Reading this vignette, I drink in the narrative like sweet vanilla and caramel pouring down my throat, a cold milkshake savored at the end of a long week's labors.
There's something so beautiful about your writing, which I have been struggling to identify for years now. I'm reminded of Ray Bradbury and Hemingway when I read your work... simply the effect your passages have on the audience. But these are very imprecise comparisons, fumbling and groping in the dark.
Recently I reread "Heroes Rise//Monsters Fall" and "Our Private Kingdom" in an attempt to figure out what I admire so much about your stories, and to try to imitate these skills and incorporate them into my own work.
I think what's so beautiful about your work is that you combine several well-honed skills into an amazing arsenal which hits the readers with astonishing force.
Your stories are confident and sensual; sophisticated and primal; they tap into the most elegant forms of art, dance, music, the heights of civilization, in order to tell stories about very basic and animalistic passions... sex, war, religion, everything that is the core of existence, the adversarial extremes which give meaning and purpose to life. But all of these subjects become shrouded in taboos, they are seen as dirty and unclean and vulgar and lowbrow, because at the core of these subjects (sex, war, religion) is a fundamental competition to be triumphant.
And the flipside of competition is failure, rejection, and the shame of inadequacy. Sexual Rejection... Military Defeat... Religious Prohibitions and the Divine Judgment of God.
A great story! Robert Service wrote a wonderful poem about people like that.
"There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest..."
Love your style of prose.
Reading this vignette, I drink in the narrative like sweet vanilla and caramel pouring down my throat, a cold milkshake savored at the end of a long week's labors.
There's something so beautiful about your writing, which I have been struggling to identify for years now. I'm reminded of Ray Bradbury and Hemingway when I read your work... simply the effect your passages have on the audience. But these are very imprecise comparisons, fumbling and groping in the dark.
Recently I reread "Heroes Rise//Monsters Fall" and "Our Private Kingdom" in an attempt to figure out what I admire so much about your stories, and to try to imitate these skills and incorporate them into my own work.
I think what's so beautiful about your work is that you combine several well-honed skills into an amazing arsenal which hits the readers with astonishing force.
Your stories are confident and sensual; sophisticated and primal; they tap into the most elegant forms of art, dance, music, the heights of civilization, in order to tell stories about very basic and animalistic passions... sex, war, religion, everything that is the core of existence, the adversarial extremes which give meaning and purpose to life. But all of these subjects become shrouded in taboos, they are seen as dirty and unclean and vulgar and lowbrow, because at the core of these subjects (sex, war, religion) is a fundamental competition to be triumphant.
And the flipside of competition is failure, rejection, and the shame of inadequacy. Sexual Rejection... Military Defeat... Religious Prohibitions and the Divine Judgment of God.
Anyway, it's quite beautiful.
Thanks for that, Paulos. Tough and true. How are you doing?
You had me till the end.
I get together with my old platoon guys about every two years, reminiscing on almost identical scenarios.
Love this!
So true, coming together is as easy dipping into a warm pool.
You had me till the end.