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The legion of Robert Sheckley fans is usually a quiet and unassuming bunch. Yet sometimes they stir. The occasion of a new publication, or even the repackaging of old material, may spur hidden aficionados to step out of the shadows and publicly declare their loyalty.

One such declarant is Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize winning book critic for the Washington Post, whose review of STORE OF THE WORLDS, a newly-gather collection of 26 short stories from the 1950s and 1960, appeared this week under the headline, “A Master of Satirical Fiction.”

If you’ve never read anything by Sheckley and wonder if he’s worth a try, Dirda provides some helpful comparables: Kurt Vonnegut’s books, the sardonic comeuppance stories of John Collier and Roald Dahl, Edward Gore’s little albums, and reruns of “The Twilight Zone.”

To that affinity list I’d add this advice: If you remember fondly the mind-stretching experience of your college anthropology class, and/or if your ideal of humor is all sorts of Lord-what-fools-these-mortals-be satire, then this guy’s for you, and STORE OF THE WORLDS is a good point of entry.

One caveat. Don’t be misled by the fact this volume appears under the imprint of New York Review Books, whose reputation rests on resurrecting out of print literary gems. Sheckley is not a “literary” writer, at least not as that term is generally understood. Your reward as a reader is not the quality of his prose. Your reward will be to enjoy the playfulness of a fertile mind — a mind delivering ideas sometimes antic, mostly sardonic.

There’s one other collection of the author’s stories currently in print that you should consider as an alternative: The Masque Of Manana. It’s a hardback and contains 41 stories, 15 more than the paperback STORE OF THE WORLDS. Among the stories found in both books are the four Dirda specifically calls out in his review. Another fan-favorite, “Watchbird,” a cautionary tale that presaged by half a century today’s controversy over domestic use of drones, is found in STORE but not in MASQUE. One of Dirda’s favorites is mine also: “Shape,” aka, “Keep Your Shape,” an aliens-visiting-earth story in which Sheckley maintains tension so well that you’re simply overwhelmed by its lovely dénouement.

I was introduced to the world of Robert Sheckley by a friend way back in graduate school, and, following a pattern not unknown to inveterate readers, gobbled up the author’s work — some novels but mostly the collections of tasty short stories — like a kid in a candy store. Those days you could easily find Sheckley in bookstores specializing in science fiction/fantasy. Every city had one. (But today?) Another source: the disreputable dark dusty corners of used bookstores where ratty SF paperbacks were kept.

Thank you, NYRB, for allowing readers like me to revisit these stored pleasures.

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In Act I, one of the sailors, the serious-minded Gabey, expresses his rapture at suddenly finding love. The song he sings is “Lucky to Be Me“:

I used to think it might be fun to be
Anyone else but me.
I thought that it would be a pleasant surprise
To wake up as a couple of other guys.
But now that I’ve found you,
I’ve changed my point of view,
And now I wouldn’t give a dime to be
Anyone else but me.

What a day,
Fortune smiled and came my way,
Bringing love I never thought I’d see,
I’m so lucky to be me.
What a night,
Suddenly you came in sight,
Looking just the way I’d hoped you’d be,
I’m so lucky to be me.
I am simply thunderstruck
At the change in my luck:
Knew at once I wanted you,
Never dreamed you’d want me, too.
I’m so proud
You chose me from all the crowd,
There’s no other guy I’d rather be,
I could laugh out loud,
I’m so lucky to be me.

Now, you’d be right to say the song’s romantic formula — a woebegone fellow looking for redemptive love finds it smack dab in front of him – has been used so often as to be, by now, a cliché.  But there’s something about the song’s lyrics, some quality that makes it work.

So let’s back up a minute.

Suppose it was your task is to write a jaunty update of this old tale of a lucky turn of fortune, this love-walks-in cliché. Suppose you’re expected to write something that fits within the tongue-in-cheek style of the show while also paying respect to tradition. From whom, among your betters, would you respectfully borrow? What ur-text would you reference?

A possible answer hit me a few days ago, and it may be the very same answer Comden & Green came upon seventy years ago.

I think the guy Comden & Green latched onto was the father of durable clichés: Shakespeare.  My guess for the text they referenced?

Sonnet 29:

When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least.
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

You don’t have to strain to see parallels. Both sonnet and song are emotional exclamations and both foreground a man whose depression lifts with the appearance of a loved one. Yet the affinities go beyond subject matter. The path of Gabey’s and the sonnet writer’s stories charts the same course. The same cues appear. All of this is described with synonymous language.

To begin, Comden & Green’s twentieth-century American notion of fate and destiny is of course entirely different than that of Elizabethan England. Yet notice how crucially the word “fortune” is used in both instances. Though separated in time, there is the same initial yearning to be “anyone else but me,” the distressed wish to be “like him” over there or “like him” over there — and, then again, like this man, like that man. We see that the “couple of guys” mentioned by Comden & Green are a summary of what may have been twice that number in Shakespeare.

The emotional “turn” (“Haply I think on thee”) that Shakespeare withholds until the two-thirds of the way through the sonnet is something Comden & Green choose to reveal partially in the introduction (“I’ve found you”) and then with fuller detail as to the circumstances further along (“Suddenly you came in sight”). A different pace and placement of the revellation is understandable, as the lyricists’ audience would demand more lavish attention be paid to the emotional payoff (Sing to me at length, repeatedly, about how you feel now!) than does the reader of the sonnet. The quiet reader is content to learn that the speaker feels like singing at heaven’s gate — and demands no demonstration thereof.

Both song and sonnet close with the identical lesson learned: When I’m in love, there’s no other guy I’d rather be. I wouldn’t change my lot for a king’s fortune. I scorn alternatives. In my state of joy I just want to laugh out loud.

How daunting it is to stand before Shakespeare and his verbal mastery. How could anyone — even word wizards like Comden & Green — not desire that man’s art, that man’s scope? Back to the task at hand, the solution was to stand with Shakespeare or, let’s say, to borrow a little from the guy. To form an informal trio of Comden & Green & Shakespeare.

OK. I’ve got no proof of my hypothesis. But, pace Google, I did find an interview Betty Comden granted in 2004 that offers some interesting leads. Here she reflects on her early education and drama apprenticeship:

I understand that you attended a special program at New York University in the Department of Dramatic Arts. What were your studies like at NYU, and how did they influence your later work?

Oh, well, it was an interesting school. I was there all four years, and we mainly studied the classics—Shakespeare, a lot of Shakespeare—so it was a dramatic group at the college. Not in regular classes, but they did performances every evening in the school auditorium, and so I saw a lot of Shakespeare. But a lot. And it was a great education; I’m glad of it. I recommend it to anyone.

What were the Washington Square Players?

Oh, well that’s the group I was just mentioning that played mostly Shakespeare and some Sheridan. Let’s see, what else? It really was mostly the Shakespeare plays.

While “Lucky to Be Me” is mostly all Comden & Green, it takes nothing away from their accomplishment to say they learned to play well with Shakespeare.

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In the fields of Glover-Archbold Park buttercups (ranunculus) are runin’ wild.

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Up close, the five-petaled flowers of this species of ranunculus are highly lustrous.

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Up close, the fruit of acer palmatum are colorful pairs of winged samaras.

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]]> http://www.mikeettner.com/04/2012/spring-finery/feed/ 0 http://www.mikeettner.com/04/2012/the-collected-writing-of-joe-brainard/ http://www.mikeettner.com/04/2012/the-collected-writing-of-joe-brainard/#comments Sun, 01 Apr 2012 14:10:37 +0000 MikeEttner http://www.mikeettner.com/?p=3830 .

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A Special Publication of the Library of America, this is a generous volume. It contains a three-page preface by the book’s editor Ron Padgett (a poet whose friendship with the author dates back to their high school days in Tulsa, Oklahoma); a ten-page Introduction by novelist Paul Auster; followed by over 500 pages of writings interspersed with the author’s own drawings and cartoons. Rounding out the book are pages of helpful editorial content: a Chronology; a Note on the Texts; and a Glossary of Names. The names belong to fellow artists, writers, dancers, musicians and associates mentioned by the shy-but-gregarious, serious-but-gossipy, frivolous-but-solemn, Joe Brainard.

The volume leads off with I REMEMBER, the autobiographical book Edmund White once labelled “a completely original book” and Paul Auster calls “a modest little gem.” There is an undeniable charm and relentless spell to it. Baby Boomer readers especially will be nodding their heads non-stop in recognition:

“I remember putting on sun tan oil and having the sun go away.”

“I remember catching lightning bugs and putting them in a jar with holes in the lid and then letting them out the next day”

“I remember Christmas cards coming from people my parents forgot to send Christmas cards to.”

“I remember red rubber coin purses that opened like a pair of lips, with a squeeze.”

“I remember wax paper.”

Over the years the simple template of I REMEMBER has influenced thousands of students in American creative writing classes, jump-starting imagination. Foreign writers too have followed its trail. One is Édouard Levé, whose Autoportrait is a pour of thousands of self-contained, self-referential declarative sentences — chips off the Brainard block.

And yet I REMEMBER fills only the first quarter (pages 3-134) of this Collected Writings volume. The bulk of the book falls into the category of Miscellany. To get a sense of the scope of these nearly 100 pieces, see the book’s Table of Contents on the Library of America site, here. Truth to tell, these pieces, which cover the hunt for love to the hunt for cigarettes and everything in between, include many misses among the hits. Take for example the illustrated piece on page 391 entitled “Matches.” It reads in its entirety: “If I strike say 60 matches a day (and I do) in a year’s time that would be — let me see — that would be — I hate math.” But the prevailing tone is a winning youthful energy, casual, humorous, miniaturistic. In his 1971 “Bolinas Journal” (reprinted at pages 285-333), he revealed his credo as simply “trying to be honest.”

Without doubt this book will appeal to Brainard “completists” — readers so taken by the delights of “I Remember” that from this intimately personal raconteur, from this easy sharer of confidences, they demand to hear more, more, and more.

The critic James Dirda recently observed that while THE COLLECTED WRITINGS “may not be a fully canonical Library of America title,” it is still “a superbly engaging bedside book.”  I agree. After the opening section devoted to the minimalist yet somehow magisterial “I Remember,” this becomes a book to be dipped into at leisure.

A note to readers who care about books as objects, especially the matter of their binding: Unlike volumes in the main Library of America series which are Smyth sewn (allowing you to open the book wide and bend back the covers without “breaking” or otherwise harming the binding), THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF JOE BRAINARD is a “Special Publication” that features a different design and production. The trim size is larger (good), but notch binding is used here, a disappointment as it renders the book less elegant than regular LOA volumes.

I see I’ve used a lot of numbers in this review. A final one is 52. That is the age of this still-young author at the time of his death in 1994. The coldness of numbers masks the warm effect of THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF JOE BRAINARD. In its pages you meet a big-hearted guy.

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[A version of this review appears on Amazon, here.]

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04-07-2012: This morning I came across an adoring review by Alberto Mobilio in the April/May 2012 online issue of Bookforum, here. Mobilio argues, convincingly, that “I Remember” is best read as an incantatory poem, one that epitomizes “that peculiarly American aspiration to self-mythologize in the face of an otherwise relentlessly quotidian world.”

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A novel searing in emotional power that will be felt especially by readers who have lost a parent to a difficult illness, THE SICKNESS qualifies as a necessary book. It is the most accomplished piece of literature I’ve read recently, and unquestionably the most moving.

Alberto Barrera Tyszka’s formidable achievement starts with a simple formal structure — two intertwining storylines that play out over the course of a month or so, involving a handful of people living in contemporary Caracas, Venezuela. The primary focus is on Dr. Andres Miranda and his relationship with his sixty-nine-year-old father. In the opening pages the son learns his father has an aggressive form of cancer that will kill him in only a few weeks’ time. (Their reticent love may remind you of the father-son relationship in Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses: A Novel). A secondary story traces the emotional entanglement of the doctor’s secretary with a hypochondriac patient, charted through a fevered exchange of email messages.

I’m hoping THE SICKNESS receives the attention of careful critical reviews in places that allow for expansive analysis. So finely packed with incident and insight is this novel, so expertly orchestrated are its emotional revelations, and so sure-footed is the author’s blending of erudition and raw truths, that you will be caught in its influence long after reading its final pages. (The American novelist Chris Adrian, who supplies a short Introduction, confesses he was at first afraid to open the book with its wrenching report of terminal illness; then, having read it, he found himself eager to read it again.) There is so much to talk about! This novel is an ideal selection for a book club discussion.

Among Tyszka’s wonderful touches are his aphoristic observations, nonchalantly released into the flow of the narrative. These are usually serious and relate to the medical world, though not always: “Blood is a terrible gossip.” “Sickness is a form of disloyalty, an unacceptable infidelity.” “Why do we find it so hard to accept that life is pure chance?” In old age “there are no more deadlines, there is only the present.” “There are some people who only read in waiting rooms.” “Adolescence is the most unclassifiable of joys.” “Reality is always different when you’re taking a shower.”

And consider this Zen-like statement:

“Tears are very unliterary: they have no form.”

Throughout the novel the generous Tyszka also pays homage to the thoughts of others who’ve traveled the same terrain of illness, pain and death. Among them are Chekhov; Celine; Robert Burton, who wrote “The Anatomy of Melancholy” (1621); Susan Sontag, who observed there are two kingdoms, sickness and health; William Carlos Williams, who wrote that the doctor “must watch the patient’s mind as it watches him, distrusting him”; and Michel Foucault, who said that, “viewed from the experience of death, illness can be seen as a function of life.”

The book asks — and answers — the final question: What is the best way to say goodbye to life?

Other reviewers who are better qualified to judge the translation have praised Margaret Jull Costa.

In my photo, above, the U.K. edition (hardback) is on left, U.S. edition (paperback) on right. Depicting what appears to be a father and son at the prow of a ferry boat is appropriate as it directly relates to two scenes in the novel. The photo of a pier extending into the sea with a lone figure at its apex is an example of poetic license.

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In this, his first novel, Ernesto Sábato displays an assured hand in fashioning a fresh tale of obsession and murder. The pace of THE TUNNEL is uncommonly well controlled. There is no fat on the bones of its first-person confessional narrative. At 140 pages, divided into 39 chapters, the book can be read in one or two sessions. This I recommend. Uninterrupted attention to the diseased mind of the artist-confessor, Juan Pablo Castel, is the optimal way to experience Sabato’s own artistry.

We know from the opening pages of the novel and from the first encounter between Castel and María Iribarne that these two lovers are doomed to play out a fatal destiny. We expect the descent will be devastating. It is.

The affair begins with the traditional dance: tentative connections, daydreaming, high expectations, misunderstandings, jousting, furtive telephone calls. Looking back after his crime, Castel recalls “how we are blinded by love, how magically love transforms reality.”

It is chilling to come upon the first intimations of violence. Sábato is a master of the slow reveal. He is aware of how we, his apprehensive readers, are taking in and digesting the progress of the tale. I was struck by the teasing manner in which he parcels out dialog between the lovers, and how he uses their diverging temperaments (the overly-analytical Castel versus the elusive María) as a means to keep us off-balance. We want to hear more from María, in her own words, unfiltered by the claustrophobic, maddeningly selfish perceptions of the narrator. When she finally speaks honestly to him of her desires, during an escape from the city to an estancia by the ocean (“I can’t count the times,” she tells Castel, “that I have dreamed of sharing this sea and this sky with you”) — the emotional effect is powerful.

When first published in 1948, and championed by Albert Camus, THE TUNNEL was placed on the shelf with contemporary existentialist literature. It is true Sábato bows in that direction, as when Castel waxes philosophical:

“There are times I feel nothing has meaning. On a tiny planet that has been racing toward oblivion for millions of years, we are born amid sorrow; we grow, we struggle, we grow ill, we suffer, we make others suffer, we cry out, we die, or others die, and new beings are born to begin the senseless comedy all over again.”

But to the 21st-century reader chances are this will sound like window-dressing. Nowadays the philosophical takes a back seat to the psychological, which means THE TUNNEL becomes a case study. It is an examination — or, since the story is in the form of a confession, let us say a self-examination — by a man suffering through deep psychological trauma. Castel boasts: “My brain is in constant ferment and, when I get nervous, ideas roil in a giddy ballet.” Although he fancies himself a superior analytical being, we know better. Obsessive, vengeful, violently jealous, here is a man depressed, suicidal. His descent is plotted with steady skill by the author.

Notes: The paperback edition I read, no longer in print,  is covered with the striking a black and white photo (below). Penguin Classics is issuing a reprint edition in April, 2012, with an inferior cover (above) that does little to evoke the novel’s mood. A film version of  The Tunnel was released in 1988 to mixed reviews; Peter Weller plays the role of Castel, and Jane Seymour is María.

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Washington, DC (North Capitol Street and New York Avenue), February 29, 2012, 9:30am.

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Washington, DC (North Capitol Street and New York Avenue), February 29, 2012, 9:30am.

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There is a scene in VARAMO in which the protagonist, whose name supplies the novel’s title, finds himself in a café seated at a table occupied by three book publishers. They’re a cynical bunch. One of them encourages the inexperienced Varamo to try his hand at writing:

“In barbaric lands like the Americas, writers produce their best work before learning the craft, and nine times out of ten, their first book was their strongest, as well as being, in general, the only one they wrote.”

The prescription Varamo receives from his tablemates is this: First, write down some story “notes.” Then, “write out the notes one after another with some commentary in between. Try not to tidy them up too much; immediacy is the key to a good style.”

Only a handful of César Aira’s fifty-plus novels have been translated into English, which means it is impossible for non-Spanish readers to identify his best work. Yet from the pattern of the available work it’s beginning to look like Aira, despite his fecundity and his omnivorous instincts, is following the advice of the publisher in the café: This mad creator writes only one novel — and VARAMO is such a one.

The book, set in the Panamanian city of Colón in the year 1923, moves through a single evening and night experienced by a timid and lovelorn 50-year-old Panamanian civil servant. As is his common practice, Aira’s “notes” are strung into a somewhat disjointed but ever-forward-moving “chain of events.”

Varamo leaves work after receiving his salary in the unprecedented form of two counterfeit 100 peso notes. In a state of anxiety he returns home to care for his paranoid mother. He works on a taxidermy project. Back on the street, on route to his favorite café he watches an automobile competition known as a “regularity race.” He stumbles upon a conspiracy to overthrow the provincial government. He reacquaints himself with a romantic interest. Reaching the café, he’s given tips about the writer’s trade. When midnight strikes he wanders through the deserted town square and comes face to face with a transformative vision. It is an epiphany both “interesting and poetic: a `writerly’ experience; for him, everything was `writerly’ now.” He goes home to write a long and soon to be renowned poem.

These narrative “notes” are interrupted periodically by Aira’s trademark asides, discursions that sometimes reach the level of mini-essays. They engage a broad range of disciplines including economics, political science, sociology, psychology, philosophy (especially the mystery of time), and postmodern literary strategies. As always, Aira is fascinated with cycles, reversals, switchbacks, dichotomies (tropical exuberance vs. impeccable formality; abstract vs. concrete; the imaginary vs. the real). Paradoxes and oxymorons abound: “transparent labyrinths”; “he had continued to move within his paralysis”; he was “nostalgic for the present.”

The unsuspecting poet Varamo and (I suspect) Aira both enjoy the freedom to be inconsistent. Early on Varamo and Aira observe, “Light was what made the world work,” while later they declare, “Money is what ultimately moves the world.” Aira has a special disdain for bureaucrats: “Like nearly all public servants, [Varamo] didn’t do anything special to earn his salary.” Aira’s mixed bag aesthetic allows the author to inch toward sentimentality, albeit formally expressed: “The most awkward aspect of individuality was being left out of the shared understandings that create social bonds.”

The text of VARAMO, smoothly translated by the veteran Chris Andrews, occupies a mere 124 pages and is not divided into parts or chapters — all the better to maintain a forward momentum that Aira so values. On the final page Aira indicates the date of the book’s completion: 15th of December 1999. Like Varamo, the author was 50 years old.

When designing VARAMO, the publishers corrected a problem some readers (I among them) encountered with “The Seamstress and the Wind,” whose text is set in a very small font size. In VARAMO the reader is well served.

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A version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.

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As processed through Songify using musical accompaniment of “Deluge” by Khush:  The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Opening Lines)

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Shakespeare suffers the same treatment, here: Sonnet 18

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