setze d'octubre 2015

Llegit, d'en Fredric Brown, The Screaming Mimi (1949)


Un trompa educat i existencialista torna a fer a de periodista en veure una deessa nua per casualitat. La deessa ha un gos malparit d'allò pus. També és boja. El periodista trompa esdevé doncs si fa no fa menys trompa durant tres o quatre dies per a resoldre el misteri de la dona nua i de l'estripaventres qui s'hi relaciona.

Haver algú els screaming meemies és haver un nerviosisme neuròtic, un atac d'histèria o de pànic, i el diguem-ne heroi resol els assassinats de rosses comesos per l'estripaventres mercès a una estatueta qui en diuen doncs "la mimí qui esgaripa esbojarrada".

L'existencialista s'oblida del seu existencialisme i va per feina — i llavors la novel·leta en pateix — esdevé menys interessant com més adotzenadament "criminal", o criminalment interessada.

A guy can get anything he wants if he wants it bad enough. Anybody can get rich. All you got to do is want money so bad it means more to you than anything else.

Awakening is never a good thing; sometimes it can be a horrible thing. With the cumulative hangover of two weeks of drinking, it is a horrible thing.

It was one of the few things that couldn't have happened. So it hadn't happened. That was logic.

Why did anyone in his right mind live in Chicago in a summer heat wave? Why did anyone live in Chicago at all? Why, for that matter, did anyone live?

The Lee girl was a private secretary.”
“How private? Kind that has to watch her periods as well as her commas?

He thought how very nice it would be to die, quietly and painlessly, without even knowing it was going to happen; just to go to sleep and never wake up.

Again an automobile almost ran him down as he cut diagonally across Chicago Avenue.

The thought of lying in an ever−cold grave, for instance, is a horrible thing in winter; in summer—

She'd have been there sooner or later anyway; five years from now, fifty years. Death is an incurable disease that men and women are born with; it gets them sooner or later. A murderer never really kills; he but anticipates. Always he kills one who is already dying, already doomed.

He watched the last of the water gurgle out of the tub, and he wondered—had he just committed a murder? Isn't a tub of water, once drawn, an entity? A thing−in−itself that has existence, if not life? But then life, in a human body, may be analogous to water in a tub; through the sewerage of veins and arteries may it not flow back into some Lake Michigan, eventually into some ocean, when the plug is pulled? Yet even so, it is murder; that particular tub of water will never exist again, though the water itself will.

Unconsciously, one judges others by comparison with oneself; and two people both of whom have eaten onions cannot smell each other's breath.

Wondered if she had died a virgin. He hoped that she hadn't, but not aloud. It's fine (...) for a girl to save herself for Mr. Right, but it's damn tough on her if Mr. Wrong comes along with a carving knife first.

L'explicació de tot plegat, absurda.

Only there was a transference. Seeing yourself—in that statuette—as a victim, seeing yourself in that state from the outside, you became, in your mind, the attacker. The killer with the knife.

Potser la conclusió que en trec (pobre de mi) és que en Brown és millor en coses curtes. Les llargues se li fan massa embolicadament llargues.

Així que ves.