am i going to die? like this?

The fake VW ad above is National Lampoon's take on the Chappaquiddick incident and gained them a costly lawsuit. What had happened? Just two days before Neil Armstrong got to utter his famous sentence (did he have a ghostwriter?) Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy drunk-drove his Oldsmobile Delmont 88 from the small Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, which is located at the eastern end of Martha's Vinyard, into tide-swept Poucha Pond, leaving the scene afterward. And a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, trapped inside the car, on the passenger seat, struggling for two to four hours with her life, until she eventually probably not drowned, but suffocated, in the car. Am I going to die? - Like this?

Joyce Carol Oates's 1992 Pulitzer Prize finalist novella Black Water zeroes in on this incident, again and again. And again. Her narrative is structured around the impact and the sinking - and the thinking (pardon this awful play on words) - of Kopechne, which is, due to the circumstances given, fragmented, repetetive, disbelieving, sensuous and haunting. I haven't finished it yet and do not have the proper words to tell you why of all things I wanted you to know about this, but this is a really good read, and not too long, too! And it also reminds me structurally of this other really great novella, or short-story, for that matter, Robert Coover's Spanking The Maid, although Coover does not write about shock and trauma but excruciatingly masochistic manners and the beauty of language that rises from that. In fact, it is about nothing but the excruciatingly masochistic process of producing beautiful language. You should check that out, too. Plus, it is really nice to have it lying around, cover up, that is.

To come full circle (with lots of tiny bits and huge circly-segments missing) with the title and the opening picture, I can not finish this post without showing you this National Lampoon cover from the January 1973 issue. And I do so, because it is also excruciatingly beautiful. At least as much as my writing is excruciatingly excrutiating.