NEEDLING

Perusing the second-hand bookstore the other day before going to work, I found a little book which might turn out to be a small treasure, though it’s been written in intermittently here and there. Why do people write in books? Make marks? Underline sentences? It’s highly annoying, and if perchance you are reading this post, and that you happen to be one of these people: Please stop! Think of the people who will inherit such and such books, they may not want their attention drawn to one sentence on the page, which to you might have had a specific and significant meaning, but for them only takes their attention from the rest of the page for reasons they don’t necessarily understand. I bought the book anyway, because it had only a few marks through its pages, and because it’s a book by an author I’ve enjoyed, an author who has not published all that much, and a title I had never heard about: Willie Master’ Lonesome Wife, by William H. Gass. I’ve only started reading the small book.

Here is a paragraph from this book:

“Suppose, for instance, a stranger were to–oh, say you’re laughing uproariously, and that’s the occasion for it–spit in your mouth, god forbid. Still, daily, they do worse. So here you are, you’ve cracked your face across–ha ha ha-ing–and someone–some enemy, some social scientist, some polisher of singular skills–fires it in suddenly. Well you’ve always had your own wash working for you, sloshing about–an inland sea foaming up against its rocks (how grand that’s put, how grand), and you don’t mind it. You don’t go hithering and thithering, do you? moaning, do you? god, my god, my head is leaking, lord, my head is leaking through my mouth, my god, and down my throat and past my shoulders, all those tubes, good lord, and towards my shoes? In that case, then, you must be friendly to it. You’re old chums. But hawk blind on a table and you’ll never tell your spatter from a thousand. Queens. Boyfriends. Bums. If you have an experimental twist, try this: expectorate into a glass–sufficiently–twelve times should do it. Do not tarry. Drink the spittle. Analyze your reluctance. And wonder why they call saliva the sweet wine of love.”

by William H. Gass from his book Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife.