The episodes in Jesus' Son hang on degenerates, but the narrator's simple, intimate diction conveys a sense of peace rather than anxiety about or perverse fascination with the damaged scenery and people at issue. This collection of short stories by American author Denis Johnson is quite good. I learned of Jesus' Son by reading the essay, "Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?," published in The New York Times Magazine in March 2018. The essay includes this quote from Johnson's collection: “The sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity.” I was intrigued. Then the essay's author reveals, "While I was studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I spent my nights at the writers’ bars on Market Street, and I spent my days reading the other writers who had gotten drunk in that town before I’d gotten drunk there: John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson." Having read this, when I picked up Jesus' Son, I expected Johnson's stories to boil up in America's less populated stretches of shadow and pain. Not so.
My favorite stories include "Dundun," "Emergency," and "Dirty Wedding." In a scene in "Dirty Wedding," the narrator, having accompanied his girlfriend to the abortion clinic, is asked to wait outside the building among pro-life protestors. Johnson writes: "It was raining outdoors and most of the Catholics were squashed up under an awning next door with their signs held overhead against the weather. They splashed holy water on my cheek and on the back of my neck, and I didn't feel a thing. Not for many years."
Note: Jesus' Son was published in 1992
This reading of The Collected Short Stories of Richard Yates was my first exposure to the author's writing. A few years ago, I saw and very much enjoyed the film adaptation of what is perhaps Yates' most famous work, "Revolutionary Road." Hard to believe and somewhat sad that I lived this long without reading this brilliant American writer.
Yates (1926–1992) masterfully crafts poignant stories in which personally profound events happen quietly. These are moments the characters will likely relive with feelings of melancholy or bitterness. This book includes stories from previous collections Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love, plus several stories under a chapter heading named "The Uncollected Stories." Of these short stories, I loved "A Glutton for Punishment," a brilliant study of a pathological failure drawn to graceful defeat. I also loved "The B.A.R. Man," a story in which the tension rises until the last word. Yates' stories sometimes end with a feigned punch, and I flinch. "A Convalescent Ego," the last story in this anthology, does the opposite; I laughed as I read it on a plane, and the end warmed my toes.
Notes: Revolutionary Road, the 2008 movie directed by Sam Mendes, stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet; but Michael Shannon owns it, of course, with his performance.
Kojak: You know, in a way, I admire her. A little kid, out of the sewers by her fingernails. No father, a lush for a mother.
Crocker: Why did you walk away from her?
Kojak: (Laughs) You know, I remember seeing a picture once. About this guy, came out of the streets, made it big. When he was a kid, used to have holes in his soles. So now he's got 200 pairs of shoes, he's rich. But he'd still cut a guy's heart out for a pair of shoes. That's why.
Note: 20 November 1977
Sitting on the front porch in the middle of the night and debating whether a tree needs trimming. I wish I could make those limbs disappear. I wish I could make other things happen. I would start with that tree. But I should think bigger. Surround myself with a giant wall? Bring lots of people over here? Go somewhere else? No. Would I want to just lie on the couch at my parents', watching a movie with mom and dad? Would I want to live forever? Be young forever? Have billions of dollars just to live and die comfortably? Maybe there is nothing else anymore.
I started reading Zane Grey's Western novella "Riders of the Purple Sage," but I could not stand the unworldly prose. Bits of it were salted goodness; most of it was sour. For example, the good:
The life of his eyes dulled to the gloom with which men of his fear saw
the approach of death. But death, while it hovered over him, did not
descend, for the rider waited for the twitching fingers, the downward
flash of hand that did not come.
But the sour dialog included this:
"Oh! Don't whip him! It would be dastardly!" implored Jane with slow certainty of her failing courage.
And prose like this:
Jane's subtle woman's intuition, even in that brief instant, felt a sadness, a hungering, a secret.
There have been many Western-genre works that I have enjoyed. But, I decided, as I sometimes do, that I did not want to spend my time trying to push through this one. There are many other works worth the time.
Notes:
I had just started chapter three.
The word "sage" (and "purple") was overused and worked into the prose unnecessarily.
Horror novella "The Hellbound Heart," published in 1986, was the basis for the 1987 film, "Hellraiser," which became something of a horror franchise. The novella, written by Clive Barker, opens with a devoted hedonist solving a puzzle box that introduces him to the Cenobites, a religious order dedicated to extreme sensual experiences. The Cenobites immediately own Frank, the filthy bastard, and doom him to an eternity of unfathomable pain and misery--which, I guess, gives them pleasure. That event sets up a silly story about how Frank's sister-in-law, who became infatuated with Frank upon marrying his brother, discovers and almost rescues Frank, so to speak, by murdering a couple of guys. The writing style, plot, and characters were ridiculous. This is a twisted story, really, but aside from coming across a few good phrases describing some intense sensations, I felt silly reading "The Hellbound Heart."
David Axelrod emerged on the national political scene as Barack Obama's invaluable strategist during the 2008 campaign. After the campaign, Axelrod stayed on as Obama's senior advisor for half of the first term. He returned to the campaign trail for Obama in 2012. While these events, covered in Axelrod's memoir, Believer, are momentous, I enjoyed the beginning of Axelrod's story most of all.
When he was a child, the future strategist, born in New York City, witnessed a John F. Kennedy campaign speech. Axelrod cites that moment as a formative experience. He had caught and internalized the political optimism of the day. He recalls the experience with undiminished sincerity.
I also enjoyed his brief recount of Chicago's modern political history. This memoir also offers a little of the guilty pleasure of gossipy criticism, such as when Axelrod criticizes Elizabeth Edwards for micromanaging the 2004 presidential campaign of her husband, John.
Axelrod
went to college in Chicago, then started as a journalist investigating
Chicago politics and corruption. He had his own column in a city
paper by age 18. Axelrod was friends with Obama long before they campaigned together, both having built careers out of Chicago politics.
Axelrod keeps the narrative moving. He could have written a whole book on just the first week in the White House, with the whole country groaning under the weight of the the financial crisis. But Axelrod gives those monumental days only the standard highlight reel. His writing is crisp, clever, and often funny. His forty-year career goes by too fast at times. He is an underrated and undervalued figure in our national politics. His enduring belief in the promise of America is precious.
I know there were moments there when I told myself, "Hold on to this feeling." But all I remember is how I felt seeing the seven-day outlook on the local news of a city I was about to leave forever. And, out on the sidewalk, under the old church awning, all that regret and anguish stored up in a man's face.
Mark Leibovich wallows in the networking and social maneuverings in This Town—which is, of course, Washington, DC. He kids DC's political players about the unseemly side of their work but never condemns them. Leibovich paints an absurd picture and sort of shrugs it off. His easygoing prose makes a shrug seem like the natural reaction. This Town delivers the goods for political junkies—especially if you tracked national politics from 2007 to 2013. Hearing how embedded Washington correspondents are is discomfiting. But if disillusion has already set in, the disappointment in This Town lands softly.
The short piece, "Herodias," appears in Gustave Flaubert's 1877 work, Three Tales. (The other two tales are "A Simple Heart" and "Saint Julian the Hospitalier.") "Herodias" concerns the characters and events surrounding the beheading of John the Baptist.
Flaubert casts as the central figure Herod Antipas, now commonly known as King Herod. At the time of the events, however, Herod was probably referred to as Antipas, and he was seen as more of a governor, a regional figure, than a king. Flaubert depicts Antipas as a weak ruler manipulated by his wife, the title character, Herodias, a princess from a powerful family of vassals of the Roman Empire.
Antipas was unpopular, perceived by his public as sycophantic and idolatrous. Added to the ruler's frustrations was John the Baptist's high-profile condemnation of the marriage to Herodias—a scandal; to marry Antipas, Herodias divorced her first husband, Herod II, Antipas's half-brother.
In Flaubert's telling, Herodias uses her daughter, Salomé, to seduce Antipas and persuade him to take John's head. Flaubert deals us a story rich in politics, sex, and violence, then combines them all in the climactic scene of Antipas's seduction and John's beheading.
The soil in the Mid-Atlantic sops up the irony and becomes poison. Blood loosens the ground, and roots stay exposed in the late season of water-cooled air. The thickest trunks pull away when a hellacious wind comes and weakens their will. Yours breaks. Though you're lit up at night, still the main attraction is fallacy.
Billy Budd, Sailor is Herman Melville's last novel. It tells us the story of a handsome, well-liked, naive young sailor, Billy Budd, who was drafted into the British Royal Navy in 1797. While at sea, the ship's master-at-arms, John Claggart, grows deeply envious of Budd and falsely accuses the young sailor of organizing a mutiny--an especially serious charge given that the recent mutinies in the Royal Navy have led to martial law at a time of ramped-up fears of French aggression. When confronted by his accuser in the presence of the ship's captain, Budd clocks Claggart, who drops dead. In the text, Budd's shocking, violent turn seems to erupt from a desperation born of his stutter, which renders him powerless to defend himself with words in the moment. A court martial ensues, and although nobody believes Budd was organizing a mutiny, the officers sentence the young sailor to death. To not execute him would risk encouraging actual mutiny and, therefore, national security. Melville's prose is characteristically and wonderfully eccentric, but the events and themes (law and reason?) in this very slim novel feel undercooked. It was published posthumously and should probably be considered unfinished. The book's latter portion reads like a coda rather than a conclusion.
Note: Is Claggart's accusation leveled out of maliciousness or out of a self-deceiving need?
Some people like estate sales, wandering through a stranger's home, seeing pieces of another life. Some people like being in the office when everyone else is gone or reading a letter written to someone else. You feel distant, tempted to feel, almost involved, but still in control.
Frankfurt begins this meditation on bullshit by examining the definition offered in Max Black's 1985 essay, "The Prevalence of Humbug": bullshit is the "deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes." Frankfurt gets his footing here, but says this definition fails to adequately capture "the essential character of bullshit." Frankfurt next mines a few bullshit-related anecdotes and quotes to uncover his theoretical understanding of bullshit. The somewhat oversimplified synopsis of that understanding is that what is essential about bullshit is that (1) the bullshitter cares not for what is true or false, like the liar and the honest man (in fact, the bullshitter could be saying things that are more or less true and still be bullshitting) and (2) the bullshitter says whatever suits him at the moment in an attempt to deceive his audience about what he is up to and who he is.
The prose in "On Bullshit" is crisp and graciously plain; Frankfurt's essay, an exploratory philosophical analysis, manages to avoid philosophy jargon and name dropping.
Note: This is good:
One who is concerned to report or to conceal the facts assumes that there are indeed facts that are in some way both determinate and knowable. His interest in telling the truth or in lying presupposes that there is a difference between getting things wrong and getting them right, and that it is at least occasionally possible to tell the difference. Someone who ceases to believe in the possibility of identifying certain statements as true and others as false can have only two alternatives. The first is to desist both from efforts to tell the truth and from efforts to deceive. This would mean refraining from making any assertion whatever about the facts. The second alternative is to continue making assertions that purport to describe the way things are but that cannot be anything except bullshit.
Here at The New Yorker is a collection of anecdotes about personalities that contributed to and shaped the The New Yorker. The book also includes some short fiction and nonfiction pieces reprinted in full, as well as cartoons and sketches. This is a book you can keep bedside and leaf through leisurely before sleep. All of it is entertaining; some parts are laugh-out-loud funny.
Note: I enjoyed James Thurber's The Years With Ross a little more than Here at The New Yorker.
You could say there was something pitiful about her. And, superficially, you wouldn't be wrong. She had these big, scared eyes (the right one maybe popped in a little lower than the left). Under different circumstances, you might have wondered if she was in shock—those eyes always wide, reflective, lacking presence, suggesting vulnerability. She spoke aimlessly, ceaselessly. In groups, she ticked her head like a chicken and registered each person's face, seeking approval there.
The Thanksgiving Visitor returns to the childhood days Truman Capote wrote about in his previously published semi-autobiographical short story, A Christmas Memory. This time, a schoolyard bully, Odd Henderson, menaces young Buddy. To his horror, Buddy's older cousin, Sook, invites Odd to Thanksgiving dinner in hopes of ending the boys' feud. At dinner, Buddy attempts to publicly humiliate Odd, but this revenge scheme fails. Buddy learns about cruelty, the lesson of Two Wrongs, and the dignity of empathy.
After his failed attempt at revenge, Buddy sulks in the shed. Capote writes:
The door to the shed was ajar, and a knife of sunshine exposed a shelf supporting several bottles. Dusty bottles with skull-and-crossbone labels. If I drank from one of those, then all of them up there in the dining room, the whole swilling and gobbling caboodle, would know what sorry was. It was worth it, if only to witness Uncle B.’s remorse when they found me cold and stiff on the smokehouse floor; worth it to hear the human wails and Queenie’s howls as my coffin was lowered into cemetery depths.
Note: The Thanksgiving Visitor was first published in the November 1967 issue of McCall's magazine.
Nancy Dickerson was the first female national political television reporter. In the 1960s, she became a household name while covering the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Nancy created space in media and popular culture that was expanded by Barbara Walters, Katie Couric, Megyn Kelly--generations of intelligent, powerful women.
Nancy's son, John Dickerson, wrote On Her Trail, a book about his mother, who died in 1997, and his relationship with her. This book is a wonderful read that is three-fifths traditional biography and two-fifths memoir.
Although the telling is done with love, John does not mythologize his mother. Quite the opposite. Their relationship was rocky until John got a foothold in the Washington press corp and Nancy reluctantly reached retirement. Although she has passed, the relationship lives on. In telling her story, John checks her along the way, calling out her shortcomings (and his), which has the effect of humanizing the both of them.
The advertising copy calls On Her Trail "part remembrance, part discovery"; that description is accurate. John Dickerson shares memories, but much of the book comes out of his research into his mother's personal records. He discovered in her early journals a playful young woman that rarely surfaced after she relocated to DC and broke into journalism. John's writing is clean and personal, touching on the themes of ambition, dreams, beginnings, choices, family, love, and regret.
Note: John Dickerson, also a successful journalist, was a great host on CBS' "Face the Nation" and now co-hosts the network's morning show.
I was a member of a show-business family. We were in a movie that was nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award. I got blackout drunk at the awards ceremony. Early the next morning, I asked someone what happened. He answered, "You won!" I was disbelieving. He added, "Yeah, and you spoke! You gave a speech!" More disbelief; plus anxiety. He showed me a transcript of what I said, and, of course, it was incoherent. I felt ashamed; this would be my legacy.
Note: The ceremony included a great live performance of scenes from the movie version of Pink Floyd's The Wall.
The episodes in Jesus' Son hang on degenerates, but the narrator's simple, intimate diction conveys a sense of peace rather than anxiety about or perverse fascination with the damaged scenery and people at issue. This collection of short stories by American author Denis Johnson is quite good. I learned of Jesus' Son by reading the essay, "Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?," published in The New York Times Magazine in March 2018. The essay includes this quote from Johnson's collection: “The sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity.” I was intrigued. Then the essay's author reveals, "While I was studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I spent my nights at the writers’ bars on Market Street, and I spent my days reading the other writers who had gotten drunk in that town before I’d gotten drunk there: John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson." Having read this, when I picked up Jesus' Son, I expected Johnson's stories to boil up in America's less populated stretches of shadow and pain. Not so.
