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“Quickly Aging Here,” a poem by Denis Johnson

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“Quickly Aging Here,” a poem by Denis Johnson—

1
nothing to drink in
the refrigerator but juice from
the pickles come back
long dead, or thin
catsup. i feel i am old
now, though surely i
am young enough? i feel that i have had
winters, too many heaped cold
and dry as reptiles into my slack skin.
i am not the kind to win
and win.
no i am not that kind, i can hear
my wife yelling, “goddamnit, quit
running over,” talking to
the stove, yelling, “i
mean it, just stop,” and i am old and
2
i wonder about everything: birds
clamber south, your car
kaputs in a blazing, dusty
nowhere, things happen, and constantly you
wish for your slight home, for
your wife’s rusted
voice slamming around the kitchen. so few
of us wonder why
we crowded, as strange,
monstrous bodies, blindly into one
another till the bed
choked, and our range
of impossible maneuvers was gone,
but isn’t it because by dissolving like so
much dust into the sheets we are crowding
south, into the kitchen, into
nowhere?

RIP Denis Johnson

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Denis Johnson, one of the greatest American writers of the latter half of the 20th century, has died at the age of 67.

In books including Jesus’ Son, Angels, Tree of Smoke, and Fiskadoro, Johnson created vibrant, intense worlds, simultaneously tragic and hilarious, peopled with weirdos and druggies, criminals and soldiers, those who harm and those who cure. Describing Johnson’s prose style requires employing paradox: His prose seems spare, but it’s also incredibly rich; his narratives dwell in rough realism, but this description belies the refined magic of his writing. Johnson painted a damned and fallen world again and again in his novels, but made a space for his characters to earn redemption. His characters, in the hands of a lesser writer, might come off as cartoonish grotesques, but Johnson’s realism extended into their psyches. The man could create souls.

I cannot understate the impact Johnson’s writing made on my development as a reader. I think I first read Johnson’s story “Emergency” in a collection of stories edited by Tobias Wolff; it was on the reading list for a creative writing class I was taking my first semester of college, and I learned more from analyzing the way Johnson put sentences together than I did from anything else. I made a friend read the story; told another friend about it and he said, “Of course,” and made the mistake of loaning me his first edition hardback copy of Jesus’ Son, which had been out for maybe four or five years at the time. I never gave it back, and it remains one of the books I’ve read the most times over the past 20 years.

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Johnson’s novel-in-stories Jesus’ Son is the perfect gateway drug to hook 18-year olds on a particular kind of American literature forever. Those interested in Johnson should also check out his debut 1983 novel Angels, his perfect novella Train Dreams, or his Vietnam War opus, Tree of Smoke: All make excellent starting places.

I’ll close with one of my favorite paragraphs, the last lines of “Beverly Home,” the last story in Jesus’ Son. The lines encapsulate Johnson’s vision of his world, his characters’ place in that world, and the redemptive spirit that might guide us to create a place for people like us:

All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.

 

I’ll be reposting some of the stuff I’ve written on this blog about Johnson’s books all day today, but for anyone interested, here are a bunch of links:

A very short review of Denis Johnson’s new novel The Laughing Monsters

Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams Is a Perfect Audiobook

Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams Is a Perfect Novella

Angels — Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move and the Pleasures of Postmodern Crime Fiction

Tree of Smoke — Denis Johnson (second review)

Essential Short Story Collections: Jesus’ Son

Tree of Smoke–Denis Johnson (first review)

Swampangel — Max Ernst

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Swampangel, 1940 by Max Ernst (1891-1976)

“Bonebreaker,” a new short story by Nell Zink

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The newest issue of Harper’s features a new story from Nell Zink called “Bonebreaker.” You can read it online for free. First few paragraphs:

Jed came downstairs. He worked mostly in the sleeping loft, writing serious journalism. His current project was about a friend’s imprisonment on charges related to terrorism. He said, “Laurie.”

“What?” She was sitting at the table, eating cereal and using the Tor browser on her encrypted laptop to read a friend’s personal newsletter. This week it was a funny-unfunny story about breastfeeding in a parking lot.

“We have to go.”

He had already counted their money in his head: $15,000 in cash, a premature inheritance from Laurie’s mother; $40 in fungible drugs; $200 in a PayPal account he couldn’t access. Getting locked out is what had told him it was time to go. They were renters in Detroit and owed $8,000 on the lease. They had $17,000 in credit card debt and $90,000 in student loans. None of it mattered but the cash.

They took a walk by the lake and talked about how to go.

Nonstop to London, obviously. Europe and Canada had great liberal reputations, but no borders. Any agent of any government could just come and get you.

 Read the rest of Zink’s story “Bonebreaker” at Harper’s.

Angel of the Annunciation (detail) Giovanni Bellini

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 Angel of the Annunciation (detail), c. 1500 by by Giovanni Bellini and workshop (c. 1430-1516)

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Still Life with a Figure — Balthus

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Still Life with a Figure 1940 by Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola) 1908-2001

Still Life with a Figure 1940 by Balthus (1908–2001)

Eve Tempted — John Roddam Spencer Stanhope

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Eve Tempted  by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (1829–1908)

The Achievements of Capitalism (Donald Barthelme)

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The Achievements of Capitalism:

  1. The curtain wall
  2. Artificial rain
  3. Rockefeller Center
  4. Canals
  5. Mystification

From “The Rise of Capitalism” by Donald Barthelme, which you can read in full here. (Or in Sixty Stories, a perfect book).

Falsehood — Giovanni Bellini

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Falsehood (or Wisdom) from Four Allegories, c. 1490 by Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516)

Memory of Past Fragrments — Leonor Fini

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Mémoire Des Fragments Passés (Memory of Past Fragments), 1984 by Leonor Fini (1908-1996)

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”

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Breakfast Piece — Herbert Badham

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Breakfast Piece, 1936 by Herbert Badham (1899-1961)

Claudio and Isabella — William Holman Hunt

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Claudio and Isabella, 1850 by William Holman Hunt (1827–1910)

From William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Act 3, Scene 1:

ISABELLA

Be ready, Claudio, for your death tomorrow.

CLAUDIO

Yes. Has he affections in him,
That thus can make him bite the law by the nose,
When he would force it? Sure, it is no sin,
Or of the deadly seven, it is the least.

ISABELLA

Which is the least?

CLAUDIO

If it were damnable, he being so wise,
Why would he for the momentary trick
Be perdurably fined? O Isabel!

ISABELLA

What says my brother?

CLAUDIO

Death is a fearful thing.

ISABELLA

And shamed life a hateful.

CLAUDIO

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

Army of Shadows (Book acquired 16 May 2017)

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I first saw Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 film Army of Shadows about a decade ago, when a friend brought over the Criterion Collection release and insisted we watch it. I watched it again with my uncle, a fan of French cinema and  WWII films in general (and the guy who made me watch both Paths of Glory and Belle de Jour when I was like 14).

Anyway, Contra Mundum is releasing a new translation of Joseph Kessel’s 1943 novel Army of Shadows, which Melville based his film on. The translation is by Rainer J. Hanshe. (I recently talked to Rainer about his translation of Baudelaire’s notebook My Heart Laid Bare).

Here’s Contra Mundum’s blurb:

Originally published in Algiers in 1943, Joseph Kessel’s Army of Shadows is one of the first books to have been written about the French Resistance. Now available in paperback, Contra Mundum Press is proud to present the first new translation in over 70 years, and the first edition since Jean-Pierre Melville’s iconic 1969 film.“What, then, when it comes to recounting the story of France, an obscure, secret France, which is new to its friends, its enemies, and new especially to itself? France no longer has bread, wine, fire. But mainly it no longer has any laws. Civil disobedience, individual or organized rebellion, have become duties to the fatherland. The national hero is the clandestine man, the outlaw.

Nothing about the order imposed by the enemy and by the Marshal is valid. Nothing counts. Nothing is true any more.

 

One changes home, name, every day. Officials and police officers are helping insurgents. One finds accomplices even in ministries. Prisons, getaways, tortures, bombings, scuffles. One dies and kills as if it’s natural. France lives, bleeds, in all its depths. It is toward the shadow that its true and unknown face is turned.In the catacombs of revolt, people create their own light and find their own law. Never has France waged a nobler and more beautiful war than in the basements where it prints its free newspapers, in its nocturnal lands, and in its secret coves where it received its free friends and from where its children set out, in torture cells where, despite tongs, red-hot pins, and crushed bones, the French died as free men.”

Meanwhile.

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All the pie and coffee in Twin Peaks

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Sunday Comics

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Today’s Sunday Comics entry is a page from Chris Ware’s magnificent 2012 novel Building Stories (Pantheon Books).

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I had occasion to look through Building Stories again this week. I had to paint a room, which required moving books from shelves, which meant unshelving Building Stories, which unwieldy beast that it is, has been covered in other books for a few years. Building Stories takes the form of 14 different sized books in a box—it’s pretty hard to shelve in any accessible way, which is a shame (but also a pleasure). Ware’s opus seems to me one of the best American novels of the past decade, but I think its greatness tends to get overlooked because a) people are still prejudiced against comics and b) it challenges all the “reading rules” we bring with us to novels—there’s not a “right way” to read the novel. You have to put it together your self, in a sense. Anyway, for me the page above, which is the last page of the chapter called “Disconnect,” is the “conclusion” of the novel, a sort of metacommentary epilogue that (somehow) ties the narrative threads together in a moving and satisfying “end.”

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