The Cheerful Scapegoat: Fables

by Wayne Koestenbaum

Overview

Wayne Koestenbaum's first book of short fiction: a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables.

In his first book of short fiction—a collection of whimsical, surreal, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables—Wayne Koestenbaum takes the gloom and melancholy of our own terrifying political moment and finds subversive solace by overturning the customary protocols of tale-telling. Characters and narrators wander into strange locales; the difference between action and thinking, between reality and dream, grows moot in a heightened yet burlesque manner. The activities in The Cheerful Scapegoat are a cross between a comedy of manners and a Sadean orgy. Language has its own desires: figures of speech carry an erotic charge that straddles the line between slapstick and vertigo. Punishment hangs over every dialogue—but in the fable-world of The Cheerful Scapegoat, abjection comes with an undertaste of contentment. The tchotchkes of queer culture—codes and signifiers—get scrambled together in these stories and then blown up into an improbable soufflé.

Koestenbaum's fables travel in circles, slipping away from their original point and leading the reader to a paradisiacal suspension of fixed categories. Intensified sentences and curlicue narratives scheme together mesmerically to convince the reader to abandon old ways of thinking and to take on a commitment to the polymorphous, the wandering, the tangential. Koestenbaum's fables—emergency bulletins uttered in a perverse vernacular of syntactic pirouettes—alert us to the necessity of pushing language into new contortions of exactitude and ecstatic excess.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635901443
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/23/2021
Series:	Semiotext(e) / Native Agents
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, novelist, artist, performer—has published nineteen books, including The Queen's Throat, which was praised by Susan Sontag as "a brilliant book" and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Yale and a Visiting Professor in the Yale School of Art's painting department, he is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

Table of Contents

1 [she sauntered from clique to clique]

The Cheerful Scapegoat 15

The Cheerful Scapegoat in the Suburbs 23

The Cheerful Scapegoat (We Three) 30

2 [your dormant orifices]

Pulling Lashes 39

Gardener's Scarf 41

That Odd Summer of '84 43

Sorting Out Andy 45

Bloomsbury Revisited 47

3 [the remorse plague]

Green Ice Cream Man I Didn't Love 51

And Then I Threw My Hands in the Air 53

The Red Door 55

The Terror of Complications 58

Telephone Receivers or Cooking Spoons in Purple Haze 60

4 [a chemistry set suitable for toddlers]

The Snow Falls On… 65

Pincushion with Thimble 67

Zucchini Blossoms 69

Gay Memphis Bookcase 71

Reverse Butterfly 74

The Greenhouse 76

5 [play our way into Utopia]

Dimples in His Tie 81

Martha Never Asked Permission Before Dropping By 83

Thrown Crystal 85

Terrifying Typo 87

The Logic of Rivulets 89

He is Perpetually Tan 91

6 [a revolutionary almanac torn to pieces]

The Temple of Timidity 97

Profile of a Departed Cellist 99

Do You Take Mustard? 102

Decor Analysis 105

An Exercise in Expiation 107

Conversation in Darkness 109

7 [the civic crotch]

Pillow and Tom 119

Newspaper on a Dubious Patio 121

Mayoral Chandelier 123

The Diplomatic Rock 125

8 [impersonate the tree]

Gauffrage and the Erotic Limitations of Capability Klein 131

Who Speaks? 136

The Pathos of Communication 139

The Sexual Translator 141

9 [the schmatte engulfs me]

To Be Engulfed 151

Disreality 153

Declaration 156

10 [antipodes and prophecies]

Stones and Liquor: or, Some Differences between Remorse and Regret 161

A Few Don'ts about Yellow Wallpaper 165

Pink Eye (A Family Romance) 169

On Not Being Able to Paint 173

The Artist's Methods 178

11 [oddments cribbed from funerals]

Sebald Sandwich 187

Tortoise 189

The King of Nevada 191

His Husband 194

12 [keep vaudeville vague]

Variety Springs 199

A Page from My Intimate Journal 218

Acknowledgments 227

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Koestenbaum sucks every last drop of nectar out of words, like an avid hummingbird at its flowers, then hovers over sentences so exquisitely precise, bejewelled and hilarious — just fall back already into the glistening boners and coruscating silvergrass. (Is that Ashbery or Laura Riding lying deep in flora beside you?) Surrender yourself to the engorged astonishments of these fables."—Guy Maddin, filmmaker 
 
"Wayne Koestenbaum derails the sexual and gender conventions of the genre of the mystical-and-mythical-style fable using trans and queer speculative porn-fiction and lyrical criticism. Narratively exquisite and fiercely irreverent, his fables construct a brilliant one-of-a-kind mind-body-game where literature becomes a sort of “operation” in the unconscious infrastructure of our desire. Strikingly original, tender, radical, funny, unforgettable."—Paul B. Preciado, author of An Apartment on Uranus and Testo Junkie 
 
"Wayne Koestenbaum's marvelous Cheerful Scapegoat is festooned with beaucoup celebs from today's fables and those of centuries past, including Marxists ("sexually speaking"), torch singers, forgotten Hollywood stars, Greek heroes and unknown kings. Each story mercifully eschews the conventional Aesopian tale, often in a fabulously cheeky mode, where every maxim or moral strives for “vaudeville grandeur” rather than tidy meaning. While gorgeous and funny, Koestebaum’s stories movingly graze the human only to kiss the divine, often “with the melancholy that only an unfinished cigarette has the effrontery to epitomize.” This book is something rare, something new."—Andrew Durbin, author of Skyland
 
"This is an elegant, rude book—beautiful and acerbically composed. Like scenes scripted by Edward Gorey and directed by Ryan Trecartin, Wayne Koestenbaum’s brief parables manage to be at once delicate and extreme, vile and flowery, cooly precise and gorgeously insane. I don’t know anyone else who writes like this."—Lucy Ives, author of Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World
 
"Do you, Dear Reader, crave some dark wit with your titillation, a little salt in your cocktail, a love-bite with your Benjamin? Do you prefer not to solve love? Do you prefer paste to rarity? Rot to profit? Monica Vitti? Between Streisand and Wilde, would you rather not choose? In the eruditely amoral tradition of Guy Davenport, here are elegant tales which invite new lascivious forms of attention. You will not be glum. Each sentence has a fabulous mouthfeel. You’ll be imbued with a fresh capaciousness. You will find that each can be adored."—Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal

Editorial Reviews

"These charmingly insouciant short stories by the noted critic, poet and essayist exhibit the same surreal whimsy that distinguishes his work in other formats."—New York Times Sunday Book Review

"Koestenbaum sucks every last drop of nectar out of words, like an avid hummingbird at its flowers, then hovers over sentences so exquisitely precise, bejewelled and hilarious — just fall back already into the glistening boners and coruscating silvergrass. (Is that Ashbery or Laura Riding lying deep in flora beside you?) Surrender yourself to the engorged astonishments of these fables."—Guy Maddin, filmmaker 
 
"Wayne Koestenbaum derails the sexual and gender conventions of the genre of the mystical-and-mythical-style fable using trans and queer speculative porn-fiction and lyrical criticism. Narratively exquisite and fiercely irreverent, his fables construct a brilliant one-of-a-kind mind-body-game where literature becomes a sort of “operation” in the unconscious infrastructure of our desire. Strikingly original, tender, radical, funny, unforgettable."—Paul B. Preciado, author of An Apartment on Uranus and Testo Junkie 
 
"Wayne Koestenbaum's marvelous Cheerful Scapegoat is festooned with beaucoup celebs from today's fables and those of centuries past, including Marxists ("sexually speaking"), torch singers, forgotten Hollywood stars, Greek heroes and unknown kings. Each story mercifully eschews the conventional Aesopian tale, often in a fabulously cheeky mode, where every maxim or moral strives for “vaudeville grandeur” rather than tidy meaning. While gorgeous and funny, Koestebaum’s stories movingly graze the human only to kiss the divine, often “with the melancholy that only an unfinished cigarette has the effrontery to epitomize.” This book is something rare, something new."—Andrew Durbin, author of Skyland
 
"This is an elegant, rude book—beautiful and acerbically composed. Like scenes scripted by Edward Gorey and directed by Ryan Trecartin, Wayne Koestenbaum’s brief parables manage to be at once delicate and extreme, vile and flowery, cooly precise and gorgeously insane. I don’t know anyone else who writes like this."—Lucy Ives, author of Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World
 
"Do you, Dear Reader, crave some dark wit with your titillation, a little salt in your cocktail, a love-bite with your Benjamin? Do you prefer not to solve love? Do you prefer paste to rarity? Rot to profit? Monica Vitti? Between Streisand and Wilde, would you rather not choose? In the eruditely amoral tradition of Guy Davenport, here are elegant tales which invite new lascivious forms of attention. You will not be glum. Each sentence has a fabulous mouthfeel. You’ll be imbued with a fresh capaciousness. You will find that each can be adored."—Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal

From the Publisher