There are two kinds of books in this world.
So I find this book on the science fiction shelves of a middlin’ bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina, and my interest is immediately piqued. (Look at the cover. Does that look like science fiction to you?) (And yes: that sort of snap judgment does indeed kick over a can of worms. Nasty, divisive business, those genres. But: think of “science fiction” less as a much-maligned, ghettoized idiom whose ability to address the human condition with a much wider than usual array of metaphor and imagery has been grotesquely overlooked by narrow-minded Philistines, and more as a commercial classification which overworked booksellers use to quickly categorize product for easy sales—think of it like that, and you’ll see what I mean when I say a book like this on those shelves in a store like that is going to catch your eye.) (I mean, geeze, next thing you know you’ll be putting Canopus in Argos in between Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and Harpy’s Flight.) (Actually, Powell’s shelves half of Canopus in Literature and half in Science Fiction/Fantasy. Which doubles your chances of stumbling across it, I guess, but makes it a bit difficult to pick up the whole set at one go.)
Where was I?
Ah, yes. Saw this book a year ago, finally just got around to picking it up, have now begun reading it, pure curiosity and no real expectations (though Anthony Burgess does go on about how it’s Scotland’s shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom), so it wasn’t until I got to this passage—
Lanark did not wish to be an artist but he felt increasingly the need to do some kind of work, and a writer needed only pen and paper to begin. Also he knew something about writing, for when wandering the city he had visited public libraries and read enough stories to know there were two kinds. One kind was a sort of written cinema, with plenty of action and hardly any thought. The other kind was about clever unhappy people, often authors themselves, who thought a lot but didn’t do very much. Lanark supposed a good author was more likely to write the second kind of book.
—that I smiled to myself and settled in; I’m in good hands with this one. (It gets rather rapidly weird and strange. Science fiction? No. But a dark fantasy, thus far. In the modern idiom, of course.)
It’s true. He do read wierd stuff (sic).
Steve Lieber cuts a magisterial figure in a silk dressing gown and a pair of pinstriped trousers from a bespoke morning suit. He’s bracketed top to bottom by flawless white spats and a leopard-skin fez, that indispensible Excelsior! of sartorial whimsy. “Come in, come in!” he booms, stirring a cup of coffee. “May I offer you anything? Coffee? Port? A cigar?”
“Oh, no,” I demur, stepping into the airy chambers of Mercury Studios as one of the black-clad assistants takes my jacket. (Yes, it’s a hot summer here in Portland. But one doesn’t make points with Mr. Steve Lieber by dressing down.) “I’m fine.”
“Are you certain? They’re Cuban…”
“Couldn’t possibly.”
“Well then. What can I do for you, Mister, ah—I’m dreadfully sorry—”
Oh, how charming! As if it’s his fault he doesn’t remember nobodies like me. “Kip Manley, sir. Freelance critic of the paraliterary. I wanted to speak to you about your upcoming column, for, ah—” And here was a dicey dilemma. How to refer to the (rather rudely named) site without risking a disruption of our delicate decorum? Luckily, discretion was close to hand with a deft dodge: “Kevin Smith’s movie and pop-culture periodical?”
“Ah, that rascally World Wide Web site, Movie Poop Shoot dot com,” said Lieber, his voice and genial smile suggesting that, while its declassé taste was not an habitual one on his tongue, he nonetheless revelled genteely in the Rabelaisian wit of this misbegotten moniker. He continued to stir his coffee. “An argosy of acerbic articulations on (and analyses of) the arcana of that glorious business we call genre entertainment. How wonderful that a movie’s nebulous marketing scheme could, like Pygmalion’s statue or Frankenstein’s monster, take on a life of its own and go forth, into the world, to do what good it can. And how pleased I am to be able to steer its course with my few humble suggestions.” His spoon clinks against the cup, a merry sound against the industrious hullaballoo of the studio all about us: I can just make out shy, retiring Paul Guinan before he ducks back into the echoing gut of a hollowed-out 1887 knock-off of a vintage Reade Electric Man, brought it at no little expense for vital artistic reference; that bearded man taking tea beneath the windows with Ron Randall is, yes, George Lucas, here I believe to confer on the finer points of Imperial starship chandlery for the forthcoming third and final film (I try not to gawk); and in yonder corner—but no: I was sworn to secrecy as to the nature of the project being got up to there, and its participants, else I’d drop such hints as would make the whole comics industry sit up and slaver. —And this is a quiet day at Mercury.
“At any rate,” says Lieber, “if you’d care to step over to my workspace…” Stirring his coffee, he leads me to a sunlit corner laid with a hand-knotted Persian rug, defined by a pigeon-holed secretary desk to one side (quaintly archaic, its miniature writing-surface burdened with several precariously balanced stacks of leather bound books and brightly colored comics periodicals) and a sleekly modern, skeletal drawing table to the other (an ebony-and-teak tabouret, its dozens of drawers neatly shut, stands half under it like a faithful hound). A work table defines the third side, and it is here that Lieber pauses, looking a moment at the work of two black-clad assistants upon a sheet of bristol board, painted with black ink and strapped to a restraining frame. One of the assistants holds a bedraggled toothbrush, stiff with white paint, and shakes it at the board as if to admonish it for some imagined slight. “If you would,” says Lieber, holding out one hand and shaking back his rakishly unfastened French cuff. The assistant gladly surrenders the brush. “I think you’ll find,” says Lieber, holding the brush bristle-up and then whipping it with a subtle twist of his wrist, “that with white on black, a modified Wronski flip results in a more pleasingly scattered splatter. It’s just the thing for starfields—if a bit tiring for explosions. Here. Try it yourself.” The assistant takes up the brush again, and performs quite adequately. Lieber beams. “Now then,” he says, stirring his coffee. “Where were we?”
I should, perhaps, take this opportunity to steer the conversation back to our ostensible topic, but I’m distracted by the tantalizing mound of books. “Are these for upcoming projects?” I ask, picking up a much-loved copy of Eco’s Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language.
“Ah. I’ll be reading the chapter on symbol closely as part of my terminally in-progress response to McCloud’s Understanding Comics. While the semiotic dialect between signifier and signed is not the same thing as the closure of which McCloud speaks, there’s nonetheless a mischievous transference at play into which I wish to delve more fully. Plus,” he purses his lips, stirring his coffee, “there’s Dylan Horrocks’s piercingly trenchant Journal essay to take into consideration.” He sighs, stirring his coffee. “I’m afraid at this rate it shall be posthumously published, if ever.”
“And this?” I say, of a trade paperback edition of Anne Hollander’s Sex and Suits.
“Ah,” he sighs. “Don’t get me wrong. Wonderful book. But she has little to say on the subject of rep ties, about which I shall be doodling a little piece for Gentlemen’s Quarterly. I’m afraid the definitive history has yet to be written… Oh, and the Carter there—have you read Carter?”
“No,” I allow, momentarily spell-bound by the bizarre image on the cover, as provocative as the title: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.
“You must read Angela Carter. At any rate—and though it’s not officially hush-hush, I nonetheless really shouldn’t tell you—”
I perk up. He stirs his coffee a moment, drawing it out. Smiling.
“I’ve tentatively agreed to adapt that book for a publisher who as yet must remain nameless.”
“Excellent!” I cry, and then the next book in the stack catches my attention. “But Sex and Rockets?” I say, holding up the luridly jacketed hardcover. “Surely this is a bit lowbrow?”
“Not at all,” he says. “Work-product. It is the definitive biography of John Parsons, who made a brief appearance in the most recent issue of Alan Moore’s Promethea. I’m curious as to Parsons’ continued cachet as a black magician of some note when it’s quite clear from his own writings he wasn’t a terribly good one. A point I intend to make in my mostly favorable survey of the occultic history underlying that marvelous comic book—in an upcoming edition of my column, which is, I think, why you came to see me today?”
Indeed. Playtime is over. I pull out my notebook to begin the formal interview as he lifts his spoon from the coffee cup—it’s a delicate green cup, fragmented with delicate black lines, as if sketching an incipient fracture; Lieber will, in a moment, explain that it is a priceless example of the Japanese soma-yaki style. But at this moment he lifts the cup to his lips and sips. “Ah,” he says, smiling. “Just right.”
—But! Honesty compells me to admit that I have taken some few liberties with the truth. The “Wronski,” after all, is a quidditch maneuver, and those who know me will recognize that I loaned Mr. Lieber my own prized leopard-skin fez. As for the rest of it: oh, heck. Go read his damn column yourself and find out. It’s a hoot and a half, and if he isn’t really tackling obscure rocket-scientist magicians and surrealist erotomanic picaresques, well, he is writing about comics about bees and about non-linear road trip poetry and about skin-mites that live on Charles Darwin’s head, so I wasn’t too far off. Was I?
Seeing doppel.
He smokes, of course, because I let him. Doesn’t mean I’ll let him have the good stuff. Silk Cut, or Gauloises, maybe. Harsh and bitter and nasty. I glare at him through the haze.
“Yeah?” he says.
“I’m getting tired of it.”
“What?” he says. “The lies? The deception?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Christ, I don’t think I’d ever realized how acerbic he comes off, sometimes. How sarcastic. Cocksure and arrogant. —Is his voice sliding ever eastward, over the Atlantic? Is mine getting more Southern? “You know I’m probably not going to do anything about it.”
“Except bitch at me.”
“Why not? What else have I got to do around here?”
“Nobody’s stopping you from getting anything done.”
“You are!”
“And whose fault is that?” He smiles. We both have beards, naturally enough, but they do different things to our smiles. His is unpleasant. (I am told by those in a position to know that mine is more, shall we say, goofy.)
“Elias,” though, is what I say next. Struck by a sudden—insight?
“Elias,” he says. Skeptical. “Your last and least pathetic attempt at creating a truly evil person.”
“That’s who you’re starting to remind me of in these little chats.”
“Please,” he says. “Elias was adolescent transference at best; irresponsibly inept psycho-social lashing out. —Or did you miss the significance of how the other character you played then was such a monstrous suck-up?”
“Don’t try to psychoanalyze me,” I snap. (I honestly had missed it. Till now.)
“You and I,” he says, grinding out his cigarette, “are playing for altogether different—and higher—stakes. On a considerably more public stage.”
I have to laugh at that.
“It’s getting more public all the time,” he says, coolly, shaking out a fresh cigarette.
“For you, maybe. A little.”
“What’s good for me,” he says, sighing, “is good for you.”
“And what’s good for General Motors is good for America.”
And that’s when he laughs. “Pretty much. But it was me that got you into Dante’s for free that night.”
“Which was such an effort for you, I’m sure.”
“Did I get what I wanted in return? I don’t remember ever seeing that write-up…”
“You know that wasn’t my fault.”
“Whichever. But it is both of us being spoken about. Elsewhere. Sometimes in the same breath.” That grin again. “You nearly had a heart attack when you stumbled over that one.”
“You exaggerate.”
“Perhaps. Nonetheless: you are, I think, afraid. Of what? Paraliterature is paraliterature.”
“It’s not that simple,” I say. “It’s hardly that simple.”
“It sounds to me like someone needs to remember the lesson of the Mark of Cain.”
“And emet, yes, yes. Thank you for showing me of the error of my ways.”
He smiles, a little—pleasantly—and nods appreciatively. “Emeth. But that was a good idea of yours.”
I frown. “I’d thought you were the one who came up with it.”
He looks away, down at his keyboard. Sucks in some smoke and blows it out. “You had a point in coming here? Aside from pestering me?”
“Ada,” I say.
“Or Ardor,” he says. “What about it?”
“Who gets it?”
“You? Or me?”
“Precisely.”
He waves a hand dismissively. “Go ahead and take it. My plate is pretty full at the moment.”
“Gee,” I say. “Thanks.” It isn’t as withering as I’d hoped.
“Just maybe don’t write anything about it until you’re sure you’ll finish it. This time.”
“You haven’t finished it yet, either.”
“Of course not,” he says. “And yet,” musingly, “we will think different things about it…”
“Will we?”
“If people remembered the same,” he says, “they would not be different people.”
“Think and dream are the same in French,” is what I say—I think—but I’m not sure, because one of us says, “Douceur,” and for a moment it’s almost like I’m the one sitting there, tie loose, almost but not coughing on a lungful of bitter nastiness that suffuses effortlessly into my thirsty blood, and I’m peering up at him, ratty sweater puckered by an old blob of translucent caulk, in dire need of a haircut. “Douceur,” I say, again, or not, and he shakes his head—“Silk Cut,” he says—and coughs once, wetly, into a curled-up fist, and the moment passes.
“Do you?” he says, suddenly serious. “Want me to stop?”
Well, no, I don’t say. That’s not what this is about, I don’t say. I just—I just— I just can’t find the words. (Which is the crux of the matter. Isn’t it?)
“That isn’t really feasible,” is what I end up saying, and I wince (inwardly) at my glaring lack of charity.
“All right, then,” he says. Stiffly.
So I turn to go. And that sonofabitch just goes right back to typing.
Slaysome.
I am an avid viewer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as you might have guessed). Sue me: I like a show that’s taut, well-written, funny, scary, emotionally true (even if a tad melodramatic at times), confident enough in its skewed storytelling to kick it around and have fun.
This may explain why the current season has been something of a disappointment.
Oh, it started strong. Started with a bang. Bobbled a little, but then there was the musical, which was the astonishing miracle of a elephant waddling up to the edge of a plank near the tippy-tippy-top of the Big Top itself, a black feather clutched in its trunk, and you know the thing’s all gonna be done with wires, they’re not gonna let an elephant plummet to its death or anything, but, I mean, come on. Fly? In forty-eight minutes plus an overture? Singing and dancing? Original songs? On a TV show? My God, doesn’t anyone remember Cop Rock? (Why, yes. Fondly, in fact. But that’s a kettle of fish of another color.) —Anyway, the elephant fuckin’ rocked.
And then the writing headed south (hear that giant sucking sound?), and Willow got “addicted” to magic, and we won’t even talk about the Doublemeat Palace fiasco.
There’s been glimmers to keep the true fan going, though even I have been tempted to just go shut it off, already. But the past few episodes—I mean, like, Xander and Anya’s wedding, which was a low farce that couldn’t pull itself off, you know? And the guy they got to play Uncle Rory: nice enough, but too familiar, and he was no Bruce Campbell. It all felt wrong (even if the whole bit with future Xander coming back to warn himself not to marry Anya was a nice touch)—until we got to the end, when it suddenly became clear that this episode had been written by someone who was sick unto death (much like myself) of the TV wedding convention, the iron-bound law which states that one party or another will, must, has to have “cold feet” and consider tossing the whole shooting match into the garbage (usually on the flimsiest of pretexts) only to have his or her love reaffirmed by some pious TV bullshit, much laughter, the best man forgot the ring, the bridesmaid’s snogging the brother-in-law, ha ha, I do. Gag. —So to see the farce on Buffy turn suddenly, sharply into ordinary yellow-bellied craw-sticking chickenshit everyday tragedy, as Xander walked, was—well, it was refreshing. Didn’t redeem the episode, but did manage to salvage it, give it that kick of something umf.
But last night’s—
Last night’s—
God damn. Last night’s was creepy nasty good in all the right ways. A beautiful job of deconstructing the show itself, stripping it down to bare essential parts and kicking them around and laughing even while you wince at some of the rough bits, and then put it back together again with a triumphant roar and a last lingering shiver—
Jesus.
(I’m being incoherent. I do apologize. Some of this is [one hopes] mitigated by the fact I just got done watching it; I was at the laundromat last night. We taped it. Watched it tonight, just now, over dinner [torta de papas, olive bread, a nice enough Primitivo] and sat there, grinning at each other, hey, this one isn’t gonna drop the ball. So this is fresh and hot off the press and raw and all of that.)
Remember DS9? (Hell. Remember when Trek didn’t actively suck rocks?) Anyway. There was that episode where the Orb or whatever was fucking with Sisko’s head and he was suddenly somehow back in the ’50s writing science fiction stories for a low-rent Golden Age two-bit Campbell knock-off ’zine. A nice enough episode actually dealing with race in a meaningful way (let’s not talk about the show’s uneasy relationship with race) and even if it had a Twilight Zone naïveté it was still something nice to say about the power of dreams (or, let’s be realistic, the power of two-bit Campbellesque pulpy genre fiction). —It was a graceful reminder of why exactly DS9 was doing what it was doing in the way it was doing it, and even if they cheesed it out a little over the next season or so with Sisko’s ’50s alter-ego occasionally popping up in a mental institution, scribbling scripts on the walls, it still helped galvanize the show. Plus, it was neat seeing all the various alien actors without their prostheses.
Anyway, point being: I’m sure that casting a bald black man with a neat little beard as the mental ward doctor in last night’s Buffy was a conscious nod; a tip of the proverbial hat.
Choice demographic.
“So there’s this great article on Salon,” I’m saying.
“Yes..?” says Jenn. She’s tapping and clicking at the iMac, putting pictures of arcane technical gear into seemingly arbitrary places on a giant white field.
“You remember Stargate? You know how it became a TV show?”
“Vaguely.” We’ve got our Buffy, our Angel, our West Wing, and I guess we won’t be watching Futurama much anymore. —And Farscape, whenever it manages to be on. But I digress.
“Well, it used to be the number one syndicated action hour whatchamacallit on TV. Hot enough that they were actually talking about doing another movie, a whole series of movies. They were talking a new Trek.”
“And?” She’s peering intently at the computer screen. Tap. Click.
“Well, the producers decided being number one wasn’t good enough. See, the audience was tilted female—”
“Oh,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Space bimbo?”
“Yup. And killing the sensawunda exploration plotlines in favor of dark ’n’ moody conspiracy theories. So the fans’ favorite actor left in disgust, and they let him go, and now the fans are revolting, the ratings suck, and the plans for a movie are pretty much on hold.”
“Idiots. Why do they keep screwing things up like that?”
“I dunno. Hey. What’s that?”
She tears her eyes away from the screen for an instant. She’s using the stylus tonight, with the drawing tablet. She swears by it these days. Makes me feel old-fashioned. Give me a keyboard and a mouse any day, please. —Besides, it looks anachronistic, that plastic pen, the paperless tablet, and her Dickensian fingerless gloves. But I digress. “It’s an issue of Bitch.”
Which, of course, is rather obvious. What I’d meant by asking “What’s that?” wasn’t so much “What’s that?” as “I see you’ve recently acquired an issue of Bitch; might I inquire as to why—assuming, of course, there is a specific purpose?” It’s just that “What’s that?” seemed more efficient. More fool me.
Luckily, it hinges on Dicebox, so Jenn’s eager to talk about it. “It’s got an article on black women as characters in science fiction,” she says, “so I picked it up. I haven’t read it yet. I have all this work—”
“Mind if I?”
She sighs. “Just leave it where I can find it.” Moves a speaker—I think it’s a speaker, it’s round and wedge-shaped all at once, and on a weird wire cradle, but it looks like it has some speaker cones in there somewhere, and it’s the sort of matte black that’s really popular with serious hi-fi gearheads—anyway, she moves the speaker a smidgeon to the left; nudges it back. So I pick it up. Flounce on the bed. Flip open the magazine. Mermaids on Coney Island, fatsuits as the new blackface, a comparison of mary-kateandashley and My Evil Twin Sister, an intriguing interview with Allison Anders (I’d always thought Gas Food Lodging was overrated, but that’s neither here nor there)—and Harriet the Spy? From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler?
Hold the phone.
“I loved Harriet the Spy,” I say.
“What?”
“Harriet the Spy. I loved it. There’s an article in here about the gender gap in young adult fiction. Lamenting how we’ve fallen from the heyday of the ’60s and ’70s, when you had books like this with characters like Harriet or Claudia and writers like Louise Fitzhugh and M.E. Kerr. Christ, I’d completely forgotten her. She rocks. Is That You, Miss Blue? All those books.”
“I remember,” says Jenn. Apparently, I’d bored everyone to tears a few weeks ago by pointing out to all and sundry that The Royal Tenenbaums was Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The Westing Game, 20 years later.
“It seems I’m an anomaly.”
“Oh?”
“Boys aren’t supposed to like reading books about girls. I had no idea Harriet the Spy was a girls’ book.”
“It is.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be. It’s just a fucking awesome book about, about being a writer and too smart for your current circumstances and just starting to figure out how to manipulate the wider world around you and . . . ”
“But it is a girls’ book.”
“Yeah, well, fine, I understand that. But it shouldn’t have to be.”
Jenn yawns and stretches. “Boy, am I glad we dropped a half-gig of memory in this puppy. These files would be impossible to work with without it.”
“Of course,” flipping more pages, “the backlash is that everyone thinks boys don’t read enough, and so there need to be more books for boys, and so more books are written with boys as heroes or narrators.” There are exceptions; there are always exceptions. (And it’s an utter coincidence one of those was written by someone I know. So there.) “Even Kerr’s written mostly from the point of view of boys lately, and you remember Island of the Blue Dolphins?”
“Yes…”
“They wanted him to change the sex of the heroine. He had to convince them it was based on a true story.”
“Geeze.”
“‘Why have young males been left out in the cold when it comes to publicly funded libraries? I think it’s because most librarians are female—or gay…’”
“Who said that? The writer?”
“No, she’s quoting a Canadian educator. Ray Nicolle.”
“Jerk.”
“Yeah. And—”
“What? What’s so funny?”
I’m giggling because I’ve reached the point in Monica T. Nolan’s article (“Harriet and Claudia, Where Have You Gone?” and it’s not online yet, so go grab issue no. 15 of Bitch and read it your own dam’ self) where she ties it all together: “The publishers of YA books must woo male readers, and—like the quintessential heroine of the ’50s teen romance—have embarked upon a never-ending quest to win a boy’s approval and gain the status and sense of self-worth they crave.” I’m giggling because suddenly, it all makes a twisted sort of sense, the whole Stargate fiasco—of course being number one in the ratings isn’t cool, if your viewers are primarily girls. The icky, uncool, clingy side of fandom, the obsessively thumbnailed gallery side, the slash-fiction writing side, the side of fandom that insists on making comparisons to Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and David Copperfield, as the Salon article takes pains to point out: the girly side of fandom. Of course that’s uncool. You want to hang with the in-crowd, the geek-kings, the choice demographic as Ferris Beuller would put it: the fickle, disdainful 18-25 males who think Seven of Nine is hot and argue about conspiracy theories and don’t buy all that much, which is why advertisers are so keen on snaring them, which all makes sense if you stand on your head and think about it with high school logic. Junior high school logic. The Stargate producers just wanted to be cool, man.
Screw the chicks.
“Yeah,” says Jenn, as I’m trying to convey this epiphany to her. “That’s nice, but—”
“Fuck,” I say, waving my arms around. The cats are getting nervous. “It even explains that crap about NBC thinking they have to skew their comedies male next year. They’ve been making too many shows for women. Like Ed. Jesus!”
“Hon,” says Jenn, still peering at the screen, “you’re starting to rant.”
“But,” I sputter.
“Why don’t you go write all this down? And let me finish my work, okay?”
Well, it does all make sense. It does.
Boutique cynicism.
“There’s a saying that goes,” says the lawyer, “if you want a million-dollar verdict, start with a million-dollar client.”
The party of the first part is definitely a million-dollar client. Without giving away specifics that I can’t give away, let’s just say that through pretty much admitted negligence on the part of the party of the second part (do they really write like this, lawyers?), something horrible happened to the party of the first part, and I’m not on the jury that’s deciding how much the party of the first part will get, in economic and non-economic damages. (We are instructed not to consider punitive damages, though the party of the second part ought to have it coming.) Instead, I’ve been hired for the day to sit on a fake jury, so the lawyers for one part or another can figure out just how the case is likely to play out. And it’s a good temp job, as temp jobs go, and there’s something engaging about sitting in a room with five other people and laying out why you think thus-and-so, and listening to other people say why they think this-and-that, and figuring out where the boundaries are and the middle ground and the size of the ballpark, and then figuring out what game you’re playing in it, and everybody being more solicitous than usual in such circumstances, hearing each other out and paying attention, because even though this is fake, it’s still close enough to something we were all taught was holy, in a secular sort of way. (No one’s been sued, among the six of us, that I know of. I doubt anyone’s been arrested.)
But we are basically deciding what the party of the first part gets for the trauma; for having this event occur, and affect them. The economic damages—lost wages, medical expenses—are undisputed. It’s merely the bonus money, in a way. It’s not like something like this happens every day; there’s no going rate for this event. We have to pluck a number, pretty much out of thin air. (How much longer will the party of the first part live? How much does that break down to, per year? What’s a good, round number?) We get hung up, arguing over the final amount—we have our good round number, but some want the agreed-upon economic damages added to this number; others want the economic and non-economic to add up to the number, which the jurors of the first part claim is unfair, as, if the party of the first part had made more money, say, the economic damages would then have been higher (more wages to have been lost), and the non-economic damages thereby lower—in effect, punishing the party of the first part for being a more productive member of society. (And in fact, the lawyers for one part or another were curious as to the possible effect the relative affluence of the party of the first part might have on this aspect of the proceedings.)
—The book I’d brought with me was The Royal Family, which I’m re-reading for whatever reason, and I’d been in the middle of the “Essay on Bail” when the paralegal came down to let me into the building. So maybe I’m worrying overmuch about the price of everything and the value of nothing, but it seems to me we’re dealing with a singular event, here; I don’t want this to have a going rate. (I don’t want it ever to happen again.) It seems to me important, then, to signal this (somehow, but to whom?) by joining the jurors of the second part. Let it be a flat number, overall. What does it matter, at this level? I don’t think we ever settled it, but the basic questions had been answered, so we were free to go. Here’s your check.
It wasn’t until today, reading “The False Irene,” that I remembered the three guys in the toy store. Coming around the corner, looking for the Legos, and hitting the—smell, that was the first thing: sweet, but the sort of sweetness I used to smell when I had the problem with my ingrown toe and couldn’t afford to have it looked at. It’s a high, bad sweet smell, the sort of smell that reminds you sugar is a poison. There’s a sour roundness to it, a saltiness almost, approaching that corn-chip smell of old socks—a stale, burring undertone to the high strange keening of that sweetness. The smell coming off these three, or one of the three, I don’t know: a man with a mustache, black hair shining unwashed under the lights, a black jacket, smeared; he’s throwing boxes of Legos to the floor, laughing. Two—kids?—one was a middle schooler, I think; the other older. I do not have a clear picture of them. (He wasn’t throwing Legos to the floor. He knocked one box down—on purpose, I think—and picked it up, shaking it. Shaking it in the face of the older kid. “I broke it,” he said, rattling the Legos around inside the box. “I broke it.”) —But that smell; that smell. I’m wondering, now, later, how much he would have gotten. Had that event, you know, happened to him, instead.
(As a side note: Vollmann’s Amazon page currently notes that customers who bought titles by William T. Vollmann also bought titles by these authors:
- Marcy Sheiner
- Penthouse Magazine
- Caroline Lamarche
- Rick Moody
- Paula Fox
(I somehow think he’d be amused.)
Döppelganger.
I like to imagine that he dresses better than I do, but I’m pretty sure when he’s at his computer he’s got cigarette burns on his T-shirt and cat hairs all over his sweater. We have two cats: one’s black and white, and the other a motley calico diluted with Russian blue (brindle, or so we’ve been told); upshot being no matter what I wear—the dark green, almost black sweater, the pale uncolored polar fleece—the cat hairs show up with little effort on their part. I imagine it’s the same with him.
I was writing something somewhere about love and domesticity, I was talking about (some of) the reasons why I dropped out of college, which had a lot to do with blond hair to the middle of an amazing back and a coyly winsome smile and a situation of achingly pure tragedy, or so it seemed at the time; I was going to make some point about the different kinds of love, and how the kind of love that’s usually celebrated, the kind that reaches its culmination just before the credits roll, after many wacky misadventures that end up mostly for the best and if there’s any screaming or crying it mostly involves a secondary character, somebody’s best friend, the grace note giving the whole thing its biting something of fragility, its pleasingly bitter affirmation of reality without spoiling the broth—do you remember how Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross turn to look at each other at the end of The Graduate? That’s what happens usually after most such loves burn themselves out all too quickly, that look, that empty, terrified, what-the-fuck look, and Edna may tell you that the candle burning at both ends makes for a lovely sight, but she knows, she knows that carefully husbanding a fire, building it with kindling and good dry logs with some foresight, red hair and a slippery snarky look that sneaks in under my radar, that opens and unfolds into something rich and new when I’m not looking and yet that I know, that knows herself, down to her toes; all that will last much longer, you see, and you know, fireplaces aren’t without their romance. —See? That was the point I was going to make, and then he walked in. I narrowed my eyes at him. (He still smokes.)
“I already said something with all that,” he said. And it’s true; I’d loaned him the anecdote for something else, another essay, and he’d been focussing on a different look entirely, a grin this time, or not so much a grin, from some other movie, or not from a movie, per se, but it was different; he hadn’t been making a point at all about love and domesticity, but about memory and the vagaries of sex and lust but nonetheless, there they were: the hair, the back, that smile, the unbearably beautiful angst I just wouldn’t put up with now, today. Different points entirely, but suddenly the point I was making went grey and listless; friable; ashen; and I put it away and never bothered to finish it. —Nor does it help matters much that he’s been making more money than me. Lately. Bastard.
“Whenever that pervert shows his face,” sings Momus, “my friends all think he’s me. They give him records by Squarepusher, and a box of Japanese tea.” Which isn’t exactly my problem, but I know what he means, or maybe I know what Nick Currie means. Whatever.
Camryn Manheim.
Amy and Aaron, over for beer and pizza, and in goes The Great Muppet Caper, the Empire Strikes Back of the Muppet trilogy. (Should I be putting a ™ after every Muppet™? —Ah, screw it.) Amy, of course, is on tenterhooks (after announcing the “Best. Musical number. Ever,” in her best. Comicbook guy. Voice, which is pretty darned good), waiting for the best. Line. Ever, but—as Miss Piggy, duped by the deliriously itchy Charles Grodin, takes the runway in the latest of Diana Rigg’s awful swimsuits—Amy pauses a moment and pontificates in that peculiarly Amy way: “You know, it was a hell of a long wait from her to Camryn Mannheim.” Which—ignoring the intended ironical recontextualization, and the idea of a man’s right arm in drag, and the whole host of bendings over backwards you have to perform to read just about anything the way you want to read it these days—that says something, you know, in its own modestly profound way.
And I’d forgotten how squiffy the Muppets can make me feel. And I’d forgotten John Cleese’s bit. And the best line ever? “You can’t even sing! Your voice was dubbed!”
