Response Prompt #1

When it comes to concert detail the best examples for are the the ones that cast suck vivid imagery you feel as though you are watching the scene itself on a stage, not reading it on a page. In the most recent novel I have read ‘Hair Styles of the Damned’ by Joe Meno there are many good examples of this imagery but the best by far would have to be:

“From the moment I did get my nose fucking broke, but backwards now, here’s what it must have looked like: A tone of hot red blood pouring up my chin, slipping back around the corner of my lips, up, up, up my nostrils. Blood, in very tiny specks and drops, rising like magic from the front of my Misfits “Die, Die, Die My Darling” black T-shirt. My teeth tightening themselves, the gritty-tasting enamel slipping magically back in place. My fucking stomach relaxing, my guts pulling themselves back together. The bridge of my nose deflating, like a balloon losing its air, folding back to its original straight shape. Me coughing, but backwards, the sound going back inside and down into my lungs with the blood. ” (Meno, 235)

There are many concert details in this excerpt, it being a part in the novel that just stimulates all of your senses at once. It transports you right to this exact moment in time. The first example of the great use of concert detail is the very first line ‘From the moment I did get my nose fucking broke, but backwards now, here’s what it must have looked like: A tone of hot red blood pouring up my chin, slipping back around the corner of my lips, up, up, up my nostrils’ (Meno, 235) I find this to be an excellent example because right off the back you know what you are in for from this passage, a scene of someone getting their nose broken, already your mind takes this idea and runs with it. Your mind starts to conjure up images of past injuries you have witnessed but as you read on and he begins to describe [the blood] slipping around the corner of his lips it just takes on a life of its own, in my mind at least, because the word ‘slipping’ just makes the blood feel reckless and unpredictable, even more so than it already is. My 2nd example is ‘my guts pulling themselves back together.’ (Meno 235) With such a bold word like ‘pulling’ it almost makes you physically feel the tension on his guts, the straining of an object when in reality they are a globby, liquidly mess. In my mind it just sets this hard image because as I said before, I picture guts to be kind of soupy and for them to ‘pull themselves’ is just such a raw image you immediately get in your minds eye. My 3rd and final example is ‘Me coughing, but backwards, the sound going back inside and down into my lungs with the blood.’ (Meno, 235) I find this to be an exceptional example because not only can you imagine the cough itself, I mean everyone knows what a cough sounds like but this cough also becomes an object. You as the reader can physically see it because you picture this thing actually moving back down into his body through his throat and then back into his lungs. This paragraph to me shows how Joe Meno can not only write well but how he can paint such a vivid image for you, it is almost as if he painted a picture of this scene or that he had filmed it, the words are that image provoking for me.

Anna Jakubik (422)