Thursday, August 19, 2010
VirulentSlumber: Word Alimony
VirulentSlumber: Word Alimony: "Word Alimony Your rabid smile enthralled my shoe-tasting eyes But then I thought back I said to you yesterday that those words were mo..."
Word Alimony
Word Alimony
Your rabid smile enthralled my shoe-tasting eyes
But then I thought back
I said to you yesterday
that those words were most perfect
You flitted away to tomorrow's next
I took it down and held it up
It's true, those words knew me
I knew it only to be mine
Don't gift 'em to me. You can't
It's right here, too close, too real
Right here in the center
The cynosure of me
Oh the hell with it
Intercourse the words, will ya?
It's still my baby.
And I'll fuck again
Your rabid smile enthralled my shoe-tasting eyes
But then I thought back
I said to you yesterday
that those words were most perfect
You flitted away to tomorrow's next
I took it down and held it up
It's true, those words knew me
I knew it only to be mine
Don't gift 'em to me. You can't
It's right here, too close, too real
Right here in the center
The cynosure of me
Oh the hell with it
Intercourse the words, will ya?
It's still my baby.
And I'll fuck again
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Guilty Pleasure
It really bothered me that Canadian novelist, Andrew Davidson (of 'The Gargoyle' fame) was not as preponderantly sweeping across digital discourse as I would've hoped, or was convinced of. Anyone who's been even tangentially close with me over the past year will know I have been obsessed with this book for a while now.
'The Garogoyle' is frustratingly niggling in that it eludes you just as viciously as you try to vise-grip it and engrave it's multichromatic dreamlike substance in your memory forever. It doesn't help that you've got two chronological orders to get on board with. Like every other time you resent the hell out of the new start of a story just when you're beginning to get sucked into the previous one, this book obliges the same.
Yeah. No, I don't like the narrator when he audaciously chooses to be so indulgent and narcissistic, for one, he does it in first person. Secondly he's so uppish as to think his namelessness lends a cooler, disconcerting quality to his writing. But I grudgingly concede when he counterpoints this indulgence with powerfully lithe story telling and magnetic medieval history.
I should just tell you what it's about. There's a beautiful man (an atheist smart-alecky porn actor, dope-fiend, cynical bastard blasé about everything) that gets his body incinerated in a junked-up on cocaine and bourbon car accident. From this point on, he knows that his ungodly symmetry was no more him anymore. Which meant he wasn’t there anymore. He’d humour all the showmanship of rehabilitated burn patients in his hospital when they brandished “heartwarming stories of human triumph and determination”, with a scathingly banal subtext “He winked in an effort to inspire me but, because of the contracture around his eyes, it only made me think of a housefly struggling to get out of a toilet bowl”.
And painful surgical procedures? Might as well, right? Only because the only thing that kept him going was that he needed to be well enough to get released and well enough for a thoroughgoing suicide. Not before long, he meets a paranoid Schizophrenic- Marianne Engel who whirls him through their life together in fourteenth-century Germany at a monastery named Engelthal where she was a nun and scribe and where a mercenary dithered into, severely burned, to be tended to and then released. All the time that she recounts to him everything that she believes to be true, he believes her to be batty and cuckoo, right till the end too, make no mistake. Even as he moves in with her following his discharge from the hospital when she regales him with timeless romantic stories across centuries, each of which are cast in a crucible of love and hope. He doesn’t want to die anymore, though. That’s just it. You scud along the story knowing all along that it’s going to be redeeming finally, but not for anything else but for the fact that you become him, that you are him now, that you are going to him right till the end. If you’ve read it, you know what I’m talking about.
The book is expository, sure. But it’s brilliant exposition. It’s melancholic and still feel-good. I’d tell everyone to read it.
'The Garogoyle' is frustratingly niggling in that it eludes you just as viciously as you try to vise-grip it and engrave it's multichromatic dreamlike substance in your memory forever. It doesn't help that you've got two chronological orders to get on board with. Like every other time you resent the hell out of the new start of a story just when you're beginning to get sucked into the previous one, this book obliges the same.
Yeah. No, I don't like the narrator when he audaciously chooses to be so indulgent and narcissistic, for one, he does it in first person. Secondly he's so uppish as to think his namelessness lends a cooler, disconcerting quality to his writing. But I grudgingly concede when he counterpoints this indulgence with powerfully lithe story telling and magnetic medieval history.
I should just tell you what it's about. There's a beautiful man (an atheist smart-alecky porn actor, dope-fiend, cynical bastard blasé about everything) that gets his body incinerated in a junked-up on cocaine and bourbon car accident. From this point on, he knows that his ungodly symmetry was no more him anymore. Which meant he wasn’t there anymore. He’d humour all the showmanship of rehabilitated burn patients in his hospital when they brandished “heartwarming stories of human triumph and determination”, with a scathingly banal subtext “He winked in an effort to inspire me but, because of the contracture around his eyes, it only made me think of a housefly struggling to get out of a toilet bowl”.
And painful surgical procedures? Might as well, right? Only because the only thing that kept him going was that he needed to be well enough to get released and well enough for a thoroughgoing suicide. Not before long, he meets a paranoid Schizophrenic- Marianne Engel who whirls him through their life together in fourteenth-century Germany at a monastery named Engelthal where she was a nun and scribe and where a mercenary dithered into, severely burned, to be tended to and then released. All the time that she recounts to him everything that she believes to be true, he believes her to be batty and cuckoo, right till the end too, make no mistake. Even as he moves in with her following his discharge from the hospital when she regales him with timeless romantic stories across centuries, each of which are cast in a crucible of love and hope. He doesn’t want to die anymore, though. That’s just it. You scud along the story knowing all along that it’s going to be redeeming finally, but not for anything else but for the fact that you become him, that you are him now, that you are going to him right till the end. If you’ve read it, you know what I’m talking about.
The book is expository, sure. But it’s brilliant exposition. It’s melancholic and still feel-good. I’d tell everyone to read it.
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