Between Sinister and Funny

Abstract

Between Sinister and Funny Judith Podell (bio) Violent Outbursts Thasseus Rutkowski Spuyten Duyvil www.spuytenduyvil.net 107 Pages; Print, $16.00 There’s such a fine line between sinister and funny or between outright psychosis and the stuff of TV sitcoms; Thaddeus Rutkowski reminds us in 86 terse, deadpan, and frequently surreal vignettes, many of which have been previously published in magazines and anthologies such as Barbaric Yawp, Poetry in Performance, and Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. The cover of Violent Outbursts could be an illustration from at least one of them. I’m thinking of “In College,” the longest, which summarizes the college experience in a four-page list of likes (heavy metal music, off-campus housing, live models in art class) and dislikes (art theory, sexual frustration, social humiliation). Under a Magritte blue sky and a backdrop of three tilting houses with TVs in every window, a young shirtless man, illuminated by a street lamp, faces a figure, presumably female, who is standing in the doorway. They stand too far apart to suggest intimacy but from his determined stance, and the fact that there’s a boom box at his feet, we think he’s prepared to stand ground: I liked showing up unannounced at the home of a person, especially if the person was a young woman I had a crush on. I didn’t like waiting for hours outside a door like a stalker, until the person who lived behind the door arrived. I didn’t like hearing after waiting for the person I was waiting for that I was not her “idea of a romantic hero.” From the shape of young man’s head, which is squared and suggestive of a flat top haircut, we might even assume he’s the older version of the nameless boy from “Pigeon Landing:” When I was 6, a pigeon landed squarely on my head. The pigeon landed squarely because my head was square, or more like a cube. There was a flat area on top just big enough for a medium sized bird to land on, without falling off. Or maybe that was just how the pigeon saw my head. The givens of childhood: a father of Polish descent who’s somewhat nuts, an immigrant Chinese mother, and an outhouse in his backyard: None of the kids who lived in town had outhouses. I didn’t really feel underprivileged. I just felt like I was living in an earlier era, when people had no indoor plumbing. My friend knew how to get girls. All he had to do was bring them into his basement and breakout the sticks. I myself had no clue about romance, but I was sure the one thing I didn’t want to be carrying on a date was my flute. Those familiar with Rutkowski’s work might recognize these details from Tetched (2005) (which Rutkowski calls “a novel in fractals”); only here they have been stripped down, assembled in the kind of associative order one might find in a collage or an album and set free from the limits of gravity. Rutkowski has cited Donald Barthelme and Richard Brautigan as influences, but for me, his singular voice and vision the matter of fact surrealism of a Charles Simic poem or a Saul Steinberg drawing. If you flap your arms hard enough, you can fly but not far. Reality is provisional and has the random assembly quality of a dream: ramshackle, poorly made, or a few pieces missing. We’re in a house on the outskirts of a small town in the middle of no place in particular but it feels like home. In the back yard, “tattooed, rubberized family life goes on while up in the sky, the saucer approaches.” Or maybe we’re in a speeding car until unspecified “things settle down,” en route to Pit Bull Stadium where everyone sings the Pit Bull anthem. Rutkowski will take a figure of speech literally, throw in a unicorn, and then detonate: I wanted to be a soul brother, but I didn’t have the rhythm or the siblings to succeed. I was living in a void, a place without music or...