(urth) Bibliomen part 2

[Marc Aramini]

JOHN J. JONS, JR (April 15, 1942 – 1998)

Jons is stricken with diarrhea in New York City and, still looking for a
restroom twenty minutes later, is mugged. He wrote “A Guide to the Public
Toilets of America”. “It was published to little notice in 1990, and within
a year had sold over one million copies.” When he was not considered for
the Nobel Prize, he wrote *Meditations on the Utilitarian Theory of
Literary Merit* (pushing the idea that practically useful literature is
great literature). It was ridiculed. “Jons died of accidental causes in
1998, having apparently attempted to clean the front sight of his .357
Magnum with his teeth and pulled the trigger in the process.”

A revision of his guide to toilets is found and published. “Only after
several million copies had poured from the presses was it discovered that
the directions in the revised edition were uniformly incorrect.” Jons'
grave marker is inscribed “Cloaca Deception”.

The reason for his name is the obvious eponymous word play we would expect
for a man destined to write about toilets. Rather than having an obscure
artist die unknown, we have a prominent one who is never given the
intellectual respect he feels he deserves, seeking revenge on his public.

The guidebook motif will be repeated by Wolfe in his collaboration with
Neil Gaiman, *A Walking Tour of the Shambles.*

XAVIER MCRIDY (1939- )

In the most overtly Borgesian effort of *Bibliomen*, Xavier McRidy begins
work on *The Paper Nautilus* in 1969, about a reviewer reading *Mr. Milton
in Medoc* by S. Peety. In that book, the title character is writing a
dissertation on* Allegiance to La Villa Real de la Santa Fe De San
Francisco* (by Juan Gabriel Sebastian de Solo y Varios – whose name ending
means alone and many) in which an Argentine author attempts to persuade a
reluctant publisher in Buenos Aires to translate *The Paper Nautilus*.

“McRidy has hopes of a critical success if he can ever find his way out.”

Here is the labyrinthine metafiction of the Argentine Borges: a man writing
a novel in which, through a chain of fictional reviews, dissertations, and
translations, his novel appears again, nested in the chambers of a paper
nautilus, a labyrinthine book. The irony of the title which translates to
allegiance to the real city of the holy faith of St. Francis is in the
indeterminate nature of a final level to reality in the entry.

Xavier means “owner of a new house”. McRidy could be derived from a name
meaning “son of the expert”, or could be based on some more nebulous pun.
Peety most commonly occurs as a phonetic spelling in dialect for pity, but
it might just as easily refer to something else.

LIEUTENANT JAMES RYAN O'MURPHY, NYPD (May 8, 1931 -)

Lieutenant O'Murphy, born the day after Gene Wolfe, is interviewed by the
New York Daily News on February 31, 1988. He is the head of the
Bibliokleptcy and Plagiarism squad.

His squad investigates book crime. He clarifies why people attempting to
sell the rights to the Hitler diaries were not subject to prosecution, and
they soon talk of the book forger Louis Gold from *Peace*. O'Murphy says
Gold is out of his jurisdiction, but proceeds to praise his technique and
skill highly. His forgeries “would have been as good as original material,
and maybe better and more characteristic.” O'Murphy says minute details
should be checked, inserted as private jokes, such as the date of the
interview, to identify Gold's forgeries. (Here, O'Murphy mentions that
Arthurs has fled to the South of France to avoid prosecution for his
dishonest academic work – Mr. Milton from the fiction *Milton in Medoc,*
believing himself related to John Milton, also retires there.) The Woody
Allen mockumentary *Zelig* is mentioned, about a man who assumes the
characteristics and habits of the famous people that inspire him, and
O'Murphy indicates films are not his province, though if Allen shows his
face at the prominent bar for writers and entertainers in New York,
Elaine's, they will get him (Woody Allen always hung out there).

He is currently working on the case of the French Grave Robbing – the book
which killed Bernard French was titled *Great Lost Art of Western Europe*,
and because most of the large books were pulped, it is quite valuable. At
least two people opened French's grave and stole the book. He believes the
plates will be taken out in Amsterdam.

Lt. O'Murphy is the nephew of the Monsignor O'Murphy who helped Sister Mary
join the order of the Sisters of Perpetual Vigilance, and sounds his ideas
off on him.

His entry lets us know that *Bibliomen* as a whole is probably the forgery
of Louis Gold from *Peace.*

Can we determine who stole the book which contained Bernard French? Though
there is no motive at all, the few characters alive and positioned to do so
are Kirk Arthurs, Jon Johns, Paul Rico, and John Kinder Price, but it is
more likely the mystery is meant to be unresolvable. Kirk Arthurs and Mr.
Milton both flee to the South of France, however, though they may not exist
in the same reality.

James implies “supplanter, Ryan means “royalty”, and O'Murphy implies a
male descendant of the sea warrior – appropriate for the dominant metaphor
of books as a metaphysical kind of boat.

ANNE PARSONS (November 7, 1935 -)

Anne Parsons becomes an Assistant Librarian at the Kansas City Learning
Resource Center (once known as a library). When the Center seeks to expand
the Audio Visual section, she proposes building a new facility to house the
“noneducational and antieducational” materials. They opt to get rid of all
the books to make space for the VHS tapes, selling them at ten cents a
piece to the public. Anne Parsons buys them all and moves them into the
abandoned building she had hoped to replace. She institutes a classic
library system. Special interest groups demand representation, and she
points out texts like Othello, Don Quixote, and the works of Samuel R.
Delany.

Soon, her building is spray painted with obscene pictures and an attempt is
made to fire bomb it. When the number of viewers increases, a “brutal
street gang” known as Arthur's Pages appears to protect them. A convicted
rapist, William Bugge Ribberts, is found dead with a scrap of paper in his
mouth saying, “who kills a man kills a reasonable creature”. (This only
seems ironic out its context in Milton) Parsons refuses to explain.

Most of her collection is now gone, and she plans to purchase another
50,000 volumes and is training an assistant, but Parsons only responds to
inquiries with “Shhh.”

The message found in the dead man's mouth is an injunction against
censorship made by Milton in his *Areopagitica:*

as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a
reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills
reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man
lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of
a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a life beyond life.

This shows the devotion to books which Arthur's Pages have brought, seeking
vengeance on those who destroy books or censor them. The threat of books
being replaced by more modern media is given free reign here – the classic
library model thrown out in favor of a video resource center.

The name Anne implies “favor or grace”, and the last name Parsons is
someone who works for or serves a parson, a man of God. Here the library
and books are seen as the vitality and spirit of reason and immortality.

The argument that the canon and works of literary quality are
representative in general of a very specific, homogenous demographic (dead
white males) is briefly presented and challenged by Parsons in this entry.

ADAM (?) POOR (?) (1951 - )

Said to be born on the Isle of Sark, Poor is only known from the
biographical information on his book's cover. His first book, *Voices
Vocable*, involves a cast of seven characters who have boarded a train from
Sark to Bournemouth. The challenge is to sort the characters out by their
voices. “It is possible that the tunnel linking Sark to Bournemouth had
collapsed and they are limbo [sic], or that there is no tunnel.”

His second novel was a detective story, *The Salted Mine,* in which one
detective solves a murder, the second accuses the first, and a third comes
to exonerate him, though clues planted by Poor indicate the third detective
is actually the murderer.

Attempts to locate Poor have been fruitless, and his birth on Sark declared
a forgery by *The National Enquirer. “*His publishers are said to be
holding his royalties in trust, and it is said Prince Charles and Princess
Diana are among them.”

Sark is actually a real Channel Island located off the coast of Normandy,
France, considered the last feudal state in Europe. It does not allow cars
and has a population of approximately 500. It is accessible only via boat.
Bournemouth is a coastal town of England. The train mentioned is clearly
fictional – they would have to be using a boat, or the tunnel actually be a
fictional one under the sea.

Sark is the setting for Mervyn Peake's novel *Mr. Pye* and may have
inspired the *Gormenghast* setting. Peake actually lived on the island at
one time.

Adam means “red”, while Poor is actually a place name reference which could
be Picardy in France, besides the obvious English meaning of the word.

I feel that Poor's narrative technique is one which makes overt several of
Wolfe's tendencies, especially in stories like “Cherry Jubilee”, where both
detectives are wrong and listening to the speech patterns of the identical
girls help sort them out. This entry also shows the reclusive author who is
known only by their work, and this could be either through the workings of
time and history or an intentional avoidance of publicity and fame (though
here Poor could easily be a pseudonym or a “fictional” author).

Is there any relationship between Adam Poor and his imaginary, conceivably
collapsed tunnel and Man-on-Fire of Sister Mary through the red resonance
and the (non-textual) ghost story of the Hoosac Tunnel deaths, or is this
entirely coincidental?

Do the seven characters on the train in *Voices Vocable* have any
relationship to other characters in *Bibliomen* or in other works? Seven
seems to be a favored number for its religious significance – it is also
the line the Chairman of Isaac, Abraham, and Joseph uses to call Lucifer.

JOHN K. (KINDER) PRICE (1873- )

Born in Pennsylvania, Price moves to Massachusetts and, after the death of
his wife and child, tries to find a hobby, including building ship models
(as per the Dickinson reference again) and stamp collecting. After reading
of a book of spells in a pulp magazine, in 1939 he resolves to find it
(probably an HP Lovecraft story). “Because the book did not exist, he could
neither fail nor end the search by discovering a copy.” His search expands
from Springfield and local libraries to sending correspondence all over the
world: the Congo, Persia, and Bythinia. In 1952 a neighbor reports Price
had not been seen for several weeks, and the house later burned down. He
was spotted intermittently at Dartmouth campus and garage sales around
Boston. The most recent sighting (1977) was in the stacks of the British
Museum Library. “It is conjectured that Price has still not discovered the
book he seeks; but he appears to have found something.”

The search for arcane lore seems to have led Price to some form of
immortality. Lovecraft and the tales of eldritch knowledge clearly
influenced Wolfe's approach to fantasy.

Since the last appearance of Price is contemporaneous with the last
published book of Adam Poor, is there any relationship between the two?

John means “grace or mercy of the Lord”, Kinder can imply “children”, and
Price means “son of Rhys”, which implies “enthusiasm”. What is the price of
being young forever?

PAUL RICO (1960 - )

Born in New York City, Paul is a graffiti artist who begins with
obscenities and eventually becomes more allusive and clever, reaching
public attention with “I JUST GOT REAL”. He transposed restroom graffiti to
the subway cars he favored. Most are cleverly banal, such as “FREEDOM OF
THE WALLS!”, “UP WITH SKIRTS”, and “PEACE OR DIE”. When his graffiti is
mentioned in the New York Times, he becomes more intellectually ambitious:
“FREE THE NINE WORTHIES”, “ DIAL-A-DWARF – RING THE NIBELUNGS”, and
“PERSEUS IS AFRAID OF SNAKES”. On seeing a poster advertising the book he
puts out called TRAINING THE MIND, he vandalizes it immediately.

Unconventional expression is explored as art with a social conscious here,
quite tongue in cheek. Almost every one of the vandalized messages are
double entendres or paradoxes – such as the freedom of expression available
by writing on walls, which ultimately in actuality delimit and circumscribe
liberty.

Paul means “small or humble”. Rico as a family name implies “rich”.

RISHI (c .3500 or 3300 BC -)

Rishi's entry takes the form in a parable of wisdom. An ancient sage sits
in a cave for the last forty years of his life. “By day he spoke with the
gods, by night with spirits, and with animals and the winds at all times.”

People come to ask him how to achieve wisdom, which the sage knows is quite
simple: following a nearby riverside path to the book of wisdom. The first
supplicant will not go because of insects, the second because she has
already seen that side of the mountain, the third because the village he
must go to is poor, until finally a handsome and young disciple comes. Each
time before, Rishi had altered his advice to overcome the objection of the
previous supplicant, but he simply repeats his first injunction to this
final seeker of wisdom to follow the nearby path to the village where the
book rests, where it is read from every day.

“In the final year of Rishi's life, he who had been the youth returned; but
he did not hold himself boldly, nor were his eyes yet bright. 'Great Rishi
… there is no longer a path.'

This parable shows that eventually, when wisdom is not sought, the path
towards it vanishes. The old sage has been so out of touch that he does not
realize the world changes around him, and while the parable has a
traditional tone, even the man of wisdom is rendered foolish in his hopes.
Of course the idea of a book as containing wisdom fits with the theme of
*Bibliomen* as a whole, but wisdom is lost if it is not actively and
continually sought.

Who is the Sloan who attributes Rishi's birth to 3300 BC rather than 3500?

SKEETER SMITH (APRIL 10, 1969-APRIL 3, 1978)

The baseball player Skeeter Smith is an editorial comic character created
by Chick Beal for the *Chicago Daily Star*. Beal envisioned him as a comic,
but Skeeter was perceived primarily as an athlete. In 1972, when a decision
went against the Cubs, Skeeter forced the umpire to eat the rule book, an
umpire who resembled Beal's editor.

After that, Skeeter wasn't very funny. He then moved to the *Indianapolis
Chronicle* as Beal and his wife separated, and then after further problems
moved to the Julius, Georgia Patriots, appearing on the last page of
the *Julius
Emperor*. (I am not certain this is a real city and team – more likely
created for its pun of Roman Emperors with the name Julius or of the Julian
line). On April 3 a small box indicated Skeeter would no longer appear, and
on April 4 Chick crosses a busy highway and is killed in an apparent
suicide.

The popularity of a fictional comic character and his creator are given
parallel lives here, showing how all art is ultimately a metaphor for human
existence. Chick only outlives his creation by a day. Even in a strip about
baseball, it seems that the author's life somehow creeps in, coloring the
representation.

Skeeter means “quick and darting.” Smith means “one who works in metal” or
“to smite.”

Chick is a short form of Charles, which means “free man”. Beal, in addition
to implying a handsome man, could mean “bee-hill” or “Land by the Bend”.

THE WOMAN WHO RESIGNED (?)

A thin woman with no makeup comes to town and checks into the Big Tree
Motel, and within a week her nondescript, androgynous and cheap clothes
were found on the edge of town. Years later a deer hunter brings in a
strange thing he has shot, neither human nor animal. The coroner who tested
the blood asserts it is not human, and the innkeeper of the Big Tree Motel,
Mrs. Collins, indicates she thinks the woman just gave up. The narrator
indicates the thing wasn't human, and Mrs. Collins says, “But that's what
you want, isn't it? …. To quit the job of being one, give up on everything
and go somewhere far away. Haven't you ever noticed how far away a bird is
from us? It'll sing to you, but you can't talk to it, and it doesn't care
if you live or die.” The woman left behind two books: Grimm's *Fairy Tales *and
*Genetic Engineering Practice*. Deer hunters continue to have stories of
seeing something in the woods, and when the narrator gets lost, he comes
across a farmhouse where a woman claims to have milk and crackers outside
for her dog, though her dog stays inside with her.

We finally have a look at science textbooks, crossed with Wolfe's earlier
story, “Sweet Forest Maid.” The woman has made her escape from humanity an
experiment, bringing to life the sylvan fairy tales of forest spirits,
probably by experimenting on herself until she has bred something both new
and ancient in the wilderness.

LETTER TO HIROSHI HAYAKAWA

In this letter, Gene tells a publisher of a nurse helping a brilliant young
man who was dying, and he tells her of all the things he will do – go to
the university, travel, and see the sick. Before he dies he says the powers
at the edge of the universe revealed he would do all that, then he died.
She sees his face the next day reflected in a magazine kiosk, and seems to
see him over her shoulder as well. At that point, the Japanese American
nurse screamed out a word that means “ten thousand years” - Banzai! This
can also be an injunction to long life as well as acclamation for the
Emperor. This hopeful injunction of spirit enduring long after the body
dies ended the original publication of *Bibliomen. *It purports to be
reality but is more mystical than several of the entries.

SEAMAN (1951 -)

Glenville Neal was born in London and began drawing the comic *Smoke and
Mirrors* in 1978. Smoke, the Lord of Obscurity is a demigod “ruling Earth
from a vast palace outside time and space” who eliminated historical
abnormalities, both assisted and occasionally opposed by his consort
Mirrors, the Lady of Illusion. Neal immigrates to the United States and in
1988 begins to see Smoke everywhere, claiming he must draw him in order to
avoid being plagued by his own creation.

The final paragraph reveals that Neal is simply a fictional creation of B.
J. Solomon, and that Neal's circulation has gone down as his mental health
deteriorated, until he is transformed to a more conventional superhero
after his wife leaves him: Seaman, “a righter of wrongs and avenger of
injustices residing beneath a vast dome of glass under Lake Superior.”

Here we have Neil Gaiman of Sandman fame fictionalized as a graphic novel
artist who creates something interesting in his art, but in this reality he
is simply another, more banal creation than his own drawings, and in order
to maintain ratings, B.J. Solomon completely commercializes his character.
Of course we have the idea of psychological fracturing which could explain
the leaking of fiction into the real word, but Glenville Neal seems trapped
in another creator's reality.

The name Solomon means “Peace” – does this refer to any other
(nonfictional) fiction writer?

Does Glenville Neal drown himself after his wife leaves him?

CAPTAIN ROY C MIRK, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. (January 15, 1928 – April 28, 1996)

Mirk became a naval officer and then a University Professor of American
literature until his retirement in 1993. Mirk published several nonsensical
works: such as Poultry as Symbolism in Nineteenth Century American
Literature, Washing as a Euphemism in the Works of Jack London, and A
Post-Modernist Critic Views the Antebellum Middle West. He comes up with
the idea of bringing his works to a wider circulation – he buys a schooner
named the Appaloosa and renames it the Bounty.

He travels up and down the North American Coast and encourages people to
trade volumes freely, taking and giving as they see fit. In January of
1996, Mirk rearranged the confusing hold by subject area, putting “critical
works he favored” to starboard and books of all other types to port. He
spies Davidson's *Mutiny in Space* on the shelf on April 18th and pulls it
out, at which pint the Bounty capsized and sunk. “His body has never been
recovered.”

Here we have a wonderful idea that turns sour because of the critics' own
agenda. Mirk wants his ideas promulgated, so he promotes literature and its
free exchange but is disappointed that no one ever takes the critical books
he has written. In favoring his own agenda, he unbalances the literary
view, seeking to place his own obsessions in a position of prominence. This
is another criticism of the academic world, especially in post-modern
re-evaluations that ultimately decentralize meaning and significance.

It is interesting that Avram Davidson's *Mutiny in Space* seems to cause a
book mutiny on the Bounty – marginalized entertainment in the form of
science fiction (but of a very particular type, with the literary but
unique science fiction of Davidson) capsizes all the careful
categorizations that Mirk has attempted to force on his collection. Mirk
and his work is lost at sea, for despite his efforts to circulate
literature, it was his own agenda, one not worthy of remembrance.

This final entry ties together the idea that the original sources
themselves will survive, infused with the vitality of the sea rather than
the frail, artificial ship upon it.

Roy can mean “king” or “chief”, Mirk implies “dark”. The murky agenda of
the Captain undermines his endeavor, just as the academic world presses its
own concerns on a pre-existing literary world, attempting to control and
re-organize something which should live as itself without conforming to
academic categorizations.

LITERARY ALLUSIONS

For the most part, the references to particular authors and stories are
listed in the individual story sections, but the entirety of *Bibliomen* is
perhaps inspired by the artificial metafictions of authors such as
Pirandello in *Six Characters in Search of An Author* or Borges' various
stories that see reality as just another level of fiction. The various
genres in the individual entries pay tribute to the comic medium, graffiti,
science fiction, academic criticism, publishing, experimental fiction, and
even book collecting.

CONNECTION TO OTHER WORKS:

The absurd in Wolfe usually takes the form of comedy. His collaboration
with Neil Gaiman, *A Walking Tour of the Shambles*, “Dumpster World”, and
“Planetarium in Orbit” all have a similar feel. *Bibliomen* is the most
literary of these efforts in its exploration of metafiction, adventure
novels, psychological breakdowns, science fiction confessions, literary
puns and allusions, guide books, comics, and even picture books, but is
still very far from serious.

The return of Louis Gold, the forger from *Peace*, is a nice Easter egg –
and there is some indication that he is the author of *Bibliomen* as a
whole.
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