Skeleton Man by Jesse Mitchell (from the novel "Mythic Creatures")

Skeleton Man
by
Jesse S. Mitchell

It is a progressive era. We are a progressive people. The world is changing and challenging. I throw an American cigarette up to my lips and light it in a flash of blue-orange flame. I close the door and look down the hallway to the door out to the street. I become apprehensive. All those monstrous cars and scooters spewing out their fumes, their smoke slithering around everything and strangling, ruining the cherry trees and rhododendrons and roses. Now is a new time. A time like no other. Right now and in the middle of it I stand, like a thin piece of straw in the eye of a hurricane. French air, it smells so sweet as the Virginia tobacco smoke wafts up into it and carries me away. One war won in 1945, another one lost in 1956 and now, 1962, a colony lost and the empire of the Gauls is all the better for it. I watch the yellow light bulb sway on its chain. The door next to mine opens and out looks a pair of shifty, blood shot eyes.
“Hello, Ali.”
“Oh it is you, yes, yes, that was the noise. You cannot be too careful, no.”
“I guess not.”
“So out you go into the sighing sisterhood of Parisian society then, my good man.”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“Stripping the bark off the twigs, which ones spotted and clean, ey? Oh yes, you know that, that Marilyn is dead today?”
“Okay, I will see you later.”
“Stay careful. They breathe just like you and I, but their eyes…their eyes give it all away.”
“Sure, Ali.”
I walk down the hall to the door. I pick up my pace. I can tell the rain is soon to come because my hip is starting to hurt. I can feel the gentle ache that is always there start to transform into a big time yowling rage of pain. This means the rain will come soon and it always has…it has been this way since the day my leg was ruined. Laying beneath a pile of bloodied and wet bodies in the Warsaw Ghetto, I hid, a small boy…frayed and cowardly, shaking and sweaty but alive. It was there that the hard boot step of a tall blond Nazi stepped hard on the edge of the pile and crushed what was my left hip. I lie there in the quiet. I didn’t allow myself even a tiny shriek. I simply kept still and wrestled with myself and my hurts and shames. The German walked on, gun held high in his dirty hands. He didn’t ever know I was there. I watched from under my pile. He walked but a few steps, when out of no where the fiery cocktail of some heroic Polish Partisan tore off the better part of his face, down to the skully bone, and set his uniform ablaze. I could see the bony grin of his expiring face. I cried out in thanks silently and watched as he fell backwards, madly firing his weapon up into heaven. The wounded animal dying before my big five year old eyes. The rain is going to fall out of this sky at any second now. I can feel it down in my bones and joints. I open the door and fling myself outside into the gently warming sun. The sun is our savior. I know what liveth in my life. I know my place. The beautiful world unfolds as if for the very first time ever, creation renewed, and all is brand new and just for me. It is all gifted to my weak and lusty senses. A gift of flesh and blood and glory and shiny shiny things, moving at half speed. It makes a little wicked smile stretch across my face as I breathe out cigarette smoke. Tortured and scared, dubious and wild, but still alive.
I pass under the yellow dangling light bulb, like a silent star swinging over my head. My eyes begin to feel sandy. The effects of another sleepless night. At night when I sleep, I dream, and when I dream the terrors come and that will not do, so I do not sleep if I can help it, so that I do not dream. Inside my head my tired mind babbles to me and the clouds of confusion rise up in a wall on the horizon of my imagination and the lighting of depression strikes and soon I will be left vacant and numb. I find myself in a Prufrock state of mind…etherized on a table. I take two benzedrines from my inside jacket pocket and slip them into my mouth as I pass the big glass window walls of the concierge and quickly walk out the door into the street. Beat my brain into submission, make myself whole, make my eyes alive and not a part of all this death. Black black, bleak and evil, the wicked wickedness of all this death and shadow, shroud wrapped around everything like gift wrapping for the morbid and moribund. I put the benzedrines beneath my tongue. They are not sublingual but I find they work this way best. I leave them resting under my tongue before I swallow them down. At first they will give me euphoria and a release from the lethargic giant that swells inside but before long they simply will leave me numb. And soon they will give way to paranoia and make my body shake and sweat and I will call out to the heavenly creatures to grant me back the numbness and then I will take more to recapture the euphoria and think I can no longer go on, all before I break down again and find myself a broken up and wadded up piece of tissue paper. The light of the sun tears away at my blood shot eyes. A parlor game. The dreadful energy beating down on me from high up in space and sky. The heat from the sun burns me. It tears my flesh, rays of light stabbing and cutting into my soft uncovered face. My eyes cannot adjust to the light. I must go down the street. If I am to find Millicent…I must go down these streets. If I am to do anything at all, if I, if I…oh, I must go down to the Vert-Galant or the Quais, that is where I will find her. She will be with all the clochards, celebrating the nothing…the nothing that they do, all the nothings and nothingness and nothingnesses. Multilingual tigers and beasts singing songs under the cover of universal things, telling truths to each other and waiting for the darkness to come and make the truths truthful. We all pay our price. My mind is mine alone and the stories that I let out are few. The sun above burns me whole as I walk down the street. I wish with hands held up in supplication for the rain. Step, step, step, right and left, I am too alert, I can feel every movement I make. My mind shrinks and twists. I can feel an attack coming on. My body will shake me down to the ground. Flop and flop on the dirty earth at my feet. I feel the headache coming on. My brain will open up and confuse my eyes. Oh the things I can see when I shake. This is when the monsters come out, the monsters in my mind. A car whips by me, too close, but the wind cools and the excitement, even if momentary, relieves. I hate everything that makes me numb. If I can feel it then I can handle it. And here come the paper doll people. They walk down the street with me and toward me. They are everywhere. I cannot see a spark of life in them…I look and look in their eyes, I watch their eyes and their movements and I cannot see the light of life in them. I grow scared. I do not like being around all of this. I cannot walk in the midst of this. I sit down on a bench and put my head in my hands and wait, wait, wait for the streets to clear out again. I cannot be surrounded by these ghosts, all the ghastly phantoms moving from here to there, from work to home, from school to kitchen, from birth to grave. I cannot stop the screaming of my mind in the midst of them…I can almost feel them when they near me. They feel so empty. Touch the empty places inside. Ah, I wait for the streets to clear out but I must move on and I know it. I must do what I came out to do. I cannot see their light. Little candles all snuffed out…little beautiful candle lights parading in a line but now all extinguished in tiny whiffs of smoke and soot. A dirty world. A broken down and bruised world filled with pieces of things pulled off and cast aside…pieces of things that no longer can fit together. A deliberate shipwreck world, nothing but water-logged bone and stained rags. The thought makes me shudder. The thought makes some parts of reality so much more clear. You are commerce, world, and I am nothing but diversion. You are complete and I am just so threadbare…filled up with holes. My mind writes the stories filled with the holes and bits and pieces and the words of unpleasant truths. The unspoken tales of the fiends and hidden things in my head. The skeleton man shakes his bony hands at me in the dark of my mind. I close my eyes to the passing people. I let them go. I stand up. I leave behind my bench. New strength flows into me and I can leave the world to its own ways. My steps return to me. I can walk.

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 43: Marlene

Dick Ridpath has narrowly avoided calamity in the boudoir of Hope, the beautiful daughter of the vile rancher Big Jake Johnstone. But he’s not safe home yet, not by a long shot, not while a certain sultry international assassin is on the premises...

(Click here to read our previous episode; the bewildered may go here to return to the first chapter of this Genessee Cream Ale Award-winning masterpiece.)

Outside Hope’s room Dick stood still for a moment, breathed deeply, and then glanced down. In the insane rioting of his soul he had not quite realized the embarrassing extent of his erection.

There was a sound, as of an approaching panther. He turned and saw Marlene in a short red terrycloth robe, carrying a hairbrush and a towel and apparently headed toward the bathroom.

He stood to one side to give her plenty of room to pass, but she stopped as she came abreast of him.

“I trust there is still some hot water. Mr. -- Schmidt?”

“I certainly hope so,” said Dick.

“You must have taken a very hot shower,” she said. “Still you are schwitzing.”

She put out a red-nailed finger, laid it on his chest and then showed him a bead of sweat quivering on her perfectly still fingertip. She smiled, put out her tongue and put the bead of sweat on it. Then she drew the tongue back in between her full red lips and swallowed.

Dick started to turn to go and she stepped closer to him, pressing her bosom against him.

“I can help you,” she said. “I can dispose of Grupler for you.”

Dick made to step away again and she pressed him against the wall. She let the towel over her left arm drop and she reached under his kimono and put her hand on him. The stiff sharp bristles of the brush in her right hand pressed through the silk of his robe against his chest.

“We could go together,” she said. “I caught your wibration at the table today.”

“You caught my wibration?”

“Yess.”

Her left hand worked expertly down below while her strangely strong right hand and hard but soft torso kept him pinned against the wall.

Dick reached down, grabbed her left wrist and pulled it slowly but firmly out of the fold of his kimono.

“You are strong,” she whispered. “I like strong.”

She pressed herself harder against him.

“And you have a big one. Grupler has a tiny one and he does not satisfy me. You could maybe satisfy me.”

“That’s flattering, Marlene, but you forget I’m married.”

“Your wife could be eliminated too.”

Dick heard Hope’s door open. He looked over and there she was, looking at them.

He pushed Marlene away and her robe came open, revealing her quite remarkable breasts. She stood there looking coolly from Dick to Hope, making no effort to close her robe.

Dick made a sort of foolish shrug in Hope’s direction and then headed back down the corridor, following that part of himself that Marlene had so expertly aroused.

He felt slightly faint.

(Continued here, and until the bitter end.)

diary of a heretic, chapters 11 - 14

to begin at the beginning, click here

by kathleen maher

pictures by rhoda penmarq

11) Revulsion I have not looked at Carlos once since the meeting. I have not even come close enough to looking at him to know whether he’s noticed I’m not looking at him. Oh, I’ve maintained. Being around him. But it’s required tremendous effort. Like walking around with the flu. Just sitting up takes will power, just keeping my eyes open. The need to lie down in a darkened room and let my hatred of him run through me is almost insurmountable. 12) Further Indignities I will fire him. Today I held steady even as he slunk around, brushing up against me! His repulsive hand on my shoulder. His long swift fingers alighting at my sides, as he dipped behind me for a knife or slotted spoon. “Excuse me, Slim,” his knuckles oh-so-lightly jiggling the extra bit of flesh at my waist. “Everyone needs to know and say why they’re alive.” The man had gall! “You know,” he said, his voice a milk-and-honey parody of seduction, “I used to love to talk about my spiritual life. Maybe it was the times, the zeitgeist. When you’re young you can say anything. When you’re my age, more and more important things become unpronounceable.” 13) I Have to Admit Here’s his argument (Yes, Carlos is still here. And yes, I am going to fire him!): The media constantly give us pictures of skeletal children; ethnic-racial-religious wars; ritual mayhem; close ups of endless brutality and disease. Thus, my speech about worship far from qualifies as a disaster. “Every once in a while, Malcolm, you ought to take a peek outside your shell.” Much as I detest him, I have to admit: Even if the man did trick me into calling worship a kind of perversion, even if the whole thing was just as ugly as I think it was—so what? My personal humiliation simply doesn’t register on the Richter scale. 14) How Wrong I Was Everything’s changed! Carlos and I have spent the last forty-eight hours together. All my senses are heightened and I know: Something good is going to happen. Absolute knowledge gives off a humming sound that intensifies after a while to a constant a buzz. Imminent good runs through all my perceptions, waking, sleeping, and in between. Two days ago, the skies dumped three full feet of snow on city and suburb. And now, forty-eight hours later, the blinding, howling army of snow devils shows no sign of letting up. Cars and trucks can not make it through. They’re lost inside towering drifts. There is no other news. Life in Chicago has stopped. The CTA is at a standstill. The piercing beeps of plows making minimal progress are incessant. And—Carlos is with me. That’s the main thing, Carlos is with me! Maggie took Saturday off. And Stephanie left hours before the first flake drifted through the air; she’d heard reports. Carlos, on the other hand chose that static afternoon, a day oppressive with the impending blitz, to experiment with breads. Four new recipes had come to him in a dream. I started warning him around two-thirty that if he didn’t leave he was going to get stuck. (And to think that up until last month he was always gone before noon!) “Look out the window!” I shouted; snow wasn’t so much falling as blasting horizontally past. “You want to get trapped in that? You want to freeze to death?” He said, “You’re too young to remember but it used to snow every winter.” I nodded, yeah, sure, of course it snowed like this all the time. “But didn’t you go home before the el froze to a standstill?” “I wouldn’t worry about it.” Carlos sprinkled sesame seeds on bread dough. Fine; get stranded. Carlos should have left an hour ago. Promising to follow his instructions to the letter, promising he could taste the results of his dream-visions tomorrow providing the plows got through, I handed him his coat and hat. No dice. So. . . He’s slept on my couch the last two nights. He’s shaved in my sink, bathed in my tub. He has a tattoo on his right shoulder blade, a bluish-green dragon taking flight and breathing fire. Thirty minutes before going to sleep and the same upon waking, he meditates, meaning he sits cross-legged, hands on his knees, palms up, his slow, deep breathing involving an erratic hissing sound. With the blizzard, Carlos has stopped taunting me. His reptilian gestures against the backdrop of falling snow look more like natural subtle grace than anything calculated. But I’ve caught myself wondering if this, too, is part of his plan, a way of manipulating me. Except he couldn’t have planned how much snow would fall, or for how long. Clearly my suspicion of Carlos, my distrust and dislike, have been misguided, a reaction to the fact that I’ve always been so dependent on him as a baker. And then when he usurped my dream of the New C. of C.—well, no wonder I hated him! No more, though. In the sharp glints playing off the brightness of this newly white world I can see how wrong I was. Tonight we ate Spanish rice and drank red wine which he’d bought during the hushed white afternoon. He went out several times, for a razor, a comb, cumin, green peppers, wine. And returned each time with state-of-the-neighborhood information: most food and liquor stores were open, but no laundromats or dry cleaners. A group of children tried to coax their German Shepherd to pull their sled. While Carlos waited to buy condoms (because, he explained, militant ascetic though he be, without a fresh handful in his pocket he nonetheless feels in jeopardy), R.Ph. Stan Jenson sold a teenage boy a carton of Camel cigarettes. Maybe he asked for an I.D. card—Carlos didn’t see. Most of the trains ran today; I heard them. Yet Carlos has said nothing of going home. At one point I started to invite him to stay indefinitely, but changed my mind, afraid of scaring him off. These last two days have been so blanketed, so quiet and white and separate, I want them to last forever.

chapters 15 and 16

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 42: bad place

In our previous episode our international adventurer Dick Ridpath somehow found himself, clad only in his old kimono, in the boudoir of young Hope, clad only in a diaphanous nightgown.

He finds himself quite overcome.

A hazy shade of September in 1969, some several miles outside of a town called Disdain, in a land of enchantment called New Mexico...

(Go here, if you must, to return to the first chapter of our serialization of which Edmund Wilson has said, "The words 'sprawling masterpiece' come to mind.")

That falling outward feeling. He’d felt it first when he was eight years old, walking down the aisle to Communion in St. Pat’s in Philadelphia, this feeling that he was leaving his body. He had grabbed onto the arm of the kid in front of him, and the kid turned and looked at him like he was crazy. Dick said something to the kid, something stupid, mundane, anything, something to pull himself back before he slipped away entirely and forever. And he felt himself coming back, and he sighed as if he had just crossed a tightrope over some yawning great bottomless gorge.

These attacks or whatever they were had recurred throughout Dick’s childhood, usually when he was lying in bed at night, and he had learned to fight them off by running into the bathroom and turning on the light and staring at his face and repeating Hail Mary Hail Mary full of grace Hail Mary Hail Mary full of grace until he felt himself coming back, settling back again into his body.

Once it happened when he was lying in his room listening to Fibber McGee on the radio. He felt himself slipping rapidly away, and he ran (with what seemed like a comet’s trail of his own self trailing behind and above him) into his father’s den where his father was reading a book, and he babbled something and his father said, “Are you all right?”

As Dick became more adept at pulling himself back he also learned to tell the warning signs and how to avoid the attacks.

And so he grew up and never quite went insane, and by his early twenties he felt he had himself under control. The trick was simply not to let his mind drift too far toward a certain place where it became all too aware of its utter aloneness. He was already quite aware that he was alone, but to be too aware was to open the doorway to, and step into, insanity.

When Admiral Quigley first asked him to experiment with LSD Dick went right ahead, and, very much to his surprise, he loved the experience. (Some of the other guys had a terrible time, and in fact a couple had been turned into gibbering wrecks and had spent months in the psych ward at Walter Reed as a result.) But even at the peak of a “trip” Dick kept away from, and was able to keep away from, that awful place of utter aloneness.

Some years and dozens of LSD and mescaline trips later, along came Daphne. That glorious beginning of their affair, and she read an article in Life about LSD and Ken Kesey and his mob. She wanted to try it. He happened to have some excellent government-issue stuff stowed away in his old seabag for a rainy day. They gave it a go, and as they were peaking they started making love. He was on top of her and she was staring deep into his eyes. As many times as he had taken hallucinogenic drugs he had never done so while having sex, let alone while having sex with Daphne, which was already an amazing experience in and of itself, and he began to have that feeling again, but instead of floating away he was falling down into those grey eyes and he was not afraid, and it was like all the universe was passing through him into her and up out of her eyes into his.

Then they lay there drenched in sweat, listening to the sounds of their own breathing, to the sounds of the city. Then it was up and out to the Automat, because Daphne wanted cherry pie and coffee.

And so they experimented, taking acid together, trying to break through into some permanently accessible exalted state.

They discovered that they could go even further than they had gone that first time. He would let himself go, falling away inside her, and these journeys into some disembodied almost but not quite egolessness became longer and deeper, swooping wild soaring flights, and Daphne was always there flying right along with him, in him, and he in her, until one time he went in so deep that suddenly she was not there. It had happened. He was alone, horribly alone and all in darkness, and there was no going back ever and not even the hope of extinction. And he howled and howled but the howling was silent, all was silent and black.

He gradually awoke and became aware of his body again to realize he was huddled in a fetal position in a dark closet. He got out of it and Daphne was over on her bed, sleeping. It had been the most horrifying experience of his life, and he had seen a good deal of horror in his life.

When he talked about it later with Daphne she listened quietly and then said, “You shouldn’t have been afraid. You should have gone on.”

“I couldn’t go on,” he said. “There was nowhere else to go.”

She pause for a few seconds and then she said, “There might have been.”

But that had been enough for him. He knew how far he could safely go now, and before he reached that point he always forced himself back. He would neither go there willingly nor let himself be pushed there. If he went to that black place again there was no guarantee he would come back, and that place was the one place he did not want to get stuck in. If there was something beyond that place -- and he was pretty sure the only thing beyond it was oblivion -- he would just have to reach it by going around the black place, and if that were not possible he would simply have to live and die the ignorant unachieved fool that he was.

But now for some reason, standing here caught in the scary but thrilling charm of this mad little witch Hope, he wanted to let himself go there, to that place. He was tired, tired of holding back.

But it didn’t seem the thing to do, really. Not here and now with this poor girl. He felt he’d better speak and break the spell before it was too late, or perhaps he would fall, willy nilly, fall away into those bottomless brown eyes.


Hope had asked what?

Why were he and Daphne here.

“I don’t really know,” he said.

His voice sounded stale and flat, the snapping of a dead twig on a dead branch of a dead tree, but he knew that by speaking he had pulled himself back, and he could already feel the sweat on his back cooling.

A sighing moment passed, and he was actually on the verge of taking a deep breath and going into the whole tedious transistor radio business for the second time that day, but then she simply took her hands away and said, “Are you going to the barbecue?”

“Um, yeah --”

“I’ll see you there,” she said.

He could feel where the energy from her hands had been cut off from his hand, and suddenly his hand felt cold, and separate.

(Continued here.)

interview with dan leo

like a drop of water forming endlessly but never falling, or an arrow that can never reach its mark because it has to keep covering half its distance, the internet novel railroad train to heaven revives the glory days of high modernism when "only the exhaustive was truly interesting". we caught up with mr dan leo, the author of railroad train and many other fine works, in the shadows of his cork lined study, overlooking a rocky windswept beach somewhere east of valhalla. does the blog/twitter/internet novel have a future? does it have a present? Sure. The problem is that most of what people put on the internet is going to be crap. Who can sift through all this garbage? Who has time? did you set out to write an "endless novel" or did it just happen? This of course refers to my Railroad Train to Heaven, which runs on my own blog. No, I really didn't plan it this way. It all started after I spent a year or so not writing anything creative; all I was doing was writing query letters to agents for another novel (Uncle Buddy's House). I had read that it was a good idea to have an "online presence", so one night on a whim I followed the Blogger instructions on how to start a blog, all the while thinking I wouldn't know how to do it and that I'd just give up. But then all of a sudden, sure enough, I had a blog. At first I just put up a couple of funny photos I found, with made-up captions. Then I had a story that an old friend of mine named Brian had sent me. He only writes about one story every five years or so, and all he does is send them to me and then apparently forget about them. A real outsider artist. But I always liked Brian's stories, which used to come hand-written, and then eventually typed; then, finally, with this last one he had gotten a computer and an internet connection and he sent it to me electronically. I asked Brian if I could put the story on my new blog, and he said yeah, but not to use his real name. This is the story ("Gangsta Dream", by Kevin McDoom AKA Frank Scattergood), if anyone wants to check out some really original insanity, just as it appeared on my blog on that fateful date of March 25, 2007. So now I had one story up by a friend and some funny "found" pictures with captions. Now what to do? I had two supposedly "finished" novels in the can, but I was reluctant as yet to put them on the blog. (Although later I did revise them and put them up.) So, inspired by Brian's story, I started writing these odd little stories supposedly about real people and events set (as Brian's story was) in our old neighborhood of Olney in Philadelphia. I presented them as if they were true tales, written in a sort of neighborhood-weekly jargon, even though the events described were rather outrageous. Oddly enough I have gotten more than a few e-mails over the years from former Olneyites asking me if such and such really happened, and I always have to tell them that sadly all this shit is made up. (And I discovered an odd thing about the internet, i.e., that if you don't clearly label something as "fiction" some people will always think you're describing real events.) So for a couple of months I occasionally knocked out these little tales of old Olney, this quartier perdu that no one outside of Philly has ever heard of. (I'm still waiting for another story from Brian by the way, but he's on another one of his extended hiatuses apparently). One day I remembered this strange demotic poet who would write sentimental little poems every week in one of our local papers when I was growing up, poems about a mother's love and a puppy's eyes, that sort of thing. I decided to try to write one of these poems, and I invented a persona for the bad poet, "Arnold Schnabel", a 42-year-old bachelor who worked for the railroad, lived with his mother, and who was an usher at the local Catholic church, St. Helena's. On the side he wrote one poem every week for the local paper, the Olney Times, a noble publication which did actually exist for many years but which sadly folded last December. I continued to write or channel these poems and I found that they were starting to tell a story, i.e., Arnold's descent into madness. Arnold did lose his mind, on a dark night in January of 1963, but he continued to write his poems once a week like clockwork, and, despite their growing strangeness, the Olney Times continued to print them. He comes home from the mental hospital after a few months, but he is still too psychologically fragile to go back to work as a brakeman, and so the railroad puts him on an open-ended disability pension at half-pay. That summer his mother decides to take him to the seaside resort of Cape May, NJ, to stay at her sisters' boarding house, and (she hopes) to recover his mental health. All of this was documented in Arnold's weekly poems. Then one day I thought, hey, I'll have Arnold write his memoirs, as a sort of therapy for him, but also to pass the time (his time, but mine too I suppose). And that's how this particular endless novel, Railroad Train to Heaven, started. I didn't really mean it to be a novel, or endless, but it developed that way. (I get a kick out of working on more than one thing at a time. Currently I'm serializing an older novel called A Town Called Disdain on flashing by. My method with this is not to think about it at all until I'm ready to put up a chapter, and then I look it over and rewrite whatever seems too stupid and then put it up. Another online rag, Troubadour 21, is running "the early years" of Arnold's tale, and I use the same method: don't think about it until the editor says it's time for more stuff, and then I look over the old chapters, make any changes that seem necessary and send them off.) There's something insane about writing an open-ended and possibly endless novel, and I very much doubt that I would have ever started it if I hadn't started a blog. There are precedents of course -- Proust, Henry Darger, and other novelists who write these long novel-cycles. I think the open-ended blog novel is also a bit like the long-form TV that's developed in the past fifteen years or so -- The Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Men. Why not try to do in prose what those excellent shows do on film? The trick is to make each chapter feel like a separate story in the story-stream, to have something happen, something real, something that will make the reader want to read the next chapter. do you have now , or have you ever had, any interest in "experimental" writing - "cut up" or randomly produced writing? does the phrase "rub out the word" make your heart beat or your blood boil? I'm always interested in experimenting. I look on each time I sit down to write as an experiment. Like, will I think of anything worth writing? But as for "cut-ups" and that sort of thing, no. When I'm writing a new chapter I hardly ever have any idea what's going to happen next, and that's plenty random enough for me. if herman melville and nathaniel hawthorne were alive today, would they be movie directors, tv writers, video game producers or jonathan franzen? It's amazing that you should ask me this, because I'm seriously thinking of putting Melville and Hawthorne into the next Arnold chapter! God knows what these guys would be doing today. Haven't looked at Franzen's new one yet, couldn't get through The Corrections. To me that sort of thing is really boring. I really don't like writers who seem to be trying to show you how clever they are, and, by extension, how clever you are because you get how clever they are. the supreme cultural council takes away all computers, smart phones etc from schoolchildren and commands them to dedicate their lives to reading one author. which author? (besides yourself) Boy, that would be a tough one. I do really like writers who have a rich body of work you can just sink into. And you discover that some of your favorite authors really are just writing endless novels, but they just put them out in installments and change the titles and the names of the characters. But you can read a page of some of my very favorites (Richard Stark, Patricia Highsmith, Muriel Spark, Kingsley Amis) and it could just as well be in one novel as in another because their styles are so distinctive and they write about the same themes over and over again. Cormac McCarthy totally is that way, although his last couple of books got a lot less florid. can literature be fun and meaningful again? Sure, but first writers have to write from their souls and not from some idea of what they think a writer should be writing. But you have to have talent, it's either there or it isn't. And even talented writers squander their gifts, trying to write great novels when they really don't have anything interesting to say. And talent comes and goes, inspiration comes and goes. Great writers tend to write not-so-great novels toward the end of their careers, if they live too long. A funny thing about even good writers is that they often don't know when they're writing crap. A musician will know when he's played badly, but a writer will put out the most arrant bilge and think it's good. I remember reading Norman Mailer's book on writing, and I had to laugh because this book on how to write well was chock full of bad writing. Oh well. And even your best friends won't tell you when the inevitable decline sets in...

The Angel Leah by Jesse S. Mitchell. (from the novel "Mythic Creatures")

excerpt from "Mythic Creatures" by Jesse S. Mitchell



Paris, 1962.

1

The Angel Leah is a demon and a cannibal, or at least she has her tendencies. The same evil that lies in all souls, slippery and black shiny, it lies in her soul. Our diet is much the same, paint and words and amphetamines and analgesics. The search for sustenance is toil. I watch her as she brushes her long brown hair. She sits perfectly stick straight in front of the mirror and brushes down flat the wayward strands. Her eyes are weak but mine are weaker. I can barely see anything unless it is put right in front of my terrible eyes. I look out of our cracked glass window though and today because it is uncommonly clear I can see for miles. I can see the Place De La Concorde, where the giant men have stepped, and I can see down to the Pantheon where the giant men have slept. I dare not walk down that way; I am still much too slight a man, but on this fact I am working on a remedy. A remedy or a protest, a brilliant thing to take me to unforgettable lands, to place me into some not so indifferent hands. A good time may be all I ever find.
I watch out the window and I block out the sounds. I only watch and wait for the clear sky to crack open and let down the golden drizzle. And I will not leave this apartment until it comes.
“Jack? Are you listening to me?”
I do not blink my eyes. I take in all the light that the sun can send. I can take the heat. I can take the energy. I can focus. I can focus through the pain in silence.
“Hey, can you hear me?”
“What?”
“I have been speaking.”
“Sorry, I was watching the street. I was a thousand miles away.”
“Take me downtown.”
“Why?”
“I am hungry, and I need a few things.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Yes, no. Not yet.”
“Are you still worried about being deported? No one is looking for you.”
“No, I am not going until it rains.”
“It doesn’t even look like rain. Why do we have to wait on the rain?”
“Because I am watching the sun and I am waiting for the rain.”
“Well, I suppose I will just sit here and starve.”
“You are too young to starve.”
“No one is too young to starve.”
“Maybe you are too beautiful then.”
“No one is. Now come on.”
“No! I will not go until it rains! I said that.”
“Did it never rain in Poland?”
“No, it just snowed.”
“Never rained?”
“Well, maybe it rained a little for the Germans but they brought it with them. For the rest of us it just snowed and snowed and snowed all year long.”
“I can call Raquel to take me downtown.”
“Yes, do that. I will come along later.”
I watch the cars line up around the block and bounce back and forth along the road. Like a child’s toy, the cars just keep going around and around the streets. They all look the same and as far as I know they are all the same ones, all day long. Man and woman and child and beast and bird swirling around down there in automobile and bus and on foot. A catastrophe always circling with them, a bloody disaster always awaiting man’s steps and I would pray for them if I knew how…if I knew how to pray for them. I can save myself, that much I know for sure. Buried beneath the mud in silence mouthing any supplications I knew, the small body of a boy slept in tears long enough to escape the fire and boot…I know how to save myself.
As I let my eyes wander over the landscape below, I listen to the blurred sounds start to come through the north-facing wall of our apartment. It is the longest wall in the whole place and it is covered in glittery golden paint that one night, in a daze of swilled and smoked creativity, I coated nearly everything we own with. Behind the wall the chants and bellows from our neighbor, Ali, start to murmur through and then grow louder and louder still. He is making his sounds again. He is a wild Algerian wizard. He claims to have died a thousand times and always returns from the grave to further honor the name of the Prophet. His voice is as deep and gravelly as a stone quarry and he moves like hell, throwing himself around without a pause for gravity to catch up. He is a madman and very thin with black, tired eyes. He never sleeps or eats, just bellows out stories and legends to himself all day and night of Rifs and Berbers and Djinn. He is usually polite and harmless enough. I can detect no major moral inadequacies in his character.
I listen as Leah dresses herself in a white papery dress and tall boots and steps hard around on our bare wooden floor. The tinkle of jewelry. The swoosh of femininity. She is off to meet her friend Raquel down the street at the corner. She pauses by the window and looks and lets me know she is leaving and to meet up with them later. I think I shall go out and find Hashhead Millicent, Millicent the Magnificent, and buy some pot. I tell Leah this as she leaves floating out the door. She agrees. Millicent, the West German émigré heiress, so tall and solid. Millicent the robot, she is a metal red eyed machine, with mechanical arms and legs and breasts and lips so bright, and she has the best tea in Paris. No one ever leaves any room for me. I make my own room. I find a tiny little crack in a life or place and I squeeze right in and make myself comfortable. It is the nature of all my relationships. Follow along with me long enough and you will see, you will understand. I grab my notebook and pull out my chewed up pen. A few lines written before a leave makes me feel more successful with my day in general. A few lines of verse or prose, blend the two and no one can help it, they will hate it. I scratch down my words, in scribble, some letters far too big and some too small to see, the meaning lost between the lines and affects. I close the notebook. I know I am done when the sides of my hand get covered in gray charcoal dust. Black suit, I always wear a black suit. I put the jacket on and the shoes next. Walk to the mirror and straighten the tie. Oh my, starlight in my eyes, red, red and moist. I pull my sunglasses off the table and press them hard on my face. I hide my eyes. Bend down and dust off my shoes and grab the keys and creep out the door. Crack it open, pull it open in a rush, bang, shut, closed and down the hall I go.

paths... (3)

by human being

with contributions by francis scudellari and horace p sternwall

illustrations by rhoda penmarq

third of five parts

to begin at the beginning, click here

the circle i draw  cuts its own path i watch it lovingly as it disappears out of my sight * There’s a sidewalk here, the city has poured, cemented with smooth and perfect squares. It leads to all the usual places, only altering when at last it crumbles. There's also the rough- cut route I’ll walk, taking Aeolus by his shaky hand to stroll where moths mingle, dandelions dance, and destinations giggle tickled by our setting suns. - Late summer's stroll  by Francis Scudellari * on my way i came across a woman buying and selling other people's secrets - buy something! - i don't need anything... i travel light - you want to sell some of your secrets then! - no... i've got none - everyone has got at least a few secrets! - nobody has got any secrets - then what are these i have here? - they are your hiding places inflation is not a change but deflation is on my way i came across an unflying bird she was lying on the ground with drooping wings and an unsinging beak i hold her in my hands and looked into her sad eyes he loved me, she started in a broken voice, but his love was a cage he'd envy the sky if i flied he'd hate the trees if i sat in them he thought all i sang had to be about him relating my songs to himself reproaching me for the joy or the grief or the anger i expressed towards things in my life i didn't fly i didn't sing i forgot my voice and even my wings but one day i came to myself i was not a bird anymore who am i then? i ran away but he came after me he said he loved me but his love was a cage he said he loved me but his love was death these were the last words of the bird gradually my hands grew cold i buried her in my words and continued on my way wondering if the hunters ever love the birds * many strange dreams i tried to weave into what i really believe but something always broke the spell so now - i'll never tell - i'll never tell  by horace p sternwall *

part 4