This is a reanimation of the Vicaribus blog as lived by Miro Kazakoff and Ehren Foss in 2004 and 2005. The photos may be spotty.

Palahniuk Attack

Posted by ehren

I hit my head again while leaving "Coffee Time," then spent 32 minutes talking shop with Jake about the next set of programming works, then started walking SE.

Miro read that Chuck Palahniuk (let's just pretend, for once, that I proofread and that it's spelled correctly) would be reading and signing at the First Unitarian Church, 1011 SW 12th, at 7:30. Bless the unitarians and their tolerant gender-neutral diety for allowing Mr. Paliahniuk, the English speaking world's most famous teller of horribly gruesome and morally bereft stories, to speak publicly.

Mr. Paliahniuk -- of Fight Club fame -- was an engaging and funny speaker, and prior to the reading he regaled the crowd with anecdotes from his career. Given his reputation, it's not surprising that he would attract a certain audience. "And after 'Guts' came out it was always the last few," he said slowly, "who would make sure they were the last ones to talk to me, who would look around nervously and then tell me stories of sexual degeneration that just blew my mind....I love those stories." He told of a promotion gone awry: Crates of fake rubber arms, feet, and legs with bloody stumps to give away as gags on his tour. For the western half of the tour, he happened to always be scheduled a day behind Aron Ralston, the guy who cut off his own arm in the wilderness after being pinned by a rock, which led to much confusion among the book store employees. "What? No, those aren't mine...Yes I know I cut off my arm, but I didn't order them!"

Chuck (I'll refer to him in a familiar manner as I am tired of trying to spell Palahniuk) brought one of those boxes of bloodied limbs and began tossing them out into the audience. One of the severed arms he tried to get into the balcony fell short, and hit square against the ballustrade. I turned quickly and made a one handed catch. Ha ha ha.

He read a story called "Hot Potting," which was about a remote natural geothermal area and the awful things that happen to people who fall into the boiling pools. I won't spoil any of the thin plot, spread like a thin calcite crust over certain doom. Helpers passed out around 300 teriyaki beef air fresheners to help with the mood.

Coincidentally, a few years ago Sean (who you will meet shortly) and I were driving across the west on a backpacking trip. In Yellowstone we snuck into the big lodge to nab much needed showers, and in the hour (and a half...) Sean was talking to his then girlfriend on a payphone I wandered into the lodge bookstore and found a 200 page paperback all about the various ways people have died horribly in the hot pools of the park. The memory stuck with me because the stories and descriptions were incredibly graphic, frightening, and gruesome. Chuck lifted at least one of his details -- a foolish young man who jumps in after his boiling dog only to reach the edge and climb out with his eyes seared white and skin sliding away in sheets -- right out of the pages. I'm not accusing him of plagarism: Every author selects and rearranges nonfiction to make fiction. The two (three?) books of his I've read, though, all suffered from the same inability to build anything on top of the horrible thing he's dredged up from the rotting human lakefloor. The characters in "Hot Potting" were flat non-entities, and sooner than the second sentence about the boiling pools you know what's going to happen to at least one of them. Miro argued that he's a horror writer with post-modern techniques, and that the territory allows certain freedoms and takes others away, but I just don't find him entertaining to read. Great speaker, though.

In the Q & A section Chuck revealed a few of his secrets; a favorite emergency room nurse, the inspiration and source of a few favorites, and he did an admirable job explaining his place in the literary world. He's helping to preserve the great tales that nobody else wants to. That prior knowledge of geothermal danger took the edge off "Hot Potting" makes me think that most of his readership doesn't deal with the weird or terrible on a regular basis, and he helps sate the macabre appetites for those of us with calm, quiet lives. I doubt many mortuary assistants, nurses, prison psychiatrists, or crime scene photographers read his work. He's talented, loves his work, and puts on a dynamite show (for a book reading). What more could we ask?

If you told me a year ago that on this day I would wake up in a school bus, receive two sharp blows to the head and a large sum of money from a man I've never met, catch the bloody severed limb from a famous author, and sleep under a highway overpass, I would have had a number of questions for you.