First Ladies

First Ladies' Forum

(Site manager's note: the following January 1999 Discussion Web thread began when "Brooklyn" responded to a question from "Sally a.k.a Sugar" about how to have fun. After a few grotesque proposals, "Brooklyn" suggested "two very funny books. 1. Letters from a Nut by Ted L. Nancy (you can read this during one standing at the bookstore); 2. Flashman by George M. Fraser, somewhat apropos to the recent bombing on Bin-Laden in Afghanistan." He added, apropos of Amis:

"This recently cracked me up: a buddy I've put in charge of reading Dead Babies read a passage that indicated that the Whitehead family, four strong, tipped the scales at a combined 100 stone. It was funnier after it was established what that worked out to in American."

This posting inspired a veritable flood of posting from First Ladies (and one unwise intervention by Eva Peron), of which the following are offered as samples):

MEMO TO: Brooklyn

From: Mamie Eisenhower
Category: Category 1
Date: 1/12/99
Time: 2:59:38 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.73

Ya want fun, schnoodles? I got yer fun. Right here: Fun With Your New Head by Thomas Disch. He's got another story collection called Getting Into Death.....I can recommend a comic book called Warts & All by Drew & Josh Friedman. (They're the illustrious sons of Bruce Jay.) It's a borderline-mystical experience, I can promise you. My fave piece is "Entertainment Freak." I wish to heck they'd collaborate again....

Re: MEMO TO: Brooklyn

From: Hillary Clinton
Category: Category 1
Date: 1/13/99
Time: 1:37:18 PM
Remote Name: 198.79.246.181

Mamie! Where in the afterlife have you been? I've missed our little chats. We have so much to catch up on. You would not believe what else Bill has put me through since we last talked. Get that Ramtha or somebody to put you through to me. Just don't let the freaks in the media find out: they don't understand our special rapport, you know, and not only will they call me nuts again, but Ken Starr is also liable to subpoena you for the impeachment hearings (Starr chats with Roy Bean regularly, and they are both terrible gossips; there'd be no keeping it out of the New Etherik Times).

You also didn't tell me you were reading the living again. Then again, both of those books by Disch are out of print, so I suppose in a way they're dead too, although their author isn't yet. Since we're on the subject, maybe you can do a little research for me. Some critics think Disch's protagonist in Descending has already slipped into the afterlife when he rouses from his book to find himself on that endless escalator. Some (mainly dead ones, I admit; I think I read this in the New Etherik Times Book Section) contend that there are no such places in the afterlife - who needs escalators when you're bodiless? - and that Disch's description only reveals his laughable ignorance of postphysical reality and his viacentrism. Have you ever seen such a thing as that escalator? hoping I don't find the answer out in person any time soon - yours sincerely - Hill

Re: MEMO TO: Brooklyn

From: E. Peron
Category: Category 1
Date: 1/13/99
Time: 11:57:51 PM
Remote Name: 129.37.168.58

Hillary, my poor deluded love, you're such an American!

Re: MEMO TO: Eva

From: A ticked H. Rodham Clinton (via Brooklyn)
Category: Category 1
Date: 1/14/99
Time: 9:13:18 AM
Remote Name: 207.238.28.10

Don't cry for me you stuffed bitch or I'll come after you (ever hear of Vince Foster) and rip out the voice box and whatever contraption that allows you to type. I'll drop you in a pond and logroll your torso. When I'm through no taxidermist either side of the equator will even think of taking you on.

Oh yeah, sorry about your neighbor, Brazil. We tried to help, sorta. Maybe when I'm the VP things will be different.

MEMO TO: Hillary

From: Pat Nixon
Category: Category 1
Date: 1/14/99
Time: 12:35:31 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.69

Dear Hillary: What can I say? I feel your pain. Gosh darn these fiendish hubbies. I gotta hand it to ya, Hillzy. You're a ballzy gal. Your heroic stoicism is unequaled on Planet Earth. But lemme tell ya something. If that hubby of yours pulls a Dick Nixon and throws a press conference and starts gibbering away about how his mother was a saint---just turn around and kick him in the nuts and fly off to Bermuda with Lee Trevino. (By the way, does Al Gore come with an extention cord or do you just recharge his power-pack at night?)

Listen hon---Mamie just succumbed to another fit of catatonic despair over the fact that Borges went blind and Beethoven went deaf and The Big Bopper died so tragically young in that fiery plane crash on The Day The Music Died. So she asked me to ghost-write for her, ha ha.

Tom Disch knows the Ethereal Realm like my butt chews gum. Do we have an escalator here? Of course not. Well, actually we used to. But The Big G got rid of it because Truman Capote kept getting his toes caught in the crack down at the bottom. I know what you're thinking. What the hell is Truman Capote doing in First Lady Limbo? How the hell should I know. All I know is that he likes to strut around here with nothing on but a leather thong and one of Jackie O's pillbox hats. And by the way, the latest gossip up here has it that Truman has been sending email bombs to all those "stinking heteros" who were rude enough to rebuff Truman's drunken romantic flirtations back during the glory days of Studio 54. So if you happen to get "bearded"---by God, it's what you damn well deserve for breaking Truman's heart.

Tom Disch wrote a preface to a Philip Dick novel that's better than the actual novel. Here's Disch on the Cuban missile crisis:

"In October of 1962, Kennedy had his moment of macho glory when he declared a quarantine around Cuba, where the Russians were building missile bases. For a few days everyone was waiting for the bombs to fall. The sensation of dread and helplessness was just the stuff nightmares are made of. For those who had read more than the government's bromidic brochures on the subject of nuclear destruction and who were living at that time in a major (i.e., targeted) city, there was little to be done but figure the odds for survival. Fifty-fifty seemed to be the general consensus among the New Yorkers I knew. The poet Robert Frost, legend has it, reckoned doomsday even likelier than that, and when he appeared at a symposium at Columbia University, he declared himself to be delighted that now he would not die alone (he was then 88) but would take all humanity along with him. A year and a half later, in November of 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated---probably as a quid pro quo for his earlier efforts to play a similar dirty trick on Castro. However, at the time we were asked to believe that the deed was accomplished by a single bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. Earl Warren, having been admonished by President Johnson that continued doubts of the scapegoat's sole guilt could lead to nuclear war, was directed to write a scenario to this effect. The Warren Commission issued its report in 1964, the same year in which The Penultimate Truth was published. Neither was nominated for a Hugo, for indeed both books were much too hastily written to deserve such an honor."

Here's Disch on a ludicrous poet named Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Like the perfect hypnotic subject, Emerson gives the impression of being able to enter trance states at the drop of his high hat, whereupon the liquid measures flow, alternating the praise of nature, in true romantic style, with praise for the poet's large soul than can mirror so wide a view. Long before Ammons became the amanuensis of mountains, Emerson spoke up for Mount Monadnoc (and Monadnoc for Emerson)."

Here's Disch on John Updike:

"If the class that Updike addresses so cogently were in the habit of reading poetry, he would be America's Philip Larkin. But they do not, and so the merits of his poetry have been by and large unacknowledged. And even that lends the poetry an additional Ozymandean grandeur, as though one were to come upon a tastefully appointed dinner for eight in the middle of a toxic waste dump."

Here's an Updike poem entitled "The Beautiful Bowel Movement":

"Though most of them aren't much to write about---mere squibs and nubs, like half-smoked pale cigars, the tint and stink recalling Tuesday's meal, the texture loose and soon dissolved---this one, struck off in solitude one afternoon (that prairie stretch before the late light fails) with no distinct sensation, sweet or pained, of special inspiration or release, was yet a masterpiece: a flawless coil, unbroken, in the bowl, as if a potter who worked in this most frail, least grateful clay had set himself to shape a topaz vase. O spiral perfection, not seashell nor stardust, how can I keep you? With this poem."

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