From Detroit

"From Detroit, when I told her semi-coherently what little I knew about Paul's situation, she seemed glad to hear from me, was completely ready to step in and seemed to know all that was required. She, for starters, wasn't satisfied with the evaluation at Cornell. ("Cursory at best. This is much too serious.") These first-rate specialists only trust their own--their own nurses, techs, phlebotomists, scanners, pipettes, blood pressure cuffs, etc. Medicine, in most ways, is not a science or an art, but a guildish freemasonry extending back to black mysteries and necromancy. I'm okay with it."

~~ from Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel by Richard Ford

The idea of choice

"The idea of choice in most things is of course a feathery lie of western philosophy. Selling houses lets you know it. There, humans regularly choose then unchoose, choose then regret choosing, choose then rechoose, resist choosing, then choose wrong and learn to like it. Choice usually isn't choice, only what you're left with."

~~ from Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel by Richard Ford

There is no was.

"She even quoted that scrofulous old faker [William] Faulkner . . . when she said, 'There is no was. There is only is.'"

~~ from Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel by Richard Ford

the Old Oaken Slop-pot

"When I reached the Delta gate in Marquette—having stabilized to a fugue state of grief mixed with low-grade aspiration regarding timely questions relevant to what now for me, or what ever—the waiting area was a-thrive with activity. The Northern Michigan University Fighting Bull-Bats were a day away from playing the archrival, Wisconsin-Eau Claire Anvil Heads in a pigskin contest to decide the Peckerwood League Championship and who would bring home the Old Oaken Slop-pot and go on to the Clinker Bowl in Duluth on New Year's day, when the fate of the world would be decided."

~~ from Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel by Richard Ford

one of America's greatest writers

"Fred Exley was maybe the most difficult writer I ever dealt with. He was such a drinker that by nine in the morning he’d be totally drunk. He was also one of those guys who wanted to argue about every change. He wrote a piece for Inside Sports about his relationship with his high school coach. Really nice piece. You couldn’t tell if it was a short story or a reported piece and we didn’t claim it as either one. The piece comes in, it’s about 6,000 words long and Walsh tells me to cut it to four and I say, “John, this is a short story by one of America’s greatest writers. You don’t cut it.” Walsh insisted that we make the cuts.

"So in order to do the piece I had to get up at seven for a couple of months and call Exley. I could hear him getting drunk on the phone and I’d argue about the story and the cuts with him. By nine he was totally out of it."

~~ from "The Man Behind the Curtain" by Alex Belth

the great American real-estate novel

Monkeybicycle fiction editor James Tate Hill joked on twitter about writing "the great real estate novel," and I tweeted back that one to two of Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe novels fall into this category. . . and then within a week or two, I picked up my navy blue hardcover edition of Bright Lights, Medium-Sized City and learned that, in fact, this was the great real-estate novel of our time. Florida short sales, routine foreclosures, overbuilt subdivisions, leaking pipes, busted garage doors, and broken dreams are all invited to the party. Hill, Ford, and Jay McInerney can only dream of drinking the same I-4 7-11 colas as Orlando's Nathan Holic. A hundred pages in, I find BLM-SC to be a fun and informative page-turner with a creative hybrid model, mostly novel with some "choose your own adventure" and graphic elements. It's worth a look.

PS--You can buy five copies of this book for less than the average ticket to Disney World.

the struggle to find a publisher. . .

Richard Ford's "I'd spit again" concerning a Colson Whitehead negative review brought me to another Guardian piece on John Kennedy Toole's struggle to find a publisher. It's tough out there, so do the best you can and remember to appreciate any small success that comes your way. Good luck, always. I need it too.

from The Lay of the Land

"I watch CNN every night, but never afterward think much about anything I see--even the election, as stupid as it is. I've come to loathe most sports, which I used to love--a loss I attribute to having seen the same thing over and over again too many times. Only death-row stories and sumo wrestling (narrated in Japanese) will keep me at the TV longer than ten minutes. My bedside table, as I've said, has novels and biographies I've read thirty pages into but can't tell you much about."

~~ Frank Bascombe from Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land, p.250  

April 11 (Clemson Literary Festival)

The fifth annual Clemson Literary Festival begins today and continues through Saturday. Richard Ford is the featured writer, but there are many others in the fold. I'll be reading from Fight for Your Long Day as part of the Society of English Graduate Students event on Thursday, April 12 at 1:30 p.m. in Hendrix's McKissick Theater.

lish edited hannah?

Am I the only one waiting for the bomb to drop? Or pathetic enough to consider the posthumous possibility that someone will unearth "The Truth" that Gordon Lish heavily edited and rewrote entire paragraphs of Barry Hannah's fiction???

Could it be possible? Ridiculous, right?

Before you threaten this blog with its own mad does of Lishterine, consider the possible:

Barry Hannah was a lonely, mopey plotless writer narrating tales of dysfuctional lesbians who never left the living room with TVs always tuned to the saddest reruns. And then, bam! Lish discovers him and turns his stories into booze-soaked, Southern tragicomedy! Gerry Roth becomes Geronimo Rex!

Gordon Lish, who seemingly has done a hell of a lot for contemporary literature, has wound up playing the role of the sulky devil in regard to the Raymond Carver collection. Somehow, Lish has become the "baddie" who corrupted the true Carver or imprisoned him to unfair but non-negotiable edits or "Jew behind the curtained" him or something.

And now Poor Barry Hannah has been dead and gone for a month, but his editor Gordon Lish is still lurking, most likely "discovering" new writers and eating red meat on rye. Somehow, Lish has gotten a bad rap in all this and yet based on the evidence, he has had a hand in as much contemporary American fiction as anyone else. Maybe we should start revering him as a mystical straw who has stirred so many fine drinks?

OK, forget the cocktails. But I recently read that Sam Lipsyte's journey from sad nobody to literary discovery to "comic genius" included an invitation to join the prestigious Lish writing seminar. I have no information on any "girlie action," "play," or "bi-curious and known drunk" Lipsyte received as a direct result of such membership, but it does seem as if once again--as with Carver, Hannah, Richard Ford, and others--we can thank El Gordo for anything we know about Lipsyte's fiction (input The Ask at a virtual front near you).

So in closing, an open invitation to Lipsyte: dish us the real deal on Lish--all the dirt or other brown dust worth mentioning. Or at least tell us what we should know about this guy...

...thanks, Sam.

And blessed Barry, yes, rest in peace and leave a light on for the rest of us.
For more on Lish's history of helping literature, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Lish is a place to start.

Independence Day

Independence Day by Richard Ford is the novel to begin reading now. It is far superior to The Sportswriter although this one is also quite good. You don't have to be a fan of books with funny sales scenes (in this case, real estate) or a fan of baseball hopeful of renewal via vicarious pilgrimmage to Cooperstown, New York. You don't even have to yearn for a great novel of South Jersey although I'm sure that thought is inspiring!

Last night, I glanced at a copy I own of The Lay of the Land, the third in his Frank Bascombe trilogy, but it didn't grab me. I'm finished Pop Apocalypse by Lee Konstantinou (and I do approve of his messages) and searching for another book to begin. So I'm between books and reading beginnings: Philip Roth's Everyman, Albert Camus's The Fall ( a reread after 20 years or so), and William Vollmann's Riding Toward Everywhere.

It looks like the Vollmann is taking the lead because he is writing about hobos and hitching and hauling ass across the West on freight trains. I'm early in the book, and I've learned Vollman has had a series of small strokes in his past, something not at all shocking when one considers his prolific output. I notice he is published by Ecco Press, and if I'm not mistaken I just read a nice, short article on David Halpern, who founded Ecco in the early seventies; the article is in the back of the most recent Poets and Writers. Halpern has had a life worth vicariously living too!

Back to Vollmann, I've always been interested in his writing career and amazing output although I have not read many of his novels. Ice Shirt is the only one I can remember reading cover to cover although I always check them out at the bookstore when I stumble upon another fat, Vollmann book. I've also always been intrigued by Deep Springs College in Deep Springs, California, and I know Vollmann studied there. A little like St. John's but much smaller, the school sounds like one of those very special places.

Anyway, so far, I appreciate Vollmann's honesty and humility in this book. He is 47 and he needs a bucket for a boost to catch a train; to understand their place on the rails, his friend has coined the term "fauxbeaux." Vollmann sounds fragile and humane. He has punched out 1000s of pages of prose and yet we don't here him brag or boast like various politicians or other celebrities. None of those smiling phonies would have the courage or capacity to live like Vollmann, and yet his voice too is but one among billions.

Does anyone hear a freight train in the distance???