Jim > Recent Status Updates

"Every hundred feet the world changes, said Florita Almada. The idea that some places are the same as others is a lie. The world is a kind of tremor."

About a quarter of the way in, this perfect prose poem: "He called the funeral home and talked to someone by the name of Tremayne. He said he was Edna Miller's son. Tremayne consulted his notes and expressed his condolences several times , until he found the paper he was looking for."

"The sky, at sunset, was like a carnivorous flower."

"Archimboldi's work, his novels and stories, that is, seemed completely foreign, a shapeless and mysterious verbal mass, something that appeared and disappeared capriciously, literally a pretext, a false door, a murderer's alias, a hotel bathtub full of amniotic liquid in which he, Jean-Claude Pelletier, would end up committing suicide for no reason, gratuitously, in bewilderment, just because."

"Every flap to be peered under every crevice to be crept into every chustling memory there they go like clockroaches."

"And in this room: a bowl made of mirrors, so that as I drank of it, it drank of me."

"...jobs are tedious and death-making and we can't change that..."

"...the human custom of wrong love."

"'Consumption is not a passion for substances but a passion for the code," says Baudrillard.'

"Emotions of that order, very subtle, very profound, very carnal, and essential, and completely unpredictable, can hatch entire lives in a body. That's what writing is. It's the pace of the written word passing through your body. Crossing it. That's where one starts to talk about those emotions that are hard to say, that are so foreign, and yet that suddenly grab hold of you."

Okay, said Marsha. But still, the Grey-Bellied Comet for a study on sexual selection? Why not something more clearly appropriate? Why not the Marvelous Spatuletail?
To which I replied: : Oh, please.

"Not long after that she started making out with Baggy just to get him lit. She asked the girls how much for a three-way, how much for a four-way, then turned and told Ernie he wouldn't be one of the ways."

Oldcorn was a shot-putter form the hippie days. He was my hero for a while. I was a shot-putter from the long-after-the-hippie-days-were-gone days. It was called the Reagan era, but I learned that later.

"Anything that's a threat to convention is a cult"

Provocative pulp.

One of the most entertaining contemporary short story writers.

Deliciously morbid.

Some of these stories feel like rehashes of stories he's written before, but Escape from Spiderhead punched clean through my cynicism. My god.

I don't have access to the copy I was reading anymore so I'm going to have to pick up my own because the first essay floored me.