Barry YourgrauRezensionen
Autor von Mess: One Man's Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act
Rezensionen
Wearing Dad's Head von Barry Yourgrau
My only Yourgrau reading so far is his fabulous set of short stories [Wearing Dad's Head]. He has also written and appeared in the film of [The Sadness of Sex]. I must look that up.
A cross between Rick Steves travelogue and Monty Python sketch with occasional bursts of Philip K. Dick science fiction or Edgar Allan Poe horror or J. R. R. Tolkien fantasy or Salvador Dali surrealism or Gary Larson Far Side cartoon or Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Hop on and and take a unique journey across the globe, read Barry Yourgrau’s forty-four travel-snappers and your notions of what it means to take a trip will be shaken up and nothing short of Yourgrau-ized.
As by way of example, here are episodes in the life of globetrotter Barry as he roams and roves and rambles in lands and landscapes and among creatures both human and nonhuman that you’ll never see described in books on travel:
UPRIVER
Move over Joseph Conrad and Álvaro Mutis, here comes Barry Yourgrau with his tale of adventure up a jungle river. He’s on a mongrel steamer and the humidity and heat are brutal. There are a couple of seedy business types and an old lawyer. There’s also a woman. Here’s how Barry describes her:
“a virginal young woman in a high-throated dowdy frock, no doubt going out to be a governess. . . . She sits staring straight ahead in her torn chair, in an eerie rigid manner, without a word – without even, as far as I can tell, the slightest action of her frail breast. The behavior and the pallor of her skin, make certain extravagant rumors I’ve heard play about my mind.”
Barry speaks to one of the business types about all of this. Almost predictably, the cigar chomping crudester makes an off-color remark. The tale concludes with a touch of Conrad and a pinch of Mutis:
“Around us the engine throbs, and groans, and drags us along deeper into the dark, choking walls of the wilderness, bearing in our midst the pale cargo of the governess, inert and transfixed in her cracked chair, like a feeble, desiccated figurehead, or a blighted icon, of our enterprise.”
* * * * *
Here's a story that speaks to our experience of being violated or suffering injustice at the hands of rude, disgusting people. How many rude people have your encountered in public places? For myself, more than my share.
One Barry quote and a couple of my short comments capsulize this tale of rudeness and violation:
SUITCASE
"I'm on an old fashion train. I doze off to the gentle sway of the wheels. I wake up. I blink. Then I sit bolt upright. My suitcase is missing."
Turns out, the conductor took Barry's suitcase since Barry was asleep. He goes ahead and opens it out in a field while the other passengers watch.
Barry runs out and shouts at the conductor but receives little explanation and absolutely no apology. Barry returns to the cabin with his suitcase.
Sorry to say, the world is chock-full of such conductors.
* * * * *
And here are two brief tales from the collection in their entirety:
PROTECTION
When I return from my walk to the ruins, there's a note slipped under my door at the little hotel. It's a warning, that an attack by pirates is imminent - and that every guest is expected to place his firearm at the service of the management.
I rush along the balcony and downstairs, in an uproar.
"What is all this about?"I demand, rattling the paper at the huffing woman who tends the desk. She's now wrenching a shutter closed. "You must bring your gun, right down here," she replies. "To protect us." "But why on earth would I have a gun!" I protest. "And protect against whom - what does this mean, "pirates'?" I demand frantically. "Desperate men, desperate men," she snaps back. "Is on the radio. Marauders. But how you not have no gun?" she cries, unwilling to believe my news. "You're a man, you say you're a traveller, yes? You must have means to defend yourself!" I shake my head, and fling up a hand at her insistence and ignorance.
"What I am is a poetic traveller," I inform her. "I take the chances of the road equipped with a journal," I explain, "to record my impressions. Plus a sketch pad and watercolors. But I'm really an indifferent artist," I confess. "I also carry a cheap camera, and a child's bouncing trifle I got at a street stall, to remind me of something dear years ago. That's what I have."
The woman stares at me and then claps her hands to her head.
"No gun!" she cries. "But how will we protect ourselves!" She starts wailing, and ponderously heaves herself about. "But surely someone else has a gun!" I protest. "No, no," she wails. "You the only guest, is the off-season." But what about the hotel, it - my god," I squawk, "you can't expect your guests to supply an arsenal to defend the place!" But the woman isn't listening, she's fallen to her knees by the counter where she grimaces in fervent, terrified prayer.
I'm a quandary. I start back toward my room, but then I change my mind. With a thudding heart, I step outside, into the muggy temperate air. The beach and the inlet lie just thirty yards below. I scan them, and the empty horizon, and the small headland with its domestic crumble of ruins, from which I'd just returned. All is silent, with the sluggish stillness of late afternoon. But now this vista pulses with menace. I edge out a few feet more and peer frantically and absurdly left and right, looking for anything near the hammock, the scraggly picnic table, the beach chair, for use as a lethal weapon.
CAMPFIRE
I make my campfire by the side of the road. Sad grey folk drift out from the cold woods and settle by the rim of the flames. There're the ghosts of travellers, like myself, who've gone before me. I poke at the fire and hunch stolidly in my coat, and they start up their round of tales. Ghosts telling stories in the firelight. They groan and murmur at what haunts them: memory, regret. The night wind rummages with its stony fingers in the burning embers and knotted brush. I nod, my eyes welling, as one in rags laments a love abandoned in a strange country, out of selfishness and pride, out of a traveller's false extravagance of self-regard. Regretted ever since . . . like an early death. The speaker's quavering face is gaunt from remorse, from the torments of memory.
I keep my peace, full of my own thoughts, waiting for the flames to ebb away and break up this company. But why am I among them, they want to know. One like me, still in the midst of his days. Or rather, here on the broken margin. They chide me in their dreary way on the vainness of the traveller's life. On the desolations of the cold woods. ButI just settle further in my coat, stolidly waiting them out, staring int the dying flames.
Barry Yourgrau, born in 1949, the same year of birth as such outstanding authors as Martin Amis, Jane Smiley, Patrick Süskind, Richard Russo, César Aira, Richard Price and, on a much more humble level, yours truly, the Goodreads reviewer posting this review. I love the fact Barry and I share the same year of birth - I count Barry among my all-time favorites. Wacky and weird - exactly to my literary taste! If I was stranded on a desert island and had but one author to read - Barry is my choice!
Each and every time I read one of Barry Yourgrau's remarkable stories, it hits me like a powerful drug. In the spirit of celebrating my very favorite Barry collections, below are two of the shorter pieces, the first from A Man Jumps Out Of An Airplane and the second taken from Wearing Dad's Head. Even if you enjoy these pieces a fraction as much as I do, you will be overflowing with enjoyment.
HORSE OPERA
A man is awakened from a nap on a muggy afternoon. Someone is trying to be an opera singer. The man swears groggily and sticks his head out the window.
There is a police horse across the street. The policeman is standing beside it, red-faced and confused, his hat in the gutter. The horse sways its flanks and tail, and paws the ground with a hoof and tosses its head -- all this in time to the aria it is bellowing out-of-tune with its wide-open horse's mouth.
The man blinks at this extraordinary sight. He pulls his head in from the window and rubs his fists in his eyes and goes over and empties the water glass over his head. Cautiously, he sticks his head out again. The horse is still at it. The cop is nowhere to be seen. The man hears sirens now, in the distance. The horse seems to hear them too, because it stops for a moment and cocks its head. Then it starts up again at an absolutely frantic pitch of expressive fervor. It rears back on its haunches and crosses its front hooves over its heart and squeezes its eyes shut; its great epiglottis throbs in the depths of its throat.
The onrushing sirens quickly drown this heartfelt song. But they don't stop the singer. The horse continues to croon its heart out even after the patrol cars skid up and the angry blue figures swarm out and throw ropes all over it and haul it up a ramp. It is still singing, as the big metal doors swing shut and the orange light flashes, and the big black van goes rumbling away.
UTTERS
I get involved in a game of strip poker. The others have somehow persuaded a cow to join in. The cow stands stupid and uncomfortable in the cigar smoke. My tablemates ply it with booze. it is decked out in a pathetic catalogue of bedroom apparel. Naturally it always plays a losing hand. It can't manage with its garments, and everyone makes full use of the opportunity to handle it, in the name of assistance. I watch in disgust as a beefy bank-manager type fumbles with a lacy garter on the cow's flank. His hands are trembling. "Will you look at those udders, will you look at those udders," he keeps mumbling. His face is flushed crimson. The cow shifts a leg, quaking, big-eyed. "Count me out," I mutter finally. I throw in my cards, for good. Without further ceremony I push back my chair and go out onto the patio. i take a couple of deep breaths. The salacious laughter rises behind me. I hurry off unsteadily down the steps, feeling unclean and despicable. "These package vacations are a nightmare," I think to myself. In this frame of mind I wander about the lakefront for an hour. Not a soul is about. Lugubriously I make my way back. I stop at the foot of the patio steps. The sound of mooing goes out into the night, above the swarming of abandoned laughter, the yelps and the cries. Silhouetted shadows come and go in the French windows' curtains; horns toss about and disappear. Sourly I turn to leave again, when the French windows burst open. The bank manager staggers out into the moonlight. He wheels down the steps, his shirt tails loose, his suspenders flapping at his knees, and lurches straight into me. "Oh my god, oh my god," he moans, half in ecstasy, half in horror. I shove him away from me. His face is smeared with milk.
Many years ago when I first read this book of Barry Yourgrau’s collection of outlandishly imaginative surreal, fabulist micro-fictions, I thought his writing was too good to be true.
I just did complete another rereading and I can assure you – Barry’s book is, in fact, too good to be true. But, thanks to the blessings of the gods of our childhood dreams and our weird, hallucinogenic visions, we can read and appreciate his stories as well as marvel at his ability to turn a vivid, highly visual phrase.
Wearing Dad’s Head is one of Barry’s first published books and has a decidedly Freudian flavor, his mom and dad, especially his dad, having a predominant place in nearly all these wacky, sexually playful fictional snappers. I could write until I’m blue in my or my own dad’s face or my fingers turn blue and wash away in the bathtub à la one of Barry’s stories, so I will simply cite the opening of two of my favorite pieces.
UDDERS
I get involved in a game of strip poker. The others have somehow persuaded a cow to join in. The cow stands stupid and uncomfortable in the cigar smoke. My tablemates ply it with booze. It is decked out in a pathetic catalogue of bedroom apparel. Naturally it always plays a losing hand. It can’t manage with its garments, and everyone makes full use of the opportunity to handle it, in the name of assistance. I watch in disgust as a beefy bank-manager type fumbles with a lacy garter on the cow’s flank. His hands are trembling. “Will you look at those udders, will you look at those udders,” he keeps mumbling. His face is flushed crimson. ------ Here is a youtube video of Barry performing this story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QeVu...
MAGIC CARPET
My father arrives on a magic carpet. “Come on,” he says. Sitting cross-legged together, we lift magically into the air. We glide over the backyard. Our rectangular shadow passes over the sheets my mother is hanging up. She rushes out from them to the back gate. She wave at us and, shouts indistinctly. I lean over, excited and scared, and wave cautiously down to her. She signals frantically for me to come back. My father gives a lazy, sardonic laugh and opens and shuts a fat, much-ringed hand in farewell to my mother’s diminishing, tiny figure. She dwindles to a speck.
As a nod to my love of Barry’s stories and encouragement for any reader of this review to write some of your own imaginative micro-fiction, here is one of mine relating to my own boyhood and relationship with my father:
PARADE OF THE PAST
It’s back again, the same old dream, the one where I’m standing on the sidewalk of Main Street in the small shore town where I grew up and haven’t lived in decades. The street is filled with water – I might as well be in Venice – and here they come as if in a bizarre Fourth of July parade, floats or whatever they are, motoring down the watery street.
First there is a gigantic turtle, every bit as large as a truck, paddling with its head and the top of its shell above water, carrying on its back a band of giggling kids in bathing suits. The kids are obviously having a blast and they all wave to me.
Next, there’s a float labeled “Dads”, where a bunch of blue-collar, middle-age men I recognize from my youth, including my own dad, are sitting in easy chairs, surrounded by beautiful blonde, tanned, bathing beauties. The dads smile and wave to me, knowing they’ve never had it so good.
This passes and the third float comes into view. Here we have the people who tried their best to make my life hell, including the eighth-grade bully, an overbearing buffoon manager and a sinister coworker. Their float is really done up – balloons, swan figurines, streamers, glitter and a banner that reads: “The Bad Guys”. They are all smirking and, like the kids and the dads, wave to me until their float passes out of sight.
What makes this dream all the more puzzling is that I’m standing there, trying to figure out if this is really a holiday parade or the normal flow of weekday traffic. I’m inclined to think it’s nothing out of the ordinary, because, unlike a real parade, there are no spectators lining the streets; quite the contrary, I’m the only one present.
Barry Yourgrau, born in South Africa in 1949 and living in New York City for many, many years
A book of dozens and dozens of one and two page micro-fictions where you will encounter bizarre happenings of all varieties, casts, shapes and sizes: a man climbs inside a cow, gentlemen in tuxedos perch in a tree, a couple of girls are locked up in an aquarium, a man comes home to find his wife in bed with a squirrel, there’s a bathtub filled with rutabagas, it snowing in a living room, a man rents two brown bears, sheep graze on a supermarket roof. Welcome to the world of Barry Yourgrau, located at the intersection of Freudian psychoanalysis, surrealist art and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. But wait, enough with the generalizations; here are the openings lines from three twisted Barry snappers:
HULA HORROR
It’s very late at night – very early in the morning. I’m in a thatched-roof hut. Earthen floor. Kerosene lamp. A girl – a fellow tourist – has gotten drunk and is now dancing just for me, lasciviously as she can manage, in the middle of the place. She sways and bobs, come-hither style. She’s stripped off her clothing and is attired solely in a ‘native’ grass hula skirt, colored pink.
I drink, as I have copiously all evening; the gramophone squalls, the lamp throws a melodramatic light, harsh, utterly black in the shadows. I keep time with my glass, thinking, Man, the brochures don’t tell you about this, and then a horrible realizations pops into my mind, like a window shade flying up. That pink skirt, I realize, my skin turning icy – that pink skirt is hideously evil: it’s an instrument of black magic, a voodoo booby-trap planted here on us two boozed-up, wooly-brained tourists.
VILLAGE LIFE
Country girls, red-cheeked and buxom, stand feet wide apart at a counter. They lean on it, elbows propped, forearms crossed. They chat. Their skirts are gathered above their waists.
An old man plods down the line of them with a bucket. He reaches in between the thighs of each girl and puts the fruit he brings out into the bucket. The girls laugh. The atmosphere is easy. They mock the old man, they make cracks and someone ruffles his few hairs.
ARS POETICA
A man comes in. He has a glass throat. You can see his larynx in there: a microphone disk, a little speaker horn. A mailman comes in with his big bag. He opens the small transparent hatch in the man’s throat and pushes in a couple of blue air letters. The man beings to recite – a wonderful poem about being jealous of the clouds; then another poem, not quite as good, about a forbidden voyage.
“So this is how poetry is made,” I think. “What are some other ways?
------------------------------------
And as a mini-tribute to my love of Barry’s wildly inventive fiction, I wrote this little prose poem:
THE QUAGMIRE
Barry is stuck in a real quagmire. He just performed his act which ended with his mounting a sheep and afterwards slitting its throat and hurling the sheep out a third story window. The women organizers of his performance, much to his surprise, found his act disagreeable right from the start. They went ahead and called the police. The officers could see blood smeared all over the walls and floor. “Sir, we invited him to perform his flash fiction. We never expected anything like this!” In his turn, Barry told the officers about a bog of emotion and a marshland of gut feelings that must be expressed in more than just words. The police didn’t buy a word of it and hauled him away. What an abysmal ending to his performance. Barry has landed himself in a real quagmire. He has a nut to crack and no sheep to crack it with.
If I were passing out literary awards, Barry Yourgrau wins the grand prize in the category of short-story writer with a vivid, outrageous, over-the-top imagination. And in this collection of ninety wacky, surreal micro-stories, Barry turns his extraordinary imaginative powers to the topic of Eros, or, in more plain language, that good ol’ trio to which we can all relate: love, lust, sex. To share a taste of what a reader will find in these pages, here are the openings sentences from five of my favorites:
POETRY
My girlfriend leaves me. I become so unhinged that I douse myself with flammable liquid and set myself on fire. I squat in an awkward hideous position on the sidewalk, bleating her name as I gasp in shock at what I’ve done. The chaos of flames envelopes me and the air about me trembles. Passersby scramble away in horror, their faces covered behind their arms. Their screaming gives way to the shrieking of sirens, I topple stiffly onto my side, crackling, unconscious.
POISON
I sit in a café in late morning. A girl hurries by. She gives a distracted smile. She’s quite pretty. In an appealing way. I stare hurriedly down at my coffee. I stir it with a spoon that trembles. A while later, she goes by again. I can’t stop myself: I look. She’s not pretty, I realize. She’s lovely! She’s utterly, wonderfully lovely! I groan and shift my shoes about on the floor and clutch the little round table with both hands. ------ Youtube video of this story with Barry as actor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaQ7nZBV0_s
SILVER ARROWS
I track a girl I fancy through the park. My little friend is helping. It’s slow going. The path veers up and down all the time and the stubby wings my friend sports are in fact just ornamental, so I’m forced to lug him about on my back, so he can keep up. The arrows in his quiver jab me in the neck. I have to put him down repeatedly to make him rearrange things. --------- Again, a Youtube video of this story with Barry acting as main character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwzFTW_A6J0
DARK HOSPITAL
I get a job at a hospital. It’s for victims of love. The wards are dingy and ill furnished, and the sufferings of the stricken in their squalor are truly heartrending. I’m overwhelmed. I have to stuff my ears with bathroom tissue to try to shut out the moans of anguish, the cries of longing, the desperate monologues into imaginary telephones that are never answered, never connected. Even semibuffered so, the tears often drip down my chin as I ply my mop sluggishly up and down the worn, crumbling corridors.
GOLDEN AGE
I have the good fortune to die and come back to life during far, far bygone days of a golden age. I find myself in the palm-crested precincts of some balmy South Seas isle. The locals are as benevolent as you could ever hope, physically glamorous and culturally on the simple side, and spotlessly clean of person. ------- Turns out, the young girls on the island lack one very important body part necessary for experiencing intense pleasure: a clitoris. But, no problem, Barry proposes a solution to the local old crone Shaman – sewing in a pearl. The results are fantastic beyond belief! Bizarre? From my own experience I can say that when you open yourself to your unconscious dream-world and then mold those crazy images into short prose, be prepared for some disturbing mindbenders and weird combinations you wouldn’t want to repeat in polite company.
Recognizing this psychoanalytic fact and in the spirit of Barry’s story of Golden Age, here is a short piece I wrote some years ago taken directly from one of my own vivid dreams. Apologies to any of my Goodreads freinds who might be offended - the muse sometimes speaks in ways that cause sheer pasta shock:
CONCERTO
On their feet, whistling, hooting, shouting, applauding, feet stomping in unison, the audience responds to a command performance by the soloist and orchestra of a cello concerto. There is a call, especially from the tuxedoed young men, for an encore! encore! But the cellist, a fetching young lady with long golden hair curling down over her shoulders and framing her fairy-tale princess face couldn’t play another note even if she wanted to. Anyone could see her energy is spent, her skin flushed and perspiring. All her skin, that is, for she is completely naked, having used her body for her cello, clitoris for bowstrings and the middle finger of her right hand for her bow.
Oh, Barry! You know from your own harrowing experience just how much the beautiful ladies can get away with. I mean, how could a loves-struck man say "no" to anything when looking into the eyes of the above mademoiselle?
For those unacquainted with the outlandish imagination of Barry Yourgrau, please take the below flash fiction as an invitation to explore the many more wacky tales of love and romance found in Barry's collection published under the title, The Sadness of Sex.
I share my review here as a way of wishing all my book-loving friends a love-filled, glorious new year.
EXECUTRIX
My hands are suddenly ice-cold. To thaw them, I stuff them inside my mouth. The freezing flesh adheres to my tongue, to the tissue of my cheeks. I can't get my hands out. I manage to turn on the oven with my feet, and I kneel and stick my head assemblage into its warmth.
Footsteps come up behind me. My girlfriend's voice announces that killing myself that way is no solution to anything. I try to explain my situation, but my hands gag me. She starts tying my feet up behind me. She learned this in class, she explains, they have more successful deaths than I would believe because the professor is so good, he really knows about these things. I pull my head out finally, to try to get across what I'm really doing before she tries anything irrevocable. I twist around and am confronted by the sight of her in scuba gear and feather headdress. I garble a scream into my hands and throw myself to the floor as a harpoon crashes into the oven, missing me by a hairsbreadth. "You little faker!" she shrieks, flinging down the harpoon gun and stamping off to the doorway. "I can't believe you did that. I can't believe you'd pull a stunt like that! I thought you were serious!"
I cower on the floor, blubbering and shaking my head and pulling helplessly at my hands. She's still hot as hell. "Shit!" she cries, banging her fist against the doorjam. Shit!" But then she stops. She squints down at me nearsightedly. "What is that you're doing?" She bends closer. "Oh wow, I didn't notice that! Oh wow! That's really amazing, eating yourself up!"
Author Barry Yourgrau, born 1949
Ever have your heart broken? Are you at this very moment experiencing heart ache? Barry Yourgrau's story is about one such man who took action, drastic and profound, in dealing with the agony of his tormented heart. Please don't try this at home, friends.
FIN DE SIÉCLE
I realize that my heart is the source of so much misery in my life, I decide to take extreme measures. I liquor myself up, and in the privacy of my kitchen, under the bare lightbulb, I perform a crude, hideous, but at last successful procedure at the sink, using the big parsley-chopping knife, then a series of soup spoons, then the knife with the short, all-purpose blade. Grimacing in distaste, my hands slippery with gore, I clap up the vile, thudding knob of misfortune in a plastic leftovers' container. The floor around my shoes is splattered with crimson and shadows.
Sometime after midnight, I slink out into the back alley and make my way hobbling fitfully to a small park in the neighborhood. I shake the ex-organ out into the refuse amid some bushes, and fling the container into other bushes a distance away, and dodge off heavily into the broken-lamped darkness. I regain my back door at last, breathing with difficulty, huge icy drops of sweat beading my gray flesh. But no one is following me, no one shouts alarm. Not even a sudden, massively irresistible sickness of stomach can dampen my spirits as I fumble the door bolt closed behind me, and take one tottering, frantic step in the direction of the sink.
The remains of the night are honestly very bad, and so are the next several days. I lapse into a kind of delirium, which is understandable given the profundity of my ad hoc kitchen ministrations. But even as I twist about gasping in my stained sheets, even as I struggle, all multiple thumbs in the bathroom, with my preposterously unsanitary, makeshift dressing - I'm all smiles. My head veers awkwardly in and out of the bathroom mirror frame, but the edges of my double vision radiate a profound, existential beneficence, a quivering halo of joy.
In not much more than a week, I'm back on my feet, good as ever, save for a slight concavity of posture. Also, I've retained a certain pallor, and for a good while, I tire easily. But really, so what? I start dating with almost voracious abandon. My "love life" so-called becomes a scenario of boundless activity - and astonishing brazenness. Whoever strikes my fancy, then and there I make a strolling beeline for her, be she that strange, sinuous gamin spotted slouching on a street corner, be she yonder jet-set haughty, sitting coiffed, cross-legged, and contemptuous at her aperitif. I present what's on my mind with forthright brass. Often, I'm snubbed. Quite often, it's true, laughed at. More than I should care to admit. I'm toyed with. But times enough, I charm, sensationally. I woo with an unearthly impunity, I take unfazed possession of quite a number of souls, I treat more than one with less humanity, alas, than properly i should. I have girlfriends galore, and sooner or later, for their reasons or mine, I move on to others. In a word, sometimes I win all there is to win between the sexes; other times, the word is short, with two brusque letters. Occasionally I'm let down after truly duplicitous, well-nigh pathological manipulations. But listen to me: hear this: It never matters! Whatever succeeds, succeeds; whatever fails, so it fails. Because I don't feel a single thing! No pangs, no torments, no soulful wrenchings or yearnings, no disturbing ecstasies, no twining of deepest celestial privacies. Only the invigorations of activity, rewarded by occasional carnal delectations, or else a mild sigh of fleeting annoyance, as if a bug had improvidently flung itself against the freshly polished sheen of a display window.
"How is it you always seem so . . . so nonchalant . . . so eternally possessed of such . . . buoyant insouciance?" my girlfriends will inquire earnestly, wandering the pleasant confines of my living room. (I've moved since my fateful home surgery.) "How can you be that way all the time?" they want to know. I smile at them from the drinks table. I shrug. I go back to mixing cocktails. There's silence as they drift over to the fashionable paisley-on-paisley sofa and settle down, musing, and take up a picture in its silver frame. "Where is this place?" they ask with a frown of puzzlement. "And why do you, who are so quintessentially stylish, keep a photograph of such a god-awful bunch of littered bushes, and in such an exquisite frame?" My eyes light up as I pass the chilled martini glass over to them and ease back against a neighboring cushion. "Oh, something very wonderful once happened to me there," I say mysteriously. They regard me over the lip of their glass. they dart a glance again at the photo. They turn their heads coyly sideways. "Oh! Something to do with ... love? they inquire, with a probing, worldly-wise grin. I nod slowly, closing my eyes. Then I burst out laughing. I sit there simply roaring my gleeful, pale head off, clutching a pale hand to that place in my slender chest, while they stare at me, completely perplexed, trying haplessly to find the clue to share in my amusement.
Link to a clip of Barry reading the beginning of FIN DE SIÉCLE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUIuz4KOANE
Barry Yourgrau wins the grand prize in the category of short-story writer with a vivid imagination. And in this collection of 90 whacky, surreal micro-stories, Barry turns his extraordinary imaginative powers to the topic of Eros, or, in more plain language, that good ol’ trio to which we can all relate: love, lust, sex. To share a taste of what a reader will find in these pages, here are the openings from 5 of my favorites (the last one is mine):
POETRY
My girlfriend leaves me. I become so unhinged that I douse myself with flammable liquid and set myself on fire. I squat in an awkward hideous position on the sidewalk, bleating her name as I gasp in shock at what I’ve done. The chaos of flames envelopes me and the air about me trembles. Passersby scramble away in horror, their faces covered behind their arms. Their screaming gives way to the shrieking of sirens, I topple stiffly onto my side, crackling, unconscious.
POISON
I sit in a café in late morning. A girl hurries by. She gives a distracted smile. She’s quite pretty. In an appealing way. I stare hurriedly down at my coffee. I stir it with a spoon that trembles. A while later, she goes by again. I can’t stop myself: I look. She’s not pretty, I realize. She’s lovely! She’s utterly, wonderfully lovely! I groan and shift my shoes about on the floor and clutch the little round table with both hands. ------ Youtube video of this story with Barry as actor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaQ7nZBV0_s
SILVER ARROWS
I track a girl I fancy through the park. My little friend is helping. It’s slow going. The path veers up and down all the time and the stubby wings my friend sports are in fact just ornamental, so I’m forced to lug him about on my back, so he can keep up. The arrows in his quiver jab me in the neck. I have to put him down repeatedly to make him rearrange things. --------- Again, a Youtube video of this story with Barry acting as main character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwzFTW_A6J0
DARK HOSPITAL
I get a job at a hospital. It’s for victims of love. The wards are dingy and ill furnished, and the sufferings of the stricken in their squalor are truly heartrending. I’m overwhelmed. I have to stuff my ears with bathroom tissue to try to shut out the moans of anguish, the cries of longing, the desperate monologues into imaginary telephones that are never answered, never connected. Even semibuffered so, the tears often drip down my chin as I ply my mop sluggishly up and down the worn, crumbling corridors.
GOLDEN AGE
I have the good fortune to die and come back to life during far, far bygone days of a golden age. I find myself in the palm-crested precincts of some balmy South Seas isle. The locals are as benevolent as you could ever hope, physically glamorous and culturally on the simple side, and spotlessly clean of person. ------- Turns out, the young girls on the island lack one very important body part necessary for experiencing intense pleasure: a clitoris. But, no problem, Barry proposes a solution to the local old crone Shaman – sewing in a pearl. The results are fantastic beyond belief! Bizarre? Well, from my own experience I can say that when you open yourself to your unconscious dream-world and then mold those crazy images into short prose, be prepared for some disturbing mindbenders and weird combinations you wouldn’t want to repeat in polite company. Recognizing this psychoanalytic fact and in the spirit of Barry’s story of Golden Age, here is a short piece I wrote some years ago:
CONCERTO
On their feet, whistling, hooting, shouting, applauding, feet stomping in unison, the audience responds to a command performance by the soloist and orchestra of a cello concerto. There is a call, especially from the tuxedoed young men, for an encore! encore! But the cellist, a fetching young lady with long golden hair curling down over her shoulders and framing her fairy-tale princess face couldn’t play another note even if she wanted to. Anyone could see her energy is spent, her skin flushed and perspiring. All her skin, that is, for she is completely naked, having used her body for her cello, clitoris for bowstrings and the middle finger of her right hand for her bow.
Back nearly 30 years ago when I first read this book of Barry Yourgrau’s collection of outlandishly imaginative surreal, fabulist micro-fictions, I thought his writing was too good to be true. I just did complete another rereading and I can assure you – Barry’s book is, in fact, too good to be true. But, thanks to the blessings of the gods of our childhood dreams and our weird, hallucinogenic visions, we can read and appreciate his stories as well as marvel at his ability to turn a vivid, highly visual phrase.
Wearing Dad’s Head is one of Barry’s first published books and has a decidedly Freudian flavor, his mom and dad, especially his dad, having a predominant place in nearly all these whacky, sexually playful fictional snappers. I could write until I’m blue in my or my own dad’s face or my fingers turn blue and wash away in the bathtub à la one of Barry’s stories, so I will simply cite the opening of two of my favorite pieces.
UDDERS
I get involved in a game of strip poker. The others have somehow persuaded a cow to join in. The cow stands stupid and uncomfortable in the cigar smoke. My tablemates ply it with booze. It is decked out in a pathetic catalogue of bedroom apparel. Naturally it always plays a losing hand. It can’t manage with its garments, and everyone makes full use of the opportunity to handle it, in the name of assistance. I watch in disgust as a beefy bank-manager type fumbles with a lacy garter on the cow’s flank. His hands are trembling. “Will you look at those udders, will you look at those udders,” he keeps mumbling. His face is flushed crimson. ------ Here is a youtube video of Barry performing this story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QeVuttKI2k
MAGIC CARPET
My father arrives on a magic carpet. “Come on,” he says. Sitting cross-legged together, we lift magically into the air. We glide over the backyard. Our rectangular shadow passes over the sheets my mother is hanging up. She rushes out from them to the back gate. She wave at us and, shouts indistinctly. I lean over, excited and scared, and wave cautiously down to her. She signals frantically for me to come back. My father gives a lazy, sardonic laugh and opens and shuts a fat, much-ringed hand in farewell to my mother’s diminishing, tiny figure. She dwindles to a speck.
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As a nod to my love of Barry’s stories and encouragement for any reader of this review to write some of your own imaginative micro-fiction, here is one of mine relating to my own boyhood and relationship with my father:
PARADE OF THE PAST
It’s back again, the same old dream, the one where I’m standing on the sidewalk of Main Street in the small shore town where I grew up and haven’t lived in decades. The street is filled with water – I might as well be in Venice – and here they come as if in a bizarre Fourth of July parade, floats or whatever they are, motoring down the watery street.
First there is a gigantic turtle, every bit as large as a truck, paddling with its head and the top of its shell above water, carrying on its back a band of giggling kids in bathing suits. The kids are obviously having a blast and they all wave to me.
Next, there’s a float labeled “Dads”, where a bunch of blue-collar, middle-age men I recognize from my youth, including my own dad, are sitting in easy chairs, surrounded by beautiful blonde, tanned, bathing beauties. The dads smile and wave to me, knowing they’ve never had it so good.
This passes and the third float comes into view. Here we have the people who tried their best to make my life hell, including the eighth-grade bully, an overbearing buffoon manager and a sinister coworker. Their float is really done up – balloons, swan figurines, streamers, glitter and a banner that reads: “The Bad Guys”. They are all smirking and, like the kids and the dads, wave to me until their float passes out of sight.
What makes this dream all the more puzzling is that I’m standing there, trying to figure out if this is really a holiday parade or the normal flow of weekday traffic. I’m inclined to think it’s nothing out of the ordinary, because, unlike a real parade, there are no spectators lining the streets; quite the contrary, I’m the only one present.
Barry Yourgrau, born in South Africa in 1949 and living in New York City for many, many years
A book of dozens and dozens of one and two page micro-fictions where you will encounter bizarre happenings of all varieties, casts, shapes and sizes: a man climbs inside a cow, gentlemen in tuxedos perch in a tree, a couple of girls are locked up in an aquarium, a man comes home to find his wife in bed with a squirrel, there’s a bathtub filled with rutabagas, it snowing in a living room, a man rents two brown bears, sheep graze on a supermarket roof. Welcome to the world of Barry Yourgrau, located at the intersection of Freudian psychoanalysis, surrealist art and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. But wait, enough with the generalizations; here are the openings lines from three twisted Barry snappers:
HULA HORROR
It’s very late at night – very early in the morning. I’m in a thatched-roof hut. Earthen floor. Kerosene lamp. A girl – a fellow tourist – has gotten drunk and is now dancing just for me, lasciviously as she can manage, in the middle of the place. She sways and bobs, come-hither style. She’s stripped off her clothing and is attired solely in a ‘native’ grass hula skirt, colored pink.
I drink, as I have copiously all evening; the gramophone squalls, the lamp throws a melodramatic light, harsh, utterly black in the shadows. I keep time with my glass, thinking, Man, the brochures don’t tell you about this, and then a horrible realizations pops into my mind, like a window shade flying up. That pink skirt, I realize, my skin turning icy – that pink skirt is hideously evil: it’s an instrument of black magic, a voodoo booby-trap planted here on us two boozed-up, wooly-brained tourists.
VILLAGE LIFE
Country girls, red-cheeked and buxom, stand feet wide apart at a counter. They lean on it, elbows propped, forearms crossed. They chat. Their skirts are gathered above their waists.
An old man plods down the line of them with a bucket. He reaches in between the thighs of each girl and puts the fruit he brings out into the bucket. The girls laugh. The atmosphere is easy. They mock the old man, they make cracks and someone ruffles his few hairs.
ARS POETICA
A man comes in. He has a glass throat. You can see his larynx in there: a microphone disk, a little speaker horn. A mailman comes in with his big bag. He opens the small transparent hatch in the man’s throat and pushes in a couple of blue air letters. The man beings to recite – a wonderful poem about being jealous of the clouds; then another poem, not quite as good, about a forbidden voyage.
“So this is how poetry is made,” I think. “What are some other ways?
------------------------------------
And as a mini-tribute to my love of Barry’s wildly inventive fiction, I wrote this little prose poem:
THE QUAGMIRE
Barry is stuck in a real quagmire. He just performed his act which ended with his mounting a sheep and afterwards slitting its throat and hurling the sheep out a third story window. The women organizers of his performance, much to his surprise, found his act disagreeable right from the start. They went ahead and called the police. The officers could see blood smeared all over the walls and floor. “Sir, we invited him to perform his flash fiction. We never expected anything like this!” In his turn, Barry told the officers about a bog of emotion and a marshland of gut feelings that must be expressed in more than just words. The police didn’t buy a word of it and hauled him away. What an abysmal ending to his performance. Barry has landed himself in a real quagmire. He has a nut to crack and no sheep to crack it with.
Orkney Skull Splitter Ale
Oskar Blues Tenfidy Imperial Stout
The best parts of the book are Yourgrau's investigations into the lives of true hoarders. If he had focused on famous hoarders of the past and present, this book would have been fascinating from cover to cover. A large portion of the book, unfortunately, details Yourgrau's legitimate, but minor, struggle with his own packrat tendencies. Some of Yourgrau's commentary is unintentionally funny, such as his observation that the problem with cleaning is that you have keep doing it over and over again. Achieving middle age without learning this fact is a luxury most people don't enjoy. Yourgrau's personal epiphany regarding his feelings about his father and their relationship to his things is the best part of Yourgrau's personal story.
Overall this is attempt at a cross between a comic memoir and research on a real and often tragic disorder fails at being either.
Not worth the time, unless you like Woody Allen . . .
Rating: 5 Stars.
Recommended if you like: Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, David Byrne, Erotica Flash Fiction, Rene Magritte art
This collection of short prose pieces (each about a page long) depict seemingly ordinary situations where fantastically absurd things happen. They seem less like like stories than cosmic jokes or Zen fairy tales for Americans. Each prose piece offers surprises and revelations. (“A man comes home and finds his wife in bed with a squirrel”, “A couple of girls are locked up in a big aquarium,” “I have the last pack of cigarettes in the world; but no matches.”) The characters themselves are less interesting than their situations; one page is enough for them to fall in love or meet imaginary creatures or feel some grand feeling. A lot of the prose pieces are sexually explicit but strange (in one a man finds a map of Greenland on the inside of a girl’s thigh). The prose style is compact and exquisite and easy to read (and suitable for being performed publicly). Now that I’m finished, almost none of the pieces have stuck in my head; all I retain is the memory of being dazzled by a rapid series of unreal images and events. On the bright side, I probably could reread these pieces and enjoy them just as much as the first time.
What is the aim of these koan-like stories? Should the reader notice the allegorical resonances or simply enjoy Yourgrau’s marvelous and whimsical sense of the absurd? With Kafka or Dino Buzzati, the initial situation may have been absurd (i.e., turning into a cockroach), but the author spent considerable effort expanding on the idea and giving it an air of plausibility. But Yourgrau’s stories are more playful than plausible. I am unsure whether to call this a profound literary work — you can’t have real character development or serious drama in a form so compact and whimsical. These kinds of stories don’t NEED to be profound — especially when the far-fetched imagery is so metaphorical. In the Soupbone story, the protagonist jumps out of an airplane while emptying a shoebox of letters from his old love; to his surprise he finds a falling dog also in midair helplessly trying to chase after a bone. Why a dog? Why a soupbone? Part of the fun of these stories is trying to relate the imagery to some universal feeling of dismay or anomie – if that is even possible. The stories grab and intrigue me, but they don’t really move me; that is not the point. Yourgrau has written sequels to this collection using this same innovative short form: Sadness of Sex (about sex) and the NastyBook (geared towards younger readers). This form breaks all rules and takes advantage of today’s reader’s short attention span and the magical possibilities of prose. Highly recommended.
Strange? That’s almost exactly what all of the stories in this thin volume are like. Most of the stories involve the narrator and the use of first-person story-telling. Many of the stories concern the narrator along with his mother, his father, or sometimes both. Occasionally, there’s an attractive young woman in the stories.
The writing is good, but there are so many stories which are so bizarre that, after a while, they all seem to blend into one another and not much stands out. There are two stories, though, which did stand out for me. In “Animals”, the narrator’s father turns into a gorilla while his mother turns into a llama. In “Safari”, the longest and best story, the narrator and his dad go on a safari on their front lawn.
I’ve never read a book quite like this one. The size of the stories are more or less those of flash fiction and mostly completed within a page or two. Of other authors I've read, I’d most compare Yourgrau’s writing style to that of the Israeli author Etgar Keret. If you like reading something different, I’d say give this book a try. Even if you end up not favoring it that much, it won’t take long to read through its total of 127 pages.
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SqueakyChu | 6 weitere Rezensionen | Dec 19, 2009 |
SqueakyChu | 6 weitere Rezensionen | Dec 19, 2009 | 
Rollo loves NuttiNutz Bars (much better than any regular meal) and manga/comic books (especially Su-ichi Samurai Swordboy). He's not a huge fan of his family, particularly his big sister, Noreen.
But, when his mom is abducted by trolls during a family picnic, Rollo is shocked to realize that he is the only one who is overly concerned. Every one else seems to be content to mourn her briefly and then move on with life. Noreen has no problem overtaking her mom's closet and jewelry collection. Rollo's dad even appears to be dating again, and his new girlfriend comes complete with an evil poodle. It's up to Rollo to set off to rescue his mom.
To boost his confidence, he turns himself into his very own manga character, Samurai Stickboy. Armed with a hockey stick, some NuttiNutz Bars, and determination, Rollo sets off on his quest. On his way, he is both helped and hindered by Marv and Harv Tweety, twin brothers who are more confusing than they are useful (especially when one of them dies), a set of talking teeth that Rollo begins to hate, and some strange directional signposts. With a little luck Rollo will be able to figure everything out and be able to rescue his mom before it's too late. If not, well...
This book is half comic book/half written-out manga, with enough non-stop action to keep just about any boy interested. It definitely keeps you guessing; you never know what might happen next. It's like a whirlwind that picks you up, sucks you in, spins you all over the place, and then spits you back out.
And it really develops as it goes, too.
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