Table of Contents:

Home
Acknowledgements
Bill Roorbach Dedication
Submission Info

Archive:

Volume 1 Spring 2002

Volume 2 Spring 2003

Volume 2 Spring 2004

Volume 2 Spring 2005

Volume 5
Spring 2006:

Contest Winners

Editor's Prize

Tumbling Dice
- Steven Shattuck-

Honorable Mentions


My Peripeteia
- Tara Sumrall-

A Charming Red Stiletto Is Dangling From A Cloud
- Allison Davis-

Charles Williamson
Western Kentucky University
                                     
Ready for the House
                                     
                             “The longest-running, weirdest, loneliest enigma in popular
                                    music is a guy from Texas who calls himself Jandek.”
                                                                                    -Douglas Wolk, music columnist
          So who is Jandek?
          Answers never come easy.  Jandek creeps along the upper lip of soundless balance beams; he is a phantom whose shadow looms large over the cinderblock walls, spanning the plain enclosure with dull anticipation.  Jandek falls to the floor; his pale fingers caress your sallow cheek. Fingers move like leaves swept across the windstruck pavement, but you turn away from him regardless, his sadness burrowing into you like a sickness; he reacts; his arm slowly wraps around your neck and a hot bluster of breath wafts across your ear; he pulls himself closer and whispers his secrets, all mired in nostalgia, and yet unfamiliar; he speaks in scalpel-sharp poetry that shatters so close sharp bristles of glass seep into your skin.  His whisper grows into a growl, a growl made of moist Texas soil, a growl that tears everything apart piece by piece; drab white walls crumble like paper; your linoleum floor ripples and quakes, streaked in gaping brown wounds; curtains split into the silent shadows; bookshelves combust into violent flowers of flame; cabinets open and shut with indiscretion, like a chorus of severed tongues.
          Imagine that whisper as a song. Imagine all songs made as a thread, stark and thin, treading along the frayed bottoms of your ragged jeans; little do you realize that this thread, glaring from the bottom of your shoes, is engorged in flame, flames pounding like a pulse along the incline of your ankle, inching up, inching up. The flame swallows you whole, pythonic streams of smoke drifting into the naked summer sky; licking its orange lips, a wild bouquet of hungry flame sashays across your living room carpet; its swollen, bulbous form yawns and sucks up everything in your home; everything glows like the clearest constellation. You are now ready for the house.
          Jandek is a riddle, so it would be best if we speak of him as one. Outside of this, all we can truly say about Jandek can be summed up in one terse sentiment: we know absolutely nothing about Jandek.
*-*-*
          The lonesome cigarette pressed between my lips sputtered soft in the heavy southern night; porch lights flickered and beamed, with small shards of light hitting the coarse concrete where Laura and I both sat cross-legged, watching the steady ebb and flow of late-night traffic, luminous eyes chasing one another like hungry ghosts; a brown and beaten porkpie hat obscured her features in a mask of shadow, and every time I turned to her I could see small emeralds peeking from the brim, burning holes into pregnant pockets of air. Her lips glistened like gossamer. Phlegm as thick as milk strolled through my throat as idle conversation roused the fireflies, who danced with every breath; the air was hot and clammy, and my palms shirked from the heat, stuffed behind back pockets, pressed against granite and dirt. Lipstick rings splotched the heel of her menthol cigarette; centipedes of smoke danced in figure eights, resembling thin arrows of ice bending in the sweltering pitch black.  The familiar smell of potted lilacs swam in the air.  Crickets chirped.  So it had been for four months. So it would be for a long, long time.
          Her fingers crawled spider-like along the bulge of my knee, and she said, It is nice, isn’t it?  I don’t remember what I said at that moment, whether my words were precise or profound or banal, or if they weighed in with any consequence whatsoever, but when the last consonant kissed the vowels something stirred in Laura’s slender chest, stirred and coagulated like storm clouds rolling along the horizon.  She paused for a moment, her hot and tepid breath pulled in, and she let out a heavy sigh; I looked over and saw tears, a narrow sheen of chrysanthemum, rolling down her soft and sanguine cheeks. I asked what was wrong, but there was nothing wrong to report; a smile as sweet as honeysuckle mired in that faint and salty moisture lurked under her visored porkpie hat. No, there’s nothing wrong, she assured me; no explanation could be gathered from these strange and unexpected tears.  How silly, she laughed, How silly it is to be a girl. An unspoken ‘why’ lingered in the air.  I tried to figure these things out, but it all seemed so much larger than me, as if it would swallow me whole if I occupied myself with it for too long.  So I dropped it; I just inched closer and closer, taking her hand in mine; perfume lingered in her long, blonde hair. She hiccupped and I laughed. Spheres of smoke poured out of her pretty mouth; three days worth of stubble strayed along the incline of her soft, porcelain neck; our cigarettes died with little fanfare, and we tossed them into her mother’s lush green garden.  She let go and smiled behind her watery veil.  I smiled, looked down.  Lipstick stained the lower edge of my shirt collar.
          Days later, in the privacy of my room, I coiled thread around my finger like a promise ring and pantomimed a banquet alive in white.
*-*-*
In a career spanning around twenty-five years, Jandek has released over thirty albums, ranging from acoustic blues to electric folk to a-capella absurdism; in a career spanning around twenty-five years, nobody knows anything else about Jandek. Jandek’s music tramples across the American landscape like a fading memory; he lives in the stretching shadow of popular music, staring away from industry values, balking at celebrity and pop star posturing; he orbits our icons with sun-bleached apathy. Disengaged from the public, all we have is the music; the recluse himself renders himself as irrelevant as dishwater.  This, of course, does not stop one from guessing.  Sources say he wrote seven manuscripts but threw them to the fire; sources claim he idles his time without acquaintances, living up to his hermit pedigree; sources say he’s the half-retarded son of a record executive working in some clandestine operation.  But nothing’s for certain; nothing’s ever certain.  We must realize that beyond the exterior, beyond the wood paneling and shuttered windows, all concrete information regarding the musician known as Jandek should be labeled as pure theory or conjecture. All of this is window dressing.  In a career spanning around twenty-five years, Jandek has maintained complete anonymity, never granting an interview, never performing before a public audience, never issuing a press kit, never making a public statement of any kind.
          Album covers vary between hazy home photographs of haunted interiors, suburban exteriors, and snapshots a fair-faced man, lips taut, chiseled cheeks pale and wan like a Romantic poet, his coal-black eyes cadaverous and searching. Is this man Jandek?  If so, these album covers may be the only validation of his existence.
          Claiming exclusive distribution rights to each album is a company based in Houston, Texas called Corwood Industries.  Scanning through the Houston area yellow pages leads to a public listing; an address and a phone number are readily available. Like Jandek, Corwood slouches in shadow, shrouded in anonymity; their P.O. Box distributes his music only, categorically responding to inquiries with brusque, cryptic messages, and the telephone line may ring and ring, but a droning dial tone is all I’ve ever found. All business transactions are handled through the post office box, and when the albums arrive a two-page catalogue, branded with a bland, nondescript typeface, folds over the jewel cases, held together by a brownish-black rubber band; compact discs are eight dollars, but its cheaper to buy in bulk, with twenty albums available for a paltry four dollars apiece. That’s it. Public records on Corwood are sketchy, misleading; the tangibility of the Corwood’s offices remains debatable, dubious even.  Bridging Jandek to the rest of the world is Corwood, and Corwood serves as the flailing right arm of Jandek, reaching deep into at the blind Texas soil, digging deep through a thousand dingy tenements and thoroughfares, his hand blossoming in blisters so raw they can only be alleviated through salt and song.
*-*-*
White roses of snow blossomed on her mother’s pleated wood patio; her mother’s head, adorned with long strings of iron colored hair, hanged like the head of an aging swan, her lithe and lonesome silhouette lingering like musty cobwebs over the kitchen window; her eyes boring into the both of us, and when I turned to look at her the cold cut into my ankles. I turned away and marched in the long, stretching ribbons of snow. Spears of sunlight cascaded through the oak trees, the gentle crunch of ice haunting my every step. A fragrance resembling lilacs spotted Laura’s hair, and as we lost our balance and fell into the white sea, I found myself falling so hard my bony legs bent in sharp and painless contortions, and I landed on top, my knees straddling her like angry scissors.  She laughed, her red lips pearled in melting ice; her soft, exposed stomach splotched in chill-bumps; water seeped through denim, and the warmth in our legs left us like light from a snuffed candle; a silver crucifix, twisting around her throat, slipped in the snow, falling into a pearl-white sepulcher of snow, and when I reached for it, the thing slipped through my narrow fingers.  It was lost from that day on. The memento moved on with little remorse.
          My arm slipped into the mounds of snow; draped in ice, I shivered like windblown leaves; spears of white mist shot out from my mouth like lines of kites, drifting into the sharp, brittle air, struggling for attention in the cotton white fields spilling out from her fragile front doorstep.  That smile suggested so much, and whether there was toxin in her teeth I do not know; her hand clasped the buttons of my jacket, each one snapping like the beat of a familiar song, and she pulled me closer, close enough to smell the lilacs in her hair, now in her mouth. I felt a languid perspiration stroll along my cold and heavy shoulders, and when my hand went up her shirt I felt the chill of small cherries gathering goosebumps in the breeze of winter.
          Inside her mother wrung her hands in the kitchen sink and watched the water cascade like streams of sparkling diamonds.
*-*-*
Everything begins with Ready for the House. Jandek’s fledgling album, released in 1978, established what was to be known as the traditional Jandek sound, a sound that would be reinvented time and time again throughout the course of his recording career. But how is one to describe this sound?
          When the needle hits the vinyl, a cold cacophony mists about the corners of the room; rings of smoke unfurl, coiling into small, wiry wreathes; fingers find their place upon the fret board.  Plucking tunelessly on an acoustic, Jandek warbles and howls, moans and murmurs; dissonance punctuates every passing note, strummed away like an afterthought, whirring like lost crickets, notes colliding in their dreaded ecstasy, making noise, sputtering to the ground and dying like wingless butterflies. Jandek sits alone with five toneless chords, but two is all he needs; I imagine a dark room, his spectral fingers callused, his voice, steeped in sadness and golden gravel, hovering over his head in halo formation. Desolate landscapes, slathered in dust, translate to weather-beaten poetics. One song is finished.  Then another.  Then another.  Then it is continued with the next album.  Then the next.  On “First You Think Your Fortune’s Lovely,” Jandek sings:
First you think your fortune’s lovely,
And you fly out through the door.
Grandmama, I feel so lonely.
My rapture’s painted on the floor.

          Characterized by this strange, austere aesthetic, Jandek released two more albums before he would produce a record with any collaborating artists.

*-*-*
What have I done, I thought, to deserve all this?  There’s so much wonder in this life of mine and I never did a single thing to deserve it. Laura still loomed in my mind, a tentative dooryard laid out in my direction; her curls flowed downward on the slope of her shoulders, a radiant oat color eclipsing the red marks I imprinted in a trail below her chin. I am too old and too unkempt for this sort of thing; my head is adorned with long, stringy tendrils of hair spiraling this way and that, my bare arms broom-thin and my wrists knotted; when naked, I resemble a gutted trout, red and ribbed and stinking in the afternoon sun.  Look, just look at me and look at her, sitting across from me, limp as trouser socks hanging from the end of a clothesline, a clown in kid’s clothing, oh god, what a waste, what a waste.  But I didn’t say anything, didn’t plead of beg for some half-hearted response.  We ate our lo-mein in a muted silence.  Her lips made a distinct snapping sound, and my jaw clicked revolver-like; dissentions of scars crawled along my lower left leg and my fists, small as pebbles, pounded upon the table because I did not know, did not know where I was after these past twenty years, how all this came to be. She looked at me; I smiled.  I vaguely remembered purple mascara and the dimly-lit interiors of my dirty Ford Taurus, an incandescent fog that crawled along the broad face of dirtied car windows.  Other than that, the ghost still leaned against my shoulder; other than that, the egg drop soup grew clammy in the stale, air-conditioned frost of her mother’s sparsely-furnished dining room.
          Oh yes, I believe it’s time, she said, her arms folding over her fortune cookie, lying crushed on the dining room table; in great detail she elaborated on her own maternal yearnings, a diatribe resembling something akin to an instruction manual revolving around ovaries and sperm, the matrimonial banter associated with children, a house with four front windows and a thatched roof, orange bricks scaling its face like slits of sunlight, and inside there’s lime-green carpeting, a sofa, a love seat, billowing curtains dancing with the calm summer breeze, a crib, short, stumpy arms reaching out to heaven for a smiling, clean shaven father, a man of credentials, a man of self worth.
          I lied and placed a hand on her knee.  I told her it was time.  I said, I think I’m ready too.
*-*-*
          In 1982, Chair Beside a Window ushered in an unexpected development; for the first time an outside vocalist appeared on a Jandek album. With a throaty, honey sweet gospel influenced delivery rich in texture, “Nancy” crafted this clay-tinged melancholia into a perverse facsimile of melody.  So, as Jandek plucked two disharmonious chords, digressions into the sparse, skeletal territory, where the dry soul cradled him as if he were the withering brown roots dying slowly in the earth, “Nancy” crept along his fading face like a mid-summer dew, trickling down like sweet rainwater.  For a time, the music changed.  Making her debut on a track titled “Nancy Sings,” her voice is a single wilting rose in the midst of Jandek’s desolation:
Listen to the sound of a constant fall.
Skies give water for life of all.
If you reach into the air,
Rain will come to kiss your hair.
          The albums that followed blended acoustic and electric, harmony and dissonance; “Nancy” belts out the blues and Jandek, for a brief moment, shies away from the sadness, lets in the happiness, fragments of sunlight peeling through the binds for the first time. A disparity of voices melts into a twisted sort of harmony, and the cackle and hiss of cheap recording equipment cannot shroud seconds of timid laughter; Jandek’s fingers continue to strum like blind muses, but the music tastes more of honeyed liquor than a mouthful of mud.  On “Governor Rhodes,” Jandek and Nancy share this incantation:
We are here together, in love, in life, in magic, in celebration.
We are here.
Let us celebrate.
Celebrate our love.
Celebrate our magic.

*-*-*
          Traditional sex between Laura and I inexorably led to a strange and unfortunate conundrum; she was still a virgin, and our single attempt at consummation resulted in halting, gurgling screams spilled out in the ears of a rank motel ceiling. It won’t fit! It won’t fit! You’ll kill me!  Move it away, please!  I pulled away, dropping down at her side, and touched her quivering forearm.  Ruby-red lips quivered, thick with frightened quicksilver.  She said, It’s all right, Chuck, it’s not you, it’s me. Maybe we should just wait. I’m not ready. It’s for the best, she said.  Besides, I can pleasure you in other ways. With that, her pale legs, stranded like a schooner at sea, kicked aside the twisted bed-sheet and she pressed them against my sides; her areolas were the size of quarters when she straddled me, her hips rocking back and forth, back and forth; the moisture of her sex smoothed along the base of my engorged penis and as my dumb and blinded seed shimmied into her marble deep naval, my clipped exasperations turning into short, spiritless breaths.  Was it good, she asked, running her fingers over my spectral white seed, still clinging to her stomach.  I rubbed my eyes, nodded my head.  So it continued for months and months.
          Then Laura had a better solution.
          With time, we experimented with group sex; all accidental, she claimed at first, but a fine solution, because I could fit somewhere else, somewhere more welcoming, and she could be there, be there to kiss me when I came.  And so, we crawled over one-another, the moisture layered thick along our bending spines, my body hovering over that slender, unfamiliar frame as Laura’s legs lied elsewhere, shuddering like plastic bags quivering in the wind, our hands scaling down some sad and nameless girl’s soft stomach, moving with the ornamental malpractice of a poetic cadenza; the stale taste of sweat grew copper sour in my mouth, the pressure of orgasm spiraling in a womb that felt both dead and cold. When we were all done, Laura smoked a cigarette and then fell asleep; the girl did likewise, throwing her spent arms over her shoulders, kissing the exposed spot where a crucifix once lied.  I walked out; a twin size mattress is too small for three spent bodies.
          I looked at myself in the tall bathroom mirror and hated every part of my body: the hideous hooked nose; the sparrow thin throat; skin so white it looked translucent under cheap metallic lighting; a chest pronounced in a ribcage too large for my small and structureless frame.
*-*-*
          Blue Corpse hobbled along and changed everything. Released in 1987, Jandek returns to solitude, gripping his acoustic guitar, sweeping up the bad memories from his cracked bathroom tile and translating that wastebasket into strange and solemn music. “Nancy” has abandoned him; cobwebs curtain the gatefold; the album cover bears a blurred photograph of Jandek walking alone, his shirt tossed aside, his arms marrow thin.  He snarls to something we cannot see. And the music. Oh god, the music. Though his voice sounds distant and worn, like a pair of beaten tennis shoes lying limp in the noonday sun, his words string together in solemn and breathy homilies, carrying a discernable melody wedded to his strumming, which is, though still sloppy and amateurish, more polished, more conventional. Jandek carries a coffin in his footsteps; lyrics ripe with old ghosts that writhe into the forefront, and every time his voice cracks, I imagine hands stained in tears. On this album, Jandek pleads with a woman, a woman who abandoned him; Jandek spills his soul on forty minutes of haunted dirges, his sorrow unrelenting, coiling like a snake:
I passed by the building where you sleep
And I wanted to sigh
At the sweet smell of your loving,
But I just weep at the morning.
I just weep.

           “Nancy” never reappeared.
*-*-*
          Kansas was the place she wanted to be; Wichita, where the midwest housed a blonde-haired straggler and filled the form of a new lover, a new interest, and I was left to count the dust collecting on the family mantle. His name was B-----, and where I was milquetoast, bland, and as undesirable as a fistful of dying fish, he was two-tone electric, punk rock, a veritable maelstrom of sex appeal and five fingered swagger; by the time she fed his lips with her mint fresh tongue and opened her legs for something I had never known, something that left large beige bruises trailing along her thighs, I was nothing more than a blurred Polaroid picture, a sleepwalker shuddering in a cold enclosure of sand and trees.  Discourse turned into rhetoric; my campaign promises withered like ancient graveyard underbrush every time he touched her pearl white throat. The telephone line rang and rang, turned into the drone of a dial tone; sonnets proved infantile; nights were spent in stolid nudity as I pressed a photo album against my emaciated and child-like chest.
          As I turned into her driveway, I watched the porch lights flicker like a series of sighs; my disguise was indifference, but the lengthy blades of grass knew better than to fall for such cheap deception. As the crickets chirped a soft-spoken chorus, I strained to see the kitchen lights bouncing along the white wooden paneling, tried to find the faint glimpse of a mother’s silhouette, but all I found was a small, imprecise crack and when the fog touched its frosty face I swallowed every shard of glass that window pane had to offer. Laura’s mother was nowhere to be found, her shadow no longer lingered as it did in the winter. I collapsed on the ground and watched the rusting tin roof, the peerless and pupilless windows, a door locked on the other side and the white linoleum I would never know again. My knees collapsed upon a bed of rocks; my swollen fists fell in puffs of dirt. Then I thought, Where is Laura’s crucifix? Where is her crucifix? Is it lost? Did it sink into the hungry brown earth? Will its roots writhe deep in the hot moist soil and form an oak tree, tall as the most hopeful childhood dream? Please make this true. Then I wondered, Will its branches cast shadows over my dirty face? Will its leaves blanket my thin threadbare arms?  God, I can hope.  I can only hope.
*-*-*
          After Blue Corpse, Jandek experimented with a variety of sounds, alternating between electric and acoustic, solo and accompaniment; the music careens from awkward to repellant, from adept to coldly calculated.  Sometimes it sounds like Jandek’s just going through the motions. Sometimes it sounds like he’s hiding something. For a stretch of albums, Jandek collaborated with an unnamed guitarist whose delta blues-strumming veils Jandek’s distracted plucking with tunes emphasizing convention over primitivism. And the music streamed out like driftwood down the mouth of the Mississippi.
          Years teetered on, and Jandek floundered from style to style, experimenting with tone and timbre while, in the process, abandoning his electric guitar. By 1993, Jandek returned to his solo acoustic brand of postmodern blues with Twelfth Apostle, a bloodied, open gash of an album where a Jandek bespeckled with age contemplates his past and yearns for direction:
Now I got time to wait awhile,
Before I walk that faithful mile.
And so I sit beside a window,
So I can see which way the winds blow.

          On 1999’s The Beginning, Jandek concludes with a fifteen-minute piano piece; a thunderous flourish of harsh and jagged notes, keys smashed into the framework, hands scaled in black and blue bruises; hammering on the high and low notes, slathering music like finger-paint; Jandek sounds like a catharsis in motion. It was a beginning, all right. But for what?
*-*-*
          Vomit reamed along the lips of the toilet bowel; my knees buckled under self-inflicted fatigue and I heaved another meal with prescribed aplomb. My appetite continued to shrivel. Food smelled of paint thinner; bread and lukewarm water was all I could hold down, and when I did eat something else I would lurch like a fallen pampas tree into the slippery slope of the toilet, gagging until the nausea subsided into a mild disconcertion.
          Laura gave her goodbyes in broad strokes of ink, saying things like, I think my heart points here, and I’m sorry I hurt you; somehow I could not, and cannot, believe this, and during those long and troubled days desolation thickened into a stew of a thousand missed meals; I felt so fucking small, so fucking small and irrelevant, and when I was curled in the corner of my dresser, fingernails scratching along the face of four polished drawers housing old love letters, I watched the walls peel away like burning paper; I was so enraptured in fantasy I failed to recognize the assured and hurried nature of Laura’s bon voyage.
*-*-*
          Nothing could prepare listeners for Jandek’s follow-up album, Put My Dream on This Planet; on no other album has Jandek ever been so gravely alone. Putting aside the acoustic, Jandek records songs with no musical accompaniment; for nearly an hour, Jandek croons in a distant a-capella. All terms of musical expression aside, Put My Dream on This Planet equates crude voyeurism, an invitation into Jandek’s private museum of ghosts and goblins; his wounds fester and with every listen we are applying the salt and vinegar. His words stray like stranded animals without the slow and steady pluck of the guitar; Jandek tells us he wants to get back on his feet, wants to release himself from the self-appointed reclusion, but something or someone keeps pushing him to the ground, won’t let him go out into the cold; we’re inclined to believe him. On the album’s final track, a one-minute closer entitled “I Went Outside,” Jandek takes his first step out the door:
Cold dark and lonely I look round for my shoes.
I put them on.
I went for a walk,
In the snow and ice.
So cold.

*-*-*
          Time passed; I had grown old, clean-shaven, soft-spoken, coming back from a week-long visit that had seemed to last much longer.  Two heavy suitcases rolled out the hidden compartment of the Greyhound’s deep navel; bags poured out in every direction, with fifty sets of legs pumping like furious pistons beside them; hungry travelers groped for their luggage, tearing through each other as if all were blind.  And as I stood amid a torrential sea of human traffic outside the decaying Greyhound station, I craned my neck for a moment and caught a glimpse of a girl, just a small peripheral vision at first that, slowly, transformed into images of Laura sitting in the farthest corner of the station, framed in the radiance of the summer heat; her rose red lips pursed and practical, her eyes hidden beneath a brown and beaten porkpie, her hands moving like awkward mice over the edge of her ticket stub. I turned away. Why is she here, I asked myself, Why is she here? It’s been two years now, two years and now she is back, back from the house, and here she is, in this place, the conductor drones on and on about times and places, and Laura stands complacently in the corner, looking down, looking down, looking down into the dirty gravel parking lot? 
          Laura eventually spoke, asking a passer-by where she could find a restroom and, with bated breath, I realized that this was not Laura at all but someone else completely; her voice was far too wispy to be hers, her cheeks too swollen, and her bust-line too plump and prominent. As I looked closer, she did not resemble Laura at all. Imposter, I said aloud. It was too much; I walked away. A warm bluster of wind passed by my neck and I sank into the soil, my hot skin sweating steady streams of paint; my mouth heaved chimney-like as a sequence of squalid cigarettes followed and filled me up to the rim of their occupancy. Every part of me shook like weak, rumbling windows.
          Later that night I sat in my room. My thoughts stretched out like a long, yawning arm, stretching out into the far-flung plains of a place I had never seen. I did what I had to do. I picked up a tape recorder. I sang a song.
*-*-*
          In 2002, Jandek’s hand throttled the throat of an acoustic guitar once more.