Human Tongue Sauteed in Buttermilk, Things We Do to Each Other in Hotel Rooms, and a Few Words about Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird

Primary Text:

Gray, Amelia. Museum of the Weird. Tuscaloosa, AL: FC2, 2010.

Secondary Texts:

Davis, Lydia. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. New York: FSG, 2010.

McEwan, Ian. The Cement Garden. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

Tertiary Texts:

various books, written and not-yet-written, by Philip Roth, Tim O’Brien, William Styron, J.P. Donleavy, Richard Brautigan, Katherine Anne Porter, Milan Kundera, Jeffrey Eugenides, Edward Said, Blake Butler, Matt Bell, Benjamin Percy, Laura van den Berg, Robert Lopez, Scott McClanahan, Franz Kafka, Deleuze/Guattari, Kyle Minor, and Amelia Gray.

Here is a list of some things you will find pictured on the cover and storied in the pages of Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird:

1. Post-Apocalyptic Rolex.

2. Javelina Eating Sunflower Seeds.

3. 90 Lb. Watermelon.

4. A Pyx, Blessed.

5. Human Tongue Sauteed in Buttermilk.

6. Snake Farm.

7. Rib Removed by God.

8. Boyfriend in Suitcase.

9. Jewel-Encrusted Skull.

10. The Cube.

11. Plate of Hair.

12. Armadillo with Miller High Life.

13. Trichobezoar.

14. The Boyhood Home of Former President Ronald Reagan.

Here is a synopsis of the opening story, “Babies”:

An unnamed narrator wakes to discover she has unexpectedly given birth overnight. When she wakes, the boy is “at that moment having breakfast.” She cleans up the mess, cleans herself and the baby, and calls her boyfriend Chuck, who coughs and says: “I’m not amenable to babies.” Pretty quickly, though, Chuck gets amenable. Then the narrator has another baby the next night. Then:

“The next morning, there was another baby. And another. And another. And another.

“That brings us to today.”

One thing that is interesting to me about the way “Babies” ends:

Everyone accepts everything.

An anecdote about Ian McEwan and Philip Roth:

When Ian McEwan wrote his masterpiece The Cement Garden, he let Philip Roth read it in manuscript. Philip Roth was very generous with his time. He brought the manuscript to Ian McEwan, and spread the pages around. He said the novel was very good, but that Act III had to change. In Act III, Philip Roth said, all hell had to break loose.

What I would have done with “Babies” if “Babies” was my story:

That baby would have undone the narrator’s life, and the boyfriend’s, too. The second baby would have bankrupted everyone. It’s clear, what with all the baby-making mess, that soon there will be no unstained sheets, mattresses, or mattress pads in the house. Consider also the consequences to the woman’s womb and vagina of having babies every night. Consider the milk duct consequences of even four simultaneous babies. Consider how the neighbors will treat this house once it is a terrible drain on the welfare system. Consider how the babies have undone the narrator’s preexisting wants, desires, dreams, plans, etc. Consider how the babies have undone Chuck. Consider how Chuck’s leaving has undone the narrator. The world is a cold, cruel place, and there is nothing to be done about it.

What Amelia Gray did with the ending of “Babies”:

What’s happened has happened, and that brings us to today.

What Ian McEwan should have done with Philip Roth’s advice:

Ignored it.

What Amelia Gray should have done with my advice:

Ignored it.

What Ian McEwan did with Philip Roth’s advice:

Ignored it.

What Amelia Gray would have done with my advice had I offered it:

Ignored it.

The result of Ian McEwan’s choice to ignore Philip Roth’s advice:

The Cement Garden is a stone cold masterpiece.

The result of Amelia Gray’s choice to ignore my advice, had she asked for it, had I offered it, and had she indeed chosen to ignore it:

Museum of the Weird is a stone cold masterpiece.

Why I was scared to read Museum of the Weird:

Because Amelia Gray’s first book, AM/PM, was a stone cold masterpiece, and I didn’t want to be disappointed if her second book didn’t measure up.

Why haven’t more people read AM/PM?

Because it is a book of interlocking one-page narratives published by Featherproof Books, a micropress out of Chicago.

Are you casting aspersions in the direction of Featherproof Books?

No. It is the best micropress in the United States, North America, and the English-speaking world. Once you buy one of their books, you buy them all. If they had any marketing money, someone at The New York Times would declare them the next Seymour Lawrence.

Who was Seymour Lawrence?

Seymour “Sam” Lawrence was the visionary independent publisher who brought you Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, and the first English-language editions of Pablo Neruda’s Selected Poems.

Are you saying we might be on the front end of a renaissance in independent literature?

I wasn’t saying that, but why not say that? The independent literary scene in the United States is as vibrant as it has ever been, and right now it is full of young writers who have written good books and might one day write a great one.

Who are these writers?

Amelia Gray, for starters.

Who else?

Blake Butler, Matt Bell, Benjamin Percy, Laura van den Berg, Robert Lopez, Scott McClanahan… (This list could get long!)

But you said Amelia Gray has written two stone cold masterpieces? Isn’t that greatness?

Now I’ve stuck my foot in my mouth.

Well, now you have. So what are you talking about?

Maybe I meant “bigness.” Maybe I meant “cultural relevance.” Maybe I like the idea that it is still possible for a writer of my generation to write for a broad audience of generally intelligent non-writer readers a big ambitious socially-engaged and philosophically-engaged and history-minded novel like Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex or Philip Roth’s American Pastoral or Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Isn’t that what you keep saying you’re trying to do?

Yes.

Isn’t it a little self-serving to say it, then?

Yes.

If you’re so convinced this is the thing to do, then why haven’t you done it yet?

I’m trying. It’s hard. I’ll probably fail.

Do you ever think it might be the wrong idea about literature, anyway, this big Ahab-ish ambition?

Yes.

Do you ever try to diagnosis its origins in you?

Other people have done it for me.

What did they say?

Psychological origin #1: A sense of personal inadequacy rooted in childhood slights and the desire to use literature to make oneself important.

Psychological origin #2: Megalomania.

Psychological origin #3: The desire for the kind of money (book advances, film options, lecture fees, and tenure-track teaching appointments) one-page stories will not bring.

Psychological origin #4: The brain wiring native to many heterosexual males.

Psychological origin #4a: Saul Bellow said he did it so women would sleep with him.

Sociological-historical origin: (see Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993)

Word most likely to appear in the title of such a book: American.

So it’s all for vanity, those big books?

No. I really think those big, ambitious books, even the ones that are big failures, have a weight and a value that rewards the time of the reader, and that the big canvas can do plenty of things the little canvas can’t do, and that therefore there is a potential embedded in the big book at the level of conception that is lacking in the book that is more modestly scaled.

And yet, when confronted with Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird . . .

What confronts me is a pleasure of a different but not lesser order that what I receive from, say, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice.

Can you further characterize that pleasure?

Have you heard of Lydia Davis?

Yes.

There is this story of hers titled “Example of the Continuing Past Tense in a Hotel Room.” The entire text of the story is one sentence: “Your housekeeper has been Shelly.”

If you asked me to synopsize Toni Morrison’s Beloved in one sentence, I would say: “The great ghost story that undoes all our preexisting wrongheaded notions about slavery in America and makes us feel and feel and feel while all the time we forget we’re even reading because the enchanter’s spell has convinced us briefly that we are in the midst of living the great ghost story that undoes all our preexisting wrongheaded notions about slavery, even though we aren’t thinking about it in those abstract analytical terms because what we are mostly doing is more akin to the experience of living than the experience of thinking.”

The reason I would be able to thus synopsize Beloved is because the narrative is exhaustive. The writer has done the reader the service of mediation of the most immediate variety. Information-management is foregrounded, even if, in this case, it is foregrounded in a very sophisticated way that requires the reader to be a good reader. We know the things we need to know, and where there is mystery, it is an experiential mystery germane to the subject, the theme, the structure, and the working method of the novel, not a jerking-you-around-by-unnecessarily-withholding-information mystery.

But what do you do with a story where the text is shorter than the title?

Often, when I am reading Lydia Davis, it is the experience of reading as a self-conscious experience of reading which is initially foregrounded. What I mean by that is I don’t ever for one second forget that I am reading. Part of the pleasure of reading Lydia Davis is the sophisticated pleasure of reading a writer who realizes I realize she realizes she’s crafting a story meant to call attention to itself as a story. We’re having a wrestling match. Me and Lydia Davis. She is going to make me do the work of fleshing out her story even though she is no less capable of fleshing out her story than Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison respects me by offering a fully rendered experience. Lydia Davis respects me by offering me an invitation to make an experience alongside her.

One result of this is that it would be easier to write a six hundred page digression about Lydia Davis’s one-sentence story “Example of the Continuing Past Tense in a Hotel Room” than it would to write a one-sentence synopsis of Lydia Davis’s one-sentence story “Example of the Continuing Past Tense in a Hotel Room,” because since Lydia Davis has withheld so much, and because what she has offered up is so richly allusive, almost anything of any human importance in the world might attach to the reader’s experience of it.

That talk is abstract in a way that makes me want to kill myself.

Right. I agree. Better to make a list. I shall now assume the boldfaced voice, since both of these voices are mine, and since this Q&Aish two-voiced essay form is just a strategy to keep the reader interested in reading me even though all I’m doing is parsing a private preoccupation.

Here is a partial list of things that attach to my reading of Lydia Davis’s one-sentence story “Example of the Continuing Past Tense in a Hotel Room”:

1. “Example”–Which says that (1) we have a speaker who is using a form in which one gives an example, (2) that the example is meant to illustrate something, and (3) our instructor is the implied author, organizer, and controlling intelligence who has asked us to enter in (with our intelligence) to a reckoning with the example.

2. “the Continuing Past Tense”–Which invites us to parse the grammar, in particular the verb, which will follow in the story’s one sentence.

3. “in a Hotel Room”–And here the trouble is foregrounded, because what is a hotel room, but trouble? And what kinds of trouble happen in hotel rooms?

A Digression from the List Wherein We Think About a Few of the Varieties of Trouble That Might Take Place in This or That Hotel Room:

1. A Man Cheats on His Wife with Another Woman.

2. A Woman Cheats on Her Husband with Another Man.

3. A Man Cheats on His Wife with Another Man.

4. A Woman Cheats on Her Husband with Another Woman.

5. Three People Participate in a Ménage à Trois.

6. Four or More People Participate in a Group Sex Session.

7. Someone Brings a Video Camera to Consensually Record Sexual Activity.

8. Someone Brings a Video Camera to Nonconsensually Record Sexual Activity.

9. Someone is Lonely and Watches Hotel Porn.

10. Someone is Lonely, Watches Hotel Porn, and Masturbates.

11. Two People Watch Hotel Porn Together.

12. Two People Who Are Not Married But Yet Are Somehow Transgressively Intertwined (Maybe One is 22 and the Other is 17) Engage in Some Variety of Sexual Activity in the Hotel Room.

13. Two People Transact Something Fiscally Illegal.

14. Two People Agree to Transact Something Fiscally Illegal.

15. Someone Consensually Injures Someone Else.

16. Someone Nonconsensually Injures Someone Else.

17. Someone Reads a Philip Roth Novel Even Though His or Her Upbringing Forbids It Under the “Input-Output” Metaphor by Which One Considers One’s Mind a Computer Whose Input-Output Daily One Must Choose, Lest One Reproduce the Transgression One’s Mind Has Consumed; Or: “Garbage In; Garbage Out.”

18. Someone Kills Someone Else.

19. Someone Cuts Up a Body.

20. Someone Reads a Gideon Bible, Converts to Christianity, and Thereby Alienates Loved Ones for Whom This is a Grave Transgression.

21. Someone Renounces Christianity, Tears Up a Gideon’s Bible, and Leaves the Remnants in a Drawer for Someone Else to Find.

22. Someone Prepares a Dirty Bomb for Deployment in the Adjacent Subway Station.

23. Someone Prepares a Dirty Note, to Be Delivered Anonymously and With Joy, Over the Internet.

24. Someone Pays Someone Else for Sex.

25. Someone Offers to Pay Someone Else for Sex, but then Renegs.

26. Someone Offers to Pay Someone Else for Sex, Renegs, Has Sex Temporarily Withheld, then Finally Agrees to Do What He Promised in the First Place, Money-Wise.

27. Someone Shelters while Fleeing the Law.

28. Someone Shelters while Pursuing Someone Fleeing the Law So They Might Make Some Money by Finding and Incapacitating Them Long Enough to Bring Them to the Law.

29. Someone Steals the Hotel Towels and/or Bathrobes.

A Digression from the Previous Digression Wherein I Relate Some Hearsay:

Some guys I know from the Metropolitan Community Church in Wilmington, North Carolina, told me about a hotel in Orlando where people rent rooms by the hour for the purpose of having sex in them. They said you can walk around and look in the windows people have left open because they want you to watch them. They said sometimes people put slips of paper in the windows to set up rendezvous. These slips are often explicit about what one wants to do to someone else or about what one wants done to them.

Back to the partial list of things that attach to my reading of Lydia Davis’s one-sentence story “Example of the Continuing Past Tense in a Hotel Room”:

4. So now we’ve been thinking “hotel room,” and we’re thinking of the weirdness of the word “continuing” in conjunction with “past tense,” and we’re thinking about the weirdness of the verb construction “has been,” which, the speaker has already taught us, is the manifestation of the continuing past tense, and it’s happening in a hotel room, and: “Your housekeeper has been Shelly.”

5. Is this just one of those housekeeper notes where Shelly wants you to know she has a name so you won’t stiff her out of a tip, since although you don’t want to spend any more money than you already have on the hotel, you also know that hotel housekeeping is a desperation job that doesn’t pay much money in the first place, and that Shelly, therefore, is probably a person in desperate straits—maybe she has some children she’s barely providing for, and maybe she’s doing this because she’s too scrupled to do work that is frowned upon by polite society even though it pays better and possible even confers more pleasure and respect to the person performing it while said person is performing it.

6. Perhaps Shelly has had experience in the past with people not wanting to tip housekeepers of whatever particular ethnicity she might be, since, let’s face it, the United States is a place where people hide their racism, but often enough it’s still there, doing its work in places where there aren’t any consequences for its exercise, such as the question of when or if or how much you tip somebody. Maybe Shelly’s name isn’t Shelly, but instead is a name that will trigger someone’s perhaps un-self-aware racism sufficiently to keep them from tipping in a situation where they’re not obligated to tip and probably already don’t want to tip. In this way, we see that Shelly is a significantly more intelligent person than our lousy tipper wants to give her credit for being, and good for Shelly, I say. Good for Shelly.

7. Perhaps Shelly has been in a relationship with the potential tipper, and perhaps implicit in the grammar is the threat that she might know a way to continue the relationship even though it would be inconvenient for the relationship to continue in the estimation of the potential tipper,

8. Or: Perhaps Shelly is Suicidal,

9. Or: Perhaps Shelly is not a housekeeper at all, but she feels like one, and she has been one for the twenty-some years she and her hotel room companion have been together, but she’s not going to be one anymore, no sir. She is making her stand, here in the hotel room, and you, buster, have got some choices to make.

Approximate Number of Additional Speculations Raised by Lydia Davis’s “Example of the Continuing Past Tense in a Hotel Room” I Have Omitted:

20, 793.

What’s Your Point?

I’m trying to think about what makes a work of literature small or big.

A Tentative Conclusion.

It’s not just length.

On the Other Hand:

Many scholars actually classify Kafka as minor literature. Deleuze and Guattari have even written a book about it, but I haven’t read it.

Speculate About the Book You Haven’t Read.

Maybe it’s about how minor literature often contains within it significant keys to understanding how we experience human existence, but since the tribe of readers is mostly timid about things that are difficult to understand or categorize, we simultaneously fail to realize how everything that is most important in literature is fundamentally minor.

That Doesn’t Sound Like Post-Sartrean French Philosophy.

I’m not sure I buy it even now.

So What Do We Do With Amelia Gray?

Read her.

Why?

For pleasure.

Why Else?

Because Museum of the Weird is a catalog of possible literatures, the emulation of which might enrich future works of literature, but I’m afraid she won’t have the courage to keep going if she doesn’t attract enough readers to bolster her courage, so I’m recruiting, and I don’t even feel bad about it, because I think literary criticism is mostly dead, and I think the highest calling of the Internet book reviewer is consumer advocacy. I have your best interests at heart.

Why Else?

Museum of the Weird excerpts an obituary from The Daily Tribune, Bay City, Matagorda County, Texas, December 27, 1937.

Why Else?

Other forms the book pioneers for short fiction: The Trip Advisory (in this case regarding visits to the boyhood home of Ronald Reagan), the Code of Operation (in this case: a snake farm), the Tortoise/Hare inversion, the Fisherman-Married-To-Knife-And/Or-Dead Tilapia Story, the Story-From-Which-I-Have-Been-Appropriating-the-Form-of-This-Book-Review-Sort-Of-But-Not-Exactly Story (“There Will Be Sense”), the Blockage Diary, the Pit Screenplay, and the Do-A-Lydia-Davis-Form-One-Better-Grand-Finale Story.

If You Could End Your Review-ish Essay By Near-Plagiarizing the Ending of Any David Foster Wallace Story by Way of Giving a Benedictory Blessing to the Author of Museum of the Weird, What Would You Say?

Wish her well.

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Art by Zach Dodson.