long haulers

writers are the real "long haulers" of this life.

— Alex Kudera (@kudera) July 21, 2020

aimless travelers

"For the first time since leaving the United States on this aimless trip I saw other aimless travelers. I had been passing myself off as a teacher; they called themselves students. There were advantages in being a student: student fares, student rates, student hostels, student entry fees. Great, hairy, middle-aged buffoons complained at ticket counters and shouted, "Look, I'm a student! Do me a favor! He doesn't believe I'm a fucking student. Hey—" They were cut-priced tourists, idlers, vagabonds, freebooters, who had gravitated toward this impoverished place because they wanted to save money. Their conversation was predictable and was wholly concerned with prices, the exchange rate, the cheapest hotel, the cheapest bus, how someone ("Was he a gringo?") got a meal for fifteen cents, or an alpaca sweater for a dollar or bunked with some Aymara Indians in a benighted village. They were Americans, but they were also Dutch, German, French, British, and Scandinavian; they spoke the same language, always money. Their boast was always how long they had managed to hang on here in the Peruvian Andes and beat the system."

~~ from The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux

the condition of the lower orders

"It was in Bogota, one gray afternoon, that I read the following passage: Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill-policed and wretchedly governed: a decent provison for the poor is the true test of civilization.—Gentlemen of education, he observed, were pretty much the same in all countries; the condition of the lower orders, the poor especially, was the true mark of national discrimination."

~~ from The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux

More than anything, I wanted to read a book.

"But my chief reasons for taking the Puntarenas train had nothing to do with travel. More than anything, I wanted to read a book. And I had a good book. Twice in San Salvador and once in Limon I had opened Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; each time it had been night and, while I had read the novel with fascination, on turning off the light the horrors of the story returned to me and made me wakeful. It was, without any doubt, the most terrifying story I had ever read: claustrophobia, shipwreck, thirst, mutiny, cannibalism, vertigo, murder, storm—it was a nightmare journey, and it produced nightmares in me. At home it might not have seemed so bad, but in three Central American hotel rooms--hot, stifling, narrow; the bulb-blistered lamp shade, the strange bed, the rat gnawing the ceiling—the book was an experience of pure terror. I put it away, and I vowed that I would not open it again until I was in a sunny railway compartment. It did not matter where the train was going; what mattered to me was that I should read the book under ideal conditions, on a train, with my feet up, my pipe drawing nicely. This was my reason for going to Puntarenas on that train."

~~ from The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux

Beauchamp's Gaddis

Beauchamp on Gaddis https://t.co/dZVirBTnih #FridayReads #Gaddis #PlayerPiano #JR #awp #mfa

— Alex Kudera (@kudera) July 4, 2020

a literary kingmaker

The new issue of the iconoclastic The Agonist is out, and in it for the first time, I got caught up with the Stephen King controversy. I had seen his name trending, and I know he is vocal on twitter, blocked by the president, etc., but there is too much of this stuff to follow it all. Anyway, in "The Doomed Equality Movement" by Daniel N. Davidson, I read

The author Stephen King has lately been excoriated for saying that he “would never consider diversity in matters of art, only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong.” For that he was accused of exercising white privilege, being an opponent of affirmative action, and promoting systemic bias. Rather, his critics insist, one should judge by the criterion of diversity–which would mean the division of all honors so that all self-identifying groups get theirs.  

I do not know if any current "equality movement" will fail or succeed, but the passage reminded me of Stephen King's lament, expressed somewhere in his famous On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. This memoir on the writing life is likely the only King that those of us who don't read horror have read, and in it, he expressed the wish that he were better recognized as a genuine literary talent—a "sentence maker" as we could say. In the passage I'm thinking of, he is also considering his fellow novelist-musician Amy Tan, and expressing dismay that their bestselling novels are never recognized as having literary qualities, in particular he notes they are not recognized for "the language." I am recalling this from memory, and I'm sorry I don't have the passage handy, but we've come a long way—or there's been a long fall?—when a figure such as Stephen King can be recognized and "excoriated" for being a kingmaker in the world of "high brow" art. Where is the Nobel committee? Or Joyce scribbling in his grave? Is Stephen King's opinion on "matters of art" supposed to matter at all? Why isn't Thomas Pynchon on twitter? And, no, I do not mean to imply that King is overrated in the genres he's working in—the horror novel and the tweet.