David Gordon White Tiger on Snow Mountain
In describing a
university student in “North American Post-Modern Culture” who was researching
a thesis on “cultural and literary ‘Marginalism,’” the narrator writes: “In a move that her professors found
brilliant for one so young, and that had earned her a grant to travel to New
York, she had evolved past the early postmodern fascination with footnotes to
focus her research on acknowledgments pages.”
The short story
collection White Tiger on Snow Mountain,
by David Gordon, has many of these sharp and witty critiques of the academic
and public intellectual discourse today.
Of course there’s a
lot of broader humor as well. In the
story from which the above was taken, “All This Time,” the joke, and plot, is enhanced and advanced
knowing that the student was intending to focus on a particular writer, not
coincidentally named David Gordon, who she presumed was long ago deceased. “She seemed disturbed by the news,” he writes
of her reaction to his not being dead. And
to the flesh and blood subject standing before her she says: “This could be a
problem for my research.”
My favorite story in
the collection, “Matinee,” is basically about two boys going to the movies (and
having one boy's sister go along, all three juvenile delinquents ditching
school), but is much more. (It helps to
know that Mr. Gordon’s resume includes writing pornography for living, so there
is a hilarious and not infrequent use of
indelicate sexual repartee and description.)
The two boys have
their own backstory going at the beginning of the piece, both being at the age
of sexual mania, one kid a fairly grounded young man with straight-laced parents,
the other kid untamed and from a totally wildass family---and it’s his sister
who is with them, and she’s crazy, too. Their
world comprises the first half of the story, which is very funny, and very
nasty.
But it is the second
half of the story that lights up the scoreboard for me, when the trio arrives
at the Earl Theater, one of the glamorous, ornate, almost mythical single-screen
movie palaces that became anomalies in the 1960’s and 1970’s as big city
downtown’s deteriorated and multiplexes in suburban malls proliferated. (During that time Los Angeles had a wealth of
the magnificent (and near magnificent) theaters on Broadway between Second
Street and Eighth Street: the Orpheum, the
Roxie, the Globe, the Cameo, the Palace, the State, the Tower, et al.)
I’ve not read a
better homage to these theaters than in this story, exemplified by the Earl and
spoken by Mr. Gordon’s narrator. He
begins by declaring “The Earl is a ruined temple…” and then goes on to write almost reverentially
about “entering the great cave of the theater, with its balding plush seats and
the shifting curtain marked with the masks of joy and pain…the Earl is the best
place in the world to see a movie.”
He describes the audience,
fewer than two dozen patron-philosopher-critics scattered around the auditorium,
there for a variety of reasons---sleeping, drinking, to get out of the cold---and
gives plenty of examples of the vocal interplay, among themselves as well as
remarks directed toward the screen depending on what was happening in the movie
at the time.
The scene in the
Earl lasts for several pages and is unerring in capturing the atmosphere of the
fading movie house. I’d call “Matinee” a
period piece, and a valuable historical document of that era, as well as a
well-told story about the crazy excitement of youth in general. The story ends with these two sentences: “Everything is still possible. You have not yet begun to live.”
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