In a torrent of rage, love, and irony, Adrian C. Louis explodes all the myths and hypocrisy of Middle America in the twenty-first century. This is how Walt Whitman or Allen Ginsburg might have written about our post-9/11 world—where the realities of poverty on Indian reservations and the plight of Hurricane Katrina victims come in second place to the vagaries of Homeland Security. For Louis, both he and our nation face an uncertain future. Like many of us he is trapped in a surreal void of the present, where he is faced with middle age and isolation, the death of loved ones, an unsatisfying job, and the battle against loneliness and self-destruction. He writes as if he has nothing left to lose but then fills the page with bittersweet sorrow for everything that has been lost. Armed with unforgettable images, relentless rhythms, and a dark and scathing humor, Louis takes aim at this American life.
In a torrent of rage, love, and irony, Adrian C. Louis explodes all the myths and hypocrisy of Middle America in the twenty-first century. This is how Walt Whitman or Allen Ginsburg might have written about our post-9/11 world—where the realities of poverty on Indian reservations and the plight of Hurricane Katrina victims come in second place to the vagaries of Homeland Security. For Louis, both he and our nation face an uncertain future. Like many of us he is trapped in a surreal void of the present, where he is faced with middle age and isolation, the death of loved ones, an unsatisfying job, and the battle against loneliness and self-destruction. He writes as if he has nothing left to lose but then fills the page with bittersweet sorrow for everything that has been lost. Armed with unforgettable images, relentless rhythms, and a dark and scathing humor, Louis takes aim at this American life.
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Overview
In a torrent of rage, love, and irony, Adrian C. Louis explodes all the myths and hypocrisy of Middle America in the twenty-first century. This is how Walt Whitman or Allen Ginsburg might have written about our post-9/11 world—where the realities of poverty on Indian reservations and the plight of Hurricane Katrina victims come in second place to the vagaries of Homeland Security. For Louis, both he and our nation face an uncertain future. Like many of us he is trapped in a surreal void of the present, where he is faced with middle age and isolation, the death of loved ones, an unsatisfying job, and the battle against loneliness and self-destruction. He writes as if he has nothing left to lose but then fills the page with bittersweet sorrow for everything that has been lost. Armed with unforgettable images, relentless rhythms, and a dark and scathing humor, Louis takes aim at this American life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810151772 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/08/2006 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 120 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Logorrhea
By Adrian C. Louis
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2006
Adrian C. Louis
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-5178-9
Chapter One An E-mail to Taspan Wi
Just got back to Minnesota. Took the scenic route, Rushville to Gordon, Gordon to Martin, Martin to Mission, Mission to Winner, then north of Winner by Colome. Came upon this Indian guy walking down the road backward, real fast. Freaky. I just kept going, watched him in the rearview mirror. The guy was really covering some ground, but backward ... Not the kind of hitchhiker you want to pick up. My first thought: Heyoka. Immediate second thought was that he was a ghost, which was why I kept going. Third possibility was that he was crazy or half buzzed up and just freaking out oncoming cars. Whatever, it was exquisitely spooky, and he had a goofy smile on his face-not a comical grin, but one of deadly pain.
There is a fourth possibility. It was me, walking fast, walking backward, cussing out every ghost I ever imagined, every ghost that pissed into my ears and danced upon my eyeballs. It was the spirit inside me, kicked outside temporarily to protect me from other truly drooling spirits sent by jealous enemies.
Kwe Na'a
Though blessed sage bloomed in our ancient valleys, my generation's beds of birth and ejaculatory death were cursed with an eternal confusion of internal combustion. We enrolled in tribal demolition derbies and fell to the fired earth and moaned. We could not pray, so we crawled toward the mothering darkness. We cannot tell you why we spent a lifetime crawling when we had wings that were strong, supremely brown, and so holy.
Blue Turtle Songs
Late May on a five-mile stretch of Interstate 90 near Canistota, South Dakota, dozens and dozens of turtles marched through the blood and smashed flesh of their brothers upon the blacktop. For a long and brief moment I wondered why these little shellbacks were crossing the forlorn road until an ejaculation of epiphenomenalism clued me in to the fact that these little twits were poet turtles. Of course they were only trying to get to the other side but what mattered more was that they were driven by the bloodied memories of their lost and stolen homelands. What mattered more than their destination was the dark possibility that they were on a crying jag and listening to blue turtle songs when their hearts exploded inside my soul.
Rabbit Dance
I'm a squatter here in Jesusland. One week before the war taxes are due, engorged winds from Buffalo Ridge buffet my parked car and snort boundless detritus past a burgeoning greenness of lawn where a peculiar little rabbit huddles and stares at me. It's only a few feet from the car, so I lock the beast in an eyeball duel. It refuses to budge and so do I as sunshine wraps my '83 Ford in warmth pungent as an old quilt. I awaken twenty minutes later to find the victor has vanished. * * *
Dear rabbit, I'm snug as a thug in the cell of my car, procrastinating a visit to a smug and learned woman who likes to tickle my tailbone. Trickster rabbit, this year I've seen aging friends and allies falter under the weight of love's corpse and all I could do was thank the spirits that I was not them. I've watched them shake in glittering madness and substitute logorrhea for logic. I've seen them rage when kindly eyes beseeched them for the keys to their silly love-shorn brains. Rabbit, brother, do not let me become one of those quaint, nervous hobblers. Shit, I've already staggered down blood roads as hellish as any man has. My damn dues are paid in full. And I have loved one woman whose loving heart pumped the contagion of Calvary and Wounded Knee simultaneously, and I will love her until I most miserably die if you, dear rabbit, will hop back here and convince me I can live on memories alone, and if you will then crawl up into the fan belt and stop this sad car's engine from igniting. Rabbit, O rabbit, I am only asking for one fortuitous foot, foolish fetishist that I am.
Dreaming Bear
Blessed be the weak and meek, but I'll tumble grave-way as neither. There is a woman I have recently come to know whose fine young legs I would slay monsters for, but then what would a man in his fifties do with such fine thighs were he to win them? I am boldly stupid to be still worried at this late date about finding some cave for the fat dreaming bear asleep on my lap. The medicine man I consult is not sure if such a thing is good or bad. He only shakes his smiling skull, and I ape him ever so amiably, drunk on the nectar of possibility.
Magic Marker Rock Graffiti near Lolo Hot Springs, Montana
Because you ... invented your god, invented your hell, you are condemned to each. When I tell you that I command certain spirits, then you really should believe me when I say that in this very breath I am praying for the past of your future. -CHIEF JOSEPH * * *
Great Chief Joseph, I dance the sweat lodge dance with you, brother. Oh, what a true honor to read your dark words upon this craggy rock. I toast you with anything but white man's woozy water. I know how those things go since I had to stage-screw this alkie Native princess in A River Runs Through It. (Script said she was Indian, but then maybe she was just a little thespian like me.) -BRAD PITT * * *
P.S. You might not know this, but I also got mangle-killed by a Native spirit bear in Legends of the Fall. Another Montana story ... I played Tristan Ludlow, and in this tall tale I got to poke another Native. So you and me, Joseph, we're damn close to being blood brothers, bed brothers, some horseshit like that. -B. PITT (AGAIN!)
Pax Americana
Miniaturized and moaning, invisible vultures fly circles above your head and flap wings inches from your ears. Initially, you feel some unease, a slight malaise easily shrugged off until night demons with Kalashnikovs push past pills to enter your dreams. You can no longer sleep when summer makes gates of windows. You turn your head from shadows waltzing in corners of your eyes. Your life is now bereft of all disguise. All appears as it truly is: pointless, brief, dark, and deadly. Now might be a good time to lubricate or return desert bones to their dry, dark beds.
At the Minnesota State College in the Winter of My Discontent
Woke up fairly sprightly on Sunday with only a very slight hangover and decided to grade papers. Made my coffee just right. Okay, it was Nescafé and tasted like crap, but liked it ... I did. Opened the antique briefcase from a New England Brooks Brothers store. It was given to me in '73 as a bribe for banging most magnificently. Me, old fat half-breed, was once loved by many pretties in panties of the rainbow. So I neatly arranged the papers on the table, savored the Nescafé, then hurriedly peed and showered. Dried, I drove to the supermarket and thought and bought a whole naked chicken for Sunday dinner. Then I vacuumed, washed dishes, and put the plump bird in to bake. I clipped my toenails. I meditated. I watched the last half of Predator on TV-one of our favorite flicks. Then let the chicken cool and made chicken salad sandwiches-mayo, onions, thinly sliced celery, finely chopped pickles, and I don't know why I chopped the pickles so tiny. My sandwiches and I migrated to the well-worn couch and we watched a "reality" show on NBC called Fear Factor. Spastic Christ on the cross ... Is our nation controlled by some new and invisible drug from deepest outer space? They were eating dicks on TV. All metaphors fizzle and squirt out the eye's window here. Yes, they were eating parboiled water buffalo penises-Lord have mercy. Network TV had schlong gobblers retching over a filthy 50G prize. I shuddered, lost interest in food, switched to CNN, and took a spasmodic nap and awoke with a snake of skank slithering from mouth to mealy brain, so I ate ten of those mints that sleep in a tin. Newly minted, I watched Larry King. Brokaw, looking gray and haunted, babbled about a post-retirement project. Drank me a tumbler of Teacher's scotch. Decided to have another. O Teacher's ... Vivat academia, vivant professores. Semper sint in flore! One more slug and I was humming what Peter LaFarge said of Ira Hayes through the lips of Johnny Cash: "He won't answer anymore, not the whiskey-drinkin' Indian, not the marine that went to war." Fell asleep deep unto the couch. Awoke to an IED or RPG nightmare choreographed by a talking head saying the war dead in Iraq now neared twenty-five hundred souls. Sweet, average American kids graveyarded for no sane reason. Monday morning. Woke. "Monday, Monday," that '60s song, fruggin' in my scotch-addled head. Made coffee, real Starbuckian beans, all the while thinking no coffee ever tasted so good as that of my youth, boiled thick in a buckaroo percolator, coffee from a tin can that opened with a key creating a dangerously sharp ribbon of shining tin memory, and at this instant, as I caught my shimmering self in the mirror of time, I softly sang (a lie): "We love you, old bastard. We love you, old gray thing." I shuddered and winked at myself. Beyond the dancing strands of tin I knew the stack of papers waited. My long-haired brain conjured dire images of my own faulty education and how a poor boy transported to an Ivy League institution learned to disabuse middle-class values, learned how America was built upon the broken backs of too many million nonwhite men. I shook my head and did what needed to be done. I got in my farty old car and went to the store for supplies. I thought about driving to Sioux Falls to get my ashes hauled but decided against it. It was going to be a damn long winter. The Carcinoma Cowboy Oh, a false clock tries to tick out my time to disgrace, distract, and bother me. BOB DYLAN
I When wild white hairs sprouted out of my ears, most lies to myself slowed, though I still cannot disarm that seemingly alien voice which forces me to write endless embellished obituaries before that tired tire of my soul is softly deflated. That voice tells me that I'd like to think at least some of my foolish footsteps will be forever frozen in the cold mud of history. It demands that one or a handful of others recall the sublime insignificance of my necessary tales of dark things bumping in the white night of my slow dying. That voice announces that while I yet live, I might like a drunken brawl of a wake for the demise of desire. It's been too many years since I was rode hard-put away wet. So in my gray slowing life I must defer to that voice. Last spring when a wild young mare cantered into my corral, I nodded as if she were just another ghost. When she trotted up and said, "I am a horse too," I truly knew she was only going to play me. And she knew that I knew. Thus, the game commenced. "What have you seen?" I asked. "Not as much as you, master." Okay, it's not like I expected. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full. "But you do know things," I said. "That I truly do, sire." Sire ... It was going to be easy to let her kill me. My anticipation was appallingly salacious, so when she did the quick dance with her scalpel, all that bled was her deliciously evil smile. Perhaps a valuable lesson, I told my still breathing self. There is no fool like an old fool whose blue dreams fail to note that nothing is as beautiful as an ordered universe where he can look forward to a measured mouthful of heavenly dirt. But then she only opened me up, rearranged me, left me to slog through more syrupy time. I clicked my sticky boot heels three times and whispered, "There's no fool like an old fool." II Oh, a false cock tried to crow out my days and dismay, disfigure, and bugger me. And the dirt of gossip grew on my face, and the ghost dust of tumors covered me. But if the marrow was great and the cells were not sick, they could pierce through lust no matter how thick. So I greased up my hand and remained where I sat and said adios like I gave a rat's ass. III She cut me deep and hard, and for weeks I moaned with pedophile priests loitering at my bedside. A tireless sun mooned no backside. Only the sweet slot machine drop of morphine drip soothed the ragged sutures of middle age and painted a peculiar hell upon my slow eyes. I stood at the trembling crossroads where drugs end-psychosis begins. At least the priests had scurried away, and through windows washed daily, I saw an ordered world. No immaculate conception of weeds unto sidewalks. No broken beer bottles sparkled on the pavement of this Plains city. The streets were freshly washed. In the ordered living rooms of newly painted small houses every single television pimped the sparkly, minted smiles of sweet-speaking skulls. Serene parents, knee-bouncing cherubim, gasped glossolalia at their mind control machines. All was a perfect lie and I saw the immaculate sham of evangelism. I sensed the perfection of demons rising from the Shroud of Turin. The essential chaos of the universe was cloaked, ordered, and humbled. In a thick morphine haze, I heard the very soul being sucked out of surrounding saline prairies. In the itchy embrace of a hospital bed, I realized we'd be better off as clean, hairless meat for gray off-world carnivores who like their choice cuts lean. Dizzy, I fled the surgical ward AMA and drove by sanitized Rapid Creek, where Skin winos with shined shoes, tart smiles, and pressed white shirts strolled by, twirling their bumbershoots. In the piss-yellow light of dawn, a fey April wind found no single piece of trash to kiss and blow. And on every other corner, black SUVs held suited men with ashen skin and Ray Charles sunglasses. MP3s stroked their ears as they cradled MP5 submachine guns. These obedient public servants were garbage collectors, waiting for anyone to breathe truth, waiting to thin the feral herd placidly grazing in Badlands surrounding this shiny hill city. They were waiting for me too, but they'd have to wait longer. A pulsing roan mare was waiting, an eagle feather tied to her mane. Tomaano There was crusted snow on the dry slopes of my loins until my sixteenth spring when my tongue became a wild springtime river with cui-ui dancing away from this desert the white savages had stolen under the rubric of Jesus Christ. I took up the pen like I would later take up the jug and wrote skewed history like today's entry, forty-two long winters after the first: Garter-held nylons wrap young brown thighs that predate glum Golgotha by twenty thousand years, and for those very thighs a continent of feathered felons will attack wagon trains, the Internet, their very own culture, whatever, whomever, when a bartender's bugle sounds the last call.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Logorrhea by Adrian C. Louis
Copyright © 2006 by Adrian C. Louis. Excerpted by permission.
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