Celebrating Ambrose Bierce’s centennary, the Corpse is inviting readers to submit entries for our new Devil’s Dictionary. The one below is an example, by the Editor.
DERIVATIVE: an example of something that should have never happened: turning the verb “to derive” into a noun: it took 100 years for the verb “to derive” to turn into the adjective “derivative,” and another 50 years for the adjective to aquire a negative connotation, as in “his work is derivative,” and only a few months to redefine that noun as a “financial instrument,” and then less than ten seconds for that instrument to become the proctological tool that every American now calls painful. This is the price of letting bankers use words instead of numbers. People, take back your language, and use those butt-plugs we’ve been selling here at the Corpse offices.
The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard, Los Angeles, Siglio Press, 2008 If... by Joe Brainard, Los Angeles, Siglio Press, 2008 www.sigliopress.com
Joe Brainard was both a great artist and a great writer, a rara avis, in the best of times. His epic I Remember, is one of the literary accomplishments of the late 20th century, a long poem in which every line begins with the words “I remember,” and then goes on to recall everything that Joe Brainard’s memory was able to recall, from his earliest childhood to the moment of writing. The swift and witty practice of memory in I Remember is an exercise in truth and accuracy, a manual of American culture, pop and not, and a psychoanalytical tour-de-force directed not just at specific and personal neuroses, but at the incurable and painfully amusing maladies of a whole society. Joe Brainard, like his New York School friends and contemporaries, Kenward Elmslie, John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Ron Padgett, and Ted Berrigan among them, managed to ride with verve the zeitgeist of an age rich in creative stimulation and ready-made for revolution. Joe was a Pop artist, in the sense that his art, like his writing, blew out the frames of genre and the conventions of the medium, and partook with pleasure and energy from the demotic. “The Nancy Book” chronicles the adventures of the comic-book character Nancy in Joe’s own world, in collaboration with Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Frank Lima, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett and James Schuyler. This beautifully produced edition comes also with essays by Ann Lauterbach and Ron Padgett. “If...” is a series of postcards presenting Nancy in a variety of “if” situations (see below). The reprinting of these extremely rare works by Joe Brainard is an event for at least two reasons: 1. “The Nancy Book” is a masterwork of collaboration from the age of collaboration between artists and writers, a practice of instantly communicable delight that occured only twice in the 20th century: the dada-surrealist age, 1915-1935, and the New York School, 1957-1973, and 2. while comix have become “acceptable” for both “high” art and commercial translation (into movies), they have never attained the freshness and impertinence of being recast for the first time with such vigurous insouciance. Joe Brainard was a genius who had the good luck of living at the right time and having genius friends. Snap up these books, people, you never know when another epoch of public misery and artistic glory will sweep us away. When it does, you’ll have guides.
Detail from IF... by Joe Brainard, 1974, (c) Estate of Joe Brainard
WSB: Do you know that famous story about the Zen Master who appeared before the Emperor with his paintings? He bowed three times and disappeared into his paintings.
SE: ah ya. (laughs) do you think that will ever happen to you? Or does it often happen to you?
WSB: I hope. I hope. Yeah. (long pause) You know… I think the only really important function for people is to feed their …cats.
SE: (slightly uneasy laugh)
WSB: That would bother me more than anything else... when I pass. If I should die? That’s what would deter me from suicide… My cats …my cats… what would happen to my cats?
SE ( an audible sigh, and then quickly…) Not that you’re gonna…. (Simultaneous with his reply…)
WSB: Not that I ever … everyone looks at me reeel funny when I say that I have never considered suicide.
In the National Museum of Romanian Literature’s archive there is a set of photographs remarkably interesting . They depict a group of youngsters, about 25, happy, on a sort of “holiday game” in the Bucegi Mountains. In these photographs, taken in July 1932, we find Mircea Eliade (recently returned from India), Mihail Sebastian (recently returned from Paris), Haig Acterian, Mircea Vulcănescu, Dan Botta, Mihai Polihroniade, Marietta Sadova, Floria and Sylvia Capsali, Mac Constantinescu, Petru Comarnescu, perhaps even Leny Caler etc. Romanians, Jews, Armenians, Greeks and so on. Ethnically heterogeneous as it were, this was an usual group of friends in interwar Bucharest. The typical examples of tolerant and multiethnic towns of Greater Romania include Timişoara, Cernăuţi, Brăila and some others. Bucharest is always forgotten, though it, too, was a multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual and multi-confessional city.
The ‘20s and early ‘30s came after the miraculous date of 1 December 1918. “Romania should be so lucky – P.P. Carp would ironically comment – it no longer needs politicians”. Greater Romania seemed to enjoy a short, quasi-paradisal, period, with a generation of young intellectuals who, as Mircea Eliade believed, for the first time in history did not have a historic mission to fulfill. An “amniotic period”, as Ioan Petru Culianu would call it, referring to the state of the fetus, protected by the amniotic liquid in the maternal womb. In Eliade’s words (as used in The Myth of the Eternal Return), “the terror of history” acted softer. Consequently, “the boycott of history” could also be applied in a softer manner. It was probably the very lack of a common “national mission” (or at least a “common danger”, to generate the syndrome of the “citadel under siege”) that atomized society and led to the brutal “fall from Paradise” and the well known political failure.
The friendship between Eliade and Sebastian was an exceptional one, not just through its depth, but also through its bumpy manifestation. A Dostoievskian friendship, if not also a Eugen Ionescu-type one. For, at a certain point, around Sebastian-Béranger Romania was “rhinoceros-izing” itself in concentric circles, reaching the last, and most intimate, one – that of the friends.
Mircea Eliade (fourth from right) and Mihail Sebastian (second from left), with a group of friends in a mountain cabin in the Bucegi-Carpathian mountains in Romania (July 1932)
Eruptions of starlight, joy and gladness As, at 10:30 p.m. on Shattuck, the New World dawns with shouts of "Yes we can!" From young persons thronging the clogged street. The street people, however, are just trying To get some sleep. I infer this from the body- Bundles I see huddled in every alcove. But why, In the rapture of intoxicated victory I glimpse around me, do I insist on this Dissonant note? "A complete curmudgeon," Gentle Dorothy once called me, in Exasperation, accurately, I cannot deny. Aye, O Friend! I fear there are What are lately called Depression Issues At work here. How tiresome, really. By Depression do I mean the mental kind And am I signalling I "need help"? Some, I'm told, might well secretly think so. "And maybe they're right, William," tenders Gentle Dorothy from across the hearthside. The nights are growing sharp, November In the Cumberlands, ancient aching joints, Getting up in the dark and seeing your breath, Bad patches of thatch to fix before frost Closes in and fingers, too numb for labors, Withdrawn into religious half-mittens.
There were street people in William's village Too. But in knowable communities That which is often seen soon becomes known, Thus accepted and not stepped over As if inhuman, insignificant Or nonexistent. Naturally William, Who saw the poetry in everything, Perceived the poetic aspect of this-- Particularly after coming back from London, where the bewildering urban Alienation and estrangement Had already long since taken hold. Awed have I been by strolling Bedlamites, He writes in Book XII of The Prelude, Referring to the road-wandering not- Quite-normals of that not-so-remote epoch, From many other uncouth Vagrants pass'd In fear, have walk'd with quicker step; but why Take note of this? When I began to inquire, To watch and question those I met, and held Familiar talk with them, the lonely roads Were school to me in which I daily read With most delight the passions of mankind, There saw into the depth of human souls, Souls that appear to have no depth at all To vulgar eyes. I like that. To me it feels More considerate toward the Bedlamites Than the shrieking street partygoers To the street people trying to sleep this night Of victory through, unnoticing. It's Their right, one might almost say, acknowledging In the same breath that they have no rights. Who needs a loud victory party When all you want to do is lay your body Down in a shop doorway, wrap your thin fleece sack Around you, and chase a few winks. Morning Wake-up on the street comes at five--with the light, Now that Standard Time's back, and the clatter And roar of garbage trucks and street cleaners.
"I have to get out of my negative Comfort zone," Angelica's wise cousin Peter Heinegg, Ph. D., joked Ahead of the election, anticipating A liberal landslide that would leave Him little content for further volumes Of social criticism. His That Does It: Desperate Reflections on American Culture comes with the dedication "For Angelica--I had to dash off a Few more jeremiads before Obama Comes and drags me out of my negative Comfort zone." This reminded me of a work Whose title has always strangely intrigued Me: Granville Hicks' I Like America. My tattered paperback copy cost Fifty cents in 1938. "A native Sees his country as it is and as It might be," the subtitle goes. And it's not Just a rose-colored-spectacle gloss
Of a book: Nobody Starves--Much--perhaps The chapter most pertinent to the scenes I see on the streets as each night I pass By--discusses such uncomfortable Subjects as that phenomenon thought Of, as recently as the Eighties, As pure anachronism: the American Street beggar. Enough for Everybody Is another chapter. And The Freeing Of America. And Can We Work Together? But even with bread lines still fresh And vivid in his mind, Hicks remains Able to build his vision upon an America Of known and knowable communities That no longer exists in the world of lies The no less honest or idealistic Peter Heinegg must needs begin from.
Her other cousin Paul sent us a picture of His wife Rita, a black woman, and himself, Embracing Barack Obama, smiles all Around. Paul had signed up fifteen hundred Voters for the cause. Gentle line of second Generation Americans, the Heineggs. Paul like Peter with his brood of bright kids: So That now, as another cousin puts it, this clan Of transplanted Austrians has a new branch: The Black Heineggs, citizens of the New World that this morning has its dawn. What I mean, O Friend! is, please don't take my lines To mean I'm tempted to sell the New World short.
On campus the night is again cool, dark, and Almost empty under the dripping canopy of tall Eucalypti by the Genetics labs. Junior, In which a character portrayed by The present governor of California Is seen to become "with child", somewhat Like Mary toward Bethlehem to wend-- Only it's not immaculate conception But expert science by brainy Emma Thompson that works the supra-natural Magic--had these labs as its fictional Location. Well do I recall the ten long Widebody movie production trucks Lined up like supersized camels of Hollywood Magi, as far as the parking Kiosk. Not even UCLA Boosters, When Bears host Bruins, boast that big A bus fleet. A world is going on and constantly Changing, changing. The Election Night Sea of celebrants has ebbed. Away From the crowds of tooting screaming white People on Shattuck, five young blacks loiter In the shadow of the labs. Four males and a Girl. Smoking and quietly larking. The biggest dude--athletic, in a STRIKE FORCE windbreaker--talks quietly on cell. The girl reels between them, singing softly "He loves you," and "he loves you," and "he loves You" as she goes. Each of her friends accepts This news in turn, without any expression I can detect. As I skulk past, not wishing To spoil what appears the lowest-key And best victory party of the night, The girl, whirling, floats up to ancient me. "And he loves you," she sings with eyes and smile That say, I guess, You may be surprised by What's coming. And I go on my way.
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A NEW DEVIL’S DICTIONARY
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