Velociworld

THE LIVING END

I wish there were some way to put Stanley Elkins's The Living End to film. I would do it. It is impossible, of course. Ellerbee trapped in Hell, scampering amongst the piss and shit and blood rivulets, Quiz the groundskeeper fucking with the interred Ladelhaus, one simply could not pull it off. And yet I love this novel. It made me want to be a writer, more than Faulkner, Hemingway, Garcia Marquez. It is remarkably profane and sacriligeous, and yet suffused with humanity. Here a slice:

And for all the world she was the Virgin Mary, the capital letters and epithet like something scrawled in phone booths or spray painted in subways. The snide oxymorons repugnant to her. Virgin Mother, Immaculate Conception. Her story known throughout the world, carried by missionaries to hinterland, boondock, clearing, sticks; parsed by savages, riddled by New Guinea stone-agers, all the bare-breasted and loinclothed who stood for whatever she could not stand, almost the first thing they were told after the distribution of gifts, the shiny mirrors in which they could see their nakedness, their dark, rubbery genitalia, their snarled and matted wool, the fierce, ropy nipples flaring against the stained, gross coronas of breasts pickled as strawberries, almost the first thing they were told, her shame a story, her story a legend, her legend an apotheosis, told through translators or in the broken pidgins of a thousand tongues, or with actual hand signs...

That is beautiful stuff. I wish I could write like that. And I would give his widow a healthy slice of the gross (never take the net! There is no fucking net!) of whatever humble scrapings that film would accrue.

Pipe dream. Unimaginably unable to engineer. Still...