Black Humour Passage of the Day

[Bleak&Icy]

Not just wicked, no, I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an action figure--primarily a limited being. This is my forty-year-old conviction. I am now forty years old, and, after all, forty years--is a whole lifetime; after all, it's the most extreme old age. To live beyond forty is indecent, banal, immoral! Who lives beyond forty--answer me sincerely, honestly? I'll tell you who does: fools and scoundrels do. I'll say it in the faces of all the elders, all these venerable elders, all these silver-haired and sweet-smelling elders! I'll say it in the whole world's face! I have the right to speak this way, because I myself will live to be sixty. I'll live to be seventy! I'll live to be eighty!... Wait, let me catch my breath...

-- Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky)

[G. S. Carnivals]

"I tell you, no one worships this city as I do. Especially its witticisms of proximity, one strange thing next to another, adding up to a greater strangeness. One of the more grotesque examples of this phenomenon occurs when you observe that a little shop whose display window features a fabulous array of prosthetic devices is right next-door to Marv's Second Hand City. Then there are those places - you've noticed them, I'm sure - that are freakishly suggestive in a variety of ways. One them is that pink and black checkerboard box on Bender Boulevard that calls itself Bill's Bender Lounge, where a garish marquee advertises Nightly Entertainment. And if you stare at that legend long enough, the word 'Nightly' will begin to connote more than the interval between dusk and dawn. Soon this simple word becomes truly evocative, as if it were code for the most exotic and unspeakable entertainments of the infinite night. And speaking of entertainment, I should cite that establishment whose owner, no doubt an epicure of musical comedy, gave it the title of Guys and Dolls, Inc. What a genius of vulgarity, considering that this business is devoted solely to the sale and repair of mannikins. Or is it really a front for a bordello of dummies? No offense intended, Rosalie."

Thomas Ligotti - "The Chymist"

[Bleak&Icy]

When the rest of them turned away and began to head back to town, I stayed behind. Another town manager would arrive before long, and I did not wish to see what form the new administration would take. This was the way it had always been--one town manager succeeding another, each of them exhibiting signs of greater degeneracy, as if they were festering away into who knows what. And there was no telling where it would all end. How many others would come and go, taking with them more and more of the place where I had been born and was beginning to grow old? I thought about how different that place had been when I was a child. I thought about my youthful dream of having a home in The Hill district. I thought about my old delivery business.

Then I walked in the opposite direction from the town. I walked until I came to a road. And I walked down that road until I came to another town. I passed through many towns, as well as large cities, doing clean-up work and odd jobs to keep myself going. All of them were managed according to the same principles as my old home town, although I came upon none that had reached such an advanced stage of degeneracy. I had fled that place in hopes of finding another that had been founded upon different principles and operated under a different order. But there was no such place, or none that I could find. It seemed the only course of action left to me was to make an end of it.

Not long after realizing the aforementioned facts of my existence, I was sitting at the counter of a crummy little coffee shop. It was late at night, and I was eating soup. I was also thinking about how I might make an end of it. The coffee shop may have been in a small town or a large city. Now that I think of it, the place stood beneath a highway overpass, so it must have been the latter. The only other customer in the place was a well-dressed man sitting at the other end of the counter. He was drinking a cup of coffee and, I noted, directing a sidelong glance at me every so often. I turned my head toward him and gave him a protracted stare. He smiled and asked if he could join me at my end of the counter.

"You can do whatever you like. I'm leaving."

"Not just yet," he said as he sat down at the counter stool next to mine. "What business are you in?"

"None in particular. Why?"

"I don't know. You just seem like someone who knows his way around. You've been some places, am I right?"

"I suppose so," I said.

"I thought as much. Look, I'm not just interested in chit-chat here. I work on commission finding people like you. And I think you've got what it takes."

"For what?" I asked.

"Town management," he replied.

I finished off the last few spoonfuls of my soup. I wiped my mouth with a paper napkin. "Tell me more," I said.

It was either that or make an end of it.

-- "The Town Manager" by Thomas Ligotti

[gveranon]

From one moment to the next I hated my piano, my own, couldn't bear to hear myself play again; I no longer wanted to paw my instrument. So one day I visited the teacher to announce my gift to him, my Steinway, I'd heard his daughter was musically gifted, I said to him and announced the delivery of my Steinway to his house. I'd convinced myself just in time that personally I wasn't suited for a virtuoso career, I said to the teacher, since I always wanted only the highest in everything I had to separate myself from my instrument, for with it I would surely not reach the highest, as I had suddenly realized, and therefore it was only logical that I should put my piano at the disposal of his gifted daughter, I wouldn't open the cover of my piano even once, I said to the astonished teacher, a rather primitive man who was married to an even more primitive woman, also from Neukirchen near Altmunster. Naturally I'll take care of the delivery costs! I said to the teacher, whom I've known well since I was a child, just as I've known his simplicity, not to say stupidity. The teacher accepted my gift immediately, I thought as I entered the inn. I hadn't believed in his daughter's talent for a minute; the children of country schoolteachers are always touted as having talent, above all musical talent, but in truth they're not talented in anything, all these children are always completely without talent and even if one of them can blow into a flute or pluck a zither or bang on a piano, that's no proof of talent. I knew I was giving up my expensive instrument to an absolutely worthless individual and precisely for that reason I had it delivered to the teacher. The teacher's daughter took my instrument, one of the very best, one of the rarest and therefore also most expensive pianos in the world, and in the shortest period imaginable destroyed it, rendered it worthless. But of course it was precisely this destruction process of my beloved Steinway that I had wanted. Wertheimer went into the human sciences, as he always used to say, I entered my deterioration process, and in bringing my instrument to the teacher's house I had initiated this deterioration process in the best possible manner.

-- Thomas Bernhard, The Loser (trans. Jack Dawson)

[Bleak&Icy]

I was waiting for gveranon to post a passage by Bernhard. No one does black humour quite like him.

[Bleak&Icy]

Oh, if I were doing nothing only out of laziness. Lord, how I'd respect myself then. Respect myself precisely because I'd at least be capable of having laziness in me; there would be in me at least one, as it were, positive quality, which I myself could be sure of. Question: who is he? Answer: a lazybones. Now, it would be agreeable to hear that about myself. It means I'm positively defined; it means there's something to say about me. "Lazybones!" --now, that is a title and a mission, it's a career, sirs. No joking, it really is. By rights I'm then a member of the foremost club, and my sole occupation is ceaselessly respecting myself.

-- Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky)

[Daisy]

“And so was his grandfather” [Asta su Abuelo], Plate 39 of Los Caprichos (1799), by Francisco Goya

This poor animal has been driven mad by Genealogists and Heralds. He’s not the only one. [A este pobre animal le han vuelto loco los Genialogistas y reyes de Armas. No es el solo.]

[G. S. Carnivals]

The Dinner Man himself often teased Beatie with his ventriloquist skills (which bordered on mind-throwing ones), to such a degree that she had fallen in love with a wicker chair. This, Beatie was told, had been handicrafted by a member of the commune who had been blind, deaf, dumb and amputated; he had died only last spring, just after completing it, the night they all had thought a police raid was afoot.

"Why do we call you Dinner Man, Dinner Man?" Beatie asked, almost with the breath rather than the voice—or, perhaps, with an inconsistent consistency of saliva she incubated within the throat walls.

She had never thought to pose the question before, but this evening she had a devil inside. It seemed, in fact, that significant stirrings in the flatland of fate were impending. The Dinner Man put his arm round Beatie's shoulders and, ensuring that he avoided disturbing the pins in her hair, took a peck at her petal-soft cheek. He decided that silence was the only possible reply to her question. The whole matter was far too complicated for mere words to suffice. But another commune member who had come to sit nearby mimicked a reply, much to the Dinner Man's irritation:

"My face resembles what once was slopped on school canteen plates."

D. F. Lewis - Miscreant in Moonlight

[gveranon]

From "A Galaxy Called Rome," by Barry N. Malzberg

As interesting as the material was, I quailed even at this series of notes, let alone a polished, completed work. My personal life is my black hole, I felt like pointing out (who would listen?); my daughters provide more correct and sticky implosion than any neutron star, and the sound of the pulsars is as nothing to the music of the paddock area at Aqueduct racetrack in Ozone Park, Queens, on a clear summer Tuesday. "Enough of these breathtaking concepts, infinite distances, quasar leaps, binding messages amidst the arms of the spiral nebula," I could have pointed out. "I know that there are those who find an ultimate truth there, but I am not one of them. I would rather dedicate the years of life remaining (my melodramatic streak) to an understanding of the agonies of this middle-class town in northern New Jersey; until I can deal with these, how can I comprehend Ridgefield Park, to say nothing of the extension of fission to include progressively heavier gases?" Indeed, I almost abided to this until it occurred to me that Ridgefield Park would forever be as mysterious as the stars and that one could not deny infinity merely to pursue a particular that would be impenetrable until the day of one's death.

So I decided to try the novelette, at least as this series of notes, although with some trepidation, but trepidation did not unsettle me, nor did I grieve, for my life is merely a set of notes for a life, and Ridgefield Park merely a rough working model of Trenton, in which, nevertheless, several thousand people live who cannot discern their right hands from their left, and also much cattle.

[Vulture]

This is the story I can’t make head nor tail of it, somebody said: “You ought to write it down,” I can’t remember who, perhaps it was me, I get everything mixed up, it’s true sometimes when I’m being introduced to someone I concentrate so much I take on the same face as the person and the friend who is introducing us doesn’t know if it’s me or the other one, he just leaves me to sort it out for myself. Instead of saying: “Excuse me” and putting on my real face again, I explain why I like to look like people and get all mixed up again, my friend gets angry and the other person goes off saying she hasn’t got all day to waste she’s got shopping to do.

Mahu or The Material - Robert Pinget