Tripticks E-Book

Ann Quin

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 286

Beschreibung

First published in 1972, Ann Quin's fourth and final novel was a radical break from the introspective style she had developed in Three and Passages: a declaration of independence from all expectations. Brashly experimental, ribald, and hilarious, Tripticks maps new territories for the novel – aspiring to a form of pop art via the drawings of the artist Carol Annand and anticipating the genre-busting work of Kathy Acker through collage and gory satire. Splattering its pages with the story of a man being chased across a nightmarish America by his 'first X-wife' and her 'schoolboy gigolo', Tripticks was ground zero for the collision of punk energy with high style.

Leseprobe

TRIPTICKS

TRIPTICKS

Ann Quin

Introduced by Danielle Dutton

SHEFFIELD — LONDON — NEW YORK

INTRODUCTION

In 1968, the British literary quarterly Ambit, under the editorial auspices of J. G. Ballard, Edwin Brock, and Martin Bax, ran an infamous competition for the best work written under the influence of drugs. Years later, in an interview for the Paris Review, Ballard recalled that, overall, in terms of quality, “cannabis was the best stimulant, though some good pieces came out of LSD.” But “the best writing of all,” he went on, “was done by Ann Quin, under the influence of the contraceptive pill.” This winning story, “Tripticks”—the beginning of the novel you’re holding, which Quin had started earlier that year—won publication in the magazine and a prize for its author of £40. It’s a funny little anecdote—“Don’t laugh,” Quin wrote to Marion Boyars, “but I’ve won a Drugs competition”—but it seems to me this comic subversion of Ambit’s contest is also a preview of the more serious subversive work Quin was doing in this book. For just as her birth-control pills—Orthonovin 2, to be specific—deflate the romantic narrative of 1960s drug culture, Tripticks, Quin’s most pointedly satirical work, is a feminist anti-romance, anti-road novel of a distinctly disruptive sort.

Ann Quin was born in the English seaside town of Brighton in 1936 and died in 1973 having walked into the water. According to one newspaper report, her body was found floating off the coast of nearby Shoreham “dressed only in panties.” A fisherman had seen her strip down on a Brighton beach the night before. The article is brief—”Sea-death woman was Brighton writer,” it’s called—but it includes a black-and-white photograph of Quin almost smiling beneath a dark pixie cut. “She wrote many books,” the article concludes, “including Berg and Three.” In fact, at the time of her death, Quin had published four extraordinary and stylistically daring novels: Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969), and Tripticks (1972). She was only thirty-seven years old.

You can read about her early years in “Leaving School—XI,” an engaging autobiographical sketch included in 2018’s The Unmapped Country: Stories & Fragments, edited by Jennifer Hodgson.* Quin’s version of her own story begins after her working-class mother packed her off to a convent school to rid her of a Sussex accent and transform her into “a lady.” In the convent she felt trapped, sensed the devil always near, “hiding in the folds of black cloth,” and developed, “A death wish and a sense of sin. Also a great lust to find out, experience what evil really was.” Naturally she escaped to a public library to read: Dostoyevsky, Elizabethan drama, Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf. “The Waves,” she says, “made me aware of the possibilities in writing.” And how could it not? “The sun had not yet risen,” Woolf begins. “The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, perusing each other perpetually.”

Tripticks chronicles a nameless narrator’s exploits as he drives across America pursuing his “No. 1 X-wife and her schoolboy gigolo”—or else the ex and her lover are pursuing him. Let’s just say they’re following each other, perpetually, in Buicks and Chevrolets, back and forth across a dystopian U.S.A. The America we find in Quin’s novel is a place of rampant consumerism, religious hypocrisy, gory violence, and new-age self-help bullshit. It’s also sex-mad, drug-addled, racist, and riddled with the language of advertising clichés. When we do glimpse the natural environment out a car or motel window, it is often almost terrifyingly beautiful, a not-quitesurreal prehistoric vastness of mesas and rock formations, “sheer walls of symmetrical blue grey basaltic columns” and “salt pools with crystals forming on their surfaces” and “bare broken peaks.” But any romance of the American West is always immediately cut through, chopped down, pressed up against something else, like “6 packs of fridged beer” and a “U-Drive Inn” or a “lead-filled baseball bat” and a “hanging tree.” Of course the setting of any novel, no matter how experimental, is made out of nothing but words, yet that truism feels somehow truer of Tripticks. Language is the landscape we’re traversing in this book, a shifting vista of TV commercials, political rhetoric, sexual fantasy, and sand dunes. Language is what’s happening in here.

The most stylistically daring of all of Quin’s stylistically daring books, Tripticks also marks a departure. If Quin serves as a literary bridge between Virginia Woolf and Kathy Acker—as she’s been described—then this is the book that gets her onto the Acker side of the canyon. Whereas her three previous novels showcase a quieter psychological interiority, here the prose is cacophonous and rude; it’s fragmented by lists and quotations; it’s polyvocal yet monologic, often funny, creatively punctuated, feels somehow both manic and static, and is, at times, so syntactically complex as to approach a ludic nonsense. In particular, much has been made of this book’s linguistic relationship to the cut-up methods of William Burroughs. There’s Ian Patterson in the London Review of Books noting that Quin used the techniques “of writers like Burroughs to create a fast-moving, jump-cutting, semi-absurd, road-trip quest narrative,” and in the now defunct Books and Bookmen we’re told Tripticks reads like “sub-Burrovian cut-uppery.” Publishers Weekly argues more broadly that the book “evokes some of the more experimental Beat writers.” Meanwhile, Becca Rothfeld in the New York Review of Books points out that Quin rejected any suspected Burrovian influence, but concludes: “Tripticks reads like a machismo mash-up by William Burroughs.”

Personally, I read the book as a critique of machismo (Burrovian or otherwise). Machismo is self-romanticizing, after all, whereas everything about Tripticks, from those birth-control pills on down, reads like a subversion or parody of self-romance. We know via John Hall’s 1972 “The Mighty Quin” that Quin did rely on “cut-ups from Time, Life, television commercials and Yankee sex and criminology pulp” while writing Tripticks, yet just as the novel is a parodic takedown of 1960s American culture that both mocks and engages seriously with the material of that culture, so too the book seems to me to simultaneously utilize the cut-up and to stand firmly outside the traditionally macho aesthetic with which it is associated. So while Tripticks can be read in relation to Burroughs, or, in a different way, to Kerouac’s On the Road (another ostensibly drug-addled novel of the American “open road”), its relationship to these American cultural touchstones is not straightforward. It’s worth noting that in 1961, in a letter to her friend Carol Burns, Quin wrote: “simply hating ‘On the Road’—what a lot of sentimental rubbish and so tedious how it goes on and on in this phoney pseudo ‘isn’t life crazy but it’s life man’ sort of fashion.” Also worth noting: as Quin was writing Tripticks, she was reading Gertrude Stein.

Then there are the images. Given the riotous linguistic performance of this book, it’s tempting to want to read its illustrations for clues. Certainly I find myself reading in this way, looking back and forth between the images and text, hoping to find the one explicating the other. We’re trained to expect illustrations to do exactly this. But while certain images here feel plainly illustrative, others seem only thematically related to the text’s overall obsessions (maps, mesas, S&M), while still others come across as ambiguous or random (why so many gorillas?).

In an interview with Alan Burns, Carol Annand, the book’s illustrator, explained that the text of Tripticks was already finished when she came on board to do the illustrations. In fact the book had already been accepted for publication, and so Annand had to fit her illustrations into an existing layout, hence images that frequently appear as footers, snuggled up against the pagination. This timing also likely explains why the book begins and ends with drawings, giving visual imagery both the first and final word. I’m especially interested in those closing panels: a hillside, a building, a rooftop. They don’t match Quin’s descriptions of the location of the novel’s climactic closing scenes, even though there’s also a rooftop involved in those shenanigans. Instead, Quin and Annand leave us with ambiguity, associative logic, more distance to cross. They leave us with collage, which, like so much in this book, relies for its effects on juxtaposition, a comedy of scale or tone, and an emphasis on messiness and chance. Annand, in that same interview, said she “tried to make a visual narrative run parallel with Ann’s narrative.” But Quin’s is a narrative of disruption, quotation, and play; the images illustrate that as much as anything else.

In the end, Tripticks stands alone as Quin’s only image-text collaboration—or at least the only one she published. Why did she decide on illustrations for this work? Was it to introduce another voice not her own, to expand the polyphony of the encounter? Or for the experience of collaboration? Or to build into Tripticks a greater sense of the materiality her text was already pursuing? For my part, I keep thinking back to that “drugs issue” of Ambit. If you look it up on their website you can flip through an old photographed copy priced at £40 (the same amount Quin won in the contest). Scroll through to the first page of “Tripticks” and you’ll see it appears on a recto while facing it on the verso is a full page of inky black cartoonish drawings by an artist named Martin Leman. Perhaps Quin, having seen that spread, could never quite shake from “Tripticks”/Tripticks the playfully cacophonous energy of the image-text encounter.

In a piece at the Quarterly Conversation, Jesse Kohn, thinking through Tripticks’s stylistic difference from Quin’s previous novels, writes: “As a writer with three books behind her, Quin seems as eager as the No 1. X-wife to blot out the memory of her previous cohort.” By “previous cohort” he means, of course, Berg, Three, and Passages. Quin “flees stylistically” in Tripticks, Kohn argues, turning to face those previous three works just as our narrator “steer[s] his car towards the incensed trio of castrating X-wives,” It’s a neat idea—the fourth book bearing down on the earlier three like some sort of crazed mutineer—at least in part because it’s natural to think of Tripticks as Quin’s last stand, an end. In fact, Quin was working on a new novel when she died, and that work-in-progress, “The Unmapped Country,” shows her operating more in the mode of her previous books than in any new artistic space Tripticks had opened up. Rather than representing an entirely new and final direction, then, it’s possible to see Tripticks more like a wild U-turn, an outlier among outliers, Quin’s own rebel work.

Danielle Dutton, St. Louis, 2022

* Hodgson, who is currently writing a book about the life of Ann Quin, graciously answered several of my questions and shared some archival gems. I also want to gratefully acknowledge the archival work in Nonia Williams Korteling’s “Designing its Own Shadow—Reading Ann Quin” and Dennis Cooper’s blog spotlight page on Tripticks.

TRIPTICKS

For Alan and Carol Burns

I have many names. Many faces. At the moment my No. 1 X-wife and her schoolboy gigolo are following a particularity of flesh attired in a grey suit and button-down Brooks Brothers shirt. Time checked 14. 04 hours Central Standard Time. 73 degrees outside. Area 158, 693 square miles, of which 1, 890 square miles are water. Natural endowments are included in 20 million acres of public reservations. All outdoor sports are possible. Deep sea sleeping, and angling for small game are favourite pastimes. The man who doesn’t reckon his pleasures on a silver platter is a fish that walks by night. Batman’s the name, reform’s the game. Farm out the elite, the Ruff-puffs, stinking thinking, temper tantrums, strong winds, captivating experiences, Burn Down Peyton Place, and inhale deeply stretched time with red eyes.

Eyes that fall away to 282 feet below sea level. I am hunted by bear, mountain lion, elk and deer. Duck, pheasant, rabbit, dove and quail. He at first feels a little like George Custer at Little Big Horn. The enemy is all around and awesome. The road ahead is going to be difficult there will be some nervous Nellies and some will become frustrated and bothered and break ranks under the strain, and there will be blood, irony dwarfs and dragons, skyrockets fired to celebrate orgasm’s efficiency. Suicide in a scented Sodom. Soul on acid. Hero angelic, domestic and cosmic on a journey with God on my side and the Brownie Troop.

Meanwhile I eat a toasted cheese hamburger, and dwell on five days of unconfined feasts of roasted pig. A miracle for a man who has nothing to lose. True your family adventures may not match those of ancient Greece, but you’re equipped to make history and why shouldn’t you be, we’ve worked hard to make it that way, we took no short cuts, spared no expense, watched no clock. If you come filled with dreams it may happen that your dream changes about every 15 minutes. The most is yet to come. 3,000 miles of strawberry ice cream. Lips are frenchfries teasing cole slaw fingers. My belly a Golden Poppy and the Motto is I Have Yet To Find It. Or as posted to my 3 X-wives. Ranked according to value vehicles food allied products fabricated metal machinery stone clay glass lumber and apparel.

White gold her hair one of my faces married (I displayed at that time a droopy Stephen Crane moustache and shiny eyes fixed on some wild interior vision). A bevy of stars, many now fallen. Reproductions

a gristmill

wine press

and the reservoir with its undershot waterwheel, a restored chapel and adjoining wing of seven rooms she has taken over with the fourth husband of my No. 2 wife. Under the rough hewn redwood timbers they were lashed together with rawhide. Open during daylight hours an unusual arrangement of garden pools. Hours subject to change in summer. No dogs, with the exception of seeing-eye dogs, are allowed. Cats are permitted to stay overnight provided they are on a leash. A naturalist is on duty. As members of the 89-person party died, those remaining resorted to cannibalism. Only 47 were rescued. Picnicking. Campsites near the original area. Where I warted.

Cement

sand

gravel

and a gun.

Full of booze and passion for justice he sees himself as a law and ardour candidate. His politics are symbolized by the itchy trigger finger, and his judicial philosophy is summed up in a tidy homily, ‘You can’t serve papers on a rat’. For months he terrorized the young women, and he was quickly dubbed the ‘Phantom Rapist’. He left typewritten notes at the scenes of his crimes. A strategy he called ‘working the system’.

He is layin’ low, like Br’er Rabbit in his briar patch but we know he s in there. Hovering, pale and jittery, like an image that persists for a second after the set has been turned off.

I knew they scrutinized me through a two-way mirror. A matter of impatience between us. Between the sunken gardens, colonnade and the workshop. They set up their own quarantine regulations. Frozen turkeys and yoghourt delivered from the nearest Piggly Wiggly. She played the mechanical organ, he an old horse fiddle, and other games with other interesting relics. Most of their amusements, I soon realized, could be accommodated without my presence. The inertia of distant omniscient perspective. That other side of the goddamn appletree. Intimations of immortality and a need for sincerity and violence become reflections of the reality only. I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death. The attacker may be a sadist who bites slowly and intentionally, leaving well-defined teeth marks. Mainly found on the breast, neck, cheek, top of arm etc. Their degree of viciousness can vary tremendously, from the nipples being completely bitten off to one bite only, a ‘love nip’.

I fired three times at their flagstone barbecue pit. And emerged from an underground channel through different rock strata. The name is not Gnome. The sensible thing is to kill them off, petrol bombs you know. Napalm your Castle awaits you.

It was when hitting Highway 101 I noticed they were following. I turned off into a winding road. Without campsites rest areas picnicking trailer hookups Naturalist programme.

Their faces, glass faces behind me, twisted into grotesque shapes by the Pacific winds. Surrounded by Himalayan cedars, illuminated with 8,000 coloured lights. I proceeded with lights extinguished for several miles, and began a journey in an atomic submarine, scientifically authentic, to view mermaids, sea serpents, and the face of my first wife’s father. Pets may be left in a kennel at the main gate, he said. This one happens to be dead, I replied. In that case we’ll arrange a funeral at once. But I didn’t want a burial performed just then. However I told him that eventually a statue in her honour would be appropriate for erection in the town park, where visitors may choose to arrive by helicopters. He seemed genuinely pleased at this idea and showed me around the grounds of his No. 1 home. In addition to the eight-room stone and frame house (a market value of $82,000 when it was appraised six years ago he confidentially told me) there were a grassy helicopter pad, a log-cabin guest house, two boathouses, a kidney-shaped swimming pool, a sauna, a trampoline and a profusion of trees and marigolds. ‘All this was pasture, plain pasture when we bought it, I planted those pines as little sprouts and look at them now, you have to keep them fertilized and use lots of mulch.’ A recent hailstorm had played havoc with the trees and the roof of the house. He noted aloud ‘I’ve got to fix that’. He bent over and picked up several broken willow branches and handed them to his chauffeur (who I felt sure secretly belonged to the Panthers). While an electric player piano blared Oklahoma he led me to the garage where there were three autos:

a 1926 model T Ford

1930 Model A

A new red convertible. ‘A copy,’ he said proudly, ‘of the ‘29 Ford Phieton.’ He tried to start the Model T, but the motor coughed, spat and died. ‘Someone’s been tinkering at the choke.’ He hopped out, lifted the hood and tinkered for a minute, explaining that he used to run a bike repair shop and liked doing his own mechanical work. Then his ire was directed at his anti-smog gadget. ‘The car idles so fast that it automatically leaps to 30 miles an hour when I take my foot off the brake, I’ve got to be careful I don’t kill somebody,’ he said with a rueful smile ‘just coming out of my drive.’

He led me further into the grounds. Crocodiles, hippopotami, and snakes slipped through murky water. Along the shore, amid live, rare tropical trees, shrubs, and flowers, appeared elephants and other jungle animals. ‘Visitors you know will find it hard to believe that none of the animals are alive.’ I felt convinced one or two were, possibly his wife’s pets. She took her poodle Bu-Bu with her everywhere. ‘I wish I had been an Edwardian,’ she moaned at dinner on my first visit. ‘When we give a dinner party as you can see the people who serve wear green jackets and white gloves, but look at the curtains they’re in shreds. ‘That naughty Bu-Bu of yours,’ her husband shouted.

After dinner he showed me the champagne plant, wine cellars and bottling rooms. This was just a hobby, he explained. He was in the ballpen industry, with eighteen plants selling a billion ballpoints a year in 96 countries, ‘enough to pen a letter stretching from here to Saturn’. I knew the familiar commercials: a ballpoint being buried by a bulldozer, rattled on a flamenco dancer’s boot and shot from a rifle, only to write perfectly again. He claimed that it would soon make the pencil obsolete.

I saw myself in the near future living like a modern pasha. Indulging an insatiable yen for the luxuries a Falcon jet Convair turbo-prop Jet Commander Rolls-Royce Custom Lincoln Caddy Sting Ray a houseboat and a Riva speedboat, and perhaps a thoroughbred racing stable, and two Eliza Doolittles for maids.

A recent afternoon in his life. Man Friday helps him into his Pierre Cardin jacket. The Rolls is waiting. Three lissom girls are already in the back seat. He wanders across the lawn to pet his two tame ocelots. ‘Tell my wife that I’ll be back tomorrow.’ The Rolls is crunching along the gravel driveway when someone runs from the house and shouts, ‘Urgent call from New York.’ Twenty minutes later he is finally airborne in his twin engine falcon jet.

I tentatively asked him about his earnings. ‘Now you’re prying into my personal business,’ was his angry retort. ‘Just say it’s between 50 cents and 5 million dollars.’ Then he went on about a fund he was creating to provide huge public cocktail parties with free food and drink for anyone who wants to attend. ‘This would be a real nice way to be remembered,’ he said. There had to be a hitch - the parties would not start till after his death, and he wants to enjoy them too. So, for every party, he has arranged with a local funeral home to have his remains wheeled out in a big silver casket. ‘They will stay at the party until the last guest has gone.’ As he told me all this he had the strangest gleam in his eyes, it was like he couldn’t wait to die and get on with the fun.

His study was built in the shape of a wine barrel. He showed me photographs of his daughter in graduation drag. Of her as a plump baby, naked on a crocodile skin. And photos of his home town

pharmacy

ice cream parlour

bank

drugstore

dentist’s office

general store

an old oil rig

early locomotive

box-car

handcar and caboose

hotel

saloon and other enterprises.

I became the caricature of the surly inarticulate ‘man, like I mean’, as I caught sight of his daughter, my first wife to be, chewing gum in the memorial garden of camelias, roses and flowering shrubs. A maze symbolizing the various paths offered in life. At its centre a small stone summerhouse with a highly finished interior signifying the hastiness of judgment on the basis of outward appearances.

‘That’s the orchard over there a fine sight to see you know,’ he said, ‘the Cherry Picking Festival is held in June and the public is invited to pick their own fruit, and over there well we have the Marine Corps Supply Depot - there we go you know my grandmother or was it my great grandfather was Celtic see that fireplace well its modelled after a Scottish war lord’s and this well it’s a miniature Railway an authentic replica you know of an oldtime coal-burning engine and that well that’s a photo of the world’s largest jet-missile rocket test centre and has a 22-mile runway - not open to visitors of course.’

I made the appropriate gestures, remarks, while thinking of his daughter’s petrified face imprinted on fossilized leaves. Vital secrets of her own wondering aloud while shopping by Rolls. I was curious to know if she was a member, like her mother, of the D.R. (Daughters of the Revolution). I doubted it. Her speciality would be wooden heads, tightly leather-wrapped. At the moment, her father reported, she was preoccupied with lizards, which she says ‘look like man in certain stages’.

Later at a health resort under hot-water geysers we made it for the first time in the mineral springs and mineralized mud baths. My mouth searching for hers by means of siphon pipes. And later that same day I got a strange blow-job in a parking lot, it was 35 degrees outside, by a weird woman, two days later I was still weak at the knees and couldn’t think about it. Now I could try and ease my way out of this by saying I didn’t ask questions, just stated my personality

smart, well-educated

Lack of respect for authority

ambitious

lack of spiritual and moral

deep concern for social

fibre

problems

lack of responsibility

good values, character

lack of manners

communicate

lack of dialogue with elders

independent thinker

values ill-defined

poised personality

lack of good study habits

vocal, will speak up

lack of love for fellow men

mature, prepared for

lack of self-respect

life

too impetuous

versatile, able

too introspective

intellectually curious

too introspective

well-groomed

nothing missing

care about community

read for pleasure

consider myself informed

sense of humour is important

enjoy discussing ideas

my best work is done when I’m not working

I am dominant

relationship with my family is fucked up

I am sophisticated

considered attractive

interested in marriage

liberal regarding sex

more of a dove than a hawk

my date should be psychologically weaker

I am optimistic

Pot and pop-pills are morally right

I drink regularly

On the other hand I am interested in some of the factors which may, or may not, effect my psychological feelings. For this reason I have hand exercise springs

REMEMBER

Hold the hand spring in a closed position throughout the ‘thinking’ period. Place your check mark on the line, not in between lines

THIS

NOT THIS

Do Not Omit any Scales for Any Concept Yesterday

Good _______ _______ _______

Bad

large

large

unpleasant

pleasant

light

heavy

cold

hot

active

passive

rough

smooth

My Mood Now

small

large

passive

active

hot

cold

bad

good

heavy

light

pleasant

unpleasant

Fantasy Profile

Organized

Dreamer

Athletic

Sexy

Confident

Aggressive

Subtle

Natural

Practical

Well-dressed

Healthy

Introverted

Passionate

Thrifty

Quiet

Nervous

Funny

Warm

Paternal

Extroverted

Serious

Impulsive

Talkative

Trusting

Active

Intelligent

Kind

Content

Maternal

Cheerful

Creative

Self-controlled

Cautious

Do-it-yourself

Altruistic

Emotional

Reflective

Jealous

Obsessive

Wholesome

Common Interests

Pets

Jazz

Psychology

Parties

Walking

Photography

Lectures

Scientific

E. S. P.

Medicine

journals

Stock Market

Stereo

Movies

Antiques

equipment

Yoga

Astrology

Acting

Humanities

Foreign travel

Modern lit.

Dancing

Sugar buns

Discotheques

Portable lawns

Ethics

Pop Art

and unusual work-it-yourself devices

Still what have I managed to say - that this is a performance of extraordinary charm and brilliant technique. And though there are dozens of qualities I value more, this production embodies its own vision as completely as any I have ever seen. Certainly my No. 1 wife had some of these qualities, concepts, and I recognize now only too well that large, active, flushed face following me round every bend. Along the northeastern edge of the city. Round the remains of a 11-feet in diameter valley oak, killed by miners digging around its roots for gold. She failed seeing me then as they both marvelled at the two pieces of tree preserved in the monument. But as soon as I climbed into the Chevy they began the chase again.

He rages across the country like a sorcerer’s apprentice with a gunmetal wand. This puffy-eyed, ponch-jowled hero has vague stirrings of honour and mortality. He knows he is superannuated just as Randolph Scott did in Ride the High Country, but he rides the low country with nowhere to go but lower.

A broad expanse of white sand beach, bordered by Monterey cypress trees. I left the Chevy in a prominent place outside the U-Drive Inn. On returning I noticed they had changed their name for the register. I recognised his cramped writing. Through the keyhole I watched them doing Yoga together. They were naked. Why had she never done that with me? Admittedly there had been some extraordinary positions we discovered. Obviously anything in three dimensions can be any shape, regular or irregular, and can have any relation to the wall, floor, ceiling, room, rooms or exterior or none at all. No proscenium arch is able to limit the variables of action. An infinite variety of angles and perspectives. Cannot be identified, does not affirm any order but has its own interelation of parts, colour, scale and touch.

Eerie rites greet the morning sun. He kneels on the floor grasping a small wheel with both hands and slowly prostrates himself. On a roof not far away someone runs on a treadmill. The president of a dressmaking company puts on a belt that sends electric shocks into his abdomen, while his wife stands with one foot on a four-wheeled board and the other foot on another four-wheeled board reverently squatting and rising, while their daughter lies head down on a slanted board, jerking convulsively at the waist. Sauna belts to sweat into. Executive Barbells to swing. Tensolators for building up muscles; vibrator massage machines (‘both centrifugal and percussion action’) and roller massage machines (‘for deep-penetrating massage’) treadmills and rocks and vibrating belts and electric bicycles (‘Do your story dictation aboard a Trimcycle’). Tone-O-Matic weighted belts - belts loaded with 10 pounds of lead and intended to be worn in the normal course of a day’s activity. One man cried that his hands were getting bigger and bigger. Instructional manuals in such arts as giving a massage (‘People rubbing people is always nice. People rubbing people with skill is an order of magnitude nicer’).

Through another keyhole I had watched my No. 2 wife being whipped with kippers, imported from Scotland. I thought then goddamit why hadn’t she ever told me? The kippers were never mentioned in the divorce proceedings, her Attorney was an understanding guy, or so she informed me in the middle of one of our last fights. Oh those beautiful silent battles on the bed when finally I would get her across my knees - ah well . . . Yes her Attorney, the one who used the kippers, she also informed me he liked fishing for

black bass

bluegill

crappie

and catfish

And came from a once booming mining town, complete with plaza and hanging tree. His father kept a saloon sporting batwing doors, housing firearms, coins, minerals and other documents, papers of historical interest. I always knew she had an interest in antiques. He was well-preserved, I guess, for his age. Maybe the dieting and the wearing of a Tone-O-Matic weighted belt helped.

Meanwhile my No. 1 wife and her lover kept me awake half the night. Why hadn’t she ever moaned like that with me? What I needed, of course, was a Spy- Prober, one that penetrates solid barriers, makes any wall an open door. Yes, it even looks DOWN into a room below. A 3 precision ground optical quality lenses, affording an extreme wide angle field on objects standing by the very wall through which you are observing. Such sharp delineation that you can photograph right through it, sharply recording everything in the viewed area. Looks like an ordinary pen when carried in your pocket (had my father-in-law thought of that one?) And for those of you who demand perfection, a professional model complete with silent hidden drill. As countless people have shown, the individual need not really be powerless, the machine can be made to stop and change direction, even though Talking Turk knows your secrets.

All right now so why are you confused? You have barely lived yet life, you feel, has already passed you by. Another inevitable victim, the non-spy who has never paid any attention to cryptography, a pragmatist who doesn’t know on which side his corn bread is buttered. What began as a quiet investigation has blown into a full-scale and still unresolved controversy. Sample question: How do you respond to those who present you as a conk-headed junkie, fanatical and depopulating the Centre? With these characteristics in mind researchers have been working on a variety of complex experiments designed to detect desperate and imaginative efforts in stuffy motels filled with nightmares and gentle but impassioned ladies, and other critical areas. They have used giant fans, rotating racks, poem-snippets in fog machines, sugar buns dropped from planes, or spewed upward from strange machines. One of these an E-meter can not only detect unhealthy habit patterns during the oedipal period, but can also pick up subtle emanations from a tomato. The E-meters and their accompanying leaflets are protected from seizure by the right of freedom of worship, which puts them beyond the reach of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and the F.D.A. They are not used to diagnose or treat physical disease, or Lunar Microbe hunters, they are treating the spirit of laconic lovers with falsetto voices. They are qualified to perform shirt open gospel rock, barnyard baths, familiarization flights and burial rites. But think about what’s really wrong with today’s calculators, think about a calculator which eliminates all the things you don’t like:

The immaculate silhouettes

60 relatives

Snoopy’s mother

Britain’s Bonnie Prince

The New lunatics

Four wives at a time

Improbable satyrs

Unhip hippies

Little Carlo

And egg communication

I mapped out the next day’s route, making sure to supply myself with extra water. The thought of the three of us splitting into frantic parties, each striving wildly to get out of the barren valley finally made me have a peaceful sleep. I dreamed of being a love slave to a gang of outlaw women. Ah those cabinets of dreams. Always the hero to the rescue of wonder women who were continually being molested by

giant lizards

snared by dissolute white slavers aboard a baroque

submarine

enslaved in an Albanian bauxite mine

sacrificed by a sacred polar bear

cultivated by a mad fungologist

hostess to a tupperware party in Kew Gardens

slain by a blind zen archer

attacked by a pack of half-starved gila monsters

given a 3-year gift subscription to ‘Family Circle’

magazine

mailed to Ceylon

belaboured by a deranged ex-Nazi

tied to a Japanese monorail

abducted by a secret society of midwestern necrophiliacs

dangled from a rope above steaming tarpits

fired at by a manta ray

elected recording secretary of the Local Weight

Watcher’s Club

crucified by a degenerate rabbi

made cruel sport of by a band of incredible lesbians

captured by a warped Macao tattoo artist

set upon by an enormous scorpion

subjected to the aberrant whims of a crazed Brazilian

foot fetishist

resurrected by a maniacal Eskimo medicine man

tuned in every afternoon at four o’clock to watch The

Dating Game

assaulted by Zeppelins

abducted by U. F. O.

High Priestess to the black Falashas of Ethiopia.

What man can resist the siren song of sex? Down through the ages, feminine wiles have brought mighty men to their knees, empires have been lost and reputations have been ruined by temptresses who have seduced the gullible to gain what they desire, and then consign their hapless victims to a destiny of doom! Only recently a blonde beauty whispered sweet promises to a lonely bachelor and lured him to a desolate spot where, instead of fulfilling his desires, she delivered him into the arms of death. At one point when the victim-to-be showed signs of losing interest in the blandishments of the sirens, the girls put on an impromptu performance that made Salome’s dance of the seven veils resemble a Girl Scout’s festival.