Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22
Page 4
Much as an artist will spend hours combing the hairs of her brush to perfection or the writer ensures again and again that his stack of blank paper has straight edges before setting down a single word, Rogers bred and re-bred his bacteria over the course of the next six months without ever daring to paint with them.
But he could not stall forever. His first painting, in bacteria on a mica flake, was of a thumbnail-sized Garden of Eden. Magnified with a jeweler's loupe, tiny ocelots sprawled on emerald branches, herons stood one-legged around a droplet of a pool, lizards and frogs clung to the undersides of every speck leaf, and Adam and Eve themselves embraced in a glade of sphagnum.
Only one other man, the painter Arthur Dove, saw the painting while it lived. Dove was sufficiently moved by the miniature to sing its praises to everyone he knew before going back to New York City, and by the time Rogers was ready to show his first large-scale work, a modest buzz had swept the Baltimore art community, and he felt compelled to invite friends and colleagues to the unveiling.
Rogers had installed two panes of glass, flush against each other, measuring eight feet high by ten wide, into a specially shuttered attic studio. He had then introduced carefully designed cultivars of colored bacteria to the minuscule gap between the panes, bacteria bred to grow and mingle and wiggle into place to form their picture within a strict time-frame.
He was entertaining the guests downstairs, waiting for the painting to mature, when he heard his apprentice, a local boy named Tom Blake, cry out from above. When Rogers reached the attic, he found the bacteria blooming ahead of schedule, swirling and coiling into their magnificent living replica of a Franklin County field at night. The stars twinkled in feverish animation; the clouds kinked and spiraled as the bacteria glided between the panes of glass; the trees undulated as if rustling in a breeze.
Matters were only made worse when Blake threw open the shutters, which caused the bacteria to perform as they had been bred to on the introduction of light. This group consumed that one; the next moved to the frame, chasing the other to the corner. Before Rogers's eyes, the starry night dawned, first running awash in rosy ripples, then suffering the curls of indigo sky to be burned away by a languid sun that darkened as it climbed the sky from a pale lemon to a richer shade reminiscent of egg yolk.
By the time the guests had been notified and crowded up the stairs with much cursing and sloshing of drinks, the bacteria painting had run its course and died, leaving nothing but a black scum between the panes that represented nothing so much as a neglected bathtub ring.
Despite his well-meaning friends, Rogers fell into deep depression from which he sent numerous letters to his father, forgetting, or ignoring, the man's death a year before. He also remained house- and studio-bound, during which time he presumably perfected new strains of bacteria, although he refused to share the results of his work with any visitors.
One morning, five months after his ruined show, Rogers did not come to breakfast. His housekeeper, finding the door to his studio locked, called several of his friends to break it down. They discovered him lying supine, trails of dried blood oozing from his nose, ears, and eyes, dead from fever.
Rainbow bacteria in dishes of agar cluttered every surface, alongside reams of cheap typing paper filled with handwritten notes. What portion of the notes was legible indicated that Rogers had denounced his chosen medium as “sadistically ephemeral,” and that he prayed he would be judged by his masterwork, an “ingenious illness” which dwelt in a stoppered vial of blue glass. His friends, though they did all to search but tear up the very floorboards, found no such vial.
When the doctors removed Rogers's shirt for the autopsy, they found, imprinted in his flesh by colonies of colored bacteria that had gathered beneath the skin, a portrait. Under the examination lights, the portrait, an unidentified elderly man, grimaced, winced against the brightness, and dissolved into a flock of black teardrops that ran down beneath the skin in the channels of Rogers's ribcage.
In the years after his death, artists visiting Baltimore took to honoring Rogers by kissing his tiny gravestone in the Lantern Hill Cemetery, which led to colorful lip rashes and the occasional visual hallucination.
3. Of all failed Utopian societies, the most tragic was Symphony, New York. Its founding in 1900 came at the end of a decade-long struggle between composer Elijah Nile and his musical nemesis, New Orleans-born Clement Beauchamp.
The rivalry between Nile and Beauchamp began in the mid 1880s, during their student days at Monadnock Conservatory in southern Vermont. Nile, studying composition under avant-garde marching band leader James Hannibal Orser, wrote a requiem, based upon the poetry of Sappho, to be sung pianissimo by a hundred-strong choir of quadruple basses. Nile's classmate Beauchamp, the son of a respected violin maker and a prodigy himself, on hearing that Nile's stunt composition was to be performed at the annual graduation recital, reputedly said, “He won't win her favor this night!” (The “her” in question was a young woman desired by both Nile and Beauchamp; brief notes in Nile's diary mention the double infatuation, her clothing and pistol of a “fantastical nature,” and that she was “tattooed like an island savage.") Beauchamp responded by writing his own recital piece, a nocturne, and inventing the only instrument on which it could be played, the 1,001-string Viola d'Arabia.
Audience reaction ranged from befuddlement to anger, amusement to apathy. In the later recollection of both Nile and Beauchamp, it was during this concert that each became aware of the other as a mutually exclusive genius, touching off the most cutthroat feud in the musical history of New England.
For several years the feud was limited to wild innovations in song structure and instrumentation. At first Beauchamp's concerts were showier than were Nile's; with a background in instrument making, Beauchamp had the upper hand in constructing such oddities as the Ether Lyre, which sat alone on a dramatically darkened stage playing melodies derived from the movements of the spheres, a multi-harped improvement on the piano forte called the forte forte forte, and the Tyrannophone, whose multiple pipes and horns were arranged in the shape of a life-sized dinosaur skeleton.
Beauchamp's creations were intimidatingly grandiose, but Nile strove for more subtlety. He discovered “empathy chords,” tones so striking or moving that listeners invariably reacted orally, with sighs or screams, on hearing them. His infamous “Asylum” cycle, which a young Charles Ives described as “uniquely disturbing,” gained much of its musical effect from the unwitting, or at least unwilling, collaboration of its own audience, whose shrieks and moans provided a basso continuo beneath the wailing of the chorus.
Nile tinkered endlessly with his compositions. For the last performance of “Asylum,” he had each audience member sing a note on entering the custom-built concert hall in order to seat them with others who were like-voiced. Then by piping particular empathy chords to various parts of the hall he was able to elicit the appropriate screams in the soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and bass registers. Beauchamp's papers tell us that his and Nile's eccentric beloved attended the concert but would not sit in her assigned soprano section, moving instead behind a group of visiting Southerners, which caused Nile's emotions to blossom from nervousness into the furious jealousy that so marked the evening. Whether through accident or design, one of the tourists, a gentleman from Tennessee, was seated at the precise confluence of the hall's terrible acoustic power. He suffered punctured eardrums and a permanent change in personality, his former sweet nature giving way to snarling cynicism.
Clement Beauchamp, determined to end the rivalry by conducting the ultimate musical concert, composed what he named “The Infinity,” a five hour and seven minute long grand opera that was to be performed, starting at noon, on the 1st of July, 1898, by the entire Eastern seaboard. Four years went into the composition and distribution of the myriad parts to each town and township, along with copious notes on when and how each vocal subset was to begin their singing. He dedicated his work to “Elijah Nile, a fine joiner of
notes.” Wallace Byrd, a newspaperman from Hawthorne County, Virginia, whom Beauchamp invited to hear the concert, wrote of the occasion:
The expression on the Maestro's face is one of tragically innocent anticipation. He has assured me that the summit of Lully Hill is the best location from which to hear the concert, although, one must admit, the lowering storm clouds in the east offer cause for concern. The great quantity of food, apparently packed, but not, thus far, offered, leads one to wonder, is another guest expected?
And later, recording the approach of twelve, and the light rainfall that filled the afternoon and continued into the evening, Byrd wrote:
The Maestro sits cross-legged on the sodden blanket, his face lifted to the rain-choked sky, a rapturous expression borne upon his face. His hand moves with a languid, quite beautiful motion, as if conducting phantoms, and I cannot distinguish the tears from the raindrops flowing down his cheeks. He speaks at times, in a whisper. “Ah,” he might say, “the Maryland basses, entering with a wonderful precision,” or, “I had worried, writing the Charleston sopranos such a difficult descant, but needlessly! They are perfection itself, a glory that verges on heavenly,” or, simply, “Listen, sir, listen, I am vindicated, listen!” However I strain, I myself can hear nothing but muffled thunder and the susurrus of rain in the the wet grass.
Beauchamp took ill, and from his sickbed demanded to see newspapers from every town to which he'd sent music. Several seemed to mention “The Infinity” in brief paragraphs that mocked his hubris. These he clipped out and assembled into one article, which he tacked to the wall at the end of his bed. From a distance of several yards, and through his feverish eyes, the motley page looked much like bona fide criticism. His fever ran to pneumonia, and a week later he went to his grave, the scant consolation of a bad review better than no review at all. Recent research indicates that all of Beauchamp's clippings were written in response to local happenings that had nothing to do with his concert.
Nile's spirits were oddly depressed at the death of his nemesis. We also know, from his sparse diary, that the object of his and Beauchamp's desire had disappeared, mysteriously vanishing, as he put it, “in search of answers elsewhere.” He too had one last grand musical project in mind, which was the building of Symphony, a Utopian musical city. His engineers built each block, street, alley, lintel, gutter, cupola, and cornice to his precise specifications. Every room was designed to capture the noises inside, to amplify and tune them, and to project them outward into streets that curved like the bells of horns. All musical instruments were to be banned within the city walls, as was talking outside of special, velvet-lined speech rooms, so as not to interfere with the intended effect, a richly textured, ever-mutating musical collage that would swell and dwindle as the tenants woke and slept and went about their daily business.
However, Nile had trouble finding any tenants for Symphony's musical buildings. He lived there alone, for three years, in a house at the acoustic center of the city. After finally going deaf, he slashed his own throat with a violin bow.
It is still possible to visit the ruins of Symphony in upstate New York. On a windy day, you might even be able to hear some ghostly fragments of Elijah Nile's last work, powered by wind and the traffic on Route 86. As for Clement Beauchamp, musicologists reported hearing fragments of “The Infinity” in Appalachia through the 1930s, apparently passed through several generations, and in 1996, Nashville music star Jimmy Buttry hit the country charts with his own version of one of these fragments, called “Broke My Heart."
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Dear Aunt Gwenda
Live Nude Plagiarism Bad Movie Reference Random Capitalization Edition
Dear Aunt Gwenda:
Mac or PC?
Aunt Gwenda: Personal to John Hodgman: Stop calling me. I gave Ira Glass back his cellphone ages ago, and I hated Tron.
—
Dear Aunt Gwenda:
My most recent short story is based partially on a series of events relating to a friend of mine, events which, as they were somewhat dramatic, became known not just to our wider circle, but outside it as well. However, I elaborated upon these events in a way that might cast an unpleasant light on my friend. Do I owe him some sort of disclaimer, or do I need his permission to relate those events that actually concerned him?
—
AG: I think it's safe to say that Mr. Unpleasantly Lighted is no longer in the friend camp. It's possible you've even propelled yourself into Nemesis Territory. Even if you never showed your magnum opus to anyone (and the world might thank you for that anyway, who can say?), the very fact that you felt the need to plagiarize your ex-friend's life is, well, disturbing. Ask not who isn't flattered by this situation, just go look in the mirror. Dude, be a writer: make something up. Chances are the only people who would read this story already know it. Next.
Dear Aunt Gwenda:
My sister's husband's tell-all memoir includes a detailed account of our brief, regrettable flirtation. My sister has disavowed me, although she has yet to divorce the man himself. How can I bring a reconciliation about?
AG: Clearly, what's called for here is an Untimely Demise, possibly even a Mysterious Disappearance, or an Untoward Incident. Or maybe the dreaded Call to Homeland Security. Whatever the case, you've got to get Mr. Indiscreet out of the picture, so you and sis can bond over your memories of him. So much the better for the girl talking if his character is impugned by the Method of Disappearance.
(Don't think I didn't notice that you left out whether said brief, regrettable flirtation took place after he was married to your sister, or before. If it was after, leave her alone. She's well within her rights to disown your soap operatic tendencied a$$.)
Dear Aunt Gwenda:
Do you think it is valid to dump friends/lovers for conflicting literary preferences, for example preferences which have been unexpectedly revealed to you and are in absolutely shocking opposition to your own views? I tell myself these tastes have no bearing on a person's morality, intelligence, or personality, and yet...? Really. And what about hiring practices? Does it depend on the field? And is this issue separate from musical/artistic/TV/movie preferences?
AG: Please recognize that this a rare moment of candor. If a friend or lover's conflicting taste is enough to make you consider dumping them, then you may as well go through with it. There's no future in such a fragile union.
Otherwise, I suggest using these little lapses in All That Is Holy as an excuse for some good, old-fashioned mockery. Scalding zingers make the heart grow fonder. (I say this as someone who allows out of love, sweet love, a box of Forgotten Realms novels to sit quietly in a closet, awaiting their moment to spring forth and turn us all virus-like into Conan and Conanettes.)
(Exception: If we're talking Orson Scott Card, abort the relationship immediately.)
—
Dear Aunt Gwenda:
Cultural relativism?
AG: Moneypenny. Dog cat relations. Superglue. Back to the Future sequels.
Speak sense if you want it in return.
Dear Aunt Gwenda:
My most recent short story is based heavily on the life story of a friend's grandmother, as related to me by that friend, without his grandmother's knowledge. Privacy or unwanted revelation is not really an issue, but I was wondering if this constituted a sort of plagiarism, and what my responsibilities are in reference to the friend and to his grandmother, as my story has recently been accepted by a small literary journal.
AG: What is afoot with all this thin veiling in the fiction, people? Is this because of the recession? Are we being plagued with a poverty of ideas? Are grandmothers now to be stripped of their anecdotes wholesale, in the hope that grandmothers don't read small literary journals? (Because that will Not Out. They do. They read all of them. All the grandmothers—all 900 of them—have an assigned small literary journal, and They Will Discover Your Treachery.)
This must be settled in the old way, but since duels are overdone
lately, I recommend arm wrestling granny instead. Yes, you may lose, but the tradition of honor must be upheld. You do not want the grandmothers finding out about this on their own. Really. Come clean. Square your elbow on the obsidian table of death and take a deep breath. Good luck.
Also, try making something up next time. Then you won't have to worry about the ancient league of grandmothers humiliating you to the theme song of Sylvester Stallone's trucker-with-an-arm-wrestling-dream movie classic, Over the Top. (Hearts were warmed.)
Dear Aunt Gwenda:
Which award is better: the Hugo or the Nebula?
Is it better to have loved and lost or is it better never to have lost at all?
What should an author do when a student writes to them and basically asks the author to write their book report?
AG: These questions appear on the surface to be unrelated, but isn't everything related? Isn't the entire universe just a tear on a giant's cheek?
1. Depends on the vintage.
2. Losing is good for being able to come up with your own damn stories instead of ripping off friend drama and grandmothers.
3. The author should immediately travel to the student's location and take the child under their wing, whether the child consents or not. If the author is forced to go undercover as a student, a la one Mr. Jon Cryer as a certain stock broker on the run from the mob in Hiding Out, so much the better. It all comes down to how much you are committed to The Children. If The Children are forced to write their own book reports, the book reports will be inaccurate, introducing a rip into the fabric of the giant's tear bubble and We Will All Die. Why do you want us all to die? Who will buy your books if that happens? The giant must not be allowed to wipe the universe away. You're a writer—how long can one little book report take anyway?
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Mike's Place
David J. Schwartz