Spotlight on … William Gaddis Carpenter’s Gothic (1985)

 

‘This is William Gaddis’s third work of fiction in 30 years. That sounds like a sparse stream, and misrepresents absolutely. Mr. Gaddis is a deluge. “The Recognitions,” his first novel, published in 1955, matches in plain bulk four or five ordinary contemporary novels. His second, “JR,” a burlesquing supplementary footnote appearing two decades later, is easily equivalent to another three or four. For those whom tonnage has kept away, “Carpenter’s Gothic” – a short novel, but as mazily and mercilessly adroit as the others – should disclose Mr. Gaddis’s terrifying artfulness once and for all. “Carpenter’s Gothic” may be Gaddis-in-little, but it is Gaddis to the brim.

‘With fewer publications so far than he can count on one hand, Mr. Gaddis has not been “prolific” (that spendthrift coin); instead he has been prodigious, gargantuan, exhaustive, subsuming fates and conditions under a hungry logic. His two huge early novels are great vaults or storehouses of crafty encyclopedic scandal – omniscience thrown into the hottest furnaces of metaphor. Mr. Gaddis knows almost everything: not only how the world works – the pragmatic cynical business-machine that we call worldliness – but also how myth flies into being out of the primeval clouds of art and death and money.

‘To call this mammoth reach ambition is again to misrepresent. When “The Recognitions” arrived on the scene, it was already too late for those large acts of literary power ambition used to be good for. Joyce had come and gone. Imperially equipped for masterliness in range, language and ironic penetration, born to wrest out a modernist masterpiece but born untimely, Mr. Gaddis nonetheless took a long draught of Joyce’s advice and responded with surge after surge of virtuoso cunning.

‘”The Recognitions” is a mocking recognition of the implausibility of originality: a vast fiction about fabrication and forgery, about the thousand faces of the counterfeit, and therefore, ineluctably, about art and religion. In the desert years of long ago, when I was a deluded young would-be writer tangled up in my own crapulous ambition, “The Recognitions” landed on my grim table (and on the grim tables of how many other aspirants to the holy cloak of Art?) and stayed there, month after month, as a last burnished talisman of – well, of Greatness, of a refusal to relinquish the latter-day possibilities of Joyce, Mann, James, Woolf, Proust, the whole sacral crew of those old solar boats. That, I think now, was a misreading of Mr. Gaddis’s chosen ground. He knew what monuments had gathered behind him. He willingly moved on. He was not imitating a received literature; he was not a facsimile Joyce.

‘Mr. Gaddis was, in fact – and is – new coinage: an American original. To claim this is to fall into his own comedy of ”enamored parodies weighed down with testimonial ruins.” Originality is exactly what he has made absurd; unrecognizable. Yet if it is ob-ligatory to recapitulate Mr. Gaddis’s mockery through the impact – the dazzling irruption – of his three-decades-old first novel, it is because “The Recognitions” is always spoken of as the most overlooked important work of the last several literary generations. Tony Tanner: “The critical neglect of this book is really extraordinary.” David Madden: “An underground reputation has kept it on the brink of oblivion.” Through the famous obscurity of “The Recognitions,” Mr. Gaddis has become famous for not being famous enough.

‘”Carpenter’s Gothic” should mark a turning. The title itself, the name of an architectural vogue, is a dangerous joke. It alludes to a style of charm that dissembles – that resplendent carved-wood fakery seductively laid out along the Hudson a century ago, “built to be seen from the outside,” its unplanned insides crammed to fit in any which way – “a patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions,” according to McCandless, the owner of one of these “grandiose visions . . . foolish inventions . . . towering heights and cupolas.”

‘McCandless is a geologist, a novelist, a heavy smoker with a confusing past. He has locked up one room containing his papers, reserving the right to visit it, and rented the house to a young married couple, Paul and Elizabeth Booth. Paul, like the house, has grandiose visions. He works as a public relations man for Reverend Ude’s evangelical operations, which reach as far as Africa; when Ude drowns a boy while baptizing him, Paul in his inventive fecundity – he is a desperately hollow promoter – twists this into a usable miracle. Liz, Paul’s wife – wistful, abused, hopeful, humble, herself quietly deceitful – is, along with her ne’er-do-well brother, Billy, heir to a mining combine intent on scheming itself back into a business empire’s version of African colonialism. Paul, a combat veteran, was formerly bagman for the company under the chairmanship of Liz’s father, a suicide; the company is now in the hands of Adolph, the trustee. Adolph keeps Liz, Billy and Paul on short rations. Obedient to Paul’s several scams, Liz goes from doctor to doctor, patiently pursuing an insurance fraud. McCandless reveals himself as the discoverer of the African gold the company is after, and seduces Liz. But there is no gold; McCandless is a lunatic impostor. In the end, brother and sister die of too much imposture. A LL this crammed-in conspiring, told bare, is pointless soap-opera recounting. We have run into these fictional scalawags before, rotted-out families, rotted-out corporations, seedy greedy preachers and poachers, either in cahoots with or victims of one another, and sometimes both. They are American staples; but ”plot” is Mr. Gaddis’s prey, and also his play. Triteness is his trap and toy. He has light-fingered all the detritus that pours through the news machines and the storytelling machines – the fake claims, fake Bible schools, fake holy water out of the Pee Dee River spreading typhus, a bought-and-paid-for senator, an armed ”Christian survival camp,” fake identities (Paul, pretending to be a WASP Southerner, is probably a Jew), the mugger Paul kills. Plot is what Mr. Gaddis travesties and teases and two-times and swindles.

‘Yet these stereotypical illusions, these familiar dumping grounds of chicanery, harden into stony truths under Mr. Gaddis’s eye – or, rather, against his ear. He is a possessed receiver of voices, a maniacal eavesdropper, a secret prophet and moralizer. His method is pure voice, relentless dialogue melting off into the panning of a camera in the speaker’s head. It is dialogue that does without quotation marks, preceded instead by a serenely poised dash – a brilliantly significant Joycean smudge that allows no closure and dissolves voices into narrative, turning the clearest verisimilitude into something spectral. Speech is fragmented, piecemeal, halting and stunted, finally headlong – into telephones continually, out of radio and television. Through all these throats and machines the foul world spills. The radio is a perpetual chorus of mishap and mayhem, pumping out its impassive dooms while the human voice lamenting in the kitchen moans on:

— Problem Liz you just don’t grasp how serious the whole God damn thing is . . . the bottle trembled against the rim of the glass, – after him they’re after me they’re after all of us . . . He’d slumped back against word of two tractor trailer trucks overturned and on fire at an entrance to the George Washington bridge, – fit the pieces together you see how all the God damn pieces fit together. SEC comes in claims some little irregularity on a Bible school bond issue next thing you’ve got the IRS in there right behind them with misappropriation of church funds for openers, problem’s their new computer down there’s just geared to their mailing list if they don’t build their mailing list there won’t be any funds what the whole God damn thing is all about, you get these Bible students they’re smart enough digging up Ephusians but they count on their fingers nobody knows where in hell the last nickel went. . . .

‘And on and on: fire, death, fraud, money, voice voice voice. The voices are humanity seeping out, drop by drop, a gradual bloodletting. It isn’t ”theme” Mr. Gaddis deals in (his themes are plain) so much as a theory of organism and disease. In “Carpenter’s Gothic” the world is a poisonous organism, humankind dying of itself.’ — Cynthia Ozick

 

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Further

‘Carpenter’s Gothic’ @ goodreads
“Carpenter’s Gothic”: William Gaddis’s Compositional Self
A Census of Carpenter’s Gothic
Blog about the first 96 pages of William Gaddis’s novel Carpenter’s Gothic
Carpenter’s Gothic Reader’s Guide
Carpenter’s Gothic – Chapter 1 discussion thread
‘Carpenter’s Gothic’ @ Internet Archive
Fittings: William Gaddis’ “Carpenter’s Gothic”
The Most Curious Career: William Gaddis in Germany
‘ALL DESIGNED FROM THE OUTSIDE’
Mysterious Skin: The Realia of William Gaddis

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Extras

William Gaddis in Conversation

William Gaddis Keynote at The Writer and Religion Conference (1994)

William Gaddis- Wanting to Write vs. Wanting to Be a Writer

 

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Interview
from The Paris Review

 

Zoltán Abádi-Nagy: Since over the years you’ve acquired a reputation for avoiding interviews, particularly those that address your work, let me ask why you are submitting to this one?

WILLIAM GADDIS: I suppose because I’ve got some illusion about finally getting the whole thing out of the way once for all. In the past I’ve resisted partly because of the tendency I’ve observed of putting the man in the place of his work, and that goes back more than thirty years; it comes up in a conversation early in The Recognitions. That, and the conviction that the work has got to stand on its own—when ambiguities appear they are deliberate and I’ve no intention of running after them with explanations—and finally, of course, the threat of questions from someone unfamiliar with the work itself: Do you work on a fixed schedule every day? On which side of the paper do you write? That sort of talk-show pap, five-minute celebrity, turning the creative artist into a performing one, which doesn’t look to be the case here.

Thank you for the vote of confidence.

And so I’ve the hope of laying a few things to rest; an interview I can simply refer people to when the threat of another appears, without having to go through it again.

You say a work has got to stand on its own. Isn’t it hard for a writer sometimes to adhere to this principle steadfastly? In other words, are you never annoyed by misinterpretations of your works?

What writer is not? And unless you’re writing “what they want”—I mean, some formula simply for the money—isn’t that our history, from Melville on? It comes with the territory, as the playwright said.

Now that you have decided to step out of your reclusiveness—and before stepping back into it—perhaps you’re dissatisfied with the image that is in circulation concerning your life and personality and views that you’d like to correct?

I’d hoped this interview would clear up some of that—what can be cleared up, that is to say, because trying to correct one’s “image” is as futile as it is irrelevant. Of course, if your image is really all you’ve got going—which is hardly uncommon these days, take a Henry Kissinger, for instance—you’ll want to deliberately distort the record to make yourself look good. I’d go back to The Recognitions where Wyatt asks what people want from the man they didn’t get from his work, because presumably that’s where he’s tried to distill this “life and personality and views” you speak of. What’s any artist but the dregs of his work: I gave that line to Wyatt thirty-odd years ago and as far as I’m concerned it’s still valid.

Here is another obligatory question. You have received recognition in the form of various grants and awards, including the substantial MacArthur Prize Fellowship. What is your feeling about that? How have they changed things?

Well, I almost think that if I’d gotten the Nobel Prize when The Recognitions was published I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised. I mean that’s the grand intoxication of youth, or what’s a heaven for. And so the book’s reception was a sobering experience, quite a humbling one. When finally help did come along, recognition as you say, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts, they came in difficult times and allowed and encouraged me to keep on with the second book and start the third. Without them, I wonder if I might not just have dropped the whole damned business, though God knows what else I might have done, too late even to be any of the things I never wanted to be. There’s always the talk about feeding at the public trough, disdaining grants because you’ve never been given one. I mean we’d all wish to come out with the fierce integrity of Samuel Butler, say, who never wrote simply to publish or published everything he wrote—The Way of All Flesh was posthumous after all—and that has been the luxury of the MacArthur. But then I never was a fellow to rush into print.

Could you say something about the genesis of your own novels? Can you reconstruct what was involved in your getting started with The Recognitions?

I think first it was that towering kind of confidence of being quite young, that one can do anything —“All’s brave that youth mounts and folly guides,” as we’re told in As You Like It. The Recognitions started as a short piece of work, quite undirected, but based on the Faust story. Then as I got into the idea of forgery, the entire concept of forgery became—I wouldn’t say an obsession—but a central part of everything I thought and saw; so the book expanded from simply the central character of the forger to forgery, falsification and cheapening of values and what have you, everywhere. Looking at it now with its various faults, I suppose excess would be the main charge. I remember Clive Bell looking back on his small fine book, Art, thirty-five years after it was published in 1913, and listing its faults, finding it too confident and aggressive, even too optimistic—I was never accused of that!—but still feeling, as he said, “a little envious of the adventurous young man who wrote it.”

What moved you to write JR?

Even though I should have known from The Recognitions that the world was not waiting breathlessly for my message, that it already knew, and was quite happy to live with all these false values, I’d always been intrigued by the charade of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the stock market conceived of as what was called a “people’s capitalism” where you “owned a part of the company” and so forth. All of which is true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six hundred million, you’re not going to influence things very much. Also, the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don’t know what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually happened in the company is not your concern. In many ways I thought . . . the childishness of all this. Because JR himself, which is why he is eleven years old, is motivated only by good-natured greed. JR was, in other words, to be a commentary on this free enterprise system running out of control. Looking around us now with a two-trillion-dollar federal deficit and billions of private debt and the banks, the farms, basic industry all in serious trouble, it seems to have been rather prophetic.

Carpenter’s Gothic?

Well, that was rather different. I cannot really work unless I set a problem for myself to solve. In Carpenter’s Gothic the problems were largely of style and technique and form. I wanted to write a shorter book, one that observes the unities of time and place to the point that everything, even though it expands into the world, takes place in one house, and a country house at that, with a small number of characters, in a short span of time. It became really largely an exercise in style and technique. And also, I wanted to take all these clichés of fiction to bring them to life and make them work. So we have the older man and the younger woman, the marriage breaking up, the obligatory adultery, the locked room, the mysterious stranger, and so forth.

 

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Book

William Gaddis Carpenter’s Gothic
Penguin

‘This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their “carpenter gothic” rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine bidding to take over an ore strike on the site of Ude’s African mission. At the still center of the breakneck action–revealed in Gaddis’s inimitable virtuoso dialoge—is Paul’s wife, Liz, and over it all looms the shadowy figure of McCandless, a geologist from whom Paul and Liz rent their house. As Paul mishandles the situation, his wife takes the geologist to her bed and a fire and aborted assassination occur; Ude issues a call to arms as harrowing as any Jeremiad–and Armageddon comes rapidly closer. Displaying Gaddis’s inimitable virtuoso dialogue, and his startling treatments of violence and sexuality, Carpenter’s Gothic “shows again that Gaddis is among the first rank of contemporary American writers”‘. — Malcolm Bradbury

Excerpt

The bird, a pigeon was it? or a dove (she’d found there were doves here) flew through the air, its colour lost in what light remained. It might have been the wad of rag she’d taken it for at first glance, flung at the smallest of the boys out there wiping mud from his cheek where it hit him, catching it up by a wing to fling it back where one of them now with a broken branch for a bat hit it high over a bough caught and flung back and hit again into a swirl of leaves, into a puddle from rain the night before, a kind of battered shuttlecock moulting in a flurry at each blow, hit into the yellow dead end sign on the corner opposite the house where they’d end up that time of day.

When the telephone rang she’d already turned away, catching breath, and going for it in the kitchen she looked up to the clock: not yet five. Had it stopped? The day was gone with the sun dropped behind the mountain, or what passed for one here rising up from the river. —Hello? she said, —who…? Oh yes no, no he’s not here he’s… No I’m not, no. No, I’m… Well I’m not his wife no, I just told you. My name is Booth, I don’t even know him. We’ve just… Well if you’ll just let me finish! We’ve just rented his house here, I don’t know where Mister McCandless is I’ve never even met him. We got a card from him from Argentina that’s all, Rio? Isn’t that Argentina? No it was just a card, just something about the furnace here it was just a postcard. I’m sorry I can’t help you, there’s somebody at the… No I have to go goodbye, there’s spmebody at the door…

Somebody hunched down, peering in where she’d stood staring out there a minute before, a line straight through from the kitchen past the newel to the front door fitted with glass, shuddering open. —Wait! she was up, —wait stop, who…

—Bibb?

—Oh. You frightened me.

He was inside now, urging the door closed behind him with his weight against it, bearing up her embrace there without returning it.

—Sorry, I didn’t…

—I didn’t know who you were out there. Pushing open the door you looked so big I didn’t, how did you get here?

—Coming down 9W in a…

—No but how did you find it?

—Adolph. Adolph said you’d…

—Adolph sent you? Is something wrong?

—No relax Bibb, relax. What’s the matter anyhow.

—I’m just, I’ve just been nervous. I’ve just been very nervous that’s all and when I saw you out there I, when you say Adolph sent you I thought something’s wrong. Because something’s usually wrong.

—Bibbs I didn’t say that. I didn’t say Adolph sent me… He thrust his legs out from the chair across the hearth from her where she’d come down to the edge of the frayed love seat, knees drawn tight and her hands caught together at her chin, pressed there. —When I saw him last week he told me where you’d moved, I didn’t know what you’d…

—Well how could you know how could we tell you! How could you know where we’d moved you never, we never know where you are nobody knows. You just show up like this with your, your boots look at your boots they’re falling apart look at your, that hole in your knee you don’t even have a jacket, you…

—Oh Bibb, Bibbs…

—And it’s cold!

—Well Bibbs Jesus, you think I don’t know it’s cold? I’ve been on the road sixteen hours. I’m driving this moving van down from Plattsburgh with no heater, I had to cut it out when the cooling system went. Twice, the whole fucking thing broke down twice and it just broke down again right up here, up on 9W. I saw the sign and remembered this is where Adolph said you moved to so I walked down here. That’s all.

—You look tired Billy, she said in a voice near a whisper. —You look so tired… and her own hands fell away.—You kidding? Tired, I mean that fucking truck you wouldn’t…

—I wish you wouldn’t smoke.He threw them, match and cigarette together, at the cold grate, came forward on a torn knee to pick them up where they’d hit the firescreen. —You got a beer?

—I’ll look I don’t think so, Paul doesn’t…—Where is he? I saw the car I thought he’d be here.—It’s broken, he had to take the bus in this morning. He hates it, Billy… ? She was up, calling from the kitchen —Billy? She looked up to the clock, —he’ll be here any minute I just don’t want…

—I know what you don’t want! He was up talking loud to walls, to the balustrade mounting from the newel at the door, to furniture —Bibb?—There’s no beer, I’m making tea if you…

—You just want me gone before Paul shows up, right? And he was across the room pulling open a door under the stairs on the cellar dark below, jamming it closed and opening another and stepping in without a light, standing over the bowl there. —Bibb? from the opened door. —Can you lend me twenty?

The cup rattled on the saucer, passing. —Oh I should have told you. This one stops up, I should have told you to use the upstairs…

—Too late now… he came out tugging his zipper, —can you lend me twenty Bibb? I was going to get paid when I got the van down there but…

—But what about it, the van. You just left it?

—The hell with it.

—But you can’t just leave it there, up there right in the middle of the…

—You kidding? The alternator’s shot, you think I’m going to sit up there all night with it? Send that heap out on the road they can come haul it in.

—But who? Whose is it, what are you doing driving somebody’s moving van down from…

—Like what do you think I was doing, Bibb? I was trying to make seventy five bucks, what do you think I was doing.

—But you said you just saw Adolph, I thought you…

—Oh come on Bibb, Adolph… ? He was down in the chair again, one hand cracking knuckles on the fist of the other. —Adolph wouldn’t give me the sweat…

—I wish you wouldn’t do that.

—What, about Adolph? He…

—With your knuckles, you know it makes me nervous.

His shrug dropped him deeper into the chair, one hand seized in the other. —Sit there in his paneled office I have to listen to every fucking nickel he’s accountable for to the trust, the estate, the lawsuits the nursing home bills his duty to conserve the assets I mean shit, Bibbs. No wonder the old man made Adolph his executor. He sits there guarding the estate with one hand, dealing out this lousy trust with the other him and the bank, Sneddiger down at the bank. Ask one of them for a nickel he says the other one might not approve this expenditure, I mean that’s the way the old man set it up. Just to keep us…

—Oh I know it, I know…

—Just to…

—Well it’s almost done, isn’t it? It’s almost done, by next spring you’ll…

—That’s the trust Bibb, that’s just the trust that’s what I mean. That’s how he set it up, just to keep us out of the estate, by the time we get there there won’t be one anyhow. Twenty three lawsuits Adolph says, they’ve got twenty three lawsuits by stockholders against the company and the estate trying to get back what the old man handed out in those payoffs. The estate is using every resource at its disposal in dealing with these cases says Adolph, every resource that’s Adolph. That’s him and Grimes and all of them do you think they want to settle it? Every resource do you think they give a shit if they win it or lose it they just want to keep things going, adjournments postponements appeals they charge the estate every time they pick up the fucking telephone they’re talking to each other, like they’re all sitting in each other’s laps picking each other’s noses two hundred dollars an hour every one of them Bibb, they’re talking to each other.

—But what dif…

—I mean every time I go in there Adolph has to remind me how they smoothed the way for the old man’s retirement when he could have gone to prison instead. I mean why didn’t he. He should have gone so should Paul, so should…

—Billy please, I don’t want to go over it again, just go over it and go over it Paul just did what he was told, it was all going on long before he went there anyway. What was Paul supposed to do, they even said it wasn’t against the law didn’t they? Even the papers, when the…

—Then how come there’s all these lawsuits? If it wasn’t against the law how come there’s twenty three lawsuits, if the old man wasn’t as smart as Uncle William he’d be in prison right now but he takes the fast way out like he always did, like he always did Bibb. He crapped on the floor for somebody else to clean up that’s all he ever did and there was always somebody there to clean up. There was always Adolph cleaning up that’s what he’s doing now, that’s all he knows how to do. Two hundred dollars an hour he’ll keep cleaning up till there’s no fucking estate left, you know what he just did? Adolph? He just gave Yale ten thousand dollars did you know that? From the estate, ten thousand dollars for Yale while you’re living in this old dump and I’m out driving a broken down…

—But it’s not! It’s a beautiful old house it’s what I always…

—Come on Bibb it’s a heap, look at it. Over there in that alcove, take one look at the ceiling and it’s ready to fall down, you know what Adolph just spent on those copper roofs at Longview? He just came back, him and Grimes and Landsteiner all of them, they were all down there. You know why? Reviewing the estate’s assets Adolph tells me, you know why? right now? It’s duck season. Go down there and blow every duck they can see out of the sky and the estate pays every nickel, Adolph doesn’t know a twelve bore Purdey from a Sears, Roebuck but he’s down there banging away at anything that moves. Conserving the assets they call it, so they decide to spend thirty seven thousand dollars on the roofs, I mean thirty seven thousand dollars. Those copper roofs they’re supposed to turn green to go with all that fucking moss hanging off the trees, Longview they call it Longview you can’t see ten feet through the…

—Oh I know it I know it…! The saucer rattled the cup and she set it down, —please don’t let’s keep going over it please!

—All right Bibb, but I mean he could have left it to us couldn’t he? Or Bedford, even Bedford, I saw Lilly…

—Leave you Bedford? You think he’d have left you Bedford after that last party you had there? That party when he was off in Washington putting cigarettes out on the carpets and all the broken glass and Squeekie passed out right in his own bathtub? and then somebody painting a hat on his portrait in the library with Day-Glo, you thought he’d leave you the house after that?—He could have left it to you at least.

—I never liked it. Paul would go crazy at Bedford.

—Paul will go crazy right here. Let Lilly go crazy at Bedford, I saw her coming out of Adolph’s office. She was in there trying to get some money to heat the place this winter, she’s scared all the pipes will break. Not a nickel, not from Adolph. He always hated her.—He didn’t hate her, he just didn’t like the idea of a big country house like that going to a secretary who…

—Who the old man had been screwing for twenty years? so he leaves her a lousy house without a nickel to run it and Adolph jumps right in and pulls out all the furniture? Where is it anyhow, those two big marquetry chests and those chairs from the…

—In New York. It’s all in New York, in storage there. We had to rent this furnished, for a while anyhow till they get their things out, or her things, I think it’s all hers it’s all kind of confused…

—But I mean what are you doing here anyway Bibbs, this broken down little town how did you…

—We just had to get out of New York that’s all, we just found this through an agent and took it. You saw me down there the last time I couldn’t even breathe, it’s filthy, everything, the air the streets everything, and the noise. They were tearing up the street it sounded like machineguns and then they started blasting right on the corner. They were starting a new building right there on the corner and every time it went off Paul went right up the wall, he still wakes up at night with…

—Man like he’s already up the wall, he’s been up there since he came back whose fault is that.

—Well it’s not his! If you’d been old enough to be…

—No come off it Bibb, I mean all that southern officer bullshit of his? that dress sabre with his name engraved down the blade from that half ass military school he went to? And I mean what he told you his father said? his fucking own father? That it’s a damn good thing he was going in as an officer because…

—I’ve told you! It’s not, I never should have told you that it’s not your…

—I mean how could he tell you! Like how could anybody tell something like that he’s already up the wall, he can’t get a job he can’t even look for one so he pretends he’s setting up his own business? I mean he goes in and tells Adolph he’s…

—Well he is.

—He’s what, setting up his own business where, here? Like what’s he going to do, open a laundry? buy you a washboard and…

—Billy stop it, honestly. It’s a consulting, being kind of a consultant, I mean it’s what he’s done before when he was…

—Paul the bagman.

—Please! Don’t, start all that… She was up, through to the kitchen. —Twenty? is that enough?

—Bibb… ? He followed her in, —I mean you know what he…

—Please I don’t want to talk about it… She’d pulled open a drawer, digging under linen napkins, under placemats, —just twenty? You’re sure that’s enough?

—It’s plenty… and as she bent tucking the napkins back he ran a hand over her arm bared to the shoulder, over the bruise there. —This some of Paul’s work?

—I said I don’t want to talk about it! She pulled away, —here! I, I just…—Bumped into a bookcase, great… he thrust the bill into a shirt pocket. —I mean you know why he married you, we all…—All right! I, I just… she came after him to the front door, —I just wish…—I wish too, Bibb… he pulled the door open, grazing the newel there, and he was out, shoulders hunched against the chill. —You any better up here? your asthma?

—I don’t know yet I, I think so. Will you be all right Billy?

—You kidding?

—But where do you, where are you staying, we never…

—Sheila. Where else.—I thought that was over. I thought she went to India.

—She came back.

—Will you call? Will you, wait will you hand me the mail? I don’t want to come out… She reached a bare arm for it, he slapped the mailbox shut and then stopped by the car stalled on the apron there, rocked it with one hand.

—What’s wrong with it.

—I don’t know, it just doesn’t go. Will you, there’s the phone, Billy? Please call me…? She came through looking up to the clock, sat down with a shiver. —Yes hello… ? No, no but I expect him any minute. Could he call you back when he… Yes any time, this evening yes any time this evening, I’ll tell him yes… She hung it up and left her hands there, resting on it, and her forehead down to rest on the back of a hand drawing breath, drawing breath, till she heard the door.

—Liz…?

—Oh. There was a call for you. Just now, a Mister…

—What the hell is he doing out there!—Is, who…

—Billy, your God damn brother Billy he’s out there under the car, what the hell is he doing here.

—Well he just, I thought he’d…

—The usual? came to borrow money? How did he get here.

—Well he, he just showed up, he…

—He always just shows up. Did you lend him any?

—How could I Paul, I’ve only got nine dollars left from…

—Good, don’t. Any calls?

—Yes just now, Mister Ude? He said he’d call back.

—That’s all?

—Yes. No I mean there was a call for Mister McCandless, it was somebody from the IRS Paul when can we get this phone thing straightened out, all I do is answer these calls for…

—Look Liz, I can’t help it. I’m trying to get a phone put in here under a company name, as soon as the…

—But when they shut it off in New York the bill was over seven hun…

—That’s why I’m putting it under a company name! Now God damn it Liz stop pushing me like this the minute I walk in the door, you’ll just have to put up with it. Hang up on them, now look what about your brother. Will you see what the hell he’s doing out there?

—Maybe he’s trying to fix it, the car I mean, he…

—He couldn’t fix a rollerskate. I’ve got to get that thing fixed, this God damn bus what was I, half an hour late just now? Traffic backed up all the way down 9W to the bridge there.

—On 9W? Was there, was everything all right? I mean…

—What do you mean all right, I just told you traffic’s backed up for three miles, police cars wreckers the works… He’d turned from the kitchen doorway to the one opened under the stairs. He snapped on the light there, —Liz? Look don’t let him in the house again, just don’t let him in. He doesn’t know how to live in a house, he doesn’t even know how to flush the toilet when he’s…

—No wait Paul wait! I told him not to it’s stopping up again, don’t…

—Well Christ…

—But I told you not to…

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. At least two people here have managed to solve the Captcha verification bug by commenting in ‘incognito’ mode. So those of you who are continuing to have problems commenting might want to try that? ** Dominik, Hi!!! I’m so relieved that you found a way through the Captcha problem. I hope it continues to work and that others can circumvent that mess in the same way. Yes, the problems always have to do with the producer. He seems hell bent on destroying the film. It’s very, very difficult. New SCAB! Now that’s very, very happy news! Can’t wait! No, I don’t know ‘Fall’, but you can bet I’m going to find it post-haste. I too have a heights fear, but I will ball my fists and do my best. Self-lighter, that’s rich and nice. Yay for Hungarian! Love causing a certain someone to vanish from the face of the earth on countdown …. 3, 2, 1 … gone, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ooh, that track sounds cool at a glance. I’ll indulge post-this. Thanks. Those are cool lighters. Especially ‘Hard Edge Latitude’. Kind of a nice name too. It was Miss Kittin. I watched the ceremony, and I was, like, … isn’t that …? Congrats to the UK. I don’t think the US did so well, but no surprise. ** Måns BT, Hi, Måns! Oh, that’s okay, there’s no correct tempo for commenting around here. No, the film thing just gets worse and worse, and life is kind of hell accordingly. But we’re trying and trying. Trashy X-Mas sounds enviable indeed. Yes, making films is a whole, whole lot harder than writing, that’s for absolutely sure, haha. Great! Obviously I’m excited that you’re dedicating your talents to literature. Lit needs you, sir. Huge support on the writing project, whatever it ends up being. Do let me know how it’s going, if you feel like it. I’m both a writing process junkie and a fan of you. Haha, well, interesting about your PE teacher. If they like it, that might be a first for my work. Yeah, the only time I ever sip a little wine or beer is when I’m stressed out in a social situation. And two or three sips/gulps do actually help. I would say ‘IE’ is my favorite Lynch. I like Argento, sure, although I’ve never entered the passionate mindset that a lot of my friends hold towards his stuff. But, yes, they’re cool certainly, or quite a few of them at least. My week looks scary, but I’ll follow the sun, as they say. Wonderful to talk with you as always! ox, Dennis. ** Lucas, He grew up in the deep South of the US where evangelistic religion is kind of inescapable, so I think he had that stuff drilled into his head basically from birth. Thanks about the film situation. It’s really terrible right now, and good wishes are very welcome. Yeah, that you can talk about it is what will ultimately make it all seem doable and hopefully peripheral soon, I hope, I hope. No, I’ve never played Pokémon, it’s weird. I don’t even know what those games are like or how they work. I just know the characters’ physical appearances because they’re so omnipresent in the world that it’s kind of impossible not to recognise them. When I finally restart my game addition, I’ll finally try a Pokémon vehicle and see what happens. Happy for your Monday’s positive vibes, and, boy, I could use such vibes so thanks for hoping I come across them today. ** Dom Lyne, Howdy, Dom! I have a hard time throwing away used up lighters, it’s weird, so I have drawers full of dead lighters. And most of them are just generic, 2 euro lighters I grab at the Tabac shop. Strange, it’s not like they’re sculptures or something. I like the sound of your doggo. I’m so happy that it’s September and that the weather is even behaving like it’s September! Love to you. ** HaRpEr, Me too. Mine is still in a drawer somewhere. Here’s to your hopes strengthening and winning the battle. On my end, things have gotten even worse, much worse even since yesterday. My hopes aren’t helping, but they’re also not giving up. Have the best day possible. ** Right. Today I spotlight my favorite novel by the pretty great across the board American post-modernist novelist Mr. William Gaddis. Please have a look and read. Thank you. See you tomorrow.