I came across Juli Kearns by way of her Website, a large part of which is dedicated to the analysis of film. Specifically, it was her very in-depth screeds on the works of Stanley Kubrick that captured my imagination (I believe she is also part of the documentary Room 237). In many of these, she goes into frame-by-frame dissections, picking apart small continuity discrepancies and inferring pounds of meaning and discordant connections throughout the films that the reader can choose to believe or not. Much of her film writing can come across as conspiratorial, or "seeing things that aren't there," but the mere density of her analysis, combined with inventiveness and creativity in her writing, make it obvious that she possesses a passionate and complex mind.
So, browsing around her website, I was intrigued to find that she was also an author of literary fiction. I bought the only book available on Kindle at the moment (I'm going through a purge, promised myself not to buy any more real books until I offload an armful), which happens to be Thunderbird and the Ball of Twine (a Folk Tale).
I was not let down by Kearns' imagination, but was surprised by how much I came to care about all of the characters (not just the two protagonists, every one of 'em). The story, without getting into spoiler land, follows Odile and Johnnie, two interestingly-named young adults. They are both artists in the midst of toxic relationships and are searching for themselves in a world full of anxieties, minor revelations, ennui and pain (much like all of as are, or were at one time or another). The sighting of a U.F.O leads to a car crash that unites these characters, spinning them into a web of frightening and hilarious situations.
The prose style is occasionally dense, but always alive and bristling with energy. It can go from chunks of stream-of-consciousness, ala Woolf, to dialogue-heavy jousts like the best of detective fiction. There are also small lyrical miracles that electrified my arm hair. The reader in me wanted more, the writer in me wanted advice.
Here are some quotes that I highlighted:
He didn't question the situation as he felt behind it one of those question marks that should be allowed a generous length of highway to straighten its story out as time thought best.
All it takes is a little patience and people will automatically assume you are clever without your having uttered a single word.
...those thousands of books in his apartment, a sarcophagus of collective mind, a majority of the writers dead yet still speaking continually whether he opened the covers of the books or not, the letters were there, those squiggle snakes of symbols representing thought, breath of thought, ideas, stories, awaiting rebirth in yet another mind, waiting to partake of human existence again, to wake inside another brain, a body with all its jingle jangle hormones and electrical charges, waiting to find form in muscle, bone, flesh and blood again.
"Where are you going? Cliff asked. "I thought we had plans to make plans to do something today."
"They don't think about what they're doing, they just do it. That's one of the big problems with humans, we think too much. Free will killed our instincts, we have to plan. Free will is why people need motivation and inspiration and animals don't. Birds and butterflies don't need motivation seminars to go south for the winter. A salmon doesn't need encouragement to swim upstream to its death. Success at being a salmon is built in. We've been incapacitated by thought."
"Maybe every aspiring artist or writer should first have to prove that they can sell their share of snake oil."
Post apocalyptic scenarios demand at least one survivor make sense or insensibility of civilization's husk else the cinema will be still life.
Being that she was a skeptic, she was surprised, when she thought about it, that she believed one hundred percent in so much that was unknown, a veritable infinity of unknown. How could she be a skeptic and believe one hundred percent in the unknown?
Lights rise in the theater and one person would realize that gold flash as a caution light, even a warning to not proceed, don't enter the crosswalk now, maybe never, while another would see green, go, an urgent and personal message to make for the Swiss hills where the flowers dance around lakes of chocolate and there is more than enough cowbell for everyone, and even beyond, to the Himalayas and Mt. Everest, where the illumination is received that melt glaciers aren't lemons but an opportunity for the best water park slide there ever was.
One could try to rise above the life of the senses but the archaeologists and anthropologists would be appeased with fish bones and clam shells at trail's end.
Most minor characters in Thunderbird and the Ball of Twine (a Folk Tale) are more interesting that some main characters in other novels I've read. Each offers a fully-realized view of the world, some strange, some deranged, some prophetic. I cried, I laughed, I will remember portions of this story forever.
Juli Kearns' work deserves to be read by everyone that loves serious literature. I purchased her most recent novel, The Rhetoric of Streets from her Lulu.com page, and can't wait for a new glimpse into her fascinating mind.
