Lunar Follies

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  TSIOLKOVSKY

  “Three (or so) segments of a work in complex progress …”

  “… but the myth of the frontier has consistently engaged the disarmingly irreverent sophistication of the modern multi-lens camera, of course. Earlier works, like the focus of the interplay as seen in the presentation of the scrims usually associated with the pinhole camera, the nonchalant stance, the thematic array, and the variously colored fluorescents, confront the secondary myth of the iconic cross-cultural artist, as prefigured in the many seminal and provocative essays by a group of distinguished contributing editors, published in the Contemporary Camera Obscura. ‘The nearest star,’ to adduce a well-known remark of the anonymous Gnostic followers of Blake, ‘is much too near,’ profoundly encapsulates the varied philosophies of shared visual interests and loosely Hegelian theoretical vistas, many of them here on display as a group for the first time, allowing students and scholars to spend hours, rather than the usual hurried moments, with objects commonly associated with the tenaciously unyielding subjects herein deployed in ‘ur’-constructions that take as their unifying and irreversible (although subject, always, to aporia) theme the images that are, paradoxically, vital yet moribund. Whereas mechanical tools, e.g., the hammer, the adze, the wood plane, the nathan, the ripsaw, and the blotter, project and valorize the images in the early films of Wynton Marsalis, inescapable filtering of new and little-known earlier works by now-lost ‘outsider’ cinematographers, as presented in varied locations within North American public spaces throughout the fifties and sixties, contradict a haze of pioneering techniques which can transform such mundane instruments into dazzling media installations that relentlessly transgress the cherished Germanic motifs which inoculate, or, conversely, are inoculated by, surprising Baudelairean correspondances; for example, via the imagery of Callahan, Atget, and Adams, cultural topoi, so to speak, that have delighted and outraged the ‘mouse in the dynamo,’ as Bartley Scott put it some years ago, as well, too, as influencing those cinéastes and plasticists who pioneered the fevered pyrotechnics and mysterious and ineradicable film captions that have come to be viewed, with much justification, as harbingers of pure process, emblematic clips heavy with metaphor, and short but multi-layered arguments, not to mention a vertiginous, motile linear perspective and the labile interfaces contemporaneously labeled as ‘technovideo interventions,’ despite their static modes within …”

  —Kelli Dawn Tsiolkovsky

  Kelli Dawn Tsiolkovsky writes the “Arts, Dining, and Cinema” column for the West Village Edge, and is also the author of Brooklyn! Economy for Epicures, and the forthcoming novel, Andy Warhol Was a Virgin (Whitlow / St. Martin’s).

  TYCHO

  A photograph in the corner of the apartment, cloudy, dark, difficult to make out: In a room filled with haze, a woman in a low chair, her face in her hand in a familiar female posture, weeping—again, familiarly—bitterly. She weeps for Buddy, her dead son, killed at the age of sixteen in a fall from the parallel bars that at one time graced, God knows why (perhaps to kill Buddy) every public high-school gym in New York. “My Buddy,” she whispers, bitterly weeping. Life, despite its vaunted pleasures, can be monstrous and ruthless, utterly without pity or solace, despite sunsets and cool forests. The days are long since he died, long. The room’s haze seems to thin or lighten, but then it is again precisely as it was, so it probably never changed at all. (As if a photograph could show such changes!) She thinks about her son all through the day, the days, every day, her obsession is said to be “unhealthy,” an “unhealthy obsession.” So much for assistance from friends and providers of assistance. The world, and we know exactly what “the world” is, prefers that everybody rid oneself of anything that might even hint at “unhealthy obsession,” no matter the form it may take. It wants everybody to fall in! dress right dress! ready front! cover! You girls gon’ soldier or you’ll be doin’ close-order all night! No room for obsessions here, of any sort, that’s what “the world” wants. But she misses his voice, she misses the touch of his hand. Maybe she’ll come out of this funk, this depression, this despair, and become, once again, a valuable, contributing member of society, with a great deal, oh, a great deal to give to same. In the meantime, while society waits, Buddy, her sweet, handsome, funny Buddy, nobody quite so true, is dead; and, although, as a good Catholic, she knows that he must be in heaven with God and all His angels, he’s not here. He’s not here! She thinks about him all through the day. But now, wait, we discover that this is a photograph of—what?—a man shielding his eyes from the sunlight that enters the small room through a worn, almost transparent, window shade. He is thinking about something, but what? He is thinking about the woman whose photograph he is gazing at, holding it at an angle, away from the glare of the sun. She is in a low chair, bitterly weeping. He has looked at the photograph every day for months, an “unhealthy obsession.”

  WALTHER

  Touchdown!: Mayhem for a New Millennium

  Fifty years of gridiron history, the glamour, anguish, pain, and courage of this “equivalent to war,” as Buster Walter, dean of football writers, put it, the exhibition brought to us with the generous assistance of the Texas Petroleum Products Alliance.

  The compelling photographs of the exhibition include classic images, both historical and contemporary, of the adipose guardbacker, blustering backender, cute tackleback, demanding quarterend, egregious endtackle, flouncing puntdrifter, grotesque quarterguard, hallucinatory crawling back, incendiary nosebacker, jejeune endnoser, knuckle-headed walkback, lascivious endpunter, moronic tackleguard, newfangled halfnose, otiose comingback, precious going-back, queenly tackleblitzer, resistant outback, sincere ball-toucher, triumphant pushnoser, underpaid shortflagger, visionary quartercatcher, wonderful widecenter, xenophobic backshover, yawning openguard, and zenlike jingotackle. Sincere thanks for gracious permission to reproduce their likenesses to Jambo Pierce, Biff Caldwell, Z. Z. Steeples, Derkone Motherwell, Carl Bracciole, El-Hashishe Thompson, Merlon Brown, Lucky Reno, El ’Rode Washington, Ziggy Imbriale, and Calderotte Saunders.

  [Proceeds from admissions and sales of souvenirs and memorabilia to go to the Citizens’ Committee to Build TEXPROL Stadium: “The People’s Place, The People’s Pride.”]

  COLOPHON

  Lunar Follies was designed at Coffee House Press in the Warehouse District of downtown Minneapolis. The text is set in Perpetua with Bittersweet titles.

  OTHER BOOKS BY GILBERT SORRENTINO

  POETRY

  The Darkness Surrounds Us

  Black and White

  The Perfect Fiction

  Corrosive Sublimate

  A Dozen Oranges

  Sulpiciae Elegidia: Elegiacs of Sulpicia

  White Sail

  The Orangery

  Selected Poems 1958-1980

  FICTION

  The Sky Changes

  Steelwork

  Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

  Flawless Play Restored: The Masque of Fungo

  Splendide-Hôtel

  Mulligan Stew

  Aberration of Starlight

  Crystal Vision

  Blue Pastoral

  Odd Number

  A Beehive Arranged on Humane Principles

  Rose Theatre

  Misterioso

  Under the Shadow

  Red the Fiend

  Pack of Lies

  Gold Fools

  Little Casino

  The Moon in Its Flight

  ESSAYS

  Something Said

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Gilbert Sorrentino: A Descriptive Bibliography by William McPheron

  FUNDER ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  Coffee House Press is an independent nonprofit literary publisher. Our books are made possible through the generous support of grants and gifts from many foundations, corporate giving programs, individuals, and through state and federal support. This sccond printing was made possible by a special project grant from the Lannan Foundation. Coffee Hous
e Press receives general operating support from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature and from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Coffee House receives major funding from the McKnight Foundation, and from Target. Coffee House also receives significant support from an anonymous donor; the Buuck Family Foundation; the Bush Foundation; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; Consortium Book Sales and Distribution; the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art; Stephen and Isabel Keating; the Lerner Family Foundation; the Outagamie Foundation; the Pacific Foundation; the law firm of Schwegman, Lundberg, Woessner & Kluth, P.A.; Charles Steffey and Suzannah Martin; the James R. Thorpe Foundation; the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Foundation; West Group; the Woessner Freeman Family Foundation; and many other generous individual donors.

  This activity is made possible

  in part by a grant from the

  Minnesota State Arts Board, through

  an appropriation by the Minnesota

  State Legislature and a grant from

  the National Endowment for the

  Arts.

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Half Title Page

  Contents

  Alphonsus

  Alpine Valley

  Alps

  Altai Scarp

  Appennines

  Archimedes

  Aristoteles

  Carpathians

  Catharina

  Caucasus Mountains

  Clavius

  Cleomedes

  Copernicus

  Cordillera Mountains

  Eastern Sea

  Eratosthenes

  Fra Mauro

  Gassendi

  Grimaldi

  Humboldt

  Hyginus Rille

  J. Herschel

  Joliot-Curie

  Jules Verne

  Jura Mountains

  Laker of Dreams

  Langrenus

  Longomontanus

  Moscow Sea

  Neper

  Ocean of Storms

  Petavius

  Plato

  Posidonius

  Ptolemaeus

  Purbach

  Pythagoras

  Riccioli

  Rook Mountains

  Sea of Clouds

  Sea of Cold

  Sea of Crises

  Sea of Fertility

  Sea of Moisture

  Sea of Nectar

  Sea of Rains

  Sea of Serenity

  Sea of Tranquillity

  Straight Wall

  Theophilus

  Tsiolkovsky

  Tycho

  Walther

  Colophon

  Funder Acknowledgment