#502 This Blessed House- Jhumpa Lahiri

#502 This Blessed House- Jhumpa Lahiri

Sanjeev “was lonely with an excessively generous income for a single man.” His career is going well and his family has arranged a marriage to a younger woman named Twinkle. Like her name would suggest, she is a free spirit. “It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see,”

They have just moved into their new house and find Christian artifacts all over the house. They are not Christian, but Twinkle is enamored with the trinkets and insists that they not only keep them, but display them openly on their mantel.

“They didn’t bother her, these scattered, unsettled matters. She seemed content with whatever clothes she found at the front of the closet, with whatever magazine was lying around, with whatever song was on the radio—content yet curious.”

She won’t get rid of the paraphernalia and he relents, although when all of his work friends and colleagues come for their housewarming he is terrified of the impression it will make. His guest, it turns out, are so taken with his wife and her stories of hunting down these treasures throughout their new house, that they all as a group go hunting in the attic to find the piece-de-resistance. Sanjeev is the only one not enjoying himself, and he is once again literally left standing alone.

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#237 Where the Road Begins- Jack Kerouac

#237 Where the Road Begins- Jack Kerouac

Nobody writes discovery better than Kerouac; discovery, adventure, wonder, and the enlightenment of youth. This is not a true short story, but it’s worthy of a look. Like a lot of what Kerouac writes, this is part fiction, part memoir, part manifesto.

“You embark upon the Voyage, face eager, eyes aflame with the passion of traveling, spirits brimming with gaiety, levity, and a flamboyant carelessness that tries to conceal the wild delight with which this mad venture fills you. You sit in the train, and you begin to feel yourself eased away, away, away…and the gray home town is left behind, the prosaic existence of 18 years is now being discarded into the receptacle of time.”

What could be more romantic a notion than traveling away from home at eighteen? The excitement and kinetic mind of Kerouac makes you want to immediately drop your things and hit the road, anyway…just go, man, go. Reading Kerouac always reminds me how much I love reading, traveling, living. There will never be another like him.

Rating: 7-8-8-10 Total=33

#141 Movietone: Detour- Peter Weltner

#141 Movietone: Detour- Peter Weltner

Movietone was the name of the black and white newsreels shown before films during W.W. II. Weltner said that just like some of the horror movies of that period, these newsreels represented films in which “…dread and beauty, horror and wonder are nearly indistinguishable.”

Sayler the Sailor (yes, you read that correctly) is on shore leave. He explores NYC and looks to exploit the local scene to make a little money. He meets up with other seamen and all goes well until it doesn’t. Drunken nights, prostitution, gay strip clubs…then murder, awol, on the run, new identity, etc.

At first this reads like a kind of pulp-noir story, with writing like:

“The night is stubborn, the stars like pins. Saylor squats by the shore-end of the pier and watches the day’s second lover disappear behind the stacks of crates and boxes that had hid them from the streetlight.”

By the end it reads more like a Burroughs or Kerouac Beat adventure. Either way, I enjoyed it.

Notable Passage: “Dead eyes are as lusterless and scratched marbles.”

Rating: 7-7-8-7 Total= 29