90s short stories

Take, for example, Lynne Tillman's Absence of the Heart (from the 90s series, Serpent's Tail, London, 1990), recommended by Harry Matthews, Gary Indiana, and Edmund White, and signed by the author. She writes, "To Tim -- very glad to meet a sympathetic [sone] All my best. Lynne T [squiggle], June 1991." It's a book of stories, but I'd thought it was likely a novel. The stories appeared prior to this publication in various literary journals. They are, for example, "AKA Mergatroyde" in New Observations, 1985; "The Trouble With Beauty" in Conjunctions 14, 1989; "A Nomadic Event in the Body," in Semiotexte, 1984; "Weird Fucks," in Bikini Girl magazine, 1980; "Diary of a Masochist," published anonymously in Paranoids Anonymous Newsletter, 1978; and "Madame Realism" in an artist's book.

My manfriend and I used to go to a bookstore on the west side of Madison in his old used Chevrolet Malibu station wagon, a car named "the space potato," because it was long and beige and had rust spots on it, like eyes of a potato. Anna Smith worked there; she was a talented experimental poet trained in acting, and my manfriend liked her, and it was an occasion to flirt with her while I sat in the aisles, mesmerized by titles. When it was time to go, he'd come and find me, and there I would be, reading the backs of books. "Don't read blurbs," he told me. "Read books."

Harry Matthews writes about this book by Lynne Tillman, "In Absence of the Heart, Lynne Tillman lures us into unfamiliar ground with utterly persuasive, utterly duplicitous candor. Once there, we shall never be brought safely home. ..." Gary Indiana writes, "Lynne Tillman has the strongest, smartest, most subtly distinct writer's voice of my generation. I admire her breadth of observation, her syntax, her wit."

Maybe it's that I live with my mother that the word "fuck" gets me highly annoyed, as if no one ought to use it. Even my mother used it once. I had said, "I'm not taking my fucking car back into that repair shop so they can overcharge me," and she said, "You're not going to have your ~fucking~ car much longer if you don't." She said it very precisely. There was no ambivalence in the way she did it. Her diction ting'd it like a bell.

A friend, yesterday, told this joke on the phone about Ferdinand the Bull. Some bulls are standing on a hill overlooking a field with cows on it. One bull says, "Let's run down the hill and fuck that cow." And another bull says, "Let's walk down and fuck all of them." A wisdom joke, he called it. He didn't realize that I had given up on sex, so it's no joke I would find amusing, but maybe it is wise. Did I get it? I suppose. It's about running vs. walking. It's the word "fuck" I don't like, but I guess that's the word we use.

"Weird Fucks" sounds like a list story -- it might be a list story. It's the opening piece in the collection and runs from page 7 to page 43. Pretty long. She writes (p. 9), "I was a slum goddess and in college. He looked something like Richard Burton; I resembled Liz. It was, in feeling, as crummy and tortured as that." I like the phrase "slum goddess in college." The first passage I opened to in the book and read, just by flipping through the pages, was very intriguing, but I will not be able to find it easily again. Here's another one: "As we entered the restaurant, he said casually, 'Some crazy person kept calling me today.' Ah, I thought, that's how he talks about me, the me he's dissociating himself from." He tells her, "'I'd pick up the phone and there'd be no one there.' 'No one there?' I asked. 'No, the phone kept ringing, I'd answer and there'd be no one there. Finally I put the answering machine on.'" (p. 65, "Hung Up").

From "Absence of the Heart" (p. 67): "It was a battle for her to think. It was pointless. She spoke to herself. I am the one who waits. I am the one who will be waited upon. I have the kiss that can change men's lives. I can awaken the dead. I can never die. I am empty. I am perfect. I am full. I am all things to all men. She shook her head violently. He watched everything. The shake of the head, a sign to him. A fire lit. Something was burning. He felt ill, he felt wonderful. She was sublime, and he wondered how words like that existed before her."

Perhaps I should read the whole book. Read it to do it justice from the inside then reinvent the ways in which it partly molded me, or not and shrug it like a sleeve or do and get out of it like pants. Reading fully is to put your hands in the hands of the maker. It is not a glance.

Small party for an excuse

She tore up in a beauty parlor, I should say, not up a beauty parlor. Not that she wasn't beautiful in her own way, more likely she was just mad at it, at beauty, not at anyone's in particular. At her 23rd medallion party, she sat next to me -- I was 37, glad to be there, glad to be alive (but not yet grateful). She said, "You seem to have a few hormones still kicking around inside you." I didn't realize what was next in the general scheme of things, the bans, if you want to call it that, bans on singles having sex, bans on marrieds having sex, and worst of all, bans on marrieds being married, what a horrible drill that was to become ... (and this was the only way I could interpret it) ... for real estate, bans which must have been working better than war to revitalize the economy. I was in my graces, and she was keeping her chin up; she had left her husband for sex then gone back for him, and he was sitting by her. She was a quipper, quicker than anyone. There was a book called Not-God that she had discussed in the meeting. I had read it.

The internet gets quiet weekends. My mother and I are going to see Sicko tonight. Tony says people in Minneapolis might do well to worry about that bridge, but people across the country shouldn't worry about it -- that's what he's been doing in New York, watching on TV all day and yesterday about the 35W bridge. Infrastructure, I said, and he said, yes, that is a good thing for the whole country to worry about then, infrastructure. Wiretapping, another thing, I was thinking, but we didn't talk about it.

After the elms

Without the elm trees, the garden will be sunnier, but what will happen to the wildflowers that grew in their shade, wildflowers that require shade? The rose garden will be less encumbered by the elm trees' root systems, roots that cable under it. In the garden, rose is a queen; the human gardener places her higher than deer who would eat her and elms dying at her feet, but I cannot help mourn the trees' passing. The rose tree from Lake Nokomis suddenly blooms again, after a slow year; the deer leave her.

Sisters

Did he ever say to you, "I wish I could go running?" And so you stopped. You stopped going running when you needed your strength most in order to take care of him -- it was the summer he had the transplant, and you were decorating the house, and his mother was staying w/ him -- didn't you need your strength more than ever ... more than ever ever? If I said, "I wish I could go sailing," as you say you wish I would say, that it would occur to me to say, instead of saying what I did say, wh. is that I cannot meditate sailing on such a day, you would bitterly retort -- go sailing then, knowing no stray or bull or carnivore would take me. No, it wouldn't matter whether I said I could just go sailing on the day my sister says we wouldn't even know each other anymore, except for the relationship of sister -- and what a marvelous thing truth is; no, truth is that you like hurting me because it frees you to go sailing. That you can go sailing & feel caressed by the lake on the day after you have sent your sister to a prickly bed … that you can take her men, lightly, away from her, that you can abnegate her, frees you. I did go out on the lake this summer & tried to meditate w/ the swoosh of the water & the sun, but w/o a boyfriend in that setting, the sea was not of me, the lake, the way it was in childhood, the way nature envelops divorced people ... they are friends, but men aren't interested in me anymore, and it isn't that I wasn't spiritual enough, as you say. … Do you believe that men deserve happiness for all the happiness they have created in themselves & for others? Some of us have given every evening of our lives to working spiritual programs and still -- maybe it is men wouldn't be enough for me, a stray who likes the flash of fake blond hair, like a bird that likes shiny objects. Maybe it is that love would be enough for me, the right one. So I wrote about love in a slightly different way than you. I've been thinking about finding women again, that maybe one of them would find me worth knowing & loving & that our good humor would return to us; are there lesbians w/ boats or do only strays, bulls, and carnivores have them? and that she might be interested in something besides the flicker flash of fake blond hair, my poetry inside of me, the depths of good whales.

First Edition (Rose)

Buried tree