The Strange Psychology of Admiration

I just did Ms. Phillips a favor in microcosm and purchased her debut collection, which I read, in Wolfgram Memorial Library, some odd thirty three years ago, in 1982. Read yes, but cannot remember the slightest thing about it, because of my young vibrating brain fumes. Of all Phillips work, I believe I responded to Black Tickets best, but if I can be unkind about my brain damage and overzealous emotional longing, I can stick a few pins in feminine literary endeavor which has its moment in the sun and then becomes more of a routine expectation. Much like Lorrie Moore, with whom I only have passing familiarity as a reader, Jayne Anne never quite sealed the deal with her modern overlay on the South's agrarian argument with the cosmopolitan North, and I harbor the vague idea that I was referred to her work because of the effective shock value of her plot points about body betrayal-- one of her stories where this is accessible and easy to grasp is "Home", an anthologized piece about a dying grandmother and the battle with "smell". The bonny instructor is less confrontational about fecal matter than I am in my posts, but "Home" is brave, honest, nicely balanced between burgeoning youth and the struggle with age over death.

Why the bottom fell out for Phillips after that is anyone's guess. Writing is a lousy way to make a living. Machine Dreams, her novel, has some interesting tropes, but those figures of speech weren't enough to sustain the book, and like many short story authors, she falters in long form, and Fast Lanes, which I now read at Paley, alone and unhappy, did not seem to sharpen the perspectives of her voice. Why then I cut her portrait photo out of P&W, taping it on my door in Diamond Park, and wrote her publisher a frothy enthusiastic letter, and then my more dangerous poem, "fortissimo" published in Metis, a tribute, yes, but it was also something else, a form of sexual imitation so that I could get laid the way I imagined Jayne Anne herself presenting her body to men as something to be feasted. Heady stuff, eh?

Yes, but both Jayne Anne and I will soon be passing the torch, and to those who will listen, although you'll have to learn this for yourselves: it is okay to get "blown away," by a writer who touches on your affinity, but this doesn't mean they aren't ambivalent about hero worship, that they aren't flawed people too who have to have practiced shields with students, and they will not necessarily offer you the friendship you think you don't have.

I don't think I asked her if she ever got the letter. It was foolish in any case; the poem, however, will be in my book, with her work more evenly adjudicated.

Indelible Banana Peels

I really have you going, don't I? Well, bemusement may be a small consolation for beggars, but what I was straining to remember in Stardust is why I would not offer Jayne Anne any further appreciative missive, or need the mentorship somewhat glazed over by her meritorious caste. She and I appear together in Oxford Magazine, some years ago now. She is transcribed addressing the freshman class, in a rhetorical tropism with angels, why I don't know. Her address opens the issue. My byline closes the issue because the graduate department telephoned me, appreciated my acid pouring forth against the Iraq war, shredding American materialism, and to the extent that this creates a dialogue with a financially secure feminine has been from the south, and a feminine has been who was a has been arriving for departure since she started, it is enough. Perhaps she is a catty embrace your inner bitch type, or has a fragility I cannot hear in my ringing ears. I no longer have praise to offer, nor the power to be moved by her output, nor anyone with which to share. I told myself to stop engaging with my aunt Marie, but I am worried she is going to die, and so returned her call yesterday; the sheer inanity of provincialism never ceases to amaze me. This is why I want to go home to Rome, I ask myself, to listen to histrionic crows screeching in sound and fury?

I cannot live with her again. I can't stay here. Adoption along Rittenhouse Square seems unlikely, and all I wanted to do was watch a movie.

As to the letter I mailed to Ms. Phillips, all I remember is an exuberant gush of the sort I have received from bush babies-- the strange psychology of fandom which may not have reached her, as I sent it in care of a publisher. The only thing I remember about experiencing Black Tickets was the edginess of the authorial voice had its appeal.