Read Online The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories by Bruce McAllister - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Bruce McAllister
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times Dr. Plankt says that he wants to take me away from Cypress Street and put me in a better—
Wait! The computer just typed something! It works just like a typewriter but without anyone’s hands on it. The words it is typing are from Dad’s head! Dr. Plankt has the piece of paper in his hands now. He’s showing it to three doctors. Now he’s showing it to Mom. Mom is starting to cry! I’ve never seen her cry before. I want to see the words from Dad’s head!
Another doctor is looking at me, and he has the paper now. I say, “Can I see it! Can I see it?” He looks at me again, and I think he knows who I am because Dr. Plankt talks about me a lot to everyone. I must be important. I don’t like the look on this other doctor’s face. It’s like the look Uncle Josh gets when he’s feeling sad about something. This other doctor closes his eyes for a minute and comes over to me with the paper. The paper, the paper! The words from Dad’s head. The words are:
OH OH
MY MY
WIFE! SON!
I I
CERTAINLY CERTAINLY
DO DO
NOT NOT
WANT WANT
TO TO
LIVE! DIE!
When I squint my eyes and look at these words from Dad’s head, they look like a man in a hat with his arms out, kind of like Dad—except that there’s a split down the middle of this man.
It’s funny, but I know just how Dad feels.
The Man Inside
Story Notes
I’ve always been a great fan of what in the ’70s was called “intermedia”—the ways graphic elements and text can be brought together on the page for synergistic impact. When I wrote this story as a junior in college, I hadn’t yet been exposed to experimental writing—the “intermedia,” “found poetry,” “concrete poetry” of the ’70s—though I would be a few years later through good friend, poet, and fellow Claremont alum, William L. Fox ( Driving to Mars, Terra Antarctica, many others). Bill would go on to win Guggenheims and grants from NASA and become one the country’s major writers on how human beings perceive and interact with their environments—but his West Coast Poetry Review and WCPR Press, in the meantime, I’d be involved with editorially for a number of years (publishing, as we did, people like Richard Kostelanetz, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Raymond Federman, and other major experimental poets). That interest in “intermedia” I dragged with me to graduate school, to that MFA program, where I tried at one point (since we were required to take a class in “a second art form”) to see if fiction could indeed be combined with graphics—“text with visuals” in an integrated storyline way. It would be tricky, I knew, because the human brain experiences the semantic symbolism of language very differently from visual images—that is, “suspension of disbelief” would be different for the two media—but what I hadn’t expected was the reactions the proposal got from the two different departments. The novelist I suggested the project to, showing him an example of what I had in mind (“This is the house that Jack built: [show house]. This is the house Jack should have built: [show other house].”), grimaced and said, “Why in God’s name would you want to put pictures in a text? It’s distracting.” The painter I then proposed it to said, of course, “That font is ugly.” As I said, it’s a tricky thing to combine media—or to combine them well—but the best intermedia artists/writers, like the best experimental novelists and performance artists and conceptual artists, do pull it off. Compared to their efforts, this little story—a tiny thing by a very young man—isn’t much; but, hey, it does prove I had that “concrete poetry” impulse in me long before graduate school or I wouldn’t, on that cloudy, forlorn day in Claremont, California, have seen “The Man Inside” as the very visual thing it is. The indebtedness of this story in other ways to Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon
Wait! The computer just typed something! It works just like a typewriter but without anyone’s hands on it. The words it is typing are from Dad’s head! Dr. Plankt has the piece of paper in his hands now. He’s showing it to three doctors. Now he’s showing it to Mom. Mom is starting to cry! I’ve never seen her cry before. I want to see the words from Dad’s head!
Another doctor is looking at me, and he has the paper now. I say, “Can I see it! Can I see it?” He looks at me again, and I think he knows who I am because Dr. Plankt talks about me a lot to everyone. I must be important. I don’t like the look on this other doctor’s face. It’s like the look Uncle Josh gets when he’s feeling sad about something. This other doctor closes his eyes for a minute and comes over to me with the paper. The paper, the paper! The words from Dad’s head. The words are:
OH OH
MY MY
WIFE! SON!
I I
CERTAINLY CERTAINLY
DO DO
NOT NOT
WANT WANT
TO TO
LIVE! DIE!
When I squint my eyes and look at these words from Dad’s head, they look like a man in a hat with his arms out, kind of like Dad—except that there’s a split down the middle of this man.
It’s funny, but I know just how Dad feels.
The Man Inside
Story Notes
I’ve always been a great fan of what in the ’70s was called “intermedia”—the ways graphic elements and text can be brought together on the page for synergistic impact. When I wrote this story as a junior in college, I hadn’t yet been exposed to experimental writing—the “intermedia,” “found poetry,” “concrete poetry” of the ’70s—though I would be a few years later through good friend, poet, and fellow Claremont alum, William L. Fox ( Driving to Mars, Terra Antarctica, many others). Bill would go on to win Guggenheims and grants from NASA and become one the country’s major writers on how human beings perceive and interact with their environments—but his West Coast Poetry Review and WCPR Press, in the meantime, I’d be involved with editorially for a number of years (publishing, as we did, people like Richard Kostelanetz, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Raymond Federman, and other major experimental poets). That interest in “intermedia” I dragged with me to graduate school, to that MFA program, where I tried at one point (since we were required to take a class in “a second art form”) to see if fiction could indeed be combined with graphics—“text with visuals” in an integrated storyline way. It would be tricky, I knew, because the human brain experiences the semantic symbolism of language very differently from visual images—that is, “suspension of disbelief” would be different for the two media—but what I hadn’t expected was the reactions the proposal got from the two different departments. The novelist I suggested the project to, showing him an example of what I had in mind (“This is the house that Jack built: [show house]. This is the house Jack should have built: [show other house].”), grimaced and said, “Why in God’s name would you want to put pictures in a text? It’s distracting.” The painter I then proposed it to said, of course, “That font is ugly.” As I said, it’s a tricky thing to combine media—or to combine them well—but the best intermedia artists/writers, like the best experimental novelists and performance artists and conceptual artists, do pull it off. Compared to their efforts, this little story—a tiny thing by a very young man—isn’t much; but, hey, it does prove I had that “concrete poetry” impulse in me long before graduate school or I wouldn’t, on that cloudy, forlorn day in Claremont, California, have seen “The Man Inside” as the very visual thing it is. The indebtedness of this story in other ways to Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon
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