Mike Zoot – Chessbumpin

Haunted Hymns - The Two Sides of Tim Cohen

This is yummy. Check out Kevin E. Taylor’s blog. Each post is worthy of your concentration and the gift, is, absolute enjoyment.

Kid Sister - Right Hand Hi (Riton Remix)

Sick! Sanely Sexy. Meaning it’s alright for you to agree so. Don’t worry crazies, no one will call you crazaaay for jamming to this. Now do it.

Who now is alone, will remain so for long, will wake, and read, and write long letters. Dear. My Only. Assure me of ourselves, that the sad I am isn’t that, but a misunderstanding of no importance. You don’t worry we will grow gray, do you? I wonder at it, the unbeloved likeness that has me cower against the black, an incessant nearness that steps in, overruling me. Streaming sadness in a constant flight from self-seeing, a once beauty nearly my own walking miracle, a threat. I am hungry and possibly the starvation between us. If you were here I’d know, because you would tell me, ugly as I am or never and not but famished, only a raven. And there I go again, a cake of soap in my mouth. Unless, of course, you say flesh, bone, there is nothing there. Gorge on me, Beauty. Turn my taste into a shriek, a valuable upsurge that you can swallow, so I can make you well again, always again for you, my faint familiar insistent Beauty.

She tossed a star. It split her hand.

Let me come as your driving, before winter, barely using your breaks. When bikers are high on their pedals, and we, even higher on the hills, that can’t be felt in our legs. Accept me, as I am, all memory, every moment. Without a seatbelt, let me go, pointing at Sonoma, and fall through the roof. Do you ever make mistakes when you count? So much of what matters, I forget. And don’t let yourself do it, become a mind of squashed grapes. I’d rather have harvest and nouns, the fog slowing the penis, than everything inside me turning quiet and blind. What people love they repeat. I’ll expect you to allow yourself and go. Into a canopy when I was around, young, hanging all over you and the age. Persimmon and areca nuts, colors of our drive, and I’m fingering, hoping the foot tires of gas. Calling November, an aesthetic of arrestible beauty and décor. “November” out the window, and through the roof. And then not till tomorrow, as we wake with seed and skin in our mouths, do you tell me that was death Chelsea, that is death, our drive, Sonoma, and you’re fascinating but you’ll forget, that death, Chelsea, to you was somehow still alive in November, harvest ugly and empty and you are fascinating, and I am contemplative, and we are complete.

1. A progile

I am a secret, tremblement, murmure, tremblement, tremblement, a tiny heart beating, poof.

At birth something and then something else again. Only a genius is given a sentence, and unfolds a secret inside. There are two things. And this second is a romance.

I’d like a cat that yawns to wear a caramel coat. In a room there must also be three thousand books. Rest atop the carpet, and the ceiling should be a novel. You flip it so to forget the fan. Also there are more things, a flashlight and three peonies, a vase of water and stems. Sometimes none mean anything. A few letters on the page give us a good laugh. We are cave animals hiding under quilt, tooling poking, pancakes flopping, out of town. And this is never it. And we are always after more.

O Robert really does know what to send my way.

I LOVE YOU JAMES. I LOVE YOU JAMES. I LOVE YOU LIGHT YEARS. I LOVE YOU LIGHT. I LOVE YOU YEARS. I LOVE YOU JAMES SALTER.

RF: Speaking of Light Years, would you talk about Light Years a little bit? Tell me how that, the idea for Light Years came about.

JS: I don’t recall exactly. There was a period in my life when we lived on the Hudson River, or close to it, upriver from New York City. About half an hour up. And we had certain friends, and it was the first civilian period of my life. I’d gotten out of the service, and it was like, I don’t know, your first years when you’re out of college, or something. It was all new. The people were different. Life was different. And we had one particular couple that we were very close to who were essentially the model for the couple in the book. And of course when I say “model,” you understand that you take liberties. You make an effort to make these people a little more—what can I say?—a little more exalted. A little more interesting than perhaps they were in life. However, I was thinking of them one day, I suppose it’d been in my mind for a while, and suddenly it began to take form. I do remember this: I sat down and started writing. I remember I thought, “I’d like to write a book, but not a Tolstoyan book about the backgrounds of people and how it all came about and what happened to them.” In short, not a carefully plotted social novel of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, of which I had read many examples and was brought up on. I thought I’d like to do something a little different. I’d like to write a book that was only the things you remember from all that, that stand out from it all, that life is really composed of. Things that people said, certain moments. You don’t remember all the stuff in between. That has be invented or reconstructed anyway. And starting from that premise, which I later saw reiterated in something that Jean Renoir said, that the only things in life that matter are the things you remember. That’s self-evident in a way. If you’ve forgotten them, they can’t be very important. Unless you forgot them on purpose. You remember the things that are important. I thought I’d like to write a book with that as the pattern of it and leave out all the rest. I thought, “Now that’s an original idea.” It may not be. I really don’t know. But I was pleased with the idea, and I sat down one day, I remember, and wrote down what I thought those things should be. There were, I don’t know, about 35 or 45 of them, and those essentially became the chapters of the book and then the book itself.

RF: In that book, I think it’s Viri who says, “There’s the life people see you living, and then there’s the life you really live. And that’s the one that causes you the trouble” and what have you.

JS: Yes.

RF: And then, at the very end of the book, he’s standing there at the shore of the river, and he says, “I am ready” and what have you.

JS: Yes.

RF: And I’ve often wondered if, that “Now I am ready” “Am I ready now to”—to try, to take away that distance between the is and the are, in other words, the life that people see me living and the life that I am living. I mean, it—

JS: Well, I don’t object to that, but that’s not what I had in mind.

RF: I’m sure I—

JS: I mean, what the author has in mind, in a sense, can be irrelevant because the book is what it is. And things people think about books later—books worthy of talking about, often things people ascribe to them were not intended at all. Or the author was unaware of what he or she was writing. No, I didn’t mean it that way. I meant it, you know, I wish we had the book here, I’d like to just scan the last pages quickly, but I believe what happens is his marriage had broken up, his children are grown, I think his wife has died—his ex-wife—by this time, he’s gone abroad, he married another woman—a woman devoted to him, but very ordinary in many ways compared to the glories of this difficult woman he had—difficult, but rather marvelous, the woman he had been married to. And now he returns to the old house, for no particular reason. He’s not restoring it or anything. He happens to be wandering there. And I think he sees a turtle on the shell of which they had scratched their names years before, and here’s this tortoise. I mean, it was 20 years before, making its way through the leaves. Have you ever seen that? I’m sure you have, the way they move along, and his life has moved along, and there’s the river. People have said to me, “Did he kill himself?” Well, that’s the farthest thing from my mind. I mean, I don’t think that’s implied or signified. I think he’s saying in a metaphysical way, that he’s ready to face and to acknowledge and to understand the whole thing. To be part of it, even in this third act, a part of it. I’ve always been ready, but I am really ready,” is what I think he’s saying. But as I’ve just said, you don’t have to find that. And maybe it’s not there for some readers. You know, it’s a poetic book, it’s a lyrical book, there’s a poetic line at the end. If you get it the way it was intended, fine. If you don’t, well…

RF: Well, that’s the way you stated it is the way it actually reads. “I have always been ready. I am ready now—”

JS: I am ready at last.

RF: Yeah, “ready at last.” Once you read things several times, you say, “Gee, I wonder if I have that right.” So that’s why I wanted to ask you.

JS: On the other hand, I really shouldn’t have gone this far into it because when you start doing this, certain lines don’t bear that kind of inspection and examination. You have to take them whole, so to speak and accept them. Otherwise, it’s like the English class where they’re saying, “What are the motives behind Hardy’s repetition?” Then you know, you’re saying, “Let me out of this class.”

RF: Well, we take it whole and accept it, and by that I mean your archive, we’re thrilled to have it.

JS: Thank you.

RF: We’re certainly thrilled to have you numbered among our authors. Thanks very much for your time this afternoon.

JS: It’s a pleasure. Thank you.

Harry Ransom Center: Interview with James Salter.

A man I am fond on, and potentially, deeply affected by.

RF: In the process, then, you know, you get organized and you start writing, and the question always that arises, what is the pivotal structure? Is it the sentence, the paragraph, you know, the chapter, what have you? How do you view that?

JS: Well, I try and finish chapters. You’d be a fool to be excited by a sentence, and a paragraph is really not that much better, although sometimes you feel a certain sense of warmth, having written a paragraph that seems to be close to what you had hoped.

RF: Well, don’t you also, I mean I sometimes feel when I read your work—and somebody else who you admire, and that is Nabokov. Speak, Memory, for instance, which is a book in addition to Light Years that I give as gifts because I can delight in a sentence in both your work and his. And I know you wrote one time that the sentence has to be in the service of the greater product, something like that. But is it not okay to delight in that sentence? And say, “Boy, that is good!”

JS: I think that’s a little like looking in the mirror as you pass the entrance hall. Don’t waste your time.

RF: [laughs] No, but I mean for the reader, is it not okay?

JS: Well, for the reader, it’s okay. But remember that sentence is in the service of something larger. And so I don’t count that as being a particular strength or virtue. I think it’s the opposite. I had a tendency—I’m trying to work past it—I had a tendency to try and write such sentences. But I no longer want to do that. I’d rather—

RF: Is that a retreat from lyricism or something?

JS: Well, I think that’s very apt. Yes, I’d like to back off from that.

San Francisco Chronicle | By Carol Sklenicka

An intricate review of a complicated author after his death.

Raymond Carver’s life, as related in the exhaustive and definitive new biography by Carol Sklenicka, reads like a Raymond Carver story. That isn’t merely a facile observation about a writer who mined his own life for his work: His impact on American fiction of the late-20th century was such that in the ’80s and beyond, you’d often hear folks proclaiming that a bit of real-life flotsam was like one of Carver’s brittle, perfectly crafted short stories.

Charles McGrath, a former fiction editor at the New Yorker who went on to edit the New York Times Book Review, cites a quartet of dominant influences in the magazine’s late-century heyday of fiction: J.D. Salinger, Donald Barthelme, Ann Beattie and Carver. Others came to see Carver as the American Chekhov.

Yet it took the literary world a long time to get what Carver was about, and even when he began getting published, many critics slammed him and other so-called “minimalist” writers for what they perceived as a dumbing-down of American short fiction. Of course, they were wrong, as Sklenicka, a Bay Area writer, doesn’t need to point out in “Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life,” which is not merely a great biography, but often an astute critical assessment of Carver’s writing as well.

Raymond Carver had a hard, short life. He grew up in Washington state, married his high school sweetheart, whom he met in 1955 at the Spudnut Shop in Union Gap, Wash., when he was 17 and she was 14. Her name was Maryann Burk and some still say she was the love of his life. But theirs was not an easy relationship. They moved around a lot, prompted in part by Ray’s career restlessness and in part because there never seemed to be enough money, especially after their two kids were born.

He spent a good deal of time in the Bay Area, working for a while with an offshoot of IBM developing something called a Reading Laboratory Series, which he enlivened with stories by Chekhov and Maupassant. At another point, he worked as a hospital janitor while Maryann worked for est founder Werner Erhard.

As recounted in Carver’s poem “My Dad’s Wallet,” when his father died, Ray and Maryann had to pay for the embalming and for a suit, since his father didn’t own one. They declined the cost-saving option to bury the senior Raymond Carver without pants.

Stranger than fiction

As the saying goes, you can’t make this stuff up, which is one key to Carver’s writing process. But Sklenicka goes well beyond connecting dots between incidents in Carver’s life and his stories: She analyzes the connection as a way of understanding the man and his work.

“Taking something that had happened to him or someone he knew and turning it into a story allowed Carver to let his mind be bold and self-protective at the same time,” she writes.

“In this manner, he gained some distance from his painful feelings and perceptions.” Yet, she also notes that “only a handful of the thirty stories in Carver’s first two collections (“Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” and “Furious Seasons and Other Stories”) use first-person narration, and the most effective of these use a character who is very close to Ray … or Maryann. Third person gave Carver a mental distance and clarity he needed to turn his experience into fiction.”

Through much of his adult life, Carver was an alcoholic and a heavy smoker. His marriage deteriorated but there was a kind of co-dependency with Maryann that went far beyond their shared fondness for a drink or two. The author Leonard Michaels knew them in their Bay Area years and observed of the Carver marriage that “however bad it may have been, the very badness came out of some tremendously deep, intimate absolute condition … I saw they had trouble, and I saw they were deeply … connected.”

When Ray had an affair with a woman named Diane Cecily in Montana, he had to tell Maryann about it and to announce that he felt real love for the other woman. “Both he and Maryann marveled that such a thing had happened so quickly,” Sklenicka writes, adding that the two went on talking about it for the next few weeks “while at the same time preparing themselves and the children for a new school year.”

Eventually, and inevitably, the talking stopped and the real ending of the marriage began, probably on the night Ray smashed a wine bottle into the side of Maryann’s neck, severing an artery. Soon after, he hit bottom: “From then on, Ray had a death sentence on him. Whichever way he turned - toward the next drink or away from it - he felt doomed,” Sklenicka writes, adding that “[w]ith alcoholism’s perverse logic, Ray blamed Maryann for the double bind he found himself in.”

A separate book could be written about the impact of Carver’s alcoholism on his work. Certainly, it had a huge impact on his relationship with his most famous editor, Gordon Lish, self-dubbed Captain Fiction, who first met Carver in the Bay Area and went on to edit his stories for Esquire and elsewhere. Lish, a singular figure in late-20th century American publishing, discovered and protected writers, but also tended to edit with a heavy hand.

Whose voice?

When he was drinking, Carver more or less acquiesced to the severe editing, and Sklenicka thinks she knows why: Lish had “become the authorial voice within Carver, in effect usurping Carver’s authority over his own work.” But once Carver sobered up, he tried to reclaim that authorial voice. He despaired reading the galley proof of his collection “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” to find it radically edited without his input: “Although the precise stages of editing are obscure, comparison … shows that whole pages of stories were excised, most notably from ‘A Small, Good Thing,’ which also had its title changed to ‘The Bath.’ Main characters became nameless. Secondary characters nearly disappeared. Landscapes and weather were gone. Endings that tended toward epiphany vanished.”

There is no easy answer to the question of why Carver drank, why he clearly felt so haunted in his life, and Sklenicka is wise enough to avoid any simplistic pronouncements. Yet, sifting through the shards of Carver’s life, the indelible portrait of a classic outsider emerges. For example, although Carver was in the Bay Area for much of the ’60s countercultural eruptions, he may as well have been back in Yakima, Wash.: “Ray remained outside the turmoil, a man with a family who wore ties to work as the West Coast scene burst from private to public significance. … In a way, Carver’s not being part of all this defined him; he watched the innovators and the experiments and kept on writing his out-of-step, dark domestic stories.”

The last years of Carver’s life were marked by sobriety and a new marriage, to the poet Tess Gallagher. Perhaps in part because Gallagher was not interviewed for the book (she’s quoted from other sources, however), the latter section of Sklenicka’s biography seems a bit compressed. Gallagher took charge of Carver’s life and career during his final decade.

After his death in 1988 at age 50, the family’s battles over the estate and, more important, the rights to Carver’s work are ugly from any perspective, and Gallagher does not come off in a good light.

That said, it’s to Sklenicka’s credit, and a testament to the credibility of her book, that regardless of who did cooperate with her research (and the list is astoundingly complete), the biographer doesn’t play favorites. Sklenicka makes it clear that Gallagher saved Carver’s life and helped him re-energize his career. Perhaps Carver could never find complete relief from the demons that haunted him, but it was only with Gallagher that he was, at least and at last, able to achieve a kind of detente with them. And that in itself was, to cite the title of one of his greatest stories, “a small, good thing.”

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