Denis Johnson’s new novella
Posted: September 17, 2011 Filed under: books, people, writing Leave a comment
photograph by Cindy Johnson
Denis Johnson has a new novella, Train Dreams. An excellent review by Anthony Doerr says it might be the most powerful story and writing he’s published. That makes you pause because how can you better perfection in almost everything Johnson’s published, but you know what he means. Here’s a quote from the review that makes a nice point, reminding me of why Jim Harrison’s novellas are so powerful:
“In an 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales, Edgar Allan Poe said that apart from poetry, the form most advantageous for the exertion of ‘highest genius’ was the short prose narrative, whose length he defined as taking ‘from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal.’ Novels, Poe argued, were objectionable because they required a reader to take breaks.
“’Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal,’ he wrote, ‘modify, annul or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book.’ Because you have to stop reading novels every now and then — to shower, to eat, to check your Twitter feed — their power weakens.
Short stories and novellas on the other hand offer writers a chance to affect readers more deeply because a reader can be held in thrall for the entirety of the experience. They offer writers, in Poe’s phrasing, ‘the immense force derivable from totality.’”
Bedside books
Posted: June 9, 2011 Filed under: books, fiction, people, poetry, writing 2 Comments
Jan Reid’s Comanche Sundown is a beautifully imagined novel with two real-life quintessential Americans at its core, the Comanche half-blood chief Quanah Parker and a half-blood black named Bose Ikard, the son of his slave-owning father. This book should be a contender for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It’s in the ranks of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, E.L. Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. Quanah and Bose are blood brothers engaged in living their lives as men at a pivotal moment in history when Whites are turning the Comanche ranging ground into cattle country. The story is also an intoxicating tale of the Indian women who shared their lives. The novel puts flesh on two real-life figures and their time, not so long ago. Reid’s re-imagining of the Comanche way of life and Quanah’s shamanistic aura and fearlessness is a masterful feat of story-telling. His recent biography of Doug Sahm, the Texas Tex-Mex rocker, is also a good one for the road. His The Bullet Meant for Me defies easy description. It’s an autobiography of a writer who took a pistol shot in the stomach that passed on to lodge against his spine––paralyzing him for months until he regained the partial use of his legs: bracingly tough-minded, inspiring, beautifully written, a portrait of an artist in mid-flight who refused to go down for the count. In Comanche Sundown, he’s written a masterpiece on the richness and tragedy of frontier life.
Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia is encyclopedic in scope, his summing up of a lifetime of reviewing, 851 pages that cover a daunting range of literature with a particular nod to European writers, historical and modern. The more I read James the more I’m reminded of his rare qualities, the mind of a poet blended naturally with the hard-earned wisdom of someone at home on the streets, who can’t and doesn’t want to put literature behind academic walls but keeps it rooted at the forefront of lived life, as it was when it was created by writers struggling with the temper of their time. He writes with the assurance of someone who knows that literature, poetry and the lives of writers can teach truths far beyond the esthetic sublime.
Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence just came in the mail. What can I say. I love what his critics find irritating about his prose, the quick-wrapped lightning illuminations that fearlessly strike at the quick of a writer’s essence. If they would only accept that Bloom is a Jewish mystic writing not so much from a historical view but from a point of revelation, they wouldn’t be so vexed by his approach. He’s the most inspired, broadly visionary critic in American history, and his books will rest on a shelf reserved for uniquely American writers, close beside the three mentors who gave him the courage to be himself––Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman.
Larry McMurtry’s Hollywood and Literary Life. I always fall for McMurtry’s quirky nonfiction voice. What I like about these two memoirs, the first was Books, is their lack of personal or literary pretension, his tendency to dodge any serious discussion in mid-course and go off to eat a burger and fries or some such ordinary undertaking. I know underneath it all is a reader and storyteller of the first magnitude, but taking himself too seriously in these memoirs isn’t in his nature. At any rate, the memoirs feel honest. They have a diary feel by a diarist who knows pretension is the kiss of death.
The Mekong: A long, soft river
Posted: May 31, 2011 Filed under: articles, places, writing Leave a commentA version of this article originally appeared in East Magazine.
By Roy Hamric
“The Mekong, it’s just a long, soft river.”––Jack Kerouac, in After Me, the Deluge
Part I
The bus pulled into Chiang Khan on the Mekong River as the sun fell behind the mountains lined up like sharks’ teeth to the north in Laos. Moments before, I had traced the Mekong’s blue line on a map. It marked the Mekong River journey I would take riding in cheap buses down a 650-kilometer course along the Laotian-Thai border. The bus pulled onto Chiang Khan’s main road lined with rustic, wood buildings and teak wood guesthouses. At the Suk Som Baan Hotel, the ping of raindrops sounded on the tin roof. The small white room with its simple metal bed frame and white sheets and teak wood flooring were straight out of a Joseph Conrad story. Beyond the three open windows, two-deck Chinese junks loaded with felled trees were docked on the riverbank. The window view framed a misty picture of the pearl-gray Mekong and the blue-green shoreline of Laos on the far side. I dozed off that night to the high-pitched squeaks of jing-jok lizards scampering across the walls. It was a perfect start to a Mekong River journey through sleepy Laotian river towns. My plan was to start on the Thai side of the Mekong, to cross to the Laotian side at Non Khai for a visit to Vientiane, the capital, and then to take ordinary buses along the Mekong River south until it disappeared into Cambodia.
After breakfast, I hired a longboat pilot to give me my first taste of one of the longest most mystery-filled rivers in the world. The difference between the river’s two sides was clear the night before. Only two or three lights could be seen on the Laotian side. The boatman shoved off to parse his course through the swiftly flowing river, around large tree limbs and uprooted trees being swept downstream. On the Laotian side, dozens of bamboo fish traps rested on the bank. Old men and children splashed in the water to chase in fish. Families bathed. Two naked kids wearing Santa Claus hats stopped splashing water on each other to wave hello.
About 5 miles down the river the boatman gunned his 20-horsepower engine through the Kang Kood Koo rapids before turning to circle back to Chiang Khan. He pointed to a grassy water line 25 higher, where the river had crested only one month ago. In Chiang Khan, the rooftops of the buildings were dotted with red satellite dishes mounted on the shop houses sitting next to the river on slender wood beams like very still dark spiders.
The Mekong River in Thailand
My first boat ride on the Mekong River fulfilled a long-held dream. I had pictured its tiny rivulets beginning high in the eastern mountains of Tibet before heading southward, passing through six countries before finally fanning out into Vietnam’s southern delta in hundreds of web-like streams. For much of its 2,800-mile course, the Mekong River was still a natural, free river. Three bridges span the river in Southeast Asia, one at Vientiane, built in 1990; one in Pakse, Laos, opened in 2000, and one recently completed in Vietnam.
China has built seven dams on the Mekong, in Yunnan Province, but so far the river is undammed in Southeast Asia, where it remains a main artery of travel and sustenance. But, the river’s wildest days are clearly over. China plans to build six more dams along its course. It’s estimated the river’s full hydroelectric potential is equal to the annual petroleum production of Indonesia. China now controls its flow through Southeast Asia. Laos and Thailand have built dams on Mekong tributaries. Laos is counting on exporting hydroelectric energy as a capital resource to energy-starved countries. Proposals to put more dams on the Mekong in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam haven’t yet borne fruit, but its only a matter of time.
“Without doubt, no other river, over such a length, has a more singular or remarkable character.”––Francis Garnier, co-leader, French Commission Expedition to the Mekong River, 1866.
The next morning I boarded a bus to Nong Khai. An ancient, battered TV and CD player was wired above the driver’s seat. A Thai teenager scanned a magazine with nude centerfolds, and two foreigners were speaking Dutch. The Mekong flowed by only a few hundred feet away for most of the ride. Willem Leutner, in his fifties, a red-cheeked high school psychology teacher, was on holiday. He was being befriended by a barefooted, drunken Thai man, who was shouting louder and louder as if that could make Leutner understand Thai. The driver and passengers all ignored the drunk, his slurred speech and his embarrassing encounter with the foreigner.
“In Thailand,” Leutner said, “most rural people believe in spirits. That means this man is not himself now. He’s under the control of an evil spirit, and if they do something to embarrass him they make him lose face, plus they would also lose face too because they would have to show their emotions. Thais always try not to show their emotions in public. They feel sorry for someone who does. So they just ignore him.”
It was his third trip to Thailand. “The Dutch are the Chinese of Europe,” he said. “You will see us everywhere.” He described his recent vacation to Malawi, where he said the women taught him to dance from the hips down. But, Thailand, he said, it has something even more special. He lived with a Thai woman for six months. “The place has woken me up to something inside me that I never thought I had,” he said. “I have a different energy inside me now. I am growing inside. I will return to teach in a few months, but I will come back to live here later. I’ve discussed it with friends in Holland. They don’t understand.” Scenes of modern Thailand flashed by. A barefooted rice farmer knee-deep in water talking on his cellphone. Small engine-powered plows, replacing the water buffalo, furrowed straight rows in flooded rice paddies. The road entered Nong Khai lined by verdant ponds filled with two-foot lily pads and pink flowers. The drunk Thai was sleeping peacefully.
River bank farming in Thailand
A Way Station at Nong Khai
That evening, I dropped into The Meeting Place, a legendary expat bar to visit with the owner, Alan Patterson, an Australian, who was something of a Mr. Fix-It for expats. From his bar-restaurant-guesthouse, he provided immigration forms to cross the border, or he might try to sell you a house, a banana plantation, a fish farm–or just introduce you to aging Vietnam veterans who lived in the area in small houses or rooms with a Thai wife or girlfriend. They congregated to The Meeting Place both day and night to while away the time.
“This is command central,” said Patterson, who had lived in Nong Khai for nine years. He sat behind his horseshoe shaped desk surrounded by a computer, a TV tuned to CNN, a fax, several mobile phones, three clocks showing time for Bangkok, Perth and Honolulu, and assorted sales brochures and maps.
Expats and Thais kept kept drifting in as we talked. “About 80 expats live in the area, and maybe 20 in town,” he said. “They come in and out and they don’t get on each others’ nerves too much. A lot of them are sick with this or that, living on their government checks. They’re good for the economy.” Then his voiced trailed off. “There aren’t many Americans in the area––easily four times more Germans, Dutch and Finnish.”
From his desk, Patterson managed his Web site which promoted the Mekong River area and his business schemes. “We had beautiful houses built here in the boom era that still haven’t been sold,” he said. “Prices started around 1 million baht (US $30,000). You get great value for your money. I want to build a retirement community here for vets––and make sure they don’t get jerked around by the Thai mafia.”
Leaving, I noticed a bar tab list nailed to the wall alongside large magazine centerfolds of Asian women. “VICTIMS,” it read, followed by 10 scribbled names, ending with the name, “God.”
“An Englishman wrote that. He makes us laugh a lot,” said a red-haired man sitting at the bar, one forearm tattooed with “Airborne” and the other “Singha,” a Thai beer.
Looking at a row of weathered foreigners sitting on the bar stools in mid-day took me back to a feeling of Vietnam. Lke clockwork, paranoia surfaced in the room. A white-haired, haggard man with a pockmarked, swollen face, his nose a dull purple, slurred, “You look like you’re from Langley. CIA, right? I can always tell. You’re from Langley, right?” Everyone’s head turned to look. We were on Vietnam and Laos time, a long time ago, and it was time to leave.
The riverfront of Nong Khai was lined with restaurants––all with a verandah view of the Mekong flowing past. At sunset, the sky and river took turns mirroring red, orange, pink, gold, deep blue-gray and black. Then the lights of Friendship Bridge flashed on linking Thailand to Laos in a tiny chain of gold. Vientaine awaited across the river. (Part II to come)
An empty passenger boat on the Mekong River
clive james’ flowering
Posted: May 6, 2011 Filed under: books, poetry, writing 1 Comment
The Australian native Clive James, one of the writers who has dominated British journalism and criticism in the past decades, is undergoing a late blooming in his poetry, unfortunately the offshoot of some serious illnesses. He’s one of those essential British writers, like Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens, who is hard to keep up with because of their prolific outpouring. His blog, click here, is one of the best on poetry and art. For a good close reading of his poetry, see this article in The Australian. For essential, confirmational reading, see his “Five Favorite Poets” essay on his blog. His prose glows when he writes about poetry. Here’s a poem from his Website:
Whitman and the Moth
Van Wyck Brooks tells us Whitman in old age
Sat by a pond in nothing but his hat,
Crowding his final notebooks page by page
With names of trees, birds, bugs and things like that.
The war could never break him, though he’d seen
Horrors in hospitals to chill the soul.
But now, preserved, the Union had turned mean:
Evangelizing greed was in control.
Good reason to despair, yet grief was purged
By tracing how creation reigned supreme.
A pupa cracked, a butterfly emerged:
America, still unfolding from its dream.
Sometimes he rose and waded in the pond,
Soothing his aching feet in the sweet mud.
A moth he knew, of which he had grown fond,
Perched on his hand as if to draw his blood.
But they were joined by what each couldn’t do,
The meeting point where great art comes to pass –
Whitman, who danced and sang but never flew,
The moth, which had not written Leaves of Grass,
Composed a picture of the interchange
Between the mind and all that it transcends
Yet must stay near. No, there was nothing strange
In how he put his hand out to make friends
With such a fragile creature, soft as dust.
Feeling the pond cool as the light grew dim,
He blessed new life, though it had only just
Arrived in time to see the end of him.
––The New Yorker
john jeremiah sullivan
Posted: April 2, 2011 Filed under: books, people, writing Leave a comment
JJS, that would be John Jeremiah Sullivan, writes about DFW, that would be David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King, read Death coming for our spirits, in an essay in GQ that hits the target and goes right through it to the other side, leaving you with some certainty that DFW, who is often called a “generational writer,” (which underrates his importance), has been deciphered, but of course that’s creating another fiction, and this is sounding a bit like DFW so check out the essay here, because it’s a watermark in appreciation. The bits about Cormac McCarthy are interesting, as if DFW saw him as his polar opposite, a writer trying to create mountains in a sea of sand. In sections of the uncompleted novel, DFW pays homage to McCarthy’s high-art prose style, or he recognizes its usefulness in shrouding everything in nobility. The photograph shows DFW’s jottings on a book from his library, which is now in the DFW collection at the University of Texas.
Graham Greene
Posted: April 1, 2011 Filed under: books, people, writing Leave a comment
Graham Greene in mid-life
Our worst enemies
here are not
the ignorant
and the simple,
however cruel;
our worst enemies
are the intelligent
and corrupt.
––Graham Greene,
in The Human Factor
Name dropping
Posted: March 31, 2011 Filed under: books, fiction, people, writing 2 Comments
Check out page 295 of Jim Harrison’s newest novella collection, The Farmer’s Daughter, when you see a copy. He kindly slipped my name into one sentence in this force majeure book, particularly the first two novellas: The Farmer’s Daughter and Brown Dog Redux. There’s simply no writer like Jim Bear. He shares his buddy Thomas McGuane’s luminous language plus an always beating, warm heart, making for characters that are the closest you’ll ever get to pulsing human blood on the printed page. Plus funny, out loud laughing.
Philip Larkin
Posted: March 5, 2011 Filed under: articles, people, poetry, writing Leave a comment
I’m nearing the end of Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. Larkin’s essence is best captured in a description made by his longest-running girlfriend, Monica Jones, who decided that his tombstone should bear the word, “Writer,” not poet, and she’s so very right. Larkin started life wanting to be a novelist and wrote two good novels, before hitting a wall and ultimately abandoning two uncompleted novels. But his full-time turn to poetry continued the voice of the novels, in condensed, contained stories grounded in stripped down quotidian, demotic language, concerned with everyday life and, particularly, his personal fears and insecurities. His thousands of letters to his girlfriends and friends, in the reading, are close equivalents to the gist that makes up his poetry, by that I mean you often get exact glimpses of his poetic voice and are put in that place, in the states of mind, from which his poems arise. Aesthetically, he pushed romanticism out the door, but ironically the intensity of his art, and the body of the poems––the personae that they create––re-romanticized, if you will, his effort. He credits Thomas Hardy in his evolution, but there seems an unbridgeable gap between the two. Larkin’s language is post-modern, absolutely taken down to the bone. Hardy was still writing as if poetry needed to be beautified, something Larkin avoided. He wanted simply to give each word the space to live, individually and, finally, collectively. That esthetic is absolutely essential to his being able to write about what he does with such affect. I’m not sure, but maybe Larkin’s intention was never to devalue romanticism by avoiding it, but rather to renew it by rummaging around in hopes of finding it in the banality of life, to invest it with the seriousness it deserves in light of the recognition that ordinariness is all that we have. That is not to say that everything is ordinary, in the sense of routine. The point is also that all we have is what we get, as Larkin might say, and what we get is raw, unshaped, discrete, often quite beyond our control, so we must stand up to that face to face. Something along this line is touched on in his Paris Review interview:
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel happiness is unlikely in this world?
LARKIN
Well, I think if you’re in good health, and have enough money, and nothing is bothering you in the foreseeable future, that’s as much as you can hope for. But “happiness,” in the sense of a continuous emotional orgasm, no. If only because you know that you are going to die, and the people you love are going to die.
Elliot said something perfect about Larkin, while remaining neutral: “He can make words do what he wants.” At any rate, I’m glad finally to have discovered Larkin. He gives me something I need––art made from within our time based on an interesting sensibility of thought within a common feeling or moment.
Bedside books
Posted: February 26, 2011 Filed under: books, people, writing Leave a comment
Books by Rembrandt (Iphone photograph)
–The World Is What It Is, The authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French. This looks to be a rock solid, no holds barred appreciation of the ruthless artistry of the Calypso Rambler.
–The Letters of Alan Ginsberg edited by Bill Morgan. A best of the best of AG’s some 3,000-plus letters.
–The Selected Letters of Alan Ginsberg and Gary Snyder edited by Bill Morgan. The two lions of spring who made it to be lions of winter.
–Philip Larkin by Andrew Motion. Someone should do a study on the art of profanity as irony and satire, using the correspondence of Larkin and the chattering conversations of Larkin and Amis. William Empson?
Philip Larkin’s nothing
Posted: February 23, 2011 Filed under: people, poetry, writing Leave a commentWonderful wording by Philip Larkin, from the poem “I Remember, I Remember.“
“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”
or, Something, like nothing, happens anywhere, or
Nothing like something happens anywhere or
Something like nothing happens anywhere…
self portrait by Philip Larkin
I’m reading the Larkin biography by Andrew Motion, after having learned a great deal about Larkin from reading Kinsley Amis’s and Martin Amis’s writings about him. Larkin was one of those people everyone knows, on the surface, but who only a few people are allowed to know well over a long period of time. The stereotype of his “ordinariness,” of course , is a total fraud.
It can have only survived because of his looks, which through photographs placed him in the company of a passing face in the crowd. On the other hand, everyone who really knew him found him physically striking, and, if they were allowed entre into his world, they knew his mind was on fire. What let him down were the little things, and by that I mean those little things that become big things when we’re adults. One’s traits. The tip-off to Larkin’s character is his women pals. He had good ones, and for a long time, juggling them one, two or three at a time.
Something said early in the book about God wanting people to exercise their desires [that would be the Old Testament God, since the New Testament God is nowhere to be found], to seek abundance in life, resonates in Larkin’s life. His fears and inhibitions stimulated his desires which were met, judging from what I can see, about as well as anyone’s. But he didn’t think so, and on that he largely based his art. He early saw how life’s so-called ordinariness was the unrelieved companion of desire and pleasure, and an antidote to fear, and of course, in his art, he forsook standard romanticism to drive that point home.
It has led to the common misunderstanding of his work that haunts all original writers for years after their work is completed, until ultimately the work is seen fresh by a new generation for what it really is. The New Romanticism.
the roy hamric journal 