Today’s Throwback Thursday post features Gerald Vizenor’s Hotline Healers (1997).

  
At left: Gerald Vizenor reading from Blue Ravens at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, October 18, 2014

Vizenor’s work, drawing upon the trickster tradition in Native American culture, is among the most radical in Native American writing today. Academics of all stripes (but particularly anthropologists), the champions of victimry, Richard Nixon, and many others come under the lash of Vizenor’s satiric tongue in this hilarious, often surreal work: Hotline Healers.

In this collection of eleven linked stories, Vizenor brings back one of his most popular characters, Almost Browne, in full trickster force. Born in the back of a hatchback, almost on the White Earth Reservation, this crossblood storyteller sells blank books–some autographed (by him) with such names as Isaac Singer, Geoffrey Chaucer, N. Scott Momaday, and Jesus Christ; projects laser demons over the reservation; lectures in the Transethnic Situations Department at the University of California; is crowned Indian Princess of the University of Oklahoma by posing as the “mature” senior Penny Birdwind (who majors in native animations and simulations) and delivering a heartstopping, lip-synched rendition of Peggy Lee’s “Fever”; and much more. The stories feature many members of the Browne family, including Grandmother Wink, who can drop an insect in flight with a single puff of her poison breath, and great-uncle Gesture, the acudenturist who creates false teeth with tricky smiles from the Naanabozho Express, the free railroad train he runs on the reservation.

From Chapter 1: Teaser of Chance

Almost Gegaa Browne is rather ordinary, as you know, and a homely person in many ways. Ordinary in the sense of natural reason and native sovereignty. His tricky stories, even as a child, were heard as dares, the trusty tease of chance, the ruse of extremes, and the constant motion of creation, but you might think otherwise in his actual presence.

Almost teases everyone, a natural sense of mercy that others sometimes misconstrue as censure outside of the barony. He wears four ordinary wrist watches, and the hands are set at arcane hours. His clothes are borrowed, bright, loose, and wrinkled from neck to ankle. He never wears hats, socks, or undershorts, and his outsized shoes are nicely tied with copper wire.

“We live forever in stories, not manners,” he teased a writer for the New York Times. “So, tease the chance of conception, tease your mother, tease the privy councils of the great spirit, be a natural pirate, and always tease your own history.” Yes, my cousin is outrageous, notorious, wanton, a natural bother, as you know, and he is a mighty hotline healer in his stories.

Almost creates his intimate celebrations of contradictions, the traces of natural chance, the turn of seasons, a thunderstorm, and yet he amounts to much more than humor, a tease, and a generous memory at the end of his own stories. He is a hotline healer with a sure hand, heart, and eye of survivance. Almost has never been a separatist or a treasonous coach of victimry.

Read the rest of Hotline Healers, Chapter 1.

Vizenor’s newest books are Blue Ravens, a historical novel based on his great uncles’ journeys before, during, and after WWI, and Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku.

We are pleased to announce a new book by Harvey Shapiro, A Momentary Glory: Last Poems. A celebration of Shapiro’s work will occur on Tuesday, September 30, at 7:30 PM, in the Rare Book Room of The Strand Book Store (828 Broadway at 12th Street, NYC). Read more here.

The distinguished poet Harvey Shapiro passed away on January 7, 2013. The poems in this book, many of them previously unpublished and discovered only after his death, are a great gift, and the final confirmation of his extraordinary talent. Edited by Shapiro’s literary executor, the poet and critic Norman Finkelstein, these last poems bear an unprecedented gravitas, and yet they are as supple, jazzy, and edgy as Shapiro’s earlier work. All the themes for which he is known are beautifully represented here. There are poems of his experiences in World War II, the erotic life, and of daily moments in Brooklyn and Manhattan, all in search of a worldly wisdom and grace that the poet calls “a momentary glory.” As Shapiro tells us, the poem “Is an Egyptian / ship of the dead, / everything required / for life stored / in its hold.” The book includes a introduction by the editor. An online reader’s companion is available at http://harveyshapiro.site.wesleyan.edu/.

For more details, click here.

Also available as an ebook—check with your favorite ebook retailer.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Psalm

I am still on a rooftop in Brooklyn
on your holy day. The harbor is before me,
Governor’s Island, the Verrazano Bridge
and the Narrows. I keep in my head
what Rabbi Nachman said about the world
being a narrow bridge and that the important thing
is not to be afraid. So on this day
I bless my mother and father, that they be
not fearful where they wander. And I
ask you to bless them and before you
close your Book of Life, your Sefer Hachayim,
remember that I always praised your world
and your splendor and that my tongue
tried to say your name on Court Street in Brooklyn.
Take me safely through the Narrows to the sea.

Brenda Coultas has been keeping busy after the release of her latest book, The Tatters! On Sunday, August 24th, she will be reading in the Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale, New York, as part of the 24th Annual Subterranean Poetry Festival.

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Dream Life in a Case of Transvestism

1

I’m in a man’s uniform with military creases in the shirt. I search an informant for drugs or money, to verify that she goes in clean. It’s very hot. She wears a tank top, shorts, and slip-on shoes. She pulls up her top; nothing beneath her breasts but a wire taped on for sound. I look down her shorts, public hair shaved. Check inside the soles of her shoes. Nothing. It’s daylight and we are in an empty railroad yard.

2

My sister and I walk down the midway in matching sailor suits. My cousin Tommy is dressed in a nautical jacket, carrying a cane with a ceramic dalmatian head. All the carny barkers watch. They wish they were dressed like us.

3

At a party for girls only, I wear a can-can dress with big kittens on the skirt. It has  a velcro zipper that I like to open and close. We take our clothes off. They all turn out to be boys. Later, I found out that I went on the wrong day.

4

I am a woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman. I am so much a woman I do not recognize myself. Yet I have never been more of a man.

My testicles lie beneath my skin and I touch the two knots in my groin. When I swear I place my right hand upon them and tell the truth, as told by me, a liar.

5

Since I became a woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman, I lost my virginity. There are sixteen types of hymens. I had thirteen of them. My hymen was a chameleon that hung from a chain on my sweater and changed shape constantly.

“What’s that on your sweater?”

“It’s just an old maidenhead that I spray painted gold and glued some sequins onto.”

6

I lost it in a car in Kentucky, beneath the bride where I was born in the car’s back seat. My father drove, the doctor in back with my mother. My father drove faster and faster. Her pains came closer and closer together. The crown of my head emerged. We were late crossing the water. All of us were very, very late.