Lunar Follies Read online

  LUNAR FOLLIES

  by Gilbert Sorrentino

  Coffee House Press

  2005

  COPYRIGHT © 2005 by Gilbert Sorrentino

  COVER + BOOK DESIGN Linda Koutsky

  COVER PHOTO © Rana K. Williamson

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, 1045 Westgate Drive, Saint Paul, MN 55114. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to: Coffee House Press, 27 North Fourth Street, Suite 400, Minneapolis, MN 55401.

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals help make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book. To you and our many readers across the country, we send our thanks for your continuing support.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP DATA

  Sorrentino, Gilbert.

  Lunar follies/by Gilbert Sorrentino.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56689-169-1 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-56689-169-8 (alk. paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-56689-290-2 (ebook)

  1. Art—Exhibitions—Fiction. 2. Arts—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.07L86 2005

  813’.54—DC22

  2004028140

  3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Portions of this work first appeared in McSweeney’s.

  LUNAR FOLLIES

  CONTENTS

  Alphonsus

  Alpine Valley

  Alps

  Altai Scarp

  Appennines

  Archimedes

  Aristoteles

  Carpathians

  Catharina

  Caucasus Mountains

  Clavius

  Cleomedes

  Copernicus

  Cordillera Mountains

  Eastern Sea

  Eratosthenes

  Fra Mauro

  Gassendi

  Grimaldi

  Humboldt

  Hyginus Rille

  J. Herschel

  Joliot-Curie

  Jules Verne

  Jura Mountains

  Lake of Dreams

  Langrenus

  Longomontanus

  Moscow Sea

  Neper

  Ocean of Storms

  Petavius

  Plato

  Posidonius

  Ptolemaeus

  Purbach

  Pythagoras

  Riccioli

  Rook Mountains

  Sea of Clouds

  Sea of Cold

  Sea of Crises

  Sea of Fertility

  Sea of Moisture

  Sea of Nectar

  Sea of Rains

  Sea of Serenity

  Sea of Tranquillity

  Straight Wall

  Theophilus

  Tsiolkovsky

  Tycho

  Walther

  “… while the ears, be we mikealls or nicholists, may sometimes be inclined to believe others the eyes, whether browned or nolensed, find it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself.”

  FINNEGANS WAKE

  “You’re painting a shoe; you start painting the sole, and it turns into a moon; you start painting the moon, and it turns into a piece of bread.”

  PHILIP GUSTON

  ALPHONSUS

  George Alphonsus, famed as the Supreme Master of Magic, is said to have had a hand in creating the illusion that has, quite successfully and convincingly, asserted itself as “art for our time.” The question asked most frequently has been, “what of the millennium?” Or, on occasion, “what of the exciting millennium?” George creates the convincing illusion, which, most agree, silences the seasoned and cynical journalists, who are, of course, the framers of such questions as have to do with “art for our time.” For instance: “Is baseball too slow for our ultra-busy, speeded-up, on-the-go age?” “Will the loathsome cockroach lead the way to a cure for breast cancer?” “Was John Kennedy Junior a closet queen?” “Do we have to die?” “How can we be happy in a bad job?” And “Is birth-control science the way to the Rapture?” But to the Supreme Master of Magic, anent his astonishing and artistic illusions (which, he insists, and strongly, on calling “The art of astonishing and artistic illusions”), they ask, e.g., “How does it feel, George?” Silence usually ensues, and so it’s on to the snow-chains story; the heat-wave story; the story of the tough coach and his swell young protégé; the killer-hurricane (with puppy) story; the mudslide story and the people who will rebuild; the forest-fire story and the people who will rebuild; the flash-flood story and the people who will rebuild; the depraved priest story and the youths he abused every night for nine years; and, of course, the magnificent new stadium that will seat 150,000, cost nothing, make an entire city rich, and stamp out the cocaine trade as well, so that the little guy, if white, will win at least maybe story. And all the while, through rain and fog and the golden California sun that bakes the brain right through the jaunty baseball caps that are always the rage, George, the Supreme Master of Magic’s, newest illusion is, yes, right this way, over here, yes, here you go, right by the spilled latte, yes: illusion dot com dot magicgeorge dot com you chumps.

  ALPINE VALLEY

  The place or space or venue is rife or blossoming with pictures or photographs or collages or photocollages of the famous avant-garde publisher’s wife, the famous underground diva or fringe dancer or performance artist, whose most renowned and transgressive “happening”—as such events were termed in the sixties in all their rude and feverish innocence and glamour—“Cunnus Delicti,” concluded with the artist slowly pulling a long, thin scroll of paper from her vagina. In between periods of “whirlwind creativity,” as her husband smilingly notes, she likes to read the submissions that come in over the transom, as they occasionally say in publishing. This spousal remark is recorded, in its totality, amid the images that virtually surround one in the studio, amid a clash of vital forms. One novel was thought to be too long for its fragile premise, yet the choreographic instincts that inform the artist’s “mind” are too present ever to permit her to define the word “premise. “This has always been her way, so says her adoring husband, from behind his aromatically billowing briar. “She has an eye for the authentic,” he is quoted as saying in a yellowing, brittle newspaper clipping, the words glowing with orange highlighter ink or solution or is it, perhaps, a kind of water color? Above this focal point, or “coign,” as a dear old friend from “boardwalk days” has called it, this endearing remark, virtually palpable in its compassion for the real, the authentic, the unashamedly human, is a photograph of the artist, in her defining moment, pulling the paper scroll from her proud, naked vagina; and, just above the photograph, sharing the wall space that overlooks the massive worktable crammed, as always, with ideas for new dances, new performance ideas, new and startling contortions, just above it, stained, creased, covered with admirers’ notes of congratulation and admiration, and, forebodingly, warning, like a stern aegis, or a harbinger of just what art can be, is the discolored scroll itself, assertive, defiant!

  ALPS

  Terrifying photographs, drawings, and poor collages of “Old Geordy Sime,” one of his era’s most famous pipers, alternate with miniature reproductions of the Alard Stradivarius, the installation, a word nicely borrowed from the Persian (like “peach”), creating a kind of frieze that dominates the small and warmly claustrophobic room. The title of this particular installation is “Welsh Harps,” an oblique hommage to Sime. The artist’s irrepressible sense of humor is everywhere apparent here. The portrayed women defend their actualities in no uncertain terms, here on the cutting edge. �
�They’ll no longer take ‘no’ for an answer,” would seem to be the essential rubric under which deft revolutions occur; and then there is “neon is their middle name,” another call to arms. The word “cunt” may not, of course, be used, save in the correct, life-affirming way. Indian drums are scattered about, if drums can ever be “scattered.” Yet scattered they joyously are, in the ineluctable ways of craft, and craft is all, when you get right down to it. It’s time that artists who aren’t pulling their own weight were given the bum’s rush. “The Bum’s Rush” is, fortuitously, the overall title of the whole exhibit. Over on the other wall is the interior profile of an English church organ, which completes the diorama—calling capitalism, once more, to account. Dioramas, as presented by certain fabled buildings at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York, were sublimely vulgar and made kitsch into the “art of our time.” “At will’s Musical Establishment” was first seen in the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, but was withheld from this particular show by those few who know. A wild twangling daily issues forth from all corners of the “space”: at one, three, and five P.M. “Ring dem bells!” is the wonted cry from the poets who get five free tickets each day, starting at noon. (This is not the Director’s doing!) Poets are likely to do just about anything for a buck, as they say, or for publication in Zing, Edelweiss Review, Insomnia News, Hurdygurdy, Blotto, and The Tribes. “Their hurts healed for a few dollars” or two contributor’s copies. On Tuesdays, senior citizens are admitted at half-price, God love them.

  ALTAI SCARP

  Here are the stars of eternity, some dressed as imitation ladies. In attendance, two-inch engineers, cut out of cardboard, and curious in transparent socks. The sun, which shines on the tableau, is red, and, as usual, round, something like the dial of a watch. The stars, it should be noted, cluster about a red table upon which are displayed a wooden spool that apparently once held thread, a scatter of paper clips, a tin airplane, and a few old elastics, or, as they are usually called, “rubber bands.” These items may, possibly, be glued to the table’s surface. There is, too, an unappetizing dinner rather carelessly crowded onto a small area of the table, where it has grown stone cold. In a corner of the room, a trunk, leather and lined with leather, ready for the stars’ vacation, is “gummed” all over with red stars and small photographs of tables and trunks; and next to it are its trays, removed so as to display their contents, nothing more than a number of hinged boxes, filled, almost to overflowing, with small discs of white cardboard edged with nickeled metal of some sort. Each disc has the same words carefully inscribed, in red ink, on one side: DARN, CONVEY, DISCOVER, SUCK; and on the other side: FASTER, TISSUE. It appears that the stars, or in any event those stars dressed as imitation ladies, refuse to examine or, for that matter, even glance at these “messages,” and that they will continue to refuse to do so.

  APPENNINES

  A group, a line, actually, of determinedly, even aggressively unlifelike mannequins are arrayed, or lined up, against a ghastly backdrop of what is meant to be a Hawaiian sunset. The mannequins, male and female alike, have “breasts,” and a disturbing, large sign, ANOTHER NAIL IN THE COFFIN OF BOURGEOIS GENDER ROLES, in magenta neon or something glowing, shines upon them. The mannequins appear to be dressed, or partially dressed—depending on how each mannequin is situated as a “radical construct”—as investment bankers, venture capitalists, bond traders, arbitragers, and cocksuckers, each “construct” attended by a “wife,” “husband,” “lover,” or “partner,” appropriately dressed for daily tasks and plain fun. Music plays continually on a loop (?), to the annoyance of the gallery visitors; and although this music is extremely bad, it must be noted that it is not precisely music, but world music, and its infirm quality a mocking comment on inverse canon formation. One mannequin, whose “breasts” are quite enormous, seems to have an equally enormous “erection” in its tight Tonetti briefs, although the flashing strobe lights that accompany the passionate if off-key strains of a “white-bread” version of a classic Venezuelan fanfanzanga, may well be responsible for a “bulge” that is really not there, but is an optical illusion. The noise in the gallery space is so loud as to be painful and disorienting, and this may account for the lewd, even depraved acts visited upon the mannequins by ironic and rebellious iconoclasts at virtually all hours. Such acts have come to be called, by their perpetrators and would-be perpetrators, “rudiments of gesture.”

  ARCHIMEDES

  Piles of wet clothing, puddles of dirty, soapy water, and a tarnished crown of false, or fool’s gold, set the tone for this installation, one which slowly and almost imperceptibly turns from the innocuous to the eerily disturbing, as the vast floor of the converted gymnasium, which serves as the gallery’s exhibition space, accommodates, insistently and obsessively, more piles of clothing, more puddles of water, more cheap-jack crowns. It is only when the eye refuses to be mesmerized by neurotic uniformity and repetition that the floor space between these strangely iconic and wholly sterile elements of a useless formalism is seen to contain cluttered configurations of miniature, varicolored, metallic spheres, cylinders, fulcrums, circles, conoids, spheroids, ovoids, and ingeniously designed sand-reckoners. These familiar geometrical shapes function as footnotes or marginalia, of course. The floor is bathed in a cold, aqueous, silvery light, which has the uncanny effect of making these simple conjugations of things (and what is more “thinglike” than laundry, wet floors, “Coney Island” headgear?) into noble, if threatening, constructions. The entire installation suggests to the viewer willing to connect with its sublunary symbolism a world—our own world, perhaps—and the number of grains of sand in their trillions upon trillions that it would take to completely fill it. An extraordinarily compelling architecture of delights, this, by the Grupo Archimedes, rich with the unspoken and unrevealed.

  Eureka Downtown, through June 15th

  ARISTOTELES

  Two copulative verbs, large, and by nature rough, converge upon a blushing noun, which tries, gamely, to hold its skirts down in the blustery wind blowing hard toward the famed copse of eucalyptus trees imported from the Pulitzer Bank, sadly fished out long, long ago, by fascists of foreign persuasions, mostly Norwegians, drunk, and foul with innocent-whale blubber. A dreadnought hovers nearby, fly agape, yet he seems, at first glance, to be slipping edgewise toward the empty booth in the diner. The diner is a perfect replica of an authentic copy reconstructed from the edges of the dreams of those who know what real rock-and-roll is, and, more importantly, what it used to be. The entire tableau, if one may be forgiven such an evangelistic word, seems to present a kind of “truth”—and, surely, the place cards have no reason to lie, to paraphrase the professor. In his latest book on seemingly inconsequential (“yet alarmingly labile,” as he notes on more than one occasion) and neglected things, he plumbs the depths of the notably banal, as this word was understood in Victorian London, and comes to many conclusions about British comestibles. Be that as it may, the tableau keeps turning, twisting, changing, metamorphosing, and so on and so forth, over and over, in subtle homage to various geniuses of dramaturgy, post-Aristoteles, e.g.: Inigo Jones, Bob Jones, Bill Jones, Henry Jones, “Dem” Bones, August Strindberg, Irving Thalberg, Hank Greenberg, Mrs. Goldberg, “Bob” Altman, B. Altman, Bergdorf Goodman, “Noodles” Goodman, Aristotle, Richard Tottel, Dr. Fell, and others too numerous to name. But now the noun succumbs to the crass importunings of the verbs and their lusty rods* hold sway! A card appears from out of a haze of bluish smoke and on the card is lettered, “Handlome il al handlome doel,” yet another trope of the colonized mind. In the careless iconography of the streets, this phrase may mean that [she] is in the process “of getting [her] ashes hauled.” There is, finally, a somewhat banjaxed and vafunculed series of half-hearted alarums before Bottom enters and puts out the lights, much to the annoyance of the person hired to perform this act. This, too, is to be considered part of the shifting, flexible, ceaselessly variegated piece. “So we beat off,” a
volunteer demigod chuckles softly, as he leans on the windowsill to gaze at the traffic far below in the gathering summer dusk, headlights gleaming off the wet, shining streets, reading his index card with admirable precision and a degree of panache, even.