Milkbottle H

by Gil Orlovitz

Milkbottle H is a tragicomedy of contemporary existence treated with compassion and bitter irony, in which all of mankind are conceived as being inextricably linked. Told with a heightened naturalism in which our thought and speech processes are reproduced with an amazing fidelity, the book may baffle and even infuriate, Yet it makes its presence felt, forcing us, almost as if against our will, to conclude we have here something very important to the heritage of modern literature.

There are two essential themes running concurrently through this monumental work, both related to the protagonist, Lee Emanuel. On the one hand we have his passion for the fifteen-year-old Rena Goldstein, and the subtle oppositions to this passion by both families. On the other hand we have the story of the death-in-progress of Lee's father, Levi Emanuel.

With Lee's second marriage, the strands of the parallel themes convulse, separate, re-form, and intertwine. In the relating of the several events and themes that spring from the fusion of the two central threads, time and characters seem to merge so that "all time is eternally present" and the people are alike, one unto the other. The physical scene is Philadelphia, with constant shuttling to New York and Los Angeles.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Contemporary

534 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Orlovitz was born in Philadelphia, PA. He worked as a staff writer for Columbia Pictures, co-writing the screenplay for Over-Exposed and writing episodes of The Adventures of Jim Bowie and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. He published several books of poetry during the 1950s and 1960s and his poetry, plays and short stories appeared in several anthologies and journals. He published two novels, Milkbottle H and Ice Never F, the first two parts of a planned trilogy, in 1967 and 1970 respectively. He died in 1973 at the age of 55.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Milkbottle H is written in the delirious style and wayward language so one, while reading the book, must construct the plot oneself…

Of all things, Levi is succouring and salving his dead brother’s feet, for they are sore, chilblained from the winter cold in the Levi Coal Company Yard, weary from many directions decided on simultaneously, let us put balm on Aaron Emanuel’s feet, only second in command in leading the Hebrews out of Egypt, the chariots are loaded with black anthracite and the second in command must twice and yet thrice rest the desert while the scholar of the tribe climbs to receive the order from on high, but let us have Aaron superintendent while Levi is gone to face the angry cloud of Jehovah upon the mountaintop

At times, however, delirium ebbs a bit so the picture becomes a bit less obscured.
Everything is turning about a certain Jewish family living in Philadelphia and the youngest son, Lee is a protagonist, presumably. It’s a story of parents, children, milieu, religion, reverie, relationships, passion, aging and disintegration…

…I know you but I will not know you Lee knows look at the big girl or her atremble against the scutiform sky, the skull, only, brought home from the wars on the childshield, for there is not room enough there for the body, the bodys down below, left on the earth for the scavenging Leegenitals to find, pick up and consign to a certain anonymity within himself, her body an unknown or anyknown female thing within Lee while he does honors to her skull, an honor of error, perhaps, but think it a time honor…

Chaos in life leads to chaos in the head… And vice versa.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

...even great literature is unnecessarily dirty Terry avers, dont you think, even that magnificently beautiful Ulysses, for example, why there was no need for Joyce to inject all of those dirty passages and spoil an otherwise beautiful book, I just cant forgive him for that....

From memory I’ll paraphrase a thesis from Walter Benjamin that one task of every true revolution is the attempt to realize the potentialities left unactualized in previous revolutions ; to redeem them. This sentiment is at the heart of the piety of The BURIED Book Club ; to redeem potentialities contained within but never actualized, to redeem our literary heritage. Milkbottle H is BURIED ; so too had been Moby-Dick and The Recognitions and Gravity’s Rainbow and Women and Men. Reading these works is their redemption.

What is Milkbottle H about? The typical : love, death, sex, moths, baths, Harbisonsmilk. Hmyes. This novel is about prose.

I attempt a literary triangulation. Does this book stand on its own? Yes. Look, ©1968 ; the following are all nearly contemporary or come later. Orlovitz is writing within the very heart of what I like to call postmodernist/after-Joyce fiction, right toward the peak of its high-modernist variation. I claim no series of influences ; because who has read him? There is a dark heart here, misanthropic perhaps in a mood similar to Kohler, but here its not a characternarrator but the novel itself which seems to spit. Lets say already that Milkbottle H is not designed to make you feel one wit better about being a human being ; there is no celebration here of sexuality, that most inner kernel of the human. More like trauma. If it is a matter of the bitterness of a Gaddis, a bitterness not about The Artist’s place in society but the bitter fact of needing to persist as being human. This body ; disgusting, but there you find yourself.

Prose ; I still don’t know what that is, but that is what this book is -- wordswordswords. A flood. 1968? But I experience the kind of sentence made famous by the BREATHERS of McElroy ; the nearly and insistently run-on which only follows the necessity of moving through and tying in what is always disparate, to make something cohere. Some occasions of words need to be just right there because the word itself wants to be not for some reason beyond, as perhaps in my favorite portions of Sorrentino ; I just love that word right there, maybe meaning nothing particular to decode, but those other words can carry the weight of that demand. I get notes of Gaddis the only to have properly preceded Orlovitz with full literary accomplishment in a kind of broken dialog and those transition passages in J R and those party scenes in The Recognitions and just have lots and lots of people/characters. And with style is thinking we encounter dialectically essayistic passages of thought reminding one of Theroux’s tortured sentences in An Adultery. Moments of lucidity ; a shift of perspective and action and movement that won’t hold still ;; a sentence or mere word returning us to some other locale some other time or relationship ;; a system of leitmotivs holding a whole together -- and the novel ends with Joyce’s washerwomen.

And there is the thing from Gravity’s Rainbow ; the love of shit, the erections, the hymens, the disgust of genitalia, constipation, embodied traumaticisms ;; straight out of Rabelais with the bawdydelight replaced with post-Freudian complexes ; incest ; perversions ; yes, homosexuality ; bestiality ; castration ; total dismemberment ; Frankensteinism ; mommy & daddy. A Pynchonian hallucinatory experience of what lies deep below ; the supposedly overfamiliar territory of what is unconscious. If you like I were disappointed to discover that Ulysses was not as dirty as promised you must should turn to Orlovitz’s novel which despite Terry’s preferences is packed with all that dirty stuff Joyce could only put into letters to Nora so even there one gets only one quarter of the body and what it can do and will do no matter what you’d rather. But too we wont miss the humor ; yes, humor among it all.

Orlovitz goes into my sanctuary, my pantheon (should he be not as great as his peers, this is no matter ; his is the tradition which requires literary redemption) of the bestest of what 20th century literature has enabled within itself ; the route which our literature can still take even after all this time ; not just to salvage a book here and there, to unEARTH and read, but to return to the revolution which Joyce began by continuing, returning to that certain codpiece not because better-in-the-old-days but because there sings the future and the task to actualize those potentialities covered-over when The Victors wrote our reading=lists. To the lists! indeed. Arms!



______________
I wrote a few words prior :: I have a multiple-origins theory for The BURIED Book Club. I'm not sure if multiple-origin theories are still churning out dissertations today, but they sure were back in my student days. At any rate, one of the origins can be located in comments #1 & 2 below. And Milkbottle H has its singular role to have played by way of an off-hand remark made once upon a time by Enrique [who has now nuked his account and every last one of his comments and submissions to any and every discussion in which he has ever participated which has resulted in terribly annoying lacunae everywhere and fled himself back to librarything for no known reason. Good luck to ya!]

USPS delivered a beautifully preserved -- UNREAD! -- exemplar of this Gil's first book. And just to have thumbed through it -- Oh My F*****G GOD -- this looks like a something or other. HONEST! But what's my next difficult book really? This? McElroy? Julián Ríos CBR? Chromos?


____________
A bit about this Gil, inclusive of some of his poetry:

http://phillysound.blogspot.com/2006_...

See also the thread devoted to Gil at The BURIED Book Club ::
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...



__________________
The beginning ::


dont you think if a thief wants to come in, a locked door wont make any difference;
he takes a walk,
he goes flying,
he crouches and he creeps
a small moth, making a mild twang against the summerscreen, becomes a slate folded wingclip against the metal mesh; Lee Emanuel nods at the white mottles on the body, the canted wings, three quarters of an inch arrowhead, tiny black twinks of eye each pocked by a pop of glisten
leaning by a yield Lee
;scrubby antennae, halfstarved, halferect, tucked shrug. Category of the eaters of light
reaches for his cigarette lighter, fizzes wheel against fling
black balloons gray
susurrating into blue, scutiform, yellowtipped the Philadelphia
Adelphia Hotel
Horn And Hardarts
Lintons
Thompsons Cafeteria
Jokes; You’ll Kill Me Yet Sammy Take What In The Middle Of The Oi That Was A Hard
Frankford El
Market Street El
Traffic Eastbound Only
Traffic Westbound Only
Fifth Street A Rumble Of Granite Bison Blocks The Carwheels Riding Herd Levi Emanuels Sole Surviving Accident Is That A Fact Is That A Facts
Le Emanuel has a midwife in attendance at his birth let me remind you that Rabbi Jonah Silver of the Brith Mikveh Synagogue
the route of the Number 5 trolley begins at Frankford Aenue and Orthodox Street connecting the the A bus that traverses the Roosevelt Boulevard, Hunting Park Avenue, 33rd Street, Benjamin Franklin Parkway to turn south on Broad Street and terminate at Federal Street, whereas the Number 5 trolley passes the grocery-delicatessen, proprietor Solomon Goldstein, at 3892 Frankford Avenue
gas streetlamps all yellow
Gakwoosh more phosphoresce than the cigarette lighter
and Rena Goldstein. Then eat it. The belly detaches commences a parachute end-over-end descent toward the moth
and Esther Goldstein in all her crinkled vivacity whose lyreblack hair when untrammelled lyres beneath the waist for silver troikabells to tinkle light from in the night and ice outside Odessa to bobbin glint from in the day. A head shorter than Rena; up and down and around, half the size of Rena; her laughter a maidens, V for vagabonded virginity, lyreletch, My daughter’s a little horse, isnt that right, Nate
,carrying a flickering blue and yellow nutriment
Hidden redgod lavastitches underamong Esther’s hairblack, volcanic virginity flow.
The mothsize flame licks at the moth’s undercarriage. The insect moves not. The Leebelly pendant from the screenmesh, being a basic bag, stuffs itself with canted arrowheads, shoot-the-chutes, drowsy glory, Lord High Flex the Elocutioner Muscles, let them eat cake and :
Subtitle : The Ruthlessness of Trivia. Like the Sadist who would---
Pinpoint Experience
Jeanne d’Moth

[the signs are printed in all=caps which look too ugly here on gr ; and of course paragraph=indentation got lost]

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rating stars seem pointless for a novel so unlike a novel. I won't attempt any sort of summary either -- Let's just say . . .

Thank you Tough Poets Press . . . thank you for reviving this BURIED gem. MILKBOTTLE H . . . no comparisons work here. This work stands pretty much on its own, tall as that Harbison's watertower. Gil Orlovitz never attended a writer's workshop, I would bet . . . or, if he did, after hearing all the workshop harangues, hokum and bunkum of do-this-dont-do-that, write-this-way-not-that-way, he told them to 'pound sand' or something far less civil but far more Orlovitz, and went on to do his own thing. “I don't need no stinkin' rules,” I hear him say. What he produced is extraordinary, experimental, wonderful, puzzling, entertaining, bold – I run out of adjectives. Is it for you? Probably not.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about a guy taking a bath. It's also about sex, visiting your dying father in the hospital, worrying about your wife's virginity, turds, the city of Philadelphia, having ringworm that itches real bad, Judaism, and probably some other things that I missed. It's kind of hard to read because time doesn't seem to exist in this book - scenes from different parts of the main guy's life sort of flow into one another, so that the overall effect is that they're all occurring at the same time. It's also kind of hard to read because he doesn't use apostrophes, doesn't really tell you what's going on, and he likes to write really cool run on sentences and use very abstract metaphors to describe people's skulls, facial expressions, emotions and so on. There's some very good stuff in here although it kind of fell off a bit for me towards the end when the small amount of narrative that did exist seemed to dissolved almost entirely. But it's still pretty cool.

[Jonathan]

My copy (which appears to have been used to beat soot-covered street urchins) has arrived and a quick flick through reveals the kind of prose-insanity that can either float my boat or sink it...Will set sail shortly and report back...

[Crito · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you give Milkbottle H credit for something, it’s that there aren’t many holes you can peg it in. It’s seemingly postmodern but doesn’t fit the ethos at all, it’s supposedly Joycean but only superficially so, and you can only accurately call it Avant-Garde which is about as generic a term as “alternative.” At its core though, being a marital drama with semitic self-deprecation, yin-yang sentimentality and cynicism, questionable female dialogue, and constant talk of genitals, I personally put it in the camp of the novels Roth and co were writing at the time, or more closely as the exaggerated stereotype those writers have been retrospectively given. You couldn’t possibly look at a sentence like, “His testicles yawn and crack their knuckles at the awning of her breasts rising in the blouse beneath her jacket,” (190) and mistake it for Pynchon. Obviously with its avant-garde bent it couldn’t be further stylistically, but seeing the style so shallowly applied throughout the novel it’s safe to say you can’t take the style as anything you should evaluate the novel seriously from.

The “Joycean” thing is a perfect example of this because you see throughout the novel Orlovitz smashing words together haphazardly in order to emulate the trademark Joyce compound, but it has none of the context of why Joyce did that in the first place. Joyce mashed words together to form a new synthesis, where each word brings its own meaning to the table and exposes something in the meaning of the other word you wouldn’t have considered if you hadn’t put them together in that exact formation. Orlovitz on the other hand takes something like dark blue and makes it darkblue which says absolutely nothing new except for what it says about Orlovitz himself. And yet in brief flashes he sometimes shows the capacity for understanding Joyce, there’s a passage where Lee’s dying father tells a rambling story which did seem to capture the spirit of a Finnegans Wake passage pretty well. However it’s all the more damning if he understands how and why something works yet won’t bother with employing it that way the majority of the time, even more so that he’s clinging to something that isn’t his in the first place.

There isn’t a lot that he does make his anyway. It has many ideas, like the musings on fidelity, or the strangeness of inhabiting a body, but it offers no new takes on these ideas other than the fact that Gil is saying them now. There were moments where I’d be reading a passage that seemed to be impressing me before slowly realizing he was just giving me boilerplate store brand existentialism. I’ll rightly admit there is some good writing in here in pockets, I can open a page and see something that works. It’s overall unevenness that Milkbottle H suffers from, it lacks a singular coherent identity. Orlovitz doesn’t seem to settle into a consistent standard of prose you can call his until around halfway through, before which is a lot of mute back and forth folksy dialogue and a lot of the groaning superficial style he wants you to think so badly is impressive. Maybe it’s just the fact of reading it in the current year is that we take it for granted how the
enter
key
for
emphasis
is
not
good writing and maybe it’s unfair to peg him for that, but it sure doesn’t add any substance to what he’s putting forth, or further inform his fairly derivative themes.

And one of the most glaring of his attempts to be flashy is all the edgy aspects of it. The fact I like edgy stuff by no means makes me an authority on it, but Orlovitz crams it all in at such a volume as to make it banal no matter if it was that way to begin with or not. They’re written like punchlines but they don’t come off that way. Since reference copies are hard to come by I think you can forgive a lengthy block quote:
Actually, of course, Rena has been tossing her hymen for years into the hymen barrel. That is to say, each night she discovers shes got a rotten hymen from her hymen factory and she goes by the hymen barrel she tosses in the rotten hymen and one night when stopping by Leechance to look into
Chance/the fife of the dancing ant
/the rotten hymen barrel she finds the rotten hymens swarming with crawling knives in and around and through and between and over and under the rotten hymens because, after all, she cannot omit coming to the conclusion that Solomon Goldstein, looking for a place to hide his nest of ulcers, has finally hit on his daughter’s rotten hymen barrel, so that, in agony, Rena suffers from an ulcerated hymen promoting spicules of pain similar to that caused by knives (511-512)
So here is an expression of Rena’s sexual guilt in relation to her father. There is so much here opposed to what the other parts of it are doing. “Rotten hymen barrel” sounds like part of a Louis CK joke, but in context it is not a joke nor is it funny, you are hammered with rotten hymen after rotten hymen to where if it was a joke it would be a really lazy one, just a paragraph of the same punchline repeated. So fine, maybe he’s being transgressive and confrontational to shock the reader, but you come to consider the book is 530 pages of successive rotten hymens, there is hardly one more rotten hymen that would produce any visceral reaction. So at face value, yes it’s a poetic metaphorical representation of the genuine feelings, struggles, fears, and agonies of the characters. How can we relate and take it seriously if we’ve been made so dulled to it? Can you be shocking, funny, transgressive, expressive, and profound in one go, well absolutely, there are plenty of authors who have pulled it off with flying colors. Does Orlovitz? Apart from one pretty great scene of self mutilation, not really. It’s just more flash in a box of glitter.

And that’s the biggest problem here, some really spotty employment of style is supposed to make up for substance. Its cover arrogantly sports a blurb from Time’s negative review of it: “He has succeeded only in substituting conventions of technique for conventions of content,” which is fairly spot on even if the reviewer thinks the novel takes place in a tub just because it’s a recurring scene. And it’s not hard to see something like this with the problems it has come from an established poet writing their first novel. But that doesn't excuse it either, and neither does its niche status as an underground novel. Seeing exoticism in an obscure, panned, and forgotten novel is naivety, and even if you find the flashy parts appealing to you it’s still no Joyce or Beckett, let alone Roth or Burroughs. Recommendation is a near non-issue considering how few copies are floating around, but I chanced upon it in a small library, which is the way I’d recommend it for the curious. But if you have to go out of your way I wouldn’t recommend it.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

The whole goddamn American people wants its bone structure decalcified, they want to be a heap of jelly.
― Gil Orlovitz, Milkbottle H