Toby Olson

I think I first encountered Toby Olson at a party in Rachel Blau Duplessis' penthouse (edit: correction from The Poet--it was actually Joan Mellen's joint). Some sort of gathering for the new MA English/Writing students at Temple U. This would be September '92, I believe. The Poet and I were enthusiastically drinking our way to drunkeness; we sort of found each other around the liquor dispensing area regularly and began chatting. No one else seemed to be drinking, and this we found outrageous. At some point, The Poet let fall an exquisite and shapely hors d'oeuvre of some sort--perhaps a stuffed mushroom? Perhaps a bit of meat inside a crusted confection? I can't recall, for obvious reasons. I was rapidly unfurling a fourth sheet, for one. What I do recall is his dismay as he picked up the dropped food like a helpless and fallen baby bird; I thought for sure he was going to eat it, he seemed so distraught. But he was disturbed not at the potential waste of this object, but because we were in rather swank digs and he didn't know what to DO with it. The Poet flirted briefly with positioning the saucy tidbit amongst the liquor bottles, then he considered hiding it in the beer cooler. There was no trash receptical in evidence, and he was not about to leave the bar area. He put it, with a brash smile, in the outside pocket of his tweed blazer, and I thought "This guy and I--we'll get along." Toby Olson approached us, towering over us with his great bearded broad-shouldered form, and said "at last, I find some drinkers at this soiree." The Poet and I had been eyeing Rachel's fine collection of red wines, but were reluctant to touch anything. Toby had no such qualms when we mentioned our considerations--he quickly uncorked one and shortly we were uncorking others, and I recall that evening returning to my dorm completely uncorked myself.

Toby was my favorite teacher at Temple, because he genuinely was interested in the strange stuff I was doing at the time (though my final semester he rightly trashed some garbage I started churning out; this trashing led me to hang up my attempts at fiction for many a year). I recall him smoking Camels in his No Smoking office with the windows open. We shot a lot of shit together there.

I mention him because I'm really enjoying



When Toby's on top of his game, his novels unravel much the way his poetry does, in a series of small revelations in which images and events resonate with other previous images and events, but little if anything is ever resolved satisfactorily. In Blond Box we find a series of awful events detailed from one character's point of view, and gradually these same events are recalled, investigated, studied, and recreated by people who were there or who are trying to write about the events later. There's a trope of live sex shows (which also featured prominently in Olson's fantastic The Woman Who Escaped from Shame); a recurring theme of impotence (lots of hernias and prostate cancers amongst the former male-stars of said live sex shows); the occasional intrusion of a seedy science-fiction novel written by someone whose graduate assistant is studying the events in question, the events of which actually begin somehow to bleed into the current timeframe of the novel itself; and throughout the work are numerous allusions to works and writings of Marcel Duchamp, most notably those in the Philadelphia Museum collection (which includes the startling and wonderful Etant Donnes and The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors--both of these works mysteriously drift in and out of Olson's narrative); a strange box and/or treasure map may have led to the murders of two people, but perhaps not. Duchamp preempts Olson's novel in the way he preempts urination in public restrooms. I can't use a urinal without Duchamp anymore, nor can I look upon a shaved mons pubis without Marcel hovering above me. Now I can't think of Duchamp without Olson. In this way we absorb and are absorbed by what has gone before and what will follow. Narrative is a faulty (landscape) approximation of life and time and memory, and yet allowing allusions to other forms of narrative, including Duchamp's strange word-collections associated with his fixed installations, enriches Olson's studious attempt to create a wholly realized aesthetic sphere for us to experience. I also recommend Dorit in Lesbos and Seaview, which do much the same in rather different ways. I'm recommending this book before I've quite finished it, but Blond Box needed me to stop for a while and absorb.