November 30, 2002 4:21 PM Joe Coluccio

Dreams of Extraterrestrials – Version 1.0.0.0

Farmer Johnstone and his wife Betsy, who first contacted the Far Fumbling Fab from Eridani False Sun Seven said, “Well, hell, I just naturly assumed they was beaners from the border crossing so I put ‘em to work pickin’ peaches.”
“They did have a kinda cunning silvery glint in their eyes, which was as many colored as the rainbow in a wet sky” said Betsy, “Their skin was real scaly, but it was packed in some kind of sardiny grease. I told Farmer he should pay ‘em a little more than minimum, because workers is so hard to find at the harvest time. We let ‘em set up housekeepin’ in the far shed.”
“ ’Magine my surprise,” continued Farmer Johnstone, “when I go out to the fields at the end of the week and find that they just shucked their skins! Left them shinin’ in the sun. I was abandoned at high crop with but a couple dozen baskets on the back of the tractor pull and most of the fruit in them with what looked like molding greased up spittle covering the fresh fuzz. Them immigrants was gone like a cool breeze through The Devil’s Valley. And didn’t never come back!”

Xortle chortled. Glad to be unclad. Planet fall and deploy was an arduous task. First contact was almost never fruitful. Several worlds back he had communed for almost two heavy rotation days with what essentially turned out to be as sentient as a blaskit stuffed with alklazone.
The vegetation guardians seemed to have a pleasant demeanor as well as an exceedingly dull wit, but some small sense of purpose. The soft short one with prominent features that appeared to be bound heavy hanging flesh sacks of some dubious biological determination was moved to befriend them. A small bowl of viscous bubbling swampy meat was offered to the Highest Fab who hesitated and then fairly excorporated on the spot. Xortle diplomatically rushed forward so that no gap of being could be perceived. Intelligence is, sighed Xortle, as sentience does.
Summer seed day and the Fab diminished, multirated, then solemnly as was custom moved forward with spreading entropy toward a prominent beaming seat of intelligence which bustled like a hard cardace at the fleming nexus.

Xortle hummed. There was all manner of disruption, molecular, mechanical and metaphysical. Communicative messaging impinged with a brutal gross vengeance. These planetary beings marched on solid ribbons of tar macadam holding dark antannaed contrivances that passed oral squawk to aural squeak, pinching low freq to ever higher modulated signals disposed directly into the atmosphere . Xortle and the Fab were stunned at the prodigious waste. They rode buffeted and confused on a hot shot of boisterous bumptious carrier wave. They bored in. Told stories. Laid the lay. Finally they grew fat, sated and sticky sick of their sullied sailing.

“I understand that you city boys had some kind of trouble.” said Farmer Johnstone.
“Yes,” said Betsy, his wife, “we couldn’t get the cable for about three months. Farmer called and complained but all he got was some whining from the telephone clerk. And, Lord, that terrible high pitched static over the phones was enough to make your ears split. I had to stop payment on the party line.”
“You think it had something to do with them pilgrims to which we showed a kindness?” Farmer scratched the back of his hot rude neck.
“I guess they did come about the time the troubles started.” said Betsy, “The night after those flashes lighted the flanks of Old Hiney’s Mountain.”
“Welp,” said Farmer Johnstone, “your sure welcome to take a peek down to the orchard. You won’t find much though. Had to hire a bunch of no goods and they stripped us blind. The woods is pretty trampled up and full of soup cans.”

Xortle opined. The entire rest of the Fab had dissipated in the aether. He was one of the unlucky ones. The Fab would now be a part of the fabric of the world wide nettled and gnostic grid. It might take a micrum, a sweepstage or longer, but eventually the meaning would be made clear. Communications Interspecies would take place. All you can do is plant the stories sometimes.

“Farmer,” said Betsy one night in the coolness, “do you think our children will have rainbow eyes?”
“Yep,” he said, “they just might.”

Xortle flosticated.

Monday, November 25, 2002 6:36 PM Joe Coluccio

A Little Jargon here, a little Jargon there and pretty soon you are talking serious Exclamation!

First things, as the philosophers say, first. Or was it the carpenters, or the democrats, perhaps it was the Confusions. In any case I heard it somewhere and it seemed oh so elegant and right!

I believe in Integration. (What does Mac Davis mean when he says he believes in music, or there is a radio station in town that says it is where the music matters, what?) But seriously. I don’t mean to say that I can’t accept differentiation. I can and often strip things down until their constituent elements reverberate with contradiction, ambiguity and segregation. I, myself, shake the rattled role of indeterminate and naked separation. But, when the course is clear, the stars navigate the night, I sail invariably to the shores of that which is whole. It’s just the way I am.

I find that Jargon splits my soul. I am, it turns out, a Jack of all Trades and Master of None of any in Particular.

So when I walk into a Home Depot and someone wants to rabbet his joints, I’m okay, really! Big hairy guys and trendy petite overhauled women, displaying paint smears and swatches of gaily colored fabric, gazing longingly at a radial arm saw with enough power to cut a compound miter through a live Sequoia, or a square tabled router that will cove a piece of flat trim stock with the ease of a knife spreading warm butter on a scone. I gasp. It gives me pleasurable pause.

I move to a science fiction connection on the internet and find that NESFA has published not only the entire short works of Frederic Brown but five of his novels have been anthologized as well. Or not only the Lensman, but the Skylark have been reissued in trade paperback facsimile edition. With the mere mysterious click of a mouse I find that same Frederic Brown has his complete detective fiction published in uniform edition as well as an unknown series by sf’er Robert Sheckley. My eyes tear as the BEM’s blast the moxy from the shamus in me. “I’m a private dick,” says Loren Estleman’s Amos Walker. Hmmm, we kinda related, says the streetwalker, “I’m a public pussy.”

I have a priori discovered that I have a posteriori an itch. It seems my Weltanschauung doesn’t much allow for the Zeitgeist. Or is it that Zeitgeist became embroiled in my Weltanschauung? In any case Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. Or to ask it far less succinctly can there be that than which nothing greater can be thought. Ontologically speaking, of course.

It turns. I can name that tune in one demisemiquaver. First declension nouns dative case end in eta or long alpha. James is Joyous because Jung was easily Freuded. You have to have a check valve in the hot gas line when you relieve to an intermediate pressure. Ted Williams has a .344 lifetime batting average. Disney’s multiplane camera has been outstripped by CGI. Wotan is a Rhine Osiris. A trope is a tripe is a trap.

Problem and solution. It integrates in me. And, man, are my arms ever tired.

I just flew in from Cleveland.

Sunday, November 17, 2002 6:39 PM Joe Coluccio
Working Paper #1

I never metaphor I didn’t like.

I admit that even by my own standards I am perverse. When I hear a rule turning to concrete law, I don't merely fly swat it, but I take to nuclear armament. Bombard the thing into its constituent quarks. So, occasionally, for my own good health, I review all the rules that I have to live by, personal and societal and give them a good laugh. That is the basis for my comedy. It may be the basis for all comedy. In the remarkably astute words of Professor Wagstaff, Huxley College, (appropriately contra Darwin) "Whatever it is I am against it."

I have been reading that Plato banned poets from his Republic. And that Aristotle argued for them. One because they were imitators of the ideal, the other because they were imitators of the ideal. Now this ideal is an idea that I am roundly enamored of. And I mostly tip my hat to Aristotle even though I find his endless classification more tedious than the sparkle of Socrates beating his colleagues into a fluffy soufflé during dialogue.

I, despairingly, do not have the temperament or the skills of a philosopher. I, hopefully, have the soul, or at least the spleen, of a poet. (Wouldn't want to live in your old Republic anyhow, Mr. Plato!) But I am forced, by my own superego, if by nothing else to confront my self aggrandized aesthetic. So, poetically, if not philosophically, the following is where I quick stand.

All that I do know and see resides in the word.

Simple, no?

I cannot move on without a consideration of those who I consider my antecedents. If they know up in that big laughing Elysium in the sky, they must look, a smile on their wine red dribbling lips, askance and aghast. Hell, you should stop here and go read them and leave this blogging trail blaze in the deeps of the woods where it belongs among the sheltering pines.

Although I love to death, Groucho and his kin, and Abbot and his Costello; Steve Allen once said that Harry Ritz was the funniest man alive; I don't get it; I nod off to the Stooges; hunger for Harold Lloyd, grudgingly acknowledge Chaplin and marvel at Buster Keaton, these, friends, were not primarily writers.

Turn your gaze instead to the works of S.J. Perelman. They sit before me as I write. I need only mention titles like Carry Me Back to Old Pastrami; Is There and Osteosynchrondroitrician in the House; And Thou Beside Me, Yacketing in the Wilderness; and of course; Captain Future, Block That Kick, to give you a major dose of comedic genius. Perelman left America for England, like old Thomas Stearns Eliot who wasn’t that much for a laugh (Head full of straw, alas), because, unlike T.S. and his now frustratingly ambitious Cats, he couldn't any longer find funny articles in the newspapers to feed his wild imagination. It is a stance in which I have long been in sympathy and agree with the whole of my heart and several other sensitive portions of my body. As a note in passing, you should know that S.J's. brother-in-law and friend was Nathaniel West who hardly wrote anything funny after Day of the Locusts.

Turn your gaze, sorry for all this head swinging, to Robert Benchley, part of the Algonquin Crown Stable of American Wit. Who has been known to say "A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down." and whose The Sex Life of a Polyp (1928) is one of the funniest and most biologically informative works I have ever seen. I should warn those of you with young children that although this short would definitely carry at least an "R" had our rating system, which allows us to watch a person get cut in half from the abdomen by a laser sited automatic pistol, but shuns as obscene the vision of a mother’s naked breast feeding an infant, been in effect in those days. Some of the more exploratory and sexy Polyp stuff is pretty gamy leaving me to propose the definite possibility of a NC-17. Certainly a Quadruple X, banning it to the Garden Theater on the North Side. Nay, I say, it is better to pick up the VHS in the hot little back room of your local video renter. Fore warned, c’est á dire!

I should mention Thurber and Parker and Max Schulman and Jean Shepard and Mark Twain and Lawrence Sterne and Tobias Smollet and Stephen Leacock and Alexander Wollcott and certainly George S. Kaufman, who once begged people back stage during a Marx brothers performance to be quiet because he thought he actually heard a line performed by the Marxes in one of his plays that he had written, and a panoply of others. There is great comedy out there that didn't come from the meager infested minds of those who inhabit Hollywood today.

Now comes the working part, in part.

Here is the fruitful beginning of Joe’s unwritten (now written) Rules of Comedy. I open my mind for your careful perusal.

The limits to my comedy are not length of time. There are those who would relegate comedy to the fast quip, the sorry AM morning joke. To them I simply say, Hah!

I almost never mention bodily parts, although I think people running around on the stage smacking each other with various sized and colored fake penises would be a scream, and flatulence for comedic effect. I save those for my more dramatic moments.

Topical and political observations are verboten! Notice I use the German here for totalitarian emphasis.

Never write after dinner and you are tired. Which I very am now.

Monday, November 11, 2002 6:09 PM Joe Coluccio

I go to look for America,

On a train from the North down to Copenhagen, a young man entered the railroad car with a flourish. He had on a charcoal gray overcoat that looked for the world to me like a cape flourished by Dracula on a brisk flap, evening, Carpathian Mountains. He imperiously removed it, folded it, set it on the seat next to him with a soft and practiced elegance. He then withdrew a fine black leather covered volume out of his dark tailored jacket interior breast pocket. It was a work of Goethe writ in Gothic German script. His controlled stable manner made me uncomfortable. I sulked in my fleece lined folk singer rebellious tan winter coat, the odor and gummy feel of too many hours traveling in a land that I had little hope of understanding. Ratiocination and will fled my being, sucked from me like bleeding sap. I was miniscule, damn near invisible, against the plush seat wishing for some sleep, some resemblance of relief. The cars clacked out of the station, Holstebro, I think and the shut night down businesses echoing familiar after hour’s commercial lights passed, with strange long names spelled in curling fantasy Danish letters. It added to my growing sense of alienation. The Young Man continued reading Young Werther, occasionally looking out into the dark landscape, paying scant attention to me.

A Christmas Service, late Eve night at the Duquesne Chapel, my cousins around me. I have been absent from the catholic church since the days of kneeling old St. Joes in Verona the Latinate Mass. Confused I listened to the perfectly understandable and unbelievable prosaic English, born of some English odious King James rhythm . O the oblivion of chanting custom, I stood as others stood. I echoed words in a perfect pantomime of blessed beatitude. Before bread breaking wine drinking, the priest said something completely unexpected, he asked each of us to give a sign a peace (be with you) to any other around us. A family, directly in front of me, matron mother and patter eternis, a college son clothed in a charcoal gray great coat and elegant manner and daughter, turned and kissed one another. Complete and naturally. I feebly shook hands, my weak hands with cousins and collegians, squeaked something that lilted peacelike in the incense air. The mass continued without me. World without end.

My father's mother, severe woman with her hair gray drawn up in a bun, long black sack dress to the tops of her black and uncomfortable shoes cooking spinach in a large pot on the stove watching a black and white tv match-up between Haystacks Calhoun and Gorgeous George. She roots for the one in the white shorts, always, no matter. My father is scolding her in Italian. Ma, you can't only eat spinach. You gotta eat something else. I have no idea what he is saying. She shrugs her obstinate shoulders. I don't know if she realizes I'm alive. Her face reveals little emotion. She reminds me of an Indian Chief with her wrinkled handsome face. I wonder, finally, now what wisdom, what strength, what love was in her.

A clipping service, he says, we run a clipping service. You would be in charge of these women clipping newspaper and magazine articles. A clipping service? How could such an idea never even occur to me. Do you think you can handle it, says the guy with a moustache and a striped shirt as we look out over the Tenderloin, Market Street down near the bus station. It don't pay all that much. Sure, I say, not at all sure. Who do you clip things for? I ask. Movie stars, politicians, football players. Lots a people, we clip 'em and then paste 'em on these sheets. Big half octave pale brown sheets and then send 'em off. A world of information. I don't get the job instead go to work for a cleaning and tailor's supply house a 12 th Street just off Broadway, Oakland California.

David Lawrence Convention Center. I enter and look at all the people seated in the lobby scribbling pencil stubs the crossword puzzles. The wind is considerably taken out of my billowing sails. Ooof! My wife has managed to get me a place in the Jeopardy try-outs. Far worse this is than any college admissions. I tentatively sit on a pinned cushion until we are called to an upper floor and ushered into what looks like every class room in which I have taken a test. Desk with side boards to set our papers upon. We are handed the sheets and told that if we miss more than five we will not be part of the program. Up a notch or two the mercury of my anxiety level goes. The test is absurdly hard and aimlessly trivial at the same time. I recognize that Clara Peller said where's the beef, but miss the name of Charles Revson’s book. Silly me. Scores tallied I am accelerating once again in my car outside the David Lawrence Convention Center on Penn Avenue.


and find ravioli, meatballs and thank god vino!

Monday, November 04, 2002 6:26:21 PM Joe Coluccio

Good night, Mrs. Cohen, wherever you are.

I was sitting, comme l'habitude, as the French, who irreconcilably adore Jerry Lewis, say, sipping hard caffeinated coffee and absorbed in a dream of writing that I was pledging before God, the Holy Roman Empire and Truth, Justice, an American way of living, at a coffee bistro in the environs of Squirrel Hill, when I noticed, on the sidewalk outside a flashing dark haired beautiful woman. She entered and I exited all thought and gazed at her. She was in her fifties, I suppose, dressed casually, a pleasant visage as she looked in the nooks and crannies for, well... as it turned out a fetchingly pretty blond woman. They ordered coffee and sat in a booth on the other side of the shop from me.

In the ninth grade at Seneca Junior High School, (the place is now rebuilt as an old folks home is called Seneca something to do with assisted living. Sits on the crest of Saltsburg Road, a hard climb up from its nascence on Verona Road and a million miles from Saltsburg, PA. My own Aunt Mary on my father's side lived the remainder of her Alzheimer existence there with a smile on her face that made those who visited jealous of the world's harsher reality.), my Home Room, as well as my English teacher, was Carole Cohen. Dark hair that danced around her neck, dark eyes that penetrated more than I could ever hope to hide. I was (and am) hopelessly, in love with Mrs. Cohen. I am sure that I am not the only one that was so affected; 'cause I could hear the eyes of teacher's click as she clicked down the hollow hallow halls. But their adoration, like the French and Jerry Lewis was of the more coarse and sensual kind. Eventually I married her. More about that in a moment.

I have wished for two things in my life. A. I wanted, from first glance at the night splendor of the sky to be an astronomer. I would even at this very late moment throw it all over, if I was invited to Mt. Palomar. All my heroes have been astronomers. B. I have wanted to write. Both desires are not that different and have to do with inner reaches. I was, in that year of the ninth grade, under the thrall of Leon Uris. (Maybe Harry Browne, Richard Tregaskis, certainly Edward L Beach.) I thought that Battle Cry was the most astounding and important novel ever written.

Mrs. Cohen gave us an assignment to write something creative. I wrote about a platoon of marines on some godforsaken Pacific island. The ending was some pleasing trick that is lost in the web filled rafters of my consciousness. After correcting my spelling of Sergeant (see Carole I remember) Mrs. Cohen gave me a relatively glowing grade and some validating criticism. My friend, Phil Trafican, and I would meet at the end of the day in our Home Class Room and talk to Mrs. Cohen as she prepared for the following day. She encouraged us in our writing and in our intellectual quests. One weekend she invited us to her apartment to meet her brother, who was a writer.

Beechwood Boulevard. I can almost remember the building when I pass the apartment complex on the street which has made the Guinness Book of Records because it crosses (must be Catholic) itself so many times. I thought it strange to invade the habitat of teacher away from the relationship of classroom. Were they then just common people after all? This intimate glimpse proved that Mrs. Cohen didn't live anywhere near the corner of Valhalla and Mount Olympus. I don't remember the apartment much, it was small, tight and cultured. A studio piano, books proper on their shelves. Clean. We drank soda, her brother showed us his work, we talked large and small and eventually returned home.

She cried one day as we discussed the Holocaust in class and despaired at the wasted loss of life and the good that was snuffed out of the world. How many Einsteins died at the hands of the Nazis? We were assigned an essay. Two days later she read a paper written by Frank Cerra that pointed out the flaw in her argument. How many Hitlers were killed, asked Frank? She praised Frank for his good thinking. I don't remember what I wrote but have yet to come grips with the true evil that can be so manifest by you and me.

I vowed to dedicate my first book to Mrs. Carole Cohen, wherever she was. She was one of the first and one of the few that saw something in me. Oh, yes, my first wife had dark hair and black flashing eyes. We lived a kind of reverse Abby's Irish Rose marriage which embraced both the invisible Elijah and the less than probable Saint Nick. Ravioli, kreplach, what's the difference (a little tomato sauce and little chicken broth).

The woman at the coffee shop? I walked past her booth. We smiled.

Ah, how schmaltz can tickle the heart!