Man, Oh Man

Praise for Man, Oh Man

"Man, Oh Man is the dense cigarette smoke fog that permeates the air of a purgatory for the deeply-intelligent. A truly ontological and metaphysical experience, teeming with dozens upon dozens of happenings and un-happenings. Another way to put this: welcome to your Great American Un-Novel. Man, Oh Man should be added to the list of books that stand the test of time. After this, whatever Corrao writes next, please also add to that list …yes, I’m sure."

- Mike Kleine, author of Lonely Men Club

"A bold and innovative debut by a smart young novelist. Man, Oh Man is a crafty experiment of form—it's like nothing I've read before."

- Daniel Abbott, author of The Concrete

"Like Didi and Gogo, Laurel and Hardy or Jake and Elwood – Man and Oh Man wind and unwind; they knit and unknit … and as they do Mike Corrao's Man, Oh Man shifts from sweater to skein and back again. Man, Oh Man puzzles through dialogue and debate, each sentence a cog seeking to be refit into the novel's clockwork mechanism; a gear looking to connect, only to find itself lost in a Goldberg Machine."

- Derek Beaulieu, 2014-2016 Poet Laureate of Calgary

Mike Corrao’s debut is equally brief and ambitious, playing freely with language and diving into questions of philosophy, art, humanity, and being—while searching deeply into the psyche of that one guy in freshman philosophy class who’s got it all figured out and can’t seem to quit doling out answers. Funny in spots and necessarily grating in others, characters Man and Oh, Man plow through mountains of cold coffee and cigarette ash searching for—well, they’re not sure. It’s witty, smart, and unlike anything I’ve ever read.

- Brooks Rexroat, author of Thrift Store Coats

"'Do any good novels exist?' is a question feinted in the verbal joust of Man & Oh Man, the bickering ciphers of Mike Corrao's curious debut book. It is a question Corrao cleverly evades answering, either in the book's incessant repartee—for his ciphers, in the tradition of Didi & Gogo, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, and Bouvard & Pecuchet, do not seek answers as much as they seek to make time concrete with their voices—nor in the project of Man, Oh Man itself, because this is a book that is only masquerading as a novel. Much like the book of Flaubert's titular duo, it is a savage critique of knowledge and erudition. But, only in using the form of the novel could an essay of such circularity achieve the goal of embodying the nothingness of culture's inexorability."

- John Trefry, author of Plats

"Reading Mike Corrao’s Man, Oh Man is like being stuck on the loading screen before the universe begins. Every half-idea, mundane absurdity, and meta-criticism is suspended and floating in a yawning vacuum, so the titular characters can examine, prod, discuss, and break the epistemologies we take for granted. Part Angela Carter, part Beckett, this novel is a fever dream in a Parisian café where the other patrons can see your existential phantoms. You look up from your chess game and out the window with a sigh, having long ago forgotten how to make sense of the chaotic outer world, and having long ago stopped caring."

- August Smith, author of Bird Lizard House

"Man, Oh Man is Mr. Show meets Six Characters in Search of an Author—funny, deep, absurd, true, good. Mike Corrao's jangled jive jazz dialogue will hold you as much as the questions the characters ask about life, the world, humanity. Seriously, just read it."

- Adam Van Winkle, author of Abraham Anyhow

"Man, Oh Man is a distorted, contemplative, and refracted look at the nature of storytelling itself. It’s as if two literary critics, over-invested in the authority of Barthes, Derrida, and your other favorite literary theorists, sat down in the café of Ernest Hemingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place and discussed narrative theory all night, humorously enacting both the trivialities of theoretical discourse gone awry, but also the importances and constraints of language, the spiral they fall into both affecting their own positions as subjects to each other, to the narrative they themselves are in, and the narrative they attempt to construct with the language they weave around themselves."

- Janice Lee, author of The Sky Isn't Blue

Man, Oh Man is one of the smartest and funniest books I’ve read this year. It’s a self-conscious satire on intellectualism and the post-modern novel. The author, Mike Corrao, is creative, witty, and original. His literary debut at 22 is as groundbreaking as Bret Easton Ellis’s early success with Less Than Zero.

- Andrew Wilt, author of Age of Agility: The New Tools for Career Success

Reading this book is like eavesdropping on a fascinating conversation—a conversation you must hear even though you risk being noticed the longer you listen, until, suddenly, both participants turn to you and acknowledge your faux pas. At times hilarious, meta, playful, witty, and obnoxious, most threads of the (pseudo-)intellectual debate between Man and Oh Man become what every philosophical discussion becomes if drawn out long enough: bullshit. You'll find yourself leaning in closer so you can hear what they'll say next.

- Jason Jordan, editor of decomP magazinE

Copyright © 2018 by Mike Corrao

All Rights Reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections of this book, please write to Orson’s Publishing at [email protected].

https://orsonspublishing.com/

ISBN 978-0-9914463-2-2

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Man, Oh Man

Mike Corrao

Labyrinths & Discourse

I.

Across from each other, at ease in the rigid café seating—the room empty around them, spaciously immaterial, fading into a purgatorial abstraction where their physicalities dissipated slowly and torturously—Man and Oh Man smoked out of the same ashtray, took long drags, and flicked their stubs across the table, hoping to annoy one another.

—What if there’s actually a bull in the china shop?

—Then you say so.

—If I say that there’s a bull in the china shop, it’s a metaphor. How do I make it literal instead?

—Why would there be a bull in the china shop?

—Who’s to say how things like that happen? I’m sure they do every now and then. If not, then where would the metaphor come from in the first place?

—Because bulls are clumsy and china shops are full of fragile things.

—It’d be in the second place. The bull comes to the china shop in the first place. Then someone writes it down in the second place.

—Yeah, yeah, yeah.

—Yeah, yeah, yeah, yourself.

—Maybe the bull oughta be the china shop instead. If you say the bull is the china shop, then who would bother to correct you? It’s different enough to step away from any confusion, but close enough to stay attached to the phrase.

—I don’t want to be tied to the phrase, I just wanna be a surrealist.

—Fuck off then.

Man, Oh Man continued to flick their cigarette butts at one another, not bothering to dodge them, striking the matches to light, and returning to the status quo, courtesy of long therapeutic drags, one whistling randomly formed collages of music while the other coughed into his sleeve.

—What if I want the bull to own the china shop and the whole thing to seem just mundane and typical, like this is his everyday life?

—Then don’t just say there’s a bull in a china shop.

—What then?

—The china shop was owned by a middle-aged bull, handed down to him by his parents.

—What if I want it to be a young bull who took the initiative to start up the shop?

—You’re an ass.

—The young bull owned a china shop, which he had purchased after graduating from school.

II.

The setting floats in and out of obscurity, as if blurred by some unseen medium. Stacks of books appear, all varying in quality and edition. Man, Oh Man begin meticulously removing manuscripts from the surrounding piles. They flip through the pages, occasionally stopping, running a pair of scissors along the binding, and separating the contents. No attention is paid to the oddities that permeate throughout the space. Abstractions, sourceless shadows, static.

—If the man is annotated, do we keep him around or do we set him on fire?

—We keep the parts without the annotations.

—Can we just cut out the annotations?

—No, the whole thing is tainted once it’s annotated. Imagine if you knew what Shakespeare was talking about. Just let the man talk and don’t bother with the rest.

—You’re increasingly and nauseatingly eccentric.

—Leave the Kenosha Kid. Take out the rest.

Man, Oh Man ran the scissors through the book, excluding the lone scene, throwing the rest into the ashtray, where they spit on the binding, and burned holes into the cover, grinning quietly and separately as they moved on to the next.

—If the book is split in half, do we keep one half entirely or do we take a piece from each half?

—In this case now, leave the second and keep the first. The poem means nothing without the analysis, so it’s useless, but if we take the analysis without the poem, then we get to piece back together some literary phantom.

—What’s the difference between annotations and analysis?

—The analysis is fake here. The annotations were real there.

They cut along the binding and remove that which can be salvaged. The remains are burned. Cover turning pale, curling into ashes. Name disappearing, fading into a blur. The two conversationalists move forward through the predetermined set of tasks, carrying with them a false sense of omniscience.

—What do we do if the whole thing is gibberish? Do we still have to cut