BooksBarbecue
Back Loudermilk
Chapters (60)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Personae
  4. I: Early Days
  5. One. Control
  6. Two. Doubt
  7. Three. Fate
  8. Four. Same
  9. Five. Fine Arts
  10. Six. In Loco Parentis
  11. Seven. Settling
  12. Eight. Neighbors
  13. Nine. Prospects
  14. Ten. The Lucky
  15. Eleven. Instruction
  16. Twelve. Same
  17. Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
  18. Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
  19. Fifteen. The Reason
  20. Sixteen. That Person
  21. Seventeen. Predictably
  22. II: Writing Teacher
  23. Eighteen. Early Poems
  24. Nineteen. Motivation
  25. Twenty. Allegory
  26. Twenty-One. Grief
  27. Twenty-Two. A Portrait
  28. Twenty-Three. Veils
  29. Twenty-Four. Soft Power
  30. Twenty-Five. Lists
  31. Twenty-Six. A Break
  32. Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
  33. Twenty-Eight. Custom
  34. Twenty-Nine. Parity
  35. Thirty. Fortune
  36. III: Volta
  37. Thirty-One. Images
  38. Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
  39. Thirty-Three. Letters
  40. Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
  41. Thirty-Five. Love
  42. Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
  43. IV: Your Best Reader
  44. Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
  45. Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
  46. Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
  47. Forty. Détente
  48. Forty-One. Worlds
  49. Forty-Two. Recognition
  50. Forty-Three. Persistence
  51. Forty-Four. And Then
  52. Forty-Five. Mingling
  53. Forty-Six. You
  54. Forty-Seven. Persona
  55. Forty-Eight. Est et Non
  56. Forty-Nine. The Author
  57. Epilogue
  58. Afterword: The Libertine
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. About the Authors

Now Loudermilk is out. Loudermilk wants to know what the goddamn motherfuck that was all about.

Harry tells Loudermilk that they have neighbors, in case Loudermilk wasn’t aware.

“Neighbors?” Loudermilk asks. He digs around in the back of his boxers. “That’s awesome, dude.” Loudermilk muses that they really need to get started thinking about their own place. He says that to tell the truth it is a fucking dump.

Harry says that whenever Loudermilk would like to make a move on that side of things that would be great.

Harry goes back indoors.

Anyway, Harry is busy. He has better things to do than observe the homosocial rituals of landlocked patriarchs. He has already started working on the writing project for Loudermilk. He needs to find out how people write a lot of poems, because he’s pretty sure that he and Loudermilk—or, rather, he—are/is going to have to write a lot of them. He’s reading a book titled Singing in the Present Tense: A Critical Anthology. He found this volume—a poetic guidebook of sorts—in a used bookstore in Oswego before they left. “The poem is,” Singing in the Present Tense tells him, “many things to many people. The poem is an expression of what the author of the poem is thinking or feeling, and it may even be both of these at the same time. A poem does not have to be poetic or beautiful. You may be surprised by the number of things a poem can be.”

A jay outside is making a sound like a laser. Harry turns the page: