Goth Rock

When I listen to Liars’ 2012 album WIXIW especially the trancey musings of “Octagon,” its hyper electronic drums, plodding keyboard bass, Angus Andrew’s murmurings of “I thought, I’ll live, I always thought you” or whatever it is he’s saying, I feel that a hole has been ripped in time, that I’ve been transported back to a place where I wasn’t yet drinking age, but still slipping into bars to dance in black under strobe to imported British tunes with gothic sounds. But then I left Florida for Tennessee and rejected all effete British music, preferring the homegrown psychedelic hillbilly ramblings of the Butthole Surfers’ “Ricky” or po-mo classic rock of Dinosaur Jr.’s “Little Fury Things” and it’s only many years later deep in middle age when I discover this Brooklyn ensemble that sounds a lot like Bauhaus or some other brooding European band that I might have danced to at a bottle club when I was eighteen.

Eternal Return

Leo Spivak, consummate salesman, ready to pounce at the beginning of Gerald Shapiro’s story, “Worst-Case Scenarios,” selling the Flaxman Voice Transformer to a group of spinsters nervous about late-night calls, later talks his high school crush into bed and the next day shows up with her panties as an offering for her husband, reappearing in “Bad Jews” to bury his dead dad who has slipped in his own shit in the shower and then again, later, in the last story in his last collection, Little Men, a prequel of sorts, Spivak in the eighties, President Reagan, after bouncing back from a madman’s bullet to the lung and full of vitality, appearing nightly in his dreams, while in the days of this earlier incarnation, Leo snorts coke and writes ads, or tries to, about preadolescent feminine hygiene spray, a future baby girl kicking inside his wife’s womb, Spivak fucking around, this time with a shiksa name of Mary-Louise though Leo doesn’t care for distinctions like that nor fidelity to his wife and that is what might make him most hilariously poignant and pathetic to me and most a figment, a creation, of Shapiro’s mind because Gerry—my teacher, my mentor, my friend—loved his wife with a devotion that was inspiring to see, his recurring character not even a second cousin though they were both bad Jews—as in lapsed, as in non-practicing—and now that Gerry has died Spivak will no longer return except in our minds or on the pages where he forever dwells.

Oracle

“Critical thinking is much harder than memorizing facts!” an English teacher in Wyoming asserts in The Times. Another, this one from Indiana, says that teachers know their students’ struggles “because they live open lives online and day to day.” I teach at a community college in New York City and worry about generalizing about my students, even just the assumption that all of them want that certificate that vouches they’re educated and employable. We never have these conversations about the children of rich people—who have always been sent to schools where fact-memorizing is not on the syllabus—but for the other ninety percent of young Americans. I suspect that the reason my students are fond of the end-of-the-world scenarios that adults in Hollywood are so eager to sell them is because they know that none of this will remain in two hundred years when an alien archaeologist visits the charred rubble which was once the United States of America, not money, not The New York Times, definitely not their high school or college diplomas, and not this text which you are just now finishing.

September 23, 2023

About the writer

John Talbird is the author of the novel, The World Out There (Madville) and the chapbook of stories, A Modicum of Mankind (Norte Maar). His fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Potomac Review, Ambit, The Literary Review, and Riddle Fence among many others. He is a frequent contributor to Film International, on the editorial board of Green Hills Literary Lantern and Associate Editor, Fiction, for the online noir journal Retreats from Oblivion. A professor at Queensborough Community College-CUNY, he lives with his wife and two sons in New York City. More of his writing can be found at johntalbird.com.