Brick

Doorstop, tarp-weight, scorpion-killer,
half-brick of my heart – feed me visions
of violated glass and tied-on hateful notes.
How is it, faux stone, you have shed
but a few red specks? In one year
you moved millimeters on your own.
Heft of conscience, leftover masonry:
you are expendable but refuse to go.


*

Does anyone with a house NOT have a loose brick or cinder block lying about on the porch or in the yard or garage?

Anyway -- an exercise in focusing intently on the trivial. Anything can be an object for lyrical meditation. Cheap emblems: people I barely knew, events I was on the periphery of, that sit on the grand, wrap-around porch of my mind like bricks and half-bricks, decorations, coasters, unread paperbacks, fly strips, dirty ash trays, gas cans, broken curtain rods, etc. Possibly I am a stray brown leaf, a bit of lint or less, on thousands of memory-porches, myself. Also a broken chaise longue, a rarely-used exercise machine ("As Seen on TV"), an antique wagon wheel, or a genuine Navajo dream catcher with maybe one feather left intact: something once of value or at least utility, long ago, in numerous peoples' lives.

Whereas I am a mad collector, and tend to everything and everyone as carefully as I can, and my memory-porch is a sad though impressive museum with no theme at all (except lost love).

Dirt

As a lad I rebelled against my mother’s torturous
ear-digging and washcloth abrasions, soap-blinding
and upbraiding me for not doing it better myself;
back in those days when grandma’s beads
darkly pearled my neck lines, and the grass
stained straight through my blue jeans
into the knobs of my knees, and cuts and scrapes
were debrided painfully by my mother’s hands
that one summer evening delicately plucked,
head and all, a tick from my five-year-old prick.
As a father myself, years later, without thinking a whit
I wiped snot from my son’s button nose
and flung it deep into the sands of the sandbox.
My wife, his mother, was known if he had a cold
even to suck at his nostrils when he was an infant
and spit the slime away. But mothers are mothers
and giving birth is not for the squeamish. That
nose-sucking custom, I should say, is something
they do in Japan, where my wife’s from,
and maybe in other far-off lands, but we do such things
with our own and not someone else’s little brats.
On the playground I watched their snot ball up
and string out as they played with their plastic trucks,
and their mothers chattered on as I grew annoyed
at the neglect, but the strings just dropped into the sand
and made tiny clumps not unlike brown-sugary nubs.

When I was depressed, I was a lackluster bather. I flossed,
I brushed with vigor, I wiped my ass until the tissues
came away clean, but in the shower I’d make a few
haphazard passes then pronounce myself done. My skin
was a screen for rotating horrors: rashes, permanent grit,
scabs and scab-shadows, blemishes, pits, scars, boils,
tar-flecks as if I’d swum in the Gulf, flea bites
from sleeping with dogs who also hated to bathe,
ant bites wet from rapid-fire scratching,
moles, flowering bruises, whole constellations of stains
and ugly wounds. Who needs to needle tattoos?
Stop bathing and grow your own. Dirt was my aura,
all my society as such; I confess I was insane.

*

Ok, I exaggerate a bit in the second stanza: I was feeling Rabelaisian, just for a moment.

Although it's been years since I read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, the novel passed through my mind the other day. I remembered how Esther Greenwood stopped bathing as she descended into her madness. When I was seriously depressed, repetitive chores seemed existentially dreary -- more than usual, I mean. Why bathe, change your clothes? -- you'll just have to bathe or change all over again in 24 hours, again and again and again. The healthy mind knows how to float above such small concerns; the ailing mind is trapped in them.

Donald Barthelme's Reading List ca. 1984

I'm a pack rat; lately, I've become a digital pack rat. That is, I'm taking every scrap of paper I've saved over the years and scanning it. (It's something to do between grading stacks of student essays.) Here is one of the more pleasant finds from my roach-eaten old banker boxes: the reading list Donald Barthelme gave to his writing students back in the early eighties. The original is even more wonderful -- it's a mimeograph handout! (I used to love that smell).

So, the list is obviously dated -- everything's thirty years old or more. But it gives a sense of Barthelme's tastes (no big surprises for anyone who knows his work) and what he expected of his writing students. You can see works by colleagues and friends, too - but I expect he genuinely admired their works listed here. DB was a great teacher, a man of integrity, and someone who expected rigor of thought. This list was an invitation; what might he have added to it, had he lived into the current moment?

*

IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER...

AT SWIM TWO-BIRDS, Flann O'Brien

THE THIRD POLICEMAN, Flann O'Brien

COLLECTED SHORT STORIES, Isaac Babel

LABYRINTHS, Borges

OTHER INQUISITIONS, Borges

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, Garcia Marquez

CORRECTION, Thomas Bernhard

NOG, Rudy Wurlitzer

GIMPEL THE FOOL, I. B. Singer

THE ASSISTANT, Bernard Malamud

THE MAGIC BARREL, Bernard Malamud

INVISIBLE MAN, Ralph Ellison

UNDER The VOLCANO, Malcolm Lowry

BECKETT ENTIRE

HUNGER, Knut Hamsun

I’M NOT STILLER, Max Frisch

MAN IN THE HOLOCENE, Max Frisch

SEVEN GOTHIC TALES, Isak Dinesen

GOGOL'S WIFE, Tommaso Landolfi

V, Thomas Pynchon

THE LIME TWIG, John Hawkes

BLOOD ORANGES, John Hawkes

LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN, Grace Paley

ENORMOUS CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE, Grace Paley

I, ETC, Susan Sontag

TELL ME A RIDDLE, Tillie Olsen

FALLING IN PLACE, Ann Beattie

IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY, William Gass

FICTION AND THE FIGURES OF LIFE, William Gass

THE WORLD WITHIN THE WORD, William Gass

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF, Norman Mailer

CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Anthony Burgess

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT, Celine

THE BOX MAN Kobo Abe

INVISIBLE CITIES, Italo Calvino

A SORROW BEYOND DREAMS, Peter Handke

KASPAR AND OTHER PLAYS, Peter Handke

NADJA, Andre Breton

CHIMERA, John Barth

LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE, John Barth

THE MOVIEGOER, Walker Percy

BLACK TICKETS, Jayne Anne Phillips

COLLECTED STORIES, Peter Taylor

THE PURE AND THE IMPURE, Colette

WILL YOU PLEASE BE QUIET PLEASE, Raymond Carver

COLLECTED STORIES, John Cheever

I WOULD HAVE SAVED THEM IF I COULD, Leonard Michaels

COLLECTED STORIES, Eudora Welty

THE 0RANGING OF AMERICA, Max Apple

COLLECTED STORIES, Flannery O'Connor

MUMBO JUMBO, Ishmael Reed

SONG OF SOLOMON, Toni Morrison

THE DEATH OF ARTEMIO CRUZ, Carlos Fuentes

BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING, Milan Kundera

THE RHETORIC OF FICTION, Wayne C. Booth

HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, Joseph Campbell

HENDERSON THE RAIN KING, Saul Bellow

THE COUP, John Updike

RABBIT RUN, John Updike

PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS

HOW WE LIVE, edited by Rust Hills

SUPERFICTION, edited by Joe David Bellamy

PUSHCART PRIZE ANTHOLOGIES

THE WRITER ON HER WORK, edited by Janet Sternburg

MANIFESTOS OF SURREALISM. Andre Breton

DOCUMENTS OF MODERN ART, series edited by Robert Motherwell

AGAINST INTERPRETATION, Susan Sontag

A HOMEMADE WORLD, Hugh Kenner

FLAUBERT, Letters

SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO, David Mamet

THE CHANGELING, Joy Williams

THE NEW FICTION, edited by Joe David Bellamy

GOING AFTER CACC1AT0, Tim O'Brien

THE PALM-WINE DRINKARD, Amos Tutuola

SEARCHING FOR CALEB, Ann Tyler

THANK YOU, Kenneth Koch

COLLECTED POEMS, Frank O'Hara

RIVERS AND MOUTAINS, John Ashbery

TRAGIC MAGIC, Wesley Brown

MYTHOLOGIES, Roland Barthes

THE PLEASURE OF THE TEXT, Roland Barthes

FOR A NEW NOVEL, Alain Robbe-Grillet