Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Excitability

Diane Williams Excitability. Selected Stories 1986-1996 Dalkey Archive Press, 1998 Over the years, I’ve read and reread all of Diane Williams’ books, but Excitability is still my favorite. When I read it first, in my mid-twenties, I suspect that I more pretended to like it than actually enjoyed it. I grew into it. These are stories that take time to learn to read -- or else I am wrong. Maybe all that’s required is the willingness to be continuously jolted and discomfited. Whatever the case, it’s well worth it. Just as science needs explorers in the furthest reaches, with deep space probes or electron microscopes, so fiction needs Diane Williams. I think this is especially true now that very short stories have become ubiquitous and fashionable. Williams shows how fiction under a thousand words can be truly daring, even vast, and not just an exercise in cleverness, a convenience of the writing workshop. The recent work of Diane Williams (Romancer Erector, Vicky Swanky is a Beauty) is like a walk in a brilliant art gallery -- who doesn’t enjoy that? The older work is like going to see the graffiti and street art of an outlaw. In both cases you are looking at real art, but in the earlier work (on that perilous street) there is a feeling that you might at any moment be apprehended, mugged, violated. When I read the early stories, collected here, I feel I am a bit in danger. All her work is fascinating and necessary, but the recent work seems to me safer. Safe, in this case, is not a synonym for lesser but -- oh, how I relish the danger!

This Life, In Terms of Trees

for the bunkheads of Moosehill

This butternut is tenderly fond of me, as I am fond of it. I dip two fingers into my White Russian -- yes, I have carried a cocktail glass, in the middle of the night, right out of the farmhouse and down the dirt road to this reunion. I rub my fingers across its deeply grooved bark, then rest my forehead on its trunk to listen. This is our preferred method of communication. The butternut does most of the talking. Despite the vast responsibilities attendant on its position, the butternut is effusive in its welcome. I am the family’s youngest son, the crooked one. The butternut is a doorman to the invisible world. We care for each other. I feel as though I am the old butternut’s very favorite dog. On the way here, halfway down the dirt road, I stopped to see my friend the willow, arching between the pond and the moon. Years ago the willow taught me its true name, which I still remember and won’t reveal. To say I love the trees is harmless, but people will think you childish, sticky sweet, if you say, The trees love me. The trees love me. Not, you understand, because of anything I have done, but simply because I am their own. After visiting the willow I checked in with the cemetery. I wasn’t afraid. They know me there. I hope it doesn’t sound too conceited if I say the dead were pleased to see me. I was glad to find them well. I suspect that dead, like “reality”, is a word that should always be placed inside quotes: “dead” people. They are not really so dead. The dead have their enthusiasms. They stay current. The living are more measured. As is always the case, as must be so. They have an image to uphold in the town and therefore always appear somewhat strained. There is one dinner at which I am stripped of essential information, like a tree of its leaves. After that questions are avoided, as sensible people avoid a mess. The butternut, however, is unconditional, as is the trellis orchard, the black walnut, the irrigation pond. The briars of the blackberries take every chance to cling to me. I have come home. When I was eight or nine, my father planted a dead tree in the backyard in hopes that I might become a normal boy. It was a large dead apple tree, a Cortland. He planted it in cement. The idea was that I should climb on it, and gain in strength and agility. Naturally this had zero effect. I went on reading. I liked scary stories most, even when they gave me nightmares. I had a particular fascination with the story of a witch who slipped off her skin at night, folded it, put it under the bed and flew off for the evening. There was no way for me to explain to my father that only sporadically was I a timid crooked boy with a limp. My father marches now into the parlor. “I have received some very bad news.” And I brace myself for news of sudden death. It is the widow Cartwell. She refuses to cut down her beech trees. Two purple beech trees have been planted in the cemetery, in memory of her dear departed husband. They are blocking my father’s view of his favorite oak tree. Well, not exactly blocking, since the beech trees are saplings and the oak tree is approximately 70 feet tall. Still, my father insists that the vista he enjoys while driving down the dirt road is now entirely spoiled. “It’s like rape!” he says. When I appear alarmed he downshifts. “Well, it’s like disfigurement.” I remind him that the oak tree has not actually been harmed in any way. I commend him, again, for arranging for lightning rods and visits from a tree doctor. I then try to express, delicately, my opinion that trying to convince the grieving widow, as well as her grown sons, to hack down their father’s memorial beech trees is likely not worth the bad feelings and unpopularity which will surely result. My fathers scoffs at me. He says, “It is totally worth it!” When I was a child, my father planted a blue spruce, on Mother’s Day, for my mother, who was dying. Now the blue spruce itself is dying. It stands like a giant skeleton beside the farmhouse. This is not what was supposed to happen. Blue spruce trees, like mothers, are meant to live a long time. The blue spruce is dying because of a gas leak in the water supply. Though the water was painstakingly treated, the tree cannot recover. I know this because the tree told me, as I rested my forehead on its trunk in the yard and was helpless to console it. My family can’t decide why the tree is dying. Of course I can’t say, The tree told me, so I nod along with everyone else like it’s all some big hairy mystery. This is how my life on the farm has been. I knew, but could not say that I knew. Because I could not say how I knew. And above all because it was obvious. The butternut is dying, too. Of the canker which is slowly girdling its trunk. Who will mind the door when it is gone? How old was I when I knew that the butternut tree was, between worlds, both doorman and door? On knot on its trunk it was possible to knock and gain admittance into contrary, parallel and otherwise. That door will be closing shortly. I remember once I knocked and stepped through -- Only now does it occur to me that I did not come back.   

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: GRABINOULOR, A Joyous Neglected Dada Masterpiece

The First Book of Grabinoulor
Epic by Pierre Albert-Birot
Translated from the French by Barbara Wright
First published 1921
English translation, 1986
Dalkey Archive Press, 2000


The fact that this book is almost totally forgotten seems to me indicative of the low esteem in which joy is held in this world.  Nearly a hundred years ago, Albert-Birot was the publisher of SIC, an avant-garde review which published every famous name in Dada.  When Grabinoulor appeared in 1921, it was praised by Apollinaire, Celine, Max Jacob and Raymond Queneau.  I had never heard of it, despite reading fairly deeply in writing of the period.  I found it by chance, lying in the stacks of a Galway book shop.  Marvelous good fortune!

Grabinoulor is a mad picaresque tale, in 26 parts, one of them verse, with zero punctuation, about being young, omnipotent, and exceptionally horny.  Written at the end of World War I, the narrator begins with an appreciation of his vigorous morning boner and proceeds at once to reshape Paris and the globe.  I’m telling you, there’s nothing like this book -- which also means I’m rather helpless to describe it.  If you’ve read Henri Michaux, think of the tales of Plume -- but now imagine that the protagonist, instead of being thwarted and trodden upon at every turn, is instead repeatedly victorious.

What sort of book is this?  This is a book where the protagonist advises his grieving widowed friend to telephone Venus and ask her to send a Great Love at once and she agrees, calls up Venus right up.  Venus immediately consents, asks for specifics (dark haired and well-equipped, please), and poof! Great Love appears at once.  Everything is going swimmingly until the widow’s dead husband calls up from Heaven, where phones have recently been installed.  Does this give you an idea?  Or: in Chapter 19 of this book “a lobster mayonnaise starts the world going again.”  Time and space are more playthings than obstacles and Grabinoulor usually gets the girl.  It’s so much fun, engaging and readable, despite the atrocious typeface.  Put on your reading glasses and surrender to happiness.  Intended to liberate the soul, Grabinoulor still does the job, nearly a century later.

Reading Grabinoulor, I was surprised that it doesn’t have a cult following -- at least not in English.  What a brilliant source text for painters, poets, song writers,  animators, and film makers -- to say nothing of libertines and sensualists.  When you’re fed up with despair, when you’ve had all the ennui you can bear, seek out the hero Grabinoulor. He’s spectacularly horny and out for a lark across the universe.

Drunk At the Art Museum

from People Who Don’t Matter

Series 4: Drunk At the Art Museum

Here at the art museum, the nice lady at Drop-In and Draw says, “It’s called negative space -- but it’s not negative!!!” Seriously. Is this kind of disclaimer necessary in other countries, or only in America? You know, it might be nice to not be quite so broke. For one thing I could buy better whiskey. Whiskey that is actual whiskey and not this stuff in a plastic bottle that’s actually 80% grain alcohol with whiskey flavoring. I poured some in a trial size Scope bottle. For when I need to take the edge off public transportation. And evidently I forgot to rinse the bottle. So that the whiskey-flavored rotgut is now Scope-flavored. And it is no worse this way than it was to begin with. I don’t pretend. I understand this won’t turn out well. I get that. I’ll be 57 or 64 or 42 and I’ll be sick or broken-down or drunk or desperate and I’ll have no _____ and no ______ and no _____ and no _____. Folks will hear news of me and they will say it is too bad and secretly they will be pleased, not so secretly, because it will mean that they were right all along to work and save, to stay home, to behave. God likes nothing so much as to beat upon the Divine Providence crowd. My wandering hippie poet friends are homeless drunks now; my sparkling hustler pals are dead. Yes, your acquaintance Patricia is following her bliss in the painting studio but -- her husband is a lawyer, right, and now he gets to have affairs and that is the bargain. In the future I will be the illustration for a lesson about morality -- who would dream of interfering with that? This is not a generic exhaustion; this is a very specific kind. Even though I slept last night on someone’s sofa, this is the exhaustion of traveling all night on the bus, on an all night Indian video coach with a jacket for a pillow and the most persistent and useless boner of all time. Now I am off the bus but I’ve still got further to go: do I have everything, is this the right terminal, where is the gate, I have to rest, I have to remain alert, when exactly is whatever’s coming next? A college boy scribbling in a notebook is adorable. Especially if the young man is bearded and the notebook is spiral-bound. Even in his thirties that man is still seen as commendable, well-rounded, engaged. But a middle-aged man who endlessly scribbles is assumed to be homeless, drunk, crazy. It is a perpetual source of frustration to me that no credit is awarded for being half-drunk, half-crazy, semi-homeless. It’s a shame that, in this day and age, being semi-functional isn’t seen as more laudable. I’m only half-crazy! Can’t I get a fellowship for that? As a young man, one of my primary goals was never to appear pathetic. It never occurred to me that this would get harder all the time... Someone recently stood over me in the coffee shop and asked, “Are you writing something? Or are you just writing?” What was I supposed to say? I note the profusion, the procession, the symptoms. Diagnosis is another department, down the hall. If, instead of having almost no money at all, I suddenly had enormous amounts of it, I know just what I’d do. (Let no one say that I am not a pragmatic person prepared for all eventualities.) I’d check myself into a luxury hotel room way up in a skyscraper, one in which luxury is expressed in a monastic aesthetic. For days I would sit in a hard chair with arms, just staring out. When I became antsy I would obliterate the debts of my friends and arrange for all of us to receive celebrity dental care. I would pay lavishly for translators to publish work by writers I adore who still have not been fully or adequately translated. A lot of money would go to ecological concerns. I would cry and cry and cry. I admit I might have several elective procedures. Certain people would receive money to just go on being themselves. The farm where I was a child would be preserved. I would go to elaborate lunches with the best wines and my favorite homeless people. Most of the time however, I would just sit in silence, staring out. Some weirdnesses can be traced back. However I also find within myself some peculiarities for which I can offer no explanation. For example, I know that Hsing-Hsing, a panda at the National Zoo, was a great buddha who came to benefit the world by sitting all day in a cage near Washington, DC. This is not one of my spiritual beliefs. It’s something I know. Also, I am overwhelmingly emotionally affected by Juan Gris. Who gets emotional about cubists? One is supposed to swoon over Matisse or Chagall. Even my mania for Miro is more explainable. Still, I can’t look at a painting by Juan Gris without feeling that someone powerful who loves me has called me up out of the blue just to say something encouraging. It is evident somehow amid the geometry. Beige and black, hunter and pea green. Heavy ruled or wavy lines. The overlap. The liberation of perspective. I feel as though I am in the presence of my vastly gracious forefather, benevolent patron of the heroic notecard. About these, my illuminated sausages. I seek something danceably humble. Something that people interested in progress and achievement will come across and say, “It’s just pages journal pages from a notebook really.” Or: “Sounds like that guy has some problems.” I seek something that won’t matter to those who matter, to those who consider themselves to matter. I seek something the important will find nonsensical. What I am looking for is almost beneath notice. Those for whom it is intended will recognize it. One thing I have learned how to do well is how to be moderately poor. Other people learn to be successful, efficient, dynamic. I developed skill in poverty. Here are a few pointers I’d like to share with other non-winners. When you have a little money, buy a 25 pound bag of rice. Not the worst rice. You are going to have to eat and eat it. Not basmati either. A diet of only basmati may result in impotence. Learned that years ago at the ashram. Then buy a variety of beans. Now you know for sure that you are not going to starve. The heart relaxes. The very lowest grade of canned tuna way at first provoke you to vomit, but I promise you it’s much more tolerable if you meow ecstatically while cranking open the can. Then, the next time a little money shows up, you buy a membership at the nearest art museum. I am completely not kidding you. Those will be the best 45 bucks you ever spent. Because you’ve got to keep the heart alive and not be ground to bits. Not to have your nose rubbed every minute in what a poor loser you are. So you become a museum patron. An officially fancy person. And then whenever you need to you can you flood yourself with beauty, you can keep from being crushed to nothing, you can survive. Here is something extremely important I haven’t heard anyone mention. You must get drunk at the art museum. I mean it. You have not been drunk until you have been drunk at an art museum. You must not miss out. There is no place on earth better to be moderately drunk than an art museum. I do not mean so drunk that you are a danger to statuary. Obviously. If you investigate the lives of super-rich people, you will discover that they spend inordinate amounts of time at special events, events which are, more often than not, simply opportunities to be drunk at the art museum. The rich may sip champagne from crystal. The rest of us will have to make do with sips off a flask in the john. Just the same, this may still be one of very the best things that ever happened to you. Drunk at the art museum, the space is itself ecstatic. (Don’t you, too, go to a museum as much for the space around the art as for the art itself?) You are free to stare and stare, to gaze in raptured contemplation. Three gins in, you’re on just the right wavelength, slowed down some, detached from your own specific catastrophe, awake to colors, noting that many artists did masterful work at the age that you are now, imagine that, maybe it’s not too late, even now, even for you.