Each year around this time Munich and its Oktoberfest seems to get a bit of attention in the media. I’ve only been to Munich twice and Oktoberfest one time, but I’m a big fan. Ironically, I managed to get an invite into a festival beerhall tent from some Irish residents of Munich and not my German friends. The wonderful tilt-shift video below is from Joerg Daiber of Little Big World who compiled some great footage of the city and its festival in miniature.
“By the Numbers”
by
Hob Broun
[1]
THEY WORKED AT THE enclosed mall in King of Prussia. They wore plastic nametags, the corporate logo above a deep groove accommodating a Dymo label. Jenelle for the record store, Courtney for the bookstore. They had received reprimands for lateness.
[2]
Dinner is interesting. The plastic bag doesn’t melt in the boiling water. You cut off the top with scissors and lobster Newburg comes out.
From the paper: “Dartmouth Warnell, 19, of North Philadelphia, while attempting to escape from police custody, was shot and killed in the parking lot of the Afro-American Cultural Museum. A warrant for driving-while-suspended had been outstanding.”
The table is a phone company cable spool which occasionally insinuates a splinter. The
VCR format is unchic: Beta. The movie from the rental store traces an anchorwoman who finally turns into a werewolf on the air. They’ve seen it before.
[3]
Saturdays there are special events at the mall. It could be a ho-ho banjo band in red vests and sleeve garters. Or a begonia club. Or a cat show. There might be Cub Scouts all over the place. Everyone seems to put in the extra effort on a Saturday. Their jaws ache from smiling.
[4]
Courtney and Jenelle together in a bath. Pubic hair is ugly, but they’re afraid to shave. Many products for the hair, each based on a wholesome foodstuff. Plastic bottles bobbing.
J: I wish my toes were long and thin like yours.
[4A]
Courtney and Jenelle in a stall shower, embracing in soap foam. Why they’re late all the time. Mist.
[4B]
Courtney and Jenelle washing clothes by the Orinoco. (Black-and-white, dubbed.)
C: Why can’t I get my skirts as bright as yours?
J: You’re not beating them hard enough.
Rising smoke in the distance, music of chain saws.
[5]
She had enough imagination to feel molten plastic when she took the albums from the carton. These were red mostly, with lettering in white. There was a song about land reform, another about mascara. She thought of wearing leather next to the skin.
“Where would I find language instruction tapes?” She shelved the travel guides in overstock, felt once more this alien regret at not being able to type. Letters to show the way. Orange signs in her sightline: Romance Cooking Health & Fitness. She thought about her eyes in someone else’s face on posters all over town.
“Do you have How to Avoid Probate?”
[6]
Jenelle’s mother lives by herself in Cherry Hill in a house that’s almost paid for. Dad is trying to make a cleaning service go in south Alabama; he calls often, seems not to be doing well. She has brown hair, type O blood, allergies to shellfish and aluminum foil.
Courtney’s mother is Japanese, a war bride. Her father died last summer of asbestosis. Her brother is in his third year of biochemistry at Drexel. She is right-handed, underweight, wears glasses to correct a mild astigmatism.
[7]
They could be married to men like sleds on rails: top ten percent of the class, membership in a rowing club, an ability to anticipate currency fluctuations. They could be plain in Quaker bonnets, humming as they card wool, shaded sweetly by belief.
[7A]
Rod turned back to her in his belted leather coat of a too-shiny material that was not leather. His wide dark eyes glistened with forgiveness. Courtney inhaled the coat’s laboratory musk as he gathered her up in his arms.
[7B]
Jenelle heard the whispers in passing, her gray skirts brushing the cobbles, the black book cradled in her hand. She had broken the silence in fear, but her quiet simple words had then seemed to lift all eyes in the meetinghouse.
[8]
Was it a party? Jenelle is lying in bed, cold cucumber slices balanced on her face. She has unplugged the stereo, forbidden music. Wondering if he really will phone tonight, Courtney wishes for an interesting birthmark. Someone downstairs is raking leaves. Jenelle has an enema and feels better.
J: Why don’t we have towels that match? With our initials intertwined in a contrasting color?
C: I don’t know.
[o]
Strollers were unconsciously arranged around the fountain; the mothers could not wake their children. Earring Emporium had not had a customer all day. An NCR repairman set down his tool kit and wandered aimlessly. The sound track was muddy for Cinema III’s matinee. A man with no family bought a badminton set and charged it. An aquarium burst spontaneously at Petsateria; there was a brief waterfall over jagged glass, and then little flips on the carpet….
Courtney took the taped package out from behind the stockroom fire extinguisher. Her mouth was dry. The package felt funny. Too heavy? Too light? She was late for the rendezvous….
Jenelle put the mustard on her pretzel left-to-right, signing everything was go. Slowly, as if browsing, they moved toward the Westgate exit, past Jeans World, Muffy’s, the Cookie Castle. They were being followed. The two men wore state trooper glasses and trim black chin beards, but weren’t as young as they thought. Were they DEA? Libyans? No hesitation. Jenelle took the silver gun from under her rabbit jacket and gave each one two in the face. JFK time, brains on a pink dress….
Courtney and Jenelle hydroplaning in a white Camaro, spinning across three lanes of expressway, coming out of it and going harder on. The windshield a gray boil. Hiss of the police-band radio. Swerving headlights. The needle edging past 100….
“Don’t you read?” Courtney said.
“No, I’ve finished school.”
“Read and you’d know nothing ever happens to us. Just these little vignettes we’re not even aware of.”
“You mean it?”
“Anyway they do.”
“Okay.”
Jenelle threw the package out the window, bit off the tip of the silver barrel. The gun was made of wax and contained a thin lime syrup.
[—1]
Courtney and Jenelle in a cemetery with hoagies. From this elevation it is possible to see a white church, the empty river. New shoots of grass are just starting. The air is soft, receptive to the least aroma trace. Starlings forage between grave aisles, behind bronze-doored crypts. Oil trickles over Courtney’s lip. Jenelle catches it on her finger.
C: I wish we were in our eighties and could look back.
J: Me too.
[oo]
What then do we want words for?
The tab on a file.
To say this was in Pennsylvania, during the second term of Reagan.
I am slightly nonplussed by the idea that I didn’t know anything about the extraordinary life of the late writer Hob Broun until I stumbled on the short story above. Hob Broun (born Heywood Orren Broun; 1950 – December 16, 1987) was an author who was born in New York City, but lived and wrote in Portland, Oregon. Following the publication of his first novel, Odditorium, Broun required spinal surgery to remove a tumor that ultimately saved his life but resulted in his paralysis from the neck down. Remarkably, he finished a second novel–and wrote the stories in Cardinal Numbers–using a kind of writing-machine: an oral catheter (or ‘sip-and-puff device’) connected to a customised word processor, triggered by his breath whenever a letter flashed on the screen. Using this technology, he completed a second novel, Inner Tube, and wrote the short stories contained in a posthumously published collection entitled Cardinal Numbers which was edited by Gordon Lish and which won an Oregon Book Award in 1989. He was working on a third novel when he died of asphyxiation after his respirator broke down in his home in Portland, Oregon. He was thirty-seven years old.
Those of you who stop by TBTP regularly know that I’m a big fan of public transit and clever transit advertising. The short video below from Denmark ticks all of the boxes and best of all it features a great soundtrack by the incomparable Chrissie Hynde.
Like most U.S. students of my generation I was introduced to the work of Shirley Jackson through her story “The Lottery.” A small town in Vermont is the setting for “The Lottery,” and the town square where the locals gather to ritually stone to death one of their citizens was based on the square in North Bennington where the author lived. Jackson told one friend the story was about anti-Semitism, a prejudice she felt keenly in North Bennington.
My personal favorite from Jackson is We Have Always Lived in the Castle. In that novel, Jackson embodies two aspects of her personality into two eccentric, damaged sisters: one hypersensitive and frightened, unable to leave the house, the other a sort of devious prankster who may or may not have murdered the rest of her family for her fragile sister’s sake.
But it seems that when October rolls around each year all that folks remember is Jackson’s supernatural tale The Haunting of Hill House. According to Laura Miller’s excellent introduction to the 2006 Penguin Classic edition, “Like all good ghost stories, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House sets a trap for its protagonist.”
Shirley Jackson wrote about the mundane evils hidden in everyday life and about the warring and subsuming of selves in a family, a community and sometimes even in a single mind. She wrote about prejudice, neurosis and identity. An unfortunate impression persists (one Jackson encouraged, for complicated reasons) that her work is full of ghosts and witches. In truth, few of her greatest stories and just one of her novels, The Haunting of Hill House, contain a suggestion of genuinely supernatural events. Jackson’s forté was psychology and society, people in other words — people disturbed, dispossessed, misunderstanding or thwarting one another compulsively, people colluding absently in monstrous acts. She had a jeweler’s eye for the microscopic degrees by which a personality creeps into madness or a relationship turns from dependence to exploitation.
You can read more about Jackson and The Haunting of Hill House here.
MUSHROOMS
by Sylvia Plath
Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,
Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!
We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.
It’s always a bit serendipitous when one randomly discovers a blog post on a book that transports one right back to childhood. This copy of ROBIN HOOD by Paul Creswick. (Philadelphia: McKay, 1917), illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, was one of the volumes in my tiny personal library. I also owned well-worn copies of Treasure Island, Rip Van Winkle, Robinson Crusoe, The Mysterious Island, and The Yearling, all illustrated by Wyeth. Each of the books was a flea market find that often had significant wear, but I treasured them nonetheless.
“The Nobel Prize”
by
Robert Walser
translated by Tom Whalen
Today, thank God, I’m back in the pink again, which I definitely deserve because I’m a nice person. How was it for me yesterday? I was emotionally ill. Full of thoughts, I ran about vehemently and at the same time galled. And why was that? I believed my colleague Hopeful had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. A notice in the paper had fooled me. How gullible I am! I took my countryman High-hope for the happiest person and myself in consequence for the unhappiest. I imagined all the pretty girls had already composed the most talented satirical poems about me. Yet nevertheless, with what strength, what grandeur I conducted myself! With what composure I strode forth. I can barely describe it. In any case I’m satisfied with myself. I had received an apparently hard blow, but inwardly I did not refuse, not even for a minute, to accept the perfidy of fate. This morning I checked and learned that Persistence, not Hopeful, had received the Nobel Prize. Persistence is someone whom I do not begrudge the honor. The sensations one has. Regarding my dear compatriot Hopejoy, I can calm myself. This pleases me, and since I’m full of joy, I can allow myself to be seen again. Yesterday I thought I had become impossible to my countrymen. Thankfully this unpleasant notion had to retreat. My friend Hopeful is at work. I want to be as well. I can now. I’m capable of this anew. To the same extent that Persistence was crowned with the Nobel Prize, I am crowned with the most cheerful serenity. Yesterday I was like a snapped-off plant, while today I’m a sturdy tree. What illusions can do to us! Brain power, you’re weird! Now that this Nobel Prize business no longer weighs on me, how noble I seem. Yes, the world is gay and serious.
“Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.'” Ernest Hemingway
Like millions of other J.R.R. Tolkien fans I have been transfixed by the new televised adaptation of the Middle Earth saga. Waiting for the next episode to drop, I searched out a wonderful set of recordings of Tolkien reading from his beloved classic The Hobbit.
In 1952, a friend of J.R.R. Tolkien showed him a tape recorder, which the author had never seen before. Delighted, Tolkien sat for his friend and read from The Hobbit for 30 minutes “in this one incredible take”. The audio is split between these two videos (with visuals and music added later).
NB: If the videos fail to launch, please visit our homepage.
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