Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Surprise Visitor

I went to the LaSalle house yesterday to retrieve some more boxes and to pick up some documents for the estate. When I pulled on the driveway I saw this fella poking around the workshop in the back. This is not "the bear"...you can see he still had both ears. It was still a little scary. Marie has refused to even set foot near the house anymore because of all the bear activity, and I honestly can't blame her. I apologize for the fuzzy picture, it was taken with the camera that is in my telephone from inside my truck. Thankfully he left right away and I was able to go inside without incident. Might need to do something about these rascals soon. It's obviously a problem. I'll have the shotgun with me from now on, not sure how much good it will do though.

-Jim

3 comments:

Victor Gischler said...

Jim,

I like to consider I'm something of a LaSalle scholar, but I'm sure the depth of my knowledge pales in comparison to yours. Did any bear stuff ever make it into his later fiction. I re-read DAVY CROCKET ON MARS a few days ago, skimming for bear references but found none.

Victor

EmersonLasalle said...

That's an interesting question, Victor. Well, as you know, Mr. LaSalle harbored an intense hatred of bears for most of his life. His novels rarely mentioned them, except in the most spiteful of manner. I do recall a scene in a later novel that included the crucifixtion of a bear by a group of demon possesed cub scouts...maybe Hell Rings My Bell...I'll have to do a little digging for you.

-Jim

Neil said...

I often re-visit that strange chapter in LaSalle's 1963 lesbian-western-zombie novel THE DEAD SHALL LICK OUR SCARS in which he rants for at least six or seven paragraphs about "goddamned cockatoos", pretty much abandoning character completely to say "Trust me on this--an uncaged cockatoo in the morning is a mortal danger to a man's precious organ" and so on. In fact, the seventh paragraph ends in the middle of a sentence and returns to the story as if nothing happened: "...And if you firebombed the whole continent of Australia to rid us of the pesky flying b" Just like that. And on with the pivotal scene when Twisty discovers that her new lover, the Sheriff, has double-crossed her and stuck her in the cell with her ex-lover Vanessa, as though the Sheriff herself was testing Twisty to see if she would stay true. But Vanessa has already become a zombie. Twisty somehow reaches her human soul by singing that old standard they both loved, "The Sun Can't Blind You If You Don't See it".

Anyway, that's just another example of LaSalle's hatred of animals, or as he called them, "Possible Future Foodstuff".