I discovered Barry Yourgrau's writing back in 1988 via reading Oak in Between C and D: New Writing from the Lower East Side Fiction Magazine. I read and reread Oak many times and quickly picked up Barry's book Wearing Dad's Head and enjoyed many other similarly bizarre, wacky, highly imaginative snappers. Here are a few excerpts from Oak:
I'm eating lunch. Through the green shutters of the window I watch a sheep trot by on the road. A flock of them comes ambling along placidly behind. A pretty shepherdess appears, hurrying. I smile.
"How charming," I murmur to my mother, who sits in her rocking chair, puffing on her corncob pipe as she whittles a cloths peg with her penknife.
She curses at it, whacking it with great blows of her decorated crook, as if it were a rug she were beating. "Hey - hey there!" I shout, hurrying around the baa-ing flock. "Stop abusing that animal like that!" Thee shepherdess glares under her bonnet. "Why don't you just get lost," she snorts, apple-cheeked and nasty, as I come up.
"First she was beating up a sheep and then she tried it on me! But I'll fix her!" "Not with that goof-ass twig broom, yer ain't gonna," my mother snorts. She points with her pipe. "Git the pestle from the butter churner. It's oak."
"Now yer mind now," my mother warns me, limping over to the window for a view of the proceedings. "I know how them Bo Peeps go at it. She'll fake yer high to the left, then try to come under low right and wham yer jewels up in yer watch pocket."
"Now we'll see how you like a dose of your own medicine, you little pastoral sociopath."
"Would it ever be possible for you once to speak in English instead of that repulsive backwoods gutter-lingo you affect!" my father demands of my mother in exasperation.
Comments
Post a Comment