Monday, October 27, 2003

Fu Manchu says: "Red Girl! I am touched by your sensitivity and beauty. By the way your nipples, while in no way being differentiated in hue from the scarlet Martian flesh surrounding, are yet so clearly nipples. My ancient flesh longs to explore your deepest recesses that I might know your color's constancy! Red Girl, I should do anything to dally here with thee, including - oh here break my heart! Yes, now I feel the Truth of Democratic Justice, oh now the memory of George Washington's smile and his charming candor and the way his father birched his butt (though that bit gets left out just as the excrutiating final moments of the stupid kid who yelled the Emperor is nekkid are abbriged...(?)). "Red Girl I should do anything should I be able to bind you every night in my mysterious Chinese love. I shall work with you to undo Fascism's Knot! Yes! We battle Tojo and fat Himmler and icky Goebbels. "But my Martian Maid, a man returns to his nature as a dog to his vomit. Who knows, maybe it just needed to breathe?" Fu Manchu holds the Martian and always topless Red Girl in his arms. Tears run down his unnaturally aged yellow cheeks from the hypnotically green lakes that are his eyes. "My Nature is Evil," he blubs. 2:52:12 PM    comment []

"I think much more has been written about 'my' ROADHOUSE TRAMP, which only ever existed in a very vague sense, than about many much more tangible publications, and I have not looked into re-issuing it precisely because its mystery is I fear its only enchantment. Besides of course the Fu Manchu bits... But everything I said about Fu Manchu I tried to recreate faithfully from my memories of the radio shows. It's just simple plagiarism. When the Red Girl went to Fu Manchu and won over his heart to the cause of Democracy I can remember crying because I was 'So In Love with Fu Manchu, I Just Didn't Know What To Do'..." Mr. Herman sings the old standard in a reedy tenor. "After that poor Texas boy did those things they published in that horrible common London paper with the boobies the scene where Bubel Andriessen and the Hollywood Twins kill and eat that couple and their siamese.. I have never cared for siamese but I think I could not have been the author of that scene... If it was even in the original it must have been Raoul's or Simon's work... They were like so many of the French fascinated with American Crime. American Crime has such a Protestant, rough-hewn, individualistic quality. Europeans favor organized, hierarchical slaughters... Do you know what I say?" Mr. Herman leans forward elbows upon knees to confide: "I say Americans are obsessed with Cereal Killing. Cereal." Mr. Herman mimes eating Corn Flakes. He giggles. 1:43:45 PM    comment []

"That book they published in Texas was a complete mystery to me until it showed up as 'a hippy cult classic' in the pocket of that child who killed those people and then I saw a copy of it when they started bringing them to me to be autographed. I guess it looks like the one that Raoul published in French but you know really there were only about seven copies of that. I have had reason to study the way strange little stories travel the world and I discover that I am the creature of two press releases. Have you ever read the Menken story about how he made up the banning of bathtubs in Boston one slow afternoon and watched his fabrication become History? In Saigon, in Singapore, for the most peculiar reasons ROADHOUSE TRAMP will be cited and it will be described as the 'parisian policier of pineywoods passion' and the 'hippy cult classic'. And then will be related the rumor that really it is the work of J. Edgar Hoover." - J. Evardd Herman. 12:58:02 PM    comment []

"You see I signed papers giving the whole of the silly manuscript to Raoul years and years ago even before the book was first printed and while they tell me all that's over now as far as legality goes I have a suspicion it may not be for Raoul's family because Raoul's Mother was really horribly upset... Apparently drawing dirty little pictures was precisely the revenge Raoul had sought in his tempestuous relationship with her... I have always supposed his drawings were some kind of code in which he expressed something in the family dynamic odious and loathsome to dear Maman... "She was one of the first women ever to study law wherever it was that she studied. She was a magistrate or something under Petain. She did something dark and nasty Raoul would only hint at." 12:24:38 PM    comment []

"I met Raoul at the seaside and Raoul's interest was only ever parodying the rude little drawings his cousin was having such success with in the Haute Monde, though I am always tempted to quote my Aunt Stephanie and say 'I have lived a life as high as any'. And then she would give you that sinful old person cackle like I have now." It is Mr. J. Evardd Herman's habit to reach out and touch the people with whom he speaks as if to reaffirm their corporeality or to renew some physical bond... It is the habit of men used to busy, crowded anonymous rooms... Or of the blind... Mr. Herman's eyes are attentive if sad and sort of washed out as if overexposed. "For Simon it was an obsession. 'Our Opera'. Simon's obsessions were always sort of speedy, thank God. We built sets from these scraps of cloth and samples from the store where Simon worked. In Paris then American Comic Strips and James Baldwin were the rage. I had been raised a nun by my harlot mother and knew nothing of these worlds and contributed the most implausible inventions which Simon would try then to render vulgar. 'It must be Earthy! Earthy!' he would cry." The apartment he dwells in now is notably austere but Mr. Herman shows you pictures of residences swirled with fabrics. Simon and he had had a store in a nice street before Simon died... "I shall tell you an amazing thing. Before I came to France I have no memory of having ever seen Cotton growing. Simon came into the store with a stalk of the stuff, is it called a stalk? and said, 'look' and I looked and I said 'What in the world is that?' and he told me. The clothes you wear tell such interesting stories. Do you know what your jacket says? Brrrrr." Mr. Herman shakes himself in imitation of a cold sheep. 12:02:24 PM    comment []