The dogbones from my search

ETGAR KERET } Like a mosquito in its flight of search for the easily penetrable skin over the softest flesh for its needle, I keep searching for idioms that suit my writing. Privately. In my diaries, that is. Idioms as a characteristic mode of expression, you know. 

One of those sketchy entries in which I tried to breathe in a thought went like this: ‘..and kiss you for long while asking you what do you think when I kiss you for long and you gasp with me..’ The search, I think these days, could be to drive in the experience. 

Those private searches had taken me through Anais Nin, Murakami, and Carver among others. I thought Nin had the electricity: 

The body of Lillian changed as she talked, the fast coming words accelerating the dismantling. She was taking off the shell, the covering, the defences, the coat of mail, the activity. 

Today I read a bit of Etgar Keret, the Israeli writer who they say is maxing out his minimalism: 

After school, the older kids had an argument about if when you hang somebody and he dies, it’s because he chokes to death or because his neck gets broken. Then they took bets on cartons of chocolate milk and caught a cat and hanged it from the basketball hoop, and the cat screamed a lot, and in the end its neck really did break. But Mickie wouldn’t pay for the chocolate milk, and he said it was because Gabi had pulled hard on the cat on purpose and that he wanted to see it again with a new cat that nobody touched. But everyone knew it was because he was a cheap-ass, and they forced him to hand over the money. Then Nissim and Ziv wanted to clob-ber Tsion Shemesh because he was a liar and the cat’s dick didn’t get hard at all. And Michal, who’s probably the prettiest girl in the school, happened to pass by and said we were all disgusting and like animals, and I went and threw up on the side, but not on account of her. 

Murakami, said a university paper recently, carries the scent of the existential realism of Raymond Carver, the master. Which the Japanese Jazz bar freak denies, of course. Keret< I thought< could be stretching Carver’s minimalism. Also Keret’s people, like Carver’s, try to express why they do what they do as they are in the process of detection, figuring out their actions and their purpose for acting. Okay, Keret also wrote the story that became the film, Wristcutters.

Rewarding searches, though.