Your Bones arrived, a Worthy supplement to my own narrow marrow. Not yet had time to do more than gnaw a bit on the joints, but it's my hope to have time (Time!) to swallow, digest, and shit them out again, to re-fertilize this old (Old!) earth. (!) What I have seen of them so far, they remind me of a fellow I once met in Afghanistan... who had a good story...
Glad you liked my story, Vision. I think it has a maturity and depth that much of my previous work lacks. And since I know exactly how and why it does so, it may be expected that future (Future!) work will have or strive for the same. But I write only when the daemons drive me to do so, or boredom, or (rarely) vast inspiration, and these days there is not much of any of those, so it may be a while before anything more turns up.
Your letter was even more Worthy than Bones (more Worthy and more Bones?). Indeed, I think you (and perhaps me too) are most lucid when your audience (potential audience, that is) is the smallest (for both of us our actual audience are about the same whether we write letters or novels). Nevertheless, John Barth seems to have killed off that genre (or at least laid it to rest for a while) as he did with the Great American Historical Novel (though the GAHN was done in with wit, humor, grace, complexity, etc., whereas the epistolary novel was bludgeoned with a long-handled solipsism that only an omphalophile could love.
Meanwhile, back at the monastery... we last left our hero he was striving, pen sharpened and at the ready, to do battle with the evil monster, Paranoia, and his scurrilous master, Chauvin. We remember how our beautiful heroine, Visa O. Lovely, was in danger of being done in by the monster: chained down, stripped to her bare essentials, and guarded by a Passport About to Expire... And our hero's friends, a motley (but lovable) crew of eccentric seers, visionaries, do-gooders, do-badders, do-nothings, and (zippity) do-dahs, were striving mite and maign to help our hero rescue his beloved from the maws of an Expiration Worse Than Death... And how breathlessly we awaited the next installment of this thrilling (and seemingly endless) episodic soft-soap opera. Well, we're still waiting, we're still waiting, we're still waiting, 'cause nuttin' ain't happened yet. (Gorsh, maw, I can't hardly stand the excitement. Now let's go watch an ice cube melt.)
Well, it seems (Again!) hardly no trouble at all to fill a letter with the most pointless inanities and mealy-mouthed moronisms, so I can only conclude that in this case I must have slipped up and said something substantive, for I find that hardly halfway through the available (indeed, virtually obligatory) space of this aerogramme I have nothing more to say, and am forced to close. The rest of the paper will be fine toilet quality, void of black ink (with life as complicated as it is already, who needs a black asshole?) for the only thing left to say is, love you brother, and dig your trip and wish you a fine and error-free winter.
V.
No comments:
Post a Comment