As a maker of such writing, he descends from a long line traceable from Whitman and Melville to the modernists and Mackey’s idol, Baraka, to the metafictionists John Barth and William Gass.

In Horai there is neither death nor pain; and there is no winter. The flowers in that place never fade, and the fruits never fail; and if man taste of those fruits even but once, he can never again feel thirst or hunger.

Back in 1913 for instance, a driver named Jack Tower misnegotiated the southwest, and overturned in the south chute after exiting the turn.

He is a shady character.