Alec Mouhibian

Welcome to The Lucky Frown, a storage room of observations, insight, and criticism — where ideas are delivered to the dust, with the hope that they might one day be recovered and found useful.

Lucky Frown. The noun is Alec’s. The adjective is mine. I suppose no one will ever know what it means. I certainly don’t know what it looks like, but I’ve felt it gather on my face.

For me, the lucky frown is born at night, in the twilight between the conscious and the subconscious, when words chase each other on my page, trying to find their inevitable sequence. It does not seem inevitable at the time, for the universe is sill infinite and white on my page. Inspiration hits like lightning and withdraws, while the Muse teases from the horizon, as if to announce an ancient challenge. Now, from sheer necessity, ideas seek bodies in words that don’t quite fit. They’re replaced, then rewritten, then erased again. They evolve and devolve and mutate and cannibalize and resurrect until — by some miracle of desire and necessity — the lightning is captured, the Muse ropes its master into the horizon, and the writer sees before him the Sentence as it was always meant to be.

A cynic he might be, but the author knows that he has ushered an idea to its destiny and, at least for that moment, given it a soul. If his words could come to life in that moment and watch “with an auspicious and dropping eye” the movements of their creator’s face, they would see and recognize, with unmistakable cetainty, the self-denying expression of the author’s final contentment… The Lucky Frown.