Jon Sarkin, a chiropractor from Massachusetts, suffered with a noise like a fire alarm going off between his ears for a year, until an operation to put it right caused a stroke, necessitating the remo
Call me Jim. Some years ago (the precise number is unimportant, but it is twelve), I, being of sound mind and body, other than the fact that I am totally deaf....
Jim is in bed, surrounded by strewn newspapers all over the floor. They are for the most part largely unread, but this clutter, this disorder, and the faint smell of newsprint Jim likes.
Jim went to a private school in Connecticutt, where he grew up, called Thompson Academy. Each day, there'd be chapel before classes. They'd sing hymns and shit like that. The headmaster, Mr.
Jim was in bed, listening to "Brown Sugar" by The Rolling Stones. He wondered if there was anyone worth dealing with that wouldn't know who did this song.
For Jim, purgatory was a fetid place ruled by the evil lord "Xequkus," who, along with his horde of flying monkeys, out of work since The Wizard of Oz, and willing to work for minimum wage and a denta
You saw Jim and he told you how he had read just about half of Slaughterhouse Five , and, like Billy Pilgrim, was thinking that maybe he was unstuck in time too.
The immediacy of it hit Jim like when he heard the line "THIS MAGIC MOMENT." It was hard for Jim to explain the hit, meaning the feeling of utter and shuddering suddeness he felt, like when he saw T
Jim vaguely understood, in way the reptilian life-forms understand something, if "understanding" is the right word to describe this neurological phenomenon - I mean, do lizards truly understand stuff
Jim vaguely understood, in way the reptilian life-forms understand something, if "understanding" is the right word to describe this neurological phenomenon - I mean, do lizards truly understand stuff
So this is the way it's gone down for me, Jim thought. He looked at the wall. He felt like Travis Bickle, God's lonely man. He thought about the narrator from Notes from Underground.
His was this feeling that if he stopped what he was doing, then his lungs would stop breathing and his heart would stop beating blood and he would even stop thinking - that somehow (and he realized ho
In the midst of all these uncertainties, Jim was forced to, on this frozen night, by his compulsion to utter shrill cries, run back and forth screeching his blackboard fingernail scream.
He was a young man, lean, fair, morose, with lanky hair and a shuffling gait, with brawny shoulders, exuding a natural piety that you might see in certain humble youths, romantic, impulsive, sunny-sid
Their view from the knoll would be difficult to describe in any known terrestrial language, the villages around the river, the extraordinary river, the sunshine as it rebelled voraciously, even atroci
I shrugged wearily, disgusted with the argument. I listened to the steady rumble of the coal conveyor, the scream of the traffic on the highway, the far-off rattle of the electric railway.
Can you explain your experience -- anything that's happened to you, down to the dumbest thing -- and convey the truth of this experience, and whatever meaning it supposes, its penetrating and subtle a
He was vexed - vexed so, that his sleep was disrupted in a cascade of non-focussed and vague disturbances, transformed from restful peace to a fit-filled demi-monde of demonic half-dreams and irregula
I'm with the thought police," he said, and his slight, doubted way of saying it obscured this sentiment, as when the morning sun is obscured by an immense smudge of coal-gray and soil-brown particulat
During the entire forty-mile drive from Jacob Lake they had seen nothing so far but green meadows decorated with herds of cattle and deer and beyond the meadows the aspen, pine, spruce, and fir, uncut
The highway signs pointed out motels and scenic roadside points of interest: Mesa Motel (free cable TV): only 4 miles; Lucky Peak Reservoir: next exit. Lucky Peak. I was there a few years back.
"Glen Canyon City: 4 Miles." That sign was the last thing I remember before, as the tell me, I became totally unhinged, shamelessly and hopelessly addled, atavistic, hindbrained, adrift from my moor
We were just outside San Bernadino. Highway 5 threads a splendid needle through the high desert as it flattens west through the red brethren eyeball that is Berdoo.
Whispering, Smith pointed to a patch of seepaged-darkened sand before them. "Watch what I do and then do the same thing. You understand?" We nodded. "Hurry up," he said. I looked at Smith.
He has a shattered-glass-being-dragged-over-hot-asphalt voice, registering rage, paranoia, lust and loneliness as a single emotion clenched into a taut, sinewy vocal fist punching the cosmos, a linger
If an old man sees something anew, through different eyes, he becomes something else; it's like, almost, the declaration of a new, sovereign nation, perhaps, and the electronically-amplified techno-i
I wish I was a catfish swimmin' in the deep blue sea where all the voodoo mojo hollow men sleep, yeah, baby, them straw dog-men with them minds fulla big ideas chock-filled with deepened darkness whis
running voiced into the never, nethered realm
i seek your salve saved salvo in the deep deep wood
this faded glen isn't quite the dream i lightningbolted when we slept
As he walked over the gorge-bridge, the river's roar, seven hundred feet down, was sighed to a quiet murmur, a vague, indistinct gurgle of ambivalent strength - more a weakened pulse then some surge
The bridge was gone. Huge shards of concrete fraggled obscenely, perversely protruding from its north and southsides like atavistic vestiges of some dead-end missig link.
He landed in the swamp after marching through the woods and near the swamp was an inland office where he began to feel the savagery, the utter, atavistic savagery, which had closed around him, all tha
You have a charmed life. You clap your hands and stamp your feet to the rhythms of your strange, charmed witchcraft. The stillness you exhibit when loft through the sunlight is impressive.
A woman with salt fish came here fresh as a cherub, innocent, pure, knowing no evil. At the time I was suffering from the tropical disease I wrote you about in my last letter.
A jetty projected into the river. As I walked out, near the end was a man with an expression all at once remarkable. What struck me as remarkable - why he impressed me as so - I know not.
The river was there, fascinating like a snake, murmuring vaguely, carcassed with decaying machinery, frightful, bizarre, hooked and crooked, crooked like the man who walked a crooked mile, twenty-mule
I made sure I got there before Santiago did. I didn't really trust the guy. He had just gotten out of Pelican Bay a month before, and you know what prison does to a guy.
This last fact particularly infuriated him - that he'd have this memory etched acidly on his brain; a glinting, grotesque blowtorch of body-chilled associations.
There remained only his memory, and his thoughts tumbled out helter-turvy: the two black hens he saw in Montgomery, Alabama; his John Prine records; the box of matches he left on the hearth, the o
When I passed the ash-heaps on the train that morning I had crossed deliberately to the other side of the car. I didn't want the memory of what'd happened there stuck in my brain like a divot.
I couldn't sleep all night. Dreams - not the dreams of deep sleep, but rather those of half-wakefulness, dreams at the nexus of reality and surreality, intruded my brain.
I care deeply about accidental astonishment. What I mean is that when one is surprised that one is surprised. Does this seem repetitive as well as redundant? This is not my meaning.
Early in the morning, up in the cloudy sunrise sky, we heard an airplane. "Where's Duke?" someone asked, but we all knew Duke was on that plane, headed for the free zone.
His tongue was thick with the vinyl-chloride dust of the factory at which he worked. Outside, the roaring wind which had howled all morning showed no sign of letting up.
Sometimes I feel like a needle, a damp and dark fumble, a catalyst, a membership card, a television, a disruption, a huge crowd on a balcony, an uncool discovery, a mirror ball, a laughing rifle, a se
Press life. Make an extended concert of it - never run from its at-times high-pitched pomposity, its confusion and perfusion of thumping chatter, its automatic vigilance.
Then we get the hell out of here I whispered as we gunned the car whizzing by the sign that read leaving Blanding Utah past the sunless plateau out to Bullfrog Creek where Pancho had a place.
I believe in a palace of crystal that can never be destroyed, just as I believe the clump of trees out my window, or childish impatience or Jonah in the belly of the whale or Sinbad the sailor or my
His mind works swiftly and runs easily, penetrating further and further into his diligent planning, his clockwork brain burning evenly but fiercely like some outrageous Andromeda adventure or the wind
Until I left, things apparently went easily well, I reasoned. Then, almost soon after, this texture of constancy vaporized from my memory. Malevolence and dislocation transmitted instantaneously.
The candle went out. I could no longer distinguish her face. I thought back to a guy I went to college with, for some reason, Jeff Tauber - or was it Taber?
My friend - actually, he's not really a friend; he's more of an acquaintance; thinking about it, I now realize that I'm in the habit of calling people "friends" who really don't rise to that defini
the epiphany of experience
is etched upon my brain
it seeps into my consciousness
just like it was a train
but awareness has its downside
at least that's what he said
Small sea-birds flew screeching over the shuddering white surf. I thought about how long birds have been screaming over the sea, squawking their squawks.
I stopped, but I didn't come back. "Smith, godammit, is it true?" Winston screamed again. I just kept on walking. "Fuck you," I thought, but didn't say it out loud.
He sat still again, his hands crossed on his knee. He scanned the paper: near Winston-Salem, a farmer, while tilling his field, had unearthed some unusual looking arrowheads.
His friend Sven was talking. "There are five stages in mastering a thing," Sven commenced. "At first, one doesn't even know he doesn't know. The second, he understands that he doesn't know.
the fox ran out on a moony night
crescent shone a hound-dog light
fox, he saw that hound-dog moon
and turned around the corner
yes, turned around the corner
Exactly as they had done at the front door, the little man's eyes flickered over their faces. They reminded me of Winston's eyes - blurry with gin, as atmospheric as outer space, thickly spectacled.
After listening to my messages I called Ishmael back. He wanted to know if I wanted to go to Robinsonville with him this weekend. He wanted to go to the antique car museum they have there.
Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side of the square. A bomb had demolished a group of house two hundred yards up the street. The air smelled like boi
I traveled back to California to stay in Jack's cabin. He was about to go with Charrington up to Marin County. He was on this visionary poet quest. Before he left,
The afternoon was more bearable. But not much. The morning had been infernally humid, a wet tropical prickle that made him dizzy. The air was still uncomfortable an
As he walked, he thought of his broken, crushed dreams, the emotional deadlines so far past due they seemed in front of him, and, as he trammelled past the boarded-up liquor store, h
His dream was still wild in his mind, especially the part with the eel with the head of Dr. Camp, his pediatrician from when he was a kid, opening a door into the darkness.
He felt that just thinking was like struggling with some crushing physical task, his eyes aching unbearably, no right to refuse this neurotic anxiousness, troubled memory, words that murmured murky, d
As I write this, I, and you will find this most curious and interesting, ....Now, where was I?....Oh yes! I was about to confide in you a most voluptuous morsel.
"Is it better to do nothing?" you yourself ask yourself, as you sit in your room, humiliated, gloomy, phrasemonging, disgusted, the room silent and loathsome and smears of orange on your rug and in th
His calendar was full of trashers. That's what he called these humdrum, annoying appointments - trashers. He hated trashers, nothing more than a waste of time.
I presently am in one of those elevators they have that has one of those metal doors made before the war; you know, like they always seem to have in these grand pre-war apartment houses.
This last fact particularly infuriates me. So, I scream WELL, NEVER MIND! at no-one and become aware of the silence after my scream as one becomes aware of a new sound.
He had felt for some time that life is a singular misunderstanding. He didn't expect her to think anything other that this thought was nonsense, so for her not to understand proved his point.
We make the most of those hollow places men ill-advisedly lean against.
When we are
or at least think
close to the now-stuffed idea
of men there leaning impatiently together.
Hardly individuals
You'd be interested to know that he wasn't trying to excuse his behavior of being such a dark grumble, such a half-pain, such a sensational animal, a fallibility, an altered and indistinct revocation
He stood on the concrete jetty that jutted from Duval's beach, sandwiched between the ocean and the air. The sweet heavy sky felt like a stuffy blue ballroom.
desultory cadences not withstood like so many frogs croaking in the australian night
like these lights that i hear when there's nobody around even to turn my beds
