Twisted Tales from Texas

Review: Daniel Chacón. The Last Philosopher in Texas: Fictions and Superstitions. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2024. ISBN: 978-1-55885-993-7

Michael Sedano

Daniel Chacón's The Last Philosopher in Texas (link) gives every writer permission to write whatever the heck springs to mind out of one's imagination, organize their writerly scribbles into a mass, and make a book out of them. There's one proviso: stuff has to be good reading. It helps if you have a febrile imagination and the ability to find a portal where ideas turn themselves into words on a page.  

Good reading takes good writing, which Chacón lavishes upon his readers in a sweet set of sentiments subtitled "Fictions and Superstitions". The Last Philosopher in Texas offers readers Fictions, an amalgam of one-pagers of crystallized events and moments, mixed with longer form writing of perplexities, and the short paragraphs called Superstitions. 

 

Readers will call the collection fun, and while that's enough, the collection's ethos grows out of a world of strained social relationships, people falling in and out of love and lust, couples breaking up, last chances, and broken memories. 

 

Individual personae might be male or female, straight or gay. They're raza middle-class tipos, college graduates, they come from and are of familia, and they're fitting into the world of work and love and marriage.

 

There's not a happy person in the book. Chacon's characters are caught in circumstances, some of their own doing.  

 

There's magic, too, that directs the trajectories of characters' actions, a magic that's like a portal into a different dimension, or where  broken or false memories leave a character dumbfounded with what should have happened but doesn't. Or does.

 

There's no single good reason to pick up Last Philosopher, other than having fun. Take a typical Chacon story, "Wonder Bread". It's a True story, says the introduction, pulling your leg. A fastidious fellow cuts a bologna sandwich with a sharp knife. A divagation briefly explains why he's using a sharp knife. Fellow adjusts cheap eyeglasses. A divagation and we learn why cheap eyeglasses. Holding the knife, our hero reaches for the slipping eyeglasses and blinds one eye with the pointed knife. Since the story's in the Fresno sticks there's a delay getting medical help. Jump in time now the hero's ashamed of the scar and eyepatch. Jump back in time to when he returns from the hospital. The sandwich has disappeared.

 

That's the story and it's true.

 

My favorite fiction is the ingenious "Authentic Mexican Food." It's not about cooking but shifting perspectives and simultaneous identities. A professional woman chooses a touristy place to eat, notices the women dressed in folklorico blouses making tortillas in the window. The woman goes into a dream of scholarly achievement while imagining herself a tortillera dressed in folklorico traje. The story ends with the point of view of a tortilla-maker as we realize the academic has switched identities and takes her place in a window making tortillas.

 

Another character imagines a girlfriend from más antes. He runs into her on a deserted block during the pandemic. He wants to catch up on all those years and the woman goes "huh?" It's not that she shares no memory with the fellow, it's that his memories are, to her, totally false and he either imagined what the woman denies, or he's gone through a portal into a different dimension where those thoughts are irrelevant.

 

The title fiction is the book's final story, and the most "finished" fiction in the collection. The story also highlights a singular flaw that mucks up the lives of many characters, alcohol. A fellow with a BA in Philosophy takes a job flipping burgers in a woebegone Texas waystation between here and there. 

 

He's a local celebrity, "the philosopher," people call him. The Philosopher walks into a bar... is how many a joke starts. In this story the philosopher walks into the bar to the loud greetings of "here's the philosopher!" and he talks philosphy with these rural Texans, earning him free drinks. So he drinks them. And he drinks some more. He fries his brain. The story wraps with the philosopher confessing his love for a beautiful homeless vato and the two of them go off into the sunset to live happily ever quien sabe.

 

No one is going to accuse Daniel Chacon of writing happily perverse stuff, not until they've read all the happily perverse stuff that makes up The Last Philosopher in Texas. Readers should be concerned for these people--they are not well off nor happy--but the writer sloughs off the care and woe behind humor, trickery, and the reader's enthusiastic curiosity to see what's going to happen in the next fiction or superstition.