T HE C ENACLE / A PRIL - The ElectroLounge

20 / THE C ENACLE / JUNE 2001
His themes often concern saner, gone times, days slower & more conducive to the lingering
armchair dialogue—as in this passage from "Those Were the Days, My Friend":
I had a conversation last week here with a fellow who maintained that this
young fellow T.S. Eliot is the begin-all and end-all in literature these days.
Well, I’ve read "Ash Wednesday" and while I agree that this young man is a
gifted fellow, well-read, my heart is reserved for other favorites.
This love of the refined & literary past was put to its most creative use in Bergeron’s "Graham
Wilkins: A Remembrance" in Cenacle #6:
The subject of this paper is the eighteenth-satire of Graham Wilkins. Born in
Northumberland in 1721 of nonconformist parents, Wilkins’s work was
heralded as the excellence of style in the days of Oliver Goldsmith and fell
into obscurity toward the end of the Victorian era. Wilkins’s novel, House of
Suffolk, written in 1763, may have influenced Washington Irving’s sanguine
treatment of English rural life in his Bracebridge Hall.
Wilkins is a fake, a product of Bergeron’s bemused imagination. Written in the form of a
straightforward literary essay, this piece is a delightful ruse.
The Cenacle has been from its inception a magazine which contains a lot of my own
writing. The issues over time have been composed of one-third to two-thirds my work.
From 1981 to 1998 I wrote the dozens of novellas, short stories, & scraps that taken
together comprise my novel Cement Park. From Cenacle 1 onward I published the later years
of these stories, beginning with the 1994 novella "Beauty, Obscura [a new fixtion]" which ran
5 issues & concluded in Cenacle 7 November 1995. Cement Park is set in present day
Hartford & tells the stories of a rock musician named Richard James Americus, his daughter
the artist Rebecca Dorothy Americus, his rock band Noisy Children, & his bar & restaurant
called Luna T’s Cafe. The following from the opening pages of "Beauty, Obscura":
A great deal of what drives me in life is the Mystery I perceive at the heart of
it. pursuit of that mystery, apparent discoveries o/hints along the way,
detours tragic for their abrupt ends, valuable for their plaintive warnings of
what to expect, this all is what keep me sitting in joints w/black pens + white
paper, keeps me believing in the value of truthgroping sessions that are the
drinking times w/my mates, keeps me ever after the newest manifestation of
my eternal She, keeps me convinced that it is not when you have achieved
carnal knowledge of her that you know anything, but it is this precise