SHOES

<p class=ql-align-justify>Lansky's singular marvelously absurd graphic hybrid novella <em>Shoes</em> 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.</p><p class=ql-align-justify>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.</p><p class=ql-align-justify>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.</p><p class=ql-align-justify></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Plot summary:</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p class=ql-align-justify>Jack somehow restored from Cuban highs through institutions in Ohio faces his schizophrenia transcends his alcoholism and discovers poetry in the shoes of being.</p><p></p>