Wilson

by David Mamet

  A – Cf. “The Tie,” p. 197.

  * Big gloves and big socks.

  1 – How Blota Got His Name, B-zine “Commemero-Cards,” series #4. See also A Child’s History of Bazoomercom.

  1 – Chicle.

  2 – Deletion or omission, running to two paragraphs.A

  A – Based on the lacuna (= 2 inches, approx.) in the original manuscript.

  3 – From “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb, or Seventeen Excuses for Corporate Failure,” from The Tie:

  Now it is the Future.

  Now it is Not the Past.

  Now it is the time of which all Dreamed.

  They are gone now.

  What can we make of that?

  JIM BROOKS, President, Brooks Brothers

  1 – And it was this “prediction” which inaugurated the inclusion in the Liturgy of “How could he have known … How could he have known …”, Canonical Authority, “Three men will surely follow me”, Canto XXXVII: 4.21. Cf. Bill McCloskey and the “After-Hours Boys,” “Tom, Dick, and Harry,” from A Child’s Christmas on Mars – all proceeds donated to Kamp Kawaga,A fresh-air camps of Mare Nostrum.

  A – Such of course, when proved not to be the case, occasioned the defenestration of Mr. McCloskey and the resultant closing of Madison Avenue (N.Y.) between 33rd and 34th Streets, which, if it did not inaugurate, certainly exacerbated the confusion and the terror of “That Day.”

  1 – See The Old Wrangler in Burbank (privately printed).

  2 – From: Will and Ariel Durant, on Our Boardinghouse (NBC Radio: Blue Network, 12 June 1939):

  QUESTION: Is anything ever “irretrievably lost”?

  ANSWER: Well, if not, where is my other sock!

  3 – Look at the photos. You can see it in his eyes. That man had been around the block.

  1 – This seeming vacuism achieved, in the decades following the Riots, the invocational, placative, apotropaic statis of “Cosa da Inquisition” (see Abbot Encastellaugh, The Spanish Inquisition: 14??-189?, or ¿Quien es la sobre prima?”A

  2 – See Mrs. Lida Parker Knowles, and the Ladies of the Church Committee, Memories of Old Pasadena (feuilleton).

  A – This note is spurious.

  3 – Cf. The Gnostic Union with “the Real”, op. cit., and Carl Young, Fantasist and Fantasy.

  1 – “Intuition” is perhaps much too strong a term. I would suggest the alternative “observation,” or some other word which indicates just looking at the damn thing and seeing the obvious.

  2 – See the works of C. F. Post, Battle Creek, Michigan (www./po-toastie; fee involved), and Whippies, op. cit.

  3 – Carl Rogers, The Devil Made Me Do It.

  4 – The original, of course, referring not to the waterbird (genus gavia), but to the King, employing the Middle English lauen (from the Icelandic, meaning, “one who is at the end of his rope”). Cf. Jespersen’s (attempted) conflation of the Althabascan and the Norse. I would remind him (were he here to remind) that the Vikings sailed west. Duh.

  5 – Songs of the Rod ‘n’ Gun (privately printed).

  * The same thing.

  † Whatever that means.

  6 – This is an example of that “academic humour” to which we, in honesty, must admit Greind was partial.

  The three areas – the grand mal, the revelation, Priedieux’s decampment – constitute, of course (in petit) the syllabus of that year’s study at the Institute. It is not for the student to “choose,” but to apply him-or herself to the entire course of study. And Chet’s faux-avuncular “aside” must be seen as what it was: a ploy, and the operation of a sick, sick mind. For those students who accepted his “suggestion” and wrote on the priedieux were failed, dropped from the university, and, thus, debarred from an academic life.A

  How sad is the misuse of power.

  Lord Acton said that power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely.B

  His success with the bon mot betrayed him into that unfortunate and touching waste of what promised to be both a brilliant diplomatic career, and a rather nice life; for, having uttered that most famous line,C he could never afterward utter a simple statement, but it had to be (to his mind) pithy, weighty, memorable, and rhythmic. Questions ranging from “How are you, Binky?” to “Would you like the scrod?” were met with a tilt of his head, a sad, knowing look, a sigh, and the rendition of a one-liner aspiring to universal applicability.

  No wonder his wife shot him.

  But, to return, how sad is the misuse of power. And how pathetic the autonomic operations of our human breed.

  Having subdued the beasts, harnessed first fire, then water,D then the electron, the atom, the neutrino, muuguu, and starlight itself, where do we end, who know no boundaries nor cess? Where do we end but, time after time and inevitably, in the shit-hole, warming fire giving way to instruments of war, wisdom to academia; for, the one aspect of the inevitable we may decry all day is that it’s bound to happen. [The manuscript here continues in holograph:] And it won’t change a goddamn thing.

  A – The author fails to find significant the fact that two of them were killed. Hmm.

  B – The Sayings of Lord Acton (Ridgely, Hants: Beaverboard Press).

  C – Christmas Panto, London 1912.

  D – Cf. Archimedes, in Roman Holiday,

  directed by William Wyler (1953).

  1 – The chances of a victorious outcome for the Blue team, subsequent to the bidding above, have been calculated as one in 235.

  2 – See Ryzybski’s Dream. (And cf. Ryzybski’s Dream, pp. 187–8.)

  1 – J. M. Potts, M.D., Martian Space Service, I Found the Cure for the Salk Vaccine.

  * For the seeker-after-truth.

  2 – “Donna and Chet”, in La Nouvelle Ecosse: Pays des Vacances exquises (Editions Vuillard).

  3 – “A History of Whippies,” International Pâtisserie (formerly Ceres) Archives.

  4 – A cut toward the knee.

  5 – Tesso.

  6 – It should be noted that even if there is no Inner Code, those responding to the Whippies ad (“Win a free membership in the Bootsie Club”) did constitute a mailing list; and it was from this list that the first subscribers of Bongazine came. Wheels within wheels.

  7 – Lettres de mon Moulin.

  8 – © Scholastic Testing Service.

  9 – See extract below.

  * And, for the most part, ill-written.

  10 – “Fee fie fo fum,” Bongazine, vol. XV no. 10.

  11 – I would have liked to’ve been there.

  * No comment.

  1 – In the original, mis-spelled as “Martiality,” and, therefore, mis-filed, an orphan, with an orphan’s brave face masking but never concealing self-doubt, fear, and a general sense of unfairness, in the section “Mars.”

  2 – “Lady of Spain”: (a) I adore you [pull down your pants]; (b) I’ll explore you.

  3 – Was it a simple error in transcription, in arithmetic, which led Greind to his (mis)identification of the two cryptograms?

  * Nighty.

  4 – The urine was Mrs. Wilson’s,A but did she pen the note?

  The ancient joke, of course, is “Mr. President, someone has written ‘Fuck Nixon [Truman, Disraeli, Leon Blum, Frederick of Prussia, Pharaoh]’ in urine in the snow. We’ve analyzed the urine, and it is that of your wife. Worse news, still, the handwriting is that of your Prime Minister.” Ancient joke, still good today. Just change the names.

  A – “Chemical Analysis of Urine: The Wilson Note”, Report of the Bureau of Investigation (later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation).

  (I am indebted, also, to Herbert Yardley’s immortal Secrets of the American Black Chamber, for acting as a shim and holding up one corner of my work table during the writing of this piece. I would also like to thank my wife, Boo, for her unending good sense, good humor, and generosity, and my three girls for their patience. Daddy loves you very much.)

  1 – In the original, “cantillations”.

 
; 2 – Shouts from the floor: “Oh, bullshit.”

  3 – Traditionally, of course, Bongazine, vol. 1 no. 1, or, in the case of the Traduction, Dink Stover at Yale.

  4 – Here, once again, as the narrative breaks off, I must recur to the Schedule of Medications, in the hope that, if it does not clarify, it may aid the reader to pass the time until his or her next meal, job, promotion, extramarital affair, insight, sleep, et cetera, et cetera, moo moo moo moo moo n’jambaya. R’koo, r’koo, r’koo.A

  A – Transcribed from the best available (existing and enhanced) record(ing)(s); cf. The Diorama: “Martian Landings in Song and Story on The Mall” – “The Shame of the Smithsonian,” J. Dilinger.

  1 – “Can it be, may it be, can it be that no one has remarked the coincidence of the ‘Trunk’ motif in the canon with – and proven through statistical analysis to fall exactly in a pattern 1:4:5:1 with – the ‘Bootsie’ material? Can I be the first to conflate the American ‘Trunk’ with the British ‘Boot’? What joy!” Krautz.A

  A – Disallowed, as composed under the influence of steroids.

  2 – Cf. Terra Incognita, or Find Your Way Home (Floorsgaarrd, Sweden: Silva Compass Company).

  * Hocks.

  1 – Disputed. (“For the books, do you see, for the books were found on the Shelf, and, so, must be considered.”)

  2 – Nobody has any idea what he is talking about.

  3 – cf. “How About It?”, A. Huysmans.

  1 – When I was a little boy I had a puppy. I miss him.

  1 – See Lola Montez and the Cargo Cults [?Cunts], Yale University Press; Boston Blackie Meets His Match, op. cit.

  2 – It is obvious that the author here intended, once again, to mount his hobbyhouse and “quirt” it into a lather; or, to put it simply, to discommode us once again with his beloved theory of Spontaneous Appearance, or of Synchronicity between this world and space,A this particular anecdotal snippet of coincidence: the resemblance between the beast on Montez’s lap and that creature whose likeness was found scratched into the exterior of the Capsule.

  QUESTION: HOW WE GO ASTRAY AFTER THE “EVIDENCE” OF OUR SENSES

  Love, politics, commerce, war – search in vain to find a theater of endeavor not replete with blatant instances of self-deceit. What can we not convince ourselves of, and does the mind not function, in the main, however we might wish to think it otherwise, to the detriment, to the undoing of the body?

  O, better, then, Sport, I say, than Philosophy, for the getting of “Wisdom” – for there is no Wisdom. There is only Folly; and any fool could see they were two different dogs.

  A – This note has been lost. How could it be reconstructed? It cannot. It is bootless as the effort to determine the time through reference to a stopped or broken watch. “Surely,” one thinks, “knowing, as we do, the time the watch stopped must have some worth, all I need do is to determine the interval since then, and I shall know the current time.”

  In which we see, yet again, the human capacity for self-delusion. For the fact that the watch was constructed to tell the time bespeaks no hidden or residuary excellencies on its part once that operation’s ceased.

  Now, like the corpse of man, it now exists only to call our attention to the absence of that which we once had ta’en for granted. No. No, like the corpse, it can tell us nothing now save the fact it once could tell us something.”A1*

  1 – “How dead the dead look. With good reason.” Greind. Cf. his Thoughts on a Cessation of Being, from chapter 12:

  I was once in church. And the pastor’s sermon concluded with the phrase from scripture, “Let the dead bury the dead,” at which utterance I heard, at my side, a feminine voice mutter, “Who’s stopping them?” and I turned my head to glimpse, for the first time, the young woman who’d, one day, become my first wife.

  * What of the operations of pathology? How can one take this otherwise than as an intentional slight?

  1 – See Walter Wade, B.A., It Could Have Been a Toaster.

  2 – Cf. You Only Rent It (etc.)

  * Wilson’s.

  1 – See Two Trains Are Leaving Chicago, op. cit.

  * “Kissing and telling” [disputed].

  1 – (River T.K.).

  2 – Of Bongazine.

  3 – With all apologies to any religious readers. The author is supposed, and the editors avow the lack of any intent to insult or transgress the usually agreed upon moeurs of polite discourse. Within which bounds they hope all reasonable readers will find this disclaimer to lie.

  * Death Larsen, the “Sea Wolf.”

  † Figuratively.

  ‡ Is?

  1 – “said Ginger” (var. edn).

  * How could he think otherwise?

  2 – “or d’Artagnan”; this scrawled in the margins of a “reading copy” in the Carnegie Library, New South Mars – “Where your friends are.”

  1 – Bautz et al. (eds), There Stands a Woman with Soap in her Hole (2011).

  2 – “See the World in a Grain on Sand”, Business Opportunities in Egypt and the Holy Land (USIA pamphlet, ?1930).

  1 – Imitation being the sincerest form of plagiarism: “Two sperms looking at an egg. One says to the other, ‘Makes me wish I was born.’” (Twelfth Vatican Council on Birth Control, Intercourse, Pa., 20??).A

  2 – N.B. Stateville Prison, Joliet, III., 19??: “Richard Loeb, youngest student ever to graduate from the University of Chicago, last night ended his sentence with a proposition.”

  A – Note used by permission. I cite also: The Perry Como Sweater, Its Provenance; Jump Back: The Life of Lord Cardigan, and Cloak of My Colors [?Cork of Many Colors]; Racial Diversity in Cork and Kerry, Irish Echo (Sunday Supplement and Classified [date?]); and the MIT Publications monograph, submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a degree, Doctor of Philosophy in Earth Science, Toward a Real Number Parameter on the Ways to Skin a Cat, and its film version, Let Common Sense Prevail (or, in S. American release, Skippy).

  1 – According to generally accepted standards of accepting, Lutz, Frost, et al., Questions and Answers in Bookkeeping.

  1 – The remainder of this speech has – mercifully, as we may opine – been lost.

  2 – He means, of course, that the likelihood of it occurring is as the likelihood of the aforementioned winter (or “Alpine”) sports. A computation made more difficult* by the fantastical or notional nature of the second term.A

  A – One tradition holds that the sentence or bon mot ends, “… in their picturesque Scandinavian knitwear.”†

  * Impossible! Impossible!

  † Would that we lived in a world where such could, unquestioned, be accepted as the case.

  1 – The true position of the heart, in all mammals, lies almost precisely upon the meridian, and not, as is erroneously supposed, slightly to the left.A

  A – There appears to be a direct correlation between the education of the individual and the individual’s disposition to minimize the distance between the position of the heart and the body’s center line – the uneducated picturing it lying below the left nipple, the intellectual just to the left of center. All are, of course, wrong, but it must be observed that the less educated, though guilty of the greater error geographically, are decreasingly (as their misconception deviates from the center line) guilty of intellectual arrogance.

  1 – Chet and Donna are two, as two they are one; and Ginger is one, which is, of course, three,A which, once again makes one. So it has always been found “nice” that their narrative “completes” the disquisition.B

  A – 2

  B – Which was written, and was understood to mean, “that portion prior to ‘The Old Wrangler.’”

  1 – Cf. Alcock and (?) Brown, Brittle Women: “I don’t know, but I been told, Eskimo pussy …” et cetera.

  * Vast, actually.

  2 – We may safely accept as sufficiently quotidian to lack claim upon our notice the pronouncement that an Eskimo is “cold.”A

  3 – Lite
rary.

  4 – Except Ancient Greece. And England.

  5 – The following five hundred words were expurgated by the (First) Trilateral Commission, and, though existing on microfiche, were lost in the fire at the Stop ’n’ Shop.

  6 – Cf. Encyclopedia Britannica.

  A – See “We Sell Umbrellas When It Rains,” in Jokes of the Catskills (Animal Welfare League, 1963).

  * Limitless.

  † Surpassing.

  7 – What can we say about the exclusion from consideration of the sometimes adverb, sometimes adjective, “mighty?” Where might it have fallen in the sentence?”B For a sometime rambling but, withal, rewarding dispatiation of Greind’s “reasoning” for the exclusion, please see At a Store Near You, op. cit.

  8 – Or seals.

  B – Mighty cold Eskimo is pussy.

  Cold mighty Eskimo is pussy.

  Cold Eskimo mighty is pussy.

  Cold Eskimo is mighty pussy.

  Cold Eskimo is pussy mighty.

  * Never.

  1 – Or password.

  2 – Note: To have fathered a child who would live till the twenty-second century, a man, by the most liberal estimation, could not have been more than three at the time of the Discovery. And, even granting that to’ve been the case, would have had to be up sufficiently past his bedtime to have been quite extraordinarily (a) drowsy or (b) cranky.A

  A – It is, to me, profoundly disturbing that the commentator would not mention the third (and, in all, most likely) possibility, i.e. (c) asleep. I deal with the phenomenon in the next chapter.

  1 – Cf. Lon Chaney as The Wolfman (Universal, 1940).

  * Too much.

  † ???!!!

  1 – X, in this case, being the inclusion, in chapter 12, of an other-than-exhaustive litany of the possibilities of portal architecture.