June 5, 2013: Little book, I don't do you justice. I will finish you (hopefully this week), but I owe you a reread





June 6, 2013: Seems fitting that the last thirty pages of this were read in a state somewhere between consciousness and sleep. Because that's how it read. Like some kind of nightmare you wish someone would wake you from. Goodis' material is usually dark (that's why he's up there with the big boys in the noir field) but this one felt especially so. Goodis is capable of creating charac

June 5, 2013: Little book, I don't do you justice. I will finish you (hopefully this week), but I owe you a reread





June 6, 2013: Seems fitting that the last thirty pages of this were read in a state somewhere between consciousness and sleep. Because that's how it read. Like some kind of nightmare you wish someone would wake you from. Goodis' material is usually dark (that's why he's up there with the big boys in the noir field) but this one felt especially so. Goodis is capable of creating characters you would swear he pulled from real life. But he outdid himself here. I wanted to cradle the two main characters in my arms and invite them into my tree-house and tell them, Hey, you guys, it's not so bad. Look: cookies. Milk. Soda, if you want it. We'll live that mean ole world behind and just hang out here for a while. Eh? Eh? But these characters, these people know better than that. They could hide with me in the tree-house and still the world would be waiting for them when they climbed down again. Even if they waited forever, it would still be waiting. So, fuck it, they said, we'll meet you head on. Oh, they did some running, their own version of it. And I cringed and cowered and said, No, no, no, don't do that, that's not gonna go well at all. But this is noir, and a lot like real life noir doesn't pull any punches. So you walk blindly - well, not so blindly; you have your eyes wide open to catch a glimpse, if only a fleeting one - you walk not-so-blindly in and take your licks and hope you come out on the other side. But what if you have someone tagging along behind? Someone you were unready to give yourself to but somehow they managed to whittle a hole in that block of wood you called a heart, the one that turned into a block after the last time something bad happened and in order to prevent it from ever happening again you simply said, Alright, that's enough, I'm out, I'm not doing this anymore. But then this new one came along and you said you wouldn't get involved and you wouldn't let the person in but somehow they kindled a little fire around that block of wood and it began to spit and his and without your being aware of it the other person was adding stick and twigs and the fire was getting bigger and you wanted to put it out but the more you wanted to put it out the bigger it got and the harder it got and by then it was too late anyway. You were in too far. But life's always creeping up behind, maybe just a step or two or maybe it's two or three blocks away, but it's always following and it's waiting on the chance to cut in. And when it does, you'll dance. And you'll dance. And you'll dance. You'll get seasick and you'll swoon and if you're lucky before it really gets rough you'll be thrown free, thrown overboard; or you could be lucky and hang on for the entire ride and what a ride it'll be. There's music somewhere. It may be music you yourself are playing or it may be piping in from that gaping rent in the sky, the one where all the darkness is coming form and maybe someone's just turned out the lights for a while, that's all it is, someone's turned out the lights. Say, would you mind turning the lights back on? But the one who turned on the lights may no longer be there to turn them on for you and you have to figure out how to turn them on again yourself. Click. Click.



Click.