Lansky's singular, marvelously absurd, graphic, hybrid novella, Shoes has cutting-edge detailed, prose modeled on recanted reality. It moves like the doorway god Janus, who, upon the threshold, looks both outwards, and to the interior. Two faces, toggle facets of moments, the third eye drawn from both, or either, and between the front and back, the edge. Imaginary and real, fantastic and mundane, possibilities sublimely rendered in comedic instants tucked into the mind as wayposts.
The novella shifts between places, a possible diagnosis, a change of heart, and/or venue, that keeps the reader in a rather delightful attempt to keep up with or abandon meaning in a literal sense. Take the rich detail and let the author's sure hand move the narrative smartly back and forth through the doorway. Understand that the instrument of illustration is unnecessary for genuine pleasure in getting a little lost in the story and getting a little lost in the author, but the graphic element helps. There is a personal metaphor in all the mileage piled up, in the distance, from place to place recounted, time travel, from footnote to footnote.
Steve Lansky has a unique perspective, from the doorward gaze, drawn either way, of the neurotypical, or the neurospectacular. Somewhere in between ambition, and accomplishment (something of a bipolarity itself, eh?). He starts a conversation with a version of himself, and flexes outward, as the reader becomes the most colorful of chameleons. Sure, there's some shapeshifting here, and a relaxation of the serotonin guardrails, that order memory, and experience, to behave in a linear way, but it's supposed to be fickle.
Plot summary:
Young Jack Acid, aspiring artist and writer, lands in a halfway house transported from Cincinnati to San Francisco mid 1970s, in the midst of left coast marijuana uprising, and social unrest. Rejected by radical mental health intervention, traditional means are suggested causing Jack to seek Zen, the Merry Pranksters, hitchhiking, storytelling, and rockstardom.
Years later he absorbs the intervention of Unusually Tretheway, a lesbian Sensei, whose hallucination chamber yields a story including radio, Cuba, Lansky in Cuba, time travel, famous people in and out of place and time, photography, fine art, Harvard, mystical romance, method acting and neurolinguistic programming.
Jack, somehow restored from Cuban highs, through institutions in Ohio, faces his schizophrenia, transcends his alcoholism, and discovers poetry in the shoes of being.
Steven Paul Lansky wrote Main St. (2002) and Eleven Word Title for Confessional Political Poetry Originally Composed for Radio (2009), published by Seaweed Sideshow Circus. His audionovel Jack Acid (2004) is available on Spotify. His memoir: The Break (Arbitrary Press 2022) had chapters previously published under the title: the citizen, in The Brooklyn Rail (2005), ArtSpike, CityBeat, Streetvibes and Article 25. His animated videos: Bratwurst (with Leigh Waltz), Exit Strategy, Harvest, and The Broken Finger Episode A-8 or the Cigarette Break are on YouTube channel: lanskysp. For more: Whole Terrain, New Flash Fiction Review, Black Clock 20, and St. Petersburg Review Issue 8.5. The novella, A Black Bird Fell Out of the Sky was published on Seaweed Sideshow Circus (2017). Life is a Fountain, a collection of vignettes and sketches was published by Dos Madres Press in 2018. Published under the heteronym, Paul Thanas, and illustrated by Steven Paul Lansky, And Then the Cow Was Drownded (2024) is his latest novel on Arbitrary Press. Original art, links to writings, the music of Lansky's harmonica heteronym, Flem Snopes and other tidbits are all at www.stevenpaullansky.com
