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  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 9/14/07; 3:05:22 AM ¦ by Chuck Baker
  • I won't use the term "surreal". It is utterly surrealistic how often the term is used for situations that may be or most likely are not, surreal. So, I feel that the term "surreal" is not completely apropos in describing this excellent installment of the third chapter of Beaver Teeth. Then again, I could very well be surrealistically wrong.

    CB3
    • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
    • 9/18/07; 7:59:39 PM ¦ by Phil Austin
    • Chuck:

      I agree. I've always been confused by being called surreal, since I think it means something only known truly by ten or twelve people in Yurp in the Twenties Past. The rest of us just use it to describe the unknown. Super Real. Over Real. Too Real, I suppose. I don't think my stuff is like that, it's just weird. Surweird, maybe.

      Phil
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 9/14/07; 6:53:41 AM ¦ by Dana Price
  • I am reading Beaver Teeth out loud to the Kingfisher nesting beneath my houseboat. There is a place in BC called Beaverdell. I spend the night there this summer - me and my betrothed. We were traveling by mountain bike along the Kettle Valley Trail Way, headed for Christina Lake, some 170 miles from where we started in Summerland. My life has taken me north to British Columbia many times, taveling up Highway 97 from Sausalito once a year in our 1970 converted Crown School Bus. I got eaten alive by mosquitos at Goose Lake, California/Oregon stateline but recovered quickly - must have been the bucket of cherries freshly picked in the orchard that brought me back to the living and the not scratching. My days in LA a distant memory???..the injured soul I was???..young, paralyzed, unknown. How lucky I am now to read your unfolding chapters and be reminded of your great talent. I would like to send photos. How do I do this? Dana
    • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
    • 9/18/07; 10:43:05 AM ¦ by Phil Austin
    • Hi, Dana:

      So nice to hear from you and get updated on your life. I post pictures to this site in a way different than you would, but I should think you'd just past the pictures themselves into your message. Maybe Messrs. Trail or Zenlen or Brown have a better way, because it's been done before. Sorry to be so addled, but looking forward to pictures.

      Phil
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 9/14/07; 3:00:41 PM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • I'd enjoy a good Kingfisher watch today - I just finished a great book called "Refuge" by Terry Tempest Williams that has a deep appreciation of birds of the Great Salt Lake as a cornerstone of the story. And as for Beaver Teeth, I didn't even get to Chapter Tres yet but I did figure out that by pasting Uno and Dos into Word and printing them out, not only is it easier to read but I am also left with a document that should hold up in court. Speaking of courts, as a kid I thought that King Arthur named his city Camelot because he had a lot of camels. Anyway, thanks Phil for sharing the writing. I wonder if Chet Honeyacre's aversion to the name of Beaverteeth has anything to do with his secret aversion to the perceived cuteness of his very own last name? It's nice to see the words "clever beaver and cunning dental paraphernalia" all strung together. Amen.

    I do believe I've been to to Beverteeth-to-Midden Pioneer Parade. The Midden Police Force, known locally affectionately as the Coprolites, sure knows how to mock-up a memorable and arresting float. And, because I crave action, my favorite part was when the city public works guys were digging a hole. More such action, yes! That's a hole that portends future developments and that equals page-turner. Call me part of the Cute Beaver Faction but I'd give my eye teeth to have a vacation cabin in Clay Baby County. Or maybe just one of those end-of-timeshares.

    Sorry to go long, but I'm still underemployed and I don't have to start searing the onions until 5:30. On to three!

    Wishing I was ambidextrous as hell,

    Edward James Almost
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 9/17/07; 1:39:42 PM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • Chapter Three: What the heck was in that mud??? Ahhh??? the smell of caps and the fresh cheap leather of a toy gun holster with fringe. I want to buy a cologne that smells like caps. "Caps - by Ralph Wiggins - for the man who aims to startle." Annie Bob makes it alright/wrong to be aroused by the older older woman.

    Audie Feldatthuey
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 9/18/07; 12:26:23 PM ¦ by ZenLen
  • Dana--

    To post photos to this blog, you need some kind of photo-sharing service, like Photobucket (http://photobucket.com/), which happens to be the service I use. The account is free.

    Once you upload your pictures to the site, you can copy the HTML tag and just paste that into a message here.

    Len
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 9/19/07; 9:15:00 AM ¦ by Karl Henning
  • Phil,

    I've enjoyed the first couple of chapters, and look forward to reading the further chapters.

    How did surreal come to be so misused an adjective?

    Cheers,
    ~Karl
    • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
    • 9/29/07; 7:02:52 PM ¦ by Phil Austin
    • Karl:

      Melting watches sort of skewed the movement away from its original horror-of-war roots, I've always thought.

      Salvador
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 9/21/07; 2:35:49 PM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • Chapter Four- Off in the Drifta with its manual shifta and what I want to know is, "Who murdered Chesta's fatha?" Chapter Five - As an amply-heighted anthropologist myself even, I officially have a huge crush on Karen Mae Petersunn??? I just feel like she gets me. But I am not sure about the Petersunns and their kidney-shaped gene pool, as a family. We may have to adopt just to avoid the recessant gene of dreamy.

    Borg Onad
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 9/26/07; 5:46:49 AM ¦ by Dean Monti
  • Dear Phil,

    I've been looking forward to reading more of Beaver Teeth for years. I've heard you talk about it (and read from it) for quite some time and I know it's a project close to your heart.

    I also really enjoyed the short stories that were part of Tales of the Old Detective, and would love to see that collection in a bound copy someday too.

    It's a sad state of literary affairs that there's so much dreck at the bookstores these days and not enough good off-the-wall fiction. You've been hit with "surreal," -- my books have been associated with with the dreaded buzzword "quirky" which is a not-so-distant cousin. Unfortunately, neither of these is a recognized genre in the big world of publishing, and big time editors often pass up good stuff because they can't see the market for it.

    After being rejected by every major publisher for my novel "The Sweep of the Second Hand" (a comic look at a art house film projectionist with insomnia), and being told that "no one will publish humorous fiction," I found a brave soul at Academy Chicago Publishers, a mid-size press. Long story short (probably far too late for that), the book got excellent critical reviews and was eventually sold to Penguin Putnam Berkley's Signature edition, where it got a bit more public exposure in its paperback incarnation.

    So, just some practical comments here, because I really want to see Beaver Teeth get published. I assume you have a good literary agent -- if not, you should be able to get one. Don't self-publish (you worked too hard on this, it's too good, and your book could end up wallowing in obscurity), but don't be afraid of good mid-size and independent presses (as a route to larger publishers). I want to go into a bookstore and see Phil Austin in his rightful place on the shelf, right between Paul Auster and Edward Abbey.

    Keep the faith,

    Dean Monti, author of The Sweep of the Second Hand dmonti@aad.org
    • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
    • 9/29/07; 6:53:38 PM ¦ by Phil Austin
    • Dean:

      Thanks so much for this advice, just the sort of thing I'm looking for. I don't, in fact, have a good personal lit. agent, generally using ICM in Hollywood who reps FST. And this should change, thanks for reminding me. I have qualms about self-publishing, that's for sure. My goal now is just to get the book up here, forcing me to make final rewrites, especially in the last twenty chapters, getting every bit of advice I can get from the readers and (especially) contributors to/of this blog. What are you working on now?

      P.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 9/27/07; 4:34:12 AM ¦ by ZenLen
  • Dana--

    In Photobucket, copy the code labeled HTML tag and paste that in. That will allow others to see the image directly.

    You may have to edit the image in Photobucket to get it down to the right size. Just click "edit" above the image. Take care, though, once you've reduced the size of the image, you can't embiggen it again. You'd have to upload the image a second time and start over.

    Unasked-for Advice in Atlanta
    • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
    • 9/27/07; 1:52:56 PM ¦ by Dana Price
    • ZenLen, Hey thanks very much for your unasked-for but very helpful advice from Atlanta!

      Dana
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 9/27/07; 6:58:35 AM ¦ by tigerlily
  • Phil,

    Enjoying this read very much! I'm looking forward to your getting Beaver Teeth published so I can catalog it for the library I work at!
    • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
    • 9/29/07; 10:47:13 PM ¦ by Phil Austin
    • Tiggielil:

      It's just so nice to hear from you, burning bright, in the forest of the night.

      William Bla(n)k(e)
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/1/07; 7:05:06 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • Phil:

    Well. Iím grateful. Itís lovely, isnít it, to want to write, to be able to write, and to have a story to tell? With characters whose lives are, and in a way that I think you intend, the town of a Place in the mind of a Time. And, like the picture accompaniment to Chapter Four shows it to be, itís all uphill water from here.

    The pleasures of this prose are many for me: the precision patience of observation and description (words that see in their saying and that hear the reader listening to them!); the rhythms of speech, internal and external, and the alternating musics of long and short sentences; a vision world worded and an imagined word en-worlded. Itís prose that crosses the boundaries and borders of itself into the differences within and of itself. These I can name. But the named that can be named is not the true name. Which is why, as you narrate, names are so important on earth, in Beaver Teeth, as they are elsewhere, and in heaven.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/1/07; 7:06:15 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • P.S. A Lakota song I long ago saw in English translation reminds itself to me, because too the Mountain walks in your prose:

    'Go to the mountain
    And cry for a vision'


    Dogen said that mountains walk, just as human beings do???.The prose of a vision-bestowing Mountain that walks with many voices, and characters whose respective orbits must obey the respective gravities of the destinies of what's in their names (as in all Great Dream "Tales of Ancient Days", vestigial from the Beginning Time, "Biblical" when that name really means what it means, then rebuilt anew from the sleep of our words today)???As I said: it's lovely when there is a story, and the teller is just what the story needs, and so, like a Mountain to the cry, it gives the teller its vision and the words with which to tell it (while also renewing the cry).
    • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
    • 10/1/07; 7:48:37 PM ¦ by Phil Austin
    • Robber G:

      Yeah. I've spent a lot of time above nine or ten thousand feet on mountains of the west. The vision-bestowing mountain has, as its spiritual opposite, oxygen deprivation, or at best a kind of thinning of consciousness. Dogen's walking is another man's hypothermia. Vision has a lot to do with seeing and a lot to do with nothing much else. We hear something and it's subject to doubt. We see something and it's confirmed, somehow. Proved. We touch something and we are the same as the three elephants and the squashed organism. I think this book is trying to work out vision in one way or three anothers. We'll see. As I get past chapters twenty or so, the big (re)writing will begin and that's summation and now I'm an old guy looking at a book I wrote years before. We'll see if I have an actual brain or not.

      Musil's Man of No Qualities, I'm afraid
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/2/07; 2:54:02 AM ¦ by ZenLen
  • I've read up through Chapter Five thus far. Feel free to tell me to sod off. I think the most important thing is that each artist create in their own way and to pursue their own vision of a project.

    That being said-- Overall, I think you spend too much time telling us things and not enough time showing us. For example, the first sentence of chapter five. I don't want you to tell me that Karen Mae is going to be important to Chester, I want to discover that myself through the action of the story. Instead of telling us how people feel or felt, show us. The character who pops best for me is Annie Bob, and I think that's because she's presented solely (soully?) through her words and actions.

    At the end of the published version of The Last Tycoon, Edmund Wilson padded the book out by publishing Fitzgerald's notes and outlines. One of the notes he made has always stuck with me. In all caps he wrote "ACTION IS CHARACTER." I think this is good advice.

    There are scenes that work extremely well. Chester's interaction with Annie Bob and the road crew is one and Chester's spirit walk is another. I loved the twist of Annie Bob being dead and Karen Mae inheriting her dogs. As I read it, I was guessing that you'll probably end up spinning that out a bit more in a rewrite.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/2/07; 5:41:14 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • But then, what if the character is in the absence of action, and it's the absence of action that makes the character, makes him a telling, not a showing? Or: what he has to show isn't seen (character cast as a shadow of absence?), and so the telling is its action. For Chester, maybe, how he will act, and what his actions will be, remain to be seen? 'The future for him is already a thing of the past.' Can we see the narration, the voice-other about or within the character voiced and/or acted, too as the characterís action?


    Phil: An Edmond Jabes poem translated. I might title it ëFor An Old Guy Looking At A Book He Wrote Years Beforeí


    When the memory is returned to us
    Love finally will know its age.


    Sweetness of an old shared secret,
    Does the universe still contain
    The hope of the first utterance?
    And the hand, the untouched page?


    There is only time for awakening.

    • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
    • 10/2/07; 8:41:17 PM ¦ by Phil Austin
    • Robert:

      The Jabes poem, for one reason or another, reminded me of this Lucinda Williams song:

      If we lived in a world without tears How would bruises find The face to lie upon How would scars find skin To etch themselves into How would broken find the bone

      presuming that he asks if the hand still contains the hope of the untouched page. Ms. W could as easily ask how smiles would find the lips to lie upon, if we lived in a world without laughs. But the techniques seems to me to be the same, a kind of reverse logic that in its own way reflects what the Zenman finds no fun in my story, my cavalierly pushing the reader into a conclusion that is not - at least for the moment - his/her own.

      I may be crazy as a hoot loon, but I was strongly influenced by Tristram Shandy long ago and Rudyard Kipling stills seems to me to be the ideal narrator, god help me. Maybe I'll learn my lesson. As you point out, there's a thin line between the narrator and the hero. Shadows of each others' absence? M. Trail pointed out to me in another correspondence a similar feeling that maybe I hadn't made Chester likeable enough to get the reader through the first few chapters and that seems to me to be in much the same spirit as what Len's saying.

      Thank god for rewrites and no publishing deadlines. On to Chapter Eight.

      Aust
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/2/07; 7:11:33 AM ¦ by ZenLen
  • Well, Robert, you've hit on something there. As we both know from old What's-his-tzu, the guy who wrote about Robber Cheh and about horses and not-horses, nonaction can be character, too. Wu-wei is Teh, I think is how that would be put.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/3/07; 4:00:35 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • Phil:


    Yes, Rudyard Kipling. Somehow, I knew it. The other day I was listening to Joni Mitchellís new CD release ìShineî, the last song ìIfî based on the Rudyard Kipling poem. Listening, my thoughts were brought around to Beaver Teeth. We are the narrators of such stuff as our heroes are made of. And they certainly are made of our influences. Rudyard Kipling, Tristram Shandy, two great influences to be under the influence of, and Iím glad you proclaim their voices in yours. I think itís so important for othersí voices to resonate and be heard in your own; it gives your language, the characters that live by the stories you tell, harmonics and overtones of meaning and imaginative life. However thin the line, even if itís just the implied meeting-place of shadow and light, Chester is other than you, just as, too, the narrator is other/not-other than you. Thereís no need to draw the line.

    You may remember we had an exchange a couple or so years ago, about your writing and the Desert to City, City to Desert moebius strip relationships in the imagined places you write for, and about Beaver Teeth too, in which I presumed to invoke Sherwood Anderson, in particular his ìWinesberg, Ohioî, as an encouraging example to accompany your writing efforts. "Realism in so far as it means reality to life is always bad art," he wrote. And: ìThe thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.î (Well, Chester is thinking a lot about a lot.) And also: "My freedom sleeps in a mulberry bush. My country is in the shivering legs of a little lost dog." The Road-side dog that Czeslaw Milosz speaks of. And you do know dogs, Phil, you do know dogs. Oh, and this as well: ìÖeach truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful."Itís the attention, Phil, the patient, loving crafting of attention to ëthe realí, that surpasses and eludes, and never (thank God) conforms to ëthe realisticí, that gives life-giving imagination to your characters. Of course, as you know, the Place is a character, perhaps even the character. Like Dogen said, mountains are walking too. And what will Chester be, if heís likeable but not Chester? Who is this story, anyway? Itís ok, necessary sometimes, I think, to make the reader work for and in the imagination of the story, to expect that of the reader.


    In one of his poems of hopeful waking from California Dreaminí, Philip Whalen wrote: ìSomeday, Iíll never learn.î


    P.S. Amen from Paco Ignacio Taibo II: "You have to tell a story, and then let the reader take part, have the perception, see the way you see. I've always believed that literature is the most subversive space of cultural creation in the world, but not because you can put ideas in it, use it as a vehicle to transport ideas. Rather, because when you open a book you can see the world through somebody else's eyes. And I think that is the most subversive experience in life."

    P.P.S. to Len below: Right. I, for one, didn't construe your comment as a concern for "realism"/"not-realism". As a writer, and in your writing, I know, you're always at work keepin' it real. I thought your observation, as with what else is in our conversation here, invokes the general concern of any writer as to how what's 'real' to him/her gets written with fidelity as a bridge of words to the reader. Real to real, so to speak.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/3/07; 6:22:03 AM ¦ by ZenLen
  • The only frame of reference I have for making any comments is acting class. There, the only real criterion is "Did I buy that moment or not?" and that is the standard I used in my comment. All I can do is point to moments that either work for me or don't, and the artist has the responsibility of deciding whether the comment is valid or useful.

    If Kipling and Sterne are the artistic godparents of Beaver Teeth, then I say go for it. Then really splash around in that pool and drench all us bystanders in it.

    For the record, my comments had nothing to do with a desire for "realism" or "not-realism." They are simply my gut reactions to a text I had never before encountered.

    I hope to be able to catch up on Chapters Six and Seven in the next day or so.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/3/07; 6:43:49 AM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • On behalf of the Lazy Lowbrow Readers Club, I'd just like to mention that there are so damn many books in the world that we have come to the conclusion that how a story starts is crucial for us as our minds tend to wander. We want to get hooked like adolescent trout and that means we need to know some things about a character pretty quick??? like what is their "problem" in the tale and what kind of things are they likely to do about it (we get hooked by intriguing action early on). We would also like a glimpse of what their soul is like. Once we care about this person we will gladly follow them through all kinds of content, be it convoluted or directly told, both reflective and active. And that way we get to end up at the end, where we often see the seed that was sown at the start and we love the tale and urge others to read it. Think James Joyce reworking the Hardy Boys' "Mystery of the Moaning Cavern." Which reminds me, we also like some sex in there.

    Regards,

    Kent Fyte-DeFeeling
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/3/07; 7:23:47 AM ¦ by ZenLen
  • Robert--

    I apologize for my reaction. I should have known better and had more faith in you than that.

    Len
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/3/07; 9:32:32 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • Len:


    No apology necessary, please, but thank you. I was, am still, intrigued by what you observed--the 'show'/'tell' conundrum--and didn't intend my conversation as, or to appear as, reactionary, or as dismissive of your view, in defense of my own opinion as just one reader. It wasn't and I'm not. The way(s) a reader is invited in, allowed in, to a story, as well, are, probably, as many as there are readers. Each writer and story makes its choices. The Sherwood Anderson quotation I had to hand. I thought it spoke of a common concern of the craft, and one that all our comments have in common. I think, too, a writer, any writer, writing to be worthy of the salt in his wounds, contends within himself and in his story, with word-bridging real to real, maybe searching for the reader he becomes in the act of writing. We are each, of course, a different reader. I hope these distinct views and respective opinions are like the spectrum of colors in prismed light, the uniqueness of each neither in conflict with the others nor introducing seperation into the whole that is an illumination to all.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/4/07; 10:14:54 AM ¦ by Karl Henning
  • Mark Trail writeth:

    . . . there are so damn many books in the world that we have come to the conclusion that how a story starts is crucial for us as our minds tend to wander. We want to get hooked like adolescent trout . . . .

    I once ran into a great Edgar Allan Poe remark on how a story should always begin in a striking manner. I could fib and say that I am too lazy to find the exact citation, but the fact is, I sold the book to a second-hand shop in Tonawanda long since.

    Cheers,
    ~Karl
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/4/07; 12:05:50 PM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • Well now this is blowing my mind like a Sirocco down the Sahil Plain cuz my first girlfriend back at Moremath High in Victorville was named Tonya Wanda Pose. That to me seems just a little too tidy to be a coincidence and a little too eerie to relax upon. Just don't tell me you bought the book in Tunisa in the first second-hand place, por favor.

    Kent Frye-Bacon
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/5/07; 3:41:14 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • ìÖwhere the river emptied into the mighty Sound.î


    Phil:


    Back, again, to the pleasures of the prose: your ëlong sentenceí (as Iím calling it), I especially enjoy it, when and how it occurs in your story, and it especially interests me. (Maybe it should be called the ëtwisted apples sentenceí, after Sherwood Andersonís: "Few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.") One example: ìThe result was that the head began to roll again, bouncing and hurling through the air, down off the troubled mountain and into a clearing in the deep dark black drippy forest where it found Chester's body and snapped back on and the whole unit sat up and rubbed its balding head and felt its big body and concluded that nothing much was broken.î I thought, I guess, there are many examples of this kind of ëlong sentenceíóI ërememberedí there being many, but reading again now to find them, maybe theyíre not (Maybe itís the effect of two ëlongerí sentences consecutive). Oh, hereís a good example of as I remembered it:


    ìLogged once and then again by ancestors with bigger arms and saws and donkey engines than any of us can now imagine, blown down by storms and burned by fires, asphyxiated with mud as it was, still the downslope forest lived, its dougfir trees and hemlocks and cedars - as well as its attendant deciduous forest of alder and madrona and maple - fringed the bulb farms and lined the streets of the town and threatened to overgrow any patch of land left untended. Berries were everywhere, the land was moist and fertile. Prosperous yet modest, fed by over sixty inches of rain a year, both town and valley typified the successes of those adventuring Sons of the North, the children of both Luther and Loki, those Scandinavians who had wandered to the forested northwestern corner of the American Wilderness within the memories of two old men named Peterson, however you spelled it. By contrast with the Pacific Northwest, the seemingly ancient cultures of Massachusetts and Virginia and Pennsylvania had produced Washingtons and Franklins and Jeffersons by the time the Northwest's first Caucasian settlers were only engaged in the felling of trees as large around as New York City blocks. Historically, while still complete with its native population - the soon-to-be-overwhelmed Squilimuk People - Chester Honeyacre's valley was a fertile plain, biblical in promise, the river stuffed full of trout and salmon, the wild berries profuse; its beaches - where the river emptied into the mighty Sound - a living floor of clams and oysters and crabs and mussels, creatures large and small, edible one and all. It was a valley waiting to be spoiled.î


    Is it a rhythm thing, or the need to keep the flow of image unbroken and in a readerís ësingle breathí? Is (and if so, how is) the choice of this ëlong sentenceí deliberated? Does its ëmusicí cohere the words around its ësound', all the more heard because of the short sentences that occur after-between? That first line ìLogged once and then again by ancestorsÖ.î sounds like, say, a William Stafford poem (Gary Snyder, actually, was my first choice), though not ëlikeí as in an influence; and to ësound like thatí is a great thing, I think. Ginzyís ìAmerican sentenceî in WCWís ìIn The American Grainî? I may have gone too far, there. Still, that ëlong sentenceí is a sentence for getting somewhere else, starting from back before it started.


    I dreamed I saw Philís book last night


    On the shelf between Auster and Abbey


    Says I to Phil ëYouíve tripped the light obscure.í


    ëI wrote headless for Chester,í said he


    ëChesterís head became attached to me.í
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/6/07; 5:26:55 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • Phil:


    Yay, hooray, and yippie kai-yo-tay (the Phonetic Coyote)! Itís a great thing to be too much influenced by Borges, a writer who himself, as you know, loved the Nineteenth Century narrative, as you call it. (His little introductions to American and English literature respectively positively sing of their substance.)


    Len once observed to me that ëthe future of radio is its pastí. I love the succinct insight of this saying. Your narrative has its future(s) there, too. Itís as Charles Olson observed, if I remember correctly (in Call Me Ishmael and in his essay ìEqual, That Is, To The Real Itselfî), that Melvilleís Moby Dick narratives opened up new narrative ëspaceí (in English, that is) for wording possibilities of ëthe realí. And thatís the ësenseí that makes it all make sense.


    The narratives that Melville gave us in Moby Dick or The Confidence Man (whereís the HBO series of that!?) live in further or different possibility in, say, the prose poems of that most ëcontemporaryí of prose poem meisters, Stephen Berg. The Nineteenth Century narrative, again, in the living now of a very different ëcenturyí, with the same distinctive little or no-distinction between prose and poetry.


    The narrator is where, how, why everything makes sense already, his breath of meaning breathes in each sentence. Anderson instructed himself in his sentences that ìeach truth was a compositeÖî of multiple guises of meaning--ìvague thoughtsî he called them rather. It is for the reader to listen, follow the music of the thought and the subject, and to deliberate the writing. Maybe youíve got a variation on that stray dog Chogyam Trungpaís ëfirst thought best thoughtí axiom. First ëvague thoughtíÖ The harder they vague, the better they deliberate.


    ìI seem to think the subject matter trumps the way of telling it, since I trust my narrator to make sense of almost anythingÖî O brave new Nineteenth Century that has such narrators in it!
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/6/07; 6:15:59 AM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • Thank you all for going deep. You honyockers and your allusions to stuff I don't know anything about really keep me ringing the little bell at the reference desk. Of course I am up on Nancy Drew and her illustrations. I believe someone could take a classic Drew mystery that everyone loves like maybe "The Clue of the Tapping Heels" and rewrite it in the style of ten famous authors (say Erich Maria Remarque, Upton Sinclair and Hunter Thompson for starters) and then release all ten at once. That theoretically could knock the book-buying public back on its ear, plus sell like hot cakes.

    Speaking of knocking, I was really knocked out by those Lucinda Williams lyrics. Which song is that? Where did they go???are they still here? And for when the lyrics don't matter, try the version of "Cowgirl in the Sand" from Crazy Horse At The Fillmore 1970 which came out a few months back. I got mesmerized by it again last night??? had it up so loud I was annoying Consuela the Housekeeper. It makes me ecstatic.

    I learned a good new word: COZEN: to deceive, win over, or induce to do something by artful coaxing and wheedling or shrewd trickery. I thought this would be a good word for you, Len, not because of the trickery part, but just because it has "zen" in it. Like, "This has been a Cozen Production" at the end of something. No need to thank me.

    I assumed Tonawanda was near Samoa. Live and learn!

    Kent Boyle-Ahnegg
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/6/07; 8:06:24 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • Mark:


    Speaking of dings at the Reference Desk, have you read Ilan Stavansí Dictionary days (a defining passion)? This is a very good one for someone whose joys include a newly discovered (or re-discovered) word.


    I recently came across one of cozenís kissiní cozens. About the word ìauthorî. This is from Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, by Giorgio Agamben, that book which occasioned so-many of the hilarious hit sit-coms on the WB.


    ìThe modern meaning of the term ìauthorî appears relatively late. [Well, isnít it just like the modern to appear relatively late?] In Latin, auctor originally designates the person who intervenes in the case of a minor (or the person who, for whatever reason, does not have the capacity to posit a legally valid act), in order to grant him the valid title he requires. Thus the tutor, uttering the formula auctor fio, furnishes the pupil with the ìauthorityî he lacks (one then says that the pupil acts tutore auctore). In the same way, auctoritas partum is the ratification that the senatorsóthus called patres auctoresóbring to a popular resolution to make it valid and obligatory in all cases.


    The oldest meanings of the term also include ìvendorî in the act of transferring property, ìhe who advises or persuadesî and, finally, ìwitness.î ÖWhat is the common character that lies at the root of these apparently heterogeneous meanings [Is the narrator to his characters as is the sensus communus to the individual senses? Thus the narrator as the character the characters have in common]ÖIt is the author who grants the uncertain or hesitant will of a subject the impulse or supplement that allows it to be actualizedÖ auctor signifies the witness insofar as his testimony always presupposes somethingóa fact, a thing or a wordóthat preexists him and whose reality and force must be validated or certifiedÖTestimony is thus always an act of an ìauthorî: it always implies an essential duality in which an insufficiency or incapacity is completed or made valid.î


    All this might, I know, may be too much bordering on the verge of the hated metaphysics for that man in the nick of Danger. Metaphysics as a borderland pursuit? Well, anyway, I like this sort of thing. And a slam-bang opening of insufficiency or incapacity always grabs me. Somewhere, in an essay, in an interview, or both, Borges made the remark that words had been given to him as sight for his blindness. He also stated that he wrote ìto ease the passing of time.î In our time, so accelerated and murderous, we surely and sorely do need the ease. Hence the precious eye-sight of each newly discovered (or re-discovered) word.


    Ding, ding! Auctor, narrator!
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/7/07; 4:23:49 AM ¦ by ZenLen
  • Mark:

    Cozen is one of the words that exists at the edges of my vocabulary, one that I can reasonably fumble with while reading, but wouldn't think to use--even if I capably could--while speaking or writing. For some reason, it puts me in mind of of the Elizabethan term "coneycatcher," a "coney" being (according to Merriam Webster online) a dupe and a coneycatcher being a confidence man.

    I'm afraid that my cozening days are behind me and that I showed no particular talent for it. More coney than coneycatcher am I, am I. For radio is a heartbreak, or so I'm told. Regardless of its future, its present is in the hands of focus groups and formats.

    Finally, I always thought "author" meant "bear," although that mey have been just an Authorian Legend.

    Author Pendraggin'
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/7/07; 6:19:40 AM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • I have been getting a kick out of that new sitcom, "Auschwitz Misses!" Quite the blend of the bawdy and the boney. And really interesting about the word "author"??? I like thinking of it as "witness." I guess I won't be shouting "author, author" so loosely when I stand to clap wildly at the end of plays anymore. They are going to have to earn it now. I do love the sound of the pounding of my white gloves.

    I'd never heard of "Dictionary Days" but it sounds good so I just bought a used library copy on Amazon for $2.18 plus $79.50 for shipping. I know this is wrong and that I should shop at my local used book store in order to make the world sustainable but that guy gives me the creeps. He wouldn't have it in stock and would just try to sell me something else with "dic" in the title anyway. When my wife gets up, I'm going to try to work "coneycatcher" into some sort of affectionate nickname for her. I make up a new name for her each and every day and she is just sick to tears of the whole thing.

    I read Chapter Six of B-Teeth yesterday while on a bed in the front-lawn screen tent with the slanted October sun beaming in and I found that it relaxed me??? the park, the dogs, the monuments, the clarity. All to good effect and very settling. I've been made ready for what comes next.

    Ezekiel "Easy" Tiempo
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/12/07; 9:21:37 AM ¦ by Karl Henning
  • Hi, Phil.

    Are you from Tonawanda, "Western Gateway to the Erie Canal"?



    Nay, though I once belonged to a sextet of performing composers (or we may have been composing performers) who, until more balanced thoughts prevailed (which took, by varying accounts, as little as ten minutes, or ó as the Master of the Wings and Bleu Cheese Dippe claims ó even as long as the memory of Twilight of the Nods) were irredeemably unknown as The Fires of Tonawanda. There is a jokey/geeky new music allusion lodged in there, which it were perhaps tedious to detail (though, if I were tedious as a king, &c. &c.)

    Hoy Mark,

    If I were from Tonawanda, it would be a Tonawanda of verdant salt-marsh and irresolvable 4-3 appoggiaturas. My Tonawanda is large, it contains multitudes even of Samoans (who happily have not complained about the insufficiency of surge-protectors).

    Cheers,
    ~Karl
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/12/07; 9:30:39 AM ¦ by Karl Henning
  • Dictionary Days . . . wasn't that a nostalgic fictionalized biopic of Samuel Johnson (with Woody Allen as Boswell)?
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/12/07; 4:04:23 PM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • Hard to believe that I sat down, freshly home from the office and still in my Blue Serge Protector Suit, to go over the posts of 10/12. I can't believe it either. If we forget the lessons of 10/12, then the composing performers have won. All I know is, if living your life to enjoy a quaff of Compost Cabernet, surrounded by hoborific funishings at an outdoor fire pit is wrong, then I have built my life upon sand. And I saw a hypmotizing movie out of Brazil called "House of Sand" last night. That is all I know.

    Andy Diedtrien
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/15/07; 5:11:27 AM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • Thanks for the link to the lyrics; man-o-man what a song that is. David Byrne keeps a very interesting journal and his entry of 10/4 is about sitting in with Lucinda and her band:

    http://journal.davidbyrne.com/

    Ahh, the sweet, sweet memories of the Samoa Cookhouse! We beflanneled young hippie boys used to make our regular altered appearances there for the steaming, heaping platters-o-goodness, served logging camp stylie. All you can eat and eat, plus baskets of soft hot rolls which could be tucked away in near-Dickensian waif fashion for postponed sustenance??? carbo-loading for running wide-eyed through the redwoods. Putting the man's ham to a greater good we were sure we were.

    In Seven, Chester's anxiety at the prospect of losing the Pioneer Parade is as palpable as a sebaceous cyst. I can relate, as I used to produce the Cornish Christmas street fairs in Grass Valley and there is much riding on such community shindigs. Praying for good weather also comes into play. Will he dodge this bullet in Eight?

    And Len, I hate to be a Buddha-pest, but I am hungary to know more about this Zen condition? Is it serious? RGM~ "Dictionary Days" has arrived and this nice little hardback appears to have been kicked out of the Missouri River Regional Library in Jefferson City, MO. That seems a bit ungrateful on their part but I am happy to have it. I already like Stavans' unpretentious style and his ability to drop in a good "chimera" and have it feel completely natural.

    Henri Aldrich
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/15/07; 9:18:35 AM ¦ by Karl Henning
  • This was Faneuil Hall, but now it's nothing but aspidistra. Well, and the odd stalk of chicory.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/15/07; 10:28:46 AM ¦ by ZenLen
  • Mark--

    The key thing about the Buddha condition is that it is all an illusion. Or the recognition of an illusion. Or the overcoming of an illusion. This is apparently accomplished while sitting under trees by the sacred river. Unfortunately, I find myself sitting under fluorescent lights by the data stream.

    Sam Sarra
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/15/07; 4:47:53 PM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • Went down to the data stream

    brought my cane pole, wet online

    went down to the data stream

    brought my cane pole, wet online

    dept. manager come by

    she shore was lookin' fine

    dept. manager come by

    she shore was lookin' fine



    yes, yes.

    .

    Nearsighted Blackberry Chitlin'
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/16/07; 8:53:49 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • Phil & Phil-odelphians:


    Our friendly neighborhood influence Borges left a message for this conversation. I just happened to get it during the thrill of starting a first read of Golden Doves With Silver Dotsby Jose Faur.


    "The poet is each one of the people of his fictitious world," says Borges; "he is every breath and every detail. One of his tasks, certainly not the easiest, is to hide or dissumulate that omnipresence." "Dissumulate that omnipresence" perhaps something akin to Snoop Dog's "shizzilate that shit"? A play of hide 'n go narrate, in any case. In Narrator we trust!
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/16/07; 10:10:35 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • CHESTER PSALMS: WHY HE CROSSED THE ROAD


    "There is also another who did not come up to the level of having his night illuminated by lightning, but, rather, by some radiant body or some type of rock which is radiant by night.î -- Moshe ben Maimon


    It was not the answer he had expected. Perhaps that was to be expected; the question itself had been so unexpected. Why did Chester Psalms cross the road?


    It was unlike a symbol. It was ìsignificant only in syntagmatic opposition.î But, surely, it was she and she alone who was his significant only. The road went on, though never finalized into a way, into a distant autumn evening. Someday, he would walk that road. In the meantime, yes, it was true: the road was walking too.


    Maybe it was that he had something to prove; something that wasnít solvable. Thereíd been an unfamiliar sound. He looked behind him. He wasnít being followed. Unfamiliar became a distraction. ìConstrained to certain modes of interpretation even while he thinks himself free.î The first thing that struck him, when he studied the facts, was that their succession in time did not exist insofar as the speaker was concerned. Only by complete suppression of the past could they enter the mind of the speaker. He looked behind him again: the moment history intervened it falsified his judgment.


    ìAn indication, nothing more,î the great detective had said, at a place where the train tracks became a turn. Meaning, the straight by infinitesimal increments became crooked. Meaning, the perplexity was intentional. But still, and again, there was something near behind him, following him. It did no good to turn around. The Burning Bridge, burning but not consumed, burning if he approached, burning if he didnít. Even at its narrowest interval, someone always tried to build a house there.


    It did no good to turn around. Turning around meant suppression; suppression meant falsification. He had to cross.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/17/07; 5:37:21 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • CHESTER PSALMS: TWO GUISE NAMED ONE


    He was not an original. He was a translation of a lost original. There was omnipresent danger of getting lost in the original. He was a working translation of loss whose origin was lost. When he came to a Book in the road, he took it.


    The Book was shedding its leaves. He gathered some, with an intuition, or maybe just an intuition of a hope, that they would give him his memory. He was nakedly forgetful; these gathered leaves he could learn to read, and cover himself in what he read. It did not answer the question--a trace of itself the original left when it was lost, of where he was. The danger was still everywhere.


    He was more than the gathered some of his leaves. But first, in order to read, he had to memorize the vowels. Or, said from the other side, to vowel-eyes his memory. Heíd leap in order to look.


    A late autumn road: and he, at the where-are-you? Place of the world, crossing where the sunset intersected the horizon. The circumferential middle of nowhere intersection of sunset and horizon, that is. He was one or the other. ìAll notions associated with one or the other are to the same extent mutually irreducible.î The point of divergence, a choice of one, but both ways going, he would cross in the middle, neither fire nor snow.


    All roads led and he was being led around by the road-less taken. Straight as a rail, semiotic was a dead end. The Presence was in the semantic. His exile was hers too. His and Hers exiles. There was no Name for the Name for it.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/17/07; 8:11:17 AM ¦ by ZenLen
  • This is my second try at this. Let's hope this one takes so that I can resume my rightful place in The Shadows.

    Chapter Six: No notes.

    Chapter Seven: First, on a technical note, Chester's ex is referred to as Shirley in the first paragraph and Shirley Anne in the second. Shirley Anne, if memory serves, is what normally gets used throughout the novel thus far.

    On a far more subjective note, reading these two chapters has given me some insight into where I'm having problems with it as a reader, and it has to do with the integration of the historical and background material with Chester's story. I find that every time I'm just gaining empathy and sympathy for Chester, I'm whisked off into the town's past and his family's past. Now, I think these are necessary elements, and there are a lot of great insights in there. (I particularly enjoyed the description of how a town gets turned into a suburb, a process that I've seen in action all around the Atlanta metro area.) The problem is that each intrusion of history causes me to disconnect from Chester as a character.

    This was not the case with Karen Mae's story, where her back story was intimately tied up with the history given. I was more emotionally attached to her all the way through the chapter. With Chester, it's like a magnet being switched on and off.

    I liked the reference to Indian School Way, which put me in mind of two things. One was, of course, "Temporarily Humboldt County" and you saying, "Eddie's one of our prize students. We're giving him away next week." The second was School Street in Pawtucket, RI, which drifts away from downtown parallel to the mighty Blackstone River and the parking lot of Apex, "The Discount Store with a Difference." The "Difference" being that it was really a department store.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/17/07; 8:57:35 PM ¦ by Bernie Splim
  • Well, it's nice to be back. Thank me very much. I will proceed to read Beaver Tooth and report back as soon as I can. I can vouch for altered states at the Samoa Cookhouse. At least I think I was there. Pass the peas!

    Maceo
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/18/07; 9:11:11 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • CHESTER PSALMS: A ZERO PRONOMINAL SIGN


    His arrival, heíd been told, would be coincident with his being shown that heíd arrived. ìHere I am,î is all he could say, when called upon to answer. ìHereî though was not where heíd thought it, or ìI amî, was. Immediately he was told: ìGo!î ìHereîóthe speech of it, meant, therefore, on a journey to some(w)here else.


    It would bear repetition. And he would bear the crossing for the sake of repetition.


    Speech (unqualified by a ìthird personî) would take him to the place where his words had originated; even if this place could only be designated by the uppermost fine Point (which itself contained simultaneous dawn and sunset).


    There comes a Point, so it is said. For Chester Psalms, it was the Point between two differences, ìin syntagmatic oppositionì, in the time it took for a successive synthesis. îThe future moment is absolutely new, but it requires history and time in order to come about.î


    Chester Psalms: in successive synthesis from first person to second person to ìthird personî, ìwhose function it is to express the non-person.î Excluded from the act of speech, but thereby an exile and no more an anomaly at the very center of the scattered and dispersed languages. One day his Point would come. It was already visible, twice a day, once at dawn, once at twilight, on the horizon. The horizon: furthest horizontal visible point of visible horizontal distance. The horizon was the road heíd cross to get to the other side.

    To cross meant repetition. ëIí was his steppingstone.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/18/07; 12:31:42 PM ¦ by Karl Henning
  • Chester Psalms, I think I pointed him once. No one could match his sublime antiphonalness.

    Legs on sale. Selah.



    Cheers,
    ~Karl
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/19/07; 5:06:30 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • CHESTER PSALMS: THE STORY OF HIS OLDEST MEMORY


    "Now, what is at stake is the strangeness between us, and not only that obscure part which escapes our mutual knowledge and is nothing but the obscurity of being within the Ióthe singularity of the singular Ióa strangeness which is still relativeÖ" ñ Maurice Blanchot, "On Jabes"


    The horizon: space giving itself time to define itself. Chester Psalms: taking all the time on the horizon to semantize about himself. "Here"--much like the relationship of illuminated and unilluminated moon sides, was the unilluminated side of the original question: "Where are you?"


    The distances digested him. He digested the distances. When 'inside' had become 'outside', the 'outside' had become 'naked', and 'naked' had become to mean forgetful of his previous remembrance. He laughed at last: he was having an 'out of Garden' experience.


    He wished there was someone who could tell him the story of his oldest memory. If he'd been the Blind Beggar, he could have remembered that when it began, there was neither side 'inside' nor 'outside'. But his memory had been built 'for two' during a forgotten sleep, like the dreamless sleep of a zero. Then: there was the co-incident-sound of 'nor' and 'nur' (Arabic), and of 'or' (Hebrew) in 'nor', the simultaneous everywhere neither light, and before there was separation in an act of speech. His oldest memory, was it thisÖlight?


    He hadn't wanted to be alone. It wasn't good for him, he'd been told. Now, he was alone, and alone with the only memory that could turn him inside out.


    The one and only plot, someone once said to him, is: a stranger comes into town, a stranger leaves town. He'd arrived, to begin, and would arrive again, to leave, coming and going, a stranger.


    The difference between there and here? A 'crossing' sign. Whether horizontally or vertically, one had to cross in the middle. There was no Name for the Name for it, yes, but in that Name he'd entered the three dimensions of time. He could catch up to the Past-now, maybe, since, thanks to the emerging invisibility of that Point on the horizon, it had become his future.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/21/07; 5:15:46 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • CHESTER PSALMS: THE LABOR OF LITERALITY


    The declensions of the Past, the permutated past and the future-past included, were so many reverberations of the original concealment? Shadows in the Valley of Reverberations? Is that what the Baal Shem Tov had meant when he said ëremembrance is the secretÖ?í


    Chester Psalms: a late autumn lingerer at the upside-down co-incident point of Inverse Mountain, in the realm of the conventional.


    The no-Name Named left traces. For detection, precisely; Its and ours, his and hers; and too for the bifurcated speech subjectivity of ëIí and ëyouí. The interval of interruption, pause and silence; the strangeness and the stutter of the Other. The no-Name Named was the Trace of traces. Its Speech spoke the first horizon (the first Trace that was of separation). A spoken horizon of vertical calm and repose: assent and ascent. Now wasnít somewhere he could get to. The instruction ìGo!î was differentially meant. The differences: here and there, just as the dawnóthe (either) ëorí-light differentiated, comes up here and there. In a neither-word: nor.


    ìA bird of the sky carries the Voice.î Birds were leaving for another sky. He was returning by crossed roads, a seasoned beginner in a season incommensurable with age. In flashes distant heíd startled to hear then see from ëwithoutí something so interior it had neither eyes to see itself, nor ears to hear itself. Awakened to, that is by ìan ageless woundî, naked (meaning, alternately revealed concealed), inflicted byÖby night by angel by man?óUnknown Inflictor who once answered ìWho?î with another Name.


    ìAll roads lead to the same point,î Neruda stated. His conclusion, anyway. For Chester Psalms neither the roads were the road nor the same point the same point. After all, this wasnít some semiotic striptease in an existential burlesque. O light-now let me be the me of your memory! ìNowî in French (not the ënowí of ëthis momentí, ìmaintenantî) is the word ìOrî. The Hebrew word (aleph vav resh) for ìlightî is pronounced ìOrî. Neither nor: Now or neither light. Neither-or: Neither either nor or light. Now-not now. In permutation heíd trust.


    Or was now. And it was now and neither.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/23/07; 8:23:55 AM ¦ by Karl Henning
  • Somehow I'm thinking of Elvis's appropriation of "O Sole Mio" . . . .

    It's now and neither
    Go hold me loose
    Fish me my garland
    In mauve burnous

    To-morrow won't be quite soon
    It's now and neither
    My love-poltroon.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/23/07; 12:15:56 PM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • Karl Mark's response is: "I like it!"It is as catchy as a catcher's mitt.

    Romney Toodagroin ~Commander, Third-Person Poltroon
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/24/07; 2:42:08 PM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • CHESTER PSALMS: IN THE VOICELESS VENUE


    ìIt was one of those days when the sun deceives everyone.î ñIsrael Rabon, The Street


    Last time heíd seen her, he hadnít, only almost had seen her. He was about to enter, cross the threshold of a nightclub in which she was performing that night. Heíd followed her voice (which for some reason, unknown to him as yet, allowed itself to be followed and, more importantly, allowed him to follow it).


    That night, heíd stood at the door, stood as other customers, arriving, muttered their impatience at him as they had to get around his motionless body to enter. That night he did not enter. Like each motion of a birdís wings advanced it along a traceless path that left only the entire sky behind for those following, her voice was gone; and so, untraceable, it was everywhere he went. Hers was the voice that could stop and resound the silence, the interruption; like the aleph, a silent opening before the utterance.


    He no longer heard her voice, but he could still follow what he no longer heard. She was with him, though he was not with her. The repetition of the aleph-interruption. ìAll the rest is commentary.î Interruption could not be followed. Another laugh to himself. Well, the commentary on that was: her ëwithí didnít work like othersí ëwithí.


    The next day, too, he didnít remember now what day that wasóone of those days, the street where the nightclub was located felt absent from itself. Which made him feelÖlike the last page of a book (whose previous pages, once turned, had disappeared). Surfaces contended with the sunlight that, he felt, struck them with heat and glare that belonged more to a desert. What business had the desert showing up there, right where he was certain he was? Or, rather, was it the effect of her voice, gone, but with a house built from its absence?


    Her voice had built a place, for him, in which he could listen to its absence. For others, it was a nightclub, full of song and noise, of talk jumbles. It was his ability to remain outside that allowed him to listen to what those inside did not hear.


    He stood--this was his interpretation, between the stranger and his strangeness. The street outside the nightclub was familiar to him still, and despite the desert sun that refracted off its stone surfaces, but any destination it could offer him was already a border beyond which was desert. He didnít wander well on straight streets, or so heíd remembered.


    But that had changed, on that next day. Changed by a sun that stuttered silent light, that released whole flocks of golden words, that shone differently in the strangerís eyes. When his eyes had re-adjusted to the distance, to the far beginning at the end of the book, he was in the desert.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/28/07; 5:03:37 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • THE REPETITION OF CHESTER PSALMS


    ìBecause of thisÖî-- Bereshit 2:25


    ëThe risk of silence is the future, the risk of silence is the future,í he told himself. Then from pretended made up memory, he recited: ëBeware O Chester, the desert is wandering tooóthrough you!í He was, was he not, an itinerant silence, a Psalm interrupted? Like the sky: up in the air and everywhere; and, too, a space for nowhere.


    But the Desert protected the deliberately broken fragments of Beginning. Even broken, they remained supra-coherent, more than the whole of their parts.


    ëThe Traces, not the Faces,í he told himself. In the Desert, a horizon is not what it used to be, but was what it is in Beginning. It encircled. The original question ìWhere?î encircled. (ìWhere?î-- the original question, was an ëinsideí not ëoutsideí the Garden question; was it still originally spoken from there, from ëinsideí the Garden?) As if he was, being in the Desertóand he was, was he not, already, on the other side of the horizon? It occurred to him: ëAppears-Not-What-It-Is, To Beí, that is a translation of the no-Name for the Name for it.


    The sun went its autumn way. Stars, punctual appearances of belated after-light, and simultaneous, did not punctuate the successive synthesis. And it was evening. What was, that it was, especially since its decline and disappearance occurred first, and as if opposed to its own name?


    Early morning, he gathered from the Book; leaves of it fell fresh at first morning, stayed like sparks of dew on the Desert until the sun dissolved them. He gathered only what he needed. If heíd gathered more than his need, it vanished anyway, along with the ungathered Book for that morning.


    The gazelle of dawn, bi-furcated speaking light leaping above the two-sided horizon with its inter-subjective interval. Out of flocks of golden words, this one: ìHearî was ìherî + the Aleph. In the Desert, vast-domís expanse of unbordered interruption, No One could hear him difference.


    The Desert listened for him, and he supplicated with silence.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/29/07; 4:18:39 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • Phil:


    Bitten by more hare of the trigger without the safety on!


    This story of yours really has my best attention, and best attention loves it, loves being had. Your work with ëtrust the narratorí and memoryóand, yeah, again, once in a narrative while, your long sentence (like a long steam train whistleóthe voice wail in the song ìMystery Trainî), such a pleasure to read and read and read and reflect in, the familiar stranger in the strangely familiar, the attempts to forget, or to neglect memory, but that really donít work, do they, as memory (or, make it majuscule, Memory) doesnít forget those for whom itís meant. It must be built (and this word has such ancient connotations and uses in Hebrew traditions where I come from), and by many, Temps Perdue, especially the one(s) who return home. Stories do have to return home, too, donít they? ëImaginary but real all the same.í It has to be. OtherwiseÖwhat? ìMy quest is only to remember. Memory is mystery enough for me, you see?" says the old man near death. Dearly departed, we are beloved here today. Narrative built with model precision detail, arriving on pre-tracked routes. But who is arriving, and where? The story with its great, ever-satisfying, ever-allusive, themes of parent-child, woman-man, of loss (and lost) in place, of displacement and return and the mystery that re-signifies everything become too familiar to the point of neglected or forgotten. And especially: the characters themselves. Characters must remember; memory must be in character. Are memories in character but scale-model reproductions? Imagination, then, their requital?


    Itís been a theme at play in my doodles with the mensch of broken Psalms, intended to seminate here where we conversate, so Iíll write it here as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote it, the exact quotation: ìBeware, o wanderer, the road is walking too.î This is how memories and characters arrive different than they expected of themselves, or different than themselves, or different than they departed. The story is a way, but itís different, maybe, than where itís going at any given moment.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/29/07; 7:23:56 AM ¦ by ZenLen
  • Two technical notes on Chapter 8:

    I think that there are returns missing from the two following exchanges of dialog:

    "They hired me to get to you ?" She laughed. "They're as stupid as one expects, aren't they, down there? Have you opened the goddamn envelope?"and

    "Seven fifty and two hundred blow jobs." "Done. Willy, you kill me. You're as crazy as everyone says you are. I guess thatís why I love you so much."

    I'm still processing the thing as a whole. If it turns out that I have any usable thoughts, I'll post them.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 10/31/07; 4:44:35 PM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • Phil:


    This Chapter Nine of this Beaver Teeth of yours, and wow oh wow its opening paragraph-- one of the loveliest of paragraphs Iíve heard through my eyes in whiles gone longÖMy middle childhood years love of trains remembers itself awake againóyes, long. long freight trains slow moving in the night, as I watched from a window of my grandparentsí apartment in Wynnfield Terrace, in suburban Philadelphia, slow moving with the night and then, sometimes, that spine-shivering mystery moment when the train STOPPED. Then the wait of what might be happening, and Iíd imagine myself sneaking out and getting into one of the open boxcars, all that tensed metal movement suspended from motion in the night. Then the train would be, why I say this Iím not sure, reborn into motion and the sound of the rolling wheels, car by car by car, until, at the end, the cabooseówasnít there another world inside of it, for me a solitary in my imagination, going from place to place, never having to stay in one place, and though that to me was so sad. The sadness too, not the same sadness, Iíd feel, like losing a friend, or a love, or a parent, when the caboose passed by and soon after I couldnít hear the train anymore.


    We are such stuff as these stories are made of, dreams the visions we can get of such stuff of selvesóothers not us too and especially, without being visionaries or even hoping or thinking we could see, or be seen, from beyond. We get ëem anyway. The sustained, loving, humorous, agonized, depressed, exalted attention, attention, attention to a place (or, make it majuscule, a Place), thatís the big beautiful thing here. Iím repeating myself, from before. But its repetition here is not the same as saying it before.


    This, what Iím about to say, is going way too far, I know, and completely in a direction you donít intend to go, but yesterday I happened again to read a quotation from that great Yiddish humorist from Prague, the one that talks about a need for books ìthat affect us like a disasterî. Recently, I happened to see, stopped on a bridge, and visible in both right and left directions as far as I could see, box cars, rusted, fatigued, ëbound for gloryí box cars. They looked to me like theyíd never move again, liked theyíd arrived at place permanently in-between, and then just stopped, bewildered, or defeated, maybe both, probably neither. The sight of it, their silence in it, affected me like a disaster. Chester Honeyacre might he say, along with our Yiddish humorist, ìI have powerfully assumed the negativity of my timesî?


    Another big beautiful thing here: the voices begotten of voice, and the long, long rolling now picking up speed now speeding, then steady or slowed down to slowly ambling train of syllables and words, joined and coupled in increments, in magnifications of description.


    The Narrator, he hears it all, his Sound mind embraced listeners, they hear it all too in his words.


    A p. s. about the company of Carruth, Hayden Carruth, the poet, that is. With the phrase just above ìvoices begotten of voiceî, I was thinking of the writers and poets company in which I read this story, unbeknownst to you, of course, and not that I infer or conclude any of this company as intended or sympathetic influences by you. Most often, once in your aural story world, I think of Hayden Carruth, the voices en-voiced with his poems, actual people known in the down and out, the marginal, the rock and soil resistant to the deluge of accelerated leveling reduction to universal mediocrity, the loners and longers, and how the written worded successive synthesis of what he seesóthe meaning imbued literalities of person and place, gets its powers of description from what, from how he hears.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 11/1/07; 6:09:30 AM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • I like 8 with the whole Trigger negotiation BJ waltzin' Memory Train session. But enough about books, something very serious happened around here yesterday. It turned out that that burning smell signaled the end of my big old Magmavox. I am now feeling melancholy with the realization that that was my very last cathode ray tube ever. It appears that there is no turning back now, so like the despondent dyslexic, I will throw myself behind the bus and chose between a Plasma Set (too big/expensive/bloody-sounding) and an LSD-TV(hard to trust/disconcerting/demanding viewing angles) with their incredibly scary clarity, strange connectors and huge definition. But which to buy? How many inches? What about the guilt? Please advise.

    Hugh "Jim" Pediment
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 11/1/07; 6:51:25 AM ¦ by ZenLen
  • I agree about the value of the opening paragraph and would extend it to the chapter as a whole. This is my favorite Chester chapter yet, and I think the tone of it is exactly where it needs to be.

    Also, having worked in the railroad industry for a short period and having accidentally chained my wife to it for the last several years, I enjoyed the train talk. Tell me, was that a hump yard that Chester visited? (That's a railroad joke.)

    And Mark, don't get a plasma. The screen can get damaged by an implement no greater than a child's thumb. I worked in the mailroom at Aaron Rents a little better than a year ago, and all the people who were spending their paychecks in the company store were getting LCDs.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 11/2/07; 3:47:53 AM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • Phil in the Blancs:


    Provoked and pleased. Pleasantly provoked too, your provocation being oh so pleasant. And: because; the ëbecauseí I like to quote from Paco Ignacio Taibo II (and already quoted once in this conversation): ìbecause when you open a book you can see the world through somebody else's eyes. And I think that is the most subversive experience in life.î Which, to me for one, makes the book an opening and openness to subversion.


    Thanks, too, for the notice about the mensch of broken Psalms. (Cool Psalm O. Dee his maybe a rap name, if he needed it to or wanted it to be. Dissimulating the omnipresence, in Babylonics. Following the riverbed, singing his strange Psalm as the Stranger Time Town forgot, or in a land of weeping rivers that flow away from memory.) Parenthetical asides aside, all his walking-roads lead to, really are led by, the Book. A particular reading or readings of a time ëbecomeí how he is written. And, too, heís been, is, our conversations and experiments. Carruthís line from his poem ìLostî: ìI changed the appearance of myself to myself continuallyÖî Or, to quote myself, as I said in my first entrance into this conversation: ìÖan imagined word en-worlded. Itís prose that crosses the boundaries and borders of itself into the differences within and of itself.î Following Bashoís counsel to his students not to follow him but to follow what he followed, I follow what Edmond Jabes followed, his permutations of Desert and Book, for example, and/or itís as if Paul Celan, as if he were to write a detective noir from his poems. In other words, the text is a story as commentary, in the margins, on the story that is not told, does not appear, as text, that is, but produces or begets other stories to define its absence.


    Recently I noted to myself: ëChester Psalms is the Book made into a character / Chester Psalms = Ha-zeh ha-Sefer Adam, ëThis Book is the (a) human being.í Chester Psalms is ëmadeí of readings and his character is midrash. He is written readings, written in acts of reading.í Tell me: who, who, who wrote the Book of Psalms?


    But, ah, the Book, what is it? This primordial, then millennial-personal, ëholy sparkí of a question (or, with Jabes, make it majuscule, Question), too precious to define. Itís the mystery, the solution, the detection; and itís the solution that finds and identifies the clues. Dissimulating the omnipresence ofÖthe Book. Chester Psalms, yeah, heís loose now in the Desert, where the Book wandered but left no traces and belongs to No One.


    Quoth Raven who stole the light: ìNeither-nor, Neither-nor.î
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 11/2/07; 2:27:27 PM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • Since I've been underemployed, I find that I have time to hang out at the health club jacuzzi in the mornings and annoy the old people. In my defense, I am good for helping elders up when they fall (2 times)and holding open doors for those with walkers (6 times). I've carved out a begrudging friendship with gruff old Germanic Ruth who looks built for wading out into the Baltic Sea. She scoffs at the temperatures at the outdoor pool. Fuff- you call that cold? And then there is Dora, so cute and friendly, man, if she was just fifty years younger, I'd ??? I think it may have been the Saskatchewan truck that got me started.

    Al Dattenmoore
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 11/3/07; 5:29:18 PM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • SCHPRECHEN SIE DWARF?


    Phil, Mark, Len:


    Changing the all-Chester channel for a panel, to pour ya from another bottle of psalm-story. This is a coincidence big enough to drive a vintage Dust Bowl Saskatchewan doo-dah man truck through. Yíall are talkiní TV, the passing into legend and institutionalized history of the old time light-in-a-box kind, and one of you wrote about a guy who was absorbed into a TV and into a channel changing TV ingested odyssey, and Iíve just read the short story, English translation of original in Portuguese, ìThe Dwarf in the Television Setî (original first published in 1979), by Moacyr Scliar (pronounced, in English Mwa seer Skleer), included in The Collected Stories of Moacyr Scliar. The story ends with the demise of the television set. The storyís first paragraph:


    ìIt is terrible to be a dwarf and have to live inside a television setóeven if it happens to be a gigantic color TV; however, there is at least one advantage: When the TV is turned off, it is then possible to watch some very interesting scenes from behind the screen. And whatís more, itís possible to do so without anybody noticingóafter all, who is going to pay any attention to a television set when it is turned off? If people paid attention, they would be able to seeódeep down where the small luminous point disappears at the moment when the TV is turned offómy attentive eyes. In the daytime I watch, thatís what I do. At nightÖWell.î


    The hybrid of this short story and Lenís advice, ëDonít flat screen that dwarfÖí!?


    P. S. Never ever did I think would come the day when the last lingering devotees in the Romance Cathode Church would have to get their tubes tiedÖAt least, thereís still daytime dwarf-a-vision.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 11/4/07; 5:38:52 AM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • Well, it does creep me out a little to think that I may have been hosting dwarf-in-my-tube observers all these years as I went about my daily duties. And if I do take LCD in my living room, how will I know that I am not being watched by one of those slender slender metallic digital eels? They could get in there. What is the truth? I don't want to have to start tearing things apart.

    Randy Hitler
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 11/5/07; 3:52:25 PM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • Thank god that's not a Banana Slug. Among my surpressed memories are finding one in my refrigerator when I lived in Eureka (no explanation) and the fact that we actually had our wedding reception dinner at the Samoa Cookhouse. Big Chuck from Colorado was picking cuz he was paying and he insisted on calling it at "The Cookshack." Anyway, the Hollywood writers are on strike, so pull on your scab pants and lets submit a spec script for "Two and A Half Mensch." Scab Pants ??? I have their second album, still sealed and crofted.

    Don R. Partee
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 11/5/07; 6:18:47 PM ¦ by Robert G. Margolis
  • Mark:


    You wrote my mind. Strike while the ironyís hot! May I, and merely, suggestÖ


    Why Do They Hiatus? (pilot for Terrorist TV); Write Supremacists; Everyone Loves Racism; Don't Menschen It; Gender Bender; Animatronically Correct; Mystery Loves Company; Glam-pires ('Just because you're dead doesn't mean love gets any easier.'); The Satan of Suburbia; and, heck, why not, Schprechen Sie Dwarf? (or alternatively Knockin' On Heaven's Dwarf)-- with credit to Scliar (and not like that guy who based Life of Pi on his Max and the Cats), this one could be about sit-com family life as seen by the dwarf in the tv set. Oh, and the one I hope Phil would consent to get involved in: L. Frank Baum, Indian Killer.

    These are a few of my favorite scripts, for development and tuning until they're at the right pitch. My pitch-fork's at the ready. Pick a scab, any scab.
  • Re: Beaver Teeth, A Novel (#)
  • 11/6/07; 5:53:22 AM ¦ by Mark Trail
  • Ooh,ooh, I want to work on KO'n Heaven's Dwarf??? can it be sort of like Deadwood, only they speak German/English (Ginglish) and have TV sets and nuclear families? I want to keep the hog service. And the soiled doves. I can also work back