Review -- Daniel Grandbois's Unlucky Lucky Days
A Blend of Tales, Fables, Fiction, and Poetry
In these 73 pieces from Unlucky Lucky Days (a mixture of fables, creation myths, tall tales, nursery rhymes that don’t rhyme, and Zen koans), Daniel Grandbois, in simple diction and high-speed syntax, takes the reader on a journal to where all thought begins, translating the experience into language.
On this journey, one finds, among other things: a twin goat who wears around his neck a bicycle chain like a chain worn by a rapper; a man who, after running out of toothpaste, pliers out his molars to wash them in the washing machine; and a man who mistakes his wife for a hat (inspired, possibly, by neurologist Oliver Sacks’s book which discusses a case study on visual agnosia).
Zen Koans
Yet if these tales sound like mere shenanigans, they are not. A humorous mysticism, like that found in Zen koans, exists in all this play. In the creation myth, “Happy Birthday Grandma,” Grandbois re-writes Hakuin’s now clichéd “what is the sound of one hand clapping.” Here, the “unborn things” of the world realize that if they immediately blow out sticks flamed by lightning, the sticks’ ashes will grow new life:
…There was a great hoopla in the thunderstorms as each new thing was born, and then everyone shouted, “Blow out your stick!”
But they couldn’t hear each other over all that thunder. Besides, they were growing tired of having to wait forever for lightning to strike a stick to begin their birthday parties. It was decided that fire should be caught and kept on hand. Also, they would replace the thunderclaps with clapping of their own. No one knew how to do that yet, so they practiced with only one hand at first, until they got good enough to use both.
(22)
Like all Zen humor, this example shows the aburdity in logic, the futile attempt at trying to explain the unexplainable.
The Language of Sound
If this book, in parts, goes beyond simple paraphrase, Grandbois makes up for this in sound-sense. Fully aware that meter and sonics in language are quite different gigs than rhythm and sound in music, Grandbois--a former bassist with Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, a band which opened for Johnny Cash in Las Vegas in 1998--knits each note down to a tee, nonetheless.
After having revved-up “The Horse” with “h’s,” “w’s,” “f’s,” “r’s,” “s’s,” and short and long vowels, the writer gives this:
One after the other, it [the horse] kicked them through manure and dried-out fields, where weed stalks and feathers stuck to them. Then, it kicked them back across the country road, up the marble steps and through the oaken doors of their elegant, rented villa.
(52)
Like the horse kicking the couple all the way back home, the back-to-back stresses and the “k’s,” “d’s,” and “st’s” kick these last two sentences, too, down the page to piece’s end.
The Peculiar Characters of Prose and Poetry
In hilarious, intelligent, absurd, literary, sad, and surreal tales, Grandbois slips the images he finds deep in his mind onto the page for us to read, and then slides them back into our collective unconscious. Poetry and prose wake up simultaneously and roll over to love-stare into each other in a midnight bed.
After just the first read of Unlucky Lucky Days, one can't help but feel like he/she is walking around inside the mind of one of Grandbois's peculiar characters. One feels--after several reads--even more lucky.
Daniel Grandbois, Unlucky Lucky Days, BOA Editions Ltd., 2008, ISBN 978-1-934414-10-1
Cover for Unlucky Lucky Days
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Daniel Grandbois
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