Modern Problems

By Dorian Taylor

A book of experimental fiction left to me by a writer who published in my experimental ezine The Blue Review in the mid to late 90s. It consists of a poem, 17 pieces and a novella. Taylor sent an entire box, I will get to the pieces in it as time permits. So far I have two novels I am finishing up with, expect them soon. The work is different, if you're tired of same old, it might be your antidote

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sangraal Inc.
• Release date: Sep 11, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452313757

Dorian Taylor

The box came via the Post Office on a Thursday morning. The return address carried no name just a P. O. Box in Ventura California. It contained a sealed envelope and a dozen big ringed binders filled with neat handwriting. The envelope was addressed to me and marked "Personal and Confidential." It contained the following: Dear Rick, I suppose this is a surprise to you, but, for the life (or now death) of me, I couldn't find anyone else in the world to take it. You are the only person who ever paid me to write anything, my only editor or publisher. I suppose that you can throw it out, I know how hard it is to publish things. However, I had the idea that you might one day revive The Blue Review and, since for almost four years I was a contributor, I would hate not to be a part of that. The binders contain the miscellaneous writings of Dorian Taylor, the name by which you knew me. It is quite an improbable name and actually the name of the hero of the novel Top Forty, which you will find in the third binder. I am not going to give you my real name, because I have always rather despised it and, if by some miracle my writings find their way into the public eye, I would prefer they be under the pseudonym I created for that purpose. In Yard Sale, the novella in the first binder, I wrote the following: "All human endeavor resolves itself into group activity. The artist who paints alone in a garret cannot exist alone. In order to secure what he needs to paint, canvas, brushes and the like, he has to know a merchant who sells these things. Having painted, he must then sell his painting. In order to do this, he needs to know gallery owners. So it is with all things within society. It is never enough to be good, or even great. One must be both able and willing to join a group in order to enter society. Van Gogh, arguably the greatest painter of all time, at least the most expensive, was never able to do this. It was left, therefore, to a group of people to discover his paintings, and sell them, after the impediment of his physical presence was removed from the scene. Because Vincent did not cultivate the acquaintance of gallery owners, he painted beneath the glass floor. He could clearly see other painters of lesser talent and greater social skills, exhibit and sell paintings. He saw, but did not understand. Painting is incidental to success in painting. The social skills required to convince gallery owners to display and sell paintings are the prerequisite. The curious feature of this is that the best artists are often anti-social. This leaves any thoughtful person to imagine that the best of art goes out with the rest of the trash just before the estate sale. More than likely, this is the case." Since I have always been a bit unconventional I decided to change this formula a bit and send my artistic production to the only person who ever seemed to like it. You are, of course, invested with all it's rights etc. The only favors I would ask is that you dedicate any book to Valerie, with the poem I have included as the first page in the first binder, and that you credit my writing to Dorian Taylor. From 1997 to 2001, I edited a literary ezine called The Blue Review and Dorian Taylor had been one of my most popular contributors. I hadn't heard from him (or her) since I stopped publishing the ezine and I honestly know nothing about him (or her). The box was a total surprise, and a wonderful one. Whoever Dorian Taylor is, or possibly was as the letter seemed to indicate that he (or she) is no longer with us, he (or she) was a very inventive, interesting and enjoyable writer.

Book preview

Modern Problems

by

Dorian Taylor

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Sangraal Books

on Smashwords

Modern Problems

Copyright © 1997, 1998, 2009 by Sangraal, Inc.

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Dedication

To Valerie -- Last Seen June, 1965

Somehow, like the scent of morning, she remains.

Amongst the yesterdays where memory wanes.

Her walk, her look, her wide eyes, stay

In the mind where yesterdays decay.

Through the years, somehow, she remains.

Yesterday fades, and less memories it contains.

But years do not touch her, she remains.

Her hand in mine in the glow of youth,

Remains forever as constant truth.

In quiet moments, in my mind, she remains.

Old, as youth and childish love, she remains.

Yesterday's sunshine in today's quiet rains.

An old man's memory of that first love, not faded

In a mind where memory is gone or jaded.

A trick of the mind, forever, she remains.

Introduction

by

Richard Russell

The box came via the Post Office on a Thursday morning. The return address carried no name just a P. O. Box in Ventura California. It contained a sealed envelope and a dozen big ringed binders filled with neat handwriting. The envelope was addressed to me and marked Personal and Confidential. It contained the following:

Dear Rick,

I suppose this is a surprise to you, but, for the life (or now death) of me, I couldn't find anyone else in the world to take it. You are the only person who ever paid me to write anything, my only editor or publisher. I suppose that you can throw it out, I know how hard it is to publish things. However, I had the idea that you might one day revive The Blue Review and, since for almost four years I was a contributor, I would hate not to be a part of that. The binders contain the miscellaneous writings of Dorian Taylor, the name by which you knew me. It is quite an improbable name and actually the name of the hero of the novel Top Forty, which you will find in the third binder. I am not going to give you my real name, because I have always rather despised it and, if by some miracle my writings find their way into the public eye, I would prefer they be under the pseudonym I created for that purpose.

In Yard Sale, the novella in the first binder, I wrote the following:

All human endeavor resolves itself into group activity. The artist who paints alone in a garret cannot exist alone. In order to secure what he needs to paint, canvas, brushes and the like, he has to know a merchant who sells these things. Having painted, he must then sell his painting. In order to do this, he needs to know gallery owners. So it is with all things within society. It is never enough to be good, or even great. One must be both able and willing to join a group in order to enter society. Van Gogh, arguably the greatest painter of all time, at least the most expensive, was never able to do this. It was left, therefore, to a group of people to discover his paintings, and sell them, after the impediment of his physical presence was removed from the scene. Because Vincent did not cultivate the acquaintance of gallery owners, he painted beneath the glass floor. He could clearly see other painters of lesser talent and greater social skills, exhibit and sell paintings. He saw, but did not understand. Painting is incidental to success in painting. The social skills required to convince gallery owners to display and sell paintings are the prerequisite. The curious feature of this is that the best artists are often anti-social. This leaves any thoughtful person to imagine that the best of art goes out with the rest of the trash just before the estate sale. More than likely, this is the case.

Since I have always been a bit unconventional I decided to change this formula a bit and send my artistic production to the only person who ever seemed to like it. You are, of course, invested with all it's rights etc. The only favors I would ask is that you dedicate any book to Valerie, with the poem I have included as the first page in the first binder, and that you credit my writing to Dorian Taylor.

From 1997 to 2001, I edited a literary ezine called The Blue Review and Dorian Taylor had been one of my most popular contributors. I hadn't heard from him (or her) since I stopped publishing the ezine and I honestly know nothing about him (or her). The box was a total surprise, and a wonderful one. Whoever Dorian Taylor is, or possibly was as the letter seemed to indicate that he (or she) is no longer with us, he (or she) was a very inventive, interesting and enjoyable writer.

Editing The Blue Review, I attempted to focus on experimental writing, whether fiction, non-fiction or poetry. My most popular writers were Dorian Taylor and Harrison. I never had the slightest idea who lurked behind these pseudonyms, and now I rather regret the fact that I did not find more about my contributors than I did.

Taylor's literary legacy, of which I suppose I am now the executor, consists of several binders of fiction, a binder of philosophical writing, and two binders of poetry. There are clues, or red herrings, scattered throughout the works, for example, Taylor seems very familiar with California, New York City, Albuquerque and the area around Tuscola, Indiana. While I cannot be sure, much of the writing is from a male perspective, so I conclude, at least in my own mind that he was a man, and have therefore decided to bestow the male pronoun on him. He appears to be of the generations born in the nineteen forties, the war children or the baby boomers. The dedication poem To Valerie- Last Seen June, 1965 would seem to indicate that he graduated high school then which would mean he was born in 1946 or 47.

It is, in a way, somewhat self-defeating to try to figure out who he is, or was. The true measure of a writer of any kind as that he is undated, and unknown except for those rearrangements of the dictionary he cares to leave behind him. Though I do suppose that I will continue to wonder, conjecture and possibly investigate. The investigation is, of course open to the reader. Perhaps, in reading, you will find a fuller and more complete understanding of Dorian Taylor than I have been able to achieve. I can merely give it all a professional edit, query, send and gather form letters in the hope that readers will have that opportunity.

Jamie's Legs

From all that he could conger up in his mind in later years, all that really presented itself to his memory were Jamie's legs. He was seventeen, and it was his first party as a pledge of Sigma Delta Phi. He was drinking a beer, but that was not as strange as it might have been, as he had been drinking beer at parties and in drive-ins ever since Nicky Chapel got a fake I.D. two years earlier. The party was a mixer in which the older members of a fraternity donate their house and pledges while the older members of a sorority add their pledges. What exactly this is supposed to do, no one is quite sure, as the older members leave early in prearranged pairs and the pledges, left totally without supervision, get too drunk to fully recall the eventual outcome.

She was sitting on the floor between two other girls. The nearest to him was very well proportioned, without being thin. This, of course prevented him seeing the other two, with the exception of their legs. She was wearing inch high heels with a T-strap across the top of her foot. Her legs were thinner than those of the other two girls, but, at least in his mind, the best proportioned. In his mind, nearly thirty years later, the initial sight of those legs was a crystal clear as if it had happened just moments before.

Occasionally, on television or out in the real world, he would see a pair of legs that reminded him of Jamie's legs; and if he was not too busy, or preoccupied, he would try to remember Jamie. He had the idea that she had been thin, though he admitted to himself that the thin might have been only in her legs. He would try to recall the size of the tits he licked and sucked in the drive-in, but the size of them, or exactly how they looked under a blouse, eluded him. She wore her hair down, and long, he remembered that, though not the exact color, somewhere between dirty blond and mousy brown he would eventually settle on. Her eyes? He had given up trying to remember them, or any other feature of her face many years ago.

She wore a mini-skirt to the mixer, so, in his mind, a miniskirt was as much a part of her as anything else he could remember about her. He did recall that on one date, she wore jeans, but that was aberration he rarely considered. For over three decades, in his mind, she wore a black mini-skirt, tan nylons and black T-strapped one-inch heels.

Neither of them had anymore than a dorm room, so they fucked in the back seat of a nineteen-fifty-seven Ford Fairlaine 500. He never really recalled the exact feeling of it, fucking being more or less the same girl to girl to woman. He did, however, recall running his hand down the inside of her thigh to her knee.

Jamie was homesick for Montana. She went home for Christmas and never returned. He went on to other girls, with other attributes. And now, he sat at the bar, looking at girl's legs, and strangely, missing hers.

When Barbara Went to the Ladies Room

She was a homely little girl from Nebraska. Wild red hair and a dead white skin with way too many freckles. A hard lean, nearly skinny body, without the curves and the softness men expect in women.

We met in a theater group. Acted together off-off Broadway, showcase productions. She was primarily a dancer; in fact one might even say that she was a dance.

She had a quality when she moved that seemed to pick up the spirit of what was in the air. She would dance to the sounds of the city walking down the street.

Standing still she was a homely little girl from Nebraska, in motion she was Terpsichore, the Goddess of the dance, and she came from Mount Olympus.

There is or maybe was, a bar off of Washington Square, situated in the basement. It had chess boards painted on it's tables, and the chief reason for going there was to discuss philosophy, or literature, or maybe play a game of chess, while sipping the French liquid fire called Pernod.

Because it was near an off-off Broadway Theater and because I loved to discuss philosophy, I often found myself there in the early 1970s. It was not a place to bring a date; there wasn't even a jukebox. It was a place where serious thoughts muddled themselves as the Pernod took hold, a place where every evening all of the ills of the world were cured and life reordered into paradise.

It had been a torturous rehearsal of an avant garde absurdist exercise by some denizen of the alphabet avenues. The New York streets were raw with icy slashes of February rain. Both Barbara and I were drained, cold and tired, and my little bar was just around the corner.

We shrugged out of the soggy coats that had failed utterly to keep us dry and sat with my usual group, deeply engaged, as always, in the mental masturbation of philosophical thought.

Barbara sipped her Pernod and absorbed more than listened. It was as if she absorbed the sounds into a rhythm that played through her as she picked up the glass or moved the cocktail napkin.

She excused herself, without even the customary explanation with its fine euphemistic embellishments of either a little girl or a sand box. And as she walked across the bar the conversation stilled. By the time she reached the door marked Ladies, the bar sat in dead silence.

Almost stunned, we sat that way until she emerged and walked back to the table. Every eye followed her as she sat, and picked up the glass of vivid yellow liquid.

There are those who do not believe in Gods or Goddesses. Who cannot accept the idea that the world is full of supernatural wonder, terror and beauty. None of whom you will find among those who were there, in that little bar that night.

Because, you see, we witnessed a Goddess. Barbara had absorbed philosophy, it's rhythm, it's melody, and she danced it across the floor of that bar on a cold and raw night in February. Every step was a pattern solved, a question answered and an enigma fulfilled. And everyone there was changed. Not one of us was the same person when we left as we had been when we entered.

The Greeks called her Tersichore, I knew her as Barbara. And she made me believe in magic.

Through Fred and Wilma, Darkly

There is a magic about some places, even when the magic there is long past it's prime. Like a Hermit crab, it crawls into a new shell of time, and in it's new clothes passes us by unrecognized. Greenwich Village in the seventies was such a place.

It was Jade's idea. Jade you can be assured is a stage name, but then I never knew her real name. Residence above a theater, and some small parts off-off-Broadway brought us together from time to time, and somehow sharing natural blond hair made us seem to be a couple, which we were for only a single evening.

The play we were working was a one woman show basically, she acted, I directed. An experimental piece set in a bedroom that featured a love story; a soliloquy of a courtship, a marriage and the discovery of betrayal by a lady unobtrusively holding a revolver before a policeman silently enters to take it from her and discover her husband on the bed.

She played it well, but the idea was wearing as thin as the audience in its second week. There is always something discouraging in a good play that no one really wants to see. Many of the best plays are that way. There is something too real about them for them to be viewed as entertainment. They become too much like life, so much so that audiences cannot believe they are the product of imagination. And so much of the enjoyment of theater is the opportunity to suspend your disbelief, which is impossible if there is no disbelief to suspend.

In a showcase production, the only pay is a cut of the box-office. And when you breathe life into what is essentially life, both the pay and your hopes dwindle away into a species of depression that cannot be relieved even in long bouts with wine, gaiety, and evenings that spread out to dawn.

Jade and I were sharing this depression in a small bar across from the Public Theater on Lafayette, when she was inspired to go see him.

Laws in the Greenwich Village of the early seventies existed more as suggestion than actuality. There were always places to go after four AM when the bars were supposed locked and barred by law. So we were able to purchase three bottles of a French red wine, the homage he preferred, to spread out before the most famous unknown writer in America, despite the laws that forbade a bar to sell wine that way.

He was known to have his office hours in the evenings, and welcome anyone with something intoxicating to drink and some knowledge of who he was.

He denigrated his own work, and often himself when anyone in the media showed up to interview him. He hated the publisher that made him famous, and hid from fame much as Jade and I were hiding from our lack of it.

The lock on his front door was broken, as was the buzzer system, so we made our way to his second floor door. When we knocked the door opened itself and he was sitting across the room, trying without success to light a roach