24 March 2016

Visiting Scarfolk, the most spectacular dystopia of the 1970s

"Richard Littler had a frightening childhood, too, but as a designer and screenwriter, he turned his memories of life in suburban Britain during the 1970s into a haunting and hilarious blog and book about the fictional dystopian town of Scarfolk. Littler mined the dark side of his childhood to create pamphlets, posters, book covers, album art, audio clips, and television shorts—remnants of life in a paranoid, totalitarian 1970s community, where even babies are not to be trusted"

Considerem, agora, esta outra: “He'd wake up in the middle of the night, his heart racing so fast that he thought he was dying but it wouldn't go away, it wouldn't go away, so he'd go running and he'd keep running until he couldn't think anymore. We came home one night and our door was open, most of our things were gone or broken, all our clothes were thrown around the rooms and even our pictures were wrecked too, and the overpass where the endless miles of cars would pass, it hummed night and day and night and day, we used to think it sounded like a river, but all that slipped away that day. In the morning I'd go home, she'd be up all night from crying alone, watching a credit card TV and holding a credit card phone, sitting on a credit card couch still in her mom's beat up and ugly robe”. Carver também? Não, Willy Vlautin, dos Richmond Fontaine e Delines, mas igualmente romancista premiado. Gente da mesma família. Os Fontaine chegaram ao fim e You Can't Go Back If There's Nothing to Go Back To (magnífico, como os anteriores, por vezes, também arrepiantemente dylaniano) é o ponto final. Quando uma débil esperança espreita, ouve-se “it’s a wonderful world if you put aside the sorrow, better take the time to know it if you feel anything at all”. Não adianta respirar fundo, de alívio: os Delines vão continuar.

"You’ll put down strangers, kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses, and lead the majesty of law in lyam to slip him like a hound. Alas, alas! Say now the King, as he is clement if th’offender mourn, should so much come too short of your great trespass as but to banish you: whither would you go? What country, by the nature of your error, should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders, to any German province, Spain or Portugal, nay, anywhere that not adheres to England: why, you must needs be strangers" (W. Shakespeare)