Seen, circa 1992, West Sacramento

A public bus rolls haltingly through the low-slung hopelessness of West Sacramento, California. A family of four stands at a bus stop, two children with fudgesicles, their dark-haired father in a black tank top and bushy mustache, the lanky, harrowed-looking mother gazing toward nothing in the distance. Physically, she could be his sister. He may be out of work, they on the road with him. The summer afternoon in the wide open valley is hot. Sunlight off the white sidewalk hurts their eyes. Later, in the evening, the children are soothed with the noise of American television in motel rooms. McDonald's dinners. Dad with a six-pack on the little round table by the window. The blinds are down, the children on the edge of the bed, the mother lying face down in a stagnant, drying creek two blocks away, drunkenly taking in bits of what water remains. She is a high school graduate. He has been trained to drive big trucks. It is summer and the children have finished school, said goodbye to one or two other children, to a teacher who thought the boy was a poor student, who didn't know he'd had a sister in the lower grades. The father watches the television from the table, wonders where his wife could be.

Three Unforeseen Masterpieces

 

3 unforeseen masterpieces, multiple copies

A couple of years back, I had two unpublished essays in hand: this one here, about three great works of American nonfiction by three authors famous for things other than writing; and another, more personal one, that I thought was the best thing I'd ever written. The latter one, the personal one, wasn't quite done, but I thought that when it was I might submit it to The Believer. While I was finishing it, I submitted this literary one below. I expected them to reject it; while I had published many articles in GQ and some other local magazines, everything I had ever submitted to a literary publication had been rejected. Still, I figured that by the time they read and rejected this one, I'd have the other one finished, it would be the best thing I ever wrote, I would immediately follow up with it, and they would like it. But before that could happen, to my great surprise and even greater delight, they accepted this one here. There followed a long silence. A couple of times in the following months, I emailed asking for an update, but got little information in return. In the meantime, I finished the personal essay, submitted it, and it got rejected. It took another year and a half for edits on the accepted, literary essay to come, and several months more after my re-write, but eventually The Believer changed their minds about the piece and told me they wouldn't be publishing it after all. Neither would anyone else, I suspect. So, here it is, because I think it is interesting and that it might inspire a few people to read these three books, which will bring them pleasure. The Sarah Palin opening is slightly dated, but the point of it is clear enough, so I won't revise it with a more relevant name. (I'm so glad she's no longer relevant.)

To read the essay, please go here: 
Three Unforeseen Masterpieces: 
Grant's Personal Memoirs; Thomas Hart Benton's An Artist in America; Whittaker Chambers' Witness.*

* I know there's a typo in the introduction to the full essay, but blogspot won't let me correct it, for now...


From the essay:

There are examples, though admittedly moving ever deeper into America’s past, of great works of literature being produced by public figures whom we might not have thought capable of writing an undeniable literary gem. And in three particularly controversial cases, neither their bitterest enemies nor their harshest critics could naysay the literary force at work in narratives by three men each of whom had found fame without words: one as a zealot and informer, one as an iconoclastic muralist, one as a master of the art of war and a drunk who kept falling off his horse. What Whittaker Chambers, Thomas Hart Benton, and Ulysses S. Grant have in common is this: each at a critical point in his life wrote a brilliant autobiography evocative of his times, his country, and his soul. All three wrote books that betrayed an intimacy and skill with words unforeseen in an otherwise complex life. Each author achieved a singular, unmistakable tone. Each work is an invitation into the distinct and fertile mind of its creator.

Faulkner's Pants

Box of William Faulkner's pants, Oxford, Mississippi, Spring, 2010.

Photo: Jim O'Brien

Poem by Desmond O'Grady

This is one of those poems, like R.S. Thomas' "Song at the Year's Turning," that I can't really figure out but love very much anyway. I love "fisted flex of heart." Also how "staring staring silence" is revisited later with the "Unwinking eyes of saints" and "I felt the Churcheyed, fidget fear." I love the structure of the three long sentences that make up the three stanzas, and the tone of frustration, perhaps tinged with surrender. Perhaps not tinged with surrender. I'm not really sure. I like the outraged shock in the question of the title. Is it outraged shock? Is it a sort of mocking of teenage petulance? There's some kind of returning going on, but is it to an emotion? Or a place? And if it's to a place, is it a physical place or a spiritual one? Maybe it's all of these things. Or none of them. I can't really figure it out. But still I love this poem by the Irishman, Desmond O'Grady, which I found in his 1967 collection called The Dark Edge of Europe.

Was I Supposed to Know?

When,

In a blue-sharp, fallow sky,

With wind in hair

And grey of rock, angled by ages, sharpening the eye,

I

Stamped down that cut stone stair

Towards sand and sea

And clawed, nails scratching, down from the deaf-mute cliffs to where

Were track and trees below --

Was I supposed to know?

When,

With senses quick as compass

And tightened skin,

In breaking clearing, fell on Church and Churchyard moss

I,

Helpless, toeheeled in

To Christ and Cross

And staring staring silence, felt small as a pin,

Felt schoolboy years ago --

Was I supposed to know?

Was I supposed to know

That each fisted flex of heart

And wide of eye,

Each pitch of thought in bone-sprung skull; each stutter start

Of unravelled blood in my

Knit flesh and bone;

And every studied part I cast me as a boy;

That all my rebel scorn

And mock at prayer,

My every bedded bitch and spilled out kids unborn,

Were

All marked mine with care --

By some high Law

Or some high guiding Plan -- to lead me back to where,

Again,

With coffin smell of pew

And chris of Cross,

Unwinking eyes of saints and hushed confession queue --

For one loud nervous boot

Of frightened heart,

I felt the Churcheyed, fidget fear of schooltied youth?

Satan's Waiting Room, or Stages of Grief

Wrote this article about formerly famous rock bands sustaining their careers at casinos for GQ in 2006. It got killed. Spin read it, and said they might run it, but changed their minds. GQ kindly paid me my full fee for the story (or gave me credit for the wordage, as I think I was on contract at the time). It was a lot of work and travel. It's not easy to get to Atlantic City from Oakland, for example, and I wanted to take a bus on the final leg; I thought it might be interesting to ride a Friday night bus from Philly to Atlantic City, just to see who my fellow passengers might be. I was wrong. I recall being more disappointed by the Spin rejection, I guess because it would have been so nice for a killed thing to find a life after death. I did a bunch of editing at Spin's request, but in the end, they lost interest. I had originally pitched it to GQ as a story about once-famous rock acts playing at state and county fairs. But GQ thought it would be more interesting at casinos. They were probably right, but somehow I just couldn't pull it off. The original version included an REO Speedwagon show and backstage interview. I don't remember why or when that section got dropped. Might have to do with how nice the REO guys were, and that I just couldn't find much funny to say about them. I never liked their music. Or Eddie Money or Rick Springfield, for that matter. I admit to liking Styx briefly when very young. Doobie Brothers I have liked on and off, and they are very much the sound of my childhood summers. It was humiliating for the story never to see the light of day. It involved so much travel and work that just about everyone I knew was aware that I was working on it and was excited about it and often asked me how it was going and when it would appear. On my last trip to Vegas, outside the Eddie Money show, some dude sneezed all over me and I ended up being sick for weeks. The husband of a co-worker of my wife was a huge, life-long REO fan, and so I took him with me to the show and then backstage afterwards. It was very exciting for him, which was nice, but just added to my embarrassment when the story died. Of course, magazine stories get killed for all kinds of reasons, not always to do with the quality of the writer's work. But this one was probably my fault. My original, working title was "Satan's Waiting Room." It was some kind of joke about how, if Florida is God's waiting room, and if Rock & Roll is Satanic, and if casinos are where old bands go to die, then casinos would be Satan's waiting...well, you get it.

Stages of Grief

At first, to catch their names on a state fair schedule -- Journey, Styx, Blue Oyster Cult -- seemed a kind of cosmic rock comeuppance. Finally, these bands who had blasted music back into a dark, bullshit age of meaningless rock opera pomp, who had never deserved their former fortune or fame, were getting theirs in the hellish heat of the fair.

But in my more reflective moments, a certain nagging sadness would taint my schadenfreude. Did any formerly-famous musical act really deserve this fate: forced to trudge onstage and fain the triumphant rock and roll body language of their glory years while banging out their hit songs for the millionth time before another sweaty, heat-dazed, corn-on-the-cob sucking American crowd staggering about the fairgrounds.

Well, now these former idols and two-hit wonder mainstays of the fair have come in from the heat: fairgrounds rock has taken over the glam stages of Vegas and Atlantic City and the glamour-free nightclubs of the far-flung Indian reservations. Frampton is here. Juice Newton is here. REO Speedwagon is here. Even some remnant of Queen is here.

Sooner or later they’ll all be here in rock and roll’s Indian burial ground.

To read the whole thing, go here: Satan's Waiting Room

More Chekhov, more on books

This paragraph from a Chekhov short story describes something of how I read. The first and last sentences sound particularly familiar. Are these the last years of my confinement? What am I confined in? Life and consciousness and failure. Could books save me? (With the passage's final image, I was reminded of Ishmael clinging to Queequeg's coffin.) Ultimately, they destroy the prisoner in the story. Books, and his years of solitude, turn him into a cynic, a misanthrope, a Timon. Is Chekhov saying that if you knew humanity only through its books, you would want to avoid it in real life? Is he saying that that conclusion would be accurate? And if so, is he blaming humanity for this outcome, or just writers of books, like himself?


During the last years of his confinement the prisoner read an extraordinary amount, quite haphazard. Now he would apply himself to the natural sciences, then he would read Byron or Shakespeare. Notes used to come from him in which he asked to be sent at the same time a book on chemistry, a textbook of medicine, a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or theology. He read as though he were swimming in the sea among broken pieces of wreckage, and in his desire to save his life was eagerly grasping one piece after another.
                                                                                                         
                                                                                                           -Anton Chekhov
                                                                                                            "The Bet"

The part you can skip: WHF

I think it is much better for a book to have some parts that can be skipped just as well as not, you get through it so much faster. I have often thought what a good thing it would be if somebody would write a book that we could skip the whole of. I think a good many people would like to have such a book as that. I know I should. 
                                                                                           
                                                                                              -William Henry Frost
                                                                                                Fairies and Folk of Ireland (1901)

                                                                                                            

Line from the poet Desmond O'Grady

There's a time in the wound of childhood when something clots.
                                                                    -Desmond O'Grady
                                                                      from the poem "The Nail"

Also see: Poem by Desmond O'Grady - Was I Supposed to Know?

Books: the way of the horse

It wouldn't be a terrible fate; everybody loves horses. But I think someday print books will have gone the way of horses, once not too too long ago so essential in so many ways, now a curiosity, a luxury, a pleasure to see but few of us ever really get near them or need them. Someday there will be people among us who own books (horses), who read books (ride horses) regularly. And, like horse people today, book people will be seen as sort of interesting for that slightly exotic bit of culture they experience with their books (horses) and all their book-(horse)-friends. Some of us will envy them their special interest and the activity of reading (riding) and caring for their books (horses) and that extra bit of knowledge they have about types (breeds) of books (horses) and how to handle a book (horse). Having grown up around books (horses), many of their children will have learned to love books (horses) and will come to have their own. Nearly everyone will at some time in his or her life have read a book (ridden a horse), on vacation at a fancy resort or while visiting a family friend who keeps a few. Some will find they enjoy being around books (horses) and reading books (riding horses) but will never come to own one. Perhaps they will be prohibitively expensive to own. Perhaps some will find they are allergic to books (horses), or frightened of them. I think I will be dead by the time this happens, but perhaps not for long.

From Kickham's Knocknagow

Irishman C.J. Kickham's 19th Century novel Knocknagow is exceedingly charming and often very funny. That's why this dead-serious, grisly passage, which I read last night, came as a shock. I happen pretty much by accident to be reading Knocknagow immediately after finishing Thomas Flanagan's great historical novel, The Year of the French, about the bleak and bloody 1798 uprising of the Irish, with some aid from the French, against their English overlords. Knocknagow is set some decades later, but a couple of veterans of '98 populate the book, and the '98 Uprising has become part of the consciousness of many of the younger characters as well. Here we learn the reason that Mrs. Donovan (mother to Mat the Thrasher, local hero for his good looks, good nature, and hurling prowess) tends to have a sad face, which the narrator calls "the shadow of a curse." The soldiers referred to are English Red Coats, although some of them may well have been native Irish. The yoeman are local troops loyal to the crown.

Poor Mrs. Donovan got that sad face of hers one bright summer day in the year '98 when her father's house was surrounded by soldiers and yeomen, and her only brother, a bright-eyed boy of seventeen, was torn from the arms of his mother, and shot dead outside the door. And then a gallant officer twisted his hand in the boy's golden hair, and invited them all to observe how, with one blow of his trusty sword, he would sever the rebel head from the rebel carcase. But one blow, nor two, nor three, nor ten, did not do; and the gallant officer hacked away at the poor boy's neck in a fury, and was in so great a passion that when the trunk fell down at last, leaving the head in his hand, he flung it on the ground, and kicked it like a football; and when it rolled against the feet of the horrified young girl, who stood as if she were turned to stone near the door, she fell down senseless without cry or moan, and they all thought she too was dead. She awoke, however, the second next day following, just in time to kiss the poor bruised and disfigured lips before the coffin-lid was nailed down upon them.