My story "The Complete Apologies" is forthcoming in JONATHAN, A journal of queer male fiction published by Sibling Rivalry Press.  Many thanks to editor Raymond Luczak for his kindness and encouragement.

Love On A Rampage (Manifesto #1)

A manifesto is a communication addressed to the whole world, in which there is no other pretension other than the discovery of a means of curing instantly political, astronomical, artistic, parliamentary agronomic and literary syphilis.  It can be gentle, good-natured, it is always right, it is strong, vigorous and logical.

A propos logic, I consider myself very charming

-- Tristan TZARA

Love On A Rampage

(Manifesto #1)

1

All I want is to make something honestly beautiful before I die.  I believe in short-term goals.  Only at dawn and dusk is Tokyo revealed to be a seaside town.  Only once or twice a year is anyone moving slowly enough to notice.  Painters with easels and seagulls could appear at Shinjuku West Exit among the skyscrapers.  It’s that light.

Your mother and your spouse want you to be good.  Your government hopes you’ll behave.  The world is remarkably uninterested – and this is worth more than everyone’s love put together. 

2

I now love people I hardly liked previously.  I wish all my enemies robust genitals.  My love is the most American thing left about me.  My love is as American as opening fire in a schoolyard.  My beloveds are these strangers walking past in Shinjuku as dusk.  More specifically, this gelled boy wearing sunglasses even though it is night and a V-neck sweater even though it is May. 

I have a mania for including the excluded.  Including those who’d rather be excluded.  Pedophiles and Republicans, transgendered realtors and the winners of the bake-offs,   everyone attempting to opt out of the world, with buds in their ears, tapping away on the screens of their phones.  I am also vigorously and on principle rigorously opposed to anything designated “respectable”.

Respectability is defined as “the capacity for being entirely useless in an emergency”.  The respectable save only themselves.  And their money.

It is not possible to opt out of the world.  Finally this will become apparent.  Perhaps when  apps fail to bring rain.  It is not possible to opt out of the world.  Even now that everyone is doing so, or believes that they are, hiding like a toddler behind their own hands, believing they have disappeared.

I am, by definition, an embarrassment.  From a highly respectable family.  Just the same, I insist: if everyone was embarrassed, then wouldn’t everyone be less embarrassed over all?  And, better still, less ashamed?  

My all-American love is on a rampage, here in Shinjuku at dusk

3

Often I fear I have made a mistake.  I ought to have tried harder to succeed, to make something of myself.  Then I discover that well-to-do white people are trying to decide whether or not to buy their six year old daughter an iPad.  Then I am simply glad to have chosen forms of uselessness that I really enjoy and varieties of worthlessness that really appeal to me.  I am grateful for my unprofitable life, grateful above all for my chosen areas of research, fellatio and literature, one, of course, exponentially more popular than the other.

4

The sun is up, the air is clear, the cancer has moved to the liver.  First I cared, then I didn’t care, and now I don’t remember.  I don’t have time to win or lose.  I only have time for coffee.

5

Some poets tells better stories than proper story people can.  This is a highly embarrassing scandal, which no one is ever even supposed to discuss. 

Personally, Fernando Pessoa & Company is my favorite storyteller.  Entirely straight-forward and at the same time all mixed up.  As in: “I got off the train. . .”  Or: “One day, outside of space and time, / I was served up love as a dish of cold tripe.” 

The shame is more than proper story people can bear.  To be bested by poets.  It’s as if they found a dildo in their sweetheart’s sock drawer.  A dildo to whom they could hardly compare.  And when they confront her, she says, “It’s not just the size, frankly.  I also feel myself comprehensively loved.”  

6

Feeling inadequate?  Please be reassured.  Millions of incompetent Americans are doing a good job every day.  In banks and hospitals, in kitchens and classrooms, in bed and air traffic control.  Few things are so entirely overrated as knowing how.

7

All I want is to make something honestly. . .  you understand I don’t really care.  It’s more fun to gamble.  And I am not above making requests.  (What fun is it to be God if you can’t answer prayers?)

I intend to be happy. . . because I am a cuss.  Actually, I didn’t intend to be happy.  I figured I’d be miserable forever, but then I changed my mind.  I’m going to be happy because conservative taxpayers are appalled that a promiscuous homosexual with a penchant for literature might be happy.  I write my small stories because it is my calling.  (Not everyone, it turns out, is called to usefulness.) 

Moreover, I writing in honor of all those persons who would rather I shut up.  Each of the 144 volumes of my Collected Works is dedicated to a respectable person positively aghast to have their good name associated with mine.  Each of the respectable shall be embossed on the spine.

8

I try.  I try to try.  I try harder.  I try to try the right way for once.  I try to keep trying.  Abruptly it becomes clear that actually what I must do is locate a particular and peculiar form of listening.  A certain wavelength, which may or may not be indigo, which may or may not be ultraviolet.

I do not know how I came upon this.  It was not because I was trying. 

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Robert Walser

Robert Walser, The Robber
Translated by Susan Bernofsky

University of Nebraska Press, 2000

Robert Walser’s last novel, The Robber, was found after his death, written on 24 sheets of paper, in a script so minute and indecipherable that it was thought for some time to be a code, or else a symptom of the schizophrenia with which Walser had been misdiagnosed. 

Although Walser died in 1956, having spent the last 26 years of his life in mental asylums --where he was reported to be “perfectly lucid and ready to converse on a wide variety of literary and political topics” -- this novel was not published in German until 1986. 

This book, in my opinion, will only appeal to a small number of people, but those people will love it enormously and at once.  These are simply the people who, like myself, cannot help but adore a novel which begins, “Edith loves him.  More on this later.”

The novel is described as a game of “a narrative hide-and-seek”, by its translator, Susan Bernofsky, whose agile and delightful translations have fuelled a resurgence of enthusiasm for Robert Walser among English-speaking people.  (I “follow” half a dozen writers, and try to read everything they write, but Susan Bernofsky is of only two translators whom I follow – she chooses phenomenally interesting writers and translates impeccably and with zest.)

Although Walser suffered from mental illness, and refers to it explicitly in this book, to dismiss The Robber as the ravings of a schizophrenic is both insulting and false, as will be evident to anyone who undertakes reading it.  As W.G. Sebald wrote, “The Robber is Walser’s most rational and daring work, a self-portrait and self-examination of absolute integrity. . . . I can imagine how, while writing The Robber, it must have occurred to him on more than one occasion that the looming threat of impending darkness enabled him at times to arrive at an acuity of observation and precision of formulation which is unattainable from a state of perfect health.”

However, if you are happen to be new to Robert Walser, this is not the place the start.  (Feel free to disobey me: I\d be very curious to hear about your experience )  Most newcomers to Walser begin with the short fictions, or the novella, The Walk, but personally I suggest starting with his quirky, appealing, and accessible first novel, The Tanners.

Like any of Robert Walser’s quirky devotees, I love to read sentences aloud and copy them out.  Naturally I adored the following: “There are, to be sure, persons who wish to extract from books guiding principles for their lives.  For this sort of most estimable individual I am therefore, to my gigantic regret, not writing.  Is that a pity.  Oh yes.” (5)

It was to my substantial embarrassment then, as I continued to read and to copy out passages I found delightful, that I discovered that I have no choice but to confess that I do turn to Mr. Walser for “guiding principles” on how to see and live and write.  (It is no accident that I am a conspicuously under-achieving and unprofitable variety of person.) 

I wonder how many other eccentrics now do the same, how many misfits are now attempting to obey Walser’s counsel that just as “little children must endure diseases undeserved, and so we ought to let ourselves go a bit more indulgently, be calmer, learn to embrace our circumstances and make peace with ourselves as best we can.” (21)

The novel, despite the compression with which it was generated, is thankfully not one unbroken mass, but is comprised of sections from four to ten pages long, which one learns to navigate in time. 

One of the most delightful discusses the plight of a teacher and addresses the subject of envy:  “The fame of this professor of yours pleases me.  I consider it of the utmost importance for us, the living, to learn to set aside our obsolete anxiety which makes the advantages of other appear to hinder us in our own development, which is by no means the case.” (29)

Surely we would do well to keep in mind valuable pieces of advice such as the following:

“The making of reproaches can become a mania worth laughing at, and a chastised person is invariably in better spiritual shape than his chastiser, who in fact is never more than a poor wretch, whereas the one found guilty is apparently, and also in actual fact, in a position to be bursting with health.” (97)

Or how about this one, which I have personally verified at a number of parties:

“When a person begins to speak of serious matters, eight listeners out of ten will share the conviction that he is beginning to, one might say, plummet downhill, as though everyone in high spirits were automatically at the pinnacle of human cleverness, which can’t be entirely true.” (97)

Under-achieving misfits such as myself cannot help but be comforted by the news that, “Yes, there still exist persons who are continuing to grow and haven’t managed to come to terms with their inner and outer lives with terror-inspiring speed or in a trice or a twinkling, as if human beings were merely breakfast rolls that can be produced in five minutes and then sold to be put to use.” (48)

The rare person who undertakes this book will find it studded with delights like these and full of the odd humble swagger of Robert Walser.  What a marvelous book.  If I am ever given the option to choose a miracle, I will ask that a lost Walser manuscript be discovered, and delivered to Susan Bernofsky. 

If you are still considering to undertake this very odd book, heed the following:

“I now address an appeal to the healthy: don’t persist in reading nothing but healthy books, acquaint yourself also with so-called pathological literature, from which you may derive considerable edification.  Healthy people should always, so to speak, take certain risks.” (59)