Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): Letters to Dead Masters: #27

          George,

          I am overhearing Tibby talk to one of his fiction-writing friends on his cell-phone. The subject of his phone-call is “falls from grace”— who’s fallen, who hasn’t. In literature, there are any number of ways to fall— you can publish the wrong things at the wrong time, be too famous or not famous enough, shoot too many arrows at too many moving targets or forget to defend yourself. Tibby happens to be discussing the arrow-shooters; guys who create toxic social contexts and destroy themselves in the process. Ironically, this is precisely how I perceive Tibby. “With guys like this, you just have to walk away,” he says. Tibby, as usual, projects onto other artists what he doesn’t want to see in himself; but I see Tibby’ projection as representative of a larger problem. To put the matter bluntly, artists in 2010 America have largely gone Republican, owing to the subconscious influence of one Dick Cheney (pants-wearer) and his jack George W. Bush. The Republican syndrome in American artists manifests in two ways: 1) an inability to see art in any but the most crassly competitive terms, and 2) a complete and totalized unwillingness to change on any level. This widely manifested syndrome has turned the arts, willy-nilly, into a charnel ground; a damned, God-forsaken locale. The cruel irony is that a majority of artists (like Tibby) consider themselves to be liberal. It’s a generation sickness that spans three generations; and it makes mince-meat of any American “ideals” that artists could think to propagate. Heather Mullen’s nightmare. Tibby and I do small-talk, and the subtext never changes; he pretends to know less about myself and my work than he actually does. His biz is parasitic and voyeuristic. Yawn.

        I just had to repel a kind of attack. A tall, thin, balding guy in his (I’m guessing) fifties with a moustache and a plethora of arm-tattoos invited himself to sit down at my table and smoke a cigarette. I put him off by telling him I’m “working.” I am, and part of my work is digging through the “Fall Arts” issue of one of the weekly free shit-rags. I’m stunned: there’s no literature in this at all. It’s all theater, painting, pop music. Philly is, after all, a fiercely illiterate city. People here pride themselves on what (and how much) they don’t know. And here comes Tibby again, and it looks like he’s got big news. It is this: one of his friends (an NYC guy) scored a movie deal with his latest opus. Of course, this is something I have no chance of competing with. Tibby presents the data to me as a fait accompli, but I know that most movie deals fall through. Tibby’s two objectives: to fill up his accustomed vacuum of hollow space (he’s not writing, scrounging, wife preggers) and to make me feel as small and worthless as possible. If I have an objective, it’s only to gather anecdotes towards a comprehensive summary of human foibles. I’m willing to be complicit with Tibby: I flinch at apropos moments. Tibby, incidentally, carries his body like a befuddled twelve-year-old forced to carry six feet and one-hundred seventy pounds. His wardrobe evinces hipsterism reduced to bare essentials— faded blue-jeans, tight tee-shirt. His speech conveys the know-it-all assurance of burgeoning adolescence. In other words, he’s a man-child. The DJs aren’t that different; immaturity, after all, fuels the cheap competitiveness and totalized stasis that have made a charnel ground of this place, too. Interactions like this used to shake me; but when you begin to look beyond yourself, they become easier to bear. For the real players, there are even interesting levels to self-absorption— you are absorbed in yourself, while also engaged in acts of self -transcendence. In this mode, you can get past button-pushing and see into the life of things. Tibby thinks that writing a novel is just pushing buttons— here’s something that looks symbolic, something that seems penetrating, something with “universal resonance.” He’s a show-off, fishing for praise. Vast, mighty, ephemeral careers have been built from button-pushing. Real literature erupts when an artist starts to fumble— Audrey Cope said that. It’s fun to do these arabesques while waiting to see if Dana eventually shows up (I still don’t have her cell number). Sometimes I feel like tossing my entire enterprise aside just to gawk at the sky. The Grind could use a little sky in it.

       Well, Dana finally showed up alright. She was a little off-kilter, a little askew, and also a little mischievous. A bunch of whispered conversations ensued, and, from a gesture Kris made, I sussed what the point must’ve been— Dana is coyly leading everyone who needs to know to believe that she just gave one of the DJs a blowjob. Sigh. Am I a little tender, about this stuff? Yeah. Julie Hayes once claimed to have given twenty guys blowjobs over the course of one summer. Guys who will never eat, I trust, desert mushrooms again. Yikes. Well, get over it. She probably just sold him some dope. Who knows? I hope she really did it. Once again, I do the yeoman’s task of walking in the park, dancing in the dark, and reminiscing. To me (I say, to the assembled throng of 19th century bards), Heather Mullen (her again) was always the quintessential Master of Disaster (MOD) around fellatio; was, in fact, a High Mod. She thus displayed mastery of craft-skills related to fellatio and emotional dispossession, streams of consciousness, skewered perspectives, not to mention an artful sense of fracturing. It remains to be seen, I incise spitefully, if Dana displays such mastery. Inbuilt also, for Ms. Mullen: the deconstructive impulse, the definitive conviction that “there is nothing outside the sex.” That’s the thesis of Equations, anyway, right? Not to mention Reception Velocity, like on the Internet. The irony of the High Mod girl; she sucks.

       Deep in my own desert mushroom trance, I can’t not hit Trish again. Killer instincts aside, Trish’s hardcore fellatio Romanticism was about an ideal, a belief; that we were two souls interlocked, moving through our private and privatized universe together. Sincerely. And she was wildly lyrical, orally. She found me mad, bad, and dangerous to blow; but it worked. The music was electric. Trish was Psyche, she was Helen, she was Penelope. Not to mention Venus, Athena, Maud Gonne, Fanny Brawne. And Traci Lords. Phantasmagoric, in a way that Heather Mullen could never be; but short, as it were on irony. Dana Blasconi need not apply.

        Sky-Clad,          

              Adam

© Adam Fieled 2024