“Sons of bitches.” Lituma felt the vomit rising in his throat. “Kid, they really did a job on you.” The boy had been both hung and impaled on the old carob tree. His position was so absurd that he looked more like a scarecrow or a broken marionette than a corpse. Before or after they killed him, they slashed him to ribbons: his nose and mouth were split open; his face was a crazy map of dried blood, bruises, cuts, and cigarette burns. Lituma saw they’d even tried to castrate him; his testicles hung down to his thighs.

– Mario Vargas Llosa, Who Killed Palomino Mollero

He got in, but shoved his face out to the window and let go one. I braced my feet, and while he still had his chin on the window sill I brought down the wrench. His head cracked, and I felt it crush. He crumpled up and curled on the seat like a cat on a sofa. It seemed a year before he was still. Then Cora, she gave a funny kind of gulp that ended in a moan. Because here came the echo of his voice. It took the high note, like he did, and swelled, and stopped, and waited.

– James Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice

Then everything began to reel before my eyes, a fiery gust came from the sea, while the sky cracked in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured down through the rift.  Every nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed on the revolver.  The trigger gave, and the smooth underbelly of the butt jogged my palm.  And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all began.  I shook off my sweat and clinging veil of light.  I knew I’d shattered the balance of the day, the spacious calm of his beach on which I had been happy.  But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace.  And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.

– Albert Camus, The Stranger

It’s hard to kill a character. These three examples blow my mind. Llosa’s because it allows the reader to construct the murder in imagination, Cain because it’s callous and succinct, and Camus because it’s so damn other worldly.

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You can’t do this.

But you can do this.

Writers are always Facebook posting about books they’re currently re-reading. I don’t buy it for a second. Nothing can shame you like a gape in reading history. This is always downplayed. “Sure I’ve read that [classic/important title name goes here], it’s just that it was a long time ago.” Course you did. Funny thing is, I see far less Facebook updates about old books being read for the first time. Everyone re-reads everything. They’re soooooooooooooooooooooo excited to be doing so. Can we quit being posers? Just admit you’ve never read the damn book. You didn’t read it in high school. You didn’t read it in college. It’s okay. It doesn’t make you less cool/able to be a great writer/intelligent/reliable as a source of literary validity to your peers. Some books you haven’t gotten to. Let it die with that. Quit re-reading books for the first time. It’s as bad as when you lost your virginity again.

Dear Kevin Murphy,

I realize I told you I’d post tonight. But I can’t think a thing through to the end. I’m envious of those who can (I think Kyle Minor posts instead of sweating, which is fine because he’s brilliant) in blog form. Christ, I don’t want people to know what I’m thinking. Not about most things. Fiction’s best for me because I can muddle stuff behind texture. Behind plot. Most people who blog don’t like plot. They don’t like narrative. They’re of the opinion that narrative is fallacious, that traditional stories work to mislead the mind, forcing us to measure occurrences against preconceived notions in order to establish a moral that is, at best, entirely subjective, and, at worst, a tool of repression foisted upon lower classes by those who’ve established a cultural dominance.

I guess. It’s all just events that happen. Any resolution, and subsequent message that can be deduced from the culmination of the resolution measured against plot points in the story’s trajectory, is a forced thing. Nothing truly lines up unless the mind forces it so. All reasoning is truly training, and truth in language can only be found in the most elemental bits of our communications. Words. Comma placement. Even the sentence has become too big a container for us to dawdle upon. The thorn of a text is where the true genius must be measured.

I think people think that. They should paint there fingernails black and tell me food is for posers.

(more…)

The narco war in Mexico is heating up, and as a resident of a border community I’ve been following the coverage closely. It’s devastating how the country of Mexico has degraded in the wake of President Felipe Calderon’s war on drugs.

Last week an entire Mexican town was evacuated. Here’s the report from a local newspaper:

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