Monday, May 12, 2008

Not So

Ron paid me back for the glasses on Friday, as sweet as pie, then snapped one meaty hand over the counter and grabbed my shirt not hard but so sudden I could hear stitches rip. "You fucked up, Andrews," he goes, "with 'Paradise Lost.' Pretend to update it and kill the verse? You fucked up."

"I hear you, Ron."
"Oh you hear me. You hear me. I like that."

He lets me go and stomps off, and I start putting his money in the till and reminding myself to breathe. Jesus Christ, the states people get into about literature here. He didn't even come to the salon Thursday night, he musta been at home hating on me and writing his little speech for today. Anyway, the lesson's been learned. I'll do better with book two. And now he owes me for a shirt, but I ain't saying anything about it, stress I got already.

Last night we had a fine crowd. Two-for-one pulled-pork sandwiches on the chalkboard outside means everybody brings a pal and picks up the cheque; and that salty, evil cajun sauce Julio ladles all over everything sure sells a lot of beers. Mase (short for Maserati - his old man was a car nut) came in with a small Oriental type who turned out to be a Japanese exchange student on loan while his host family was doing some kinda cheese festival in Wisconsin.

"Weren't up for the cheese festival, eh?" I said as I put down his orange juice, hoping to cheer him up. He just shook his head. His eyes were like golfballs under the dim blue chandelier, watching everybody argue and pontificate and define and redefine and lecture and drink and fight.

"Quiet type?" I said to Mase.
"Stepped onna tooth as we came in," said Mase, patting the Japanese kid kindly on the shoulder. "He thinks we all come here to bust each other's heads open and slug beer.
"Not so," I said to the kid. "It's a literary salon, pal. Hey, what's your handle anyway?"
"Kobayashi Haruto," he said.
Mase said, "His family's just been callin' him Sony 'cos they can't remember the whole long thing. Ain't that right?"
Sony nodded. He looked miserable, kept his head down, and sipped at his orange juice. I thought to myself, That there kid is going to have a hell of a long night.

But Spencer Graham had just read Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods,' which won a bunch of awards in the now-time, and we got on the topic of fantasy and postmodernism.
"Charles de Lint," Spencer says, "is a master of postmodern fantasy because he has made it urban rather than rural, open rather than secret, and he nods to the origins in British literature. As does Gaiman."
"Gaiman nods to Pratchett," Sony said suddenly, looking up from his nibbled sandwich.
"Sure," Spencer snapped, annoyed. "They worked together on 'Good Omens.' They nod to each other."
"Pratchett has seniority, he is the better-read elder," Sony said. "He is the master parodist."
"'American Gods' wasn't parody," someone said loudly at the back.
"Very true."
Sony said, "'American Gods' is no more nor less than 'Small Gods' set in a true place rather than a child's silly fantasy world. But 'American Gods' is the more important work because it does not let the prose carry away the story."
"Borges wrote the really important stuff about gods of any size," Mase said, hotly, "small or big."
Sony said, "They both owe a debt to Borges, but so does any writer in any language since the great Borges published his first word."



I listened in astonishment to the general susurrus of approval inside the room, barely stepping aside as one of the waitresses brushed past me with another plateful of sandwiches. Dripping sauce smoked in her wake.



Sony said, "Pratchett is a great author also, because he knows as Borges knows that you cannot write even one line of a book without having read one hundred books before putting pen to paper."
"So that's the golden ratio?" said the Greek sadly. He's a failed novelist with I swear to God fifty books under his belt, about one every six months. I always thought he came to the salons to kick-start some kinda new muse, since his current one inspires such shit. "A hundred books per line?"
"The number does not matter," Sony said impatiently. "But you must read first quality to create quality. The foolish J.K. Rowling reads one book on medieval alchemy, written for high school students, and one book on common British baby names, and she writes a foolish fantasy in circle-dotted prose. But Pratchett writes for instance 'Eric.'"
"His shortest book!" I said.
"'Eric,'" continued Sony, "for which you must have read 'Paradise Lost' and also 'Faust' and also 'The Malleus Maleficarum' and also 'Inferno' to find any jokes funny."
"Don't forget the management manuals," chuckled Cal. "Hey Mase, where'd you find this guy?"
"You can't deny that Gaiman's pretty fuckin' well read too," Spencer cut in.
"Who denies?" said Sony, and he went beet-red under his shiny cap of fake-looking hair. "I do not deny that. He is also a genius."

I quickly glanced over my shoulder to see if Ron had heard the dastardly words 'Paradise Lost,' but he and the anonymous priest had apparently been at the Sambuca in a back booth and both had passed out in a ring of pale-blue flames. I scuttled over with a wet dishcloth and one of our bartenders helped me beat out the sticky fire.

"You get back out to the 'forties, kid," I told her, handing her the burnt dishcloths. "Put these in the hamper. How's the crowd out there?"
"Loud as a freight train and high as a kite," she sighed. "And that P.I. is in stirring up trouble again."
"Kick him out," I said. "He's bad for business. And I got to get back to the salon now. Put a move on."



When I got back to the discussion, there was a tight circle around Mase and Sony's table, and everybody magically had a new bottle of beer.
Sony said, "The Mabinogion."
"Yes!" said the Greek. "Lloyd Alexander read that for the Prydain chronicles."
"And Philip Pullman read 'Paradise Lost," said Mase. "'His Dark Materials.' 'The Golden Compass.'"
"That's from Milton?" someone said, a buddy I didn't know. He sounded about three beers over the line, and he also sounded like he was enjoying it. "I thought he was like a fuckin'... anarchist."
"Anachronism?"
"Aliquot?"
"Alchemist?"
"Arachnophobe."
"Atheist?" I suggested politely.
"Yeah, one of them things," said the drunk stranger. "Wow. And he read the fuckin' like... Milton."
"An author who claims to write for children should know that children grow up and get library cards," said Sony. "Rowling does not seem to realize this. She seems to believe that books exist in isolation."
"So Prydain's better than Hogwarts."
"Certainly it is better than Hogwarts," Sony said.
"I agree with the Jap," said the Greek, reaching over to finish off the kid's sandwich. "Every book owes a debt to every other book."
"I think you mean every author owes a debt to every other author."
"No, books have a life of their own outside of the man who writes them," said Mase firmly. "That's from Pratchett too."
"That's from Borges."
"Even Borges cites his sources," said the drunk, who was halfway under the table by now, only his hand and the green glass bottle visible. "Sandborg. Mac... Maced... Muh... Macaroni Fernandez. Both inspiration and hope."
"So you're saying that any book that is truly original is worthless, because it doesn't acknowledge a debt to any other books?" said Cal.
"No book is truly original."

I had to kick everybody out around three a.m., reluctantly, and only because the shouting was starting to filter through to the dining room, sixty years away. Mase and Sony graciously stuck around to help me pick up the empties, which we had about ten bucks worth, to my surprise.
"Your English is pretty good," I said to Sony as he brought me another full tray. "How long have you been studying it?"
"Three years," he said, shy and soft again without an audience, hiding behind his hair. "A good friend of mine, Yoshiko, translated 'Smoke and Mirrors' for me. And I began to learn English so to read without translation."
I hesitated. Throughout history I thought there must have been dozens of books named 'Smoke and Mirrors.' Then I said, "Gaiman. Right. The short story collection. Doesn't hold a candle to 'American Gods,' o' course."
"It is a very valuable book," he agreed quietly. "It makes me sad that it is not real."
"It was real," I said.
"No, you joke with me," he said. "It is a fantasy."
"It was real," I said. "That was the whole point of the book. It was all real."
"No, no," he said more vehemently now. "Some things are real and some things are not real."
"OK," I said. "Give me an example."
"Horses are real," he said. "Unicorns are not real."
"Uh-huh."
"Iguanas are real, Godzilla is not real."
"You didn't really get the book," I said as gently as I could. "You loved it, but I can tell you didn't really get it. Unicorns are exactly as real as horses. And gods are real, leprechauns are real, golems are real, thunderbirds are real. Those of us not privileged enough to sense them - to see them, hear them, smell them - have no right to deem them unreal."
He nodded slowly, and smiled. "Now I understand it."
"OK. So tell me."
"Everything is real."
"Hot damn, Mase," I called over the kid's shoulder. "I think this one's a keeper."

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Lost


Anyway, that guy never did come back to claim his self-help book from the other day. I'm guessing he's beyond help now, self or otherwise. Which is a real shame because one of our bartenders invented this cocktail this morning that'll cure what ails ya in ten seconds flat, whether it be syphilis or claustrophobia. It does give you hallucinations, exploding head syndrome, and spasming sphincter disorder, but hey, nobody ever said a panacea wouldn't have side effects. And SSD is a hoot at parties.

We had a priest sit in on the salon last night. He didn't wear his collar but we all knew; some priests keep an invisible collar you can see from across the room. "Anybody here ever read 'Paradise Lost'?" he asked around midnight, which had the effect of breaking up a fistfight Ron and Cal were having over 'Synthetic Men of Mars.'

"'Paradise Lost'?" pants Ron. "I'll kill any man here ever read that hoity-toity down-from-Oxford fancy-pantsy swanky-pinky-cocked university shit."

There was a general silence while I was sweeping up the broken glasses and doing a running total in my head for the damage. Now me, I've read 'Paradise Lost.' And enjoyed the hell out of it, thanks, and spent fifty pages of Books VII and IIX in a cold sweat of inevitability with a bullet casing clenched between my back teeth so's I could deal with the tension.

Ron's one of those guys who'd probably appreciate Milton's little ditty if it wasn't for the language, let's face it. He's got an 'I (heart) Satan' t-shirt for Christ's sake. What he needs is a fresh and untainted view, free from the old stones of ancient learning. Lucky for him I got all this free time.

PARADISE LOST

THE L.S.A. VERSION

Book I:
John Milton: There was a war in Heaven, and it was ugly, and the losers got thrown into a pit deeper than Rockefeller's pockets.
Beelzebub: Are you all right?
Satan: I do believe I have broken everything except my pride. Let us fuck up our enemy.
Beelzebub: Fuck yeah.
(They look around. Pandaemonium is like the aftermath of a frat party, except on a lake of liquid fire instead of somebody's basement.)
Satan: Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n.
(He goes to wake everybody up. Everybody wakes up and complains about their backs. A bigger bunch of lowlives you have never met, including lewd spirits and sea-monsters.)
Satan: OK. So we lost. But there's always time for one more war. Somebody get me a chair and put on a fucking light. We need to talk.

See? Twenty pages of tightly-scrolled bug-up-his-ass iambic boils down, once you take out all the flowery stuff, to a couple of lines tense with broken dreams and damaged honour. What's not to like? Maybe I'll bring it up next time. If Ron pays for the broken glasses, that is: can't get something for nothing these days, and the Strip ain't a charity.