Ripping Yarns

I used to tear books in half for a living. Managing inventory for an indie bookstore during the 1990s, one of my tasks was "stripping" the mass market paperbacks. This entails, for those not in the trade, ripping the front cover off to return to the publisher in exchange for credit, then tearing the book in half (or into thirds or quarters, depending on the thickness of the tome) and trashing/recycling the remaining paper. I was often asked, Aren't you disturbed on some level, destroying all those books? Answer: Yes, I am disturbed on some level, but it's not from destroying all those books.

You might try and excuse this blasphemy by saying, well, they weren't sacred texts. It was a lot of unsold Danielle Steele and Zane Grey and Margaret Truman and Allan Folsom and Robert James Waller. But I'd rip up classics as well as over-ordered bestsellers -- not all those high school kids pick up what they need for Required Reading, after all, and there was no reason to keep stock of an extra 200 copies of The Awakening until the next fall, not when we needed credit for twelve cases of the new John Grisham novel, due to land come springtime.

That's how the book business works: We got only so much room for only so many books.

As of this writing, my library is comprised of just over 500 titles. (I know that number because, being disturbed on some level, I grabbed a cup of coffee and spent a couple-three minutes doing an inventory count, just like in the old days.) This is as small as my collection has been in many years. I reduced it significantly prior to our move to Birmingham, by somewhere in the neighborhood of forty percent, weeding out books I'd read decades prior, or might not read until decades hence, or might not read ever. It wasn't an entirely painless process, I will admit. Then again, neither was moving. We're talking four flights of stairs, here. Halfway through the day, I found myself wishing: If I knew which boxes my Really Treasured Books were in, I'd set the rest on fire, right down there in the street in full view of God and everybody, and only call the firemen to hose the ashes into the sewer.

My library has routinely expanded and contracted by way of constant acquisitions and occasional purges. I've tried to keep my collection bound by available shelf space, but this hasn't always worked; books tend to end up here and there, in decorative piles. But the purges accomplish more than clearing floor-space: as a dedicated apartment dweller, I never assumed permanence. Meaning, at some point, all that stuff has to be picked up and moved again, so why have more than I'm willing to carry? It's not so much about shelf space as it is about life space.

My sister Dena taught me to read when I was four, using Heckle & Jeckle comic books. (I disliked being read to, wanting instead to read for myself -- a characteristic I still have, pretty funny from a guy who came up with Southern Writers Reading as the eponymous title for an onstage literary event.) I was the unofficial class librarian throughout fourth grade, each week quickly raising my hand to volunteer for the task of dusting and tidying the industrial metal bookshelves that lined one wall of our classroom. I majored in English for five years, then found work in bookstores for the next thirteen -- and frankly got a much better education, taking home books about social and scientific theories, religion, histories, biographies, even a bit of literature now and then. I am, in short, no stranger to the joys that books provide.

I used to assume that a healthy personal library had to be a steadily growing thing -- it was a physical manifestation of the owner's mind, or at least a window into it. Books in that sense were trophies of achievement, each shelf the equivalent of a sheepskin certificate, even if it was only from the School of Nurse Romances. A library was evidence of the worthwhile shape of your life, and the more you had, the better, the faster, the smarter. But as somebody who hasn't lived in one particular place for more than a handful of years, my practical need to purge physical objects outweighs any urge to showcase what I've read in the past in order to perhaps prove to visitors that I can carry on an interesting conversation (because I often can't, anyway).

Buddhist monks spend hours, days, weeks creating those intricate mandalas out of colored sand, only to brush them away (ceremoniously, but still) after they finish. So, I wonder: What is this library but a multicolored mandala, a dreamcatcher, a skein of flexible ideas grouped here only temporarily, in this form, before again taking to the wind? Why hang onto books? Why even try? When Sonny Brewer and I were chasing dollars with used and rare tomes at Over the Transom, we'd occasionally receive a beloved copy of something, like that first state edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, or that full collection of Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese ghost stories -- and as tempting as it was to keep such things for ourselves, we had a great notion: we were only a temporary transit lounge. We were just keeping those books until their rightful owners came to collect them. We loved them, but we also loved seeing them go. (That is, after all, another way in which the book business works.)

At the end of Fahrenheit 451, there are almost no books left in the world, only people who remember those books. But it is more than memory, it is life itself. I am Plato's Republic, says one character, introducing others: I want you to meet Jonathan Swift [...] and this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr Albert Schweitzer. And so do we all become Spartacus, one book at a time.

I suppose it all boils down to a rephrasing of an old cliche: When I croak, I won't take any of these books with me. I'll only take what I've read. And what a gift that will be.

[This was a response to The Wily Blogger who will, I hope, one day reinstate her wily blogging.]

V. (1963)

Now and then, it takes a few honest tries before I can get certain books to fit inside my skull. Square pegs, round holes, we will sell no wine before its time, all that. It took several attempts over a handful of years before Blood Meridian screwed down in there, for example. Same with Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and, for reasons I am unwilling to discuss, World War Z.

Thomas Pynchon's debut novel V. was no different, first time I picked it up in 1990, shortly after finishing Vineland. Reading it now for the 6th or 7th time (though it's my first go-round in over a decade), it's somewhat easy to forget why -- I'm now well-acquainted with the basic structure, and am no longer fooled when Pynchon goes off on some labyrinthine philosophical/scientific/pseudo-historical tangent, or introduces, often with fanfare or at least an elaborate pun, some new character who then all but disappears for the rest of the novel. Like many first-time readers, I found myself unduly vexed by these basic Pynchonian stylistic nuances and peccadilloes, which are present in even his most streamlined narratives. It's a little like being a novice sailor or kook surfer -- first, frustrating impression will be that a body may move in only one direction: the way of the wind or the wave. But an old salt knows energy moves in multiple directions; you take your pick and plot your course. The wind, the waves, those are just symptoms of a power ready to be harnessed.

So Profane's aimless drift and Stencil's misdirected quest are now Beaten Paths; instead of worrying over the map, I can just enjoy the scenery: those smaller details that spread out from all angles, often telegraphing ideas that will be expanded upon, or at least queerly mirrored, in novels to come. At the forefront is Pynchon's morbid fascination with self-dehumanization, which is far more creepy than the aspect of being dehumanized by a collective, whether bureaucratic or conspiratorial, under the aims of social control. In V., the characters are ready to take matters into their own hands: No one wants to be who they are, and are haunted by ideas of unrealistic, unholy perfection. There are no attempts at self-discovery or even improvement beyond the shallow, the physical -- only yearnings for others, unattainable Others.

And forget the Machine Age, these characters are entering a Machine Consciousness. Pulses and hearts tick like frantic clockwork. Spongy brains whir. Women seduce automobiles. Eyeballs contain secret sprockets and gears. (Pynchon didn't start dabbling with steampunk in Against the Day, he started it here, before the practice even had a genre title.) But we are not machines, with parts that can be swapped out when they fail; we are humans, and there's only so much improving we can do before time moves us off the playing field. Herbert Stencil, searching for a wispy historical phantom known only by the titular initial, has at best a vague grasp of this essential concept. But only because he is obsessed with history, and possessed of a knack to always begin his investigations just as the principles from whom he most needs answers all disappear behind the layered veils of passing time.

But I, like the novel itself, digress ...

I used to pick up every book with the fevered intention to finish, like it was some kind of assignment, a grade I'd get in Heaven. No more of that crap, here in my old-ish age. I'm not shy about putting a book down, for good -- or even reaching for the trash can, if necessary. Novels better not get bogged down in rambling detail, or neglect atmosphere at the risk of moving too quickly, or be too clever, or have stupid dialogue, or obvious or strained humor, or be written by a clod who uses exclamation points, or ever, ever feel the need to mention a character's last experience in noninvasive lighting.

But every now and then, I put a book down not for any aesthetic such reasons, however petty, but because I know I'm not ready for it. It's not you, I tell the book, it's me. Still, I often wonder about my fascination with the prose of Thomas Pynchon, why I always stick with it when I really prefer pulp-era science fiction or crime or weird horror, no apologies. Let's face it, I ought not like it. I don't like Tom Robbins or David Foster Wallace or most of what gets labeled as "post-modern literature." I've put down a lot of those books; their challenges and rewards aren't for me. But I found a kindred spirit in Pynchon for some reason, despite the stupid names he bestows upon his characters. And I keep coming back to these novels, time and again, which is unusual for me (short stories by Bradbury and Lovecraft are one thing, but I plow through a novel once, I'm typically finished. Friends who are driven to re-read Austin and Fitzgerald and Twain on a cyclical schedule are gifted with an impulse I lack). There's an scene in V. where a painter struggles with a painting because the light keeps shifting in the room, but Pynchon uses that to illustrate how our perception of art (among other things) changes over time, and we should use that to examine ourselves. He's got something there.

Then again, maybe it's as simple as a pattern set early in my reading life by The Hobbit and its obscure, out-of-print sequel, The Lord of the Rings. Those books involve long, intertwining plot lines, not to mention a ComicCon's-worth of weirdly named characters. (Against the nomenclature of what seems like nineteen-thousand generations of kings-in-exile, Russian novels are cakewalks.) But I loved them, I loved them from the first pages, and when I was about halfway through The Fellowship of the Ring, I tried to talk my sister into reading them too. But, nah, she'd already tried, and gave up just a few chapters into The Hobbit. Too many dwarves, too many weird names. This really disappointed me, that part of every reader that wants to share the experience of a deeply-loved book. And I suppose I vowed then that I would never let anything so trifling as a menagerie of characters, however all bizarrely named, get in the way of a great reading experience. That's the only explanation I have for why I forgive Pynchon all these insanely stupid names. Dewey Gland, after all. Jeebus.

I was operating on the motto Make It Literary, a piece of bad advice I made up all by myself and then took.
     -- Thomas Pynchon, on the subject of his early writing, from the introduction to Slow Learner

Gravity's Rainbow (1991 hardback edition)

Hardback editions, of any description, of Thomas Pynchon's first three novels are hard to come by. My slightly cocked 1966 Modern Library edition of V. is a trophy collected during my early days at Over the Transom, when rare book searches were our forte, before the existence of ABE and Bookfinder become common knowledge. (It both cracks me up and embarrasses me now that we charged a $15 "finder's fee" for tracking down out-of-print titles, a job that currently takes seconds using Google. Ah, the Salad Days of the Internet, when access to a search engine was a license to print money.) Anyway, circa 2000, most ML copies of V. were selling in the $75+ range. I found mine for under $30 from "a guy who apparently didn't know what he had" -- our phrase for someone anomalously listing an uncommon book for far less than the average going rate. My good luck.

Eariler in the decade, while working at Page & Palette, I picked up what is sometimes referred to as a "second printing" of Gravity's Rainbow in hardback. Vineland had just been released as a trade paperback and, for the first time since initial publication, GR was given a refreshed cover with matching typography. Viking's decision to issue a few new hardbacks with updated jackets must have been off-the-cuff; they didn't bother to assign a new ISBN, standard practice with a reissue and/or new design elements -- hence the "second printing" confusion.

I didn't need a hardback, already owning a paperback with the exact same cover. But I'm a sucker for new artwork, particularly when it offers improvements, and this struck me as both appealingly modern (the original early 1970s design was a sick orange color, to my eye uninspired and certainly stale by the early 1990s) and subtly appropriate: it's the initial bloom not of a sunrise or sunset but of a nuclear explosion, like the one suggested in the novel's closing moments ("I don't think that's a police siren..."). I probably also liked the idea of having a "permanent" copy for the bookshelf. Covers would, after all, come and go (and GR was indeed updated again only a handful of years later, for the Penguin Classics USA edition), but this was a damn keeper.

My mind changed by 1999, however -- when I wanted tickets and travel money to see Roger Waters, then embarking on his first tour since 1987. Given that I'd probably always have quick access to some perfectly usable copy of Gravity's Rainbow, why did I need this hardback gathering dust? To eBay with it! ... I should have known something was up when my reserve of $30 was met within hours. I think I ended up selling that copy for somewhere upwards of $80. More than enough for my ticket, certainly -- and I hadn't even listed my college-era comic books yet. More good luck, or just dumb luck?

I sold quite a lot of stuff on eBay that year -- to fund not only that particular road trip but also my life, in the short term -- but that copy of Gravity's Rainbow was the only thing with which I regretted parting. Particularly since the price it went for signaled to me that I'd unwittingly, stupidly released a treasure. I would periodically check the usual dark corners of the internet, with no luck: the only hardback copies of GR floating anywhere near my price range were ex-library copies, stamped and mauled and missing any jacket whatsoever.

Finally, late in 2005, I tripped upon an ABE listing. Same book, same cover, forty-some-odd dollars, shipping included. Here was a guy who apparently didn't know what he had, same as me, six years earlier. [Perhaps exactly as I had been? ... This book has a front hinge that is cracking, despite an attempted, somewhat botched, repair at the front-end papers with binder's glue -- exactly the sort of repair I'd have attempted on just such a flaw, working late hours in the "engine room" at Over the Transom. And I could almost, almost swear that my given-away copy had just such a problem with the front hinge. Then again, maybe Viking printed cheap copies and they're all prone to that.]

Now if only I could find one of those guys with a first edition copy of The Crying of Lot 49, I'd be all set.

The Bear Bryant Funeral Train (2007)

This is a book I edited. The first edition had been declared out-of-print due to a plagiarism controversy/literary misunderstanding, however you want to see it. What I saw was a good book that deserved a second chance at life.

Jake Adam York saw the same thing.

Early on I had the idea to reassemble the collection using Brad's original graduate thesis as a manuscript, which would then be bolstered by an academic apparatus similar to that of a Norton Critical Edition. This remained just an idea, however, until I became aware of Jake's fierce defense of Brad's literary technique on the storySouth blog. Was he willing to redesign that elegant argument for print? He absolutely was. Before long I also had two other great writers on board, Michelle Richmond and John Dufresne, as well as Professor Emeritus of the University of Alabama, Don Noble. But it was Jake who set the table.

On 15 December 2012, Jake suffered a fatal stroke, and left holes in the hearts of all who loved him, who worked alongside him, who learned from him, who read his work. He was merely forty years old: It's hard not to imagine how we've been robbed of decades of powerful, insightful poetry and impassioned prose -- quite possibly even of an eventual Poet Laureate. Upon hearing the news, I sought out his prose poem "Leaving Alabama" which, near the end, advises:

Drive one last time along the river, and don't think how the morning sun lights it till it looks like molten steel [...] Look straight ahead. Adjust the rearview mirror. Adjust the rearview mirror. Feel it warm beneath your hand, its box of river and sun and steel and shadow. Ignore your heart rising to your throat, this terrible relapse. Think of everything you hate. Everything. Then pull the mirror down.

Jake, I did not know you well enough. But I do know that when your mirror was pulled down, so unceremoniously and by a hand not your own, there was no hate anywhere in sight. You've taken too much love with you for that. We'll miss you, buddy. Say hello to Jeanne and Wayne and William for us in the meanwhile. Peace.

Great Tales of Terror & the Supernatural (1994 edition)

I have crappy retention for short stories. Almost none. Assign me a short story, quiz me about it a year later, I'll flunk. Sometimes I can remember a critical detail (there's a terrible motorcycle accident in the middle; giant ants are on the rampage; yellow wallpaper is involved) but usually nothing specific about the plot. I will often remember if I enjoyed the story, and maybe some of the mood of it; other times even the titles will be totally unfamiliar. It's maddening in its own way.

Then again, silver lining: This peculiar form of Literary Alzheimer's disease means my enjoyment doesn't necessarily decrease with repeat readings. Sure, I've read Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "The Haunted and the Haunters" enough times to have memorized every ridiculous trope, but it feels like a mint ride each time. I am afforded a pleasant, bookish kind of deja-vu. Events unfold off the page, but I don't remember them until after I've reread them -- like waking up from a dream you know you've had before. It's kind of nice. I get to experience something quasi-new while also satisfying the basic human desire for hearing a story retold over and again.

Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural is a textbook of uneasy numina. Over fifty genre classics from the likes of Hawthorne, Lovecraft, Faulkner, Bierce, Wells, James (M.R., that is). Tiny print covers all 1000 pages. Given my apparent propensity of my brain to jettison short fiction, plus the time it usually takes me to traverse this book from cover to cover, I've joked that this volume would be the only one I'd need for that proverbial Desert Island to which one may only take a handful of favorite things: upon finishing, I could just flip back to the beginning, and start fresh...

The Silmarillion (1977)

This book is a cornerstone of my library. It's a first American printing, a gift from my brother-in-law Pete, what must have been Christmas 1978, based on the inscription. It looked in better shape as an original gift, but it's always been a treasure to me.

I read both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings while in 6th grade, consuming them slowly over a period of nearly a year -- I lived inside each chapter for as long as I could, often reading them two or three times before finally moving forward in the story. While I always had a rich imagination, Tolkien's saga was a turning point for me in realizing that escapism for "grown folks" could be just as immersive and entertaining as the ghost stories and comic books consumed during my first decade or so on the planet. (I'd previously held a dim view of the Harold Robbins and James Michener slogs favored by my father; their titles and covers looked common and dull.)

The Silmarillion was an equal turning point. As a 7th grader, I struggled with the cold, alien structure of this "Middle-earth bible," as well as with the linguistic, and of course mythological, aims of Professor Tolkien, all of which were over my head. I was plenty game, but might have understood more had I simply used the book to smash myself in the face a few times. Still, I finished. I couldn't have explained half of what I'd just read, but I finished all the same.

I did realize two things, even then. First, that even the most fantastical genre tales can have roots in serious intention and theme -- and that is an awesome and wonderful thing. Second, that my duty as a reader isn't always to understand absolutely everything; it's to take away from difficult material what I am capable, at that moment in time, of taking away. Something will be learned, and no work, as Gurdjieff would say, will be wasted.

Thank you, Pete.

See Also:
The Lord of the Rings (1954)

Commonplace Book: purevineland

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
     -- Alan Watts

The map is not the territory.
     -- Alfred Korzbyski

Eternity is not a length; it is a depth of time. We enter and meet there through the sacrament of love.
     -- Forrest Church

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish fill the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

-- Henry David Thoreau

The purpose of the universe of the flowering of consciousness.
     -- Eckhart Tolle

You are an aperture through which the Universe is looking at and exploring itself.
     -- Alan Watts

Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.
     -- Eckhart Tolle.

God chooses one man with a shout, another with a song, another with a whisper.
     -- Rabbi Nahman of Bratislava

To try to be better is to be better.
     -- Charlotte Cushman

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.
     --Thomas Jefferson

You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do.
     -- Anne Lamott

Worry is a form of prayer for something you don't want.
     -- Bhagavan Das

There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
     -- Carl Jung

People tend to become like that which they love, with its name written on their brows.
     -- Huston Smith

The Astrolabe of the Mysteries of God is Love.
     -- Rumi

God is being, awareness, and bliss. God lies on the further side of being as we understand it, not nothingness; beyond minds as we know them, not mindless clay; beyond ecstasy, not agony. Understand with Shankara that "the sun shines even without objects to shine upon."
     -- Huston Smith, The World's Religions

My doctrine is not a doctrine but just a vision. I have not given you any set rules, I have not given you a system.
     -- The Buddha

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
     -- Leonard Cohen

Sing a Song of Bradbury

On the fifth of June, in this Our Year of Predicted Apocalypse 2012, the planet Venus -- guiding light of ancient mariners, namesake of love goddesses from all cultures, bright twinkle making her the celestial object most often mistaken for a UFO -- transformed into a pinhole shadow while traversing the surface of Sun. Under cover of this rare astronomical event, Ray Bradbury -- usually associated with the redder, colder, farther planet of Mars -- slipped forever from our own surly Earth.

Though he will likely always be shelved as such, Bradbury never much cared for being labeled a "science fiction author." This was a misnomer from the start, applied by Doubleday at the release of The Martian Chronicles in 1950. Fair enough for that book, but even by then Ray had moved from the genre-driven pulps to the "slicks," including a special Halloween edition of Mademoiselle built around his short story "Homecoming," not to mention four appearances in the Best American Short Stories anthology series (thrice with stories not of rocket ships but of racial strife). And as anyone who reads beyond the title knows, Chronicles isn't really about Mars: it's about exploration, ambition, the folly of human desire -- the burgeoning space-age was merely a handy metaphor. And Bradbury examined far more than Mars over the course of his 50-year career. No matter the locale -- romantic, foggy Ireland; quirky but bitterly divided Mexico; Civil War battlefields; China circa 400 AD; his own Rockwellian, fictional Green Town, Illinois -- he mostly charted another striated, romanticized crimson landscape: the Human Heart.

After receiving the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2000, Bradbury got busy refocusing the lens on his long career. As part of that process, Sam Weller's authorized 2005 biography, The Bradbury Chronicles, goes a long way, cataloging Ray's disparate achievements. His work appeared in decades of publications ranging from Captain Future and Weird Tales to The Saturday Evening Post and Redbook. Commissioned by John Huston to write the screenplay for Moby-Dick. Winner of the 1968 Aviation-Space Writers Robert Ball Memorial Award despite having never flown in a plane (though he eventually did fly after the age of 60, Bradbury steadfastly refused to learn to drive). Friendships with Alfred Hitchcock, Christopher Isherwood, Ray Harryhausen, Aldous Huxley, Forrest J. Ackerman, even Walt Disney (for whom he wrote the original voice-over narration for the Spaceship Earth ride in EPCOT). A fistful of Cable Ace Awards for the seven-year television run of The Ray Bradbury Theater, itself primed by years of work in radio and theater, including his own Pandemonium Theatre Company. Not bad for a wide-eyed kid who once stood on Hollywood sidewalks, hawking newspapers to movie stars.

Equally important to this legacy was the assemblage of Bradbury Stories, a companion for the older The Stories of Ray Bradbury. Over the course of his career, Bradbury published over 600 tales; these two volumes taken together showcase a third of that output, and are a perfect jumping-in point for someone just discovering his work. Even then, the new will seem warmly (if strangely) familiar: the pages bubble over with motifs and storylines that have been either formally adapted or outright stolen to fuel an untold number of films, television and radio shows, comic books (including many issues of Tales from the Crypt and episodes of The Twilight Zone -- to which he surprisingly contributed only one official script, being deeply dissatisfied with the resulting episode). Tellingly, Bradbury Stories reaches page 125 before yielding a bona-fide sci-fi story, and even then it's a chapter from Martian Chronicles.

Still, his most resonant and probably most widely read work is the one that looks most penetratingly into the future: Fahrenheit 451. Though he was essentially rejected by sci-fi's hardcore community for not engaging in harder science, few of its other citizens turned in work so socially prescient: the prevalence of advertising; the numbing escape of reality programming; the easy distractions of prescription drugs; false news as entertainment. It's easy find a censorship message, given the book-burning "fireman" career of the main character, Montag -- but as his boss, Chief Beatty, explains: "Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then ... they'll be happy. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with." Beatty isn't talking about an imaginary, totalitarian future, but about our Here And Now. 451 isn't about a society sadly, unjustly deprived of books. It's about a non-reading society that couldn't care much less about books or reading -- in any format.

As Weller has it, Bradbury used fiction to predict the past while staying nostalgic for the future -- a seeming impossibility that yet perfectly sums up the man's outlook. Indeed, to read Bradbury is like sitting on the porch of a twilit summer evening: soon the golden leaves will tumble like nature's confetti, but for now, move to stand barefoot on the new-mown grass, cool as a shadowy woodland stream. Listen to the metallic wail of cicadas in the fading cotton-candy light. Watch your shadow dissolve behind you and know that if you keep enough love in your heart, you will Live Forever.

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury. Thank you. Godspeed.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, August 05 2012

________________________________
Does the blood move in your hand, does that hand move to touch metal, does that metal move to touch Space? Do wild thoughts of travel and migration stir your soul? They do. Thus you live. Therefore God lives. You are the thin skin of life upon an unsensing Earth, you are that growing edge of God which manifest itself in hunger for Space. So much of God lies vibrantly asleep. The very stuffs of worlds and galaxies, they know not themselves. But here, God stirs in his sleep. You are the stirring. He wakes, you are that wakening. God reaches for the stars. You are His hand. Creation manifest, you go in search. He goes to find, you go to find. Everything you touch along the way, therefore, will be holy. On far worlds you will meet your own flesh, terrifying and strange, but still your own. Treat it well. Beneath that shape, you share the Godhead.
     -- Ray Bradbury, from Leviathan '99

William Gay: Literary Legacy Will Have Lasting Resonance

Remembering that night, November 2001, Southern Writers Reading. Interrupting the Alumni Grille portion of the evening to announce to the gathered souls in Theatre 98, who then erupted in cheers, that, just in from Hohenwald, William Gay had entered the building. Rest in peace.

William Gay -- a drywall hanger, house painter, and ginseng root gatherer from tiny Hohenwald, Tennessee -- kept a dark, dark secret for more than five decades of his life: He was one of the most brilliant literary minds of his generation.

Even to those who knew him well, this was apparently a facet of his life unrevealed during the years he spent doing practical labor to feed his family: "In a lot of ways it was like being in a closet. You really didn't go out on Monday morning and talk about the sonnet you wrote over the weekend." But Gay never thought of himself as anything other than a writer, "the highest thing," he believed, "that you could aspire to do."

To the literary world, it was a spring-loaded surprise, tripped with the 1999 publication of his first novel, The Long Home. That James A. Michener Memorial Prize-winning book was quickly followed by a second novel, Provinces of Night, and I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down, a collection of stories previously published in magazines such as GQ, Harper's, the Oxford American, and the Atlantic Monthly. Stephen King declared Gay's third novel Twilight (which features an immoral undertaker far more wicked and dreadful than any sparkling vampire or werewolf) to be the best book of 2007.

The 55-year gap between Gay's birth and the beginning of his publishing career is often mentioned as though it was time (and therefore art) criminally lost, though Gay himself apparently did not see it that way. He spoke in near-Buddhist terms of his journeyman process, of being at first more purely interested in the beauty of language over the movement of story, which earned him no publication credits. Having spent zero time in creative writing workshops or even speaking much with other writers (excepting a somehow unsurprising correspondence with Cormac McCarthy, in the time before McCarthy became a household name), Gay knew no mentor or peers to help direct his powerful natural talent. He was, however, a voracious reader -- it was nearly impossible to name a classic novel or a comic book with which he was unfamiliar -- and found lessons enough in studying Thomas Wolfe and Flannery O'Connor. And while drawing pay as a carpenter, he made more serious work of studying the people around him, their motivations, their flaws, their humor, their loves. Eventually, his narrative strategy took an organic shift toward more concrete storytelling, and editors and agents began taking notice -- but all that early concentration on crafting language would pay off: it is now difficult to uncover an article or criticism about Gay where he isn't compared, favorably, to William Faulkner.

Equally like Faulkner, Gay wrote of salt-of-the-earth Southern-born characters: bootleggers and juke-joint owners, young lovers trapped by the ghostly wrongs of their accidental lineages, carpenters and blues musicians, angels and devils incarnate. In short, ordinary people who find themselves walking the razor divide between Good and Evil, often then forced toward the hard choice that cuts down the middle. They swerve and collide upon harsh, illuminated landscapes: achingly described versions of the rural Tennessee that Gay observed and loved firsthand -- a knowledge that provides anchorage and manifest for his grander gestures and symbols.

While his themes are not exactly the stuff of musical comedies, his prose is not without levity, often downright hilarity: At the 2001 session of Fairhope's literary Southern Writers Reading series, Gay brought down the house reading a scene from Provinces of Night about two men using bricks to secure a blow-up doll beside a rural mailbox. (And for those fortunate enough to have heard Gay read his work aloud, it is impossible to view his words upon a page -- whether it is crafted prose or an off-the-cuff answer to a question in an interview -- without hearing his distinct voice: a Tennessee drawl more personal than merely Southern, so rich as to have often seemed like a language unto itself.) He was a master at what Bram Stoker referred to in Dracula as the King Laugh -- things are never so terrible that human beings will cease to find humor. Not, at least, without ceasing to be human.

Though lauded by the writing and reading community, Gay himself was uneasy with success and the cultish attention that sometimes came with it. Same as Ken Kesey in the wake of his Merry Pranksters celebrity, he viewed it as a distraction and hindrance to creativity. Thanks to an utter lack of pretension, it was no artistic affectation that he would rather work than answer the phone or the door. Even so, visitors were regarded with compassion and generosity, no matter the hour of the interruption. And after dispatching callers with whatever answers or advice he felt was best given, Gay would be inevitably drawn back to his writing table and the plain drugstore-bought tablets and notebooks into which he preferred to draft his stories -- perhaps inspired by the interlude. No work, no experience would be wasted.  

Surprised by his seemingly blunt arrival and shocked by his sudden death, the literary world will never be without William Gay. There is still a novel, The Lost Country, somewhere out there in the aether, and a plethora of nonfiction writing -- much of it about music, his love of which was barely eclipsed by his love of literature -- waiting to be collected. For years to come, the rich ferocity of his already available works will enthrall, electrify, magnetize, and inspire -- paraphrasing from The Long Home, these are the things time will not take away from us.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, March 04 2012

The Rum Diary (1998)

Given the amount of alcohol, paranoia, and depravity splashed across its pages, one might almost consider Hunter S. Thompson's early novel The Rum Diary a thematic prequel of sorts to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, published to great infamy some twelve years later. Initially drafted in 1959 when Thompson was twenty-two years old, freshly discharged from the Air Force, and working as a sports reporter in San Juan, Puerto Rico, The Rum Diary is otherwise a fairly conventional if picaresque narrative, notable chiefly for the hallmarked nervous prose style of the man wielding the typewriter.

Paul Kemp is a wandering journalist who, following stints in New York and London, has managed to land (as Thompson had) in San Juan for the purpose of working at a doomed English-language newspaper, the Daily News. A chaotic soup of characters is immediately introduced: first is Sala, a dejected and cynical staff photographer who spends most of his time bemoaning his "degenerate" co-workers; if it weren't for freelance undercover assignments shooting casino interiors, he might have no work at all. Kemp is amused rather than engaged by Sala's rants, and hangs around him more for the entertainment value than the friendship. The paper's editor is the blustery Lotterman, who rotates stale assignments among the pool while assuring them the paper has loyal backers and adequate funding. Chief among the correspondents is Yeamon, supposedly researching why the locals are deserting the tropical island paradise even as privileged Americans are flocking to it; mostly, though, Yeamon would rather pick a drunken fight than file a story.

Because the newsroom is such a craven hive of flop-sweat-covered desperadoes, Kemp spends most of his time at Al's Patio, a neighborhood hangout where the beers are cheap and cold. Yeamon's beach shack on the other side of the island is also an attractive refuge, not least due to his winsome blonde girlfriend Chenault, who makes a hobby of sunbathing naked in order to rile to local fishermen.

As Kemp befriends Sanderson, a former News editor now aligned with "big PR outfit" Adelante, he slowly realizes the foundering paper is merely an organ for larger interests in American land investments, to be tossed aside once the right deals have been made. Though well paid to script brochures for a shady development project, Kemp increasingly submits to his growing ennui, a disastrous tendency as Carnival season approaches -- that frothy maelstrom of street partying, sexual tension, and unlooked-for racial violence. Despite many options, and the acknowledgement that he is riding a wave he does not quite understand, he is content to see where the momentum will ultimately beach him -- perhaps into the arms of the gorgeous Chenault, perhaps into jail, perhaps both.

Overall, the novel is a winning pastiche of youthful indiscretions not unlike early Fitzgerald (Thompson was a big admirer) or Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, another debut novel which heralded the arrival of a great talent while only hinting at the direction said talent would eventually take. Thompson's writing is crisp, elegantly raw. The plot is thin but the adventure-filled episodes are legion -- bar brawls, sexcapades on midnight beaches, drunken spear-fishing, narrow escapes from law enforcement -- and all spiced with Thompson's prescient wisdom, already prominent in his world-weary descriptions of vagabonds and grifters and fools. Such observations (if not obsessions) would come to fruition in Thompson's later writings of the 1970s, as he sought to make sense of the perceived departure of the American Dream, to find "that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." Here, he writes of a full decade prior, just before the wave crashes on good men who should have known better. One cannot help but wonder what Thompson would say about the current trending nostalgia for the early 1960s, now falsely painted (as all prior eras tend to be) as a grandly innocent, gently flawed time -- perhaps he would sadly echo Kemp's bitter observation at the end of the novel: "The ride gets pretty ugly from here on in."

Originally published in the Mobile Register, February 19 2012

Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (2010)

There is a line buried deep in Brad Watson's latest, luminous collection of short fiction, which signals the overall effect of the stories: A charged, nervous air, the atmospheric equivalent of the feeling you get when you knock your funny bone. It's uncomfortable to be thus jarred, but oddly reassuring to know we can occasionally be hurt without being too deeply scarred. Sadly, the same can’t quite be said for many of the characters limping through the brilliant Aliens in the Prime of their Lives.

Watson's stories, by his own admission in interviews, are this time around a little more personal than the ones in his 1996 collection, Last Days of the Dog-Men. This is evident in small but bold touches, details that carry the whiff of memory, the settled weight of emotion. A recurring location is the Coastal South, which at first seems a timeless reflection but is unmistakably Alabama and Mississippi during the 1960s and 70s. There is, however, no Mad Men-esque nostalgia at work here: more to the front is a kind of matter-of-fact melancholy, a wistful yearning for things not as they were, but how they might have been better, and thus how current times might be improved. The landscape is Flannery O'Connor territory for sure, but Watson isn't just squatting; yes, there are gypsies and hillbillies and even the odd zombie, but Watson moves beyond vibratory strangeness and into the inherent humanity to be found even amongst his most displaced and misinformed characters. He loves them, despite their cavernous fault lines, so that his readers can too.

The collection's opening story, "Vacuum," concerns three languid young boys who come to appreciate the situation of their broken home: if their father could leave, so too could their mother. Worse yet, she's actively threatening to do so, screaming over the roaring vacuum cleaner while they stubbornly stare at Westerns on television. Taking it upon themselves to find a medicine for her malaise, their best scheme involves calling on the lecherous old doctor down the street over for advice. Through their innocently misguided eyes, Watson gingerly evokes a journey into an understanding of the adult world, pickled as it is.

Most often, it is pickled in heartbreak. Several of the stories define the rifts and aftershocks of failed relationships. "Are You Mister Lonelee?" concerns one man's decision to rent his home following the departure of his wife -- whom he considers ipso-facto dead after a scooter accident renders her a "different person." Another, simply titled "Terrible Argument," is partially told through the eyes of a confused dog as it attempts to process the constant, violent fighting between its ill-matched owners.

And then there is the elegiac "Fallen Nellie." This quick and dirty snapshot of a Gulf Shores party girl showcases Watson's talent for finding the richest, purest metaphors in death and dying -- though the subtextual commentary is more overtly about the ravaging of the Gulf's shoreline (from walls of stacked condos or waves of spilled crude oil, matters not, take your pick). The story would not be out of place as a spiritual coda to his National Book award-nominated novel, The Heaven of Mercury, itself plump with such set pieces.

The collection is punctuated by the title novella, which takes place partially in a kind of alternate dream universe -- which is all the so-called "Good Old Days" are, anyway. A teenage pregnant couple moves into an attic room, married against the wishes of their parents, and are promptly visited by a man and woman claiming to be alien beings but are more likely escaped inmates from the nearby asylum, asking for custody of the unborn child. Immediately thereafter, the teen parents find their lives rolling blissfully forward; if it's not postcard-perfect, then it's near enough: fulfilling work, familial stability, a well-built house in the country. But in the offing is a twist that would make Rod Serling proud, as their small-town dreams begin dropping away like the layers of a rotten onion -- a twist both extraordinary and mundane, where real the magic lies.

 

What we pine for, Watson is telling us, is not some moment of physical, redeemable time. We pine for an ideal place, one parallel to our own, one collectively imagined at some distant point, in some brave moment where we recognized our own potential ... potential which never bloomed. Still, there it is, that hypnotizing possibility, unredeemed, unjustly out of reach, forever. What we wish hardest for sometimes isn't future possibility, but past improbability. And what activity is more human, and less alien, than the wish for a better world, whenever it may be?

Originally published in the Mobile Register, October 09 2011

You were born together, and together you shall be forever more. You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days. Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God. But let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup, but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread, but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each of you be alone, even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

     -- Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

Ocean's Eleven (2001)

Ex-con Danny Ocean is out to even the score with Las Vegas casino owner Terry Benedict, who's now dating his, Ocean's, ex-wife Tess. The goal is straightforward: rob three casino resorts all sharing the same underground money vault, on fight night when the coffers will be stuffed. This is no simple smash-n-grab, however: Ocean and his buddy Rusty, bankrolled by a rival casino magnate, put together an offbeat team of experts -- pickpockets, explosives and surveillance geniuses, model builders, acrobats -- each assigned a specific task in the overall scheme. Casinos being somewhat protective of their on-hand cash, there are arcane, ridiculously elaborate security measures which must be overcome or disabled without alerting Benedict and his army of watchful goons that criminals are right beneath their impeccably mannered noses. Decadently stylish, sexy, and fun, just like Vegas itself -- and the team of diverse actors (including but in no way limited to Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Elliott Gould, Bernie Mac) is having so much obvious fun, what George Clooney said about the Rat Pack-stocked original is equally true here: "You'd pay money just to watch those guys sit around and drink coffee." So what if the caper ultimately hinges on a couple of unlikely events and improbably timed coincidences? Or does it... The reveal at the end, laying out how the team tricked not only Benedict but also the audience into believing their "multiple cons" are anything other than smoke and mirrors designed to fool the casino goons into doing all the heavy lifting, is classic sleight of hand, if not downright slick dealing from the bottom of the deck. (Extra points for hilarious Trojan Horse usage of those ubiquitous escort brochures and "lady card" handouts that plague pedestrians along the Strip.) Still, this movie leaves burning questions: Does Clooney ever look disheveled, even when he's disheveled? Why is Brad Pitt so hungry? What is the ongoing appeal of Julia Roberts? The world may never know. Followed by imaginatively titled sequels Ocean's Twelve and Ocean's Thirteen.