Spotlight on … Harry Mathews Cigarettes (1987)

 

‘I created this abstract scheme of permutations of situations in which A meets B, B meets C, and so forth. There’s no point in looking for it now because no one will ever figure it out, including me. Anyway, I stared at this for a year, and in time people started appearing, then situations, then stories.’ — Harry Mathews

‘Novelist, poet and essayist Harry Mathews is one of literature’s great modern treasures. The deft experimentation which characterizes his work must at least in part be attributed to his association with the Oulipo, a group of French writers and mathematicians devoted to exploring the potential of literature by applying sets of rules, simple and complex, to texts, with the thought that a series of logical steps can lead to surprise. And surprise, as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan — among others — has pointed out, is perhaps the most convincing proof of our unconscious. (Incidentally, out this month from Atlas Press, is the excellent oulipean resource, The Oulipo Compendium, which Mathews co-edited.)

‘Last year Dalkey Archive Press, another modern treasure, started to reissue a selection of Mathews’ out-of-print works, including most recently Cigarettes, his 1987 masterpiece. An immensely readable, densely plotted, slyly subversive novel, Cigarettes is full of surprises. Its chapters center on pairs of relationships between the book’s characters who operate in New York City’s art and business world in the early 1960s. Chapters are titled after the relationship pairs: Alan and Elizabeth; Oliver and Elizabeth; Oliver and Pauline …

‘Mathews weaves remarkable hues of compassion and coercion into his cast of personalities: passively naive, hugely generous or pathologically fearful of being swindled, excluded or duped. Some are able to dwell satisfyingly in ambivalence; others are so frustrated by ambivalence they lunge toward an extreme of kindness or cruelty. The narrative’s subplots, which involve scams, seductions, friendships, forgeries and love affairs, are staged against a backdrop of bars, art galleries, country homes, S&M; clubs, artist studios and horse-racing tracks — and are tantalizingly drawn out without being resolved.

‘There is much to praise in this elegant book, which is wicked and warm at once: the casual introduction of complex ideas, the humor, the Herculean scaffolding of its structure, the skilled blend of language — gorgeous description, detailed narration and speech. Its direct dialogue ranges from natural (an artist to his assistant: “You are crapping all over the canvas. You know better.”) to bizarrely clichéd (a woman discussing horse track betting with the man she’s courting: “Wrong nick-name toots. The point is, so far my system’s no answer to a virgin’s prayer.”), to frighteningly incomprehensible (a young artist debilitated by an undiagnosed illness: “Then a nice older piece of lettuce for salad days full of suggestions & spinal trappings.”).

‘For Mathews, language mirrors human conduct and, specifically, communication — an activity often structured by misreadings of oneself and therefore others. Language and behavior are interconnected enterprises with vast possibilities; both can be executed creatively; both can be played out as unthinking responses to received information. It’s a process which sets in place a stubborn assortment of destructive behaviors — such as parents’ possessiveness toward a “favorite child,” younger siblings’ anger at the older ones who cared for them, and miserable self-absorption — which require concerted efforts, if not extreme measures, to break.

‘Among the ways Mathews’ characters break that conditioning include: sadomasochistic games (which come off somehow touching and hilarious); physical and mental illness (sickness being an especially violent form of destruction); and the more conventional teacher-student relationships, as between these two writers: “Morris was showing him what writing could do. He advanced the notion that creation begins by annihilating typical forms and procedures, especially the illusory ‘naturalness’ of sequence and coherence.”

‘But changing habits isn’t just about obliterating patterns; it’s also about allowing new knowledge in — and understanding that it dwells nearby — as the exquisite meditation on death at the novel’s end suggests: ” … the dead stay everlastingly present among us, taking the form of palpable vacancies that only disappear when, as we must, we take them into ourselves. We take the dead inside us; we fill their voids with our own substance; we become them.”

‘In Cigarettes, life is a kind of play whose capacity for rapture, longing and pain are limitless. Engaging with it can prove to be achingly joyful.’ — Lynn Crawford

 

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Gallery

 

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Further

‘TCH, TCH: NOTES ON CIGARETTES’ by Jeremy M. Davies
‘THE NARRATIVE ARTISTRY OF HARRY MATHEWS’ CIGARETTES’
‘THE MANY FALSE FLOORS OF HARRY MATHEWS’
‘Harry Mathews’s Al Gore Rhythms: A Re-viewing of Cigarettes’
‘Quotes About Harry Mathews’s Cigarettes (1987)’
‘Composing: Harry Mathews’ Words & Worlds’
‘Recognizing the Thing Itself in Harry Mathews’s “Cigarettes”‘
‘Should Writing Hurt?: Joseph McElroy interviews Harry Mathews’
Harry Mathews interviewed by Lynne Tillman @ BOMB
Harry Mathews, The Art of Fiction No. 191 @ The Paris Review
’25 Points: 20 Lines a Day’
HARRY MATHEWS IN CONVERSATION WITH LAIRD HUNT @ The Believer
‘In Quest of the Oulipo’ by Harry Mathews
‘HYMNS TO MISUNDERSTANDING: HARRY MATHEWS’ FIRST THREE NOVELS’
‘EXTRAVAGANT TABLECLOTHS: HARRY MATHEWS, POET’
‘SOLVING (AND NOT SOLVING) THE CONVERSIONS’
‘More Harry Mathews (fewer numbers this time, I promise)’
‘How French Is It?’
‘The Curse of Coherence: Cold War CIA Funding for Oulipo’s Confidence-Man’

 

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Extras

Lecture Oulipo, Harry Mathews aux Récréations 2011 à Bourges

Harry Mathews reads “The New Tourism”

Marie Chaix and Harry Matthews | The New School for Public Engagement

Lecture / Reading Harry Mathews, 10.10.11, galerie éof, Paris

Harry Mathews Quotes

A Tribute To Harry Mathews | The New School

 

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Interview
from EOAGH

 

Barbara Henning: I reread Cigarettes a few weeks ago and the characters are still in my mind.

Harry Mathews: How was it?

BH: It was great. I especially liked the characters Phoebe and Lewis. They are the characters that are the most alive, the most suffering …

HM: Yes, and Lewis turns out to be the narrator in the end and that changes everything. It makes him a much more sympathetic and humane character than he seemed before.

BH: I was wondering how you invented this narrative. Somewhere you talk about how the structure enabled you to work with some autobiographical material.

HM: Not so much autobiography, but my early milieu. New York, and the Hamptons, disguised in the book as Saratoga Springs. When I was writing Cigarettes I found myself confronted with this abstract list of events that had no meaning at all. But it finally gave me access to the circumstances of my early life. I didn’t know that was going to happen. I had set up a series of five-item lines of events, moronically simple events like A meets B, B dislikes A, A falls in love with B, B flees. . . and you have no idea who A or B is and they are not the same always. Anyway, I’ve spent years concealing this.

BH: Tell us.

HM: Well, let’s say there are five lines and then you transpose the things. You take the first item from the first line and put it into to the second line, and the third item into the third line, and so forth. You get a completely different story. I had this whole thing laid out in front of me, but there was no indication of who anyone was or where it was happening….

BH: How did you come up with that?

HM: I just kept looking and little by little and situations and characters started emerging. It was extraordinary. I had had no idea what I was going to do.

BH: It reads like a Victorian novel.

HM: Well, that was deliberate.

BH: When I finished it, I thought that it almost invites a structural analysis, and maybe that’s what you started with. Or maybe the critics would come out with something totally different.

HM: (laughter) They would come out with the detective aspect of it. What seems to have happened didn’t happen, it turns out he and she were not behaving the way you thought they were. That’s what people think is Oulipian about it, but it has nothing to do with it. It was just something that grew out of the structure. It was arbitrary in the sense that I lined up the different events, but they were after all very basic. They didn’t signify anything substantial.

BH: It wasn’t really a mathematical structure—

HM: It was because the situations were permutated, as in a sestina; their order changes in a precise way. The sestina, by the way, is a wonderful form. The Oulipo has done lots of work with not only the sestina but with what we call n-inas or queninas: that is, the principle of the sestina extended to poems whose stanzas have any number of lines (not merely six). This was the work of Roubaud, something not conceivable thirty years earlier.

BH: My students are writing sestinas this week, using sentences instead of lines. I’ve been doing this every semester in the flash fiction classes I teach.

HM: Do you know my prose sestinas?

BH: Yes, you gave them to me long ago. They are in the course packet with your assignment. I’ve been using them for years. What was the relationship between the New York School and Oulipo? You were involved with both groups.

HM: There is no connection, except for me. Incidentally, the original members of the New York School denied its aesthetic existence. I got involved because I had met John Ashbery, we became friends and soon started the magazine Locus Solus; Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler were the other two editors, also charter members of the New York School. Look at those three poets: they don’t have much in common.

BH: Yes, they are very different from each other.

HM: They had something basic in common, like “clean” writing. I don’t know how to define it. There was some unspoken rule perhaps that warned against self-indulgence.

BH: But with O’Hara and Jimmy Schuyler, there’s this intimate voice… I think that’s what a lot of the poets in the second generation New York School picked up on.

HM: You’re so right. I particularly like what Ron Padgett has done with that. Have you seen his last book, How Long? In fact his last two books are packed with rare jewels.

BH: It’s sitting on my to-read shelf. What you were doing with Oulipo was quite different from what they were doing. I’m thinking there is this experimental edge to the New York School, an interest in collage and . . .

HM: I don’t think there really was, certainly in the case of John Ashbery and we’ve discussed it often enough. You know he isn’t really interested, I mean occasionally he’ll use a formal procedure but it’s exceptional.

BH: What about his pantoums?

HM: True enough. The Oulipo was also interested in the pantoum. Jacques Jouet was the one who led the way; he eventually wrote an article on the pantoum, including its oriental traditions, that is as useful as such things can get.

BH: And you wrote a sequence of haiku in your latest book, The New Tourism.

HM: Oulipians have been writing haiku for years. The haiku has become like the sonnet, something you can do in your sleep. I mean it is not a really demanding form. Some people find it difficult, but all you need is five plus two fingers. However, I discovered a mistake among my own haiku, one of them is missing two syllables in the second line. Let’s call it a clinaman.

BH: I wrote a sequence of sonnets for a Leave Book pamphlet long ago and I was looking at them recently and noticed one was only 13 lines.

HM: It is still a sonnet. By the way, Ron Padgett wrote a great self-definitional haiku: “First five syllables,/ Second seven syllables,/ Third five syllables.”

BH: Richard Wright wrote a book of haikus at the end of his life, a terrific book.

HM: I wrote them because they are so short. At the end of the day I’m usually sozzled and sleepy; it was interesting to see what emerged from the day. Was it you that said they were little glimpses into my life?

BH: Yes, I did say that in a letter to you.

HM: I don’t know why I stopped, but I’m glad I did since there are so many of them already. It’s thanks to the guys who run this little press that I put them in; I’d found many of them defective as poems, but that doesn’t matter: it’s having the long sequence that matters.

BH: I like to collect haiku images either in my notebook or with my camera. It keeps me sane, in a yogic way of speaking.

HM: It was at the moment of the day when I couldn’t . . . well they probably did, kind of relief and abandonment of ego, which is half way there.

BH: Did you know Laura Riding when you were with Robert Graves in Majorca?

HM: No I never met her. She was long gone by then. They broke up in 36. And I met Robert in the fall of 54. No, I wrote this long piece on her, it’s in my collected essays, The Case of the Persevering Maltese.

BH: I remember reading that essay some time ago.

HM: At the time, they had just republished a wonderful book of hers, called Progress of Stories. I wrote this enthusiastic review, it must have been the most enthusiastic review she ever received.

BH: She was still alive then, wasn’t she?

HM: Yes, oh alas, and I really figured the whole thing out and not in an ah ha way I’ve caught you, but in a respectful way, but unfortunately this was the pretext for her grousing. I said, you know, her name has changed so much, the only thing that is consistent is Laura, so I’m going to refer to her as Laura.

BH: You must have known how she would respond to any critical writing about her. Did she write you letters?

HM: She wrote a letter to The New York Review of Books, an absolutely loathsome letter which I answered with three lines. I wasn’t going to argue with her. She was too insane. But I love her all the same. I love The Telling, too. Did you ever read that? It is a terrific book. I pay tribute to that in this review, too.

BH: Yes, years back Lewis Warsh gave me a copy of The Telling. That’s the first time I read Riding. I also wrote a piece on her (after she died) that I presented at a panel for The Poetry Project. It’s on-line. I’ll send you a link. I spent quite a bit of time in the library reading all her letters to the editors and made a poem-essay in response.

HM: I have a student who has become a very good art critic and historian, Rafael Rubenstein. When I was his tutor at Bennington, he wanted to write on Laura Riding. In the end he sent her his thesis; I said, if I were you I wouldn’t. She just stomped on it.

BH: She created her own empty spot in literary history. Even now she doesn’t show up in lots of anthologies where she should. I may be almost out of questions today, but let me ask one last thing about Cigarettes. When you were writing it, when you got involved in these two scenes, the one with Phoebe’s terrible mental suffering and then the sadomasochistic sex scene with Lewis, how emotionally involved were you?

HM: In the case of Phoebe I was very emotionally involved because among other things, even though she is unlike Niki de Saint Phalle, Niki suffered from hyper- thyroidism and the description of Phoebe’s disease was really a replica of Niki’s. It was a ghastly, terrible experience to witness, and I was happy to be able to write about it in fiction, about someone who wasn’t Niki, rather than writing about her. In the case of Lewis, Lewis appears on the first page of the book. He’s the one who is saying I want to write a book about these people. They are showing him a letter from Owen and he can’t believe that anyone wrote this and he’s there speaking as “I” and . . .

BH: And then the reader completely forgets about it until in the end you realize you have been listening all along to Lewis. There’s one tiny reference at the very end that made me realize that. What was it?

HM: It was some reference to Morris. So my heart went out to him. He seems to be a creep but actually he is the person remembering everything so he can tell the story. I felt sympathy for Lewis. I suppose I was thinking about myself in my less sociable days.

BH: That’s all the questions I have, Harry, except—how did you hurt your finger?

HM: There was another French writer, Hélène Cixous, a feminist whom years ago I was ridiculously pursuing –– she was obviously gay. One evening friends of mine started making fun of her and I got very mad and swept my hand across a table full of glassware and cut my finger open very nastily. I went to an emergency ward up the street. They put me in front of this woman doctor. She was relatively young, but she had a solid older nurse standing behind her. She looked at my finger and said, But you are bleeding terribly! Oh, no, I said, this is perfectly normal. I spent my whole time reassuring this woman who was scared shitless of sewing me up. She took a hooked needle –– she was chain smoking through this –– and got it into one flap of my gaping wound, then she got it through the other, then she pulled the thread right through both flaps of skin and out the other side. It was extremely painful. I learned how many nerves there are in the extremities. Of course she had to do it all over again. Are you suffering pain? she asked and I said, Oh, no, nothing at all.

BH: So now your finger is bent like this because you were defending Hélène Cixous.

HM: Yes

BH: I have one more question. Why did you call the book, Cigarettes?

HM: That’s a very good question. Everyone asks it.

BH: You didn’t lay out cigarettes as you were laying out the permutations, did you?

HM: There’s no explanation. The explanation is that it’s a good question. After looking at that title every page after page after page, people wonder, why is it called, Cigarettes.

BH: I never thought about it until we were sitting here talking about Obama smoking. So you chose it because there would be no possibility of connecting it with the novel in a meaningful way.

HM: Only in a clichéd way, life or love is like a cigarette, you finish one, you start another, all that kind of junk. And I don’t see that. I think the title is getting better and better because no one smokes anymore, well, only two-fifths of the population.

BH: The sidewalks are now full of people who smoke.

HM: It reminds me of Tlooth. Here you are in the middle of the Venetian episode and the guy goes out to the prophetic marsh and sinks his or her leg and pulls it out and the marsh says, Tlooth. What happens at that point is interesting because the reader looks at the top of the page and realizes this has been there all the time and for a moment the book becomes an object, calling the reader back to reality.

BH: It’s already four o’clock and I have to head downtown. Thanks Harry for sharing your afternoon with me. And thanks for lunch, too.

 

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Book

Harry Mathews Cigarettes
Dalkey Archive

‘Cigarettes, more than any of Mathews’s other works, is about characters and their relations, how the networks of people knit together over a life. Compared to his previous novels, it feels like a more traditional, almost Elizabethan mode of style. But again, just under the surface, it is clear the author is up to something different: the characters are presented almost like icons in a chess set, played out in Mathews’s imagination in a series of formal integrations. Each of the novel’s 15 chapters—titled, simply, Allan and Elizabeth, Oliver and Elizabeth, Oliver and Pauline, etc.—explores the connection between two recurring characters over a stretch of 40 years. Slowly the manias, evils, desperations, illnesses, and all other sort of hidden human issues manifest themselves and combine over the framework of something larger about death and money and fraud and art. While Mathews is masterful at mimicking the serial manner of 19th century novels, he constantly injects his little puzzles, small sticky scenes, and knobs of language that throw the balance off of itself over and again. Opening sentence: “What’s he mean, ‘I suppose you want an explanation?’”’ — Blake Butler

 

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Quotes

She was disgusted with herself…and the disgust permanently cured her of suicide. Her piddling life did not deserve dramatic remedies.

*

While at the New School Irene met Mark Kramer, ten years her senior, a prosperous public accountant with a weakness for high culture. He persuaded her to leave the Bronx. From their brief marriage she learned that the sexual sincerity of the male may have capture and imprisonment as its covert goal.

*

So Pauline’s resentment lived on, a ponderous beast dormant in its gloomy trough. Twenty-five years after her marriage, her friend Owen Lewison told her one evening that Allan and Maud, for reasons unknown to him, had sequestered a valuable painting by Walter Trale, improbably claiming that it had been stolen. He asked Pauline to find out if the painting had been hidden in Allan’s apartment. ‘High Heels’ accepted, with a vengeance, with no illusion about her task: she would seduce Maud’s husband and implicate her sister in a dubious scheme.

*

Pauline never interested Oliver except as a prize. He soon neglected her. He discouraged her from working, from having children—when he learned the truth about her inheritance, he declared that in such difficult times children cost more than they could comfortably afford.

*

Oliver’s self-esteem did not lessen when he learned, much later, the facts of Pauline’s inheritance. He never overtly reproached her, and in truth the revelation left him almost grateful. After all, it confirmed that he had the right to manage things, the right to show condescension and pity, the right to control.

*

Morris had imagined a prodigious book: for that place and time, The Book. It was to include fiction as well as criticism, theory as well as poetry, using the most appropriate medium to explore each facet of its subject: the finiteness of intellect and language confronting the infinity of the intuited universe. During the spring weekend they spent with Phoebe in the Hudson River valley, Morris invited Lewis to collaborate on the project. They would begin work on May 24, Morris’s thirtieth birthday. The task would take at least three years.

*

In a clump of copper beeches by the stables, on a tablecloth spread on the ground, Phoebe set out lunch: two club sandwiches, four pears, a slab of rat cheese, a frosty thermos of martinis. They ate and drank. . . . Owen felt pleasantly restless: “Let’s go take a look.”

“This is no time for camp followers,” Phoebe told him. “We’d be in the way.”

“Well, I feel like joining the party.”

“They thought of that. You get to bet.”

*

At another time [the voice in Phoebe’s head] repeated an inexplicable succession of letters inside her docile ears: b.s.t.q.l.d.s.t., b.s.t.q.l.d.s.t. . . . Phoebe could not decipher the series. After making it yield “Beasts stalk the question lest demons sever trust,” and “But soon the quest lured drab saint thither,” she rejected the possibility that the letters were initials. She found it even harder to make words out of them, especially without a u for the q.

*

During her trip, Phoebe learned something about the series of letters. B.s.t.q.l.d.s.t. signified an old train careening down an old track. At slower speeds, the train said,

Cigarettes, tch tch.

Cigarettes, tch tch.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I’m not sure that fun in the usual sense is what masters are looking for. Jagger seems to have fully recovered from his heart thing since the Rolling Stones are now on a giant North American tour. Reducing or over-inflating is what the media is all about. Everyone, Mr. E has updated his FaBlog with a ditty called ‘Prejudice and Pride’, and it’s right smack dab here. ** Bill, Thanks, bud. The earlier Meijer is quite good but different, yeah. Maybe not as strong as ‘Rag’. She’s writing a book about bull fighting now. That’s why she was in Paris, a stopover on her way to Spain. The heat lessened yesterday, and the skies are normal summer fodder finally again today, and we’ll see how long that lasts, But, yeah, it was fucked. ** Sypha, Hi, man. So sorry to hear about your body and emotional woes. I hope things pick up. Yes, I’ve come across several escorts who’ve swiped that boy’s photos. Unless he lives simultaneously in multiple cities in Eastern Europe, I don’t think they’re him. ** JM, Hey, Josiah! I did see/get the photos you sent me on FB, and, yeah, holy god, it looks to have been just a mindblower! And very involving/taxing to do. Big kudos, sir. And thanks a lot! And enjoy your in-between time! ** Keatonum, It’s funny you say that about the Beatles because I just yesterday restored a very old post about the ‘Paul Is Dead’ phenom because a blog reader requested it. Um, hm, I think you’re right about the Queers/Beach Boys. How strange. Loving your self-blurb. Sounds fresh. Two ‘boy’ songs. Nice. And why am I not surprised? ** Dominik, Hey D! I’m glad you liked Ryan’s work. Like I said, I had a feeling it might be up your alley and useful to you in your thinking and practice maybe? Cool. No, we’re not supposed to get the timing report until maybe a week or a week and a half from now, so I have a lucky break. Yes, I do feel like it’s taken ages to get to this point with the new film, ha ha, but I’m very happy that we’re close to starting the process. Zac is going over the translation to finesse the language right now. Hopefully we’ll get it to our producer in the next couple of weeks. Any progress on the Chicks performance? I don’t know ‘Euphoria’. I’ll look for online evidence. So great to see you! Lots of love snowballing back towards you! ** Nik, Hi, Nik! Thanks, man. I’m very happy you liked those books. I’m good, especially now that the heatwave died. Did you get it there? The TV series projects is in a short break. There are some kind of big, troubling issues that need to be sorted out right now. Long story. We’ll see. We’re readying the final translation polish of the script of the new film to deliver to our producer ASAP, and then, assuming he’s cool with it, the many months of seeking funding will begin. The gallery hasn’t sold a gif novel yet, but they say there are interested prospective buyers, so we’ll see about that. Super fascinating about the Sarajevo stay. You sound very perked, which is cool. I’m so glad that turned out to be so useful and inspiring. A possible band? Obviously, I like that idea. Yeah, spread any news if and when you have some. ‘For A New Novel’ was hugely important to me. Hard to overstate what a big effect it had. I read it in the mid-80s when I was living in Amsterdam and doing my final preparations for the George Miles Cycle, and it was kind a very giant key that allowed me to figure out what I wanted to do and start. I haven’t reread it in a long time. I think it’s on my shelf, so I’ll put it off. I don’t remember if I agreed in totality with everything he was proposing. Probably not. The Nouveau Roman had its own aims, and it was reacting to the literary/social climate of its time, so I don’t know that the aspect you found troubling was important to what I got from the book. I didn’t feel a need to fully agree with him, but I guess his principles about fiction were very mutateable to me and to what I wanted to do, if that makes sense. I saw enough of what I needed to see, in other words. Take care, pal! ** Steve Erickson, Hi. With the slaves, I always think it’s pretty safe to assume that most of what is written/proposed is a brain/libido-to-brain/libido thing. David Brooks … maybe not. Huh. I’ll go check up on his stuff. I don’t think I know his work, but his name is one of those names that might not have stuck on its own. Oh, I’m hardly the best judge, but I don’t have any serious expectations about what Gay Pride is or should do or be. Maybe the softening effect of the word ‘Pride’ is part of the problem. ** _Black_Acrylic, I’m surprised too! Ha ha, Victoria Beckham … he did look a little like her, ha ha. ** Misanthrope, If/when I go to London, it will be for an event, and I will let you know. That is funny about niece thing. God know they’ll be an interesting couple of kids considering their source. We’ve cooled here. Low 80s. Feels like the 60s to me. (I like the 60s). Praying the cool down is a keeper. Well, for a week or two at least. ** KK, Yes, and SCAB’s editor was just several comments about yours. Dominick. Yeah, super happy about that connect. I would imagine Nervous Breakdown can sort out the doubling pretty easy. That guy Brad Listi is cool. I was on his show. It was fun. I say take the chance if it comes up. Great about the possible Tanner retrospective. I’m assembling a Tanner post. Probably PGL was never submitted to Austin Film Society. Our American distributor was not very on the ball. That would have been great. I don’t know of any screenings of PGL coming up in the States. Sure would love to do them. You might be stuck with streaming or DVD via the biggest screen and best speakers you can get. Have a terrific day, man. ** Okay. Today I draw attention to the great Harry Mathews’ one crossover ‘hit’ novel, the marvellous ‘Cigarettes’. If you haven’t read it, check out the post and see if you’d like to. See you tomorrow.