Jedediah Smith

From pulp horror to avant garde poetics, writing that hits hard by Jedediah Smith

  • Tuesday Citation: They Do Not Always Remember by William S. Burroughs

    First published in Esquire, May 1, 1966, this routine (Burrough’s term for his writing jags) was later collected in Exterminator!

    Here is Burroughs talking about the story in relation to his creative process in a lecture at the Naropa Institute (Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics):

    Now I get about forty percent of my sets an[d] characters from dreams. Sometimes, just a phrase, a voice, a glimpse, and sometimes I will get a whole story or chapter. All I have to do is sit down and transcribe the dream. An example is a story in Exterminator! called “They Do Not Always Remember” And, sometimes in dreams I find a book or a magazine and read a story. So perhaps writers don’t write, perhaps they just read and transcribe.

    Now what are dreams made of? – Much the same material as a novel – pieces of old movies, newspapers, magazines, novels, sensory in-put. The line between subjective and objective experience is purely arbitrary. No objective reality could be experienced without somebody there to experience it subjectively, and no subjective experience could exist without something to experience.

    THEY DO NOT ALWAYS REMEMBER

    It was in Monterrey Mexico … a square a fountain a café. I had stopped
    by the fountain to make an entry in my notebook: “dry fountain empty
    square silver paper in the wind frayed sounds of a distant city.” “What
    have you written there?” I looked up. A man was standing in front of
    me barring the way. He was corpulent but hard-looking with a scarred
    red face and pale grey eyes. He held out his hand as if presenting a
    badge but the hand was empty. In the same movement he took the
    notebook out of my hands. “You have no right to do that. What I write
    in a notebook is my business. Besides I don’t believe you are a police
    officer.” Several yards away I saw a uniformed policeman thumbs
    hooked in his belt. “Let’s see what he was to say about this.”

    We walked over to the policeman. The man who had stopped me spoke
    rapidly in Spanish and handed him the notebook. The policeman leafed
    through it. I was about to renew my prostests but the policeman’s
    manner was calm and reassuring. He handed the notebook back to me
    said something to the other man who went back and stood by the
    fountain.

    “You have time for a coffee señor?” the policeman asked. “I will tell
    you a story. Years ago in this city there were two policemen who were
    friends and shared the same lodgings. One was Rodriguez. He was
    content to be a simple agente as you see me now. The other was Alfaro.
    He was brilliant, ambitious and rose rapidly in the force until he was
    second in command. He introduced new methods … tape recorders …
    speech prints. He even studied telepathy and took a drug once which he
    thought would enable him to detect the criminal mind. He did not
    hesitate to take action where more discreet officials preferred to look the
    other way … the opium fields … the management of public funds …
    bribery in the police force … the behaviour of policemen off duty.
    Señor he put through a rule that any police officer drunk and carrying a
    pistol would have his pistol permit canceled for one flat year and what
    is more he enforced the rule. Needless to say he made enemies. One
    night he received a phone call and left the apartment he still shared with
    Rodriguez … he had never married and preferred to live simply you
    understand … just there by the fountain he was struck by a car … and
    accident? perhaps … for months he lay in a coma between life and
    death … he recovered finally … perhaps it would have been better if he
    had not.” The policeman tapped his forehead “You see the brain was
    damaged … a small pension … he still thinks he is a major of police
    and sometimes the old Alfaro is there. I recall an American tourist,
    cameras slung all over him like great tits protesting waving his passport.
    There he made a mistake. I looked at the passport and did not like what
    I saw. So I took him along to the comisaria where it came to light the
    passport was forged the American tourist was a Dane wanted for
    passing worthless checks in twenty-three countries including Mexico. A
    female impersonator from East St Louis turned out to be an atomic
    scientist wanted by the FBI for selling secrets to the Chinese. Yes
    thanks to Alfaro I have made important arrests. More often I must tell to
    some tourist once again the story of Rodriguez and Alfaro.” He took a
    toothpoick out of his mouth and looked meditatively at the end if ot. “I
    think Rodriguez has his Alfaro and for every Alfaro there is always a
    Rodriguez. They do not always remember.” He tapped his
    forehead. “You will pay for the coffee yes?”

    I put a note down on the table. Rodriguez snatched it up. “This note is
    counterfeit señor. You are under arrest.” “But I got it from American
    Express two hours ago!” “Mentiras! You think we Mexicans are so
    stupid? No doubt you have a suitcase full of this filth in your hotel
    room.”

    Alfaro was standing by the table smiling. He showed a police badge. “I am the FBI señor … the Federal Police of Mexico. Allow me.” He took the note and held it up to the light smiling he handed it back to me. He said something to Rodriguez who walked out and stood by the fountain. I noticed for the first time that he was not carrying a pistol. Alfaro looked after him shaking his head sadly. “You have time for a coffee señor? I will tell you a story.” “That’s enough!” I pulled a card out of my wallet and snapped crisply “I am District Supervisor Lee of the American Narcotics

    Department and I am arresting you and your accomplice Rodriguez for acting in concert to promote the sale of narcotics … caffeine among other drugs …”


    A hand touched my shoulder. I looked up. A greyhaired Irishman was
    standing there with calm authority the face portentous and distant as if I
    were recovering consciousness after a blow on the head. They do not
    always remember. “Go over there by the fountain Bill. I’ll look into
    this.” I could feel his eyes on my back see the sad head shake hear him
    order two coffees in excellent Spanish … dry fountain empty square
    silver paper in the wind frayed sounds of distant city … everything grey
    and fuzzy … my mind isn’t working right … who are you over there
    telling the story of Harry and Bill? … The square clicked back into
    focus. My mind cleared. I walked toward the café with calm authority.

    WSB

  • Monday Composition: The Sea is a Horse, Of Course

    A man named Beaver had a baby with his wife, Bunny. In the weeks before the birth, Bunny bulged big, and Beaver walked proud. Yet, when the labor came due in the maternity ward, the baby was born not from Bunny but through Beaver’s mouth.

    This caused several complications.

    When the wee babe’s scalp crowned, all of Beaver’s teeth fell out. All that precious ivory, yellowed so diligently with years of coffee cups and pipes of tobacco, gone.

    I will need Bunny to nurse me like the baby, Beaver thought. Beaver thought, like my son, I will need to eat strained carrots. 

    When the umbilical cord was cut, it did not retreat down Beaver’s throat but flopped about his mouth like a second tongue, creating its own babble of poppycock and taradiddle. 

    My language has been confounded, Beaver thought, and my words will scatter away from my face until I can once again sift falderal from folderol. 

    As for the afterbirth, having nowhere else to go, it settled in Beaver’s gut, bloating his belly and hunching his back. 

    Once they had returned home, Beaver lay long in bed under the weight of the afterbirth. He resolved a reversal was in order. He told Bunny he would swallow the baby and let it be born again, through her.

    Ith my birthrighth, he gabbled.

    Having none of that, Bunny slept on top of the baby every night, while Beaver haunted its crib, looking for his son while he gummed the bedposts.

    One night, instead of covering the baby, she replaced it with a smooth stone wrapped in swaddling cloths, and Beaver swallowed it.

    The next day, Beaver visited Dr. Brevity to complain of a pain in his gut. The doctor poked his skin feeling the stone perched within atop the afterbirth, and diagnosed, you have a stone.

    Will it pass? Beaver asked.

    With luck commensurate to the size of the stone.

    Whew, said Beaver, and he headed off to sea, to float on his back and find relief in the weightlessness of water. I will pee and let my salty sea join the greater sea and the greater salt and the stone will flow away from me.

    But with each wave, the tide grew higher and Beaver sank lower, dragged down by the weight of the stone he could not disown.

    As he began to drown, he thought, this isn’t birth.

    He thought, this isn’t right.

    A selection from Esau’s Fables, published by Mount Diablo Books and available in print and as an e-book from Amazon. The piece also appeared previously in Bending Genres Magazine.

  • Tuesday Citation: Short-Order Cook by Jim Daniels

    An average joe comes in
    and orders thirty cheeseburgers and thirty fries.

    I wait for him to pay before I start cooking.
    He pays.
    He ain’t no average joe.

    The grill is just big enough for ten rows of three.
    I slap the burgers down
    throw two buckets of fries in the deep frier
    and they pop pop, spit spit. . .
    pssss. . .
    The counter girls laugh.
    I concentrate.
    It is the crucial point–
    they are ready for the cheese:
    my fingers shake as I tear off slices
    toss them on the burgers/fries done/dump/
    refill buckets/burgers ready/flip into buns/
    beat that melting cheese/wrap burgers in plastic/
    into paper bags/fried done/dump/fill thirty bags/
    bring them to the counter/wipe sweat on sleeve
    and smile at the counter girls.
    I puff my chest out and bellow:
    Thirty cheeseburgers! Thirty fries!
    I grab a handful of ice, toss it in my mouth
    do a little dance and walk back to the grill.
    Pressure, responsibility, success.
    Thirty cheeseburgers, thirty fries.

    From Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems by Jim Daniels. Originally appeared in Places/Everyone. Copyright © 1985 by Jim Daniels.

  • Monday Composition: The Enormous Whisker

    Feeling the need of increased stature among his peers, Pepkin decided to grow a beard like those of the great philosophers or Tolstoy or Brahms, and so he stopped shaving. When his beard came in though, it came not as many hairs but one enormous whisker. It grew just above the jawline of his right cheek and resembled a tree trunk. Since it lacked the look of a conventional beard, he thought about shaving it off but decided to give it some time and see how it developed. 

    As it grew longer, it continued to thicken and soon grew quite heavy. He found himself tilting his head to the right most of the time, as one with classic paralysis of the fourth cranial nerve, and people thought it gave him a contemplative air. In fact he found himself being given considerations he never had before.  Friends would listen attentively as he spoke. Strangers would ask him to opine on matters of the day. Clergy sought his advice on matters both theological and lay. Pepkin noticed other men adopting what had come to be called the Pepkin Tilt. 

    He worried this imitation might dilute his uniqueness, but it was about this time his enormous whisker began to sprout fruit. At first they were just small green nuts clustered at the end of the whisker, but over time they blanched until they looked like pulpy white berries. The weight of the fruit and the still-growing whisker itself caused it to bend down, and the fruit would sway and slap against Pepkin’s chest as he walked. While some men tried to mimic this look as well, with beaded scarves or lengths of pasta, the consensus was that Pepkin had taken his innovation too far. He found himself shunned. 

    So, he stayed in his apartment more and more, then retreated even farther, rarely leaving his bedroom. Finding the open space of the vast room vertiginous, he constructed a canopy over his bed and brooded inside. After several weeks within this crib, his fleshy berries began to split and ooze a viscous liquid. From within, little baby snakes emerged, each with a face identical to Pepkin’s. When all the snakes had hatched, he took a razor and shaved off his enormous whisker. From its fine-grained substance, he built a boat and sailed it out to sea. The snakes sunned themselves on the deck while Pepkin steered the wheel. 

    Those who saw them go tried to tell the story of their departure, but few would believe them. So, the storytellers formed their own clubs and societies. They would take turns retelling the tale of Pepkin. They called it “tilting.”

    A selection from Esau’s Fables, published by Mount Diablo Books and available in print and, as of this week, as an e-book from Amazon. The piece also appeared previously in Flash Fiction Magazine.

  • Saturday Retro Review: “The Circular Ruins” by Jorge Luis Borges

    Like Frankenstein, Borges’ story “The Circular Ruins” explores the disturbing consequences of creating life, though here it is through dreaming rather than science. The narrator’s goal is to dream a man with minute integrity and insert him into reality, effectively creating a person out of dreams. Starting his task with perfect integrity, the narrator spends what feels like an infinite amount of time perfecting minute details, such as the hairs on the dream-man’s arm until the task comes to seem Sisyphean. Though the story follows a seemingly simple plot, it leads the reader in circles, reflecting the circularity of the text itself. Borges draws on a Joseph Campbell-like structure, weaving mythological elements and archetypes into the narrative. where reality and illusion blur.

    The father-and-son angle serves as a meditation on parenthood, creation, and the responsibilities tied to bringing another into existence. A god of fire, reminiscent of Prometheus, grants the narrator the power to fulfill his purpose of creation but twists the myth into a realization that the creator himself is also a dream. Realizing you’re a dream is one of the story’s most profound moments, leaving the narrator as a trapped figure in endless circularity. As the narrator views his dream-man with both love and detachment, much like a parent might, the narrator reflects on his own decay and the fleeting nature of existence, transforming from the color of fire to that of ashes. Further, Borges’ description of the narrator as a grey man emphasizes his ethereal and enigmatic nature.

    Borges integrates folkloric references, such as a Cornish legend, to tie his narrative to timeless myths and universal themes. The phrase “tributaries of sleep” poetically conveys the flow of dreams that feed into the narrator’s creative process. Weaving a rope of sand illustrates the futility and fragility of his task, highlighting the ephemeral nature of dreams. Coining the faceless wind suggests an attempt to shape something intangible and formless, like identity or reality.

    As with The Company in “The Lottery of Babylon”, the creator in “The Circular Ruins” seems to possess all-encompassing knowledge, operating with a mysterious, almost divine authority. The ruins in the story evoke a sense of a lost religion that, paradoxically, somehow comes true through the narrator’s act of creation. The narrator’s god is not the God of the Bible but a dream god, aligning with the story’s metaphysical and mythological focus. The dream god reflects the narrator’s belief in a divinity that exists within the realm of imagination and dreams.

    The story embodies metafictional and intertextual elements common in the postmodern school, blurring the boundaries between reality, fiction, and self-awareness. Borges’ use of language captures the surreal beauty of a dream, elevating the story’s poetic and philosophical tone. Like Voltaire’s Zadig, the story explores themes of destiny, creation, and the search for meaning within a larger cosmic structure. The ruins suggest a fake Babylon, evoking echoes of Borges’ “The Library of Babel” in their enigmatic, labyrinthine significance. The mention of other burned temples alludes to the cyclical destruction and rebirth that underpin the story’s themes. Borges’ story evokes the adventure and mysticism found in H. Rider Haggard’s tales of exploration and lost civilizations. Like Xenophon’s Anabasis and its tale of 10,000 mercenaries, “The Circular Ruins” portrays an epic journey, albeit one of the mind and spirit rather than physical conquest. The story’s setting feels like an aftermath of disaster, where the ruins represent both destruction and the potential for renewal. The narrator’s solitude reflects yet another abandoned village, a hallmark of Borges’ settings steeped in mystery and decay. The imagery could also evoke the post-apocalyptic aesthetic of the 1979 Walter Hill movie The Warriors with its surprisingly optimistic version of New York where chaos still holds potential for transformation.

    In the Gnostic cosmogonies, a red Adam who cannot stand is a flawed creation, paralleling the dreamed man as an imperfect reflection of his creator. Borges evokes the idea that the world was created by the demiurge, a secondary deity whose imperfect work echoes the narrator’s own creation. In this, the story makes connections to ancient tropes and anticipates future ones:

    • It resonates with themes from Valis by Philip K. Dick, where creation, divinity, and human perception intertwine in a metaphysical exploration. The narrator’s act of creation feels like an addendum to the creation story, presenting a personal, recursive mythology.
    • Lilith, as a figure of unorthodox creation, serves as a parallel to the dreamed man, an alternative version of humanity’s origins.
    • The geopolitical urban legend about red mercury echoes the alchemical undertones of the tale, where transformation and secrecy play central roles. Alchemical texts resonate with the story’s themes of creating life from an idea, turning intangible thoughts into tangible forms. The cold fusion of terrorism, like the narrator’s dream, represents a dangerous and explosive act of creation with unforeseen consequences.
    • The dreamed man parallels a golem, a man made out of clay but without a soul, questioning the essence of humanity. The narrator’s creation recalls Adam of dust from Genesis but is ultimately an Adam of dreams, born from imagination rather than divine breath. The wizard is the dreamer, embodying both the power and the isolation that come with the act of creation.

    Borges was the darling of the literary set when he was alive, celebrated for his masterful blend of erudition, philosophy, and imagination, and he is still a god of modern literature The story exemplifies Borges’ hallmark intertextuality, drawing on myths, religious texts, and literary references to deepen its meaning. Paradoxically, Borges’ made-up quotes and citations, a trademark of his style, lend “The Circular Ruins” an air of scholarly parody, blending fiction and reality. Much like H.P. Lovecraft, Borges’ works often parody 19th-century scholarship with their meticulous yet fictional sources.

    The story’s themes evoke a clash of blades vs. brambles—sharp intellectual concepts intertwined with the messy, tangled nature of dreams. Borges, like Poe the prankster, injects wit and irony into his work, creating moments of puckish and wry humor amidst serious themes. At the same time, the philosophical undertones of the story recall the works of Herman Melville, blending grand existential questions with intricate, extraordinary sentences. Borges’ writing is puckish and wry, laced with a sense of mischief even as it reaches for profound truths. The narrative of “The Circular Ruins” itself represents an apotheosis, where the narrator ascends to a godlike role as a creator, only to discover he is also a creation.