With much appreciation for the pithiness of the Rake

Long overdue (my spare time held hostage by that infernal cartel of Netflix and The Wire), a quick thought on Tree of Smoke:

I had been looking forward to the book since last summer, when the New Yorker gave us an excerpt that included a couple of Phoenix scenes. Santa left all 600-odd pages in my stocking, and I read it on the bus last month.

A book that will last? Who knows–probably not. I followed it with Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep, a beautiful novel, probably impossible to write in any other era, that felt like one from which writers can really learn their craft–especially in terms of how language and point of view work together. I’m not sure Johnson has done something like that. More on Roth later, maybe.

But Johnson’s book is beautiful in its own right, and for exactly the reasons that John Jeremiah Sullivan identifies in Harper’s. When I think of the language in Tree of Smoke, I want to apply all kinds of adjectives that would fit an athlete, or, I don’t know, Whitman: muscular, audacious, flexible, ingenious, exhilarating, living. Sullivan puts it like this:

Again, “job of labor”? Is that even good idiom? I’ve looked some and failed to turn up even so much as a localism in East Anglia. I’ve heard “job of work,” which is quaint and pleonastic enough. But as so often, it’s the tinge of self-conscious, controlled manner in Johnson’s writing that elevates all of its energy and noticing into something elegaic.

Which is to say, B.R. Myers really does everyone a disservice with his review in the Atlantic. Pretty brazen to admit up front that he hasn’t read any other Denis Johnson. Even more brazen, if that’s in fact the case, to accept an assignment to write the review in the first place. Much of the reason for reviewing is to steer readers’ ruminations about a book, or so I think. You can’t accomplish that by offering counterarguments to the blurbs on the dust jacket and picking out passages you think are clunky, especially if, as Sullivan recognizes, it turns out that there’s really something behind that clunkiness.

(For a more energetic rejoinder to Mr. Myers, see this post by the Rake. Skip down to the final sentence if you don’t have a lot of time.)

“We can’t wait to read his book. We will buy his book.”

It’s been a backwards-looking couple of days. Not in a bad way, I should add.

The other night, we took some out-of-town friends to dinner in downtown Tempe, which meant, ipso facto, regaling them with tales of bulldozed establishments from yesteryear–Beeloes, Long Wong’s, the old sites of Changing Hands and Caffe Boa. We ended up at the new Caffe Boa. Much bigger restaurant, good food, so-so service, prices a lot higher than they used to be. But enough of the restaurant review…

Sitting at a table a few feet away from us were Alberto Ríos and an extra-shaggy Jay Boyer, having dinner with somebody I didn’t recognize–maybe a candidate for an open position at the Piper Center.

I didn’t go over and bother them; it was pleasure enough just to see them there, kind of a reminder of what it felt like to get my toes wet in writing, back in the day. Since moving back into the neighborhood, I hadn’t really thought of how good Tempe and ASU had been to me in that respect.

I told a couple of Tito and Boyer stories over dinner that night–more interesting to me, I think, than my companions. I never studied with Tito, just watched him from the back of the room, but the way Boyer taught, and what he taught, had a huge impact on me. His lectures on Twain and Mailer and Kesey were amazing, and I still have the response he wrote to my final paper.

One fragment of memory that floated back from Boyer’s class was a string of students lined up to see him at the end of a lecture, everyone a little desperate (it must have been late November, with papers coming due), Boyer backing out the door with the excuse, “I just can’t stay–I have to meet Mr. Legendre right now to talk about his novel.”

That would be Thomas Legendre, then an MFA candidate, previously my freshman comp teacher. I looked him up yesterday, and discovered that he’s made it: his first novel, The Burning, came out in ‘06, to terrific reviews. It was great to see–I remember thinking, even in my first semester of college, and without him mentioning that he was in the MFA program, the guy seems like A Writer. He was a good teacher, too; I taught a few of his lessons ten years later in my own comp classes.

And from that recollection of Monsieur Legendre I drifted to another memory–talking a couple of years later with Chris Pexa about how good the course had been, better than most upper-division offerings in the department. We had been in it together, but hadn’t really gotten to know each other–later, he shared some of his poetry with me, I tried to keep up with him in a philosophy class, and we became friends. After we graduated, I saw him once, in 1999 outside the ballpark at the end of the New Times 10K, but we haven’t crossed paths since.

I looked Chris up today, and came upon this wonderful news: he’s a recipient of an ‘08 Arizona Commission on the Arts grant, to work on a book of prose poems, A Throne of Horses. It looks like it will be, as kids used to say, wicked. Here’s what the panel said:

Pexa’s prose poems are slyly sophisticated without being presumptuous. It seems to us that he writes out of a Whitman-like trance—a wholly new voice in contemporary poetry. We can’t wait to read his book. We will buy his book.

Congratulations, Chris. And thanks for (unwittingly) helping to welcome me back to the Valley.

Separated at birth

From an investigative-journalism perspective, I’m sort of disappointed that neither Janet Maslin nor Charlie Gibson has teased out the implications of this politicoliterary mystery:

The weird thing is, their voices are even more similar. Here’s Dean, talking about how he will swoop in and become the Democratic nominee. And here’s Carlson talking about some book called Ron Carlson Writes a Story, on which he is apparently some kind of authority.

Check out the way they say hello. (On the Carlson interview, it’s at 3:41.) It’s eerie.

Two questions for the press to ask:

• As a ski bum in Colorado during Vietnam, did Dean ever conduct cross-border forays into Carlson’s home state of Utah?
• As a teacher at swanky Hotchkiss, did Carlson ever surreptitiously drive north to Vermont and seek medical attention (perhaps a blood transfusion) from Dr. Dean?

Shepard and the Twenty Grand

Now there’s a good title for a story–Kinda calls up memories of “The Killers,” doesn’t it?

But the point is: National Book Award finalist Jim Shepard’s the winner of The Story Prize for the collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway. They had a thing to announce it last night at the New School in NYC. They gave him $20K in cash.

Truth be told, I knew nada about The Story Prize before seeing the press release. But if George Saunders and Rick Bass were finalists last year, and Mary Gordon won it, I trust the judges.

(Speaking of Bass, I’ve got to say he looks suspiciously erudite in a suit. Like Robert Reich’s bald brother, maybe. Somebody get that man a fleece jacket and a hound dog… )

If you don’t want to trust the judges and want a taste of Shepard for yourself, give “Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay” a try, from Ploughshares last year. It’s really, really good.

Ha again.

Ha.

Houseguests

The Republic ran a nice article over the weekend about the writers who have been given rooms of their own at the Citlaltépetl Refuge House in Mexico City. Here’s the opening of Chris Hawley’s piece:

When the paramilitaries burst through his door, beat him and pointed a Kalashnikov rifle at his chest, poet Xhevdet Bajraj knew it was time to get as far from Kosovo as possible.

It was 1999, NATO bombs were falling on the province, and Serbian troops were fighting pitched battles with Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian guerrillas. Serbian gunmen were torching homes and locking up anyone who might be perceived as a leader — even semifamous poets. Bajraj joined the thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring Albania.

Then came a strange invitation from a most unlikely place. Mexico City had just opened a “safe house” as a refuge for a persecuted writer. Bajraj and his family were welcome to live there, city officials told him.

Why so generous? The local director of cultural relations:

“We have a history of taking in these kinds of people, and they have enriched us as a city.”

My first thought: Could there be a smarter move for Phoenix than replicating this? Vegas, Pittsburgh, and Ithica have their own iterations. The payoff is pretty obvious:

For some, the refuge becomes a steppingstone. Egyptian Safaa Fathy, a writer and filmmaker, now teaches at Cornell University. Algerian Yasmina Khadra has become a successful novelist and lives in France. Diop is taking a job at Rutgers University in September.

Then I scrolled down to the initial page of comments on the story:

The Repugnant aids and abets (–verb (used with object), a·bet·ted, a·bet·ting. to encourage, support, or countenance by aid or approval, usually in wrongdoing) the illegal insurgents.

Our country and our way of life is under attack by illegal insurgents and the Repugnant helps them by advertising insurgent support groups, and sob stories.

and

hey just like to be a refuge for these “socialist/liberal” writers who have been trouble-makers in other countries…they can tutor the MEXICANS on how to screw the American’s even more!

The educated want to stir enough trouble in Mexico to send all of the illiterates here…and then our stupid legal system will protect them.

You talk about protection of CIVIL RIGHTS…HOW ABOUT THE ‘RICKIN’ CITIZENS OF THIS COUNTRY…HAVING SOME PROTECTIONS!

Ay de mi. Some work to do in this neighborhood.

A final word

Just about everywhere I look today, there’s excited chatter about what Mr. Obama accomplished in Iowa. And understandably so–whatever your stripes, it was arresting to witness.

Suspicious of your own euphoria? Need something to bring you back to earth? Try this.

It’s the final post from Andy Olmsted, a blogger for the Rocky Mountain News and an Army major who was six months into a tour in Iraq. Yesterday he died in an ambush.

Aspirations

Please believe me… I’d rather not begin the year by calling attention to the most worstestly bad paragraph I’ve read in the last 37 years. I really do prefer discussion of plot and character and structure to the identification of individual sloppy sentences.

But I almost don’t have a choice–several days after its publication, I can’t get this clunker out of my head:

It can work or backfire or just disappear, like a bloody drop in a bucket. Pakistan will be unstable in the coming days, as it has been in the past and will be again. Who can say if Bhutto’s slaying is the pinball that leads to destruction, the painful agent of positive change, or just a killing, like most, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing more than murderous nihilism?

If it weren’t an article ostensibly serving to provide historical context for an assassination with serious political repercussions, I’d have to assume the writer were joking. I mean, I’ve mixed a few metaphors in my day, but that’s ridiculous. And it doesn’t really improve. The rest of the article is here.

The sad part, I guess, is that it’s not an article from the Daily Courier. It’s from the Post.

Now, I’m as annoyed as the next guy by Dana Milbank’s dumb jokes and David Broder’s always-wrong predictions and Linton Weeks’s peculiar hostility to the people over at PEN/Faulkner. But this is also the home of so many amazing writers: Robin Givhan and Stephen Hunter and Michael Wilbon and Tom Ricks and Walter Pincus, for starters. Shouldn’t something rub off? Have all the editors taken early retirement?

So. As 2008 gets underway, let us agree to try a little harder. Maybe take a time out, go back, and re-read what Zadie had to say? She’s speaking to the novelist and the fiction reader, mainly, but I’m thinking it works for the Style-section writer, too.

Everybody Loves Ray

February 1, 1979

I’m going to Mardi Gras with Tess; and the Fords are coming down in March for spring break and we’re going into Mexico by train for a week. . . . I’m happy, and I’m sober. It’s aces right now, Gordon. I know better than anyone a fellow is never out of the woods, but right now it’s aces, and I’m enjoying it.

Yup, it’s the New Yorker’s holiday present to us, the Winter Fiction Issue, gloriously adorned with a Raymond Carver portfolio.

I haven’t received my hard copy yet, but on their site they have an n+1 edition of the feature. Here’s what you get for your $4.95: the before-editing version of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” with its original, almost-as-good title, “Beginners”; a version of the story showing Gordon Lish’s edits, a selection of Ray’s letters to Lish; a little explanation of their relationship; and some Ray and Tess photos.

The whole thing is downright inspiring. Makes one want to write, or at least go rent Short Cuts and watch Lyle Lovett play a creepy baker.

Daddy dearest

After the Styron essay I noted yesterday, the very next thing I read was a Philip Schultz poem from last spring’s Ploughshares. Immediately following, I scanned the article on Obama’s father in the Post the other day.

As the altogether parentless Charlie Brown would say, Good grief! Does anybody have a pop who wasn’t a villian? It makes you think Richard Rohr was a pretty shrewd businessman to get those man camps off the ground.

The Schultz (P Schultz, not C Schulz) piece is, like the one I noted in August, awesome work:

Specimen

I turned sixty in Paris last year.
We stayed at the Lutetia,
where the Gestapo headquartered
during the war, my wife, two boys, and me,
and several old Vietnamese ladies
carrying poodles with diamond collars.

Once my father caught a man
stealing cigarettes out of one
of his vending machines.
He didn’t stop choking him
until the pool hall stunk of excrement,
and the body dropped to the floor
like a judgment.

When I was last in Paris,
I was dirt-poor, hiding
from the Vietnam War.
One night, in an old church,
I considered taking my life.
I didn’t know how to be so young
and not belong anywhere, stuck
among so many perplexing melodies.

I loved the low white buildings,
the ingratiating colors, the ancient light.
We couldn’t afford such luxury.
It was a matter of pride.
My father died bankrupt one week
before his sixtieth birthday.
I didn’t expect to have a family;
I didn’t expect happiness.

At the Lutetia everyone
dressed themselves like specimens
they’d loved all their lives.
Everyone floated down
red velvet hallways
like scintillating music
you hear only once or twice.

Driving home, my father said,
“Let anyone steal from you
and you’re not fit to live.”
I sat there, sliced by traffic lights,
not belonging to what he said.
I belonged to a scintillating
and perplexing music
I didn’t expect to hear.

I’m Goin’ Down

There’s only a little to take away, I’m sorry to report, from “Reading My Father,” a bit o’ memoir by Alexandra Styron, in last week’s New Yorker.

The interesting segments concern her childhood, when she spied on Sinatra taking a shower, nightly opened wine bottles for Good Old Dad, and at most other times sought merely to deflect his attention and his rages.

Less effective is the more-prominent narrative of her adult effort to grapple with her father’s life, in part by picking up Sophie’s Choice for the first time. The Brooklyn of the novel, she discovered, was her Brooklyn, too.

That’s about as far as she takes it. The description of Bill’s second, deadly bout with depression is somewhat moving, largely because he had seemed to have escaped, had emerged from the first struggle with some remainder of his mind and soul; she does a decent job of evoking the terrible capriciousness of depression. In the end, though, I wanted more; not to be too callous, but I’ve felt deeper emotion listening to a good Springsteen song.

(One plus: Alexandra’s narrative provides a good coda to the interview with Bill below, conducted by the ever-irritating Charlie Rose.)

~ 

On a more positive note, a reward one gets for looking at the Styron piece–plopped in on page 54 are sixteen very fine lines by the plainspoken, sometimes-too-smug Charles Simic:

To Boredom

I’m the child of your rainy Sundays.
I watched time crawl
Over the ceiling
Like a wounded fly.

A day would last forever,
Making pellets of bread,
Waiting for a branch
On a bare tree to move.

The silence would deepen,
The sky would darken,
As Grandmother knitted
With a ball of black yarn.

I know Heaven’s like that.
In eternity’s classrooms,
The angels sit like bored children
With their heads bowed.

Odd how well it complements the Styron essay…

ho ho HO!

What are you going to do, not participate in this baffling and irresistable craze?

Knock it off.

Oh, this is good.

To Mason w/love

Thanks, Mason blog, for sending some visitors on The Internets this way.

The Mason blog people are more or less a subset of the Phoebe people. For those who don’t know Phoebe, it’s a literary journal at GMU that publishes poems about discontinued characters from The Munsters.

(Not really. But wouldn’t it be great?)

The book had something to do with, well, I don’t know…

“So, what do you write?”

Simple question, but I haven’t had a good cocktail-party answer at the ready until now.

James Fallows, tired of writing about the NIE and Tommy Lee Jones, had a post today about genre fiction and how he distinguishes the good from the bad. It’s a simple test: Do you remember something from the novel–a character, a scene, a world–later? Fallows is generous; if something from the book sticks in his head for a month, that’s a pretty good book.

That makes sense to me, even if it’s awfully subjective. Overall, I can’t think of a better cross-cutting approach. It works for stories, too, though there I’m betting it’s individual scenes that we’d say we remember.

“So, what do you write?”

“I write fiction I hope you’ll remember.”

Holiday cocktail parties, here I come… (Now I just need to start writing again.)

2,500 miles

A couple of weeks ago, I wormed my way into a dinner with Anna Quindlen, who was in town for a few days of lectures and conversations over at ASU. I’m not sure exactly what I expected, but I found her surprisingly down-to-earth and eager to hear from everyone at the table. And she had some interesting things to say, both about working as a journalist and working as novelist.

Perhaps because Quindlen began her career as a journalist–where stories are chopped, copy editors write the headlines, editors kill pieces for no particular reason–she seemed to lack the usual authorial protectiveness/defensiveness about her work. I heard in her responses an approach to both journalism and fiction that was something like: get the words on the page as best you can, let the editors do what they must, move on to the next project, and don’t waste time looking over your shoulder. The sense I got was that writing might be her life’s work, but her writing wasn’t her life. Pretty refreshing.

And yet for all that, it isn’t her latest Newsweek column that I’m running around telling people to read this week. What I want you to go find is the latest piece by a writer about as far from Quindlen as you can get. The 2,500 miles from Tucson to New York is only the beginning.

What you need to dig up is the current issue of Arizona Highways, and the article you’re looking for is “Coming to Arizona,” by Charles Bowden. It’s perfect. In a thousand words, he jams together the despair of his youth in academia, the glorious danger of the desert in June, the exhilaration of that plunge down I-17 from Flagstaff from Phoenix. (Did you know the freeway could be exhilarating? In this essay it is. Is there a better writer you’ve probably never heard of? Doubtful.)

It’s true, Bowden isn’t for everyone. Anna Quindlen, I’d guess, wouldn’t go hiking with the guy. There’s a little Mailer in his work, both the ego and what could come across as sexism, though I’d hope people wouldn’t read it as misogyny. If you can scrape away those things–and, actually, they’re mostly absent from the Highways essay–what you discover beneath are the ingredients of poetry and life: velocity, tequila, birdseed, humor, creosote, loneliness, gasoline.

It’s hard to explain without showing you the man’s work up close. (Helps to hear his voice, too, 100% gravel.) Unfortunately, Arizona Highways is hopelessly mismanaged and has hardly any Web presence. So you’ll have to trust me on that one. Or you can extrapolate from something like what I’ve excerpted below. It’s a tiny bit of an “Expedition Journal” Bowden wrote and posted on a site he and a few friends glued together as an argument for a new, giant bi-national park in southern Arizona-northern Mexico.

Last night, I was sprawled out on the ground. The lightning to the east and south had died down. The voices of Team Tontos had stilled. All lights were extinguished. It was after midnight, and the stars hung low and slapped against my head when I sat up.

Silence. Just the humming of the planets. Not a light in the distance, no glow on the horizon from some distant city. Black night, white star, silence. It was closer then, this thing. It was big and it was near. And we all knew it, whether asleep or awake.

What we want, we cannot quite say…but with God as my witness, this is the place to find it.

Here’s a little more:

I get up at dawn at our camp slapped against the Tuserals. Fresh badger holes dot the cholla colony; huge rat middens clot the hillside. We’re maybe six miles from water — my badger neighbor is living off blood.

The sun hits ninety by nine a.m. A green and white chopper lands, and the Border Patrol pilot says he found a group of seven the day before with two gallons of water for all. Then there was that dead man in his twenties sprawled in the Mohawks only three hundred yards from water. Routes, numbers, the heat, people going down…I can smell the pain, feel the stab in the muscle, the shredding of the mind until the only thing you know is that you no longer know. They are out there, moving north: men, women, children, fat guts, lean guts. Dead guts. The traditional road of the devil ran east to west. The new road to hell goes north through the flames to El Norte. I sip a can of ice cold V-8 and hear them clawing toward a little share of my world.

A desert bighorn can get moisture from the dew of plants, run a body temperature of 107 F. I can’t. They — those shadows chasing mirages — can’t. I clutch my cold can of V-8. They clutch their dreams, rasping sounds coming from their throats.

Doesn’t take much to get the idea.

I’ll admit, some of my enthusiasm is connected to the gradual Southwest re-education I’m undergoing. As I settle back into Phoenix, I’m especially hungry for writing about this place. (For instance, finding the section of Tree of Smoke set here was thrilling.) I’m not so hungry that I’ll pick up a Tony Hillerman novel, but just about. The stuff Bowden does–I think that’s what I’m looking for, as a reader and a writer, back here in the desert.

RIP, or whatever comes next

Gotta say something about Norman Mailer, I guess.

One of the more infuriating experiences at the beginning of my MFA program was a nonfiction course that included a series of student presentations on the broader oeuvres of the writers we were studying. More often than not, as with my little talk on the deceptively straightforward E.B. White, we got it wrong. First, we weren’t seasoned critics. Second, we weren’t seasoned readers. Except for one crazy guy named John, who I think had read more than the rest of the class combined, none of us were really qualified to talk in a useful way about a writer–certainly not for 45 minutes.

The worst offense came during the Mailer presentation. The presenter was almost comically horrified by everything about the man.

Except, of course, it wasn’t really the man that was offending her. It was the persona he cultivated on the page and in the papers. They were different, even if intertwined. Writers, critics, readers–we should all know that. (Half the fun of The Armies of the Night is Mailer playing with the difference.)

Anyway, it’s hardly worth arguing about. Heaven knows, he could be a nut case and an egomaniac and a wife-stabbing criminal. But, inconveniently he wasn’t just that. He was also wickedly smart, prodigiously insightful as a critic, and profanely funny.

And I think many writers would say he was a kind man. See Salon’s assembly of remembrances, especially the one from Edward Abbey, and the one from Andre Dubus. (For equal time, preceding Dubus is Diana Trilling’s recollection of his unprintable first words to her.) The Dubus essay, by the way, is one of my all-time favorites. Absolutely brilliant writing in its own right.

As usual, the Paris Review has a great memorial page, including PDFs of his two PR interviews.

Dear Reader

It’s been about 10 months since I gave The Google any props, and they’ve clearly been hurting for attention over that span. So, a few words:

At a friend’s suggestion, I was poking around on Goodreads, a peculiar little site I don’t think will take off. Essentially, it offers amateur-hour book reviews, with some social networking. You write some reviews, you read your the reviews by your “friends,” you comment on your friends’ reviews. Overall? Enh.

Still, a book my friend mentioned on the site seemed interesting, and–demonstrating Goodreads’s #1 stumbling block–I Googled said book, which yielded this. Organize the world’s information, indeed.

Book Search doesn’t always provide useful information. (I don’t really care to see a map noting all the locales Chuck Klosterman mentions in the Cocoa Puffs book.) But sometimes what they offer is just what you’d want, and they make it easy to follow up with a secondary search. And they present digitized, sans-copyrighted works elegantly. And the experience of skimming an author’s oeuvre, like this, is kinda nice–clean, informative, straightforward.

The interface is sometimes screwy: Try searching for Martin Amis from within Book Search, for example, and if you’ve clicked on “full view” or even “limited view,” you get more unrelated hits than you’d expect. Copyright issues, I guess.

But even with the bugs, it’s not hard to get a sense of where they want to take this. And, by all appearances, it’s not evil.

More bad news re. productivity

This is not good.

Effective tonight, the Times is eliminating its TimesSelect (i.e., pay us $7.95 a month) service. Now we can all read as much Frank Rich and Thomas Friedman as we want.

Really, that’s not an exaggeration: they’re making the archives from the past 20 years free, too.

Curses. Now I’ll never get around to reading Swann’s Way and the next Britney biography…