Grandfather had bronchitis and sipped whiskey from a flask, talking about how in the fine, early years of his marriage he and his wife (this was in the late thirties) would jump in their car and drive all the way to Chicago in less than three days just to eat in a bona-fide French restaurant.  At a crossroads he permitted the frantic dogs to jump out and chase a coyote–in a lifetime of chasing coyotes they had never caught one except pups in the den.

________

I used to keep up with Jim Harrison (especially remember A Good Day to Die), but hadn’t thought of him in years until I recently read The Woman Lit by Fireflies (which reminded me of how I admire and like his writing).  Dalva was on my Reading List in the 1980s but somehow I never got around to reading it; making up for lost time now.

Below is another couple of Teaser sentences from Dalva (I know . . . I know . . . that is two too many according to the “Teaser Tuesday” rules . . .)

It was today–rather yesterday I think–that he told me it was important not to accept life as a brutal approximation.  I said people don’t talk like that in this neighborhood.

Working my way through A Good Day To Die, by Jim Harrison.  I say work because so far it’s not very good.  Did come across this little bauble, though:

Then with startling speed he clouted the sailor in the ear with the heel of his hand.  The arc of the swing was wide but fast and the sailor collapsed on his butt with a yelp …

“What if that guy had known karate?” I asked.

“Nobody knows karate if you get a good one in first.”

L’intellectuel germanopratin par excellence

“Sorte de croisement entre Yves Montand et Jean-Paul Sartre“, BHL est résumé en trois mots par l’américaine Marianne Wiggins (1) : “grand, riche, beau et marié à un ancien mannequin. Selon elle, “son aura de philosophe a fait de lui un habitué des plateaux de télévision, mais il est aussi un journaliste accompli doublé d’un réalisateur de documentaires. Il n’est donc pas étonnant que le mensuel américain The Atlantic Monthly ait eu l’idée de génie d’engager M. Lévy pour marcher sur les traces d’Alexis de Tocqueville, qui, au XIXe siècle, avait parcouru notre jeune nation, puis rédigé son grand classique De la démocratie en Amérique (…) Tocqueville était un magistrat, un juriste imprégné de pragmatisme et d’idéaux moraux. M. Lévy est un intellectuel à paillettes, un beau parleur un peu snob (…) Même s’il reconnaît avoir eu pour compagnon de voyage Sur la route, l’ouvrage de Jack Kerouac, il devait également avoir sous la main la collection complète des Vanity Fair. Les Américains typiques sont pour lui rien moins que Barry Diller, Norman Mailer, Woody Allen, Warren Beatty. Tocqueville avait certes rencontré John Quincy Adams, Sam Houston, Daniel Webster et Andrew Jackson, mais aussi des fermiers, des artisans et des petits commerçants, et il avait débattu avec passion du système éducatif américain, de la poésie du pays, de sa langue et même de sa conception du mariage (…) La méthode de travail de Bernard-Henri Lévy consiste à faire jouer à des célébrités le rôle d’oracle local. Jim Harrison pour le Montana, Charlie Rose pour la Caroline du Nord, Sharon Stone pour Los Angeles. Parsemer un article de noms de célébrités rend sa lecture plus aisée et plus agréable, le problème, c’est qu’American Vertigo aurait pu s’appeler “Célébrités en Amérique” ou “Dans l’intimité des stars”. 

Encore plus sévère, l’Allemand Johannes Willms – qui s’appuie sur la lecture de Le b.a.-ba du BHL, enquête sur le plus grand intellectuel français, de Jade Lindgaard et Xavier de La Porte – trace un portrait au vitriol de notre BHL : “L’homme est une icône ambulante. Il est aussi connu en France que cette femme à la poitrine opulente par laquelle le peintre Eugène Delacroix a symbolisé la Liberté, celle au chemisier grand ouvert, qui franchit une barricade le drapeau tricolore à la main. Bernard-Henry Lévy – qu’en France on appelle BHL – a deux choses en commun avec cette créature emblématique : l’attitude narcissique et la chemise blanche ouverte jusqu’au nombril (qu’il porte sous un costume sombre). La tenue, qui met en valeur son torse de héros au bronzage permanent, fait son petit effet. C’est un élément non négligeable car, à l’âge de la télévision, l’apparence est le message. Le narcissisme et la chemise blanche ne sont donc pas une marotte mais un logo. Or l’effet que BHL a habilement construit pour accroître son prestige d’unique star des intellectuels français semble s’être épuisé. Une biographie vient de paraître, quatre autres sont en cours d’élaboration et toutes entendent détruire la magie, dépouiller BHL de sa chemise déjà grande ouverte et le présenter dans la “vérité” de sa nudité (…) [Son] réseau de connexions diverses si typique de l’“exception culturelle” française explique également pourquoi BHL reste toujours la star des intellectuels français : tous les médias d’une certaine importance, ou presque, sont à ses pieds, et ses rares détracteurs ont du mal à se faire entendre (…) Reste à voir si tout cela suffira à lui faire passer sans dommages la tempête qui se prépare avec les autres ouvrages, en particulier ceux de Philippe Cohen et Nicolas Beau, deux journalistes connus pour leur pertinence et pour leur virulence. Il serait de toute façon grand temps de démythifier ce comédien qui, en se faisant passer pour un intellectuel, ridiculise l’ensemble de cette corporation.”

Dans un article consacré à un ouvrage de BHL, Comédie, un autre journaliste allemand, Rudolf Walther (3), n’y va pas de main morte : “le cœur du livre est en réalité un monologue que mène BHL, le médiatique, avec un Lévy prétendument authentique et purifié. Inutile de souligner que ce dernier n’a pas souvent droit à la parole. Dès les premières phrases, la catharsis est annoncée : “Je les connais bien. Le théâtre. La bassesse. Ces gens qui vous tendent la main comme pour vous prendre le pouls.” Ce que l’auteur ne dit pas, c’est qu’il s’est précisément servi pendant vingt ans de ces gens-là pour sa propre mise en scène. Les “nouveaux philosophes”, tant dans leurs propos que dans leurs publications, n’ont jamais atteint un niveau d’élaboration critique ou théorique très élevé. Devant les caméras en marche, ils dictaient leurs commentaires sur les émissions de la veille, un “dialogue” avec les médias qui a fini par se tarir. Aujourd’hui, ils se contentent donc de soliloquer.” Ce qui ne l’empêche pas que “BHL ne travaille que là où le sang coule ou, du moins, là où tourne une caméra.” Fermez les guillemets !

Il serait toutefois faux de faire des journalistes allemands les critiques les plus sévères de BHL. Introduisant une traduction d’un article de l’écrivain consacré à l’Allemagne, Jürg Altwegg (4) rappelle l’apport du philosophe français : “il s’est fait connaître du grand public par sa mise en scène de la “nouvelle philosophie”, qui, dix ans après Mai 68, allait entraîner la fin de l’hégémonie marxiste dans la culture française et marquer le déclin du communisme. La contribution de Lévy à la critique du stalinisme et du marxisme a paru sous le titre la Barbarie à visage humain [Grasset]. Dans la foulée d’André Glucksmann, qui, dans les Maîtres penseurs [Grasset], revisitait les précurseurs du national-socialisme dans la pensée allemande, Lévy élargissait, dans l’Idéologie française [Grasset], l’approche antitotalitaire à l’analyse du terreau dont s’était nourri le régime de Pétain. A sa parution, en 1981, le livre souleva de fortes vagues et ouvrit les yeux sur la France de Vichy.” Faisant allusion à l’article de Lévy sur l’Allemagne d’après la chute du mur, le journaliste écrit : “Pour les lecteurs allemands, l’article de Bernard-Henri Lévy est plus qu’un résumé des récents débats : c’est un miroir français, un regard extérieur, plein de sympathie, plein d’injustice aussi, et non dépourvu de sens critique. Il montre qu’il existe un débat politique transnational sur le passé. Et qu’une sorte de conscience intellectuelle européenne est en train de voir le jour.”(1) Marianne Wiggins – Los Angeles Times – 02-02-06

(2) Johannes Willms – Süddeutsche Zeitung – 09-12-04

(3) Rudolf Walther – Tages-Anzeiger – 22-01-98

(4) Jürg Altwegg – Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung – 25-02-99

“Los largos viajes en coche han sido otro importante analgésico para Harrison. Después de comer conduce su todoterreno por el apabullante paisaje que rodea su casa. “Es importante escribir sobre lo que realmente conoces. El paisaje y la gente están totalmente conectados”, sostiene. Cruza ríos, sube montañas por las que pacen ciervos y en la esquina de una carretera secundaria señala un viejo saloon en el que pasó demasiado tiempo. “El dolor de no entender la Historia es muy evidente en América”. ¿No es ésta la tierra donde empezar de cero? “Este país tiene un largo historial de intentos fallidos de reinventarse”.

Extracto de la entrevista publicada en Babelia. Leer completa.

Ver además:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/books/25harr.html

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec09/jimharrison_07-09.html

http://www.lib.msu.edu/services/spec_coll/writer/MWCJimHarrison.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Harrison

When night begins falling, the way you see things is not to look on directly but to focus at some spot just beside them. That, Harrison knows, is the proper place for the writer: off to the side, watching. “It’s never the conclusions, it’s the story, the experience.” Again and again, book after book, year after year, one struggles to keep that focus, to strip insulation off the last half-inch or so of experience’s wires to make connections, to tell the story as best one is able.

Jim Harrison, author of the novella, Legends of the Fall

I feel this, this insulation stripping away. It feels a bit scary. I want to reach out. I feel my hand flit out to grasp the things I have used in writing to be safe, high rhetorical flourishes, talking about something without crystallizing it into a moment, holding the reader(if I have one) at arm’s length. It amounts to wanting to be known, but not really. You can come this far, but no farther. And, while we are reflecting, this rarely, rarely, if ever in one lifetime, happens with me and a real person.
It’s a rarity, this stripping away. And it feels kind of good.

NEVER NEVER NEVER lay a book facedown when open!

DO NOT drop food or drink on the book you are reading!

Excerpt from Jim Harrison’s novel The Woman Lit by Fireflies:

Gwen told Stuart everything important except why she was on the train.  She was voluble in a way she couldn’t remember, and in a manner she couldn’t have been with someone her own age.  She told him about the small family ranch between Mule Junction and Guthrie to which she had retreated after a brief, unhappy marriage to a university mathematician who now owned a computer business in Albuquerque; about the Cambodian girl they had adopted and she had raised to the current age of sixteen; about her love of flying and the old Cessna 172 she owned that was temporarily grounded in need of a valve job; of the Simmental-Charolais stud bull that was the ranch’s bread and butter, of her arthritic father who lived seventy miles away in Silver City because he needed dialysis twice a week, but always came to dinner on Sundays.  She told him that her daughter, Sun by name, was precocious and had been recruited by colleges for early admission but had chosen to spend another year at home and graduate with her own class.  Sun’s hobbies were botany, livestock and Indian history.

“Maybe that’s because she’s Oriental and the Navajo and Apache are Athabascans who supposedly crossed the Bering Strait from Asia, then came on down here a thousand or so years ago,” Stuart suggested.

“She’s too perverse for that.  She prefers the Anasazi, Hopi, the Isletas and Pueblo people who came up from Mexico.”

[from the section of the novel entitled SUNSET LIMITED]

Jim Harrison is one of my favorite writers.

My undergraduate years were infused with fly fishing.  After finding a professor in the English department with enough hook and bullet pages in his office to keep me busy for a few degrees, I wrote a thesis on Roderick Haig-Brown’s literary connection to the Campbell River. I deconstructed, if you will, the entire river through his discovery of its waters, seasons, and fish coupled with his naming and personifying the watershed. With many visits and flies thrown, I came to have a sliver of understanding for the river and I have been trying to achieve the same level of appreciation for many rivers, oceans and fields ever since.

On the Campbell - Line Fence Pool in front of Haig-Brown's House

Through fly fishing, I found literature. Thomas McGuane shouldered his way in towing Russell Chatham in his wake. Hemingway made the sound of a wounded Penn International to get my attention and Peter Matthiesson arrived with Barry Lopez carrying snow leopards and wolves. David James Duncan brought his own fly covered pulpit and the entire Nick Lyons Press cannon careened through the door. I had the chance to speak with Mr. McGuane a number of years ago about a book I was hoping to edit with some of the great modern angling writers bearing the brunt of the writing (the hard part). He was gracious and encouraging -  a gentleman. I can say with confidence that David James Duncan is one of the finest trout fly fishermen I have seen.  This review was triggered by his insistence on fishing a micro-hatch in a small tributary of the Bitterroot. I remained transfixed by uncatchable trout in the mainstem. He caught fish – I was a strike-loser (more on that in another post down the line…). Skeena system guide Tom Lee and photographer Brian O’Keefe are the two finest fly throwers I’ve witnessed – (more on this later too).

But when the smoke and bourbon cleared, Jim Harrison stood there looking at me with his one good eye.

I can’t say why Harrison stuck more than the others. Volume may have played a role. I found his novellas first, then poetry, then novels. Each subject and each treatment ran clear. I started to buy his poetry to give to hunting and fishing buddies. This practice dwindled as I am reasonably convinced that poetry does not make a good gift for such gentlemen. It may have been the food writing – or at least the pure lust for food. I could not walk out to collect a brace of woodcock ( I don’t live close to a living woodcock) and grouse don’t make for the same religious zeal.

Perhaps it was Montana, and more specifically, Livingston that got my attention. I like a place that has what seems as many art galleries as dive bars and blue ribbon trout streams within yelling distance.

Getting to the point then, the worlds collided as I recently came across Anthony Bourdain in Livingston – with Jim Harrison and Russell Chatham.

After viewing, go out and read Cabin Poem by Harrison. Then have a drink.

Painter and avid sportsmen Russell Chatham lives in Livingston Montana where he continues to paint the landscape of America. A self taught artist, he moved to Montana in 1972 where his focus shifted to depicting the western terrain and the rivers that run through it.His work frequently appears on the covers of Jim Harrison’s publications.

Snowstorm Over Independence Pass

Summer Evening on the North Platte River

Gibbon River on a Summer Evening

Some Brie-head interviewed over here at ShatterColors Literary Review. I guess he edits the magazine or something. So he’s interviewing himself in his own magazine?  And he publishes himself in his own magazine? Hell, I don’t know. I’m tired after running a hill workout. Then I read this, making me more tired. He’s one literary dude, though. Very literary, no doubt.

Robert Scott Leyse (14 bucks he prefers you use all three names) says some really un-sightful things here.

Like he says that he attended a “writing event.” Sounded like he had a hell of a good time, too. In his words, I thought, “What does a gathering of clowns spouting pretentious rubbish and thirsting to have their asses kissed have to do with writing?”

Touche, Robert Scott Leyse. “Thirsting to have their asses kissed” is an excellent image, or maybe just a mixed metaphor/dating service for burros. Either way, I love a man who can recognize a clown in disguise (or were the writers wearing their red noses and giant shoes?).  Reminds me of the grandmother in Flannery O’ Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Grannie wears very clean underwear and knows exactly how to identify “Good Men.” Only takes her a few minutes, too. (Unfortunately, she is soon executed, along with the entire family she leads directly to their collective doom.)

I’ll just jot down this epic poem here, la-dee-da….

One problem I have with Robert Scott Leyse is that the people I meet at “writing events” are scared of clowns. Also they are self-deprecating, witty, humble, interesting, well-read, grinders at the page after page, and know how to drink a shit-load of quality ale. (Those that don’t drink beer I maybe never meet.)

Possibly we attend different conferences?

As an editor Robert Scott Leyse prefers, “love stories, at whatever stage of a relationship…”

Hey! I do too, maybe. So good call, maybe.

Then Robert Scott Leyse reveals his true internal thrumming, as he drops the dark and stormy nights of his intellect onto flash fiction.

Egads! Run for the big tent, you clowns!

On flash fiction (you can hear the disgust steeping in his bottom lip like a tobacco chaw): “It’s a writing exercise, useful in learning the virtues of succinctness of expression. As for it being a viable form… Basically, some corner-cutting smartass thought, “Hey, why waste these writing exercises? Why not doll them up in fancy terminology — call them ‘flash fiction,’ ‘flashers,’ or ‘impromptus’ — and persuade people they’re real stories? That way, I’ll be able to churn out three or four or five of them a night!” Needless to say, I neither read nor publish writing exercises.”

I adore that last sentence. Cutting, shall we say. In fact, fuck it, all short forms are actually writing exercises, especially those damn sonnet things. I mean how can 14 lines be “viable”? Yo, parable, fable, mythology, psalm, and all you annoying hieroglyphics, please go away or at the very least add a whole lot of words, OK? Can we get some more words, seriously? Back up the fucking WORD truck, beep-beep-beep. MORE, MORE, like in a legislature or a contract.

And, yes, you pegged me, Robert Scott Leyse, since I do write and read flash fiction, I am indeed a “corner-cutting smartass.”

[But Impromptus? That sounds like a type of water dwelling dinosaur in a children's book. Dude, don't bring that one out in public, just a friendly tip.]

Speaking of “corner-cutters,” and since I just spent a semester with a grad student researching a bit of the inexhaustible history of flash fiction as a genre, other corner cutting clowns would include:

Margaret Atwood, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Dave Eggers (a ton here), David Foster Wallace, Tara L. Masih, Pu Songling, Kim Chinquee, J. G. Ballard, Jim Harrison, Kobo Abe, Primo Levi, Angela Carter, Max Steele, Barry Graham, Umberto Eco, H. H. Munro, Don Delillo, Mervyn Peake, Anton Chekhov, Kurt Vonnegut, Andrei Bely, W.B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Luigi Pirandello, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, John Steinbeck, George Orwell, Ander Monson, Mark Twain, Marianne Gingher, Wu Jingzi, Dubus (x 2), Vladimir Nabokov, Oscar Wilde, Molly Gaudry, Agatha Christie, Dr. Seuss, Jaroslav Hasek, Samule Beckett, Jeff Noon, Matt Bell, Aesop, Deb Olen Unferth, Patricia Highsmith, Emily Bronte, Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, John Updike, Jill Christman, Julian Barnes, Richard Wright, Sherman Alexie, Sara Teasdale, Shane Jones, Diane Williams, Jesus H. Christ, Blake Butler, Maya Angelou, W. G. Sebald, Edmund White, Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Carver, Carolyn Forche, Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, Buddha, Dorothy Parker, Tao Lin (oh, fuck him [I kid]), Carol Bly, Russell Banks, John David Lovelace, Krishna, Richard Brautigan, Ezra Pound, Scott Garson, Michael Kimball, Jewel, Robert Olen Butler, Gertrude Stein, Alexander Pushkin, Joseph Young, Emile Zola, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, Michael Martone, Hart Crane, Tania Hershman, Joyce Carol Oates, John Edgar Wideman, Rose Terry Cooke, Plato, Katherine Anne Porter, Kate Chopin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez.

hanging out, corner-cutting...

I could go on, but it gets ridiculous the number of authors in the canon, and outside the canon, and shooting from a cannon (a la Hunter S.), that have worked in this genre, and didn’t I just say I was tired, and also I need my typing finger for clowning tomorrow morning.

I just got to clown, yo.

Wouldn’t want to be with that “impromptu” crowd, anyway, would you? What’s next, you start valuing other forms of brevity, like say oysters, shots of bourbon, sudden kisses, short films, or the well-cut diamond?

A writing exercise? Flash fiction is to a writing exercise as a haiku is to a pretzel. Something. I disagree, Robert Scott Leyse. And what if a flash WAS a writing exercise? What if someone wrote a story in the shape of an apartment building (Georges Perec) or as a travel guide (Martone) or I don’t know a freaking examination. On and on…or can stories only be one way, “love stories, at whatever…” etc.

[A red fox just loped across my backyard. Is it limping or loping? I mean loping is like attitude. Limping you probably got car-struck crossing highway 69]

Oh hell, I digress, and if you read this blog you know where I will digress to, like a ship drifting to harbor…1.) preheat oven. 2.) slice corn tortillas. 3.) Add cheese and “impromptu” toppings.

Well, I just had some kick ass nachos. It felt good. It didn’t take long, they are often listed as appetizer…so eat my board shorts (those are the very, very, very long shorts, sir, I think you will like them), Mr. Robert Scott Leyse.

(BTW, here is an exam, a writing exercise, as you would say.)

Well, what can you do? Not human at all, is it, the flash fiction above…drivel, really.

No, no, know.

Now?

I am going to go relax in the bath.

I will not! For me, a hot shower. I said hot.

And quick.

And good.

*

Beer prices are going up. (again)

Here’s what the D-bag at Budweiser says: “The environment is very favorable, we think.” (He means for price increases.)

Here is the D at MillerCoors: “We have seen very strong pricing to date this year, and we are projecting a favorable pricing environment moving forward.”

Can you believe people who work at a brewery talk like this? I am done with these fools. Can you smell the cynicism in the voices of these guys? It’s micro-brew only now (was heading percentage-wise that way anyway). I mean I feel like I am buying my beer from an attorney, and he’s laughing right in my face. Going home and telling his wife about all the suckers he found today in his “pricing environment.”

*

Kind words from The Prettiest Girl in School about Eggs here. Thank you for reading!

*

S

For me, summer is always the season of rereading.  Whether it’s The Good Earth (which I’m pretty sure I’ve revisited every summer since the sixth grade when it was assigned), or something I haven’t picked up in a long time (it was Middlesex this time), I seem to be able to take a new look at the familiar during the summer in a way that I can’t always do the rest of the year.  

Most recently I have been rereading Jim Harrison’s novella The Man Who Gave up His Name, and the other day I came across one of my favorite things to find in a story:

“Today Nordstrom had no opinions about the river.  He just looked at it for a while.  Of late he had become especially tired of pointless opinions and was trying to get rid of them.  He would catch himself thinking as everyone does: too hot, too cold, too green, too fat, too spicy, ugly building, old slippers, loud music, homely woman, fat man.”  (from the Legends of the Fall collection)

I love a good list.  If done well, a list can seamlessly integrate important information in a small space without obviously doing so.  Lists are a great problem solver, but aren’t strictly utilitarian.  For example, one of my favorite lists ever (so pretty!) comes from the Edward P. Jones story “The Store.”  It’s rather long, so here is a small part of it:

“When you work in a grocery store, the world comes to buy: tons of penny candy and small boxes of soap powder because the next size up–only pennies more–is too expensive and rubbing alcohol and  baby formula and huge sweet potatoes for pies for church socials and spray guns and My Knight and Dixie Peach hair grease and Stanback (’snap back with Stanback’) headache powder and all colors of Griffin shoe polish and nylon stockings and twenty-five cents worth of hogshead cheese cut real thin to make more sandwiches…” (from the collection Lost in the City)

This list goes on for some time with very little punctuation, and does not even come to a close at the end (he managed to have an ellipsis that I don’t hate?  But how?).  I think I love this list because it both is and isn’t a list at all.  And to be background information it comes along rather late in the story, but in his way Jones makes it work.  I’m in jealous awe every time I read it.

And while I’m in a sharing mood, I’ll leave you with my favorite line I’ve read in the past couple of days:

“The sight of her sleeping always made him a little envious, the way conversations in other languages did.” (from the Kevin Moffett story “First Marriage” which I stumbled upon in New Stories From the South 2008)

I was working from home the past couple days, and absolutely forgot to make time to have a brief thought. Right now, I’m looking at pages from my calendar that I’ve kept by my desk for a while, to keep them in mind. I’ll share a couple of them:

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

- G. K. Chesterton, English writer and apologeticist called the “prince of paradox”

Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too,
said Rilke one day to no one in particular
as good poets everywhere address the six directions.
If you can’t bow, you’re dead meat. You’ll break
like uncooked spaghetti. Listen to the gods.
They’re shouting in your ear every second.

- Jim Harrison, American novelist and poet called a “force of nature”

I’m not entirely sure what either of them really make me think of, but they’re ones that give me the sensation of almost thinking of something. Perhaps I have, I just haven’t yet realized the connection…

An oldie but goldie, from one of my favourite writers. (An oodie, but goodie?)

from the New York Times‘ Writers on Writing Series.

By ELMORE LEONARD

These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather.

If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues.

They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated”, and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .

. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs”.

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose”.

This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character — the one whose view best brings the scene to life — I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.

What Steinbeck did in Sweet Thursday was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. “Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, “Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled “Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter “Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: “Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”

Sweet Thursday came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

Here’s this week’s Booking Through Thursday:

What’s the most serious book you’ve read recently?
(I figure it’s easier than asking your most serious boook ever, because, well, it’s recent!)

I suppose Jim Harrison’s The English Major is serious (see my review) if by “serious” you mean literary.

And what does it mean to be literary or serious? I once had someone pooh my choice for reading of Rita Mae Brown’s hilarious novel Venus Envy because the novel wasn’t “serious” — it wasn’t serious, this champion of high-minded literature said, because it was screamingly funny.

Is comedy not serious? Does serious mean gloomy, morose, existential? More than 300 pages and filled with Latinate piles of copralites? (And yes, I’m the one who pooh-ed on celebrity bios, but really, I know why I dislike them — many seem to be giant publicity pieces.)

The English Major
By Jim Harrison
Grove, 2008

Sometimes bawdy, sometimes loopy, always witty, Jim Harrison’s picaresque novel The English Major (Grove, 2008) chronicles the cross-country road trip of sixty-something Cliff as he tries to get a grip on his post-divorce, post-farm life.

Freshly divorced,  and hornswaggled out of his farm by his ex wife, real estate mover and shaker Vivian, Cliff is inspired to set off cross country to rename all the states and state birds, using a child’s jigsaw puzzle map of the United States as his travel guide. Along the way he’s distracted from his project by an affair with Marybelle, a former student from Cliff’s years as a high school English teacher, by the overdrive lifestyle of his son, a movie producer in San Francisco, and by trout streams, thunderstorms, bad meals, good meals, cell phones and OnStar, as well as his own

 sorted and unsorted thoughts.

What makes reading Harrison a pleasure is that there is so much to drink in. Harrison is a sensualist and makes readers feel, hear, taste or smell every experience his characters fall into, from meals to thunderstorms to sex. Here, for instance, is Cliff describing an oncoming thunderstorm after he’s been lost a few hours in the Arizona desert:

I fell asleep and awoke in an hour by my pocket watch to ripping thunder. It crackled and tore through the sky about a mile south of me and there were lightning bolts in the black sky that looked like maps of river systems with splintery little creeks coming out from the main bolts.

As I’ve read more and more of Harrison, he strikes me as a cross between Philip Roth and Henry Miller. He’s capable of Roth’s insights especially into the quirkiness of male sexuality and its twining with male psychology, delivering characters such as Cliff, who charge headlong into journeys of self-understanding, without Roth’s free-floating anxiety. And like Miller, Harrison delights in the sensual, whether it’s food, sex, trout fishing or being caught in a thunderstorm.

Where he differs from the two, especially Roth, is in the fun he seems to have taking readers on journeys with his characters. And each of his characters, in their own way, approach life with a particular attitude, one touched with something like optimism or Zen acceptance, as Cliff demonstrates when he concludes his journey with a return to Michigan, and a return — sort of — to Vivian:

This won’t be a bad life I thought happily. What there is left of it is undetermined but I’ll do fine.

Here’s this week’s Booking Through Thursday:

What’s the funniest book you’ve read recently?

I’m currently reading Jim Harrison’s The English Major, and though it doesn’t have me doubled over with laughter, it is representative in part of Harrison’s quirky humor. I particularly like the disdain the narrator Cliff has for cell phones, referring to them fairly often as dog turds. It’s such a perfect description isn’t it? 

Now, if you want a real guffaw, read Ian Frazier’s essay “Coyote V. Acme” in his nonfiction collection of the same name. It’s a legal brief of Wile E. Coyote’s lawsuit against Acme Co.

Has self already drawn up a list of the books she’s enjoyed reading, so far this year? She might have, but perhaps self is experiencing another of her senior moments.  If dear blog readers remember similar post, can someone tell her?

Let’s see, since January 1, self has read:

• 15 novels (including several that should rightly be called “mysteries”)
• 12 non-fiction books (a few of which could probably more rightly be referred to as “memoirs”)
• 1 short story collection (George Saunders’ CivilwarLand in Bad Decline –  excellent!) and 1 novella collection (Jim Harrison’s The Summer He Didn’t Die –  also excellent!)

Let’s see, of the 15 novels self has read so far this year, her favorites have been:

• Sebastian Barry’s A Long, Long Way (Do not think you know this book unless you’ve read all the way to the end, dear blog readers!)
• John Burdett’s Bangkok 8 (a “mystery” that transcends its genre)
• Jim Harrison’s True North (Only read if you have a strong stomach)

Of the non-fiction, self’s favorites have been:

• Emma Larkin’s Finding George Orwell in Burma
• Xin Ran’s Sky Burial:  An Epic Love Story of Tibet
• Wendy Moore’s The Knife Man
• Charles C. Mann’s 1491:  New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Now, back to more excellent reading!  Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

James Hines was a striking man – A Black Albino man who stood 6ft 7ins tall and weighted 300lbs. He lived in the town of Allendale, South Carolina and was known by almost everyone there.

James Hines,60, died of skin cancer in 2004 and his family picked out a standard-sized casket at Cave Funeral Services in Allendale. His wife, Ann Hines, said her husband’s body was only shown from the chest up at his funeral. And no one suggested a longer casket.

The funeral home is owned by Michael Cave who employed his father, Charles G. Cave to do odd jobs. Charles, who does not have the license needed to embalm a body, would help with tasks around the home like dressing and cleaning bodies. He discovered that the body of James Hines was too long to fit into the casket the family had ordered.

He decided to cut off the legs, between the ankle and the calf, with an electric saw, without consulting with the family. He then placed the severed legs in the casket with the rest of the body. Since the casket was designed to show only the head and the torso, nobody knew that James Hines legs had been sawed off. Besides family members said they were so distraught they didn’t notice anything was wrong.

Rumors about Hines’ suspected truncation started spreading through the town not long after his death in October 2004. But confirmation came four years later when a fired employee, who was the only other worker in the room with Charles Cave when Hines’ legs were cut, told the family what happened.

The authorities were called in and an investigation was started, leading to the state funeral board exhuming Hines’ body.

“It’s just like pulling the scab off an old sore. I was kind of like smoothing things out. But now it’s like starting all over again,” Ann Hines said two days after investigators pulled the casket from the ground, lifted the lid, photographed the contents and returned it to the earth, all without leaving the graveyard.

Under South Carolina law, destroying or desecrating human remains is punishable by one to 10 years in prison. The state Board of Funeral Service voted unanimously to close Cave Funeral Home in Allendale. The board also fined funeral director Michael Cave $500 and ordered him to pay $1,500 for the investigation. Evidence also has been turned over to criminal investigators. Whether Cave can ever reapply for his license will be determined in the final order, said state licensing spokesman Jim Knight.

Michael Cave appealed the decision. He said should be allowed to keep his license because he wasn’t in the room when the legs were cut and had no idea what his father was about do. He also said there were no other blemishes on his 26-year record in the funeral business.

“It was a terrible act,” said Cave’s attorney, Rep. Jim Harrison, R-Columbia. “But these aren’t terrible people.”

Administrative Law Judge Deborah Durden gave her decision immediately after hearing the appeal and revoked the license of the funeral home. The ruling may be the end the family business founded in Allendale 49 years ago.

Harrison thinks Michael Cave could eventually go before the board and ask to be reinstated. In the meantime, the family is trying to figure out if it can complete services for a few bodies left in the home and what it should do with dozens of prepaid funeral plans, Harrison said.

Harrison said he felt the board acted especially harshly. He could find only one other time the board took away someone’s license. But Christa Bell, a lawyer for the agency that oversees the funeral board, said state law gives members discretion to remove someone’s license for any reason they see fit.

“If they cannot take the action they took in this case,” Bell said, “when can they take it?”

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Wolf (1994)

USA

125 painful minutes

Director: Mike Nichols

Writer: Jim Harrison

               Wesley Strick

Terrible.  

If you happen to be in the mood for a film whose budget can only be described as totally welfare, look no further.  Wolf is it.  I’m unsure exactly why director Mike Nichols chose to spend money on welfare looking animatronic wolves, for example, when real wolves would have sufficed.  It wasn’t as though the wolves were required to perform overtly complicated manoeuvers like driving sports cars or jumping through flaming hoops.  No.  I think the most complex thing that I saw any of these shitty animatronic wolves do was raise their heads and look at the camera.

It doesn’t matter though.  It’s not like real wolves would have made the difference between this film eating a colossal wolf dick (which it did) and being lauded by critics everywhere as an astounding achievement in filmmaking (which it wasn’t).  Wolf had more problems than an unemployed, alcoholic single mother, namely that it was a two hour long, storyless exercise in fucking terribleness.

According to the trivia section on Wolf’s IMDB page, Jack Nicholson tried for 12 years to get this project off the ground.  He should have quit after about six minutes.  What exactly it was that made Jacky boy think that anyone would ever enjoy a film about a cuckold douche splash, who pokes a wolf with a stick until it bites him, and who subsequently turns into a werewolf that is more Robin Williams than evil nocturnal beast of the witching hour, is totally and completely beyond me.

It’s also completely beyond me as to why this movie had to have anything at all to do with the publishing company that Jack Nicholson’s character worked at.  Did we really need to see him repeatedly show up for work even after he’d been fired?  What the fuck was he doing there?  He didn’t even have a job and no one seemed to care.  They let him keep his office and everything.  

Oh man…

 It’s going to take me a while to recover from this one.

Playboy will publish an excerpt of Vladimir Nabokov’s final work, an unfinished novella titled The Original of Laura. Don’t look so shocked: The magazine interviewed him in 1964.

Ernest Hemingway: KGB spy?

The Second Pass takes a look at ten books that need to be tossed out of the canon. First up, Don DeLillo’s White Noise: “DeLillo sacrifices any sense of realism for dull, thin polemic.” I’m not buying the “polemic” bit, and who said he was shooting for realism anyhow?

The Iowa Review has a new editor.

Politico rings up Ward Just for a quote about the death of Robert McNamara.

Eudora Welty’s estate pulled her name out of the running for the renaming of her alma mater, the Mississippi University for Women.

The Atlantic has a modest proposal: Give tax breaks to publishers who support new and little-known writers. M.A. Orthofer retorts, “don’t ‘not-for-profit’ publishers (many of the finest small publishers in the US) already get obscene tax breaks ?”

John Updike’s longtime home in Beverly Farms, Mass., sold last month for $2.5 million.

Jim Harrison has a pretty fancy house too, though his actual writing room looks like a cubicle in an abandoned real-estate brokerage.

George Pelecanos doesn’t know jack about writing about shotguns, according to a Field & Stream gunblogger: “Pelecanos in particular will put characters in a tense armed standoff, then have someone say ‘I can shoot you before you have time to rack that pump.’ In real life the immediate reply would be ‘Boom.’”

I know I’m not the only one: I read several novels at a time. One is usually in the kitchen; the other by my bed, a third in the living room (or even the bathroom, though magazines are more appropriate there since I need a pen or post its when I read).

By some odd coincidence, all 5 of the novels I am reading now or have just finished are quite similar: the narrator or one of the key characters is a man in his late 50s or 60s who is going through some sort of post divorce/relationship,  fear of death and aging/health crisis.  Maybe it’s just the usual midlife crisis, but happening later? 

These are not traditional man-caught-with-his-pants-down (and it’s all revealed in e-mail)  sort of stories, either. These men are portrayed quite sympathetically: their wives range from the bitch who left, to the bitch who is at the top of her professional career to more sympathetically but equally unavailable wives (one with incipient alzheimers; the other just growing in a different direction). 

This trend (if I may call it that: four of the  novels are fairly recent) provides an  interesting alternative perspective to the Sandra Tsing Loh article in the Atlantic.   Though I wouldn’t say it’s a call for passion either a la Cristina Nehring’s Vindication of Love.  The men in these novels are quite sexual or sexually frustrated or just plain horny:  In two novels, women’s butts figure prominently in  the plots; in 2 others, the male characters fantasize but don’t act; and in the fifth, well, I haven’t read far enough yet to know, so don’t tell me.

Basically, this is an in progress blog posting: I haven’t finished two of the novels yet, so I’m not sure if this “trend” I’m noticing will hold up, and I’m not so sure how new a trend it is.  Philip Roth’s characters immediately come to mind. But these men, well, they are different. 

If you’ve read any of these, let me know what you think:

• Jim Harrison’s The English Major
• Richard Russo’s Straight Man  AND Bridge of Sighs
• Jim Lynch’s Border Songs
• David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence

“Cliff est à un tournant de sa vie. Plaqué par sa femme à soixante-deux ans, il décide de tout quitter et de prendre la route, à la recherche d’un nouveau souffle. Bientôt rejoint par Marybelle, une ancienne étudiante avec qui il vit une liaison enflammée, il poursuit son chemin au gré des obsessions américaines. Célèbre à l’envi la beauté des femmes, le désir et l’ivresse quand bien même le festin touche à sa fin. Traverse le pays de part en part, attribuant à chaque État le nom d’une tribu indienne. S’attire les foudres ou l’incompréhension de l’Amérique bien pensante dans un pays qui n’est plus à un massacre près. Son voyage, ponctué de rencontres extravagantes et cocasses, lui apportera-t-il pour autant la renaissance tant recherchée ?”

Une nouvelle rubrique dans ce blog (re)naissant : un carnet de lecture, reprenant mes dernières expériences littéraires suffisamment édifiantes dans le bon sens ou pas pour que j’ai envie de vous le faire partager. Il n’y a rien de plus personnel que le rapport au livre et à la lecture, de plus intime que le choix d’un ouvrage, et par contraste, rien de plus agaçant que de se voir imposer ou proposer lourdement un sujet, un auteur, un titre.

Dans la même veine, rien de plus déprimant ou lassant ou inintéressant que de lire le compte-rendu d’une lecture faite par un autre. Mieux vaut se limiter au résumé de l’éditeur dans ce cas. Mes carnets de lecture seront donc brefs, fugaces, pour vous donner ne serait-ce qu’une accroche.

J’ai aimé cette nouvelle livraison de Jim Harrison, parue en 2008 aux Etats-Unis, quoi que ce ne soit pas son meilleur roman à mes yeux. Mais on y retrouve les ingrédients du succès et du rêve, avec un brin de ce désenchantement pour partie lié à l’âge et à la vieillesse venant.

Il n’empêche. J’ai frissonné en imaginant la ferme aux crotales en liberté, j’ai intellectualisé en parcourant la frontière ultra-sécurisée du Mexique parcourue par Cliff, j’ai fantasmé sur le cul de Sylvia dans son short rose en plein jogging. Et chose rare, j’ai découvert un aspect nouveau jamais entrevu dans mes lectures Harrisonnienne… la disproportion, le déséquilibre, la folie pantagruelique dans l’alimentation de base de l’américain moyen un peu cultivé que l’on découvre dans le ton très spontané d’Harrison, quand bien même cet amour de la bouffe fait partie intégrante de son oeuvre.