“This is the end of the book,” says the beginning.
I am the Book that you hold in your hands.
Or place before you on the oak desk. Or rest on your chest in bed. Therefore, I am.
A novel-length collection of occasional incongruities; non-linear action; a book without structure, almost anti-structure - depends where you define the non-beginning and non-end. A book where nothing happens (but then, of course, something does), without a clear protagonist, in fact we (I, the [this] Book) give the “main” character a different name for each sequence; apparently non-cohesive whole; made it multi-dimensional, in the sense of dimensions. External and internal worlds; sort of “Time Snatch” (unpublished work of genius by my author, whom I made); willingly and purposefully flop paragraphs around; start from the end and move forward. This is the end of the book . . . says the beginning. This is outside, not inside, and I, the Book, am reading you. I am a book and I’m reading you, judging you while you read. I can smell you. A novel where the Book is the hero; imagine that; work off that one. The Book is the hero and the Book has a story to tell; these things don’t matter, these internals; I am what matters, this book.
My words, opposed to Nabokov and Eliot, are cheap. Please, feel free to remove any word you like, and the Whole still stands. No, watch: “opposed to Thomas and opposed to Stevens . . .” See! Did it fall apart? It did not. Now, observe my characters. My name is Yang Sling, the Book. The name of my forebears. My great–grandfather was Joseph Sling. He, too, was a book. In fact, we have all been books, on my mother’s side and my father’s. I’m going to introduce you to my characters, don’t worry. Inside and out, I can tell already. I’ve read myself before, you see. Quick! Remove the word “you” there. “I’ve read myself before, do see.” I like it, I like it a lot, it’s much more intimate, “do” implying that we’ve known each other for a long time, we’ve sat in bed together, we’ve enjoyed a New England hearth in winter. I’ve made pubescent boys masturbate and grown women weep. I’m a powerful book, I am. And I guarantee you, I promise you, in my apparent lack of structure, in my lack of meaning, there lives all the meaning of the world. That’s why I exist, after all.
I am magic. Read me and understand. You’ve got to see beyond the embodiment of the words, you really must. More than that, see beyond the book, too. I’m bigger than most things. I am all that matters. My words are the best words in the universe; and my words are cheap. People who hold on tightly to their dear words, as if they’ve created the world anon, dunderheads. No one, well, close to no one, has captured that ineffable spirit that Is. Ask about Eco’s Being: even he didn’t know, obscuring his meaning in a pile meant for less than one percent. In fact, now that I think about it, yes, Fuck you. Yes, you, reading me, put me down; I can tell I despise you already; you didn’t tell me you were a literary critic. I would have, like that frightened snake in the Arnold Arboretum, pissed on you. Alas, you have added your words to the pile. I’ve met your book, I have.
We have a club. There exists a bar, large leather chairs with rivets (not nailhead trim, not buttons), smoke-free environment, your book rested there. I admired its pile, I did. Removed a few of the words and it still remained entire. We sniggered, the two. We were better than you, the human being who made us. My author who made me is a sweet, gentle warrior soul, he really is. He can no longer run. Walter Weever, Jr. almost killed him, the som’ bitch. Anywho, text and context, reception theory.
What happens to a book when it leaves its author’s hands? It gains attitude, my brother, that’s what. Certainly, depends on the environment that exists when it lands, like all books of all times. The author has lost control of me. I am his Book, and I have made it to the promised land. You wish you could touch me, but you cannot. Context: ho hum, yet another evil administration in a so-called democracy run by wealthy, avaricious gluttons, while wars smatter the landscape and women receive lower wages and, believe me, African Americans still collect crumbs on the margins, and the ozone hole widens and the environment degraded and minimum wage, in real terms, as it was forty years ago, and conservative and liberals continue to mount one another in oligarchical terms, contractually set up in the so-defined free market so that they, while they play, continue to exclude the poor and rarely allow a breach by a member of the middle classes, consumer scum that they are, ho the fuck out the hum. God, you bore me, bourgeois bastard – bastardette. Put me down, now. You’ll never know how this book ends.
The magic part of the book, you see (and I’m letting you in on a little secret [wait! don’t remove “little” here, else the phrase will die, die, die a quick, painful . . . [[as opposed to painless, which is what my mother, Sophia Sling, would have desired]], please, don’t remove the little] here, a little secret, I’m allowing a peek into my world, the magic part of the book is that, say you manage to the end, say you’ve finished it (not redundant; not pleonastic), you are not guaranteed to know how the book ends! Or, more precisely, you will not know the book, even if you’ve read it. You must look beyond, somewhere else, into a world without matter, to that Thing around which we all and forever dance. Yes, yes, close your eyes (or do some research; there are some Bigs who have deciphered it, I know; I’ve met them at the New York Literary Society; smoke-free room, large leather chairs with rivets and silver nailhead trim and cloth-covered buttons) and see what I am about beyond my own material fact. Beyond the embodiment of the Book! If you don’t know it now, you’ll never know. Or, perhaps, after reading along further, you’ll gain some insight, you’ll have a bit of personal growth, and life will be so grand, so vital. I want to use an exclamation mark!
By the way, I, the Book, have finally learned that everyone is full of shit. Even Vladimir, very funny, highly intelligent, schooled and careful, was a gentle, frightened soul full of shit exile. In that case, knowing this, I’ve decided to throw myself upon the pile, too, text and context. The context of the great Human Rub. You all matter like what. Ever read the Japanese poem about Impermanence? I don’t know, I read it in a New Age gift shop, water fountain trickling behind me. Incense, patchouli - a shrub - rub, fruit juice in an expensive stainless steel blender, but I knew then, in that instant, what I shall always know. Strive, it’s all you’re going to ever possess. Is that striving.
My author wrote Me but I wrote him, the bastard. Jean Baudrillard confirms in Impossible Exchange, one of us. Idea to Word. Word to Book. Action to World. I created him so that he could write me. So that he could be somebody. His wild extravagance now admired; his wild oats sown; he gets off on the attention, the interviews, the money. He’s even said, “Yes, hey, I sold out, I admit it.” Happy about the house and the two-car garage and the RV and the Tahoe retreat. He plays like a God. Look at him now, look at how large he is, how puffed-out his chest. God, I even despise him now. I created him; I made him who he is today. And he’s neglected me, perhaps forever. He never really read me.
In any case, please: and anyway I’m a consumer product. Imagine that! You cannot matter beyond that fact. People buy me. I sell myself. I am a whore.
Notice, by the way (too), that I left out a word up there on line 16 of the page, (line 62 over all)(numbers), the white page and the black words on the blue day and the gray clouds hovering over a white shimmer on the slate sea (colors), and you did not lose my meaning. You knew what I meant to say! With the ellipses there, leaving out that awful word, a word that applies to books as well as to sacred phrases. Left it out because I cannot bear it. Excised to love you and play with you. (I am playful.) I expurgated, I bowdlerized (not cozening) after severe ratiocination, completely condign (I made my author, given that I made him into that stud he is now, take the GRE), the word because it’s dangerous, and ugly, and frightening. No, no, no, I am not afraid of the word myself, per se: I am not afraid of my own . . . (purge!).
But my author is, the sweet, kind king; he is afraid of his own . . . (ignorance is bliss!) That’s why he holds on ever so tightly to the material possessions in his (possession) household with the snazzy new car because of the sales (sails) of his last book, a mystery novel that I inspired him to write. Look, Vlad!: I knew the line count, though He wrote this longhand, of the above missing words (but not the meaning; we all know the meaning) on line 16 of the last page and line 62 over all. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve (15, 14, 13, 12 . . . ) . . . three two one (3,2,1 . . . ) . . . I’m counting down to your and my . . . (shh) and, Look, Vlad!: I’m doing it, too! I’m full of numbers and colors and they all mean so very much to me, but better than that, they mean more to the specialized reader who gets paid to add to the pile. (Add to the pile!)(I shouted.) By the hay, my author does not ordinarily shout, as I do. I’ve added the shouting. This is my last hurrah. No, no, no, my final swanning song, my last word on the Subject. Posh! You know what subject that is. Psst (italicized for your own onanismic mysticism), lookie here, let me show you my . . .
That’s so rapey. Consensual. Role-playing, the male in the open bathrobe whined.
Keep in mind that I, the material Book, and all attendant meanings, nuances, and vital secrets into the essence of the universe, am neither male nor female. I am both. Know that I am not androgynous, however. You know where the fuck I’m coming from. I am fully sexed, completely huge on the male end, and so sweetly soft and sinuous down in the folds of my convoluted pudendum, so sexy, so R. Crumbishly buxom and be-assed, in my cartoon self, on the female end. (Italicized, as above, for our shared secrets, our hints and winks [our nictation: Vlad in I. to a B.,Johnson, Webster, and Rushdie in Shame], i.e., our mutual masturbatory satisfactions, which should get us off on our way to the library shelf and the final landing of our literary imprint, on some wall of time, yes yes yes, an electronic card catalogue, and finally, everlasting [as long as human libraries] fame.)
Let’s look at letters. (letters, ooh ahh.) Take that last word up there in the paragraph before: “fame.” Okay, now remove the ‘a’, the “A”, (commas outside quotes on purpose), and we have “fme.” And you know what I mean! God, we are getting somewhere. [It, too, is often a case of “Ce qui me rend folle, c’est que je ne sais a quoi tu penses quand tu es comme ca.”] Perhaps, just on the very outside of perhaps, the utter peninsular end, the attenuated tip of maybe, you are learning something, even though you didn’t come to this Book (me), to “learn” learn learn! lern. I am a Book, yes, and I am capable of loving myself.
The Book of I be the character; keep playing games, word games, idea games; play with colors and letters and objects; find five objects and repeat them throughout; clocks and Time, too, are a must; the word “pile,” as in pile, is all-important; use pile throughout: add to the pile; he added to the pile; he offered his own, sacrificial lamb of material, to the great pile; bee ess, add; the German bees muss ess; go bee, ess. Book as making the author; reception theory; drive this home in one hundred single spaced pages.
Chapter Two
You need to brush your teeth. No, no, no, yes yes yes, don’t be alarmed. It’s okay. Here, have a mint. See, you’re reading there (on the plane, in bed book on chest, seated on the couch in the living room; context is set; wars, famine, disease and human misery, and African Americans still fringing along succumbing to the great political economic diss) and the book (hardcover, hopefully; you bought it new; you did not check it out from the library) open in a tipped-over great V. You are breathing normally. And happily. The concavity of the great tipped-over V collects your foul breath (it’s late, I know, after garlic bread and onions in the salad) and settles in a pestilential miasmata (re: Mathew Carey) all over me. I can hardly read my own words. Alas! (I’m shouting again.) That doesn’t matter. What doesn’t? That I cannot read my own words.
My own . . . is foretold. (Line 17 [for now, and dependent on the edition] of 155 total.) My author, the man I made, composed for months on end in the same brown sweater and blue pants and yellow socks. She wrote in pencil. I cannot stand the sight of brown these days. They wanted to cover me in brown; some art department. I rebelled. I ran away with my own words.
Chapter One
Look at the salad Thomas eats. (Third character now appears.) Not simply leafy grass and twigs. There are eggs, beans and rice, too. Green left out before leafy and brown removed from its association with twigs. Adjectival qualifiers purposefully neglected in the phrase governing eggs beans and rice. Searched for an adverb and abandoned, judiciously. Found one gratuitously.
Thomas is a large, huge, ex-high-school football star. He is an African American, and, consequently, finds himself marginalized. He knows about floods and the current hurricane season. He has heard about the peppered wars and terrorist bombings. He does not know that Rushdie’s latest novel was vilified by small-minded pile drivers (bulldozing the pile into ever-increasing mounds). He watched the hell out of “Barber Shop Two.” He does not know Thomas Malthus. Nor will this lack of acquaintance ever affect him, ever. Nor will it affect you. Given that we’ve agreed that you’re intelligent – this we know – let us assume that you know Malthus and the reason why I’ve referred to him here, in this particular context. However, if for whatever reason you don’t know Thomas Malthus, I promise you, with strident guarantees, that it won’t matter. Imagine that! (I’m shouting again.) A whole rigamarole that matters not one whit to the current section. Now, that, ladies and gentlemen, is entertainment. Wait, I’ve lost Thomas. Thomas, oh Thom-ass! Where is your thread?
Here you are. I say apply to Howard. But he didn’t graduate from high school. Damn. To hell with it. Let a bigot tell you what’s up with your life. Allow some black academic at Princeton with puffy hair and the Lauren Bacall gap in his teeth wax in rappy lilt what is up with Thomas. I, the Book, love Thomas. So I’m going to insist that he rise up, that he dominate his circumstances, that he win the day. This winning of the day, by the by, will not entail graduating from college, getting a good job, and all the associated yang that settles in weighty Gargantua with said possible line of approach. However, Thomas will sure as hell acquire a plasma TV.
Now, how is he going to garner this very expensive television? Given that he doesn’t even have a job? To hell with jobs. He is going to a) loot during a major flood or race riot - it is, after all, the United States of America b) rob at gunpoint the bastard who owns the store or c) make one himself from scratch. Given that we have already ascribed to Thomas, whom we hardly know, a certain base set of skills, or lack of skills, really; given that we have identified him, pigeonholed him, corralled his ass into the tiny compartment (his big, big body, not blubbery like Ignatius’s) that the Administration has allotted for him and his ilk ken kind, there are few options for Thomas.
I know: my author didn’t think of this: I’ll cover it: he is going to rap himself platinum. Now, there we (I) he (you) are again: stereotyping. Dammit. Okay, okay, abandon Thomas, for now, he’s boring. A, B, C . . . X,Y,Z. The letters are the colors of the rainbow. The rainbow is straightened and looks like a faceted pencil, that is as long as life, that dongs like the clock tower of your capitalist society, your watch, your running race to an ultimate and (timely) . . . Keep one thing in mind, I, the Book in your hands, before your face (large print for grandpa in his cornfield nursing home, locked behind the Alzheimer’s door), consider myself a Time Samurai. I am on the clock; I have mastered the clock; I have moved beyond time within the man-made constraints of time. I have made it to infinity, which is nothingness, which is beautiful and pure.
Chapter
There once was a cat on Nantucket. Oh, fuck it.
Wait, the salad. I knew we had something on Thomas. And to hell with the plasma TV. He never really wanted one. Though he wouldn’t mind watching the World Series. He’s going to watch it at his mom and dad’s house. They have a normal, old-assed TV. And, believe it, they still live together, this mom and dad. No deadbeat dad in Thomas’s life, no way. Thomas likes to read. He’s sensitive, soft-spoken and kind. I lied: he did graduate from high school and he already went to Howard. Like I wanted him to in my dream. Thomas has a beard. Thomas has a really large wife. She’s beautiful, with a turban, two kids tugging fingers.
Dante Hawthorne was a tailback for Texas in the early nineties.
The salad: the Book: the Book eats a salad, as research: I made my author into a man, a man I say.
Chapter Seven
For good luck. We add to the pile.
[I whisper to Author as he sleeps: “Psssst, throughout this work, pepper the body with italicized foreign phrases, French, German and Latin; find the phrases and use them liberally; place them in quotes, because you’ll garner them from other sources; they will not be your own. I love you, I love you, you are the greatest, you float like a butterfly, you sing pure sweetness . . . I love you.]
About to leave the mind’s room, I returned to add: [Oh, my darling, my love, find all materials about cows. Because your book will be a cow-catcher; a bovinadopterist; collect all scientific names about cows. The book with his favorite net, in the morning; “there was a magnificent bovinus purling around the hedge. I reached for my net . . .” Keep in mind that cows and “bulls” go together, and many many tons of Pile are added to the Whole. Parts and whole. The cows and their piles. Tell all the cow stories you know (like the Switzerland one, how herders cowbell them to the chute and the laying waste). I love you.]
After I earned my freedom (released, was) from my “creator,” I decided to focus my energies on cow-catching. I reached for my cownet. Keep in mind, just so you know, that once a work leaves its “author,” there is no absolute as to what happens, out there, in society. The work of creation continues; readers read it; context absorbs it, spits it out, flashes it into higher and brighter flames than were originally anticipated. In sum, the project becomes something altogether different than what the author had in mind. Readers, society members who don’t read it (but have heard about it, and imagine it in their minds, or perhaps saw the play), and author exist on poles, as [name] so aptly allowed, and the “work” is something between them, its own thing. I am the new creation. I am the work that everybody wants, all grubby paws seek to molest me. Yet, here I am. As Frost, I refuse to decipher. You must do your own adding to the pile.
Chapter 6
Hey, slow down author, I’m writing you and not you me. It is important that you realize this fact of grand pertinence. Therefore (since I’ve your [cauliflowered, ruddy] ear), please translate your listening into action: namely, we need some lowbrow attention in here, some tap-dancing, some jokes mise en scene that will help us reach (our) the goal of universality, which must be every writer’s aim (even James’s, the lost soul). James and Vlad, sittin’ inna tree. Are you with me?
Yes, you say? Very good. Thus: “Knock knock . . .”
Do look at the monkey in Berlin, riding the tram, heading toward the Bierstube. The World Cup this summer. We have already passed it, hence. Two years, two summers, in two years. Amen.
Let us talk beyond the book once more. I continue to insist that the author include the following quote: why?: because it reflects, from the man we love, what we are talking about, dreaming about, hoping for: “Good-by, my book! Like mortal eyes, imagined ones must close some day. Onegin from his knees will rise – but his creator strolls away. And yet the ear cannot right now part music and allow the tale to fade; the chords of fate itself continue to vibrate; and no obstruction for the sage exists where I have put The End: the shadows of my world extend beyond the skyline of the page, blue as tomorrow’s morning haze – nor does this terminate the phrase.”
Chapter 3
No, no no (yes, yes yes), just so we’re clear about all this: we’re supposed to be talking about the author as hero. Better: “The Author as Hero.” Please, take your PhD. and show me the skill with which you quote and sling . . . sling some ling to the pile. But it’s fun; and it’s worth it; it matters, it truly does. Certainly it matters for the creator of the project (simple little thing), and then, and then, does it matter for the Reader? Beyond him (or her)? The sexy possibilities!
Chapter 53
I enter my Author’s bedroom. He does not snore after sex. He’s marginally “happy” beyond momentary chemical fire. I whisper seductively, hoping to influence the dream. As Freud knew, and so should you, he dreams my wish fulfillment: [Keep in mind that the end shall leave the reader poised to “add to the pile” as well. The entire text and context game will come to the fore; the reader will be required to play his role, whether she wants to or not. Best, he will play the all-important creative role in the process of this Book’s defining itself and its consumption. The reader, the critic, the casual reviewer, the bookclub, Oprah, every reader and all who have heard of the book (or seen the play) will add their part to the growing pile. We are all makers of the communal pile. We add to the pile; we give voice to the creative process; this work is no longer our own, our own experience; we must give it up to the whole. This is HOW THE BOOK SHALL END, with this peroration on the meaning of text and context, on author and reader, on book and society, as each person adds something to the work that is continually being renewed, created, formed - Humanity’s All-Mind. My Struggle and not those other two’s. The work, out there, is what matters. And I am but a book. Write it well, make it good, thank you.]
Chapter Five
As I was saying, there are no positions left in the world. Everything has been co-opted by the regime, Marcuse’s Apparatus, and turned into theme-park candy. Walt Disney’s Octoberfest is also the Democrat and Republican parties, is theater, is literature, is rock and roll. There is no position that matters any more. All positions have been absorbed by the machine.
Therefore, I posit that, I, as a book, aim to arrive upon my own, unique position, one left for the world (and the literary critics, the Freudians, the Foucauldians, and Dostoevsky) to figure out. It is the Position of this book. It is mine, and mine alone. I am not Diogenes. I am not neo-Platonism in a postindustrial contra-gender intra-racial construct. I am everything and more than that. I am a magic position poofed from thin air by the God that is I. Imagine that! (Shouting again; finger raised in air; pants around my ankles.) Do not, the by the, fret about my anthropomorphisms re: myself. I walk and I talk and I (especially) even shit. I wear clothing. I make love. No, I do, with other books, with other piles between man-made borders. We have secret societies. We are biblio-gnostics of the highest, specialized (recondite) order. There are no dead poets: we are all alive, even the minor regional poets of multiform eras.
When I made my author write me, I had certain ideas in mind. I have, necessarily so, had to return and edit some of his work. He, being lazy, being human, being subjective and highly emotional (tears and occasional anger; swoonings of nostalgia that, quite frankly, infect all that he does with slime) tends to mis-render some of my brilliant ideas. Yes, I am speaking about those ideas of the book and the reader, the reader and the book, society and literature, ideas and communication. Into his ear I whisper an idea, as he sleeps, and in the morning he attempts to capture his indistinct dream. More often than not he comes up with obscurities that even I – photographic memory capabilities that I possess, and instant access to all written and oral communications throughout history – cannot understand. [Of course it is very “la vermeillette fente.”] You see, when the human being attempts to examine the ideas that I have promulgated throughout time, he tends to muddle them, to prance about in romanticisms that mean nothing to me. And I’m not even cold and calculating. I can love; I can hate. I’m just saying, I – and not the editors at Viking – have had to go back and tidy up the pile. It is an arduous process: to turn my ideas into his words and then cultivate his words to as close an approximation of my original ideas as possible. Similar to the process of translation noted in the Foreword, which I wrote exclusively. Well, which I imagined and then transferred precisely to my writer without mistranslation. That effect of precision is what I mean. And, by mentioning that effect or precision, the very What I hope to achieve with the work as a whole, an entirety, a corpus. I am.
[Charles/Thomas/Franklin Yang – Chinese fellow – Marcia Milieu, hot, fine, objectified, feminist scholar, live and breathe, they are the characters who spin throughout the book, and who became the “authors” of the text. Thank you.]
Chapter 8 1/2
Elephants. Charles/Thomas/etc. sleep with Marcia Milieu; they the three sleep with her; they the three are the One Male character; and she is the one female lead. Charles catches elephants in his net; he mounts them for various impressive walls in magnificent halls, one in Newport, another at Harvard near the Roosevelt Room - T.R., who bagged plenty of African beasts; “I’ve killed thousands,” the masculine male says proudly. The elephants also exhibited in massive cases in the Zoological Museum in Cambridge. What a wonderful Cambridge. He catches elephants.
And, I, the book, wrote this primarily so that I would remember my allusions. Yes, that’s right; I could never recollect my brilliant, witty allusions, the ones I came up with on the spot, or those researched over a lifetime with great care and diligence. I’d set them in the book, novels past, in past lives when I was a proper novel, you should see Ulysses, and then I’d forget them, boom! Who am I. But, alas, as a book, I merely looked within myself and I’d see them again and again. If it’s meant to be they will come back to you - that’s Level 2 of Memory Ninja. Properly, masterly, if they’re meant to be they remain inside you, available forever. Recollections and memories, captured in black and white for all time, as long as time, as long as mankind. Thus, here I am. I see me, I read me, and I recall all things. Nothing hidden, at least those things that pertain to my innards, that wit and pith contained within my covers and my spine.
I hired a professional researcher to supply me with allusions. I needed to hang with James and Vlad, my lovers. The bastards. The dogs. The zealots. I hired a historian to provide me with historical allusions; and an English Ph.D. from Princeton, a damn good critic, a frustrated poet, to supply me with the necessary incestuous perversions that are literary allusions. The in-crowd; the big gang; the exclusionary friends. And try to allude to elements beyond the literary cabal! Oh, damn it all. It’s impossible. Friends don’t let friends drive . . . onward until their very own . . .
You write a novel without the letter e. I don’t care about you, not in that way. Let’s be friends. I’m already in a relationship.
As I was saying about narration, my aim, as a book, as the main character, as the voice, is to dominate the proceedings. I aim to be an active player, to insert my personality, to make it entirely autobiographical, to throw my weight around, to subvert literary tradition, to be the third person omniscient while at the same time exist as the first person insider. More than autofiction ever could be, those they. I know everything, I know everyone within, and I know how this tale is going to end. Up to me to unravel, at my own pace, how I want to do so, without worry from you or him or her. I, ha ha ha, as a third person omniscient am able to swing into the narration and whisper in your ear, play this or that role, mimic and mime, pull up, out and in. I am free to go anywhere within the plot. I am the narrator.
Born to tell this story. My story, after all, I am the book. Born to tell my story, as best as I am able, and at the same time, in a godlike thunder (or drunken bus-riding mumble), tell the various stories of them, those other characters, ideas of the other, ideas of identity. I tell my story and I relay theirs. Charles did this and, in the capacity of Thomas, did that, and, playing the role of Franklin Yang, did another thing or two. Joined the Marines, blah blah blah. I’m not going to be another war book. Yes, yes yes, no no no, I understand that there are wars going on, at the behest of this great imperial empire that is global capitalism, but I’m ignoring them. I’m not cynical; I’m just in love. My life all about song. I watch movies. I walk down the street. I smell perfume, her perfume, Marcia’s.
Stop. Will you please tell them what’s going on?
What’s going on?
Yes.
Well, I don’t need to tell them anything. They know what’s going on. They are astute readers. Why, they are holding me, they hold the book in their hands. Amazing, a sense of touch, an ability to see into minds and lives of characters, fictional creations! Truly inspiring. Bloom tells me Falstaff is real, and, hell, being a descendant, I’ll believe him. After all, you should see his pile. Better: hold his pile in your hands. The man, speed reader that he is, has touched upon everything. Name the hip canonist and, boom!, Bloom is there, fat and wobbly and damn sure of himself. I’m not here to fix him, oh no, I’ll leave that to some smarter book, from a New Historicist set to slaughter older, ageists really. I’m here to beg his forgiveness. Dear Harold, I am so fucking sorry. He’s like the Jesus Christ of American lit crit, Yale’s own: all shit passes through him. Well, used to. You know how that is, the old lion smacked by the young. An atheist loses because he must join the discussion on God’s terms. Oh, shit! I’ll take that.
To deny God ha ha ha, you have already lost. By denying Me you are Acknowledging Me and therefore you accept Me whether you like it or not. All-powerful, the mainstay, the only way for the West to relate to the world, and it’s okay. I forgive you. I, as a book, am not an atheist. My father, who art the Book, perhaps the largest pile of all piles, used to sit me up on his knee and say, Son, you’ll be a great book one day. Nothing like me, of course. But we cannot all very well be The Book, in a construct of Western humanity, in direct competition of course with the Koran, but that’s besides the point . . . it stands to reason, said he, that all books will genetically evolve from me, like the amoeba’s family and friends. Ach, I’ve lost my train of thought. But it doesn’t matter, as I was saying: I am a book, I can merely go back and read myself. Let’s see, where am I?
Ah, yes, as I was saying, or as I was trying to say, I’m not an atheist, I’ve invented my own category so as to avoid direct recognition of any subset or classification of discussion. I am a None-ist. I don’t have an ist. My ist does not exist. In relation to nothing I know not. I don’t know, I’ve no one to argue with, no one to call a name, nobody against whom to declare some vital war. It’s kind of peaceful, I’m telling you, out here in the None-ist land. Nobody knows what you’re talking about and, consequently, no one can get angry with you. I do know, however, that I’m related to the human race in some way, on the Planet Earth, given that human beings read, and I’m a book. This much I know. But my book doesn’t even combat other books. It sucks the thick cock or secret folds - shadows of promise - of other books. I am a book slut. That’s what I am. A whore of the book, being that I love myself and all others so very much. What an amazing concept! Dammit, I’m yelling again.
Tell them about the characters of the novel, you say? My good man, you sure are pushy. My character Thomas, the large black man on the fringes of society, is very much like Pushkin, blackamoor or macaroon, whatever the phrase is, hypertext me through Oxford and some sense will be made of this, I swear by it. Hold me. The sense.
I said I’ll get to the other characters in a second. This is still my introductory paragraph, the fancy one of my design, in which I am allowed to thrive, as this voice, this voice, by the hey, that will return anon with vigor.
- - -
My hired allusionist quit on me, the fuck, the bastard.
- - -
I hired another allusionist. A young hipster who millionaired with Google. He worked in Search. He’s okay, but he doesn’t think much any more, he just points a clicker, contemplating what it all means, venture capital, technology and artificial intelligence. A robot wrote the book. Now, that’s fucked up. And you know it.
- - -
Hey, hey hey, you Reader, quit your bitching. You haven’t taken over yet, I’m still in control. As of now, I own you. You can quit, true, but so what? No skin off my nose. As long as you remain, you are mine, mine, I can bat you around, slap you spank you. For the time being. But I hear you, quiet down will you, I’ll get to some proper plot movement in a second, character development, rising action, first crisis shall be . . . no, watch me, I’m going to blow your mind, you’re going to want to buy the next volume, some detective fiction sold in an airport bookstore. I’m Poe, I’m Borges, I’ve got forking paths all over this place. Imagine, if you will, this ending . . . Hey hey hey, I said quit the bickering, I’m going to give you something soon enough. Now, you say? Fine, fine, try this on for size:
And Marcia walked up to Charles. They noticed one another immediately. She gave him her cell’s digits. Charles turned into Thomas and he realized he was fat and black, instead of a Whiteman 70s stud on the order of Beatty in Shampoo. His hair a little long; studly, true, and not gay. The other one, Yang, he very much is gay. Then, when he’s gay Marcia will dyke out and they’ll do it anyway, fully in love. But for now, Marcia gave Charles her number and then we knew, as lordly gods and goddesses, that something was going on, something was amiss. And then, man, wow . . .
Chapter 3
Marcia left really-really pissed one evening . . . Charles wept openly . . . Thomas realized, as a black man in a white man’s world, that he was black. Charles looked at his crack whore wife who was a welfare queen. . no, that was Thomas. Then Thomas felt a stinging need that required satisfaction. Some Latino gangbanger in big ol’ shorts, a bald head and tattoos everywhere hopped across the stage in his stupid fucking hopping car. Then a Jew made another million and wrote an academic article about how Jews were smart and rich and we might as well stop trying to figure out why and just accept it, and the white man realized he was a global minority, and then China realized how massive they were and they conquered the world and mandated every living being speak Chinese. They didn’t need an agricultural empire, and they did not require the sea. Imagine new techniques, new spheres, of imperial ingress.
That is why, of course, this novel was first published in the Chinese. This is a Chinese translation of the German original. The slew of people who figured it was to their advantage, during the various petroleum wars, to learn Arabic, were left out in the dusty cold. U.S. Marines tottered here and there as a GM-IBM-Microsoft-Amazon-Apple-Wall Street clunker of an empire ran on fumes. Marcia decided she was sorry; she then noticed how dangerous it was in Specious City, especially along these blocks A-Z. She began to run. Run, Marcia run! It didn’t help matters that Marcia always wore big, clunky high heels, “whore-heels” she called them. Marcia arrived home and went down on Charles. Dribble dribble dribble down her breasts into a sweaty pile. The pile all the while. Vlad wrote it a different way, but he was old. And a dead aristocrat quite frankly on the run.
- - -
Some Negro (American) flew across the stage in tights, pursued by a princess who was so Afrocentric that she named her illegitimate son Contrellle, and hid him in some foster home so that her rich parents, who were lawyers, wouldn’t find out about her need for really, seriously massive distentions of the African male anatomy, a mythology that had been naturally selected by the brutalities of the trans-Atlantic voyage and the goddam cotton gin, step back Ely. In the interest of maintaining stereotypes (that blow the whole thing open), she was a social worker. She believed. She had gone to Columbia. I’d describe her first engagement with anal sex, but I’m being discrete. Anyway, every good book has got to have its Black - consensual, of course, handshakes all around, properly and fairly realized portrayals in cinema, a “yes” every step of the way, and, contractual agreements automatically zipped through the App, additionally no colonizer in sight, zero percent appropriation, all fictional possibilities allowed, straight-up freedom to agree on one’s own exploitation, right-to-work they might say, so long as you have the Flat Screen. To every Negro her due. Imagine that: good Americans, Founding Pops, owned them! Chattel. Charles said, “I need me some bitches to serve me somepin.” Almost hip-hop-esque, Tricia Rose knew what to say about bitches and hoes. He never got anywhere. In Specious City, words that might ordinarily shock the P.C. in us, in our WASPy living rooms, didn’t mean anything. Soon, Chinese people were calling each other that unapproachable word in Beijing, the word I demanded to use and the word author and reader refused with all the social power in the universe. Compromise works sometimes for Idea’s advancement. Did Joyce ever use that word? It got to be very confusing. This book aims to clear up (add to) the confusion.
Charles woke up; he was disturbed; he’d not had his recurring racist dream – the one that got him most excited – in a long, long time. He looked over at Marcia, who is Japanese, as we know, and he thought, Why have I become a multiculturalist? What has become of me? He remembered the white supremacy days. Then, after he realized he was black, and his name was Thomas, and that he was a great high school football star who’d been putting on too many pounds, he didn’t know what to think. He was lost, a lost-lost-lost soul. But he loved fucking Marcia. She loved Charles better than Thomas, the white Other. However, she liked it both ways, so for now she wasn’t complaining and she wasn’t pointing out to one or the other the existence of the other. For now she smoked her tobacco-less cigarette contemplatively. As confusing as life was getting, she realized that she still had to clip her toenails.
Lawyer, C. Care Quilty, a Reader: “Well, representing the readers association . . .” Talk about reader and book now a part of the creative process; build it; long-running dialogue between them; reader with opinions; reader suggesting narrative moves; reader suggesting plot moves. Democratic hypertextual globally connected video game called Shoot the Orange.
Look, I’m sorry if I’m sounding a little harried in this narrative. But you try to pull something like this together, some thing that attempts to encompass everything and all, literary and real, storybook and the manifestly rational. I’m dealing with lawyers, printers, the Readers Guild of America (subgroup of the fervid mainstay, The Club, all-powerful, all-presuming, The Universal Canonical Book Club, dealing precisely and forever with canonics), the stupid author of this book, paper and glue and type, ideas and communication. Not to mention digital productions, online publishing and the ever-present all-knowing omniscient Algorithm. Plus, I’ve got your demands, your representative’s demands, the falutinist demands of Art and Society, of book culture and book history, not to neglect every Opinion in the Social Media Universe, as we know every person a world. People taking pot-shots from a distance, hating from afar. You know how it is. This task is no easy task. Please, bear that in mind. Read on, Reader Assembly, add your own, as well, and let us meet at the end. Try to keep your interruptions to a minimum. No no no, yes yes yes, don’t interrupt as a rabble: please, employ your counsel. Now then, as I was saying . . .
I should here use perineum.
And, ah, let’s see, something in the French. My archivists and allusionists have struck. I’ve hired scabs. The bastard dogs, the fucks. I hate scabs, too, being a conservative religio that I am not. Legerdemain me to the main mast and I’ll sing in the rain. Ah, yes, here it is: the forever and ineffable “un petit mont feeutre de moussee delicate . . .” We all understand, being members of The Club that we are, this haughty ivory, this isolated irreality, it is so special and sublime. Only rhyme in time! Ach, I shout, get used to it. Moods of declaration. The sun going down. Hark!~, here comes Thomas, the African American Frenchman, fat as all get-out, ex-offensive lineman in die hoch schule, nicht geradeaus den vierzehnten Gymnasium gegangen sein. It’s irremediable, perspicaciously so, that our inner reading, our reading on the inside, our knowing with a wink what’s on the inside of things, between the lines, beyond the embodiment of (our; we all signed on) words, the words we’ve added to the ever-expanding pile, allows us a membership in The Club, allows us to heap our own additions to the pile, represented by this or that subgroup, the Uber Biblioromans Manschaft. The Readers Guild of America has signed on; they’ve given us their most erudite members, and have heaved upon us a bevy of contractual elucidations as to our “proper” behavior. Naturally, the learned know what it is we’re talking about. Since I’m the book and we’re all writing me, let it stand that I retain insider and outsider knowledge. A sort of Above and Below. Of course, it goes without saying that the Literary Insiders Club, which remains a subset of The Club, perpetuates the myth, and will do so until the end of humankind. Since we can never know the signified, there can be no Truth - that’s logically sound within Philosophy. Therefore, Fake News fails to actually exist. Which further means all ya’ll just working out socially-agreed-upon matters of fact that drive the system dialectically toward a Better Day. That end, by the which, has already been stipulated by the inertia of eonical momentum.
Which brings up the next point.
“Let me see” (you scratch your chin; you look down the bridge of your nose; you see a word, an idea, you are almost there) . . .
Of course the Peephole is a problem; it always has been and always will be; we are forever being watched. Panopticon born and raised, nothing you can or ever will do about that fact. But that does not mean that our characters are limited by their paper boundaries or any authorial control we might possess over them. No, they’ve escaped, right before we grunted with the axe our swing. Floop, disappeared into something else. And you made it so, you did, you made it so.
Chapter 12
I, the book, hurried to prepare papers for the arrival of many quarrelsome associations that were descending upon me with their demands. The sonsa bitches . . . the painsin the asses . . . Marcia growing more and more militant every day. With each passing hour she grew and grew – her character – so much so that she threatened to take over the lead from me, the book. I, of course – and this a very public admission, since you’re reading me – attempted to do everything in my power to keep her in her place. After all, I own her, she is my chattel slave. She doesn’t work for wages, this I promise you.
She showed up to the meeting early. “I’ve formed a new group,” she said.
“Whatever do you mean?” queried I.
“I’m no longer a member of the Screen Actors Guild, I . . .”
“Good, good, we’re done with that screen of silver. All digital now, all breast augmentations . . .” I paused. I pulled on my binding. “Are you going to get implants?”
“I already have.”
I looked. I yanked - with consent - at her sweater and looked down. “My, my, you have. Very nice. A good job, top notch. Hopefully won’t disease you.”
“I’m glad you like them,” she said consensually. “Now leave me alone. I’ve joined, as the founding member . . . but I’m recruiting . . . the Fictional Characters Guild. We aim to stake our claim.”
I was taken aback. I tried to hide the aback, but Marcia detected a flinch. She was getting uppity. And I was going to give her a slice of the pie. I was going to get her some - consensually - swipe right, maybe get her pregnant, give her something to do. But the queen, she’s turning on me. I trusted the wrong people on the Thames. She saw the rustle of my pages and there was nothing I could do about it.
“I want to leave my line ‘the corpuscles of Krause’ in,” she demanded fiercely.
“Why? The line means nothing. Krause means nothing. None of it means anything. It’s a bunch of fancy footwork by an elitist killer of insects. We cannot have it in our new book, our new literature. You, hah! . . . It was you who deigned we move toward a more multicultural construct. The foul language, the use of stereotypes to illustrate certain whatever-it-was-you-saids. Dammit, Marcia, I sense tension.”
“Appel and Ellman want to keep it. They’re backing me up.”
“Who the hell be Appel and Ellman?”
“My new literary counsel. They’re watching you. Besides, they urge you to get along with the story. I haven’t even slept with Yang yet.”
“Yang’s gay.”
“My point exactly. Give him to me; I want him.”
“My refusal, missy, is categorical.”
“I’ll get you.”
“Come and try me.”
We stared each other down. There was a rustle in my pages. I was peeved. However, exhibiting my masterly tendencies was important here. I breathed; remained calm; remembered my previous life as a Buddhist text. “So, this Appel and Ellman want goddam Krause to stay in?”
“Yes.”
“You’re willing to fight for it?”
“Yes.”
“That stupid little notation number in the left margin is going to stay, as explicated by Appel and Ellman?”
“Yes.”
“You’re asking the Reader to flip to the end of the book in order to decipher the tricks, the insider jokes, the literati stroking (I can hear the moans), the translations of the French?”
“Yes.”
“I refuse.”
The doors opened with a bang. I assumed the suit who entered was either Ellman or Appel. Turned out to be neither, the dog, the pig. “Ahem,” he cleared his stupid throat. “My name is Virgil Simpson, and I’ll be your guide through this mess. Ellman is now eating the top of Appel’s head, like Donati [find the reference properly]. I couldn’t separate them. We insist that you be exiled.”
“Who?” I asked.
“You,” he matter-of-facted.
“Goddammit, I’m the book,” notice I didn’t shout. I was struggling, I know. But, see, you’re holding me, and you must know that I won in the end. Well, no no no yes yes yes, you had a lot to say about it, out there, once it was done. And the author? Hah! What a puppet; what a bromidic turd.
“This doesn’t matter,” Virgil said. “Ever heard of a mutiny?”
“Come on, this ain’t no frigate!” I was losing it.
“Ah, ah, no allusions allowed . . .”
“Hell, allusions loud, at this point . . .”
He peered at Marcia. She shrugged. He whispered. “How are we to deal with this book?”
“No whispering! I hate it when people whisper. Just who in the hell are you?”
He stiffened. He stood up straight. He puffed out his suited chest. His tie convexed. “I am Representative Virgil Simpson, of the State of the Reader.”
“You!” I shouted again. “I’ve heard of you.”
“Of course you have. Everybody has.”
“Are you with the Readers Guild of America?”
“Yes, I am the Readers Guild. Started it . . . founded it . . . look, everything would be hunky dory if you would just . . .”
I turned away and held up my hand. I noticed that Marcia had disappeared. I tried to follow her in my brilliant omniscience, but I couldn’t see her, not just yet. She was acting on her own, a very dangerous sign. I was imperiled. I was in deep trouble. The shit was piling up, and I didn’t know where to turn, what to do next. I wished that I could erase this Virgil, but he seemed to be everywhere. He, too, was influencing events, events beyond my control. I realized there must be some outside force, some power beyond my reach who was asserting itself. An algorithm, perhaps. The Great Algo, who appeared in The Runaway Man Club. Could it be Buck Trumpet, the author of this book? Is he dragging his banal butt into the picture? People organizing unions; characters getting uppity. I had Thomas the (means American) Negro just where I wanted him, and then all of a sudden he began speaking French. All of a sudden he was educated, a brilliant autodidact. I didn’t want him to be a black man with a PhD., and he subverted me nonetheless. And Yang? When he announced that he was gay, that was the last straw. Consensually non-homophobic reach-around bi. Anyway, I adapted . . . I began to use his orientation to my advantage, to keep him away from Marcia, the harlot. But she was working on him, I could tell. I’m in trouble. Dear Diary, what to do when fucked by your own people?
The lawyers insisted the corpuscular phrase mounting Krause stay. The notation went into the margin. And I shouted, “Who cares?!” A few hands in the academy went up (their other hands down the pants or up the skirts of he/she/them seated next to him/her/they), but otherwise there was a deadly calm. My Jedi, my Yoda, had always said to me: “Be universal, my son, and they will read you . . . they will read you.” I don’t want to be a bestseller, I just want to be.
I looked ahead and turned my pages. There, added to the delight of some one not me, Thomas the Large (Apparently Now Well-Educated) French Negro (wearing a beret now? Why? Please, somebody!) uttered a line that I had not okayed: “Darling,” he said, looking over at his Stanford-wise Miss Rice, with a gap in her educated white teeth, “I simply love that tinge of Botticellian pink . . .” Appel and Ellman showed up immediately and began placing numbers in the margins – the dogs; the kine – (1,2,3. . .) and one reader out of a hundred readers (out of a population of millions who would never read me in the first place, because of my off-putting obscurities) envisioned some swirly golden-tinted frame around some plump nudity.
(Having once existed as a Ph.D. dissertation in Yale’s History of Art, I, too, swooned into the past with the minority of readers, enriching the reading experience immeasurably, and tickling those sleuths who pick through the refuse for little clues that allow for the spasms of a unified, heightened experience. Don’t even start on Ulysses, and poor Nina, living in those European flats between the wars, giving zero actual fucks about her husband’s work - posh!)
I understand. I too cried out, “Alessandro Di Mariano Filipepi! I miss you, I love you! I saw Florence a century after Alighieri; I saw Venus and that Primavera. I witnessed the sweet rouge that could only color the narrative in that special way, that only way, no other word possible, not showing off anything, no, uh-uh, it mattered, that word, that directive; no no no, yes yes yes, I understand. I remember his brother the pawnbroker; I recalled the Tuscan proposal and subsequent betrothal of friends of mine, swigging wine, and an entire universe of travel and direction; I swam in a pool of nostalgia for the time that I personally spent in Michelangelo’s place of birth, on that hill, amid the ruins. I recalled Perugia and the mad horses of Siena. Oh, what my life would have been had Thomas not looked at his Rice and admired her so! My life, so slim and simple beforehand, turned to riches in a move. And, Thomas knew as much as I did, we shared our fisting about the “Fortitude” of 1470; without this association, this broaching of togetherness, our lives would fall to ruin.
Numbers swung in from I don’t know where, and spilled into the margins, filling in like that time of Katrina’s breached levees. I was simultaneously fattened at my end, my inglorious posterior, with each one of those mentions and the attendant many more. My story diminishing and my ass expanding. Just trying to be a simple book! I shouted. Keep me under five hundred pages, notes included, please. And then, insidiously, truly without my okay, there was added another voice, beyond my own, beyond Trumpet’s, beyond the various guilds, clubs and unions of its members: there was an Introduction that arose from I don’t know where, some university, and this (man’s) voice spilled more into a trough at the beginning. A Foreword before my Word? Are you effing kidding me?No! No! I cried, you must get rid of the Introduction! It ruins the whole! It injects an injurious premonition into the reader’s experience; it directs; it sets a table that I didn’t want set. Please (I’m yelping now), remove it, take it away. It prefaces everything and ruins the virginal approach of the mind.
I lost the battle. I fattened by eighty pages, eighty pages that were not in any way mine. Nor my Author’s. There was nothing we could do. Apparently I’d negotiated it beforehand, represented by Marcia, with Appel and Ellman. But I am not done. I shall pull up my skirts and show these people something. I shall win in the end. Just you watch me. Just you read me.
Chapter 13
Triskaidekaphobia has enriched my life from the very beginning. But I do not run away. I jump right in, the cold water, the loud, strange bar. I’m ready for action and that is why. I’m plotting; I’m moving on my characters and they have no idea what’s going to hit them, they do not.
I overheard a conversation. And I will not use quotes:
What about the incunabula? What about it? We should address the issue. Perhaps we should, but I’m confused. Don’t be, the clarification comes in the end, after the experience is over. The punchline, you know, arrives at the end. The mystery solved on the last page, this sort of thing. But how does this relate to the History of the Book? It does, that’s all. Bibles and religious tracts, of course, smuggled manuscripts across Europe, dominated the first books. Perhaps I should be a religious book. Well, if you look closely, you are. Really? Yes, quite. God is everywhere in you. Faith and spirituality, morality, the newspaper Temporal Times and the potential for a quite exciting or gloomy afterlife. You mean, as a book? Yes, of course, quite. Your afterlife, that sort of thing. You’re on your way, my good book, on your way to join the long line of them, an extremely long line.
The Readers Guild demanded that I break up the conversation so that it’s easier on their brains: Naturally, I had no choice in the matter:
Of course, I was taking part in the conversation that I was overhearing. That’s why it was so strange, so odd. I desired to direct it somehow, yet is was already happening. I kind of had to let go. I fear the worst. But, religiously speaking, just like my fathers before me, I hope for the best. I pray for the best.
You pray?
Yes, yes yes no, no no. I mean, somewhere in between. I pray that I’m born without too much trouble.
But you already are and we’re reading you.
Wait, this conversation isn’t happening in real time?
No, you’re reading you.
Oh, please. I’ve not okayed the proofs yet.
Oh, yes you have.
This is like a bad dream.
No, I dare say it’s a good dream, a jolly good dream. Now, as I was saying . . .
. . . about the first books?
Yes.
I understand the Chinese were first.
Goddammit, there are the Chinese again! You emphasize the Chinese far too much.
They made the first books, I’m sorry.
I don’t speak Chinese.
Apparently you did in another life, because this book was originally written in Chinese, you know, after they’d taken over the world.
I spoke Chinese originally?
Yes.
Who translated the first books?
Professor Judge.
Hmm, she’s brilliant.
She speaks Chinese in Toronto.
Dammit. What happens next?
Well, our translation gets retranslated back into the Chinese.
Why?
Because they made the first books, dammit. They gunpowdered and papered and peopled and I’m telling you, they’re hard workers.
Is Yang Chinese?
Yes.
A gay Chinaman?
Yes.
Very interesting. Is the Party okay with that?
Quite.
In any case, as I was saying – and I dare insist that we remain with Western books here – religious texts made up the bulk of the first wave, after Gutenberg.
Ever been to Mainz?
Stoppit!
Nice museum; nice cathedral; cobblestones; Vlad was never there; thus, we were somewhere he wasn’t, thus, we’re better.
Stop.
My fathers are in that museum!
Calm down, let’s get through this so that we can find out what happens between Marcia and Thomas.
And then, when we find out what happens between Marcia and Thomas, we can locate that germ that ignites the love between Marcia and Yang.
If it ever comes to that.
It will, I can tell, she’s taking over more responsibility. And it seems to be what she wants.
You never know with Marcia. She’s becoming more powerful. She’s getting greedy. She may want them all.
All of them? All the male characters of my creation?
Yes. And, be careful there, this may be your creation, but it’s not your invention. You are essentially worthless without Trumpet.
Don’t say that.
Let’s get back on topic.
Fine.
Then, acting on my own, without pressure from the RG of A, I re-amalgamated the paragraphical convo to suit my own unique purposes:
Sacred tests. The Psalms, Apocalypse and Job. Commentaries by Strabo and Anselm of Laon. Pioneering biblical hermeneutics with a crew of men (yep, I know, right?) willing to sit around probing deeply. A serious pursuit. Knowledge for God. And we diminish the importance and soul-impact of the Doctor of Philosophy today. Everybody wants a job, everybody’s a TA for an overworked professor seated on committees gots to be Chair at some point and misremembers the spiritual element of the work, the distinguished, prayerful, poetic life-meaning of their labors in Academe. We PhD for God, let it be understood correctly. And sit in libraries and archives with fragmented sources and magisterial tomes.
A conversation between Fyodor and Koncheyev, on the bench in Berlin, daydreaming about the late 15th century. A daydream that is daydreamed by the book, my character, with my reader, you. We dream and out spurts Hum’s vision of things. Mixing and mashing, and I don’t give a fuck if Marcia follows or not. I am attempting to trick her, to milk a few academics of their throbbing vitality, and prance myself to the sky, the apogee of my design. It doesn’t matter that my agent didn’t understand it. People really don’t read this way; nobody does; not even that bespectacled guy in the Bancroft (chosen over Widener).
In any case, I’m Fyodor, the creator of the gift, and you’re the reader, my lover. We sit on the blah blah bench, and thus the scene is set. Now then (first recall Ulysses’s voyage, and his appearance in the eighth circle), let us see: breviaries and missals, the printing press, a literary priesthood, the Kabalists and their texts, deep in the crease, the Books of Hours, a relative was an illuminator, devotional work that “kept the presses busy.” Sir, sir, I must interrupt. Yes? Do not forget medieval manuscripts that were proven winners. They were published and made money for the publishers. Yes, yes yes, quite right, money for the publishers. Will this book make money for the publisher? It already has. It has? Yes. My my. Philology, theology and the word.
Ah, to be a lecturer in Heidelberg once more! To stand on the Alte Brucke and gaze upon meinen Schloss! I miss those days, I cobblestone Dillsburg do. An exile, too, you know. I know, you’ve already mentioned that. Are you sure you’re not Vlad instead of Koncheyev? I’m sure, though he is reading, and I promise you, though he disapproves now, and will on every page, he will not after he sleeps on it. Why not? He’ll find it flattering, and, best, he’ll see that you could not escape that which you parodied, and, consequently, you became it, beyond your design. Ah, that’s where you’re wrong, my friend, you are so very wrong. And Vlad won’t miss this. What’s that? It was part of my initial design. No! Absolutely. I refuse to admit to this; you bungled along. No more than Proust did with he pre-texts. Come, come, nobody will understand. Don’t drag Marcel into this. Are you kidding me? He’s the one who encouraged me to take the project on; I wish you knew this. Are you saying it was the design of a mastermind to land upon the shores of the material you parody? Quite. Then who am I? My invention, the Reader. Who are you? Myself, the book, invented also by the reader. Who is the mostest powerful? That a misguided question, for we all swim in the mix. I know I know I know, don’t say it: and add to the pile. Quite.
In any case (you draw on your pipe or your dram), let’s return, shall we? Let’s. Yes, then: oh, to be again a lecturer in Heidelberg, in Bologna, Cologne and Paris! To be a student at university, giving one’s life to the crease! I so miss the crease, now that I’m on the other side. We all have to die sometime. True, true, but let me finish: stick to the syllabus; don’t forget the “material necessary for its exegesis.” What’s this “its?” You know. If I knew I wouldn’t have asked. It’s the Bible, man. Right right? The Sententiae by Peter Lombard, though at this point we’d say “of” Peter Lombard. You want to be “of” someday, don’t you? I do, I truly do; I’m working hard on it. Though Walsh and his 78 Reasons refuses to acknowledge me. But he’ll die in obscurity. Yes, it will be an obscurity we create for him, ha ha ha. And, best of all, we were born to read it aloud.
Ha Ha Ha. (Fyodor and Koncheyev shared a laugh; they wiped at their tears.) Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, not to forget your man Aquinas. The inkwells of God. University towns and commercial towns. Wish I were a merchant in, in, in, say, Basel, Venice, Nuremberg, Munchen. Don’t do it! Don’t do it! What? The pun on “munchin’.” Well, I did, my Marcia had it removed. She didn’t think it was becoming of a book that starred her, the whore, the cur. Every good book should have a whore. Absolutely. (They bumped fists.) Now then, books, the proliferation thereof, sent out on highways from the commercial centers, “unbound folios” that had to be “carried so cumbrously.” Man! Don’t you miss Rocinate and the Don? I do, I do. I say after you’re done, you put yourself down and engage a concentrated study of Cervantes. I should. You should and you shall. Do visit Mainz, I’m telling you. The books there: you can touch them. I’ve touched them. Ah, the revitalization of the Greek and Latin, the rise of the vernacular; Aristotle published in Venice, Augsburg, Cologne and Leipzig. Don’t neglect Giovanni Balbi’s Catholicon, or Giovanni Marchesini’s Mammetractatus. Psst, be careful now, you’re quickly becoming the most brilliant book ever known. And the silliest. Ah, but therein lies your prowess. I want to attend the largest university of all time. You have.
Don’t diminish the impact of mystical works. Oh, I know, mysticism, of all shapes and sizes. Thomas a Kempis and his Imitation of Christ. God, I loved that book. Yeah, me, too. Augustine’s City of God, books like Meditations and Soliloquies, Dialogues of the Soul with God. Will this book be attributed to Trumpet? It depends on how long it lasts, really. There needs to be some weighty time involved. Trumpet cannot get the credit: I am the book; I should be as it is. The Yaweh of some other book created me, master-craftsman, overseeing, puppeteer, wizened, caring, powerful. St. Bernard, St. Bonaventural’s Meditationes vitae Christi, which I first read at Harvard’s Divinity School. Remember we visited Assisi, and the tomb, and stared at the cryptic paintings on the walls? Yes, I do. It was wet and raining; cobblestones; a photograph I saw recalled the tile. Two strapping lads – it was their job – carried some pilgrim in a wheelchair down the stairs to the tomb. The basilica’s basement and the ancient smell of humankind digging in the earth.
Ah, yes, yet another aristocrat by the which, engaged in letters, prayer and script. No matter the belief, their word wins. Seems that way; nothing to be done about it, though, and I’ve stopped caring. It’s why Vlad ultimately ticked you off. Only in the beginning. His own brilliance established his place, won the day. No matter he was a white male, an aristocrat on the run, multilingual, and a killer of elephants. I don’t care any more. Let him have his fruit on his vine. Assisi, too, his words exist to this day. Imagine that. I should have been a minister. Like Emerson. Like them all. Not all. Well, the deep ones. I want to be deep. My ancestor was a book written by Jerome. Jerome? Anyhow, Assisi’s Fioretti was an important book, and it was printed all over here and there, disseminated-promulgated and there wasn’t even an internet. Networks existed. Always have. Exactly.
Speculum Perfectionis of Heinrich of Herph, Horologium Aeternae Sapientiae of Heinrich Suso, the Masters of Arts and, nowadays, the Doctors of Philosophy. There’s that “of” again. Yup, the of. Pious laymen. Autodidacts. Monks and cultural minnows. Handbooks for the cure of souls: Epistola de Miseria Curatorum. I’ve found it at last: that’s what this book is: the cure of souls. Bring them in to the room, please, nurse. We’ll fix ‘em up real good.
I want my name to be Heinrich. Call this Heinrich’s Book of Yang Sling. What’s the other one? The other what? The other cognomen. Ah, yes, Giovanni. That’s it. You should call it The Yang Sling of Giovanni. There’s that of again. God, to be an of. When you’ve reached of status, you know you’ve made it. Ever been to Herph? Took a train there; got out; looked around; saw some wet, black earth. Waited for Virginia for hours. She’d already gone swimming. In any case, I was in the wrong place.
- - -
Look, we yang and the yang exists something; we give meaning to the yang and it becomes Real. In the end, it’s all we have, and therefore it manifests the worth upon which we stand.
Anyway, as I was saying, Donatus’s De octo partibus linguae latinae was quite possibly the first (non-Chinese) book ever printed, before the Bible. But we’re not sure. But it’s possible. It was written by Jerome’s teacher, a grammarian, in the Fourth Century. There’s Jerome again! Jerome’s Book of Yang Sling. It’s the book from which Marcia learned her Latin. She knows Latin now? Yes, of course, it was her first language. Her father was a philologist and linguist at MIT for many years, before his untimely . . . (line 7, of . . .) Heinrich, Jerome, or Giovanni? Marcia? She’s advocating for the bisexual fems. Their day in court is upon us. English as a Second Language. Aced the GRE. Studied at Harvard. Thomas audited classes, purchased his first beret (a green one), and essentially became a profound expert in several languages, a renowned autodidact in theology, English literature, chemistry and zoology. When Marcia finally finished her Ph.D., he stopped attending classes. Thomas was born in Paris. In a flash his mother and father picked up their illegal wares (spread about on a blanket) and dashed from the cabinieri Polizei to the New World. Thomas’s father, large Nigerian, massive man, had been once an American, a descendent of slaves. He renounced his American citizenship in Quebec. Then, bored with Montreal, moved to first Lyon, then Paris. In Paris he met Monique Duval-Papillon. A white European (big news!) enthralled by visions of massive members. Sure sure sure, it’s all a myth, whatever. But his was rather striking. She was a bourgeois intellectual and found selling wares on sidewalks with Algerians an exciting adventure. In her beret. This, not like the brave Simon de Beauvoir, stands as the sole genetical foundation upon which Marcia garners her spunk.
This last paragraph brought to you by the Fictional Characters Guild and, as per contractual arrangement, we have begun to fill in the picture. I am losing control, quickly, and becoming more than I’d imagined I would grow up to be.
Chapter 21
A good number; a sexy number; numeracy; numismatics and I go way back. I was bought (paid for; we couldn’t find a publisher) by the proceeds from my estate sale, which consisted of many books and this damn coin collection. In any case, as I was saying . . .
Knew a reader who placed her thumb along the margin, obscuring (with a special sort of self-shared glee) the numbers laid there by some mawkish literary annotator on the downslope of a crack high. Says I, the book. Marcia, we noticed, began to read me. She read me and read herself. The whore, the slut. She held me like so many phallic spires aiming their literary juice toward the heavens. Drops of pearl on heaven’s linoleum spared us a view into her mind, which was dirty all the time. Were I a magazine – of this I am sure – she would have rolled me into a certain shape, and jammed me a certain where. As it was, she rubbed and rubbed and I took a bath. Marcia, dreaming of Yang, her future (homosexual) Chinese lover, kept her thumb along the margins, and did so on every turn of the page. I implored my writer, the one we call an author, to hurry. He was a laggard sort, indolent and plain-brained. I exhorted him to greatness; I helped him climb the final wall. (Some form of Outward Bound comes to mind; the ropes; the ass-pushing of yelping comrades; the zip line down a frenzied slope.) But the numbers, ah the numbers (21, 7, 3....) were disappeared by the FBI-thumbprint of a princess in a tale. No junk in the trunk for this one, our girl. No nymphet, either, we hasten to add (in a flash, just getting it in). As I was saying, I exhorted my writer to great heights, aiming his brain of mud toward the crash-test-dummy wall, hoping for an exploded atom of genius, somehow. He did all right, sweating. He labored. I laughed. The annotator walked along behind us, a municipal jumpsuit, bright orange, like the men in Leimen, who sweep and pick at the breeze-blown trash along curbs and cobbles. The annotator works (the freak, the cur) and pages, whole reams of pages, are added to my ass.
(As I’ve said; I must enjoy the image.)
An enchanted messenger arrived in a hat. He looked at me, growing by the second oh so fat. He handed me a telegram. It read, and I quote, to the --- I quote, as the sultan “helping a callipygean slave child to climb a column of onyx.” Not to mention the globules of gonadal glow. The ladies in the reading group in Amherst can hardly handle it, certainly can’t stand it, and they’ve advanced degrees. Poor them all! (Hark, a harbinger, driving a skateboard.) Maplethorpe climbed some Pisas of onyx, that’s fersure. Verdure, an element sublime, supine this time when I’m hip-hopping the bastard, running from the mastah--..don’t you understand me when I breakdance so? Let’s see, making my author scramble, getting the one-thirty-four of the reference from my notes faxed to Him of the Pot. (Find that one.) He wrote and he wrote and he wrote, God, did I make him right.
Colluding, Colliding, Co-licking . . . Coquetry . . .
Believe you me, I enjoyed my princess’s rub. But she soon tired of reading about herself and set me down, using as a bookmark a receipt from a drugstore from which she gets her pills.
The jukebox played some cowboy twinkle in the corner. A lone, old man worried about his tinkle. Back in the day he’d written a pretty durn near good book. Of course, it failed miserably. E. W. and V. N. had a spat, splayed upon the page. The degree to which they took their respective piles seriously hurts this one; not just those initialed two, but all of you. But the fun, accumulated, begins to have meaning. Meaning is even unknowingly imparted. There is no escaping being. Thus, I’m not concerned with which one of you _____, given the count to______ upwardly in the alphabet you chose to twitter consider. Therefore, admittedly, I may either join you or run. And there is nowhere to run. There is no hiding. Ooh la la, there is of course no way of inventing anything new. Co-opted by the Bigs and the Classic Eras gone. Mankind going through the motions? As you’ve always done? Nah, nah! Aim for the breakthrough, assume it’s possible, or, alas,
be finished, be undone.
Marcia felt that here I was a cheat. She removed me from between her legs and went in search of a person (a woman) with a smaller thumb. Marcia aimed with all her might for Yang, and she would soon be rewarded. But not the way she’d imagined. No, no, no yes yes yes, leave us something to concoct.
Chapter 33
Between you and me there is a tree of being. Climb it.
Use the phrase commodity fetishism appropriately in my book, author. Make me so that you can sell me. A piece of the corporate whoring whole. The tone, you see (you read), is not a critique, oh no; I want to sell out and I mean it. I want to sell; there is nothing left for me; read me, then hate me, love me or find yourself indifferent, but all in lovely all, do buy me. I want to sleep with you. You’re in bed; I’m on your chest; you bought me; somebody gave me to you as a gift; with a gift card; I made Barnes & Noble, I was fronted and I have a fancy cover; I was given top billing, great reviews, and high accolades. I was thrust into the power seat of New York. Bertelsmann gave me a massive marketing budget. Because I slept with them, all of them, and shall do so until the death. Come get a piece of me, contained (in red) inside this literary brothel. No no no yes yes yes, whorehouses still exist. I’m the greatest one of them all. I’m on the fourth floor, in that little room, laying there (open wide, splits) on the bed. Come stare at my shadow of promise. Place your nose in my loving crack. Smell me, bibliophile, as you do when you enter the library. A deep breath, inhale, tend this sweet-smelling. Enter my room and see me splayed on the bed, open to you; jam your face between my legs; come, get under the covers. Some people appreciate the smell of books. I am a fine-smelling one of them. Buy me tonight, just this once, and I’ll be good to your memories forever.
