“It’s a fine wine but the only way to drink it is to use the cork as a suppository.”
Contents- Book review, book review, imposter syndrome confession, kind regards….
Days Between Stations by Steve Erickson
I’ve never tried autoerotic self asphyxiation, but I bet you it feels slightly like reading this novel. It’s a force that gets under your skin. It has a pull that’s undeniable. It’s not a novel I’d readily jump into and it’s not an easy read. Time jumps, characters jump, it’s a fever dream that starts with Lauren and her godlike husband who professionally races bicycles. She’s pitiful in the relationship, but they have a kid and live in San Francisco.
Cut To: Michel, a young teen who lives in a brothel in Paris where he’s been held prisoner in a sort of way, conflict, conflict, conflict, Cut To: Michel is now older and a filmmaker and that’s when I’m hooked into the story, that’s where Erickson gets me, that’s where the rope around my neck metaphorically speaking loosens its grip and gives me a kiss. I’m in and I can’t stop reading this book. I can only read a few pages at a time. It’s too much to power through. It’s a fine wine but the only way to drink it is to use the cork as a suppository.
Screw it, I’ll just type the description from the back of the novel to be even more vague.
“In a world of cataclysm and unraveled time, a young woman's face, a misbegotten childhood in a Parisian brothel, and the fragment of a lost movie masterpiece are the only clues in a man's search for his past. Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations is the stunning, now classic dream-spec of our precarious age -- by turns beautiful and obsessed, haunted and hallucinated, in which lives erotically collide, the past ambushes the future, and forbidden secrets intercut with each other like the frames of a film.”
It’s a petit beast. I wish I could recommend it. I love it. I just don’t know how to explain it, Erickson probably can’t explain it, but it drew me in and I’m affected.
Oh, here’s a comparison. I read House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski when I was in my 30s. Reading this in my 50s feels like a more grown up version, a more refined version and it’s a little harder to follow than House of Leaves. It’s good though, there’s something about it. It’s like a lover with a burn scar on her face where when you first meet her you’re put off, then you talk to her and she has a sultry voice, swears like a sailor, then she licks her lips and just that one motion of her tongue grabs you. You’re in love. You want to trace the burn scar with your fingers while you cuddle and listen to a Coltrane record on the turntable.
There you go, think about reading it. You may or may not like it, if you like it you’ll like it a lot, at the same time it’s nothing I’d ever read again. It’s not like reading Ulysses and finally getting through it and going, oh crap, I need to read this again for real. Because they say the first time you read Ulysses is the second time you read Ulysses. This ain’t no Ulysses, but it’s a lover you’ll never forget.
The Heart In Winter by Kevin Barry
Why has Barry just landed on my radar? Best book of the year for me tied with 18% Gray.
It’s a love story set in 1891 Butte, Montana, before our hero takes off on the run with the wife of a severely devout self flagellating catholic, after he steals money and set the Serbian boarding house ablaze. It’s the wild west and Tom is a poet of sorts and just a down and out dude. Then Polly arrives to be wedded to the older catholic dude before they’ve even met. It was a situation better than the situation she had back East that she doesn’t talk about too much, but, Tom falls in love, it’s a love that demands no returns, no refunds, all sales final, you’re in love so suck it up.
And with that Tom and Polly take off to get themselves real anonymous in San Francisco. Polly falls for Tom as well and there’s a posse out for blood because Tom just had to burn a boarding house down and her old man Catholic husband that Polly was set up with wants her back.
Rewards are on their heads and this love story reads like the book of Revelations. It feels biblical, it could be the 67th book of the bible because it is a parable of red hot passion and what we’ll do for it when it shows up. In life it mostly never shows up, then it does, maybe once or twice and it’s a hot fire that can only keep burning until something bad happens.
I just grabbed Night Boat to Tangier and can’t wait to see what Barry did with that one.
Other books of note I’ve read recently:
Cruel Summer by Ed Brubaker
The Hunter by Richard Stark
A Taste for the Brilliants by Noel Clad
CUT TO: Imposter Syndrome or how to take a beating and become a writer…
My head’s been in a weird space. Some type of imposter syndrome, not as a writer, but getting my writing out there, pitching, doing the pitching part of this game we’re in.
It’s like the night before school tomorrow and the bully told you he’s going to kick your ass sideways on the playground in front of everyone and there’s no way to settle the conflict because you have no idea what the conflict was, or is. I had many of those nights.
One time when I got in my first fight in school I got punched hard in the stomach by a kid who knew karate when I was 8 years old. I tried to kick him in the nuts but missed after. Everyone laughed and I cried as I walked all the way home.
When my mom and dad found out they had no comfort for me, they only told me I shouldn’t have tried to kick him because we may meet him when we’re preaching and how would we explain my violence when we’re preaching Jehovah’s new world.
After that I kept most of my fights to myself. I never got the best of anyone, I just learned how to duck and cover. One time a senior in high school, on the football team guy, beat me up my sophomore year in the bathroom. Threw me against the wall and slammed me down. I scrambled up, then he head butted me and I went down again. At least that was more of a private beating, but I really wanted him taken down somehow. My body hurt, but my soul hurt even more because any shred of manhood was stolen from me. I hadn’t even hit puberty yet, I was a late bloomer with the pubes.
That time I told my dad about it. I felt so distraught. His only reply: “You should have stayed down.”
This is the shit in my head from my developing years, if you can call them developing, the de-evolutionary years, which makes pitching uneasy, where I blow it all up in my head to a way larger thing than it really is.
That’s when I have to practice what I preach to my students when I tell them to serve the story. I’m not serving my novel by holding it back, I need to get it out there, let it be rejected, there’s no senior prick high school football player looking to beat down a kid in the boys bathroom.
Writers, we’re all a mess. That’s why we write, to try to make sense of all of this crap.
Join us, last call for my writing workshop starting Friday, September 19th. We have a great group so far.
Thanks for reading, see ya next time.