Cutty, One Rock

is the name of a collections of essay by August Kleinzhaler I'm reading right now. It's great - particularly the title essay, but others such as Eros and Poetry are very fine as well. The dust jacket tells me that most of them first appeared in the London Review of Books, but a more 'merican group of vignettes you will not find. Consider these sentences from the title piece, a memoir of his brother that reads very much like a 1970ish, Jersey version of A River Runs Through It:

They didn't look like hoods, more like midcareer bureaucrats, fortyish, chubby, thick glasses. But they'd brought two good-looking molls with them; I can't imagnine they were even eighteen: blonds, Marty and Will. It fell to me to keep the boys entertained while my brother retired to his bedroom with the two Mafiosi for what was to be a very, very serious conversation. My brother had warned me that there was a good chance they'd kill him, and, without spelling it out, that if I was on hand my own health might be in jeopardy. We were very close at that stage. I loved my brother more than anyone in the world, and didn't have anywhere else to go.

Yes, you are correct - those good looking molls are boys. It's a crazy world, the one his older brother moved in through the late hours. Much, much crazier than yours or mine. The younger brother knew that world pretty well himself, by association anyway, and for an hour or so while reading, so do we.

Kleinzhaler's real job is poetry, which is the only way he could have come up with such an oft-quoted passage as this:

I'll spare you the funeral and mourning rituals. It was pretty horrible. The spectacle of a parent grieving for a child is togh to watch, especially when it's your own parent. Ther was an amimal sound coming out of my mother, like a dog wailing, but softer. I'd never seen a corpse up close before. I wasn't thrilled that the first one belonged to my brother. Then there was the makeup and his icy-cold cheek.

The other essay in the book I really enjoyed was Eros and Poetry. Roughly chronological, it takes a look at Love that is sometimes scientific, sometimes folksy, and sometimes even loving. The first of these, for example:

Dr. J. N. MacKenzie, surgeon to the Baltimore Eye, Ear and Throat Charity Hospital, asserted in 1884 that the respiratory and olfactory mucosa has a structure analogous to the spongy central body of the penis and is equally erectile.

Bet you didn't know that, did you? Aren't you glad you do now?

Referencing Stoddart's The Scented Ape (though aren't apes scented too?):

Perfumes can be analyzed in their parts: the upper notes are made from the sexual secretions of flwoers, produced to attract animals for the purpose of cross-pollination and often formulated as mimic of the animal's sex pheremones. Many of these contain compounds with a fecal odor.

Towards the end he blends Martha Nussbaum and Proust.

Nussbaum writes about katalepseis, about the cataleptic impression having the power, through its own felt quality, to convince us that things could not be otherwise. "But this knowledge, which the shrewdest perceptions of the mind would not have given me, had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallized salt, by the abrupt reaction of pain" (Proust, Remembrance of Things Past).

It's a short book, just 155 pages, and you can read the last two essays while standing in a bookstore. You should.