Theoretics of Love

Joe Taylor

Description

"Skulls do stare back, dont let anyone kid you." So says Dr. Clarissa Circle, for not one year after graduating from UT and its infamous "Bone Farm" in Knoxville, she attains regional fame by exposing a supposed Native American burial as a not-so-recent murder. Consequently her dissertation gets revamped and published commercially and she gets hired by UKs Physical Anthropology Department northward in Lexington, where she also earns a lucrative retainer as consultant for Fayette Countys Metro Police. In the ranks of that same department a mercurial lover appears: a black homicide detective named Willy Cox. Mercurial can run both ways, Clarissa decides, having a fling with an old hippie aptly nicknamed Methuselah, who comes in the picture after a thirty-year-old mass grave containing eight ritualistic murders is unearthed. There were rumors, local historian Methuselah indicates, of a strange campus cult in the early 70s . . .Bang! In Manhattan, when the Twin Towers fall, events cascade. A young woman sneaks into Clarissas lab to photograph the eight reconstructed death heads during the mesmerizing TV extravaganza of the falling towers. Not-so-passive death threats concerning the eight ritual murders start, which incline Clarissa and Willy to temporarily mend their love life. Methuselah takes up with a young classical guitarist. The odd middle-aged "petite artiste" whos been stalking Clarissas house to draw endless sketches disappears. A young religious zealot gets committed, then released to haunt the campus and neighborhood in a disturbing fashion. On steep banks by the Kentucky River, a double suicide is discoveredor was it a murder of passion? A drug parole office from Louisville visits to add fuel to the cult rumorsjust as he adds fuel to another spat between Clarissa and Willy. In sum, love shifts from requited to unrequited and back and forth, just as deaths mount to shuffle from official suicides to official murders. Love, hate, and unsolved murders are getting a workout in the Bluegrass state.

Informations

• Publié par: University of Georgia Press
• Date de parution: 30 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781603064262
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for The Theoretics of Love
What to say about Joe Taylor s brilliant, ambitious new novel? That it s a mystery story wrapped in a literary romp? That its chorus of voices are all convincing, beautifully realized, and full of energetic duende? That its sentences are often Nabokovian and its characters straight out of CSI-Wonderland? That I am in awe of it? All I can say is read it. This is a big-hearted, generous novel-a storyteller s wet dream-that keeps opening out into fresh marvels. It might knock your socks off. This novel should make him a belletristic star.
- C OREY M ESLER , author of Memphis Movie and Robert Walker
Why isn t Joe Taylor famous? I laughed out loud three times in the first chapter of The Theoretics of Love . A few chapters later, I felt my heart would break. There s nothing theoretical about Taylor s talent. You ll love this love story.
- C HARLES M C N AIR , author of Pickett s Charge, Land O Goshen, The Epicureans, and Play It Again, Sam
Joe Taylor is a quirky genius of a storyteller. In vivid, beautiful language-sometimes erudite, sometimes edgy-he tells of eccentric characters who are in search of the genuine. The Theoretics of Love is emotionally profound, a great joy to read.
- A NTHONY G ROOMS , author of Bombingham and The Vain Conversation
Joe Taylor is a wonder and a gift to us all, and especially to Southern letters. I m grateful for his generous spirit, for his big-hearted writing, and, of course, for his astoundingly beautiful beard.
- B RAD W ATSON , author of Miss Jane
A LSO BY J OE T AYLOR
STORY COLLECTIONS
Some Heroes, Some Heroines, Some Others
The World s Thinnest Fat Man
Masques for the Fields of Time
Ghostly Demarcations
NOVELS
Oldcat Ms. Puss: A Book of Days for You and Me
Let There Be Lite, OR, How I Came To Know and Love G del s Incompleteness Proof
Pineapple: A Comic Novel in Verse

NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2019 by Joe Taylor
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc.,
Montgomery, Alabama.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Taylor, Joe, 1949- author.
Title: The theoretics of love : a novel / Joe Taylor.
Description: Montgomery, AL : NewSouth Books, [2017].
Identifiers: LCCN 2018052613 (print) | LCCN 2018055344 (ebook) | ISBN 9781603064262 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781588383303 (hardcover)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3570.A9395 (ebook) | LCC PS3570.A9395 T48 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.54-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052613
First Printing
Design by Randall Williams
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books

The Black Belt, defined by its dark, rich soil, stretches across central Alabama. It was the heart of the cotton belt. It was and is a place of great beauty, of extreme wealth and grinding poverty, of pain and joy. Here we take our stand, listening to the past, looking to the future.
To Tricia
As long as the firmament of You is spread over me, the tempests of causality cower at my heels, and the whirlwind of doom congeals.
M ARTIN B UBER, I AND T HOU
I have killed them, to be sure, but I have not eaten them. I killed them because of war, God, chance-forces outside myself; but it was assuredly because of my own will that I did not eat them. This is why in their company I can now gaze at that dark sun in this country of the dead.
S HOHEI O OKA, F IRES ON THE P LAIN TRANSLATED BY I VAN M ORRIS
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Monkey Meat
2. Dumb Show
3. Lap Dancer
4. The Case of the Missing Sandwich
5. Critical Mass
6. Live, Evil
7. Princess of the Diaspora
8. A Wicked Little Laugh
9. The Petite Artiste
10. The Silver Platter Matter
11. Zeno Approaches the Unapproachable
12. Tilting the Blame R
13. Amo, Amas, Amat
14. The Theoretics of Love
15. The Lover s Paradox
Acknowledgments
The Lover s Paradox APPEARED in slightly different form in Quarterly West . Dumb Show appeared in slightly different form in Bayou . Tilting the Blame R appeared in a slightly different form in Trajectory .
In the late 60s when I attended the University of Kentucky, a wonderful professor of physical anthropology taught there. On occasion the Lexington police would consult her about a body. Though her real personal life was quite orderly, she serves as the inspiration for Professor Clarissa Circle. Also, I ve compacted several of my philosophy professors from that period into Professor John Hart. Those professors influenced me far more than they would have thought possible. As far as I know, no ritual murders took place in the 1960s or any time at the University. In art, truth travels a different highway. The Afleet Alex incident at the Preakness took place two years later than in this novel. In art, truth travels a different racetrack, also.
I want to thank the following people for their insights concerning this novel: Grace Bauer, Jerome Goddard, L. A. Heberlein, Kat Meads, Corey Mesler, Stephen Slimp, and Tricia Taylor.

1.
Monkey Meat
Years 1999-2000
(Clarissa, Willy, Methuselah, Pebble)
It wasn t Knoxville s infamous bone farm that pushed me into forensic anthropology, but books: Keep the River on Your Right and Fires on the Plain. Keep the River poses as cultural anthropology. I found it in a used bookstore, and since its cover depicted a goldenly flowing Amazon where my boyfriend and I might someday canoe, I hugged it to my post-teenage bosom and scooted money across a glass counter-carefully, because the storeowner was a moist-handed pervert. Once home, I found River to be a New York Jew s South American field diary of becoming . . . not a hip New Ager, but a cannibal. Jane Austen and her wannabe nymphs paled, they fainted. Two weeks later I blundered back to the store, where the wet owner puffed wet lips: Didya enjoy Schneebaum? I blinked at his jism-caked black hair. Keep the River on Your Right, his voice wheezed. You bought it two Saturdays back. Didya enjoy it? He leaned backward for another book, creaking his stool and giving me an eyeful of belly button. He licked two fingers before handing over the last of my life-changing duo: Fires on the Plain. This one s just as good. I ve been saving it just for you. This one was also about cannibalism. Ee-e! Monkey meat, monkey meat, its Japanese narrator keeps giggling as he eats dying comrades on some Pacific World War II island.
Thus were delivered the cultural shards that broke my literary spine (to tangle a clich ). To the horror of friends and professors, I moved from English to anthropology, reading Levi-Strauss so thickly that my roommate began sneaking out with my boyfriend. Drunk, they wrecked his car. He died; she went into physical rehab, never to be heard from again. Monkey meat, monkey meat, I chanted to my empty apartment. Ee-e!
But to claim those books pushed me into forensic anthropology isn t quite true. At a lunch hour on anthropology s second floor I spied two female graduate students reassembling a skeleton. They hovered like miniature goddesses, and I gawped until they motioned me in-on the sly since I hadn t had a hepatitis shot. Becoming as wired and glued as those skeletal bones, I pursued a PhD in forensic anthropology, so engrossed that upon finishing my dissertation the only political news I could envision was the Gulf War at one end, which frolicked like an endless fireworks display, and Monica Lewinsky at the other end, which frolicked like an endless Altoids commercial. Monkey meat, monkey meat framed my life. If we humans don t eat one another literally, we do so figuratively. Only short mandibles keep us from gnawing one another s raw hams. I even theorized that we d live better as honest cannibals, for we d undergo some meaningful human contact, if only gustatory. (As you can see, whatever culture three years as an idealistic English major in stilled, my ex-roommate, my dead boyfriend, and forensic science dis tilled.)
Still, compromise asserted itself, and my monkey meat mantra publicly fluffed into, No one ever touches anyone.
No
One
Ever
Touches
Any
One.
Ever, never, ever.
I remained near my alma mater s Knoxville campus to complete a year of post-doctoral consultation at the sly instigation of my committee chair, who hinted that a university northward would soon announce a lucrative opening. So I farmed my dissertation into three reputable papers. More importantly, I solved a grisly double murder as county consultant. Flesh had been boiled off the bones of twin murders that surfaced on a Native American mound after a buckling freeze. The local sheriff, a drunken weekend country guitar player like my runaway dad, assumed they belonged to long-dead Injuns-his term-but grudgingly called me in since the county was already wasting-his term again-a consultation fee. After a rudimentary inspection, any first-year doctoral student could have ticked off suspicions: Don t these bones emit a smell of rotting meat? Don t they give a greasy feel? Aren t they fresh-dead white instead of gray-brown from absorbing the surrounding earth s chemicals? The list theoretically could have meandered to carbon-14, though save for the Kennewick Man that method rarely plays in North America.
Voila! Murders recognized (and soon prosecuted) and my watered-down, popularized dissertation picked up by a university press whose publicity manager hyped a photo-op of me atop that burial mound balancing two skulls in my two manicured hands.
In truth, what tipped me off wasn t the age of the bones but the fact that the skeletons weren t buried east-west as the surrounding Native Americans were. Instead, one lay at a forty-degree variance, the other twenty degrees off true east. Then my olfactory did come into play, for a good deal of marrow-albeit cooked-remained in the larger bones. H