NEXT PAGEUnless they frequent underground film festivals, readers of poetry are unlikely to have heard of Charlie Blumenthal, this issue's featured poet. Charlie, who was briefly a graduate student at Ashgrove University nearly fifteen years ago, died recently in San Francisco following a protracted battle with mental illness.
Blumenthal's "novella in verse," Thrilling Love, which we present to you in its "entirety" here, arrived in our offices under unusual circumstances. Accompanying the manuscript was a letter from a Ms. Alisha Lambert, who lived in the same San Francisco neighborhood as Blumenthal (North Beach) and purchased the manuscript at a blanket sale. Ms. Lambert admits that she was drawn to the manuscript not for its contents but for its crimson, satin-lined cover. However, after removing the pages from their flamboyant bindery, she didn't know quite what to do with them. Upon perusal of a few poems, she noticed that some of the sheets of paper bore the logo of our school. Ms. Lambert then sent it to The Quarterly.
Initially, I rejected the manuscript out of hand. Among its numerous literary shortcomings, I noted (as will the reader) Blumenthal's embarrassingly overwrought tone; his shamelessly sensationalized subject matter; and perhaps most painfully, his hopelessly outmoded (to say nothing of inconsistent) meter.*
Still, I couldn't entirely banish Thrilling Love from the precincts of my mind. Perhaps it was my reluctance to return to the slush pile, but I began to feel a sort of duty to the dead. Just who was Blumenthal, anyway? I did some sleuthing. Though the registrar was able to confirm his enrollment here for three semesters, the trail of his identity ended there. I made a few telephone calls to an older alum I knew, sent out some emails, inquired of one of our tenured professors. No one neither former students nor faculty - seemed to recall either the man or his work. Perhaps this should come as no surprise. While enrolled at Ashgrove, Blumenthal did not distinguish himself. He apparently won no academic awards, published no poems in The Ashgrove Quarterly, and gave no readings of his work. If this lusterless performance weren't sufficient to ensure Blumenthal's literary obscurity, he then left midway through his second year to pursue a film career in Los Angeles.
While his "career" in the City of Angels would prove to be less than celestial, he did manage to achieve some measure of understated notoriety. According to a write-up in Wide Angle, a journal of independent film, Blumenthal scraped together money from friends, and completed a silent short film (since lost) entitled "Sondra," based on his original script. The film, says Wide Angle, follows "fifteen catastrophically erotic minutes in the life of a beautiful high school student as she tries to complete her trigonometry homework without interruption." Among its startling images is a restaurant scene wherein the heroine is consuming a bowl of linguine, only to feel the tines of her fork latch lovingly around her fingers; a moment when Sondra is applying lipstick, not noticing as the tube begins to swell tumescently before exploding on her chin; and of course the film's climax, in which Sondra, bewildered at the breadth of her near-supernatural sensuality, races suicidally to a rooftop ledge, consoling herself at the last instant by counting the cars below.
On the surreal strength of "Sondra," Blumenthal was contracted by United Artists to write several full-length scripts, only one of which was optioned, and none of which was ever bought or produced. At this point, it is safe to assume that Blumenthal, by then in his forties and still a bachelor, had had enough of the Tinseltown tease and decamped for San Francisco. Almost immediately upon arriving in Fog City, he vanished into an ignominious void of alcohol, topless bars, and pharmaceutical drugs. When Blumenthal finally died last month due to complications resulting from an enigmatic concussion it was assumed that he had never produced any more verse.
Thrilling Love proves otherwise. Composed some fifteen years after he left this university, the "story" seems to involve a disastrous love affair between its protagonist a failed screenwriter and the mysterious stripper with whom he falls perversely in love. I say, "seems," for, as you'll see, Blumenthal's mental capacities were clearly failing him at the time of Thrilling Love's troubled composition.
At this point the reader cannot be blamed for wondering why, beyond a feeling of obligation to an alum, we would choose to publish this manuscript. For nearly thirty years, The Ashgrove Quarterly has endeavored to bring you what we consider to be the most innovative and accomplished new fiction and poetry that this country has to offer. Why jeopardize our reputation? A difficult question to answer. Alison Zuck, my associate editor, felt the manuscript, despite its problems, succeeds in disrupting our often romanticized notions of insanity by presenting the work of someone suffering from the multitudinous horrors of actual brain damage.
As for myself, I view Thrilling Love as a kind of cautionary tale. How many of us writers - on long nights when the white expanse of paper (or computer screen) seems an endless glacier stretching formidably before us - hasn't thought we heard the syrupy siren call of Hollywood? Resist, I say! The life of a poet may not be an easy one, but it offers what I can only call an archetypal nobility of imagination.
Antoine Sugar, Editor
The Ashgrove Quarterly