Broadside 5

Animated intro for documentary on San Francisco activist Bill Sorro:

Stories from strangers

The average age in the novel writing class I took this fall semester at the local JC must have been a solid 45, weighted by the 5 or so senior citizens (the 3 sept/octagenarian men all WWII vets). Maybe just as many are in there 20s and the majority late 30 to 40 something.

Many of them have taken the class repeatedly for a number of years, the instructor having been teaching the same class since his late 20s, now in his late 40s(?) So maybe they've grown accustomed to their eccentricities, or maybe it's true what the Lizard King said: People are strange.

Richard is one of the WWII vets. Meek but amiable, he rarely speaks up in class, but when he does it usually elicits laughs from the rest of the class, whether or not he intended his comments to be funny. He often bakes brownies from scratch to share with us on our coffee break halfway through the 3 hour class. In the bio that went with his short story posted on the department's online literary journal, he was a factotum from the midwest.

His novel in progress is a collection of short stories about the travails of a hermaphrodite born in the sticks, cast out as an infant and raised by wolves, subsequently exploited by a travelling circus, and now as an adult looking to settle down into married life as a heterosexual man though he has opted not to have surgery. The best man at his wedding is a domesticated pig, his best friend.

For a deluded minute I thought that Richard was Thomas Pynchon. That maybe Pynchon hid out in community college writing classes and that part of the reason his tales are so densely impenetrable, so obfuscate is that he wrote everything in direct opposite to the sound opinions of his classmates who have been instructed by the instructor to judge everything by the standard conventions of story telling, arcs and POV and all that page-turning stuff.

Richard's story read like an old Appalachian tall tale you would find in a highschool English lit textbook, the burgeoning literary identity of a nation (these days we've traded in hyperbole for hyper-real). Pugilist butterflies and libertine pigs. It was effortlessly bizarre but somehow sounded like something so sweetly conventional like Laura Ingles pining for that brawny buck Alonso. But then again completely something else, done up backwards so that sentimentality never felt so subversive. (I thought about saying to the class how this reminded me of Samuel Delaney, about a love story where the lovers eat each other's shit)

After the class had it's say ("This is Richard being Richard," they said lazily sweeping away dust into some remote corner), Richard tried to explain some detail in his story we all missed: in the brawl with the butterflies, when the butterfly stuck it's tongue in the protagonist's ear, this effectively made the hermaphrodite more masculine, "That's why his voice was suddenly deeper," Richard offered. This destroyed my illusion. Never listen to the author. The day Pynchon makes an appearance will be the undoing of his career.