From the Kenyon Review Blog's Sean Casey:
When I’m writing a story and need a peripheral character run over by a truck, I name that character Charlie Long. Charlie Long was my basketball coach when I was ten years old. Among other encouraging words, he threatened to hang me from the basketball rim by my “dingle-dangle.”
From Joan Acocella's "The Typing Life," a review of Darren Wershler-Henry's The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting in the April 9 issue of The New Yorker:
Nietzsche used a typewriter. This is hard to imagine, but in the effort to stem his migraines and his incipient blindness—symptoms, some scholars say, of an advanced case of syphilis—he bought one of the new contraptions. So did Mark Twain, and he was the first important writer to deliver a typewritten manuscript, “Life on the Mississippi,” to a publisher. Henry James also had a typewriter, and a secretary, to whom he dictated. That is a famous fact; it is said to have contributed to the extreme complexity of James’s late-period style. (But why would oral composition make a writer’s prose more complex, rather than more simple? Again, Wershler-Henry does not address the question.) James got used to the sound of his Remington; when it was in the repair shop and he had to use a loaner, the new machine’s different sound drove him crazy. For many years after his death, his devoted typist, Theodora Bosanquet, claimed that she was still receiving dictation from him. Indeed, through her spirit medium she was informed that Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and John Galsworthy, all as dead as James, also wanted to use her stenographic services.
Wershler-Henry tells us about William S. Burroughs, who wrote in certain of his novels—and may have believed—that a machine he called the Soft Typewriter was writing our lives, and our books, into existence. We also hear about Jack Kerouac, who typed “On the Road” on a roll of paper so that the job of changing the paper would not interrupt him and thrust him back into the world’s inauthenticity. Kerouac was a fast typist—a hundred words a minute. Two weeks after starting “On the Road,” he had a single single-spaced paragraph a hundred and twenty feet in length. Scholars disagree as to whether the scroll was shelf paper or a Thermo-fax roll or sheets of architect’s paper Scotch-taped together. As with Burroughs, Kerouac’s relationship to the typewriter was heavily mediated by drugs. He would buy nasal inhalers, pry them open, and eat the Benzedrine-soaked paper within, followed by a chaser of coffee or Coca-Cola. Don’t run to the drugstore. They’ve changed the formula.
"I only know that from the time I was 17 until this morning I've done nothing more than wake up early every day, sit in front of a set of keys to fill a blank page or a blank screen with the sole mission of writing a story never before told that will make life happy for a reader who doesn't exist. To think that a million people would read something written in the solitariness of my room with 28 letters of the alphabet and two fingers as my sole arsenal seems insane."--Gabriel García Márquez in a speech to open the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language Congress, which just released a special commemorative edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
In attendance, none other than Bill Clinton, who commented, "I believe he's the most important writer of fiction in any language since William Faulkner died."
From the "are you frickin' kidding me" file, I give you this quote from Time's James Poniewozik:
"The Howl of this movement is Neal Pollack's new memoir Alternadad."
Look, I've read the book. It's fine. Not great, not awful. A couple of laughs, a handful of shared experiences, a moment or two in which I thought I might actually start liking Pollack and then reality set in. But if anyone thinks this book will change the way my generation looks at parenting, they've never been a parent or they've been a parent that smoked too much weed or sniffed too long from the chimney of their Diaper Genie.
I've managed to get through a few dozen pages of the newest Best American Nonrequired Reading, a book that I make an annual read alongside its older sibling Best American Short Stories. This year, the Eggerian staff has added a new section to kick off the collection. Basically, it's a hodgepodge of items spotted on the Internet, such as a sampling from the hilarious Chuck Norris Facts Website. Yesterday, I found out that Chuck Norris has written a column responding to this website and all of the purported facts. This sounded like a possible fount of entertainment until I heard that it was actually the debut of a regular column that Norris, whose tears can cure cancer, will write at the righter than right conservative site WorldNetDaily. Well, so much for the fun. In the article, Norris tells us that he doesn't so much mind the "facts" but he wants folks to remember that "without him, I don't have any power. But with Him, the Bible tells me, I really can do all things – and so can you." That's how he responds to all of the facts about him. Humor interruptus. Ah well.
Anyway, this year's BANR has been blessed with a great introduction by Matt Groening. I guess it should be pretty obvious after watching The Simpsons all these years that Groening is a heavy reader, but you can tell from this excerpt that he's an addict. Hell, he even mentions "the book blogs":
Even though there’s not time enough in the day to fulfill all my pressing obligations, I am still finding new ways to obsess over books and reading. I decided in 1999 to plow through the great books of the twentieth century, chronologically, and here in mid-2006 I have finished H.G. Wells’s Love and Mr. Lewisham; Jack London’s first collection of short stories, The Son of the Wolf; Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz; and Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, all published in the year 1900. At this rate I should be finished with the great works of the previous century sometime in the next three hundred years.
Then there’s The New Yorker, now available in complete form on several annoying CDs. These too I’m plowing through chronologically, and after a year I am almost done with 1925, the first year of The New Yorker’s existence. I’ve been reading jazzy quips about Charlie Chaplin, Prohibition, and the Scopes Monkey Trial. The most intriguing thing from 1925 so far is an ad for a Ring Lardner book, What of It?
And of course we mustn’t forget the book obsessive’s treasure trove of books about books: the reading guides, the long lists, the shortlists, the book blogs, and the reading journals. I have collected a few dozen book guides, ranging from the squaresville How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler, to the breezy Read ’Em and Weep: My Favorite Novels, by Barry Gifford. My favorite is Martin Seymour-Smith’s Guide to Modern World Literature. He seems to have read every novel in every language, and has a pretty cranky opinion about almost all of them.
I try to surprise myself by reading outside the genres I usually gravitate to. Fed up with the repugnant current political scene, I decided to bury my sorrow through biographies of all the American presidents. Currently I’m reading 1776, Washington’s Crossing, and His Excellency, George Washington, so I have a ways to go. And at a beach house a couple summers ago I found a tattered copy of The Best Sports Writing of 1947, which contained “Lethal Lightning,” a great article about Joe Louis by Jimmy Cannon, and now I’m thinking I gotta read more sports books. And recently I discovered the weird, outsidery pulp fiction of Harry Stephen Keeler, the author of such intriguing titles as The Man with the Magic Eardrums, The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, The Case of the Transposed Legs, and Y. Cheung, Business Detective.
And I still want to read all of Dickens, Wodehouse, Twain, Pynchon, Patrick O’Brian, and John le Carré — one of these days.
You’ve gotten this far, so you’re probably as messed up as I am about reading. Let me conclude with a list that will keep you up late at night when you’re supposed to be sleeping or making love: Wolf Whistle, by Lewis Nordan; You Play the Red and the Black Comes Up, by Eric Knight; Dog of the South, by Charles Portis; The Fan Man, by William Kotzwinkle; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon; and short stories by Steve Almond, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Matthew Klam, and Shalom Auslander. And don’t forget the pieces in this very anthology. They’re not too shabby either.
"Bad Southern Lit is like Bad Southern Oysters - nothing will make you sicker when it's 'off.' Just as nothing can ever taste better than sea-salty raw oysters on the half-shell when fresh, when real."--Allan Gurganus in his introduction to the 2006 edition of New Stories from the South.
For all of the bad things that I've done to my body in its three-and-a-half decades of lugging me around, I have to give it credit for having the sense to tell me that I need a break. Actually, it's a direct result of some of the abuse that I get this bodily notification. For some mysterious reason that probably has more to do with genetics than the idiotic decision to play football my senior year of high school, I suffer from a deteriorating disc in my neck. Thanks to this, when my stress level reaches the boil-over point, my neck usually decides to stiffen, rendering me a useless invalid for a few days. That's what happened this weekend. And while it would be easy to say that it's the new baby that has set it off, I think it's more a combination of things, the baby being the final straw, so to speak. What the pain in the neck does is allow for me to catch up on some sleep which in turn helps with the stress levels, and ultimately makes me be a better father and partner and all-around good guy.
So while I'm on the mend, I need to dig back into the Syntax of Things archive for something that I've been reminded of a lot these last few weeks. Back in February, while sitting in the meteorologically neutral San Diego as Elaine and I pondered the possibility of moving back to the South, my one giant fear was Summer. Still is. Until last week, I pretty much tried to ignore North Carolina's heat and humidity. But a few mornings ago, I walked outside and into what can best be described as a steam bath. 6am and just sitting on the porch made me sweat. That's what really made me recall the excerpt I posted back in February while sitting in my apartment in weather-ideal San Diego (or so they say). It's from Jack Butler's amazing novel Jujitsu for Christ and may just be the best description of Southern heat that I've ever read. If you can think of one better, let me know.
From Chris Bachelder's U.S.!, a book I absolutely loved. This is part of the Policies and Guidelines section of a syllabus for an Advance Fiction Writing class taught by a re-resurrected Upton Sinclair:
No romance novels. No fantasy novels. No coming-of-age novels. No father-son hunting trips. No literal vampires (metaphorical blood-sucking is fine). No beach houses. No divorces or affairs. No suburban malaise. No point-of-view stunts. No fragmentation. No gentle fading of the light. No ice cubes rattling in cocktail glasses. No coitus against walls. No ambiguous narrative stances. No subtle shifts. No celebration of chaos. No rhythmic evocations. No irrelevant beauty.
Normally, any journal which contains a T.C. Boyle novella would get quick mention on this blog, but McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #19 is more than just a bunch of bound pages containing a collection of stories. Packaged in what looks like a cigar box are artifacts and memorabilia (pictured above) from bygone wars, stuff that will make you realize that we've all been there, wherever there is, before. According to the McSweeney's site, here's what you get in this box:
Our first issue of 2006 turns toward earlier and equally uncertain years, traveling back by way of pamphlets, info-cards, and letters addressing bygone conflicts and still-constant concerns. Expect, among other recovered works, carefree strategies for insurgencies in Nicaragua, astrological advice for the Nixon/Agnew campaigner, sanguine guidance for the soldier stationed in the Middle East at mid-century, and commonsense reinforcement for the doughboy drifting toward a gonorrhea infection.
My favorite of these pamphlets has to be "Fallout Protection: What to Know and Do About Nuclear Attack" which cautions, "These are somber subjects, and they presuppose a catastrophe which can be made very unlikely by wise and positive policies, pursued by imagination and faith." Uh oh. No problem, though, because they also sent along a wallet card containing air raid instructions. These will go great with my fallout shelter, pending plan approval and the 2006 midterm elections.
But really, even if useful, this is all just clever packaging for an issue that contains that Boyle novella and pieces from Christopher Howard, Adam Golaski, Brendan Connell, and Sean Casey. Because I'm in a good mood, still alive, and want to give back a little something to all of you who come here day after day, here are the first few hilarious paragraphs of Casey's "The First Chapter":
From Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader:
The Heart of Saturday Night Press Release (1974)
The blur drizzle down the plate glass and a neon swizzle stick stirs up the night air, as a cue ball maverick of a moon rolls across an obsidian sky and the busses groaning and wheezing at the corner of restless blvd. and midnight road, across the trucks from easy street and window shoppers beat the cement stroll and I sit scowling over this week's special Norm's pancakes and eggs $.69 trying to stretch out in the bowels of this metropolitan area. I've tasted Saturday nights in Detroit, St. Louis, Tuscaloosa, New Orleans, Atlanta, N.Y.C., Boston, Memphis. I've done more traveling in the past year than I ever did in my life so far, in terms of my level of popularity, on the night spot circuit, I remain in relative obscurity and now upon the release of a second album, which I believe a comprehensive study of a number of aspects of this search for the center of Saturday night, which Jack Kerouac relentlessly chased from one end of this country to the other, and I've attempted to scoop up a few diamonds of this magic that I see. Musically pulling influence from Mose Allison, Thelonious Monk, Randy Newman, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Ray Charles, Stephen Foster, Frank Sinatra....
My favorite writers, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Michael C. Ford. Robert Webb, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Larry McMurtry, Harper Lee, Sam Jones, Eugene O'Neill, John Reechy and more. I drive a 1965 Thunderbird that needs a valve job and at least 4 quarts of Penzoil a week and gets 4 miles to the gallon on a long distance, the trunk is busted. And I have 3 warrants on traffic violations in the Los Angeles Metropolitan area alone. I am a pedestrian piano player with poor technique but a good sense of melody. I write in coffee shops, bars, and parking lots. My favorite album is Kerouac-Allen on Hanover Records.
Born December 7, 1949 in Pomona, California, I drink heavily on occasion and shoot a decent game of pool and my idea of a good time is a Tuesday evening at the Manhattan Club in Tijuana. I reside now in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles and am a dedicated Angelino and have absolutely no intention of moving to a cabin in Colorado. I like smog, traffic, kinky people, car trouble, noisy neighbors, crowded bars, and spend most of my time in my car going to the movies.
Now, with two diploma albums, Closing Time and The Heart of Saturday Night, I trust I will secure enough club dates to keep me moving. I've been an opening act for many artists including Frank Zappa and the Mothers, Buffalo Bob and the Howdy Doody Review, Charlie Rich, John Stewart, Billy Preston, John Hammond, Jerry Jeff Walker, Bob La Beau, Danny O'Keefe and others and I've met Ed Barbara of Manhattan Furniture.Your friend and mine,
Tom Waits
If you want to hear Mr. Waits in true storytelling mode, check out the mp3s available at San Diego Serenade.
From Beth Ann Fennelly's very nice piece, "The Secret of Secrets," about the correlation between motherhood and poetry. The essay will appear in the upcoming Winter Reading Issue of the Oxford American:
A thing I love about mothering is a thing I love about poetry: Both make you a child again. Pound said famously about poetry: "Make it new." Toddlers at play make the same demand. We are dipped in turpentine, the film is wiped from our eyeballs, we really see what we are looking at (why do we rarely see?). Both poetry and motherhood are humbling, they do not care whether you appear civilized to your neighbors, they are greedy, they demand you eat with your fingers, they lie in wait for the moment you announce you've got it nailed (fool!), and then it is all tantrums, or all silence. Both cost you more than you think you can bear, repay you more than you deserve. How to get the right last line, or how to get the child to eat asparagus--both are problem that repel logic, oh ridiculous limited logic. The kryptonite of creativity alone can solve them. Why should Claire eat her asparagus? It's the lion-tamer's whip, and she doesn't want to be tamed. Naturally.
"Why?" both poetry and motherhood ask, and when they receive the answer, ask, "Why?" again. Both terrify us because we can't control them.
From an unpublished essay by William S. Burroughs, part of the vast Burrough's archive which was purchased today by the New York Public Library as part of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.
As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow ponge silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hasiesh and languidly caressing a pet gazelle...
I've decided to create a new category, one which will house various excerpts and quotes which I feel might strike a chord with readers of Syntax of Things, or at the very least have some importance to me and the mood or atmosphere that surrounds my life at the moment I come across the quote/excerpt.
To initiate this category in a fine fashion, here's an excerpt from Steve Erickson's Our Ecstatic Days:
I read him this book called I Am a Little Monkey. There's one part where the mommy monkey cleans the little monkey by picking the bugs off him like monkeys do, and every time I get to that part I pinch him allover like I'm picking the bugs off him. Now whenever I get to that part of the book Kirk scampers to the other side of my bed with Kulk to get away, knowing what's coming. Are you a monkey, I say and he says, "No I'm not a monkey!" Are you a boy? and he answers, "Yes I'm a boy!" except last time. Last time I said, Are you a boy? and he said, "No please!" and puzzled I said then what are you? and he answered
I'm a Bright Light.
What are the odds? I mean: ever, you know? what are the odds. While populations unleashed in a stream of semen, whole Indias exploding in my womb...so what are the odds what kind of kid you'll wind up with? How many millions of sperm are there in the white whisper of a cock, and if one happens to meet up with the waiting egg, it's one kind of kid, and if another, then it's another. Conceive at ten o'clock and you get a psycho. Conceive at 10:01 and you get a Bright Light.
