To contain it so gently

The first time I saw him he had barrettes in his hair, wore a huge hoodie and big pants and looked like a cross between a raver and a boy in a fairy tale. The last time I saw him he was hooked up to a ventilator—all tubes, neck brace, IV drip. The first time he may have been standing outside our dorm, smoking, trying to look fucked-up enough to make the right friends. It was about time for me. Neil was a year younger than me, a freshman who landed at Oberlin one year after I did. I wonder if I picked him because he kind of looked like a girl, except he wouldn’t have been a very pretty girl with his deep-set eyes and slightly big nose, which were exactly the best things about his face. And full lips. But he was small-framed, so maybe less threatening as a male specimen, and more familiar—the city boys I’d grown up with tended to be shorter, slighter than boys from outside the city (or maybe it was just that everyone swam in their baggy clothes). When he didn’t wear those barrettes, he would have to brush his hair out of his eyes.

The last time his eyes were sealed shut and blue, blood dripped down from the corner of one. The first afternoon in the hospital I thought he could hear us talking to him. It almost looked like he smiled or nodded but I can’t remember if his eyes were open that day or if the doctors opened them at the end or if they never did. I vaguely remember a blank stare, the big brown eyes. But mostly that blue, purple. All bruise. Life support. What is that?

I think of Neil sitting on the ground, feet tucked under him, knees pulled up to his chin. Ratty jeans bottoms that dragged on the ground when he walked. I think of us making eggs in my frying pan in the dorm kitchen on special occasions, pretending to be grownups or kids at home even though any food we bought had to be labeled (when someone ate my Phish Food I went ballistic). I think of when he first read me Rosy Ear by Zbigniew Herbert, a poem he wrote about Achilles, and the drawings he left in my Longman Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, large-eyed boys and girls with spiky, misshapen hair next to lines by C.D. Wright and Tom Lux.  When I went to his house while friends were collecting his things (when do they become “personal effects”?), I took his copies of Frank Lima and Zbigniew Herbert, whose work he’d introduced me to, hoping I’d find notes in the dog-eared pages, or more of his drawings.

The hospital said it was a broken leg. Then they called back and said come right away. They wouldn’t tell us much because we weren’t family. We sat and smoked in the “Sobriety Garden” overlooking the river and the FDR Drive. We got drinks and waited a few hours for his mom to arrive. I picked a piece of mint in the garden, or maybe that was one of the next days. It was unseasonably warm and nominally “better” to be outside than pacing the hall waiting for news, trading visitor’s passes as more friends arrived. There was also sitting in his room, listening to the machines’ accordion of air, heave and collapse, the occasional beep. Looking at his cheeks, his skull wrapped, his feet. Touching a hand I hadn’t in years.

At his funeral service I read from a postcard he wrote me about brushing his teeth with soap and drinking whiskey straight from the bottle while on a camping trip in Yosemite with one of his friends Gabe (there were two), but why was I one of the readers? I couldn’t have been to him what he was to me, a first in that way. He lost his virginity years before we even met, so I probably started out to him as just another person to sleep with. The card he made for my twentieth birthday, after we’d been together on and off for many months, had a drawing of a slim, long-haired girl. I wanted to believe it was a drawing of me, but I was also weirdly jealous of the drawing, figured it was of someone else or some dream-girl I could never be, like the girl in a screenplay he wrote—the perfect girl drawn on a sheet of acid. But the card said he loved me and “everyday it astounds me that you tolerate my nonsense.” Neil was my training for a lot of nonsense. Neil was the original nonsense.

It happened in a dorm, naturally, the shittiest dorm on campus, where we lived down the hall from one-another. (My roommate and I had gotten second to last draw in the housing lottery.) It was in his room—his roommate was probably out with his role-playing game crew. I think we first kissed the night of the annual “Red Party” (one of the school’s most frat-like events), after talking in the terribly-lit cinderblock hallway for a while post-party.

Around that time my friend Sarah threw a “tequila pajama party” in her room in the all-women’s dorm. We didn’t actually sleep over, and not all of us even wore our PJs, but I drank tequila for the first time and wound up puking all night thanks to a shots and beer one-two punch. Sarah is known for being blunt as hell and asking slightly inappropriate questions in front of large groups of people, which is perfect for slumber parties at any age. We played a variation of “Truth or Truth” or “Skeletons in the Closet” and Sarah asked everyone who was a virgin, or not a virgin, to raise their hands. It was a fairly even split, but I was still determined to get rid of it pronto. It was getting ridiculous, and there was a known shortage of straight (even straightish) men at our school.

We probably used a condom from the vending machine downstairs. I can’t remember much else other than feeling relieved, and I’m sure it was incredibly awkward except he knew what he was doing compared to me, and he was very sweet. I was glad to get it over with already. I probably did a little dance in my head like Tom Hanks in Big when he finally gets with his grown-up lady girlfriend and orders coffee, black, the next morning.

Right after the big event, or maybe it was a couple nights later, Neil and I took a walk over to Fairchild, the nicer dorm nearby with a semi-vegan food coop in the basement. Sarah was standing outside. Could she tell? Did I signal to her in girl-speak? I was relieved to be delivered into the safe company of a friend, or mixed company at least. I also felt some kind of small triumph. Check that off the growing-up list. That I soon fell in love with Neil was a benefit or inevitability (given how much of a romantic I am and how much of an under-the-radar charmer Neil was) that I hadn’t counted on but I’m sure I secretly wished for.

When you can’t see someone, can’t physically be near them again, it makes you want to speak to those you can, keep them in your life in some capacity no matter what. Writing to those who are gone magnifies the line between the possible and the impossible. To address them—does it soothe or just call up the ghosts to keep you from sleeping? It’s the kind of sentiment Neil might scoff at or at least express more eloquently. When I read the cards Neil wrote to me, he is still addressing me. We are not back in the time when we were in love, and I don’t wish to be, but he calls me “you,” he calls us “we.” He writes, “I’ve seen beautiful things. I’ll never be able to describe them, but I hope someday we can come here together.” He frames that time I learned how to share space, choose words carefully, nurture and be nurtured, hurt and be hurt. The main character in Cut Out Paper Heart, Neil’s screenplay, eats the entire sheet of acid, not tab by tab, but devouring the whole thing in ragged pieces, chews up the girl, not swallowing her whole but still consuming her entirely—by the same token she consumes him from the inside out. Neil was that kind of love, albeit in a less menacing or cannibalistic way.

I’ve seen Neil more in the past year in my sleep than in the past almost-decade since we finished school, even though we lived a five-minute walk from each other in Brooklyn for several years. In the dreams, mostly he is telling a story and making me and everyone laugh, maybe doing his impression of an old man, maybe talking about otters or llamas. I was always competitive with and inspired by Neil, but he could out-word me any day. He could call something “grand” and get away with it or say, “I can’t wait to see you. We’ll make chicken soup,” in a letter. The last time I saw him conscious was at a party the night he got hit by a car; I had also run into him the night before that after not seeing him in a while. He had just gotten back from a few months away, practicing Thai boxing, about which he was writing a beautiful blog. Even though he was drunk at the party, he still managed to say something sharp, observant, and sweet to me in our brief conversation about my band’s performance that night. I wish I remembered his exact words.

I don’t remember much about the first time we slept together, but I do remember one of the last times. Fall of my junior year. We rode our bikes out to the golf course at the edge of town. It was misty—very The End of the Affair (a movie we saw that year), but with bad late-nineties fashion and neither of us looking nearly as attractive as Ralph Fiennes or Julianne Moore. Most of our last sexual encounters involved long walks or bike rides, tossing stones into the reservoir, me giving him a flat-eyed look in conversation to avoid saying what I really wanted to. At the time I was newly enamored with Rilke’s poetry, especially the Duino Elegies. In his Fourth Elegy, Rilke writes, “Aren’t lovers always / coming to sheer drop-offs / inside each other / they who promised themselves / open spaces, good hunting / and a homeland?” Sure, some of it was late adolescent hormones coupled with a penchant for drama on both our parts, but it was Neil who began to show me how to navigate the cliffs of intimate relationships, to search for adventure and a home. His postcard from Yosemite said, “I want so badly to show them to you,” the new landscapes he had seen and started exploring. I have been looking ever since.

Note: The title of this piece comes from the Rainer Maria Rilke poem Fourth Elegy as translated by David Young in Duino Elegies

_______________________________________________________________________________

Rebecca Keith’s poems and other writings have appeared in Best New Poets (2009), The Laurel Review, The Rumpus, The Awl, BOMBlog, Storyscape, The Millions, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, was a semi-finalist for the 2010 “Discovery”/Boston Review poetry contest and has received honors from the Atlantic Monthly and BOMB magazine. A native of downtown New York, Rebecca is a founder, curator, and host of Mixer Reading and Music series at Cakeshop. She also sings and plays guitar and keyboards in the Roulettes and Butchers & Bakers. To contain it so gently originally appeared in the seventh issue of Dossier.

Image: Adam Frelin, White Line, fluorescent fixtures and bulbs, steel cable, generator, 240′ long, 2005.

My new favorite blog is Bookshelf Porn, created by Anthony Dever. It makes me feel better that I had over 40+ boxes of books when I recently moved and makes me think that daydreaming about what my next bookshelves will look like (I haven’t unpacked yet) or hoping someone will buy me a Sapien bookcase for my birthday is normal behavior. I can’t lie, I have been reading on a Kindle as of late and this website makes me want to smash it with a hammer. (Once I finish what I am reading, of course.) I particularly loved the video from the Toronto bookstore Type at bottom. Way better than a toy store coming alive. That was always creepy. Postscript: If you live in this house below with the tree in the window, I would very much like to be your friend.

All Images re-posted from Bookshelf Porn

I love self-help and instructional/how-to books. The ones I read usually involve something like getting in touch with my soul and/or how to make chicken soup, but I’m always open to other methods of self-improvement, like how to protect yourself and still have a sense of humor while doing so… Enter Punching Tom Hanks – a hilariously imaginative guide, by stand-up comedian Kevin Seccia, on how to beat up just about everyone and anything, like that super annoying guy carrying a baguette in front of you. Mark Walberg and a T-Rex (together). A time-traveling caveman (this would have come in handy during the Geico Caveman television show days). The future version of yourself. Or that bottle of whiskey that keeps taunting you to drink it (I love whiskey so I’ll just ignore this one). This book seriously has an answer for every situation, even how to beat up the author. I don’t think that’s really an option though, because once you read this, you’ll want to be Kevin’s best friend- not just because he’s so funny, but, ironically, he also happens to be one of the sweetest guys you’ll ever meet. Just don’t get on his bad side.

The book is out Tuesday June 7th, and there will be a launch party at Hotel Chantelle’s rooftop garden.
92 Ludlow Street, NYC
7pm-11pm

Music by Ingie Pop and The Rude Dudes

Complimentary cocktails from Herradura Tequila, 7pm-9pm

Rain or Shine (retractable roof!)

RSVP: punchingtomhanks@gmail.com

Almost Famous Reading Series
Saturday December 11, 2010
2-5pm/ Free Admission
Apexart 291 Church Street
NY, NY 10013

Sloane Crosley is a super-hero of sorts; book publicist by day and best-selling author by night. For her day job, Sloane works at Vintage Books as the publicist for big dogs like Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Jay McInerney, and Dave Eggers. In her free time, she wrote her own book I Was Told There’d Be Cake, the best-selling collection of essays that HBO bought the rights to and is currently being turned into a pilot. Her much anticipated second book How Did You Get This Number? comes out this week. Although some of these essays take place as far away as Alaska and Portugal, they are all very rooted in that wonderful melancholy New York humor she’s become famous for. Highlights include an essay that reads like an ode to smelly taxis and how difficult finding a decent apartment in New York is, weighing the pros and cons of a kleptomaniac roommate. Also, whenever you can quote “I believe you are in league with the butcher,” you win my vote.

Katherine Krause: How many hours a day do you write?
Sloane Crosley: Depends. Sometimes five. Sometimes none. Though I don’t think you can write well after three hours. Or at least I can’t. I hit hour four and it’s like I write one sentence, get exhausted, and need a cookie.

Katherine: Do you have any rituals for writing?
Sloane: I need a full glass of water and a clean apartment. And I usually start sitting on the floor.

Katherine: Do you try to write humor or does it just come out that way?
Sloane: Mostly it comes out that way. That said, I have a general sense of when it needs to either be drawn upon or cut back.

Katherine: Do you read a lot of humor writing?
Sloane: Actually no. I appreciate it. I love David Rakoff and Nora Ephron and humor novelists like Sam Lipstye. But I don’t seek it out. It’s how I feel about potato chips. I’ll eat them if they’re there and I’ll like them but I’ve never pulled off the road for them.

Katherine: You’ve said you are a short story fanatic- what are some of your favorites?
Sloane: Oh my God. Well, okay. Collections are too many so I’ll go with individual short stories:
People Like That Are The Only People Here by Lorrie Moore
In The Gloaming by Alice Elliott Dark
Pie Dance by Molly Giles
Things You Should Know by A.M. Holmes
Christmas Is A Sad Season For The Poor by John Cheever
White Angel by Michael Cunningham
The Dead by James Joyce
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates
How To Give The Wrong Impression by Katherine Heiny
A City of Churches by Donald Barthelme
Love and Hydrogen by Jim Shepard
Mortals by Tobais Wolff
Send Me To The Electric Chair by Clyde Edgarton
Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story by Russell Banks
Down Through the Valley by Wells Tower
and maybe Girl by Jamaica Kincaid. I think of the last line of that story all the time.

Katherine: Do you write fiction or poetry?
Sloane: Fiction. My poetry sucks. I know because I’ve never really tried. I think you have to have a special calling to write good poetry.

Katherine: Did you always want to be a writer?
Sloane: Yes. Mixed with other things like archeology and art but pretty much, yes.

Katherine: Did you always want to be a publicist?
Sloane: Fuck no. I had no idea what a publicist was growing up. But it turns out to be a pretty excellent job when you believe in what you’re promoting.

Katherine: What is one book or story you always try to push on people?
Sloane: When people come into my office and just say they need something to read I’ll give them Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro or anything by Lorrie Moore or Dave Eggers. Also The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon is a crowd pleaser. If I could push any book on anyone? Maybe The Moon and Sixpence.

Katherine: Is there one book you re-read again and again?
Sloane: Dubliners by James Joyce.

Katherine: What’s your opinion on the iPad and digital technology in the publishing industry?
Sloane: Call me when it makes waffles. No, really: I think we’re so simultaneously scandalized and fascinated by it but generally I think the iPad is great. Though the glare in the sunlight sucks if you intend on taking it to the beach. But it’s not blanketly bad for books. But it’s hard for me to have a definitive opinion on e-readers yet. I think both their advantages and damages have yet to be realized.

Katherine: How many actual books do you think you own?
Sloane: 600? 1,000? I can’t do math so good. It’s why I work in publishing.

Katherine: Who are some of your favorite artists? Photography, painting, mixed-media, etc…
Sloane: Gregory Crewdson, Tracy Emin, Amy Cutler, Tokihiro Sato, Sally Mann. I like Robert Montgomery. In general I end up liking one piece by an artist, which doesn’t bode well for art collecting.

Katherine: What’s your best NYC survival skill?
Sloane: Ignoring my instinct to turn when called. That and walking over sidewalk grates in heels without really having to see when one is coming up.

Katherine: When people come from out of town to visit you- where do you take them?
Sloane: The Russian Samovar, Raoul’s, Death & Co., Egg, Frankie’s, Barney Greengrass or Russ & Daughters. I like Omen too. I like to ply people with food and drink, clearly.

Katherine: What is a book or a piece of art that sums up NYC to you?
Sloane: The giant Chagalls in Lincoln Center. I remember standing beneath them with my grandmother when I was about 4 and her explaining what everything in them meant. It’s one of my earliest memories of the city.

Katherine: Any plans to leave NYC or are you here for good?
Sloane: I would leave if I had a good reason or a strong desire. Put it this way: if I felt I absolutely couldn’t live anywhere else, I’d force myself pack my bags tomorrow. I’m here by choice.

Fill in the blanks:

If I could follow in anyone’s footsteps it would be: George Plimpton

The last thing I think about before I go to bed is: what I’m doing with my life

The last thing that pissed me off was being ridiculously nice to someone I can’t stand because I was nervous

What I hate about NYC is crowds

What I hate about suburbia is a lack of crowds

My favorite flavor of ice cream is mint chocolate chip or that cereal milk thing at Momofuku

If I could be re-incarnated I would come back as a panther

Best cultural institution in NYC is The New York Public Library

House on fire- what do you rescue? Mabel (my cat), my passport, my computer, photographs, first edition of Franny & Zooey, a box of sentimental things, a Givenchy bag

The last thing that scared me was getting caught doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing

How Did You Get This Number is out on June 15th followed by a nationwide book tour. Visit Sloane’s website to find out when she is reading near you.

Barnes & Noble Tribeca
7PM • Wednesday, June 16th
97 Warren Street

McNally Jackson
7PM • Monday, June 28th
52 Prince Street

Get a load of William T. Vollmann’s new title:  Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater With Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines. In other words, welcome to the work of William T. Vollmann.  I admit to being drawn to his new book, not because I have a particular interest in Japanese Noh Theater (I don’t), or because I believe Vollmann is the Noh expert of his day (he’s not) – but rather, I’m interested in experiencing the latest Vollmann experience.  I mean this as a compliment.

If you’ve never read any of his books you’ve probably heard of him second or third hand, heard that’s he’s crazy, heard that he smokes crack, heard that he frequents prostitutes and you’ve inevitably heard that he writes long books.  Impossibly long books.  But what you might not know is that William T. Vollmann is one of the most daring, breathtaking, morally serious authors writing in English today.

While Kissing the Mask is, on the surface, about Japanese Noh Theater (and about a dozen other, tangentially related topics) it’s really just an excuse for him to write a book about capital B Beauty and Beauty’s infinitely unfolding (and folding) mysteries.  He says as much in the clever opening chapter (Chapter Zero) Understatements About This String-Ball of Idle Thoughts where, in two short pages, he preps the reader for the semi-academic, but-mostly-personal-research, journey they’re about to embark on:  “Deaf, dumb and illiterate in Japanese, innocent of formal study in any discipline of art, a graceless dancer afflicted with bad eyesight, I may not be the perfect author for any essay on Noh drama.  Fortunately, this is no essay, but a string-ball of idle thoughts.”

Vollmann goes on to say in an extended footnote that whatever factual errors he made in the book, few people will catch them because so few people are educated in the nuance of Noh.  Nothing like appropriately lowered expectations!  How humble, how…Japanese!  But, also, how deft!  Those two little pages buy the remaining 498 pages a great deal of legitimacy, if not compassion or, at the very least, pity.  (John D’agata’s About A Mountain would have benefited greatly from such a simple yet commandeering escape clause).

And in case you still weren’t sure what to expect from Vollmann’s latest non-fiction escapade, he spells it out in the conclusion of his opening remarks:  “How I love my life in this floating world!…I’m a glutton, a plump middle-aged man now beginning to understand the old lechers who clutch at beauty, not that I’ll do that; I’m proud, so I’ll watch grace in theaters, bars, teahouses; I’ll invent a book about representations of feminine beauty and write off every geisha dance on my taxes….”

Got it?  This is not a book about Noh.  This is an imagined book (a fake book, really) designed to allow the author to experience things that he was going to experience anyway.  Why not?

Actually, this is Vollmann’s nonfiction M.O..  Poor People, his 2007 response to James Agee’s 1941 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is a hybrid research/travelogue/meditation on the relative nature of wealth (and lack thereof).  While 2008’s Riding Toward Everywhere might, on the surface, be about two fifty-something men hopping trains, hobo-style, across the western United States, it’s really a meditation on America, American values and the particular kind of paradise that we Americans seem to fetishize.  And 2009’s 1000 page-plus monster Imperial? (Disclosure: I only made it through the first third.)  It’s “about” the history of the region between California and Mexico called Imperial but it’s about so much more – it too is about America, American values, the politics of water, land use, the way human beings treat one another when survival’s at stake.  Think of Vollmann’s non-fiction as a kind of personal documentary cinema.  Extremely well-researched (yet inevitably imperfect, messy and sometimes downright confusing) personal documentary cinema.

Kissing the Mask is Vollmann’s latest foray into the unknowable mysteries of the human experience and so it may come as no surprise that one of the most oft repeated words in the book is evanescence, meaning “soon passing out of sight, memory or existence; quickly fading or disappearing.”  This one word could be used to describe his entire project – beauty, mystery, life itself….  It’s also useful to know that the most oft repeated question in Kissing the Mask is “What is a woman?” for this is, no doubt, a central concern of the book.  “The unanswerable question,” he calls it, in chapter one.

What makes a woman woman? Vollmann’s not in the least bit interested in a biological answer (of which, he merely says, towards the very end: “…I sometimes regret that in this book about feminine stateliness I have forgotten the vibrant vulgarity of biology, the “real” world of the floating world we float through…”), and he’s not interested in a moral treatment of femininity; his aim in this book is to understand the aesthetic nature of womanhood, that is, the performance of feminine beauty.  Regarding this, he says, “The withholding of a thing invests it with desirability; to the extent that it grows (or remains) opaque to the gaze, resistant to the will, it draws us towards itself.”  This is femininity.  Regarding the Noh performance of feminine beauty, he says: “The point is to make the audience experience skilled unexpectedness.  If they anticipated novelty, they would undervalue it.”  This too is femininity.  And in another possible answer to the unanswerable question What is a woman? Vollmann writes:  “The model’s expression in today’s magazines is neutral, not unlike a Noh actor’s, the eyes wide open, but in concentration, lips parted or not, but rarely smiling.”  And in regard to a Katie Holmes fashion spread in an American magazine, he wonders, “How much of the allure is her makeup and dress, how much is diet and discipline, how much the young, lovely female body she was given?”  All of these things are also femininity, a question to which he clearly seems more comfortable providing a bevy of possible answers than one pat conclusion.

Formally, Kissing the Mask, like the rest of Vollmann’s non-fiction oeuvre, is constructed of essays, interviews, (more-or-less casual) first-person narrative, photographs, drawings and oftentimes all five at once.  This stylistic hodge-podge, narrated by a larger-than-life character, is what makes his books so much fun to read.  One gets the impression that one is snooping over the shoulder of a semi-deranged, super bright world traveler as in this somewhat typical excerpt from an interview with Noh actor Mr. Mikata Shizuka:

“‘Where does your consciousness go when you perform?’

‘It depends.  The state where you think absolutely nothing, I think it’s hard to grasp.  But the intention is to show….  If you want to show something, it comes to you internally, then somehow shrinks.’

I told him about feeling in my hands and fingers when I am caught up in my writing; it is an exhilarating feeling during which my fingers do not belong to me, but to something else which is writing.  What is it?  I do not know.  At its best, it is not an assertion of myself.”

It’s a typical passage in that we meet a character from Vollmann’s journeys, through Vollmann, and the experience is immediately translated back into what Vollmann knows best: himself, writing.  This is the kind of non-fiction that drives some people crazy, in which the narrator often intrudes upon and supercedes the subject matter at hand – a practice that, in Vollmann’s case, is often and too easily passed off as narcissism.  But I see Vollmann’s intrusions less as a narcissistic tendency than as an ontological strategy.  Which is to say, he begins his investigation (whether it’s into violence, poverty, America, whatever…) with the assumption that things in themselves can never truly be known, an inevitability that should not in any way preclude from asking the big questions.  And what better tool to refer to when wading through Life’s opaque mysteries than oneself, one’s experiences, one’s beliefs, one’s feelings?  This is in part what makes William Vollmann’s brilliance – he is an investigative reporter in the truest sense, cable news networks and glossy magazines be damned.

So when, in the sixteenth chapter, Vollmann journeys to a Japanese beauty salon to be made-over as a woman (wig, make-up, pretty black dress and all) it should come as no surprise (thanks to the irrefutable testimony of actual photographs) that William Vollmann does not even come close to looking like a human woman.  And so to answer his echoed question: “What is a woman?” Our one clear-cut answer might be:  Not William Vollmann.  Which I think, technically, disqualifies his whole argument that femininity is a performance and perhaps not an innate quality at all specially reserved for one gender and not the other.  Oh, well.  But then again, don’t forget:  Vollmann set the book up not to create a new hierarchy of truths in regards to beauty but merely to unspool “this string-ball of idle thoughts.”  And no one unspools the given world quite like William T. Vollmann.

It goes without saying that this style of writing, this kind of investigation is not for everyone.  If you like your non-fiction neat and tidy, with more-or-less pat conclusions (think Newsweek articles or, say, a nonfiction book along the lines of Eat, Pray, Love) Kissing the Mask is probably not for you.  But if you like a little challenge, a little adventure, a little unbridled audaciousness in your authors and if you too sometimes find yourself in awe at the inexplicable mystery and seemingly endless beauty of existence then have I got an author for you!

Shawn Vandor’s first book, Fire at the End of the Rainbow, is recently out from Sand Paper Press

Shawn Vandor’s first book, Fire at the End of the Rainbow, is recently out from Sand Paper Press

Photograph by Skye Parrott

We are all in the gutter, and most of us have our minds firmly entrenched there. Certainly that’s the case with the lovelorn desperadoes who populate the personal ads of The London Review of Books. Like most of us, they’re looking for love but willing to settle for a little dirty action…yet what separates these high-minded lowlifes from the rest of us (thankfully), is their refusal to compromise their truest selves, they’re determination to give full voice to their darkest desires:

‘I’m everything you ever wanted in a woman. Assuming you’re into fat 47-year old moody bitches who really don’t enjoy the mornings. Stop talking and pour the bloody mary’s at box no. 1908’

‘Man, 46. Animal in bed. Probably a gnu. Box no. 1910’

‘Sexually, I’m More of a Switzerland’ is the second  collection of LBR ads, following on from the surprising mainstream success of ‘They Call Me Naughty Lola.’ Together, the collections may be read as a portrait of a particular sector of England’s reading class – sarcastic, bitter, wildly inventive, willfully perverse, abject losers in love. Alternatively, they can be read them for the simple pleasure of  the laughter they provoke – particularly if grew-up with the advantages of American dentistry and are able to laugh unselfconsciously in public. For these sad-sacks however, the sun may have set on the old empire, and Great may less frequently be attached to Britain, but the people’s continuing delight in adventurous word-play and its ongoing love affair with eccentricity suggest that there will, indeed, always be an England.

www.wordsandimagesbyjohnd.com

Fire At the End of the Rainbow, the first book by Shawn Vandor, is a poised and unusual performance, an autobiography made of very brief chapters which eschew the typical surreality of short prose forms in favor of a less experimental, more vernacular directness. It begins with jokey pieces about men confronting men, but steadily gets grave, until the violence—and the critique of masculinity—becomes extreme. In the story Man of the House, Vandor bickers with the father of a friend about where to take a shower: the bathroom, or outside on the new back deck, where the weather is uncomfortably cold, and the fight, although trivial at first, grows unbearably intense. Later, in Man of the House II, Vandor endures a dinner at the home of actor Michael Madsen, a threatening and unpredictable man who almost hits the narrator and just quickly offers him a movie deal. In Subway Ride, Vandor sees a man beat the crap out of his girlfriend; in You Look Nice Tonight, a female friend describes how she was humped on public transportation by a stranger, an anecdote that ends ambiguously when Vandor discovers his own manhood poking from his shorts. In the title story, his mother’s boyfriend chokes her after a miscarriage, “…like a million men before him throughout all time.”

Vandor seems the prisoner of a useless, almost dangerous vulnerability, and undergoes humiliations worse than those endured by other people, as when, for example, he shits his pants in the company of his dream girl and her father in a motorboat, or when a middle-school classmate named Jill seduces him and then kicks him in the balls. Nearly every passage comes down to a gendered battle for dignity, and he emerges from this youth both ambivalent—often juggling several girlfriends at once—and impulsive to the point of liability—moving back and forth across the country to be with women who don’t seem interested in him. The Shawn Vandor of Fire At the End of the Rainbow is an extremely complicated literary creation, and while the book provokes a long and fierce analysis of him, it does not leave him reduced by diagnosis, a considerable achievement for an autobiographical work.

Vandor’s technique is clear, concise, often funny, but never desperate for laughs, and exhibits the same perplexed, defensive reticence as his character. He would like to leave the reader troubled, and doesn’t nervously over-entertain or end on strange, obliquely evasive notes. He is forthrightly ambivalent. He lets a girlfriend cry in his arms without knowing how to comfort her, because “…I was too far away from myself and I didn’t know how to get back,” and he feels nonplussed toward the advances from a gorgeous woman named MaDora, asking “Where’s the mystery? Where’s the suspense?” as though he prefers the uncertainty of courtship to actual fucking, and loneliness to intimacy. As the title suggests, the book ends, not with a solution, but a permanent state of mind.

Fair or not, first books are not often noted for their control. Fire At the End of the Rainbow is uncommonly accomplished and harrowing.

Adam Novy’s first novel, The Avian Gospel, is forthcoming from Hobart.

Photograph by Stephen Rose