On the Texas Frontier
Notorious Killings and
Celebrated Trials
Bill Neal
(Texas Tech University Press)
They even got them a Texas State Senator, Steve Bell (1919), who ran a movie theatre on the side when he wasn't being a Senator, did entertainment, and, apparently, was in the business of what Mr. Neal calls the "impregnation" of a lady named Suetta. My dictionary does make note of the word "impregnation," but to me, it sounds a little formal, not making for the kind of feud that ultimately did in the good Senator Bell. The writing is a bit Wild West, mostly, apparently, culled from court records. Sometimes they --- the records, if not the writer --- get quite windy (when not randy).
A Love Affair
Jacques Poulin
Sheila Fischman,
Translator
(Archipelago)
Of Grisélidis Réal
Days and Nights of
An Anarchist Whore
Jean-Luc Hennig,
Ariana Raines,
Translator
(Semiotext(e)/MIT)
Hennig may be a lady of the night, but she has a few strictures. She doesn't like being woken up too early to go to work. She doesn't like the guys who go on too long, without getting off: she gets bored. Yes, she washes them all down thoroughly before she begins operations, and she keeps a little black book, with a list of their preferences, what they prefer her to do, upside or downside, those little artful things she does with her hands ... the red whip, too, hanging there on the wall.
We do wonder, sometimes, though, what William Barton Rogers, the founder, some 200 years ago, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ... we wonder exactly what he would make of all this stuff, this world that Hennig describes so exactly, the stuff she does with her hands, and the washrag, and the red riding crop, etc., being distributed by MIT Press and all.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
(Wayne State University Press)
Then, "Solution to Brian's Problem," includes Solution #2,
- Wait until Connie comes back from the "store," distract her with the baby, and then cut her meth with Drano, so that when she shoots up, she dies.
In the next tale, Jim Lobretto is just trying to get back to Kalamazoo but spills some hot coffee down his leg at the gas station, then gets some gasoline on his pants, and when the cop stops him for running a red light, he gets nervous, tries to light a cigarette, succeeds in setting his leg on fire but there is no snow on the ground so when he rolls on the ground he can't put it out, so the cop calls an ambulance.
Jim's leg is badly burned but he refuses to stay in the hospital and when he gets home he can hear the two lesbians downstairs having sex, and he gets angry and screams down the register at them to shut up, then he goes out to the car, gets his shotgun out, and but the pain is too much, and he is rolling on the ground, and screaming...
The last story I got to, "The Inventor (1972)" tells of a guy with a big scar down his face who clips a thirteen-year-old girl in his rusted El Camino and breaks her leg. When he tries to get to a phone on the highway no one will let him in (they don't trust strangers). Nor --- after reading these stories --- do we. The author's notes don't tell us where Campbell got the ideas for this bleak, gray collection.
Pamela August Russell
(Sterling)
- I tried to leave L. A.
only to get struck
in traffic.
Now what?
The title of this collection is B Is for Bad Poetry. A poem with the name "Riding Bitch with Rosemary Clooney & Peggy Lee" goes:
- You with the stars
in your eyes
put them back
in the sky.
You're ruining it
for the rest of us.
"Autobiography" reads:
- Looks like a pump,
feels like a sneaker.
Looks like a pump,
feels like a sneaker.
The title is, presumably, from the pen of the author. Could we substitute the letter "D" for "B?" As in "Dismal." Or, perhaps, "E?" As in "Extremely Dismal."