Gilbert Sorrentino - Lunar Follies

B’s — let’s face it—“literary” book doesn’t fit well into the context of our poor list as it now stands, nor, for that matter, as it will stand at any time in the foreseeable future.

How I’d love to be able to grab up B’s new blockbuster, but my hands are tied, as are my knees and ankles, alas!

If B had another book that we could bring out a year or so before or after this book I’d love to take this book on along with the other book. But as it stands, sorry.

We schmoozed, all of us here at Annex-Subsidiary, about the real strengths of B’s new book, but finally the “gals from Swarthmore” here thought it demeaning to educated white women with money.

The latter sixteenth of B’s new offering is almost shattering in its power, but the earlier sixteenth seems derivative, weak, unimaginative, hackneyed, and plodding. Give my best to B.

The utter holocaust of B’s new exploration of a novel is a marvel of authorial honesty and creative tale-spinning; but, alas, we all felt that it depended much too heavily on stylistic crap rather than straightforward plotting.

In order to do right by B’s ludicrous yet oddly disturbing new sally into the perverse, I’d have to feel, on every page, the excitement of being humped on my desk by the spick mail boy, and I just don’t.

I’m delighted, as you may know, that you thought to send me B’s rubbishy new novel, along with his collection of rotten stories that I so loathed a year ago, but they don’t add up to the sort of swill that I envisaged making up a really knockout marketing event. Too bad.

B’s new book, we all agreed here, has three pages, two paragraphs, one clause, seven and a half phrases, thirty-seven sentences, and four hundred and sixty-five words of keen, knee-weakening majesty, but the rest of the book is kind of blah, so we figured, “oh, fuck it,” alas.

What a remarkable slab of a book this is! — but we have room on our list for only one such slab a year, and this year’s loser has already been contracted for. Best to B.

I must confess that I found the plot of B’s new offering confusing and elusive, but that’s a failing I guess I’ll have to live with in this vale of tears.

I liked lots of B’s at times extraordinary new novel, but the author seems somewhat too pleased with himself, but perhaps I’m not the right editor for such a difficult work.

B’s latest foray into his standard porno-fiction is often elegant and even beautiful, but it lacks the punch of the short-story collection of his that we passed on last year. Thanks so much for letting me see the work of this important author.

B’s work simply lacks the dishonesty and superficiality of the work that we cotton to here at Himmler-Aspen, at least in this woman’s opinion, and so I’m afraid that I’ll have to pass again on this new novel.

We loved, really loved, this excursion into rage and bitterness, but I’m sure that another editor somewhere will love it even more.

It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve held on to B’s manuscript for seventeen months, so I’m sending it back to you, still unread, as you know.

I’ll have to say no again, I’m sorry to say, to B’s terrific new book, since, as you know, Van Cleef & Arpels no longer publishes anything that resembles books.

We were impressed by B’s sly and ingenious new novel, but we have at least nine really bad books under contract, and are seriously overextended at the present time.

I’m afraid that I have no record of ever receiving B’s manuscript of humorous essays. It’s been a madhouse here since our merger with Metro Yahoo Collins Spielberg. If I come across it I’ll have it returned by messenger immediately.

In the haze, there can be discerned, perhaps, a dark grave, an Italian sea, an ideal copy of the lyre of Orpheus, and an arbor of formidable vines among whose bilious green rests a solitary rose of sorrow. Alas! the head they all adore aches still with the kiss of the enormous queen, and what a lariat-spinner she can sardonically be. And there she stands, or, actually, emerges, emerges steadily and slowly from a crepuscular violet and lavender that informs the entire room! There glows, as well, the golden hair that is popular with every true son of Greece, an odd collection of rogues, of course, many of them actually Italian, covered, most usually, with ashes like unto grime on a smeared window, through which most travelers cannot see the horizon. Just as well, since it was never intended that they see anything at all. What a blague! What a jape! A pale-pink hydrangea complements the daguerrotypes of the azure sea, although “azure” is a word that creative-writing cliques insist should never be used in, well, creative writing. And we are well aware of what that is! As something more than mere decoration, assemblage doyens and their faithful docents claim that a flame-colored scarf is central to just about everything; as are, too, the Lord of the Volcano, three green glass eyes, peace be upon them, two Frostian spondees, dragons’ teeth (as usual), and a certain implacable scarlet. None of these earthy, sublunary things can manage (despite their changing dispositions within the space of this really beautiful, if somewhat fruity, fake Louis xvi apartment, complete with upholstered jakes) to derange the pure given whole, the serene quiver of Sacred Art, which is always as astonishing and inevitable, but not really, not really at all, as a song by the sublime Harry Warren, e.g., “At Last” or “I Only Have Eyes for You.”

Three clarinets, attached bell to mouthpiece, bell to mouthpiece, bell to mouthpiece, make what might be thought of as a fairly long “tube,” glistening black, decorated with what the catalogue is pleased to call, incorrectly, “silver filigree.” The tube leans against an off-white wall. Title: “These Silvery Things Are Valves Like.” Nothing else appears to be in the gallery, save for an attentive guard, in an (but of course!) “ill-fitting” uniform that could “use the services” (but of course!) of a dry cleaner. We say: “He’s his usual gracious self!” We say: “He didn’t even bother to come to his own farewell party!” We say: “How we gonna give ‘im his gift?” The guard examines the clarinets/tube and it becomes clear that he is, or may be, an integral part of the exhibit, like he’s art. We say: “He’s probly part of the exhibit, like, art!” We say: “As far as I’m concerned, he can go piss up a rope! Look at that ill-fitting uniform on him, Jesus.” The catalogue suggests that the artist who created this majestic piece rarely interacts with his colleagues, but is aloof, disturbingly private, and, in matters aesthetic, his usual gracious self. He is a practicing poet, and also the reluctant spokesman for those who love life, laugh over a bottle of good Cabernet, feel that nature is extremely important to all human intercourse as long as it stays out of the driveway, and attend their own farewell parties. Alternative titles for the piece, culled from the visitors’ book that rests on a lectern at the gallery entrance, are: “Breaking Up of Our Summer Concert,” “Orchestra en Plein Vent,” “A New Year Contraband Ball at Vicksburg,” “Dos a Dos or Rumpti Iddity Ido,” and “Sporting a Toe.” “And they ask why,” a woman, rumored to be the department chairman — and who looks like a bag of rags tied in the middle — says, “he makes the big monkey!” A quick check of the monthly-meeting minutes notes that she may have actually said, “the big money,” although there are some who argue for the fey, “the bug money.” The clamor increases as the academics and their guests await the free box lunches and the mineral water, but the clarinet installation restores silence. For once.