Affinity
Page 41
Save me a seat. So sweet of you, if ridiculous, hypocritical—you must know very well that as the guest of honor you will have a seat; in fact, it is the seat of the guest of honor, and if you want someone to sit close beside you, if you want someone, an old, dear friend, to clasp your hand, to drink with you, and reminisce with you, and laugh with you, it is your prerogative, and no one is likely to deny you who have been paid, for a fifty-minute lecture, in excess of an adjunct’s salary for an entire semester.
In my soiled and ill-fitting khakis, in my hiking boots, worn suede jacket, baseball cap over straggly hair, with my wan, pale, truculent face I am not exactly dressed for the quasi elegance of either of our “good” restaurants; but it seems that I am invited, and that you will insist that I sit beside you, to the consternation of your hosts. For how sternly you address them, the middle-aged woman who is our new dean of the faculty, an avowed “fan” of yours (she has said), who will not fail to do your bidding; for you are complaining also, not gravely but pleasantly, with the air of a stand-up comedienne who is accustomed to getting both appreciative laughter and her own way, of the room you’ve been given in the alumni house—in fact, it is a suite, but it is not what you’d expected—you are hoping that someone (the apparatchik?) can book a room for you in a “real hotel” with a large-screen TV and twenty-four-hour room service. Anything but this charming old “historic” house on campus. Of course, this will be executed.
An extra place at dinner, not so difficult. A hotel room at this time of evening, more difficult. But both demands will be met, for your hosts are eager to please you. The dean is particularly eager to please you for you are a famous person who will (very likely) write about them and the college, and it is to their advantage to please you, so far as they can.
Always, people have been eager to please you. Why?
The harder you are to please, the more eager they are to please you. It is something like a law of nature.
And it is a fact, or was—I loved you.
Might have died for you, if you’d explicitly requested it. As it was, your wish was too oblique out on the hiking trail. You’d allowed me to misinterpret. For which I am grateful—I love you.
Somehow then, you are gone—moving haltingly, using your cane. My colleagues have escorted you away with the intention of protecting you from further interruptions; smiling after you, somewhat dazed, I am not sure what to do next—wishing that I had not brought my bulky backpack with me, damned awkward to carry on my bicycle, particularly in the rain.
Since approximately 4:00 p.m. it has been raining. When I’d made my way on my bicycle to campus, suffused with anticipation and determined not to fail.
What will be done that cannot be undone.
But now—all has been altered.
My pride is such, I will not run after my colleagues to ask which restaurant. Where is the dinner in your honor, at which I will sit close beside you, and clasp your hand?—where, in the night, in the pelting rain?
Pride too will not allow me to beg a ride with my colleagues. For these are not colleagues but rivals for the fickle admiration of undergraduates. Perhaps not rivals so much as enemies, who would be cheered if I died, or at least was grievously injured, in a bicycle mishap on the highway, in pelting rain on my way to the French Provincial restaurant at the edge of town—for I think it must be this, I think I overheard one of your hosts utter the name of the French restaurant in a low voice, hoping that I would not hear; of course, in the rain, as I pedal along College Avenue shakily, I am cursing myself for having come away without a raincoat crumpled and shoved into my backpack with other supplies.
Headlights in my eyes, near blinding. Like the flashbulbs heralding a new life, which make me smile, and my breath catch in my throat.
Let’s try that again, please. Both of you—eyes open and SMILE.
Now, however, my senses are on high alert. I am feeling good—uplifted. Very smart to wear my baseball cap; my hair will not blow wetly into my face. But I am hoping that it is the French restaurant at which the dinner will be held, and not the other—Carnival, it’s called—on the other, farther side of town; if I arrive at the wrong restaurant, I will have to bicycle miles to the other, and even then, I can’t be absolutely certain that the dinner for you will be at Carnival either, if not at the French restaurant; for there are one or two other possible restaurants to which the lecture committee might take you, one of them a steak house, the other a reputedly upscale Italian restaurant, and each of them far too expensive for me to afford even if I were in the habit of going out to restaurants to eat, which I am not.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
ROBERTA ALLEN’s most recent book is The Dreaming Girl (Ellipsis).
JOHN ASHBERY’s newest collection of poems is Breezeway (Ecco/HarperCollins). A two-volume set of his collected French translations was published in 2014 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
JEDEDIAH BERRY’s first novel, The Manual of Detection (Penguin), won the Crawford Award and the Hammett Prize and was adapted for audio by BBC Radio. His story in cards, “The Family Arcana,” was recently published as a poker deck by Ninepin Press.
JONATHAN CARROLL (www.jonathancarroll.com) is the author of twenty books, most recently Bathing the Lion (St. Martin’s). He lives in Vienna, Austria.
MATTHEW CHENEY is the author of Blood: Stories (Black Lawrence).
ROBERT CLARK has published nine books and has just completed a new collection, Bayham Street: Essays in Longing. He lives in New York.
ROBERT COOVER has published more than twenty books of fiction and plays, his most recent being A Child Again (McSweeney’s), Noir (Overlook), and The Brunist Day of Wrath (Dzanc). His new book of fiction, Huck Out West, from which the excerpts in this issue are taken, will be published by Norton in January 2017.
ROBERT DUNCAN (1919–1988) was associated with movements including the San Francisco Renaissance, the New American Poetry, and the Black Mountain school. Called “one of the most accomplished, one of the most influential” of the postwar American poets by Kenneth Rexroth, he was also a pioneering figure in gay culture and politics, publishing the essay “The Homosexual in Society” in 1944. Recent editions of his work include The H. D. Book: The Collected Writings of Robert Duncan (University of California), Ground Work: Before the War/In the Dark, A Selected Prose, and Selected Poems (all New Directions).
RACHEL BLAU DuPLESSIS is the author of the multivolume poem Drafts (Wesleyan and Salt), Interstices (Subpress), Graphic Novella (Xexoxia), Eurydics (Further Other Book Works), and Days and Works (Ahsahta). “Useful Knots and How to Tie Them” is part of a new long poem, Traces of Previous Formats.
ANDREW ERVIN is the author of the novel Burning Down George Orwell’s House (Soho), which was recently translated into French by Gallimard/Editions Joëlle Losfeld, and a collection of novellas, Extraordinary Renditions (Coffee House). He lives in Philadelphia.
MARGARET FISHER is the author of Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas, The BBC Experiments 1931–1933 (The MIT Press) and RADIA, a Gloss of the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto (Second Evening Art).
ELIZABETH GAFFNEY is the author of the novels When the World Was Young and Metropolis (both Random House). She lives in Brooklyn.
ISABELLA HAMMAD is an English writer based in Brooklyn. Her contribution to this issue marks her first appearance in print.
MICHELLE HERMAN’s most recent books are Devotion, a novel, and Like a Song, a collection of essays. Her 2005 novel, Dog (MacAdam/Cage), will be reissued in 2016 (all Outpost 19). She directs the MFA program in creative writing at Ohio State.
BRANDON HOBSON is the author, most recently, of Desolation of Avenues Untold (CCM).
Cover artist ZACH HORN is a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He lives and works in Dorchester, Massachusetts.
TIM HORVATH (www.timhorvath.com) is the author of Understories (Bellevue), which won the New Hampshire Literary Award, and Circulation (sunnyoutside). “The Spinal Descent” is excerpted from h
is first novel.
EMILY HOUK serves as coeditor of Ninepin Press and has just finished work on her first novel. This is her first appearance in print.
DIANE JOSEFOWICZ coauthored The Zodiac of Paris (Princeton) with Jed Z. Buchwald.
PAUL LISICKY is the author of five books, including Lawnboy (Graywolf), Unbuilt Projects (Four Way), and, most recently, The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship (Graywolf). He teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University, Camden.
SPENCER MATHESON just completed his first novel and is writing a libretto for composer Patrick Zimmerli’s opera about Lucia Joyce. He lives in Paris. This is his first appearance in print.
J. W. McCORMACK’s work has appeared in periodicals including Bookforum, Tin House, The New Republic, VICE, New Inquiry, and n+1. He is a senior editor at Conjunctions.
RICK MOODY is the author of three collections of stories, a memoir, a volume of essays on music, and six novels, including, most recently, Hotels of North America. With Darcey Steinke, he edited Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited (both Little, Brown).
JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author, most recently, of the novel The Man Without a Shadow (Ecco) and the story collection The Doll Master (Mysterious Press). She currently teaches at UC-Berkeley and is a recent recipient of the President’s Medal of Honor in the Humanities.
STEPHEN O’CONNOR is the author of five books, including the novel Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemmings (Viking) and the fiction collection Here Comes Another Lesson (Free Press).
M. J. REY is an emerging writer based in Los Angeles. This is his first appearance in print.
ELIZABETH ROBINSON is the author, most recently, of Counterpart (Ahsahta) and On Ghosts (Solid Objects), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
DARCEY STEINKE is the author of the memoir Easter Everywhere and the novels Milk (both Bloomsbury), Jesus Saves (Grove/Atlantic), Suicide Blonde (Atlantic Monthly), Up Through the Water (Doubleday), and Sister Golden Hair (Tin House).
CHARLES B. STROZIER teaches history at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City. His contribution to this issue is an adapted excerpt from his forthcoming book, Your Friend Forever (Columbia). He is also the author of Lincoln’s Quest for Union: A Psychological Portrait (Basic Books and Paul Dry Books), Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Apocalypse: Fundamentalism in America (Beacon).
Poet and translator COLE SWENSEN (www.coleswensen.com) teaches at Brown University. Her most recent book is Landscapes on a Train (Nightboat).
GILLES TIBERGHIEN is a philosopher and writer specializing in landscape theory and land art who teaches at the Université de Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne. His work in this issue was originally published in French in his 2008 book Amitier (Éditions du Félin).
SALLIE TISDALE’s new collection of essays, Violation, was published in April by Hawthorne Books.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
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EDITOR: Bradford Morrow
MANAGING EDITOR: Micaela Morrissette
SENIOR EDITORS: Benjamin Hale, Joss Lake, J. W. McCormack, Edie Meidav, Nicole Nyhan, Pat Sims
COPY EDITOR: Pat Sims
ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Jedediah Berry
PUBLICITY: Darren O’Sullivan, Mark R. Primoff
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS: Matthew Balik, Elena Botts, Kaitlynn Buchbaum, Brigid Fister, Adela Foo, Gilad Jaffe, Julie Jarema, Kelsey Johnson, Tessa Menatien, Chloe Reimann, Zoe Rohrich, Jay Rosenstein, Anna Sones, Nicholas Wetherell
CONJUNCTIONS is published in the Spring and Fall of each year by Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504.
This issue of Conjunctions is made possible with the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Copyright © 2016 CONJUNCTIONS.
Cover design by Jerry Kelly, New York. Cover art by Zach Horn (www.zachhornart.com): The Garden of Nocturnal Delights, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 62 in. © Zach Horn 2016; all rights reserved by the artist.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4222-2
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