Bud Speaks Up

Global City Review Secrets UUUIIED ISSUE NUMBER THIRTEEN 2 0 0 0 FOUNDING EDITOR Limey Abrams MANAGING EDITORS CONTRIBUTING Nina Herzog & editors for secrets Alexandra Soiseth Susan Leu is & Erika Tsoukanehs EDITORIAL BOARD Elizabeth Chakkappan. Edith Cheiat. Susan DAloia Carla Drysdale. Patricia Dunn. Nina Herzog. Susan Leu is. Gretchen Primack. Alexandra Soiseth. Erika Tsoukanehs CONSULTING EDITORS ASSISTANT EDITORS Edith Chei at & Gretchen Primack & Susan Thames Erika Tsoukanehs PRODUCTION & COPY EDITOR ADMINISTRATION Carla Drysdale Erika Tsoukanehs SUBSCRIPTIONS AND LISTS READINGS Pat Dunn Susan Lewis DISTRIBUTION PUBLICITY Susan D Aloia & Susan Lewis Eli Connaughton OUTREACH AND EVENTS DEVELOPMENT Susan D Aloia Elizabeth Chakkappan WEB Eh Connaughton & Ahmed Nassef (advisory) Global City Review is edited and published by writers. Staff reviews, columns and occasional pieces appear in the City Notes section. GLOBAL CITY REVIEW Secrets 2000 NUMBER THIRTEEN COPYRIGHT © 2000 BY GLOBAL CITY PRESS ALL RIGHTS REVERT TO AUTHORS UPON PUBLICATION. Global City Review is published tw ice a y e a r . ALL CORRESPONDENCE SHOULD BE SENT TO: 105 WEST 13th STREET, suite 4c NEW YORK, NY 10011 PLEASE INCLUDE AN SASE AND BIO WITH ALL MANUSCRIPTS. GLOBAL CITY REVIEW IS DISTRIBUTED BY BERNHARD DEBOER, INC. ISBN: 1-887369-1 1-2 Global City Review owes THANKS TO THE ROY AND NIUTA TITUS FOUNDATION FOR THEIR CONTINUED SUPPORT AND TO INDIVIDUAL READERS FOR THEIR GENEROUS DONATIONS. Contents Editors’ Note v Introduction vii FICTION Bud Speaks Up by Jennifer Haigh 5 River of Stars by Chuck Wachtel 2 0 Kindred by Karen McKinnon 50 The Varsity Banquet by Gwendolen Gross 97 Secret Encounters by Karen Brennan 113 Underground by Edith Chevat 130 NONFICTION The Fairy Tree by Rachel Hadas 70 His Future Career by Hettie Jones 77 DRAMA Listen. Dad: A Monologue by Alexandra Soiseth 39 POETRY The Secret Language of Elephants by Mary Morris 1 Morning. Evening. Night by Ron Drummond 3 Shower by Jarret Keene 15 The Assignation, Just You Wait, and Knowing When to Stop by Timothy Liu 17 Recitative of the Cartographer s Prodigal Son by Virgil Suarez 36 Will I Become and Second Hand Shirts by Lynne Sharon Schwartz 45 Genital Secrets by Russell Edson 49 The Twenty-five Secrets of Literature by Gerry Gomez Pearlberg 62 Simile and Metaphor by Rachel Hadas 74 Trans-parent by Kimiko Hahn 87 Spring Night by Gretchen Primack 111 Dear Mr. Humbert by Carla Drysdale 112 Loretta, Spinning by Richard Fifield 129 ARTWORK (Cover) Tree by Allison Jeffrey PCK and Breath by Patricia McKiernan 64 Body. 3 and Untitled by Garvin Burke 66 L eaf and Untitled by Allison Jeffrey 68 CITY NOTES Fire Island Diaiy— Spring 2000 by Leslie T. Sharpe 153 The Iconography of Blondness: Reclaiming Mae West and Marilyn Monroe by Linsey Abrams 163 A Quest for Place— A Look at Artists' New York by Michelle Y. Valladares 180 lndri_i lndri_ason by Eliot Weinberger 187 My Obesessions, a new column by Kate Moira Ryan 194 Contributors 201 Upcoming Issues 207 Global City Backlist 209 Editor's Note This issue is dedicated to Charles Nix, who designed the first small black-and-white issue of Global City Review, in Spring of 1993. Since then he’s designed every issue of the magazine, and every book we’ve published, beautiful in their own right from the outside in. I found Charles by mistake...which, so that doesn’t sound haphazard to an extreme, is how we find everyone— but in his case it happened through a personal not professional connec tion. Little did I know my luck. It’s been a rare partnership: from years of his donating time, like the rest of us, though on the partic ularly labor-intensive production end along with his designs...to desperate meetings he used to join about how and where to find money. Charles’s only break from us in 13 issues and 6 books was when he escaped for a year to Nepal then made the mistake of coming back. So now that it’s time for him to delete GCR from a long list of professional commitments, I want to say something he already knows: His meticulous attention to work on our behalf, his commitment to a project he began like we all did without knowing the extent of our madness, and his generosity with his remarkable talent went way beyond the call of duty. Charles is as classy as the little book he leaves us with, and I’m going to miss him. It seems almost ridiculous to say thanks, such a small word for such a huge debt. The part of this issue that concerns the theme Secrets was con ceived and edited largely by Susan Lewis and Erika Tsoukanelis. As Contributing Editors, they solicited, read (if they didn’t actu ally read it that’s their secret) and selected the work most inter- GLOBAL CITY REVIEW esting and most in keeping with GC’s sense that nothing treated in literature is simple or easily definable...that received wisdom is rarely wisdom. The tyranny of culture rests in the methodologies and hierar chies that underpin where we start thinking. Organizing by themes has a way of pointing that out— it brings home to editors and readers the widespread influence of the “articulated.” In this case the idea of the secret. At the same time it’s an opportunity to re-articulate the idea, in the broadest sense, by what’s included and how. Within that, individual stories and poems, etc., partic ularize experience in a way that’s persuasive because of the ques tions we’re left with. Meaning, in every instance, is speculative. Reading Erika and Susan’s complete manuscript, I wondered in my own way: Whose secrets gets outed? Which secrets are pub lic? When is a secret a value? Is something secret if no one wants to know it? Is there any such thing as a secret? I thought of spies, repression, poker...it occurred to me that secrets drive the world. The Contributing Editors’ introduction follows mine. Keep ers and betrayers of secrets, watch out. Re City Notes, this issue has two columns, Fire Island Diary by Leslie T. Sharpe and My Obsessions, by Kate Moira Ryan. Eliot Weinberger has written one of his illuminating and in this case strange essays, about supernatural events in Iceland. And the review essays include one by Michelle Valladares about the recent work of several artists whose subject is a sense of home, and one by me that looks at Claudia Shear’s play Dirty Blonde about Mae West and Joyce Carol Oates’ novel Blonde about Marilyn Monroe. LINSEY ABRAMS Introduction W riting is telling secrets. Reading is being whis- pered to. And the printed word gives us permission to listen. The reader is allowed curiosity, the urge to pry, voyeurism, with out carnality or shame. Reading literature is, after all, an honor able pursuit. The writers in this issue expose the hidden, forging voice where before there was silence. They invite you to listen in on secrets that confound intimacy, as in Jennifer Haigh’s "Bud Speaks Up,” in which an uncommunicative husband regrets his failure to probe his wife’s feelings until her health prevents her from speaking. Or Hettie Jones’ memoir, "His Future Career,” in which a young nephew, sensing in his nonconformist aunt a kindred spirit, confides one secret but hides another. In these pages, the reader can also spy on secret loves: in the lyrical cadence of Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s "Will I Become” and "Second Hand Shirts,” in Gretchen Primack’s "Spring N ight,” or the raw immediacy of Karen McKinnon’s "Kindred. ” Secret love involves betrayal in Kimiko Hahn’s "Trans-par ent,” where a father’s affair and its tragic effects are viewed through the eyes of a daughter whose anger is matched only by her empathy, her quest for wholeness in response to a “complex ity. without mercy.” Other daughters struggling with secrets of need and definition include the aptly named and falling "Star” in Gwendolyn Gross’ “The Varsity Banquet,” and the daughter who finds a way to feed her hunger for love in Alexandra Soiseth’s "Listen, Dad.” {n i} GLOBAL CITY REVIEW In this collection, there are also secrets of the individual entangled in the larger dramas of society, like the young mother in Edith Chevat’s “Underground,” whose ordinary domesticity is a cover for her role as a communist during the McCarthy era, or the child-celebrity/victim Elian Gonzalez in Virgil Suarez’s “Recitative of the Cartographer’s Prodigal Son,” which sings with haunting beauty of “a boy, his dead mother, two countries between/ this ebb of hurt and pain.” Other pieces address what can be seen and what is called real, such as Rachel Hadas’ luminous and analytical poem “Simile and Metaphor,” and her essay, “The Fairy Tree,” as well as Mary Morris’ disturbing “The Secret Language of Elephants;” the dis tilled, crystalline brevity of Timothy Liu’s “The Assignation,” “Just You Wait,” and “Knowing When to Stop;” Richard Fifield’s “Loretta, Spinning;” and Jarret Keane’s “Shower,” which investigates the relationship between illusion and revela tion. There is humor in Russell Edson’s wry view of our prying curiosity in “Genital Secrets,” in Gerry Gomez Pearlberg’s wise wink at our appetite for gossip in “The Twenty-five Secrets of Literature,” in the surprising connections between the flailing characters in Karen Brennan’s “Secret Encounters,” and the counterpoint between the secret meetings of a pair of teenage lovers and the immigrant family of the child who watches them in Chuck Wachtel’s “River of Stars.” The visual art in this issue investigates what lies beneath the surface of things, working with secret codes and coy conceal ments, with ambiguities of form and reference which require the viewer to contemplate what might, or might not, be its impli cations.

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