Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Barthelme, Snow White

Donald Barthelme, Snow White
Atheneum, 1967


In 1967 the New Yorker devoted nearly an entire issue to publishing Barthelme’s novel Snow White.  It is inconceivable that they would do something so peculiar and interesting now. (Just today I saw that the New Yorker plans to offer novellas electronically.  Which they clearly wish us to believe is terribly innovative and daring -- or, perhaps 10% as daring as they were 50 years ago.)

When I started reading Barthelme a few years ago, the general opinion seemed to be that the stories were what mattered, what held up.  I read 60 Stories, then 40 Stories, then read them both again.  Hungry to read something fresh, I decided to risk this novel and was a little surprised to find it an absolute lark.

Enamoured as I am of Barthelme’s non-stop high stakes language play, I guess I had worried that a novel might be just too much, too exhausting.  I wish I’d understood that this novel is actually even more broken up, more fragmentary and poem-like, than most of his stories.  You could think of it as a collection of 100 rants, or 100 flash fictions if flash fictions were any good, or a even a book of 100 prose poems, if prose poems got off their high horse, fled brunch, and got smashed.

Don B’s brilliant language wizardry is melded to events that are fun and hilarious and somehow just right.  What a joy to throw 6-packs of Miller High Life through the windscreen of a man named Fondue!  (I assert that the courtroom drama that ensues is my favorite court scene in literature -- though I will admit it is somewhat irregular.)

Best of all: let’s poison the prince for once!  Yes, please!  I shouted.  Give Snow White a break!  (Or, as she puts it herself, “I myself am so buffeted by recent events and non-events, that if events give me even one more buffet, I will simply explode.”)

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Duras, Emily L.

Marguerite Duras, Emily L. translated by Barbara Bray Random House, 1989
Emily L. is for confirmed fans of Duras. This is the advanced course, suitable only for the devoted -- among whom I am numbered. Reading Emily L., I sometimes shook my head, laughed or argued. “Over the top, Madame Duras! Random!” Yet -- I’m glad this book exists and I’m delighted (in a despairing, wine-soaked Duras sort of way) to have read it. Does it make sense to say: “It is not a great novel, but it is wonderful to read”? That is how I felt, on the lucky night I consumed it, along with a bottle of cheap red wine. (Could this book be read while entirely sober? Possible, presumably, but not ideal.) If you can, read a few pages before purchasing the book. If you’re not on the wavelength, you might find it senseless. If you are on the wavelength -- enjoy. And don’t forget to also drink plenty of water. From pg. 29: “One sensed they must have lived together through some adversity, and through it have come to know one another so well that they arrived at a common being, in good and ill, crime and innocence. Until the ultimate end in a common death, which so far they’d always avoided, for some reason that didn’t matter.”

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Outside and Subterranean Poetry

Barbaric, Vast & Wild
A Gathering of Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present
Edited with commentaries by Jerome Rothenberg and John Bloomberg-Rissman
Black Widow Press, 2015



Everyone who styles themselves an outsider should be required to buy this book.  It’d rocket up the bestseller list and surely we would become, along with our creations, more interesting and more tolerant, dashing and emboldened and enriched.  The books I love most are those that grant me entrance to an entire world; this is such a book.  Not since M.A. Caws’ Surrealist Painters and Poets have I found an anthology that so deserved to be called a treasure house.

‘Anthologize’ is a dull word for Rothenberg’s daring feats of inclusion, a heroic attempt to somehow make a book of all that has been left out.  Here are texts from the inside of pyramids, excerpts of Zen tales, Gnostic gospels, Pali scriptures and Hildegard of Bingen’s private language.  What better way to read a book than in a continuous state of surprise!  I did not expect: Nostradamus, Mayan spells, a brilliant translation of Dante, Nietzsche’s last mad letters, Marina Sabina, Robert Walser’s microscripts.  Here is much that is strange, horny, godmad, crazed, obscure, direct.  Canonized outsiders are present: Blake, Dickinson, Rimbaud, Genet, but they are outnumbered by the excluded, by texts from the schizophrenic and psychotic, the paralyzed or deaf, from those locked in, locked up and locked out.

For those of us with non-normative bodies and minds, this book is crucial.  It is a source of solace and encouragement, as well as a reminder of how much brilliance comes from way, way outside the margins.  With any luck it may also prove to be an antidote and tonic for a time when artists and writers seem to be in a hurry to produce sensible, reasonable, marketable commodities.

Only the great Rothenberg would have known or dared to create such an anthology.  Arguing for it is like arguing for the dictionary: a book as delightful as it is necessary.    

ATTEMPTS AT A RAFT

11 New Small American Stories

American Home

After many years of wandering, I no longer have a home in America.  Instead I visit friends -- some of whom are, by now, quite well-to-do.  Not that they think they are well-to-do.  Inevitably they will confide, quite solemnly, that they are only just getting by.  Despite my forlorn appearance and strange history, they are really most hospitable.

“I am SO sorry!  We have a few errands to run.  We’ll be gone a few hours.  Will you be OK by yourself?  You won’t be bored?  This is the dog.  Here is the garden.  This is the pool.  Here is the hot tub.  Sorry the gym equipment is fairly basic.  This is the beer fridge.  Here is the liquor cabinet.  This is how you use the coffee maker.  For ice you push here.  That’s the computer, it hooks up to the TV.  Careful not to confuse the hand pumps!  This one is hand sanitizer.  The other is silicon lube.  Here in the nightstand are all of my toys.  Have you ever seen one that does this?  My friends joke I’ve got the largest porn collection outside the Vatican!  Are you sure you’ll be OK by yourself?  Do you get nervous?  Do you get bored?  If you start feeling down, don’t be shy, take one of these.  All these are for nerves.  I just mix and match.  You’re sure you’ll be OK?  Please -- make yourself at home!”

Then, of course, I feel guilty.  Because I love my friends.  I love their company.  I came to see them.  Certainly I don’t want anything to happen to them.  I want them to thrive and flourish, to go forth and succeed in the world.  And I want them to return.  I do.  I want them to come home.  Eventually.  Not too soon.  The first thing I do, when I am finally left alone, is pray that they will be delayed.

Intention

My original idea was to become a big, big success.  Just as, you know, a way of making sense out of everything.

Gospel

Amazing what one single daiquiri can do for a shopping mall.  True, it’s 32 ounces, frozen, and made with tequila but still, moments ago the air-conditioning was the only thing good in this whole place and now it’s all one big sparkly candy store!  A heavenly procession exits the shoe store and ascends.  Tall men in white suits, gorgeous women the entire width of the escalator.  In front of the hot pretzels a man has burst into song.  All of the rest of us are clapping along.

-- Notice --

I’m not going to attempt dating again until I meet someone who understands that -- disappointment is just the way that it works.  I’m disappointing, I’m reliably disappointing, just same as everything else in the universe.  It doesn’t have anything to do with me personally.  

Hypothetical darling, we could still go about loving each other, if we put our minds to it.  But, no, everyone wants someone just like the guy in the video they’ve got in their phone, except their guy isn’t an escort, he has a good job, lots of money, excellent credit, a home here, an apartment in Europe.  He’s interesting but not nerdy, loves to travel, stylish but not fussy, spiritual but not religious, thick and uncut, loves to party but doesn’t overdo it, is due to inherit.

I am so tired of that guy.  We are both of us imaginary, but in somewhat different ways.  Therefore, although I have consistently done absolutely anything to get laid for the last -- a moment please, I’m calculating -- 27 ½ years, tonight I’ll stay home and not attempt to resemble the guy on anyone’s phone.  I say, let someone else disappoint them.

Phone

The man on the phone asks, “So -- what turns you on about transforming into an animal?”  

I want to say, Hey man, this is your call, your fantasy, I’m just going along with it.  I want to say, Dude!  Is this part of your graduate thesis?

But I don’t say any of this.  Gradually we turn into horses.

Story

What most people want, it appears, is a movie without electricity.  A sensitive rendering.  A compendium of perspectives and issues.  Astonishingly, it appears people think that something ought to happen.  (Isn’t too much happening already?)  It’s TV, it seems to me, that people want, but without the noise or commercials.

But that is not what I want.

I am in search of a strange museum.

Boyish

“Please.  No.  You haven’t seen all of them yet.”

Says the former soldier, boyish and lean even at 50, even after the Afghanis blew him up.  The government rebuilt his hip and his ass.  Also, the poison used by one side or the other gave him “a small case of cancer” in both of his lungs.

He keeps a cooler of beer by his bed in case he wakes up in the night.  The more he drinks the more his Irish accent comes out.  He doesn’t want anyone to touch him, not in the bar, not until he’s made up his mind it’s completely all right.

Then this grinning horny kid comes along, ready to go home with him, touches the side of his face and says, “I love scars!”

The King of Thailand

The belief that one possesses psychic powers is a remarkably common delusion.  Only at its further reaches does it attract attention.  (Most everyone is fairly sure they know what their mother, lover and dog are thinking.)  I know one strenuously spiritual lady who prophesies the collapse of the global banking system.  Within two weeks.  November at the latest.  The banks persist; she goes on being wrong without noticing.  Some day, I assume, the banks will finally fail.  And even when we’re all broke, she’ll be pleased to be found infallible.

This morning I woke up entirely certain that Bhumibol Adulyadej, the King of Thailand, had died.  I had that precise pain which could only mean the king was dead.  The taxi drivers all say the war will start the day the king dies.  I checked, he hadn’t died, no doubt he will die soon.

For years I loved a man: you know how it goes, the more I loved him, the less he loved me.  Anyway, the uses he desired for me were not those which I desired.  He still wished to tell me, endlessly, how terrible it was to be a telephone service representative.  For a games company, the kind people gamble on and go crazy.  Basically it was an electronic sweatshop.  Took advantage of refugees from the European electronic collapse.  

From him I learned that nowadays, if people wish to communicate, they send a text.  Actual phone calls are only for abuse.  Basically the company had a rule that if he wasn’t chewed out at least 30 times a day he went on probation, was ineligible for promotions and bonuses.

None of this was pleasant to hear, but it was all real, and I was willing to hear it, if only he loved me a little.  He couldn’t tell me he loved me a little.  He could only say it was very hard job.  I grew resentful.  I dared him to say a kind word.  He looked at me like I’d asked him to violate his religion.   

Finally I stopped writing to him.  Since he didn’t love me.  He didn’t write back.  He didn’t do what he was supposed to do and discover he loved me when I was gone.  As for me, I still love him, every day, but just a little, the way some people go on smoking just 1 or 2 cigarettes every day for years.  Honestly, he wouldn’t have needed to love me much.  I would have flown to him if he had said I could make him even 10% happier.  Which really isn’t very happy at all.  But he never said anything like that.  

When I think of the man that I love, I know he is suffering deeply.  Not because of me.  I was not particularly significant, but for other reasons.  I do not want him to be unhappy.  I want him to be happy, even if it means he hardly ever thinks of me and, when he does, I am only evidence of his humble origins, of how very far he’s come.

But he is not happy.  He is anxious and depressed -- to a degree which may even be dangerous.  Also he’s ill.  Not direly, but in a miserable and persistent way.  I am certain of this, of his feeling, and of my ability to know what he feels, even though he is thousands of miles away and we have ceased to write or to speak.  

I believe that I have psychic powers.  This is a remarkably common delusion, which calls attention to itself only in extremes.  I know what he feels, even though he does not write to me, does not speak to me, does not love me, does not seek my help, does not want me back.  I believe I have psychic powers.  (No rule says powers have to be useful.)  I am delusional.  I am entirely delusional.  But I am delusional and I AM RIGHT.

Explanation

This mop-headed tie-dye teen opening the screen door with his shoulder because he’s got iced coffees in both hands, calling back to his brother

I was talking to ME.

Mercy

I need to do dishes but this palmetto bug won’t leave the sink.  When he finally does climb out, his next choice is to perch on the sudsy tip of the orange dish soap.  Hello, I am trying not to kill you.  Please cooperate!

99 Years

Not because I understood. Not in the least. Just the opposite, in fact. I have a congenital disability. I was born without a big picture. Other people have one. They try to lend me theirs but it doesn’t work. It’s like when I tried to learn to watch television. I wanted to watch with everyone else. I tried but I could not be convinced. Wanted to be, but couldn’t. So I take notes. Because it doesn’t make sense. Nothing fits. Because there is no way of drawing a line under anything. Because the story is false. Yet it all seems so helplessly urgent! When you don’t understand what is being said you must struggle to catch every word. Because the room refused to stop spinning, I took notes. Here, then, are my attempts at a raft. Incomprehension. Is the basis. Confusion. An abiding and adoring panic. That sea. What country are they calling this now? And what am I supposed to be -- don’t even say it. All I know is what the woman at the next table is saying. Between bites of her donut. “This is the job. My father is 99 years old. There is absolutely nothing wrong with him.”