Lunar Follies

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  4. Color photographs, in a snappy collage, reveal a passel of exuberantly drunken soldiers, in khakis and the flowered garments known as “AWOL shirts,” madly dancing with their chosen whores, and the noise made by these revelers can easily be imagined; at a table in the crepuscular rear of the room depicted, and barely discernible

  5. in these images that pretend to offer us the truth about the febrile disturbance of young libidos, is Paulina, who may be remembered by some as the Indian girl partial to ice blue underwear, which sets off her silken-gold thighs to perfection, and which makes her a local bright star, christened, by Sergeant Beldino, Señorita Lingerie.

  6. What wild ecstasy for Private Archie Griffith to pretend that Paula is his fiancée, his as-yet-unravished bride, his Judy or Barb, this tall, dark girl,

  7. who will not remove her brassiere and thus grant Private Griffith the sight of his fair Joan’s ripening breast; and so, in leaden-eyed misery, he pays Paula an extra dollar if she will leave her stockings on, so as to assure himself of her profession; for what fair wife in Private Griffith’s native town of Belleville, Illinois, would go to amorous bed so flagrantly deshabille?

  8. Rills of crimson wine and spiced cold mushrooms have no place amid the raucous, sweaty, fevered lusts and drunken laughter of Ofelia’s; nor of the 1-2-3 Club, the Palma de Oro, Señora Amor’s, and the Cadillac, but are substituted for by icy Carta Blanca cerveza and bowls of salty green olives.

  9. This dark photograph—there is no light to speak of—shows Celia, Visitación, Teresa, and Clarita smiling in the darkness, their teeth gleaming whitely, their naked bodies in sweet repose, the dull opiate of a night’s sweated wages protecting them from starvation, illness, brutality, the clap, and even poisoned wine, for yet another day.

  10. Some soldier, passed out on the floor of the Club Mosaic, the last oozings of his last bout of mescal nausea pooled by his all-American chin, dreams of

  11. flies on summer eves, of downy owls, and of the face of the carelessly beautiful whore, Julia Emilia Suarez. He sighs. He will marry the fucking lovely bitch, for he loves her, and she be fair; more happy love (and she be fair!).

  12. We come to understand these things, for Jenny Shuttle worth-Robson, an assistant professor of cultural studies at Johns Hopkins, has explained the gestures and signs and obscured metonymies of the photographs and cinematic “stills” in this “BORDERTOWN” exhibition, in her introductory essay to its sumptuous catalogue. Professor Shuttle worth-Robson is a recognized expert in the everyday lives of what she has termed “brothel-entertainment workers, “but what the whores themselves call schifuzza, or, more informally, schijuzz’ or schi’. Nobody has determined how the Italian word has come to be used the world over.

  BORDERTOWN: Loves and Lives in Mexico: To December 31st.

  SEA OF NECTAR

  The Transgressive Act

  Fourteen motherfucking beer bottles are fucking haphazardly arranged next to an off-white shitty wall on the left. Six fucking more are fucking lined up in front of the fucking off-white wall on the right, in the foreground, you got it, cuntface? Four more are over here, right fucking here, next to this, you cocksucker! There are also twenty-six bottles in the back, and, just behind those fuckers, thirteen more. Nearby, shithead, two bottles lie on their sides, and one fucking hangs from the fucking ceiling, just above them, or above that, shiteater. Twenty-one are behind the false wall that has been hinted at in the hip ads placed in those faggot shitrags, and God knows how many more are fucking hidden under those things to the left, prick. A few more fucking bottles are fucking crowded together and the cocksucking motherfucker prick bastard clutter right in fucking front of that cunt of a woman standing there grinning like a possum eating shit also seems to be a fucking part of it all, the asshole shit! Forty more of the motherfuckers are here and there, and even more, if one should take a fucking look! The fucking glare of the fairy-ass lights make all these useless shit-heel things fucking shine and fucking gleam and fucking glint and fucking God knows fucking what, like nobody’s business, understand, you bull-dyke cuntlapping bitch? “Nobody’s Business” is the putative title of this pile of putrid shit “installation,” designed to make the assholes of the fucking world think they’re in art fucking heaven, although “Shit for Brains” would fit the fucking mess better; the title, incidentally, you dumb fuck, following, in what prickheads call “a new tradition,” the nickname bestowed on the cutting-edge artist who “made” this stinking whorehouse of a layout, the cocksucker faggot fairy queer prick motherfucker! That’s what they call him, “Shit for Brains,” don’t kill the messenger, cunthead, everybody knows it. It is, let’s face it, a fucking bad, really bad piece of fucking bullshit art, right, ass-fucker? Fucking A!

  SEA OF RAINS

  A curiosity that attracts what many exhibition-arts experts have called its “fair share” of visitors, whom it invariably leaves amused, irritated, or bewildered, is the so-called “editorial wall,” a display that contains fragments of editorial correspondence, sent by various editors, over a period of some thirty-five years, to the agent of a writer who is called, so as to protect his privacy, “B.” It is beyond the scope of this article to present the messages on the editorial wall in their entirety, but a representative sampling from them should serve to give their overall flavor, or, as one writer recently put it, their “odor.” Without further introductory remarks, then:

  I’ve always admired B’s work, as you know, but this handcart doesn’t look as if it’s going to make us any lettuce, not, as you know, that General Motors Xerox Publishing Group Ltd, puts lettuce above good, fresh art.

  I doubt if I could make this wholly unreadable slag—save, of course, for its marvelous descriptions of things—a success.

  B, as you know, can only, alas, be marketed as a good soldier, not, alas, as the perfect stunner of a planet that readers, alas, demand today.

  B’s new novel is compellingly urgent, but it is not intriguingly powerful or astonishingly compelling. Sorry.

  I know how highly regarded B is among literary circles, but I’m afraid that his somewhat difficult work is just not right for Shit House at the present time.

  I read B’s sickeningly erotic book with as much lust as I could muster, but I doubt that I am the right whore to do right by it. Best of luck to B.

  The pages, one by one, are fine pages, as are the words, one by one, but I feel that the pages and the words together don’t make me want to put my shoulder to the wheel for B’s fine new novel.

  Fine plumbing, as is all of B’s work, yet unrelentingly odious and morbidly attentive to gross details of things.

  I admit that I pissed my designer pants reading this one, but after the laughter, there was nothing much to “dig” into.

  This schlub of a book, bright in spots, of course, doesn’t fit our grandiose fictional plans as of now.

  As you well know, I lack the brains and finely honed reading skills required to publish B’s book with the care it deserves, since I am currently sort of really fucked up with a monster coke habit.

  It gives me, as you may know, a big hard-on to regularly read your better authors, like B, and as regularly reject them.

  B’s new entry is difficult, boring, and sexually disgusting and misogynistic, but it, as you know, has passages of lyric fireworks. Not for us, I’m afraid, as you know.

  B’s—let’s face it—“literary” book doesn’t fit well into the context of our poor list as it now stands, nor, for that matter, as it will stand at any time in the foreseeable future.

  How I’d love to be able to grab up B’s new blockbuster, but my hands are tied, as are my knees and ankles, alas!

  If B had another book that we could bring out a year or so before or after this book I’d love to take this book on along with the other book. But as it stands, sorry.

  We schmoozed, all of us here at Annex-Subsidiary, about the real strengths of B’s new book, but finally the “gals from Swarthmore” here thought it demeaning to
educated white women with money.

  The latter sixteenth of B’s new offering is almost shattering in its power, but the earlier sixteenth seems derivative, weak, unimaginative, hackneyed, and plodding. Give my best to B.

  The utter holocaust of B’s new exploration of a novel is a marvel of authorial honesty and creative tale-spinning; but, alas, we all felt that it depended much too heavily on stylistic crap rather than straightforward plotting.

  In order to do right by B’s ludicrous yet oddly disturbing new sally into the perverse, I’d have to feel, on every page, the excitement of being humped on my desk by the spick mail boy, and I just don’t.

  I’m delighted, as you may know, that you thought to send me B’s rubbishy new novel, along with his collection of rotten stories that I so loathed a year ago, but they don’t add up to the sort of swill that I envisaged making up a really knockout marketing event. Too bad.

  B’s new book, we all agreed here, has three pages, two paragraphs, one clause, seven and a half phrases, thirty-seven sentences, and four hundred and sixty-five words of keen, knee-weakening majesty, but the rest of the book is kind of blah, so we figured, “oh, fuck it,” alas.

  What a remarkable slab of a book this is!—but we have room on our list for only one such slab a year, and this year’s loser has already been contracted for. Best to B.

  I must confess that I found the plot of B’s new offering confusing and elusive, but that’s a failing I guess I’ll have to live with in this vale of tears.

  I liked lots of B’s at times extraordinary new novel, but the author seems somewhat too pleased with himself, but perhaps I’m not the right editor for such a difficult work.

  B’s latest foray into his standard porno-fiction is often elegant and even beautiful, but it lacks the punch of the short-story collection of his that we passed on last year. Thanks so much for letting me see the work of this important author.

  B’s work simply lacks the dishonesty and superficiality of the work that we cotton to here at Himmler-Aspen, at least in this woman’s opinion, and so I’m afraid that I’ll have to pass again on this new novel.

  We loved, really loved, this excursion into rage and bitterness, but I’m sure that another editor somewhere will love it even more.

  It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve held on to B’s manuscript for seventeen months, so I’m sending it back to you, still unread, as you know.

  I’ll have to say no again, I’m sorry to say, to B’s terrific new book, since, as you know, Van Cleef & Arpels no longer publishes anything that resembles books.

  We were impressed by B’s sly and ingenious new novel, but we have at least nine really bad books under contract, and are seriously overextended at the present time.

  I’m afraid that I have no record of ever receiving B’s manuscript of humorous essays. It’s been a madhouse here since our merger with Metro Yahoo Collins Spielberg. If I come across it I’ll have it returned by messenger immediately.

  SEA OF SERENITY

  In the haze, there can be discerned, perhaps, a dark grave, an Italian sea, an ideal copy of the lyre of Orpheus, and an arbor of formidable vines among whose bilious green rests a solitary rose of sorrow. Alas! the head they all adore aches still with the kiss of the enormous queen, and what a lariat-spinner she can sardonically be. And there she stands, or, actually, emerges, emerges steadily and slowly from a crepuscular violet and lavender that informs the entire room! There glows, as well, the golden hair that is popular with every true son of Greece, an odd collection of rogues, of course, many of them actually Italian, covered, most usually, with ashes like unto grime on a smeared window, through which most travelers cannot see the horizon. Just as well, since it was never intended that they see anything at all. What a blague! What a jape! A pale-pink hydrangea complements the daguerrotypes of the azure sea, although “azure” is a word that creative-writing cliques insist should never be used in, well, creative writing. And we are well aware of what that is! As something more than mere decoration, assemblage doyens and their faithful docents claim that a flame-colored scarf is central to just about everything; as are, too, the Lord of the Volcano, three green glass eyes, peace be upon them, two Frostian spondees, dragons’ teeth (as usual), and a certain implacable scarlet. None of these earthy, sublunary things can manage (despite their changing dispositions within the space of this really beautiful, if somewhat fruity, fake Louis xvi apartment, complete with upholstered jakes) to derange the pure given whole, the serene quiver of Sacred Art, which is always as astonishing and inevitable, but not really, not really at all, as a song by the sublime Harry Warren, e.g., “At Last” or “I Only Have Eyes for You.”

  SEA OF TRANQUILLITY

  Three clarinets, attached bell to mouthpiece, bell to mouthpiece, bell to mouthpiece, make what might be thought of as a fairly long “tube,” glistening black, decorated with what the catalogue is pleased to call, incorrectly, “silver filigree.” The tube leans against an off-white wall. Title: “These Silvery Things Are Valves Like.” Nothing else appears to be in the gallery, save for an attentive guard, in an (but of course!) “ill-fitting” uniform that could “use the services” (but of course!) of a dry cleaner. We say: “He’s his usual gracious self!” We say: “He didn’t even bother to come to his own farewell party!” We say: “How we gonna give ‘im his gift?” The guard examines the clarinets/tube and it becomes clear that he is, or may be, an integral part of the exhibit, like he’s art. We say: “He’s probly part of the exhibit, like, art!” We say: “As far as I’m concerned, he can go piss up a rope! Look at that ill-fitting uniform on him, Jesus.” The catalogue suggests that the artist who created this majestic piece rarely interacts with his colleagues, but is aloof, disturbingly private, and, in matters aesthetic, his usual gracious self. He is a practicing poet, and also the reluctant spokesman for those who love life, laugh over a bottle of good Cabernet, feel that nature is extremely important to all human intercourse as long as it stays out of the driveway, and attend their own farewell parties. Alternative titles for the piece, culled from the visitors’ book that rests on a lectern at the gallery entrance, are: “Breaking Up of Our Summer Concert,” “Orchestra en Plein Vent,” “A New Year Contraband Ball at Vicksburg,” “Dos a Dos or Rumpti Iddity Ido,” and “Sporting a Toe.” “And they ask why,” a woman, rumored to be the department chairman—and who looks like a bag of rags tied in the middle—says, “he makes the big monkey!” A quick check of the monthly-meeting minutes notes that she may have actually said, “the big money,” although there are some who argue for the fey, “the bug money.” The clamor increases as the academics and their guests await the free box lunches and the mineral water, but the clarinet installation restores silence. For once.

  STRAIGHT WALL

  A long flat slab of the finest marble from the celebrated although by now wholly exhausted quarries of the small Tuscany village of Sfogliatelle is balanced, on one edge, elegantly if precariously, atop a volume of dead poems of some local notoriety. Their floating vocables urge new ways of seeing if not reading, of reading if not seeing, or of thinking a little if neither reading nor seeing. So the placard above the receptionist’s desk states: said placard and desk depend from the saccade-like nervousness and twitchiness of the slab’s darker side. Bolted to the slab are magazines that feature some of the finest writers of our time, but not, thank God, all of them. Many of them are in collaboration on contemporary thoughts: “The Future of the Village”; “Frozen Custard Rediscovered”; “How a Tough Street Kid Became an Oscar Contender”; and many others. Their prose, which is refreshingly irreverent, is the norm. The magazines have been sprayed with a faux-gold lacquer which has then been “sown,” while still wet, with cigarette stubs, ashtrays, insects, a small Burundi vase, a report detailing the bad news for an unknown yet beloved person as to his incurable disease, or, perhaps, diseases (the report is in the demotic Greek spoken by Weehawken diner owners), many excellent words from here there and everywhere, a sepia-t
one photograph of a small glade in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, smeared with what may be brown paint, Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup, or excrement, and a glob of a truly ghastly crème de cervelle, once served to a Princeton alumnus on the occasion of his life. A small rectangle of stiff white cardboard is stapled to the wall and reads: DON’T BELIEVE THE POOR. The slab lists slightly to one side and is bathed in the soft light that is, so we have been told many and many a time, the hallmark of New England summers. A cheerful video loop reveals a smiling youth gesturing toward what he says, or, rather, shouts, is San Francisco. “WHAT WEATHER!” is a phrase that he repeats over and over again. The slab turns occasionally, somewhat like a scena ductilis. But only at certain hours, and not so anyone would notice. Then there is the music that happenstance, as it will, directs, jingle jingle jingle. And all is rendered in a brilliant Lydian translation.

  THEOPHILUS

  Just opened: At the Kangol-Polo Galleries: You won’t go far wrong with this judiciously selected, and soberly, but not stuffily authoritative exhibition of what has recently come to be called “ingenuous” art, or, occasionally, “crippled” art. The show goes a long way toward sorting out the lines and planes, not to mention the arcs and tangents, large circles and even complex rhomboids of influences, affiliations, and imitative procedures to be discerned within this difficult, often misunderstood, and, at times, hopelessly muddled school. Everything is placed simply, even puritanically, in the galleries’ spacious rooms, and the whole takes up, quite comfortably, the entire second floor of what was once a SoHo firetrap. The works are arranged in shrewd juxtapositions and canny alliances, so as to allow the viewer to discover how these iconoclastic fringe artists and artisans and their art and artisan products play off each other. The great Rube Chang, for instance, and Marco “the magnificent” Globus present three semi-collaborative works (“Blue Asters and Paperback,” “Edward Van de Fugger, Christian,” and “Lieutenant Chip Mainwaring Abusing Himself”), which remind one of the early red-clay-and-torn-denim “cut-downs” made by George, “the soupreem master of magikk,” in his Lake Jango garage, as well as the “moron collages” that were discovered a decade ago in a corncrib on Jubal Chamborizee’s property. (Chamborizee, also known as Lord Chimborazo or Sir Henry Cotopaxi, was the acknowledged master of sooty-cob annealing, a painstaking process whose subtlest techniques died with him.) Ruth Billbew’s “The Beast from the Stygian Deeps,” “Larry’s Bony Wife, Martha,” and “Ants at a Picnic: Study in Black and Egg Yolk,” are clearly in the same early-ingenuous mode as Duwayne Bushelle, Bushelle Edwards, Mac Brontus and his humming raccoons (Brontus’s droll designation for those who selflessly assist him in his crush-and-burn operations); and her “Vomit in the Doorway,” perhaps the central iconic image of all postwar ingenuous art, and an acknowledged focus for contemporary studies of painterly surfaces, especially in the work of Katz, Thiebaud, and, not surprisingly, Warhol, reminds the most jaded gallery-goer of how sublime the “cripples” can be. The powerful construct, “Leventy-Seven,” by Duke Charlotte La Bushe, startles anew in its position of majestic prominence in a small gallery off the main corridor, as it gestures toward, illumines, and shrewdly “explains” its immediate successors in the fiendishly difficult heavenly-glaze procedure, “Uniform and Chips, with Pastor,” by Whitfield Wamp, “Weightlifters at Prayer,” Fincher Leroy Ellerbing’s last known work, and “Jesus Destroying Pornography,” by an anonymous member of the Southern Baptist Corsairs. The catalogue, informative and entertaining, by the exhibition’s curator, Stanford MacArthur, informs and entertains, indeed, yet helps us to remember that which it is dangerous, much like history and current events, to forget; that art is, at its most sublime, simple, decent, and, as one delighted visitor to Kangol-Polo was overheard to say, “easy on the eyes.”