{"id":2912,"date":"2015-04-01T15:40:41","date_gmt":"2015-04-01T19:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=2912"},"modified":"2015-04-02T15:35:29","modified_gmt":"2015-04-02T19:35:29","slug":"smacked-upside-the-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=2912","title":{"rendered":"Smacked upside the head"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes it’s a bit of text, sometimes a phrase in a tune, sometimes a (photo-)graphic, but the experience is pretty much the same: a brief guffaw loosed at the sheer excellence\/audacity\/brio of the thing. Case in point, this from the end of a piece by Charles Simic<\/a>, from New York Review of Books, which just rolled in via RSS:<\/p>\n

\nHere, to give you an idea, is the beginning of a story called \u201cWater Liars\u201d from a collection of [Barry Hannah’s stories] called Airships:<\/p>\n

\n When I am run down and flocked around by the world<\/b>, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beers to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another<\/b>. The line-up is always different, because they are always dying out, or succumbing to constipation, etc., whereupon they go back to the cabins and wait for a good day when they can come out and lie again, leaning on the rail with coats full of bran cookies. The son of the man the cove was named for is often out there. He pronounces his name Fartay, with a great French stress on the last syllable. Otherwise, you might laugh at his history or ignore it in favor of the name as it\u2019s spelled on the sign.<\/p>\n

\n I\u2019m glad it\u2019s not my name.<\/p>\n

\n This poor dignified man has had to explain his nobility to the semiliterate of half of America<\/b> before he could even begin a decent conversation with them. On the other hand, Farte, Jr., is a great liar himself. He tells about seeing ghost people around the lake and tell big loose ones about the size of the fish those ghost took out of Farte Cove in years past\u2026\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Having previously read the story and knowing what was coming, reading this far was all that was required for my purpose, which was to close my eyes and go to sleep with a smile on my face.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Maybe epiphany<\/b> is a sufficiently weighty word to bear this freight of delight. I guess I could say that I live for such moments of glee, and this one sent me directly to Amazon to snag Hannah’s book on the Kindle. <\/p>\n

\nA photographic example from the just-concluded trip to France is another suchlike, a scene I glimpsed for just a moment while ankling around in Pont-Aven (on the south coast of Brittany) and had the wit to capture: