Steven Paul Lansky is a novelist, musician, poet, radio DJ, and educator. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and since childhood, spends his summers on St. Joseph Island, Ontario. Steven is an author of seven books, two poetry chapbooks, an audio novel, a novella, a collection of vignettes and sketches, a memoir and a novel.
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 way-posts.
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 neuro-spectacular. 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.
I have no illusions. I can tell when people are calling me out on my shit. Or are they shaming? One of my friends died intoxicated on opiates and marijuana, after living longer than any of his immediate family in his bloodline in any recent generation. This he claimed while also defending his misery. His last several years included divorce, the loss of most of his friendships, and a deterioration that he self-described as being shamed by others.
This from a guy who had anchored an AA meeting, brought many angry people into the fold of MA as well. Yeah, his reputation as a hard drinking, raucous hellraiser came up in nearly every conversation. His family had had great artists, great thinkers, his wife had worked hard in the airline industry, was generous, outgoing and an outstanding friend. What went wrong? The government had every intention of helping a middle-class gent such as him.
Let’s face it, no one likes a complainer. He retired early, he had limitations brought on by medical conditions. He had two mental illnesses, not to mention alcoholism. And to this day acquaintances and some friends thought he needed to pull himself up and work a little harder. You’re a difficult case, they told him. You might think ill of him, or then again, you may think well of him, that he was a protected class, an elder, and early retired, at your expense. There it is again, he cared what you thought. What he really cared about is how well you thought of him, not how much. I’m reminded of this statement, another old AA’er taught me: True humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less. Does that give a fellow license to envy, point out that someone needs to do inventory, or insult the intelligence of a friend? Stuck on this, he could have done more, and when you ask for help, know that he was your friend.
