A city of epic revels in which every stark or shattering reality remains always in plain sight—New Orleans. No place for the timid. We underwent, there, some memorable defeats, and any fun was end-of-the-world fun. I’m afraid to return, and not proud of it, since the end of the world did come.
The story is strangely unwilling to hazard the mechanism of the fabled frog kiss. To me it’s a simple identification of the reptile—gelatinous, swollen sack—with the male eyeball. Organ of the creepy gaze, abject master in this its dojo. The princess, I guess, is écriture feminine.
More fireflies. I hear Avatar’s doing big numbers. “The King of the World,” Midas himself, surely met the devil who obsesses this tale, too, that devil who when he seeks to tempt projects movie-dreams onto desert-screens. In a cartoon, the fantasy sequence is also a cartoon, just in a different style. And style is almost nothing at all. “Open your eyes,” says the firefly, but to what? Where, in paint and line, is solid ground, zero level, the reset button, the Good, the ought? Are we meant to surmise that the style of reality is self-evidently the style of Snow White? Or, more bizarrely, of those Silly Symphonies in which the hard schist of judgment is depicted, paradoxically, as a landscape of funky, undulating trees?
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