=Story of the Week=

Gibbous Moon

It was another in a series of bad dates. No big deal. I was used to them by now. They’d even gotten to be a kind of running joke with my friends; I was already organizing my material, thinking of how I would present this latest disaster in the coming days to its full comic potential. 

As for my date, well, he didn’t seem to be particularly engaged in the business at hand either. In fact, he seemed intent on avoiding looking at me altogether. Maybe he was also gathering material to tell his guy friends? Do guys even do that? I don’t know, probably they do, but in some unrecognizable form, unrecognizable to me, anyway, like the way they say “I love you” by checking your tire pressure.

Anyway, he was holding a steak knife in his right fist beside his plate. He’d been holding it now for several minutes, as if he’d forgotten he’d taken the knife up in the first place, as if he’d forgotten his hand altogether. Lord knows why he was holding a knife at all. He’d ordered the mushroom-spinach ravioli, not a dish you needed a knife to cut. I was picking my way through the sodden mound of what the menu had encouragingly described as the steamed vegetarian platter.

“So you’re one of those leaves and stalks types,” he said, as if it were a comment on our ultimate incompatibility, at best some obstacle we’d have to eventually confront if we intended to have a long-term relationship.

I didn’t bother to point out that he was making an enormous assumption based on what amounted to very little evidence. It was only one meal, after all. Besides, he wasn’t eating meat either. Did that necessarily mean either one of us was a vegetarian? But this date wasn’t going anywhere: no need to start an argument over nothing for nothing; that's the way I figured it.

The meal ground on to its conclusion as these things inevitably do; but it was exhausting, uphill work.

The waiter came at last to deliver the bill. He was a tall, slender, dark-haired guy with some kind of accent. His outfit of black pants, a loose-fitting white shirt, and blood-red sash was well-suited to him. He looked romantic and dangerous, like a bull-fighter. Funny, I don’t remember what my date that night looked like with anything near the same specificity. Something fuzzy and blonde is the best I can do in calling him to mind, something indeterminate, like an electron cloud, wearing a light mustache, a Bryan or a Ryan, some diffuse name like that.

“Argentine,” my date said, referring to the waiter.

I asked him how he knew. I mean, Argentine, of all things. Bryan or Ryan just shrugged, signing the Amex slip. The tortured candle was twisting and spitting in its cup and I watched it like I always do while someone pays for my meal, slightly embarrassed.

The drive home was uneventful; I won’t waste your time or mine describing it except to mention that we had a slight difference of opinion on exactly what the phrase “a gibbous moon” meant. He thought it had something to do with a monkey, which I would have thought perfectly ridiculous if there weren’t a time, and not that long ago either, that I thought the same thing. I’d looked it up once and knew for about five minutes what gibbous really meant but I’ve long since forgotten. So I knew that he was wrong and that I was once wrong, too; now I knew better, but only half-better, since I'd forgotten the real meaning, and that was the only real difference between us. 

There’s a lesson in that somewhere, but what it is—well, the sentence that would explain it is all tangled up in my brain and I just don’t have the patience or the mental dexterity to untangle it. Sometimes it’s more expedient to leave the laces in a knot and slip the sneaker onto your foot. More to the point of things, too. When you have somewhere you're going, that is.

It made me think, though, that at one time we might have been a better match for each other, but, alas, we’d missed that chance and that’s just how it is with people.

He walked me to my front door and we kissed good night but there was nothing in it for either of us; it was just one of those things you do to spare each other any awkwardness. I’ve had sex with guys for the same reason, I’m not proud to say. Still, I think it can be taken as evidence of the basic decency of human beings. At least I hope it can.

The old guy next door was out on his porch with his dogs, pretty much as usual. He was pretending not to be watching. Afghans, I think they are, big leggy dogs with long noses and ropy hair-dos that always reminded me of Barbra Streisand at a certain point in her career. 

He takes a fair amount of interest in my comings and goings, I’ve noticed. I suppose I provide him with a kind of entertainment. Like one of those reality shows whose characters interest you precisely because you don't have a lot invested in what happens to them. If anything ever happens to me, if I disappear after a date, for instance, and go missing for  days, he’ll probably be one of the first they come to question. He won't have much to tell them, though. I don’t think we’ve said more than a dozen words to each other since I moved in here. The way he sees it, I’m just a renter, after all. To tell the truth, I see it that way, too.

=mail art received=

::Bob Ray, Ocracoke, NC::

This triptych of cards—which miraculously all arrived at the same time—has got to be one of the coolest pieces I've ever received. I seem to say this a lot, don't I? But it's true. I get so much cool stuff from such a wildly eclectic group of diversely inventive artists that my sense of amazement is frequently being refreshed. My involvement in mail art  has become the art-school education that I never had. 

In terms of color, composition, theme, whether you look at it figuratively or as abstraction—even technically, how it was made, which I can't quite figure out—this is simply a beautiful work of art.  

=my bosom chum=

=Books recently read=

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn. You have to give Jerome Charyn credit for chutzpa, if nuthin' else. He had to know going in that he was going to get a lot of grief for daring to play ventriloquist for Emily Dickinson. He faced several significant if all but insurmountable challenges. 

First, he's a man and Dickinson is a feminist icon. How dare he! Let him write about Melville or Whitman, Thoreau or Emerson. There are plenty of dead white males whose graves he can rob. Why molest her where she molders? Leave our Emily to rest in peace! 

Second, just about every Dickinson fan has their own cherished image of the Belle of Amherst. The more detailed a portrait Charyn paints, the more personal his vision tinged, the less likely it's going to match the one held by most readers, the more likely it's going to seem a monstrous sacrilege.

Third, if he's to avoid restricting his narrative to an interior monologue, he has to somehow concoct a plot featuring a woman who famously seldom crossed the threshold of her own front door. How do you invent events from this singularly uneventful life?

Last, but not least, there's the difficulty of aping one of the most distinctive voices in all of American literature.

Well, no way was Charyn going to please everyone with "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson" and for sure he didn't. Many of the objections center around the very nature of Emily's "secret life."  That is to say how Charyn resolves the issue of nothing ever happening in Dickinson's life. What he invents is a series of ahistorical "romances" which he has Emily relate throughout the course of the novel and which make up it's chief subject matter. There are uncomfortably long stretches where Charyn's narrative sounds more than a bit like a corny historical bodice ripper, complete with dashing rogues, unlikely coincidences, opportune fainting spells, chivalric rescues, overheated scenes of near-sex and enough purple speeches to paint something really big purple. 

Charyn's Emily too often sounds like a cat in heat. As a young student, she falls for the school's illiterate, tattooed handyman, who reappears throughout the novel as a pickpocket, an army deserter, and a circus clown. She falls in love with a tutor, a preacher, and an oddlot assortment of would-be mentors, at least one old enough to be her father. If the Wild Bunch had passed through town, she would have fallen in love with Marlon Brando, too. Principally, though, she is in love with Daddy, a paradoxical figure in Dickinson's life, powerful and doting, paternal and patronizing, from whom Emily was never able to part—in real life and even more so in this particular fiction. Her dreams, as Charyn imagines them, turning borderline necrophiliac after Daddy Dickinson's death.

For good measure, Charyn also has Emily getting the hots for women. She has a long-running thing for her sister-in-law but also for various other female acquaintances. She often speculates that if only she'd been born with beard and chest hair she'd sweep this or that young filly right off her feet. Is he under the misapprehension that this nod to lesbianism and cross-gendering proves him a feminist?

His ultimate aim, I guess, is to run counter to the image of Emily D. as some virginal, schoolmarmish figure from our grade school days. And it's true. The Emily Dickinson we were taught in school and the image that prevails to this day in the common imagination is of a prim and proper Massachusetts lady who wrote a lot about flowers and insects and birds. How sweet! While the real Emily Dickinson was probably closer to Poe, a creature of repressed and morbid sexuality and polymorphous perversity, revealed in  her poetry by an obsession with death and the random routine cruelty of life. 

But if a darker grimmer compensatory portrait need be painted I much prefer the one painted by Camille Paglia in her stupendously rich book Sexual Personae. Paglia convincingly argues that Dickinson was America's female counterpart to the Marquis de Sade, the Countess Bathory of Amherst. After reading Paglia's essay, based on a close literary reading of the poems and an equally close reading of Dickinson's actual life, you'll never see Emily D. the same again. In fact, you'll probably come away more than a little scared of her.

Only towards the end of the novel, where Emily, over fifty and in steep decline, her death looming like a fat red tick on the horizon sucking away the last rays of light and life, does Charyn offer the much-needed rationale for the flight of his fancy. Talking about herself in the third-person, Emily describes "the disease of Miss Emily Dickinson. I had to invent what I could not ascertain-no, did not want to ascertain. I was the voluptuary who lived on the thinnest of air, who survived and conquered through invention alone."

So we are left to understand that all her various infatuations, crushes, and near-sex fantasies were all in her imagination. And who's to say they couldn't have been? Not Emily herself, not anymore. I don't doubt that everyone has fantasies that don't match-or even run directly counter to—their  public personas. But does that mean fiction writers should ransack willy-nilly the graves of the long-departed famous and cram their now empty skulls with the ghosts of thoughts they theoretically could have had? Should Abe Lincoln, to take a recent example, really be a vampire hunter? How many years after death is it acceptable to hijack someone else's life?

The problem here is that Charyn doesn't seem to be writing fiction as alternate history but as interpretive history. His reinvention of Emily would be more acceptable as the former, if she were being used as a character in what was clearly a plot of someone else's devising. Like turning Jane Austen into a detective. But Charyn is offering us an interpretation of Emily's life and the experiment he makes of trying on her skin has a bit too much of the Anthony Perkins in it for my taste.

Which is not to say that this book doesn't have it's charm. Chief and foremost among them, strangely enough, is the job that Charyn does capturing Emily's distinctive voice. You would think this would be where most authors meet their Waterloo. But Charyn pulls it off. He captures Dickinson's distinctive cadences and diction, her idiosyncratic play with words. There are even whole stretches where you can almost forget that this isn't really Emily Dickinson speaking directly from the pages, where you're so focussed on the dummy you don't see Charyn looming up behind her, manipulating her mouth, speaking for her through his own stiff, barely moving lips.

But then you do and the whole illusion falls apart. The language begins to seem stilted, overly precious, cloying, preposterously baroque and you suddenly find yourself sick and tired of Charyn's Emily.

In the end, that's what makes this novel as disappointing as it is entertaining, as disillusioning as it is occasionally illuminating. That the voice sure sounds like Emily but what it's saying sounds off, sounds like some lecherous guy in drag. I really hate to say it, but I wish this book had been written by a woman—a Jeanette Winterson, perhaps, a Carol Maso or even a Margaret Atwood. Mary Gaitskill would have had the necessary perversity, I think. 

Anyway, in the meantime, we still have Camille Paglia's essay, which limns closer to the truth, I think, by which I mean the image of Emily Dickinson I cherish—a kind of grown-up Wednesday Adams, morose, taciturn, perversely playful with a streak of sadism and a dash of masochism. The kind of girl who doesn't always rescue the bird from the snake, but watches with a grim little smile, knowing that the snake has to eat sometimes, too. 

=queen of no suit=

=thanx!=

=Some time ago I was regretting the fact that I couldn't show both sides of a great mail art piece I'd received, forcing me to choose one side over the other. Vizma, from Australia, wrote with an excellent suggestion. Punch a hole in the top and hang the piece from a string; this way I could easily turn it whichever way, depending on my mood, even let the natural air currents or atmospheric pressures or biorhythms or ley lines or whatever determine which side showed at any given time. 

This is an  elegant, inventive, & as I now recognize in hindsight (alas only after it's been spelled out to me)—relatively simple solution. Thank you Vizma, as you say, not a problem at all—well, for you and likely most normally adept creatures with an opposable thumb and a mechanical IQ above that of most squid.

Indiana, however, rightly and more accurately intuiting my lack of mechanical ability and estimating—again correctly-- that it would take me a handful of dog-years to figure this out for myself and then would come the inestimable problem of figuring out how—and with what—to punch holes in the thing (at great risk of punching holes in myself) —not to mention the whole "hanging it on the wall" dilemma, certain to be another "three stooges-like" fiasco, necessitating some sort of apparatus involving wires and hooks and screws and whatnot and which no doubt would have been hazardous to the wall, the structure and wiring of the house (who knows?) and again, to various parts of my body, decided to cut to the chase & provide me with the even more obvious, idiot-proof solution: she simply sent me another!!!

Thanks again to you both. As you can see from the above photo, the piece can now be displayed front and back simultaneously and all it required on my part was the application of two pieces of tape!! No blood shed, no tears, no contusions, no spontaneous fires, no collapsing ceiling or catastrophic fall of plaster! 

=mandala=

=micropoem=

=micropoems=