurgency police force; in a scenario Kakutani describes as part of,

oddly generic references to political and ethnic tensions in the country during the early 90's

When the conflict could literally not be more peculiar and specific.

This was after traveling for several days in a car that Iris helped him pack up. She also packed him some reading material, including one novel: Madame Bovary.

A novel about a famously adulteress young wife. Which of course drives him crazy.

He has lots of time to think in prison which leads to thoughts like,

Death was bad, but not as bad as someone else licking your wife’s c**t.

But guess who gets thrown into his cell one day? Dr. Davis Morel. Whom Iris sent looking for him.

With lots and lots and lots of time to shoot the s**t, they get down to brass tacks,

Ray said, ‘Tell me now. Be me. Be me, asking.’ He was willing the truth to come out of Morel.

He could feel Morel composing himself.

Morel said, ‘Okay then. It’s true, I love her. We are lovers, yes. So okay.’ It was clear he had spoken slowly to keep his tone under control.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Ray heard himself say.

…

‘No, but your intentions. I mean, you want to have her, take her. That is, you’re looking at this as serious, a permanent thing.’

‘That is what I want,’ Morel said.

It was difficult to keep talking. He made himself go on.

‘You’d marry her, you’d like to. Once I’m on the other side of the horizon.’

‘You know we haven’t advanced to that. I don’t want to flatter myself and say I know more about what she wants than I really do. But, yes, of course I would. Of course.’

I have to say, I was completely heartbroken by this scene. Despite expecting it for the first 450 pages of the book; after being stuck in Ray’s head for so long I found the confession unbearable.

Ray comports himself bravely and heroically in the midst of the war and realizes what he should’ve realized all along, a truth that would’ve saved him from all this Iris-grief: he should leave the CIA.

Why did Iris betray him though?

Here she is, like Eve explaining herself,

‘Also you were away when this was developing. I mean when it got serious, this serious. That’s no excuse, I know. But the truth is I wanted to do it. I wanted that. I was attracted to Davis. I was in a state of temptation that turned intense sooner than I was prepared for, and you were away. It turned intense. What I thought was that I could do it and then see, see how I felt… and I think, I think maybe I was assuming that the chances were okay that it wasn’t going to be the greatest thing in the world and that I would conclude that, finally, but in the meantime I would have gotten something out of my system. I know this is crude, me being very crude. I think it’s the kind of thing men do and…’

‘You have to stop for a minute. This is hard for me, my girl, my girl. Ah Jesus.’

‘And I don’t know if maybe I thought once I had been through it, through something forbidden, that it would be over and we could be back together.’

The time in the desert changes everything.

* HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL

Rush’s characters are frequently confronted with their own personal doom, but it is never a dead end because they are adaptable. They believe in the process of adjusting to what the world gives us because they believe in truth and knowledge.

And they believe in the future of the world.

In Rush’s last book, Subtle Bodies (2013) the final manifestation of Karen/Nelson and Ray/Iris (who all have discussed having children), Ned and Nina are trying to get pregnant, and we are led to believe that they succeed.

There’s a reason Christ, —in the world of Rush’s novels, —is not a salvific presence; we are the only ones who can save ourselves, by seeking the truth and acting on behalf of that truth.

It is an old-school radically un-nihilistic philosophy: you can know and you can act. And your actions matter. This world is bereft of fate; it is pure contingency. Christ the boots-on-the-ground rabblerouser, the desert-endurer is the figure of interest, —not the messiah risen from the dead.

So it’s not surprising that despite the hellmouth (Rush’s coinage) these characters confront, every book ends on a hopeful note.

Karen might’ve gone off to the United States in Mating but the book ends with her receiving a message from Tsau and deciding at the end to return,

I’m coming.

Why not?

And in Mortals we see her years later, a Serious Woman, leading the charge Denoon started with him diminished and sickly but still by her side,

They’re a success already, visually, Ray thought. Together they communicated valiancy, if there was such a word, that and an impression of worthiness and splendid weariness, aided of course by what the viewer knew about them, but still… They had glamour, this pair. They really did.

Subtle Bodies ends with the main guy Ned at a protest against the Iraq War that he organized, believing that the protest will be efficacious in stopping the war.

The last word of the book is a positive optimistic “No” (there’s Joyce again, he’s everywhere in Rush).

Which of course has a ring of irony because we know what happened. But I don’t think it’s meant as a cruel joke, I think it’s a paean to continue to try, try, try.

Don’t become complacent in the struggle to rid the world of cruelty and dishonesty and stupidity.

But my favorite ending is that of Mortals.

The most moving part of Paradise Lost is what happens after the fall, after Adam and Eve have the first nasty f**k in human history and then they’re vituperating each other and then Eve comes up with her little schemes to stick it to God.

But then Adam says, you know what, let’s chill, we can endure this life, together. And he forgives her,

But rise, let us no more contend, nor blame

Each other, blamed enough elsewhere, but strive

In offices of love, how we may lighten

Each other’s burden in our share of woe.

Ray, —gone from the CIA, separated from his wife for the first time in his adult life, working at a school he founded out in the bush around South Africa (trying to do good!), —is changed; and all he can think about is forgiving Iris, he wants her again for them to mutually lighten their share of woe, and he sends her a letter,

I am writing Lives, just my brother’s so far, and it’s not finished. There will be more.

I am full of love for you, but you can come however you feel about me. I have a way to let you know where I am and I will use it in a short time.

Love,

Your husband,

Ray.

And if we’ve learned anything about Rush, Iris will go be with Ray again.

They will love each other. And they will try their best to do good in the world.

Norman Rush has written four books that serve as a manifesto against Doofdom. Here are serious people living seriously. Not serious in a dry pedantic way. Serious as funny, error-prone, romantic, and striving. We can still be good, we can still be smart, we can keep learning about the world and each other.

Things are never as hopeless as they seem.

Your actions can save you.

If you’ve ever read any Rush please comment and let me know what you thought. And if you have any longer form matters to discuss about life or literature please email me at contactharoldrogers@gmail.com.

AN EXCERPT FROM MY DAD'S BOOK I, BOOKIE

BENEVOLENCE CERTAINLY HAS ITS LIMITS. . .

AN EARLY DRAFT OF WHAT WILL BECOME DOM PEDRO & THE CARAVELS (2029). . .

THE HUMPTY DUMPTY MANIFESTO

HUMPTY DUMPTY (FSG 2026) BY HAROLD. . .

MY 28 FAVORITE NOVELS

AN ALL-TIME HAROLD CLASSIC:

NANA'S FUNERAL :(

ON ART VS LOVE

READ THE WHOLE POST ON SUBSTACK

Let’s start easy. Taking our clue from the most notoriously difficult novel of the 20th century, ULYSSES (1922) by James Joyce, with its eminently comprehensible opening paragraph:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

—Introibo ad altare Dei.

The novel opens on Stephen Dedalus’s frenemy and soon-to-be-ex-roommate Buck Mulligan who is plump and stately, a rich robust relief, a goading contrapunct, of emaciated and pauperish Stephen who is deadbroke and hungry.

I guess we do run into our first difficulty: the latin at the end of the passage. But those are just the first words of the latin mass. Buck is doing a fake mass as a joke.

The whole opening chapter is basically boisterous Buck f*****g around with grim moody funereal Stephen.

Buck’s talking about how he needs to give Stephen more clothes (brokeass Stephen is already wearing his pants) and he says he has a grey pair to toss him, and Stephen says that he can’t wear them if they are grey. And Buck goes,

—He can’t wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror. Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers.

The reason twentytwoyearold Stephen is in such a bleak mood is because his mother is in fact dead: Buck says he killed her because while she was on her death bed, she asked Stephen to kneel down and pray with her and he refused.

Though Stephen believes in the integrity of not kneeling kowtow to a God he don’t believe in, the moment haunts him,

Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown grave clothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes… A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

I want you to remember that line: pain, that was not yet the pain of love.

Is it too early to say that Stephen is Hamlet? Ok, Stephen is Hamlet. But we won’t fixate on that now. Basically though, he is griefstricken, grieffrozen.

Buck says,

—The fellow I was with last night says you suffer from g.p.i… general paralysis of the insane.

Like Hamlet, the immensity of death has made him incomprehensible inward inscrutable in a way that looks like insanity.

Does it matter to you that Stephen Dedalus is the same age that James Joyce was on June 16, 1904, that he had lost his own mother to a sudden bout of cancer in the same way Stephen lost his, that he was out in Paris, dawdling around the library with his literary aspirations, under the guise of going to medical school (though his french was not nearly good enough to understand the technical lectures) not eating for 30 hours at a time due to emptypockets, writing harried letters home begging for money from his financially desultory family, making his mother weep so worried for her son until her and his father would scrape and scrounge a few bucks that the spendthrift Joyce would immediately blow, until the real Joyce, the fake Stephen, was yanked out of this Parisian fantasy back to Dublin to sit at his mother’s bedside while she endured a brutal illness and end and sent his convivial wastrel of a father off the pitiable deep end and plunged the robust Joyce clan (it seems like he had about 100 sisters) into ruin?

Joyce gives us a very loving (love in the form of careful attention), if true-to-his-detriment, portrait of his father in this book.

Stephen’s sister Dilly Dedalus is standing on the curb listening to an auctioneer sell off lovely cosy curtains she yearns for and her dad, Simon, pulls up on her,

—Stand up straight for the love of the lord Jesus, Mr. Dedalus said. Are you trying to imitate your uncle John the cornetplayer, head upon shoulders? Melancholy God!

Dilly shrugged her shoulders. Mr. Dedalus placed his hands on them and held them back.

—Stand up straight, girl, he said. You’ll get curvature of the spine. Do you know what you look like?

He let his head sink suddenly down and forward, hunching his shoulder and dropping his underjaw.

—Give it up father, Dilly said. All the people are looking at you.

Mr. Dedalus drew himself upright and tugged again at his moustache.

—Did you get any money? Dilly asked.

—Where would I get any money? Mr. Dedalus said. There is no one in Dublin who would lend me fourpence.

—You got some, Dilly said, looking in his eyes.

After making fun of his daughter in a scene I find extremely charming, Dilly turns it on Simon: she knows that he got some money because he’s drunk, she can tell he’s drunk, once again he drank away the family money.

He’s humiliated by her recognition and snaps,

You’re like the rest of them, are you? An insolent pack of little b*****s since your poor mother died… Wouldn’t care if I was stretched out stiff. He’s dead. The man upstairs is dead.

Are you surprised to find a scene like this in a towering work of Difficult Modernism?

I read this scene to Gaby in my effort to prove that ULYSSES is actually easy and for everybody. She found it likewise charming, but her reaction was also like, So? Can’t you just get something like this in a contemporary novel?

That’s a very good point. And as Pound tells us in his ABCs of Reading, you can’t fall in love with anachronism in an old work: i.e. you can’t be impressed by a word just cause it’s old, or by a scene just cause it’s recognizable of life 100 years later.

Still, this scene is exquisitely perceptive, and is Tolstoyan in its realism (Joyce adored Tolstoy). It culminates a few pages later when Stephen sees her, “Dilly’s high shoulders and shabby dress” and she’s holding a book in her hand, a French primer. Stephen told her about Paris and now she wants to learn French.

—What did you buy that for? he asked. To learn French?

She nodded, reddening and closing tight her lips.

Show no surprise. Quite natural.

—Here, Stephen said. It’s all right. Mind Maggy doesn’t pawn it on you. I suppose all my books are gone.

—Some, Dilly said. We had to.

She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death.

We.

Agenbite of inwit. Inwit’s agenbite.

Misery! Misery!

Stephen feels bad for his family, for his sisters, but he also has a calling to be a great artist, and if he’s gonna do what he’s gotta do, he can’t let Dilly drown him, and he can’t succumb to his mother’s request that he pray with her.

Ok, there is a weird word in what I just quoted: Agenbite. We were easing into it, but let’s escalate a little bit now. “Agenbite of inwit” is a phrase that Stephen thinks very early on and it becomes (like many, many things) a motif thru-out the book.

Basically it’s an anglosaxon word that means conscience or guilt, and it’s important to Joyce’s project because of how the meaning of the word is expressed in the word itself: inwit is obviously your inner wit, right? and the agenbite: it’s biting at you again and again. The word is what it is; as Samuel Beckett would say about Finnegans Wake (the culmination of Joyce’s project with language):

Here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics.

Ok, let’s pick up a thread I put down.

Why read Joyce’s work autobiographically?

Well, I think when you’re talking about a musty book fusting on our shelves unused, it’s good to dust it off, remind people that this book didn’t spring out of the ether a codified classic; it’s a product of a real dude who was really out here, devoting his life to writing these big goofy books, in exile from his home city nearly his entire life, married (Joyce once said facetiously that he couldn’t really admire Jesus Christ b/c he never did the hardest thing a man could do: Live with a woman), raising two children while almost constantly broke, bouncing around from city to city: and these books cost him, besides his sweat and labor, f*****g TROUBLE.

People were literally getting arrested for printing excerpts of ULYSSES (from what you’ve read so far, you’re probably like why? but be patient), nobody wanted to publish this s**t, —sometimes you hear, Nobody would wanna publish a book like ULYSSES now, Nobody wanted to publish it f*****g THEN!, —until he serendipitously ran into Sylvia Beach (the owner of Shakespeare & Co.) at a party, and she was so impressed by him, that she who had never published a book, decided to put it out.

REAL ART CREATES REAL CHALLENGES to the artist (and his family and friends), to the public, to institutions.

That’s why it’s too much to ask of everybody writing novels or doing whatever else they’re doing to make REAL ART. It just costs too much. But if you ninnyminded critics out here think you would be able to recognize ULYSSES when you seen it, without the benefit of piled years, you are mightily mistaken.

James Joyce used and sacrificed his whole life to write ULYSSES and FINNEGANS WAKE. To the extreme detriment of everyone around him. By the time he finished FINNEGANS WAKE (which took him 17! years) he was blind, his daughter was in an asylum, and everyone thought his life’s work f*****g sucked, the Nazis invaded Paris, he fled to Zurich and he died, not even 60 years old.

But he was OUT HERE.

Living a real life, in multiple cities all over Europe, scraping for his and his family’s livelihood, following Whitman’s essential command for the artist (which he surely knew intimately),

Who troubles himself about his ornaments or his fluency is lost. This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your labor and income to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families… re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency.

And I just feel like sometimes we have a bad idea of what a book is made out of. There is a knowledge that really living a life grants you. I think it’s easy to think of say, THE DIVINE COMEDY as a block of marble created by some desk-bound Oldster. But Dante fought in war, his wife betrayed him, he spent the twenty years of that poem’s composition literally banned from returning to his home city under threat of death. THE DIVINE COMEDY was not written by a guy solely chained to his desk reading Aquinas (though also, that was a big component of it).

What I’m saying is that the problem with some contemporary books, —if you see a problem with them, —is that even besides the small amount of learning underlying them, there is also an absent bedrock of lived experience.

The books that interest me most are the ones borne out of an extraordinary amount of learning and life.

The other reason to read Joyce in reference to his biography is because he wants us to!

In the 9th chapter of this 18 chapter book, —so the architectural if not the actual midpoint of the book, —Stephen is drunk as a skunk at the library with the Dublin literary crowd, and he gives a disquisition on HAMLET.

He sets the scene, a player comes onto the stage,

It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the days of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre…

Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit

bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who died in Stratford that his namesake may live forever… Is it possible that Shakespeare speaking his own words to his own son’s name, is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen. Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway.

Basically, Stephen argues that while Shakespeare was in London for 20 years dallying there

between conjugal love and its chaste delights and scrotatory love and its foul pleasures

(it’s hard to get a real definition on scrotatory but it definitely means whorehouse activity; and I think Stephen believes, like many, that Shakespeare’s early demise was due to syphilis), his wife Ann Hathaway was cheating on him with his brothers Richard and Edmund (who Shakespeare makes villains in his plays by way of revenge); so HAMLET (whose main character is named after his dead son Hamnet) is his act of cuckold revenge against his wife: Shakespeare is the ghost and he counsels Hamlet into murdering everyone in the play on behalf of his shame.

And here is Stephen’s grand statement on why fiction is unfictional:

If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

The rest is silence, Hamlet says dyingly. What’s silence? João Guimarães Rosa tells us in Grande Sertão: It’s us ourselves too much. Hamlet suffers from an overabundance of self and a poignant lack of two important things: 1) LOVE and 2) WISE COUNSEL.

There’s a reason that the architectural midpoint of this novel contains a disquisition on HAMLET, it’s because ULYSSES is, —(it’s also many many many other things but), —a rewriting of HAMLET focusing on those two outsized absences.

Before I go in on that (and I fear insanity is brewing), let me tell you what Stephen thinks about fatherhood:

—A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil… Fatherhood in the sense of conscious begetting is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not the madonna… the church is founded and founded irrevocably because founded, like the world, macro- and micro-, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris… may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?

This is the reason that being a cuckold is such a big problem: theoretically, it delegitimizes the whole program of fatherhood. But also, Stephen doesn’t believe in fatherhood because he’s had bad fathers. His own, Simon, is a pitiable lout. God the father and his famous son are proscribing deathmongers. And Shakespeare, with his miserly vindictiveness is also a bad father.

Now why is this book called ULYSSES?

The professorial rabble will tell you that it is because the novel corresponds to the ODYSSEY. And this is a facet of modernism, making the mundane drama of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom (who we haven’t even gotten to yet and he’s the true hero of the book) mythic by corresponding their nonadventures to the mythic adventures of polytropic Odysseus.

But why then, is it not called ODYSSEUS?

Again, the professorial rabble will tell you it is because when Joyce was a boy, he read about Odysseus via his latin name, Ulysses.

But Joyce was obsessed with Dante. Dante never read Homer because he didn’t know Greek and there were no translations into Latin. So when he puts Ulysses in hell, he is inventing his own character just based on what he’s heard. Ulysses is deep in hell for the sin of fraudulent counsel, —the same sin that we might charge Satan with in his serpentine guise.

In Canto 26, a voice emerges from a flame and tells Dante,

not tenderness for a son, nor filial duty

toward my agéd father, nor the love I owed

Penelope that would have made her glad,

could overcome the fervor that was mine

to gain experience of the world

and learn about man’s vices and his worth.

After finally returning from the travails of the Odyssey, Ulysses sets out again to challenge the boundary point of the known world; he whips his shipmates into a frenzy and passes the pillars of Hercules and sees Mount Purgatory, but gets caught in a whirlpool and drowns because his mission is unholy.

Ok, hold that in mind.

The hero of our ULYSSES is Leopold Bloom. He shares a lot in common with the portrait of Shakespeare that Stephen painted. He had a son who died at eleven days old (Hamnet died at 11 years old) in 1893, 11 years before the date the novel takes place and a dead father (who poisoned himself after his wife died because he couldn’t stand being alive without her; the ghost of his father is probably the Man in the Mackintosh that people in town see lurking around but can’t identify) and a cheating wife.

There is one big difference: he is kind! and forgiving!

Leopold Bloom’s real predecessor is Uncle Toby from TRISTRAM SHANDY which is I think the secret central text to Joyce’s entire project. Leopold Bloom is Uncle Toby Walking Around; except he is much more human, he s***s, he leers, he works, he jacks off, he picks his nose, does basically everything a thirtyeightyearold fellow might do over the course of a day.

So basically the whole plot of the book which I realize I neglected to describe is that Leopold Bloom’s wife is gonna have sex with another guy, so he makes himself scarce for the day and walks around the city; Stephen is also walking around the city, and occasionally their paths converge, but then they really converge when Leopold (for timekilling and benevolent and possiblyprurient purposes) goes to the hospital to check on this woman who is having her ninth baby and he runs into Stephen who is drunk as f**k partying with his buddies who are in medical school and Leopold notices that they are not treating him very well and decides to keep a watchful eye on him; he follows them to Nighttown (the red-light district) and Stephen gets beat up by a couple of British officers, his friends ditch him, and Leopold picks him up, takes the little money he has left for safekeeping, they go get some food, and then he brings him over to his house and makes him some hot chocolate and offers him a place to stay before Stephen scampers off for the night.

Stephen is a young Joyce incapable of writing the book we’re reading. Leopold Bloom shows him agape (charitable love) and the possibility of wise counsel, of good fatherhood; and most importantly, the attitude sorely missing from both the Catholic Church and Shakespeare: the ability to forgive Eve.

You know Eve, of course. It is my contention that the Catholic Church is built on the foundation of not-having-forgiven Eve. I think it is very easy to read Eve’s crime as one of a nearly sexual nature in her dealings with the devil, in her eating of the apple. If not that, it is at least a crime of having an unfettered mind. She acts in a way outside of Adam and God’s control and it leads to the fall of paradise. Eve is not foolish. She is testing boundaries in the way of Ulysses.

The reason for Jesus Christ, I don’t know if you know this, is because until his advent, we were barred from our heavenly paradise thanks to our foolish first parents. We need a proper sacrifice to atone for their sins. Jesus is Adam’s substitute. His death absolves Adam. The virgin Mary is supposed to be Eve’s substitute. Jesus is fully man, like Adam. But Mary ain’t fully woman like Eve. She obeys everything everyone says, allows herself to be a vessel for God’s demands. And most importantly of all to the ideology: she is a VIRGIN. It’s easy to forgive a woman who ain’t never fucked nobody.

The only way we would ever get a proper substitute is if a w***e like Mary Magdalene was venerated in place of our pristine Maria.

So thusly the church is founded on an insubstantial sacrifice, Eve was never forgiven, and the ethical consequences of that are deeply rooted in our culture. It’s not just a mythical game, the Catholic Church lays the foundation for so much of our culture and ethics, and not forgiving Eve was a lasting error.

I think Joyce believes this.

Creation and the Fall of Man is the cornerstone of his two great works. And we can prove this by looking at the exact middle pages of both ULYSSES & FINNEGANS WAKE. Joyce is an extraordinarily esoteric and meticulous designer. There’s a good reason he named his stand-in Dedalus after the designer of the labyrinth.

On Page 391.5 of 783 pages of my Vintage edition of ULYSSES, Stephen says, (and this chapter mimics the gestation of the english language so the styles are OD),

our mighty mother and mother most venerable… she is the second Eve and she won us, saith Augustine too, whereas that other, our grandam, which we are linked up by successive anastomosis of navelcords sold us all, seed, breed, and generation, for a penny pippin.

And if we look on page 314 of FINNEGANS WAKE we find,

ringround as worldwise eve her sins (pip, pip, pip) willpip futurepip feature apip footloose pastcast with spareshins and flash subtittles of noirse-made-earsy from a nephew mind the narrator but give the devil his so long as those sohns of a blitz call the tuone tuone and thonder alout makes the thurd.

Believe it or not, I don’t quite know what this whole passage of the Wake is getting at. But “eve her sins” seems to me clearly to be sounding the note of “ease her sins” i.e. forgiveness.

And in both these passages we hear this “pip” this “pippin” which means apple but is also derived from the Old French “pepino” which in Spanish is cucumber. Joyce certainly knew that, and he was certainly interested in making a dick pun wherever he could find one. And so it seems clear to me that Joyce is tying Eve’s sin to one of wanton sexuality.

Why does ULYSSES take place on June 16, 1904? Well, that was the day he had his first date with Nora Barnacle, and she took him into the park and jacked him off; it was the day of his first sexual experience that wasn’t mired in the guilt of brothels, this was a sin that sunlit original sin’s long shadow: shame in sex.

ULYSSES is a celebration of Nora Joyce.

The troubadour tradition was all about exulting the regular woman to a divine status. Dante capped this off with his Beatrice. He blasphemously allowed her to give him the ultimate revelation. But still, all these women are purified in their exaltation. Beatrice don’t fart: if you know what I’m saying.

Joyce conceived of ULYSSES as the fourth testament (after the Old, the New, and Dante’s Comedy), and he ends the book with Leopold’s wife, Molly’s monologue (there’s no punctuation, a stylistic tic that Joyce took from Nora’s letters).

It is obscene and scandalous,

he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst though his nose is not so big… like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had to halfshut my eyes still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull it out and do it on me considering how big it is

By this point in the book we are wholeheartedly rooting for Leopold so it’s wonderful to hear that he has a much bigger cumshot than Molly’s lover Blazes Boylan.

Molly wants to have sex with Leopold. She asks him to bring her an erotic book by author Paul de Kock, but what she really wants is Poldy Cock.

its all his own fault if I am an adulteress as the thing in the gallery said O much about it if thats all the harm ever we did in this vale of tears God knows its not much doesnt everybody only they hide it I suppose thats what a woman is supposed to be there for or He wouldnt have made us the way He did so attractive to men then if he wants to kiss my bottom Ill drag open my drawers and bulge it right out in his face as large as life he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part

But the enterprise bums him out too much now. It seems like possibly the last time they had sex, or at least the last time he finished inside of her was 11 years ago, after their son Rudy died.

Leopold still has very fond memories of their love though; he sees two flies stuck together (mating) and he thinks of an early date of theirs,

Hidden under wild ferns on Howth. Below us bay sleeping sky. No sound. The sky… O wonder! Ravished over her I lay, full lips, full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft, warm, sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes… Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her; eyes, her lips, her stretched neck, beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me, I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me. Me. And me now.

If it’s not clear now, Joyce can write stunningly in almost any style, and he puts almost every style in this book.

An underrated chapter is, —after the almost 200 page phantasmagorical play where a bunch of crazy s**t happens including the imagined trial of Leopold Bloom getting MeToo’d for being a pervert, a chapter which includes Stephen arguing with the ghost of his mother and culminates in Bloom seeing a vision of the ghost of his son Rudy and calling out to him and getting no response, —the first one in Part Three which is written as if Leopold wrote it himself, in a bad genteel style that I find extremely amusing,

Mr. Bloom being handicapped by the circumstance that one of the back buttons of his trousers had, to vary the timehounoured adage, gone the way of all buttons, though, entering thoroughly into the spirit of the thing, he historically made light of the mischance.

Whatever I’m quoting in this essay is a paltry glimpse of how well Joyce can write. He writes some throwaway sentences that most writers couldn’t even dream of writing. Here is from the end of a stage direction in that play chapter:

They are in grey gauze with dark bat sleeves that flutter in the land breeze.

Read that outloud, check that euphony.

And the variety too. I quoted Bloom’s interior monologue about Molly, but later on in chapter 17 we get a chapter that’s framed as question and answer in a scientific style, and we get this beautiful passage, again Bloom thinking about Molly:

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

The biggest difference, I think, between ULYSSES and HAMLET, though, is that HAMLET is a militantly anti-natalist lifedenying work. ULYSSES is a pacifistically natalist life-affirming work. When Hamlet tells Ophelia to go to a nunnery, he’s not doing it because he’s punning on the fact that nunnery is a whorehouse or whatever the f**k some people suggest; he’s doing because he’s terrified at her ability to bring children into the world and he thinks that she should avoid doing it at all costs.

In ULYSSES there’s a chapter where Leopold Bloom is on the beach looking at Gerty McDowell, a young woman in her twenties, and he’s jerking off and she’s kinda showing him some leg, and he jizzes in concordance with fireworks on the beach,

And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!

Can you tell it’s lurid? This is the chapter that got the publishers of the Little Review in our fine country, arrested for obscenity. And it’s remarkable for being the chapter that gives us the meanest turn of Leopold’s thoughts. Gerty gets up and walks away and,

No. She’s lame! O!

Mr. Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl! Thought something was wrong by the cut of her jib. Jilted beauty. A defect is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn’t know that when she was on show. Hot little devil all the same.

In the very next chapter, when he goes to the maternity hospital, God thrusts a thunderstorm on them in punishment for his onanism. Stephen (like Joyce) is terrified of thunder and so Bloom comforts him,

for it thundered long rumblingly over all the heavens so that Master Madden, being godly certain whiles, knocked him on his ribs upon that crack of doom and Master Bloom, at the braggart’s side, spoke to him calming words to slumber his great fear, advertising how it was no other thing but a hubbub noise that he heard, the discharge of fluid from the thunderhead, look you, having taken place, and all of the order of a natural phenomenon.

But was young Boasthard’s fear vanquished by Calmer’s words? No, for he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done away.

There’s a story about Joyce that a young writer went to visit him, and he had just gotten news that his own son Giorgio (whose birthday June 27th, the day of Leopold Bloom’s father’s death) had a child. He was now a grandfather. And he told the young writer that that was the most important thing in the world. And the doltish writer said, “having another Joyce?”

Joyce was quiet and surly for the rest of the visit because the young writer didn’t get it. The important thing is propagation: the continuance of life.

Even though we can look up at the sky and see,

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

and know that,

of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a paranthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

This is a worthwhile meaninglessness, something Hamlet absolutely doesn’t believe.

Bloom goes home. He offers Stephen succor and respite; he’s kind to him in the way that nobody all day has been. They drink a hot chocolate together and go their separate ways. Leopold reflects on his wife’s infidelity with abnegation and equanimity and thinks it’s,

As not so calamitous as a cataclysmic annihilation of the planet in consequence of a collision with a dark sun. As less reprehensible than theft, highway robbery, cruelty to children and animals, obtaining money under false pretences, forgery, embezzlement, misappropriation of public money, betrayal of public trust, malingering, mayhem, corruption of minors, criminal libel, blackmail, contempt of court, arson, treason, felony, mutiny on the high seas, trespass, burglary, jailbreaking, practice of unnatural vice, desertion from armed forces in the field, perjury, poaching, usury, intelligence with the king’s enemies, impersonation, criminal assault, manslaughter, wilful and premeditated murder.

He is content with his life, with his wife, with his one child who is alive (his daughter Milly). And he slides into bed and he kisses his wife’s big fat ass and he goes to sleep.

ULYSSES is a carnivalistic celebration of life in all its shitting eating farting walking taking deathhurtling concupiscent perverse joyful hilarious exuberant meaningless tremendouslyimportant glory.

And we end, apropos of this classical comedy, with a marriage proposal, Molly remembering when Bloom asked her,

I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

If you care about literature, dip into it, there’s something for you. If you’re a writer, this is a gift. It’s the best work we have in English.

We gotta bask in it, sustain it, and write in its wake.

WHAT R U SUPPOSED TO WRITE LITERATURE ABT?

NO CAP: THIS STORY GOT ME IN TROUBLE. . .

*SHAKES FIST AT SKY*

HOOPLA!!!!!!!

ON

CAROL BENSIMON'S DIORAMA

AND

CARLOS EDUARDO PEREIRA'S AGORA AGORA

1. SILVANA

Rio is the most beautiful city in the world (just edging out New York and Steubenville, Ohio—no I’m not biased), but when you’re expecting scorching inexorable summer sunshine and instead getting a gray block of clouds interrupted occasionally by chilly drizzles, it can make you wanna drink.

The bar (that I described in my last post) on Santa Clara is called Casa Suzanna. The lady who serves drinks from 8AM until 3PM is Silvana. My dad was going there for years, religiously, around lunchtime. He would stack one plastic chair on top of another (so the chair didn’t splay out, burst from underneath him: he is a man who learns from experience, some of them at least), and Silvana would come over and serve him one Antarctica after another until the cows came home, —reader the cows would not come home until my dad was s*******d.

The whole extent of their interaction was that, —and sometimes she would just laugh at him. And it’s true that he must cut quite a comic figure around here cause everyone’s always laughing at him and he don’t say nothing. I think he could’ve been a brasilian silent film star.

Anyway, one thing you oughta know about my mom is she gets profoundly involved in peoples’ lives almost immediately.

My mom comes to the bar once, and now she knows all about Silvana’s life, —she’s from São Luis de Maranhão, she lives in Rocinha, —and now they’re exchanging whatsapps. And she finds out Silvana can’t read, but it’s her dream to learn how to read. So my mom finds a teacher in the neighborhood that teaches adults how to read, and suddenly she’s paying for Silvana’s literacy classes.

Silvana’s like a f*****g pig in s**t over the whole thing, —she’s pumped. She wants to show my mom her workbooks, look I can write my name now!, blah blah blah.

So now my mom don’t wanna walk by the bar cause she thinks it’s gonna be a whole thing.

I said, Mom it don’t gotta be a whole thing. When I see her I just wave, that’s all you gotta do. But if my mom seen her she’d be like, “SILVANA!!!” and embrace her like she was lost at sea and just washed up.

And then we’d walk away and my mom would go, “that was a lot huh?”

My mom could probably use a drink too, cause early week she was beefing hard with my grandma. My mom and my grandma are basically the same person with slight variations. So what you frequently hear coming out of their mouths is, “I am nothing like that woman.”

Like me and my mom were in the kitchen and my grandma was in a different room and she was talking to us as if we were right in front of her and we obviously couldn’t hear her cause there’s walls in the way, and my mom dons a flabbergasted expression and goes, “who talks to you from another room like that?!”

I said, “you do mom, everyday.”

“No I don’t,” she said.

“Yeah you’re right mom, I’m full of s**t.”

Me and my mom ended up walking over to Ipanema, usufructing all we could of the gloomy day, and she didn’t talk about any of the swirling conflicts which makes for a very pleasant time with my mom. And we walked by a flower shop and she was bewildered by this bromelia and bought it immediately.

2. FRANKLIN

I’ve been friends with Franklin since I was eight. We played on this beach soccer team called Geração. It was a good team. And I was the worst player by a country mile. To say I was last on the bench is an understatement. The games were on Copacabana beach and they had to make a whole new bench for me out in Barra, —that’s metaphorically how far away I was from contributing.

One day I got a chance to get some real minutes against our rival Liverpool. I was in the number 9 spot up top. The goalie made a mistake and the ball came rolling right toward me in front of goal, wide open. I whiffed and fell over. Those f*****s laughed at me.

It’s hard to make friends when your worthlessness is so obviously evident. My grandma was worried about me. Without my knowledge she told our coach, Almir, to ask the team if anyone wanted to be my friend.

So we were gathered around after practice one day, everyone assplunked in the sand listening to coach’s instructions. And he goes,

“Ok galera, one more order of business. Harold doesn’t have any friends. So if one of you guys would like wanna go over to his house or something? Play some video games? Just hang out? Anyone wanna be his friend?”

Silence.

“Ok. Good practice!”

Though the next week, Franklin, who was not much farther up than me on the team totem pole came over to me and said, “what’s your team?”

“Vasco,” I said.

“Me too!”

That’s all it took.

Now you may be wondering: his name is Franklin? Yes, and his brother’s name is Jefferson. His mom wanted to name the boys after American presidents, so she chose Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin—our greatest presidents.

His mom’s name is Socorro. She sells tapioca in a cart on the beach. His dad Severino, is a doorman in a building on Belfort Roxo. They live on the 13th floor of the building, in the free apartment most of the buildings in Copacabana have for the head doorman.

(I stole many of those likenesses for my book. NO FRANKLIN, I’M NOT GIVING YOU ANY MONEY.)

Socorro’s name translates literally to “help!” —, my family’s joke was that that was an appropriate name cause that’s what Franklin would be yelling when she chased him with a belt to whip him.

Unfortunately that is a real scenario. She’s a tough, stern lady. Her husband cheated on her once and she beat the s**t out of him. Maybe there’s something to be said about all that physical castigation though: Franklin is absurdly sweet and polite and never gets into any mischief.

(He had a little fling with both my sister and my cousin way back in the day. Not at the same time, I don’t think. [REDACT LATER: YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO TALK ABT RHIANNON])

We went to the Vasco game on Wednesday. There was no rigamarole this time. We got right the f**k in. The atmosphere was livelier than on Saturday afternoon, it seemed. This was a night game, and it was a beautiful clear night.

There were no visiting fans last game, so I didn’t know that for the visitors section, they literally put a metal wall up blocking off one section of the bleachers. You literally cannot interact with fans of the other team. Even thought they might really have to be making walls in between the Vasco fans.

—These two guys got into a pretty uncreative screaming match next to us:

“Vai tomá no cu!”

“Você vai tomá no cu!”

“Não você vai tomá no cu!”

Ad infinitum. —

—I think ideally, one day, everyone will be in their own little cone of silence where you never have to interact with any other human fan at all, and you can just watch the game in silence and in peace. Like on TV! YES LIKE WATCHING IT ON TV AT HOME! That’s how we’ll keep everyone safe!—

I was probably too desperate to see a goal. I kept telling Franklin that was my only wish: to see Vasco score. So of course for 87 minutes the game was deadlocked 0-0. In the 87th minute, Vasco earned a penalty kick. The crowd rose to attention like a collective boner. We wanted it. We wanted it bad. Jair (rotten name) took the penalty. He kicked it! And of course the goalie saved it. The game ended 0-0.

I was so mad I kicked Franklin’s ass—Socorro-style.

3. ARNALDO

My dad has been a stick in the mud cause he’s writing his memoirs from his bookmaking days. So everything is, “I can’t do that, I have to write.”

Now I can finally see how obnoxious that is. My mom’s going, “he’s such a narcissistic with this book.”

He’s writing it all by hand, and I’m the one who has to type it. Cause he don’t know how to use a computer? I’m still not sure why.

I heard somewhere Tolstoy’s wife had to type up War and Peace 7 times. So I feel like that b***h Mrs. Tolstoy. When I see my dad now, I say, “what’s up Tolstoy?”

And everytime he’ll say, “who?” or “what the f**k did you call me?”

But I’m the lucky one, I get to type brilliant up sentences like, “what was to do go back drive truck?”

Anyway I convince him to come down to the bar; so—we been in this building 20 years: and you know, again, I have a fracas-forward family; there’s s**t like, when me and my unmentionable sibling were children we were making so much noise in the apartment (us running around, my grandparents screaming at eachother), that we were sued by the unit below us; therefore, now there are people we aren’t allowed to speak to via my mother and grandmother’s orders. My dad calls it Red Lights and Green Lights.

He’ll see someone and be like, “red light?”

We were at the elevator and we seen a massive Red Light coming out of her apartment: Arnaldo’s mom.

Arnaldo lives basically right across from us on the 12th floor. He lived with his mom and his dad. His dad was all demented, pissing in the plants by the elevator. My mom said she used to hear Arnaldo screaming at his parents and then “sounds of someone getting beat up.”

So we been saying he kicks his parents’ ass. Arnaldo, —my dad meanly, I think, calls him Bozo, cause he’s bald on top and the rest of his hair flows out long and crazy. Honestly his whole aspect does give Bozo the Clown. Usually he spends most of his day downstairs b**********g with the doormen, or furtively shifting around the block with a creepy look in his eye.

If he’s down there and my mom’s going up the elevator, she flips off the camera cause she swears he’s looking.

Anyway, his 97 year old mom comes out of the apartment and he comes out right behind her. We’re on the far side elevator. There’s a short hallway between the elevators. Arnaldo sees her coming our way and literally yanks her away. Our elevator shows up first and my dad signals for Arnaldo and his mom to come with us. And they get in reluctantly without saying a word.

Arnaldo’s looking down at the ground the whole time. And his mother who is dressed up like she’s going to the ball with jewelry and red lipstick on, is smiling at me and my dad.

You could cut the sexual tension with a butter knife.

We get to the first floor, and his mom goes, “wow I never knew this elevator took so long.”

We went over to the bar, —it was after Silvana’s shift; there’s always a bartender and a waiter. The waiter is this severe-looking, tightlipped guy. He looks like a mean principal, so we call him The Principal.

He’s so stern, my dad told me to ask him to tell us a joke. He said he don’t know any. My dad said, “what if I give you 10 reals?”

Nope, no jokes from The Principal.

The bartender stays inside, and he don’t even know what’s going on, cause he’s caught up playing the machines. He sees people playing that all day and not winning so he thinks he’s due. That poor f****r is just working for free.

4. RENATO

Renato is my mom’s first cousin. They’re about the same age. I didn’t see him for a long time cause the rub was he hated everyone in the family. Now I didn’t know him too well as a kid, other than as a locus of mean talk.

My grandpa used to call him GBO, which is Grande, Bobo, e Otario. Which is basically Big, Stupid, and Moronic. And there were just endless stories of his idiocy. My mom put a bucket on his head when he was a kid. LOL, LOL, ETC.

I finally meet this dude forreal, as an adult, a few years ago. And it’s like, oh, he’s obviously a little off, a little goofy, you know. And this family put him thru the damn bullying ringer for years! You guys are just meanies! No wonder he hated you.

Now, Renato’s thing is wine. He f*****g loves wine. So we made plans to meet at this wine bar in the neighborhood. My mom, dad, grandma, me, and him. He starts drinking a little and he wants to show you his camera roll.

Every picture is of a bottle of wine, and then the next picture is of him holding the bottle with a glass of wine as in like a toast, and then we get the wine bottle again posed differently. He gets on the bus and takes a lot of day trips alone and so we’ll see him with a bottle of wine in Petropolis, or Teresopolis, or sometimes even like Chile or Peru. On Sundays though he drinks champagne.

All these pictures he asks strangers to take for him, —which stresses me out when I’m with him cause he’ll just bark at a passing stranger, no preamble, no niceties, he’ll go, “take our picture.”

If there’s nobody around he’ll take a selfie. His front facing camera is inexplicably set at a 10 second timer. So we sit there smiling waiting for the countdown, every time.

We got four bottles of wine deep and my dad wasn’t even drinking that much. So we were pretty cooked. Though you can’t tell when he’s drunk, he don’t show it. I said, “I don’t even think Renato’s drunk.”

We get him out on Nossa Senhora and he calls an uber. He sees a car on the otherside of the street and goes, “I think that’s it!” and doesn’t even look, walks right out into the street.

F*****g car barely missed him here, motorcycle missed him by an inch, f*****g bus tumbling through. And he didn’t even notice! He almost got f*****g creamed. We were going, “JESUS RENATO!”

And then he’s on the otherside of the street trying to open the door to every car until he finally, after about five tries, finds his uber.

I was like, “I guess he was drunk.”

The next day he wanted us to visit him at work. I thought he had a thumbtwiddling job, if you know what I mean. But we went downtown and he works at this legitimately cool old furniture store. Where they got like high end antique pieces in this three story old house on Rua do Senado.

We pulled up and he was drinking a beer.

I said, “they let you drink at work?”

“Yeah on Saturday.”

I really had to urinate. As he’s showing us around the place, on the third floor looks like there’s a bathroom. I say, “can I use that bathroom?”

He gives me a hesitant look. But then he says, “yeah.”

Oh my god. As I opened the toilet with flies assaulting my face, reader, I will not describe to you what I saw, but it was a big ugly pile of unflushed s**t. It was so gross. And I think Renato did it. And I pissed on the s**t.

I don’t wanna end gross, so I’ll end on a happy note. It turns out that bartender playing the machines was onto something. He won the jackpot! 10 million reals. Can you believe that? From a little machine at some rinkydink bar. I guess good things do happen.

I landed in Rio de Janeiro on Friday morning.

The airport is located on the Ilha do Governador—the Governor’s Island. My mom was born on the Ilha and her ancestors have been dust-to-dusting there for several generations.

Here’s a story my grandma just told me: her grandpa was a surly racist German married to a woman who was the granddaughter of slaves. He owned an ant poison factory on the Island. So one of his children, my grandma’s Uncle Mauri; —this woman said he knocked her up. This was way back then so you couldn’t take care of this problem abortionly so they forced him to marry her. Turns out some vagabond fellow was the real daddy and they stole away to São Paulo in the middle of the night. Leaving Uncle Mauri duped and alone and without recourse to fix it, divorcewise (cause divorce wasn’t legal until 1977 in Brasil, —I just looked that up what the f**k!). He fell in love with this other girl, Mariazinha. He wanted to marry her, but her father thought it would be quite ignominious for her to shack up with this legally-bound, duped, cuck. So they stole away in their own middle of the night and went to the Tijuca forest, and they sat lovey-dovey under a beautiful waterfall. They got a can of Guarana and Uncle Mauri—as a final f**k you to his family, one can only imagine—poured some ant poison in there (from his father’s company) and they both drank it romeoandjulietally. Probably a little hasty and dramatic: they coulda just gone to f*****g Uruguay.

You probably won’t believe this, but this is why my grandma knows this story. My grandma is a spiritist medium. And she’s had visions;—I told you you wouldn’t believe me!—since she was a kid. When she was around eight (she knows this cause it was before her father died and her father died when she was nine), she was with her friends and she seen a guy, um cara moreno with his hair parted in the middle and brushed back tight, getting beat and dragged away by military officers and she was screaming, “leave him alone!” and her friends who didn’t see nothing said, “Chill Lucia, you crazy b***h!”

She ran home and told her parents and described the man she seen, and her mom was like, That’s your Uncle Mauri—who of course died before my grandma was born. And so her mom told her that romantic waterfall story.

Anyway, my flight was good. The guy in the seat next to me pre-takeoff was watching tiktoks in portuguese that were all videos of like mopey guys with text over it saying, “when you haven’t fucked in a while” or; “when your friends ask you how often you’re smashing” with extremely sad music. (Maybe he wanted me to see: it was a seduction ploy.)

I’m sorry for doing airplane material. But when he starting functionizing his little TV he scrolled over to a tab that said FAVORITES when what he needed was the tab: ENTERTAINMENT, and since he hadn’t marked any favorites, it said zero movies and zero shows for him to watch. Which really pissed him off. And he started muttering and steaming and banging on the flight attendant assistance button. But after watching him helplessly poke the screen with a hard finger like a punitive nun, I stepped in.

He was not effusively grateful as I expected. In fact, he seemed to turn on me. For the rest of the flight, he and the flight attendants seemed angry at me. It might’ve been cause of my slack-jawed snory sleep; or cause, somebody was farting it up and they pinned the fart-locus on me. I DON’T KNOW IF IT WAS ME I WAS SLEEPING.

The guy who picked me up at the airport was Luiz: a slick blabby cariocão (a character profile I’m very warm to cause it fits many members of my extended family, especially my late uncle, Luis). He told me he once spent a month in New York and his english was afiadíssimo—sharp sharp sharp—cause he’d been studying his whole life. After showing me about 20 minutes of his favorite songs on Youtube (yes, obviously, reader, while driving) he went on Whatsapp to prove his english in a voice message to an american client.

He said, “uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh… tour today, we doing? or do you uhhhhh now, decline the tour? because you are with friend?”

It did sound like the fruit of a lifetime of study. He went back and replayed it, “lets see how that turned out” and he goes, “niiiiiice.”

On the home stretch he hits me with, “cara, you gotta love Trump right?” and gave me a brief lecture on communism versus capitalism.

I got to the apartment—683 Nossa Senhora de Copacabana; pull up, bruh. I put the damn address in my book.

My fourteen year old cousin Stella was visiting. She went all f*****g out on my christmas gift: she painted a small bottle cap with a sun (basic yellow circle with porcupine-quill rays) and then painted an H on the inside. And she even got one for Gaby, but hers had a G on the inside. And also she got me a copy of Dom Casmurro. I said, “b***h, I already got two copies.” DO BETTER NEXT CHRISTMAS, STELLA.

The drama this week was swirling around her. I have a very fracas-forward family, —it’s like medieval Europe in terms of frequency and diversity of conflict. The problem is Stella’s father, my mom’s brother, is dead. And her mother, whom I call Titty (not even cause she’s that buxom but her name is Tati and I’m just being a little lewdic—if you will) is trying to remove his memory and any trace of his family from Stella’s life.

Stella got a very tough draw, lifewise. I hope she can overcome it. It bums me out, —and it really bums my grandma out. My grandma will do anything for Stella cause she’s the last connection she has to her son. My uncle was a tough person to be married to, and I know Titty went through it. So much so, that after they divorced, Titty and Stella lived with my grandma for three years. I won’t get too deep into the story cause it’s been Groundhog Day over here, repeating the same s**t every day. But it’s strife about money and loyalty. Ancient human s**t.

I used Stella’s likeness (yes, without her authorization, OBVIOUSLY) for a character in Tropop—betcha can’t guess who—and if that book had sold any copies, I might owe her some money.

My twin sister who has requested I do not write about her was there too, but she left the day I arrived. But she has requested I do not write about her, so I will say nothing further.

Anyway, let’s move onto Saturday. I went to a Vasco game! Now Vasco da Gama is my team. I don’t root for anybody in the United States by virtue of being a bookie’s son. But I claim Vasco, though I don’t get heartbroken when they lose—, thank God cause all they seem to do is lose!—like I do with Brasil’s national team in the World Cup. That’s the only team that can genuinely effect my mood.

My grandpa was an absolutely fanatic rabid supporter. Though it could be a frustrating experience to watch a game with him because he was so absurdly negative. The standard of perfection he demanded from the players, I think, was a bit over-exigent. If a player missed a touch in the midfield, Vovô would ejaculate… “CARALHO! Seu filho da puta!”

Proof I was a Day One:

And he’d keep screaming until he got so dour he wouldn’t say a word; he’d become a box of seeping grumbles.

My best sports watching experience was with him in 2011 when Vasco won the Copa do Brasil. We watched on TV as Alecsandro scored a goal to give them the 1-0 win and hugged! and cheered! and then I went to the bathroom so I could angrily text the girl with whom I shared my first kiss cause I found out she had a crush on my friend Mike (who was a shoelicker! he licked his damn shoes in grade school! and she wanted to kiss him instead of me!!?!?)

But I hadn’t been to a game in 15 years cause I usually come to Rio during the off-season.

So me and my gringo father (my mother was sick and didn’t feel like going) took a trip to São Januario expecting to just buy tickets at the window or from some scalper. I should’ve maybe checked in advance, but I trust my horsesense.

But I always forget that Brasil is an extremely extremely technologically advanced country! And what I didn’t realize is that they don’t do physical tickets anymore. You have to register every detail about yourself and get your face approved. Cause you can only get into the stadium via facial recognition. I always f*****g forget Brazil is a gleaming technocratic surveillance state! I should’ve remembered that when I took that flying car home from the airport!

We ran into this scalper on the corner and he wanted 200 reals for each ticket and he was a tough negotiator cause I said “eh” and he said, “100!” Which was a bit expensive still, the ticket goes for 88 reals full price (about $14), but he said he was gonna help us register with the technological overlords.

He was another slick blabby cariocão. You wouldn’t believe how many there are around here.

Anyway, he didn’t know how to sign up like he suggested he did. But he gave us this ticket voucher code—God this was all so complicated just recalling it renews my fear—and another guy cut him off saying, “you don’t know what you’re talking about” and he explained to me how to proceed.

Basically, each person has the right to a single ticket. And you gotta sign up on Vasco’s website, and you don’t have to give them a lot of information. Just your name, address, date of birth, CPF, passport number, picture of ID, picture of your face, your first pet’s burial site, your most traumatic memory, and the latin name of any type of flora or fauna germane to Rio de Janeiro.

The website is also very flimsy. Holy f**k was it an ordeal. I typed s**t in so many times I memorized my CPF (which I needed to do) and my dad’s passport number: 57——

The game started at 4:30. We got there at 4:00. They let people in until the second half starts, that’s the hard cut-off.

We heard Vasco score. I never get FOMO, but hearing a stadium roar from just outside when you’re supposed to be inside is a little frustrating.

We got in at 5:30. With like 10 minutes to spare. But it was totally euphoric when we got in.

I enjoy almost all live sporting events, but there’s nothing like a soccer match in Brasil. Especially at a local stadium. The field is so close, the fans are singing the whole time. It’s just stone bleachers right? And you just stand wherever you want. And unlike a Knicks game or a Yankee game when they’re f*****g pumping in artificial noise the entire time. Snippets of songs, tragic stories on the jumbotron, the announcers having to manufacture cheers: LETS GO KNICKS.

In São Januário there's no artifical noise. You can just enjoy the game, —well you can’t enjoy it that much cause Vasco is f*****g spiritless and not interested in making a big effort and they tied 1-1 with Nova Igaucu who is literally in the 4th division in Brasil, —hearing the drumbeats and songs and incessant complaints.

Obviously because of how advanced a country Brasil is, there’s also a row of heavily armed police officers watching everything you do, ready to blow your head off with a shotgun if, say, you tried to jump on the field naked.

There was a rambunctious little kid next to us throwing a water bottle around and his mom was yelling, “the police are gonna arrest you! Arrest him police! Arrest him!” and a cop stepped up to kind ruffle his hair and the kid grabbed his baton and wouldn’t let go and the cop got immediately pissed but prudently and bravely refrained from shooting him.

But the game was good. I’m going back Wednesday cause I’m desperate to see Vasco score in person. But I’m going with my friend Franklin who is notoriously bad luck, so we’ll see.

Sunday the only thing that happened is I got drunk in the middle of the day at this bar on the corner. I love this bar. It’s my platonic ideal of a bar. It is literally a hole in the wall; all the tables and chairs (plastic, Brahma-themed) are on the sidewalk. They bring you a 24 oz of beer for 12 reals (a bit less than $2) and a little plastic cup and it’s wonderful.

Also, —if you’re so inclined— inside the bar in the untenably narrow hallway on the way to the “bathroom” there’s a few gambling machines.

Apparently some guy lost 2500 reals playing on one of the machines and he was so mad, he told the bartender he was gonna come back and shoot him. The bartender quit right then and there and hasn’t been seen since.

F*****g b*****d watching me lose 2500, I’m gonna get him.

ON TRISTRAM SHANDY BY LAURENCE STERNE

THE TITLE OF THIS ONE KINDA SPEAKS FOR ITSELF. . .

Putting out a list of your year’s favorite books, I think, is hack and anti-literature; however, I saw Bruna’s Carta para navegantes stack do an awards thing, and I liked reading it, so I have thereby stolen her idea, and I am doing my own version of those awards here:

JOÃO GUIMARÃES ROSA AWARD

(this is named after my favorite writer, the greatest brasilian writer, author of the greatest novel in world literature, Grande Sertão:Veredas—or as it will be known in its new english translation, Vastlands: The Crossing—and it awards my favorite brasilian book of the year)

ROMANCE D’A PEDRA DO REINO E O PRINCIPE DO SANGUE DO VAI-E-VOLTA (1971), ARIANO SUASSUNA

My grandma bought me this book at one of them chaotic used bookstores in downtown Rio on Camões street. I thought it was gonna be a big wack tome (753 pages; though, come on Harold, how often is a book this big, wack?); cause all I knew about Ariano Suassuna is that he wrote one of the most famous brasilian plays, Auto da Compadecida—and I think people have a natural skepticism to multi-hyphenate pollination. But then I seen this blog I super respect (that writes solely about great untranslated literature) did a whole write-up about it, and so I was like I gotta hit it.

Turns out, it’s f*****g Dante, Don Quixote, a damn Paraíba Tristram Shandy. The narrator, Dom Pedro Dinis Quaderna, is writing this book from prison. We don’t know why he’s in there, and he sure delays on telling us. The book is full of digressions, crazy adventures, full of these woodcuts and photos, it plays with the historical facts of Ariano Suassuna’s hometown in Paraíba: Taperoá; and, it’s f*****g hilarious. I was so impressed by this book, that I’m gonna reread at the top of 2025. This time, with an eye to translating it.

Here’s the first paragraph of ROMANCE OF THE STONE OF THE KINGDOM AND THE PRINCE OF THE COMING-AND-GOING BLOOD, in my translation:

FROM UP HERE, on the top floor, through the barred windows in the jail where I’m imprisoned, I see the outskirts of our indomitable sertanejo town. Looking up at the sun, it trembles, shining on the nearest rocks. From the harsh, rocky and thorny land, battered by the ovenlike Sun, a burning breath seems to emanate, which could just as well be the gasp of generations and generations of cangaceiros, prophets, and holy men, assassinated during years and years between these wild rocks, as it could be the breathing of this weird Beast, the earth—this Cougar in whose flank resides the flea-ridden race of men. It could also be the fiery breath of that other Beast, the Divinity, the Jaguar, the owner of the Cougar, and who, for millenniums, spurs on our Race, pulling her up high, toward the Kingdom, and toward the Sun.

There are some obvious translation problems already; these very region-specific words like sertanejo and cangaceiro. Which is kinda like countryside and kinda like cowboy… but enough of that for now.

THE SOUND AND THE FURY AWARD

(reading is rereading, the first time you read a book, your eyes are just getting used to what the pages look like; no book exemplified that more to me than The Sound and The Fury, a book I couldn’t make jack-s**t out of the first time I read it, but on subsequent re-reads everything fell into place and now it’s an all-time fav. so this goes to my favorite reread of the year.)

COMPASS, MATHIAS ÉNARD (2015) (translated by CHARLOTTE MANDELL)

This could’ve gone to a few different books. I reread Machado de Assis’s marvelous trilogy (Brás Cubas, Quincas Borba, Dom Casmurro) and Mathias’s first big book Zone; but I already thought those were amazing the first time I hit em.

The first time I read Compass, I thought it was pretty good. But now it’s clear to me that it’s one of the best books of the century. Franz Ritter is an insomniac musicologist. He is up all night in Vienna, sick, probably dying, thinking about classical music, the relationship between the East and West, literature, Syria, but most importantly of all, he’s thinking about the great love of his life, Sarah.

When you read Énard, it’s shocking initially how much he f*****g knows, it’s a flood of erudition, which sounds daunting, but the prose is so stunning and he grounds everything in the simplest most basic human experiences: love, shame, guilt, death. Like, as smart as Franz is, he’s such a doof! Check him here, on a date in Paris, annoying the s**t out of Sarah:

Of course I should not have pointed out to her right away that she had lost a lot of weight, that she was pale, her eyes lined, that wasn’t so clever; but I was surprised by these physical transformations, so pushed to futility by anguish, that I couldn’t help myself, and the day, that day I had brought about, worked on, waited for, imagined, started off on a lamentable footing… [we paused for lunch] in a Turkish restaurant, she kept a sticky silence, while I lurched into hysterical chatter—when you’re drowning, you struggle, wave your arms and legs… I told her the latest news from Vienna… and talked about the oriental lieder of Schubert—my passion at the time—then about Berlioz… until she stopped me in the middle of the pavement,

“Franz you’re getting on my nerves. It’s incredible. You’ve been talking without interruption for two kilometers. Good lord how talkative you can be!”

But the book, beautifully, unmaudlinly, ends on a literal and metaphorical sunrise.

There is no living writer writing better novels than Mathias Énard. Not your Everetts or Fosses or (come on, ew) Franzens (all of whom are more than a decade older than this Mathias).

THE NADA AWARD

(named after one of my all-time favorite novels, the miraculous Nada by Carmen Laforet, it goes to a European novel written by a woman with an untranslated title)

LA BÂTARDE, VIOLETTE LEDUC (1964) (translated by DEREK COLTMAN)

For some reason this book is grouped with the smut in McNally Jackson. I only picked it up because I was at leaves in Brooklyn one day with Gaby and the cover was different than the Dalkey Essentials one it mostly has now. I wasn’t really gonna read it, but we went to a bar and it was daytime and so I read the first paragraph and was completely shocked. Here’s what I said in my pseudonymous amazon review (the only review):

If you love literature, this is one of those necessary books. heed not the description; this is a smutless book abt the ecstasy of everything: pleasure, horror, grief. raw in that it saws down to the essential nerve of feeling. only imaginable comp: if James Joyce wrote Sally Rooney’s novels.

La Batarde (1964), or The B*****d is an “autobiography” of the controversial writer Violette Leduc; I guess she’s controversial cause she fucked women, I don’t know. Violette has the power and perspicacity to dig at the marrow of feeling and experience. When I was reading it I felt like an unshelled turtle or a slug, something very worldprone; I could hardly go outside. I was very affected. Here is a passage about her grandmother’s death, her grandmother who she called “the angel Fideline”:

One night I heard noises and people coming and going. I heard my mother. It’s all over, she said to Clarisse. I got out of bed, I made my way on tiptoe out to the half-open door. What was all over? The pillows, the braid, the nightgown, the lowered eyelids, the hands lying on the sheet were all the same. I went back again. “What is it that’s all over?” I asked the darkness. I could hear the water jug, the basin. Why wasn’t she coughing? I didn’t see Fideline again. I was nine, she was fifty-three. The day that Fideline was buried, this I do remember, it was raining. I didn’t cry, I felt no grief. I chattered to my rag doll. Fideline left the house surrounded by a sea of umbrellas. I leaned out from a second-floor window and watched her go. Five years later I realized that she was dead, that I loved her passionately, that I would never see her again. The cypress beside her grave filled me with despair. Every time I went there, I thought it looked like a torch flaming with anger.

THE ERICH SEGAL AWARD FOR SHITTY F*****G CRAP

(named after my least favorite book of all time, Erich Segal’s Love Story: a book built out of smarm and artificiality: a book that can’t even accidentally evoke a real feeling: a work of anti-literature)

APPLES NEVER FALL (2021), LIANE MORIARTY

I read and listen to plenty of commercial fiction. I like to see what the masses are reading, and I really enjoy a lot of it. Hey, I’ve read and enjoyed all of Sally Rooney (before Intermezzo, which I have but haven’t hit), and this year I really liked Writers & Lovers and The Da Vinci Code and Gone Girl; and was listening to Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation and vibing, before my Spotify listening time ran out (b******s!).

But I picked up Apples Never Fall from the library and this is what I wrote right after I finished it:

really enjoyed the suspense & build up of this book; but it all fizzles, worse than fizzles, it turns craven. it is a book too afraid to explore actual wrongdoing. actual badness. every character only appears to be bad illusively. in reality they are Good. i can forgive the overdrawn-out prose, and the stretches of tedium. but i can't forgive that.

I get that there are different strokes for different folks, but get the f**k outta here with your cowardice. I won’t even tell you the plot or nothing, skip this book. Sorry Liane.

THE PIERRE; OR, THE AMBIGUITIES AWARD

(this award goes to a psycho book written by a lunatic)

PIERRE; OR THE AMBIGUITIES (1852), HERMAN MELVILLE

The common story about Herman Melville is that Moby-Dick ruined his career, but actually it was this book, Pierre; or The Ambiguities. He published it the year after Moby-Dick and one of the reviews ran the headline HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY. Herman must’ve definitely thought he was crazy. I can’t imagine writing Moby-Dick and this masterpiece, Pierre, within a year of eachother and having everybody talk about how much the books suck. Even a normally astute critic like John Updike says this book is “ludicrously bad” (and he would know a thing or two about ludicrously bad bookS—though amidst the stinkers, Updike has some winners).

Pierre is about a Herman-like young man named Pierre who has a very close, kinda weird (definitely weird) relationship with his mom, and he’s engaged to a very pretty young woman, Lucy, and they live in this idyllic flower-filled world; until he sees this dark-haired sad girl at a party and his loins explode; and then he finds out his dead father (who he’s also obsessed with via a portrait of him), had a secret daughter—and guess who it is? the girl from the party, Isabel. Darkness subsumes his life: he breaks off his engagement and runs off to New York City with his half-sister under the guise of protecting her but really out of some lusty-lustiness. And then his old fiance comes to live with him. And they’re dead-ass a throuple. Melville sought out to write an entertaining romance, he said, and I think that’s what this book is. But his style is ludicrously sublime, filled with authorial intrusions. Sure, yeah, it’s crazy, but that’s what makes it so awesome. Here’s right after Pierre finds out about his sis:

IN their precise tracings-out and subtile causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight. We see the cloud, and feel its bolt; but meteorology only idly essays a critical scrutiny as to how that cloud became charged, and how this bolt so stuns. The metaphysical writers confess, that the most impressive, sudden, and overwhelming event, as well as the minutest, is but the product of an infinite series of infinitely involved and untraceable foregoing occurrences. Just so with every motion of the heart. Why this cheek kindles with a noble enthusiasm; why that lip curls in scorn; these are things not wholly imputable to the immediate apparent cause, which is only one link in the chain; but to a long line of dependencies whose further part is lost in the mid-regions of the impalpable air.

Idle then would it be to attempt by any winding way so to penetrate into the heart, and memory, and inmost life, and nature of Pierre, as to show why it was that a piece of intelligence which, in the natural course of things, many amiable gentlemen, both young and old, have been known to receive with a momentary feeling of surprise, and then a little curiosity to know more, and at last an entire unconcern; idle would it be, to attempt to show how to Pierre it rolled down on his soul like melted lava, and left so deep a deposit of desolation, that all his subsequent endeavors never restored the original temples to the soil, nor all his culture completely revived its buried bloom.

As much as I like to pretend all books are for everybody, Pierre is certainly not for everyone. Thusly I’ll award a second, more accessible book,

GENOA: A TELLING OF WONDERS (1965), PAUL METCALF

The legend goes that when Paul Metcalf was a child, he went up into his attic and unearthed some manuscripts by his grandfather (a name that was hush-hush-hush in that household up until then because of his tremendous life-failure), and it turns out that one of the manuscripts he found was the unpublished Billy Budd. Metcalf was the grandson of Herman Melville; reared by his only child (out of 4) who survived into late adulthood.

This book is totally awesome. The narrator is obsessed with Herman Melville and Christopher Columbus and he uses their stories, excerpting from Columbus's journals and Melville’s books to try to make sense of what happened with his brother—his brother who is in prison, about to be executed by the state for doing something heinous. It’s a book that tries to make sense of failure and negligence and evil; erstwhile grappling with the fact that it might just all be written in our genetic code. I’d never heard of Paul Metcalf, but his collected works were put out by Coffee House Press and introduced by Guy Davenport (one of the best readers of all time; anything he puts his stamp on is worthwhile), and I’ve flipped thru it and everything he’s doing is super interesting and seems very relevant in 2024. Genoa is his best book and it’s a slim one. It’s hard to quote from it because the whole style is the threading and stitching of everything. But please check it out!

THE FINNEGANS WAKE AWARD

(for the book that pushed artistic boundaries the farthest, the most magisterial book of the year, i.e. the best book of the year written in some semblance of english)

ADA OR ARDOR (1969), VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Vlad is coy about his influences. But this book is his version of Finnegans Wake (though he hated that book, he said); except much, much more readable. And, I think, he had Pierre; or The Ambiguities in mind here, too (he adored Melville). This book is the culmination of Nabokov’s whole artistic project. It’s written in the form of a nonagenarian’s memoir about his life-ruining & enriching love affairs. Our narrator, Van Vleen is probably the devil. He certainly leaves a lot of destruction in his wake. This book moves from paradise, to inferno, to purgatory, back to paradise—and all those states are mixed up in between. At the end though, our demon Vleen comes to a sort of married bliss with his Ada, that makes one think of Vlad and Vera in their senesce. I love Nabokov, a lot. And this is OD Nabokov. The writing is off the charts, the literary games are running wild. It’s so tender, so beautiful, so sweet, so horrific, and often very funny. In his copy of the novel, he wrote “A work of genius—a pearl of American literature.” It’s only arrogant if you’re wrong, and he is spot on!

Here is him, writing coyly about Van and Ada’s original sin (original sin, I mean, in the Edenic sense):

Van, in blue gym suit, having worked his way up to a fork just under his agile playmate (who naturally was better acquainted with the tree’s intricate map) but not being able to see her face, betokened mute communication by taking her ankle between finger and thumb as she would have a closed butterfly. Her bare foot slipped, and the two panting youngsters tangled ignominiously among the branches, in a shower of drupes and leaves, clutching at each other, and the next moment, as they regained a semblance of balance, his expressionless face and cropped head were between her legs and a last fruit fell with a thud—the dropped dot of an inverted exclamation point. She was wearing his wristwatch and a cotton frock.

He grabbed her ankle as she would’ve a closed butterfly, come on!!! The fruit falling to periphrase their pruriency, come on!!!

THE HAROLD ROGERS AWARD

(awarded to the most recent book published by Harold Rogers)

TROPICÁLIA (2023), HAROLD ROGERS

Maybe I’m a little biased because I know the author. But come on, bruh. This book is sick. New Year’s Eve in Rio de Janeiro. Mysteries, secrets, murders, betrayals. There’s a family tree on page 0 that we actually find out is a dupe, is a fake. It’s a good one!

From midway thru the book, Lucia speaking:

If it was my fate to be just like my mother there was nothing I could do. We were all sick trees planted in a sick soil, everyone in my whole family from the very beginning, all we did was hurt eachother. It’s these entanglements that sink us. I needed to be perfectly alone, where there was nobody to harm, nobody to betray, no reason for me to be Lucia, I would be as pure as the wind and the air and then finally I could be good. But there was no leaving this web. We were jumbled in this muddle forever. Was it really all just oblivion? Just terror and torpor until your coffin is sealed shut? It couldn’t be. What about those grinning mornings spent listening to my grandma’s stories and hearing Marta laugh? Love was anguish when you were in the dark pit of it, but then the pretty sunshine peaked over the horizon and you forgot. How could you live just for yourself? That would grind you down to a nub of a soul. It would be an emaciated life. I didn’t wanna spend my brief drama of flesh in spiritual penury… Existence was a putrid, overflowing dump, filled with all these dumb idiots getting in my way, but I wanted all of it.

ETCETERAS

Dear reader, careful reader, you may notice the paucity (utter lack) of books on this list published in the last few years. Expecting mine, the most recent book is Compass, and that’s about ten years old. Every year, I read many very recently published books. But it’s hard for me to judge because I like almost all of them a whole lot. Because contemporary language can be ingested very rapidly. So it’s like eating a delicious meal whose nutrition can’t be determined, I think, for a decade or so. It’s not my business to determine the immediate value of these books; only time will tell. But here are 10 very contemporary books I enjoyed this year in the chronological order of when I read them:

Diorama, Carol Bensimon

Via Apia, Geovani Martins (coming out in english in 2025!)

O Presidente Pornô, Bruna Kalil Othero

The Most Secret Memory of Men, Mohammed Mbougar Sarr

Same Bed Different Dreams, Ed Park

Victim, Andrew Boryga

The Red Handler, Johan Harstad

Os Supridores, Jose Falero (Pedro and Marques Take Stock, in english)

America del Norte, Nicholas Medina Mora

American Abductions, Mauro Javier Cardenas

IF YOU HAVE ALTERNATIVE PICKS YOU THINK SHOULD’VE BEEN AWARDED IN ANY OF THESE CATEGORIES, PLZ DROP A COMMENT. HAPPY BOXING DAY.

ON MATHIAS ENARD'S

ZONE (2008)

COMPASS (2015)

THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE GRAVEDIGGERS' GUILD (2023)

I TALK STRANGELY, AT LEAST ACCORDING TO GABY. . .

ON GOGOL'S DEAD SOULS

A CLASSIC STB DIARY FEATURING PAUL

ON MACHADO DE ASSIS

YOUR FACE TOMORROW

AND SOME LURID STEUBENVILLE GOSSIP

HAROLD IS AN A*****E BRO, F**K HIM. . .

I DID AN ALASKAN CRUISE WITH MY FAMILY.

REVIEWS OF

THE SLEEPERS BY MATTHEW GASDA

VIA ÁPIA BY GEOVANI MARTINS (TR. JULIA SANCHES)

HAPPINESS FOREVER BY ADELAIDE FAITH

THE DESERTERS BY MATHIAS ÉNARD (TR. CHARLOTTE MANDELL)

EVERY LIVING THING BY JASON ROBERTS

1. NARCOLEPTIC FAUVISM PART 1

It was just a regular, bum-ass, bad vibes, midweek open mic. The most ubiquitous part of being a fledgling comedian in the big city.

There was a dude in the front row wearing a suit.

He was locked in, smiling sprightly even when the comics on the stage were clowning him for nothing more than wearing a suit; he was so bushy-eyed & bright-tailed I thought he must be a newbie.

Though often the newer comics wear the most bitter and acrid faces. I was like that, starting out. I didn’t wanna think nobody was funny. I sat there, scowling and judging.

Now I am an easy, cheerful laugher. I sit close to the stage, locked in, being the change I want to see in the world, ghandily.

Even when I absolutely don’t wanna f*****g be there, like I was feeling on this day, when sunshining life was happening outside without me.

But you gotta get your reps in, and I don’t get booked on enough shows to eschew the terrible mics.

Anyway, it’s the Suit Guy’s turn.

His first order of business: he walks over and fixes the stage curtain, bending over so that we can experience exactly how tight his pants are: you could nearly see his anus breaching. A comic in the audience makes a pants-ripping noise, it really looked like that s**t was about to burst.

He gets to the mic.

He’s bug-eyed, mustached; a clear but submerged insanity burbling in his aspect.

He starts telling us that he’s from the Netherlands. He’s something of a professional comedian over there, he says, but he’s really bad at jokes, doesn’t know how to write any. But, he says, everyone in the Netherlands knows him, he’s actually so well known that he’s banned from doing comedy over there, so he’s trying his luck in the United States.

Why is he banned in an entire country?

Well, he has one single joke, and it just annoys everyone so badly.

Now, by this point, I was getting tense, because it was certain that whatever this one joke was, it was going to happen soon, and he was insisting both how annoying it would be, and also how much he loved us and was sorry.

I was completely locked in and nervous. His insanity was starting to burble up to the surface. The fact that he squeezed into a wet-suit-tight dress-suit made me think that he was liable to do anything.

I was half expecting him to pull a katana out of his ass and seppuku.

Finally he goes, “Ok. Here it is… Hey guys, so I have narcolepsia. Do you know what narcolepsia is? It’s when—” and he drops like an imploded building, right to the floor, asleep.

Now back when I was an avant-garde comedian, I had a narcolepsy joke.

I would suddenly fall asleep, snoring onto the microphone and then wake up in a huff and ask the crowd, “did I say anything?!” and they’d be like, No, and I would say, “thank God! …I just got diagnosed with racist narcolepsy.”

And then later on, I would fall asleep again and sleeptalk a racial slur within my purview such as, “dago” or “spic”.

2. AN INTERRUPTION: COME ON HAROLD, DON’T SAY SLURS!

Yes, you’re totally right.

I shouldn’t say spic because it’s a slur for a hispanic person, and because of the Hispanophone-Industrial-Complex, they invented an entire category to describe LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN LATIN AMERICA and left out the biggest, and the best: BRAZIL (ZIL, ZIL, ZIL).

Yes, brasileños son latinos, pero no son HISPANICS; for those of you filling out your race charts at home.

Yes, maybe it’s our Whitey overlords inventing these categories, making us beef.

But in the spirit of internecine squabblement, let’s say that I love all my Latino brothers & sisters, but no me gusta, los spics.

I’m off the hook for the above section because I let ChatGPT write it for me: and I disavow everything he said.

Anyway, dago is a very interesting term. It’s supposed to be a slur for an Italian person but of course they’ve been white for so long that it’s hard for us to remember their greasy, spaghetti-sauce covered past.

An Italian being denigrated racially is now nothing but a wet-dream plucked from the brain of an It’s-Actually-Called-Columbus-Day t-shirt wearing wop.

(Jesus, Harold, can you say that?)

People used to call me “dago” when I worked at Smokey’s in Steubenville.

As in, “get me a pack of Marlboros, you dago!”

Which I guess if I was really the most muliebrious priss in the tri-state area, I could take umbrage to, barking,

“Hey! My Nana was Eyetalian!”

Frankly, I thought it was hilarious.

But really, dago might be the most appropriate thing to call a white brasilian.

The term originates as a slur against the Portuguese, when they were dockworking in Spain and it seemed like all their names were “Diogo”, which said quickly in their stupid lusophonage could sound something like “dago”.

Further information can be found in my forthcoming book, THE UNABRIDGED HISTORY OF SLURS (NYRB 2027).

3. A FURTHER INTERRUPTION: THE HACK SALOON

On Thursday I actually performed labor for a portly, megalomaniacal dago out in Jersey City.

He owns a Saloon that runs comedy shows.

He had one show going on the bottom floor, and a smaller show going on the upstairs floor; delightfully, when there was a silent moment on the upstairs show, that crowd could hear the downstairs crowd having more fun than they were.

The owner’s interest in having these shows is that once all the comics have gone up, he can go on and do his only joke. Where he has a cigar in his mouth and he wears a wig and talks about how lovely his hair is, rapunzelly, and the wig falls off and he’s actually a bald a*****e.

Two years ago, I participated in one of the worst shows of all time at this very Saloon.

The lineup was full of very strong comics, but the vibes in the room were all the way off. The host zeroed charmingly, and then the guy going bullet was this guy we call The Asker.

Because he’s always asking for things.

He wants you to be his bringer for this show, wants you to do this, that, he needs to talk to your agent, he needs to drive your car upstate, what you don’t have a car? could you buy a car for him?, etc., etc.

He found out I was on this show and he was like, How can I get on, it’s my birthday? So I gave him the producer’s number. The producer is a pushover: he gave him a spot.

The Asker brought his new fiance (“The Asker strikes again” was circulating many text threads when he posted the picture), set his camera up, and then proceeded to bomb so hard it was like somebody opened a window on an airplane: all the air was SUCKED right outta the room.

You don’t often see punchlines having a reverse effect; instead of laughing, people were gulping.

After that it was fucked.

The crowd was surly cause they were late getting the drinks they ordered, and the lighting was weird, and it just so happened that NOBODY got a laugh the whole night.

Back then, I was entering my avant-garde phase, so I was screaming at the crowd in a way that certainly appeased me.

Another comic on the lineup who hadn’t seen me in a while said, “so you’re screaming now?”

A coach from the gym and his girlfriend were at that show.

Believe you me, this coach ain’t a bullshitter. I was worried about what he was gonna say. The next day at work, I was like, “hey man, sorry the show was so awful.”

And he goes, “whatchu mean, man? It was good.”

Regular people’s experience of comedy shows is sometimes, to me, a mystery of almost theological thorniness.

This night, the crowd at the Saloon had a slightly better time, I would think.

I got up, did my ten minutes of what’s-the-deal-with-airplane-food? type fare, and then booked it the f**k outta there.

4. NARCOLEPTIC FAUVISM PART 2

So anyway, the Sleeping Dutchman is out like a corpse on stage.

His set is over and the host is like, “OK! THANK YOU!” and of course he doesn’t stir. I’m cracking the f**k up.

I say, “he’s not gonna get up. He told us this bit annoys everyone. He’s banned!”

The next comic comes to the stage and the Dutchman is moving so little that the comic actually checks his pulse. (Still alive.)

This comic is prodding him, saying he’s gonna do heinous things to him, absolutely no reaction.

I’m in awe. I take a picture and send it to Gaby saying I’ve never been so jealous of a bit in my life.

She said, “LOL jealous of a bit. that’s f*****g funny unless he’s really UNWELL.”

The Dutchman’s bit was an adrenaline shot to the whole mic. I was actually glad I showed up (a rare feeling for these things!).

But the mood in the room started to turn.

People were legitimately pissed off, screaming, “WAKE YOUR NARCOLEPTIC ASS UP!”, shouting threats from the crowd.

I really didn’t understand what the big deal was. I think it would’ve made everything more fun if we had to work around the guy. I was already planning to go behind the curtain and narrate his sexy Dutch dreams.

Two comics finally decided they had enough.

They stormed the stage and tried to undress the guy. But his suit was so tight that his jacket wouldn’t even come off. It just ended up over his head. Of course, you won’t be surprised to learn, he didn’t f*****g stir, AT ALL.

So one guy grabbed his feet, and the other guy grabbed his arms, and they carried him off the stage and set him down right next to it where he continued his slumber.

Most people cheered. I booed, hard.

Then a guy gets up on stage talking about how the Sleeping Dutchman is a disgrace to comedy. That everyone in the room is working so f*****g hard to write their jokes and this guy is just shitting all over their effort.

That rankled me.

For one, if you happened to be an aurally-gifted, sentient, fly on the wall at the open mic, you’d be pretty surprised that “effort” and “joke writing” were in any way operative terms.

And two, I said when it was my turn to go on stage,

“Aren’t we supposed to be comedians? Isn’t comedy about breaking rules? There’s not even a rule that says you can’t lay on the stage and pretend you’re asleep. And you’re all pissed off at this guy? You guys are acting like the f*****g Principal. This bit should be in the MOMA! This narc energy is f*****g antithetical to comedy. This guy came in to test us with an amazing, if admittedly a little one note bit, and you guys f*****g failed. Anyway, I have narcolepsia—”

And then I passed out on stage to wild applause.

Then the club manager called the police, and when the Sleeping Dutchman got wind that it was about to be an oinkfest, he popped up and ran out the door.

5. ART IS CATASTROPHE

Everyone wants to be a real artist until it’s time to get down to business.

Because being a real artist is a catastrophe.

If that Dutch freak was really doing that all over the Netherlands like he said (and I believe him), then he must’ve gotten pummeled, assaulted, violated in every which way.

You could tell just by how tightly his shoes were tied the kind of contingencies he was prepping for. He had physically suffered for this bit.

But very few people are willing to suffer like that for the integrity of their vision. I certainly wasn’t. I went back to my joke book and became a hack again.

I ain’t a Patriot to Heaven like the Sleeping Dutchman. I am a slave to kudos & laudation. Like you probably are too.

The heretic always thinks that the purity of the vision will speak for itself, garner admiration without requiring dilution.

It never happens like that. Seeing a human in pure communion with their God scares the living s**t outta people, and it has since the beginning of time.

If you wanna find the real artist, I can assure you, you won’t find him where everybody is clapping.

Or, or, or…

He might’ve just been an idiot pretending to fall asleep.

6. A MULIEBRIOUS CODA

After that very male week, it was a delight to rompfully muliebriate with Gaby on Friday.

The mission was to go to this store filled with girlcrap made of beads.

We were knocked off course odysseanly, lured into an awful perfume shop,

(really, if Gaby was the Road Runner, and you were Wile E. Coyote, all you’d have to do is paint a perfume shop on the mountainside and she’d be roadkill),

where they sprayed us with so much dupe fragrance I’m still trying to scrub off the ersatz Giorgio Armani.

Then we went to a much lower-key perfume store where she would have me smell the exemplars and I would say, “ooo, wow.”

Then she was diverted by a store filled with girlcrap made of ceramics; where, also, sat candles that were doughnuts and vice versa.

That was a Cyclops moment for me; I said we gotta get the f**k back on course.

Finally we made it to the muliebrious girlcrap bead store where Gaby and the store clerks engaged in a dialogue of Finnegans Wake-level density, muliebritywise.

Then we got some flower-flavored ice cream.

Then we went back to her place to watch GIRLS.

She said, “what a great Friday!”

I love muliebrity.

THE DEVIL IS OTHER PPL. . .

ON THE MRS. DALLOWAY CENTENNIAL

SCHATTENFROH

DRUNK TRAVOLOGUE

AND READING OF

A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO ANNELIESE (2025) BY JAMES ELKINS,

JOEY CHESTNUT,

THE PAINTER ANGELES SANTOS

THE TITLE SAYS IT ALL. . .

1. SAT ON A WALL. . .

HUMPTY DUMPTY IS A MYTH IN THE GUISE OF A NURSERY RHYME.

The humptian hero rises, — generationally, glittering, — from the mass of the masculine lodazal; takes his seat on the WALL; we kowtow in admiration, horror, envy as our dumptian king flits in swift abligurition upon the summit. . .

The reason Humpty is Him : NOBODY else could get up on the damn WALL!

LAST WEEK, I WALKED AROUND FRIGID NYC.

Scarfed, hatted, but ungloved, — the wind scraping my face like razor wire, stomping thru completely begrimed gargantuan snow-mounds, walking 20k steps a day : — I couldn’t stop audiobooking Ali: A Life (2017) by Jonathan Eig.

I jolted to attention when I heard, in the midst of Ali’s brutal, unnecessary fight with Larry Holmes : when he was brain-battered, defalcated, finished,

— Howard Cosell said during the broadcast,

“You can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

I love Muhammad Ali; he was my first sports hero.

In 2nd Grade, for Black History Month, everyone was assigned a historical figure to report on : I got “Cassius Clay”. (The coyness of my Catholic school, deadnaming one of the most famous people of all time to keep us from. . . getting infected by Islam?)

I never felt admirative ardor for living people; — life : movement : fallibility. . . I need a hero fixed in frieze, faults & all, like Hercules.

Ali was big, handsome, smiling, rebellious, and FAMOUS! I wanted to be all those things. He did it thru BOXING : suddenly, boxing had a fantastic allure. . .

NOBODY TALKED LIKE ALI IN THE EARLY 60s.

He said he was gonna be the Heavyweight Champion of the World since he was 13; used to go knocking door to door in Louisville evangelizing his amateur fights; talked his way to an Olympic gold medal in 1960; & eventually, a showdown with indomitable Sonny Liston.

Liston’s jab was getting hit with a lead pipe; he used to leave bloodied opponents picking teeth out their mouth-guards; a cop pulled him over once in St. Louis, started using racial slurs, Sonny beat the s**t outta him and took his gun.

He was the kind of Black Heavyweight Champ Whitey could understand in the 60s : a grizzly mean killing machine.

Cassius Clay didn’t give a damn.

There’s a great interview from before the fight, 1964 : Ali is rambling some long parable, — the act isn’t honed yet, — the reporter looks almost bored;

then Ali starts saying if he sees Liston out on the street he’ll kick his ass before the fight! The reporter tries to warn him,

“‘I saw Sonny Liston a few days ago, Cassius—’

‘Ain’t he ugly!?’

‘HA. . . he —’

‘He’s too ugly to be the World’s Champ! The World’s Champ should be pretty like me!’”

. . . Ali’s fangled jive rattled Sonny, — he’s ‘posed to be scared of me!, — Tune in to the fight : see the cocky youngster get his mouth shut. . . ; Sonny couldn’t touch him :

Jab too quick! Feet too fast! Left fearsome Sonny Liston sitting on his ass!

Ali made him quit ‘fore Round 6.

In the rematch 3 months later in the most random venue in boxing history : Lewiston, ME, in Round 1, Ali pulled back, clipped Liston with a knockdown short right hand; he looked up at the ceiling, knew he didn’t have a shot, no más, he stayed down. . .

Cassius Clay was the world’s champ : NOBODY could take it away from him.

2. HAD A GREAT FALL. . .

THE WALL IS INHERENTLY UNSTABLE.

The humptian King, — cambalhotic, stubborn, — gets carried away thinking his steps R sure 4ever ; the shouts of the jealous ferveling rabble grow louder, he leans his dumptian head over to hear ; a brick slips, he trips, — reign, rain : SPLAT. . .

The reason Humpty is doomed : WE need him to FALL!

ALI’S FIRST FALL WAS HEROIC.

They stripped him of his championship. A first in the job-germane ruffianist tradition of the Heavyweight Title : murderers were OK, but a race-militant trash-talker with a Muslim name, calling Whitey devil, refusing to enlist in the United States Army was UNACCEPTABLE.

It’s hard to imagine how unpalatable Ali was to mainstream America when he uttered his famous phrase : “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong.”

Ali sacrificed 3 years & 218 days of his athletic peak for a moral stand! In our age of politicking athletes, NOBODY would trade bread for ethics; — especially not the #1 draw in the whole world.

Boxing was his life ; now he was lost ; it’s easy, in hindsight, to discount contingency, but there’s a world where Ali could’ve been remembered as a pariah who beat Liston and then went to prison for hating America. . .

But Ali was avant-garde in everything ; America reconfigured to his gravity ; in 1970, when he finally got back in the ring, the once-jeering crowds were chanting his name.

WHAT DO WE WANT FROM A HERO?

Not perfection : — transcendence. . . Ali’s life : anastomosis of GLORY & DOOM. Everything that made him GREAT flowed upstream fatally.

In the ring, his two GOAT qualities (besides the hebetitious jab) : his irrepressible meteor of optimism, and the best chin in the history of boxing. His downfall was written in the book of those virtues.

The hero : a public banquet of magnificence. There are limits to what WE can do. We need someone to exceed those limits and bring back a divine morsel; — allowing all of US to taste transcendence. . .

Ali didn’t return from his moral hiatus unscathed : he didn’t dance like he used to, he looked older, slower ; he went 15 with Frazier at MSG but got dropped by a left hook : — the first time he ever fell, — and suffered his first defeat.

. . . George Foreman was looming : he was the Nemean lion. He made Frazier look like a bum off the street; dropping him six times in as many minutes.

Foreman & Ali were set to fight in Zaire : the RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE. Nobody thought Ali stood a chance. . .

Ali stepped off the plane, someone yelled “Ali, bomaye!” (“Ali, kill him!”); Ali picked up the phrase, started saying it everywhere. The taciturn Foreman refused to talk to the people. Hercules could never keep to himself. . .

. . . Foreman didn’t stand a chance. Like Liston, he’d never fought anybody that wasn’t scared of him. And he never fought anybody who could take his punch.

Ali didn’t stop talking the whole fight ; by the 8th round, George was spent, throwing pillowhand punches; Ali against the ropes; last 30 seconds, a burst, bing, bing, BOOM, a right hand sends the lion tumbling; the crowd : “ALI BOMAYE!”

I get chills everytime. . . Ali’s greatest victory was the harbinger of his ultimate doom.

3. ALL THE KING’S HORSES, ALL THE KING’S MEN. . .

AT SOME POINT DAMAGE BECOMES IRREPARABLE.

The humptian wretch, — cracked, annihilated, — sees his giddybrained glaverers try to patch back together the shards of his life ; it is too late ; the dumptian yolk runs out, the last vestige of life-force : the people soak their bread and eat. . .

The reason Humpty must be consumed : He is part of US.

ALI TOOK MORE THAN 200,000 PUNCHES IN HIS CAREER.

In fights against some of the hardest punchers of all time. . . ; in sparring, after his exile, he’d tell his partners to bash his head to toughen up his chin; Larry Holmes thought it was madness,

“you can’t toughen up the chin! He was taking so much damage for no reason!”

U act invincible b/c U feel INVINCIBLE. Ali could take a punch better than anyone in the history of boxing : a deleterious self-realization. . .

Sometimes when I was teaching my group boxing classes, we’d do some body sparring ; I’d hop in, let the class-takers whale on my stomach & ribs : I’d put my hands behind my head, laughing scornfully at their best efforts; . . .

The next day, after taking hundreds of unprotected body shots for no reason, my stomach would be hurting like HELL, my bowels would be in a tizzy : it took me much longer than it should’ve to realize the two events were correlated. . . I stopped.

. . . brain damage is so frightening because it sneaks up on U : U sail out, suddenly plus ultra without even realizing ; Ali said he’d never be punch drunk like them old fighters, never! he was too pretty! he was too tough! he could dance too good!

But each blow was carving tracks in his brain : by the time he realized something was wrong he was already ruined. . .

ALI EXEMPLIFIES THE EXTREME AVANT-GARDE.

At his peak, he was a coruscating PROBLEM, — an edge so sharp U couldn’t get near him without getting cut ; a planet, bending the gravity of American culture :

The country changed to accommodate Ali’s vision. He was DANGEROUS.

Eventually, always, danger sits down at the dentist’s chair to get its teeth extracted. . . The point of the vanguardist is to be mutilated.

Ali is as American as the Flag : once the most revolutionary symbol on the block, representing a NEW way to be human; . . . now denuded, co-opted by commercial interests.

He is a stylized poster on a coffee shop wall : an innocuous vibe.

. . . he shouldn’t have fought Larry Holmes; he was 38, slow, slurring his words, hardly training,

. . . after Holmes beat the s**t outta his former hero, he went over to Ali’s corner, said, “I love you. I really really admire you. I hope we’ll always be friends.”

I was listening, walking up 3rd Avenue, headed to Gaby’s : I teared up.

The tragedy of Humpty Dumpty : he warps the world in His image. . . at the cost of his LIFE. . .

But Ali, never finished, had one more moment of public greatness : 1996, with terrible tremors, hardly able to speak, he was chosen to light the Olympic flame. . . the crowd chanting the once reviled name : “ALI!” as the ultimate symbol of the United States. . .

I teared up again. . . I’m ambivalent about what happens to the avant-garde, — but truly, U don’t get a lifetime of extreme forward thinking ; . . .

if his Greatness hadn’t been appropriated by the machine, he probably would’ve never been a hero to a white Latino kid in Catholic school in Ohio. . .

COMMENT UR LEAST FAVORITE (DEAD) U.S. PRESIDENT.

. . . — THE MAN — . . .

“AN INTENSE DREAM, A VIVID RAY”

I

ON THE MORNING OF AUGUST 15, 1909, Euclides da Cunha, — the most famous writer in Brasil, — was murdered by his wife’s lover.

The TOLD story : Euclides uncovered the betrayal; pulled up furious, strapped, — snapped; shot poor, young, apollonian Dilermando de Assis three times : wimpy Euclides, the intellectual with the soldierless jib-cut, missed : Dilermando, the wife-f****r with mean aim, shot back, — hit; Euclides dead : two bullets in the heart.

Portentous apocrypha (!) : passersby ask, as he lays dying, “what insanity is this, Dr. Euclides?!” . . .

His wife, Anna, married Dilermando, — who was 17 years younger than her. Five years later, Euclides Jr. tried to avenge his father, shot at his step-dad; Dilermando shot back and killed another Euclides. . .

In 2014, Anna’s diary turned up, given to her grand-daughter by a descendent of the lawyer who represented Dilermando in court (where he was acquitted : self-defense); 45 pages, trying to justify the death of her husband and son; she opens,

“I am here to accomplish a sacred task, unload my conscience and bring peace to my spirit, saying that out of the three of us, Euclides, Dilermando, and me, three criminals, the most responsible one is me.”

. . . how much did Euclides know?

When he came back from two years in the Amazon, his wife was pregnant; the baby didn’t survive, — soon she had another one, a little blonde kid Euclides raised as his own, he called him “the corn stalk in the middle of the coffee plantation” . . .

Euclides : a rage-prone workaholic, — spent his wedding night screaming at Anna, —he’d had bouts of insanity before : when he was in military school, he got thrown out for throwing his sword on the ground in protest of the Empire. . .

Dilermando : kind, studly, present, — Anna writes in her diary what attracted her most to Dilermando was his tenderness, — ; she wanted to divorce Euclides but he wouldn’t let her; — they lived in their messy mélange until what. . . ?

Anna knew Euclides was in a deleterious tizzy his final morning : her son warned her the night before, dad is pissed. . . she stayed put, burrowed militantly with Dilermando, in ambush, awaiting Euclides’s onslaught.

Why was the Brasilian public so ready to accept Euclides da Cunha was insane?

II

ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 22, 1897, Antonio Conselheiro was found dead, — emaciated in supine prayer, — in the New Church in the center of Canudos.

He was the founder of Canudos ; a town of — not counting women & children, old & infirm, — ten thousand men, jagunços, armed to the teeth, living in clapboard stacked shacks in a religious community orbiting a heresiarchal sun : Antonio Conselheiro.

The newfound Brasilian Republic exterminated the people of Canudos in a slapdash civil war, — NO : it’s not a war when the people don’t know there’s a political battle, they’re simply defending their home;

it was an unholy internal wipe-out like the Albigensian Crusade, — in the name of the ORDER & PROGRESS newly emblazoned on the National Flag. . .

In 1897, the city-boy Euclides da Cunha was sent out to rural Bahia to report on the end of the conflict; believing, like most Brasilian urbanites,

“We had, suddenly, resurrected and in arms in front of us, an old society, a dead society, galvanized by a madman. We did not recognize it. We couldn’t recognize it.

We rose, abruptly, tumultuated by the abundance of modern ideas, leaving behind in the secular penumbra in which they lie, in the heart of our country, one third of our people. . . we deepened, revolutionarily, fleeing the fleetest concessions with the exigencies of our own nationality, the contrast between our way of life and that of the rude native sons more alien in our land than the immigrants from Europe.

Because an ocean didn’t separate them from us, but three centuries. . .”

Euclides, coruscating with IDEAS : set out on his tortuous trek, expecting to find unconscionable barbarism, — unrecognizable aliens; — instead, he witnessed the bloody shadow left behind by Brasil’s new light;

saw the dark version of himself : Antonio Conselheiro. . .

Antonio was a sertanejo from the backlands of Brasil, — the region known as the SERTÃO. . . a sertanejo : the product of centuries of miscegenation between white settlers, indigenous peoples, and the descendants of African slaves;

the most controversial aspect of Os Sertões is what Euclides writes about this mixing,

“The mestizo is almost always an unbalanced type. . . fulgurant spirits, at times, but fragile, unquiet, inconstant, dazzling one moment and right-away extinguished, lacerated by the fatality of biological laws. . .

every man is, above everything else, an integration of racial forces of which his brain is a heritage. . .”

REMEMBER : the man who wrote this was a product of the same mixing, describing himself in a poem,

“This caboclo, this tame jagunço, mixture of Celt, of Tapuia, and of Greek.”

A friend of Euclides described,

“his disdain for clothes, his face with its prominent cheekbones, his glance now keen and darting, now far away and absorbed, and his hair which fell down over his forehead, all of which made him look altogether like an aborigine, causing him to appear as a stranger in the city, as one who at each moment was conscious of the attraction of the forest.”

What did Euclides feel when he wrote about the madness he believed inherent in his own blood? Did he feel inside himself an erumpent insanity he needed to corral thru the cold grip of science?

. . . Antonio, before he was Conselheiro, — the Counselor, — lived in a hardscrabble little town; his prophetic journey began when his wife ran off with a police officer;

from then on, he peregrinated the backlands incomparably for 22 years, wearing a belt-less blue smock, living on the slim pickings of John the Baptist, — locusts, wild honey, — his legend fecundly famigerating, till he’d entucked himself in a permanent citadel, surrounded by unconditionally faithful sectarians & shivering feary accomplices. . .

Canudos : where Antonio Conselheiro and Euclides da Cunha would face off in the grand testament of both their lives.

. . . — THE LAND — . . .

“BEAUTIFUL & STRONG, IMPAVID COLOSSUS”

III

IT TOOK ME 40 DAYS TO READ OS SERTÕES. . .

The language-terrain is as grand, forbidding, inhospitable as the sertão itself; — many readers end up like the poor deraisoned raisin’d warrior Euclides describes :

“The setting sun casted, long, its shadows over the ground and protected by it — arms openly spread, face upturned to the heavens — a soldier rested.

Rested. . . for the last three months.

His body was intact. Pruned, is all. Mummified, conserving the physiognomic traces, in a way which induced the exact illusion of a tired fighter, revitalizing himself in tranquil sleep under the shadow of that beneficent tree.

Not even a worm—most vulgar of the tragic analysts of matter—had maculated his tissue. He was returning to life’s whirlwind without repugnant decomposition, through an imperceptible draining-off process.

Here was an apparatus that revealed absolutely, and in the most suggestive manner, the extreme aridity of the atmosphere.”

STYLE sprouts from SUBJECT ; penetrable limpidity in the face of Euclides’s sombral leviathan would simply be a LIE. . .

Euclides da Cunha is a geological thinker; look how he describes Antonio, as a rock aberration :

“It is natural that these profound layers of our ethnic stratification should insurrect in an extraordinary anticlinal — Antonio Conselheiro.”

He realizes what makes a collective WE begins in the soil; years pile sedimentarily: people become disparate, eroded, symbiotic with wind & river; — in perfect union with the threats to their survival ; and his STYLE formalizes this :

“The struggle for existence which in forests translates to an irrepressible tendency toward light, unraveling bushes into woody vines, elastic, distended, fleeing the drowning shadows and heightening themselves clinging more to the sun’s rays than the trunks of the secular trees — here is the total opposite; it is more obscure, more original, and more moving.

The sun is the enemy whom it is urgent to avoid, elude, or combat.

. . . the most robust plants carry, in their extremely abnormal aspects, emblazoned, all the stigmas of the soundless battle.”

The clarity-shunning language carries the scars of the claudicant, bloody creation of Brasilian identity :

— which IS as much those exterminated in Canudos as the exterminators. . .

The truth is buried deep in the sertão.

IV

THERE WAS NEVER A CONVERSATION.

The great problem of Brasilian (any!) society : the lack of communication between the people and the elites.

Euclides translates the jagunços’ protest; formalizes the communication struggle by writing ornate, arduous, otiose, — the style becomes EVERYTHING. . .

The legend of Canudos proliferated cancerous & unruly ; there was no parley : elites heard-tell something unacceptable was happening, —

here was a ferveling cauldron of miscegenation, living outside the purview of earthly institutions : eyes firmly fixed skyward,

“Canudos was made up of the most disparate elements. . .

an unconscious and brute mass, growing without evolving, through the mere mechanical juxtaposition of successive layers, in the manner of a human polyp. . .

immersed completely in the religious dream; living beneath the sick preoccupation of the life to come, their world within that protecting girdle of mountains. With no thought of institutions to guarantee a destiny on earth.

All else was meaningless. Canudos was their cosmos.”

A tempestuous cult swirling around an ascetic king. . . here was a dream of Brasil : true racial harmony beneath the tropical sun; LOOK : the free women in ecstasy,

“All ages, all types, all colors. . .

The mangled rats’-nests of deep-black crioulas; hard and flowing hair of caboclas; scandalous turbans of Africans; brunette and blond manes of legitimate white women, all mixed up, without a ribbon, without a hairpin, without a flower. . .

Madonnas encoupled with furies, beautiful deep eyes, in whose blackness blazes ecstatic madness. . . beneath the unruly hair, it was a cruel profanation drowning in that repugnant ruffianism which exuded in one breath the suffocating reek of filthy carcasses and the slow psalming of lugubrious prayers. . .”

The Brasilian military looked down from Mount Favela, saw the 5,200 houses in close quarters, heard the solemn whispers of a different path for the nation : — decided this potential future must be annihilated.

. . . — THE FIGHT — . . .

“FROM THE HEROIC PEOPLE A RETUMBANT YAWP”

V

WHO WERE THE BARBARIANS?

A classic story : U look into the darkness : the darkness subsumes U ; the Brasilian troops were angry & vindictive, — these prehistoric retrogrades were getting their licks in,

— it became a matter of vengeance; the troops started torturing the prisoners,

“They would demand they shout vivas to the Republic. Or substituting this dolorous irritation for the frank and insulting mockery of cruel allusions, in a hilarious and brute chorus of pungent jibes. And they beheaded them or hacked them up with stabs.”

It was not a campaign, it was a slaughter. . .

But the jagunços fearsome resistance earned the soldiers’ respect; while the army was at war with the parsimonious terrain & atmosphere, — with hunger, — the jagunços were used to this life,

“The jagunços ferocity was balanced by the selvaticness of the land.”

. . . literally in cataclysmic conflict with their shadow side, the army often couldn’t see who they were fighting;

— the indomitable warriors were MYTH before the battle was even won,

“the jagunço now began to appear as a being apart, teratological and monstrous, half-man and half-goblin; violating all biological laws by staging inconceivable resistances; hurling themselves, never seen, intangible, against the adversary; sliding, invisible, through the caatinga, like snakes; gliding or tumbling down steep cliffs like a specter; lighter than the musket he dragged; and skinny, dry, fantastic, melting into a spirit. . .”

Euclides witnessed much of this brutality, and it changed him; he came in believing in PROGRESS, but realized if this is modernity, modernity is a DUMP :

“a sanguinolent drama of the Stone Age was here taking place. The actors, on one side and the other, blacks, caboclos, whites and yellows, brought, intact, on their countenances the indelible imprint of many races—and they could only be united upon the common plane of their lower and evil instincts.”

As the battle wore on they realized what had always been true : they were the people they were fighting, — like when they walked thru the ruins of Canudos,

“the dilapidated soldiers, filthy, without caps, without uniforms, with hats of straw or leather on their heads and old worn out sandals on their feet, wearing the same uniform as the enemy.”

ORDER & PROGRESS always win. . . but they are false words, — glittering illusions scrubbed clean of the messy, bloody struggle for a vision of supremacy. . .

VI

WHAT IS A MORAL VICTORY WORTH?

The battered troops returned from the campaign with a profound admiration for the inviolable backlanders, who fought until the last man,

“Let us bring this book to a close.

Canudos did not surrender. The only case of its kind in history, it held out until complete purging. Expunged inch by inch, in the precise meaning of those words, it fell on October 5, toward dusk, when its last four defenders fell, dying, all of them. There were only four : an old man, two full-grown men, and a child, facing a furiously raging army of five thousand soldiers.”

They walked thru the fiery ruins of the community they exterminated from the face of the earth and noticed,

“the anguished life that the inmates of those hovels must have led. . .

Told, most expressively, by the nakedness of the cadavers. They were in every position: laid out, supine, face to the heavens; chests bared with the medals of their favorite saints; rigid in the last whines of agony; crouched over improvised trenches, in the attitude in which death had found them.”

But the Republic had been secured. . . against people who were never a threat. . .

Euclides ends the book with Antonio Conselheiro’s skull; he thought, until the end : Antonio’s madness started the whole thing;

— the fatalistic insanity carved in the synapses of his brain,

“the corpse was decapitated, and that horrible face, sticky with scars and pus, once more appeared before the triumphers. . .

After that they took it to the seaboard, where it was greeted by delirious multitudes carnival with joy. Let science here have the last word. Standing out in bold relief from all the significant circumvolutions were the essential outlines of crime and madness. . .”

After Euclides was killed, shot thru the heart in Dilermando’s backyard, while he was on the ground, Dilermando looming over him, they autopsied his body, removed his brain, examined it closely and found several lesions. . . maybe from childhood malaria, maybe from years in the Amazon, maybe it was how he was born. . .

Euclides da Cunha set the parameters for how he would be viewed by the public by what he wrote about Antonio Conselheiro, — his counterpart in eternity, — madness was rutted into the brain from the get-go, he was always gonna explode. . .

We’ll never know what happened on the morning of August 15, 1909, but we do have the lasting effort of Euclides’s witness : Os Sertões, — his Canudos, — which might vanish from history, but like Antonio Conselheiro’s last stand, will always be a tumor, lodged in the spine of ORDER & PROGRESS. . .

THE WAVES

THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES

MOMA TOP TEN

BRONTE VS BRONTE

OV COMEDY TOUR

ARE U HAPPY?

MINAS GERAIS DIARY

HOW I REWROTE NANA'S FUNERAL

INFINITE JEST 2: REALITY PROBLEMS!

(1) I’M NOBODY! — WHO ARE U ?

MY FRIEND, SLIMY B, READ WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847). Unimpressed, he told me : “she writes like a teenage girl with a thesaurus. . .”

On a frigid, blistering walk, I tried to defend Emily’s honor : arguing lexically complex teenage ardors are rollicking delights, — but Slimy B put the final nail in the coffin of the Brontë Sister Industrial Complex :

“MAN, THESE CLASSICS ARE F*****G ELITIST!”

The “CANON” : a forbidding tower of smartypants smarminess, erected so a smug self-selected elect can turn their nose at hard-working regular folk, — the common readers with their bushy-tailed joys & dog-eared best-sellers. . .

I rub elbows with some of NYC’s “elite” in my job as a boxing coach; — (I’m a punching bag for rich wimps), — and I can assure U : they ain’t cozy in their palatial apartments hooking the whole family up to brain-direct IV-drip James Joyce; in fact, they ain’t f*****g interested in literature AT ALL!

Elitism is about ACCESS.

If U are interested in what a neo-luddite might call : Great Literature, there’s almost NOTHING more accessible for U. . .

All U need is a little f*****g GUSTO and the entertainment-value of these “elitist” works will bloom like roses thru a steaming pile of manure. . .

But obviously, something, not so easily dismissible, rankled Slimy B : — what do we owe a reader?

(2) ARE U NOBODY — TOO ?

IS AMBITION THE PROBLEM?

There are two types of literary ambition : EARTHLY & DIVINE.

I suffer, sinfully, from great pangs of earthly ambition ; — when my first book got reviewed NOWHERE, I didn’t console myself : I am on a divine path, — I was PISSED. Gimme my f*****g remunerative KUDOS! I wanna walk into the literary reading and be the center of attention : — ME!

I AM AMERICAN, MATERIALIST, SCUM.

U convince Urself U are trying to talk to the PEOPLE : really, U are trying to talk to the MARKET. . .

At some point the overwhelming concern becomes :

— — HOW. CAN. I. SELL. MY. BOOK. — —

If U R Lucky, U become a corporate saint like George Saunders : fingers weighed down on every keyboard-clack with financial interest ; knowing Ur next book will occupy its own table at Barnes & Noble with a golden plaque :

“Reading George Saunders makes U a better person!”

. . . but there is DIVINE AMBITION :

“Delight, —top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.”

. . . Milton sets out his intention at the very beginning of Paradise Lost, to pursue,

“things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme. . . and to justify the ways of God to men.”

. . . Giambattista Vico spent his whole life working on New Science (1725), published it himself, edition after edition, to NOTHING, sent it to all his heroes, — SILENCE ; — walked miserable thru the streets of Napoli while the people who he sent copies of his precious book ignored him; went home to his annoyed wife and 12 hungry children : a useless FAILURE ;

wrote in a bitter letter at the end of his life,

“I expect nothing from my native city, except the complete isolation that allows me to work so hard.”

If there is something missing from the contemporary novel, maybe it’s a paucity of DIVINE AMBITION : but it has always been fewfar : — earthly rewards are sensuous & bright, eternity’s only reward is annihilation. . .

Why wouldn’t U chase material success?

(3) DON’T TELL! THEY’D ADVERTISE — U KNOW !

I DIDN’T GROW UP IN NO LITERARY HOUSEHOLD.

My dad was a bookie; my mom was a myriad-hustler who ended up working with kids with disabilities. Neither went to college; both were common readers : — they read 1-10 books a year following their interests.

My dad read books about gambling, the mafia, a few sports biographies; my mom’s taste was more eclectic, encompassed big-time bestsellers like Tuesdays with Morrie (1997) ; — which I keenly remember her reading aloud to me in Rio, movingly, when I was a kid.

Between the two of them, I only know of one “literary novel” : my dad, inexplicably, read a hardcover copy of A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) : — he probably heard it was about a funny fat guy and was sold. . .

Yet they always championed reading as something essential; — my dad would say, as I headed off to school, “there’s gold in them books!” ; the only thing they’d buy for me questionlessly was books, — so initially, a great part of the appeal was having new stuff.

. . . until middle school, my mom would take me out of school for half the year, to go stay in Rio with her parents ; she would get all the work from the teachers in advance, and she would homeschool me ; this schooling became very self-directed : basically, do all the work fast as U can, and U can go play soccer with Ur friends for the rest of the day. . .

Schoolwork & reading became very competitive : I wanted to get the s**t done FAST. . . resulting in my privately pugilistic attitude toward reading. . .

. . . I ended up in the ninnyworld of the Columbia Fiction MFA : — thru EARTHLY AMBITION : I wanted to publish a novel, — . . . wading in such terrestrially boggy waters could prove a deleterious threat to DIVINE ASPIRATIONS. . .

What a tremendously serious way to be talking, huh? Slimy B would think I’m bugging : probably thinks his point is proved. But what if I said I’m simply playing a frivolous game?; the truth is, reading & writing is POINTLESS.

Why am I even wasting my breath?

(4) HOW DREARY TO BE SOMEBODY !

IN COLLEGE I WAS AN AMATEUR BOXER.

I fought 16 times, — mostly at light-heavyweight. My record was 12-4. Sometimes people ask me, “did U make any money?” The answer is obviously F**K NO! U do not make any money as an amateur fighter. All U do is sacrifice pleasant things.

I would hear, from my apartment window at Miami University, droves of my fellow students going out to the bars to party, f**k hot babes, make those famous college memories. . . I’d be looking at the clock waiting to see when it was time to drink my last tiny ration of water for the evening, eat my lone almond for dinner, — cutting weight for a dawncrack van-ride to go fight some neanderthal in the Pennsylvania woods.

Did I like fighting? Honestly, it scared the crap out of me.

When I had a fight looming, I would have nightmares for weeks leading up to it. I would pray for something to happen to get the fight cancelled. I had two awfully pusillanimous incidents.

My sophomore year : it was time for the regional tournament, I was way out of f*****g shape; there was a really tough guy in my bracket from Navy : when the brackets came out and I saw we were matched up in the first round, I emailed Coach, told him I had the flu; — my whole body still shudders from humiliated dread. . .

I should’ve taken my ass-whooping like a man.

The next year went way better for me. I was in the Semi-finals of the National Championship. I had to fight the 3x National Champion from Army, at West Point. The night before I’d watched him knock a guy out so badly he was unconscious in the ring for five minutes and they had to stretcher him off. . .

I could’ve given the dude a good fight, but I spent the night before surrendering in my head; — I woke up and after weigh-ins, had chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast : waving my white-flag in self-destructive resignation. The first round he hit me, — not even close to clean, — I slipped. Fell to a knee. When I got up, the ref asked me if I wanted to continue; I didn’t say anything; he stopped the fight.

I quit without taking any damage because of fear. It was my supreme low-point as a competitor.

My mom was in the crowd yelling, “LET THEM FIGHT!” . . . I was like, “MOM, CHILL!” . . .

I thought about it all summer. My senior year, I was possessed. I would run around town, not listening to anything, repeating my mantra, over and over “I AM THE CHAMPION!” The only thing I wanted in the whole world was to win Nationals.

I went 6-0 and made it to the National Finals. I had to fight a dude from Navy who I’d beaten three weeks before : Biron McNeely. I did everything I could; I thought I won, but the judges gave him a split decision. I cried.

My whole boxing career was literally POINTLESS. I didn’t earn any earthly delights. All I wanted was to win the National Championship, and I failed.

Why would anyone ever do anything?

(5) HOW PUBLIC — LIKE A FROG !

THE MOST EVER-DEVOTED SAINT OF POINTLESSNESS : JAMES JOYCE.

Spent seven years scribbling his usylessly unreadable blue book of Eccles; . . . exiled, doubted, up to his neck in obnoxious penury, — nobody wanted to publish his damn books. . . ; without an eye toward GOD, he would’ve never endured. . .

It paid off : Ulysses was a resounding earthly success; acclaimed in Joyce’s lifetime, now regularly touted as the greatest novel of all time; — its innovations seamlessly integrated into what everyone knows about literature. . . a writer couldn’t dream of so much success. . .

Regular people, generation after generation, read Ulysses and LOVE it.

Overlooked fact about the “CANON” : it is, to a certain extent, defined by the taste of common readers accrued over time; cultural heritage is a democracy, if the only people fostering an artwork are a Shrouded Coterie of Brainiacs, the work will die.

My parents could read Ulysses; — it is readable & FUNNY.

They’d f**k with it if they gave it the requisite attention. They don’t because they don’t want to and I don’t blame them. They’d rather crawl into the warm frictionless womb of Facebook reels. . .

There’s a reason people open their gullets & submit to the firehose gush of CONTENT, — content is extremely explicable. U R there to flush Urself with dopamine; — it might be just as pointless as anything else, but at least there’s no ambiguity w/r/t the purpose.

Life is an inaudible ribbet : — why waste our time on activities we can’t even explain?! Which is why U hear : Reading the empathetic books du jour make U a better person :-). . .

Ulysses is easy to justify in this way : — the book rewards attention; — U will be entertained, U will feel smart for getting to the end; U can post it on Ur Instagram for awed back-pats; — it is a book that beckons the earthly reader.

What do we make of a book of pure DIVINE AMBITION?

(6) TO TELL ONE’S NAME : THE LIVELONG JUNE

FINNEGANS WAKE (1939) IS A PROBLEM.

Why would someone spend 17 years writing increasingly more elaborate puns in huge letters with crayon, seeding a deep-forest of obfuscated meaning, splayed out on their bed, as their eyes fail, their family falls apart, and every fan turns their back on them?

HG Wells read an excerpt of what was then called Work-in-Progress, sent Joyce a letter in 1928,

“You have turned your back on common men — on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence. What is the result? Vast riddles. Do I get much pleasure from this work? No.

So I ask: Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousand I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?”

What’s ironic about this extremely fair question : Finnegans Wake is actually about the common man : a good old Dublin fellow named Humphrey (known as HCE) who runs a pub and has a family. He is also, simultaneously, every man in history,

“In all fortitudinous ajaxious rowdinoisy tenuacity, the hen and crusader everintermutuomergent. . .”

And the trouble begins : What the literal f**k is this guy up to!? Most books are trying to communicate to U ; Finnegans Wake ain’t talking to U!

Look at the quote : we know it’s about HCE b/c the first letters in “hen”, “crusader” and “everintermutuomergent” are “hce” ; if we wanna look even closer, what do the first letters in “fortitudinous ajaxious rowdinoisy tenuacity” spell out. . . : FART!

Finnegans Wake is the MOST accessible book : it doesn’t need anything from U. It is completely & utterly ITSELF : a monument independent of U. . .

Open to the first page, start reading, “riverrun past Eve and Adam’s” : let the words wash over U as sonorous NONSENSE ; books trying to communicate create a division b/t U and The Thing, — here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics.

U can stop, amused & interested, or U can keep pushing, a deranged detective, to unfurl the hermetically rank b******t,

“as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia. . .”

What does it mean that Joyce spent 17 years toiling on a literature-wrecking, life-destroying, nacht-book because he thought it was FUN?

(7) TO AN ADMIRING BOG !

IN 2023, I SPENT 9 MONTHS READING FINNEGANS WAKE.

I wanted to be the toughest guy who ever read Finnegans Wake; turns out, I wasn’t even close : Gene Tunney beat Jack Dempsey twice and said,

“I met Joyce once. He was blind then. I can understand Ulysses, but not Finnegans Wake, which I have read three or four times.”

Tunney dominated me, but still I persisted, reading a mastigable single page outloud per day, with the fisticuffle fervor I used to bring to the heavy bag, — enflamed by the private repetitive struggle. . . eventually the friction abated : I completely succumbed,

“It was a long, very long, a dark, very dark, an allburt unend, scarce endurable, and we could add mostly quite various and somenwhat stumble-tumbling night.”

Finnegans Wake was released in 1939 to plenty of fanfare; — Joyce was on the cover of Time magazine! Some Time readers weren’t crazy about Joyce’s piece of s**t,

“It appears to me that it is high time such literary excrement be branded for what it is and relegated to the oblivion it deserves.”

Joyce already thought of his work as a piece of garbage : that metaphor is in the book : FW takes the form of a stained letter pecked up by a hen named Belinda at the dump,

“a cold fowl behaviourising strangely on that fatal midden or chip factory or comicalbottomed copsjute (dump for short). . . what she was scratching at the hour of klokking twelve looked for all this zogzag world like a goodishsized sheet of letterpaper."

Joyce died not even two years after Finnegans Wake was released : on January 13, 1941 ; he was heartbroken at the incomprehension, — especially the anger of its reception. . .

Everything U will ever do is FUTILE & POINTLESS : U can confront those facts with morose resignation, or U can allow it to free U ; striving for something mad, failprone, foolish allows us to bring a little divinity into our futile tasks. . .

Joyce teaches us to imbue our NOTHING with the sunny light of SOMETHING; — devote Urself completely to something utterly worthless, and maybe, it’ll turn out to mean something. . .

Like his wife Nora, — the commonest of readers, — said, “what’s all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book.”

HAPPY BDAY JAMES JOYCE.