Mudlands Sprung Issue April, 1959Mudlands Sprung Issue April, 195920081959/04image/jpegUniversity of Missouri Special Collections, Archives and Rare Book DivisionThese pages may be freely searched and displayed. Permission must be received for subsequent distribution in print or electronically. Please contact hollandm@missouri.edu for more information.Missouri Showme Magazine CollectionUniversity of Missouri Digital Library Production ServicesColumbia, Missouri108show195904supMudlands Sprung Issue April, 1959; by Students of the University of MissouriColumbia, MO 1959
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Mudlands
Sprung Issue
Big Two-Hearted Mountain
by Molly Bloomers
EDITOR'S NOTE: It has consistently
been the policy of Mudlands to seek
out the new and original in student
writing. This ernestly written story is
especially commendable in line with
this policy.
Jock was climbing the mountain. It was a hard mountain to climb
but he knew that if he climbed it truly and fairly it would be fine.
He had wanted to climb the mountain for a long time. Frank asked
him, "Why do you want to climb this great mother-like mountain,
Jock?"
"It would be a fine thing if I could climb the mountain," Jock
said. "Climb it truly."
"Truly?"
"And with honor."
"Yes," Frank said.
"Yes," Jock said. "One must climb one's mountains with honor,
but it is hard."
"You have reason."
"It is hard, and one must climb it fairly, truly and sincerely."
"Why do you want to climb this great mother-like mountain?"
Frank said.
"You are repeating yourself," Jock said.
"I must do this thing," Frank said.
"You are right."
"It is part of the code."
"Yes. One must live by the code."
"The code is a fine thing."
"Yes."
"Why do you want to climb this great mother-like mountain?"
Frank said.
Jock did not answer. He did not hear Frank. He did not hear
Frank's question. He did not answer because he was thinking and
could not hear Frank's question. That was the way it was. When you
are thinking, thinking hard and fine and truly and sincerely, that is
the way it is. You cannot hear the questions that people ask you.
He was thinking of the way the snow fell on the Zambesi that
odd year and the way the impalas died in the snow, bleeding and
vomiting from frostbite. It was odd, and it had always bothered him
that it was odd. He had intended to write about it, but he never had.
There were a hell of a lot of odd things, and odd, fine and true
things that he had never written about. There were a hell of a lot
of things he had never done.
And that year in Paris, when they had lived over the slaughter-
house and next door to the brothel. The smell came up through the
floor and he heard the squeals and he did not eat meat for a while
then. He did not like to talk about it during the day and he did not
often think about it then, but at night things are different, and he
sometimes lay in bed crying for the pigs and their squeals and the
bad smell that came up through the floor.
That was bad but it was not as bad as the War, when they got
you in the end and you lost any way you took it and any way that
they gave it to you. He remembered the Dutch boy holding his fin-
ger in the dike and after awhile you could not tell if it was water
or blood that was trickling through the hole in the dike and the boy
had said, "How did I do, Jock?" and he had said, "You did fine.
You did damned fine."
That was the way it was and that was the way it had made him
the way he was. He spat into the abyss.
"Why do you want to climb this great mother-like mountain,
Jock?" Frank was saying.
Jock pushed Frank off the edge of the ledge and Frank fell and
splattered far below.
"You go to hell," Jock said.
The Stinkies
by Stephen Jameson
Note: For the first time, Mudlands is presenting
a short story by a promising young author along
with an analysis of the story by one of the Univer-
sity's outstanding critics. This splendid idea struck
us when we discovered that other publications do
it all the time. It is a very literary thing to do,
really.
John was lonely. John was lonely because he had no friends. He
had had friends once, but since then he had become a complete bas-
tard.
John had not always been a complete bastard. Once he had been
young and happy and in love and the sky was blue and everything
wasn't upside down and backwards and he wore grey gabardine
pants with a zipper. Then the zipper broke.
It wasn't so much that the zipper broke as that it broke in pub-
lic at the spring formal and he was wearing his red, orange and
chartreuse shorts and people laughed and he decided to hell with
you all, I hate every one of you, you're no damned good. He looked
at them and said, "To hell with you all, I hate every one of you, you're
no damned good." Then he went home and started making a bomb.
"I'm going to make the biggest bomb in the world and destroy
everybody because I figure to hell with them all, I hate every one of
them, they're no damned good," John always said. He said it before
he went to sleep and on the bus going to work in the morning and
at work and at the coffee shop at lunch time and on the way home
from work and at supper. He always said it.
When he got fired and began to spend all his time on the bombs
his sister used to say "What do you do all day out there in the ga-
rage John" and he would answer, "To hell with them all, I hate every
one of them, they're no damned good." This made his sister happy.
She felt the same way.
Then one day John set off his first bomb in a crowded railroad
station and it got in the papers and everybody talked about it and
John went home and made more bombs.
Soon John was famous. People everywhere were calling him
"The Bad Bomber" and talking about him without ever having seen
him and this made John happy so he went home and made more
bombs.
But as luck would have it the police officer investigating the
bombings said to the chief one day, "Chief I've been thinking and
out of the forty-five bombs that have been set off forty-two of them
have been at spring formals. I figure the guy has something against
spring formals."
"Brilliant!" the chief replied. "Come to think of it why would
a guy want to go around setting off stink bombs at spring formals?
Say, I knew a guy once name of John Matesky whose zipper broke
at a spring formal and people laughed at him and he got mad and
said "To hell with you all, I hate every one of you, you're no damned
good' and ever since that John has been a complete bastard and he
used to be a pretty nice guy."
"You don't say," the. police officer said and he shrugged. "Well
I guess we better get on with the investigation."
That was ten years ago and since then John has stunk up six
hundred and fifty-three spring formals. He's out in the garage now
making more bombs.
Love Poem
by J. Alfred Elliot
Ripe beyond her years
My Melanctha goes.
Wet behind her ears
My sweet Melanctha goes.
Her ears are wet
With sweat,
And, oh, that sweat is sweet.
I taste it in the morning air
And everything I eat.
But ripe-plum girls do die
And fall from the trees below.
My Melanctha will.
Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!
A Critical Analysis of the Stinkies
by Tom McFadden
Mr. Jameson's story, "The Stinkies," is deceptive upon first read-
ing. It seems straightforward enough on the surface, yet it is tightly
interwoven with allusion and symbolism that penetrates to the very
depths of Modern Man's plight. Mr. Jameson is a young author to
watch. He will go far.
There are several dominant themes interacting within the body
of the story, and taken in their inter-relationships they form a splen-
did organic unity.
First there is the recurring motif of isolation. The first sentence
in the story states this plainly. "John was lonely." Three small words,
but with such stylistic force and implicit meaning! Man is essentially
lonely. By this one sentence, the author of the story generalizes the
plight of his hero to its fullest human extent: John is Everyman,
because Everyman is lonely too.
Another motif in the story is that of rebellion. "To hell with you
all," the hero repeats, each time gaining more emphasis. The author
here joins rank with Milton, Camus, Shelley, and all the other great
writers who have dealt with the subject of rebellion. Miltonic splen-
dor and Camus-like penetration mark the rest of the story too.
It could be argued that John rebelled because of an act of un-
controllable Fate-the untimely breaking of his zipper (a symbol of
all machine-made things, and hence all machinery, and hence the de-
humanizing industrialization of Modern Man). But this event was
not an arbitrary, deterministic, and hence not-self-based one. John
was a rebel and a non-conformist before. He wore gray gabardine
pants to the formal. This indicates not only that he was rebelling
against social custom, but it is not too much to assert that he wore
them with the plan fixed in mind of breaking the zipper himself and
bringing more sharply into focus the rift between his existence and
sensibilities and those of the people at the dance. It was a choice
means of exhibiting his rebellion.
A dominant image in the story is that of the bomb. Mr. Jameson
evidently alludes to the H-bomb, and to the threat of the destruction
of Modern Man by nuclear devastation.
Connected with the image of the bomb is the motif of stinking,
and related to this motif is the motif of the spring formal. The term
spring formal is a choice poetic paradox, and can be generalized to
allude to all the paradoxes that characterize man's existence. Spring,
a term connoting a time of wild and uncontrolled growth and flow-
ering, a time of freshness, is juxtaposed and contrasted with the
term formal, which involves control, society as opposed to nature,
rigid form as opposed to wild flowering growth, dryness and decay
as opposed to freshness. The hero's dramatic act is to repeatedly
toss stink bombs into the midst of happy spring formals attended by
carefree, insensitive, blind people. This act indicates that the hero is
confronting the blind masses with the reality of the stench of the uni-
verse, the universal stench that the sensitive, artistic soul perceives.
Yet they do not respond, and he must repeatdly toss the stinkbombs.
He does not lose hope, however. He keeps on. And here we have
what is perhaps the central theme of the story, Mr. Jameson's mes-
sage to Modern Man: if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
No Goat, No Wrastle by Don Feltingham
Dionysus said -
What was it Dionysus
said? the nth square root
of beetle's claws is
essence of ephemerae.
Crack, urn, and wrack your pieces.
Goat's milk and turtle's faeces.
And in the springtime blear
of ratiocination,
Clearing sneering cups of wine:
Hieronymo's mad again.
Morte de Moi' an epic poem
by Bill Hightower
Hail, Heraclitus, who book-toned sayeth
Halting heresies of paradox and poesy .
(NOTE: 15 lines are omitted from the poem because
of offensive symbolism on the 3rd level.)
Ghost of goslings, jewels in the air . .
(NOTE: 2185 lines are omitted because they do
not adequately skirt the controversial.)
Fearful first-born of mighty Jove,
Like a green pear or a kitchen stove .
(NOTE: Another 592 lines are omitted.)
And western sunsets gild the eastern skies.
The Earthy Birth
by Leopold Toomb
NOTE: To relieve the heavy contents of
the rest of the magazine, the Mudlands edi-
torial board has chosen the following light
humorous story to elicit a humorous reac-
tion from the humorous readers, humorous-
ly.
She wandered through the tombstones. Mud clung to her bare
feet in thick cakes that pushed between her bone-thin toes. The air
was cold and a light freezing rain seemed to come from nowhere in
the dark, misty sky. She pulled her tattered shawl about her thin
shoulders and over her abdomen, big with expectancy of new life,
a new life of horror, helplessness, darkness, and loss.
"Why did the chicken cross the road?" The words of that trans-
cendent yet concretely earthy question rang in her consciousness,
like fantastic and daemonic shadows cast on the walls of a hospital
room, or like bullets echoing down the path of a long tunnel of name-
less destination and fearful ornament, a tunnel she did not want to
pass through.
She did not know the answer to the fearful question. Why? Why?
She heard herselp whimpering and then she howled mournfully with
the pain of the cold, the sense of her isolation, and awareness of her
unfulfillment. She howled like a wounded coyote who is bleeding and
scared, and the sound of her howling echoed among the tombstones
and passed over the muddy ground to the river.
Suddenly she stopped howling. Lifting a bony finger she said,
"Hark!" and listened to the dying echoes of her howling. "Hark"
she said again. The word seemed pregnant with a dark meaning. The
echoes seemed to be answered by howling from the graves. Maybe
the dead people had heard her and sympathized. Or maybe the dead
people were going to come from their coffins in the dark, earthy
ground where worms and pale slugs crawled, and take her, bear her
silently away to their terrible province.
She did not know, but she felt drawn to the river. It was flowing,
sluggish and dank, at the edge of the graveyard. Standing, she began
to walk slowly, as if she were in a nightmare, step by throbbing step
to the great inevitable Unknown. At the edge of the wide dark river
she stumbled and lay face down in the water. Pain gripped her, and
the river was flowing through her, in one ear and out the other. She
felt a mystical experience coming on, and then she knew.
The chicken had crossed the road to get to the other side.