NEW PROJECT WHERE I REPLACE PEOPLE ON NEWS PANELS WITH PEOPLE FROM PAINTINGS

By Ben Greenman

©2018-24 Me

BLURBS

“Devilishly brilliant—a bewitching mix of metafiction and marketing.” 

— The New York Times 

“In just 400 words, this piece dismantles the history of modern literature and pieces it back together again.” 

— The Los Angeles Times 

“The central conceit — a humor piece composed entirely of blurbs about that humor piece — reads like a Möbius strip tied around Jorge Luis Borges’s finger.” 

— The Boston Globe 

“Every writer dreams of writing his own blurbs. This writer has done that, and only that, and benefited immensely from it. His sly wit conceals a grand scheme, and the completion of that scheme only intensifies the power of that wit.” 

— The Washington Post 

“After the first blurb, you’ll find yourself confused. After the second, amused. But by the fourth or fifth, you’ll find yourself cheering.” 

— USA Today 

“Initial bemusement will turn to wonder — this is sophisticated stuff indeed.” 

— Kirkus Reviews 

“Imagine a cross between the blurbs from The Bridges of Madison County and the blurbs from Infinite Jest.” 

— The Cleveland Plain Dealer 

“Marvelous . . . Bracing . . . A short, sharp work combining myth and romance, social commentary and poetry.” 

— Publishers Weekly 

“A splendid piece, beautifully conceived and crafted…no other collection of blurbs this year comes close.” 

— The San Jose Mercury News 

“If John Barth met Samuel Beckett in a bar, and the two of them got into a cab, and the cab picked up Andy Kaufman, and then the cab driver turned around, and it was Dorothy Parker, that would be awfully strange. It would also be the rough equivalent of this marvelous short work.” 

— The Baltimore Sun 

“‘Blurbs’ demonstrates a fresh talent at play in the fields of his mind. Expert command of the blurb form and a wickedly clever worldview add up to pay dirt. Ignore this piece at your own peril!” 

— The San Francisco Chronicle 

“Marked by a rare piquancy, this collection of blurbs sneaks up on you, and before you know it, you’re in its clutches. This is fascinating comedy, with energy to spare. Bravo!” 

—The Chicago Tribune

©Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

NOTES ON REVISING LAST NIGHT'S DREAM

By Ben Greenman

• Talking parrot needs to lose Ricky Ricardo accent.

• Former girlfriend who has reconnected with old boyfriend should not remember so many inside jokes. 

• Replace man wearing black hat (trite!) with woman wearing red shoes (cinematic!).

• Tibet has no stock-car racing.

• Knife next to breakfast plate need not bloom into flowers.

• More invisibillity. 

NOTES TO A PAPER YOU WOULDN'T UNDERSTAND

By Ben Greenman

Originally published in Superbad, 2001

1. In the fifties, Vinton was still entirely defined by his association with the Enjoin movement: see Randolph Descombes, "The Enjoin Poets Make Less With More Language"; Francis Embry, "What Goes Down Must Come Up"; and a volume jointly edited by Descombes and Embry entitled Desire Cannot Be Contained. The last of these is of special interest, since it contains the essay in which Umberto Gettlioni suggested that Vinton try his hand at writing prose. "There is one among them," he wrote, "who has thus far labored, in my mind, in the wrong mine. I mean, of course, George Vinton, whose work has shown the least promise of any of the first wave of Enjoin poets. Vinton’s problem, I believe, is not one of incompetence, but rather of dislocation. Were he to write a series of short stories or a novel, I feel we might see a different man."(99). Kenneth Burnham was shown the essay by Michelangelo Gettlioni, Umberto’s nephew, and mentioned it to Vinton in a letter. "Dear boy," he wrote, "some addlepated critic has come up with a preposterous that your talents should be wasted telling stories."

2. Weeks before his first motorcycle accident, Vinton had what he called a "insultingly, transparently prophetic dream." In a journal entry of June 8, 1958, he wrote, "Motorcycle crashing. Could not see face of man riding cycle, but believe that it was me from name tag on jacket that read ‘G. Vinton.’" The journal entry is also noteworthy in that it contains the first mention of Molly Grange, who was introduced to Vinton at a party and stuck in his mind as a result of her "red hair and shoes."

3. Zeno’s Paradox, of course, is the age-old mathematical/philosophical conundrum that holds that it is impossible to travel from Point A to Point B, because travel can be expressed as a infinite series of halvings of the interval distance. Xeno’s Paradox, less well known, was posed by the early twentieth-century British writer, Geoffrey Stanhope, who adopted the Greek nom de plume as a tribute to his forbears, and it concerns the problem of artistic representation. "Is a picture more or less real than the object it depicts?" Stanhope wrote. "If a dying man sits for a portrait, and then expires, and his picture persists, who is to say that it is not more real than the man, or more real than he had ever been?" Vinton recommended Stanhope’s work to Molly Grange, and during a vacation they took to Capri in 1961, he gave her a copy. In return, she gave Vinton a copy of Hammett’s "The Continental Op," a decision, of course, that proved immensely influential.

4. Though many of Kubelick’s poems from this period were titled as if they were light verse, they were in fact his most serious works. Vinton seems to have followed this lead for “False Starts, False Hearts” and “I Wrote You A Note On the Boat.”

5. Few have remarked upon the fact that it was his second visit to Brisbane. The first, five years earlier, had been in the company of Burnham, and it was under the older man’s influence that Vinton wrote the vast majority of "A Grand and Hopeful Plan." With Short, Vinton sketched out the plot for his first mystery novel, The Damned Shame of Louis Soule. Burnham was heartbroken when he heard of Vinton’s plans: "There is no pain sharper than this news," he wrote. 

6. Petty's name, of course, dervies from that of Marcus Petty, who served with Vinton in Korea. But the fact that he was a real man does not mean that the choice is not significant. Some critics have even suggested that Mark Petty’s name is a pun of sorts, Vinton’s attempt to encode his equivocal feelings about the written word. Lance Warner’s "Evasive Action" is a good general study of what he calls "self-seditious literature." See also A. Childs, "When Is A Whodunit Not a Whodunit? Mysteries as Master-Texts."

7. "Need title for new book," he wrote to Grange as he labored to produce a sequel to The Damned Shame of Louis Soule. "Working title is ‘Working Title,’ but I’m not happy with that. Also considering ‘Not Happy With This,’ which seems slightly better." A week later, another letter follows: "Despair all gone--solved it while reading the poetry of Mary Anfinsen and listening to the songs of Boyce Day." It is typical of him to locate his inspiration in the works of others. Interestingly, there is no record of either of them existing. Perhaps they were manufactured by Vinton.

8. Diestl and Malloy have addressed this issue in the monograph, “Stabbing Pains: The Social Significance of Cutlery in the British Murder Novel.”

9. "Touch, tip, shatter, repair, touch, tip, shatter, repair, touch, tip, shatter, repair, touch, tip, shatter, repair. It’s a beautiful line, granted, but now I’m out four vases" (11). Vinton’s "What is Left of Her Lips" was a return to his poetry. 

10. Though The Raw Deal of Walter Brown would prove to be even more successful than The Lost Cause of Arthur Cross. Vinton had great doubts about the work. In fact, he wrote Burnham a letter listing nineteen reasons why he feared the book would be a failure, including "Because readers will not see that the mystery is constructed with perfect symmetry," "Because readers will be displeased by the seemingly random relationship between short chapters and long chapters," and "Because Mark Petty never does anything. Sits, thinks, sits thinks, sits." "Still," he wrote, "there is an answer, and it sits at the dead center of the novel, and I believe that those who find it deserve their reward entirely." Burnham's response disappointed him. He claimed credit for much of Vinton’s career, and Vinton, in return, broke off with him. Burnham’s response was all out of proportion. He fired off a number of letters, made at least one profane phone call (Grange answered the phone), and published a scathing attack on the “school of fizz, or is it fizzle” that derided Vinton as a vacant stylist. See V. Petrancko, "Mentorship as A Form of Displaced Narcissism" (Chicago, 1974) for a full account of the events. Vinton’s next novel, The Broken Spirit of Fredrick Furst, was likely intended as a counterattack: the titular Furst is an aging painter who is murdered by a young musician. Over a matter of months, Vinton relinquished his grudge against Burnham. “It is an act of economic mercy,” he said, according to a letter Grange wrote to her friend Michelle Seagrape. “It means to much to him and so little to me.”

11. A similar thesis has been developed by L.T. Honegger: see The Locus Of Location: A Brief Consideration Of The Topographical Psychology ("Boekbesprekingen") of Anthropomorphism.

12. Burnham briefly became preoccupied with the work of Madame Cicisbeo, a late nineteenth-century medium who developed the pseudoscience of "dorsology"—it functioned like phrenology, but posited that a man's character could be judged by looking at his back. Vinton replied with typical malapertness: “Dorsology my ass.”

13. It is unquestionable that Howard Salter’s famous critique of The Raw Deal of Walter Brownincorporated the material from Vinton’s letter to Burnham. Vinton, who had not known about the sexual relationship between Salter and Burnham, was perplexed at first, and then furious. "I wish I had sent you a puffed-up, preening, bit of self-congratulatory nonsense," he wrote. "Then maybe Salter would have written a good review. He does not seem to think for himself." 

14 . The most flagrant of the psychoanalytic critics is indisputably Marjorie Leacock: "Burnham was ashamed of his own ailment, but also angry at Vinton for what he perceived as a betrayal. Consider the letter of July 9, 1968, in which Burnham objects to Vinton’s decision to travel West without him. In that letter, Burnham complains bitterly that Vinton is driving him to drink, and notes that ‘You will put me in my grave, though when I am there I will reverse the letters on my gravestone so as to escape simple detection. You will need a mirror to find me.’ The tropes of abandonment and inversion are so clear they might as well be in a textbook." 

15. Olivares was a Mexican middleweight turned playwright who wrote a series of what he called “metaphysical mysteries.” His most famous work was “Celos (Jealousy),” which told the tale of two kings from adjoining lands who dueled one another over the affections of a young woman. The progress of the duel, it should be noted, closely parallels that of Olivares’s 1961 title fight against Ernesto (Burrito) Padilla. 

16. It was this phone call from Grange that led Vinton to write the famous closing lines of The Rotten Luck of Marvin Eagleton: "He picked up the dead woman's hand and looked at it for a while. It was a hand like any other hand, and as such did not hold his interest long."

17. Vinton’s interest in libraries as sites of crimes is one of the most studied aspects of his oeuvre. See Nicholas Prince, “Metareference in the Library of the Mind” and Albert Haake, “Speaking Volumes.”

18. Edward Pochman’s "Doing Time" is an excellent study of sequential illogic in Vinton’s mysteries.

19. Burnham’s death was ruled an accident, although Salter believed otherwise, and said so in a letter to Vinton that he composed but never mailed. It is now part of the Howard Salter Papers at the University of Texas.  "Ask anyone who knew him," Salter wrote. "To say that you betrayed him is something of an understatement. Worst of it is that he never meant to hurt you. Ken Burnham was a good man who loved your poems, and who felt that your other work was beneath you. He was honor-bound to say so, and you, my boy, were honor-bound to listen. You did not. You mocked. You lampooned. You lived your life on the Continent, on blood money earned from work that would have been impossible without him. You cannot say that Ken was a villain. At worst, you can accuse him of being a critic; as one myself, I know the full horror of that existence."