Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

Suddenly, she screamed. From his crouch, he looked up at her face, a mask of agony — he froze.

“Ow! Ow! Ow!”

On the fourth Ow , brown & yellow stool erupted from her anus, accompanied by a marching band of flatus. She began to lean backward; Bud reached around to brace her fall.

She hit the bowl with a muted clunk .

“Are you OK?”

She had the biggest smile on her face, & sang out:

“ Plop plop, fizz fizz, O what a relief it is! Marta said I was due. She said, ‘You’re expecting . You’re going to have a baby .’ I said, ‘Make it a little girl, will you? I already have a little boy—’”

He was winded & nauseous.

“Cry, Marta, & let slip the dogs of war!”

Another fusillade as she emptied her bowels again, & Bud stood, woozy. He felt the sharp sting of a pulled lower back. With ecstatic voice, Dolly picked the song up where it left off.

“All the kids to the teacher carried — candy & ice cream cones! — but who do ya think the teacher married? — Wood’n head Puddin head Jones!”

The Art of Fiction, Part Two

“As

you know, David wrote the novels The Wire and Treme .”

“They’re novels? I mean, they were novels?” said Bud, flummoxed.

Michael Douglas was four tables away, having breakfast alone. The smell of his mother’s shit was still in his nostrils.

“They weren’t book novels, but David calls them — we all call them novels because of their dense narratives. And because of the feeling you have after you’ve watched them. It’s indistinguishable from the feelings you have after reading a novel .”

Bud kicked himself for spacing on Xochilt’s caveat. He wondered if David Simon was late, or if he was coming at all.

“They’re pretty much regarded by critics as literature . Did you know David won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for The Wire? They basically created a new category— The Novel as Filmed Drama .” Bud didn’t think Pulitzers were actually won , but why quibble? “David even did an ‘Art of Fiction’ interview for the Paris Review . You know Richard Price, don’t you? His work? He’s an amazing writer. He won a National Book Award. Or maybe it was a Pulitzer. Richard called The Wire a ‘Russian novel’*—we love Richard, he wrote some of our best shows. The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books have practically devoted whole issues to The Wire. I think if you sit down & watch all seven seasons, there is no way you would say at the end, ‘That was great television ’ or even ‘That was great cable television,’ because The Wire is no more a TV show than it is a drama about police or about drug dealers or about Baltimore. David always says it’s not about any of those things! People make a serious mistake when they try to summarize what The Wire is about. You know, put it in a pigeonhole. If a gang of professors at Harvard, Cambridge & Oxford are still trying to figure it out — did you know they teach The Wire in universities all over the world? — then I really don’t think that a television critic, or even our viewers”—she speedily corrected herself—“our readers , are going to be able to nail.”

“Wow, no, I guess not.”

“The syllabus for the course Joyce Carol Oates teaches on The Wire at Princeton says that David’s book has darkly glinting Aeschylean moral textures . Don’t you think that’s perfect?”

“Very, very accurate.”

“She says these amazing things about the show, even David doesn’t understand some of the things she says! I shouldn’t say that. Joyce is beyond brilliant , and so is David. I know that David got annoyed with her though — they’re crazygood friends by the way, & he thinks she’s wonderful —but David got a little peeved because she teaches a course on Battlestar Galactica , & tells her students that she thinks it’s a ‘sy-fy Aeneid .’ David thought that was just a little over the top.”

“Yeah. Just a little!”

“David thought the essay about Mad Men was crazy too. It talked about Don Draper’s secret past creating a real dramatic crisis in the Aristotelian sense and conflict with an elegantly Sophoclean geometry .* David said, Get over yourself!”

“How many have you seen?”

“ The Wire? All of them,” he lied. “Big fan from early on.”

“Have you seen Treme ?”

“ Love it.”

“ Treme ’s a really good book but I’m emotionally closer to The Wire because they were only in their 2nd season when I started interning for David.”

“Wow. What an amazing opportunity.”

“I’ll send you the pilot. Toni Morrison’s become a very serious fan. She is amazing.”

“Of Treme ?”

“Of Treme AND The Wire . She came to The Wire late — her friend Fran Lebowitz turned her on — Fran’s a huge fan of The Wire . She was going to write something for us but for some reason it didn’t happen. Though I guess Fran not writing something isn’t so surprising!”

She arched her neck Michael Douglas’s way.

“He looks so great . Amazing man, amazing life .” Back to Bud. “Do you know Mike Schur?”

“Uhm, I don’t think so,” Bud said, tentatively.

“He’s a showrunner— The Office and Parks&Recreation .”

“O sure! We’ve met.”

“Mike said he wished he’d created The Wire . Mike said The Wire was Shakespearean.”

“Wow.”

Bud wanted to make points, & wondered if now was a good time to bring up Lorrie Moore’s essay on Friday Night Lights from The New York Review of Books , wherein she called The Wire a “visual novel.”*

“Did you know John Updike was watching The Wire when he died?”

“Wow. Incredible. Uhm… what about Mad Men ?”

She went cold.

“What about it?”

“I was just wondering what David calls Mad Men . I mean, is it, does he think of it as a book?”

“You’re not joking?”

“No — I’m just trying to get a flavor of…”

“ Mad Men is absolutely not a book — a novel. Mad Men is more like a novelization— no. Wait. I shouldn’t even say that , because David is the only one who is writing novels for television. Mad Men is more like a… cartoon, a manga. Mad Manga! But please , if you meet — when you meet David, please don’t talk about Mad Men .”

“My agent said David was developing — is developing — a new… a new novel about Hollywood.”

“Yes! That’s why he wanted to talk to you. He loved the little book of short stories you did about Hollywood.”

“He read that?”

“ Very much.”

“I’m flattered.”

“When did you write that?”

“Probably about 25 years ago.”

“David thought they were more a novella than a book of short stories. But not a novel. He wanted to know if there were any more you’ve written.”

“O yeah!” he lied. “A bunch. But I’ve really been focusing the last few years on, well, I guess you’d call it a book .”