A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953 Quotes

“The best fact I know is that kindred souls collect like dew to morning thistle. So if any of this gets out of hand, or collapses to pillars of bromide and dust, or our solitary struggle is cheapened and dashed, I'll die knowing we were all stupid in stupid togetherness, and the allure, lustre, good in that phrase consoles my wanting spirit, that we made it all too messy, but kicked out the jams in the process.”
― Kirk Marshall, A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953

“He could smoke through the water as though an aquamarine submarine, he could sever the festoonery of the poolside ebb and eddy into fiery fluttering swathes of hot-cut flax, he could treble beneath the meniscus of the pool, sharp as synthesiser music and with a trajectory of theological impermanence, a crucifixion affected underwater, a kingfisher with the velocity and capriciousness of a shooting star, a knife in the arm of a masochist, a cleft hatchet of rock through the porous orb of a sea urchin, a dick through butter, a tyrannical nutter, Shunt through water, watch Shunt corrupt your daughter. He could move in wet like a lion through wildebeest.”
― Kirk Marshall, A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953

“Godzilla, you see, is toppled, is depleted, is immobile and breathless, the non-conversative dictator and his polemical primeval tyranny dashed to social smithereens... for some his demise will evince agitation, adulation and appraisal, but for me, Yasuhiro Dustin T-Bird, it returns the lingering largesse of an inconsolable fear. The fear is this: that there's a thing as big as pirate continents in the China Sea that we've together mythologised up to now currently obstructing the procession of metropolitan traffic all the way to Yoyogi. His formidable draconian jaw with its legend of gargantuan teeth slacks open like a lifelong foe's long-withheld liability, and sulphur rents the air in acrid, acid plumes as though the most cultured and violent yellowcake fart in categorical memory.”
― Kirk Marshall, A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953

“One day, I think, we'll invent the most impressive broom an interrogating mind might ever attest to seeing. Enormous, this thing would be, and whole formidable chōbu high and with bristles as coarse and catching as the most perniciously effective cleaning tool. And we will invent a mess esteemed and distinguished enough to satisfy the functions of our enormous, genius broom, and the time will converge wherein both the mess and the broom will not do, so what then, but manufacture something bigger, and more furious, and less manageable?”
― Kirk Marshall, A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953

“It's reasonable to try for success. Paradoxically, it's also sane to admit defeat. This excels the coming of the end. And when that tide has crested and broken, it recedes from the shore to leave behind something of principle significance. An artefact borne from the lunatic fight. The human struggle. And I can see myself, not too far into the future, with my hair whipping about in the fray of coastal spray, arching low to pick up that wriggling, billion-limbed nautilus, to hold it to my winter-cold ear, to hear what I could hear.”
― Kirk Marshall, A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953

“But Shunt, he thirsted for understanding with obsessive perseverance. It was a pathology in this way, and pathologies aren't hobbies to be entertained through the inclination of the willing. With some assertion, you certainly can't direct a pathology: it directs, contorts, warps, wears you. Shunt walked through school, down his bedroom corridor, high-ceiling'd and close-panelled, over asphalt as hot as holiday sex, in his head, always relegated to a realm of internal mystery, a sphere of indecipherable symbols that were filtered in, held fast to, but never understood. He saw things or deduced things, and they were there for eternity. Once Shunt had them inside, it was impossible to divorce or expunge them, and so there they remained, infecting his peace and placidity of mind, thoughts like foreign bodies entering a gaping, unquenched wound, and after that Shunt's life devolved into the gangrene set in by these unpurged foreign bodies. Shunt suffered from epilepsy and a panic disorder. He didn't know who he was. He was not a funny person, a wise person, a valorous person, a soft person. Shunt was epilepsy and a panic disorder, and that's as encompassing as his personality had ever been. When you suffer a pathology it directs, contorts, warps, wears you.”
― Kirk Marshall, A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953