Notes and Remixed Notes on "A Monster's Notes"

Still Alive!
Some Notes on Laurie Sheck's "A Monster's Notes"

To call something "notes" means it isn't finished.

A preparation for something else, or a work in progress.

Or

It means I know this is less than perfect. It means the piecemeal composition is acknowledged, should be applauded.

"And to my horror (for I had read the books which now all but crowded us out of the apartment) I discovered I knew nothing whatever about the grueling, mundane business of making form out of fragments." -- Frederick Exley, "A Fan's Notes"

"Form connotes and carries with it expectation." -- Ander Monson, "Fragments: On Dentistry"

It means this is less than perfect, and hence more real. The crude shape a virtue. The rough edges. Texture over all.

In Laurie Sheck's novel, "A Monster's Notes" (Alfred A. Knopf: 544 pp., $28), Victor Frankenstein's creation is alive and well and living in New York.

Mary Shelley's creation has come unstuck in time. He lives in New York or did until recently. He passes Tower Records, a Duane Reade drugstore. He takes notes on the news, developments in science. He reads abandoned books, is privy to whole correspondences, is a historian of his own loneliness.

The novel's first part is "Ice Diary"; the second is "Dream of the Red Chamber"; the last is "Metropolis/The Ruins at Luna." But the best parts of the book are in the "notes" -- lyric essays on time, space, leprosy, art. On Albertus Magnus, on John Cage. The sinews of this odd and unwieldy creature.

"I didn't seek to find her," Sheck writes in her preface, "wandered instead within and among her fragments of language -- notebooks, drafts, journals, fictions, letters, essays, and found there whole worlds spinning like planets, lived in their cold light and burnings light, wondering where I was, where they might take me. Curious, I heard a monster's voice, and out of some sharp need I followed."

Mary Shelley's stepsister Claire's letters, invented, real. Hesitant, aborted:

"So even liberty is a prison xxxxxxx and xxxx"

Much in that manner.

Writing is revision, or a kind of madness. Claire's cross-outs (xxx) resemble the stitches on the monster -- they are words left suspended in the air of the page.

When does a poet (Sheck is one) become a novelist? Sensationally great novels by poets: James Lasdun, "The Horned Man"; Robert Kelly, "The Scorpions"; John Ashbery and James Schuyler, "A Nest of Ninnies"

Ashbery and Schuyler trading off lines initially.

"On the first notebook's pages," Sheck writes in the preface, "she penciled in a left-hand margin, and there Percy Shelley left his comments and marks. Picture two hands moving side by side, she writing 'creature,' he (in some impulse of tenderness, kindness?) crossing it out, replacing it with 'being.'

Reading "Frankenstein" afresh: I see it as a commentary on (and twisted how-to kit for) the novel, that magpie form. A restlessness of form. A series of letters by an Arctic-bound explorer to his sister gets taken over by Victor Frankenstein's life story (a tangled affair in itself), which dissolves the artifice of correspondence for most of the book. And, at one point, Frankenstein's narration gets dominated by a soon-to-be one-sided dialogue with his creation.

We unthinkingly refer to the monster as "Frankenstein," understandable when the frame is so crooked, and creature and creator present themselves with equal eloquence.

Sheck embeds texts or, rather, lets them slip into and out of the pages; she compounds the vertigo. Characters write letters about books that they're translating; they quote passages, which are in fact like passages from one world to another.

The text as body.

Any line could serve as a metaphor for Sheck's project and process, such as:

"[Lady Su Hui's 'Xuan Ji Tu shi' is] a poem composed of 841 characters woven into a five-colored tapestry and arranged in a perfect square. Reading it, there's no need to start at the beginning or move straight to the end. Instead, it can be entered anywhere."

Or:

"Of Archilocos we have not one single work entire and most of the context's fallen away".

As the monster explains: "You worked to make the parts of me combine to form a new, amazing being."

More where that came from.

A commonplace book, a cover version of "Frankenstein," a epistolary novel. A commentary on revision, translation -- what lives in the margins.

"Where do you end and I begin?"

The fiction of "A Monster's Notes" is framed (as a found text) by a letter, dated June 30, 2007: "This is to inform you that the final closing on your building at East 6th Street was successfully completed . . . [Y]esterday afternoon as I made my last walk-through, I found on the second floor a shorter note, a manuscript wrapped in a rubber band, and an old computer. . . ."

It's the monster's handwriting. He muses: "And Clerval, that gentle man who everyone thought dead -- in fact he traveled east as he wanted. Even now I sometimes picture his hand moving in patient transcription as day after day he translated the 'Dream of the Red Chamber' in his house at the foot of Xianghan Hill. . . . " Clerval was Victor Frankenstein's faithful friend, destroyed by the monster in Shelley's novel, but here living in China, translating "The Story of the Stone," or "A Dream of Red Mansions," or "Dream of the Red Chamber."

"Dream of the Red Chamber," 18th century. Unfinished by the author, who is Cao Xuequin, or is he. Commentary by "Red Inkstone," who might also be Cao.

Originally published anonymously.

Unfinished by the author and hence potentially perfect, endlessly expandable in the mind.

Question for the reader: Why start what cannot stop?

Partial list of books never completed by their authors but published: Charles Dickens, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood"; Robert Musil, "The Man Without Qualities"; Walter Benjamin, "The Arcades Project."

"Those days in the graveyard I traveled across many pages which frequently ended in mid-sentence -- the books I found were mostly torn -- so my travels were wayward, random, disrupted, though maybe the mind mostly travels in this way."

"The whole issue of the unfinished is a living idea," writes the monster.

"[S]omething unfinished changes," he continues. "That means it's in a certain way alive."

As Sheck demonstrates, the lyric essay is a kind of Frankenstein's monster, equipped with parts sliced out of others, stitched up with genius and white space:

"Claire. Air. Care. Clear. Claire."

"If I could see intervals as well as objects. . . ."

"How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow!" -- "Frankenstein"

"Architecture of oblivion, its drifts."

"Winter darkness pulls over like a monk's cowl, enclosing us in worlds where strange things take place, where anything can happen, where the mind goes where it's never gone before, and stays." -- Gretel Ehrlich, "The Future of Ice"

I started this review before finishing the book, in the form of notes. I didn't know I was writing the review yet. I have another file just as long.

Fungibility of the notebook mode. Juxtaposition is easy, at times even arbitrary; effects perhaps no less revelatory or pungent.

"As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionally large. After having formed this determination and having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began." --"Frankenstein"

Cut and paste.

When am I writing this sentence?

Page 271, in its entirety: "The monks in their patchwork rags . . . and I a patchwork . . . the workings of each mind a patchwork, each self roughly stitched as you stitched me."

The energies of "A Monster's Notes" are not incompatible with those of the Web. Thought for future development: Unruly, genre-leaking books like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's "Dictee," Ishmael Reed's "Mumbo Jumbo" and David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress" might seem merely reflexive today, when we write in fragments, when our blogs and Twitter feeds and Facebook pages are de facto lyric essays, Frankenstein creations.

The intricacies of Shelley's life (who was Claire?) unclear to me till I went to Wikipedia. Sheck also embeds into her book Wikipedia, Google searches, Unknown Hosts, Redirections. All this webwork.

"The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion. . . . With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet." --"Frankenstein"

R. e-mails me that our friend J. has to take blood pressure medication because she drinks too much coffee, which makes me laugh. But also that J. "had this horrifying story about recently running into a crime scene near her house where a man had been cut into little pieces in a box." Which makes me think I will never get to sleep. I do, but in the middle of the night a storm centers itself overhead. I am not dreaming and now I understand the term "rolling thunder," the noise caroming like a ball in a roulette wheel, a ball the size of 20 baseball stadiums, a wheel with a diameter the length of Manhattan. Car alarms go off. I silently count the seconds before, or is it after, lightning penetrates the armor of the venetian blinds, to scrape my eyes and shock the bedsheets silver. —Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2009

Remixed Notes on "A Monster's Notes"

I.
“Good idea the repetition. Same thing with ads.” -- Joyce, "Ulysses"

Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died 10 days after giving birth to her.

“This is ordinary. I was a body coming out of another body that died. That died because of my body.” -- Laurie Sheck, "A Monster’s Notes"

“This was scant said but all cried with one acclaim, nay, by our Virgin Mother, the wife should live and the babe to die.” -- "Ulysses"

I don’t know which file contains my review in the form of notes and which contains my notes for the review in the form of notes.

Bloomsday now. Still writing this.

In the midst of putting together this monster I get an e-mail from R., who writes that our friend J. has to take high-blood pressure medication because she drinks too much coffee, which makes me laugh. But also that J. “had this horrifying story about recently running into a crime scene near her house where a man had been cut into little pieces in a box.”

The fiction of poet Laurie Sheck’s novel "A Monster’s Notes" is framed by a letter, dated June 30, 2007: “This is to inform you that the final closing on your building at East 6th Street was successfully completed. . . . [Y]esterday afternoon as I made my last walk-through, I found on the second floor a shorter note, a manuscript wrapped in a rubber band, and an old computer. . . .”

Page 271, in its entirety: ". . . The monks in their patchwork rags . . . and I a patchwork . . . the workings of each mind a patchwork, each self roughly stitched as you stitched me."

“Winter darkness pulls over like a monk’s cowl, enclosing us in worlds where strange things take place, where anything can happen, where the mind goes where it’s never gone before, and stays.” -- Gretel Ehrlich, "The Future of Ice"

Fungibility of the notebook mode. Juxtaposition is easy, at times even arbitrary; effects perhaps no less revelatory or pungent.

On Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog, Tom writes: “Ed Park's notes on 'A Monster's Notes' by Laurie Sheck: ‘I started this review before finishing the book, in the form of notes. I didn't know I was writing the review yet. I have another file just as long. Fungibility of the notebook mode. Juxtaposition is easy, at times even arbitrary; effects perhaps no less revelatory or pungent.’ [His notes weren't really revelatory for me -- what do you think?]”

I think you’re wrong.

And we’re not done yet.

II.
“The whole issue of the unfinished is a living idea,” writes the monster in his “Notes on Eva Hesse.” “[S]omething unfinished changes. That means it’s in a certain way alive.”

“Save your screams until you see its face.” -- movie poster, "It’s Alive!" (1974)

“It’s such a gamble when you get a face.” -- Richard Hell, “Blank Generation” (1977)

“Years later when I got smallpox it was as if that hatred was finally writing on my face. Scrawling all over it. That it had been waiting all those years. . . . My ugly, ruined face.” -- Mary Shelley to stepsister Claire, "A Monster’s Notes"

Clerval was Victor Frankenstein’s faithful friend, destroyed by the monster in Shelley’s novel, but in “A Monster’s Notes” he’s living in China, translating "The Story of the Stone," or "A Dream of Red Mansions," or "Dream of the Red Chamber," 18th century, originally published anonymously. Unfinished by the author, who is Cao Xuequin, or is he. Commentary by “Red Inkstone,” who might also be Cao.

Unfinished by the author and hence potentially perfect, endlessly expandable in the mind.

Partial list of books never completed by their authors, but published: Georges Perec, "53 Days." Ralph Ellison, "Juneteenth." Jane Austen, "Sanditon." P.G. Wodehouse, "Sunset at Blandings."

Nabokov, "The Original of Laura," to be published.

J.G. Ballard, "Conversations With My Physician," never to be published. David Foster Wallace, "The Pale King," to be published.

Title of Musil book: "Posthumous Papers of a Living Author." Published.

“[E]very book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.” -- Roberto Bolaño, "The Savage Detectives"

Read that some scholar said the unfinished fragments of stories on the late Roberto Bolaño’s computer could be read as having conclusions -- they ended, sometimes mid-sentence, in a way that made as much sense as if he’d actually finished them. Now mortality shapes them, a hidden theme emerges.

Where did I read this thing about Bolaño’s abbreviated works? Real? A dream?

Note to self: Take better notes.

Open up the paper: “Roger L. Kay, one of the most prominent analysts of the PC industry, described the new generation of machines as “Franken-products,” a reference to the monster cobbled together from various parts.” -- New York Times, June 7

Cao Xuequin’s "The Story of the Stone." Five volumes in the Penguin Classics edition. I bought Volume 1 during my weekly lunch-hour book-buying allowance, at my old job, circa 1996, at Tower Books on Broadway at 4th Street, New York.

Sheck’s monster passes TOWER RECORDS in New York.

Found Volume 2 in a box in front of a store in Cambridge, Mass. I thought it would go on like this, with me finding further installments at used bookstores, stoop sales, Salvation Army shelves. But it stopped there.

“A darkbacked figure scanned books on the hawker’s cart.” -- "Ulysses"

Found in an old folder of mine, notes for an abandoned novel, April 30, 2000: “I believe the Korean War has never ended, just as I believe the 1999 Stanley Cup finals, between the Sabres and the Stars, continues to this day.”

Next page is from a New Yorker piece, dated Sept. 30, 1996, author and article unknown: “Under the narrow legal definition of the term, Tigar found, the only national emergency even hypothetically still in existence in 1969 was, strangely, the Korean War. ‘We argued on appeal that no rational person could think the Korean War was still going on in 1969,’ Tigar explained. ‘The Tenth Circuit agreed, and dismissed the whole case.”

It seems I read 318 pages of Volume 1 of "The Story of the Stone." The bookmark is a business card from Taj Mahal Indian Restaurant, where I used to eat lunch once or twice a week. On the front I’ve written either “locus of history” or “loans of history.” On the back I’ve scrawled some unfamiliar words that I’ve encountered in the book: cangue, flocculus, incrassation, camlet. And this plaintive question: “Why does one begin to read an unfinished novel?”

“Jia She led a cultured life and never did anything.” -- "The Story of the Stone"

The bookmark at P. 178 of Gretel Ehrlich’s "The Future of Ice" is a ticket stub for the Neil LaBute play "Fat Pig."

“If 'The Story of the Stone' is a sort of Chinese 'Remembrance of Things Past,' it becomes doubly important to us to know as much as we can about the author’s life.” -- from David Hawkes’ introduction

Sheck’s Mary: “My days spent imagining his parts.”

Sheck’s monster: “I tried to piece together what I could. The lost Atlantis of her.”

“What words will you cut?” -- "The Story of the Stone"

Cut as in incise. But I’m reading it, now, as abandon.

III.
Strike-throughs, slashes. Brackets and underlinings. Double-strike-throughs. Question marks. Different typefaces. Obelus and ellipsis.

Words and names dissected, syllable by syllable. Silent letters identified. “The silent ‘e’ in hide, the silent ‘i’ in pain and recoil. The silent ‘g’ in sign.”

“If I could see intervals as well as objects...”

“It’s in the silence after you feel you hear. Vibrations. Now silent air.” -- "Ulysses"

“But it must be stressed that metaphor is not a completely successful or controllable means of communication. We employ inadequate language always.”

Mistyped: “meataphor.”

"I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame." -- "Frankenstein"

The lyric essay is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, equipped with parts sliced out of others, stitched up with genius and white space.

Where a man had been cut into little pieces--

“Those days in the graveyard I traveled across many pages which frequently ended in mid-sentence -- the books I found were mostly torn -- so my travels were wayward, random, disrupted, though maybe the mind mostly travels in this way.” -- "Frankenstein"

Another novel by a poet, Robert Kelly’s "The Scorpions" ends mid-sentence. As does "A Monster’s Notes."

List of books in "A Monster’s Notes" includes Mungo Park’s "Journal of a Journey in Africa."

Mungo Park disappeared in Africa.

As did his son, who went to find him.

“The Japanese word ‘oku’ means not only ‘north’ but also ‘deep,’ ‘inner,’ ‘the heart of a mountain,’ ‘to penetrate to the depth of something or someone,’ ‘the bottom of one’s heart,’ and ‘the end of one’s mind.’” -- "The Future of Ice"

“Sometimes I feel my own body turning into words, my skin a living network of words.” -- "A Monster’s Notes"

I misread “netsuke” for “network.”

Error.

“Claire” and “Cerval” both have “err” in them, or “air.”

“My head aches, I’m tired all the time and clumsy. My right hand’s not working right, I drop things for no reason.”

“BE SUSPICIOUS OF ANYTHING.” -- NYC MTA poster, quoted by Sheck

Meditation on themes suggested.

I mistyped “meditation” as “mediation.” “Thems” for “themes.”

Meditation on themes suggested by Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein."

On spaces created.

My notes written on the endpages, on the upper margins, on a torn sheet of a publicity letter, on a dry-cleaning receipt, across four different files on my laptop. Words in the air.

In China (relates "A Monster’s Notes") every scrap of writing is sacred, to be collected and burned. Words in the air.

Are these my real notes or the ones I will publish? Which version has more energy?

“Twenty-four-hour-a-day sun and I’m living in a skin turned inside out.” -- Gretel Ehrlich, "This Cold Heaven"

Sheck’s novel acknowledges Google searches. Wikipedia. Redirections. All this webwork.

"A Monster’s Notes" is an uncommonplace book. A site for revision, translation, error, confusion, melancholy. Limits of this method. Book is over 500 pages long, not without longueurs. (Could it have worked at 100 pages, at 50?) But heft becomes crucial to the experience. To exhaust the metaphors and the monster.

A mirror, an instant replay, “the automatic relation to himself of a narrative concerning himself.” ("Ulysses")

Sheck: “I’m reading and she’s listening.”

Every line potentially last or first.

-- Ed Park
Bloomsday 2009
New York City

Review of Linda H. Davis's CHARLES ADDAMS: A LIFE and Edward Gorey's Amphigorey Again, LATBR

By Ed Park

Charles Addams

A Cartoonist's Life

Linda H. Davis

Random House: 384 pp., $29.95

Amphigorey Again

Edward Gorey

Harcourt: 264 pp., $35

What could be more preposterous than the cartoonist as babe magnet? In a one-page riff by “Ghost World” creator Daniel Clowes, a lovelorn words-and-pictures man hopes that rebranding himself as a suave “ink stud” will change his luck with the ladies. Oddly enough, would-be ink studs have a real-life model in Charles Addams (1912-1988), the legendary New Yorker artist responsible for indelible scenes of blackly comic menace (and possibly Christina Ricci's career). As recounted in Linda H. Davis' new biography, “Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life,” the thrice-married penman had numerous affairs (with women who mostly indulged his concurrent flings and spoke fondly of him afterward), even romancing the rarefied likes of Greta Garbo and Jackie Kennedy in the '60s. “I love Pugsley and Lurch, but my favorite is Morticia,” the latter said in 1964 about the Addams Family, his popular clan of grotesques, which had just been translated to television. “She and I have a lot more in common than you might think.”

The family's raven-haired, pale-skinned, perpetually slender matriarch was Addams' erotic ideal. His first two wives bore a striking resemblance to her, and in 1943 he told an interviewer, “I think maybe I'm in love with the young looking witch,” whom he had introduced to New Yorker readers five years earlier.

Perhaps the attraction to her flesh-and-blood avatars wasn't just physical: Morticia is one letter away from the person who sees you to your grave -- death and sex in one neat bundle. The former First Lady shared details about her husband's assassination. (“Do you know, she had his brains in her lap?” he marveled.) The day after Nelson Rockefeller expired in the arms of his 26-year-old assistant, Addams (who lived in a neighboring building) bedded her and began an affair, despite the 41-year age gap. (Devotees of Anthony Powell's “A Dance to the Music of Time” might here recall Pamela Flitton's rumored deathbed romp, but the connection is in fact even more direct: Addams had an affair with the pale, dark-haired Barbara Skelton -- the British writer and “femme fatale of the first rank” on whom Pamela is thought to be partly based.)

Addams' colorful love life suggests an unruly force at odds with Davis' respectful tone. She catalogues his conquests and his collection of antique weaponry but emphasizes his warm side -- there are a few too many interludes in which Addams is shown to be good with kids. She avoids psychoanalyzing her subject, who attributed his own lack of therapist gags -- that New Yorker staple -- to his “arrested intellectual development.” Addams claimed to have had a happy childhood; one admirer said the cartoonist had “more friends than anybody I've ever known.” Davis doesn't hazard a guess as to what might have linked his serial womanizing, taste for fast cars and the gift for the sinister he distilled in nearly 5,000 drawings. Nor does she explicate, in any revealing way, why Addams' work stuck in the mind, then and now.

Nevertheless, the biography engagingly details Addams' meteoric rise (he sold his first illustration to the New Yorker at age 20 and was soon in the fold), and his working method comes to life in the early chapters -- his preferred brand of drawing paper, his extraordinarily supple “wash” technique. Most captivating is the glimpse of the magazine's communal spirit: Cartoon ideas often came from other staffers, and the vetting process could be impressively specific. (“[Put them] all in robes;…fix bulging eye; not all bald; suppressed merriment,” read part of one elaborate editorial critique.)

Addams' only flaw, as Davis sees it, was his masochistic relationship with his second wife, Barbara Barb, whom he married in 1954. (His third wife referred to her as “Bad Barbara” to distinguish her from her predecessor, “Good” Barbara Day). An aggressive lawyer who looked like a “bimbo,” Barb circulated a fictitious snooty pedigree, lied about her age and could become physically violent with Addams (an African spear once came into play). She rapidly took over Addams' financial affairs, to the alarm of Addams' lawyer, and acted as agent for his artwork , an arrangement that would have repercussions long after their 1956 divorce. This hopeless entanglement, this “terrible dark passion,” is a disturbing but invigorating counterpoint to the sunny portrait Davis otherwise paints. One finishes the book entertained but with the nagging feeling that another narrative wants to emerge, like the Addams cartoon in which a pumpkin is being carved, creepily, from the inside-out.

Along with Addams, Edward Gorey (1925-2000) is the last century's great American illustrator of the macabre. Though they share the same terrain and have enjoyed continued posthumous appeal, no one would confuse their work or approach. Addams was wedded to the single-panel format that was the hallmark of his employer, and each drawing had to score a direct hit as the reader encountered it amid the magazine's myriad attractions. Gorey's productions, full of mystery, were themselves mysterious -- an idiosyncratic array of small-format books, some published by his own Fantod Press, ranging from the 30-page novel “The Unstrung Harp” (his droll 1953 debut, in which an author endures compositional agonies) to “The Awdrey-Gore Legacy” (1972), a thoroughly deconstructed ersatz Agatha Christie novel. Fed by silent movies, eclectic literature, ballet and Surrealism, Gorey conjured topsy-turvy moral tales and inconclusive adventures, conceived of certain works as installments in nonexistent series and wrote ingenious poetry and prose that tasted of a much earlier vintage.

“Amphigorey Again,” the fourth gathering of Gorey's numerous books and occasional jeux d'esprit, has weaker material than the earlier collections: “The Raging Tide's” Max Ernst-meets-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure vibe somehow flags before its 30 scenes are digested, and the 36 contortions of an enigmatic, eyeless creature that comprise “Figbash Acrobate” will try even the hardcore Gorey fan. But most of what's here is worth having. “The Other Statue,” purportedly part of something called “The Secrets,” is a classic Gorey mood piece. The meticulous draftsmanship crowding every frame, along with the hilariously overloaded cast of characters, contrasts with the void that is the story's central mystery: not the disappearance of a cherished heirloom (a wax thingy known as the Lisping Elbow) but the absence of a coherent plot. A seemingly linear narrative reveals itself as a string of evocative non sequiturs. There's rarely a punchline in Goreyland, just an elegant withdrawal into artifice -- here, a title card touting the next installment of “The Secrets,” “The Night Bandage.”

Though it's the drawings that hold us -- the theatrical poses, the bespoke furniture in penumbral mansions, the malicious topiary -- Gorey was also a unique literary stylist. He recounts the escapades of stand-in Edmund Gravel (“the Recluse of Lower Spigot”) first as a parody of “A Christmas Carol,” then in quatrains. He returns to the abecedary form twice in “Amphigorey Again” (not counting the suitably unfinished, Z-fixated closer, “The Izzard Book”), with rewarding results: “The Deadly Blotter” is a tiny detective tale of exactly 26 words. (“Alarming behavior. Corpse. Detective enters.”) The “Neglected Murderesses Series” of postcards by one Dogear Wryde features deadpan one-sentence bios that mix precision and whimsy for maximum tension.

“Dogear Wryde” was one of Gorey's many pseudonyms, and “Amphigorey Again” is dedicated “in fond collaborative memory” to 30 other such alter egos he employed over the years. A good portion of these noms de plumes, male and female, are anagrams of “Edward Gorey” -- Ogdred Weary, Regera Dowdy, et al. This pseudonym business could simply be silliness. But it could also be that Gorey, a lifelong bachelor and presumed celibate -- the sexual antithesis of Charles Addams -- collaborated with phantoms drawn from his own private alphabet because he had no one with whom to share his most intimate life.<

Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer.

Review of Philip K. Dick's VOICES FROM THE STREET, Los Angeles Times Book Review

By Ed Park

Voices From the Street

A Novel

Philip K. Dick

Tor: 302 pp., $24.95

In “Search for Philip K. Dick” (1995), Anne R. Dick (the third of the visionary science-fiction writer's five wives) recalls a potentially life-changing response to “Confessions of a Crap Artist,” a mainstream novel he had finished in 1959. “Alfred Knopf, himself, wrote Phil a letter saying he was interested in publishing it if Phil would rewrite the last third making the female character more sympathetic,” she reports. “He compared the quality of Phil's prose to that of Salinger, Roth, and Mailer We were both thrilled with this letter. But Phil said, 'I can't rewrite this book! It's not that I don't want to, it's that I'm not able to!'”

In an alternate universe -- of the sort that Dick fluidly conjured in novel after novel -- Phil can do the rewrite. Encouraged by critics, he happily departs the precincts of science fiction, which had nurtured and released 10 of his books, and has a successful career producing highbrow, gently experimental fare. He reworks the territory of soured domesticity (à la Richard Yates and John Updike) in a working-class milieu anticipating Raymond Carver. Decades later, his oeuvre (like Philip Roth's) is lovingly enshrined in our national pantheon.

None of this happens in the real world, of course, save for that last outrageous twist: This spring, four of his best novels will appear in a Library of America volume edited by novelist and stalwart PKD champion Jonathan Lethem. Lauded in science-fiction circles, Dick (1928-1982) gained mass exposure after the movie “Blade Runner,” based on one of his books, was released the year of his death. His carpet-yanking virtual realities have been film fodder ever since -- most recently, Richard Linklater's stunning 2006 adaptation of “A Scanner Darkly.”

But mainstream acceptance was Dick's first novelistic ambition, one that took years to dispel. An early fan of “scientifiction” stories, Dick also read widely outside the genre. In 1940s Berkeley, beginning at age 19, he roomed in a converted warehouse occasionally occupied by literary figures like poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, with whom he struck up friendships. During this time, according to biographer Lawrence Sutin, he was inspired to steep himself in the classics (“I gained a working knowledge of literature from the Anabasis to Ulysses,” Dick wrote in a 1968 “Self-Portrait”), with special attention to modernists like Ezra Pound and John Dos Passos. Sutin notes that from 1951 to 1958, Dick wrote dozens of science-fiction stories and six√ science-fiction novels, all of which were published, and seven mainstream novels, none of which found a publisher in his lifetime. “Confessions of a Crap Artist,” written in 1959 and published in 1975, is a lean, semiautobiographical divorce drama that nimbly shuttles between points of view. The other surviving mainstream manuscripts gradually found their way to print, and with the publication of “Voices From the Street,” finished in 1953, we have a complete view of the path not taken.

At the center of “Voices” is Stuart Hadley, a handsome, New Yorker-reading 25-year-old and amateur painter who is languishing as a repairman at Modern TV Sales and Service. Called “Stumblebum” by his boss, Jim Fergesson, Hadley is a dreamer with unclear dreams. His marriage leaves him cold, and his wife's pregnancy intensifies his feeling that life has trapped him. (His solution: memory-obliterating pub-crawls.) Taking note of a natty young man, Hadley imagines that his bookcases hold “French novels in French paperback editions. Gide, Proust, Celine”[30] A liberal sort with socialist Jewish friends, he's simultaneously attracted and repulsed by a group of holy rollers led by Theodore Beckheim, a charismatic black preacher -- and also by the “strong, calculating, ruthless, efficient” Marsha Frazier, who runs a haphazardly produced magazine called Succubus that turns out to be anti-Semitic.

Whereas “Confessions” had both a wrenching, violent climax and a sense of humor, “Voices” is obsessed with rage and race and is unremittingly bleak, a mood intensified by its chapterless format. The title suggests James Joyce's polyphonic “Ulysses,” but Hadley is a dominant, unifying presence. Though an early story line centers around an avuncular character named Horace Wakefield, hints of a Bloom-Dedalus dyad get snuffed early. The only deviations from Dick's patient, observant style are Beckheim's tour de force of a sermon and Hadley's violent, drunken ramble, reminiscent of Joyce's hallucinatory “Nighttown” chapter. (At times the novel reads like a hazy, low-rent version of Ayn Rand's “The Fountainhead,” with Hadley's inchoate ambition as above reproach as Howard Roark's will to power; Hadley's one-night stand with the fearsome Marsha is, troublingly, a more vicious version of Roark's rape of Dominique.)

The word “primordial” pops up frequently in “Voices,” and it's tempting to read this early book as a Dickian ur-text. Most fascinating is how Dick's major theme -- a playful, terrifying disjuncture between realities -- has leaked into this seemingly solid, realistically rendered setting. The book begins mock-epically, with store owner Fergesson opening up shop in Old Testament fashion (“his seventh day -- a cup of black coffee”). Promoted to manager, Hadley grapples with the dark thought that “he might suddenly blindly, burst out and destroy the safety of his microcosmos. In his archaic fury he might smash, demolish, pull down the only world in which he could exist.” He quickly becomes accustomed to “the permanent reality of the retail store,” but those dark forces swarm in and destroy the status quo. By book's end, he is carving out a second life, starting a whole new world from scratch.

Dick completed one other novel in 1953. “The Cosmic Puppets” (published a mere four years later) is a slim, intermittently spooky book, a minor entry in the PKD canon but one that functions as a mind-bending footnote to the gargantuan “Voices.” In it, New Yorker Ted Barton returns to his Virginia hometown to discover that everything has changed -- street names, houses, inhabitants. The local paper reports that he died as a 9-year-old, and he discovers that the current townspeople operate under a mutual, sustainable delusion. All Barton wants is to get back to the status quo -- a return to normalcy. What follows is a Zoroastrian freakout-cum-battle featuring golems, spiders, moths and gods. If “Puppets” is a lot more fun to read than “Voices,” that shouldn't diminish the real struggle suffusing the longer, lonelier shadow of a book. The struggle lies not just in Hadley's losing bargain with the real world but in Dick's changing notion of what sort of writer he needed to be.<

Review of POPEYE Vol. 1, Los Angeles Times Book Review

By Ed Park

Popeye

I Yam What I Yam!

E.C. Segar

Fantagraphics Books: 182 pp., $29.95

“Be adequite,” wrote Lindsay Lohan, signing off on her heartfelt missive reflecting on the death of Robert Altman, her director in “A Prairie Home Companion.” The misspelling caused titters in the usual gossip venues, but for a reader of the new collection of E.C. Segar's original Popeye comics, Lohan's variant has its charms. From the start (1929), Popeye has entertained us as much by creatively mangling the language as by drubbing a wide variety of his opponents. Few sentences emerge from the mouth of the weirdly muscled old salt in anything close to standard English: “Insinuate” is “incinerate,” “coincidence” becomes “coincerdents,” and m's and n's tend to cross-migrate if they find themselves in the same word. In a pinch, Segar activates Popeye's most bewildering speech impediment, the replacement of t's with k's. Thus we have “personaliky,” “fisks,” and the oft-repeated “evil spiriks.” (Lohan could rent her idol's 1980 film adaptation for an effective audio version.) These deviations aren't especially funny the first time around or even the tenth, but by the hundredth you might find yourself marveling at this near-mythical sailor's odd charisma and the brisk inventiveness of his creator.

The genesis and success of Popeye, who still appears in newspapers, are as fascinating as his garbled speech. Elzie Crisler Segar, born in 1894, grew up in small-town Illinois, often working as a sort of backstage entertainer, accompanying silent films on the drums or operating the projector. After completing an 18-month comic-strip correspondence course, he went to Chicago to seek his fortune. A meeting with Richard F. Outcault -- creator of “The Yellow Kid,” the first comic-strip character -- led to a short-lived Charlie Chaplin-based comic strip in 1916. Segar followed this with a strip starring a diminutive WWI doughboy and a local feature called “Looping the Loop.” By the end of 1919, he was drawing a strip called “Thimble Theatre” for William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. This theater was to feature performances by a cast of thespians including Olive Oyl, but Segar shortly abandoned the conceit in favor of depicting the actors' offstage lives. The focus settled on Olive Oyl and her family -- father, mother, and stubby, money-mad brother Castor -- and Ham Gravy, her nondescript suitor. It took nearly a decade, or some 3,500 strips, for Popeye to swim into view.

Thus he doesn't appear in the first 100 or so strips in this gratifyingly dense collection (which kicks off a six-volume reprint project). The initial story line centers on Castor's unwanted pet -- the rare, doting “whiffle hen,” Bernice. She's boxy but endearing, looking like a displaced resident of Segar contemporary George Herriman's “Coconino County.” For a long stretch, Castor Oyl tries to kill off Bernice in nearly every strip, like a more murderous Ignatz Mouse. Once he's made peace with the indestructible fowl, Castor is offered dizzying sums of money for her by various competing agents. It turns out that stroking her head bestows gambler's luck, and Castor prepares to fleece a casino on distant Dice Island.

The date is Jan. 17, 1929. Castor spots Popeye and asks if he's a sailor. The one-eyed, rolled-cuffed, astonishingly ugly figure responds in five feisty words (“ 'Ja think I'm a cowboy?”) that perfectly announce his unshakable identity and suggest an entire lifetime already lived -- and lived hard. The menacing slouch, the anchor tattoo on a stubbly arm, the rather alarming puckering at the crotch of his pants -- Segar could be forgiven for not realizing that this grotesque whimsy would be his ticket to pop-culture immortality. (Segar would have less than a decade left to manage “Thimble Theatre”; he died of leukemia in 1938.)

Though Castor is calling the shots, Popeye proceeds to steal the show in the following episode, when Snork, a disgraced casino employee turned deranged pursuer, unloads 16 bullets into the stout seaman. “Snork at Sea” is a furious, page-turning tale utterly different in tone from the light-hearted adventures of Bernice or the subsequent pair of mystery stories in which Castor and Popeye play detective. It's a good indication of the flexibility that “Thimble Theatre's” format afforded Segar. As Coulton Waugh noted in his 1947 history “The Comics,” the bulletproof interlude “is the first hint that Popeye has entered the company of Paul Bunyan and other folk heroes invested with supernaturalism,” yet curiously he remains (unlike Superman) identifiably human. In his next appearance, after an absence of nearly six weeks, he's seen shooting craps, and he regularly gambles away anything he gets.

Perhaps the very name held the seeds of the hero's success: popular “I.” A man of little patience, immune to education and allergic to introspection, he nevertheless has an irreducible personal philosophy, one that removes the pesky cogito bit from Descartes√ and triples what's left: “I am what I am an' tha's all I yam!”

But what is he? Segar establishes Popeye as both an unbeatable warrior and a magnet for verbal abuse, thus granting him an instant moral dimension. He's called everything from a “shipwreck in the face” to a “dishfaced mud fence,” and if you scrutinize his features, you may start to see things you wish you hadn't. But his sheer ugliness becomes part of his appeal: There's a moment of comic-strip satori, several dozen pages in, when you realize the depth of emotion that's somehow conveyed by that perpetually sour, nearly immobile face, with the pipe jammed in at a fantastically steep angle.

Reading the saga from the start, it seems likely that the imminent Depression became a crucible for fans' ardor. Popeye is self-sufficient, at times fatalistic; he's a survivor, an admirable figure, with or without money. It's a strange experience to see Castor's Dice Island scam giddily unfold in the strips of March 1929, sacks of cash flying out the window as quickly as he can win them. And this is the beauty of such a comprehensive project: In the strip that ran on Black Tuesday, Castor and Popeye learn that they've invested all their Dice Island millions in a nonexistent “brass mine.” Popeye's reaction -- his mantra -- seems entirely appropriate: “Well blow me down.”<