Category Archives: Authors

On Jim Daniels and Writing

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, Pooms/Poetry, Reviews

Jim Daniels’s poetry was recommended to me about a decade ago, but I’ve only just now gotten around to reading it. This is one of the nasty side effects of getting an advanced degree in literature; you become not only one kind of writer, but one kind of reader. Or, rather, you become a reader reading to write academic criticism, not to produce (or really even enjoy) art. You’re told you must present at conferences and roundtables (some of the least useful exercises known to man) simply because you must. You’re also encouraged to publish tortured and genuflective articles no one will read in outlets no one has heard of. And be very, very careful about who you tell that you’d rather write poetry than play video games. Trust me.

But now I’m done with all of that, and I’m once again, to borrow a phrase from a future colleague, Mike Bunn, “reading like a writer.” Jim Daniels’s Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2003) is the kind of book of poetry that 21-year-old me would have gone nuts over, and I can see why the person who recommended it then did so. Like a lot of creative writing students at a certain extremely crunchy Northern California university, I was obsessed with the working class narratives of Raymond Carver, Philip Levine, and Richard Hugo. The poems I was turning out under their influence weren’t metrical, didn’t rhyme, and told vague stories about love lost (I was in a happy relationship), hard work (I had worked shitty jobs, but not in factories), and bars (these I knew). The stuff I read was awesome, the stuff I wrote wasn’t. Jim Daniels’s work is in the tradition of the poets I admired then and continue to admire today, but reading his poetry ten years later makes me realize that the things that attract us to good writing at various stages in our lives (particularly in youth) aren’t necessarily what actually makes the writing good.

If you would have asked me then why Carver, Levine, and Hugo appealed to me, I probably would have said something about narrative and mood. And indeed, these are important elements of all poems I tend to enjoy. Poetry that lacks any sort of narrative arc bores the shit out of me, but then again I think that William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” is a dripping with narrative (the word “red” is the denouement). So, like a lot of things then, what constitutes a narrative is subjective. What reading Jim Daniels now reveals is that I was and am drawn to poetry that uses narrative in a distinct way: to work through but never resolve the frustration that comes from knowing that our interpretations of and reactions to joy and sorrow are both unique to the point of being painfully inexpressible (something Joan Didion calls “the burden of ‘home’”) and also really, really generic.

In one of the many portraits in Show and Tell, Daniels writes of “Crazy Eddy,” a “drunk/garbage man with a bad temper,”:

We didn’t know then
he picked up trash for a living
and drank twelve beers a night.
Maybe all he wanted was a green lawn
and a peaceful drunk.

The simplicity of both the phrasing and the sentiment here makes the critique all the more potent: we don’t know much about what others desire, what motivates them, and the assumptions we make usually lead us further from understanding. I can’t tell you how many times I have tried to express this idea in verse only to miss it, usually by a lot. Or take these couplets from “Shedding the Vestments”:

I was inside her for the first time
when her parents pulled up the driveway.

Her father’s brain was the size of a small stone
dug up by an idiot pig. He greeted me cordially.

This is one way to react to this event, and one particularly common to young men: smugness. However, there’s another reaction that’s equally plausible: pants-shitting panic. By giving us one possibility in such a dense couplet, the poem almost forces us to imagine its inverse as well, thus making the quality of the speaker’s youthful hubris even more stunning. As you might be able to imagine, this doesn’t bode well for the speaker, and when it all falls apart and the girl gets impregnated by someone else, the final line of the poem (“go to hell”) leaves us understanding how smugness and terror can both lead us to loneliness.

There are other great poems in Daniels’s collection, including “Time, Temperature,” which is about how the racial animus of a community can infect even people who consciously try to place themselves above it. Fittingly, this poem is dedicated to James Baldwin, and it is easily the most ambitious and cinematic in the collection. As with any book of poetry though, there are some duds in here. I am not a huge fan of the “[Insert Color] Jesus” poems, or the meandering “Niagra Falls,” as these start to veer into the realm of bad impressionistic art—all impressions, no firm connections or boundaries to give them even a loose shape. But duds aside, Show and Tell is well worth your time. Personally, I am happy to have more of that to devote to reading like a writer again.

In Praise of Novellas (Especially Ones by Denis Johnson)

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations

In the introduction to his story collection Skeleton Crew (1985), Stephen King remarks that “Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair” (a few lines later he amends it to “an affair or a marriage”), while “a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”

A novella would seem to land somewhere in between, the equivalent of that dude you spent the weekend with at that cool music festival out in the desert, or of a summer-camp romance, or–if the book isn’t good–of an ill-advised fling with a close friend. I especially like it when novelists who are known for writing huge books flip the script on us and bring out something much trimmer. For example, there’s Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day; Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; and Dickens’s Hard Times (short for him, anyway). On the nonfiction side, there is William Styron’s Darkness Visible.

Denis Johnson has written more than one solid short novel–The Name of the World (2000) and Nobody Move (2009) are both fantastic–but the bulk of his popular rep is based on 2007’s Tree of Smoke, the Vietnam War behemoth that won a National Book Award. Literate people know it even if they haven’t read it. There’s also his hugely underrated NorCal narco-Gothic thriller, Already Dead (1998), which a lot of lazy critics griped was overwritten and too slow. (It isn’t either.)

In 2002 he published Train Dreams in The Paris Review, but the narrative wasn’t released as an independent book until a couple of years ago; a slim little thing that will fit in your coat pocket, it weighs in at 116 pages. You can read it during a cross-country flight. That’s what I did. No big deal, brah. Guess I’m just a reader.

Image

Set in the American West (mainly Washington, Idaho, and Montana) during the first half of the twentieth century, the book’s central character is Robert Grainier, a laborer. Nothing much happens to him: he doesn’t invent anything or kill somebody or write a famous book. Grainier works a lot of rough jobs, gets married, gets widowed, works more jobs, and makes it into his eighties, dying alone in his cabin. He never even gets drunk or shoots a gun (strange, given where and when he lives), though he does see Elvis’s touring train once.

But Johnson’s gorgeous narration (a sustained brew of narrative-driven realism, Gothic tall-tale, and dilatory, lush, at times surreal prose poetry) underscores the astonishing density of an ordinary life, the kind that most of us have, whatever era we happen to inhabit. Here is Robert as a logger in northwest Washington around 1920:

He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him. . . . Cut off from anything else that might trouble them, the gang, numbering sometimes more than forty and never fewer than thirty-five men, fought the forest from sunrise until suppertime, felling and bucking the giant spruce into pieces of a barely manageable size, accomplishing labors, Grainier sometimes thought, tantamount to the pyramids, changing the face of the mountainsides, talking little, shouting their communications, living with the sticky feel of pitch in their beards, sweat washing the dust off their long johns and caking it in the creases of their necks and joints, the odor of pitch so thick it abraded their throats and stung their eyes, and even overlaid the stink of beasts and manure. At day’s end the gang slept nearly where they fell.

Just look at that rhythm. After the switchbacks of a multi-clause, carefully unspooled, image-heavy sentence comes a short one rendered even crisper by Johnson’s decision not to use a comma after the introductory phrase “At day’s end.”

This being a story with a third-person narrator, the usual question arises of where the main character’s cognition stops and the author’s discourse begins, but regardless of where you think the border zone is, Robert is an observant, sensitive man, alive to the shocks of his own life.

Johnson’s mystery narrator also relishes subsidiary characters. This is how the dynamite handler in the logging camp dies:

It looked certain that Arn Peeples would exit this world in a puff of smoke with a monstrous noise, but he went out quite differently, hit across the back of his head by a dead branch falling off a tall larch–the kind of snag called a ‘widowmaker’ with just this kind of misfortune in mind. The blow knocked him silly, but he soon came around and seemed fine, complaining only that his spine felt ‘”knotty amongst the knuckles” and “I want to walk suchways–crooked.” He had a number of dizzy spells and grew dreamy and forgetful over the course of the next few days, lay up all day Sunday racked with chills and fever, and on Monday morning was found in his bed deceased, with the covers up under his chin and “such a sight of comfort,” as the captain said, “that you’d just as soon not disturb him–just lower him down into a great long wide grave, bed and all.”

The prose is always like that, swinging between the straightforward (“deceased”) and the disorienting (“knotty amongst the knuckles”!). In short, Train Dreams is incredible. You can read it over a weekend. And it costs about $5 on Amazon. You can thank TGR later.

Falling Off

Posted on by under Authors, Other Critics

If you’re a writer or the kind of reader who doesn’t confine yourself to Dan Brown and Harry Potter, you probably believe that brilliance eventually triumphs: that even if a writer’s work goes out of print during his or her lifetime (e.g., Faulkner until the late 1940s), the obscurity isn’t permanent. Taste changes, after all.

But even if we leave aside talent that never got a chance to write in the first place (e.g., Virginia Woolf’s famous imaginary example, in A Room of One’s Own, of Shakespeare’s sister), is this actually true?

In a great essay published in the Boston Review in 1999, Stewart O’Nan (noice name) uses the American novelist Richard Yates to argue that it isn’t, at least not all of the time. Ironically, this piece helped revitalize Yates’s literary-historical fortunes. In the twenty-first century he has gotten reprints, a first-rate biography, a long essay in The New Yorker (unfortunately it’s by the staggeringly dull James Wood), and a Leo DiCaprio vehicle. Good on him. (That said, he’ll always be the Stone Temple Pilots to John Cheever’s Nirvana. And I like STP–but they aren’t Nirvana.)

But given the decline of reading among Americans (and lots of other people), you could say that every great writer is doomed to oblivion. Eh? Eh?

Saturday Links

Posted on by under Authors, guides and nudges, mainly rap music, sports

It’s Saturday and the weather here in LA is weird, so here are some ways to avoid having to go outside if you simply can’t bear it.

  • This short but sweet piece by Christopher Hitchens about the tyranny of waiters insisting on pouring your wine for you in restaurants is always worth revisiting.
  • Every year Bill Simmons ranks the top 50 assets in the NBA using a simple, but sensible metric: how likely the player’s current team would be to trade him. This year’s list is broken up into three installments, so prepare to lose  at least half an hour of your life.
  • Are you convinced that there’s no way someone could make a movie that successfully twins a meditation on the cosmos with testimonials about the atrocities committed by the Pinochet regime? You’re wrong. Nostalgia for the Light is a gorgeous documentary about just that, and it’s streaming on Netflix. I swear, it won’t make you feel nearly as bad as you’re assuming it will.
  • Kathryn Schulz has written a piece worth reading on why she hates The Great Gatsby. Not Luhrmann’s trite film version, mind you, but Fitzgerald’s novel. Obviously, I don’t agree with her assessment of the novel’s value. Virtually all of the reasons she gives for disliking the book are the precise reasons I love it. If there’s one excerpt from this article that sums up Schulz’s failure to actually engage the book on its own terms, it’s this one: “As readers, we revel in the glamorous dissipation of the rich, and then we revel in the cheap satisfaction of seeing them fall. At no point are we made to feel uncomfortable about either pleasure, let alone their conjunction. At no point are we given cause, or room, to feel complicit.” If you don’t feel uncomfortable or complicit (as Nick does) when reading about a culture that encourages people to use others up like natural resources, you have led a very moral, cloistered life that includes never having seen a rap video. Kudos to you for that, Ms. Schulz.

Gatsby? What Gatsby?

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Authors, Visual

What Gatsby indeed, Carey Mulligan. As you could probably tell from my post about Fitzgerald’s ledger, I am a little bit nutty for the bard of the Jazz Age. Perhaps because I live in LA, or just because I feel prematurely old, I identify with the washed-up Hollywood Scott more the cocky young playboy of the early 1920’s, but it goes without saying that the work Fitzgerald produced from 1920 to 1934 was a whole hell of a lot better than what he wrote once he relocated to the west coast. Fitzgerald’s best work came out during a stretch when Americans were churning out poetry and fiction that changed literature forever. Here’s a partial list:

  • Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (192o)
  • T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1921-1922)
  • Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923)
  • Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925)
  • Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925)
  • Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926)
  • Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1926)
  • Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
  • William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929)
  • Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1929)
  • Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930)
  • Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931)
  • Faulkner’s Light in August (1932)

There was a bunch of other amazing stuff written by Americans during this period, and obviously my own prejudices inform the above list (I’ll cut a man who tries to tell me Faulkner didn’t pwn 1929-1936). But missing from this list is the best novel ever written by an American: The Great Gatsby. Smart people disagree with me about this, and that’s fine. If you want to say Absalom, Absalom! is the tops, I won’t argue. If you try to tell me Moby Dick is, I’ll take you seriously. But come on. The Great Gatsby does more in 200 pages than most writers accomplish in entire careers. Just read this:

For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the Beale Street Blues while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.

Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand.

That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position, and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was still at Oxford.

I have probably taught The Great Gatsby more than any other novel in my teaching career, and every time I try to impress upon my students just how little the novel has to do with love. It’s a story about horny, ambitious young people who use other people like drugs. For Gatsby, Daisy is merely a necessary part of the dream of himself he made up as he rowed out to Dan Cody’s yacht. For Tom, she’s a necessary part of the maintenance of his position in the Social Darwinist order. And for Daisy, Gatsby, Tom, and the other half dozen men are just ways to feel desired, secure, and valuable.  The image of the “beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids” on Daisy’s floor captures it all, and I think that image might be my favorite in all of American literature.

The less that can be said of Baz Luhrmann’s new adaptation, the better. Others have already panned it, so I will simply add this: while Luhrmann’s Gatsby predictably features some nice party scenes, it doesn’t think enough of its viewers to let them figure out what the “beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids” mean. The film is like Sparknotes come to life, as the characters mouth awful bits of invented dialogue that tell us what we should be taking away from each scene. And don’t get me started on Nick. In Luhrmann and Tobey Maguire’s incapable hands, Nick Carraway is transformed from one of the great mysteries of American literature into a simpering, sycophantic pud. Read or reread the book instead of seeing this triviality.

Coming Clean

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Authors, Other Critics

While I don’t subscribe, I read Esquire sometimes. But even when the situation is a five-minute wait at Supercuts and I’m just flipping through it, I feel kind of sleazy, because Esquire is gross in multiple ways that matter, all of them tangled such that it is difficult to theorize said grossness. But, a few theses.

First, it’s that the thing is called Esquire, which sounds like an all-schoolgirls wank mag from 1950s  Britain. (Hastag, Philip Larkin.) Second, it’s the high-definition postindustrial lifestyle they sell: men’s jeans that aren’t Levi’s and cost $200, beard lube, Dwayne Wade’s bowties, a main-page tab called “Women.” Sometimes the magazine verges on Maxim territory. Third, it’s the embarrassing fact that like a lot of young professionals (stop snickering) I am insecure about stuff like my tie pin and my car, which was built during the first Clinton Administration, and so I read Esquire and worry about my abs.

The rub, at least for this coastal intellectual, is that they employ serious writers like Charles Pierce and Stephen Marche, so you end up reading them even when you aren’t at Supercuts. Come on, they are covering the death of the mighty George Jones like crazy, which is the only way to cover No Show’s shuffle off the mortal coil. They published this little ethnographic masterpiece. They put D Wade in a magazine that sort of reviews a few books from time to time. Esquire was a reasonably serious publication for fifty years during the last century, and it still carries a little of that cachet.

A favorite piece is A.J. Jacobs’s “I Think You’re Fat” (2007), which I’ve used in a number of classes. America’s children love it. Jacobs investigates the fascinating Radical Honesty movement, which espouses the unworkable but compelling idea that even little white lies constitute an existential wimping-out:

The movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough — a world without fibs — but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It’s the only path to authentic relationships. It’s the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.

Queasy? Me, too. Camus can do, Sartre is smartre, but Blanton is striking and Jacobs makes deft experimental use of the good doctor’s philosophy. Have at it. It will take you ten minutes. You dick.

Fitzgerald’s Ledger

Posted on by under Authors, education, guides and nudges

In this Tuesday, March 26, 2013 photo, Elizabeth Sudduth, director of the Ernest F. Hollings Library and Rare Books Collection at the University of South Carolina, points at items in a ledger owned by author F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Columbia, S.C. The university has digitized the ledger and put it online for scholars. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Collins)

A couple weeks back I wrote about the impending release of some of Willa Cather’s letters. As if that isn’t exciting enough for fans of American modernism, today I found out that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous ledger can be viewed at the University of South Carolina library website. The money-mad Fitzgerald recorded each little bit of coin he brought in through his writing and the licensing of his works between 1919 and 1938, though there isn’t a complementary ledger of his rap-mogulesque expenditures. Transcriptions of the ledger have been available for some time, most notably in Matthew Bruccoli’s excellent biography of Fitzgerald, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. Still, it’s amazing to be able to search through this document and see Fitzgerald’s lovely handwriting up close. The digital humanities should focus on this kind of preservation and facilitation, not devising ways to hold virtual meetings with students in Second Life.

James Baldwin on “Florida Forum” (1963)

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Authors, the polis, Visual

The video is a bit grainy, and there is some distracting superimposed text, but this is still pretty great. Wearing a suit so on-point that it could have destroyed televisions across America, Baldwin ventures into the conservative bastion of 1960s Miami and talks about the “Negro Problem” in the passionate yet measured, cerebral tones you may recognize from essays like “Notes of a Native Son” and books like The Fire Next Time. Remember when writers could be well-regarded public figures? Remember that? Me neither. Oh well. Enjoy.