A series of aliases
In the news recently was a tongue-in-cheek pseudo investigative report by The New York Times on the purported author of the novel Cow Country, who a literary scholar had suspected to be the work of longtime recluse Thomas Pynchon, reasoning that the mystery novel shared many narrative devices and off-the-cuff humor touches with Pynchon’s cult classic Gravity’s Rainbow, whose first line qualifies as one of the most memorable at least in the ‘70s when it first came out: there was a screaming across the sky, whether or not verbatim, but the writer might well have been referring to the bomb.
And not just any bomb, mind you. That which killed thousands in real life and in fiction as well changed the course of history, and, to Pynchon fans, that of literature too. The true novelist’s wife and literary agent were quick to dispel the theory of Cow Country’s authorship, saying it was just not possible. Eventually the book’s blurb writer vouched for the real cow author’s not being Pynchon, and admitted it was not the author’s first novel but his second or third, each one written under a different name. He wishes to remain anonymous because authors are by nature “literary constructs.”
In the use of a series of aliases, who is to say which is false and which true, as soon enough even the pseudonymous writer will get lost and perhaps confused in the trick of mirrors or smokescreen to cover one’s tracks? Not to mention the trouble that goes with depositing the check, unless there was some previous arrangement, otherwise a series of affidavits of one and the same person would just make rich the notary publics.
Another news item that struck our fancy was that of the Birdman in East Village, New York, who was said to be abandoning his nest of cassettes and CDs by the end of September, with his eclectic store Rainbow Music closing shop. He had finally revealed his real name, Bill Kasper, to a reporter, and that he was well into his 70s after having managed the store for 17 years, set up because he wanted to keep busy after earning his stash on Wall Street.
The New York Times visited the Birdman at his nest and noted that the extensive collection seemed partial to jazz, blues, rock and reggae, and that given enough time (say 10 minutes) he could find whatever a client was looking for amidst the stacks of plastic and reams of magnetic tape. Name the most obscure band or act, it’s more than likely he has it in his haphazard catalogue.
Once in the backroom a wall of recorded music collapsed, and the Birdman was trapped in the enclosed space for hours, having to dig his way out slowly much like a hard-luck miner. You can’t say he was born under a bad sign though, as he has lived through an era when technology changed the music listening habits of people faster than you can say rewind or replay. The epilogue to this closing of yet another mom-and-pop venture is that exhausted Birdman’s son has taken an interest in selling the accumulated stuff online, which will surely fetch a fortune, a windfall reaped not from Wall Street but from towers of sound. So long to the stalker among the stacks.
And a quick surf through the topsy-turvy unpredictable files of cyberspace may reveal an old short story by the late Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose “Eyes of a Blue Dog” from the collection Innocent Erendira and Other Stories seems vaguely familiar. Not in the sense of plagiarism, but in the manner by which a pair of lovers see each other only in dreams so disjointed that they barely can grope to find one another in the real, waking world, with only the phrase or cipher “eyes of a blue dog” to clue them in on each other’s identity.
You can drop telltale signs everywhere, sign up on Facebook and send smoke signals but unless the color of the eyes changes from brown or black to blue, it would be like throwing pearls to swine. And doesn’t it remind you of that smash split-screen noontime romance, when the hoi polloi howls as the would-be lovers scrawl, metaphorically of course, eyes of a blue dog on the walls of a city of aliases?
