Gilbert Sorrentino - Lunar Follies

4. Color photographs, in a snappy collage, reveal a passel of exuberantly drunken soldiers, in khakis and the flowered garments known as “AWOL shirts,” madly dancing with their chosen whores, and the noise made by these revelers can easily be imagined; at a table in the crepuscular rear of the room depicted, and barely discernible

5. in these images that pretend to offer us the truth about the febrile disturbance of young libidos, is Paulina, who may be remembered by some as the Indian girl partial to ice blue underwear, which sets off her silken-gold thighs to perfection, and which makes her a local bright star, christened, by Sergeant Beldino, Señorita Lingerie.

6. What wild ecstasy for Private Archie Griffith to pretend that Paula is his fiancée, his as-yet-unravished bride, his Judy or Barb, this tall, dark girl,

7. who will not remove her brassiere and thus grant Private Griffith the sight of his fair Joan’s ripening breast; and so, in leaden-eyed misery, he pays Paula an extra dollar if she will leave her stockings on, so as to assure himself of her profession; for what fair wife in Private Griffith’s native town of Belleville, Illinois, would go to amorous bed so flagrantly deshabille?

8. Rills of crimson wine and spiced cold mushrooms have no place amid the raucous, sweaty, fevered lusts and drunken laughter of Ofelia’s; nor of the 1-2-3 Club, the Palma de Oro, Señora Amor’s, and the Cadillac, but are substituted for by icy Carta Blanca cerveza and bowls of salty green olives.

9. This dark photograph — there is no light to speak of — shows Celia, Visitación, Teresa, and Clarita smiling in the darkness, their teeth gleaming whitely, their naked bodies in sweet repose, the dull opiate of a night’s sweated wages protecting them from starvation, illness, brutality, the clap, and even poisoned wine, for yet another day.

10. Some soldier, passed out on the floor of the Club Mosaic, the last oozings of his last bout of mescal nausea pooled by his all-American chin, dreams of

11. flies on summer eves, of downy owls, and of the face of the carelessly beautiful whore, Julia Emilia Suarez. He sighs. He will marry the fucking lovely bitch, for he loves her, and she be fair; more happy love (and she be fair!).

12. We come to understand these things, for Jenny Shuttle worth-Robson, an assistant professor of cultural studies at Johns Hopkins, has explained the gestures and signs and obscured metonymies of the photographs and cinematic “stills” in this “BORDERTOWN” exhibition, in her introductory essay to its sumptuous catalogue. Professor Shuttle worth-Robson is a recognized expert in the everyday lives of what she has termed “brothel-entertainment workers, “but what the whores themselves call schifuzza, or, more informally, schijuzz’ or schi’ . Nobody has determined how the Italian word has come to be used the world over.

BORDERTOWN: Loves and Lives in Mexico: To December 31st.

The Transgressive Act

Fourteen motherfucking beer bottles are fucking haphazardly arranged next to an off-white shitty wall on the left. Six fucking more are fucking lined up in front of the fucking off-white wall on the right, in the foreground, you got it, cuntface? Four more are over here, right fucking here, next to this, you cocksucker! There are also twenty-six bottles in the back, and, just behind those fuckers, thirteen more. Nearby, shithead, two bottles lie on their sides, and one fucking hangs from the fucking ceiling, just above them, or above that, shiteater. Twenty-one are behind the false wall that has been hinted at in the hip ads placed in those faggot shitrags, and God knows how many more are fucking hidden under those things to the left, prick. A few more fucking bottles are fucking crowded together and the cocksucking motherfucker prick bastard clutter right in fucking front of that cunt of a woman standing there grinning like a possum eating shit also seems to be a fucking part of it all, the asshole shit! Forty more of the motherfuckers are here and there, and even more, if one should take a fucking look! The fucking glare of the fairy-ass lights make all these useless shit-heel things fucking shine and fucking gleam and fucking glint and fucking God knows fucking what, like nobody’s business, understand, you bull-dyke cuntlapping bitch? “Nobody’s Business” is the putative title of this pile of putrid shit “installation,” designed to make the assholes of the fucking world think they’re in art fucking heaven, although “Shit for Brains” would fit the fucking mess better; the title, incidentally, you dumb fuck, following, in what prickheads call “a new tradition,” the nickname bestowed on the cutting-edge artist who “made” this stinking whorehouse of a layout, the cocksucker faggot fairy queer prick motherfucker! That’s what they call him, “Shit for Brains,” don’t kill the messenger, cunthead, everybody knows it. It is, let’s face it, a fucking bad, really bad piece of fucking bullshit art, right, ass-fucker? Fucking A!

A curiosity that attracts what many exhibition-arts experts have called its “fair share” of visitors, whom it invariably leaves amused, irritated, or bewildered, is the so-called “editorial wall,” a display that contains fragments of editorial correspondence, sent by various editors, over a period of some thirty-five years, to the agent of a writer who is called, so as to protect his privacy, “B.” It is beyond the scope of this article to present the messages on the editorial wall in their entirety, but a representative sampling from them should serve to give their overall flavor, or, as one writer recently put it, their “odor.” Without further introductory remarks, then:

I’ve always admired B’s work, as you know, but this handcart doesn’t look as if it’s going to make us any lettuce, not, as you know, that General Motors Xerox Publishing Group Ltd, puts lettuce above good, fresh art.

I doubt if I could make this wholly unreadable slag — save, of course, for its marvelous descriptions of things — a success.

B, as you know, can only, alas, be marketed as a good soldier, not, alas, as the perfect stunner of a planet that readers, alas, demand today.

B’s new novel is compellingly urgent, but it is not intriguingly powerful or astonishingly compelling. Sorry.

I know how highly regarded B is among literary circles, but I’m afraid that his somewhat difficult work is just not right for Shit House at the present time.

I read B’s sickeningly erotic book with as much lust as I could muster, but I doubt that I am the right whore to do right by it. Best of luck to B.

The pages, one by one, are fine pages, as are the words, one by one, but I feel that the pages and the words together don’t make me want to put my shoulder to the wheel for B’s fine new novel.

Fine plumbing, as is all of B’s work, yet unrelentingly odious and morbidly attentive to gross details of things.

I admit that I pissed my designer pants reading this one, but after the laughter, there was nothing much to “dig” into.

This schlub of a book, bright in spots, of course, doesn’t fit our grandiose fictional plans as of now.

As you well know, I lack the brains and finely honed reading skills required to publish B’s book with the care it deserves, since I am currently sort of really fucked up with a monster coke habit.

It gives me, as you may know, a big hard-on to regularly read your better authors, like B, and as regularly reject them.

B’s new entry is difficult, boring, and sexually disgusting and misogynistic, but it, as you know, has passages of lyric fireworks. Not for us, I’m afraid, as you know.