Me & Mr. De

I won't pretend to be objective about Alan DeNiro -- I've been writing about his work from the early days of my blog The Mumpsimus.  I wrote about his marvelous story "Tetrarchs" (not included in Skinny Dipping) and praised "A Keeper" to the skies when it first appeared.  I interviewed him.  I invited him to be part of a symposium on "speculative poetry" that I edited.  Eventually, I even got to meet him.  And now we're in a movie together.

Naturally, I think Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead is an extraordinary book -- a book of skilled weirdness, visionary pleasures, unpretentious intelligence, and other abstract terms.

But right now what I want to do is share some of my favorite quotes from Mr. DeNiro's lesser-known works...

Neither a borrower nor a blender be.
--Appliances: A Novel in Prose

A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the wind's will is a boy's will,
And boys break wind, then wind the
Will till windy boys fall down the hill.
--Tongue-Twisters for the Doomed

In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except misquotation and lack of humor.  And that the stuff in the back of the refrigerator is probably scary.  Which won't stop Cousin Joey from eating it.  And getting sick.  Again.
--Old Proverbs Revised and Made Only Slightly Less Irrelevant to Today's Post-Industrial Society

My appendix is a lonely hunter.
--Home Surgery: A Metaphorical Handbook

A writer should never write about the extraordinary.  That is for the journalist.
--Alan DeNiro's Book of Least Favorite Quotes from James Joyce