The specialist’s chest heaved waves of homicidal catharsis. And while this troubled him, he nevertheless cleansed himself of that dreaded atonal compunction scaling its way across four vertical ventricles. His musical heart had been categorized by the visceral taxonomists like so: (1) e.g., the part inside that cried for data and hard examples but could not appreciate the warm aroma of a woman or a child’s laughter; (2) g.b., a bona-fide hard drive, an ambition that was capacious in 1995 in danger of being replaced by the cutting-edge t.b.; (3) b.d., that lascivious impulse calling the specialist to impulses that could not be sufficiently described as vanilla; and (4) d.f., a ravenous adventuresome spirit with a stapled sombrero. These heavy boxes dealt with the snack massacre like so: e.g. contemplated the ethics; g.b. casually suggested more data, with the machete applied to peanuts, Kit-Kats, twiglets, and other snack-centric decapitations that involved shrieks; b.d. wondered if it was possible to rape a half-popped popcorn and derive an atavistic pleasure that would surely be censured by the appropriate authorities (this pressing development caused e.g. to work double time on the ethics); and d.f. simply demanded this stiff trio to stop aligning itself with this intellectual wankery. “For fuck’s sake,” said d.f., “the deed is done. Let’s party. Pour me a drink. I’m pretty sure we can keep b.d.’s disturbing vagaries in check. And I’m pretty sure that I’ll stop using stupid fucking ten-cent words like ‘vagaries’ if you ply me with enough cordials.” So the specialist’s heart decided, and it was not easy with all this chatter going on, that the specialist needed to run to the bar, get as inebriated as possible, avoid any eleventh-hour rolls in the hay, and return to the scene of the crime, sprinting if necessary so that the specialist could fit this activity inside ninety minutes. At the other end, he might repine his own savage instincts with that of the sad Bavarian woman who was probably not as dissolute as b.d. (that pesky quasi-id, but essential) had conjectured.
He Left It Dead, and With Its Head
But why pick on Bavaria? It had done nothing wrong, but it had produced a brutal dictator, an interesting film director who had killed himself at 37, and a mysterious teenage boy with a letter. Still, that’s only three people. Bavaria has offered millions of individuals over the years, many of them charming and sanguine. Dutiful pillars of the community. Decent neighbors. Men who might buy a stranger a drink if the stranger tells a good story. Is it fair for us to dwell on the lonely fact? These kernels took time to bloom, and the specialist saw the metaphor contained within the snack massacre. But the specialist could not intervene. He’d seen her live out her dead memories by chomping her way through the bowl’s sentient contents, the telltale bicuspid bite mark indented into the sad blue comforter. She was too taken with murder and the blood she’d leave for the maid. She’d never know all the details pertaining to the Bavaria question until she understand that these kernels, once so bright and yellow and promising, were corpses instead of seeds. Half-popped from the pan, and half-articulate in their screams, they would not grow back. She left the kitchen and she left the specialist to clean up the mess. He unsheathed his machete, which glinted against the flickering fluorescent tube. The half-popped corn, crawling helplessly like a legless Brooklyn roach, pleaded with the specialist. But rules were rules. The machete cracked against the kernel’s head. The specialist would clean up everything else, but would leave it dead. She had to feel something.
New Essay: Philip José Farmer
In this morning’s Barnes and Noble Review, you’ll find my extended appreciation of Philip José Farmer — the wildly imaginative fantasy writer who died back in February. Farmer wrote relentlessly and created numerous books, and there was no conceivable way to dwell on them all. In the interest of providing an entry point for the Farmer neophyte, I have focused mainly on the five Riverworld books.
It’s worth pointing out that the critic Leslie Fiedler held Farmer in high regard and wrote a piece entitled “Getting Into the Task of Now Pornographer” for the Los Angeles Times in April 23, 1972. (Interesting how, even in 1972, one had to go to a West Coast outlet to sing the proper praises for a genre writer.)
Personally, I have never seen invention or yarn-spinning as literary liabilities. They are qualities just as noble and as praiseworthy as the lifeless highbrow qualities fawned over and heralded by the Bookforum snobs and the Granta dilettantes; in Farmer’s case, even more so.
The Vorpal Blade Went Snicker-Snack
She tucked the makeshift blue comforter inside the large wooden bowl, pondering the many hundred corpses she’d gnaw on in the next ten minutes. She insisted on canola oil and an old-school pot that once belonged to a neighbor who had died down the hall. She named each and every one of them, so that she could familiarize herself with their agonies on a first-name basis. The finer mastications were named after the men who had hurt her or who had broken their promises and never called her back. She’d found a kernel specialist in SoHo who was starting to harvest a new crop once more with feeling and who could quote Sade while hanging upside down with a group of tops prodding him with pliers. She paid extra with the money she’d inherited from her dead dad, who had never once taken her to the movie theater. The specialist only had so much space and was paying a good deal of money to use up a parking spot for his agricultural innovation. The specialist, who had often seen business pick up with specific clients right before they were about to die, had told her not to use his name under any circumstances. And while she was tempted to break the rules, she found greater pleasure from the high-pitched screams that came from the magma-like flow of melted butter. She looked into the bowl and saw that some of them were twitching. A nice designer touch. They. Now her only social connections were the oily bits of shrieking popcorn she shoved into her mouth. The specialist certainly hadn’t been surprised when the genealogists traced her ancestors to Bavaria.
An Alarming Discovery In One of the Dead Tree Outlets
This afternoon, as I was counting the twenty-two badly oxidized pennies in my piggy bank over the last three months and flipping through a five-dollar newspaper that I had stolen from a Starbucks, I was especially alarmed to find the following article, located on the inside back page of the newspaper’s renowned Sunday magazine. (I have scanned the newspaper article. Click on the image to enlarge.)
I am not certain if Ms. Krapp’s article represents an effort to “spice up” the magazine, which I noticed was a mere 54 pages this week, or if it was a candid outreach campaign to the newspaper’s not-so-secret affluent demographic. I only knew that I did not quite relate to Ms. Krapp’s homicidal tendencies. But if this article is true, it appears that the so-called “safe” side of Central Park hardly lives up to the modifier casually tossed around by various convention bureaus.