LITE RARY MAGAZ N /tli!
YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE VOL. 9 NO.1 SPRING 1997
Editors-in-Chief Vanessa M.Gezari Stephen Weiss Managing Editors Jonathan Gottfried Behi Rabbani Art Editor Beth M.Bernhardt Design Timothy McCormick Staff Jennie Chu,Dana Goodyear, Kamran Javadizadeh, Prem Krishnamurthy,Jenny Ludwig,Chris Mooney, Rebecca Onion, Meghan O'Rourke, Karen Paik, Karen Rosenberg,Eric Rosenthal,Sarah Rubinstein, Lanie Rutkow,Darby Saxbe, Ravindra Shaw,John Siciliano, Chandra Speeth, Greg Tigani, Tania Valdemoro, Nia Rain Williams Thanks to Paul Mellon William Curtis Carroll Davis Walter Gezari Philip Greene The Yale College Dean's Office Harvey Goldblatt and Kathline Hartch Pierson College YSEC Langdon Hammer J. D. McClatchy and Susan Bianconi The Yale Review Nancy Keramas The New Journal Yale French Studies Issue #89,"Drafts" The contents of The Yale Literary Magazine are Š 1997. Copyrights remain the property of individual contributors. No portion of the contents may be reprinted without permission. All rights are reserved.
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 editors or staff members. Yale University is not responsible for the contents of the magazine. The winner of the Francis Bergen Memorial Prize for Poetry is"Gethsemane" by Meghan O'Rourke. The contest was judged by Langdon Hammer. Subscriptions to The Yale Literary Magazine are available at a price of $15 for individuals and $35 for institutions. Please make checks payable to the YLM Publishing Fund and send to: The Yale Literary Magazine P.O. Box 209087 New Haven,CT 06520 View the magazine online at http://www.yale.edu/ylit Library of Congress catalog number 7-19863-4 This issue of The Yale Literary Magazine was produced with QuarkXPress 3.32 and Adobe Photoshop 3.0 software,and printed by Phoenix Press, New Haven, on Mohawk Superfine text paper and Warren LOE Dull White 8olb cover stock. Printing was supervised by Yale Printing and Graphics Service. The typefaces used are Futura,designed in 1928 by Paul Renner,and the Minion family, designed in 1991 by Robert Slimbach.
TABLE OF CONTENTS ARTWORK
gelatin silver print Lila Subramanian 4 etching Laura Kleger 13 charcoal drawing Catharine Balco 14 gelatin silver print Sarah Kunstler 16 gelatin silver print Laura Kleger 18 lithographs Melissa Gold 21, 29 lithograph John Kidd 31 monoprint Melissa Gold 33 ink drawing Peter MacKennan 34 gelatin silver print Shawn Watts COVER
WRITING
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5 6 12
14 19 20 22
30 32 35
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Just Figured Chris Schmidt Gethsemane Meghan O'Rourke Last Night I Dreamt That I Pulled Emily Dickinson Onto the Shore Jennie Chu An Interview with Louise Gluck Stephen Weiss Hospitality Dana Goodyear One From the Farm Elizabeth Bowman Ariadne at the Phonograph Chris Schmidt Northport Nicky Beer The Publicfiction by Josh Malbin June 10, 1865 Micaela Blei The Day Rome Ended Jennie Chu After Sappho Peter Morris The Wreckage of Cinema-Theaters in Times Square Meghan O'Rourke
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JUST FIGURED
Hard-lost, at last these first few days cast off their brilliant faces like robes of an awakened dream. Morning's early globes of light drew first our eyes,then cracked our spines as if for matins, the window like a book of hours whose print— fall's naked branches stretching across the pane an ocher truth—we'd never read before. But down here red bricks, red as embers,rise behind the trees in patterns that inspire, suggesting a formality we may have missed. The wind picks up. Our cheeks grow raw with it. And with each step,the fallen leaves give out their final breaths unduly hard, it seems,leaving not only prints, but memories as of the welder's torch: shocked escapes,each an antiqued spectral tail —as if their flight surprised our leaden eyes the moment they alighted on the book,the ground. —Chris Schmidt
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GETHSEMANE I. The Picture
It was not as you had thought it would be. The garden,tinged by afternoon sun, purple and grey in the white heat of high places. Wine,you said,from shade, and watched water cascade down slopes to city walls: In thickened night all men should be prophets, all water should be wine. It was hot,and the light was white, or the landscape absorbed nothing,turned back all waves alike: so white the deep sand shines, white the cliffs, the water,the graves upon the mount, and white I followed you then. Speak, you'd said. Not what you would but what you will: the echo then silence. Nothing and again nothing. A book left on the floor, a glass of water untouched,its surface shaking with your footfalls. An echo of the passing,second among the first. Lens and mirror flare when turned toward sun, bright stamp of hexagonal light like heel of hand on head becomes a scar that says, we looked too hard. Only later statistics appear: how much afforded, how much lost.
II. The Picture Again That the body betrays us all the time was what he taught; and when his love began to spread—nerve of heart askew, extraneous—it set her fluttering and pale to bed, her beauty lost upon its cross-slat frame. I turned toward dawn and soldiers marching.
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4
Years later we're still squabbling as old books burn. Perhaps instead of truth we want prediction— each image dependent on force of light,length of exposure. We see through mirrors and reflection and only later know the shape of light on faces. In an effort to see at once the cost of change I drew pictures all summer: lines and shade rubbed in,rubbed out, faces sprawled as graphite sheen, a silver-greyness staining my hands, the page entirely grey by month's end.
4
Blessing takes root in the body as water enters: the muscle contracting with cold in the moment of contact. Still a disciple, it seemed impossible to spare my touch—to meet the years before me was to touch your legs, and his, and feel that chill again. So I was small before you,and denied you. The silent years afterwards betrayed the story,stealing gravestones from the mount, beginning and end scratched away. The pictures fade but like a blessing neither end nor begin but go on and on. Something always moving and not returning returns you,all the time and anyway. —Meghan O'Rourke
3
Lila Subramanian gelatin silver print,9" x 9"
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LAST NIGHT I DREAMT THAT I PULLED EMILY DICKINSON ONTO THE SHORE
The white fabric of her dress is fat and resilient as the unbruisable pulp of fish preserved in melting ice. Damp,like the palm of a furious diarist whose hand has gripped the pen too long and learned the porous hum of a lung. I feel like a butcher as I handle the cloth,slowly furling the hem and finding,to my surprise, poetry on the back,scratched in a fatal scrawl,the ink bruised like a man-of-war whose outline bruises below the surface into a furious cursive mist. The length of the text extends from her feet to her desperate waist. Holding her hand I retrace the words with my eyes: I must have bad eyes. All night I scour the silent lawns for a place to dispose of this corpse, a bruise or laceration in thefurry earth—butfind none. Even the hands fail tofind a yield in thatfat dirt. What afeat to fall upon one's grave. What a price for rest, this life. I belong underground, where sleep is ambrosia and I may hide in warm fur. It haunts— the thought ofsustaining the nightly hunts much longer. I languish. Yet at twilight the day will be bruised once more, and death must befought ifso, place my hands for, and (this time?) won ... together on my chest, and close my eyes. My hand shakes furiously as I slice the dress so that the language caves into itself, an unfathomable bruise. —Jennie Chu 5
AN INTERVIEW WITH LOUISE GLUCK
By Stephen Weiss
Louise Gluck is the author ofseven books ofpoetry, including The Triumph of Achilles, Ararat, and The Wild Iris,for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. She has also published a collection ofessays, Proofs and Theories, which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. Her most recent book is Meadowlands. Louise Gluck teaches at Williams College. This interview was conducted over the telephone, and minor corrections were made afterwards. Yale Literary Magazine: How do you begin a poem? Louise Gluck: Every poem has its own history. I have to hear a kind of sound,a tone. I don't begin in an idea, I begin in a fragment of language that seems suggestive. The problem is that I very often don't know for years of what it's suggestive. So I can walk around tormented by this little shard of language whose implications I haven't completely understood. Do you write things down right away? There's no real need to rush to write it down. I usually am haunted,so I don't need to do that. If I'm working well,then I'm often writing things down, but I make it a practice never to have on my person
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the tools with which to do so, because I feel as though to walk around with pencil and paper is to guarantee that you won't need them. So I always end up borrowing pens and writing on the backs of envelopes. When you start writing, at what point do you know which direction you're going in? Sometimes right off the bat. When I started Ararat,I wrote one poem and then I wrote another rather quickly and I thought,this has to be a whole book or it's not going to be interesting; it will be a silly little group of family poems.That was clear to me from the beginning,though I didn't exactly know how to proceed. I simply was persuaded that the only way the material was going to have life was if it made a whole. There's no way to generalize. Sometimes I'll have about two-thirds of a poem and a very plain sense that it isn't done, without any sense of what I can do to make it become done. And how do you finish it, or how do you know when you've gotten it right?
I just wait. And sometimes I'll desperately try, using all the tools of consciousness and will, and every once in a while those tools will work. But usually'not right' means there's a turn, an idea,a tonal shift that I have not yet imagined. And the imagining of that can't be willed. I don't usually have trouble knowing when a thing is done,but getting there is,for me,an ordeal. Though once in a while something gets done very quickly. Do you work with other people to revise? I show people my poems,I always have,especially if I'm stuck or if the poem seems to me seriously flawed or if I don't know what my options are. And different bodies of work seem to be right for different readers. So that if I show X a certain group of poems that would by definition be uncongenial to X,X's responses would proceed from that distaste. Whereas with Y,I think, well if Y doesn't get what I think is on the page,then there are real problems,because Y should be a perfect reader for this material. You talked a little earlier about getting stuck. Could you describe a point in the pastfew years when it's been the worst, and how you got beyond it? Well it's pretty bad right now. After every book from The Triumph ofAchilles on,practically, there was a really long silence,like about two years. Before that I used to have long silences between poems.And I didn't write anything for two years after Firstborn. I don't know how I got past it. Something built up enough steam,something like that. The problem is that you can't infer from that past history a future. So that the experience of being mired in silence is an experience of silence as terminal. So the sense ofsilence and helplessness is just as painful as it was when you were younger? It's terrible. It isn't immediately terrible. When I've finished a book,I feel giddy,euphoric,and that usually lasts about six months. That's a very happy 7
INTERVIEW WITH LOUISE GLUCK
period where I'm kind of on vacation. I've done something,and I don't have to work,and it's wonderful. Sometimes it even lasts longer. After Meadowlands I was pretty happy and not writing a word for about ten months. Then I started to be a little bit less happy,and now I'm miserable. Do you hear something coming in thefuture? No. I want that to happen. And I hope it will happen, and I know I've been in this state, because I remember all the deals I've made with this God I don't believe in except when I'm in this state. Would you still say that this silence and impoverishment are critical to any writer's growth? I wouldn't dare to say that. I can't use my own life as a model for others. In fact, one of the difficulties of a writer's life is that no other version of it can serve as a model. So that I can't use someone else's stories, and I don't suppose any other writer can use mine. And yet you made the Baccalaureate Address to Williams in '93 [in Proofs and Theories]... Oh,I just wanted them not to be afraid of darkness. That I do think is crucial. I think that if you're afraid of it, and flee it, you're going to be in trouble sooner or later in your spiritual, psychological life. Do youfear that some day you mightjust stop writing? I think if it happened,it would be the worst hell I can imagine. I live in terror of it, the same terror I feel when I go to the doctor,and he takes an x-ray, and I think,oh shit they're going to find it. I try to be extremely seductively persuasive to the physician so that he actually won't take this picture, as though if the picture isn't taken,the thing won't exist. It's that same terror. But I can't imagine not wanting to write, I've been wanting to write since I was three years old.
What do you do when one ofyour writing students comes to you and tells you theyjust can't write at that time? I tell them if it's making them that frantic, they probably will. Or I give them an assignment. Actually,I try sometimes when I'm having a hard time to get assignments from friends myself. But there are things that you can pull off as a student that get harder when you're not a student.You can't simulate entirely that apprentice mode,though you remain in a way an apprentice. Do you stillfeel like an apprentice? Not to anybody who's alive especially, but I feel as though the work that I might write in the future is work I'm ignorant of and unprepared to do,so that somehow my relation to that work is the relation of the apprentice or the supplicant. What you look around for as you read is something that will turn you into a beginner again—work that alive, that unprecedented.
Have you published things and then felt much differently about them afterwards? Some. My first book, which I certainly thought was the cat's pajamas at the time. When do youfeel like your poetic voice is most your own voice? Or is it always? It sort of always is. It always sounds like me to me, though it may not sound like me to anyone else. But not the me that talks exactly, and I don't like to read my poems aloud because I feel as though I diminish them. You writefor the written impact? I hear on the page. When I'm listening to a poem being read,I'm responding to a human voice, a single voice, which may or may not accurately embody the voice on the page. When I read a poem,I hear it. The same with your own poems as with other people's? Yes,I sort of sing them to myself.
Is that why you change yourfocus with every book?
Even when you're writing?
No,I do that to keep interested. I have no choice but to do so. I wouldn't know how to repeat myself. When I finish a book,I've said everything I can say in that mode,for the moment.
When I'm writing I'm trying to think them out,feel them out,smell them out. But you can hear the shape it ought to be,I often have a sense of that. Though sometimes that's misleading. Sometimes your fidelity to an oral shape can truncate a poem,and you have to set aside your first conception.
What's the greatest lesson you ever learnedfrom a teacher? I don't know,because you can never tell whether the lessons that you've lived by will turn out to be your undoing.I believe in being hard to please, I guess. I believe in being patient, and having the courage to know when what you're writing is crap, whatever you then decide to do about it. Sometimes you might say, let's just publish it, and get clean of it that way. Whatever forms of courage I'm capable of I believe in, I think. But it is hard sometimes to know the difference between courage and rigidity.
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How do you set it aside? You say, this is turning into something a little glib. How do you connect yourself to the visionary or oracular mode? I think the oracular mode is something to be very wary of because you can hypnotize yourself very quickly into thinking that because you've tonally claimed a certain authority the poem supports that authority. It's a dangerous tool,though enormously
I wanted to write a comedy. I wanted to write something that was like The Marriage ofFigaro. Something very adult, very tolerant, terrestrial. I had exhausted myself in the sublime; it wasn't in me to do it again at that moment.And I was not willing to concede that that mode was the extent of my vocation.
turally. It was as though I had a whole book blocked out even to the sorts of sound patterns that poems would make long before poems were written. I could almost score it. It was like saying, here's where the violas will be and here's where we'll have a whole lot of timpani. But even though that orchestral model obtained right through to the end,I gave up the original premise, which was that the first half of the book would use the figures from the Odyssey ending with Penelope at her loom.And the second half would cut from the loom to the first scene of Figaro with Susanna making her wedding dress. The second half would be all Figaro. I loved the idea,the model interrupted in the middle,the two halves held together by contemporary figures. The problem was I really didn't have any poems about Figaro that were any good,and I kept writing more and more Odyssey.
And yet there is good comedy in The Wild Iris. I think about "Witchgrass,"for example—
Do you think about Meadowlands as a poem sequence?
I don't like "Witchgrass" much,though I do like "Daisies," and "Field Flowers." But I wanted to get beyond just plain being funny and write something the large gesture of which would be that kind of worldly shrug that says, people are like this, you have to forgive them because we're all fucked up.Something like that.
I think about it as one thing. One of the reasons I can't imagine ever doing a selected is I don't know what I'd do with Ararat,Iris and Meadowlands. I really feel that they have to be read in order and whole. I think of all of them as single entities, and Meadowlands as the closest to what you would call a novel, because it has narrative. It has two narratives.
Yet why did you go back to the classical allusions?
Does the unity of it make it difficult to publish in magazines before the book comes out?
powerful when it works. I just don't think about myself in any of these ways. The only ways I think of myself are in the ways I as a human being negotiate my life. When I'm trying to write, I think about the poem I'm trying to write; I try to serve it. In your essays you've talked about setting certain goals for yourselffrom one book to another. What goals did you set before you wrote Meadowlands, or what were you trying to avoidfrom The Wild Iris?
,
I really didn't plan to, and when I first saw that happening,I thought, what a mistake, because it's so hokey to just keep trucking out the old figures. But I grew up on myths. They were my first reading when I was really tiny; I didn't read fairy tales, I read Greek mythology. So those figures entered my life at the earliest possible time, when was I two,three,four years old. I suppose I'll never be free of them.In any case, my original plan for the structure was something a little bit different. I had a very elaborate and fetching idea for how the book was going to be organized; it was interesting to me to be thinking struc-
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INTERVIEW WITH LOUISE GLUCK
I hardly do that. Actually, The Wild Iris was the first time in a while that I published any poems in magazines. Yeah,it bothers me.I don't like people to see the poems separately, but every once in a while I've done it, if I have something that I think would look okay by itself, or if the whole of the book seems so remote that I think I'll never finish it, and I think, well, I may as well get this little bit into the world. Have you paid a pricefor writing about the people in your life?
I do that in a way less than the poems sound. I make up a lot. My parents wanted me to be an artist, a writer; they were either willing to be material or they trusted my taste. In the early days when I was showing her virtually everything I wrote, my mother was very capable of discriminating between gratuitous bad-mouthing and art. Every once in a while I'd give her a poem and she'd say,"Well,this is repetitive of such and such a poem that you did,and it's just mean:'And she was usually quite right. My exhusband was equally astute and objective, a wonderful reader in fact. But I don't tell other people's secrets. And I think writers who assume that their most charged stories make their most powerful poems make a grave error. Do you everfeel like you're using their voices? Oh no. The closest I ever got to using a voice I'm related to is the voice of God in The Wild Iris which sounds very much like my mother. My husband never sounded anything like any of those people in Meadowlands,and no one sounds like Telemachus. Not your son?
waning days of our marriage,one of the things he was adamant about was that I share his sports life. I had stopped minding his obsession, but he was beginning to insist that I share it. So I spent about a year watching all of the Giants games,learning the players, actually going to some games. And I became sort of rudimentarily interested, not interested enough so that I ever watched again when I wasn't living with John anymore. But the Giants were a major presence in our domestic life, right up there with food and wine,and it pleased me immensely, the thought that I could use Meadowlands as a title; it just thrilled me. When I saw the new book,I didn't suspect that the name of the stadium was related to the title. I know,it was like The Wild Iris goes to college. That was the one downside of the title, that it was clear it was going to be read as yet another extended horticultural metaphor. But it wasn't,it isn't. Well you're not missing anything with the Giants. They're awful now.
Oh God no,not in a million years. Telemachus is sort of my take on Frank Bidart, but Frank says it doesn't sound like him either.
Well I don't actually care one way or another about the Giants anymore. But they were a big part of that world, and it was a sort of deliciousness for me to be able to incorporate them.
Okay,I have to ask you. What inspired you to write about the New York Giants?
What is the danger or limitation of using simple language in poetry?
My husband was a football freak. He would sort of seal off the television room,and when my son was growing up he wouldn't have friends come to the house on Sunday or Monday if John was watching because John made so much noise. He would dress up in his Giants gear, his Giants sweatshirt and his Giants hat and his Giants mittens, and he'd be riveted. Passion like that was one of the things that drew me to him,though for years I resented the time football took out of a week. When we had a little more money,he would go to the games.In the
What about Blake? What about"Little Black Boy?" "My mother bore me in the Southern wild,/ And I am black, but 0! my soul is white:'
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Or Frost— Or"Fear no more the heat o'the sun:'Or even Milton's sonnet on his blindness. I mean,it's not the simplicity you hear in a grocery store because it's cadenced and distilled. The syntax is complicated, but the vocabulary is very simple.
OM.
Is the grocery store language useful at all? I think that I have such a strong notion of traditional lyrical meters in my head that the closer I get to the grocery store the better for my work.I just don't see any problems with simplicity. It seems all virtue, particularly when it's conjoined with syntactical subtlety,so that each word is in a place that somehow reveals its implications and larger resonances. How has winning the Pulitzer Prize affected your life and your work? It came at a great time. Normally I'm very suspicious of the world's gifts, but it was entirely sweet. My marriage was coming apart; it was a long marriage and I was expecting it to last. I was frightened for my future as a writer. I loved The Wild Iris and I wanted something nice to happen to it. And I certainly wanted something nice to happen to me because my life was so horrible. So it seemed a great gift, like the Fates saying,"you've struggled really hard, and you've done really well, take a day and be applauded:'So I entirely enjoyed it. For the rest, it didn't stop me from writing. It didn't stop me from worrying either. But it was curious socially, because it's one of the few prizes that people who don't read know anything about. It was the first time that people in Plainfield, Vermont seemed to know that I wrote poems or that the poems existed in a larger world. I wasn't sure what I thought of that actually; I liked living in hiding. One last question. Ifyou could save just one poem or bookfor posterity, which one would it be? I want to build a life's work that will last. I would like to write a series of books each of which makes the others more interesting. That's what I'd like to do. •
11 INTERVIEW WITH LOUISE GLUCK
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HOSPITALITY
.... no shelter, no defensefor any in this crowd— fools and vipers in the king's own hall. Odyssey,XX.412-414, Fitzgerald translation The stained suit of the dinner guest was splitting at its seams. Forty-one,gout-fat, and hand-in-crotch, his thighbones burned beneath his sweating palm. My tongue by now was black with wine,the aggregate of tannin silt, dark drift at the corner of my lip. The blood-ringed platter of that man's empty eye—like the week's worth of after-feast left piled in the sink,the undone dishes hard with morning crust— weighed on his giving cheek. The laurel garland sliding towards his ear had lost its braided wind. Nothing held the leaves in place— no woman,no translucent hand to correct the low ride of the twine— a stray leaf dangled like a Cracker Jack jewel and spun when he bent double for his napkin on the floor. The hostess sat on this man's right, her husband god knows where. A lengthy fear grew thicker, woolen,damp behind the clacking shuttle of her tongue: Had the last of the English port been poured with pork instead of cheese? Was the insurance adequate to cover damage from the moths? Would she sleep through that night, or suffer recognition in the grey-eyed dawn? The guests had come with nothing,but unembarrassed settled in: lisping Tom and the painted old Mae Ray. And dapper,dapper,flat-broke Jim singing of a long-gone coke kingpin. The hostess frowned at Jim. He harped on anyway. There was no luring her husband back from his exile's idiocy —his fantasy, his false memory— where he captained nymphs and industry. Sebei had accidentally got hold of my taut shoot of thigh while attempting her employer on my other side. She did not register surprise. She bathed me when I was a child. The fact that this new mistress ate with us went unremarked upon. (A snide aside from Mae was all, but who was she to talk?) On matters of propriety,the hostess had resigned.
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I see clear through the tricks of grace: through the walls of this cheap house I hear the Ozark wind. I am in a landlocked state. I am unfit to move. Guilty as guests, my mother and I. We drink the wait away. They swallow oxen whole. —Dana Goodyear
:.1111 ittriir) itiiii$1111 .1 1 1 I 11
Laura Kleger 1 2"x 81/4" etching, 9/ 3
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ONE FROM THE FARM
Turning compost into kitchen garden beds, I am under assault all morning from legions of mosquitoes bred in the raspberry canes. They suck at my sock line, up the meatless ridges of shins and fingerbones, they thread my hairline with slender probosci. Little nursers, drawing blood in drops, nippling my skin, what is this female hunger that forsakes all flowers for flesh? —Elizabeth Bowman
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1997
Catharine Balco charcoal drawing,24" x 18"
Sarah Kunstler gelatin silver print, 19" x 123/8"
Laura Kleger gelatin silver print, to" x to"
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1997
ARIADNE AT THE PHONOGRAPH
The arm moves in,the needle drops,then threads Its way across the maze of unblinking black That won't give way,as ice can, yet gives back. The hissing weaves into a hum that spreads Its wintry air over our heads like felt. What,at season's ending, makes us want An analog,attempts to wrest some font Of solace from what's hard but cannot melt? To hear, not feel, the oboe celebrate Escape from webs of spidery violins, Then caught again: again escape begins. The needle rises from the daedal plate, The arras lifts—Did Theseus sofind Some held cord outstretched, some pull he could not mind? —Chris Schmidt
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NORTHPORT
The jellied tide comes belching in at five, Destroying beaches,dragging clammers home To harbor: somewhat blue,somehow alive, Still men.Wet canvas,stories high at noon, Collapses, messing decks that brim with day. And Northport's shoreline cannot rise too soon: A tongue of sunset rimmed with jagged jibs. The pier shrugs up against the Orca II And husks the pale crustaceans from her ribs. The crew hoists squealing pulleys, dangling nets To dry. Lashed to the moorings now,they dock, Boots beating gangplanks, pitching cigarettes, To troll the trash-blown streets where ghost fish creep Around three ports: Gunther's, wives,and sleep. 窶年icky Beer
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Melissa Gold lithograph,9/ 1 2"x 131/4" 21
THE PUBLIC
Josh Malbin Getting fixed up is all about being adventurous and exploring your options. There are three of us in this library but we keep to our own floors and try not to bother each other. Mostly,we read. If I see anyone at all it's Elaine from the floor below me.She's older than I am,I'm not sure by how much,but I think by about twenty years. Mostly,I don't care. It's been three weeks and I go down to the basement daily but never to the floors above me,where Jean is, I think. I don't know because I've never seen him,but if he were on one of the floors below me,I'd have heard him.I know he's here because I saw the new graffiti in the men's bathroom—"Jean was here"—after it couldn't be anyone else's anymore. Elaine comes to meet me on my floor in an hour. We will discuss the food situation, which is not a good situation. We will decide to send Jean out to the store, since neither of us wants to go outside. This will be a problem because I don't know where he is, and Elaine didn't see the graffiti, although she will be able to point out that I only assume it's a he because I saw the graffiti in the men's bathroom. There's no reason to assume,she will say, that this person follows the same patterns of behavior that we do. He or she might very well have left the building already for all we know. This is possible. The graffiti is already two weeks old and there have been no new marks,and if Jean really were on the upper floors, we should have noticed him going down to the concession stand in the basement at least once. Although Elaine will confess that she sleeps as far away from the stairwell as possible,so that no one can get the jump on her while she is sleeping. I have never thought of someone getting the jump on me.I don't have anything of value. You should take the possibility into account, she will say. They don't know that you don't have anything.
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YLM •SPRING 1997
The competition is stiff.... but when it comes to political acrobatics, who can match California Governor Pete Wilson? Who even comes close? I have reversed my position. I now sleep as far from my stairwell as possible. And do they all look like Richard Gere? I don't look like Richard Gere. Elaine looks a little bit like Richard Gere. Since neither one of us looks like Richard Gere,by process of elimination, Jean will look exactly like Richard Gere, minus the little bit that Elaine looks like him. It's very becoming to her, since she's just Gereish around the lips, sort of pouty. The first time I saw her,in the concession stand downstairs when we both went there at the same time before we worked out a rotation, I asked her if she had had collagen implants. I didn't even know what collagen implants were,but I knew that they were for lips because I had been reading an article on them. No,they're not,she said. She seemed surprised to see me and looked,compared to her looks lately, haggard. I looked as good as I ever look, having already had three days of rest alone in the library. Who are you? Roland. That's not your real name,is it? No,I said. It's something I picked out of the article I was just reading,on collagen implants. You know that it's awfully rude to ask a woman if she's had plastic surgery, don't you? I'm sorry. It's just that you were born with very beautiful lips. I see. Elaine isn't my real name either, you know. You didn't tell me your name. Good. Never mind then. The Long,Hard Days of Dr. Dick:in America,every man should have the penis of his choice.
On my floor are the popular periodicals,the end of the history of philosophy section,the economics section,the psychology section and the home improvement section. So far, I am working my way through the periodicals one at a time. Sometimes I find books left on tables and I reshelve them.There is also a massive dictionary on my floor, a Webster's unabridged,on a wooden stand. All of this makes masturbation very difficult,since I have nothing stimulating to read. I have made two daring raids into the fiction section on the floor below Elaine's so far, but only one of them was worthwhile. The other turned up a book called Sexual Secrets of the Far East which turned out to be about a grumpy old guy fighting his prostate cancer in Brooklyn. It was anti-erotic. I read a lot, as I mentioned. Right now I'm reading an article on this fall's fashions. They are: flared waists, earth tones, mid-length skirts, and expensive suits for men. This means the stock market is supposed to go up,I think,or down. Last night when I went down to the concession stand in the basement I passed Elaine on the stairs. She said that tomorrow we will go into the upper floors to search for Jean. Also of the party,as they used to say in the old society magazines, might be pistol-packing agents of the Bureau of Land Management,or I.R.S.,or I.N.S.,or Highway Patrol,and,on rare occasions, U.S.attorneys. Sometimes,when I am feeling daring,I go to sit in the lobby near the doors. I do it only when I feel daring because anyone could break through those doors. They are locked,but the hinges are not too strong,I think. It is a beautiful lobby,though,with long curved walls sweeping into an arched ceiling, bulging off the rectangle of the library proper. The second floor overlooks the open space below,but the third floor and above are closed off. There is an echo in the lobby and I can hear Elaine wherever she is, as long as she isn't in the basement. On the bottom of the arch leading from the lobby into the library proper is a slogan in Latin. It reads: Silentium. 23
THE PUBLIC • JOSH MALBIN
The suspicion of authority has meant the erosion of standards of conduct and civility. The rules that Elaine and I have are simple: 1. From seven to eight in the morning the concession stand is hers,from eight to nine it is mine,from eleven to twelve it is hers,from twelve to one it is mine,from five to six it is hers,from six to seven it is mine,from eleven to twelve it is hers, from twelve to one it is mine.The rest of the time is reserved for Jean. This is one of the things we intend to tell Jean tomorrow. 2. I cannot come onto her floor and she cannot come onto my floor. Neither of us can go onto a neutral floor unless the other agrees,except for the basement where the concession stand is. Until further notice, Jean has been allocated the fourth and fifth floors. 3. Meetings, when necessary, are to be arranged on a neutral floor by correspondence on the bulletin board of the service elevator. These rules are meant to minimize conflict, although so far there has been no conflict and we cannot yet envision why conflict might arise. I am thinking of proposing a new rule, which would be numbered four. It would read: 4. If either party goes outside or looks out a window,he or she is not to make any mention of it whatsoever to the other party. I do not know if this is a fair rule, however, since it is only my own desire. For it to be a fair rule,it will have to be hammered out at a meeting, and Elaine has been more and more reluctant to come to meetings. They make her uncomfortable. Actually, she was uncomfortable from the beginning. We agreed to the rules but she seemed distracted, as though her mind wasn't fully on what we were doing. Contemporary culture promulgates almost impossible standards of feminine beauty. Elaine stands five feet four inches tall, by my estimate. She wears sneakers and jeans and a sweater. Her hair is brown and comes to the tops of her shoulderblades. There is some gray in it, mostly
down the line of her part, which she wears on the right side. It looks like a vein of metal in dirt. As I said, her lips are very much like Richard Gere's. Her eyes are blue,and she has a slightly recessed chin. She is very solid, and looks very strong, but she is polite to me,almost carefully polite to me.Of course,I am almost carefully polite to her. There is only one thing that moves governments on any level—it's utter,stark fear. Elaine and I went upstairs today to try to find Jean. Not only is the concession stand running very low on food,but our respective bathrooms are running out of toilet paper.You wouldn't necessarily think of it, wondering what you'd need to live in a library with working plumbing.We desperately need to find Jean so that we can send him out for food and toilet paper. Elaine wants coffee as well. Elaine,I think, wakes up before I do,and she came upstairs and stood in the stairwell and called for me this morning after she thought I would be awake. The clock said it was nine,and I checked for a patch of light on the floor beneath a window and realized that it was morning.So I asked her to wait and went to the bathroom,as I do every morning when I wake up,but I took a circuitous route,so that Elaine on the stairwell couldn't see where I had been sleeping. That's because I've gotten lazy switching around and have settled on a couch in the employee lounge that's on my floor. There's a soda machine in the lounge,and it works,but I can't figure out how to pick the lock and I haven't been able to break it open. It just sits there and sometimes I wish I hadn't used up all of my quarters so quickly. Elaine and I climbed the stairs to the next floor, where neither of us had been. Actually, I'd never been, but Elaine had before we started living here, and she said that it wasn't too confusing,but that we should stick together because it was still unknown territory. She led the way. This was a twentieth century literature floor. There were fewer chairs than on my floor, and all of the shelves were in straight rows leading away from us. Elaine
24
YLM •SPRING 1997
suggested that the easiest way to search the floor was to just walk around the outside of the room first and look down all the rows,then walk through the spaces between rows and then deal with all of the bits left over at the end.So we did, which turned out to be easy because the only bits left over were a pair of offices in the middle of the left hand wall, which is where we sat to talk things over after we'd finished. No Jean. We sat at one of the desks and looked at each other for a while. I'd like to call a meeting,I said finally. Alright,she said. When? Right now. We're both here. I think we need to decide what to do with this floor. Can't we just include it under the rules we've made already and declare it a neutral floor? We could, except that we would then be effectively taking away one of the floors we had until now allotted to Jean. Well, she's obviously not using it. Anyway,he or she doesn't know and probably doesn't care about our rules anyway. Maybe,but then again we do have them posted and just because neither one of us has ever seen him or her doesn't mean that he or she hasn't accepted the rules as they stand, tacitly. Even if he or she doesn't know,we'd be changing the status of a territory which is not rightfully ours. It'd be like the Spanish and the Portuguese carving up South America by papal mediation. Maybe a little bit,she said. On the other hand, this is where all the good books are. That's true, I said. So,she said, what have you been up to lately? Reading. I've been reading some of the classics of psychoanalysis. What about the floor? Well,I think it's pretty clear we're at an impasse, she said. We can't really work it out until we find Jean,so we just have to keep looking and if we want books from this floor we'll have to make unauthorized border raids at our own risks. Which classics? Classics ofPsychoanalysis. It's a series. What are we going to do about this floor? I don't fucking well care, Roland.I'm going back
to mine. What have you been up to lately, down there? I'll see you tomorrow and we can do the top floor then. So I followed her down and stopped at my lounge and took a nap. Because of the nap I missed my hour at the concession stand and was very hungry when it was finally my turn again. Jesse Helms says we must choose between "sexual decadence"and "restraint." But we need a human connection. I went to the first floor men's bathroom today to look at the graffiti that proves that Jean was here. I brought a handbook of graphology,keeping in mind that some allowance for error had to be made because the writing was not done at the usual angle but on a vertical surface. According to the handbook she is feminine but assertive, with a good sense of humor and a deep spirit. People who make peace in the Middle East are called a lot of things."Traitor" and "dupe"are among the mildest. Roland. Wake up. I woke up. Elaine had gotten the jump on me in my sleep. She must have watched where I went when we came back down together. We still hadn't worked out the problem of the fourth floor. I looked out the window today, Roland. I sat up and started lacing up my shoes. So,I said,am I to take this as an act of aggression? My real name isn't Elaine,she said. I know that. That's the point,I said. It's Helen. Get off my floor. You have broken one of our cardinal rules in addition to a new rule that I was considering proposing as well as one of our unspoken agreements. I was getting a little sick of them.I saw snow outside the window this morning. Are you here to work out the problem of the fourth floor?
25
THE PUBLIC. JOSH MALBIN
What did you do before we started living here? Nothing important. Did you have a family? I think we may have upset Jean. Yesterday morning there were two magazines missing from my periodicals room.I think she may have taken them to get back at us for invading one of her floors a week ago. I took them. Last week you asked me what I do on my floor. Do you want to come and see? No. You know,you're very tense,she said.You're not acting like yourself at all. I am aware of that. It's just that you have me at a disadvantage, having gotten the jump on me and all. Jesus, Roland, when I said that, I was worried about people from outside. Were you worried about me? What do you want? I want to stop living inhumanly,and I want you to come down to my floor and look at what I've been doing. Just tell me.I still have a certain amount of respect for social decorum. Bullshit. You've been sitting here talking to me without even noticing that you have a morning erection. I looked. It was true. I covered myself with a pillow. So what do you do? I make sculptures and collages when I'm sick of reading. By the way,did you know that you're sleeping an average of thirteen hours a day? And? I just think it's not very healthy. I mean, granted, we've been through some pretty traumatic shit, but it's been a couple of months already. I needed the safety of this rule crap and the library and all, but we're still alive, Roland. We can't stay in here forever. Well I'm the one reading the psychoanalysis and I don't think so. Don't think what? Don't think sleeping thirteen hours a day is unhealthy.
Oh for god's sake,she said. And she left. Is he man or machine? Is he good or evil? Theories abound,yet none satisfies. I am twelve feet tall. I am five foot ten inches tall. I have piercing gray eyes. I have insipid blue eyes. I have rolling smooth brown hair. I have mousy brown hair. My penis is twelve and one-half inches long when erect. My penis is five and onehalf inches long when erect. I can bench-press two hundred and fifty pounds. I can bench-press one hundred and ten pounds. I instantly understand all I read and can expound on it with erudition. I have difficulty understanding what I read and can barely explain it to myself with the book open in front of me.I stride with grace,elegance and poise. I shuffle. I have broken all of the mirrors in the bathroom on my floor and have carefully disposed of the glass. All who know me love me. I am a man who is not afraid to tell you exactly how he feels. I am a man who does not exist. I have gone up to the fifth floor by myself and I think I saw Jean. She was beautiful, but I only caught a glimpse of her as she ducked around the end of a stack of books.I left a note asking her to go out and get us food and toilet paper. I have been concentrating on reading Lacan lately. According to him,in learning language,I have given in to never saying what I mean.Accordingly,I am attempting to memorize the dictionary on my floor. I have written a short essay, which I have shown to Elaine,explaining my position on the subject. There are over 600,000 words in the English language. The average person knows about 17,000, and Shakespeare used about 34,000 in his plays. The sort ofperson who will quote you that statistic is probably the same sort that will quote you the one about lulls in conversation coming every certain number of minutes without knowing where either one comesfrom. In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, when one becomes inscribed into the Symbolic, one
26
accepts a degree ofpsychic mutilation. One resigns oneself to always referring to oneselfas "I," never present in the word itself always lacking the exact term contiguous with one's body, alwaysforcing a thought through the structure oflanguage. But suppose you knew all 600,000 words, if the limits of your knowledge were exactly contiguous with the conceivable limits of expression, if thefree play of language happened on a signifyingfield identical in size to your body's. Would you breakfree of the Symbolic? Would you finally be able to know that "I love you"says what it needs to say in the only words available and truly means what it says it means? The French only have 200,000 words in their language. Are they better lovers because the words "I love you"are a slightly greaterfraction of the language? I will not tell Elaine, but I think the person I want to say I love you to is Jean, if I can ever get her to talk to me.When I showed it to Elaine she said: you're getting it all wrong,you know. But there's no harm in trying to memorize the dictionary. I felt comfortable showing Elaine my essay because in the past week she and I have come to a new understanding. I have gone down to her floor and seen the massive irregular piles of books she is covering with pictures and quotes she cuts out of other books.She takes magazines from my floor to add color, she says. This is why,despite all the rules I mentioned earlier, I was comfortable bringing her my essay, although I will not tell her about Jean because she does not believe that Jean is still in the library. She has agreed, however, not to tell me if she looks outside the window,but only,she says, because it makes me uncomfortable, not because it's wrong.I know that Jean is still in the library because: 1. My note disappeared. 2. The concession stand was restocked. 3. Every time I go to the fifth floor, there are new scuff-marks on the carpet and new books missing.
YLM.SPRING 1997
AMMEN
Elaine doesn't agree with this logic at all. She is fond of pointing out that the concession stand was restocked before the note disappeared. As Ellen Barkin told Al Pacino in the movie Sea of Love,"I believe in this ...," and she snapped her fingers,hard. I have begun to have wet dreams again for the first time since I was fourteen. Here is one of them: Jam in a library, on one of the upperfloors. The layout is notfamiliar to me.Ifeel that I am not walking butfloating lightly above the ground. There is a woman who looks vaguely like Richard Gere in the next row and I pull myselfalong by grabbing onto the shelves. As I moveforward, myfeetfloat off the ground so I am nearly horizontal. I round the end of the row and I see her at the other end.I know that I cannot speak, but I want to ask her to step awayfrom the window, which is ovular. I grab the shelf pull myselfforward as hard as I can against it, and I wake with sperm on me. After the first one,I have taken to sleeping in the nude so that it is easier to clean myself. It was very difficult to clean my pants the first time it happened and I had to throw my underwear away. So that Elaine would not see them in one of the wastebaskets I threw them out the window,but I kept my eyes tightly shut. When I opened the window,though,it was very cold outside and I wish that I had not learned that, although I probably should have suspected it because the central heating has been on for quite some time now. Elaine knows anyway but she pretends not to notice. This is fair, as I pretend not to notice when she menstruates and must pack her pants with toilet paper. Scandals, untold secrets and power games—all exaggerated and amplified without limits. Elaine is insisting that I call her Helen and this morning she invited me to have lunch with her. I will call her Helen to her face if she wishes but I
27
THE PUBLIC* JOSH MALBIN
will never have lunch with her again. I couldn't stand seeing her teeth,food grinding between them and her saliva shining on them when she was eating. We had a long conversation about her four children and her husband,who owns a tool store. She kept pushing me to tell her my real name,to tell her what I did, who I was before. I have a hard time even remembering why her questions should make any sense. I am Roland,and before is a dream I keep forgetting I ever had. Gender-based expectancies and observer judgments of smiling: a study in reactive paranoia. I go often to the fourth floor now and sit by the stairs going up. Once I heard a noise on the fifth floor above me and I called out,but I think I said the wrong thing because no one answered and I have not heard a noise again. I have moved one of the few chairs on that floor to the stairwell so I can sit there and read. Sometimes Elaine comes up to this floor to get a book and she smiles at me.She smiles at me every time we meet now. a,indefinite article: 1. Any,every(A dog has four legs). Aachen,n.: a city in W.Germany,near Dutch and Belgian borders. I have memorized the first fourteen pages of the big dictionary on my floor. Every day I begin a new page. I spend an hour making flash cards and the rest of the day memorizing them. I have also found a dictionary of American slang on the first floor and I supplement the big dictionary with readings from it. Every day, when I have finished a page,I take a love poem from a book (so far only sonnets by Shakespeare and Pablo Neruda,but I do plan to expand the scope of this project) and I pin it to the wall outside the elevator in the basement,because it is the only place in the library I can be certain that Jean will have to go. On it, I write the page number of the dictionary that I have finished today,so that she can keep track of my progress and know when I am ready. Two days ago, when I went to switch the poem,the one I had left was
gone,and yesterday evening when I went to bring a new one,the one I had left had been replaced. This is the poem that I found: She and her wave-worn love had made their bower, Where naught upon their passion could intrude, And all the stars that crowded the blue space Saw nothing happier than her glowingface. This was on a bit of paper and underneath,in pencil, was Lord Byron, Canto II. I thought it was a strange poem for her to choose as an answer,but I couldn't really fault her for not knowing better than to talk about looking out the window. So today I neglected my memorizing to go to the fifth floor to look for her. Since the other time I was there, most of the books have been pushed off the shelves and are now stacked in tall mounds, most of them open,so that they slide and tear and make it very hard to get from one place to another. It took me two hours to make it up and down all the rows,and moving so slowly and loudly I think I frightened her off. Later that very day Ralph was to feel the consequences of his ill-considered jibes. Elaine comes up to see me in the evening when I am working quite hard,trying to catch up on the memorizing I missed by spending today on the fifth floor. Hello,she says. Do you know why all of the books on the fifth floor are off their shelves? I say. Sure,she says. I pulled them all off four days ago. I was bored. Walking around up there is never twice over the same path anymore. It took me two hours just to look everywhere on the floor. Were you looking for me? No,and because it took me so long up there I'm way behind now.So go away,I'm busy tonight. In fact, you've probably set me back so far that it will take me days to catch up to where I should be. You know,she says,I'm willing to talk to you before you manage the entire dictionary.
28
YLM • SPRING 1997
So? I say. She goes back downstairs. She makes a lot of noise on the stairs. Why have men created dream girls? What do they really want from them anyway? And can a real woman ever satisfy that need? Elaine has left the library. I know this because she left a note in the elevator saying that she was the one who had restocked the concession stand and that she was going outside and did not plan to come back this time. She says that the streets are clean and that spring is coming on and that she is going back to her old house and then on to somewhere else. She says she has been thinking about this for some time now and is only sorry that I can't join her in going back. She hopes I am happy, which is considerate of her,I think. ...—a phenomenological approach Jean's face really looks nothing like Richard Gere. It is everything outside the window: trees and grass and flowers in bloom. Her cheeks are the softest things on earth and her eyes and her forehead and her mouth hold absolutely nothing of Richard Gere. She is everything in the library and everything in the world. I have memorized twentyfive pages,but she has not taken any more of my poems. I have her promise,I sleep with it folded in my hand. •
-v.
Melissa Gold lithograph, to1 / 2" x 81 / 4"
29
JUNE 10, 1865
Walt Whitman holds his soldier in his hands (crackling slightly, slightly blurred) and waits for him to take his pills. His penmanship is good. Walt Whitman writing to the Pratts (their son is well,is dead,is back) discovers he's been slightly blurred pressed flat as correspondence by the weight of hot dry air and medical leave. Whitman walks the crackling tile beneath the heft of wounded words (clinical syllables, medical jokes) walks down the aisles of hospitals (the isles of soldier boys fastened to walls the barred-in sunlight blurring their faces) and stops at Alfred Pratt's small place stops at Alfred's bent-up face and finds a pulse and writes it down. —Micaela Blei
30
YLM • SPRING 1997
THE DAY ROME ENDED 1
Some say...lead2 in[to] the water...temples excerpt [themselves]...stone missing and dissipating,[their] columns robbed5 unto unseeable space4...craze among the pillars...the crowd sad and ecstatic and infatuated with the way[s] of their ambulance...against the brilliant wall5 of noon the bodies become shades: faded, cremated6...a circus7...to walk in the sunlight is a tall coma...chain of thought8 rides the swelling roar9—a torch dreamine of the sun's status"...[for] the present is but the past being recounted and recounted by Hades,12 and as you steal increasingly into realization you come to possess his mind13 like a loaded thought, one more shade14...noise told through a mine15 of water...shipped space gliding on headed blood16:sleep, sleep,sleep, sleep, sleep...
16 Entrances to the Underworld: 1 Only fragments remain of"The Day Rome Ended," memoirs written presumably in the fourth century A.D. by a Roman citizen whose identity remains a mystery. The writings were discovered earlier this decade marred with extensive water damage that renders most of the text illegible. 2 Or leading... 3 Some translations offer"rubbed" instead of"robbed," connoting the process of erasure. 4 Into this room, where the stone's sanctity is refunded. 5"Brilliant door of noon." Unlock and look. 6 Locked. To lock: to make opaque. Left out, yesterday's news has been stained by the sun. 7 Through the cataracted bleach of memory: the clowns parade in mute saltation. Four years old. 8 Thralled. 9 The minotaur rears. 10 Rippled by the surface: bronze phantasmagorias,glorias, aspirations, sighs. 11 Tallness of stature. The stolid man on stilts is earning money for his children. 12 Palms on his temples, wringing the sight from his eyes."Ladies and gentlemen!—don't let him break your hearts?' 13 His monstrous depression. 14 Sing in me,hell; the demons my patronage. 15 A tunnel,a moment of seizure elongated,spelled out, a spell. 16 [S]hipped space gliding on the blood in your head: sleep, sleep, sleep,sleep, sleep.
—Jennie Chu
32
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YLM •SPRING
1997
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33
Peter Mackennan ink drawing 34
YLM • SPRING
1997
M=M,
AFTER SAPPHO
We argue, then fuck. It's hardly unique. And yet it must work. There are no pleasant wars. But why pander to others? You can't keep applause. To know, post facto, that she was implacable will not make you adequate. —Peter Morris
35
THE WRECKAGE OF CINEMA-THEATERS IN TIMES SQUARE
Maestoso, Mae: these biting westerlies Replaced by gentler wind,like boredom's breath On windowpane. Bright shapes float on with ease, The stormy seas no object now (not death By wave,scribbled the finger on frost-glass). The sea's turned glass,flat as the screen where light Still flickers on: dust particles amass, Light's beam a smoky nargileh tonight. Waves break as time's emulsion fades, and scratch The plastic. Drifting past old theater walls, Projection plays upon the suckled match Of sun and sea. The foehn,delighted, calls On maenads,whispers watch—celluloid shades Shudder across the nymphs'wet shoulder blades. —Meghan O'Rourke
36
YLM • SPRING 1997