No 1 by The Baffler

Ce poison va rester dans toutes nos veines m~me quant, fa fanfare tournant, nous serons rendu

a ['ancienne Rimbaud

inharmonie.

The

To even the most indifferent of observers, this can hardly seem the appropriate time to launch a literary review. College libraries struggle to make room for the inevitable journals of increasingly minute specialization while bookstores proffer ever- slicker periodicals which make ever-more-expansive claims of literary authority. The Baffler justifies its entry into this seemingly saturated field by its distinctiveness: our review will be neither the tool of a University 'creative writing' program nor the slick product of a great publishing house.

American literature has lately succumbed to a variety of alarming maladies. Fiction has been captured by the professional innovationists of college writing workshops, who assure the marketability of their products (and, hence, the expansion of their reputation) by regularly announcing "the newest thing." With their minds fixed firmly on the astronomical rewards of a successful career in writing, aspiring artists trample one another in a mad scramble to adopt the newly-anointed technique. While the "vanguard" shifts constantly and its fads are fabricated with remarkable regularity, literature is reduced to commodity. "Newness" becomes a weighty criteria for artistic judgement and authors come and go in a frenzy of planned obsolescence that any advertising executive must envy. Paralleling the slide to trendiness has been the triumph of theory. Academic circles have proven particularly vulnerable to this malady, as journals of criticism begin to outnumber those of actual creation, and the author is increasingly forced into the position of psychiatric patient on the critic's couch. The ascension of the all-powerful critic with his air-tight System of Interpretation has encouraged writers to place theoretical coherence above their individual creative gifts. "High" literature is consequently threatened with the pathetic fate that overcame much of modern

painting. As Tom Wolfe writes of the days of Theory's triumph, "the new order of things in the art world was: first you get the Word, and then you can see." The phenomenon which Wolfe aptly labels "avant-gardism" has largely over, whelmed the literary world as well, with newer and newer waves of 'creative writing' theory generating buckets of derivative, dogmatic prose. This malaise has wreaked its greatest destruction on poetry. The all-too-human angst expressed by such spirits as Rimbaud and Plath seems alien to today's poets of theory and inscrutable word games. Theory and facile avant, gardism have rendered impotent civilization's most expressive form: its practitioners strive to maximize esotericity and churn out scarcely, comprehensible "gibberish." Henry Miller writes of modern poetry that The screech of the bomb still makes sense to us, but the ravings of the poet seem like gibberish. And it isgibberish if, out of two billion people who make up the world, only a few thousand pretend to understand

what the individual poet is saying. The cult of art

reaches its end when it exists only for a precious handful of men and women. Then it is no longer art but the cipher language of a secret society for the propagation of meaningless individuality.

In the convoluted minds of the fabricators of modern literary fashion that which is passionate, forthright, and ingenuous becomes baffling. Against this sordid backdrop The Baffler offers itself as an alternative. We reject the load of pseudo-intellectual baggage which literature has been forced to bear and accept instead the traditional duties of the artist, the creation of a work which, in Miller's words, "stirs men's passions, which gives vision, lucidity, courage, and faith." We denounce the self, declared critical junta that dominates literature from its platform of 'creative writing' workshops and affirm true creativity that resonates with human experience. In place of the shallow trendiness, affected opaqueness, and brazen commercial aspirations of established literary circles we offer youth, energy, and vitality. We present The Baffler, the journal that blunts the "cutting edge" and sends the "vanguard" scurrying in disarray. 3 p.s 5~~ I ~ 11 D,

1'1'f

Editors in Chief Thomas Frank

Keith White

Editors Gaston de Beam Chris Bickford

Erik Bennett Edward Johns

Eric Iversen, Arbiter of Elegance Staff Laura Brugger Paula Cerrone Laurie Chreitzberg Amy Graves

Courtney Lasseter Carol Leahy John O'Brien C.K. Robertson

Special thanks to Sarah Williams

Friends of The Baffler Patricia

Albright

Alexander

Sedgewick The Declaration Helen White David Frank Dante Germino The University of Virginia Once again, our thanks and appreciation to DOOM, Empty Box, the folks at the Unitarian House, and everyone who attended The Baffler Benefit Concert.

Contents 9

Julia Clinger Bennett & Frank Verdy Cousins Eric Iversen

Running Blindfolded Deconstruction of Trail Sage of Bucyrus Letter to Wordsworth

Robert Boucheron Keith White Edward Spurlock David Frank William Cowee David Berman

To Little Debbie I see a tortoise ••• I was Goya Plant Trip No Checkmate Ectoslavian Chant Riot in the Eye Pandora's Diving The Old Ones To a Young Person Visiting the Grandmother Coming Back to Odell A Vision of Spring Nautical Silent Movies

7 17 18 19 20 20 28 29 39 40 41 42 42 43

Nostalgia

Gaston de Beam John Long Robert Boucheron Marcella Wolfe Stephen Healey Gaston de Beam John Long William Cowee Kylie Wright

1988. The Baftk'T. All rights revert to authors.

Write to The Baffler a~ 93 AIda Drive Poughkeepsie. NY 12603

30 44 6

Little Debbie

by Robert Boucheron Child of angelic sweetness, can it be that Little Debbie has a snack for me? No baker, but a hungry bachelor, I wander through the bright convenience store encumbered with a six-pack and a quart of drinkables, when something stops me short: an icon of American girlhood, a guarantee of all that's fine and good a goddess in a paper statuette and Little Debbie is her epithet. If ever store-bought cookies can appease, the ones that do display your chubby knees. If oatmeal cremes and brownies satisfy, or devil's food can tempt a saint to buy, it's only when your dimpled cheeks are on it, under the halo of your white straw bonnet. Chock full of sugar, chocolate and spice, a sheen of cellophane around each slice, fresh as the day your tiny mitt revealed these glories from the oven, promptly sealed, the myriad confections of your art enrich the aisle and fill my shopping cart. How red the waves of hair that lap your face how white your little apron, trimmed with lace! What hymn of adoration can express the splendor of your blue-checked gingham dress? The girl who lets her salt pour when it rains would kill to have your scuffless Mary Janes.

Jane Parker, Poppin' Fresh and Sarah Lee grow stale with envy of your cookery.

o busy housewives, husbands

on the go, students and teachers, all of you should know that what her trademark slogan says is true: yes, Little Debbie has a snack for you.

I see a tolftoise draq a sel'e1f'ed head to the raduuov A stiff letter caused no bodily harm for the most part, though they dragged their feet dressed to kill, to their way of thinking, What will they think of next? Let's face it. it's just one of those things. You can't have it both ways. 7

although you can have your cake and eat it too. You've got to have high hopes. Gee whiz! It's a game that two can play. The general rule is that the exception proves the rule. Every schoolboy knows that every picture tells a story. But what about schoolgirls? The die is 8

Running Toward the Intersection Blindfolded by Julia Boulton Clinger Somewhere in Maine a boy waits for my phone calLI can't call because I can't move. My chin is touching my knees and I'm breathing so fast I'm practically vacuuming the carpet. I've been with Alexander for two years. He changed my life all around. The man I woke up next to this morning was not him. Today I will bury myself in the woodwork of the past and future. I will imagine myself as a baby and a housewife. I will think: if! can just make it to the future, I'll be married into safety, with nothing to think about but someone else. In part of my past I do not like to visit, there are two buildings. The space between them never gets any brighter than a closet. Across the street is my father's law office. Today I will try to edit the past, thinking - out of all those buildings, why did I choose the space between? In this space, daylight never registers. Here a man pulled down my yarn tights with their baggy knees, down around my leather patents which were bought the day before. Then he pulled down his own pants and asked if! liked to kiss. I've told this story three times, and when I tell it I always say that I kicked him in the head with my Mary Janes, kicked him twenty times, killed his face, ran away. I have dreamed of it before, running away, my tights the only casualty. But I was only six years old, and he was holding a candy bar that I wanted. After this happened, I stopped wearing party dresses to school. I wore Toughskins and had my teeth knocked out playing hockey. I was my brother's little brother. Back then we were shuttled between the country and city with the changes in my father's career. I was this snaggletoothed creature with hair to my knees and seven pairs of Toughskins. It went over really well at my private school. People thought I had lice. It was a pretty good year, regardless. My mom kept candy bars around the house so I didn't feel like I had to go out for them. My dad drove me to school every day, even though it was only a couple blocks. Sometimes, when my brother still went to a school nearby, he would walk over and visit me at lunchtime. Nobody seemed to mind that I was a boy. Before

cast. You shou Idn' t burn your bridges behind you until you come to them, unless the Redcoats are coming. Which is worse, burning the candle at both ends or the midnight oil? fan the flames of the fire and brimstone. If you can' t stand the heat. get out of the kitchen. forbidden fruit is a force to be reck9

rd been a walking composite of all the things "little girls are" in nursery rhymes. Sort of like an animated doily. My brother liked me the new way. He took me on. My parents thought that nothing had changed. They bought me a guinea pig. This guinea pig was named Mumruffin. It was an Abyssinian with cowlicks all over its body. That guinea pig loved me so much that it would climb up the lateral bars of its cage and hum to me while I was sleeping. I caught it once, its lumpy body scarcely distinguishable from the lump that was its head. I let it out, and it sat on my pillow all night long, singing its screechy, rhythmic song. I used 'to put my Mood Ring under it, and it would always make the "love" color. So it wasn't such a bad time - I had this guinea pig, I had my brother, and I was the best seven year old female goalie on the east coast. "Worse things have happened to better people" is what my mother says and she is right. The same thing has happened to better people. At the police station where we went to look at a scrapbook of criminals, they said two other little girls had been dragged into alleys that week. The reason those girls were "better people" is because they probably never let it happen again. Things got bad when I started growing. For one thing, all my friends were boys, so I had no one to talk to about what those sex-education classes called my "changing body." I was very anti-my changing body. It hurt when I got hit in the chest with a puck. When I grew breasts for real, I started drinking like a fish. There were plenty of opportunities for me to drink, because like I said, all my friends were boys and boys always have a drink to offer to younger girls. My brother's friends would experiment on me while my brother was at boarding school. They would see how many drinks it took before I couldn't talk anymore. Every night I would get carried out of a different bar. I don't even remember being sixteen years old. There was something heroic about it, though. Every time I knew I was about to fall over, I'd buy a stick of beef jerky for the bar dog. Like clockwork, five minutes later I'd be down. Eventually all the bartenders found out how old I was. It must have been after my dad threatened to have their licenses taken away. They liked me, though, and my friend Mark would bring me into the Manor before it opened to play pool and drink pitchers. I'd get all knock-kneed E1'--iGli--'E1e'

oned iac Like not for not

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with. Your friendly neighborhood necrephillikes the stiff, silent type. A near miss is a crash. father, like it or not. We are not to be outdone, by a long shot, not for all the tea in china, not any price, not for one minute, not on your life, for the world. We'll fight tooth and nail and like

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drunk at four o'clock in the afternoon, and when the bar opened I'd have to go out and sit in his Camaro until he got a chance to take me home. He was a disc jockey, so sometimes it would take awhile. He had this day job filling Coke machines, and there was always about a case of soda in the front seat. I'd wake up when the sun was going down with a six-pack stamped into the side of my face. Mark was one of those red people. He had red hair, red moss on his upper lip, and red spotted skin. It was spooky, how red he was. He was a minister's son, so he had some problems. He was kind of a bitter guy, but he liked me because I was a good sport, and I could drink more than any girl he knew. One time Mark didn't drive me home. He wanted to take a walk by the lake across the street from the Manor. I was practically unconscious at the time, so I wasn't exactly looking forward to seeing my parents. I remember stumbling around underneath these willow trees and Mark wanting to go-swimming. I lost my virginity that night. I guess he got my clothes off with the swimming thing. I was skinnier than a piece of bacon at the time, so it wasn't exactly as though I could do anything about it. The worst thing is that I don't remember if I tried. All I know is that I felt like someone's laundry afterwards. You should never trust a person when even the whites of their eyes are red. The time when I was six, I was wearing a blue checkered dress. There was a big rabbit sewn onto the front of it, with 3-D arms and legs and ears. When the man lifted the dress up I was looking into the glass eyes of the rabbit. I saw its 3-D arms and legs flopping around, which I thought was much more interesting than what was going on underneath my dress. I felt like if it was bad the rabbit would look different. Maybe if! had said no, the man would have let me go. Instead, I said "I like to kiss my mommy, and my daddy, and my dog Winnie, and my brother Jamie ..." and on and on and on. The last thing he said was "Don't tell your mother." I need to do this, to listen to my past and chart it on a graph somehow. To see that it is as predictable and regular as the polygraph sheet of a chronic liar. Because I am like the heroine of every stupid horror movie you ever saw. The thing is, I am also the villain. You say, "Don't open the door. Don't go in the closet. Don't investigate the closed" And I always go in

a tiger: we'll fiddle while Rome burns. Everyman has his price. Is no man an island no matter what's cooking? An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a feather in one's cap. Money well spent talks. For thirty pieces you can have a silver lining. A brain drain can become someones bread and butter. Fly 11

the closet. I know what's in the closet already, because I put it there. My roommate knows a woman who had an orgasm while she was being gang-raped. She was already grown up and normal when this thing happened. I don't think a guinea pig can help that woman. She probably goes to a psychiatrist. Sometimes I dream that I go to a psychiatrist and he says: "there's not a single thing I can do to help you." Worse things have happened to better people. At least I've never been gang-raped or had an orgasm. Two years ago I worked in a dive bar in Hamilton, New York. It was the core of sleaziness in a town that is otherwise wholesome. I gravitated to this place when I went to college and got a job as a waitress and general lackey. It was part of my social alchemy project. I also got all the free beer I could drink. In college I tried to live the idyllic childhood my parents could never provide. From six on, I had known that no one can protect me from anything, so I made the best of protecting myself I thought I could make people mean well without meaning to, through the force of my own helplessness. That's what social alchemy is - a kind of absurdity that anchored me to the earth. Back then, I had an unfortunate problem with my self-image. I saw myself as a small, fluffy character you might love the way you love Bambi, or Santa's helpers. The way I loved my guinea pig. This is a bad idea to keep up when you're walking around in bars at night wearing cocktail-waitress clothes. I'd let men press me up against the wall when they talked to me, thinking they were feeling the same things they felt when they roughed up a poodle. Men would ask me to help them test melons in the supermarket. What would register was: "poor helpless bachelor," and not: "this bastard wants to do the same thing to me." When these men would get around to making their big move, I'd be almost tragically disappointed. Can't he see, I'd think to myself, that there is a thin atomic force field around me that deflects everything but a friendly drink, maybe a ride home when it's raining? Doesn't he see the tattoo on my face that reads "Protect me from men like yourself"? Other times it was different. No perception of reaction, no disappointment. I'd wake up hung over in a strange place with no clothes on, taking a stranger's word for it that "nothing happened." At times like that I would wait until I got home. Then I would squat on the floor of my room for hours, days, fetal, in the smallest lump you have ever seen a ElIE'5i5='GiJ!II!!!!!!::5i5J'ElElIE' 5i5='ElIG;'

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in the face that launched a thousand ships. Give them enough rope and they'll take the benifit of the doubt. He told me to have a heart. but I told him I hated his guts. I have dibs on a bone to pick with you. He has eyes only for a midday snack, and then only if their bigger than his stomach. Instead of 12

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photo fry Kylie Wright

person get into. I had to have a blanket, and I had to stay close to the ground. Pictures ran through my head faster than fast-motion movies, faster than gasping for air, faster than they should. If I hadn't been able to stop that feeling my-mind would have skidded out to a stop, leaving nothing but the feeling, and a strange empty space. There is only one person who has seen me that way. He-is the only boy I have ever loved. He is not he person I woke up with this morning. Every Tuesday a jazz trio played at the club where I worked. They usually brought in a coffee crowd so I wouldn't make any money, and I'd try to break even by drinking about a keg of free beer. A boy would come in on those nights. He wore black and sat at the end of the bar drinking black coffee. He'd always be reading newspapers in languages that weren't English, and he never looked at the band. I figured he was either foreign or wished he was, but it seemed like he understood those newspapers. I poured his coffee and one time he asked me what I did when I wasn't waitressing. I told him I visited Graceland as often as I could, and read a lot of French absurdism. I wasn't lying, either. I told him how when Alfred Jarry died, his last request was for a toothpick. I said I was going to have a baby one day,just so I could name it "Bourgrelas," After a while I noticed he was looking at me in this certain way. When I'd get up to distribute beers, he'd keep looking. He had eyes blacker than his coffee and just the right amount of beard on his face. I started drinking beers like it was the night of my twenty-first birthday. I woke up on the edge of a loft bed, looking eight feet down to an oriental rug. I had all my clothes on, and a blanket over that. The boy with the black eyes was clinging to the wall like one of those things you throw and it sticks. Eventually he woke up and unadhered himself. He said "You fell asleep in my car before you told me where you live, so I brought you here." He looked nice in the morning. He said "would you like a blueberry muffin?" Once in a long while, social alchemy works, just when you stopped expecting it to. After that, he followed me around until I liked him enough to tell him where I'd be in advance. He's the only boy I ever met who can say nice things without sounding sappy. He says my hair is like Spanish moss, and talks about my eyes. I didn't know what color my eyes were before I met him .

. food have the it's keep the

for thought, feed yourselt on this. He doesn't all of his marbles. but he's does have bats in belfry. We're not playing with a full deck. but stacked. He's on the ball that he has. I've got to the ball and chain rolling. He hit the books. nail on the head. the jackpot. the hull's eye. his

Alexander is almost too aware of things to enjoy them, but he claims I altered his way of thinking. He says, "Before I met you, I thought happiness was a bourgeois emotion." That's a joke. His parents made him grow up too fast, and sometimes he wants his childhood back, clean and in one piece. I know how that feels, and I hold his head in my lap when he cries, shuddering and curled up, his nose running down my leg. When I was first in love with this boy I would stay up late watching over him like a gargoyle. I'd hang my hair down around his face so he could dream he was swimming in Spanish moss. I could feel my heart drooling on him. Maybe if I were with him always I could sweep the muckings from my past back into the past, and keep them there somehow. I could build a healthy capacity for desire, within the realm of the chosen one. Already when I'd see him walk down the street in the fall I'd practically bite my hand. He's tall and slender, with eyes that make meforget that I have ever been anything other than safe. Today I know myself completely. This comes from waking up with a stranger. Whose arms are these? Where are my shorts? Shock. The closet handle still warm in my hand, I am waking to a new day. What comes next is figuring how to live through it. Here is the pattern of my life: Through each calamity Ipurchase a stretch of cold, clear understanding. I am removed from my life, like people who have died and lived to tell about it. Suspended above myself, 1see the map of my twenty-two years before me, illuminated as harshly and suddenly as a lightning-jagged horizon. When the light goes out, Iam numb, free to glide to the next jolt of awareness. It is a day to bury myself in the folds of the past and future. In pictures of a present I cannot live in I watch myself. My legs flex and stretch like bows and arrows, in a tangle with limbs that are not mine. In the recent past, I stood at the foot of the bed where my roommate and her boyfriend were sleeping. I was standing in the path of light a streetlamp was sending across the room. I was naked and unconscious. Apparently someting went off in my head while I was in bed with this guy. I surfaced through layers of denial and whatever I'd been drinking. All of a sudden I knew that something bad was happening, and I got up and stood beside my roommate's bed, as though another person could

stride. then below the belt, between the eyes, the ceiling, the sauce, and finally the hay. I'll fix his little red wagon so he falls off it. Lean your head on my cold shoulder. If a cat has nine lives, why should he get my tongue? It was the eat's pajamas. a real even keel over. r ve got a price on my head, so 15