(urth) Sightings at Twin Mounds

[Marc Aramini]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 9:10 AM, Robert Pirkola <rpirkola at hotmail.com>
wrote:

>   "Pickwick" here with a few thoughts:
>
>                 Marc Aramini wrote: *"Someone collecting newspaper
> clippings on ufos and deciding to eat a random guy still seems a little bit
> of a stretch."*
>
>                 António Pedro Marques wrote: *"**Yes, it's strange that he'd be looking for random guys to eat."*
>
> It is important to remember that this particular victim is merely one of many in a presumably longer career of the narrator/cannibal.  This is alluded to in the beginning of the story which starts out as though it were one tale in a collection of supernatural/extraterrestrial encounters assembled by the narrator.  "This puzzling case presents *several unique features* . . ."  The features are unique because they distinguish this case from the other omitted examples in the collection, each of which might presumably also relate an incident where the narrator engaged in cannibalism and used the supernatural circumstances as cover.  Later on, he also states "Here I must confess my own shortcoming -- one I regret *more than any other* involving UFO studies."
>
> The narrator is not a person that collects U.F.O. clippings first and foremost who then subsequently develops the desire to consume human flesh, but is instead a cannibal who has taken an interest in the supernatural/extraterrestrial because he recognizes an opportunity to feed undetected in modern society by victimizing those whose disappearance will be subsumed in the fringe culture of the occult.  It would not be strange for a confirmed cannibal to be looking for "random guys to eat", because that is precisely the life a cannibal would have to lead.  The most difficult questions a modern cannibal would have to face are: whom shall I eat? and how shall I get away with it serially?  Our narrator has found one (admittedly imperfect, but not bad) answer to these questions.
>
> It is likewise important to remember that we must take the narrator's word that the sources he claims to be quoting are being quoted accurately and have not been altered or, for that matter, are not made up out of whole cloth.  The psychiatric account of "Stan Roland", which we have only the narrator's word was a pseudonym of Mr. Robakowski's, for example, is supposed to have been written by Dr. Ernest Schwartz.  Of course, Ernest=earnest=serious and Schwartz is German for "black" and so we have "serious black", or more particularly, a Man In Black (MIB).  This is exactly the type of name a person who spends a great deal of time researching U.F.O. phenomena would concoct.  Therefore, I think the theory at least admits the possibility that all of the supernatural/extraterrestrial experiences of Robakowski are made up by the narrator to tie together the disoriented Robakowski of the newspaper reports with the legend of the mounds, the girl, and the wendigo.
>
> The story still contains mysteries, but I believe they may be accounted for by the theory.  I
>
>
Just a few quick responses: he follows the unnatural and unexplained, and
his collection of such occurences is consistent with someone who follows up
on odd stories and does not necessarily imply cannibalism.  Every UFO
sighting does not necessarily imply eating flesh, merely the mention of the
Wendigo's back story.

As far as lying narrators in Wolfe - usually the scenes are not fabricated
entirely but are either unconnected or misinformed in their presentation,
with narrative bias easily "provable".  Exceptions to a definite narrative
bias most often linger in 3rd person works such as The Ziggurat,
Castleview, or An Evil Guest.  Examples of elided details or narrators who
do not understand their presentation of events: (a) Skip in Home Fires -
kills someone onscreen with no explanation or context, shooting the
"leader" in the head" - we are left to figure out how to connect that scene
to other facts such as the off screen death of Zygment and the comment that
there are sleeper spies who don't even know they are spies / b)  the death
of the boy Victor in the last novella of Fifth Head of Cerberus where he
falls and a tree reaches out to grab at him (the usual party line on this
is that the entire scene is fabricated, but if the cat bite infects Marsch
with the shadow children parasites, that scene can be literally true and
Victor can die in that fashion rather than changing shape / c) Suzanne
Delage - the narrator opens by saying I have no idea what Suzanne looks
like or who she hung out with, then proceeds to describe her daughter in
detail on the last page obsessively, with someone saying she looks exactly
like her mother and even describes exactly which clubs she partook in from
his yearbook, where her pictures are cut out.  But this seems like
suppression and eradication rather than deliberate conscious lying.

Usually scenes are not fabricated wholesale but are connotatively
isolated.  Cannibalism is a detail in the story - is that mention enough to
asseverate that every UFO or unexplained story of our narrator is a string
of feasts?  Not saying it isn't possible.
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