Traveller_Levin's Blog

Forever Overhead

by David Foster Wallace

Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you.

Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair. There are now more of the hard curled hairs around your privates than you can count without losing track. Other things. Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning. Your face has begun to get shiny when you don’t wash it. And two weeks of a deep and frightening ache this past spring left you with something dropped down from inside: your sack is now full and vulnerable, a commodity to be protected. Hefted and strapped in tight supporters that stripe your buttocks red. You have grown into a new fragility.

And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of yielding curves, frantic pistons, warmth and a great falling; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of a feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights though your window blinds cracking into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling, and on you a dense white jam that lisps between legs, trickles and sticks, cools on you, hardens and clears until there is nothing but gnarled knots of pale solid animal hair in the morning shower, and in the wet tangle a clean sweet smell you can’t believe comes from anything you made inside you.

Fathers

Alice Munro

On Friday morning last, Harvey Ryan Newcombe, a well-known farmer of Shelby Township, lost his life due to electrocution. The funeral was held Monday afternoon from Reavie Brothers Funeral Home and interment was in Bethel Cemetery. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

Dahlia Newcombe could not possibly have had anything to do with her father's accident. It had happened when he reached up to turn on a light in a hanging brass socket while standing on the wet floor in a neighbor's stable. He had taken one of his cows there to visit the bull. For some reason that nobody could understand, he was not wearing his rubber boots.

All over the countryside that spring, there was a sound that would soon disappear. Perhaps it would have disappeared already, if it were not for the war. The war meant that the people who had the money to buy tractors could not find any to buy, and the few who already had tractors could not get the fuel to run them. So the farmers were out on the land with their horses for the spring plowing, and from time to time, near and far, you could hear them calling out their commands, in which there would be varying degrees of encouragement, or impatience, or warning. You couldn't hear the exact words, any more than you could make out what the seagulls were saying on their inland flights, or decipher the arguments of crows. From the tone of voice, though, you could probably tell when the farmers were swearing.

Car Crash While Hitchhiking

Dennis Johnson

A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping... A Cherokee filled with bourbon... A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student...

hashish A purified resin prepared from the flowering tops of the female cannabis plant and smoked or chewed as a narcotic or an intoxicant.  印度大麻提炼出成的麻醉品

And a family from Marshalltown who head-onned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri...

Separating

John Updike

THE DAY was fair. Brilliant. All that June the weather had mocked the Maples’ internal misery with solid sunlight — golden shafts and cascades of green in which their conversations had wormed unseeing, their sad murmuring selves the only stain in Nature. Usually by this time of the year they had acquired tans; but when they met their elder daughter’s plane on her return from a year in England they were almost as pale as she, though Judith was too dazzled by the sunny opulent jumble of her native land to notice. They did not spoil her homecoming by telling her immediately. Wait a few days, let her recover from jet lag, had been one of their formulations, in that string of gray dialogues — over coffee, over cocktails, over Cointreau — that had shaped the strategy of their dissolution, while the earth performed its annual stunt of renewal unnoticed beyond their closed windows. Richard had thought to leave at Easter; Joan had insisted they wait until the four children were at last assembled, with all exams passed and ceremonies attended, and the bauble of summer to console them. So he had drudged away, in love, in dread, repairing screens, getting the mowers sharpened, rolling and patching their new tennis court.

The court, clay, had come through its first winter pitted and windswept bare of redcoat. Years ago the Maples had observed how often, among their friends, divorce followed a dramatic home improvement, as if the marriage were making one last effort to live; their own previous worst crisis had come amid the plaster dust and exposed plumbing of a kitchen renovation. Yet, a summer ago, as canary-yellow bulldozers churned a grassy, daisy-dotted knoll into a muddy plateau, and a crew of pigtailed young men raked and tamped clay into a plane, this transformation did not strike them as ominous, but festive in its impudence; their marriage could rend the earth for fun. The next spring, waking each day at dawn to a sliding sensation as if the bed were being tipped, Richard found the barren tennis court – its net and tapes still rolled in the barn – an environment congruous with his mood of purposeful desolation, and the crumbling of handfuls of clay into cracks and holes (dogs had frolicked on the court in a thaw; rivulets had eroded trenches) an activity suitably elemental and interminable. In his sealed heart he hoped the day would never come.

Now it was here. A Friday. Judith was reacclimated; all four children were assembled, before jobs and camps and visits again scattered them. Joan thought they should be told one by one. Richard was for making an announcement at the table. She said, ‘I think just making an announcement is a cop-out. They’ll start quarrelling and playing to each other instead of focusing. They’re each individuals, you know, not just some corporate obstacle to your freedom.’

“Crossing the Zbrucz”

Isaac Babel

Nachdiv 6* has reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken at dawn today.  The staff has moved out of Krapivno, and our transport is strung like a noisy rearguard along the high road, along the unfading high road that goes from Brest to Warsaw and was build on the bones of muzhiks by Nicholas I.

Fields of purple poppies flower around us, the noonday wind is playing in the yellowing rye, and virginal buckwheat rises on the horizon like the wall of a distant monastery. The quiet Volyn is withdrawing from us into a pearly mist of birch groves, it si creeping away into flowery knolls and entangling itself with enfeebled arms in thickets of hops. An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head, a gentle radiance glows in the ravines of the thunderclouds and the standards of the sunset float above our heads. The odour of yesterday’s blood and of slain horses drips into the evening coolness.  The Zbrucz, now turned black, roars and pulls tight the foamy knots of the rapids.  The bridges have been destroyed, and we ford the river on horseback. The horses sink into the water up to their backs, the sonorous currents ooze between hundreds of horses’ legs. Someone sinks, and resonantly defames the Mother of God. The river is littered with the black rectangles of carts, it is filled with a rumbling, whistling and singing that clamour above the serpents of the moon and the shining chasms.  

Late at night we arrive in Novograd. In the billet that has been assigned to me I find a pregnant woman and two red-haired Jews with thin necks: a third is already asleep, covered up to the top of his head and pressed against the wall.  In the room that has been allotted to me, I find ransacked wardrobes, on the floor scraps of women’s fur coats, pieces of human excrement and broken shards of the sacred vessels used by the Jews once a year, at Passover.

Teenage Wasteland

Anne Tyler (1941~)，出生於美國明尼蘇達州，畢業於杜克大學，繼續在哥倫比亞大學攻讀俄羅斯文學，取得碩士學位，之後遷居於Maryland州的Baltimore。其第9部小說Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant 及第10部小說The Accidental Tourist分別於1983年及1986年入圍普立茲小說獎，The Accidental Tourist備受佳評，於1988年拍成非常成功的電影。Anne Tyler的第11部小說Breathing Lessonst於1989年奪得普立茲小說獎，迄至2012年她已出版19部長篇小說。

Anne Tyler的小說大多以Baltimore為背景，以精細的對話描寫、生動之人物形象刻畫、婉約細膩的文筆以及娓娓動人的情節，反映美國現代家庭種種喜怒哀樂之生活面相，深深打動讀者的心靈。在美國她的作品被譽為女性小說的巔峰之作，也享有美國家庭小說鼻祖的稱號。。

Edgemont Drive

by E. L. Doctorow

E. L. Doctorow (1931~) 生於紐約市。美國當代一流小說家，以其獨特之歷史性長篇小說著名。父母是移民美國的俄羅斯猶太人第二代，酷愛書本與音樂。大學就讀於俄亥俄州的Kenyon學院，主修哲學，並於大學劇場演出。後入哥倫比亞大學研究院攻讀英國戲劇一年，值二次大戰徵召入伍。退伍金後，在電影公司當審稿員，出版第一部長篇Welcome to Hard Times，之後轉入出版界擔任編輯，出版第二部長篇Big As Life。1971年出版第三部長篇The Book of Daniel，獲得古根海姆獎。1975年第四部長篇Ragtime問世，這部作品熔事實與虛構於一爐的風格在美國文壇引起轟動，美國評論界授予“全國圖書評論界獎”，承認E. L. Doctorow為打破傳統小說寫作模式大膽創新的傑出作家。如今，Ragtime已成為美國70年代的代表作品之一，被列入美國大學文學課程的必讀書目。本短篇作品收錄於2004年出版之Sweet Land Stories，為其中之佳作。

What kind of car was it?

Guts

by Chuck Palahniuk

Printed in Playboy magazine March 2004

Inhale.

Take in as much air as you can.

MERMAID FEVER

by Steven Millhauser

The mermaid washed up on our public beach in the early morning of June 19, at approximately 4:30 a.m., according to the most reliable estimates. At 5:06 a.m. the body was discovered by George Caldwell, a forty-year-old postal worker who lived two blocks from the water and was fond of his early morning swim. Caldwell found her lying just below the tide line; he thought she was a teenager who had drowned. The body lay on its side among strings of seaweed and scattered mussel shells. Caldwell stepped back. He did not want trouble. He immediately called 911 on his cell and stood waiting in the near-dark some ten feet from the drowned girl until two police cars and an ambulance pulled up in the beach parking lot. The sun had not yet come up, but a band of sky over the water was turning pearly gray. “I thought she was a high school girl,” Caldwell later told a reporter; we read it in the Listener. “It was still dark out there. I thought she was wearing some sort of a dress with the top torn off. I could tell she didn’t look right. I didn’t want to get too close.” The body was taken to the Vanderhorn Funeral Home on Broadbridge Avenue and examined by the coroner and three local doctors. The initial report stated that the body “had the appearance of a mermaid” but that further tests would have to be conducted before a definitive statement could be issued. Two marine biologists from a nearby university arrived a few hours later and confirmed the accuracy of the initial examination, stating in their confidential report that there could be no doubt the mermaid was authentic.

From the beginning, our town was torn between the impulse to disclose everything and the desire to protect our streets from media invasion. Officials cooperated as fully as possible with outside investigators but refused to allow photographs of our mermaid. They also refused to relinquish ownership of the body, which was claimed as town property. A special committee, appointed to handle mermaid affairs, voted to permit the release of the body for twenty-four hours into the care of a hospital in Hartford, where further tests were performed and tissue samples collected. The mermaid was said to be sixteen years old and in excellent health; the cause of death was blood loss from a large wound in the lower fish body, which appeared to have been attacked by a shark. We learned that she had human lungs, a human heart, a human stomach, and part of a human intestinal tract; below the waist, where the skin grew seamlessly into scales, the inner organs, including the reproductive system, were those of a large saltwater fish. She had green eyes, a small straight nose, small ears lying flat against the head, and well-formed teeth. Her hair was abundant and lustrous, a mixture of straw and blond, and fell in long undulations to her waist. The scales were gray green with brown and black markings. They were spread across the back of the fish body and came around to the front, leaving on the belly a strip of whiteness about ten inches wide that tapered to four inches at the tail. The forked tail fin grew parallel to the human shoulders; such an arrangement suggested that the mermaid swam on her stomach, with the fin held horizontally, in the manner of a dolphin or whale, although one scientist stated emphatically that they were only making the best possible guess, since nothing at all was known about the habits of mermaids and she might sometimes have swum on her side, with the fin in a vertical position.

An immediate question arose: What should be done with our mermaid? The body was being kept at the funeral home, where experts were invited to find ways of preventing decomposition. The committee, in an emergency session, voted unanimously that a discovery of this kind was too important to be kept from the residents of our town, who deserved to see the natural wonder for themselves. The issue was urgent; already there was talk of a disturbing odor. A team of biologists from a research lab in New Haven proposed a method of arterial injection with a newly developed non-formaldehyde solution that preserved organs and prevented shrinkage; in this way the mermaid might be kept on display for several weeks or more. A debate ensued about a suitable location for such an exhibit. Some suggested the town hall, others the library, but quite apart from questions of space it wasn’t difficult to find persuasive arguments against the display of a half-naked sixteen-year-old girl in public institutions meant for business or study. It was finally decided to house the display at the historical society, which had a small room for temporary exhibits. Objections were raised by those who felt that the body of a mermaid washed up on a beach had no place in a building dedicated to the history of our town, but they were outnumbered by those who argued that the historical society was the closest thing we had to a museum.

Miss Lora

By Junot Díaz April 23, 2012

Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her.

＊culo: butt; palito: ice lolly