Saturday, December 19, 2020

NOT A PARABLE, NOT AT ALL

Boxy was a box, and his personality changed depending on what was inside him. If someone put an apple inside him, he felt healthy. If someone put a match inside him, he felt angry and worried. If someone put a book inside him, he felt smart. Boxy lived in a huge house on the edge of town, on top of a hill that overlooked all the other houses. He was very rich. His father, Arthur Q. Box, had been a businessman who had invented the parking meter and the drinking glass and many other common items and become a multi-millionaire, and Boxy had grown up with all the advantages a young box could want. Every night he was filled up with gold coins and jewelry, and in the morning a butler put the finest soaps and towels inside him. At some point Boxy became aware that he was only feeling the way he was feeling because of what had been placed inside him, and that when he tried to bring to mind a clear picture of himself, he saw nothing, only empty space and the terror that came with it. He spent all night awake, many nights in a row, thinking of a plan, and then he worked up the courage to put that plan into action. Boxy pressed the button next to his bed to call the butler, and then asked the butler to put a smaller box inside him without telling him what was inside that smaller box. The butler obliged. Since Boxy didn’t know the contents of the smaller box, he had to imagine them, and the process of imagining was what gave him his own feelings. And with this, he began to become himself.


©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

BUILDING MANAGEMENT

Guterman in 4B is an actual mapmaker, by his own admission. 

Effie Simmons in 3A is not a tech whiz—she doesn’t see so well.


Ike Musa in 4A has a new cat and he’s not telling anyone. 


Melissa Johnson in 2A has always thought her name was too plain, too drab a container for her ideas, which tend toward thinking hard about the sun until the old ideas fade away, and that’s what she has spent the morning doing, not rolling back the blind and looking directly at it, she knows that’s potentially ruinous, not just for optic reasons but for psychological ones, but rather hanging an image of the sun in the center of her mind, rushing hard into it with a mix of jubilation and terror so that it falls, not breaking, not bouncing, just falling, and then leaping upon the way a soldier in a war movie leaps upon a grenade that has been lobbed into the midst of the platoon, knowing there will come a moment when the sun on the floor of her mind explodes and fills her with both light and heat, knowing too that the sense of things that follows that detonation will be more complete than anything she has yet to experience, an ecstasy that cannot be captured by language, that she will have to leave that ecstasy burning there in her mind, more than an ember, an engine, rattling her teeth, sharpening her sight, both creating and filling cavities in her skull, in her body, or at the very least what her mind still remembers of these things, remnants of the physical world, figments, and she is calling out names as she slips further into the state that will produce that sense of things, calling out her own name. 


Brenda Mattsson in 5A is making herself lunch.


©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas


Tuesday, December 8, 2020

BIG BROTHERHOOD IN THE OVAL

A man with his shoe in his hand is called into the office of the president, where he expects to have to explain himself. 

He is not asked to do so, despite the fact that he opens the door with a disclaimer and the beginning of a story. 


“Jim,” he says. “I was at this store, Eyes Ajar, up on To Be Free Boulevard….”


He has known the president since they were boys.


(This story is set in some other decade, past or future. The mere fact that this needs to be said is as affront.)


The president, Jim, cuts Marcus off, confounded. 


He doesn’t want to know about the shoe and is more interested in the fact that Marcus is wearing a mask. 


The mask is nothing obvious, not a Richard Nixon mask or a werewolf or The Shape, but rather a thin transparent film that almost leaves Marcus’s face as it is in everyday life. 


“Your pleasantness, Marcus,” the president says. “I love that.” What he doesn’t say is that the mask has disrupted it.


The meeting is short, two-pronged, half about an upcoming diplomatic event that Marcus has petitioned to attend and that Jim regrets to inform him he cannot, the other half two old friends shooting, as it were, the shit. 


“What?” the President says. “No. I can’t be seen as having used that kind of language. Everyone knows I use it but no one must know. Does that make sense to you? I need for it to make sense to you. I need for you to have a clear sense of what I’m saying. I don’t want to disown you, Marcus. I don’t want to have to disown you. We are brothers, stitched together under the skin. We are two but we are one. I have never loved anyone as much as…”


“Shut up, Jim,” says the man with one shoe and the ability to make others feel he is wearing a mask—though there are as many masks on his face as there are on the foot whose shoe is in his hand, meaning no masks at all. “Just shut the fuck up. You weren’t elected to be anything other than this.” He waves his hands around. “This is what now you are. What now you are? What you are now.”


The two men, virtually telepathically, stand at the same time and walk out together. Marcus leaves his shoe on the desk. He’s not going back for it. Both of them know this as well as they know each other.


©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

AN EDUCATIONAL SERIES

“Slipping And Tripping“ was the subject of an address given before the boys of the Friday Evening Club yesterday morning, at a specially convened out-of-joint session, by Professor Ivan Fittleford. Fittleford offered a very interesting account of the people of an obscure region of Germany (a region unnamed at his insistence), whom he referred to as “the clumsiest beings upon the earth.” He showed a series of photographs and short movies of the Germans falling that were greeted first with laughter but by degrees converted to a more sober understanding of what Professor Fittleford called “the burdens that may afflict only those far away from us but that we should nevertheless feel as intimately as if they were visited upon us and our very families.” By the end, many of the boys were deep in doleful tears, through which they purchased souvenirs that included hats emblazoned with the slogan “Beautiful Fall Weather” and small sculptures of the Germans tumbling down. Great interest was taken by the boys and membership has increased to more than 100 in advance of next week’s talk. The topic has not yet been announced but the speaker will be Albert Saenz, the famed local acrobat better known as Sky Chicken.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

Saturday, December 5, 2020

THE NEIGHBORS RESPOND


 

Sometimes they come over fast; sometimes they come over time. A lot of times I’ll call and someone will answer, a kid or something, and I don’t know who I’m talking to, so I am careful not to introduce myself too specifically, I’ll say “Do you know who this is?” or “This isn’t who you think it is, is it?” and then depending on the response either go on talking or hang up. Because how do you know what’s next? How can you even keep that phone in your hand with so much in the world that’s uncertain? Sometimes in the process of hanging up my knuckle will tap the keypad and generate a tone and then that tone will create something else, a melody let’s call it, and I’ll start singing, fitting words to that melody, and some of the first words are the names of other neighbors, like “the Mitchells and the Meekers / Spiritual seekers” or “Albert Santoro / Was in the war-o,” and those are the people I don’t call, why would you call them when they’ve been in a song so recently, but that also starts to point me toward who I should call next, and when I get a real clear fix on it I dial the next number and see who answers, hopefully not a kid, hopefully someone who can help. Sometimes they come over fast; sometimes they come over time. Sometimes they don’t come at all.

 

 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

WHAT THE LEMONADE STAND IS NOT

It is not a car wash advertised with signs.

It is not punch served from a bowl at a birthday party.

It is not a list of ingredients for lemonade. 

It is not putting a table out at a garage sale with a few half-filled cups—or even a few filled ones.

It is not a black cube with a yellow cone on top of it.

It is not a row of yellow cylinders animated to look like liquid.

It is not designed as a threat to other businesses or beverages; it is just another option amongst many for a thirsty person on a hot day.

 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

 

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

POSTSCRIPT TO THE THIRD EDITION

In previous editions, I have been careful to respect the original wishes of the author, at least as described in the note found with the manuscript after his untimely death. While it was not always easy to decipher the note, clipped and cryptic as it was, the fact that it represented the final piece of writing in the author’s own hand was for me a compelling argument for its authority over the mostly, but not completely finished manuscript. In that spirit, the names of the main characters in the novel were replaced with the two pairs of initials at the top of the note. Readers only know them by their initials, but they were not always so. OJ, the conflicted protagonist, was originally “Philip Campbell,” and his on-again, off-again lover TP, she of the architectural practice and “hypnotically monochromatic apartment,” was originally “Karen Anderson.” Determining which shorter name stood in for which longer one was not a perfect science, but are decisions of that nature not the primary responsibility of an editor, executor, amanuensis, and friend, four jobs that I continue to hold proudly, even (or especially) in the author’s absence? Similarly, the place names on the note, though significantly idiosyncratic and at times even surreal, were duly substituted for those in the manuscript. New York City became Long Grain & Wild Rice. London became Lightbulb. The note also contained several brand names. I struggled with them at first, uncertain how they fit the novel’s overall scheme. About a week before the manuscript was to be submitted to the publisher, it came to me: they were a device for satirizing the consumerism of the world that surrounded its central couple, a world “loaded with signifiers that signified nothing other than themselves,” to quote a bit of the book’s most famous paragraph. And so, when OJ felt anger, it was rendered as “Pepsi.” When TP experienced lust, it was called “Kellogg’s.” The same principle held for Campbell’s (frustration), Kleenex (happiness), Clorox (fatigue), and V8 (ennui). I did not provide a key, as I felt that would interfere with the literary experience of the work, but given that I was assiduous in using the brand correspondence each and every time the pertinent emotion was mentioned, I believe readers were afforded ample opportunity to decipher the code. Those rules guided my editorial practice for the first edition in 1978, and the second in 1982. I must now report that a new biography of the author has proven conclusively that the note clipped to the manuscript was not a set of editorial instructions, but a grocery list. All edits have been reversed. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas