The Rake Magazine

Tag: Yo Ivanhoe

  • Are You Lonesome for Me, Baby?

    All day a dragon in a rented crow costume was installed in the tree outside my house, shrieking imprecations and keeping me at bay.

    A few months back I reversed the mat on my doorstep so that each time I opened the door I would encounter the word “WELCOME.” My hope was that this would somehow strike me as a greeting or an invitation from the world. So far it hasn’t quite had the desired effect. If anything, in fact, it’s made me increasingly self conscious about what seems almost like a gesture from a self-help book.

    Two days ago I was out walking my dog when I encountered two little girls in matching pink princess costumes selling rocks from an excavation going on in the yard behind them. I asked them how much rocks were going for these days.

    “It depends,” one girl said, “on whether they are space rocks or indian rocks.”

    “How about this one?” I asked, taking a rock in my hand.

    “That’s a space rock,” the girl said. “It fell to earth during a moon storm. Let your dog smell it.”

    I dutifully held the rock to my dog’s nose, and he dutifully gave it a sniff.

    “See?” the girl said. “One dollar for a moon rock.”

    I handed over a dollar, and as I went on my way I heard the girls erupt in laughter behind me. I was momentarily chilled by the unmistakable cruelty in that laughter.

    Now, though, it’s late. A fox is frozen in me, paralyzed at a point in a journey beyond which I cannot yet take him. Perhaps, I thought earlier, his fate has something to do with the charms of the night sky, but I now see no reason in the world why it should.

    I would so love to do something extraordinary.

    But who wouldn’t?

    You reach that point where when you look in the mirror you sort of do so with a very evasive, soft-focus glance –you’re essentially looking right through or around yourself, trying, perhaps unconsciously, to work your way back into time and memory. When you’re most successful at this you manage to see not the person you’ve become, but the person you once were, or –even better, or maybe sadder; I can’t decide– the person you most hoped you’d become.

    My sleeping dog raises his head and briefly peers across the room through eyes a half step removed from dreams. As if he seeks reassurance that this is still the same world that he closed his eyes on an hour ago, that the man in the green chair is still there, keeping watch and squinting into his book, more lost than ever beneath a giant cowboy hat that makes him feel exceedingly small and foolish.

    Somewhere in the world tonight, I’m sure, someone is playing an accordian and people are dancing. Somewhere a broken man is wide awake and screwing up his nerve to do something entirely unexpected and perhaps even extraordinary. All over the world couples are curled up together in bed. Some of them are completely unaware that only one of them will wake up to see another day. Ambulances are streaking through the universal night, through sleeping cities in every country on the earth, their drivers speaking urgently in a hundred different languages. And in every one of those same countries, under one improbable moon, thousands upon thousands of hands are folded and stricken faces are searching the dark continent behind their eyes, and the huge sky beyond, for God.

    This morning –or later this morning, when and if the sun makes things official– I’m going to listen to James Brown.

    I’m going to take my dog for a walk.

    I’m going to take another crack at the world.

    And when all is said and done, well, I guess all will be said and done.

    Hey there. You.

    See me.

    Take a look at me now.

    Take a look down here.

    I’m on top of the world.

     

  • You Know How It Is. Or Maybe You Don't. Maybe I Don't. Maybe, in Fact, None of Us Does

    What does it mean that I have to sit and think for several minutes, and eventually have to count on my fingers, to figure out exactly how old I am?

    I don’t know what it means, but I know it’s appalling, the fact that I have to do it, and the number I eventually end up with.

    I’ve been gone. You may have noticed. Perhaps you did not notice. No big deal. No skin off my teeth. I’ve been out of it. It being, I suppose, things in general. I’ve been mulling and muddling in somewhat equal measure, although if I’m at all in the business of truth-telling I guess I’d have to say muddling has mostly been winning out over mulling.

    I don’t know what to tell you: there’s an honest statement if ever I’ve uttered one. And here’s another, as long as I seem to be in the mood to speak the plain, hard truth: Good Lord, I sure as hell do eat a lot of soup.

    The winter was interminable. There were stretches that I suppose I could say were like a dream. Perhaps they were a dream. I’m not sure I can tell anymore.

    You know what the "PF" in PF-Flyers stands for? I’ll tell you what it stands for: Positive Foundation.

    How do you like them fucking apples?

    I taught my dog to talk, but he’s still a pretty tight-lipped character. I can’t get a whole lot out of him. In the last 24 hours he’s spoken to me twice, and on each occasion his utterance took the form of a question.

    The first question was this: "Those Chinese kung fu sneakers in the closet –you ever wear them?"

    The other question was this: "You ever hear of a broad named M.F.K. Fisher?"

    To both questions I responded with "Why?" and received nothing in the way of a reply. I’ll say this for my dog: he keeps his counsel. One morning I asked him, as I do each morning, "How did you sleep?"

    "So-so," he said. "A phrase was running through my head all night in my dreams."

    "What phrase was that?" I asked.

    "Mist oppeternity," he said, and then turned his attention to his morning meal.

    I chalk that last business up to the Krazy Kat book I gave him for Christmas.

    I’m full of questions these days, but my dog is unfortunately of little help, keeper of his counsel that he is. Still I ask. I go on asking.

    "How did we ever agree that ‘time piece’ means a teller of time?" I ask. "Or, for that matter, how did we ever agree that ‘a teller of time’ or even ‘telling time’ means anything at all?"

    Sometimes I just go through the dictionary and recite words to the dog, trying to build up his vocabulary. "Bulldozer," I’ll say. "There’s a beautiful word. As is hourglass. As is pitch pipe, which is actually two words, referring to the invention of Jacob Kratt, Sr., who as a young man worked for a time at the Hohner harmonica factory in Trossingen Germany, and who later, in America, worked for Thomas Edison in Orange, New Jersey before opening his own harmonica factory."

    To which my dog will either say nothing or will say something like, "Big whoop."

    I’ve had a lot of dogs, and I’ve managed to teach almost all of them to talk. My current dog’s name is Leon "Blood" Runnells. I met him at a junior college in Kansas, where he had come from Fort Wayne, Indiana to play football, this because he didn’t have the academic chops to get into a division one school.

    Leon was a complete monster on the football field. Other guys on the team were terrified of him. They weren’t much more comfortable with him off the field. His old man was some sort of badass Special Forces character, or so Leon claimed.

    "You think I’m crazy," he would say. "You should get a load of Leon, Sr. This shit’s football. My old man, he’s a warrior. He’d cut your nuts off and leave you to bleed to death in the sand, and you’d never even get a good enough look at him to make a positive I.D."

    Our Leon –my Leon now– was also notorious for having once told Lou Holtz to suck his dick, this after some booster had paid Holtz a boatload of cash to fly out to Kansas to make some sort of motivational speech, after which he’d been persuaded to swing by and lay some rah-rah bullshit on the football team.

    Anyway, Leon couldn’t cut it in the classroom, even at the junior college level, and he also suffered some kind of degenerative hip injury near the end of his first season. They were prepared to cut him loose and send him back to a dead end job in Fort Wayne. Around this same time he learned that his old man had been killed in Kosovo or someplace like that, and poor Leon took all this bad news pretty hard and started running the streets. He eventually ended up at the local animal shelter, where they cut off his nuts, implanted a chip in his neck, and put him up for adoption.

    When I visited him the first time he had turned into such a docile, good natured fellow that I took pity on him, paid the three hundred bucks, and took him home with me.

    Truly, his reticence aside, a guy couldn’t ask for a better dog. It’s crazy, I know, and people who knew him back when probably wouldn’t believe me if I told them that I now share my bed with that legendary badass Leon "Blood" Runnells and that he greets me every time I come in the door like I’m the greatest thing that ever happened to him.

    At any rate, I guess I’ve had my say, even if it wasn’t what I wanted to say, and was more than I had any intention of saying.

    I’ll just leave you with this: I’m here now, and there ain’t a damn thing Zen about it.

  • One More Cup of Coffee for the Road: In Another Lifetime

    Long, long ago, in the sweltering twilight of an August night
    roaring with cicadas and the vacuum hum of a lazy small town in retreat
    from the heat and the falling darkness, the yards and sidewalks
    abandoned for living rooms and television sets (the wobbling blue
    screens of which we could see through the dark, otherwise blank window
    frames and the gauzy, fluttering filter of curtains), I bucked you
    across town through the empty streets on my stingray bike.

    We were hunched together on my sparkling blue banana seat; I was
    pedaling furiously and you were clinging to the sissy bar. I wished you
    had been clinging to me, wished you would put your arms around my
    chest, but it was nice to feel you there behind me all the same, nice
    to hear your laughter (all the wonderful variations of your wonderful
    laugh) ringing out over the silent neighborhoods and your voice at my
    ear and your breath in my hair.

    I don’t know, can’t remember, where we were going. We weren’t,
    though, going to the Dairy Queen, where everyone else always seemed to be going and where the moths were in full swirling
    frenzy around the streetlamps in the parking lot. We were headed, I’m
    sure, elsewhere.

    We were in search of what you called a grassy horizontal, and we had darkness in mind, I think, and so we’d ride out to where the futile
    over-light of that shitty little town gave way suddenly to a great
    stretch of emptiness, where the pavement turned to gravel, where there
    were fields rolling away into the distance, and where there was a muddy
    creek and there were railroad tracks and trains (which sounded, you
    said, like iron waterfalls, and which I’ve always said sound like
    something heavy being carried away) crawling off into the night, out
    into an America we could only then imagine.

    But which we did imagine, together, breathlessly, with ridiculous
    hope and optimism. That place was where we knew we would eventually
    have to go to make our escape, to complete the process of becoming, to
    find ourselves even as we lost each other.

    That was also the place, the place beyond our close little world
    whose secrets and sadnesses we felt certain we had already divined,
    where we would one day, through exactly the sort of occasional miracle
    this world is still capable of delivering, find each other again.

    I am still, every day, my sister, my old friend, stunned by this
    miracle, still gratefully puzzled by my bounty of blessings entirely
    undeserved. And now it always seems to be that same magic dusk I
    remember, and I find myself once again in the position of trying to
    talk you onto the back of my stingray bike, trying to convince you to
    ride with me out beyond the false, feeble light of that low town, away
    from and out from under the people we have allowed ourselves to become;
    trying to get you to slow down and to listen again to the roaring
    silence and the moving water and the watch-winding racket of insects
    throbbing from the ditches, and to lie on your back with me marveling
    at the stars and the heat lightning trembling down the dark sky across
    the fields.

  • Another One from the Mothballs: The Art of Indexing

    I always thought it would be interesting to attempt to tell the story of
    your life purely in index form. I tried it once, without a whole lot of
    success. I’m sure there are others out there like me, though, people for whom
    the indexes of thick biographies are often better and more fascinating reading than
    the books themselves.

    I was obsessed with indexing for a time. I acquired and pored over
    scores of books on the subject (H.B. Wheatley’s How to Make an Index from
    1902, A.L. Clarke’s Manual of Practical Indexing from 1905, Robert L.
    Collison’s Indexes and Indexing from 1959, among others). I even paid way too much money to acquire a copy of Der Index der Verbotenen Bucher (1899),
    which was in a language I do not read, and appears to have no practical bearing
    on my own interest in the subject. The great indexers are legendary obsessives.
    In 1848 a man named William F. Poole published a book called An
    Alphabetical Index to Subjects Treated in Reviews and Other Periodicals to
    Which No Indexes Have Been Published.

    In his more recent Explorations in Indexing and Abstracting, Brian
    C. O’Connor poses the single most relevant question regarding the indexer’s
    art: "Can we design systems that detect the treasure for each
    user?" Perusing indexes it’s clear that every indexer worth his or
    her salt brings to this question a deeply personal set of priorities and
    proclivities. Check it out some time; it’s fascinating to see what sorts
    of bizarre minutiae an indexer will choose to extract from a book’s tangle
    of detail and incident.

    I’ve been collecting these minutiae for years. Here’s just a small sampling
    (and I would, of course, welcome any interesting contributions you might have
    stumbled across):

    From Margaret Drabble’s Angus Wilson: A Biography:

    Fear of falling, 556, 592;
    tendency to fall, 599,
    601;     lack of sense of balance,
    603, 604;     serious fall,
    623-4;     in nursing home,
    642-3.

     

    From Gerald Clarke’s Capote: A Biography:

    Dancing of, 58, 101, 102; eavesdropping and snooping of, 180-81,
    206-7, 294;     as love life advisor,
    166, 168;     sleepwalking of,
    44;     Montalban, Ricardo,
    298.

     

    From Donald Spoto’s The Dark Side of Genius: The
    Life Of Alfred Hitchcock:

    Gastronomic Life: potatoes,
    14;     three-steak meal, 187; gulping, 412; Personal Life, Habits,
    Attitudes, and Traits:     mustache,
    95;     woman in the back of a taxi,
    162, 374, 432, 433, 531;     destruction
    of crockery, 187, 192;     interest
    in strangling, 353, 527;     spiritual
    transvestism, 432-33.

     

    From William Manchester’s Winston Churchill biography, The
    Last Lion    :

    Silk underwear for skin sensitivity, 399; national crisis while bathing, 418-19; attitude while playing polo, 241-42; skin donation to wounded soldier with Kitchener,
    283;     bricklaying, 776,
    883.

     

    From John Baxter’s Bunuel:

    Death, fascination with,
    15, 24;     menagerie, 14; obsessive punctuality, 183; orgies, participation in, 116-17; phone, hating, 295; pistols, fascination with, 202-3.

     

    From David Sweetman’s Van Gogh: His Life and His Art:

    Tooth trouble, 203, 262; wears candles in hat, 278; throws glass at Gauguin, 289; razor attack on Gauguin, 290, 306; kicks attendant, 307.

     

    From Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s Jackson
    Pollock: An American Saga    :

    Beguiling smile of,
    2, 4, 94, 808;     dimples of,
    2-3, 44, 161, 808;     drunken binges
    of    , 2-3, 6, 7, 117, 120, 168, 170, 197, 212-14, 247-48, 249-50, 255,
    266-67, 294-95, 296-98, 302, 306, 310-11, 314, 335-36, 359-60, 448, 449, 491,
    572, 669-71, 686, 844;     fights
    provoked by    , 6, 140-41, 145, 204, 212, 228, 247-48, 265, 267, 297,
    302, 310, 350, 481, 488-89, 498, 570, 572, 715, 755, 900;     mouth harp played by, 208, 220, 247, 833,
    834;     urinary habits of,
    50-51, 469, 478, 489, 541, 612, 671, 753, 760, 762, 770, 788, 813, 818, 867,
    876, 904;     weeping of,
    249, 297, 581, 740, 763, 770, 778, 782, 787, 901, 904;     Ives, Burl, 170, 828.

     

    From Mary Tyler Moore’s After All:

    Richie’s rescued pigeon,
    208-210;     assassination threats,
    269-71;     Blue Chip stamp collecting,
    382-83;     crossword puzzles,
    383;     Gomer Pyle, 113; hitting bottom, 349-50; mother’s addiction to pinball machines,
    12-13;     as inept liar,
    279-82;     O’Neill, Tip,
    280, 281;     Kershaw, Doug,
    236;     Busey, Gary, 207.

  • Any Old Business?

    How it is that I…how is it…or, rather, why it is that I…that I seem to
    keep…or, really, that I do keep, that I keep ending up…that every
    single night I look at the clock, I look at the clock and it’s two o’clock in
    the morning, it’s three o’clock in the morning and I…I keep ending up at
    three o’clock in the morning, I keep ending up sitting here with…I don’t
    know, I keep ending up sitting here with all this shit, surrounded by
    all this shit? Night after night I’m sitting here, I’m sitting here night after
    night on the floor with my back against these racks of records, surrounded
    by these shelves full of shit, shelves full of plastic,
    anthropomorphized potatoes and carrots and hamburgers, all of them with
    hats on their heads and pipes in their mouths and their arms paralyzed in an
    embracing gesture that I often find disturbing.

    I’m sitting here with my legs crossed and my back up against all this
    shit…I’m sitting here in this ridiculous and uncomfortable position, night
    after night, delivering incoherent monologues to the beleaguered animal that shares my
    home…and what the fuck is this I’m listening to? Honest to God, explain to me
    if you can why I am sitting here like this, trying to read about the Donner
    party and poor Lewis Keseberg, who was driven by madness and the most desperate
    of circumstances to eat a woman named Mrs. Murphy. "The flesh of starved
    beings contains little nutriment," the cannibal Keseberg assures me.
    "It is like feeding straw to horses. I cannot describe the unutterable
    repugnance with which I tasted the first mouthful of flesh. There is an
    instinct in our nature that revolts at the thought of touching, much less
    eating, a corpse….It has been told that I boasted of my shame –said that I
    enjoyed this horrid food, and that I remarked that human flesh was more
    palatable than California beef. This is a falsehood. It is a horrible,
    revolting falsehood. This food was never otherwise than loathsome, insipid, and
    disgusting." Explain to me why I would continue to read as this poor man
    was asked by his interrogator, Did you boil the flesh? And as he
    responded, "Yes! But to go into the details –to relate the minutiae– is
    too agonizing! I cannot do it! Imagination can supply these. The necessary
    mutilation of the bodies of those who had been my friends rendered the
    ghastliness of my situation more frightful."

    I mean, seriously, holy shit, every fucking night….What is this? Why am I
    sitting here listening to…George Crumb? Is that what the hell this is? Or Morton Feldman? And at some point –this for certain– listening to Lou
    Reed, the idiot prince of rock and roll, listening to that jackass Lou Reed,
    listening to this lunatic Lou Reed reduce Edgar Allan Poe to the most wrenching
    and painful sort of comedy. Are there even one thousand other misguided people
    on the planet who have paid to be thusly abused? Please assure me there are
    not, even as it gives me considerable anguish to know that there almost
    certainly are. But what in God’s name is wrong with me that I would pay
    good money for a CD on which Lou Reed makes a muddled mockery of "The
    Raven"?

    Look, honest to God, this is the fucking truth: No man
    should ever find himself sitting hunched on the
    floor with a pen paralyzed in his fingers listening to Lou Reed’s
    “The Raven” at two o’clock in the morning. No man should ever eat red licorice
    and corn chips for dinner –not at three a.m. Not ever. No man should ever sit
    at four a.m. raking the soiled carpet with his fingers and building
    bewildering piles of lint and scruff and dog dander and pubic hair and chips of
    indeterminate origin. No man should ever put these piles in an ashtray and burn them. No man should ever write such words as those that
    preceded the words ‘No man should ever write such words….’ No man should ever
    spend so many hours sitting in one dank apartment that the liquor of his own
    stench has become intoxicating and the crawling of the hours has reduced him to
    a savage who cannot remember his last truly conscious thought. No man should
    ever sit studying a diagram of the arteries of the brain as if it were a
    satellite photo of a country that no longer exists. No man should ever look up
    from his hunched stupor at five a.m. and find himself gazing into the clearly
    terrified face of an elderly paperboy framed in the window of his front door.

  • In Which I Take Umbrage

    I opened my electronic correspondence this morning to discover that, scattered among the many missives from such devoted readers as Floyd Whopping Cock, there were a number of notes from acquaintances calling my attention to the fact that in the pages of the Southwest Journal local media rascal David Brauer was weighing in on the future of my employer, Rake Media Worldwide.

    Make no mistake, Mr. Brauer deserves great respect as an endangered species, one of those veteran, hard-living, ursine warriors of The Fifth Estate. The man is, in fact, a veritable pillar down at the local branch closet of that storied institution. He has held a dizzying number of positions in our local journalism community –not unlike (in the interests of full disclosure) yours truly. He has worn many hats, and has often wielded his pen like a sword of righteousness. That said, it would be tempting to opine that Mr. Brauer has grown too big for his britches, were his britches not so undeniably commodious.

    What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that when a fellow of Mr. Brauer’s stature has something to say, folks all over the Twin Cities and even out into the dark rural outposts where people still give a horse’s patoot about the Big Ideas and ideals on which this great nation was founded…well, dammit, folks can’t help but sit up and listen. They damn well should, at any rate.

    I have to confess that Mr. Brauer is one of these increasingly rare characters that can make a man sick with rumination. The miserable wretch toiling in obscurity would pay dearly for a critique from a writer with Mr. Brauer’s bona fides. And when Mr. Brauer deigns to offer his critique for free, his audience would be wise to pay careful attention, even when what the man is offering is transparently equivocal disdain, much of which he has offered before.

    In Mr. Brauer’s piece in this week’s Journal he jabs his rapier squarely at the heart of The Rake, and as a proud and devoted employee I feel compelled to engage the old warrior –at, I fully realize, my considerable peril.

    It is apparently Mr. Brauer’s opinion that The Rake has a bit too much attitude and not nearly enough relevance for his refined taste. To which I can only counter: Show me the attitude, you wonky prick. And at the very least please be so kind as to tell me what ‘relevance’ means in such a degraded and increasingly irrelevant marketplace of ideas.

    I’ll insist to my dying day –which is likely any day now– that I am fiercely proud of much of the work we have done and continue to do at The Rake, and I will argue with my last breath that that work has been and continues to be relevant to a fault. For instance: our popular "Hum’s Hot-Button Hot Tub" feature brought together some of the keenest political minds and social critics in the Twin Cities (and, yes, they were in a hot tub provided by Watson’s Pool and Spa, and, yes, they were sipping wine courtesy of a fine Lyndale Avenue purveyor of spirits) to hash over such important and timely issues (or so we perhaps foolishly believed) as teen pregnancy, crime and punishment, the scourge of methamphetamine, and the 35 Most Romantic Weekend Getaways. I like to think people –readers and participants alike– learned something and were entertained.

    Or tell me if you would, Mr. Brauer, what exactly wasn’t relevant about our three-part "Hunger Sucks" series, written by a fasting liberal Lutheran minister, a series we promoted by having the entire staff march the half mile down Washington Avenue to Cafe Brenda, where we simply stood with our faces pressed to the windows for fifteen minutes in mute solidarity with those who cannot afford to dine in the Warehouse District, or even to dine at all.

    I could give you examples all day. We’ve written about orphans, for crying out loud –hell, probably dozens of times. We’ve written about foreign countries and the people who live in them. We (ok, I) have written about clowns, but I honestly believe it was a respectful piece, and entirely deficient in attitude. We’ve even published fiction, which I will insist on considering a brave gesture even if journalists like Mr. Brauer choose to regard such work as irrelevant.

    And, sure, we’ve had our fun. I’m not going to apologize for the fact that we’re a fun bunch. Every once in awhile it’s nice to do a little something to turn those frowns upside down.

    We haven’t, of course, always succeeded at squaring the product with what we’d like it to be, and like everybody else in a struggling business we’ve had to contend with all manner of the usual challenges, disappointments, and occasional (sometimes frequent) bland compromises. But when push has come to shove –as it so often has– we’ve always at least tried to tackle subjects that we find interesting, provocative, and worth caring about.

    So the issue, Mr. Brauer, is not whether or not The Rake is for sale; the issue is what, precisely, is for sale, and not what that thing costs, but what it’s worth in a sense larger than the crass realities of economics. And I can assure you that what is for sale in this instance –if, in fact, anything is for sale– is a proud magazine staffed by hard-working people who care passionately, are broadly curious about the world we all live in, and strive mightily every month to capture some of that passion and that curiosity in a relevant context. I love the people I work with, and I know that what is for sale –if, in fact, anything is for sale– is a constellation of hopes and dreams. Individual dreams and communal dreams. Good dreams, decent dreams, dreams of at least one more tomorrow brighter than today. A dream that a group of increasingly beleaguered people can create something meaningful and entertaining and worth more than any price tag can ever reflect.

    Such dreams can be tough things. They are tough things, and they can make a man bitter. You all know that. David Brauer obviously knows that.

    I hope that you will understand me. I hope that my intentions are clear. And I bid you good day. I bid you good night.

  • Let It Loose, Let It All Come Down: A Very Sad Business All Around

    Some mysterious combination of failing light, and the smell of an unrecognized plant bring back to some men the sense of childhood, and of future hope; and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten.

    –Graham Greene, The Honorary Counsul

    What we cannot think, we cannot think; we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.

    –Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

    When not engaged in warfare they spend a certain amount of time at hunting, but much more in idleness, thinking of nothing else but sleeping and eating. For the boldest and most warlike men have no regular employment; the care of house, home, and fields being left to the women, old men, and weaklings of the the family. In thus dawdling away their time they show a strange inconsistency –at one and the same time loving indolence and hating peace.

    –Tacitus, Germania

    The place was perpetually murky, either sticky-hot and prone to tantrums, or inhospitably cold and overcast. Clouds would roll in and set up shop for months at a time, casting a disorienting pall over the days, a permanent crepuscle that made it easy to lose track of time.

    In the warm months, between spasms of rain, the little town would bake and be congested with dust kicked up by the slow, ceaseless procession of late-model European and American cars, bicycles, and carts dragged through the dust by old women and children on their way to the crowded markets.

    The town was surrounded by thick woods that rolled steadily upward toward the mountains that were overgrown with lush, almost tropical greenery. These mountains were said to be populated by ancient tribes of warring giants and trolls.

    For almost a century the population of giants was alleged to have been in alarming decline, a decline that was attributed to environmental factors and a mysterious crisis of infertility. For generations the giants had subsisted on wild hogs and the young and elderly trolls they were able to steal from their rival tribe.

    Over the years, however, the trolls had become masters of stealth, cunning, and deception, and had adapted to the once frequent incursions of the giants by moving underground, where they had excavated a complex network of tunnels and subterranean villages. They also became quite expert in creating traps for the giants. These traps were huge bunkers that the trolls would cover with brush and bait with a howling child or pig. One giant, thus captured, could feed one hundred trolls for a month.

    Eventually, the combination of these various factors led to the wholesale eradication of the giants, and the trolls had the complete run of the place. They moved above ground, started to read the Bible, and built unsightly compounds comprised of little but poorly-made mansions, town homes, and strip malls.The trolls, it was said, were indiscriminate breeders, and they rapidly accumulated great wealth and power.They were known to comport themselves with a strange combination of indolence, aggression, and arrogance. The natives of the village grew to regard them with fear and loathing, until one day a band of brazen local youths, armed with nothing but stones, mounted a series of attacks that razed entire neighborhoods, killed hundreds of trolls, and drove the remainder of the crass little bastards back underground.

  • The Wasteland

    This month marks the third anniversary of Yo Ivanhoe, and considering the similarly wasted years I spent shoveling words in a similar hole (Open All Night) at City Pages, I’m not much in the mood to celebrate five years of futility.

    When I first started doing this nonsense I was nothing but a clueless conscript to an online enterprise that meant absolutely nothing to me. Blogging? Seriously, what the fuck?

    I still don’t understand it, but I’ll be damned if I haven’t blogged. And I’ve discovered that in five years a guy can shovel a serious shitload of words in a mighty big hole that just seems to get deeper and darker all the time.

    Originally I decided to just approach this monkey business as an illogical extension of my usual pointless routines; every night for the last fifteen years I have sat down at the bottom of the day –usually in the wee hours– and written at least 300 words in a series of uniform, lined black books that now fill an entire small bookcase next to my desk. Most of those words are utter nonsense, and a small fraction of that nonsense has found its way here.

    I never wanted the black books to resemble a diary, but I did want to be able to look back at those words and find enough recognizable clues –however small– that I would be able to remember the exact day and circumstances that I wrote them. Little things like snippets of conversation I might have overheard or engaged in that day, a quote from something I’d read, or details from someplace I’d stumbled into while traveling would work their way into each entry, usually as little more than launching points for something entirely else, but from these fragments –and this never ceases to astonish me– I can now piece together days and weeks and months of my life, often with such clarity that the black books really have come to function as diaries of a sort.

    At some point I decided that this project (and at some point I did start to think of it as a project –I haven’t missed a single night since I violated that first page all those years ago) was a personal version of The Thousand and One Nights, with me playing the roles of both Scheherazade and King Dunyazad. I really believed those words and stories and stretches of impenetrable automatic writing were keeping me alive. Night after night they provided a bridge to another day, and somewhat to my surprise the days and nights did keep coming, and the words kept coming right along with them.

    This part of that project has eaten up a lot of my time and energy, and there have been times when I’ve tried to wean myself, but I always seem to creep back. I’m not sure why, to be honest with you (and to be honest with you, I’ve seldom been honest with you, just as I’ve steadfastly refused to believe in your existence).

    I guess, though, that there’s some sort of challenge to it. In the earliest days, and for a long time, actually, I would just move the words from the black books directly into cyberspace. As time went on, though, I started spending a bit more time fiddling with them, and trying to become a better writer. On many occasions over the last couple years by the time I finished fiddling and hit ‘post,’ the words that appeared here barely resembled the words I had originally written in one of the black books. I don’t know that they were truly improved, but the effort, and the time spent looking at them and thinking about them and moving them around felt like some sort of progress.

    It still, though, doesn’t feel like real writing to me, and for the most part it still feels like a waste of time. But if I’ve learned one thing about myself over the last five years, it is that I am a Titan of wasted time –mine, and yours.

    This is my life, more or less. This is who I am. This is what I do, and all I know how to do. I read books, look at photographs, listen to music, talk to my dog, ramble with my dog, literally stop breathing whenever I try to sleep, and get the hell out of town every chance I get.

    I am trying to write a story about a bullfrog who falls in love with a cow, and a man who has his cat turned into a woman, and a goat who smokes a pipe, wears spectacles, and speaks the plain, hard truth. Old, old stories, every last one of them, yet still, I think, worth telling.

    I worry, though, that I’m not long for this world. But who doesn’t?

    I’ll leave you with some selections from the Yo Ivanhoe Commonplace Book, another in-progress and almost certainly never-to-be completed project of Open All Night, Inc.:

    A Very Troubled Human Being

    What if an
    individual is perceiving a daydream and a series of external sensory inputs at
    precisely the same time, and has lost the capacity to distinguish one from the
    other? What happens to his perceptual world? Clearly he will be peopling his
    universe of awareness with elements that are altogether private, presences
    generated within which for him will be a genuine part of the real world; these
    are what he sees, or hears, or is otherwise sensing. And should he then be
    unable to differentiate these from his everyday perceptions, then indeed he may
    move into a haunted, nightmarish world, and be a very troubled human being.

    —Joseph D. Noshpitz,
    “Reality Testing: A Neuropsychological Fantasy,” in     Comprehensive
    Psychology

     

    Mr T: A Flower Unfolding

    No more small-time stuff for Mr. T. No more bit parts, no more local
    talent jive….I call the shots. I am in a position to pick and choose. More
    movies, more TV commercials, talk shows, speaking engagements, banquets,
    receptions in my honor, autograph sessions, the red carpet treatment everywhere
    I go.

    In the words of my pastor, Henry Hardy, Mr. T, you are a shining star.
    The heavens are warmed by your presence. You are a flower unfolding its petals.
    The universe is alive with your fragrance. You are a voice caressing the dawn.
    The silent spaces are filled with your joyous hope. This is your day! Live it
    in love because you are an expression of the life of God.

    —Mr.
    T,     Mr. T: The Man With The Gold. An Autobiography.
    St. Martin’s Press, 1984

     

    Talk Radio Explained

    I’ve been poking through this great book, African All Stars: The Pop
    Music of a Continent     (Chris Stapleton and Chris May) for several days, and
    last night I stumbled across the Yoruba word for radio, As’oromagb’esi,
    which is literally translated “One who speaks without expecting a
    reply.”

    Also, here’s a terrific quote from Ko Nimo, a Ghanaian musician: “The
    old people are my friends. I think of them as libraries on fire. They are
    passing away….as a musician you must be versed in the history of your
    people.”

     

    The Bush Bible

    …And you
    shall conquer every fortified city, and every choice city, and you shall fell
    every good tree, and stop up all springs of water, and ruin every good piece of
    land….

    —Second
    Kings, 3.19

     

    Elvis In Prophecy

    For Memphis shall become a
    waste, a ruin, without inhabitant.

    —Jeremiah,
    46.19

     

     

    The Gospel According to Red
    Sovine

    …For the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.

    —Ezekiel
    1.20

     

    Of the Frying Pan As An Instrument of Torture

    Mention is made of the frying pan in the Second Book of the Maccabees (Ch. VII) and in very many collections of the Acts of the Blessed Martyrs, as of St. Eleutherius the Bishop, Saints Fausta and Justina, virgins and martyrs.

    The
    frying pan –if we may trust the the natural meaning of the word and
    the afore-named histories of the Blessed Martyrs– was a wide open dish
    or plate, which (as the Acts of the Martyrs bear witness) was
    filled with oil, pitch, resin, or sulphur, and then set over a fire;
    and when it began to boil and bubble, then were Christians of either
    sex thrown into it, such as had persisted steadfastly and boldly in the
    profession of Christ’s faith, to the end they might be roasted and
    fried like fishes cast into boiling oil.

    –Rev. Antonio Gallonio, Tortures and Torments of the Christian Martyrs

     

    Madame Curie Dreams of Radium

    Whenever
    Pierre and Marie, alone in their poor place, left their apparatus for a moment
    and quietly let their tongues run on, their talk about their
    beloved radium passed from the transcendent to the childish.

    I wonder what it will be
    like, what it will look like    , Marie said one day with the feverish curiosity of
    a child who has been promised a toy. Pierre, what form do you imagine it will take?

    I don’t know, the physicist answered
    gently.

    To which Marie replied, I should like it to have a
    very beautiful color….

    –Eve
    Curie, from     Madame Curie

     

     

    Amish Recruitment Drive: Serious Replies Only

    Wanted: Able-bodied
    men and women to join ongoing, harshly-restrictive experiment in rural
    living. Requirements: severe dress code, piety, hard work, frugality,
    and facial hair for the gentlemen (with the understanding, of course,
    that one can’t get blood from a stone). Bee-keeping skills a plus.
    Absolutely no modern monkey business.

    –Classified advertisement, Grit. January 5, 1988

     

    Socrates: The Man Could Hold His Liquor

    And we are
    told that Socrates, though indifferent to wine, could, on occasion, drink more
    than anybody else, without ever becoming intoxicated.

    –Bertrand
    Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

     

     

    Adventures in Etymology

    How about this definition (from Cooper’s Thesaurus Linguae Romanae and Britannicae) for ‘fanatic,’ by way of the Latin fanaticus:
    ‘Ravished by a propheticall sprite’? And how can you not like a word like absquatulate,
    and wonder not just at its meaning but also it’s origins? (To make off,
    away, skedaddle     –one marvel to define another, and, as for origin, the
    experts throw up their arms). The etymology of abstruse couldn’t
    be more perfect: from the Latin abstrudere, to push away. And here is
    the lovely South African name for an antelope: klipspringer (cliff
    springer). Finally, I give you the Greek origins for testicles,
    translated literally as ‘bystanders.’

     

    Curiosities of Science

    …in the
    year 1639, a woman was delivered of two eggs at Sundby, one of which was sent
    to Olaus Worm the famous naturalist, with ‘attestation signed by
    Ericus Westergard, Rotalph Rakestad and Thor Venes, coadjutors of the pastor in
    the parish of Niaess.’

    They
    certified, that upon ‘the 20th of May in that year, by the command of the
    Lord President in Remerige, the lord Paulus Tranius pastor in Niaess, we went
    to receive an account of the monstrous birth in Sundby by Anna, the daughter of
    Amundus and wife of Gudbrandas Erlandsonius. Upon the 7th day of April she
    began to grow ill and her neighbors came to her assistance. She brought forth
    an egg like that of a hen which was broken by the women present. They found
    that in it the yolk and white answered directly to the common egg. Upon the
    18th of April, about noon, she was delivered of another egg, which in figure
    was nothing different than the former. The mother reported this to us and the
    woman with her confirmed the truth of it.’

    Dr. Olaus
    Worn, the ornament of the University, preserved the egg in his study to be seen
    of as many as please.

    This story is
    reminiscent of the case of Mary Tofts, ‘the rabbit-breeding woman,’ who deceived some of the
    leading physicians in the time of George II by her assertion that she had given
    birth to a number of living rabbits.

    —C.J.S.
    Thompson,     The Mystery and Lore of Monsters. 1930

     

    The Perils of Home Schooling

    We are a
    community theater whose players are comprised of home-schooled Southwest area
    children between the ages of five and eighteen, devoted to enriching the lives
    of our children and our neighborhoods through challenging and creative explorations of stories, ideas, and identities –in short, the very best of
    the theater arts. Our first offering of the 2003 season will be a performance
    of Harold Pinter’s The
    Homecoming    , with 11-year-old Tim Rickard in the role of Max, the aging patriarch
    of a dysfunctional London
    family.

    —From The Southwest Harbor
    Gazette    , June 14, 2003

     

     

    Auto-Eroticism: A Brief Reader

    Consider the
    serious psychic struggle that the onanists undergo before they yield to the
    temptation of going through the act. They surround themselves with a thousand
    oaths, they try to protect themselves with prayers and resolutions, etc. They
    are strongly determined not to fall again! If they must yield –this one time–
    let it be the last! And yet, in spite of all self-conjurations and in spite of
    all their resolutions, the instinctive craving persists within them and –there
    is a ‘next
    time,’ they
    yield once more; they slip back, again and again, in spite of everything. The
    spiritual katzenjammer of defeat naturally brings on a severe depression.

    A young man,
    23 years of age, showing all the typical signs of a severe neurosis confesses
    that for the past two years he has given up the habit of masturbation. Since
    that time he suffers from anxiety attacks and sleeplessness. Freud, as is well
    known, has pointed out that masturbators become victims of anxiety neurosis
    when they give up the habit. They become unable to live without masturbating.
    Any physician is able to verify this pertinent revelation. We find the most
    severe neuroses among those who give up the long-standing habit.

    *****

    [The female patient] was
    firmly convinced that indulgence in the habit had made her ill. She resolved to
    masturbate no longer and kept to her resolution for about three weeks…. Then
    she was amazed to find herself masturbating during a state of
    half-consciousness. Great was her horror, and she now feared going to sleep;
    she tied a bandage around her pelvic region, and woke up from sleep with a
    feeling of dread. Nevertheless her craving was supreme and she felt herself
    giving in. She could not bear the thought of confessing to her husband. He held
    so lofty a view of woman’s purity that he would have scorned her and
    possibly would have left her. But she loved him passionately and could not live
    without him. In her dilemma she decided she must die, took a large dose of
    veronal, and wrote her husband a parting letter, which I reproduce below as a
    touching document illustrating the depths of human suffering….

    My Beloved
    Otto,

    When you read
    this letter I won’t be among the living any more. I pay with death for my
    wrong. I cannot keep on under the burden of a terrible habit, while you held me
    to be a pure woman. So, therefore, know: since childhood I have practiced
    masturbation. The habit began during childhood and I have kept it up after
    marriage. Finding myself too weak to give up the habit, unaided, finding that
    the consequences of this terrible habit already begun to show themselves, and
    as I do not want to burden you with a sick wife, I part voluntarily and give up
    this life, though with heavy heart. Indeed, how shall I look you in the face,
    how shall I look my children in the face, when I find myself so badly dishonored
    and disgraced.

    No! I cannot
    stand this any longer. For the love you have so richly bestowed on me, I thank
    you. I wish you the company of a woman worthy of your confidence and love. Do
    find a woman worthy of you. Kiss our dear children for me. It is hardest to
    part from you.

    Forgive me. I
    cannot help it.

    My last sighs
    go out to you.

    Yours,

    _______

    An
    examination of this case reveals two important facts: first, that ideas of
    suicide bear a certain relationship to masturbation….

    Suicide
    represents merely the extreme consequence of abstinence. It is possible to
    construct a scale, approximately as follows: anxiety neurosis, hypochondria,
    moodiness, depression, melancholia, suicide. From the day masturbation is given
    up life ceases to be worth while….These cases demonstrate to our satisfaction
    that many persons are unable to live without masturbating and that they would
    rather renounce living altogether than try to get along without their customary
    gratification.

    Attempt at
    suicide through the abuse of masturbation is by no means rare; it is a
    particularly frequent occurrence in jails. This form of self-annihilation
    I have called ‘chronic suicide.’

    –From Wilhelm Stekl’s Auto-Eroticism. 1950

     

  • From the Wayback Machine: My Brief History of Magic

    Elmer Gylleck was a Chicago architect who did a bumbling
    comedy-magic act built around a character he called Dr. Clutterhouse. Dr. Clutterhouse would come on stage clutching a briefcase and carrying
    an umbrella. The briefcase was possessed, full of odd spirits; ghosts
    would fly from it, and gunshots would ring out whenever Clutterhouse
    opened the thing. When the briefcase wasn’t bedeviling him, the Doctor
    would be having table problems (he invented a wonderful collapsing
    table prop) or any of a number of other slapstick scenarios that were
    reliable crowd pleasers. Gylleck had a nice, clean act, with solid
    magic chops and plenty of laughs. Very influential. I’ve seen I don’t
    know how many third-rate Clutterhouse knock-offs over the years.

    In the ’60s there was a shift, and the theatrically baroque Clutterhouse sort of thing pretty much disappeared. There were all of a sudden these balloon workers all over
    town. A guy named Jim Davis was working Old Town, making thousands of
    balloon animals a week and drawing crowds and making lots of money.
    This fella was actually pretty good. He’d make giraffes, elephants, all
    sorts of interesting stuff. He actually wrote a useful little book on
    the subject —One Balloon Zoo, I think it was called. And
    there was another guy, Jack Dennerlein, an ad-man who also did good
    balloon work –tremendous birds– and he did a book, New Twists For Balloon Workers.
    Don Allen was one more Chicago magician who cashed in on the whole
    balloon thing. He’d gotten his start, I seem to remember, as a
    bartender who did magic tricks for the customers, which is something I
    don’t believe you see much anymore. Which is really a shame, because
    little pocket and card tricks are things that can help a bartender pick
    up a few extra tips, not to mention the occasional private party or
    corporate gig on the side. Anyway, I think Don Allen did a book on
    balloon tricks as well, Don Allen‘s Balloon Work…or, no, it was Don Allen‘s Rubber Circus. That’s right. That’s exactly what it was.

    For a long time I was kicking around the idea of doing a little book
    of my own, something more like a history of balloon work, maybe even a
    historical overview of balloons in general, but to be honest with you
    it just seemed like too much fucking work. Steve Martin, of course, had
    some wild early success with balloon work. Everybody knows Steve
    Martin, but guys like Jim Davis and Jack Dennerlein are pretty much
    forgotten.

    When I graduated from college I used to hang out at magic shops,
    great old places like Magic, Inc. in Chicago, or Eagle Magic in
    Minneapolis. I was never really much of a magician myself; I didn’t
    really have the discipline to get much beyond the hobbyist stage. But I
    always loved the whole culture of magic, and for a number of years I saw as
    many magicians as I could, and for a time I got steady, small-paying
    work writing patter lines for a number of magicians around the Midwest.
    I also did a short-lived newsletter that ran profiles of regional
    magicians, history pieces, a patter column, and a lot of
    advertisements for mail order gags and pocket tricks. We had quite an
    impressive roster of subscribers and the thing made money on a
    shoestring, but it just got to be too much work for me, and I’ll be the
    first guy to admit that work has never been my strong suit.

    When it comes to magic buffs I’m kind of an oddball in that I’m
    happy as a fucking clam if I have no idea how a guy did what he just
    did, if you see what I’m saying. I don’t want to know. I still like to
    be fooled. That’s the appeal of it for me. I want to be one of the
    slack-jawed yokels in the crowd, shaking my head in dumb amazement. I
    like the history more than the how-to; the history of magic is full of
    tremendous characters, genuine oddballs, and, frankly, a number of guys
    who were crazy as shithouse rats. I like a magician who has a spooky
    little something in his eyes; the very look of the guy should raise a
    few questions in the mind of the audience. If the guy’s already got you
    wondering before he’s even done a single trick, well, hey boy, he’s
    got you right where he wants you.

    Magic’s an amazing thing. The same basic repertoire of tricks has
    been baffling and entertaining people for generations, and precisely
    because the majority of the people in the audience feel exactly like I do –they
    don’t want to know how all those old tricks are done. Which is why
    you’ll still see these characters in tuxedos doing tricks with scarves
    and pigeons, and sawing women in half and pulling rabbits out of hats.
    If Joe Blow really wanted to he could figure out how every one of these
    tricks is accomplished with one visit to a library or a little poking around on the internet, but he doesn’t want
    to. And that’s a beautiful thing. That’s the real magic.

    The other thing I like to tell people is that magic is a whole lot
    more than just the usual elaborate smoke and mirrors productions you see
    so often these days. A great magician can still blow your mind with
    nothing but a quarter or a deck of cards. I remember Max Holden, a hand
    shadow artist who could hold an audience and mesmerize them every bit
    as effectively as these guys who move Winnebagos or make elephants
    disappear. I never did figure out how Holden did his famous "Monkey in
    the Bellfry" number. And for my money there’s still nothing better than
    a real professional close-up man like Milton Kort, a cups- and-balls
    fella who was also a virtuoso with coins and a deck of cards. A man like that
    could fool and entertain an audience in even the most casual and
    intimate of settings.

    Another terrific old
    balloon performer who I should mention just came to mind: Jim Sommers, who used to do a
    routine with balloon animals at the Pickle Barrel North in Chicago, and
    also, I seem to recall, did his own little book on balloon magic, Blow By Blow.

    I’ve also seen some dandy cigarette acts in my time. That sort of thing is, of course, taboo these days,
    what with attitudes about smoking being what they are. But I still
    remember a fat redhead –for some damn reason I can’t recall the
    fellow’s name to save my soul– who did a masterful bit he eventually
    marketed to the trade with the high-falutin’ title, "Ireland Simplex
    Cigarette Production." And then there was Ed Marlo’s brilliant "Cigars,
    Cigarettes, and Pipes" routine, which I saw a half dozen times in the
    early ’70s. That guy did things with a cigarette I still can’t believe
    are possible. As I was saying, I’ve always admired a man who can work
    without fancy props, stooges, or floozies.

    And despite what some of the Bible-bangers might think, magic
    doesn’t have to be at odds with the teachings of the Good Book. I have
    fond memories of a fellow by the name of Joseph White, a magician who
    called himself "God’s Magical Midget." This guy did an entire act built
    around Bible stories and religious lessons. A very effective little
    production all around, a dynamite show, and I’ll be the first to admit
    that I’m not exactly a holy man. A fellow who could learn to perform basic
    routines with a Biblical theme or religious patter was guaranteed
    steady work at chuch functions, socials, and Bible schools.

    I still remember when "Industrial Magic" was a new concept, and guys
    were learning that they could use magic presentations to sell product.
    In the mid-’60s it seemed like every trade show, convention, sales
    meeting, and grand opening featured a magic act. It was damn good
    business all around until the bottom pretty much fell out of the whole
    thing. These days they hire motivational speakers or they get
    half-dressed broads to stand around their booths to hand out
    promotional materials.

    I have a precise memory of the very moment magic first got me in its
    clutches. I was at a little carnival somewhere with my grandparents,
    and there was an aging illusionist who broke a slab of granite over the
    body of a purportedly catalepsed subject who was suspended from the backs of two
    chairs.

    "Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Human Bridge!" the old magician shouted, and then he swung his sledge hammer.

    This was a long time ago, of course, and I think what I saw that night was magic. Like I say, though, that’s the beauty of the racket. All these years later I still don’t know, but I remember that moment like it was yesterday.

  • There Is No Bottom. There Is Simply —Or Not So Simply— the End

    There is another kind of sleep,

    We are talking in it now.

    As children we walked in it, a mile to school,

    And dreamed we dreamed we dreamed.

    —James Galvin, from "Hematite Lake"

    Maris Gomes was very young when he went to sea for the first time, and not much older –still much too young– when the boat on which he was working was capsized in a storm and he swallowed seawater and rolled for hours slowly toward the ocean floor.

    He remembered next to nothing about the moments and hours after he was thrown into the cold ocean. He wasn’t even sure; he may have jumped; he may have had no choice. His last clear memory of the experience was of watching one of his shipmates, a boy not much older than himself named Scruggs Colvin, clinging to some piece of debris from the wreck and drifting out of view, his shouts quickly swallowed up by the darkness and driving rain.

    Maris had been surprised to discover that there were angels in the ocean, living in the ruins of an old shipwreck out of which they had constructed a sort of cathedral of light.

    When the angels first came for him –there were five of them, all young and more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen– Maris had assumed they were mermaids. After a moment, though, there was no mistaking what they were: they had wings, and their flowing hair was haloed with pulsing light. They also had bare feet, and when they kicked their feet the bubbles they created were infused with golden light as well.

    In the time that followed –and Maris had no idea how long it might have been– he was given to understand that the human soul would perish in salt water; it could not escape a drowned body, and the job of the underwater angels was to ferry these drowned souls to the surface for release.

    Among those living in the ruins of the shipwreck there was one very young and inexperienced angel named Doon, and this angel fell immediately in love with Maris, and he with her. This sort of thing was not only discouraged, of course, but was strictly forbidden. Doon was headstrong, however, and in every translucent fiber of her being she was convinced that she and Maris had lived together in a long-ago forest and were fated to spend eternity at the bottom of the sea.

    For his part, Maris regarded Doon as the loveliest creature he had ever seen.

    Doon implored the other angels to allow Maris to stay with her, yet they remained insistent that she release him and let them take his soul to the surface so it could begin its rightful journey. This Doon stubbornly refused to do –in her brief life on earth she had known no great love– and she somehow managed to spirit away a fully compliant Maris to another shipwreck, where together they hid from the other angels and did nothing but hold each other –their bodies tangled like the braid of a parade horse’s tail– and tell stories.

    Doon told Maris she was not so keen on Heaven. "There are no thunderstorms," she said. "No mice. No tears of joy or sorrow. Angels feel only the small, tsk-tsking pity of those who have found safe haven in God’s arms. Heaven sometimes seems smug to me, and I miss being dirty. It is not as beautiful, sad, and various as the world."

    The lovers, alas, were soon enough discovered, and for her disobedience Doon was recalled straightaway to Heaven.

    And it was only then, as he was wrenched from his beloved, that Maris Gomes finally and truly drowned.

    By this point, and much to the satisfaction of the other angels, his soul was deemed beyond retrieval.