Archive for the ‘Luc Reid’ Category
Disco Zombie
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
Barry woke up feeling claustrophobic and irritable in a pitch black, stuffy place where something stank. Above him, something hard was in his way, and in annoyance Barry punched it. He was surprised and pleased when his hand smashed through easily, and surprised and pissed when dirt poured through the hole onto him. Aggravated, Barry bashed and clawed his way up through what was left of the hard thing and through the dirt above it until he broke through into an open space. It felt like forcing himself out of a birth canal.
He found himself outside in a misting rain and some hazy moonlight, and now that he was calming down, he began to notice strange things–like the fact that he had just clawed his way up from underground when the last thing he’d been aware of was passing out after doing too much coke at the disco, and that his gold pantsuit was rotted nearly to rags, and that he had forgotten to breathe and it didn’t seem to be bothering him.
“Good morning, disco zombie!” someone called out, and Barry turned to see a skinny woman standing nearby, the ground around her scattered with heavy books and with candles that flickered under the protective shadow of a beach umbrella.
Barry took a step toward her, a strange, salty smell drawing him forward. Brains.
She stood up, snicking out a knife. “Hold on there,” she said. “I need you to do me a favor.” She held up a little baggie, and even through the bag he could smell that it was coke–which was funny, because when he was alive, coke hadn’t smelled like anything.
“You knew I’d care more about the coke than the brains,” Barry croaked.
“I made a point of using a legendary addict,” she said. “It’s how I’m going to control you. You play nice, or no coke.”
He thought about it for a moment, stepped forward, and cracked open her skull with his fingers. The knife jerked into his chest and probably damaged something, but whatever it was, it didn’t seem to be something he needed.
The brains were perfect: warm and savory. Afterward, Barry did the coke and wondered what the favor would have been. Then he went out to look for a disco.
Read Heron
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
William Mouver wrote of the Jacobean poet Thomas Heron, “As a cause of weeping, wonder, excitement, fascination, and utter envy, there has never been nor likely will ever be any poetry in the English language to rival his. That his arresting understanding of women and the beguiling romance of his words brought him as dull a wife as Judith Bullmer is frankly amazing. His writing is justly accounted the very paragon of manly love.”
Just three days after penning these lines, Mouver was dragged out of his home by an angry mob and kicked to death for seducing a blind twelve-year-old girl literally during her parents’ funeral the previous week. Since he was 43 at the time, this makes Mouver the longest-lived Heron scholar to date.
By way of examples, barrister and Heron obsessive Sean McGargan died in a library fire he set to foil a rival scholar. John Hume-Border, author of the masterful but never-completed Thomas Heron and His Times, was shot fleeing the scene of a “badger game” swindle on his 35th birthday. Documentary filmmaker Yeon Kun Kim died of a drug overdose while shooting what he claimed was an “explosively revelatory” account of Heron’s life, and the footage he acquired was somehow lost while his estate was being settled. No fewer than twenty-nine graduate students are known to have committed suicide and/or died in vehicular accidents (one notable example involving both a speedboat and a helicopter) while working on Heron-related thesis papers. Most recently, noted biographer and poet Andrea Land was found dead for no apparent reason in her home office, clutching a piece of paper on which were scrawled the words “Heron ‘Lament,’ start 4th letter then 5th etc.”
“Lament” could only refer to “The Physician’s Lament,” Heron’s brilliant, bittersweet, and beloved long form poem of 1619, and somewhat to the surprise of everyone, reading the fourth letter of the first line and following it with the fifth letter of the next line (and so on, with a reversal of direction when the end of a line is reached) produced the message “My husband doth account this verse his ouwn, with wits that ne’er thought of love have knowne.”
Professional and amateur scholars alike scoured Heron’s oeuvre for other messages, and found at least six other genuine examples (plus any number of examples that were more wishful thinking than artful writing) scattered throughout the later, most celebrated work attributed to Heron. All of which established that the actual author of Thomas Heron’s poems was inarguably Judith Bullmer Heron, making Thomas a fraud and Judith one of the most celebrated artists of all time, lesbian or otherwise.
Manly love is said to be still recovering.