Joyland Trio Deal

by Jim Hanas

  Does this make you feel uncomfortable? If so, I apologize. I only mention it because these dark spots seem so integral to who I am. Without them I probably never would have broken into that house with Jesus, let him screw me in the hot tub (so sweet), and then stolen everything we could carry, including one of your CDs, which I saw on the kitchen counter. How could I not, right? Too weird. I drained my mom’s car battery listening to it in the driveway when I got home, and then there was a new Jesus in my life. (Pronounced the right way!) It was like a sign. Like God had sent me a personal invitation to join him for the coming apocalypse.

  Today, I’m a sister of another sort. And to think, I have you to thank for all of it. Your music saved my life.

  Yay, Jesus!

  Sincerely,

  Chris Eaton

  Letter to Claude Lévi-Strauss

  The Center for Epistolary Research

  21 Southview Avenue

  Toronto, Ontario

  M6H 1T3

  Mr. Claude Lévi-Strauss

  Levi-Strauss & Co. Inc.

  80 Allstate Parkway

  Markham, Ontario

  L3R 8X6

  September 19, 1995

  Dear Mr. Lévi-Strauss,

  Whereas I agree with the basic theory you present in your book From Honey to Ashes, it would appear that one of its essential premises has no factual grounding whatsoever, and I hope to bring this to your attention via this letter. In your book, you establish a dichotomy between honey and tobacco (a dichotomy which, I might add, does not always exist; see Vizquel’s work on the Pube tribe of the Upper Vulva), and quite correctly relate it to both myth and language in many South American indigenous civilizations. However, you also raise the issue that “the oppositional relationship existed before the substances themselves, or at least before one of them [i.e., tobacco],” and it is in this statement that our particular theoretical paths diverge.

  First of all, Mr. Lévi-Strauss, it seems ridiculous to me that a man of your intelligence could assume the presence of an object in language before its actual presence in a society. (The old joke about making an ASS out of U and ME comes to mind.) As David Segui has written (and I am sure you have read), “the power of words/language is limited by its inability to create something that does not already exist”; even fantastical works like science fiction and early mythology are really just hybrids of different objects that are already operative in our own society. Second, I think it is also presumptuous to say that tobacco immediately became taboo (or at least an inversion of the supreme goodness represented by honey, e.g., “the land of milk and . . .” etc.), that this view of tobacco is somehow a product of the genes. I think you will find many indications operative in our society today that point to the opposite.

  This becomes apparent in the light of the Canadian Supreme Court’s 1995 decision to lift the ban on tobacco advertisements. It seems to me that, if what you say is true, the average person would intrinsically shun cigarettes as mundane, and even evil, but someone (a great number of someones! 30 million northerners can’t be wrong!) has taken it upon themselves to make sure that tobacco is not made illegal and closed from our society completely. I think you would also find that the majority of North Americans consume more tobacco than honey. Perhaps your theory is only the result of anti-tobacco groups; you are blind to the way they have shaped our society recently (see Thome’s work on the tactics of these groups, Butt Out, New Tammany Press, Cleveland, 1974). “People give meaning to words; they do not just happen.”

  I hope this letter wasn’t too presumptuous of me, but I find this subject fascinating and generally find you to be an intelligent and inspiring commentator. Therefore, when I saw such glaring oversights in your text, I felt it was my duty to confront you on them. Perhaps I am misreading your intent, in which case I would gladly welcome further explanation from you, or a return argument if you find me foolishly inept on this subject. If you wish, we could even set up some sort of public debate. I am up to the challenge if you are.

  Looking forward to hearing from you,

  Samuel Rosenstock

  November 8, 1995

  Dear Mr. Rosenstock,

  We are in receipt of your letter dated September 19, addressed to one Claude Lévi-Strauss and regarding his book From Honey to Ashes.

  It took a little research on my part, but I was finally able to ascertain that your Claude Lévi-Strauss is a French author, among whose works is From Honey to Ashes, and whose latest work is The Links (having not been privy to the printed title, I can only hope the spelling is correct).

  As you will note from the address on this letterhead, Claude has only one thing in common with Levi Strauss 7 Co. Inc. — part of the name. Our Levi Strauss was the originator of our very famous jeans and departed this world on September 26, 1902. There was no hyphen in his name, Levi was his given name and Strauss his surname and although the company is headed by his great nephew, Bob Haas, the company still bears his name.

  I believe if you check the “Contemporary Authors” section at the Metropolitan Public Library, you will find an address that you can forward your letter to, as I am sure you are looking forward to Claude receiving your challenge.

  I received your letter as it was addressed (partially) correctly, and when the Mailroom receives a letter they have no concept of what to do with, they forward it to me . . . you can’t imagine what comes across my desk, but it does make for some interesting reading.

  I hope I have been of some assistance.

  Best Regards,

  ---------- -----------

  Merchandising Department

  Levi Strauss & Co. Inc.

  The Thesis

  She would always be alone. Like her parents. From childhood’s hour, she felt, she dreamt, that she had not been as others were, was drawn, from every depth of good and ill, towards some mystery that she could not quite reach. Could not even see. She had a purpose. Of that she was sure. But the finer details — or even the larger, more vague ones — were beyond her. And such was her difficulty in trying to circumvent this ambiguous calling that she looked on the rest of humanity — her acquaintances and friends and even the occasional circumstantial lover, chasing the paths set out by their parents, or their likes and dislikes, or their economic stations — with contemptuous jealousy. As if she existed outside the world in which they squatted.

  She would never quite understand her purpose until her final days, when suddenly it would form like a cataract on her vision. Then and only then would she see that everything she had resisted doing up until that point, for fear that any decisive course of action might unwittingly take her further away from her destiny, had been the straightest line she might ever have shot. From adolescence onward, even with a failed marriage and a son in the middle, she had acted as if her own life, and where she placed herself within the spectrum of it, did not matter, which is probably why, in the late 1980s, by the time she had accidentally fallen into her Environmental Studies PhD and helped fashion the amalgamated degree of Archaeology, History, Biology, and Political Science, she still selected as the subject of her thesis — despite the protests of her advisors at Haverford in Pennsylvania — the Welsh inventor, the pioneer of sustainable, the hermit, the crackpot lunatic: Saith Crone.

  It was a paper that was nearly never written. Saith Crone’s inventions had undoubtedly changed the course of history. An early pioneer of mechanical sewing machines and the creator of both parcel post and mail-order retail, Crone’s contributions to the lives of housewives in the mid 1800s alone might have been enough to ensure his immortality. It is, in fact, arguable that these domestic breakthroughs, which allowed women to become more politically active, contributed as much to women’s suffrage in Britain and the colonies as the hearsay and rumors of similar political movements in Sweden. Crone invented the precursor to the modern sleeping bag, which he would always regret. And, m
ost interesting to anyone in the field of Environmental Studies, at the height of Crone’s retail empire, he took the considerable fortune he’d amassed in his short life, sold off all holdings he had in international commerce, and constructed an environment that would allow him to pursue several new agricultural theories that had lately begun to obsess him. In 1872, after nine years of steady construction, Saith Crone completed his fortress on the northern coast of Wales, near Rhyl, which he claimed he would never leave, before the term “environmental sustainability” had even been coined.

  The fortress itself (whose ruins can still be visited for a small fee though few actually take the Sefydliad chan ’n Crone Astudiaethau up on this offer) is not without architectural interest. The interior buildings, from the larder to the stable to the main living quarters, are walled almost exclusively with sandstone shipped from New Brunwick, Canada, despite the presence of a perfectly good sandstone quarry in the Brecon Beacons. And with dozens of buildings given up to seed storage, and a library around nearly every corner, there is, curiously, only one bedroom. It is also the only British castle constructed in the Elizabethan Renaissance period (in its truest sense, as opposed to the more common Renaissance palace), as the decline of the feudal system and the advent of new weapons technology made old manners of defense entirely useless. Thus, its Joseph Paxton–inspired design stands out demonstrably from that of other Welsh fortresses like Caernarfon and Raglan. Its outer walls are constructed largely of molded steel, rather than simple stone and mortar, to defend against higher-grade firearms and cannons. The inner court is, likewise, a very good example of the symmetrical Renaissance reaction to the Gothic and Greek ornamentation of, say, the Cardiff clock tower, with its gardens laid out in grids approximating Japanese Sudoku puzzles, in cubes split into groups of nine. Despite the unnurturing Welsh climate, Crone succeeded in growing everything from beetroot, leeks, and swede to bananas and mangoes, papayas, and passion fruit. He’d calculated the height of the walls to keep the harsh Welsh winds at bay while maximizing the power of the reluctant sun. The moat was fed by several nearby rivers, which subsequently drained through perforated sheets of coconut fiber in the castle foundation, beneath the lush gardens and orchards. Plus, Crone had developed a complicated system of crop rotation, transplanting entire gardens of barely sprouted plants, possibly once a month (the diagrams he left behind provided no time frame), until the soil reached a fertility level comparable to that of the Nile — 0.1% nitrogen, 0.2% phosphorous anhydrides, and 0.6% potassium.

  But no one in the field of Environmental Studies had ever approached him as a subject before because this half of the story always seemed overshadowed by the other: Crone had also built his self-sustaining fortress without any exterior doors or windows, totally sealed off from the outside world, surrounding it with a moat eighteen feet deep and a wall thirty feet high (with squared crenels spaced three feet apart and three feet deep). Because he never intended to leave it or let anyone else cross its threshold. Because he feared for his life at the hands of French assassins sent by the nephew and step-grandson of Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Saith Drava Crone was born in 1827, in Chantiesor, a small suburb of Newtown (or rather an even smaller suburb of Llanllwchaearn, which was itself a suburb of Newtown, until it absorbed Chantiesor in the 1870s). He was the fourth of five children born to a well-known cricket player and the wife of a well-known cricket player. However, Young Saith’s dreams of following in his father’s footsteps were shattered, along with his hip, when he was only eleven, pushed from a tree by his sister while picking apples on the family orchard. While he recouped, his mother taught him to sew and knit, and at thirteen he apprenticed for a short time with the village draper. At eighteen, his parents provided him with enough money to buy his own shop, but instead he spent all of it on the most luxurious cloths and fabrics he could find, had them sent to gentry across the country, and then handled his growing clientele from his childhood bedroom. He spent his days talking to the sailors who imported his bolts of material from around the world, and his evenings at the local pub playing darts. Eventually he bought his own house, then a separate work loft, then a warehouse, and then a factory.

  Then he invented his ill-fated sleeping bag, which was really nothing more than a reworking of seventeen thousand brown blankets, the remains of an order for sixty-thousand from the Russian army, delivered to St. Petersburg at the rate of six thousand per week until Great Britain joined the French in the Crimean War to aid in the defense of the Ottoman Empire and all trade with Russia was ceased by order of the Prime Minister. In order to move the stock as quickly as possible (the warehouse space was required for shipments of velvet coming in from Lucca and Genoa, as well as the finest sarcenet from Bhagalpur and antique silks from the Chinese Jiangxi province, for the manufacture of high-end breeches), Crone’s team of tailors worked round the clock: folding the long brown rugs into thirds, stuffing them with feathers and straw, and then marketing them to the poor as a combination bed/pillow/blanket. Sales in the first year were still relatively meager, however, so he spread the word of his Euklisia Rug among the journeymen and seasonal workers, shepherds and amateur astronomers. Sleeping outdoors for fun was not yet a pastime.

  Unfortunately, the new and improved rugs continued to take up space in the warehouse, carefully packed in bales of fifty. Crone’s accountant urged him to cut the stock loose, dumping as many as he could into the Severn — or the Cardigan, or down off St. Ann’s Head where there would surely be no one to see it — at a loss to make room for items with more profitable margins. He and Crone packed the first wagon themselves, but just as they were about to launch the cursed sleeping bags into the drink, they were approached by a man in uniform. It was not yet a crime to clog the waterways with most waste, but the disposal of textiles had been brought under British legislation a few years earlier in 1854, after wig merchants in London dumped barrels of rotting hair (the wig had gone horribly out of fashion after the American Revolution) into a well in the Soho district, where it attracted flies and eventually caused an outbreak of cholera and salmonella that left thousands gasping for their lives in makeshift hospitals and eventually killed over six hundred and twenty-one. The penalty was two years minus a day. They were sure the jig was up, and quickly made as though they were simple salesmen with bad timing, turning two of the bales into a makeshift table and unrolling a selection of the sleeping bags under the waning moonlight. What they did not see until the uniformed men staggered closer was that they were just foreign soldiers on leave, drunk and barely coherent, begging for a place to stay for the night. Relieved and repentant, Crone gave them two of the bags for free, tossed the rest of them in the wagon, and headed back to Newtown.

  Three days later, an emissary from the Prussian Chief of the General Staff arrived at Crone’s factory to sample one, and ordered enough — the remainder of Crone’s excess stock — to test them with the Prussian Second Army, who arrived well-rested at the Battle of Königgrätz to wrest a swift victory from Austria in the Seven Weeks War. Once reparations were made, Prussia sent an order to Crone for four hundred and fifty thousand more.

  This was the transaction that made him one of the wealthiest men in England. He was invited to Prussia by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to see an army at rest, fêted by the King of Prussia, gave a speech to sleep scientists at the Frederick William University. All because of this sleeping bag. Crone even set up another factory in Berlin to handle growing orders from the public sector as his fabulous schlafsack practically invented the outdoor enthusiast in Europe. To the Prussians, he was a minor celebrity. He returned to Wales with an honorary title and more stories for the boys at the pub than you could imagine.

  This was when he unknowingly crossed the Napoleonic Dynasty. Following the assassination of Queen Isabella of Spain, the Prussian Chancellor frantically suggested Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen as her replacement. Despite Leopold’s legitimate ties to the Spanish throne, Emper
or Louis Napoleon III of France, son of the original Napoleon’s brother (while also the grandson of the original’s first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais), feared encirclement by a Prussian-led alliance. He was also advised that a war with Prussia, which they would assuredly win with their superior breech-loading chassepot rifles (so successful in the recent American Civil War) and mitrailleuses (an early form of a machine gun), could help dam his declining popularity and distract the French population from their cries for democratic reform. So he sent an emissary to the King of Prussia demanding that they retract the prince’s candidacy. When they did not, Louis Napoleon left Paris for Metz to assume personal control of the Army of the Rhine.

  Despite being outnumbered and outgunned, Crone’s bright-eyed Prussians eventually trapped half of Louis Nap’s decimated forces in Metz, leading to the French Emperor’s surrender at the nearby Battle of Sedan. Parisians rebelled and selected an interim minister for their second republic on September 11, 1870. When the news reached Newtown several days later, in the form of an order for nine hundred thousand more bags, Saith Crone crossed himself and put out the light.

  It was Louis Napoleon’s love of puzzles that confused Saith Crone the most, that someone would choose to be alone so much when, in his whole life, Crone himself had never felt so alone while surrounded by people. It is quite impossible to say whether Crone would have been mentally fine after the fall of the Second French Empire, and continued to amass more wealth than anyone could ever need or want, had the deposed emperor not selected Great Britain as his exiled new home, and had the British Parliament not welcomed him with open arms; because it is quite simply a fact that he did, and they did. Using his own considerable fortune, Crone made an attempt to petition against the French immigration, but since Louis had already lived in England during his first exile as a young bachelor in the late 1830s and early 1840s, there was not much the Welsh entrepreneur could do. Besides, Nap had already purchased an estate in Chislehurst, where, according to an interview with Daily Telegraph and Courier, he planned to live out the rest of his days in peace and quiet with his wife, Eugenie, and young son, Jérôme. Besides, he claimed, he was glad to have time to himself without having to worry about “helping people catch trains” or “making Paris look pretty for tourists.”