by Mark Bibbins, Editor

As All Generalizations Are False

You’re there with that crazy, hell-bent old friend of yours
who’s now calmed down and grown up. Sure it’s great
to see him or her doing well, but you
can’t help but feel things were more interesting
back in the day. No view, then, can encompass the whole. It
can’t be nailed down. You’re feeling kind, so you
say nothing. Bicycles go by with the houses. The world is a matter
of yellow and red fire hydrants. You turn the block
from white houses to yellow houses. The patterns
partially repeat, but never quite. And your
former crazy friend is feeling kind. Let’s stumble
upon greatness, or stumble over the toys the kids left out,
and then into greatness, some deep universal order
beneath the random distribution of corners and points
across the room. We’ll then call it “seemingly
random,” not really random at all, in the form
of rectangles and darkness, some doorknobs,
where it’s us going back and forth, as a sort of
pendulum, as a chase scene from Scooby-Doo, caught up
in the long hallway. At some point I’ll stand by your side. At some point
you’re chasing the monster, and then the monster’s
carrying you, and then you carry the monster, and then
you’re chasing the lines in the carpet. So a monster
is chasing you. It can wear many faces, supplied by various rooms
in a catalogue. A thrift store erupts next to a pawn shop. I’m
too tired to list them. Do we really need images,
anyway? Something to mess up the sand
at the well? So we shine on. Your old friend
boards a train. I’ve been living in my own world
too long, she or he says. And she’s not waiting anymore. He’s
not waiting anymore. We hear them from their compartments,
softly, and it organizes the view out the window. Yes,
but that’s a local phenomenon, like when you’ve just met
and you still remember everything so far. It’s clever of you
to think so, as a thought experiment, where you
can follow the order of operations, saying “what you see
is what you see,” and then “what am I looking at,” and then
“what did I mean,” “where was I.”

John Gallaher’s most recent book is Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, co-written with G.C. Waldrep.

Any day’s a good day for poetry, but especially THIS day! So why not lose yourself inThe Poetry Section’s vast archive? You could do a lot worse!

You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

“We won’t be reforming this week. Maybe if the government stepped down. If this government stepped down, I’ll reform the band. How’s that? That’s a fair trade, isn’t it? I think the country would be better off, don’t you? I’ll do it if the coalition steps down.”
 — Johnny Marr has issued his ultimatum on a Smiths reunion. Here’s hoping British Prime Minister David Cameron is as big a fan of the band as he claims to be.

Yeah, it’s that kind of day. Sigh. Alright, anyway, here we go: “A LUCKY bunny had it away with 10 lady rabbits after a prankster stuck him in an all-female colony at an animal centre…. Shocked staff discovered him the next morning — sparked out after a night of rabbit passion.” The phrase “bunny bonking” also comes into play.

“When I first saw the ending, I said, ‘What the f — k?’ I mean, after all I went through, all this death, and then it’s over like that? After I had a day to sleep, I just sat there and said, ‘That’s perfect.’”
 — James Gandolfini talks about the final episode of “The Sopranos.” Much of the rest of the cast do, too. Mostly unrelated: Remember how great Sting was before he sucked?

Republican provocateur Andrew Breitbart has apparently died of natural causes at the age of 43. This is extremely distressing to those of us who are not that many years younger.

Whether or not you choose to watch all six minutes of this video of a Lord Howe Island walking stick hatching from its egg (I did, twice… though I wish it had Galaxie 500’s “Another Day” as its soundtrack), please read the story of how the egg came to be at the Melbourne Zoo in the first place. It’s incredibly exciting! Almost six inches long, with thick exoskeletons that can bring their weight to 25 grams, Lord Howe Island walking sticks, or “tree lobsters” as they’re sometimes called, are the heaviest non-flying insects in the world. They live together in mated pairs and when they sleep, the males drape three legs over the females in a protective gesture. And they were thought to be extinct for 80 years. I don’t want to spoil the end of one of my favorite books for anyone who might not have yet read it, but I will say that this story actually brings up some of the same very powerful emotions as does the last page of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

‘The Valley Of Horses’: Once More Into The Breach

It is rare for Classic Trash to revisit a series. One cannot step into the same attic of flowers or coven of teen witches twice, as Heraclitus of Ephesus so memorably told us. But in a case like this, where our intrepid Ayla came so far without… actually coming at all… it behooves the society of great readers to follow her to Over The Top Pleasure Mountain. We owe it to her, guys.

Not that it was a chore! The Valley of Horses, by equine and cave-person enthusiast Jean M. Auel, is a good time. Admittedly, the NEXT book (The Mammoth Hunters) is where the real cheap fun is at — I have not seen such CRAZED SMUT since, um, those Anne Rice books that aren’t about vampires. You know what I’m talking about. Anyway, if you missed our Clan of the Cave Bear session, you can catch up here. Let’s get back to the love; the woman-friendly love. Jondalar, you see, is the first male character we’ve met who knows how to find “the nodule.” Round of applause for Jondalar!

The adorable cheeseball vagina-centered Mists of Avalon-esque sexuality is such a delightful change of pace. It’s a little like Philip Roth wrote the first one to afford a divorce, and then the second one was written by a bunch of chicks on the Internet who own crystal deodorant. In the best possible way, I hasten to add! I mean, we’re calling sex “The Gift of Pleasure” now. Which, seriously, is that not that absolute best name for a sex toy store you’ve ever heard? Hey, venture capitalists, there are a lot of nostalgic YA-reading Millennials out there, and they need to buy Hitachi Magic Wands from someone, y’know?

I digress! Now, my very first coherent thought upon cracking The Valley of Horses — apart from “Jesus, Ayla, you’re going to get squeamish about carrying fire-starting implements because of the patriarchy AT THIS POINT? I mean, seriously, grrrl, it’s time to free your mind from the confines of your oppressors. What is this, the Panopticon?” — was “I spy a slight homage to Pride and Prejudice.”

Did you catch it? Am I just programmed to spot the Divine One’s hand at work in all things? Look: Jondalar is clearly a single man in possession of several leather thongs in want of a mate, and his brother, Thonolan, is SUCH a Bingley (cheerful, never holds a grudge, etc.) Can’t you just picture Bingley getting gored in the groin by a rhino and being all “oh, don’t spoil the party on my account!”

I was mostly convinced of the Jondalar-Darcy parallel until: “The smell of horse was strong, not from the dry wind in his face carrying their hot rangy odor, but from the ripe dung he had rubbed on his body and held in his armpits to disguise his own scent if the wind shifted.” Not… so much. That seems more Wickham-y to me. And then, soon enough, we get to what y’all were hinting at in the comments last time: Jondalar’s huge wang. Wow. I haven’t seen such adjectives for a penis since Fanny Hill. The poor guy, wandering the earth in search of a vagina that can more easily accommodate his thunder. Hang in there, big guy! That Ayla, she can do anything. Including, in this newest installment, inventing the hairbrush and horseback riding.

I hadn’t realized that our lovebirds would take half of the book to find each other, which was a mild disappointment to yours truly. In the meantime, we get lots of Jondalar’s people messing with “the flatheads” for sport, which, uh, I know we’re supposed to root for tolerance and everything, but the events of the last book totally soured me on Neanderthals, and I was reasonably open to wiping them out. You heard it here first: Classic Trash endorses genocide! Don’t worry, Jondalar comes around in his own time, when he isn’t getting with alllll the ladies. The important thing is that a lot of the rest of the book is taken up with cave-lion and horse training and fashioning baskets out of twigs, which is totally my jam.

Ayla being Ayla, right, tosses herself up on her yearling filly’s back (don’t do that!) and immediately manages to gallop around like a pro, bareback. Bullshit, Ayla.

Full disclosure: I am owned by a fine mare of truly epic sweetness and stupidity, who would have survived in this book for twenty seconds, as she is terrified of a) the outdoors, b) all avian inhabitants of the outdoors and c) water that doesn’t come in heated buckets. If she was set free by animal-rights activists, she would search frantically for a human who could make sure she doesn’t have her medium-weight blanket on too far into fly-sheet season. Come to think of it, I couldn’t even slaughter and eat her in a pinch, since she’s chock-full of non-food-grade supplements. She would be a terrible companion to have in Neolithic Ukraine. (❤ u, baby girl! Momma doesn’t mean it!) You know what you really don’t want to have as your companion in Neolithic Ukraine? A baby cave lion. You know that’s not going to end well. Trust, no one is singing Hakuna Matata by the end of this novel. Not to mention that it doesn’t take a degree in psychology to figure out that being forced to leave your son with the Neanderthals, and then taking in a baby cave lion which you name “Baby” involves some unhealthy transference. It’s time you found a mate. A mate who’s only been lightly mauled by your “Baby.” Speaking of unhealthy, did you catch the part where Ayla watches Whinney get drilled by a stallion and gets seriously turned on? She probably would have settled for Broud at that point. Jondalar, all in all, is a bit too much, and not just in the way we discussed earlier. He is like Feminist Cro-Magnon Ryan Gosling. Am I kidding? No. “But I want a woman, not a girl… I want her to have spirit, to know her own mind. I want her young and old, naive and wise, all at the same time.” “Sometimes women who aren’t perfect are more interesting: they’ve done more, or learned something.” Jondalar, are you just trying to get in our fur-and-leather pants, or is this for real? I have a sneaking suspicion that Jondalar is that guy who takes the Intro to Gender Studies class to get phone numbers. Prove me wrong in future books, guy! DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• Ayla uses “soft absorbent leather straps” to catch her menstrual flow. Why on earth would you do that? Wouldn’t you use, like, moss, or something? Honestly, I’m surprised she doesn’t have a Diva Cup. And then she uses a stick in the dirt to chart her cycle! There’s an app for that now.

• Did anyone else keep thinking of The Land Before Time during this one? How much did you cry during The Land Before Time?

• SO impressed by Ayla’s strict adherence to the Paleo diet: Dried meat! Lichen! Seaweed! Vegetables! Berries! Tubers! Occasional handfuls of grain! And she totally does high-intensity interval training. She’s basically CrossFit. How many burpees could Ayla do in seven minutes?

• What would your totem be? Because this is modern times, you can select a celebrity as your totem. Like, Debra Winger. I want Debra Winger to be my totem.

• Have you tried the crystal deodorant thing? I’ve never gone there. I cloth-diaper my baby like a total hippie, but when it comes to my pits, I want the highest percentage of aluminum that Proctor and Gamble is allowed to put on the market.

• Is there anything worse than men who are trying to figure out the meaning of life? Seriously. C’mon, Jondalar, let’s go back to bed.

• Ayla does that trout-tickling (not a euphemism) thing we remember from Danny: The Champion of the World, which I consider to be the greatest parenting manual ever written, minus the theft and the bullet-dodging. It was Dahl’s favourite of his books, what’s yours? I’m a BFG girl.

• Jonadalar shaves! With a flint razor. Did they actually do that? Is there any chance, however remote, that Cro-Magnons invented the soul patch?

• You’ve watched “Fatal Attractions,” that show about people getting mauled by their exotic pets, right? Don’t adopt a cave lion.

And for next time, let’s have a Classic Trash for English Majors selection and do Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

Nicole Cliffe is the proprietress of Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews.

“Please find enclosed one pair of your overalls which I am sending you that the head of your fabric department may determine what is wrong. I purchased these from the Brayton Commercial Co of Wickenburg, Arizona, in the early part of 1917 and I have worn them every day except Sunday since that time and for some reason which I wish you would explain they have gone to pieces. I have worn nothing but Levi Strauss overalls for the past 30 years and this pair has not given me the service that I have got from some of your overalls in the past. I know that it is your aim to present a superior article on the market and consider it my duty to help you in any way I can. Please consider this and let me know if the fault is mine.”
 — Arizona miner Homer Campbell wrote a letter to the Levi Strauss company in 1920 asking why a pair of overalls he’d worn six days a week for three years straight had fallen apart. This is from a very interesting history of blue jeans the BBC has up — which reminds me of a lecture about global affairs I attended in college, given by a professor from India, who credited the invention of blue jeans as the single most important reason for United States’ rise to solo superpower status in the 20th century. It also reminds me of the importance of blue jeans in pop music.

14. Sex Packets
13. Glint
12. DMZ
11. Vitameatavegamin
10. Comanapracil
9. Gleemonex
8. Teamocil
7. Repressitol
6. Morphling
5. Novril
4. Focusyn
3. Aslan
2. Abulinix
1. NZT-48

Is the Internet making you smarter or dumber? Yes.