From the Pen of Tucker McCann, vol. 2

I’ve written about what makes a great line of prose come alive for me here, and today we shine the spotlight for a second time on our own Tucker McCann. Here are ten more lines of his that tickled my fancy. All emphasis is my own:

“Once a fellow begins to feel the wheels falling off, so to speak, he figures that the crash might as we be a gloriously explosive romp through the median.”

 “It’s a funny component of human nature that we are capable of recognizing the artistic legitimacy of certain life transactions that live far beyond their moment in linear time.”

 “As I recall, those were good days of highways and mountains and late-night basketball binges and girls and fiction and beautiful nothingness which, to us, was all there was, which made it everything. None of us had any money, nor any immediate prospects of making any at the time, but we were naïve enough to believe that we wanted it that way.”

 “I had been staring out the window at Fourth South and the tram that ran east toward the university, wondering about any of a hundred girls, when Jed whispered to us the destiny of the afternoon while staring with burning eyes toward the counter.”

 “We watched him sit down, center himself over the table, and prepare his coffee. Then he stared into his cup, as if it were eternity itself.”

 “We’d chuckle as items careened back and forth off the cement walls with the force of the current during the flood season: turkey carcasses, old bike tires, wobbly kitchen chairs, and all sorts of faltering electronics. They all enjoyed the same fate; a convoluted and muddy floodwave to the Pacific.”

 “He was wiry and knobby and seemed to be welded to the chair with a westward lean. His spine seemed altered, as if bent under the pressures of whatever his days had demanded of him. He held his spiny fingers at his knee, with a burning cigarette contributing to the haze of the late afternoon. From a good distance, one could see his yellow stained fingers clear down to his knuckles, like upside down arthritic chicken feet.”

 “She had a way of looking attractively natural in any setting, as if she had walked into a movie set designed specifically for her, the star actress of the universe as we perceive it.”

 “A Train whistle sounded, west of the city, faint and sterile in the distance.”

The sensations- he didn’t know what else to call them‐ from that month still ran deep in the channels of his memory. The smells, the confidence, the flow of ideas, the breeze along avenues, the ease of movement. He felt a knot of guilt when he thought of those full and pregnant days against the backdrop of his malnourished present.

From the Pen of Tucker McCann

I’ve written about what makes a great line of prose come alive for me here, and we’ve shared examples from famous authors here, here, here, here and here.

In keeping with these two posts, however, I’d like to do something a little different today and throw the spotlight on a writer you’ve never read before, our own Tucker McCann. Here are ten excerpts to give you a flavor of his style. All emphasis is mine:

"But, I’ve always been doomed with the conviction that any amount of washing, if done in a public restroom, actually results in greater contamination, so I gave up."

 "The first time I set foot on foreign soil, a resplendent Mediterranean dusk slowly burned over the rooftops of Barcelona, or at least that’s how I would have written about it then."

 "The next morning I sat waiting underground in the oil-soaked dimness of the subway station while the sweet aroma of tobacco swirled into the soot-covered roof of the tunnel. I was bored, and still thinking of Marsé, and how he had blindsided me with his damn literary award. I was in a daze of regret when the train arrived in a mechanical chorus and swept me away in a subway car that smelled of stale urine."

 "… watching vagabonds fight at the foot of the cathedral, below the glare of a compassionate stone Jesus."

 "Los Angeles smoked and slept, smoked and slept."

 "He went to the mirror and saw an imperfect poem of tears running from his eyes."

 "There was nothing heroic in what I did next, but I did it all the same, as if it were heroic."

 "I detected the circumcised voices of newsmen and talk show hosts cut short as the channels swung from one to another. I could hear the traffic from time to time on Thousand Oaks Boulevard, but inevitably the flow of cars would cease, and I’d be left to my silence and trepidation." 

"Confident that the little bastard would not open the door, I taped the Declaration at navel height to accommodate him in his disability."

 "The sensations- he didn’t know what else to call them‐ from that month still ran deep in the channels of his memory. The smells, the confidence, the flow of ideas, the breeze along avenues, the ease of movement. He felt a knot of guilt when he thought of those full and pregnant days against the backdrop of his malnourished present."