No1 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,

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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 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.

The Declaration

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

===

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

help me at a time like that. It kills me that this man had the same name as my favorite brother, the only person I know in my family. The other thing that kills me is the little rags. I don't know where it started, but I've been tying these little rags around my ankles for years, to cover up how skinny they are. They are like homing-pigeon bands. They are all I was wearing when I woke up. One time Alexander was crying in my lap, and I took off one of my little rags to wipe his nose, because he was embarrassed. And that's aliI had on when I woke up. This man, Jamie was his name, stood over the couch where I had finally collapsed. He wanted to know if I'd like to see the ballet sometime. Today it will not be fun being me. The next forty years will not be like this, because somewhere in me there is a person who wants to live until I die. Where the light comes on is. when I think about Alexander, my brother, and that guinea pig buried on the shores of Lake Chatauqua. All those things are anchors to the earth. I think of them splayed like jacks on the eastern seaboard: one in Ohio, one in Maine, one in N ew York. If you connect the dots of their towns on a map they make a straight line, a miniature Orion's belt. If the world were the size of its scale models, I could s:ipe up those anchors in one try. That is how I live through days like today: by giving myself slack. I say "I can't give up before I've tried motherhood," or "I haven't even been to Europe yet." Then all of a sudden I'm standing right next to myself, as close as I can get, and I say, "It's just me, running toward an intersection blindfolded." I move closer, until I'm almost inside. What happened in that alley wasn't my fault. There has to be a reason I'm not dead. Until I know it, I'll just hold onto the rug and stay close to the ground. Then my brain stops trying to outrun itself, and something grows still inside me. Right then, I see the hopelessness and beauty of everything. It feels like my life is courting me.

I keep that and my shou Iders above the rest. He called me out on the carpet that he had cut out from under me. I've got to hand it to him, taking the law in his own hands like that. I'm having an out of body English experience. He who laughs last, has no laughing matter. This is going at a snail's pace 16

I was S;;oya but now pretty cows by Edward Spurlock I was Goya but now pretty cows in vague comprehension roam regal the once catacombed earth; the platforms of chided performers jut bate and up comes Lazarus one rainy spring moment to bewail his fellow's follies; seizing the pulpit he laments and shrieks - pleads politic to cows who murmur bovine dissension then fades in ghostly prophetic stature, the last heralded heretic beseeching with a crackling, increasingly incoherent platitude And the fields of recess are cemeteries newly etched And gravestones obstruct the passage of children Invisible Democracy! the amphitheater echoes whitish and serene, relaxed and uncrowded in the leisure grinning cracks, breeding cement with grass which crass invades to vacate desolate ideologies; the- poor players have exhausted their scenes, and sun-exposed their shadows at last but now pretty cows commend the landscape: mooing concessions, merds, cud, udders fantastic and untapped - this would have irked me Goya but now pretty cows inhabit the kingdom

in no time. Once upon a time out. Read between -the in line with. Keith White

Plant Trip by David Frank Your steps echo in a vast hall, grey lit and empty except for some plastic seats. Photogra phs cluster on a blackwashed cinder-block wall: "B-36" "Atlas" and "B-58". Try to chat with the other recruit. Like you he sits in a pale seat and wears a navy blazer. Follow the tour to a long, hushed room where rows of metal tables bask in blue-white light, each with a draftsman, bent motionless over his task. Old blueprints are evaporating in the chilly air. You shiver wearily and head for the stair. Sullen clouds are creeping above the skylights; inside rumbles the various grays of production: concrete floors, ducts, rolling bins, parts, machines, workers in coveralls, a polished steel fuselage. A power tool squawks. The elevator awaits... You hear the clinking of glass and porcelain? Smell the vague sauces as the doors slide back. Select a dish from the cafeteria cart. Stand in line. The windows moan; Outside, fretful winds buffet weeds in a tiny courtyard. Contribute smally to the hum of voices, review the scores. Are there other choices? Enter quickly where unseen cigarettes smoulder under uniform light and low ceilings. A coffeemaker hisses, and you feel perfumed feet in the carpet beyond the partition. A coin-faced man in grey and tan hands you a standard application.

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by William Cowee

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You moved upon me, White Queen, with advantage across the black and red web a stinging albino spider self proclaimed white widow who pales charcoal pawns unhorses ebony knights dismantles impregnable obsidian rooks , sins with the dark bishop beheads my raven haired queen until, cornered, , the black king bows there are no more moves the black king bows and the clock in the white rook tower peals midnight as the black king falls But it is infinitely more than checkmate. The pristine snow White Queen owns all the pieces even blushing red squares where black kings die. In the next life, if there is one, I, I will play the white.

Ectosla vian Chant by David Berman' Be leery of the unstabable man on the fast tractor. There are plenty of people walking across fields in early winter, with only one arm, looking for their high school class ring. My wife lay ill for weeks. I opened every window to let the dust and moonshine in, and she got out. I buried her at the bottom of the big brown puddle in the driveway. When winter comes I will skate on her grave. Some of the peasants claim to travel as far as twenty miles away during their sleep. You can't keep them down. I'll be a rich man by harvest, then I'll send for you, my treasure. I'll bring you here to Ectoslavia, and give it to you square on your thick little mouth.

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She claimed to be a walking revolution. She programmed anarchy into her lifestyle (spit. throw bottles. ingest LSD). but when it came to blowing up the embassy. she backed out of my plan. Just thin hate. Just another chick dropped too many times when she was a baby.

SEMIOLOGY AND THE CARTOON OUTDOORSMAN AN EXIGESIS

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by E.S. Bennett and T.C. Frank The long-running comics-page saga of Mark Trail is certainly one of the most overlooked theoretical treasures of our age. Aside from the popular Sunday installments of this cartoon chef-d'oeuvre, Mark Trail is rarely followed and, to these critics' knowledge, has' never been rigorously analyzed. How its wunderkind authors, the enigmatic "Dodd and Elrod" (their first names remain, appropriately enough, cloaked in mystique), have avoided the baleful gaze of the critic's eye, is truly baffling. By way of preface to those unfamiliar with the world of Mark Tmil, we offer this brief synopsis. The daily Mark Trail strip revolves around a small coterie of individuals, dominated by the masterful yet self- effacing woodsman Mark Trail. This central figure is surrounded by a handful of close confederates: his female companion Cherry, his devoted young follower Rusty, and his faithful but slow-witted canine Andy. The plot of the comic is uncannily predictable as Mark goes through an _endlessly repeating "Adventure Cycle": he encounters his foes-to-be, who are secretly perpetrating various frauds involving animals. He or one of his allies discovers the true nature of the evil ones, usually stumbling by chance upon their nefarious operations. The individual is subdued somehow by the badmen, then promptly freed after an overwhelming display of Mark's pugilistic prowess. Through the subtle workings of the Adventure Cycle dialectic, Dodd and Elrod entertain their devoted followers, who are always assured of the eventual outcome: Mark will vanquish his foes, and order will be restored to "Lost Forest," his home ranch. Even the ingenue can feel comfortable with Mark Trail after a few installments. While every character wears identical clothing, villains areeasily recognizable - they address Mark as "Trail" and wear their hair in styles significantly different from his. Mark's confidantes, of course, call him "Mark" and do not attempt to dazzle the audience

Typical exclamation in mid-70's movie: "Well then let's take the whole goddamned system to court!"

with duck-tails, sideburns, or lengthy locks. We mention a "subtle dialectic" above in relation to the strip's Adventure Cycles. In fact the many dialectics implemented by Dodd and Elrod are rigorous, inflexible and inexorable in the purest of Hegelian modes. The engagement of the dialectic by the cartoonists reflects T.W. Adorno's pertinent insight that only an essentially undialectic philosophy, one which aims at a historical truth, could maintain that the old problems could simply be removed by forgetting them and starting fresh from the beginning. Only in the strictest dialectical communication with the most recent. ...philosophy ....can a real change of philosophical consciousness prevail.

Dodd and Elrod employ the dialectic at a variety of levels throughout Mark Trail, the most readily apparent of which is, of course, the strip's basic 6 to 8 week Adventure Cycle. The dialectic informs daily installments as well: the splitting of each strip into three, the tripartite dialogic division, and the tendency of Dodd and Elrod to picture three figures in each panel all point to the underlying framework of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Taken by itself, though, this reading could be labeled an oversimplification of the Mark Trail text, were not its obvious Freudian overtones taken into account. In his timeless psychoanalytic formulation, Jacques Lacan manages to grasp at the essence of Dodd and Elrod's philosophical agenda. "What we have been able to unfold," he surmises, concerning the incidence of the signifier on the signified suggests its transformation into: {(8)1/s We have shown the effects not only of the elements of the horizontal signifying chain, but also of its vertical dependencies, divided into two fundamental structures called metonymy and metaphor.

Much more than a conventional semiotic analysis of subject/object phenomena, Lacan unwittingly reveals the fundamental psychological latticework constructed by Dodd and Elrod in the Mark/Cherry juxtaposition, noting that The Verdichtung, or condensation, is the structure of the superimposition of signifiers which is the field of metaphor, and its very

I love wealthy pregnant women with fur coats and lots of jewelry. They are the quintessence of bounty.

name, condensing ,in itself the word Dichtung, shows how the process is connatural. with the mechanism of poetry to the point that it actually envelops its properly traditional function.

Lacan's insight is useful, indeed, in explicating the domestic politics of Lost Forest, but it fails to offer a satisfying nexus of explanation concerning Dodd and Elrod's Calculus of Hairstyles. According to the monumental O'Brien study of 1965, the cartoon hairstyle embodies the essence of "signifier", of "bearer of meaning." Derrida comments L'instance du signifiant preside en somme au statut d'un "concept" qui se fait et defait de mille manieres a I'interieur de chaines verbales sans cesse disloquees, sans cesse compromises dans I'horizontalite canonique de leur parcours.

Dodd and Elrod's insistence on uniformity of garb, however, is deeply problematical -tn this respect. But perhaps the uncanny similarity of vetements in Mark Trail may be illuminated by Derrida's notion of "l'objet oblong" - the dual breast pockets on every character's buttoned shirt-with-collar, the similarly-fitting dungarees which sheath each figure's shanks, and the sensible shoes of which there is never a complaint - would certainly seem to bear out this hypothesis. As Derrida continues, Le style eperonnant, l'objet long, oblong, arme de parade autant qu'il perfore, la pointe oblongi foliee tenant sa puissance apotropaique des tissus, toiles, voiles qui se bandent, se ploient ou deploient autour d'elle, c'est aussi, ne pas I'oublier, Ie parapluie.

An umbrella indeed! This otherwise common contraption is conspicuously absent from the comics-page doings of Mark TraiL Perhaps Dodd and Elrod wish to impress their readers with their sturdy protagonist's invulnerability to' the elements. But the most telling theoretical touchstone for Trail analysis is the somewhat inscrutable use of exclamation points at the end of nearly every passage (with the exception of questions). Sentence structure is uniformly simple throughout, and slang is confined to the speech of confirmed rascals. Michel Foucault penetrates this enigma skilfully when he writes that ...in this region where representation remains in suspense, on the edge of itself, open, in a sense, to the closed boundary of finitude, we

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I felt shunned at breakfast. and in the dream I had that afternoon. I killed righteously. with a kick and a stab

find outlined the three figures by means of which life, with its function and norms, attains its foundation in the mute repetition of Death, conflicts and rules their foundation in the naked opening of Desire, significations and systems their foundation in a language that is at the same time Law.

This exegesis of Foucault's is illustrated effortlessly by what many feel to be Dodd and Elrod's supreme achievement: the Tony Marko episode of April-May 1986. Faced with sudden death at the hands of an irate moose, Marko chose -to ignore (misconstrue?) Mark's simple cautionary message, "Tony, run this way!", plunging to his death as a result. Ironically, the altercation which precipitated the demise of the sideburn-sporting Marko arose over a disputed tape recording of Marko's voice enunciating certain incriminating syllables. Jean Baudrillard offers this insight: Defiance is not a dialectic, nor a confrontation between respective poles, or terms, in an extended structure. It is a process of extermination of the structural position of each term, of the subject position of each of. the antagonists, and in particular of the one who hurls the

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Thoroughly mad. the passion of glue. Feeling a piece of fruit outside of you, consume it and bring it inside. Emperor of all ye can locate. â&#x20AC;˘ David Berman

photo by Keith White

by Gaston de Beam piercing water with a breath poised beneath three hundred silver bubbles wavering and separating into thousands of airated marbles upwards sailing past the cold surface to feed the greening leaves Pandora's diving, the aqualung her box, unavoidably opened to let the world's uneasiness pass cooly into her swelling lungs she feels a certain lightness at one hundred feet no doubt her smiles wrapping silver cellophane aroung her booted toes. decompressing on the rise, lifting her head in a rush of humming blue bubbles and as if from the changing fish's belly she emerges, her frothy wings spread on the rocky shore rising from voiceless thermoclines.

The Old Ones by John Long The old ones, the old ones are coming, keep coming, by cane and wheelchair, their teeth in glasses, their thinning hair, their seizures and strokes, their stained underwear, hard now of hearing (their ears full of hair), complaining of pains, medicaid, medicare. They are coming, keep coming, with vacant looks, with worn-out bibles and large-print books, with photo albums of long-dead friends, coming to visit in hospital beds, telling, retelling their tales of old times, L.\l\.1: l."I(H';:1S0X,\:"i/~'<:OL:\'TK\" their skin gone slack Wlll~RI:~1"I11.t.A.\InU]\'GU~I.\ "'n)J~ ros and spotted and veined, .J:\Cl7.1.1~.\SIl \J)elT EXI LRT.\lY\U:"~T coming to see you coming to stay, coming, coming to be with you, to be, to be you, to be you

The Sage of Bucyrus by Verdy Cousins The Final Lesson The men standing in the moonlight on that narrow porch represented the best of Bucyrus - the mayor,. Colonel Hank Foley, Sr., the fire chief, Wright Manaport; the young manager of the Pizza Hut, Tom Warble. Even Zilas Gumby, Miss Esther Poolhole's no-good nephew was there, alone and aggrieved in the back yard, sitting on a five-gallon tank full of gasoline he had siphoned from the mourners' cars. Zilas wept, half because he was bothered by bad feelings, and half because the gas fumes had burned his eyes, and he had swallowed more than usuaL Esther Poolhole was dying; she had suffered her third and most serious fall down the stairs. Miss Poolhole was the elementary school principal and teacher of grades seven through nine. She was valuable to the town for her long service in the school, of course, but she was also the only person who knew the secret, who knew what a sonnet was. The grandfather clock ticked closer to midnight. Everyone was gathered at her bedside. At last, Esther cleared her throat and said, in a sure but quavering voice, "A sonnet is a poem, usually dialectic or expository in nature and typically made up of iambic pentameter lines arranged in one of several rhyme schemes." A prolonged sigh passed through Esther's nose, a sigh so windy and final that all who heard knew what it meant.

Pizza Tom in the Restless City It was six months after that night. Bucyrus was back to business. Sweazy Tallmidge had bought a deluxe coffee urn for Mary's, Mayor Foley had been re-elected in a coal-colored landslide and Zilas Gumbv had spent a few days injail for stealing seven milk cows and hiding them in the bay of a car wash. But not a one of the townspeople knew what a sonnet was, much less the more convoluted charm of the Spenserian stanza or the elegant fritterings of the triolet. Things were in an ugly state - all form being lost, the church bells out of tune, the river scooting silently over once-musical stones, the inflections of daily life burned away by an infection of improper lassitude. The mayor chewed idly on a thick-crust-with-pork-topping pizza and looked out over the stearn rising from the car wash across the street. Tom Warble, checkered dishcloth in hand, came over to

him. "Boy, Hank, something's eating at this town," Tom said. "And it started up about the time the old lady dried her heavenly gourd." A bit of sparkling pork hung like a stalactite on the mayor's grey moustache. "Tom, I want you to go to Richmond. Now, I know this is going to sound crazy, but I want you to go and find out what a sonnet is. Lordy, I feel like a bucket-head goat saying this, but we all forgot what Esther said to us before she rattled off in her cart of bones." Tom Warble eyed the cherry tomatoes on the salad bar. "I'll gas up the truck this afternoon. And Your Honor, the pizza is on me." Tom pulled his Bronco into a parking lot next to the Burger King. A sign in the lot listed the fees, and advised those parking after the attendant had gone home that they were "on their honor" to put the dollars in the payment box. Laughing at the big-city foolishness, Tom paid up. He had asked directions to this place at the gas stations and convenience stores. "Hey, where's the college around here?" he'd ask. and then add, as an afterthought, something like, "Yeah, give me a tin of Happy Days, and by the way, do you happen to know what a sonnet is?" So far, his mission was unaccomplished. He walked up the street, passing copying centers, movie houses, parking meters. And then he saw the Village Cafl, a bright and lively inn on a .comer lot. Outside, a lanky young woman dressed in black smoked a cigarette and sketched the storefronts on the street opposite. Tom bent down to her and asked, "Miss, excuse me - but do you know what a sonnet is?" She bit a ragged fingernail and removed a crumb of mascara that had tumbled down her cheek. "I think it's some kind of poem that Shakespeare and guys like that wrote. They were about trees and women, that kind of thing. Go in there-" she jerked her thumb at the cafe behind her "-there'll be somebody who knows better than I do." Tom sat down in a booth with the number 4 tacked on the wall above the shakers and the napkin dolly. The ceilings were very high, as were the prices on the menu. "I'd may as well eat out anyway," Tom thought, and decided on the soup du jour, sure that the du jour was a kind of mushroom shaped like a baseball bat. A waitress came over. She was slender beneath her brown and baggy shift, cinched at the waist by a silver belt. Her hair, bevel-cut bangs, hung provocatively across her eyes, hiding them in a way that made them seem special as brand-new pizza pans, only more lovely. "Are you ready to order? Can I get you something to drink? I am Andrea." Tom asked for ice water. He forgot about the soup. He had forgotten about everything - even why he had come down from the mountains. The one thing he was sure of was that he wanted to

make impressionistic French love to this woman, and he didn't even know what it meant.

Tom's Determination The moonlight, chopped and diced by the Venetian blinds, shone on Andrea's face. Tom was restless beside her. While she slept, beautiful and wholly remarkable, Tom struggled with his problem. He could not admit to Andrea his mission; it would stamp him as the worst kind of fool, cast out of the briers and onto her bed. And if she did not know, if she could not answer his question, she would become a creature less perfect and elegant than the woman lying next to him. It was a problem. Tom pulled a cigarette from Andrea's. crumpled pack and smoked and worried. He had a right to worry. There he was, taking leave from his position of responsibility at the Pizza Hut, sent off by the mayor to answer the question that haunted his hometown. A pain began to gnaw between his shoulders. Where could he find the definition he needed? Who had it? Tom, quietly, got up and pulled on his grey flannel pants. "I know," he thought, "I'll find that college and ask someone there." Tom did not consider that it was nearly four in the morning. His feet slid into his loafers. He walked over to Andrea's side of the bed, and looked down for a moment, wishing, for some reason, that he had put more money in the parking lot box. "Andrea?" he said, shaking her gently, "Wake up ma'am. I have to get something important, the definition of a sonnet. Do you hear me?" "Sonny?" Andrea said, her voice dreamy, her eyes aglaze with impressionistic French sleep. Tom edged toward the door. "I've got to be going now. I'd like to thank you for everything," he said, reaching for his Pizza Hut jacket. "I've got a job to do and nobody can stop me." Andrea did not respond. "I'm on my way now." He walked out of Andrea's apartment.

Love, Unlike Iambics, Cannot be Measured The morning sun, which this morning in Richmond, Virginia, looked peculiarly like a famous Hollywood star, found Tom waiting outside the library. He had never seen columns so large, inscriptions carved so deeply. Transfixed by his awe and certainty that his journey was at an end, he did not notice the Toyota longbed pickup caroming off a power pole and hurtling towards him. Clipped by the white fender, Tom cartwheeled into the shrubbery at the front of the library. He was stunned, and there were scratches and abrasions all along the right side of his body. He looked at his trousers, sodden

with blood, and thought of pizza sauce. Such was his confusion. He fainted. When he awoke, he was in the periodicals section of the library, a Sporting News full of crushed ice pressed against his side. There were anxious faces, like those of carp, peering down at him. Everything was swimming, swimming. "The ambulance is on its way," someone said. Tom tried to raise himself on his elbows, but he 'found he was securely pinned to the table by several volumes of the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. "I'm fine. No hospital," he said. "I just need to find out. .." Everything now was not only swimming, but seemed to be wearing hazy scuba gear. When the paramedics arrived, the librarian recognized that many of them had grossly overdue books, and while they were shushed and forced to pay their fines, Tom slipped off the table and crawled into the bookshelves. Tom wasn't sure what he should do. There were hardly any accidents in Bucyrus, only the occasional hounding of the tourist families by Bobby O. and Shep in their matching jacked-up Dusters. He knew that if he were taken to the hospital, his mission would be hampered, and in his absence all hell could break loose back at the Pizza Hut. He tried to imagine Chipper and Janeen tending the yeast cultures and firing up the ovens. Groaning, he pulled himself further into the stacks. In time, Tom's head cleared. No one seemed to be in the section, but he could see feet moving through the adjacent stacks. Pulling himself up, shelf by shelf, he stood and made his way into the card catalog. Anticipating the end of his search, Tom pulled out the drawer marked "SIDD - ,SORE." His lips moved as he flipped through the cards. When he passed "Slingshots" he smelled a familiar perfume, and looked over his shoulder. Andrea, her bookbag slung over her back, was heading for the Special Collections. Tom thought that things like this shouldn't be happening in the big city, with so many people and places to be. Had she been following him? His thumb paused on the top of "Sloth, Lesser" and his eyes followed Andrea's richly woven sweater into the vertical acreage of books. With a grace that was both timeless and European, Andrea lounged beside a tall gunmetal gray bookshelf holding an early edition of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. When Tom saw her he stopped cold. He had never imagined to see her again, and now, at his moment of triumph, he was looking at her face and the lovely creases that formed between her eyebrows as she read. He said her name softly. She looked up from the book and her eyes widened. "Tom? What are you doing here?" '1 was hit by a truck. A small truck. You've got to help me." And without another thought, Torn confessed everything.

Webster's Unabridged Dictionary sat opened and proud on its sturdy podium next to the water fountain. They approached it together and began flipping through, heading for the S's. "Get a paper and pencil ready," Tom said to Andrea, as if saying, "Get a pepper and parrnesan," She reached into her bookbag. The time had come. Tom cleared his throat as he ran his finger through the field of words. "Here it is!" he cried. He looked at Andrea. "Write this down, okay?" She nodded, and again Tom cleared his throat. "Okay. Sonnet. S-O-N-N-E-T..." The sound of the scribbling pencil was sweet music to Tom's ears.

The Trouble With Zilas Traffic in the Village Cafe was light as Tom and Andrea sat in the very booth where, the night before, they had met. Their booth. Number four. With the definition in his shirt pocket and a hot turkey sub in his belly, Tom was a happy soul. They laughed and talked and the hours rolled by. The waitress refilled their coffee cups and asked, "You going to stay around tonight and help us with sidework, Andrea?" "Not on my night off," she said, laughing. "Okay then, I'm pulling the plug on your coffee." The door to the cafe flew open and crashed against its frame. The man that walked in was dirty, but he had a clean and wild gleam in his eyes. His greasy hair swirled like cheap cake frosting around his narrow skull. He stood with his hands on his hips and, in a drawl that bespoke of too many helpings of grits and syrup, yelled, "Thomas Warble! Are you in here Thomas Warble!" Tom looked around the side of. the booth. "My god," he said. "It's Zilas Gumbv." Zilas saw Tom before he could pull his head back in and pointed one gray and mean finger at him. "There you is, you mangy slime dog." He marched down the aisle toward the booth. "What're you doing here Zilas Gumby? I've got no truck with you." "It's not you that I want. I just want what you come here to fetch." Tom pulled his arm across his shirt pocket and leaned back. "Who sent you here?" "Never you mind that, Tom Warble. I come on my own, and I aim to come into my own." Zilas' hand went to a sheath on his cracking plastic belt and he pulled out a hunting knife. Pushing the blade against Tom's neck he said, "Ever since we was pups you done got it better'n me. Better house, better job. Schoolmarm Pool hole liked you better, and she was my blame aunt."

Tom looked at Andrea, who seemed fascinated by this drama. "Leave us be, Zilas.Just leave us." "Not until you give me that definition. Then I'll get what's coming to me back there. Nobody'll dare call me good-for-nothing, or home-boy, or rubberhead," Zilas scraped Tom's throat with the tip of the "knife. "No", give me ito" Andrea stood and plucked the paper from Tom's pocket, handing it to Zilas. Both the men sat stunned, Tom at this apparent betrayal and Zilas at his great good fortune. As Zilas backed towards the door, Tom shouted after him, "You'll never get away with this. I'll get another copy. I'll drive there and back before your old truck gets halfway." Zilas creased the paper with the dull edge of his knifeblade and stuffed into his pocket. "That's what you think is it, Mr. Thomas Warble Pizza Hut Manager? I've done already slashed your tires. You'll never show that face of yours in Bucyrus again," And then, like a possum diving into a hollow tree, Zilas disappeared into the night. Tom stared down at the tiny black and white tiles on the cafe floor. He heard that same voice, "Count these! Count these!" Only this time it was screaming.

The :New Order Tom sat in Andrea's apartment, wondering if he could be so bold as to pull off his shoes. He noted that the chartreuse in the Toulouse-Lautrec poster above Andrea's bed was the precise color green pepper rings turned after passing through the pizza ovens. He had the time to wonder about such things. His truck, flat to the rims and looking like it had been knocked unconscious, was going to take him nowhere. "ZiIas even broke off the C.B. antenna so I couldn't call for help." Andrea lit a cigarette and sighed. "How's your head feel?" she asked. "Like somebody unloaded a ton of broken bricks on it, and then a lot of damn patio furniture and a barbecue pit smack on top of it." She set a dish of white asparagus before him and, her fingers thin and warm and still smoking, rubbed his neck, circles that sent him spinning. "You kind of like me," Tom said, at last. "I can tell you do." "I'm fond of you, Tom Warble. But - " She lifted her hands from his neck, crossed the room and resumed stirring the sauce. Tom waited, deciding to be silent. If it's important enough, he thought, she'll finish. He took off his shoes. Andrea was humming. "[eez, Andrea," he said, and then added, "We have everything we need right here. We know what sonnets are, we know the count of lines. We'll play the rest by ear. Can't change that. No brandnew tires, no amount of crying over broken eggs can make my radi-

als inflate. It's tough, But if Zilas Orville Gumby wants to take advantage of me with his hunting knife, well, let him. They can move his rundown shack into the parking lot of the Pizza Hut for all I care. I'm just not going back to catch a flying sonnet in the gut. I've learned a thing or two. There's lots outside Bucyrus. There's malls. There's you."

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Zilas had smashed out his headlamps when he drove through a tollgate outside the city, and so he drove through the night in the rusty cornet of his truck. He steered by the stars, by the sizzling pizza of the moon, and by the sounds that gravel, mailboxes and small animals made when he veered off the roads that wound their way around the mountains. "I've got the definition! HOOHOOOO!" he shouted. "Onliest now if that little thing Torn Warble was with don't let him use her truck, I'll be as set and square as a wooden hen in Noah's Ark." When the sun rolled up that morning, Zilas was sleeping outside the Mayor's office, his enormous feet, twinkling with dew, poking out of the window of his truck. This wasn't an uncommon sight in Bucyrus. Zilas awoke, rubbed his eyes, and sat up slowly, looking quite a bit like a bag of old clothing being rolled downstairs on its way to the Salvation Army hamper. "My day," he said to himself, opening a can of Vienna sausages. "This is the day that Zilas Gumby comes into his own." The sausages slid down his throat like promises. It was a less common sight in Bucyrus to see Zilas Gumby climb into the bed of his pickup, his shirt choked by an odd blue necktie made from the belt of a castoff robe, a small piece of paper in his hand, and announce, "Everybody, listen up, listen to old Zilas! You thought I was good only to pick your trash, spending all I had on beer and Vienna sausages...." There were about twenty people standing around him now, including Mayor Foley, who held a fishing pole in his hand and had been in the process of slipping out the back door of his office...... but I just come from Richmond, Queen of the South, where I located, after much trouble, this definition for the word 'sonnet'." Traffic was stopped. The town had continued to fall apart, a process that accelerated once Tom left. The traffic lights flashed irre ularly and in unusual colors, like aquamarine and burnt sienna. The stop signs drooped like sunflowers. The tap water tasted like pickle brine. Someone in the crowd shouted, "Read it to us, Zilas." And since this' was a small town, everyone knew how to sing together in church and chant together as a street mob. "Read itl" they said, "Read it!Read it!" Zilas unfolded the paper. His lips moved as he tried to decipher the note penned in Andrea's impressionistic French hand. '"Sonnet,''' he said, looking up to .gauge the crowd's reaction to this first portion of his task. "Zilas can't read," someone said. "No! I can read fine. I've just got a bug or something in my eye." The mayor set aside his rod and reel and walked over to the truck. "Now just give it here, or I'll have to put you in jail again. Just hand it over." Zilas gave up the note and slunk to the furthest comer of the bed of his truck, where he collapsed on a stack of burlap bags.

"So, who wants to read this?" the mayor asked. Golinda Vargas answered him. "You go ahead and read it, rnayor. You can have the honor." "Well, 1- " The crowd resumed the chant. "Read it! Read it! Read it!" The mayor, his big eyebrows trembling, cried out in shame. "I can't read it. Somebody wrote it in French." "In French?" Golinda asked. "In French?" The crowd, growing all the time, took this up as well. "In French! In French!" Their voices grew louder and louder until their chant became a storm of frustration and rage that thundered across the valley, gathered against the Blue Ridge, and then shot like a fusillade back toward Richmond. "What did you say?" asked Tom. He and Andrea were lying in the cool sheets of her bed. She playfully tossed a lit cigarette at him. "I didn't say anything." "I would have bet a cow that somebody who sounded an awful lot like Golinda Vargas was just saying 'In French' over and over again. Shhh. There it is again." Tom bent toward the window, and Andrea took the opportunity to bite the exposed twist of his torso.

70 a Young Person by Robert Boucheron

o come, young person, come, my restless teen, from ranch, split-level and colonial, . hop in the wagon: come see and seen to wander the suburban shopping mall. There, in the flickering fluorescent glare, beside an artificial waterfall, we'll while away the hours without a care, gazing at passersby, and have a ball. The walls are glass, the floora marble sea, the climate under optimal control. No wind or rain, no dank humidity can touch you there, no dark night of the soul. I'll show you all the latest merchandise, and clothe you in an outfit from a dream. I'll nourish you on pizza by the slice, with diet soda, popcorn and ice cream. I'll whisper all the songs you think are nice, and pierce your tender earlobe, if you dare. I'll furnish you with practical advice, and fashion you a look beyond compare. Come as you are, in jeans and baggy top, come quick, before the parking spots are taken. Once you begin, you'll never want to stop, and once you buy, you'll never be forsaken.

photo by Paula Cerrone

Vis-iting the G-r~ndmothe-r In Pitts-bu-rgh by Marcella Wolfe I travelled past foundries withered into dust and boarded, tired caffeine stops reclaimed now by the ivy holding an original lien on the property, (taverns with neon Iron City signs were the only places doing much business now) past mountains mined carelessly, left to bleed clay red as molten steel to find that you were the only part of Pittsburgh to remain the same; still sitting, resting, you looked into the dull sea of leprous B & 0 cars in the switchvard behind your duplex.

Gaming Back to Odell by Stephen Healey From the soft ridge looking down, the four-bedroom colonials are straighter than ever. They finally locked up Leo Simonetti for indecent exposure, last week, pressed slacks gathered at his ankles, clutching his hard-on in Miss Plumchin's well-pruned mum garden. In seventh grade, he had more pubic hair than anyone in gym class. I had always wanted to have lunch with the stout Mongoloid from the special education wing who everyday wore a scuffed football helmet with a labyrinth face mask, maybe ask him why, though I felt him ramming walls. Where I am the earth is an old couch: I'm slipping between cushions. If only I knew his name, I'd look him up, stand naked at his doorstep.

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goofball Achilles with girls at his heels on the springboard doing back flips into the cherry blossom rain!

Nautical by John Long Other people's lives sink and swell around you, lapping at your shifting rim, leaving their debris. Billowing on every side, they rush and then recede. They wash across your beaches. You feel a slow erosion. Shoring up your sea walls, you study the morning sky. You listen to the wind's tales and come to fear the deep. In your archipelago, now and then a mooring breaks. The tide of events comes in and carries a little more of you out to sea.

--.

by William E. Cowee An old man slumps before the screen where flickering light plays. Empty film tapdances at reel's end ta-lac, ta-lac, ta-lac, ta-lac, until stiff fingers fumble with the switch, labor to rewind the worn print. When he is ready, film lashes its licking tongue across the light and a young man and woman appear: he, groomed and tucked in a grey tuxedo, she, smoothing a pearl-seeded bridal gown, looks up, mouthing words forever silent. The projectionist rises from his chair turns, positioning his ashen face, superimposing a young man's features on it. Squinting into the glare, he smiles, two smiles, old and young men smiling together, watching as the celluloid lover wraps herself intangibly in her husband's arms. He inclines his head toward her face until her pursed lips rest on his cheek and, whirling in her arms, he begins to crv again. >

~MARTI ~OYS CANT [)AtJ<.ÂŁ 43

J\"1fietter to ~iIliam ~orbsfuortq on the Occasion of Reading an Historicist Dissection of "T'intern Abbey" Dear Will, Just thought I'd drop you a line and bring you up to speed on what's been going on with writing these days. Actually, it's kind of been getting me down lately, and I just wanted to get some of this off my chest, you know, just bitch a little. Let's see, you've been dead and buried a good 135-140 years by now, which means you've missed out on all the latest trends, though I reckon some of your newer neighbors might be keeping you up on things. Boy, I bet Pound is talking your ear off right now, though Tom Eliot's probably " been giving you the freeze. How do you and Whitman get along? Pretty good, is my bet. But you must not think too much of most of these twentieth-century guys, all gloom and despair and "the center will not hold" and whatnot. I hope they don't send critics your way, they'd probably badger you up a tree if you gave them half a chance. You see, the fact of the matter is, you've been pretty much king of the goddamn mountain down here these days. Surprised? Yeah, it's true. Backjust after the war, this guy Northrop Frye wrote a big book about the old loon Blake, and darn if the thing didn't make them both big stars. Suddenly, everybody was reading Blake because of how Frye fit together and made sense of all those goofy symbols Willie used. Everybody said, "Shit, this guy's pretty smart, we've really been missing the boat on him." And then they all started reading the rest of you guys, and sure enough, you and John and Sam and Percy and even randy old Byron started showing up on a lot of reading lists and MLA programs. Abrams wrote a book in the"50's, The Mirror and the Lamp, that made you all look real smart, like real thinkers, not just poets of quaint nature scenes and nostalgia, and then in the'60's, this guy Hartman wrote a book just about you, Will. Yeah, it was huge, called Wordsworth's Poetry: 1787-L814, and it was all about you growing up as a poet, sort of an artist and his environment kind of thing. That went over big, too, and you come off smelling like a rose. After that book, you really took off, dissertations out the yin-yang, profs foaming at the mouth in seminars, students rhapsodizing with glazed eyes, it was really crazy. You really touched something in them, Will, your faith in poetry was so strong, really so strong. But now, I don't know. I mean, you're still big, don't get me wrong, but it's just different, you see. It seems like people are just missing the point.

They're missing the point about poetry in general. You see, nowadays, everybody's got a program, poets, critics, they all have these politics to push, and they're all scrapping with each other to get their own program the most ink. Forget about aesthetics and emotion and beauty, you have to be politically correct or theoretically extreme to get anybody to listen to you, to be noticed. And that is what they're all after you see, making, "The Chronicle of Higher Education" and getting that 150-thou-a-year from one of the UC schools. And it's getting me down, Will, it really is. The first thing you got to understand is that everybody has some label these days, a tag to hitch on their sleeves to indenrify their "critical stance." You got your Marxists, your Deconstructionists, your Feminists, your Marxists-Feminists, your Deconstructionst-Marxists, your HistoricistFerninist-Decontructionists, you get the picture. And boy do they squawk at each other. Historicists are pretty in these days, Marxists and Feminists have pretty much coopted into the mainstream, and Deconstructionists are on the outs. Mostly because they were a bunch of snooty hotheads who came in and huffed and stomped around, and were really nasty about things. Nobody really knows what they were talking about, probably not even the Deconstructionists themselves, but basically they were playing fussy little games with words and making these outrageous claims that there was no such thing as original, imaginative creativity in poetry, that it was all intertextual references that intersected in a poet's consciousness and then were parroted out in metaphorical configurations, the "meaning" of which arose out of societal beliefs and artistic conventions of the time. Nothing really "means" anything to the Deconstructionists, you see, writing is all play among texts. To most of us, it doesn't make any sense, and they have no explanation for someone like Blake or Milton or even you, Will, writers with real vision or inspiration really mess them up. I think they're all just hiding a terror of the erotic, of human instinct. They probably have lousy sex. But they're more or less out of the picture, though the rest of the scoundrels are strong as ever. They each have their own deviant approaches for how best to obsfucate literature. The Marxists look at literature against a gridwork of class relationships, how the rich and privileged exploit and oppress the poor and downtrodden, and complain that a lot of the so called "Classics" of literature really prop up this system of power manipulation. I'm not sure exactly what the value of examining class relationships in literature is, but it must be something important, because a lot of people use a lot of big words, write big books and make big dough talking about it. The Feminists do pretty much the same thing, except they use men and women instead of upper and lower . classes. They have a bit more of a point, I think, but they are also that much more dogmatic and annoying. They come close to the old Deconstructionists with their case and attitude. Like I said, both of these folks are getting absorbed into the mainstream, basically what they wanted at the start, you know, to get attention and spread their word.

But now that they're getti!1gsome real airtime, they're just fussing even more. You know, how their "true" purpose is being twisted by the white male hegemony who are just throwing them a bone, and don't really listen to what they're saying. It seems like a lot of them just want to substitute their own dogma for the present doctrine and weild all the power in the academy. It's all political, a game of power, not an intellectual or aesthetic pursuit. Yecch! So now come the Historicists. They sort of merge it all together into a mish-mash of the worst of all these movements. I mean, geez,take a look at what they say about "Tintern Abbey," a damn good poem, I think. They give this screwy reading to it, looking at stuff you apparently "suppressed" while you wrote the thing, like the fact that the abbey was in ruins, that there were vagrants living in the ruins, that the Wye river was polluted, and that all this stuff was a result of the war against France and the industrialization of the town of Tintern. All these things are "in" the poem because they were conditions of the time and place in the physical world that you talk about in the poem. Forget about what is to be human and grow older, and suffer from disappointment and random cruelty of the world, and try to live with this mature knowledge of the world. That's not what the poem's about, they say. It's about the conditions out of which the poem arose. I guess that's the real problem, Will. Everybody is so concerned with conditions of existence, things we can't do a damn thing about, that they will lose sight of character and the necessity of making choices in our lives. We're facing some hard times, Will, people are scared, and worse they're avoiding their fear, they're obsessing about all these tangents and missing the center of the struggle. You wouldn't like it much down here, I don't think. Not many of us do. Well, Will, I think I feel a little better now. Sometimes just venting a little spleen is good for the soul. I hope you're getting along well enough wherever you are these days, maybe even writing a little, eh? We'll keep . struggling, don't worry,nobody's giving up I think things will change, that the darkest time has passed. Shelley's been a solace for me lately, I think the last lines of "Prometheus Unbound" are about as good as he gets. Remember? ...to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates Neither to change nor falter nor repent: This, like the glory, Titan! is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory; /" And so it goes,

Eric Iversen

photo by Keith White

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