Shoes & Shit: Stories for Pedestrians; An Illustrated Anthology of Short Fiction

Priscilla Galloway was an English consultant in Willowdale, Ontario.

It’s a neat trick when you can indulge your sense of fun and take the result seriously, as Geoff Hancock and Rikki Ducornet appear to have done in Shoes & Shit. Hancock’s “Heel-Piece” makes a serious case indeed for the conjoining of shoes and shit: “As an assemblage,” he maintains, “Shoes & Shit is a preliminary step towards the reconstruction of our entire personality.” Further, “Shoes & Shit is an allegory of the Canadian condition, an affirmation of international bonds and the art of the possible.”

If I were a betting woman, I’d bet that the idea for a book combining these two somewhat unlikely images presented itself and appealed to the editors’ fascination with anus and exrementa — a fascination that most of us harbour, whether or not we acknowledge it; perhaps a little foot fetishism was thrown into the mix. Then came the challenge to put the collection together and arrange publication. Surely the rationalization occurred later.

“These stories suggest that all forms of nature are vaguely happy, hobnobbing with each other,” and again, “Shoes & Shit is a book in love with life,” says Hancock, but then he also cites a literary definition of scatology as “a minor and innocuous branch of pornography.” (Is there any innocuous branch of porn?) Also, “a common theme running…through the shoestories is an assertive erotic force which demonstrates links between power and sex.”

It’s a mixed shoebag, and not a brick shithouse. Maxine Hong Kingston’s “On Discovery,” about the Chinese man whose feet are broken and bound in the Land of Women, is a page of spine-chilling satire. Sylvia Fraser’s description of the tramp defecating, the artist in excrement in action, is superb. Steven Kovacs’ tale of the Hungarian peasants conned by the manure inspector, W.L. Riley’s story of the two women and the cow dung, Aimee Garn’s fantasy return to childhood through shoes, Martha Rosler’s mother-daughter exploration, are all appealing.

The overall tone of the book, however, is dark rather than happy. John Hawkes, Roch Carrier, Robert Coover, Mildred Tremblay, and Gerald Lynch have contributed the most powerful of the dark stories, from the tale of the children who sell a dead body to a one-legged man, to that of the child tormented by a sadist; the boy accidentally (?) kills his tormentor.

Shoes & Shit is beautifully produced; the limited edition of one thousand copies is elegantly printed on sumptuous pale gray paper. The photographs and drawings are fascinating. Some are quirky, such as the photo of the evening slippers on a dummy’s cut-off legs; between the slim legs rests a furled umbrella whose handle is a human foot.

The book is not, alas, designed for comfortable sustained reading; the print is too small. Perhaps, considering its theme and readability limitation, Shoes & Shit will find its ideal niche on the bathroom shelf.