A Fly in the Pigment

Angel Island Publications in Sausalito, California, has sophisticated ideas about literature which may or may not prove solvent. As well as publishing Contact Magazine, a quarterly collection of new writing, art, and ideas, Angel has brought out in paperback a collection of pieces from the Western Review, a photographic essay entitled I Am A Lover, and a study of a city called Chicago: City On The Make

Its latest publication, A Fly In The Pigment, is an outre novelette about art, Paris, philosophy, and modern society. The plot revolves around a housefly named Fanny who mysteriously escapes from his proper position in a Van Hoos still life (painted in the year 1675) and buzzes around observing modern life, until, absurdly, he dies. The press terms the disappearance "L'Affaire Ou est Fanny."

Novelist Sidney Peterson, who has written everything from the religious life of a lunatic (unpublished) to a UPA script with the title THE INVISIBLE MOUSTACHE OF RAOUL DUFY, knows a tremendous amount about art. So does the fly. Part of the book's obvious charm comes from the fly's painterly descriptions of practically everything: "Her neck swelled Ingresly, as with an enlarged thyroid."

Although Peterson's satire seems superficially too chic to be serious and too detached to touch reality, his criticisms of society have elegant little teeth. He deals with the press, fallout, anxiety, pomposity, and man's existential state in the manner of a gentle Fellini; the eye of his fly, like Fellini's camera, sees the absurd everywhere, the difference between Peterson and Fellini being that Peterson can't get so upset about it.

The aesthetic of this bizarre novel, smells and textures and tastes, has a unique quality. For example, Peterson and the fly both consider merde the most understandable word in the French language. "Renew'd by ordure's sympathetic force,/As oil'd with magic juices for the course,/Vigorous he rises." If you can first conjure up a combination of Rabelais and Kenneth Tynan, and then tone your image down a little, you may get an idea of Sidney Peterson's writing.

"No tourist on roller skates" ever did the Continent as quickly as the fly named Fanny whizzes through contemporary life. "There is nothing like the ridiculous to cultivate one's sense of the absurd," says the fly.