Such is the Scent of Our Sweet Opalescence
One sunny afternoon under clear skies the life of one Uretherer V. Lamb, 63, 'pataphysician, of Interlachen, Florida, was changed for all time. On July 5, 2015, he was standing beside his ’78 Pontiac—pulled off Interstate I-75 at Mile Marker 395—near the rest stop just north of Gainesville. He was slowly urinating past his benign prostatic hyperplasia when a lightning bolt boomed out of the blue, winged its way earthward, and struck his left shoulder. Leaving a pencil-ended entry mark, the lightning scalded that shoulder, ruptured his eardrums, scratched the lenses of his eyeballs, then exited his body in eleven separate places—one of them being right smack through and out the prostate gland.
Physicist-assistant U.V. Lamb (everybody called him UV) was thrown twelve feet onto the median, where he lay in a mud puddle, steaming, wondering what hit him. He felt as if someone had kicked his spindly legs out from under him, pinned his lopsided head to the ground, and then pimp-slapped him silly. Just then, as if on cue, limping on his right leg and kicking his left out to one side, Death walked up in the bright sunshine.
He didn’t look like anybody’s conception of the Grim Reaper. He wore no black hood, toted no scythe. He was a middling sort of man, neither old but then not young, with a bald head, shrunk shanks, a modest pot belly, a backslapping grin that grinned too hard, and a mouth that spit saliva when he spoke. He had on a rumpled green suit and a wide goon tie with parrots and palm trees on it. He went by the name of Delmas W. Pruitt.
With a glimmer of solicitude on his brow, Delmas gazed down at the man steaming in the puddle.
—Hey there, UV (he said, grinning too hard, expectorating).
—Ewww (said UV). He couldn’t see through his scratched lenses and was barely hearing through his ruptured eardrums.
—What’s that you say (asked Delmas)?
—Eww (mumbled UV)—couldn’t urggh make it . . . to the rest stop.
—The one just up the road there?
—Yeh. Bad prostate, urghh had to go. Couldn’t wait.
—Yeees (said Delmas, hitching his suspenders and pulling his suit pants up over his pot belly). Speaking of ‘going,’ my friend, how can I put this? Well, in a word, it’s time.
Delmas went on grinning. The water lapped at UV’s flanks in the puddle, and he steamed on, trying to gather back up his disarranged thoughts.
—Are you ready, then (asked Delmas)?
—Huh?
Delmas stood over UV, extending a hand downward.
—I’m Death. Nice to meet you, Mr. Lamb. Time for you and me to mosey on off now—into Eternity and suchlike places.
UV didn’t know what to say to that, so he just grunted his assent.
—Urggh . . . okay.
Just then the paramedics came wailing and sireening up in their boxy-shaped big red ambulance. Young Pinckney Osteen and pert Bernice Clingelpeel jumped out of the back running, beneath the whirl of red and blue lights, and rushed up to the victim in the puddle. Death (Delmas) took a few gingerly steps back.
—What happened, mister (asked Bernice)? How come you’re steaming?
UV tried to answer, but he only gurgled. Through his scratched lenses he could see a few blurs.
Administering to the victim, Bernice and Pinckney turned to address Delmas.
—Did you see what happened, sir?
—What it was was (said Delmas, with commiseration in his voice) is he was a-standing beside his vehicle, in the act of micturition, when a bolt of lightning come out of the blue and whapped him, I believe where it was was, upside the head.
Delmas shook his noggin side to side, grinned hard, and added,
— mean to tell you.
EMTs Bernice and Pinckney nodded. Being from the Sunshine and Lightning State, they had seen this thing before. They dragged the victim out of the ripples in the puddle, waved away the steam, examined the entrance wound, the eleven separate exit wounds, and the dangerously high blood pressure.
—Wellsir (said Pinckney to Delmas). It got him in the shoulder, not upside the head. That’s good news. He has a scalded shoulder and eleven separate exit spots that must smart, and the lenses of his eyeballs are scratched. His prostate wound appears to be not seriously enlarged, and that’s a good sign too. Otherwise, he looks as if somebody had just died outside his body and he’s wearing that person’s skin.
—That’s exactly what he looks like (said Delmas, still expectorating). Or like somebody hit by a lightning bolt. Anyways, he’s a goner.
And he grinned again, in spite of himself.
Bernice stepped back out of range of this old bird’s saliva.
—Wellsir, you may be right, but it’s our job to resuscitate. That’s what we do for a living.
—‘For a living,’ huh huh huh (chuckled Delmas, who had an offbeat sense of humor).
With that the two intrepid EMTs scarfed UV up off the ground, got him on a wheeled gurney, and rolled him back to the ambulance. Delmas crawled inside with them, so as to be there at the time of need. Ambulance driver Leatrice Eagleston turned on her sireen. They went wailing and sireening (UV done steaming now) back down I-75, wail and sireen, wail and sireen, red and blue lights flashing all over Alachua County.
Bernice and Pinckney were sticking IVs into UV. They made conversation to keep his mind off his imminent demise. The representative of which was seated there in that ambulance, one leg crossed over the other and grinning hard, in the person of Delmas Pruitt. But they didn’t know that.
—What’s your name then, sir (asked Bernice)?
Somehow, through his ruptured ear drums, UV heard the question.
—Urghh. Uretherer.
—Huh?
—Uretherer Lamb.
—That’s a nice name, Uretherer. You got any next of kin, I mean, kinfolks you’d like us to notify?
—I got two double second cousins, but they live in Alaska.
—So what kind of work do you do?
UV was gasping, but somehow he could still talk.
—I’m a urghh ‘pataphysician. My work involves pataphysics—from French ‘pataphysique: the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics. As physicist-assistant and urghh physics-insister/assister, I assist physicists, metaphysicians and other assistant physicists at the Interlachen Collider. I’m involved in quarking, doofuddling and antiquarking—things like that.
—Um. I see. Interesting work. So can you tell us how this happened to you? Do you remember?
—Urhgh. Got this bad prostate gland like problem. I was driving I-75, when my prostate tells me need to go. They’s a rest stop up ahead, and I urhgh tell him, my prostate, I say just like hang on. But prostates are impatient, you know? So I pulled off the highway just short of the rest stop, I’m standing there doing my bidness . . . and that’s all I remember. There was this, like, WHAM.
—Okay, Uretherer. You hang in there now. We’re nearabout all the way back to the hospital.
Delmas W. Pruitt said nothing throughout the whole ride. He sat quietly, legs crossed and gnarled hands on knees, adjusting his goon tie beneath his bobbling Adam’s apple, waiting for the inevitable. That ambulance went wailing and sireening, flashing its lights like bejesus—all the way to Shands Hospital in Gainesville, Florida—where they unloaded the victim, wheeled the gurney into the emergency room, rushed a trauma team in there, and—to sum things up—as expected, the patient soon gave up the ghost.
Except he didn’t. Against all expectations—those of Bernice and Pinckney, those of ambulance driver and sireen-blower Leatrice Eagleston, those of ER doctor Richard (“Dick”) Stalleywag and all the ER nurses, and last, but certainly not least, those of Delmas W. Pruitt—Uretherer V. Lamb pulled through the lightning strike. On the third day after his arrival at Shands they moved him out of the emergency ward; on the fifth day he was up and about, taking some gimpy exercise behind a walker with wheels—up and down the corridors, then down and up the corridors. On the tenth day, deemed a healthy man, he was wished a good life—“You have you a good life, now, you hear?”—and discharged from the hospital.
© U.R. Bowie 2018
One sunny afternoon under clear skies the life of one Uretherer V. Lamb, 63, 'pataphysician, of Interlachen, Florida, was changed for all time. On July 5, 2015, he was standing beside his ’78 Pontiac—pulled off Interstate I-75 at Mile Marker 395—near the rest stop just north of Gainesville. He was slowly urinating past his benign prostatic hyperplasia when a lightning bolt boomed out of the blue, winged its way earthward, and struck his left shoulder. Leaving a pencil-ended entry mark, the lightning scalded that shoulder, ruptured his eardrums, scratched the lenses of his eyeballs, then exited his body in eleven separate places—one of them being right smack through and out the prostate gland.
Physicist-assistant U.V. Lamb (everybody called him UV) was thrown twelve feet onto the median, where he lay in a mud puddle, steaming, wondering what hit him. He felt as if someone had kicked his spindly legs out from under him, pinned his lopsided head to the ground, and then pimp-slapped him silly. Just then, as if on cue, limping on his right leg and kicking his left out to one side, Death walked up in the bright sunshine.
He didn’t look like anybody’s conception of the Grim Reaper. He wore no black hood, toted no scythe. He was a middling sort of man, neither old but then not young, with a bald head, shrunk shanks, a modest pot belly, a backslapping grin that grinned too hard, and a mouth that spit saliva when he spoke. He had on a rumpled green suit and a wide goon tie with parrots and palm trees on it. He went by the name of Delmas W. Pruitt.
With a glimmer of solicitude on his brow, Delmas gazed down at the man steaming in the puddle.
—Hey there, UV (he said, grinning too hard, expectorating).
—Ewww (said UV). He couldn’t see through his scratched lenses and was barely hearing through his ruptured eardrums.
—What’s that you say (asked Delmas)?
—Eww (mumbled UV)—couldn’t urggh make it . . . to the rest stop.
—The one just up the road there?
—Yeh. Bad prostate, urghh had to go. Couldn’t wait.
—Yeees (said Delmas, hitching his suspenders and pulling his suit pants up over his pot belly). Speaking of ‘going,’ my friend, how can I put this? Well, in a word, it’s time.
Delmas went on grinning. The water lapped at UV’s flanks in the puddle, and he steamed on, trying to gather back up his disarranged thoughts.
—Are you ready, then (asked Delmas)?
—Huh?
Delmas stood over UV, extending a hand downward.
—I’m Death. Nice to meet you, Mr. Lamb. Time for you and me to mosey on off now—into Eternity and suchlike places.
UV didn’t know what to say to that, so he just grunted his assent.
—Urggh . . . okay.
Just then the paramedics came wailing and sireening up in their boxy-shaped big red ambulance. Young Pinckney Osteen and pert Bernice Clingelpeel jumped out of the back running, beneath the whirl of red and blue lights, and rushed up to the victim in the puddle. Death (Delmas) took a few gingerly steps back.
—What happened, mister (asked Bernice)? How come you’re steaming?
UV tried to answer, but he only gurgled. Through his scratched lenses he could see a few blurs.
Administering to the victim, Bernice and Pinckney turned to address Delmas.
—Did you see what happened, sir?
—What it was was (said Delmas, with commiseration in his voice) is he was a-standing beside his vehicle, in the act of micturition, when a bolt of lightning come out of the blue and whapped him, I believe where it was was, upside the head.
Delmas shook his noggin side to side, grinned hard, and added,
— mean to tell you.
EMTs Bernice and Pinckney nodded. Being from the Sunshine and Lightning State, they had seen this thing before. They dragged the victim out of the ripples in the puddle, waved away the steam, examined the entrance wound, the eleven separate exit wounds, and the dangerously high blood pressure.
—Wellsir (said Pinckney to Delmas). It got him in the shoulder, not upside the head. That’s good news. He has a scalded shoulder and eleven separate exit spots that must smart, and the lenses of his eyeballs are scratched. His prostate wound appears to be not seriously enlarged, and that’s a good sign too. Otherwise, he looks as if somebody had just died outside his body and he’s wearing that person’s skin.
—That’s exactly what he looks like (said Delmas, still expectorating). Or like somebody hit by a lightning bolt. Anyways, he’s a goner.
And he grinned again, in spite of himself.
Bernice stepped back out of range of this old bird’s saliva.
—Wellsir, you may be right, but it’s our job to resuscitate. That’s what we do for a living.
—‘For a living,’ huh huh huh (chuckled Delmas, who had an offbeat sense of humor).
With that the two intrepid EMTs scarfed UV up off the ground, got him on a wheeled gurney, and rolled him back to the ambulance. Delmas crawled inside with them, so as to be there at the time of need. Ambulance driver Leatrice Eagleston turned on her sireen. They went wailing and sireening (UV done steaming now) back down I-75, wail and sireen, wail and sireen, red and blue lights flashing all over Alachua County.
Bernice and Pinckney were sticking IVs into UV. They made conversation to keep his mind off his imminent demise. The representative of which was seated there in that ambulance, one leg crossed over the other and grinning hard, in the person of Delmas Pruitt. But they didn’t know that.
—What’s your name then, sir (asked Bernice)?
Somehow, through his ruptured ear drums, UV heard the question.
—Urghh. Uretherer.
—Huh?
—Uretherer Lamb.
—That’s a nice name, Uretherer. You got any next of kin, I mean, kinfolks you’d like us to notify?
—I got two double second cousins, but they live in Alaska.
—So what kind of work do you do?
UV was gasping, but somehow he could still talk.
—I’m a urghh ‘pataphysician. My work involves pataphysics—from French ‘pataphysique: the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics. As physicist-assistant and urghh physics-insister/assister, I assist physicists, metaphysicians and other assistant physicists at the Interlachen Collider. I’m involved in quarking, doofuddling and antiquarking—things like that.
—Um. I see. Interesting work. So can you tell us how this happened to you? Do you remember?
—Urhgh. Got this bad prostate gland like problem. I was driving I-75, when my prostate tells me need to go. They’s a rest stop up ahead, and I urhgh tell him, my prostate, I say just like hang on. But prostates are impatient, you know? So I pulled off the highway just short of the rest stop, I’m standing there doing my bidness . . . and that’s all I remember. There was this, like, WHAM.
—Okay, Uretherer. You hang in there now. We’re nearabout all the way back to the hospital.
Delmas W. Pruitt said nothing throughout the whole ride. He sat quietly, legs crossed and gnarled hands on knees, adjusting his goon tie beneath his bobbling Adam’s apple, waiting for the inevitable. That ambulance went wailing and sireening, flashing its lights like bejesus—all the way to Shands Hospital in Gainesville, Florida—where they unloaded the victim, wheeled the gurney into the emergency room, rushed a trauma team in there, and—to sum things up—as expected, the patient soon gave up the ghost.
Except he didn’t. Against all expectations—those of Bernice and Pinckney, those of ambulance driver and sireen-blower Leatrice Eagleston, those of ER doctor Richard (“Dick”) Stalleywag and all the ER nurses, and last, but certainly not least, those of Delmas W. Pruitt—Uretherer V. Lamb pulled through the lightning strike. On the third day after his arrival at Shands they moved him out of the emergency ward; on the fifth day he was up and about, taking some gimpy exercise behind a walker with wheels—up and down the corridors, then down and up the corridors. On the tenth day, deemed a healthy man, he was wished a good life—“You have you a good life, now, you hear?”—and discharged from the hospital.
© U.R. Bowie 2018
This story is from the collection Such is the Scent of Our Sweet Opalescence (The Collected Works of U.R. Bowie, Volume 13), CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform June 12, 2018
This story is from the collection Such is the Scent of Our Sweet Opalescence (The Collected Works of U.R. Bowie, Volume 13), CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform June 12, 2018
Narrated by U.R. Bowie
Narrated by U.R. Bowie
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: Hello, mister U.R. Bowie! You must get a lot of people making a bad pun on your initials: “And you are….?”
RB: Aah, and who are you? Actually my real name is Robert… Bowie (booey). I once googled it and found there to be scads of Robert Bowies all over, including one serial killer in the state of Maine. I published three books early on under my own name but when it came time to start publishing my fiction I wanted something unique so I just added the extra initial U. The name is unique except even it does not prevent me from running perpetually into my nemesis on the internet, David Bowie. His real name is David Jones, but actually there was another Davey Jones back in those days, with the Monkees, the old group the Monkees, so he couldn’t be Davey Jones. So when he decided to become a pop star, he borrowed my last name without ever bothering to learn how to pronounce it. (laughs) That’s the whole story.
BR: That’s interesting because he’s a former neighbor of mine, a beloved member of the community here in Woodstock, NY. But thank you for clarifying that.
TN: Yeah, and thanks for joining us by phone on the podcast. Even if you lived near our studio, which you don’t, we’d still have had to do this by phone because of the fantastic pandemic around us. So I hope you’re staying safe and healthy.
RB: Yes, well, I’ve been sheltering in place and hunkering down and social distancing.
BR: Yeah, I’m pretty good at social distancing, myself. Anyway, we just heard the opening of a long-ish short story of yours. So give us a rough idea—where does the story go from here?
RB: Well, it begins with a guy named U.V. Lamb, who was hit by lightning one day and was supposed to die and did not. And in not dying at his appointed time he somehow has violated certain principles of the universe—which says “die when your time comes, sucker.” Consequently he must suffer, so suffer he does, until he suffers his way through to where the story began. And this time he does it right, the way he should have done it in the first place—happy ending.
BR: Ah, I see.
TN: I like the fact that your main character, U.V. Lamb, is a professional pataphysician. That’s a job I’ve always wanted. Where can I apply?
RB: Yeah, pataphysics is the science of that which is super-induced upon metaphysics.
TN: Yeah, that’s what I thought.
RB: To become a pataphysician you need specialized training in France, where you have to study a lot of books written in French and listen to a lot of lectures and gobbledygook given by professors who have read similar deconstruction gobbledygook in books by Foucault and Blanchot. Stuff about how nothing on earth is real—as if we didn’t already know that. The main character in my story, U.V., can’t speak French but he’s somehow picked up the necessary education to land a job at the Interlachen Collider, in north Florida, working not only as a pataphysician but also as a physics assister/insister and lead quarker. Ask me what a physics assister does.
BR: Yes, what does a physics assister do?
RB: A physics assister assists physicists, and a physics INsister insists on assisting assisters who assist and insist physicists. There.
BR: Good. That sounds like an even better job. Well, opalescence… what exactly is that, and what does it smell like?
RB: The English language is full of beautiful words. Opalescence is one. Another, just to take one example, is acquiescence. And that would make a great title for a book: Opalescent Acquiescence. I just love the sound of the word opalescence, or the feel of it. What does it mean? Something opalescent has the look of a pearl, it emits an iridescent shimmer, has a milkiness like that of an opal. So everything about the word is lovely. How does it taste? Nice? How does it smell? Well, I can quote from the story, here’s a quote: “that milky, pearly, and pinkish kind of smell, reminds me of fresh papaya pulp.”
BR: I’m wondering also… are you the first one to portray Death as a simple country guy from the South who grins too much?
TN: Yeah, with a good name—Delmas W. Pruitt.
RB: Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t know exactly where my subconscious mind came up with Delmas Pruitt—he’s not exactly Death but he’s one of Death’s representatives on Earth. His job is to do the dirty work of death and then accompany the demised to the great by-and-by. I’m sure there must be scads of other writers who’ve written stories about encounters with the representatives of Death, but I can’t think of any offhand. As for the names in my fictions, I get them all out of obituary columns in the local newspapers.
TN: Hm, interesting.
RB: The obits are full of fascinating, even opalescent, people with wonderful names.
TN: “Such is the Scent of Our Sweet Opalescence” is the title piece from a collection of stories. On the back of the book, it says these stories are, and I quote: “written expressly for readers who disdain the dominant American insipid genre of ‘domestic literary fiction.’” You’re definitely setting yourself as an outsider. Can you say a little more about that?
RB: Yeah, I’m about as far out an outsider as you can get in the American literary scene. Probably shouldn’t go into this here, it sets me off on lengthy rants and raves. To put it briefly, I believe for example that the New Yorker should stop publishing so much trashy fiction, and that all creative writing programs in all American universities should be abolished,
BR: Haha, alright! I’m taking a cue from your website also, where I see you’re a scholar of Russian language and culture… and I happen to be reading The Master and Margarita right now, and I know it’s a favorite book of Tom’s.
TN: Ah, I love that book.
BR: Has Bulgakov been an influence on your work?
RB: Oh, that novel, The Master and Margarita (speaks several sentences in Russian...). Excuse me for breaking out into Russian; when I get exhilarated I break out into Russian. So when I taught that book, The Master and Margarita, that was hands-down the favorite of all the books I taught back when I was a professor of Russian literature. You take Jesus Christ and a mobster cat who walks on his hind legs and he works for the devil and he shoots a pistol, and then you put all that together into a love story—The Master and Margarita. As for influence on my own writing, I could name practically all the great Russians, but especially Chekhov, Bunin, Nabokov, Bulgakov, and Gogol, Gogol, Gogol—‘cause he’s the tops, the best, the best of the best (laughs).
TN: Yeah. It seems that your latest work is a spy novel that comes in two rather thick volumes. Give us a quick glimpse of that story, if you can.
RB: Yeah, it’s by far the longest book I’ve written. It’s not exactly a spy novel, more like a takeoff on a spy novel. I know a little bit about spookery because back when I was in the Army I used to be a spook, doing field work for the Nonesuch Agency. What I’ve done with this book is I’ve taken a lot of my own experiences and fictionalized them. The book, in a word, tells the story of a semi-spook recruited to work with Russian intelligence operatives in Central Asia, back when everybody was searching for Osama Bin Laden. While waiting in Samarkand for something to happen—nothing does—the semi-spook goes back to his childhood and tells the story of how his life in spookery began. And then he brings the story gradually up to the present, to the day when he boards a Russian helicopter that’s off to pick up Osama, to purchase him from a group of Islamic terrorists who hold him in an open-air cage out in the desert of Central Asia. And I managed to put two huge books together out of that.
BR: Well, iIf you had to identify a core philosophy or two that are essential to your fiction, what would they be?
RB: Yeah, “core philosophy”—that’s maybe too high-falutin’ to describe my fiction. I guess the main thing is that I’ve always had an intense love for words (speaks several sentences in Russian...).
BR: You’ll have to translate.
RB: What am I? I’m a philologist. What does a philologist do? A philologist loves. What does a philologist love? A philologist loves words. I have a PhD in Russian language and literature, I’m a philologist, a practitioner of philology. And it’s all there in the very word: from philos, love, and logos, word. Lover of words. Nobody without an intense love for words should be writing creative literary fiction. That’s the one prerequisite.
BR: Right.
TN: Yeah, well—back to what's on everybody's mind right now. How is our current condition of self-quarantine affecting your work and your life?
RB: Mm, so far, not much. I sit here writing books every day, same as always. As I mentioned before, I’m hunkered down about as far as I can get, so I can’t hunker down any farther. Then again, I’ve always been afflicted with chronic anxiety, so the virus can’t elevate the anxiety much more. In a word, I’m fine. Then again, I pay close attention to all the medical advisories put out by the office of Mike “The Dense” Pence. Here’s one that came out this morning, quote: “Help stomp out the plague! If you see a virus bug flying through the air, put on medical surgical latex gloves, grab the virus, put it on the ground, and stomp on it, three times. God bless America.” End quote.
BR: Mm-hmm. Thank you, Mike. (all laugh) Well, we’re at the end of our interview, and… thank you, Robert. We appreciate your time and your contribution to our podcast. And please take care in these times.
RB: I hope to do so, and it’s been a pleasure working with you. Thanks.
TN: I hope the grocery store isn’t out of papayas. I want to sniff some opalescence.
BR: Hello, mister U.R. Bowie! You must get a lot of people making a bad pun on your initials: “And you are….?”
RB: Aah, and who are you? Actually my real name is Robert… Bowie (booey). I once googled it and found there to be scads of Robert Bowies all over, including one serial killer in the state of Maine. I published three books early on under my own name but when it came time to start publishing my fiction I wanted something unique so I just added the extra initial U. The name is unique except even it does not prevent me from running perpetually into my nemesis on the internet, David Bowie. His real name is David Jones, but actually there was another Davey Jones back in those days, with the Monkees, the old group the Monkees, so he couldn’t be Davey Jones. So when he decided to become a pop star, he borrowed my last name without ever bothering to learn how to pronounce it. (laughs) That’s the whole story.
BR: That’s interesting because he’s a former neighbor of mine, a beloved member of the community here in Woodstock, NY. But thank you for clarifying that.
TN: Yeah, and thanks for joining us by phone on the podcast. Even if you lived near our studio, which you don’t, we’d still have had to do this by phone because of the fantastic pandemic around us. So I hope you’re staying safe and healthy.
RB: Yes, well, I’ve been sheltering in place and hunkering down and social distancing.
BR: Yeah, I’m pretty good at social distancing, myself. Anyway, we just heard the opening of a long-ish short story of yours. So give us a rough idea—where does the story go from here?
RB: Well, it begins with a guy named U.V. Lamb, who was hit by lightning one day and was supposed to die and did not. And in not dying at his appointed time he somehow has violated certain principles of the universe—which says “die when your time comes, sucker.” Consequently he must suffer, so suffer he does, until he suffers his way through to where the story began. And this time he does it right, the way he should have done it in the first place—happy ending.
BR: Ah, I see.
TN: I like the fact that your main character, U.V. Lamb, is a professional pataphysician. That’s a job I’ve always wanted. Where can I apply?
RB: Yeah, pataphysics is the science of that which is super-induced upon metaphysics.
TN: Yeah, that’s what I thought.
RB: To become a pataphysician you need specialized training in France, where you have to study a lot of books written in French and listen to a lot of lectures and gobbledygook given by professors who have read similar deconstruction gobbledygook in books by Foucault and Blanchot. Stuff about how nothing on earth is real—as if we didn’t already know that. The main character in my story, U.V., can’t speak French but he’s somehow picked up the necessary education to land a job at the Interlachen Collider, in north Florida, working not only as a pataphysician but also as a physics assister/insister and lead quarker. Ask me what a physics assister does.
BR: Yes, what does a physics assister do?
RB: A physics assister assists physicists, and a physics INsister insists on assisting assisters who assist and insist physicists. There.
BR: Good. That sounds like an even better job. Well, opalescence… what exactly is that, and what does it smell like?
RB: The English language is full of beautiful words. Opalescence is one. Another, just to take one example, is acquiescence. And that would make a great title for a book: Opalescent Acquiescence. I just love the sound of the word opalescence, or the feel of it. What does it mean? Something opalescent has the look of a pearl, it emits an iridescent shimmer, has a milkiness like that of an opal. So everything about the word is lovely. How does it taste? Nice? How does it smell? Well, I can quote from the story, here’s a quote: “that milky, pearly, and pinkish kind of smell, reminds me of fresh papaya pulp.”
BR: I’m wondering also… are you the first one to portray Death as a simple country guy from the South who grins too much?
TN: Yeah, with a good name—Delmas W. Pruitt.
RB: Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t know exactly where my subconscious mind came up with Delmas Pruitt—he’s not exactly Death but he’s one of Death’s representatives on Earth. His job is to do the dirty work of death and then accompany the demised to the great by-and-by. I’m sure there must be scads of other writers who’ve written stories about encounters with the representatives of Death, but I can’t think of any offhand. As for the names in my fictions, I get them all out of obituary columns in the local newspapers.
TN: Hm, interesting.
RB: The obits are full of fascinating, even opalescent, people with wonderful names.
TN: “Such is the Scent of Our Sweet Opalescence” is the title piece from a collection of stories. On the back of the book, it says these stories are, and I quote: “written expressly for readers who disdain the dominant American insipid genre of ‘domestic literary fiction.’” You’re definitely setting yourself as an outsider. Can you say a little more about that?
RB: Yeah, I’m about as far out an outsider as you can get in the American literary scene. Probably shouldn’t go into this here, it sets me off on lengthy rants and raves. To put it briefly, I believe for example that the New Yorker should stop publishing so much trashy fiction, and that all creative writing programs in all American universities should be abolished,
BR: Haha, alright! I’m taking a cue from your website also, where I see you’re a scholar of Russian language and culture… and I happen to be reading The Master and Margarita right now, and I know it’s a favorite book of Tom’s.
TN: Ah, I love that book.
BR: Has Bulgakov been an influence on your work?
RB: Oh, that novel, The Master and Margarita (speaks several sentences in Russian...). Excuse me for breaking out into Russian; when I get exhilarated I break out into Russian. So when I taught that book, The Master and Margarita, that was hands-down the favorite of all the books I taught back when I was a professor of Russian literature. You take Jesus Christ and a mobster cat who walks on his hind legs and he works for the devil and he shoots a pistol, and then you put all that together into a love story—The Master and Margarita. As for influence on my own writing, I could name practically all the great Russians, but especially Chekhov, Bunin, Nabokov, Bulgakov, and Gogol, Gogol, Gogol—‘cause he’s the tops, the best, the best of the best (laughs).
TN: Yeah. It seems that your latest work is a spy novel that comes in two rather thick volumes. Give us a quick glimpse of that story, if you can.
RB: Yeah, it’s by far the longest book I’ve written. It’s not exactly a spy novel, more like a takeoff on a spy novel. I know a little bit about spookery because back when I was in the Army I used to be a spook, doing field work for the Nonesuch Agency. What I’ve done with this book is I’ve taken a lot of my own experiences and fictionalized them. The book, in a word, tells the story of a semi-spook recruited to work with Russian intelligence operatives in Central Asia, back when everybody was searching for Osama Bin Laden. While waiting in Samarkand for something to happen—nothing does—the semi-spook goes back to his childhood and tells the story of how his life in spookery began. And then he brings the story gradually up to the present, to the day when he boards a Russian helicopter that’s off to pick up Osama, to purchase him from a group of Islamic terrorists who hold him in an open-air cage out in the desert of Central Asia. And I managed to put two huge books together out of that.
BR: Well, iIf you had to identify a core philosophy or two that are essential to your fiction, what would they be?
RB: Yeah, “core philosophy”—that’s maybe too high-falutin’ to describe my fiction. I guess the main thing is that I’ve always had an intense love for words (speaks several sentences in Russian...).
BR: You’ll have to translate.
RB: What am I? I’m a philologist. What does a philologist do? A philologist loves. What does a philologist love? A philologist loves words. I have a PhD in Russian language and literature, I’m a philologist, a practitioner of philology. And it’s all there in the very word: from philos, love, and logos, word. Lover of words. Nobody without an intense love for words should be writing creative literary fiction. That’s the one prerequisite.
BR: Right.
TN: Yeah, well—back to what's on everybody's mind right now. How is our current condition of self-quarantine affecting your work and your life?
RB: Mm, so far, not much. I sit here writing books every day, same as always. As I mentioned before, I’m hunkered down about as far as I can get, so I can’t hunker down any farther. Then again, I’ve always been afflicted with chronic anxiety, so the virus can’t elevate the anxiety much more. In a word, I’m fine. Then again, I pay close attention to all the medical advisories put out by the office of Mike “The Dense” Pence. Here’s one that came out this morning, quote: “Help stomp out the plague! If you see a virus bug flying through the air, put on medical surgical latex gloves, grab the virus, put it on the ground, and stomp on it, three times. God bless America.” End quote.
BR: Mm-hmm. Thank you, Mike. (all laugh) Well, we’re at the end of our interview, and… thank you, Robert. We appreciate your time and your contribution to our podcast. And please take care in these times.
RB: I hope to do so, and it’s been a pleasure working with you. Thanks.
TN: I hope the grocery store isn’t out of papayas. I want to sniff some opalescence.
