Volume 7 issue 1 spring 1995 by Yale Literary Magazine

The Yale Literary Magazine Spring 1995 Vol. VII, No. 1

Mum mens grata manet, nomen laudesque YALENSES Cantabunt SOBOLES, unanimique PATRES.-

Founded 1836

EDITOR IN CHIEF: Phyllis E.P Thompson

MANAGING EDITOR: Erik C. Grafe

ART EDITOR: Danielle R. Spencer

DESIGN: 11

Danielle R. Spencer and Phyllis E. P Thompson

EDITORIAL STAFF: David Auerbach, Julie Cortez, Tom Dolby, Joseph Formaggio, Vanessa Gezari, Michael Jo, Phillip Kwon, Rebecca Lesnik, Barbara Lewis, Hiroko Nagao, Lorraine Smith

WITH OUR SINCERE THANKS TO: Harvey Goldblatt and the Pierson Master's Office The Sudler Fund Philip Greene Terry Towers and The Yale Printing Service Lillian Corsan Meg O'Brian Ian Ganassi Charlotte Pavia Rosemary Hutzler Nina Thompson

SUBSCRIPTIONS to The Yale Literary Magazine are available at a price of $15 for individual subscriptions and $35 for institutions. Please make checks payable to the YLM Publishing Fund and send to: The Yale Literary Magazine, Box 209087 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520

Library of Congress Catalog Number 7-19863-4

The Yale Literary Magazine gratefully aknowledges its alumni contributors, without whom this publication would not be possible. LAUREL CIRCLE Paul Mellon

LINDEN CIRCLE

Luther Davis Clyde H. Farnsworth YEW TREE CIRCLE Maxfield S. Gibbons Stanley F. Klimcza.k James H. Manges

GINKHO TREE CIRCLE Edward J. Bermingham S. Bobo Dean William H. Dougherty Robert Footman Peter H. Hare Philip J. Heyman

Shawn Kalkstein Walter H. Mann, Jr. Ignatius G. Mattingly Ruluff D. McIntyre Richard S. Missan Richard 0. Wilson William Wise

The Yale Literary Magazine is a non—profit, registered undergraduate organization at Yale University. The views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the staff and in no way reflect the opinions of Y.Ile University, which is not responsible for the contents of the magazine. The contents are © copyright 1995. Copyrights remain the property of the individual contributors. No portion of the contents may be reprinted without permission. All rights are reserved.

TABLE OF CONTENTS The Mailbox

Lizzie Skurnick

Tracks

Michele Auer

Danube

Rebecca Lesnik

This Cook in the Army Taught Me This Trick Later Darkness

Yoav Grunstein

Rosemary Hutzler

Travelog of a Postmodern Cowboy Tapping the Vein

Joshua Kamensky

Rebecca Lesnik

Translation (untitled)

Andrew Getman

Sex, Ambiguity and the New Romantics An Interview with John Crowley

Austin Bunn

Elana Zeide

Photograph

Katerina Artavanis

Boarders

Rosemary Hutzler

Photograph

Matthew Pillsbury

Photograph

Anna Gaskell

Painting

Clayton Merrell

Painting

Courtney Miller

Sculptures

Joel Tauber

Photograph

Whitney Lawson

Photograph

Helen Smith

Etchings

Daniel Filler

Drawings

Courtney Miller

Photograph

Rupinder Singh

Photograph

Shira Weinert

Oilbar

Daniel Filler

Photograph

Jessica Kaufmann

Photograph

Lila Subramanian

Woodcut

Daniel Filler

Music Score

Philip Greene

111

Chris Laurnen PRINT â&#x20AC;&#x201D; 8" X 8"

THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

CovER: PfloToGRApit, GoLD ToNE

SHIRA WEINERT

vglih

A bold child, on a quiet morning, Took the mailbox from the Wyatts' house. It hung, always empty, like a fish on a line, Almost without sense beneath the thin, grey Sky. Suspended above the heedless ground, It asked to be thrown to the meandering river. Anxious, a child crouches by the river, Looking for the cat that has been gone all morning, Pushing her fingers into the April ground And stretching like ivy into a brittle house Of jewelweed stalks. The cat is grey With a foreleg marked by one black line. The band marches by, and each weaving line Is halved in the narrow street beside the river. The mailman is whistling at the Wyatts' grey Porch. He whistles each morning To say there's no mail. The child looks at her house, And, filled with air, looks again at the ground. Biting her reed, she watches the ground, Puckers for air like a fish on a line, Saved because no clarinet knows her house, Nor knows how she walks with her cat by the rivei; Humming long marches. The factory this morning Huffs in half time and turns the air grey. On a rainy day the water, grey, Is like one long secret, another ground, Or another sky; and every morning, While the mailman whistles a Gershwin line, The mailbox, spinning halfâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;filled in the river, Is immeasurably far from the Wyatt's house.

Lizzie Skurnick 0 a Ei

THE

MAILBOX

On a blustery day, inside her house, The child thinks of all the flat, grey Porch, of the measure of grief she feels near the river, And the delightful force of her feet on the ground After she pulled the lid into line And threw the box to the watery morning.

She thinks that the geese in the window are mourning Her absence from beside the river; They are printing sad V's in a perfect line.

Winner of the Francis Bergen Memorial Prize Ibr Poetry

he first time I saw the ghost family the grandfather clasped and unclasped his IN A girl shuffled her pigeontoed feet and a dog thumped his ratty tail against the

There was the day he asked me to marry him, on a train from Poughkeepsie, to the city to see him off, for years. My mother would have been happy, and my sister, too, I suppose. I remember scouring the scenery for rocks and Indians, wild turkeys and rusted Model T's. I noticed sea gulls and the stone walls that web New England. I hummed a tune in my head, but then he took my face and turned it toward him. Helen, he said. Will you marry me. And right then I thought I saw a troop of Indians ,ghosts or children, streaking through the woods with dogs running ahead of them and I turned my head back, snapped it back to look and I said uno." When I turned nineteen the next week he gave me the ring. Or rather left it with my grandmother to give to me. He went to Korea and his ring sits like a scar on my hand.

Michele Auer Ei CI

TRACKS

That was the first time I saw ghosts, the first time streaks of white appeared to turn my head in the wrong direction. Nameless they always stayed, nameless and harmless, connected to me by threads of time or place, headlights in a night fog. I saw a dead woman selling flowers on the corner the day my sister died, saw children walking single file by the graveyard as the ambulance with my mother in it roared past me. And an endless stream of naked wives passed my window the day he married someone else. But here is this family of ghosts, regarding me as I thumb through pasts. The mother is even looking me in the eyes. What is the message I will read only too late? She stares at me. Who have I left to lose? I shout at her. She remains. She has thin lips and a double chin. Her bony hands pull her children to her. Her shoulders slope like tree roots, from too many shrugs of giving up. It is a black shawl with red flowers, that an uncle brought back from Russia once. It is thin, almost sheer, but its warmth is enveloping and immediate. I wore it constantly, as much for warmth as to see myself like a gypsy, wrapped in a huge black fringed redflowered shawl. Withered and bent and smelling of fortune. Lately that smell has become overpowerâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; ing; laced with the lingering perfume of my mother it is unbearable. The shawl now wraps an armchair and the treelike shoulders of a dead woman I do not know. Who have I left to lose?

3 3NIZV9VIN AlIVII3III 31VA "J

hands. invisible floor. They floated before me, fidgeting and sad, hands placed knowingly on shoulders. The father coughed and they disappeared. Now they are assembled around my couch, in another portrait sitting, centered around the grandfather with the mother and father standing behind. The dog is gone and I see the little girl yelling for him but I hear nothing. They sit assembled and in my head I am choosing a frame for the faded oval photograph. A silk ascot at the father's neck, a cameo brooch on the mother's dress. My mother's wool shawl on her shoulders.

Joseph was handsome enough, I suppose, and enough of a neighborhood boy to be smiled upon and blessed by everybody. He had a Schwinn by age ten and his father's Ford by seventeen. He'd paid for the Schwinn himself. I liked his hands, thin and quick, and I loved how they rested on the red vinyl wheel of that car, how they bagged french fries, how they held mine. I even loved the autumn drives, through fiery foliage, to the hills and being alone with him. We went to drive ins and dances. Our parents approved. No, they had planned it. We had special times. He was ardent and sweet and good and I was complacent and bored. If it had been more of a struggle, if something had gone wrong, only to go right later, if he had been a tad more homely. If he hadn't lived down the block and if my mother had hated him. If there was something to work for I would have married him. When my mother died I knew something about the ashes of her family, blown throughout Eastern Europe. But their lives she buried with her own. Upstairs is a box full of letters in strange languages. It's a steel box with stamps and stickers on it, and it's etched with her maiden name in rusted letters. It is the pain box, its contents being the ends of stories, its skin sharp and lockjawed. If I put a lace throw over it it makes a curious nighttable. I tried this once but I couldn't stand the noise that fifty deaths make at night. A scarf, a few odd pieces of china, some old worn books that are cried shut, this is where she came from. I try to picture faces—red cheeks, piles of unruly black hair, missing teeth, vodka breath. I know I'm wrong. Maybe they're here, slim and dignified and grave, sitting in my living room with the family dog. His life was linear. He went from crawling to walking, from a red fat—tired Schwinn to a Ford, from high school to the Army, from me to Sue Ellen something—or—other. I wanted my life to work like that, but Mother wouldn't let it. There was some mystery element that pulled me apart, some recurring nightmare that moved our paths in circles. She never told me about it, never made the reasons clear, just let the eddies of our circle pull me in. She let me feel its strength but didn't have the courage to tell me its name. The pain box was rusted shut. The thick—boned Eastern European matriarchs of my family would have sat around a kettle, maybe peeling potatoes on low stools, or boiling the potato peels in the harder times. I would have sat among them, not yet quite so thick, my kerchief perhaps betraying a girlish wisp of hair or curve of the neck. They would have conversed openly and gruffly about my husband, his slowness in the fields, his errant Magyar blood. They would remark about the ill luck boded by the hundreds of geese that flew that morning over the village, they would worry about the coming of another child in the dead of winter. And I would rise with a sigh and go to knead the dough again, savoring their disapproval as their eyes followed the folds of my wool skirts. When my waist and jowl thickened I would again sit in the peeling circle and complain about my niece, as age entitled me to do. I imagine that I feel that rhythm now, the cloddy wooden cycles of old agriculture, the fattening of Polish sunlight for a few months of summer, the flicker of an occasional festival like an unintentional smile on my mother's face. I feel it sometimes as I choose a shrink— wrapped chicken from the grocer's flock, or drive across highways. I think of it as fruits ripen like still lifes on my windowsill. The meaning of life is too much time on your hands. Mother, I said, I want to be a dancer. I want to be a ballerina. No, Helen, you can't do that, you'd end up dead on the train tracks like that girl in the movies. I want to be a dancer, Ma. Dancers can't have babies, Helen, she said, chopping onions. Who needs babies, I said. Age six. No one needs babies except me and you, my mother said. She was red eyed, chopping onions. I flitted across the kitchen, a six year old dancer but my stockinged feet slipped and I fell.

When Sophie died my mother was quite calm. At the funeral I cried constantly, my sister my sister dead and young! My eyes could barely open and no one would hold me, not even my mother who put her hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes. "She was twenty— four," she said,"and you are twenty—one. You are now Sophie." She said this so calmly and coldly I didn't know whether to believe her and stand up straighter or to hate her and fall then and there dead. When my sister died her husband of half a year wandered off after the funeral through the parks and we never saw him again. I took Sophie's job and some of her clothes and waited for illness to strike and on that day in August my mother disappeared to the attic to wail, leaving scars on my ears and an ache in my hands. Joseph played the piano on that August night two years too early, dusting off our old upright and surprising us all with his sweet voice. Joseph would have mended my soul if it had been rent then and I would have married him. But he was two years overseas then in some Asian jungle dreaming of pinup girls and Hershey's bars. The ghost family watches. The elbows of their spare elegant clothes are frayed. The father's jacket is too short in the arms, and he tries to hide this by squaring back his shoulders. The dog is skeletal but the girl twirls his floppy ear around her finger. She has long dark brown middleparted hair. Her forehead is high and almost luminous, and her eyes are deep and close set, her nose too big. but she is beautiful anyway, in a forbidden sort of way, beauty that will bruise like a rose if you touch it. There is something familiar about the curve of her face, a worn and tired sigh about her look that belies her ten or so years. Her mother's sad bosom and her father's wan lips and my mother's August wailing hang in this ghostgirl's cloudy breath. I look at her hands, and they are clasped in front of her, fingers interlaced like vines and wire. She raises her hands before her, out towards me. They are stuck, grown together, she cannot free them, her arms a little circle of brown wool coatsleeves. I think that makes her Jewish. There was no preacher at Sophie's funeral, just a rabbi. It was a coffeetable secret, a smoky piece of the past. It meant nothing now and my mother made sure that the rites of the dead were carried out in that other language, that the passage to death be Jewish. At age twenty—one and no less I made the acquaintance of that age—old friend to death. Like her name. She never told me. The girl's ,:heek flushes in and out of the visible, the whole family shimmers like a flag. Winter grows from their breathing and I step aside for a frostbitten dream: There was the day he asked me to marry him on a train from the city. My mother would have been happy, I suppose, and my sister, too. If we had found a cart overturned, a stinking rubbish pile in time but we are on the train and I am scouring the scenery for rocks and soldiers, foxholes and shotdown planes. I saw whitened fields and barbed wire, miles of it, and quiet towns lost in space like my own, but not burning. Through the high slats of the airhole flashing but clear, the light of a winter afternoon like an archive print, rolling out like reels from

5 3NIZV9ViAl AlIV1131.I1 31VA 31-li

I'd seen the strings of consonants and globs of odd letters on old photos, scrawled on documents, etched into a heavy steel box upstairs. Once I asked her how to pronounce her maiden name and she said, I'll tell you after dinner. So I helped peel potatoes and set the table, and I ate politely and cleared the table and I said, how do you say your name? Let's eat dessert, she said. Dessert was a pecan pie from the store. She gave us ice cream with it and Sophie knew something was up. Mother disappeared up the stairs before we finished eating the pecan pie and she left us to wash the dishes. I had some sense so I washed and then I climbed the stairs and sat by her and said, what's wrong? Is something wrong? Is it your name? I don't remember, she said. How to say my name. You could have just said that, I thought. Her face then looked like a spinster's, tightened and angry and grey. That name, with its endless consonants and unfamiliar letters, lay gorged in her throat and she couldn't breathe. But I went downstairs and dried the dishes and I was glad I knew my name.

the front. Will you marry me Helen, he said, his body too close to my brown woolen coatsleeves, my body too close to his, and everyone else's and the freezing country. Will you marry me Helen! he shouts over the horror of the wheels and the train is pulling in. No one knows how they become old and childless. Surely it is a process, marked by careful decisions and sensible choices, drawn lightly with lines that deepen like wrinkles. It is a march of backward wisdom, haughty but laughing itself to death inside. It is fear and forâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; tune and brooding pain, no one watching their past because they are too certain of their future. It lulls like a swift train ride and every man woman and milkfaced child in the car is shouting Helen! Helen will you marry me! and the train is almost stopped at huge brick gates Yes and we pass at bullet speed a huge pair of black belching smokestacks, the train nonstop to home. El

Katerina Artavanis SILVER GELATIN PRINT

F W 111.1r

IMEMMOMMIMPIPWRIR

[Mow to explain this idea of rivers.

Rebecca Lesnik A

DANUBE

From an apartment in Brooklyn you can see the East River. You can see it also from the window of the B train. You can stand in Manhattan and look across the East River, to Brooklyn. You might think of your life in Brooklyn, your view of the streets and of Prospect Park. You can stand by the window of that apartment in Brooklyn, and just make out Lady Liberty. Moored in an invisible river. You might think about the significance of an invisible river. You might imagine the hem of her Amazon skirt, the power it takes to stand in a river. Then you might remember the winter the Hudson froze. How strange it looked, uneven and white. How it made you think of wartime, and soldiers in fur hats, long coats. Maybe on ice skatesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;did they do that? Then the thoughts of the Danube will break through the ice and shatter your rivers. From the banks of the Hudson, or of the East River, you can make out the black of the Danube. You imagine those soldiers in forests darker than Prospect Park at night. You imagine the ice of winter,

and then you try to imagine summer. You know these things are important. This question of rivers, and of the Danube. Which is the longest river in Europe. Which begins in the Black Forest and ends in the Black Sea.

Matthew Pillsbury -- SILVER GELATIN PRINT millw

THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

Anna Gaskell "I.B.R. WORK IN PROGRESS" C-PRINT

Clayton Merrell "DELUGE"- INK AND GOUACHE - II X 15"

Pt /

Yoav Grunstein CI

THIS COOK in the ARMY TAUGHT ME THIS TRICK

hefly buzzed inside his clenched fist. He could feel its wings tickling his palm and fingers. Every now and then it would make an effort and then stop. Over the quiet hum of the diner, between the clankings of coffee spoons and porcelain, they could both hear the sporadic buzzing, but she was pretending she couldn't. He held his fist in the sunlight over the booth table, and was looking at it and at her as she ate. She had seen him grab the fly out of the air, but before he had a chance to see her reaction she had looked back down at her pancakes. She looked out the window. Cars were gliding silently down the highway outside. Without the noise, they seemed to be moving slower. "Why do you have to do that?" she asked, looking out the window. He rotated his hand, unloosening his fingers just enough to let the fly see the world outside. "They shouldn't have flies in a diner. It's disgusting." She blinked slowly and shook her head, still looking out the window. "Disgusting," she repeated. He stared at his hand. The fly tried to squeeze through his pinky and ringâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;finger, so he immediately reclenched his fist. It was stuck. He looked closely at the fly's head, pivoting and turning as it tried to free itself. One small leg was sticking out too, and it pounded without a sound against his finger. He was afraid he might have tightened his hand too much, so he tried to loosen it again, and pushed the fly's little head back inside with his other hand. "Oops." He laughed a little to himself as he nudged the head back into the darkness of his hand, and readjusted his fingers trying not to crush the fly. She looked at him. "Will you stop?" she asked. "What do you mean?" He looked her in the eye, raising his eyebrows. She stared at him for a moment, and he found it difficult to meet her eyes, but he did. "Fine," she said. She sat back in her seat and stared at her hands under the table. He knew he had to shake his fist around a little to make sure the fly was loose inside and not still trapped between his fingers. He lowered his hand under the table and shook it. "Do you want to drive today?" he asked. "No," she said. "I don't care." He sat back in his seat with his fist in his lap. The table was bright between them. The salt and pepper shakers glinted in the cold sunlight, and what was left of his eggs and her pancakes looked greasier than it had tasted. Steam still rose from his coffee. The napkins were crumpled. He had not touched his water.

ENO,

13 3NIZV9VW AliV113.1.11 TIVA. 31-11,

"So should we keep going south?" he asked. "Okay." "It'll be warmer" He waited for her to look at him but she didn't. He leaned over the table with his elbows to see what she was looking at. When she saw what he was doing she looked up at him. She stopped playing with her hands and stared out the window again. He shook his fist around to keep the fly loose. "Look, where do you want to go? I don't want to make all the decisions." "Yes you do." "You don't even look at the map. You don't even know where we are." "I don't care. I'm sick of driving. Why can't we just stop somewhere nice and stay there?" "Okay, but where? New Orleans? You want to go to New Orleans?" "Yeah, sure, anywhere. Let's just stop driving for a while." "Alright," he said. "les settled." "Great," she said, and looked out the window. He wished it was like the beginning of the trip, when they sang together, and stopped to take pictures in empty fields. The empty fields were still there, floating by them, but their charm had worn off. It was bothersome to stop the car on the shoulder of the highway, reverse to the edge of a field he had seen, step out into the cold air and walk around with their cameras. They never wandered far, and it felt pointless when they got back into the car feeling cold and hungry and drove off. So they didn't stop in fields anymore. They stopped when he saw cows or horses or sheep, something animated, a herd in a field. Or when they saw a dilapidated barn, an abandoned warehouse, a torched bus. Now they only stopped to eat. Each mealâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;place was carefully chosen and each meal was drawn out. When they were in a good mood they invented stories about the other diners. When they were in a bad mood they didn't. They had been eating their breakfast for a long time. The fly buzzed in his hand and she looked. "Will you let that thing go already?" He smiled to himself. "I want to show you something. Let me show you my little fly trick." He raised his fist high over the table and brought it down quickly. He opened and jerked his hand back with a snap. The fly hit the table hard and bounced on its back. It lay there. "Great," she said."Great trick." She looked at him shaking her head. He had trouble looking at her eyes so he kept looking at the motionless fly. "It's not dead. It's just stunned," he said. "That's part of the trick." The fly twitched a leg. She turned away. "Wait, it's not over. Watch this." He picked up the fly with his thumb and forefinger. "I learned this from a cook in the army." The fly was flailing its legs now between his fingers, but the buzzing was gone because its wings were pinned. "Now watch and just trust me." He inserted the fly and his fingers into his glass of water and let go. The fly wriggled under water and began to float to the top. It floated on the surface, paddling in spurts with its legs. He dunked it under again with his finger, and kept dunking it before it could reach the surface. The fly was buoyant and he had to poke at it constantly to keep it under water. "I can't believe you," she said, and her voice was different. "I can't believe you don't trust me," he said, staring at the fly in the glass of water. He had it stuck under two of his fingers. He held it there for a long time. She turned away.

No, you have to keep looking so you see I'm not cheating. This cook in the army showed me this trick." She looked at his face."Why are you doing this?" "Listen, it's an amazing trick, so will you please just trust me?" He looked up at her and her eyes were sad. He looked back down at his fingers sinking the fly. They were magnified by the water. They seemed thick and clean and fly was dark and hairy underneath them "We need a cigarette," he said."Can you go get a cigarette off of someone?" She did not raise her head. "I hate you," she said. "What's the matter with you? First of all it's just a fucking fly, and second of all just trust me already." "I don't give a shit about the fly." 14 "Then what's the problem? Look, please just get a cigarette. Please? It'll be worth it in the end I promise." She pushed away her plate and got up. She walked off and he was left alone with the fly. It had not been moving for a long time, and when he removed his fingers, it did not float up as quickly as before. He let it reach the surface, but it no longer flailed its limbs. He dunked it again. "Where are we going?" she had asked him a few weeks ago. He had told her he didn't know, maybe south, maybe west. It was the most fun when you didn't know, when you decided on the way. "That's not what I mean," she had said, and he had felt foolish and remained silent. She came back smoking a cigarette and stood over the table. "What are you going to do now?" "Sit down." She took another drag. "Come on, please, just sit down and smoke the cigarette, but don't ash it." She stared down at him. Then she sat down. He noticed how natural her smoking gestures were, and wondered about all the parts of her he didn't know. "You smoke beautifully," he said. "Fuck you," she said. He smiled."Okay fuck me, just don't ash the cigarette." "Don't worry chief." He looked at her again and felt a swelling in his chest. He couldn't help smiling. She tried to ignore him, so he kept smiling. "Okay now watch. This fly has been underwater for a while." He pulled the fly out of the glass and plopped it on the table. It lay in a small puddle, soaked and formless in the sunlight. Its legs were soft and were stuck to its body or sprawled out and stuck to the table. "It's definitely dead right? I mean it's been under water for five minutes. That's longer than I can hold my breath, and this fly's lungs are way smaller than mine." She smoked without a word. "Is it dead or isn't it?" She looked at ash on the tip of her cigarette. "Just say it. It's dead right?" "It's dead." He smiled. "That's what I said when the cook in the army did this for me. But watch. Let me see that cigarette." She gave him the cigarette. They passed it carefully to avoid knocking off the halfâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;inch of' ash. "Watch." He ashed the cigarette onto the wet fly. He pushed it around with the lit end until the fly was completely covered. He was careful

They looked at the wet and ash—covered fly. "Here, smoke some more. We need more ash." She took the cigarette and smoked it down. 'Did you use to smoke?" She looked out the window as she brought the cigarette to her lips. Then she blinked when she took a drag. She took in some air after she removed the cigarette from her lips, and then let the smoke out sideways. "You know, ashing is the best part when you smoke," she said, holding the cigarette over her plate. They looked at each other. He wondered why she never allowed anyone to smoke in her apartment. She handed him the cigarette again, and he smiled to her but she did not smile back. He dropped more ash on the fly. There was a pile of ash in a puddle of water, the fly was buried. He poked around the ash for a while with the cigarette and waited. He looked at her and for a moment his stomach turned and he was afraid. He was afraid he had remembered it wrong. He was afraid he had slapped a happy end— ing on this distant memory just because it made a better story. "When the cook did this we watched the fly like this for maybe five minutes. Maybe more." She stopped watching the pile of ash. "Can I have the cigarette?" He looked at her as she took the cigarette from him. She held it between two extended fingers as she sipped from her coffee. He had never seen her with a cigarette before. Her natural gestures implied things. She seemed a different person, and he knew that if the trick failed he would be the same while she was different. He pushed the ash around with his finger, gently. Soon they would leave the diner and drive together to New Orleans. They would be together in the car, then together in a hotel room. Then they would go somewhere else together. When they got back home he would have to decide about the one—bedroom they had found together. It was big and it was convenient. It was exactly in the middle of the forty blocks that separated their apartments. He didn't want to get back home. He wanted to travel with her from place to place for a long time. They were both staring at the water and the ash when something kicked. One of the fly's legs kicked some ash and appeared sticking out of the pile, twitching. Then its other legs began twitching. He thought of saying "You see!" He thought that he should be feeling righteous after coming through despite her lack of faith, but he didn't feel that way. Her coolness as she watched and smoked made him sad. He reached across the table to hold her hand, but she just watched the fly. The fly flipped over onto its feet. Ash was piled onto its back and one leg still dragged behind it, but it was on its feet and moving. It cleaned itself off, stroking its wings with its hind leg, pushing the ash from itself. They watched as it cleaned its head. Then it buzzed its wings and cleaned them again. It walked along the table and occasionally tested its wings. One time it buzzed its wings and flew away. CI

.1.1M1.

Courtney Miller ACRYLIC ON PAPER - II X 4 1/2"

El am looking again at the picture you took of me in Guatemala, at the lip of the natural tunnel. I am tiny, facing upstream, while the river flows under. The fixative's bad; the whites are beginning to pink in certain places, like an oldâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;fashioned tinted photo of someone else staring upstream while a river flows under.

3NIZV9VIA1 AIIV113111 TWA aHd,

As if by design, the black's bleeding into the white, as, later, a darkness has crowded in, saturating the memory of standing there watching the river flow under. So often I've wanted to climb back into the picture and stand that still, in a perfect composition, stopped as the river is stopped before going under, instead of here, smack in my life's dead center, always the thumb stuck awkwardly into the frame, always searching upstream for what's flowing under.

Rosemary Hutzler 0 0

LATER DARKNESS

SMIflicIlf1DS

viaaw-aamw

Jacinvi lacif

Whitney Lawson --"MUSEUM OF SCIENCE"- SILVER GELATIN PRINT

What's the difkrence between a fairy tale and a cowboy story? A fa' iry tale starts out, "Once upon a time." A cowboy story starts out, "No shit, this really happened!" — Jean—Marie de Gaullard, Stories and Breaks

Preface

[Morning

20 THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

back to the ranch, nothing seemed as it had before. I was only a few weeks older, but there had been a break: the skies were not so far away, and the harmonica seemed to lodge itself in the back of my throat, where the heart begins. After all this time, I am still a sentimentalist: I love the wailing of the coyotes, colored and tightened by my cybernetic dreams of whining coprocessors and robot gasps. Despite my best efforts, I learned a few lessons on that story we have always called the open road; and I have once again fallen in love. But I take comfort in a few swatches of the familiar colors of the past, scraps dangling from that leather belt I have never been able to break in. I am still lonely; and nothing makes any sense, which is just how I like it.

Postmodernism

Joshua Kamensky El

TRAVELOG of a POST— MODERN COWBOY

A product of the twentieth century, staring up at the night sky with his copy of the latest university—press paperback translation of de Gaullard's Stories and Breaks and his harmonica pressing an exergue into his right buttock, will invariably have come to consider himself unique but unimportant."When my ship comes in," sang a man once in a bar on a dusty road which tried so hard to look like nowhere,"I'm gonna sail right out of Colorado." Swamped by this feeling of lateness, of having missed the ship that would take my dusty boots to the teller of the story at the center of it all, and deaf to my own past, I decided in the early morning of February fourteenth to leave the ranch during calving season. I am always a cowboy, and it's important to note here that I'm not just a cowboy. I am fully an intern at Wocroft Creek Cattle Ranch and Physiological Research Station, one hundred kilometers from the highest point in Eastern California and only a day's ride from Mojave. I spend my days in leather chaps driving thirsty cows to desert springs and wind— mill—driven wells, and my nights tweaking current paradigms for morphological adaptations by stretching loops of Henle in pinkish nutrient baths and forcing open neural sodium gates with electric massages. Sometimes I sleep, but only as the seasonal flux and float permit; sometimes I ride by moonlight, and sometimes I read chicken—gut prophecies in the burnt sulfur dust at the bottom of a test tube. Sometimes I can see the DNA programming in the sagebrush. All of us cowboys live in Wocroft's Residential Center: with the exception of some Paiute winter camps and pioneers' stone fire circles, Wocroft is the only housing provider in

the valley (Although our overnight mockups often imitate these primitive stops, history's detritus is broken from us: to dwell in the past would cross a break which at this point seems vital—we prefer to simulate on those moony nights). The techno—industrial complex comprising the nucleus of Wocroft sprawls across thirty acres of a closed valley floor, and the mirrored domes on its perimeter wear the reflections of aspen and the rust—colored strata of the valley walls. Hidden even from the top of Mt. Gunn by the eggy domes are five concrete cubes, each home to one of the most advanced non—affiliated physiological laboratories west of the Mississippi. They in turn surround a courtyard, and the black peak of the submerged pyramid which houses the Central Office stands ten feet above ground in the center of the lawn, its point truncated to provide a garden box for a come—springtime blush of azaleas. All but two of the silver domes shelter expensive power generators. The others hide an abattoir and the Ranch Manager's headquarters, a peculiar use of space if you ask me. 21 I love Wocroft Creek in the only way a cowboy can love a place, as a point of view. Lurched forward in the saddle of a pissing brown—tailed horse in late August, I once saw the tiniest bit of everything. The dry creekbed ran away under the bridgebottom of Los Angeles' belly (that's my horse, Los Angeles). The clouds disappeared. Behind my head, a bird had left where moisture was not to be found. Los Angeles trl passed his water, I kicked him in the side(not using my spurs—never use your spurs), and we galloped off in hot pursuit of an old cow with knowing and excuse; to than to tell time most of a wrought—iron gate around its neck. But that story is short and damaging, and takes less this, I should like to direct your attentions to more relevant interruptions. The age demands a proliferation of texts at the same time as a withering away ofnarrative: this function, by which stories shrivel up in their shells, can afford only one result. It seems to me (at this moment of text)a crime against my own project to articulate (in that curious fashion by which an essay becomes a narrative which in turn becomes "knowledge)that result, and so I will instead articulate the means ofits signi— fication: the postmodern. Attend, then, the willing fusion ofall narratives into one sublime anti—narrative, the telling of the end ofnarrative. It is a moment we will enjoy for a while, for we shall never be able to leave it, in any significant/signifiable fashion. —from Who is Jean—Marie de Gaullard? by Jean—Marie de Gaullard

What Every Cowboy Wants If every cowboy told his story at once, all the possible female characters would become impossible, as there are not enough to have only ever loved one cowboy. I used to be a lover and I will be again. Cowboys tell stories about being lovers. Stories about cowboys may feature lovers; but the moment when a lover really comes into being, he is nothing but, and that is why no cowboy can ever be a lover. Sometimes I wonder if none of this happened. If none of this really happened, then I could be a cowboy. I would be the only cowboy, the only lover, and no story could keep me from being a lover and a cowboy, and watching the sunset wash a Utah basin to sleep with restful strokes of warm orange. I would watch the sunset and let Los Angeles graze as he pleases with his bit on in front of God and high heaven, as I pretended to be lost in that moment. And I would be a lover then, too.

The Plane Ride Out Unfortunately, the Greyhound pulled into Reno at seven—thirty, leaving me no time to catch the rodeo. My flight for La Guardia International Airport planned to leave at six the next morning, so I had some empty time on my hands. My green duffel slung over my shoul— der, I walked in the middle of the empty road, and the wood—leather cadence of my boots followed a concealed rhythm down the twin yellow

trl

THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

lines. I waited to read the storefront signs until the right one came along: MOTEL.SHOWERS CHEAP 1 swung my boots to face the sign and clicked my heels, and repositioning my duffel bag to assuage my shoulders' fatigue, I could sense with cowboy instincts an abnormal myoglobin concentration in my dorsal muscles, perhaps the result of bad bus posture. I took that to be as good a sign as any that a shower loomed large in the immediate future. The Motel Los Angeles in Reno, Nevada offers showers for just five dollars and with towel and soap for five seventy—five. Having not cleansed my much—abused body for some time—a cowboy's compatriots don't notice his smell after two weeks and keep their jaws too tight to mention anything before that-1 opted to forgo frugality and splurge for the soap—and—towel option. The shower booth was private, an unexpected luxury. I hung my hat and laid down my duffel on a bench. As I peeled off my 22 workshirt in the tiny yellow changing cubicle, the door swung open, pushing me into the corner. "Oh! Excuse me," said a sweet and high voice, the voice of an angel, the voice of a girl. My arms were caught in my tight and sticky flannel, and had they been free I would surely have moved to hold the door open so that I could see the songbird in question. As the voice ran through my skin I was full of the will to act and the sad knowledge that, hampered by circumstance, I could not lengthen the moment enough to permit me access to the sight of her face. She did not close the door immediately, and I soon noticed that the doorknob was pressing into my hipbone. I disentangled myself and craned my neck around the door. She took this as an invitation to enter, and soon she had shut the door behind her. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything," she said, looking into my eyes. She was as tall as me and had an athletic frame, and in places our bodies were no more than six inches apart. Although I was confused, I was also a cowboy. The angel had blessed me with a visit, and I could not hide my innate sense of hospitality. I covered my mouth to cough and then spoke softly. "Well, no, ma'am," I said slowly and with a grin,"I was just getting ready to take a shower, though." I ran my eyes down her body to size her up. She wore a black dress with an apron. I looked back at her eyes. "I reckon you're the maid?" I asked. She opened her painted mouth as if to answer but declined, and instead placed both her hands on my bare chest. "You smell terrible," she said to me."Are you a cowboy?" I brought my hands around her waist and pulled her to me."Of course," I said. She feinted for my lips but drew away in the last millimeter, exhaling as she brushed her mouth against my cheek. My hands found a bow behind her back and started to untie it. She pressed her body to me, moving one of her legs between mine. "Oh," she murmured,"ohh." She ran her hands around my torso and up my back to my neck, pulling my head down to kiss her throat. "I can always tell the cowboys—oh shit, 1 can't do this, you smell really bad." She pushed me away and leaned back against the wall and swallowed."Look, why don't you clean up and then I'll come back, in say, Fifteen minutes? Is that all right? Yes, I think that should be all right." With one hand out to keep balance, she opened the door and left. I held her apron, which was nice, because I had forgotten to pick up my towel.

Our Hero At the ranch, our hero is John Wayne. Old Jeb told me that a villain once passed through Wocroft, but the story ends there, or more accurately never takes off: no one is known to have fought him, challenged him to a duel at high noon, shot the six—shooters out of his hands, married his mother and sold his birthright. With John Wayne in mind, I once set off on my journey, and with John Wayne in mind, I found I sounded a lot more like a cowboy.

A Sense of Bolivia

Sr-

The Drive to State University of New York at Persephone I picked up the rental car at LaGuardia and sped out of the airport towards a pile of slag I had had cause to frequent in the past. There, with copper wire, lost vulture feathers, unearthed graphite, and broken circuitry boards I fashioned those things I wanted on my dashboard for the journey: a compass, a key chain, an Eiffel tower in miniature, and extra nylon cord. From my pocket I took the seal of approval: a trading card—sized picture of the Ranch Manager, ten—gallon hat, chaps, and jagged shave. His eyes were such that they could never meet mine as I looked at the picture, moving it in front of my face. drove with premium unleaded in the tank and a magnetic emptiness in my heart. I hadn't seen Montana for six years and I knew she was still moving water under me, still my water, not any special love. I hadn't driven automatic for some time either, and I sank in, working my right foot into the flesh of the rubber traction lines on the pedals, my harmonica's pressure in my back pocket the only sensation dividing me from the white—bodied 1990 model. It handled the curves with precision and a controllable drama, and feeding on inertial swing the magnetic emptiness in my heart followed a perpendicular vector into my throat with every hairpin or sloped curve. Persephone was an hour outside of La Guardia (including the junkyard visit) and I told myself stories with heavy details about Wocroft and the beautiful valley behind me.

The End of Narrative sensing but not trompe l'oeil bootsgirlfr smokehouse "we must not over indulge our mythic preponderancies and forsake sy—yence" mama "worth your weight in cowshit" C—G—F—DC— bluejean soup Bolivia High Noon >ahem< shATLANTEA?owdown embrace of love

best table at the

What Every Cowboy Gets Every cowboy can make love to most women. The question is not so much,"Can he get her in bed?" as "Did he take his boots off?"

Encounters With the Other

3NIZV9VW AlIV113.1.11 31VA 31-11,

Bolivia cleans the hotel in Santa Rosalita, a town three hundred miles due south of Wocroft Ranch and Research Station. She supports an impressive, motherly bosom, and complains of flat feet. She lets cowboys make love to her, although I have never tried. A posse from Wocroft. went down to Santa Rosalita and I was on that posse. While the other cowboys waited their turn to make love to Bolivia, I asked the night boy questions about his life. He insisted on ignoring my questions and preferred to tell me his story in quick and idiomatic Spanish, and as a result I understood nothing. My questions and his story intersected. I asked him if he had ever made love to Bolivia, and he mentioned later on that she was his mother. Later on I read to the other cowboys from The de Gaullard Reader. We had circled the beds as was our habit, and they fell asleep one 23 by one, Black Jim signifying the end of the audience with his legendary snore, the snore that sounds like a sawmill full of fresh birch.

Montana, a bioethicist, had taken up with a woman some months back name of Cynthia, and she introduced us in the cafeteria of State University of New York—Persephone. Cynthia had coffee—two—cream skin, a color which I (as a cowboy) have always preferred in women than in coffee. Montana did not remember that she had introduced me to Cynthia the last time I saw her, at a New Year's party in a bar off Route One in Connecticut, while a slow and reverberant rock song was playing. There had been a lot of smoke and spilled beer, and Montana had not yet fallen in love with Cynthia, though she told me in confidence, "If you don't fuck her I may very well." As these things half the time do, the prophecy came to pass: Cynthia's red eyes struck fear into my gonads, and my cowboy stammer lost its charm. That was then: neither woman seemed to recognize the preface to the story at hand, and sensing a cognitive paradigmatic disso— Cynthia's hand and with wind—blown and sun—bleached cowboy charm, asked her to dance. Montana returned our trays, and the 24 nance, I took lovelorn behind us watched and decorated the string—laden ceiling music with a quick and joyous four—part harmony which bounced off of the linoleum and wrapped us up and outside of Persephone, the world, and all that was anywhere.

The Hotel Maid Never Came Back

Encounters with the Other's Shared One-Bedroom Apartment Off-Campus Montana and Cynthia shared a one—bedroom apartment off campus. The floors were hardwood, the wall—hangings bad local art, and Montana poured two Bloody Marys and a whiskey for me. Sitting on beanbags in the living room, we drank and talked. "Cigarette?" offered Cynthia in a colorless, compelling voice. "I never smoke," I said, moving my harmonica to my front pocket as I shifted on the beanbag. Montana spotted the harmonica and indelicately chose it to pivot out of the conversation. "If you're going to blow on that old piece of tin, I'm going to bed," she said, and dumped her Bloody Mary in the sink, splashing the wall. Montana had been a cowboy once, but had given it up for the academic life. No matter where she was, I missed her. "Would you play me a cowboy song?" asked Cynthia. She was different from all the others, this coffee—two—cream woman; she had a tension inside that I hoped to spring. Even as I blew the opening notes of"Home on the Range," I could not avoid inflecting them with the potential energy I had absorbed from the room, wound as it was into my sinews, my nerve—permeating acetylcholine, my heart.

The Re-establishment of Narrative tap spit out of harmonica wait for the right wind thinking of Arizona mud and the red reflected, play a song for the coyotes and the dogies and then, say "I—

[see "The End of Narrative]

Play and the Slash in the Self/Other Split Would it be too totalizing (and antithetical to our project, that unique function occurring between you[the Reader]and 11[the author, or rather, your conception of the author]), to admit that words change in speech as subjects do in the act oflove? We need not speak oflove's mundane occurrences to see the matrices ofdifference warp out of the confines oftheir two—dimensional plots, like Einstein's space—time graphs 25 twisted at the extremes. It is as one word takes pleasure that we suspect the word has drawn up into itself, into the purity ofits signification. We can see that ultimately, the sign withdraws to a location defined by the power in which it finds itself, the surrounding—encompassing— Other'subject. Only in the use of terms as in the union ofsex does the line between disintegrate:subject becomes signifier, selfand other become one. —from Stories and Breaks by Jean—Marie de Gaullard Through it all, my harmonica went undamaged. I found it when the sun woke me up, with Cynthia's head on my chest, my head wedged into the beanbag, the two of us incautiously wrapped in natty blankets and the guest linens. My harp glinted sunbeams from the coffee table, next to the cigarettes and the prophylactics. My boots were standing at the outer edge of our tangy mess of cloth and clothing. I put on my underpants, my jeans, and my boots (I had not taken off my socks). Cynthia, unawake, rolled onto her side and nestled her head in the beanbag. My watch said seven—thirty. I leaned over and placed a kiss on her back. "You play well. You sound lonely, like a cowboy should," she said, taking the harmonica out of my hands. "It's my job," I said."Cowboys are lonely men. They have to spend nights and sometime seasons with no company save the lowing of the herd and the falling level in the whiskey bottle." She brushed the harmonica over her lips. "You have to pucker," I said. She puckered. I lifted myself out of my seat and sat down next to her, planting a hand on her beanbag to steady myself. I held the harmonica with my other hand, so her lips touched C."Now blow," I said. She closed her eyes and blew lightly, and the harmonica acknowledged her. I moved it down to G."Blow," I said. She did. Back to the first hole. "Inhale," I said, so she would get a D. She blew, sounding a C. "No," I said. She did not move. Her eyes were closed. I slowly moved the harmonica away from her face and kissed her, once, slowly. We pulled apart and she opened her eyes. "I liked that," she said. "I like you," I answered, my heart rising in my throat. I stammered."Montana," I said, indicating the next room. "She's wanted this to happen for ages," said Cynthia. "But aren't you two—?" "Roommates. That's all." I had played myself for the fool, and felt no dismay at having done so. Cynthia pulled me down on top of her, and soon my boots were off, and my jeans were off, and that was all of me.

Home home on the range

THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

"I might very well think of you some time, when the moon is full and the horses are tired." "I might fall in love with you." "I might have been researching adaptation in the renal function of desert lagamorphs for hours on end over the ethernet, and the sun might glint off a test tube, and I might lose myself in remembering." "I might miss you," she said.

The Lyrics to Home on the Range Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play Where never is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day Home Home On the Range Where the deer and the antelope play—ee Where seldom Is heard A discouraging Word And the skies are not cloudy and gray.

Notes From The Wocroft Report(*limiting perspective)

"The results of varying venous oxygen content and the consequences of nn allometric model suggesi performance, which will be called the 'exchange potential ratio (EPR) to avoid confusion with the CPR. This index is the ratio of the maximum up oxygen to the maximum potential for the water to give up oxygen, or: EPR=Qq(Pi)—(Cv)/VGa(Pi—Pv F the blood.—" where q(Pi) is a function giving th

Imminent: A Conflation of Texts It was important to keep moving, at that time. The violence of the Eastern Sierras suggests that only cataclysm can mean real motion, and the slowness of upheaval inscribed in the rocks surrounding the valley cast a cold shadow over the sundry here—to—theres of ranch and laboratory life. A cowboy dressing in a one—bedroom in Persephone, New York, can see history's moments closing in on him, and not wishing to be a prisoner to either geology or love, keeps on keepin' on. To Cynthia, I said all the goodbyes which mean "when next we meet,"

and to Montana I winked and then allowed her to embrace me."So long, pardner," she said to me, and chewing on nothing in particular I stepped happy to my rental car, parked on the street. I wanted to live cross—time, to walk in a straight line over a curved glass dome and see the regular flow of events on the flat plain below I drove towards all the places I had always wanted to see, and the one which came up first was only two hundred miles down this road or that, an old haunt, my girl Atlantea. The strength of our friendship had waxed and waned over the years. Our correspondence recently restarted, we had found in each other a kind of friendship predicated not so much on anything in common but a willingness to write words the other could understand, in only visceral grammars. Her letters meant things I had not known without putting them in contexts to which I could relate. This was a strange moment to visit her, because I had told her I would stay on the range through the next two seasons and only then start to think about coming home. She worked out of her house, a geodesic dome with wide circular portals at each of the cardinal directions, and a bent skylight at the top. She drew blueprints for Alternative Living Models, and had a thing against right angles in unbent space. Many of her clients complained of vertigo, a problem about which she had written to me in hopes that I could offer more mundane advice than I was accustomed to giving. My response brought things to a cusp, and I had regretted giving it. Cowboys should stick to abstractions, and cows.

Job Description(Part I) A night at Wocroft is like the largest refrigerator in the world, and freon coils loop in the sky, lending that splendid feeling of icy clear vision. I remember the first time I saw the place, coming into the valley from T—bone Pass, the great amphibious army truck barrelling down the hill in neutral. The Ranch Manager once told me,"Son, ain't no way you can even lead these damn horses to water anymore. All you can do is ride 'em and hope they know where they're goin' or that they don't want to die," and as he spoke I saw him for the first time have difficulty pick— ing bacon bits out of his bushy, bushy moustache. Good cowboy hats can be bought cheap for $99 at the Gift Shop, although I've never sus— pected any cowboy of buying a gift; cowboys fashion their gifts out of windblown bones and diesel fumes, tinsongs and Mexican ropes. In Main Office I once saw the budget report for the Research Station and Cattle Ranch, but I saw them upside down an was only affected by how complete the poetry of the place seemed against the tumbleweed blowing across External Video Camera Three—West. Although the tip of the pyramid can be seen from outside, only wet—heads and motocross junkies populate the extreme valley walls. Heeding the advice of a country song and a wrinkled man, we spent the evening decentering notions of space and identity. "Hoss! Damn hose exclaimed the Ranch Manager; to my eyes, there was nothing left to see except for the ways in which dust clouds bend light to fit psy— chology. My gaiters tight and chaps cracked, I pushed (with the help of The Chinaman)three hundred head of cattle into the mountains one summer, only to find that the coffee had boiled over and no eggshells anymore because no eggs. 'Wait," I said. "You've got to catch up," said the Ranch Manager "Wait," I said. "Cowboys don't have time to put everything together" said the Ranch Manager."Everything's broken anyhow," he said. "I'm coming," said, I andputI down my book. How did Black Jim ever convince me that he was selling by the minute? going faster than the speed of sound of cows lowing in the darkness before the dawn breaks breaks the concentration on the right amount of light of candles of one by one down the dirt road to the well of lonely, lonely cowboys singing stupid happy songs, and lonely, lonely cowboys never too fat to appreciate the smell of the sight of the cloud of fire in the wood stove in the old camp in the old and hard of hearing days.

Icons: Gas Phone Food

THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

There is always a time of day that I do not know where I am going and inevitably navigate by sun—bleached stars and avian trails. At noon, at the midpoint of my journey from Persephone to Atlantea, the asphalt oven straightaways started to drive me faster than the rental car, drive me out of my homeothermic flesh and through the floating microwaves, into the ethereal stampedes of ghostly steers, out of their geography on the New York Thruway. I could stand the cranial vapor pressure no longer and pulled over at a highway rest stop, hoping to ventilate and recap. I pulled the rental up next to a pay phone and laid out my options. It was important, at that time, to keep moving. I decided that it might be good to call Cynthia. I thought I could have left something at her apartment. It is not atypical, for a cow— boy to do that. A machine answered. The gently fading reverberations of her memory in my heart, already distanced, struck unevenly against the fluctuating sine wave of the answer's magnetic alto, and I could feel a distortion pattern cast through my body."We're not home right now," she announced,"leave a message," she called,"and we'll get back to you as soon as possible," she sang, and despite the peculiar movements of the clock I kept, I could tell that as soon as possible spelled disaster. I put the phone down. Cowboys don't carry pagers. The gas station attendant lent me the restroom key while he pumped my gas, and slightly dizzy (it had been hot) I made my way to the toilet. Written in clumsy marker around the perimeter of the mirror were: MEAT IS MURDER INDIVIDUALITY IS A SYMPTOM OF METANARRATION.TO SURVIVE POSTMODERNITY YOU MUST BE ABLE TO ACCESSORIZE. —jean—marie de gaullard, slogans ofabsence FOR A GOOD TIME CALL xy141@amitol.unfun.edu I stood up, turned around, and clenched my stomach muscles until I was moving away and did not need to vomit.

Commitment and the Postmodern "No, of course not, Atlantea. I'm a cowboy." "What does that mean? Talk to me in words I know, cowboy. No myths between us. Live up to the pages you spend so much money to get to me." I used to send my letters written in the backs of turtle shells, packed in ball bearings in toaster boxes, a shell at a time."I mean, that no matter what I do in Persephone, here in your geodesic dome only five miles from the beautiful Hudson River and the greenest trees in the world and the birds of a thousand migration patterns, I am yours, and the events of which we speak and to which we hopefully allude—" I was fidgeting with my harmonica and here I stabbed it into the wet potting—soil of her Ficus tree, and I swallowed because my throat was very dry— "are irrelevant to any context in which you would like to place them, in order to nail me to History or some virtue you imagine. It's ugly, Atlantea, and I don't like it. I expect more of you." "Did you fall in love with the bioethicist at State University of New York—Persephone?"

My First Letter to Cynthia Dear Cynthia, I wanted to write "I love you in the earth using the jagged chip offa tibia pulled from the vulture—and—roach—cleaned carcass ofa cow who was lonely until she died, and I wanted to write it a hundred times and send it to you with everything in it except me. I wanted to write "I love you"in the DNA ofsix hundred kestrels and bid them "Go,go to Cynthia,'and though it would take six generations for the dumb birds to find you, the writing would still be there when they did. I wrote "I love you"on the hooves ofa gelding, on the base ofa silver dome, and at the bottom of Mt. Gunn.I wrote "I love you" with a fountain pen, with a glass of water (precious, in the arid basins ofEastern California), and with a mirrored shard. I wrote "I love you" on the skull ofa research—lab skeleton, in the header ofa lab report, and on top ofMt. Gunn. In parentheses, I write 7love you at the beginning ofevery footnote. Writing "I love you"doesn't tell any stories, but it doesn't get me out ofany either.

Text and Context Were Sitting on a Fence "I don't like to think of it in those terms," I answered Atlantea, after we had kept a stare for well over twenty—five seconds, the inter— species average length of a stare across gender lines as determined in a chapter of the 1992 Wocroft Report. She stood at the end of a white formica counter—top peninsula, the kitchen area behind her. Her small elbows propped her up, and as the sun fell to the right place, her hair seemed to disappear into light at the fringes. I hoisted myself onto the counter, blocking the sunlight, and touched her shoulders. I was an eclipse, and I could feel the sun on my neck. She turned to face me, pulling away."I don't really know what you have been talking about," she said,"the words you use, I don't know them. I read your letters for the breaks, the double spaces. I read your handwriting, your thumbprint on the tortoise shells." She started to walk around the kitchen, and I moved my head back and forth to direct the setting spotlight into her hair, to send it through her light dress. When I moved and she moved, I could make an angel out of her. She talked about letters; about the way a draughtsman feels when she has to write words without blue lines; about driveways and the

29 3NIZV9VIAI AIIVII3.1.11 31VA HHJ.,

She had made a mistake, and it occurred to me in that moment in that geodesic dome to say no, I could never, she will always and only be a friend and she is my water and I could nevet I could say that rightfully and be done with that and very probably become a cow— boy and a lover in a very real and fulfilling way, right there, in Atlantea's living room, and then remember to pick up my harmonica from the soil of the ficus tree. Instead, I picked up the harmonica from the soil of the ficus tree and fidgeted with it as I spoke."Ask me a question about who I am now," I said, my throat drying. "Did you fall in love with that woman?" she asked again, and given her move to the general I realized with some relief that the deceit I had conceived no longer constituted a viable course of action. I still declined to answer the question until the phrasing suited me."Don't ask me about old chapters, and I won't tell you cowboy stories. Ask me—" "No shit, huh?" Atlantea stared at me. She had long, wavy, golden hair, and the late afternoon light coloring it took me back to a place I had left, a place far away from my heart, at the kind of distance only a cowboy can know. Distance for a cowboy happens in the heart. He can never know where he is, as he is always so far away. "Are you in love with that woman?" asked Atlantea. "Um," I said, and knowingly broke with my heart.

sudden appearances of rental cars bearing cowboys. She talked about love, and that she thought she could be in it with me. As she stepped back, she shrank; as she moved closer, she grew. I lay down on the counter and listened to her talk about passion, and I knew the connection between us was, as I thought, out of time. I heard her words come nearer and move back. Suddenly she was on me, a kitchen knife in her hand. Cowboys aren't afraid of women with knives; in fact, every cowboy worth his spit has known threats of puncture and slash wounds to his cojones of varying degrees of specificity and probability. I relaxed; a woman with a knife usually means that sex is in the near future. And so it was: Atlantea was on me, because we knew each other so well, understood each other on a level (I like to think) beyond the words on the page. As she had said, she read more than all that. With the heavy breath of violence, she slashed through my shirt and kissed my chest where the knife cut me lightly. She ripped the shirt apart at the slash. I squeezed her wrist and she dropped the knife, and then I held her to me as she forced my mouth open with hers. Everything came together in a moment, forcing away the accumulated debris of history, of events I had known, events outside the text. We were nothing but cowboy and woman, two individuals inhabiting the closest thing to the same event.

The Cowboys Interrupt the Narrative(As Told to Them) "Well, I'll be fucked if he even got his jeans past his ass." "Shit, you wouldn't be fucked if you bought your horse dinner" "You shut your fat lips. You ever ride Bolivia without your boots on?" "Naw, she likes me to keep my boots on. She calls it cowboy style," The both of you no—good grit—sucking hoss—blowing baby stealers, shut up or I'll brand your hides Triple M and clean it off with cowshit. All right, cowboy, who'd ya fuck next?"

The Return of Hearing The sun dipped beneath the window, and quiet covered us. Quiet was a plane, bulging in little mounds where our unmatched shallow breaths from the countertop poked at its surface. The rush of history was near, and I knew if I did not leave soon I would never escape. Atlantea lay on top of me, collapsed, exhausted. Although letters and memories had led up to it, we had captured a moment free of inevitability. She burrowed her head in my neck and moaned softly. There had been nothing else. Staring up at the ceiling, I found I was hav— ing trouble breathing under her weight. Slowly the interruptions of the world returned. We moved apart. We stood on either side of the counter and rearranged ourselves. My harmonica was in my jeans pocket. The darkness was still young, and I could see her face very well, save where her hair had fallen."Do you love me?" she asked. "Only now," I said, and I yearned to be for once back in the tiniest bit of everything, at Wocroft, straddling the dry creek, Los Angeles, the bird, the sky. Away. "Yes," I said, after we looked at each other across the counter for sometime. "Yes," I repeated. "Hold me," she said, and I walked around to her slowly. I put my arms around her so there was still space. She leaned to one side of my embrace and faced outward. The tatters of my shirt hung about my chest, and I could feel her shaking against my skin. "Tell me a story," she whispered.

'Do you know the one about the cowboy?" I asked, looking towards the exit, towards the driveway. Ithink so," she said. "Do you know the one about the open road?" "Yes," she said, and she cried softly. It was time to go.

The End of the Story—This Really Happened Nothing matters after you get back home. Fortunately, if you're a cowboy, you never do. No, the story of the cowboy tells and is told by the story of the open road, and one thing you can count on about the open road: even if you keep going in circles, that's one more time you've been around the block. I read once, somewhere, in The de Gaullard Reader perhaps, that "I love you" is the only sentence that doesn't tell a story. I'm pretty sure by this point that he's wrong, but there's something to it: when you say it right, it's really only a noun. I always seem to say it wrong, but maybe someday I'll hit it. The problem with "No shit, this really happened," as de Gaullard explained in a paper delivered to the Ecole Normale Superieure— aside from the nostalgic hope of objective reference delineated by the word 'really'— is that regardless of what happened, you're still telling a story, and you can't help it. That's what makes things go, insofar as they do. I thought once that a cowboy could stop and just watch the sun— set, but now I'm not so sure: I don't think there's a story out there I couldn't tell, although I never said there's a story out there. I've got a horse beneath my saddle and a saddle beneath my bruised and broken ass, anyhow; and with that, for better or for worse, a story between my lips. Distance, then, and the heart: I will only ever be able to see the dry creek bed, and never tell its own story. I'm selfish that way, the way a self is. I have told my own; and I have told it to Los Angeles, and to Montana, and to silver domes and the Ranch Manager and the cowboys, good scruffy lot. I have told too much by hiding it at times. I have not told enough to Cynthia. And,she wrote me,she likes it that way. El

Helen Smith SILVER GELATIN PRINT

Daniel Filler PRINTS

RIeaves fall, and the poem is in their veins, In the ribbed undersides and in the pulse and rustle Of their gathering. Some kind of nesting instinct Has moved in, taking the shape of arms Buried in the drifts atop dish water, of bodies Burrowed beneath the comforters and quilts.

These are the things we do to keep a house, To keep the woods outside; we spend our days Cleaning away the curves of earthen footprints. This refusal to read the red earth and the leaves Has made my pockets bulge. I am hoarding words, Squirreling them away, stuffing the lining Of my coat and the gap between bed and wall. Soon, the flat sky's final, silent, exhalation Will leave the lines of branches bare, and I will be sweeping pieces of the world Out into the air through which nothing falls. To tap hardwood and draw the sap would be To open a vein and suck the blood and laugh.

Rebecca Lesnik El

TAPPING THE VEIN

It's winter; the leaves pile and I'm not writing. I am asking for a few more hours of daylight, or For what is right, the surge of language at my temples: Nightly I take out my collection and spread it on the floor: I stroke the words, rake them into piles, make collages; I hang some of them on the walls; I try microwaving one. Please, this is as serious as the first lie told:

They turn and take on a life of their own, creeping From their places to dance in the living room. Suddenly bold, they mambo, rhumba, meringue, Form a conga line and tread the last of the leaves. I hear glass breaking and paintings falling from walls. I rise to ask them to keep it down—I want sleep. Their parties get wilder: there is frantic coupling In the bathtub and on the kitchen counter; A bullwhip cracks and in the morning there are Handcuffs left around the leg of the couch. They've begun to make demands on me, Telling me which pens and notebooks to buy. Having gained a body and a voice, they say I am not to leave my room until I write something. But in the living—room corners there are card tables; The words are eating bridge mix from my mother's Old cut—glass dishes. They're playing canasta And pinochle. There's no sound but the slap of cards. Bound to my chair, I am turning leaves to read The hidden bone—stories. The scrawl of branches On windows has shaken me down to the root of it all, To the cold place where the veins must be opened. This is the fatal promise of spring thaw: The sky will open and my lips will be red With blood that is my own and not my own.

Courtney Miller GRAPIIITE ON PAPER

L__

t,/

IP t4

.w4'

Ulm glad to know your heart aches...not for me, I'm glad to know my heart aches...not for you, That never will this heavy earthen sphere, Unnoticed drift away beneath our feet. I'm glad to know that I can be absurd, Disheveled—and not play with clever words, Not blush bright red to show I've lost my nerve, Each time you lightly brush against my sleeve. I'm also glad to know that near me, you Can calmly, unconcerned, embrace another, And you don't damn my soul to burn in hell Because I'm not the one embracing you; That my dear tender name, my dear one, you, By night or day, will not proclaim...in vain; That strains of "Alleluia," in refrain Will never fill the air for me with you.

Mariana Tsvetaeva 3May 1915 El El

TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY ANDREW GETMAN

I thank you, with my heart and with my hand, For loving me so kindly without knowing, For all these gifts...for nighttime tranquil rests, For each day we don't meet as the sun sets, For all our moonlit strolls that don't take place, For the sun that, for us, shines not overhead, For this that your heart aches— (Aakhh!) not for me, For this that my heart aches— (Aakhh!) not for you.

4.11,

SEX, AMBIGUITY and the NEW ROMANTICS 39

M ID

HNIZV9VIAT A/IV1131.11 31VA 31-11,

(After Hugh Honour's Romanticism) El

Austin Bunn

"It is impossible to think seriously ifone uses words like Classicism, Romanticism, Humanism, or Realism. Nobody can get drunk or quench their thirst on labels." Paul Valery, Mauvaises Pensies nfortunately, we have a problem with generational thinking. It seems to us the decades are facile land— LPJ marks for cultural change—even the attempt at namelessness becomes naming ("Generation X"). But while we resist, like Valery, we also willfully embrace labels and depend on them to structure our history. Somehow progressive, beat— nik, and yuppie are terms that manage to maintain their authenticity, suggesting perhaps that we "My purpose is to simply must make the labels better. tell of bodies which have been transformed The identity paradox, between labeling and rejecting labels, characterizes the current into shapes of dif— stage, most powerfully for those raised on home computers, those who know how to program a ferent kinds..." VCR. Those born under the long shadow of a great plague. Ovid, Metamorphoses This paradox is certainly not new and, most importantly, is not even a paradox. The past Faulkner. isn't dead. It isn't even past. Stolen.

LI First came chaos. Night, its psychological bedfellow, followed. In this dark, shape spilled into shape; "the earth had no firmness, the water no fluidity." Then, according to Ovid, a god cleaved the world into ordered separation—from his hand a sweeping catalogue of forms made of oblivion, building to breath. These primordial moments reveal a central contradiction: chance reduced into system, system swollen by chance.

"Before there was any earth or sea, before the canopy of heaven stretched over— head, Nature presented the same aspect the world over, that to which men have given the name of Chaos..." Ovid, Metamorphoses

THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

In 1886, Nietzsche, as a disciple of the German hedonist Wagner, composed The Birth of Tragedy and he remains in startling agreement with Ovid over the two great principles governing culture: ordering and chaotic force. Constantly in flux, these influences can be described by a classical binary, between "uniformity, orderliness, and unadulterated seriousness" of Apollo versus a Dionysian "variability, playfulness and frenzy"(Plutarch, Moralia). Sobering logic against "intoxication;" One versus oneness. According to that ...In W.H. Matlock's The New spastic prophet Camille Paglia, Republic,— the aesthete— "In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes figure says that the only the boundary lines that are civilization but lead to convention, constraint, thing requisite to complete the contemplation of oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, callous, destructive, wasteful"(Sexual Westminister Bridge at sunset Personae, 96). is the sight of a poor unfor— The attempt to isolate them proves impossible: This is an embarassingly tunate casting herself from simple typology: there the parapet into the Thames." each enlightenment fails to obscure its oppo— site—purity must therefore have its abomina— are only two types of Michael Tanner, introduction to The Birth of Tragedy tion. As they twist in a deep symbiosis, western people in the world-culture moves between these two encompassing those who believe there are two types of people fields: Apollonian stasis and Dionysian metamorphosis. and those who do not. Despite this primeval duality, the remainder of history has constituted one Apollo and Dionysus long funeral for chaos in the strategies of the Socratics, the sacraments of the medieval church, the precision of the Renaissance (which celebrated the body, but always its clean threshold), and the 18th century modern apotheosis of the rational mind. Though submerged beneath Apollo for millenia, Dionysus never— theless surfaced in the shadowy regions of religion and nearly all regions of sex.

The High Romantics(1790-1830) resurrected chaos. Between abandon and ardor, intimate participation and removed categorization, the schizophrenia of the Romantics exhibited itself in their dual acceptance and resis— tance as the inheritors of Ovid's oblivion. Romanticism itself(a word derived from the French vernacular— "roman"—developed in opposition to learned Latin) was born from a rampage of "For Beauty is nothing cultural disjunction and excessive intellectual order. In the early 19th century, as but the beginning of ter— which we are just ror, the Enlightenment drew to a close against the rapacious violence of the French able to endure, and we Revolution, the philosophed brutal skepticism turned back on themselves, attacking are so awed by it because the "sufficiency of human reason, and the logical order of the universe"(Honour, 21). it serenely disdains to Again came chaos. annihilate us." In this day, Romanticism pulses with a chthonic energy, heralding a stun— Rilke, Duino Elegies ning individuality exalted by the structural sublime—definitively expressive and mimetic. The Romantics(Wordsworth, Shelley, Caspar David Friedrich—the list is dangerously open—ended)took sense from a world engulfed in fire, then methodically threw themselves upon the pyre."The Romantics appealed only to their own sensibilities—to their own 'living experiences' which alone could grant value and authenticity to their work"(Honour, 25). From 1790 to 1931, when W.B. Yeats prematurely declared them dead, the Romantics

Tragedy

III The resemblances to the Romantics are striking; the young artists in Paris at the turn of the 19th century "had no programme, no common goal: they did not offer new dogmas for the old"(Honour, 23)—more accurately the lack of dogma as dogma. They defined themselves in the pursuit of one goal: the authentic experience. In the words of Victor Hugo,"bus les systemes sont faux—le genie seul est vrai." Their search only drove them apart from each other, leading them to drastically contrary conclusions—"it is not the similarities but the differences which resemble one another"(Honour, 19), Their faith in the uniqueness of their characters refused to be "submerged in any school or coterie"(Honour, 20). The parallels with current stigmatizing "hip generalizationing (stolen from Jeff Giles's Newsweek article 8/17/94) are painfully evident.

IV More than any other movement, the Romantics represented the triumph of ambiguity; they were fascinat— ed by relativism and such elusive distinctions "...as those between genius and talent, imagination and fancy, original— ity and novelty, truth and verisimilitude, sensibility and sentimentality"(Honour, 25), and by extension, I would argue: hetero— and homosexuality. Identity and individuality. Gender issues—from sex education to experimentation—are certainly not new, but they have become the flash point at which we, as an oppositional generation, find our most polemical strength an most terrifying awk— wardness. It is precisely these areas that contain the most dark, Dionysian energy—a terrifyingly explosive force. [And I use "we" purposely—your hesitation (reader) at my inclusiveness is primarily a Romantic force, both resisting and demanding definition.] Certain figures from the cultural landscape successfully occupy this liminal space. We are drawn to them because they maintain in balance the contradiction of Dionysian charge and Apollonian ambition. Artist Cindy Sherman, a photographer who has spent her career inserting herself into the history of portraiture and film, and the artfully earnest folk—singer Ani Di Franco take power from their profoundly ambiguous identities. While Sherman seems to erase herself completely within her photographic imitations, she also dominates them; she is both conven— tion and invention, the entirety of the past and the overwhelmingly immediate. With raw talent and poignancy,

gNIZV9VW AlIV)13.1.11 TWA gl-II

lived, but, most critically, they were always dying. That was part of their charm. Like the peripatetic artists in European self—exile during the 1930s(Hemingway, James Baldwin, etc.) and Kerouac's distinctly American "new romantics" twenty years later, I offer the resurgence "Schopenhauer actually of Romanticism, or perhaps more accurately, the return of ambiguity. Formulated says thaat the gift of through contemporary fluid sex—roles and the primacy of the individual voice, our cur— being able at times to see men and objects as rent age, in sharp contradistinction from that preceding us, seems to possess a profound mere phantoms or dream understanding of the accuracy of contradiction: sexuality that rejects clear sex roles, and images is the mark of a diversity that resists essentialization. We have no secure sense of common ideology or philosophic capacity." teleology—this is a quiet revolution of individuality. 'Nietzsche, The Birth of

THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

Ani Di Franco, like the actor—personality River Phoenix and the singer Michael Stipe, simultaneously seduces and confuses: how can they be so revitalizing, so fascinating? Because they are primarily question marks,somewhere between pure sexuality and removed, sensual grace. Writer Jeannette Winterson, in her romance Written on the Body, applies this ambiguity formally as she refuses to reduce her narrator into gender. Fundamentally, is Kurt Cobain, that chaotic masterpiece, far off the mark when he claims, in "All Apologies", that "everyone is gay"? In the Dionysian rebirth, order will not vanish. Patterning must remain for the violations to have meaning. But in that, the spontaneity and inconsistencies (like sex itself) must be embraced. The unresolved character, an incomplete narrative, a "dubious sexual— ity," the critically open—ended: all these are our catalogue of forms. We should see ourselves as distinct in these shadows. We must resur— rect the personality of the term "romantic" from the lobotomy it has undergone. We must abandon ourselves to chaos and return to flu— idity.

Books plagiarized: Honour, Hugh. The Romantics. Nietzsche, Frederick. The Birth of Tragedy. Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae.

Rupinder Singh ELLORA, INDIA -- SILVER GELATIN PRINT

the end.

Shira

Weinert

GOLD TONE P.O.P

-./

eferring to John Crowley's fiction, Robert Chatain of The Chicago Tribune said,"there is no temptation to confuse these with other fictions; there's really nothing like them." David G. Hartwell, editor of The World Treasury ofScience Fiction, said that Crowley's cult classic Little, Big "is a dense, literate novel that is a standard against which others [in the genre] are now measured. His work bridges the gap between standard fiction, fantasy and science fiction, a predomi— nant figure in the carving out of a new niche called "literary science fiction." His works blend the magical and the real, all with a subtle undercurrent of irony.

The Yale Literary Magazine: To start at the beginning, what led you to become a writer?

John Crowley: I've written ever since I can remember when I was a little kid. -4

Elana Zeide 0 El

An Interview

with JOHN

CROWLEY

The first thing I wrote was called Bloody Knife in collaboration with my sister when we were both about eight. Actually, when I was in high school I wanted to be a stage designer, but I kept on writing. I wrote poetry, plays, started a novel, all that sort of stuff. Then I tried to escape my fate. When I was in college [at the University of Indiana, class of'641 I majored in English, but I was interested in film making. When I left school, I moved to New York where for the next five or six years I worked mostly as a photographer...then it all came back again. But I didn't think of what I was doing as writing. I thought it was something else, I didn't quite know what it was. I didn't sit down to have a career as a writer or to write a novel. I started writing a book about the future, and over time it did turn into some— thing describable as a novel. It didn't get published, at least not then. I'd rediscovered this vocation I'd been in a way avoiding, an it turned out that I had a talent for it that I should've known about, that I'd forgotten. I became very consciously a writer of novels, started thinking about novels, reading other peo— ple's novels in a way I hadn't before.

YLM: How did you move from there to develop your career? JC: It was partially a part of choosing to write this novel in the future. This was about sixty—seven, eight, nine. It was an experimental and interesting time in sci— ence fiction, you could write almost any sort of novel you wanted. As long as it was something about the future, technology or another planet, you could get it

published and get it highly regarded. It was a great way for unpublished, beginning writers to get a book published and get encouragement for a career, After that first one, I said,"That was fun to do, now I'll write one that can get published." So I wrote a real standard science Fiction novel called The Deep. After that I was on a roll and did another [Beasts], and then rewrote that first book which was also published as a science fiction novel[Engine Summer]. So now I am a science fiction writer at this point.

YLM: Do you consider your work science fiction? JC: Those first three novels. YLM: Some people characterize your work as literary science fiction— JC: I don't know what they mean by that, really. Being a genre writer is difficult because genre writers don't discriminate between good writing or not, all they're interested in is this the type of book. Being in the genre is more important than the book itself. So literary science fiction would be a book good in and of itself as well as fitting into a genre. The last four books I've written cannot be characterized as science fiction in any way. They're long family chronicles that have magical ele— ments. Little Big, probably my best—selling book, gets sold as a fantasy book. But the next two I wrote, Aegypt and Love ofSleep are not science fiction, they're just books. I've worked my way out of the genre.

YLM: Some unusual things do happen in these new books, though. JC : Some magical things happen, there's no doubt about that, but I don't think they're genre magical things. YLM: Do you believe in the magical? JC: No, I believe in the powers of fiction. I don't particularly believe in magic, I think if I believed in it I wouldn't be writing about it. You write about things to supply yourself with things you don't have, rather than the other way around. It makes up for the dimensions you don't have in the life. It's a creation that has its own rules. I can make them up, so I do.

YLM: How would you characterize the literary endeavor? JC: It's extremely difficult. I've been thinking about it a lot and notice that it matters very much to me whether I finish the kind of project I set out to do in the time I have left. The only reason I can think that I want to do that is so that I can live forever, which astonishes me because I didn't know I had such ambition. But I can't think of what other reason I would have except to try to create something that will never go away.

3NIZV9VI4 AIIV113111 T1VA 3H.1

YLM: What do you think makes a piece ofliterature live forever? JO Oh, I don't know, and I don't know if my stuff will ever do that. But it has to do with discovering an ambition I never had. In a way you do it for what the Greeks and Romans thought you did it for, what Dante wrote for, you did it for immortal fame. Now that I've discovered this, I have to treat it ironically. For what chance do not only mine but any literary work produced today have at immortal fame? I'm not even sure if there is immortal fame. It's a very strange ambition to find in yourself, but I can't think of any other reason why I would write, except for its own sake. THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

46 YLM: What would you say to aspiring writers? JC: I tell them according to most statistics, at least from the '80's, there were 800 people in the US. making their living by writing fiction. I think that's more than the number conducting symphony orchestras, but it's right up there. So, the prospects have to be considered. I also tell them that if they enjoy the act of doing this for its own sake. If they feel some gratification from it, that's the surest guide to whether or not they ought to go on doing it.

YLM: Do,you have any books to recommend to them? JC: Painters used to start copying other painter's work. Writers usually think that's bad — imitation Hemingway, imitation Faulkner — but I think that it's a great way to start. Every writer enters into writing untrammeled, feeling free, feeling original, but in fact every writer enters the stream of writing at a very historical moment. Whether or not he realizes it, those past writers are influ— ences. The best thing for writers to read are other writers, both good and personal, sometimes they're both. Our favorite writers aren't necessarily the ones you'd call best.

YLM: What would yours be? JC: Well, I think all writers have a list of books they would most like to have written. YLM: Such as JC: Orlando. I think that's because I can imagine how much fun they would have been to write. Another is The Sword and the Stone by T.H. White, another is A High Wind in Jamaica. It's hard to describe why they're special except that you can somehow feel the pleasure of the writer.

YLM: It's interesting that you can talk about writing as a pleasure while many writers talk about its pain. JC: If that any different from sport or mountain climbing? I've seen advertisements where people are just suffering — playing volley— ball, sweating, grimacing — but the ad is all about how much fun they're having. It's the same thing. There's something about human

beings that pure exercise of power and energy is delightful in itself. You can feel it when you get a little bit of that ability to exercise some power and tontrol. I think there's an added pleasure in writing, almost a physical gratification, sort of like the deep gratification of dreaming. You enter into a fictional circumstance, a personal madeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;up universe of your own that comes out of your being in the same way dreams do. YLM: Do you have an ideal reader in mind? JC: I think every writer has an ideal reader in mind. I think that's something writers ought to do. You can't write to everybody. Some one who, upon starting one of your works, thinks that it's important and going to be interesting and that you know what you're doing. They share some of your cultural baggage and will enjoy your ruminations on these things. YLM: Where do you draw your ideas from? JC: I don't know. I have gotten a large amount of my ideas from reading, mostly nonâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;fiction, from science, the newspapers, the New York Review of Books. I've gotten some ideas from the research I've done for documentary films. But to get an idea is not really the important thing, it's when the idea gets you.

Daniel Filler OILBAR

Jessica Kaufman SILVER GELATIN PRINT

49 THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

Lilci Subramanian SILVER GELATIN PRINT

H n the sudden intimacy of packing up your funny ties, half—written poems, tax forms, underwear, we are old gossips; you are a flirt; I am reminded of my father; you are asking nosy questions— Do I have a boyfriend? Why do I look so sad? Or is this just the way I always look?

50 All morning muffled thunder rolls overhead, and I picture a phantom boarder in an upstairs room, trundling furniture back and forth like pieces of a puzzle, anagram letters spelling out PRISON one way, HOME another. He wedges the heaviest chair against the door. In dreams, he has seen it fly open. A wind out of nowhere. The hiss of sand over sand: This looking for home is the only home you have.

Rosemary Hutzler 11:11 0 Fell

BOARDERS

You hand me things, and I put them in a box. Tricks of your trade, props, top hats, rabbits slip smoothly off the shelves. From somewhere you toss in a yarmulke, a beanie that's lost its propeller, your thinking cap. I hear snippets of Yiddish drift through the rooms like ancient abracadabas, the mantras of making do— we kibitz, you are nicely mesh uga— that is your gift,

For Gerald Stern a blessing on this temporary housing, its obsolescence planned and then abandoned— the way you make it yours. So ugly. So haimish. The way you make me love you in your leaving.

Here is how I'll remember it: . u with your broken rib and despotic humor, yo the Fool slouched in the throne when no one is looking, issuing casual commands. Me folding things into a suitcase splayed on the rumpled bed. You singing. A sideways sweetness.

HNIZV9VIN 70W113.1.11 TWA THI,

Me thinking, this is the life my father will have next time, when he climbs to the rung where we learn happiness. The music of the double bass he never learned to play piles up in the corners of your room, bellyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;deep and lovely. We leave it where it lies. At last the sky breaks open, rain comes down. All around us, rivers begin to rise. We put a stray penny in the top dresser drawer for safe passage, for the next tenant, the next life, as if that drawer were the house's eyes.

Connecticut Poetry Circuit Student Poet, 1995

Daniel Filler WOODCUT â&#x20AC;&#x201D;4 x 4 3/4"

+OF'

S5 BeLl.5 (2.-ouki•IB j2 STET' E. Ltt...) LowICGR-T kke t A itT INAkA ST 42. ` 1 .3t1-A1S1) '12- STEP

4. 14 AR

ill‘Crtik..1

boon I , n. 1. a benefit enjoyed; a thing to be thankful for; blessing. 2. Archaic, that which is asked; a favor sought.[ME bone <Scand.; cf lcel 13.5n prayer; c. OE ben]

tl cr.)

A Boon of Brass and Bells

Philip Greene

I 1 ,

a•

if •

••

•

,1 Lr .E._;:_Luarz.zzr 9: tf. r

Car)

•

c..1;

•

76 a

Evolution of a musical composition for brass quintet and the Yale Memorial Carillon, to be premiered in June, 1995 following a wedding ceremony in Battell Chapel. (Absolute synchronization between the two ensembles is impossible....)

Cur

•

Car)

alp

'"2 76

Trpt. I

Trpt. If

J771Lr.r.rr,!rrt Lrjj[WC:. tri.r_tr_Lr_zt. 4:171

•

Tuba

;

91 1,6 • •

•