Profile in Trivia

     I was talking to a friend the other day (actually, my best friend, herein referred to as Rainbow Trout) and he asked me what was the deal in San Juan Hell with all the

verbiage underneath my profile picture. Well, no one's ever asked me that before--I suspect no one's ever noticed it before-- but I suppose I should explain for his benefit, and for anyone else too shy to point out out that my new clothes look just like my birthday suit.

Novelist–well, that's the easy one. Novel-writing is what you do when you hang up your apron after twenty-five years tending bar.

Kibbitzer–You may be familiar with this one. Let's say you're playing a fame of chess, or poker, or Monopoly, or really any game that's not Candy Land. There is inevitably a guy standing behind you who is not in the game, looking over your shoulder and giving you horrendously bad advice on your next move. That, my friend, is a kibbitzer.

Raconteur–French for a story-teller, especially one particularly witty or amusing. From this you may gather that French is the last refuge of the egotist.

Homo Ludens–A term coined by Dutch theorist Johan Huizenga, used to explore the play element in culture. The literal meaning is Man Playing. This is my species.

Sans-culotte—Also French, and I wanted to include flaneur and croque-monsieur as well, but I ran out of space. Sans-culotte literally means pantless, but before you get the idea that I'm hanging out in the altogether  (I might be and I might not), a bit of further

explanation. The sans-culottes were the lumpenproletariat* at the heart of the French Revolution, the ones Marie Antoinette wanted to eat cake. They were radical democrats, sort of like Bernie Sanders with the mittens off. They did wear trousers--they just didn't sport the fashionable silk knee-pants of the aristos. This is my political stance.

Tralfamadorian–if you know you Vonnegut, you know the Tralfamadorians, little aliens who look like plumber's friends, with a hand where their head should be, in which is set a single eye. They also live in four dimensions, which means that they can see all of time--and choose, quite sensibly, to live in the good times. This is my philosophical stance.

Dylan Thomist– is my own coinage, taken from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, especially in homage to his great poem The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower (written when he was only 19) that expresses an intense identification with all of creation. This is my religious stance.

So there you have it--a rare example of tedious shorthand. I hope it was worth it.

*Lumpenproletariat--Marx's term for the class of beggars, thieves, and prostitutes below the proletariat proper.

Stephen Dobyns

 

“Hesitancy is the surest destroyer of talent. One cannot be timorous and reticent, one must be original and loud. New metaphors, new rhythms, new expressions of emotion can only spring from unhindered gall. Nothing should interfere with that intuition--not the fear of appearing stupid, nor of offending somebody, nor jeopardizing publication, nor being trivial. The intuition must be as 

unhindered as a karate chop.”

― Stephen Dobyns

Goodreads Gods

 Well, my Goodreads giveaway is over. 2800 people vied for ten copies of my autographed novel. There must have been blood in the streets.

 And I thought I'd contact the winners to see if they wanted any particular inscription.  The personal touch, you know? And I did contact a couple of them. But then I got this message from the Goodreads gods:

`

Well, fair enough. I don't want to spam anybody. But if there's a chance in hell any of the winners read this post and would like a personalized note, contact me sooner than later. Congratulations! I never win these things.

Do You Know This Man?

 Of course you do. You've seen this picture of him in every tasteful little coffee-shop or bistro you've ever frequented. It's so ubiquitous that it's almost invisible. And there's his name right on the poster, Aristide Bruant. French guy, right?

You might even know that the poster is the work of Toulouse Lautrec, the little guy, the godfather of posters. 

But do you know Aristide Bruant, who was anything but tasteful? As a matter of fact, he was the Andrew Dice Clay/ Ozzie Osborne of his time. He was an outlandish cabaret owner whose main attraction was himself, entertaining his customers by parading on the bar top, singing and insulting everyone who came to see him, and everyone was the bourgeois, slumming it up in dangerous Montmartre (or La Butte, as the hilly region of Paris was called). And the bar he packed them in at was The Mirliton.

The what?

The Mirliton, which basically means "the kazoo" in French. It's also a favorite vegetable in Cajun cooking, which caused me no end of trouble along about the third draft of The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter.

But maybe we'd better back up, to the bar where Bruant made his name: 

Le Chat Noir in Montmartre, the ur-nightclub, which I know you've heard of, because once again, you've seen the poster--probably in that same cool little bistro, just across from the poster of Bruant. Bruant became so well known there that when the club closed, he opened his own--at the very same site. The walls were decorated with Lautrec's masterworks, which the bourgeois crowd mainly ignored. Lautrec held court there most nights--until some place The Moulin Rouge opened up down the street.

Here's how I imagined the place in The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter:

This then was the Cabaret Le Mirliton, just one of several down-at-the-heels establishments pocking the Boulevard Rochechouart that promised song and dance and bonhomie, or alternately enough noxious drink to make the first three superfluous. 

Le Mirliton was of the first kind. As soon as we were inside the door, we were greeted by smoke and noise and the booming voice of the proprietor himself. 

“My God, look at these two! Have the sewers backed up all the way to Montmartre?”

There was Bruant, striding up and down the top of the bar in the same costume we’d seen in the posters, a gamekeeper’s outfit with a scarlet shirt and scarf, an opera cape and wide-brimmed black hat. He pointed a rattan cane at us and said, “See how they gawk? Like sheep about to be sheared! Mutton-heads!”

Interior of Le Mirliton by Louis Anquetin

 

St. Lazare, a song by Bruant