Wilson

by David Mamet

  B2 – “Jay Burrows into mass of Confectioner’s Sugar: ‘I was tired of being Blue’”, etc.

  3 – For an impartial appreciation of Krautz fils, I recommend Ashes by Mara Lentz, and its screen treatment, Testament of Dust.

  Harsh as the life of a poet very well may be, we cannot help but recur to the words of Chief Justice Hugo Black in the decision Marbury v. Madison Guarantee, in which a medical man, summoned to minister to an expiring bank director, fell into a cistern. The Justice, writing for the majority opinion, commented: “He should have catered to the sick and left the well alone.”

  And it may not be amiss, having granted to the young Krautz the application for which he strove, that of a poet, to quote from a work, chosen, the reader may be free to believe, at random, Pottery:

  Not unlike products from Japan

  Innocent of all identifying marks

  No pride of place

  Informs the crockery of our soul.

  No. Rather, like … [et cetera]

  It took the genius of “Little Timmy Jones”B3 to find inspiration in that disjunction. She reasoned that the “valence” (her word) of the Toll Hound suggested a “partner” of similar weight; such a “partner:’ she continued, was not to be found in the List of Twelve. But such must exist. It was her reasoning which led to the first recorded suggestion of the identity of Bennigsen and Krautz – such reducing the Pantheon to Eleven, and “Allowing the Mind to Rove,”B4 till Modern ScholarshipB5 came to teeter, as it now does, upon that precipice beyond which we find, not “the void,” but a (pardon the irony) belated recognition of the deity of Jane of Trent.

  B3 – Mrs Ruth Moncrieff, “The Cedars,’ Newton Lower Falls, Mass.

  B4 – History of Whippies.

  B5 – See “Bunny” Gaye,B5A Those “Little Men in Gold” (The Learn-to-Read Foundation).

  B5A – It was a “Bunny” Gaye who, while an undergraduate at Smith College, discovered the compositor’s “miscorrection” of “homard” to “homage” in Marcel Duchamp’s 1921 Manifesto: Homage* au Daddsme. (Small world.) (Pity about her marriage.)

  * [Homard.]

  4 – From: Hugo Black, Chief Justice WBA, Lettres de mon Moulin:

  A man is on a choochoo train traversing Russia. In the carriage with him is an old Jewish fellow, rocking interminably back and forth, and muttering, “Oi, am I thirsty,” hours on end.

  The train stops at a remote station, and our traveler, driven mad by the Jew, leaps from the train, runs into the station, and buys him a tasty drink.

  Back in the train the Jew downs the drink (lemonade), the traveler settles back into his seat, sanguine the Jew will now subside to silence.

  The train accelerates, and the Jew, however, begins once again to rock, intoning, this time, “Oi was I thirsty, oi was I thirsty …”

  Cf. Lynn Bogue Hung, Billing and Cooing: The Economics of Prostitution in Twentieth-century Indiana and Porno-Economics: The Hurly Burly of the Chaise-longue (Sportsman’s Press), and Marcia Kelley, Brig. Gen. USAR Ret., It’s Not the Men, It’s the Stairs.

  1 – See also Tales of the Fantasist; The Fantasist in Story and Song; (Children’s] Life of the Fantasist, also known as Life of the Fantasist for Children; and Twenty-nine Palms after Dark.

  2 – Idle Hours by Stream and Campside, Apologia (The Whippies Corporation).

  3 – “Struck like chain lightning from the rock of his consciousness,” Idle Hours Neath the Stars; “smashed like the very dickens from the adamant of his awareness,” Idle Hours at Bath and Torquay, etc. etc.

  4 – Trish, Monkey, Two-for-the-Show (Champion Laeticia’s Dragon-Dumfrey Loxen Box).

  5 – Back ’n’ Hidin’, Kungsholm, Sproon.

  * Emphasis in the original.

  1 – “We did not have these pea green soups until people began to describe them.” (O. Wilde)A

  A – I fear I must take up the issue of the pea soup “joke” referred to in note 1. This “joke” has been fairly definitively identified thus:

  SPEAKER: I will say various things to you, and you must respond, whatever I say: “French Canadian PeaA1 Green Soup.”

  LISTENER: All right.

  SPEAKER: What did the French Canadian have for breakfast?

  LISTENER: French Canadian Pea Green Soup.

  SPEAKER: What did the French Canadian have for lunch?

  LISTENER: French Canadian Pea Green Soup.

  SPEAKER: What did the French Canadian have for dinner?

  LISTENER: French Canadian Pea Green Soup.

  SPEAKER: What did the French Canadian do then?

  LISTENER: French Canadian PeaA1 Green Soup.

  Al – (“pee”) The original (by Greind) was in 101 Jake Pranks, and Rainy Day Activities (The Hardy Little Books with the Yellow Cover). That its discoverer was Greind can evoke neither doubt nor interest.

  1 – Miracle on 47th Street, op. cit. Cf. Miracle on 48th Street, Miracle on 49th Street, and the, granted, less-though-not-anti-thaumaturgical, Spurges Guides to New York (The Little Yellow Book That Screams Out, “Rob Me!”.) We are grateful to Miriam and Paul Spurges and the George and Anna Spurges Foundation for their benign [?complicity (illegible, Ed.)] in the production of this [?volume;?vellum].

  * Alexander.

  † Writing and war.

  * On the Notepad.

  † And now.

  * U Thant: Secretary General, Benighted Natives, 1968-?? See also: Camacho’s, “That Boogie in the Winter-O.” MAN’S BEST FRIEND, Macho Camacho, ed.

  1 – See Larry Budd, Bookmarks and Ephemera of the Voyage Out. See also: A Guide to the Parking Meter Problem, and My Fantasist and Yours (Faith Publications).

  1 – May it not be understood as ironic, i.e., as referring, as in schoolyard humor, to its inverse: e.g. large chaps called “Shorty”; fat ones, “Slim”; and “Wee-Butt”, then, a cognomen of the steatopygian?A

  A – Cf.

  FELLOW A: Hi there, “Crisco!”

  FELLOW B: Why do you call me “Crisco?”

  FELLOW A: “Fat-in-the-can!”A1

  Al – See also Weebut in Earthquake Land.

  1 –

  QUESTION: What is the difference, and why characterize one as one rather than the other?

  ANSWER: In the second we see the absence of hope.

  QUESTION (THE WRANGLER): Do we not, however, also there perceive the birth of salubrious resignation? JANE OF TRENT

  1 – Who is to say the Wobbly was human? Might it not have been a bird, or an ape (cf. the works of Edmund Lear), or as is found (much too) frequently in children’s literature, a totally confected creature?

  Yes, might an ape (to choose my favorite) not have hung from a bridge? Might not a sloth, a snake, a bat?

  The question why any of the above might have been “worried” could have been so easily decided (as might the identity of the Wobbly) from context, had the subsequent verses survived. But there is no use crying over spilt milk.

  * Or itself.

  2 – Ginger, of course, knew. For the verse was glued, as we know, to the wall of her cell.

  3 – Cf. W. and A. Durand, The Life History of Civilization - “either a work of over-whelming invention or a vast pile of shit” (New York Times).

  4 – On the precise steps executed by the Toll Hound, we suggest Labanotation and The Heritage of Petipa, or Found in a Trunk in Pinsk.A

  5 – Or consider that the Toll Hound considered.

  6 – But was “John Peel” imaginary? Cf. David Ogilvy, “John Peel and Ciquita Banana,” Advertising Age, December 1961.

  A – Scratched on a (beaverboard) partition between two commodes, Institute of Slav Studies, Balliol:

  QUESTION: What’s the wallpaper at the Ipatiev House?

  ANSWER: Holey holey holey.

  See also A Cottage Small by a Waterfall and The Parking Meter Problem: Rainy Day Fun for Shut-Ins.

  7 – “A. Bassett, what a dyspeptic bitch …”, “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, date unknown.

  1
– This is, of course, a vast mis-statement of the problem. The “men,” in the original, are the king’s men. This rendition suggests the men owe their allegiance/service to the horses! It was upon such a syntactical solecism, of course, that hung the fate of the Martian Dragoons “that day”.A,B

  A – John C. (“Jolly”) Rogers, Reg. Sgt-Major, U.M.D. (Ret.), Ruffles and Flourishes: My Years on Mars. See also his Trooping the Colour, and the Colour’s Always Red and The Woman in Me.

  B – The misconstruction of the possessive pronoun surfaces once again as revelatory in the Toll Hound saga: “And Bingo was his name–o”. How often do we find relief in the picayune? In the over-looked and misunderstood, in the misfiled, nay, in the very vespasienne whose discovery retransforms into a charming Parisian street corner, an operative out-post of hell.

  1 – How odd are the “works of the past.” How, to our eyes, “quaint,” as if (and further investigation may, in fact, establish this to’ve been the case) it existed merely as a “foil,” a Sancho to our Don Quixote,A a relief, or “ground,” to our impressive “figure.”

  It is this aperçu which colors much or both of the true and of the pseudo-scholarship, and work of reconstruction of the Time Before the Riots, and which informs much of the speculation about Greind.

  A – Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote.

  1 – The Stop ’n’ Shop paradigm in Bill Gapes, The Destruction of All Knowledge, vol. XII (Punchboard Press, Twenty-nine Palms, Sector Four, Group Four, New South Mars), with a tip of the Hatlo Hat to the Grinian Asteroids and All the Ships at Sea: BUT WHAT IF THE GUY FROM THE SHOE DEPARTMENT BURNT IT DOWN?A

  And also:

  Abie had a Candystore

  Business going bad.

  from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Burbank.

  A – But what if the guy from the shoe department burnt/burned it down? Who would have blamt/blamed him? Think about it. Sitting there, sniffing old fat ladies’ feet, trying to cram them in, a size too small. Who would of blamed him, cause* what did the whole thing† mean to him, any case? “Get up, go to work, sniff old ladies’ feet, go home, try not to think about it.” I would of burnt it down, that case, anyone would. So would you!!

  Cf. Bennigsen:

  This sty, this shithole of a world this worse-than-obscene compilation of all cruelties in which what higher good than [indecipherable].

  See also the works of Greind (Bennigsen) and How He Came Down the Chimney.

  * For.

  † The universe.

  2 – “He” being, of course, as per above, either Bruce Wallingford, Dora Jessica Butz, Sally James, or Deanna Marcodeangelo; see Annals of the Humphries Memorial Library, transferred from the original card catalogue to microfiche, 1991; to DAT, 1999; again to paper, 2032; and lost in the Cola Riots, surviving (in part) as a remnant, in the New Federal Document Retrieval Museum (“Playland”), Fentervale, Falls Church, Virginia (“Children Welcome, Absolutely No Pets, Homosexuals Preferred, No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service”).

  3 – Rabbi Larry Kushner, Sudbury, Massachusetts, 1996.

  4 – We here use, and will always use, the phrase as it is used in general conversation to refer to the first note. We have no patience with the quibbler – those academics and shitheads who’ve based their careers upon the mountains of monographs differentiating between the taxonomy “Note 1,” “Note 2,” ‘Note 3,” and those plumping for “The Note,” “The Note in the Garden,” “Bubba’s Note,” “The Coffee Stain,” etc. What a waste of time …

  5 – Granted, he did, eventually, shoot himself, but [indecipherable].

  6 – Expurgated.

  7– Was it knowledge, though, or was it merely “information” – that lifeless, boring stuff the schoolmasters had been trying to cram down our throats these last five million years? No wonder they were taken out and killed.*

  8 – We are assuming the light would have been left on in the dairy case. Why? Because it makes a pretty picture.

  * Good job.

  1 – Cf. Us and Them by Martin Buber:

  … an ancient rune or cuneiform, from which modern science can render only this phrase: “We can deal with the Goyim – God help us with the German Jews” – its meaning, if, indeed, it has one, lost in the mists of time.A

  And was not Krautz to posit his own “secret writing,” as it were – a Harmonics of Behavior, in which, given the tonic, one could deduce the changes: mediant, submediant, dominant, subdominant, tonic; all behavior marching, orderly, toward home, like an old tomcat, set in his ways, upon his midnight walk – his very diversion – here to urinate, here to frolic with a compliant female, thence to the garbage pails of a restaurant – an old tomcat, I say, whose very diversions and seeming pointless anfractuosities reveal, upon some observation, a routine ordered to the last degree? Would that it were, and, gentle Reader, may I be pardoned my obiter dictum on the Human State, but what, finally, is the end of all our labors, and what the reduction of all effort if not understanding of (in an attempt to better) our state?

  But any theory, however serviceable, may be stretched past the (elastic, yes, in some cases, but finite, in all) point of utility.

  A – Quoted by Krautz (ibid.) and I may take this as a happy time to peregrinate and offer that reminder “nothing is such a sure prognostication of a second-class mind as a facility with languages.”

  2 – See also O. Neselrod, Urine Testing in Literature, and the companion volume, Bend Over and Spread ’Em.B

  B – The one aspect of the situation not examined, either at the time or later (to my knowledge) is that of the container. Who has examined it?* What held the urine? Please see, Percy Bysshe Shelley, “I Made It Out of Clay” and “The Cadence Count of the Fourteenth Martian Dragoons (Mech.)”:

  A Traveler in an Antique Land One, Two, Three, Four

  Came on a Statue in the Sand Jody called your gal a whore Sound off …

  * Presumably the FBI.

  1 – “For this is but another way to know him – to know what he read or ate” (Wisdom of the Fantasist).

  1 – I call the reader’s attention, as if such prompting were required, to the “Drearest/Dearest” parapraxis in the letter to Goessals, “Drearest Friend”.A

  2 – Cf. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “One Little Letter (and the Letter is ‘U’): The Difference Between a Champ and a Chump” (18??).

  A – “A Man, a Plan, a Canal: Suez”, Psychotherapy in Civil Engineering, 19??, and the wealth of obbligati thereupon, e.g., Dearest Fiend, Drearest Feint, Nearest Friend, etc. Now this, certainly, is immortality of a sort – to’ve added a phrase to the language is to’ve touched the Community Cortex deeper and more finally than praise or riches or rewards could testify. It is, in fact,“twice blest, in that it blesseth him that gives and her that gives” (Germaine Greer, Spotty).

  1 –

  QUESTION (As the students had it, “in those days”) Why is “The Strikeplate” included?

  ANSWER Shut up and deal.A

  2 – Greind himself was once asked, “Must form follow function?”, to which he replied, “Surest thing you know.”

  A – Alternatively:

  1 Shut up in Deal – et seq.: Derry, Lobb, Concairn, etc.

  2 Shut up, indeed.

  1 – See Dickin’ Jane: The Hidden Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, op. cit.

  2 – For a discussion of the (possible) (virtual) interchangeability of the two, please see Brunner, Feld, et al., It All Ends Up the Same Place.

  3 – See Vondervogelveider, Wagner, et al.

  4 – The monograph here continues on the congruity of the Grail and the Amulet. As it offers nothing either in addition to nor more interesting or supportable than its reduction in the opening paragraphs, it is omitted.

  1 – Bongazine (February–July 2101), © the editors.A

  2 – It was Cohen, of course, who, not recognizing “that” as a pronoun, reduced a sketch which should have been the letter K into an H, and therefore misunderstood the Old Wrangler’s mess
age, “BE KIND” as “BEHIND.”

  A – Misfiled here during “Phase Two” of the Riots, its “courtesy” placement has offered, if not inspiration, at least hope, to a, granted, ever-decreasing number of academics.

  1 – Maltz, Buck and Kreutzer, Bongazine Forever.

  * Generally termed “last words,” “dying utterance,” etc.

  2 – Paul P. Crumble, My Life in Advertising (Bogside Press, 20??). Cf. The Twelfth Sermon of the Fantasist: “This year I’m going to the mountains.”

  † Ha ha.

  * This period

  1 – I do not mean to malign, and, in fact, abjure any intent to malign either here or elsewhere, any writ or scripture of any known or – if such there be – yet-to-be-discovered tribe, sect, or people which does not so instruct. Reflection reveals that I, no less than you, gentle Reader, am subject to ethnocentrism. I have taken one aspect of my myth, or Weltanschauung, and posited its universality, on no evidence save my subscription to it. Must there not be – yes, there must – those groups devoted to expulsion of their neighbors; and must there not exist monstrous great piles of records of the most grueling description, being the world myth or whatever mumbo-jumbo, of this or that tribe in which those outside the immediate, the most immediate bonds of communal or, mayhap, of consanguinal germanity are denoted “devils,” the eradication of whom is denominated summum bonum?

  Of course there must. And I will leave it to be argued elsewhere whether such division of the world into the moieties (us and them) does not engender a greater, a greater humanity. (Such, granted, within the limits of the tribe. A creation of that division, the Good, “us,” and the Bad, “them.” And I propose that even the more advanced sects make this division but are, perhaps, less aware of it.)

  But perhaps I am full of shit.