Long sentences are fireworks
books about UFOs are fireworks
When I was very young, we used to go sit on the eastern banks of the South Saskatchewan River and watch the fireworks. Like drive-in movies, all the good stuff happened after dark. As far as I knew, every night was fireworks and massive movies, Empire Strikes Back, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, Max Dugan Returns. I had an imaginary friend whose whole personality was that he could stay up past 8. “Johnny likes to boogie dance.”
I loved the fireworks but I also remember the long walks back to the car after. in high school, in Regina, it was after the fireworks that I’d find my friends. Everyone walking west towards Albert Street, I’d walk east and we’d see each other’s faces.
Around this time the Velvet Underground reunited for a series of concerts in Europe. My dad used to bring home Rolling Stone Magazine and one issue had a feature on the Velvets, who would have then been around the age I am now. At one point, drummer Moe Tucker was asked about pyrotechnics.
“‘Sister Ray,’” she answered (as I remember it), “that’s our fireworks.”
I knew exactly what she meant.
The Coffin of Honey is a drive-in movie of a literary novel and long sentences are its fireworks.
In a near future, an Earth divided into capitalist and socialist blocs is visited by extraterrestrial objects that give selected people glimpses of other lands, then return them unharmed. The Coffin of Honey explores much and explains little. There are poets and secret agents, smalltime politicians and string quartets. There’s a middle section, paragraphically dense as the heart of a star, where the Bell Letterist writes dazzling sentences that are the book’s “Sister Ray.”
There’s much to love in The Coffin of Honey, not least of which is the concept of the coffin of honey, which comes from Alexander the Great, and develops through the book in a richly rewarding and ruinous way.
