by Lucy Ives
“Dude, can you please not go in your weird hidey-hole? Remember what I just told our adolescent friend: You, Harry, are studying something no one else can understand and you’re the fucking boss of that. If anyone wants to have a problem with you or anything associated with you, they can take that up with yours truly, which, trust me, nobody in this weak scene is going to have the cojones to even think about. And pardon my asking so soon but, riddle me this, has everything not totally worked out thus far?”
Harry lets Loudermilk know that he plans to reevaluate their lifestyle come winter but for now, sure, living in a two-bedroom shit house seems fine.
Loudermilk sighs. He says that if the bunch in Harry’s panties were to get any bunchier they’d have to get him a wheelbarrow to roll it around in.
Harry in no way agrees with Loudermilk’s assessment but begins walking. He is only putting one foot in front of the other; this, at least, is what he tells himself. The lawn area is evident before them. There is a shelter and a violet cloud of grill smoke.
Harry lets himself fall behind. The sun is very bright, a dull blade poised against the earth. Harry follows his friend.
It’s like, he’d really like to believe it’s just his voice.
Ten
The Lucky
It is the first introductory BBQ of the fall workshop season, a time of new beginnings. The younger bard Anton Beans, emerging conceptual lyricist, the, who is he kidding, heir apparent to the poem-based sector of the American humanities multiverse, hovering beside the condiment table, is finally about to get across to Marta Hillary, award-winning poet and faculty member, the central conceit of his second, as-yet-unpromised manuscript, The Noise of Noise. Beans, who has been in the program for a year, arrived already under contract. His first collection, Distillation Metrics, will be published in May by a small but extraordinarily reputable press. Beans is all but guaranteed to secure academic tenure within the next five years, and he knows it. The only reason Beans temporarily abandoned San Francisco for the Midwest was to study under Marta, who is not just renowned but quite possibly the greatest poet of her generation. If she were not at the Seminars, he’s not sure what the point of his malingering here among so many reactionaries would be, although perhaps the degree itself is worth something.
Beans is twenty-eight years young. He has a PhD in linguistics and, before he left the Bay Area, was toiling very lucratively in consultation with certain IT interests, though he says nothing of this to his Seminars cohort. Beans is not a great fan of his fellow poetry students, in particular, nor is he a great fan of the arts, in general. As a toddler, he was pushed into show business. Beans appeared in a string of camera commercials before the onset of a stubborn form of childhood irritable bowel syndrome made his, albeit glowing and cherubic, face, due to its relative proximity to said bowels, unemployable.
From this early career loss, Beans learned the importance of a plan B. In his last year of grad school at Stanford, Anton Beans used some of his consulting fees (he, for the most part, was able to steer clear of options) to invest in real estate back in the city, buying a building on 24th and Mission. He knows exactly what he is sitting on, where it’s going in the next couple of decades.
Anton Beans is in some ways fairly unconcerned about his future. His ambitious mother, meanwhile, is pondering a second marriage to a cunning contractor.
What keeps Beans up at night is his own historical significance. He is not an academic, though he was happy enough to follow through with his degree. He isn’t really even a writer.
What it means not to “really” be a writer: It’s not that Beans can’t write, because he definitely can, but that he does not exactly see the point, if you see his point, which it is unlikely that you do. If you understand anything at all about mankind these days then you know that the entire race has a rapidly approaching expiration date stamped on its forehead. All this business about symbolism and getting something or other eternal across to the sensitive souls who choose to buy your puny book is just so much outdated twaddle as far as he’s concerned. It’s a pipe dream of pre-network Romanticism.
All the same, Beans can’t quite rule out the importance of reading. And the fact that he can’t convince himself that the work of reading has no power and no allure and no gravitas suggests to him that there’s something he, Anton Beans, can and should do with the rest of his time on earth as far as literature is concerned.
Poems are good for Beans’s purposes because they’re short, because he can engineer a poem exhaustively, can attempt to determine its semantic capacity in a complete sense. His favorite writers are Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, individuals who, interestingly, did not seem to particularly care for each other.
Beans likes to dress as his own personal approximation of an anti-retinal, postwar American artist, basking in the soft power that comes of eschewing figurative content and, later, objects altogether. He would never bother living in inflation-struck New York City at this point, but he thinks Sol LeWitt’s appearance in the Cold War gallery system was pretty neat. He enjoys the utter primacy accorded the “concept” by this exalted man. Beans stands with LeWitt, against rhetoric, against expression. Long live “the square and the cube as . . . syntax”! Long live logical sequence. Long live the beauty of evacuated form.
For the BBQ, Beans is wearing a pair of studiously, delicately paint-soiled white jeans, a white T-shirt, and white canvas sneakers from which he has painstakingly removed the logos using an X-ACTO knife. He began shaving his head bald several years ago and compensates for this elective scarcity by encouraging a pleasingly thick, wiry black beard of anarchic proportions to obscure his neck.
Beans is pretty sure that Marta does not know what to make of him, but that her refined and at least partially unconscious powers of pattern recognition have convinced her of his intelligence. He, for his part, would like: First, to secure a letter of recommendation from her, and, then, with this out of the way, to attempt to understand what makes her tick. If he were not currently practicing celibacy as a form of mental and spiritual self-discipline, it is likely that the two of them would be making love on a daily basis.
Marta is drinking white wine from a small green glass she must have brought for herself from home. Beans hovers at her side. Marta smells—he thinks, uncharacteristically employing simile—like an ocean breeze traveling along the tip of a rosebud. In fact, she is sex on a stick. Her face is small with a long, straight nose. Her jewelry makes elegant sounds.
“So my procedure,” Beans begins to explain, but here something very, very unpleasant occurs.
An enormous male-model type in a hot-pink hat inscribed with an obscene slogan appears at the condiment station. Beans’s fragile web is disturbed as Marta’s interest shifts. The bro has a pair of plump dogs over which he deploys nauseating quantities of ketchup, nodding approvingly to himself. A couple yards off, a weird, undersized person who looks a lot like a fraternity torture victim due to fading permanent marker drawings on his face, and who must be the wingman of the philistine, is miserably peeling the label from his beer bottle.
Marta turns away from Beans.
It is like this scumbag thinks Marta is another student, albeit one aging gracefully into her mid-forties via a budget that permits investment in Prada and the occasional foray into Comme des Garçons. And the truly frightening thing is that Marta seems to like it! She smiles that slow, dreamy smile of hers and offers the goon her hand. She greets him as if she remembers him from somewhere, which, if Anton Beans permits his worst fears momentary realization, must be his application to the program.
“Troy Loudermilk,” Marta says. “Welcome.”
The piece of shit is saying, “Welcome to you, too.”
“Yes,” Marta tells him. She makes no effort to introduce herself, rather examining the face of Troy Loudermilk. “You look so different?”
“That’s funny,” this most complacent of oafs replies. He is fussing with a pickle jar.
“I me
ant, from how I’d imagined you,” Marta finishes. “I never look at the photographs. It’s barbaric the university even makes us ask our students for them. The unaccountable needs of bureaucrats!” Some stronger sentiment seems to flit across her face but is quickly dissolved under another indolent smile. “Lovely to see you.”
The kid with the cross on his forehead is staring at the ground so hard he may burn a hole into it. Beans likes him, if this is possible, even less than he likes Troy Loudermilk. Why someone like Loudermilk would put up with a specimen like that is a curious case. Probably has something to do with needing to seem plausibly human while you walk around looking like a boxer-briefs commercial.
Troy Loudermilk is saluting Marta. “Bye!” he says, grinning moronically. He bears his submerged wieners away.
Marta watches Loudermilk go. “That is a very great poet, or so I believe.” Marta eyes Beans. “We’ll have to see if he can live up to his potential.”
Beans forces himself to smile, he hopes enigmatically. “Anyway, about the manuscript,” Beans recommences, “what you were saying was so—” But he stops.
Marta has glided off. Beans is incensed to see her standing now in the company of Troy Loudermilk, Loudermilk’s presumably foot-long schlong, and Loudermilk’s bizarre minion, the last of the trio having already succeeded in smearing the entire lower half of his face in Heinz.
Beans watches Marta nod, watches her rest her shapely hand on Loudermilk’s shoulder and leave it there. More than anything else, Anton Beans hates the lucky. Not only do they absorb all the top prizes in life’s insipid games, but they have the habit of doing very little work in the process. Anton Beans abhors the lucky. They are the cherry on the top of humanity’s miscreation.
Beans turns to the cooler, roots furiously for a seltzer.
Eleven
Instruction
Clare Elwil has made the decision not to attend any of the Seminars’ much-touted seminars, classes on the theory of composition that have allegedly defined the American literary landscape for decades now. She pretends to herself that she is apathetic—that she has no head for ahistorical formalism, the wages of New Critical disinterest in all but professional politics, the cult of style, etc., the Seminars’ celebrated and overweening interest in mechanics—but the real problem is the other students. Because she herself cannot write, she has little concern for the writing of others, and all the others ever seem to want to talk about is their own writing. By way of substitute, Clare will double-count a graduate course she took in college. She has been apprised by administrators that this is not merely possible but even usual. “You want,” they say, “time to write.” She will just need to come in and touch pen to form.
Clare is in her trio of furnished rooms north of campus, late afternoon. She stands—as in the second paragraph of a sentimental novel—before the mirror that is screwed to the back of the door between her apartment and the landing of the building’s central stair. She wears a black turtleneck and gray corduroy jeans that used to belong to her mother. She will shortly don an anorak she purchased three falls ago from a Boston Army-Navy.
Her face is big. It’s a soft oval. She has large hands and feet but spindly limbs, a long and narrow rib cage. Her hair is black, shoulder-length, straight. Her eyes are a weird lemon color, like a cat’s. Her small lips form a flat-bottomed heart. Currently her lips are chapped. She grimaces. She is five foot eight.
Clare contains her hair in a rubber band from the carrots.
Clare leaves, walks toward Building 109. The building is at the crest of a hill and the wind picks up at Clare’s approach. Clare enters. Now she is mounting stairs to the second floor; now she is making a left and then a right and is walking down the hall to the office past an open room, its door with diamond of wire-reinforced glass ajar and the beige edge of the seminar table, and she does not turn her head to look inside. She hears a voice, a man, say, “Now you’re here we can make an accommodation and try, at last, to begin. As I was saying—” and Clare turns. She sees a short man. He is with his class, standing. His eyes touch hers. He does a quick probe of her face plus lingering swipe over breasts but does not stop speaking.
Clare recognizes him from the progressive supermarket, the man with wine bottles, a late version of her protagonist Dr. Lehren, who in Clare’s story becomes the butt of an unfathomable and even sordid joke that rises in the mind of the young antihero, Eloise. And Eloise laughs. And Clare is not sure what this means but is glad to find herself successfully mapping her own previous traversal of time and space and literature.
The man is saying, “I don’t give one donkey fuck what you do while you’re here. I honest to god do not. This is not a contest and I do not give out prizes. And the first of you knuckleheads gets that through his or her skull will be the lucky recipient—”
But Clare does not hear what anyone may expect to receive from the man because she has come to the office and the noise of another sort of commerce blots out instruction.
It is only later, when she is walking down the hill again, form in hand, that she recalls the man who does not willingly distribute donkey fucks. Could one imagine that his pronouncements herald a really excellent form of meritocracy, somehow? That his is, paradoxically, the most sublime of pedagogical metrics—since incomprehensible, profane, and therefore absolute?
Clare thinks that this has got to be a poetry teacher, and perhaps this is the look and sound and style of today’s poetry.
She also puzzles over the fact that certain kinds of information are produced ex nihilo, just by way of the presence of more than one person in a given room.
Twelve
Same
“You remember,” Loudermilk yells, apropos of nothing, as the screen door slams shut behind him, “when we were at the mall?”
Harry jerks up in his chair. It is 5:00 p.m.
Loudermilk is back from class—from workshop, Harry specifies.
Loudermilk strides into the main room and wants to know if Harry remembers the girl.
Harry has been napping. He has lately returned from the university library stacks with a selection of award-winning poetry titles from the past year. These are sitting in a plastic bag near the front door. Harry mutters something about nice to see you, too.
“The one in high school, right? Lizzie? Likes to get into cars with strange men?”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” says Loudermilk. He quotes Marisa Tomei in her Oscar-winning turn as Mona Lisa Vito: “You blend.” He rolls the papers he’s carrying into a cone and brings it to his mouth like a megaphone. He intones, “Her dad is my instructor!”
Harry is sitting in one of the beer-cozy camping chairs, staring out of one of the back windows of their hut into the overgrown backyard. He squints, transforming the view into blobs of brown and green. “That’s nice,” he says.
“It’s annoying, is what it is. I didn’t realize who we were dealing with. That’s the kind of deception that really gets to me. Anyways, this is what you have to read.” He drops a few pages onto Harry’s lap. “Sample poems. Fresh from the recycling bin. At some point T. A. Loudermilk must make his own contribution.”
“I’ll try to write something!”
“Yes, Harrison, as in, a poem!”
Harry sighs.
“Jesus, you goddamn cum-dumpster, stop pretending you’re not totally psyched to do this. And, uh, have it ready for, like, this Wednesday.” Loudermilk pauses. “Please.”
Harry begins flipping through the printouts. He wants to know if he’s supposed to write crap like this.
“It’s supposed to be really good, is what it’s supposed to be! Like everything you write! How you think we got in here?”
Harry claims not to be in possession of this info.
“No, dude, you will admit that you know. Own thy poetry. By the way, have you even left the house today?”
Harry wishes Loudermilk would notice things, like the open book on his lap, the
new kettle on the stove, the miniature cactus in neon gravel on the windowsill, things which were not transferred to this building by magic.
Loudermilk is stalking back to the kitchen. He asks if Harry wants a beer.
Harry gives a thumbs-up behind his head. He’s obediently reading.
Loudermilk returns. “Find anything?”
Harry accepts a PBR. He clears his throat and forces himself to declaim:
vivisepulture
fly-eyed flickers eventime and i wake you
tunis pheromone shallow lucency
should stop shunts fujiflex and i do not
not
Harry drinks.
Loudermilk grabs the paper out of Harry’s hand. “Shit!” He is laughing. “I knew it!” Loudermilk crows.
Harry asks what the celebration is about.
“You see this?” Loudermilk indicates a signature at the bottom of the page, A. Beans. “Anton motherfucking Beans. This homo sapiens was way, way up in my grill.”
“This person’s name is ‘ant on beans’?”
Loudermilk whips his recorder out of his shorts pocket, pops out the tape. He is trembling slightly, whether with rage or joy Harry does not know. “First, Harry, friend, you need to have a wee listen to what’s on here. However, let me offer you a preview: This dick-munch is not capable of writing! Not that I know anything about poetry, but I’m guaranteeing you that right now. He’s a liability.”
Harry informs Loudermilk that this disquisition, while certainly dramatic, is not very helpful on the fact front. He testily accepts the mini-tape.
Loudermilk frowns. “I’m trying to tell you, he’s onto me—onto us. It takes one to know one! What a mother-loving hack!”
“Guess I’ll try not to imitate him.”
Loudermilk drops into the chair next to Harry’s. “I’m just saying, dude, I happen to know how good you are, so let’s take advantage of that, am I right? Let’s mess with this cum-guzzler. How’s that for a mandate?” Loudermilk hands the xeroxed poetry back to Harry. He raises his beer. “Anyhow, cheers, dude.”