Stray Reprints

Monday, January 10, 2022

READ THE ROOM

The room is no more than twenty feet square, with dull gray walls, the northern one with a wrong clock, the southern with a calendar hung to the wrong month, the east and west bare save for the two thin midline doors, neither with knobs, painted the same color as the walls. In each corner stands a man, dressed in a black coat and white shirt, and next to each man there is a table laden with notecards on which are written the secret memories of the other three men in the room. The clock strikes. A fierce wind blows open one door. The calendar turns to the right month and the cards go everywhere in the room. Secrets are suddenly in the air. Three of the men rush into the center of the room to claim the cards that belong on their table. They are screaming. Foam flecks their black coats. Each of the three men grabs at any card that contains a secret that he does not recognize. The fourth man, unconcerned, is dead.

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

SCARE TACTICS

Holding that a definite conception of fear could not be formulated, Reginald Rance opined that it failed even as a description of pragmatic conduct. “The notion of terror is so indefinite,” he said, jutting out his jaw, “that although many artists—filmmakers, authors, composers—wish to produce it, very few can predict with any certainty how to do so.” He coughed. “My fifth cousin,” he said, and trailed off. “My fifth cousin,” he said again. He was speaking, of course, of the renowned director Anson Rance, the “Sultan of Slash.” Now his eyes were wet with tears. “For a man to determine with certainty what would make another man afraid, he would have to be omniscient.” He fled the stage and called his mother, who had met the great man once. “If this is true of the individual,” he said, “think of how various must be the notions of dread which prevail among the species in general.” His mother did not answer. What no one knew was that she had just closed her medicine cabinet and seen a face reflected in the mirror.

Monday, January 3, 2022

ART IN AMERICA

From 1973 to 1987, in order of appearance: Melvin Herrera, Chris Newman, Paul Russell, Richard Bonita, Dan Suth, Donald Giller, Antonio Suarez, Allan Howe, Peter Sternschwager, Kelly Sollo, among others—unmarried men, uniformly unpleasant in character, hard to employ, estranged from their families, who were located, transported, slain, prepared, stuffed, and mounted by the predatory billionaire D.R. “Flip” Perkins. Perkins did not attempt to conceal the figures. Rather, he claimed that they were sculptures fashioned by Konstantinos Malokinis, a Greek artist who had started as a Color Field painter but had been consumed by envy in 1961, the year that Morris Louis showed at the Guggenheim, and was consequently impelled to shift over to fabricating realistic full-body effigies at roughly the same time as Duane Hanson and John De Andrea. Malokinis, a drug addict who was never clear of the stuff, a bad gambler who was often in debt, took a considerable amount of cash from Perkins in exchange for letting the rich man pretend that these ghoulish tableaus were artworks. “In a sense, they were,” he was fond of saying. Both men disappeared in June of 1987, days before they were to be arrested. A car parked at the airport contained a note that authorities believe was penned by Perkins but that consisted entirely of a quote attributed to Lincoln Steffens: “Morality is only moral when it is voluntary.”

A SPARKLING CONVERSATIONALIST

She’d been on the road since she was twenty and knew all the types, which guys were too high on themselves, which guys simmered with underdog rage, which guys cleaned their glasses over and over again like that would help them see the world more clearly. She laughed whenever she heard someone at a party said that men were the same the world over. “Come with me to a little place called Fetch Me a Memory,” she said. Maybe it was the one when the high school principal stood outside her hotel room and lowed like a cow. Maybe it was the one when she got out of the car and saw the mayor coming toward her with a bouquet of spray-painted roses. Maybe it was the one where she tied a father and son down on a hotel bed and read to them from the Bible. Decades of fieldwork firehosed out of her, and usually she was so charged up that she couldn’t get to sleep without two or three drinks and another hot night she could turn to story.

RUNNING INTO DARREN

“Some mornings,” Gary said, putting both hands around the cup of coffee he had no intention of drinking. That was the thing about Gary. He proselytized endlessly about “the market” and “passthrough purchasing” and “active customerhood,” but in fact enjoyed nothing, so when you were out with him you had to endure the pageantry of ordering food or drink, all the while suffering from the knowledge that most of it would go to waste. “Some mornings,” Gary said, “I run into Darren in here. You know him? We used to work together, me and him, over at Arktronix. The other day he said to me, ‘Hey, man, they have some prime new baristas working here. I’d like to put a straw right through the middle of her latte art, if you know what I mean.’ I didn’t know what to say so I just stared at him. And after a few minutes a tear appeared in the corner of his eye. ‘I didn’t mean to say that,’ he said. ‘There’s one woman they hired recently who I just love to look at, especially her posture, and the way her hair goes down over her shoulders. It’s like a waterfall of black vinyl.’ He sniffled, this guy, and then caught himself. ‘What I mean, I guess,’ he said, ‘is that I wouldn’t mind putting an extra shot in her espresso.’” Gary clutched the cup tighter for warmth. “That fucking scumbag,” he said. “Afraid of his own poetry.” He stood up and tossed the coffee in the garbage. “Let’s go,” he said above its loud thump.

MONEY WELL SPENT

I had the idea to arrange a dinner between Christophina and Blau with myself as the host in a medieval cavern that I had purchased with monies I made from the sale of my yacht. There were also other guests: a convicted murderer, a self-proclaimed “invert” (it was a mental category of his own invention, having to do with belief in the opposite of what he believed), some barrel boys, a septum specialist, and Morris Guberstein, who is always a wit. The cavern walls sweated coolly. One round table was placed beneath a censorious stalactite. Duck was served, l'orange and otherwise. Neither Christophina nor Blau spoke much. They eyed each other admiringly, each conceding to one of the other guests that they felt as though they were in the presence of a true master. Christophina reportedly gave Blau the ultimate compliment—the murderer asked what was so special about Blau, and Christophina, with a very serious expression, said, “It’s his pulse.” Most of the focus, then, fell to Morris Guberstein, who did voices, told jokes, juggled. He had kept his weight down and looked quite youthful, which led the invert to proclaim that he was a “total bore, really not the life of the party at all.”

Saturday, January 1, 2022

NEW RELEASES

Emerton’s psychological acuity as a lyricist extends to her singing and, specifically, to an overuse of the pause, especially before and after pronouns. The effect of this technique is, again, that the players in the story, the “I,” the “you,” the “she,” are assigned additional weight, and that the cast of characters acquire a powerful reality that far exceeds that which would normally be granted by a personal fiction such as a song. If, as happens in such rare cases as “We Can’t Find It” or “I Doubt,” the pronoun is not framed in such a way, the very existence of that character is thrown into doubt, a distrust that in turn in intensifies the trust that powers the rest of the work. Emerton’s most recent album, Bottle Jack, applies new technology to her trademark technique, adding, in the millisecond before a pronoun, an “underwhoosh,” which can best be described as a susurrus of engrossment. The cover photograph of a fish trapped in a net is a nice touch.