January 29th, 2024 - Poor Houdini
Dear TNY,
A day late, but here I am with my response to “Poor Houdini”.
I don’t know if I followed the path of the story, as it were. Does it have a narrative arc? I don’t think so. But, I didn’t have a problem with that because the sentences were so original. Here are some examples:
Frozen grass underfoot has the soft bristle of walking on a sandwich with lettuce.
Loose evening light falls from high windows, and, as the jets carry them around and around, they seem to be gazing down at their own arms and legs, saying, Look at us, look, we turned out perfect after all!
Later that evening, she tries to re-create this for Vern, but it loses voltage in the telling.
His voice is high and soft with suffering. To feel she has to have pity on him enrages her. She looks at this rage, it feels stony, she cannot move it. The higher and softer his voice, the more she wants to simply be gone from the room. Then comes the night he sees her track and swat a mosquito, initiating a Taoist crisis. His mouth twists aside like a smeared rose. She tries to recall his mouth when he was saying, I have to see you again. A small horror knob settles between them.
The author’s use of language is so fresh compared to your normal fare. The metaphors and similes are simple and elegant. The pacing has a syllabic measure to it that we don’t see often in modern writing. The colors are vivid and flow smoothly through transitions. It feels like work from an author who fucking knows how to write.
Again, does it go anywhere? Sure, from one place to another. But I wouldn’t say that I got even close to transcendence. I did see and appreciate the beauty. But I didn’t feel it, you know? And is that the goal? For Art to make use feel beloved and beautiful on this earth? Part of the giant whole? A unique and necessary wonder? Who knows. Maybe I’m asking too much of Art.
Last night I started watching True Detective season one again. A perfect show. The dialogue is beyond good. And listening to Rust talk is a delight. The lines are so clean. The perspective is so bleak, so nihilistic. It’s such a good show. And that's high praise because I'm not normally into that subject matter, to be sure. I’m not on the serial murderer/true crime wave that appears to be most of what Netflix is shitting out these days. It doesn’t make me feel good about humanity; I get sad about us when I watch them. In saying that, I did recently reread Ed Gein’s Wikipedia page and was delighted to find a nugget of knowledge I had somehow missed before: that most of his “trophies” came from people who were already dead. He’d dig up the dead and cart them home to make his lampshades. And just now, thinking of that, I’m reminded of a story that came out of Germany (I believe) in which a man volunteered to be killed and eaten by another man, one of the conditions being that the man who was doing the eating first eat the man who would be doing the dying’s dick off. Yes, to eat his fucking dick off. Turns out it’s a tough bird and the man could not get it off with jaw work alone, but they sliced it off anyway and fried it in a pan and then shared it. Then the dickless man was given large amounts of drugs and sent upstairs to bleed out in the bathtub. Slowly. At points calling for the other man and, if memory serves, having second thoughts about dying. But die he did and the man butchered him up like hogmeat and ate off him for some time, keeping the choicest of cuts in the freezer.
This is a thing that happened.
And now I’m sick retelling it to you (I’m sure the horror of it has been embellished by my mind, but that’s irrelevant to me because this is what I’m living with inside myself (like the occasion of a woman, a mother and wife, leaving home and driving across state lines to man’s house to be tortured to death, as was her request, the man doing the torturing not knowing that was the request, or the precise request anyway, and accidentally killing her (too soon for her taste would be my guess based on what I read of that case)).
Wow. I’m a fucking monster. People are monsters. Now I have yucktummy. Whoops.
I’m a day behind because we had a flood here yesterday and planet earth showed us, once again, she’s got a flawless record of winning. She really pulled up her skirt and showed us what’s what around these parts and there’s some new, moist issues to be fixed. But we got off easy, comparatively, so that’s nice.
Anyway, that’s the word on the streets, fleabags. Beautiful flowing language, no transcendence, bleeding dick stumps, and torrential downpours. It’s all happening right here on this, the most beautiful spacecraft we’ll ever know. In our pocket of this vast and cold universe. But, my honey is sitting across the room eyeballing me because this is taking up time that she wants to use for snuggling, even though I smoked a couple plugs of tobacco last night and smell like an ashtray. So, there’s love here too. There’s everything you could ever want, if you figure out how to see it.
Have a wonderful day out there. Take note of how the wind, always invisible, shows its hand by the way it shivers all that it passes through. What a world.
Nick
