In a very obvious way, my quarter in New York City (at Bonnier Corp.’s masculine stalwart, Outdoor Life) has been functioning as a kind of trial run. And not just in the blandly professional sense. Spiritually, sort of, also — it’s a chance to confirm or deny the notion that this is where I belong. As such, I’ve amassed what I consider to be a pretty exhaustive resume of garden variety Big Apple activities, assuming perhaps that if I immerse myself blindly enough, life’s big questions will somehow be answered for me.

Which is all merely an elaborate preface to say that I gritted my teeth and let go of $25 for a New Yorker Festival fiction event Friday, October 16. Readings by David Bezmozgis and Jonathan Franzen. Of Bezmozgis’ work, I had almost zero familiarity, and looked forward to him with the pallorless indifference most people bestow upon U2’s opening acts, as something above all to be put up with, as a necessary precursor.

Because Franzen, of course, occupies a real special place. His 2001 opus, The Corrections, was one of those few super kinetic reading experiences for me (in a totally different way than David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest was, a book which I read always with a sort of fierce giddiness, the only real variation from page to page being just exactly how far my jaw was from the floor). The Corrections was much more, I don’t know, fine-tuned or something. More sturdy. It had that emotional savagery too, which even as a teenager, compelled me to set the fat thing down at intervals and breathe mid-paragraph.

And he didn’t disappoint. He was hysterical. The material from his new (reportedly massive) novel is as buoyant and compelling as ever, and furthermore marked by his familiar undercurrent of tragedy which lends it, more than anything, that almost wraithish aspect of something yanked directly from the human soul. He read an extended clip from the second chapter. The first was featured in the New Yorker’s summer fiction issue.

After the readings and the author Q&As, I found myself just pacing around the space, more or less establishing a perimeter. (I have this problem where I go to readings and literary events lamely hoping that I’ll become friends with the authors. And that somehow this will happen without any active engagement on my part.)

So yes, I lurked on the fringes while people shook hands and proffered their stupid questions. These idiots — they think they’re supposed to drop big-time vocab words in the presence of published articulate people. The staff finally kicked us out because there was another reading immediately following.

Major point is, I was leafing through the festival schedule down the street maybe 15 minutes later when who should come briskly strolling by but Franzen himself. Impulsively, I shouted his name, and started jabbering like a fool about how he’s the greatest thing on earth. He’s kind of an odd fellow, Franzen, and he’s got these glasses which make his eyes seem really distantly enormous, like planets. Anyway, I think he got a kick out of my boyish enthusiasm and beckoned me to walk with him to the bar where he was meeting some old Swarthmore friends.

I made the dicey decision to bring up David Foster Wallace (I knew they had been close). Franzen called him as good a friend as he’d ever had. I told him that he and Wallace were sort of heroes of mine, being these groundbreaking authors from the Midwest. He asked me where I was from, and I was able to talk triumphantly about Cleveland for a bit which he loved, and said one of the reasons he didn’t have a totally positive experience at Swarthmore was that he always felt so innocently Midwestern. I told him I thought the literary landscape would be done a tremendous service if there were more voices like his around. He asked me my name. I told him. And we parted ways.

I’m aware that this likely seems pathetic, the fact that I was and remain still unthinkably energized by the encounter. Please make no mistake: I don’t count myself among the socially omnivorous, those who brush shoulders with the popular and posh and insist that the proximity somehow entitles them to a status upgrade. I’m in no way suggesting that having a brief conversation with a bestselling author makes me any more valuable or formidable, as a human.

What I am suggesting is that having a personal encounter with a personal hero can shake a man at his bedrock, at his core. Jonathan Franzen already has no recollection of me. Get that clear. Beyond any a shadow of a doubt, he’s plum forgotten I exist. But I’d been hopping around one of the world’s most populous, surely most dazzling, cities, cooped up in a pocket of Brooklyn that a million published authors call a motherland — a million. I’d been wordlessly fraternizing with the bearded and the bespectacled and the radically skirted, aspirants like me who graze in the pastures of used bookstores and artsy coffee shops, writing writing writing to some unknowable purpose, one which for the life of us we can’t identify but still provides that grasping sense of existential towardness.

And still, as a writer, I am unanchored. Hopelessly so. Toggling back and forth between two desolately insoluble fields — journalism and creative writing. Being able to chat one-on-one with one of the great authors of our time, even for a moment, is thrilling not only for what it signifies in the present, but also for what it might portend.

In short, that Jonathan Franzen — a man with a reputedly probing sense of character — for a few moments intuited my bona fides and engaged me in conversation, such that in three, five, seven, nine years, should I ever be so fortunate to publish anything he would conceivably read, he will see a name he once asked for and promptly remember nothing.

But then maybe a week later, he’ll be assaulted by a nagging half-image. Not a memory necessarily. Just some spectral association from something that happened a long time ago. And then perhaps three weeks after that, he’ll be having a cup of coffee when the weird ratchets and clicks of an entrenched neural reactor will describe a searing electric jolt.

And Jonathan Franzen will remember with sudden absolute clarity a windy evening in New York City back in 2009. Sam Allard, he’ll recall! He’s that crazy kid who wouldn’t shut up about Cleveland after the New Yorker festival. I wonder how the hell he’s doing.

A beautiful day in my hometown of Bohuslän, Sweden. Photo by Jolantis on Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons.

My childhood hometown’s flag has three crudely rendered medieval images artlessly arranged — it’s a veritable tribute to asymmetry. A blue sword. A red castle. A blue lion (humping the castle?) Technology of the 21st century seems ludicrous and hostile, but it’s impossible not to acknowledge that the images on my hometown’s flag appear to be preeminent examples of Microsoft Word’s stock picture options.

Before we moved to Norway, my family and I lived in a hut 12 minutes inland. My father and I would fish among the rocky islands off Sweden’s coastline and after particularly hearty catches, he’d salute the flags on top of our home when we returned. There were always three, arranged vertically: Our family crest, a serpent’s tongue, on top; Sweden’s, stout and comfortable even in the terrorizing wind; and Bohuslän’s, forever snagging and tearing and tangling within itself.

Bohuslän’s flag needed replacing three or four times as I grew up. My mother could sew it from memory and I loved watching the sword take shape on the flag, a tantalizingly electric blue in the sea of white. There was something alluring and heroic in the blade’s solitude. It seemed for me, somehow, to represent a final, impenetrable defense. Even should the lion, against all odds, scale the castle, the sword still held its ground beyond, a glistening, awesome pillar.

At age 14, I traveled with my parents north to Norway. The fish in Bohuslän had become scarce and our province was fleeing the incursion of barbarians from the South. My father presented me with a gift before our departure, a sword wrapped in a goatskin sheath. I tested its balance and its girth in the wind with two hands as my father had taught me with sticks — decent. The steel tip was blunt and the blade near the base was uneven and almost serrated with rust. But in the morning sun it glowed a distinct, almost phosphorescent, blue.

Once we’d finished setting up our new hut, my father began to hoist up our flags. The family crest, Sweden’s. I grabbed his arm when he finished — what about Bohuslän’s? It was too dangerous, he said, now that we were beyond her borders. That night I hoisted it up anyway and waited with my blue-gleaming sword. Should the barbarians ransack Bohuslän and come north, should they mount our hut and plunder our wares, they’d still have me and my stalwart blade to face. And they’d suffer.

Brian Bouldrey is always moving. As a senior lecturer in the Creative Writing program, he is wont to explode into classes two or three minutes late, donned in camping garb, brandishing a coffee mug and a purple portfolio and detailing the roster of daily complications that make his life virtually unlivable:

The weather…
The traffic….
The scheduling woes….
The boxes…

The boxes, yes, on account of the fact that Bouldrey also literally appears to be always moving — a perennial unpacker — shuffling about Chicago like a teleporter, and vacationing to/conferencing in Boston and New York and London and Paris in the meantime.

He simply can’t stay put. And his latest published book is mostly a chronicle of that peculiar habit. Part travelogue, part memoir, Honorable Banditfinds a jovial Bouldrey trekking with his vivacious German chum Petra across the island of Corsica, and mulling over the details.

Honorable Bandit by Brian Bouldrey. Photo courtesy of brianbouldrey.com

And you shouldn’t plan on finishing it in one sitting. Nor two, nor three. You shouldn’t read it too quickly at all, frankly, even though it weighs in at a conquerable 240ish pages. What you should do is sip it, like the Corsican wine Bouldrey is always trying to get his hands on, instead of gulp it — it’s more palatable that way.

Throughout, Bouldrey is nothing short of a raucous, effulgent tour guide; and it’s comforting, in a way, that the words on the page so closely approximate the attitude and cadence of his speech: “The shape of Corsica is something like a fisted hand holding up its index finger. Not a ‘We’re Number One!’ ballpark novelty foam hand sort of raised finger, but more of a ‘How many times have I got to tell you kids that this island is free and independent?’ raised finger, a scolding finger.”

His voice is fearless and fun, and, most importantly, alive on the page. But all his tricks — his witty parentheticals, asides, and innuendos; his literary allusions (deployed at will) and an entirely-too-liberal willingness to color an idea with a phrase from French, Italian or (for Pete’s sake) Latin — too often inadvertently obscure, or distract us maybe, from something much more important.

More disorienting metaphorically is that the GR20, Bouldrey and Petra’s route through the island, can be traversed both ways. A trio of hikers passes them near the end walking in the opposite direction and Bouldrey comments on how far they have yet to go. Reading Honorable Bandit was like that for me in a way, because I could never quite get a firm handle on where the narrative was off to. If, after all, the destination was just another’s starting point, where were we really headed?

“There’s danger here,” admits Bouldrey in his author’s note. “My meditative chapters … might jar you out of that sweet dreamy sorcery of the journey.” He indicates that the book itself is a conscious mimicry of the physical act of walking — left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot — which is why it oscillates between the narrative of the hike and the reflections, all appropriately labeled: Why I Walk. My concern was that there were so many barriers, so many new-fangled incarnations of narrative stubbornness — not just the oscillations, but the reflections themselves, their untamed quality — that the walking being imitated felt less like a fleet-footed frolic and more like a leaden plodding.

Bouldrey in his office. Photo by Sam Allard / North by Northwestern

But in the text, just like on the island, “there is something of a blur between the tame and the wild.” And the strongest moments come when the reflections becomes tame, when Bouldrey takes a deep breath and “documents the undocumentable” — living in San Francisco in the ’80s and ’90s, a city trapped in the dark oubliette of, not hell, but HIV. Bouldrey numbers the sections in this chapter. He parcels his images and his memories and his pain, maybe, into manageable chunks. He quarantines them.

And then the ultimate satisfaction and ultimate redemption comes at the end, when you happen upon someone coming to terms with humanity, someone taking stock of the world and discovering where he fits in. Bouldrey seems to be almost pleading: how can someone who needs to be forever in motion ever truly be comfortable, ever truly be at home?

“It’s amazing to be able to see the shape of the island from the air, a big Michelin map,” Bouldrey says as he flies away. “It’s like knowing all the vocabulary; all the declensions, all the conjugations, at last, of a language you’ve been struggling to learn — and then it’s time to go.”

Honorable Bandit functions in the same way. Just as you realize what Bouldrey’s been up to, when you realize that he’s been one step ahead of you the whole time; that there is, after all, an awful lot of art in the fact that this thing you’ve been trying to grapple with has been grappling within itself the whole time; that it is honest, vulnerable and sacred; just when you think you understand where you’re headed, Bouldrey winks. Because it’s done.

Alroy was only on the periphery of my consciousness as I ascended the escalators up through Tower City and made my way to Prospect Avenue where I boarded the Megabus. Once the Rapid had lurched to a stop in the steaming, hissing bowels below the mall, I just sprinted off the train without looking back. I have no idea how he got on the bus. I don’t think he really even showed up again (maybe he was on the first level) until about 2 a.m., after I convinced myself that contacting Diana was a lost cause. He just kind of appeared next to me, with his fingers actively digging into his hair, gouging and picking at those impossibly tight coils so close to the skin. And then he started that thing where he was licking his fingers and rubbing his scalp hard, periodically looking at me and nodding, like we were in on a secret together, expecting me to say something.

–Well, he said.
–What? I had my little journal out and was making notes, jotting down ideas.
–It’s just that I’ve told you my name, but you haven’t told me yours.
–Again, sir, information that I’m not entirely comfortable giving out.
–It’s a long drive.
–What’s that supposed to mean?
–Just sayin’.

He’s got that oily sheen in his hair, which seems to reproduce from nowhere, and which, because of all the rubbing, has gotten onto his hands and smells funny. He’s rubbing so hard — the hair is so short and stubborn. And for some reason, the repetition of it is setting me off. I just want to scream that it won’t do anything.

–I’m Alroy, if you’ve forgotten.
–I know. I know. I know. And I can call you just Roy if I’d prefer.
–That’s right, but I don’t know what to call you. He turned to face me, hair bizarrely askew. A perfect buttcrack of a part down the middle of his head with one side, the side nearest me, pressed flat to his scalp, and the other side jutting out in little bumpy puffs. A portrait of asymmetry. What’s your name?

–…
–Come on. What is it?
–…
–What’s your name?
–…
–Name name name? What. is. your. naaaaaa-
–Hal, for Christ’s fucking sake. It’s Hal. Okay. Harold Llewellyn Baudrillard, if you want the details; formerly Harold Llewellyn Coby-Baudrillard, but I officially dropped the Coby at 18, to my mother’s persistent angst, because the whole thing was just too cumbersome. But who she (my mom) is really upset with is my oldest brother Peter, not me, because he was the one who went and set the precedent. And she knows that I pretty much do whatever Peter does and Clement really does do just about everything that I do (Luke, the thumbsucker, has elected to keep the Coby.) My mom is especially affronted, Peter told me later, because she was secretly hoping that after the divorce, if anything, we’d just adopt her name. And if you’re still curious, my parents settled on Coby-Baudrillard only after bickering for the duration of the painful, almost-10-month gestation period resulting in the messy birth of my brother Peter who I just mentioned, and then discarding the hideous amalgamations they’d conceived therein, the likes of which, by the way, rarely appear even in the detritus of teen sci-fi fiction: Cobrillard, Baucoby (and its shortened cousin BoCo), Drilloby, Cocollard, Cobra.

–Lotsa “l”s.
–A great many “l”s, yes.
–I’m calling you Cobra then.
–Oh please don’t do that.
–Cooooobra.
–Just STOP man!

I said it louder than I had intended to. All eyes from the front of the bus instantly turned to me. Through the darkness, they were beads. And then it was extra quiet. It was as if something dense and constant had been sucked from the atmosphere — the sudden silence of basement water heaters. A man removed his Dallas Cowboys baseball cap and offered me what appeared to be a salute. He was saluting not me, I soon discovered, but my unconscious derring-do, which had silenced the beast. The dreadlocked behemoth had, at my shout, emitted a series of gastrointestinal gurgles which suggested the consumption of something large, hot and foul. He then coughed a violent, terrifying hack, but was afterward at peace. The catlike sets of beads all seemed to rise from the front of the bus in unison, perfectly round and glistening and thankful. A standing ovation.

The Megabus had worked out a lot of its kinks. One short year ago, a scheduled departure time of 11:59 p.m. usually meant an actual departure time of somewhere between 12:45 and 1:00. Back then it was fashionable to talk trash, affectionately, about the Megabus’s evident disregard for promptness — in much the same way that for years, it had been fashionable to talk trash about Cleveland’s own RTA, without the affection — sort of how you might talk about an offbeat sister who always forgets to set her clocks back for daylight savings. Riders entered into a casual understanding with the Megabus that went something like: for prices that cheap, it matters very little what time you decide to roll in and out of town.

Ridership shot up when college students started telling their friends and families. Double-deckers were purchased. Destinations were added, all jumbled within the interstate artery system pumping buses in and out of Chicago’s beating heart. Cleveland got a midnight bus to tack on to its morning and afternoon departures. And the late ones were usually a pleasant reprieve because there were fewer passengers to deal with — you were practically guaranteed your own two-seater. This is what made the man’s sitting next to me so discomfiting. He was frightening in sort of a Denzel Washington-when-he-means-business-type way, but people didn’t say anything, or really even pay much attention. They probably just assumed he was an uncle or family friend or something. And by that point, the two of us had had a few hours of history, such that his sitting down where he did, trapping me, made me feel like his prisoner.

Earlier in the evening, I had taken the Rapid to Tower City from W. 65th. My older brother Pete offered to drive, but I was just sort of in the mood for the train, I guess kind of interested in comparing it to the El or something. The first time I saw the man was when he got on at the W. 25th St. station, the cathedral of giant glass windows and firetruck-red steel beams, like he was looking for somebody. He kind of stood in the doorway for a second, peering in like he was looking for somebody, and then seemed to decide that it was me who he was looking for and sat in the seat directly behind mine. Except for the woman near the back in heated conversation with her grocery bags, we were the only ones on the train.

(There has to be a system, doesn’t there, for the amount they ask you for? Some formula or function must exist which they all have memorized based on age, appearance, and Lord knows what else. Because he sized me up for only a second before he seemed to have me figured out.)

–Can I get 70 cents?
–Sorry, I said. I opened up Ulysses to a random page and began pretending to read in earnest.
–Just 70 cents man.
–I really don’t have any change on me.
–Sixty-five cents?
–Look man, I promise you I don’t have any change. If I did, I really would give it to you.
–Yeah yeah. Okay, okay. whatever.

I just had a duffel, as far as bags were concerned, sitting on my lap; and Ulysses which was open, and a little cream-colored notebook speckled with woodchips or something in one of those plastic covers open beneath the book.

–Alroy, the man said, suddenly extending a sword-like hand sideways between the top of the seat and the metal bar over it. I took it and shook it briefly and nodded. Alroy then nodded at the doors of the train, which seemed to close at his command.

And then it started with a jocular jolt–a punch on the shoulder, the ascent of an aging roller coaster that you still ride for fond memories’ sake. Then it started moving, fast and loud, with purpose.

–Just 50 cents.
–Look, man-
–Alroy.
–Alroy. Look, Alroy. I’m really sorry, like I said-
–Or if you’d prefer, you could just call me Roy.
–Yes. Roy, yes. I’m very sorry. My knees were shaking bad and my duffel was doing that thing where it slides from a position of security to insecurity with agonizing slowness.

–Where are you headed?
Oh God. -–Chicago
–Chicago? Airport’s the other way my friend.
–Well, I’m not flying.
–Hitching a ride with a friend, eh?
–No. Megabus.
He paused. –You gotcher ticket on you?
–No. I mean, it’s just a number. There’s no…it’s not a ticket really.
–What kind of a number?
–It’s a code. A code sort of. Like a reservation thing. There are some letters in there too.
–You got it on you?
–Yes.
–Don’t be scared. Why you look so scared?
–I’m not…not scared. It’s just been a long weekend is all.
–Why is that?
–Many, many reasons, Alroy.

We stopped suddenly, the train I mean, over that rusting iron Tinkertoy bridge before the tunnel into Tower City. Sometimes it would just sit there for awhile.

–Sometimes the train just sits here for awhile, Alroy said, like it’s making some kind of a big decision.
–Yeah, or like it has to psych itself out every time before it goes underground.
–Then that makes two of us then. Alroy stretched and yawned. So can I get that code?
–I really really really need to get to Chicago tomorrow morning man.
–Can’t you order a plane ticket online or something?
–No. I just don’t have the money right now.
–Well I’ve got tons. He got really close to my ear at this point. I’ve got millions man. Then he got an idea. Why don’t we share it?

–That doesn’t work. The driver is standing at the front of the bus and marks down the ones who board.
–All of ‘em?
–Yeah of course. There’s like a clipboard or something.
–Then can I please get it.
–Why do you need to get to Chicago? It’s not even worth anything. It’s not. I pulled the printed paper from my pocket and held it in front of my face. I paid eight dollars for this. Eight dollars.
–Can I get eight dollars then?
–No! Man-
–Alroy.
–I do not have eight dollars. I do not have any change.-
–Do you swear?
–What? No. I’m not going to…I don’t…how can you feel so entitled to-
–Ah ha! See. So you do have something then.
–My mom just died.
–…
–…
–Whoa whoa whoa. Easy there friend. Take it slow. What’s happenin?
–I go to school in Cleveland and I need to get home to Chicago tomorrow for the funeral.
–Where, Cleveland State?
–Case.
–Good school my man. What’d she die of?
–It was cancer…heart…cancer issues.
–She had some heart cancer?
–No. It was heart problems. There were complications or something which led to cancer because…because she was a diabetic.
–Sounds like she had quite a few issues.
–Yes.
After a knowing pause. –Was she obese?

The train started to screech forward, like it was navigating through a Sleeping-Beauty-style wall of thorns courtesy of scary-ass Maleficent only made of barbed wire, not actual thorns. And then it reached the tunnel and everything was black motion.

The main character in Darren Aronofsky’s new film The Wrestler is named Randy the Ram. He’s a former wrestling champion who’s gotten old, he wears a hearing aid and prescription glasses even as he tans and dyes his hair a startlingly neon grunge-blond. His voice is bumpy, sort of, and tired — it’s the gyrating growl of an old Chevy truck’s February exhaust pipe. His body and face are battered, pock-marked, scarred.

Aronofsky looks nothing like Randy the Ram, and he’s not really even a fan of professional wrestling. At the James Hotel in downtown Chicago, he’s talking on one of those headset phones that instantly and crudely invite associations with telemarketers and Justin Timberlake. He’s sporting designer jeans and brown leather shoes that look like they’re coated in wood lacquer. His gold-rimmed glasses are a philosopher’s, a prop in a detective’s study in a 19th century play.

His dissimilarities with Randy the Ram are only notable in light of his insistence, moments later, that directors should personally connect with their lead characters.

“You definitely have to identify with them on some level,” he says from behind a tissue, sneezing erratically the moment he sits down. “The reality is I could make a story about a five-year-old girl, and the only way I could make it good is by understanding what she’s going through. And the only way to do that is by putting my own experience there.”

With respect, and with an outward mask of maybe even something like dotage, we ask ourselves: What in God’s name has this man been through to come up with what he’s come up with? If personal experience is indeed what guides his film making, we can only assume that Aronofsky has led a life of maniacal drug addiction and interstellar exploration. But he hasn’t. What he has done is conceive and direct four wildly imaginative, wholly dissimilar films, and it’s because he’s able to use his experience as a launching point and project it onto his film worlds. Call him what you will — visionary, deranged mad man, amateur — Aronofsky demonstrates with every one of his new projects something Hollywood at large can’t quite get a handle on: evolution.

In 1998, Aronofsky’s visually arresting Pi made him a cult hero. Two years later, Requiem for a Dream and its whirlwind acclaim made his a household name (for those whose households endorse film making that abides enthusiastically beyond the Hollywood mainstream). The Fountain, in 2006, prompted some critics to herald the arrival of the next Stanley Kubrick. Now, The Wrestler has devotees pleading for his candidacy at the Academy Awards.

The idea of Aronofsky having devotees, though, seems far-fetched because of his oeuvre’s unabashed diversity. “The fans shift,” he says. “There are a lot of Pi fans out there, and there are a lot of Requiem fans who hated Pi. And there are a lot of Fountain fans who hated Requiem and Pi. The ones that stick with me—I’m psyched that they’re looking forward. But for me, I’m just trying to tell stories that haven’t been told before, trying to do something that’s original, trying to tell them in original ways.”

Originality is one trait Aronofsky’s films can hardly be accused of lacking. Pushing the envelope has become so definitively his stock in trade that to settle for something generic or something not uniquely of his voice and vision would be an egregious artistic offense: not against his fans, but against himself.

“I think it’s important,” he says, “as someone working in the arts, to keep challenging yourself, and keep trying new things—different things. At least that’s what Madonna tells us.” He adjusts his jeans and brushes them unconsciously as he crosses his legs. “Film making is a really really really tough job. The thing I always say is if you’re going to deal with all the pain of making a film and seeing it through, then it better be something you’re very passionate about. Don’t try to play to the middle. Play to what makes you special, tell the story that only you can tell. And then do the work.”

Northwestern assistant professor of English and Gender Studies Nick Davis is also, incidentally, a freelance film critic and an Aronofsky fan. He applauds him for being a true artist, for his finesse when dealing with heavy emotional themes, for making bold, unconventional decisions in his film making. “His films always ask the audience to think as well as to feel, and to accept levels of paranoia and anguish that most films would steer clear of.”

The Fountain even made Davis’s top films in 2006. In that film, Davis says, “the major burden on the audience was to accept and relate to a degree of romantic love, with no irony or sarcasm, that filmmakers almost never ask of us anymore, particularly in the genres that Aronofsky works in or near.” Davis even teaches The Fountain in one of his Gender Studies classes. “I’m doing my best to champion the film,” he said.

Slate’s Dana Stevens views Aronofsky as a director whose “intellectual reach tends to exceed his artistic grasp.” That’s why the “scruffy, accidental” beauty of The Wrestler (as opposed to the grand, ambitious scope of something like The Fountain) impressed her so much. It wasn’t the magnificent performance of Mickey Rourke. It was Aronofsky’s ability to evolve, to make her rethink him. “Aronofsky’s films have always struck me as adolescent fantasies,” she writes in her Dec. 17 review, “self-consciously big ideas wrapped in lurid, over-composed images…That Aronofsky had it in him is a rebuke to the complacency of viewers who, like me, thought they had his number.”

Aronofsky’s is a number hard to come by. Yet for all his talk of telling stories only he can tell, of imbuing every film with life experience, of “connecting,” before The Wrestler, all of Aronofsky’s films seemed a far cry from truth, his characters nearly impossible to understand as human beings. The issue, perhaps, is that his film making style is so present and so powerful in all his movies that it effectively commandeers the characters in them.

It’s impossible to watch his films without constantly acknowledging that you are doing so. It’s impossible to finish one without feeling like you’ve survived something. There’s a visceral quality to them, an in-your-face bleakness which at times concentrates and snowballs into moments of extreme, graphic violence.

“I just like when things freak out. I don’t know what it is. I’m a roller coaster fan, so the more you can scare the shit out of me, the better. One way you can scare people is by doing stuff that’s very disturbing, but I try to do it so that it has a reason. I don’t want to be one of those horror directors that’s disgusting just to be disgusting.” He speaks with his hands, and he pronounces it “hawrer.”

He’s talking about the scene in The Wrestler where Randy the Ram and a sadist opponent do battle in a ring ornamented in shards of glass, barbed wire and thumb tacks. The scene starts with the two wrestlers slapping each other in the face, back and forth, as hard as they can. Then it gets grisly: staple guns, hammers, tables and chairs, ladders and lots and lots of blood.

But Aronofsky could have been talking about the unsettling scene in Pi when a man becomes so fed up with his mental breakdowns that he applies an electric screwdriver to his scalp, spraying his brains all over the bathroom. Or he could have been referencing the harrowing montage in Requiem for a Dream, culminating in a blood-splattering amputation.

Aronofsky raises his hands in surrender — don’t sue me — and confesses that he never has an audience in mind when conceiving his projects, or even while directing them, attributing his ideas instead to the vagaries of inspiration. “I have no idea why I’m attracted to these stories, these images. It’s just what comes out. I’m not conscious of it.”

It’s Davis’s hope that whatever images and stories do come out from Aronofsky are able to “connect with the Hollywood community and the ticket-buying public, so that he wins access to studio budgets that would help him realize his visions even more fully.” Davis says that people need to see these films “in the theater” to send studios the right message about supporting real artists. He adds that though many people consider Requiem a huge hit, he can’t think of anyone other than himself who saw it before it came to DVD.

There’s a great deal of financial strife associated with making films Hollywood hasn’t fully embraced. Aronofsky even had to put a portion of his union salary into production costs for The Wrestler. “Every single financier in the world, except for the one who financed it, said no. And the one who did finance it didn’t give me enough money to make it.” Back at the James Hotel, Aronofsky inhales through his teeth and shakes his head. “That’s the life if you want to tell stories.”

From a critical perspective, the stories Aronofsky chooses to tell–and the way the he chooses to tell them — are unfortunately realities that are almost too real to be appreciated, conflicts that are either too ultra-niche or so impossibly abstruse that they’re nearly inaccessible. In Pi, an introverted mathematical virtuoso is flung about a black-and-white New York City guided by his black-and-white mind, trying to uncover a pattern in the stock market by “solving” pi. Requiem for a Dream pits a whole ensemble of downward spiraling addict/lunatics against themselves and the world. An immortal man, or the trapped, intractable mind of a mortal one, is the protagonist in The Fountain, a film where enormously complex themes like “love” and “death” are made small by its multidimensional scope.

But in The Wrestler, what comes out of the story is a miraculously, dauntingly perfect Mickey Rourke. As Randy the Ram, Rourke complements Aronofsky’s directorial style, and enhances it by trimming the flourish. He becomes not an object in an otherwise doomed Aronofsky landscape, but its quiet centerpiece, a one-trick pony whose tragic, heroic life becomes what viewers latch onto.

On the whole, it’s the way the stories are revealed that make them Aronofsky’s. It’s the razor-sharp cuts that make the pills in Requiem for a Dream villains. It’s the tumult of a mind projected onto a city in Pi that makes the narrative so compelling, the searing score which tears each image from the screen even as the brain itself is torn from its captor. It’s the colors and the textures of The Fountain and the film’s slow, constant ascent which eclipses the narrative and eventually absorbs it. It is Aronofsky’s bold, boundary-less film making that gives his pursuits a nobility beyond their adherence to reality. It is his imagination that merits him pardon and acclaim. Not his story-telling, to be frank, but his story-showing: the gift of a Visitor’s Pass into that mind of his, that crazy, candid, tireless, pumping genius.

So obviously its location wasn’t doing it any favors, was it? Poor little Café Mud, situated as it was just beyond the foot traffic of Maple Street’s commercial nexus and—sort of metaphorically—safety, has died.

Its death—again as something of a metaphor here—was the untimely result of health code violations filed by the city of Evanston in October. Now, we who are left to mourn Café Mud’s passing are probably doing so in the same way we visited it (if indeed we ever visited it at all). This is to say: not without a sense of irony.

Let’s agree that the name was probably ill-advised, at least from a business standpoint. I’m referring specifically to the image the name evokes (mud), and where that image ranks—quite low—on the list of things I generally prefer to be thinking about before I buy a cup of coffee.

In the tragically appropriate case of Mud, the name seems to have vaguely inspired its coffee drinks: grainy (dare I, chunky) concoctions brewed not with tap water, but rain. Industrial-rain-cloud-type rain. And they are coffee drinks mind you, as opposed to just coffee, which isn’t on the menu. On my first visit I settled for an Americano, feeling perhaps extra patriotic in the face of the Eastern European proprietor staring me down.

He kept his eye on me like you might keep an eye on a precocious and rather bothersome Bassett Hound who, as a rule, the moment you turn away, will dissect the kitchen garbage bag without prejudice. In this way he kept his eye on me while he pulled the levers which, with a chorus of fecal spurts, produced my beverage. He looked away only as I proffered my debit card. He then politely informed it (not me) that he would only accept cash.

So then there I was, sprinting southward on Maple in hot pursuit of an ATM. Once I found one and secured my cash, I jogged back to Mud, hale and rosy-cheeked. The Eastern European proprietor, upon receipt of said cash, pushed before me the Americano he had made several minutes prior and smiled.

Well, you understandably inquire, how warm was it?

Luke, I reply with zip.

On my second trip to Mud, I went to write. Brainstorm I guess would be more accurate. I kind of tip-toed inside after an admittedly ‘normal-hours’ excursion to After Hours and temporarily elected to forego a drink. Permit me to say that the atmosphere was really terrific. It felt good in there, or comfortable, for some reason. The urban-chic, brick interior handsomely complemented the seating options ranging from new-age table-and-chair combo to woven basket. The cushioned seats were billowing marshmallowy reservoirs of comfort.

And I would’ve accomplished quite a bit more if not for the band of bearded bespectacled board-gamers and a goofy-looking journalist in formfitting jeans profiling them. It seemed like every time I tried to write something down, I overheard another proclamation regarding the house rules for “Settlers of Catan.”

The last time I went there, I never made it inside. A woman appeared to be guarding the door when I approached. She shooed me away with an accent.

I thought you were open, was what I managed.

We will be, she assured me. Could be five minutes. Could be an hour.

Could be an hour? I had no choice but to once again consider the likelihood of torture-style mafia violence in the basement. It was about this time that I hypothesized that Café Mud was merely a front for the nucleus of some Chicago-based Eastern European cockfighting ring or something.

I walked by Mud one last time before Christmas break. A friend had told me about the Yellow Sign he saw plastered on the front door and encouraged me to see for myself. Donned in black, armed with Kleenex, I anguished and lamented in private and then proceeded devoutly down Maple to pay my respects.