oh johnny

image via the infinite pattern

johnny cash wrote 'to do' lists. just that alone says a lot about the man. and then, the things he put down tell you pretty much everything you need to know.

the end of it all

(image via a year without candy)

i'm reading charles bukowski's post office. it's a real banger. full of folly and something close to swagger, but not quite because the space in between every word is saturated with such sadness and despair. but still, the "fuck it, fuck the world, fuck you" moments run all over the place in this novel, and that definitely makes it a fun read. and there are sections that work like a straight, fast arrow that come right at you, hard and quick, breaking through your skin before you even know what hit you.
for me, this bit just nails it down—
God or somebody keeps creating women and tossing them out on the streets, and this one's ass is too big and that one's tits are too small, and this one is mad and that one is crazy and that one is a religionist and that one reads tea leaves and this one can't control her farts, and that one has this big nose, and that one has boney legs...
But now and then, a woman walks up, full blossom, a woman just bursting out of her dress...a sex creature, a curse, the end of it all.

the world ablaze

"the best and the worst", by charles bukowski

in the hospitals and jails
it's the worst
in madhouses
it's the worst
in penthouses
it's the worst
in skid row flophouses
it's the worst
at poetry readings
at rock concerts
at benefits for the disabled
it's the worst
at funerals
at weddings
it's the worst
at parades
at skating rinks
at sexual orgies
it's the worst
at midnight
at 3 a.m.
at 5:45 p.m.
it's the worst

falling through the sky
firing squads
that's the best

thinking of India
looking at popcorn stands
watching the bull get the matador
that's the best

boxed lightbulbs
an old dog scratching
peanuts in a celluloid bag
that's the best

spraying roaches
a clean pair of stockings
natural guts defeating natural talent
that's the best

in front of firing squads
throwing crusts to seagulls
slicing tomatoes
that's the best

rugs with cigarette burns
cracks in sidewalks
waitresses still sane
that's the best

my hands dead
my heart dead
silence
adagio of rocks
the world ablaze
that's the best
for me.

(image via popartmachine)

find the wound

(image via here)

today i read an interview at one story with writer josh weil. when asked about some of the best writing advice he has ever gotten, he said that his mentor mark slouka told him "find the wound."
i think that's the most perfect advice i've ever heard for a writer. because in the end, that's what we are always after...finding a way to get to the inside, where the throbbing is...

leaves move in the windows

(image via leanda at flickr)

leaves move in the windows. i cannot tell you yet how beautiful it is, what it means. but they do move. they move in the glass.
...these lines are from william h. gass's story in the heart of the heart of the country. a story of lists. a story of isolation and observance, heartache and hauntings. a story of landscape. of people. of loss.
read it. read the whole collection. it might change what storytelling means for you.

what i'm thinking about

image via my sparrow

"if it's true that depth-of-characterization in fiction is analogous to degree-of-acquaintance in life, then it would be similarly true that the deeper the characterization achieved, then the less clear we'd be about a character's motivation in a story."
—from the "knowing your character" chapter of
writing in general and the short story in particular
by rust hills

"empathy....one might even go so far as to say that the experience is an involuntary projection of ourselves..."
— from the penguin dictionary of literary terms and literary theory

"i had to try to get the feeling by the use of two or three words..."
—from a 1933 letter written by ernest hemingway to everett r. perry

a confession

image via counterforce

i recently and randomly read a time magazine essay from may 18, 1970 called "violent protest: a debased language"...a key paragraph got me thinking...

The ultimate debasement of language, of course, is violence...—most dissenters turn to violence in a desperate effort to communicate their profound feelings of grievance. Yet surely this is too crude a way to get their message across. A bomb, for example, lacks specificity; its meaning is as scattered as its debris...Violence is, essentially, a confession of ultimate inarticulateness.

and then the words and ideas filtered down, and what really got a hold of me was— violence is, essentially, a confession... of what exactly? of everything that lives inside us but can't get out, of everything that exists but can't be named, of everything we want acknowledged but instead has always been met with disregard, intolerance and neglect. violence then, is a sad confession of our fragility and weakness, our tragic inability to perfectly express our existence...

Read more of the essay at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,909175-2,00.html#ixzz0y92NXg2a

in cold blood

portraits of clutter family murderers dick hickock & perry smith
taken by richard avedon, 1960
image via this isn't happiness

i'm about 70 or so pages out from the end. i told myself i wouldn't look up what perry and dick really looked like till i finished the book. but i just couldn't wait. even though i know i will finish the book later tonight... i couldn't stop myself. these portraits are astounding. i'm undone and overwhelmed and my heart is racing. i had no idea their photos would say so much. i had no idea i would feel so much.
truman capote breaks into the story with measured beats, and though the pulse of his language often gathers into sharp and clear points , it keeps a steady ever-haunting and gripping pace—
5 pages in and capote writes:
but then, in the earliest hours of that morning in november, a sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly holcomb noises— on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles. at the time not a soul in sleeping holcomb heard them— four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives.

and this is the bit of text that keeps playing over and over in my mind as i look at the photos of dick and perry... i can see and hear and smell those shotgun blasts...those blasts that killed the clutter family of four, and later, and less directly, dick and perry...

the jungle is obscene

a print from ernst haeckel's 1905 wanderbilder (travel pictures) series, image from ragesoss on flickr

iquitos, december 8, 1980

a still day, sultry. inactivity piled on inactivity, clouds staring down from the sky, pregnant with rain; fever reigns; insects taking on massive proportions. the jungle is obscene. everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin. the voices in the jungle are silent; nothing is stirring, and a languid immobile anger hovers over everything. the laundry on the line refuses to dry. as a part of a conspiracy, flies suddenly descend on the table, their stomachs taut and iridescent. our little monkey was wailing in his cage, and when i approached, he looked and wailed right through me to some distant spot outside where his little heart hoped to find an echo. i let him out, but he went back into his cage, and now he is continuing to wail there. 

— by werner herzog, excerpts from his diary entries from the forthcoming book, conquest of the useless: reflections from the making of fitzcarraldo.

we real cool

the hackney brothers of motor city hard rock band 'death'

photo: tammy hackney

"we real cool"

the pool players.

seven at the golden shovel.

we real cool. we

left school. we

lurk late. we

strike straight. we

sing sin. we

think gin. we

jazz june. we 

die soon.

i'm pretty into this poem by gwendolyn brooks. it's the poem she's most known for and i bet that gets annoying for her...but this poem just ricochets around inside me. it's urgent and true and tragic. and it just wants to fall off the tongue.

(the photo and poem are totally unrelated, except that they give me the same kind of feeling—that mix of defiance and frivolity, that i don't give a fuck attitude that is both buoyant and weighty)

what big teeth you have!...the better to eat you with

the story of little red riding hood inspires fear, imagination and awe...a flinch, a shudder, a flutter, an ache. the story writhes with terror and innocence, duplicity and corruption, savagery and simplicity. there are shadows of sex and violence, bloodlust and carnality. and guess what?—it's a kids story... the story has many tellings and re-tellings, but the tension between a chaste little girl, lamb-like in her pale winter skin, and a big sly bristling wolf is always at the core. soft little girl and grisly big wolf...round and round they go... there are so many stories in the story of little red riding hood. 

angela carter reworks the story of little red riding hood in her short story "the werewolf"... she makes little red riding hood a different sort of little girl and she plays around with what that means for the story... 

it is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts... winter and cold weather. go and visit your grandmother, who has been sick. take her the oatcakes i've baked for her... the good child does as her mother bids—five miles' trudge through the forest; do not leave the path because of the bears, the wild boar, the starving wolves. here, take your father's hunting knife; you know how to use it... when she heard that freezing howl of a wolf, she dropped her gifts, seized her knife and turned on the beast. it was a huge one, with red eyes and running grizzled chops; any but a mountaineer's child would have died of fright at the sight of it. it went for her throat, as wolves do, but she made a great swipe at it with her father's knife... the wolf let out a gulp, almost a sob... the child wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron...

the lover

originally published in france as l'amant by les editions de minuit. copyright 1984

this is one of my favorite books. it's short— at once rushing and quiet. it's repetitive and aching and indulgent and obsessive. but i think it deals with nostalgia and memory and the re-telling of an experience without apologies...duras does not ask her readers to forgive her for not adhering to the facts, instead she is desperate and desirous to manipulate her story, in moments flagrant and blatant, and at other times cagey, slinking. memory moves and contorts and mutates everything—duras knows this and allows for it, pushing her story further and further into some kind of no-man's land, outside of fact, outside of fiction. 

here's an excerpt:

the girl in the felt hat is in the muddy light of the river, alone on the deck of the ferry, leaning on the rails. the hat makes the whole scene pink. it's the only color. in the misty sun of the river, the sun of the hot season, the banks have faded away, the river seems to reach to the horizon. it flows quietly, without a sound, like the blood in the body. no wind but that in the water... all around the ferry is the river, it's brimful, its moving waters sweep through, never mixing with, the stagnant waters of the rice fields. the river has picked up all it's met... it carries everything along, straw huts, forests, burned-out fires, dead birds, dead dogs, drowned tigers and buffalos, drowned men...

what didn't happen

photo from the film the virgin suicides, based on the book of the same name (the book is great)

in class today we talked about how stories begin, how they open up and what happens in those first few lines that makes us want to keep reading more and more. we read aloud the very beginning of a story called "we didn't" by stuart dybek and after only the first sentence i could feel my skin raise up off my arms and the blood in my wrists pump and the hard bones in my knees ache. dybek was inspired by a poem called "we did it" by yehuda amichai, and he opens up his story with a couple of lines from the poem that he incorporates into his story...

we did it in front of the mirror
and in the light. we did it in darkness,
in water, and in the high grass.
—yehuda amichai

and then dybek begins his story...

we didn't in the light; we didn't in darkness. we didn't in the fresh-cut summer grass or in the mounds of autumn leaves or on the snow where moonlight threw down our shadows. we didn't in your room on the canopy bed you slept in, the bed you'd slept in as a child, or in the back seat of my father's rusted rambler which smelled of the smoked chubs and kielbasa that he delivered on weekends from my uncle vincent's meat market. we didn't in your mother's buick eight where a rosary twined the reaview mirror like a beaded black snake with silver, cruciform fangs.
at the dead end of our lover's lane—a side street of abandoned factories—where i perfected the pinch that springs open a bra; behind the lilac bushes in marquette park where you first touched me through my jeans and your nipples, swollen against transparent cotton, seemed the shade of lilacs; in the blacony of the now defunct clark theater where i wiped popcorn salt from my palms and slid them up your thighs and you whispered, "i feel like doris day is watching us," we didn't.

i'm just completely floored by this beginning— its honesty, its lyricism, its tenderness. and i'm so taken with how much can be told through what didn't happen...that by telling what specifically didn't happen, we understand just as much as when we are told what did happen... and perhaps, more.

writing up to and beyond a single moment

i recently finished reading this overwhelming, difficult, brave and beautiful book for the second time. i am even more impressed and moved and inspired than i was with my initial reading. i think faulkner's writing is gutsy, singular, jarring and breathtaking. not that i think he doesn't slip and fall sometimes. because he does and quite often, but that's the risk of an ambitious and daring writer. but particularly in this novel i find that his footing is surer despite the treacherous terrain of the text-the story of a tragic family, haunted and aching and bruised.

in an interview that took place early in 1956 in new york city, faulkner articulated how a story begins for him- "a writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others. with me, a story usually begins with a single idea or memory or mental picture. the writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what it caused to follow."

in a 1933 introduction to the sound and the fury, faulkner explicitly discusses his process for the novel, "when i began the book i had no plan at all...one day it suddenly seemed as if a door had clapped silently and forever between me and all the publishers' addresses...and i said to myself, now i can write. now i can just write. whereupon i,...began to write about a little girl...a little doomed girl climbing a blooming pear tree in april to look in the window at the funeral...i saw that peaceful glinting of that branch was to become the dark, harsh flowing of time sweeping her to where she could not return...that just separation, division, would not be enough, not far enough, it must sweep her into dishonor and shame too..."

i am obsessed with how this image, this flashing mental picture of a "little doomed girl climbing a blooming pear tree in april" exploded into the sound and the fury.

i wanna make it a heavyweight fight

 how to be a great writer, charles bukowski

you've got to fuck a great many women

beautiful women

and write a few decent love poems.

and don't worry about age

and/or freshly arrived talents.

just drink more beer

more and more beer

and attend the racetrack at least once a week

and win if possible.

learning to win is hard-

any slob can be a loser.

and don't forget your Brahms

and your Bach and your beer

don't overexercise.

sleep until noon.

avoid credit cards

or paying for anything on time.

remember that there isn't a piece of ass 

in this world worth more than $50

(in 1977).

and if you have the ability to love

love yourself first

but always be aware of the possibility of 

total defeat

whether the reason for that defeat 

seems right or wrong-

an early taste of death is not necessarily 

a bad thing

stay out of churches and bars and museums,

and like the spider 

be patient-

time is everybody's cross,

plus

exile 

defeat

 treachery

all that dross.

stay with the beer.

beer is continuous blood.

a continuous lover.

get a large  typewriter

and as the footsteps go up and down

outside your window

hit that thing

hit it hard

make it a heavyweight fight

make it the bull when he first charges in

and remember the old dogs

who fought so well:

Hemingway, Celine, Dostoevsky, Hamsun.

if you don't think they didn't go crazy

in tiny rooms

just like you're doing now

without women

without food

without hope

then you're not ready.

drink more beer.

there's time.

and if there's not

that's all right too.

this poem cracks me up and makes my heart squeeze tight. it's daunting and hopeful at the same time. it makes me want to live in loud fits and bursts and then tender oozing whimpers-back and forth between those two states, relentlessly. this poem makes me worry about time even more than i already do. i definitely don't think that not having enough time is "all right too". i've got too much to fit in this life, too much to touch and feel and taste...too much writing to do. writing needs so much time...i just want slow motion time and a quiet room with a huge desk beneath a bright window. but i want my fingers fast and breathless, tirelessly wanting to "hit that thing, hit it hard," to "make it a heavyweight fight"