Necropsy In E Minor

By Alan Ramón Clinton

Shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize, Necropsy in E Minor is the tale of a young college professor who sits down to write what he calls a “memoir,” but which really only records the past six months of his life (with numerous digressions), and ends, with the last line, after a richly devastating encounter, at the moment of writing.

Who is this person? That is kept a secret, despite the fact that he is writing for no audience other than himself. His name does not appear, but those of others do, necessary to ensure the accuracy of the anagrams and puns that have helped map his universe since he found “The Note.” Given his disposal to interpret this anonymous confessional/fantasy story, an endeavor undertaken with the firm belief that it was written for him, by someone he knows, and purposefully left for him to find.

Having abandoned the scholarly methodologies and subjects that would actually allow him to attain tenure, our professor on the lam performs all manner of linguistic analyses of the note, drives around the rim of Florida (the pilgrimage method, fittingly circular), desperately uses inkblots, the I Ching, and tarot cards for practical advice, adopts a cat named Sanity, becomes an amateur ornithologist, develops a theory of “instantaneous architecture,” endures a shamanic experience, and eggs himself on with the hope that, no matter what happens, his “memoir” might one day be found by archaeologists and thereby provide a key to human life at the close of the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452444987

Alan Ramón Clinton

Alan Ramón Clinton currently lectures at Santa Clara University in California.He is the author of a scholarly monograph, Mechanical Occult: Automatism, Modernism, and the Specter of Politics (Peter Lang, 2004) and a volume of poetry, Horatio Alger’s Keys (BlazeVox, 2008).This fall he will appear as guest editor for a volume of 2nd Ave Poetry entitled New Poetics of Magic.

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NECROPSY IN E MINOR

Alan Ramón Clinton

Open Books

Necropsy In E Minor ©2011 by Alan Ramón Clinton. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, to include electronic and mechanical means, without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Cover art water... by Ljiljana Romanovic

For more information about Alan Ramón Clinton, please visit www.open-bks.com

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Curtain Call: A Metaphorical Memoir

(Open Books, 2010)

Contents

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About The Author

Other Open Books Titles You Might Enjoy

1

The bottom is a thick forest surrounding a calm lake. The root-like appearance is the reflection of the tall, pine trees. Above it is a floating castle where the King of Storms reigns. The shoots from the castle are tall metallic poles waving the kingdom's flags. Between the two is the circular, vibrant sun setting.

Last night I dreamed I was a slut. I led on one guy, teasing him with soft whispers, desiring eyes and careful touches. Then I went with another guy. The whole time I thought, What about Mike? But I just continued. When I awoke, I wondered whether it was the King of Storms, who rules above the forest, who caused me to have these thoughts. It is he who reveals the great strikes of thunderous emotions hidden within a thick plasticity of insecurity and fear of rejection.

Even with all the power possessed by the King of Storms, there is a place below his castle that he does not control. This place is a thick forest surrounding a calm lake. Although the forest is thick, only the tallest pine trees, those that are best able to cover up the confusion, reflect on the tranquil lake. The clearly defined reflection of the pine tree represents my first personality. Plainly dressed and kind, she covers up my emotional agitations and urges. Her light brown and smooth hair flows softly into the dark, settled lake, in order to appear secure and pure.

My other personality lives under the King's reign in the floating castle. Here she is a turbulent moon-ridden girl or old woman or both. The strong emotions obstruct my ability to distinguish which one she truly is. They are wearing dirty, torn clothing, yet they adorn it with such beautiful embellishments as feathers and opals. They are unafraid to manifest emotional agitation, not caring whether it is rude or not. In the castle, the King allows the electricity to flow between the metallic flagpoles. He ignites a thunderstorm of extreme emotions, triggering strange songs of sin and wickedness, loud laughter and painful crying to pour freely. Society suffocates people by teaching them how to inhale their emotions, without teaching them to exhale. There is still the undergrowth of confusion as we struggle to be the tallest pine trees. Those who paint their hair pink have fears of revealing deep emotions. It is when the King of Storms finds that one is vulnerable that he will let a vibrant sun set, blinding one from the superficially imposed serenity and exposing us to real emotion.

—Anonymous

Suppose you had encountered the previous note on your way to class, lying under a pine tree encased in one of those brick terrariums that universities are so fond of, would you assume that it was intended for you? At first this might seem the most unlikely of possibilities, but is it? If you happened to be walking along a route you traveled almost daily, in a community made of subroutines, then it’s likely that someone who also travels this route daily wrote the message. This person may have watched you, may know that you go to class early so that you can dawdle, look at newspapers, flowers, and secret notes. This person may even know you, know that you need to carefully consider the words written therein, but only if you came upon the note surreptitiously and assumed you rescued it from the maw of death. As you can see in this case, what at first seems to be an impossibility, suddenly takes on a statistical existence that, if a bit frail, is by no means ghostly.

What is more unlikely is that such a document, written in such a curious style, should affect you so greatly. For what first strikes you about the document is its highly eccentric style, and things that are strange seldom threaten our emotional centers. The first paragraph is indirectly explanatory, as if someone were attempting to translate an abstract painting into a sort of allegory. Then, suddenly, you feel as if you are reading some undergraduate's dream diary. Ranging from maudlin symbolism to oneiric banality, the document commits some fairly grievous sins. The theme, too, is fairly well rehearsed. Violent emotions seething underneath the cold glass of social restrictions, a dark gothic presence that threatens to make everything boil over, the piece reads like a Jane Austen novel run through a blender. And yet, I feel vindicated by the fact that what struck me about the piece was neither of these elements, but that whatever was being described was thought to be meaningful in every brick, every brush-stroke, like a dull piece of cloth suddenly bursting into a tapestry of Babel.

But just in case anything seems missing from my appraisal, I should probably describe the events that led to my attachment to the document, including any details which might have caused idiosyncratic distortions in my judgment. For despite its rather arbitrary entrance into my life, this letter (I will henceforth refer to it as a letter addressed to me) became very important to me for a while, so important that attempting to articulate those things I've never directly addressed in my own mind has created such a void that I sometimes feel unsure if I can last long enough to record the story—like Hamlet rather than Horatio. It feels like such a long walk into a white ceiling that I sometimes even take comfort in the possibility I am just vomiting specters no one will listen to anyway. As the scope of the topics I will have to explicate begin to take shape in my mind, I fear that this might be the one story I can never share with anyone. A gallery of rogue selves stand in a police line-up with secret marks of guilt in their faces. If I could tell this story and bury it at the same time, they might be granted amnesty, might even begin to understand the tiny conspiracies that made them the usual suspects. So I write on, fantasizing I'm on a ship that has become trapped by fields of ice. The monster roams freely, but his creator will be left in northern anonymity.

2

If I could think of the ideal audience for this story, it would be some configuration of those rogue selves. Once on impulse my best friend called me in the middle of the night to tell me how a dream had put him on the edge of despair, a stairwell scarred with muddy footprints. Usually you wake up from a dream and feel safer (if it was a nightmare) or more anchored (if it revealed the structure of some desire). Benton, however, had woken in the mountains after his Benzedrine crashed, and looked down to see that his home in the valley was covered in water. He had checked, and his roommate was gone. The footprints were those of the roommate and his girlfriend transporting clothes and personal things while the water was still relatively low. Perhaps they had tried to wake him, but on seeing the open bottle and the law books strewn everywhere, had thought it a lost cause. More likely, they hadn't dared disturb him even in a midnight flood. When Benton got depressed, he organized his schedule so that he wouldn't see his roommate for days, not able to risk a smile or a frivolous word. This made him feel even more like a ghost, and he oscillated between wondering if he really existed and thinking he was going to die of some disease he had caught in a careless moment. Perhaps, in the heavy rain and the dark night, the two had not even thought of Benton.

Let's see, there was something about playing it by ear, and then there was a click that echoed for a really long time and I've never taken these kind of drugs before but the phone was both really close and really far away there in my hand and then later on the floor in the dark. Six hours in the dark is a lot less time than six hours in a law book, just being extinguished easier when you know that you can't go outside because it's just too cold and dirty without any magic horses to take you instantaneously to the medical profession you abandoned. Playing it by ear is much easier when there is only one note sounding much like a footstep, no reason to trade stories with the leaves who have, on the whole, lost interest in the vestments of the coke machine. But then things started to get really bad, like a sudden drop in blood sugar. Fuck it, I say, I'll go solo, but I can't go solo. Because, after all those really good dark rooms, this is finally one of those bad ones—and shit, they are bad indeed.

Or it went something like that, might have inserted some Jim Carroll or Ted Berrigan to fill in the gaps. As soon as Benton hung up the phone I began writing down the things he said as they came to mind, like Samuel Coleridge or Horace Walpole waking up from dreams only, as it was still the middle of the night, no one was likely to come knocking. Benton's actual version may have been more or less coherent. I just felt phrases and images being glued together into a text I couldn't paraphrase, but only record. The point is that I was Benton's ideal, distant audience.

"Oh yes, there was the wonderful courtship noticing feet that were almost as tiny as mine, but I felt quite betrayed when high school started to loom large as a discotheque, not at all like the jar beat where prom and graduation wound round a metal spine like threads of a tornado and there was nothing to do but sing the hymn I had found on the street—excised from the canon no doubt—called 'Crown of Thorns.' His pathway was sorrows his pathway was sorrows his pathway was sorrows his pathway was sorrows is a rose is a rose is a rose. His chest was filled with a masquerade with all the genitals blacked out. Shit, for three years my roommate was in the other room pumping his girlfriend and I'm all alone trying not to beat off. No that's right, it wasn't a hymn but a novel about a world full of aliens trying to somehow come together and make love—called Planet Earth. Anyway, the girl kept turning the jar beat upside down until it turned into a crystal ball saying how there was no way we could ever understand what made her do it, what must have been going through her head. And I said to myself, you don't know how right you are, it was like I was stalking her inspiration. If you've got friends, don't leave pictures of them in the mailbox, bring them on too. I started laughing, but now I'm rushing down a glass tube somewhere over the ocean as seagulls seem to float on my missing energy. In an instant, in a normal office chair, I can sink a thousand miles into the earth's crust. This time I find myself in stairs as dark as only I could have the dexterity to wind up. Each step has at least one, sometimes two or three, muddy footprints that are just great for sinking. I know if I hadn't looked at her sock feet so long wet as vomit as she talked about some cute shoes (but I exclaimed that any shoes that size are cute and the bear on her sock made me say that). If it's not a sock, it's a uniform dress worn to the ball that changed everything (oh, don't look shocked; there was no glass slipper)."

You can see how Benton and I became such good friends. He's almost as maudlin as I am. To his credit, I would like to remind you that the early Cinderella myths (oh yes, there are several of them, just like the Fisher King) are often quite violent, with the stepsisters cutting off their toes to fit into the glass slipper. I don't know if Benton had any of these versions in mind when giving his monologue, but I'd like to think that he did. At any rate, it would have made a lovely poem for her, whoever she was, for Benton never mentioned her name.

3

Needless to say (is that how one of my students would begin?), Benton's call was a highly lyric event for me, and not merely because it took guts or seemed to evoke my recent failures. To tell the truth, the phone call haunted me for years afterwards, though as is the case with overdetermined reactions, I was not exactly sure why. Only now can I look back and see it as the initiating text in a slowly dawning coalescence of symptoms, a creeping horizon of awareness that love turning madness into flowers a la Romeo, Henry Miller, André Breton or whoever is a function of photogénie. Jean Epstein was one of the first to describe this form of cinephilia, which can be summarized in the following lyric from Bonjour Cinéma:

I remember this projector

which cannot lie

unveiled your face

streaming with light.

As you can see, photogénie has nothing to do with plot and everything to do with the image. And to concentrate on the image streaming with light is to allow oneself the deadliest of pleasures, bewitched by cinema's very essence. This, of course, is exactly as it should be. The Russian Structuralists claimed there were only seven different stories in existence, and Hollywood has probably whittled that down to two or three. Luis Buñuel is rumored to have constructed a board game that could predict the plot of any Hollywood film, one simple enough to be used by drunken anarchists—this after he was thrown off a set by Greta Garbo, who could apparently smell a Surrealist a mile away. My point is that no one is really concerned with the story you have to tell, since they know which one it is after a few minutes, as long as you have the proper face for telling it. This is why, if Dorian Gray really existed (and he does if you just look around you), there would be a lifetime's worth of stories to tell.

Photogénie allows cinema to enter real life since the stories are the same on both sides of the screen. As Jean Luc Godard once said, Breathless was really a documentary about Jean Seberg. So the irony is that people for whom certain actions are permissible (baroque pictures scribbled on surprising airmail) do not even need to employ such creative extremes. Such individuals merely hint at poetry and are surrounded by opportunities. On the other hand, the ugly may commit beautiful crimes for the postman and are not given the chance to explain. They may act on Nietzsche's Dionysian principles, overflowing boundaries, but their faces make them look like pointless crimes. They go on beach walks for the pain of love as eyes turn them into drifters. At times they step away from their solipsism to consider how much loneliness the handicapped must feel, then make themselves feel guilty for dwelling on their own problems, then guilty for using the disabled as mere benchmarks like the philosophers do with their poor and their animals. They never have change for the homeless who seem magnetized to them—as if fate would show them both to be cats in a parking lot. They lack the energy to sustain pity for long, much less do anything with it. Such luxuries are reserved for the photogenic.

Mere metaphors for our own existence—this is not a logical process. Still, I do

Reviews for Necropsy In E Minor

[drudmann_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I received this book as part of LibraryThing's early reviewer program. This is not an easy book to read. I don't think it was the subject matter; I have a doctorate in research psychology, and I can follow the psychoanalytic themes fairly well. This novel is written in the first person, and is highly introspective. This means a lot more telling than showing. The introspection is coming from a protagonist who could have an advanced degree in a Freudian branch of literary criticism. There is enough verbiage that it's sometimes hard to wade through: sometimes I felt like I was at a party where I wasn't understanding the conversation (didn't major in literature at an Ivy League school) or watching a movie that makes a lot of references to hip happenings that I'm too old for. Other times the writing just seemed too obtuse. Now, complex, analytical writing is fine by me--but sometimes I can tough it out, and other times I can't. It's a shame, because buried in the long paragraphs are some gems, like "You become famous, you die, and then people want your recipe for onion soup." Instead, there are lots of quick, breezy allusions, such as "This isn't Pompeii, and she wasn't tubercular. Still, you will insist on calling her Lolita, and I won't try to stop you." I simply don't know what to infer from this. John Banville is easier to read.

[dianemb_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I started out liking this book even with all the times I had to look things up or reread bits to make sure I understood what he was getting at. In the end I got bored with it. It was a little obscure in parts which made it difficult to grasp the flow of the story.

[skippyofthewired · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

You will either hate or squee in delight over this novel's use of numerous postmodern tropes. This type of story telling is either hard to engage with or fits right in with how you think. At first I found myself about to rant about all the blatant typos and spacing errors but it took me several pages to realize what I was reading through the main character's eyes. An her is reading a note or story portion or dream fragment that he picked up.The novel is loosely a memoir of a university professor in the English dept. He is writing this story down for the perfect reader which I would bet is just himself in an attempt to retain some semblance of sanity. Which coincidentally what he names a cat that he rescues. The main narrative thread is the personal and professional interests of our unnamed professor. Chapter topics spill over their boundaries and come bubbling up in later chapters. Much of this story seems to fly out of Hunter S. Thompson. The drug related escapades of our narrator's rock-star and novelist friends. Other chapters follow his artistic impulses such as ink blot painting, sculpting and instantaneous architecture. The line between his personal interests and professional ones is quite blurry. He is comfortable starting up pen-pal relationship with random strangers. The narrator is obsessed, nay haunted by his infatuation with his love interests. His love interests are his muse they are the force behind his artistic endeavors. Much of his story is an attempt to find and understand the identity of his love interest. One complaint that readers may have is that there are way too many references that the feel the need to look up. While there are many things that give the appearance of needing to be looked up Clinton does a fantastic job of weaving the main points for a reference into the plot so that looking up a reference only adds to the in joke that happening in the scene. This novel is very funny and hauntingly charming.

[jonxangela · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

As another reviewer commented, I, too, was not sure if I liked this book or not by the time I was done reading it. I tend to have a strong appreciation for those writers who choose to relay their tale in stream of consciousness form, which I certainly appreciate of Clinton's writing. I felt that, much like anyone's thoughts, there were moments that were profound, some that were beautiful, and many that were vague. With such indirect bits of story and wisdom, it is necessary for the reader to be patient and take the time to really read this book. While I feel that there is much to be pondered on from Necropsy, I agree that a second read would likely heighten my understanding --and possibly, enjoyment--of this book.

[breathtest · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It was an intelligent book, but there were far too many references to be able to sit and enjoy reading it. What with looking all the references up it can take you a day to get through only a couple of pages.

[hongske · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I admire the amount of references the writer could put in a sentence, but that's as far as my appreciation of the book goes. There are too many references to things I constantly had to look up and I can't make any sense of the story at all.

[jpporter · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I do not, as a rule, read many books more than once, especially within the same month. "Call of the Wild" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" are two that I had read a few decades ago, and re-read within the past couple of years. I've read the first four chapters of "Moby Dick" at least five times, and the whole book once. Before I even finished "Necropsy in E Minor" the first time, I knew I would have to read it again before being able to say anything intelligent or intelligible about it. This is not necessarily a good thing. Clinton is clearly writing from a "contemporary literary" style (read: "obfuscatory"), and it is clear that Clinton is well-schooled in literature (including "contemporary literary" writers), as he constantly draws comparisons between his subject and what appear to have been the literary, philosophical and psychological influences to his treatment. Lots of name dropping occurs, some of it obscure, some not even clearly related to what is going on at a given point in his narrative (I hesitate to call it a story, and Clinton himself refers to it as a "memoir"). As two previous reviewers note, there is little by way of contiguity to the narrative, and it is presented in a "flow-of-consciousness" manner that can be effective (if used carefully), but here it tends to become too much of a distraction. The underlying theme of the book is the tension that exists between our "inner" emotional selves, and our "outer," socially constrained behaviors. This is nothing new, and the topic has been central to some brilliant treatments (Dostoevsky's "The Idiot." for instance, or Hesse's "Steppenwolf"), and I couldn't help but think of Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge," especially during my first reading. Here, though, the matter is almost clumsily mishandled in the first 16-or-so chapters, and then treated unsatisfyingly but (at least) directly, for the remainder. Basic premise: the narrator (a Professor of Literature) finds an unsigned note while walking to class, one day, and he wonders if the note is a coded message of some sort written by one of his students expressing her feelings about him. He then reflects on the way things have been in his life and how he should respond to this note.There is much potential in such a plot, and I was hoping for some serious treatment of the emotional/social/professional issues involved, but no such luck. Clinton is locked in on a literary target like a scud missile, its course meandering like the most lazy of brooks.I don't want this to become a purely negative dismissal of Clinton's work (hence my insistence on a second reading), because there is a good deal of insight in the narrator's wanderings. There are places in the narrative where I felt like Clinton had struck a chord that resounded in me. On second reading, I felt better able to tie together some of the loose threads (and note that Clinton, himself, warns us more than once that the first 60% of the book contains pieces to help round out the last 40% - it's just up to the reader to discover them). I was particularly amused by continuous references to two writers who apparently had profound impact on Clinton's treatment, perhaps both philosophically and stylistically: Nietzsche and Beckett. Nietzsche was a 19th Century philosopher who (allegedly) had sex with a woman once, contracted syphilis from the encounter, and ultimately went insane. Nietzsche was influenced (in part) by Arthur Schopenhauer whose work was strongly misogynistic. I can't help but wonder if there isn't a misogynistic tint to the perspective the narrator has in "Necropsy." With regard to Beckett, Clinton makes several references to Beckett's plays, particularly "Endgame," but he never explicitly mentions the work "How It Is." At the same time, there are repeated allusions to a central feature of that story - mud. For Beckett, our lives are lived in mud, and communication made by way of jabbing one-another with a can opener. References to mud (particularly feet being covered with wet sand) recur frequently in "Necropsy"; however, I'm afraid Clinton lost the can opener.This book is not for casual reading - I found myself regularly referring to Google to make sure I was giving Clinton as fair a reading as possible. One should be prepared to read the book twice (I might, if I ever feel like poking myself in the eye with a stick, try a third reading). Only time will tell if "Necropsy In E Minor" has the substance to last as long as Beckett's works.

[lilywren · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Phew, as the previous reviewer said, you certainly do have to put a little work in when reading Necropsy in E Minor. It seemed to take me forever to read and more often than not the words just washed over me. Often I wondered whether I had read the sentence correctly as I couldn't make head nor tale of it and so would re-read and re-read. I would start reading a section and feel confident knowing who, what and where only to find half way down a page we had been transported to a completely different universe which left me wondering who, what, where? I would find I would be just fine reading a couple of pages or so and then all of sudden it felt like I must have slept for a minute or so because then I would be reading and found I really had no idea what was going on, if it was going on, who was doing what and whether it actually mattered to the story. Confused? I was at times...That said, this is a stream of consciousness and it is intentional by the author. In this respect it is a clever piece or work and it does give a sense of the fractured mind of the narrator. For that I give 3 stars alone and I appreciate that some people may find it an excellent book. I think the previous review sums up my thoughts exactly especially in relation to the stories being told here by the narrator. Yes, some are funny, some sentences are profound and some are not as successful and mere ramblings. Some sentences made me scratch my head 'huh?' whilst others just flowed so beautifully.... "Perhaps a blank sheet of paper has some memory of wood, but once you've placed the first dot or dash, the wood's stories are banished"...Writing a review on Necropsy is certainly a challenge and I have been unsure what to say. I want to say this is a brilliant piece of work, very well thought out and written but I also want to say I found it hard to read, confusing, too clever for it's own good and, oh, where was I? But then I come across sentences such as "The floor of the hospital felt like sand underneath a foot of water" and stop and think and be back to 'isn't it a great piece of work?' and then I ramble and stumble and wonder if I am asleep or awake. Oops there I go..now where was I? So I shall fall on both sides of the fence - legs over there and head over here. It is meant to be this way I think and is how the narrator would like it I think! It isn't often I finish a book and am still left wondering whether I liked it or not...I think I did though..eventually....Anyway, Necropsy in E Minor is definitely NOT a holiday/beach/quick read/no need to think too much book and it most definitely IS a ouch my head hurts/where am I/where was I/who is this/who the heck am I kind of book. Confused yet?

[evenlake_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Early in "Necropsy in E Minor" the mysterious narrator states, "photogénie has nothing to do with plot and everything to do with image." This could be said of the novel itself. Photogénie is a term from French Impressionist cinema that describes a filmmaker's attempt to bring what is in his head onto the screen, and tries to force the viewer to question the nature of reality. It is a vague concept, not easily explained, and as one Wikipedia editor noted "the narrative avant-garde lacked a theoretical and philosophical base upon which these notions rest and thus the concept of photogénie is always on the edge of an inexplicable mysticism that many critics cannot accept." This also might be said about this novel.The whole novel is a stream-of-consciousness narrative, told by a mysterious man who never reveals his name. He defends his narrative style by invoking Freud, stating, "truly important revelations can only arrive in the midst of trivial rambling."There is a mystery at the core of the tale, but the reader needs to unravel the "trivial rambling" in order to determine what it is. As with most stream-of-consciousness stories, some of the ramblings are profound, some are funny, and some are less than successful. But, overall, Clinton succeeds at what he is trying to do: get us inside the mind of a disturbed individual.If you are not a fan of stream-of-consciousness narration, this is definitely not the book for you. But, if you're willing to put in a little work, do a little close reading, there is a payoff, and a few "truly important revelations."