The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep

Copying this list; thanks. The Illuminatus Trilogy is a big one for Velma. I am getting obsessive about Westlake, whose deft touch with dialogue and mood reminds me of Wodehouse. I have God Save the Mark, but haven't read it yet.

In the spirit of Westlake: the mystery novels of Neal Barrett, Jr, especially the Wiley Moss mysteries. Skinny Annie Blues is a good place to start. Written in a laconic drawl, frequently veering into the seriously loopy:

"You drink that shit, you might as well guzzle a can of toxic waste. Worst thing you can do to yourself."

"I don't drink very many," I said. "Mostly on the plane."

"That's good."

"Giselle's bought a juicer. We do a lot of that."

Chicken Man blinked. "You do what?"

"I said we drink a lot of juice."

"What kinda juice?"

"All kinds of juice. Carrots and celery. Tomatoes and beets..."

"Holy Christ." Chicken Man looked pained. He took a big slug of his drink, and wiped the spot where his chin ought to be. "That's worse than the goddam chemical cola you're swigging down. Juice'll shorten your fuckin' life."

I grinned to let him know we were having fun with this. He didn't grin back.

"That crap's loaded with carotene and phosphorus, all kinds of poisons produced by your vegetables and fruit. You eat a carrot or a beet, they start sodomizing your amino acids and sucking vital parts. Pretty soon you got a pathogenic circus down there, you got your hyped-up veggies multiplying like third world niggers in your gut. What you got in there is your mutant molecules."

"Listen," I said, "it's pretty clear to me you're full of shit. I hope you don't take offense at that."

(. . .)

The guy laughed. "I even =see= you anywhere close I will piss in your eye. I'll decay every tooth in your head."

"Jesus," I said, "what's the matter with you?"

"Isn't nothing wrong with me, dick ear."

"Something's the matter with you. What do you want, anyway?"

"I don't want a goddamn thing."

"You called to tell me that."

"Shit foot."

"What?"

"I said--"

"I heard what you said and it doesn't make any sense at all. You can't just string words together any way you like. They've got to mean something, you know? Something's got to go with something else--"

"Belly bugger," he said.

"Sissy wart fuck," I said, and hung up.

If you've read Thorne Smith at all, it was probably Topper. Some of his tone hasn't worn well, and subsequently much of his work languishes out of print; but The Night Life of the Gods remains in print (I believe), and is hilarious from start to finish:

"Don't try to get around me," she answered, "and don't be lewd. Talk to the Billingsley woman that way if you want, but if you do I'll cut your tongue out. You've gotten me into an awful fix. I'm going to be a mother . . . and my child will have no name. I'll make you pay for this through the nose, just see if I don't."

"If you succeed," Mr Hawk replied, "you'll have discovered a new source of revenue. Anyway, about that having a baby business, it's all a lie."

"What if it is?" she answered hotly. "I might have a baby -- I might have a flock of babies, great seething litters of them for all you care. You don't have babies. I have babies."

"I understand, dear." Mr Hawk's voice was placatory. "I didn't claim I had babies. You have babies."

"I don't have babies," Meg replied furiously. "Never had a baby in my life, but I wish to God you'd have some -- wish you'd have a cartload."

"I'd do anything to be agreeable, but having a cartload of babies, or even a small carriage full, is out of my line altogether."

"That's it!" she exclaimed. "That's it! Just like a big hulking brute of a man. You go round giving people lots of babies and then wash your hands of them. What are we going to do with all these babies? I ask you that -- what are we going to do?"

The small creature looked tragically about her, as if literally surrounded by babies. Wherever Mr Hawk's eyes rested he could see a small bald head. He was lost on a sea of babies, the immensity of which dazed him.

"How," he asked rather wearily, "how did so many babies get into the conversation?"

"What conversation?"

"I don't know even that."

(. . . )

Mr Hawk was too deeply involved with a large, flowing beard to which he was attached to reply.

"I'm afraid we'll have to sacrifice several inches of this damn thing," he told Betts. "It's getting all tangled up in the steering gear."

"Tie it behind your ears," Meg suggested rudely.

"You might button it under your vest, sir," Betts offered with admirable gravity.

"There are a number of things I might do with it," Mr Hawk replied slowly and bitterly. "I might take it off and hang it on the radiator. I might stuff it under the seat or build a bonfire with it. I might decide simply not to wear the beard. The possibilities of this beard are endless, and your suggestions are not helpful." Over the rim of this startling disguise he peered passionately at them. His face seemed to be all eyes and beard, which, as a matter of fact, it was. It cannot be said that the beard had improved him, but it had made him a different man, so different as hardly to look human at all. "All that I want to do with this beard," he continued, "is to sit quietly and unobtrusively behind it and to drive speedily out of this state into New York City. After that I don't very much give a damn what becomes of the beard. You can raffle off the beard. You can take the beard to an art dealer or have it framed. The beard can be used to stuff a pillow with a picture of Niagara Falls on it. Or if you can think of nothing better to do with the beard, you can thriftily roll it up in mothballs and tuck it away in a trunk in the attic." He paused and looked searchingly at Betts and Meg. "Now," he added, "I hope you no longer feel that I need any further damn fool suggestions regarding the use and ultimate disposition of this beard." Another heavy pause. "I trust it is clear to you that I don't want to wear this beard. It's not a thing I naturally run to. This beard is most offensive to me. I wish to God you were both wearing one exactly like it." Mr Hawk appeared to have said all he was going to say about the beard.

The thoughtful silence that followed was broken by the hopeful voice of Mr Betts.

"Would you like me to carry one beard, sir," he asked, "so as you could snap it on when you needed it? That would give your chin a chance to air out a bit."

Hawk shrank hatefully in his seat but still endeavored to control his anger.

"Think, Betts," he said in a cold, level voice, "think of what
you're asking. Try to picture the thing to yourself. You are carrying the beard, let us say. I am driving at fifty miles an hour. A motorcycle policeman approaches -- rapidly. I cry out, 'The beard, Betts, the beard!' You pass it forward to me. I stop the car and hastily attempt to don the beard. People stop and look. A small boy jeers. Laughter is heard. I grow confused. In the meantime the policeman arrives. He looks at me in a strange way. 'What is that?' he asks, pointing a soiled finger at the beard jumping in my hand as if impatient to be attached. 'It's a beard,' I answer, not because I want to, but because it's the only thing it could be. He looks at me more closely. A smile of satisfaction touches his cruel lips. I shrink back and wonder to myself, 'What on earth am I going to do with this beard?' Then the policeman speaks. He says, 'Well, you and your beard come along with me,' and he adds, 'and no monkey business.' Now, Betts, do you understand how unintelligent your suggestion was? I hope we shall hear no more about this beard."

Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is an acerbic pinnacle, as cranky a novel as I've ever read. It is coldly observed and passionately written.

I have said that Lou willed himself into poetry. How this came about is a long and involved story. Let it stand that he did so. At first, the poems were shown to friends, or kept to himself, but later he began to publish them in little magazines. He was a poet. I would guess that William Carlos Williams was responsible for this in the way that George Herriman might be held responsible for Roy Lichtenstein. These masters cannot be blamed for the aberrant desires of a minority of the populace.

It comes down to: "Hell, I can do that too." And you're off. If things fall right, you'll be accepted after a few years, and take your place among that great body of useless grinds who won't for a minute stop expressing themselves. Borrow, borrow, you can get into Williams and get the very names of shrubs and wilflowers into your work -- anything but the terror that dominates your own life. Lou's thinking went, perhaps, like this: If I avoid the demons that maraud through my intelligence, I'll write poems that are acceptable. I'll always know that when the time comes I'll confront these demons and out of that confrontation will come great poetry. The next step however is more difficult and can lead to total destruction. That is: the confrontation with the demons does not necessarily lead to the creation of great art (or any art at all). You can writhe in the darkest pit and filth of yourself and come up with some dull fragment of =vers libre=, indistinguishable from that of a hundred contemporaries. Thus pain does not guarantee anything. Art, you see, is not interested in your suffering. It is not a muse. Look at Robert Graves -- all that palaver about his Goddess, and all those third rate poems. What is one to do with all that chatter?

But Lou is our man here. What about Lou? Answer: he wants to live a simple life and be a brilliant ppoet. These things do not go together. (I know I am on the thin ice of romanticism here.) That simple life. I mean, Lou was one of those who though enviously of men who lived -- all of the year, or most of it anyway -- in the woods, or the mountains, or at the beach, etc, etc. That was the simple life. There they were, sturdy with boots, pipes, and notebooks, chopping wood for the fire, observing birds, checking out the sunset, the sunrise, the changing seasons. Shrewd and loving observations of their neighbors, who had finally after all this time come to regard them as acceptable, etc, etc. Nauseating stuff. These dolts keep these enormous notebooks in which they tell us city slickers all about nature, and their lives in Maine, or Big Sur, or Colorado, or some other goddamned place, full of trees and the rest of the stuff of poesie. God, what a fucking bore it all is. They lead the simple life, they note all this trash down in those damned notebooks. "Observe the turning of the leaves." "What bird call was that I heard this morning in the icy stillness?" Arrghh. "Today I finally got the old stump out. Celebrated with a half-pint of applejack." And we read this swill. Not one year goes by but some little magazine runs excerpts from one of these "wood journals" by a poet -- there is also a small collection of his verse in the same issue. The poems have titles like: "Top of Pink Tit Mt.: Cold Beans." And we sit choking on the polluted air of divers cities, marveling at the freedom that can open the world of such verse to its practitioner. Simplicity! The simple life! It was what Lou wanted -- or thought he wanted, Simple life. Brilliant poet. With demons in reserve for his later years, when he could haul them out and write his Great Poems of Maturity. If somehow Sheila could be fitted in, i.e., if she would be a Good Wife, that would be fine too. Lou was one of those men who confused passing happiness or misery with the sources of art. The world is full of them. When one disaster or ecsatsy is over, they turn to another. The war in Vietnam has spawned a thousand poets. They think their rage and impotence will make the poem. It is a banal truism that all the occasional poet needs to write a poem is an occasion. There is no lack of them in the world. That picayune poetic charge galvanized by a new friend, another storm, some red barn somewhere, anything.

These are great, Scraps. Particularly the Sorrentino, who I've never, I confess, read at all. Although the Thorne Smith is lovely too -- the bit about the beard sounds like it could have come right out of Flann O'Brien.

Well, I'm confident I've heard of "Mumbo-Jumbo," because it was assigned in a college class. The professor hated it enough, though, that he promised there would be nothing from it on the final, and I never read it.

I'm also confident that you DO know more about great classic books than I do.

My five will be unabashed ass-kissing.

1) "A Stolen Tongue" - finally read it this year, and it's great. I'm on the lookout for "The Mammoth Cheese."

2) "No Wave" - not a novel, but a book by Marc Masters that just came out that I heard about from herbivorous, about that music genre.

3) "'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy" - a triumph of the human spirit. I say without hyperbole that if I could somehow replace my very life blood with this book, I'd do it.

4) the unpublished book the wombat has somewhere.

5) "Digging to America" by Anne Tyler. OK, everybody who's more well-read than me has probably read it, even though they look down their nose at Anne Tyler. It's not exactly "unknown territory." But I think she's underrated as a writer just because her books are such effortless reads. Besides, I'm totally close personal friends with her.

And I make no excuses - I buy all my books at Barnes and Noble.

boxjam, I just assumed that everyone here has multiple copies of Quality is Not an Adjective: The Collected Boxjam's Doodle (Meat Council Press, 2007). Otherwise it totally kicks Antonia White's butt.

Also, Gavin has a more recent triumph of the human spirit.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780307346032&itm=3

I personally shredded a few copies and replaced my lifeblood with them. I have trouble getting oxygen to my vital organs now (I'm hoping the revised edition has more hemoglobin).

I sure don't look down on Anne Tyler. I could put A Slipping-Down Life on a list like this.

I have self-esteem issues.

The Amateur Marriage is pretty good, too. Although that one sold too well for me to imagine it listed amongst the above.

This, by the way, is why there isn't more nonfiction on the list above. It's not that I don't love nonfiction; but I couldn't think of many great recommendations of books that don't already have pretty strong reputations.

Leslie Marmon SIlko's Almanac of the Dead contains a 500-year map (I love novels with maps) of a borderless Native America and dozens of interlocking characters (I love dozens of characters).

Jame's Welch's Winter in the Blood is a spare, eerie existential tale of Montana reservation life.

I like edge-dwellers: Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me; Emmett Grogan's Ringolevio; Raymond Mungo's Total Loss Farm & Diane DiPrima's Memoirs of a Beatnik. These are the books I read over and over in high school. These are the books that made me leave home at 16 and start hitchhiking all over the place. I don't meet a lot of people who have read them though.

For non fiction, I like guides to trees and animal tracks, the small, palmsized ones. Don't remember who prints them.

Aw, shucks. You guys are too kind.

I've read three of Bill's list (the Westlake, the Carson, and the Reed); don't know if that makes me an outlier or not.

Will cook up a few suggestions of my own shortly....

More cheers for Westlake over here, whom I can be tiresome in advocating for, so I'm glad I didn't have to.

A few other books that I've pressed on people over the last few years, not necessarily obscure:

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas. Just an amazing tour de force stylistically--halfway through, I assumed there was no way he could pull the whole thing off (but he does).

Robert Caro, the three volumes of his LBJ biography. A gripping study of how power is gained and used.

Barry Hughart, Bridge of Birds. A charming novel in the form of a Chinese folk tale.

Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs SF novels, starting with Altered Carbon, which is a hardboiled murder-mystery not hindered by the fact that technology allows people to resurrect themselves.

Two comics:
Dylan Horrocks, Hicksville. A sweet fantasia of a comics-loving town in New Zealand.

Max Andersson, Pixy. An Eastern-European journey into the land of the dead. Twisted and funny as hell.

And if we're pimping friends' books, I would be remiss not to mention Rob Sheffield's wonderful and sad Love Is a Mix Tape.

People are always wrong about why I recommend "Under the Skin," and miss most everything that's great about it. That's the only one on this list I've read. Was trying to think of what I might add myself. "Cloud Atlas" was a fun read. I'm a big fan of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and will immerse myself in that again soon enough, I suspect. Ruth Rendell's 'Adam and Eve and Pinch Me' is a book that has really stuck with me since I read it. Rendell's best known as a mystery writer, and there's a crime in this one, though no mystery to it for the reader, and no detectives involved.