Works & Days
Bill Luoma
publisher: Hard Press Editions, 1998
isbn: 1-88909-728-4
price: $15
Luoma's Works & Days is a quiet, almost mercurial, masterpiece about the living of a life with "lazy philosophy" in world that is as static and eternal as a circuit-board, a world populated by countless baseball players dead and alive, countless bridges and street names, maps that work but can't be followed, priorities never realized in several states and small towns, and a circle of friends that never arrives and yet never leaves, as if even their most ephemeral, ridiculous conversations had the same weighty status as the immortal bon-mots of Samuel Johnson.
As a successor to the tradition of the Beat style road-novel, one notices immediately the lack of any mystical attitude taken toward travel, nor any sense of differing properties between what was once the frontier West and the industrial, civilized East -- Hawaii, where "every pretty language on Earth is spoken," may be the closest one gets to Rimbaud's Africa, the feminine void of Western civilization.
One might almost believe that Luoma and his altering band of misfits never actually go anywhere; at the same time, their place in America is clearly that of the "edge," but of a particularly "Gen-X" and none-too-dangerous variety -- it is simply where one must retreat to maintain any sort of live contact with the "other," one's friends and lovers.
Characters named simply Douglass, Brian, Marlene, Steve, Jennifer, "an ump named Norm" (one is never too sure, in fact, who is traveling, who is being visited, though certainly several of the characters take turns driving the car) and probably a hundred others are both distinctive yet seem also exchangeable; they are all part of the dominating episteme that is Luoma's world, and on reading it one senses that nothing really makes sense to Luoma unless it has been rerouted through the perceptions of one of his friends, or through the critical mass of a self-replicating "in joke."
There is a subtle wisdom to Luoma's formulations, and minor changes in standard word-choices -- something he could have picked up from a poet like Coolidge for whom word replacement is the essence of alternative perception -- give the writing a beautiful, mildly subversive texture:
Ceres always has a boyfriend with long hair when Brian calls her or she's watching the olympics. Her boyfriend is usually in Japan. I never know why people in love spend so much time apart when they could be dead in two years. I called her serious a couple of times, but that wasn't very funny. Her real name is barbara.
[21]
On the other hand, Luoma has clear ties to the "precisionist" art of Marianne Moore, Williams, and the painter Charles Scheeler, which relies on a distanced, objective approach to describing visual and social phenomenon, as if what was happening "outside" one's perceiving head were the work of several well-oiled machines.
Hanging over most of the work, and certainly the central sequence "My Trip to New York," is the presence of Luoma's late wife, the poet Helena Bennett -- Helena's death figures in several ways, as a destabilization of the general community and its warm system of relations, but also, since the coldness has set in, as the source of his own textual breakdown: "the narrator has trouble with spelling and capitalization since his wife died." One can almost read "My Trip to New York" as a testament to arrested development, a refusal to go on but "I will go on" in the Beckettian absurdist sense, but of the slacker-existential variety that one associates with late New York School writing.
Works & Days operates, then, as an outward spreading text that hopes to maintain engagement with as many people and memories as possible, and though it is centrifugal it has a focused sense of urgency. It also becomes an anthropological text, a study of the culture of a particular group of people which may not, in fact, be too spectacular, but who, because of the singularities of time and place, are due eternal contemplation.
What Luoma, who works as a computer programmer, runs up against is the breakdown or inherent comedies of system -- in both the "world" and the "textual" sense -- a breakdown most pronounced in his scattered affections for baseball players of both minor and major league variety:
Sometimes it's hard to balance your love of a team with your devotion to individual players. I don't know how to feel when one of my hitters plays one of my pitchers.
[56]
The breakdown in textual system is most humorously displayed in the "annotations" he wrote for the French translators of "My Trip to New York," for whom he explains such things as: "naughty: sexually innovative," "Being tall: she is very tall," and:
little nipper: the name of the dog in the RCA logo, and electronics company. nipper is a cute little doggie. RCA used to have its headquarters in Albany, NY with a big statue of nipper on the top of the building. Nipper is still there. RCA is not.
[tk]
Sportscenter, a weekly program that gives you all the stats and trade information on your favorite team, operates as a sort of alternate religion, as when he writes of "relating to Sportscenter and tracking your rotisserie team," or when he writes (pushing the structural subtext of all their travels):
We drove down I-70 getting low on gas and it was late. We figured we could hold out until I-70 made a T into I-15. We made it to the T but there was no gas. The next town was beaver and it was 20 miles away. There were hills to go over and coast down the other side. We made it to beaver with 0.2 gallons of gas in the tank. Cedar City was our goal, but pulling in late meant no sportscenter. In the morning we wrote postcards, picked up some film and headed for Las Vegas.
[tk]
Such writing alludes to the precision that the NASA scientists used to get Apollo 13 around the moon (the presence of panoptic satellites, though rarely named, runs throughout this text), but it is jutted up against the comical misadventurousness of the Keystone Cops, not to mention the inherently unguided, impractical nature of New Sentence writing.
Luoma's tone -- he uses it through most of the pieces in Works & Days, such as the "Ear Inn Reading Reports" ("Drew Gardner began to read. Once he said devil. Another time the mind of god."), comes from that eternally-reflected-upon space in which the body and its central emanation, speech, dies in the form the of text -- where the grapheme, as a mark on the page, confesses to the truth that all that you are reading is merely the trace of some bodily experienced spectacle, and that the body and the text are incompatible.
Hence Luoma's call for more naked bodies at one point in the text, and the poignant elegy he writes for his wife which appears in the annotations, some of which reads:
When I am feeling depressed and anxious sullen
all you have to do is take your clothes off
and all is wiped away revealing life's tenderness [...]
sick logic and feeble reasoning are cured
by the perfect symmetry of your arms and legs [...]
[tk]
Works & Days is like a map for a possible evisceration, via constant exchange of "spectacular things" among loved friends, of the alienation that capitalist culture and the need for individuation inflicts on our warm imperfect selves. Its logic, and its most developed paragraphs, leads up to one answer, humor, but that's because the break in the chain of economic and technological causality is the human itself, which can't help but be funny because it is often unexpected and rather out of place.
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