A take on ChuckWoww's "Valentine's day"

"You had sex and perhaps love again but Duan was distracted. You both were"

The drop dead memorable, lock stock and barrel, opening line to ChuckWoww’s ‘Valentine’s Day’ (http://www.thailandstories.com/article/non-fiction/valentine-s-day.html). The author is around on the net (fortunately), one book already published and yet he deprecatingly eludes.

Economical writing and patina though every word seems to be about something deeper, he alludes.

‘Especially when her expensive new cell phone started beeping. You had noticed it earlier. A gift from a friend she said. She held it to her ear. Said nothing.’

This beginning of the piece is buttressed by vital short sentences and the barely stated doubts that will engineer the narrative.

Overall his writing bothers me in way that I mostly like and confess seduction by the craft.

“Next morning early she began packing a bag. ‘Go stay sister,’ she said”.

The new phone on which she didn’t speak, spoke so we are not surprised by her imminent departure. Thus one thing really does follow from another here.

Years ago when first reading Ulysses I found myself too often lost in reverie, as though the pages crept in under my ribs. It was a long time until I understood myself to have inherited a rhetorical foundation which coincided so closely with Joyce’s as to preclude any easy reading gratification. Aristotle’s suspension of disbelief rendered not so much an effort or a result of elegant writerly artifice, rather a necessity for a certain and common kind of prose appreciation. Simply there was not enough light and dark for articulate comprehension.

Analogously the near perfect sequencing evident in ‘Valentine’s day’, puzzle-pieces placed snug-fitting one after another gestate distraction and blindside how good the writing really is.

“The walls seem to be made of cardboard. On the fourth day you meet her friend/sister/cousin Nok on the stairs. She seems surprised to see you in the building. She smiles. Don’t they all?

Beset by the elasticity of identity and the Thai manipulation of relative verity. Yim Siam.

“‘Duan very lucky na.’ Says Nok. ‘Go Samui.’

“What? Stunned you grope your way out onto the street where nothing makes sense and people have been transformed into ugly blobs of uncaring protoplasm.”

The axle and nascent Pattaya flyer.

Wandering around a Bangkok shopping mall "You catch a glimpse of a haggard, manic looking farang in a shop window. "

"Poor devil, you think. That bloke needs to get a grip. You offer to buy him a drink but he looks at you as if you’re mad and dissolves into the crowd of busy shoppers."

“Now what?”

“See if you can come up with a happy ending.”

Crises of closure occur elsewhere in his writing too; a post post-modern vertigo.

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