The Beaches of Northern California:

 

Forty Books of Poetry that Might Have Been

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jonathan Mayhew

 

 

The Beaches of Northern California

 

A highschool dropout roams the beaches of Northern California, meeting a series of strangers who propose contests of strength and absurdly specific wagers: what pieces of detritus will the next wave carry away? He is in no position to refuse any suggestion offered to him. He understands the literal meaning of the words spoken to him but he will never understand the rules of the game.

The Blurbs

 

A middle-aged professor imagines forty unwritten volumes of poetry and comes up with descriptions of the circumstances under which their virtual speech-acts might have come into existence. Is this text the fortieth or the forty-first?      

 

Estate Sale  

 

A woman in her late twenties peddles the belongings of her late stepfather—the usual collection of knicknacks—to well-meaning neighbors and “friends of the family” of less reliable intentions. The poems here are the songs she sings to herself in her car as she goes from appointment to appointment, to the accompaniment of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites: 

 

Fuckin’ netsuke, who the hell cares? 

Uncle Robert will pay five cents on the dollar. 

With uncles and aunts like him, who needs rivers of tears?   

 



My Little Brown Book

 

A young boy whose father has recently died, and whose alcoholic mother has entrusted him to an indulgent but distracted governess, copies down random passages from his father’s vast library into a small brown notebook, without comprehending anything.     

 

The Tattoo Artist 

 

A tattoo artist in an unidentified city inks slogans and proverbs onto the arms, legs, and backs of his clientele: “Eat grit or die.” Arranged in a certain order, this “wisdom literature” becomes the surprisingly translucent epic of life in our times.  

 

Hyperbole and Its Discontents

 

An amazingly eloquent hitchhiker of indeterminate ethnicity delivers lectures of spectacular brilliance and scope, on a dizzying array of subjects, to the husband-and-wife truckdriving team who have picked him up on the way to Cleveland. 

 

Diner Bill 

 

Diner Bill standing behind the counter of his diner just can’t shut the fuck up.  

 

The Instructions  

 

The first page of this tour-de-force of experimental writing contains detailed and exacting instructions for reading the second, the second contains similar instructions for reading the third, and so on. (The last page, of course, gives instructions on how to read the first.) No reader can obey these instructions, since he or she is always learning how to read the next page while trying to remember the complex instructions from the previous one. No page can ever be correctly read, since the pages before and after compete for attention with the page being read, obliterating it. Didacticism was never so liberatory.  

 

 

 

The Very, Very Long Day

 

A diary entry chronicles every thought, every event, every observation during a very, very long and very, very eventful day.  

 



 

 

 

 

1