“What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for. It was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn’t wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup.”
-Philip Roth, American Pastoral
Well, at long last, we’re finally here. Put on a suit and tie, take the #2 clippers to your hair, and bite into the lightning-blast-to-the-teeth cold of a frozen chocolate-covered banana, because today is the day we tackle the unstoppable force (or is it immovable object?) of Bigfoot Bjornsen. The foil and nemesis and brother and partner and shadow-self to our wayward hero Doc Sportello, Bigfoot is Inherent Vice in flat-topped and flinty microcosm, an exaggerated and funhouse-stretched portrait of loss and longing for times and people passed.
And today, we begin the first in a handful of episodes exploring the twisted mind and broken heart of this warped sheet of plastic as he drifts out of a commercial for Channel View Estates and materializes into that very real estate development, just in time to catch his ol’ buddy Doc catching a snooze next to what suspiciously resembles a bloodied corpse… Together, Travis and crime novelist Jedidiah Ayres chew the rag on this human blitzkrieg of broken machismo aggression and sorrow—just who is Lt. Detective Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, and why can’t we stop thinking of him?
About the Guest
JEDIDIAH AYRES
Jedidiah Ayres is the author of such crime novels as PECKERWOOD and FIERCE BITCHES, works ropebound with such control and ambition and bloodied romanticism that reading either is akin to seeing Jim Thompson's fallen kingdom of El Rey resurrected for a Cormac McCarthy campfire tale (seriously, read this motherfucker). He also writes about crime fiction and film on his site
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