The Try-Works

So, I’m reading Philip Roth’s Counterlife, a damn fine book about, as you probably guessed, alternative lives.  It’s a lot of fucking fun, both as a novel and a meditation on the possibilities and limitations of personal, religious, and national regeneration — whether as a result of our own volition or our author’s whim.

And, in one of the many scenes that gets replicated to counter purposes, I came across the following line, as given us by an insane literary fan of the protagonist, who is pretending to highjack a plane with the intent of closing down all holocaust museums, believing (or pretending to believe) that it is because the gentiles always see Jews as judging them for the holocaust that they will eventually destroy them (clear?).

Israel is their prosecutor. The Jew is their judge.  In his heart, every Goy knows, because every Goy, in his heart, is a little Eichmann.

Any Zerzan fans out there?  When did he first use the term?

Just geekish curiousity.

Larry Brown’s recipe for squirrels, biscuits, and gravy.

The late Larry Brown, the author of Joe, Billy Ray’s Farm, and seven other classics of Southern literature, had a saying. When things were difficult, complicated, aggravating, or vexing in one way or another, he’d say, “They ain’t squirrels, baby.” Squirrels, for Larry, were the antithesis of all that: They were a joy to hunt, a joy to cook, and a joy to eat. Hunting and eating them was one of life’s simple pleasures-along with bream fishing, slow back-roads driving, drinking with pals, and cradling his grandchildren. On numerous mornings he greeted me with a plate of squirrel, biscuits, and gravy, his signature dish, usually made with grays his sons had killed. Nothing ever tasted better, or will again.

2 squirrels (about 1 pound each), dressed and quartered
2/3 cup flour for dredging, plus roughly 1/4 cup for gravy
5 slices bacon
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Biscuits
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup vegetable shortening, chilled
3/4 cup buttermilk
3 tablespoons butter, melted

The rest.

Via Westword, Max Karson has tried his hand at rap again. It’s bad. Really, really derivatively bad in all the ways that Eminem is really, really derivatively bad: it’s nauseously self-pitying and absolutely fucking idiotic when trying on serious subject matter. (“Keep your dick in your pants and you won’t get diseased.”)

I want to defend Mr. Karson, but this makes it more difficult. Not because the subject matter is offensive, it’s no more offensive than any number of corny super-gangsta rap albums, but because of the limited imaginative scope of the project. My advice to Mr. Karson: read Britton, read Burroughs, read Mirbau, read Bataille, read Krassner, read Genet, read Ballard, read P-Orridge, read Melville, read Thoreau, read Crews, read the Marquis de Sade, fuck, read Eldridge Cleaver, and for Christ’s sake, read Churchill. Not because there’s much you need to take from them, but because you need to know where the edge of the envelope actually is.

I am a dilettantish believer in transgressive literature — and yes, I know, many of those listed don’t fall comfortably in the designation, nor should they — but one must actually transgress. Playing on the now hokey tropes of nineties rap is neither interesting nor challenging. Yeah, it’ll piss off academic middle management suits, but fuck academic middle management suits. One might as well take it upon one’s self to anger chipmunks. Don’t irritate them, soak them in gasoline and burn them in the street.

I love the idea of a school shooting rap from a college student, but I need more than the same shit that’s been rerun on CNN since the Virginia Tech shootings rephrased in the now-cliched terminology of urban hipster understanding. Give me why, to quote Breton, “the simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.” Or, if not that, make me understand why flickering fluorescent lights might demand the same.

Enjoy.

(There are some funny lines. For all my criticism, I’ll take this over Eminem any day.)

The latest in one of my favorite literary feuds.

Ten years ago I published Sir Vidia’s Shadow, depicting V S Naipaul as a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone, with race on the brain. He was then, and continued to be, an excellent candidate for anger management classes, sensitivity training, psychotherapy, marriage guidance, grief counselling and driving lessons – none of which he pursued.

Now comes Patrick French’s authorised biography of the man, The World Is What It Is, which makes all these points and many more. It seems that I didn’t know the half of all the horrors.

When the lawyers were shown the type-script of my own book, they were all over me. “Look at this – ‘violent, unstable, depressive’ – Naipaul could prove malice!” And the trump card of the QC, with his lists of deletions and revisions: “Do you know what it will cost you if he sues you?”

I was allowed only to quote snippets from his letters to me. Permission was not granted to see the letters I had written to him over the course of 30 years, now in an Oklahoma library. In other words, I was denied access to my own letters.

I did the best I could. I have an excellent memory. But I’ll admit I took a few liberties with geography, made a Malaysian dinner guest into a Kiwi and gave her a funny hat, omitted that I’d won an airgun competition at Naipaul’s house, dressed Lady Antonia Fraser in a more fetching outfit. And, because of the persistent lawyers, I blurred or omitted examples of Naipaul’s outrageous behaviour.

I wanted to write about his cruelty to his wife, his crazed domination of his mistress that lasted almost 25 years, his screaming fits, his depressions, his absurd contention that he was the greatest writer in the English language (he first made this claim in Mombasa at the age of 34). “I am a new man,” he assured me once, “as Montaigne was a new man.” But did Montaigne frequent prostitutes, insult waiters and beat his mistress?

Slash, change; slash, change. Even so, when my book appeared the reviewers howled at me for my audacity. “An unfair portrait”, “a betrayal” and the usual jibes – all of them portraying me as an envious upstart. Just a few weeks ago, in a sycophantic piece about Naipaul by a rival newspaper, my book was described as an example of “literary pique” because I had suggested that Naipaul was a monstrous egotist.

Now French’s biography amply demonstrates everything I said and more. It is not a pretty story; it will probably destroy Naipaul’s reputation for ever, this chronicle of his pretensions, his whoremongering, his treatment of a sad, sick wife and disposable mistress, his evasions, his meanness, his cruelty amounting to sadism, his race baiting. Then there is the “gruesome sex”, the blame shifting, the paranoia, the disloyalty, the nasty cracks and the whining, the ingratitude, the mood swings, the unloving and destructive personality.

It is not strange that he has a title and wealth and a Nobel prize – there have been other Nobel laureates as twisted as Naipaul. Kipling, for example, had a similarly dysfunctional childhood, similar views on warfare and on lesser breeds. He was also just as free and easy with the word “nigger”; but he wasn’t cruel.

The rest.

So there’s a new collection the best of American erotic poetry out, or at least poetry that really wants to be erotic, and I’ve been chuckling all day over Dan Chiasson’s review over at the New York Times.

Ours is an era of plentiful but repetitive erotic writing, an age of “copper-lidded eyes” and “green eyes flecked with yellow,” of a “backbreaking orchid” and an “orchid boat,” of hyperlegible Freudian metaphor (silos and fountains, copper pipe and cowboy hats) and its counterpart, the forensic, literal overcorrection (aureoles, Formica countertops and AA batteries). The body parts alone oppress you: lips, testicles, shoulders, eyes, over and over again until you would rather inhabit some spirit realm where bodies are outlawed. Theme-based anthologies have the unintended effect of making poets seem trapped by their subjects: there is no more variation among poets in this book than there would be in a book called, for example, “The Best American Patriotic Poems.” Individual poets shouldn’t be blamed, though poems like Updike’s or like Dean Young’s “Platypus” (“I want to watch your face contort / like bacon as it fries”) are bad by cosmic design, not individual choice. Lusty poems by straight men are, in our era, usually prone to failure — though a cat lover might appreciate the literary power, lost on me, of Dana Gioia’s “Alley Cat Love Song,” which begins “Come into the garden, Fred, / For the neighborhood tabby is gone.” But the real problem is anthologies. The many young poets represented here, most of them (Lehman makes a point of this in his introduction) young women, seem much less original than they would if encountered on their own terms. In a magazine, I might like a post-crab-boil sex poem about (ouch!) the sting to one’s “sweet meat” from bay seasoning on a lover’s fingers. Here it feels no different from the dozens of other poems that make raunchy metaphors out of unlikely foods, weird animals and western topography.

If you find yourself in a book with an orchid on the cover, its petal languid and its pistil looking ready for action, it is really best to have written an anti-erotic poem like A. R. Ammons’s bleak two-line “Their Sex Life” (“One failure on / Top of another”) or Jill Alexander Essbaum’s funny “On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica” (“She stood before him wearing only pantries / and he groped for her Volvo under the gauze”). Or do as W. H. Auden had the foresight to do: write something really filthy. His poem “The Platonic Blow” is the dirtiest verse written since Rochester — I can’t even talk about it here. Let’s just say it makes mincemeat of Updike’s dainty secretarial fellatio. Anthologies like this one are best viewed as contests (best metaphorical labia! best profane blazon!), and dear old Auden wins this one by a knockout blow.

The rest.

So, what’s the poem too dirty for the New York Times?

Well, how in the fuck could I pass that up?

The Platonic Blow - W. H. Auden

It was a spring day, a day for a lay, when the air
Smelled like a locker-room, a day to blow or get blown;
Returning from lunch I turned my corner and there
On a near-by stoop I saw him standing alone.

I glanced as I advanced. The clean white T-shirt outlined
A forceful torso, the light-blue denims divulged
Much. I observed the snug curves where they hugged the behind,
I watched the crotch where the cloth intriguingly bulged.

Our eyes met. I felt sick. My knees turned weak.
I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what to say.
In a blur I heard words, myself like a stranger speak
“Will you come to my room?” Then a husky voice, “O.K.”

I produced some beer and we talked. Like a little boy
He told me his story. Present address: next door.
Half Polish, half Irish. The youngest. From Illinois.
Profession: mechanic. Name: Bud. Age: twenty-four.

He put down his glass and stretched his bare arms along
The back of my sofa. The afternoon sunlight struck
The blond hairs on the wrist near my head. His chin was strong.
His mouth sucky. I could hardly believe my luck.

And here he was sitting beside me, legs apart.
I could bear it no longer. I touched the inside of his thigh.
His reply was to move closer. I trembled, my heart
Thumped and jumped as my fingers went to his fly.

I opened a gap in the flap. I went in there.
I sought for a slit in the gripper shorts that had charge
Of the basket I asked for. I came to warm flesh then to hair.
I went on. I found what I hoped. I groped. It was large.

He responded to my fondling in a charming, disarming way:
Without a word he unbuckled his belt while I felt.
And lolled back, stretching his legs. His pants fell away.
Carefully drawing it out, I beheld what I held.

The circumcised head was a work of mastercraft
With perfectly beveled rim of unusual weight
And the friendliest red. Even relaxed, the shaft
Was of noble dimensions with the wrinkles that indicate

Singular powers of extension. For a second or two,
It lay there inert, then suddenly stirred in my hand,
Then paused as if frightened or doubtful of what to do.
And then with a violent jerk began to expand.

By soundless bounds it extended and distended, by quick
Great leaps it rose, it flushed, it rushed to its full size.
Nearly nine inches long and three inches thick,
A royal column, ineffably solemn and wise.

I tested its length and strength with a manual squeeze.
I bunched my fingers and twirled them about the knob.
I stroked it from top to bottom. I got on my knees.
I lowered my head. I opened my mouth for the job.

But he pushed me gently away. He bent down. He unlaced
His shoes. He removed his socks. Stood up. Shed
His pants altogether. Muscles in arms and waist
Rippled as he whipped his T-shirt over his head.

I scanned his tan, enjoyed the contrast of brown
Trunk against white shorts taut around small
Hips. With a dig and a wriggle he peeled them down.
I tore off my clothes. He faced me, smiling. I saw all.

The gorgeous organ stood stiffly and straightly out
With a slight flare upwards. At each beat of his heart it threw
An odd little nod my way. From the slot of the spout
Exuded a drop of transparent viscous goo.

The lair of hair was fair, the grove of a young man,
A tangle of curls and whorls, luxuriant but couth.
Except for a spur of golden hairs that fan
To the neat navel, the rest of the belly was smooth.

Well hung, slung from the fork of the muscular legs,
The firm vase of his sperm, like a bulging pear,
Cradling its handsome glands, two herculean eggs,
Swung as he came towards me, shameless, bare.

We aligned mouths. We entwined. All act was clutch,
All fact contact, the attack and the interlock
Of tongues, the charms of arms. I shook at the touch
Of his fresh flesh, I rocked at the shock of his cock.

Straddling my legs a little I inserted his divine
Person between and closed on it tight as I could.
The upright warmth of his belly lay all along mine.
Nude, glued together for a minute, we stood.

I stroked the lobes of his ears, the back of his head
And the broad shoulders. I took bold hold of the compact
Globes of his bottom. We tottered. He fell on the bed.
Lips parted, eyes closed, he lay there, ripe for the act.

Mad to be had, to be felt and smelled. My lips
Explored the adorable masculine tits. My eyes
Assessed the chest. I caressed the athletic hips
And the slim limbs. I approved the grooves of the thighs.

I hugged, I snuggled into an armpit. I sniffed
The subtle whiff of its tuft. I lapped up the taste
Of its hot hollow. My fingers began to drift
On a trek of inspection, a leisurely tour of the waist.

Downward in narrowing circles they playfully strayed.
Encroached on his privates like poachers, approached the prick,
But teasingly swerved, retreated from meeting. It betrayed
Its pleading need by a pretty imploring kick.

“Shall I rim you?” I whispered. He shifted his limbs in assent.
Turned on his side and opened his legs, let me pass
To the dark parts behind. I kissed as I went
The great thick cord that ran back from his balls to his arse.

Prying the buttocks aside, I nosed my way in
Down the shaggy slopes. I came to the puckered goal.
It was quick to my licking. He pressed his crotch to my chin.
His thighs squirmed as my tongue wormed in his hole.

His sensations yearned for consummation. He untucked
His legs and lay panting, hot as a teen-age boy.
Naked, enlarged, charged, aching to get sucked,
Clawing the sheet, all his pores open to joy.

I inspected his erection. I surveyed his parts with a stare
From scrotum level. Sighting along the underside
Of his cock, I looked through the forest of pubic hair
To the range of the chest beyond rising lofty and wide.

I admired the texture, the delicate wrinkles and the neat
Sutures of the capacious bag. I adored the grace
Of the male genitalia. I raised the delicious meat
Up to my mouth, brought the face of its hard-on to my face.

Slipping my lips round the Byzantine dome of the head,
With the tip of my tongue I caressed the sensitive groove.
He thrilled to the trill. “That’s lovely!” he hoarsely said.
“Go on! Go on!” Very slowly I started to move.

Gently, intently, I slid to the massive base
Of his tower of power, paused there a moment down
In the warm moist thicket, then began to retrace
Inch by inch the smooth way to the throbbing crown.

Indwelling excitements swelled at delights to come
As I descended and ascended those thick distended walls.
I grasped his root between left forefinger and thumb
And with my right hand tickled his heavy voluminous balls.

I plunged with a rhythmical lunge steady and slow,
And at every stroke made a corkscrew roll with my tongue.
His soul reeled in the feeling. He whimpered “Oh!”
As I tongued and squeezed and rolled and tickled and swung.

Then I pressed on the spot where the groin is joined to the cock,
Slipped a finger into his arse and massaged him from inside.
The secret sluices of his juices began to unlock.
He melted into what he felt. “O Jesus!” he cried.

Waves of immeasurable pleasures mounted his member in quick
Spasms. I lay still in the notch of his crotch inhaling his sweat.
His ring convulsed round my finger. Into me, rich and thick,
His hot spunk spouted in gouts, spurted in jet after jet.

And, highly entertaining and truly filthy though Auden’s be, I’ve been reading (and thoroughly enjoying, fuck you) Robert Frost of late, and was delighted to see the inclusion of his “The Subverted Flower.”

The Subverted Flower - Robert Frost

She drew back; he was calm:
“It is this that had the power.”
And he lashed his open palm
With the tender-headed flower.
He smiled for her to smile,
But she was either blind
Or willfully unkind.
He eyed her for a while
For a woman and a puzzle.
He flicked and flung the flower,
And another sort of smile
Caught up like fingertips
The corners of his lips
And cracked his ragged muzzle.
She was standing to the waist
In golden rod and brake,
Her shining hair displaced.
He stretched her either arm
As if she made it ache
To clasp her - not to harm;
As if he could not spare
To touch her neck and hair.
“If this has come to us
And not to me alone -”
So she thought she heard him say;
Though with every word he spoke
His lips were sucked and blown
And the effort made him choke
Like a tiger at a bone.
She had to lean away.
She dared not stir a foot,
Lest movement should provoke
The demon of pursuit
That slumbers in a brute.
It was then her mother’s call
From inside the garden wall
Made her steal a look of fear
To see if he could hear
And would pounce to end it all
Before her mother came.
She looked and saw the shame:
A hand hung like a paw,
An arm worked like a saw
As if to be persuasive,
An ingratiating laugh
That cut the snout in half,
And eye become evasive.
A girl could only see
That a flower had marred a man,
But what she could not see
Was that the flower might be
Other than base and fetid:
That the flower had done but part,
And what the flower began
Her own too meager heart
Had terribly completed.
She looked and saw the worst.
And the dog or what it was,
Obeying bestial laws,
A coward save at night,
Turned from the place and ran.
She heard him stumble first
And use his hands in flight.
She heard him bark outright.
And oh, for one so young
The bitter words she spit
Like some tenacious bit
That will not leave the tongue.
She plucked her lips for it,
And still the horror clung.
Her mother wiped the foam
From her chin, picked up her comb,
And drew her backward home.

So, I’ve been recommended The Kite Runner by several people over the last year. People whom I respect; well read folks, with impeccable taste. So, I finally took it on a couple of weeks back, delving into the book with the highest of hopes.

And, though I know this will be the most controversial post I’ve ever put my name on, I have only this to say:

If anyone ever recommends it to you, dear reader, smack them quickly in the forehead with the nearest blunt object. Then run like hell. Immediately, and without hesitation. Then delete their phone number from your cellphone and erase their email address.

They mean you no good.

The characters are the kind of dull, stock automatons usually found on Sunday night television. There are distant fathers and sons yearning for love. There are saintly hair-lipped servants who never betray their masters, not even after a round of forced buggering. There are chaste-but-shamed love interests, courted in some of the worst purple prose this side of Harlequin. (Dappled sunlight dances in her eyes. She has hollows somewhere about her collarbone. Said hollows probably invite kisses.) And the book being not being particularly shy about propagandizing, there are Hitler-worshiping, rapacious neighborhood bullies who become Taliban.

Which is pretty much indicative of the plotting. One doesn’t so much read the book as hop from one trite plot point to the next. So, about halfway through the book, when you learn that the protagonist’s wife can’t have kids, and the narrator runs into the common friend of one of his servants whom he treated rather badly in childhood, and, y’know, said servant is dead, leaving an orphan child, you probably won’t lurch out of your chair in shock at the outcome of the novel.

And that brings us to the protagonist. He’s the kind of profoundly dim idjit who’s meant to be anything but profoundly dim. In no way do I think all protagonists should be likable, but the author should have the sense to understand the character arc s/he’s representing. In this case, our narrator is a nasty, spoiled little shit who actually seems to undermine the author’s intent. I.e., what is supposed to come across as atonement and redemption for being rather nasty to his servants, only represents that the narrator’s singular lack of insight is a fault shared by the author. So, when the narrator kidnaps said servant’s son and adopts him, one can’t help but get the sleazy feeling that the book’s popularity stems from a zeitgeist of neocolonial guilt. Angelina Jolie comes to mind. As do the novels of Barbara Kingsolver.

Worse, someone turned the author on to the oldest and most overused literary device of high school creative writing classes everywhere: framing. And, hoo boy, does the author frame. A father’s slingshot is passed on to son to save the dipshit narrator, and low-class servants are buggered through the generations. Not a narrative thread doesn’t get tied up neatly. Slutty women get gruesomely disfigured and learn the value of inner beauty, cigarette smokers get lung cancer, and fathers learn to appreciate their sons (and vice-versa).

Most importantly, everyone learns not to let evil, Hitler-loving, Taliban types bugger their servants. Which seems an important point for the author. Making me fear for his servants.

Worst of all, however, is the actual writing. When the author manages to miss the chance to drop in a cliche, it’s only because he’s so badly mangled it that it no longer makes any fucking sense whatsover. Take this one: “I hobbled after him, spikes of pain battering my scraped knees.” Not to be an asshole, but if there’s one thing, just one thing, that spikes don’t do, it’s batter. Pierce, sure. Puncture, quite probably. Batter, never.

Another one? How’s about when Mr. Hosseini attempts to tweak the proverbial “elephant in the room” cliché in hopes of slipping it by the reader. He powerfully tortures that dead metaphor, referencing an elephant “sweating in the tiny room.” That one was actually physically fucking painful to read.

Why?

Elephants DON’T FUCKING SWEAT.

It’s a kind of delicious experience, to be honest, reading the book in anticipation of the next horribly tortured turn of phrase. Swabs do some smothering of the sky. Guilt stabs and slashes the protagonist in every manner possible. Etc.

You almost have to congratulate Mr. Hosseini. Any mediocre writer can write a novel based almost entirely on cliché.

But it takes a special kind of hack to so badly mangle those fucking clichés as to create an entire constellation of nonsense.

Anyway, my advice? Friends don’t recommend this book. Friends hurl their burning copy through the author’s window, saving you from having to do it yourself.

These are the words engraved on Larry Brown’s tombstone. They come from a Robert Earl Keen song, which some of you savvier readers might also know was covered by the Highwaymen, a country music group made up of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson.

This is a fan video.

Larry Brown, as I’m learning, was a country music fan, befriending many of my favorite artists in the so-called alternative country scene.  Following is a New York Times article, running down the Oxford Conference for the Book’s celebration of Larry Brown, which turned into a concert.

I’m tearing through Joe.  It’s fucking fantastic.  I’ll give a full review when done.

The minimarts in this town are not allowed to sell cold beer, and anyone familiar with Larry Brown or his fiction might reasonably think that he is the reason. Mr. Brown, who grew up in this area, wrote stories with many a compulsive drinker, many a winding road and nary a designated driver.

Like his characters Mr. Brown, a firefighter and largely self-taught writer, loved to drive around the county chain-smoking and drinking beer. On his car stereo he played Southern singer-songwriters like Robert Earl Keen, Alejandro Escovedo and Vic Chesnutt. As his fame grew, his passion was reciprocated. He became a patron saint and friend to alt-country, anthem-folk, hillbilly, banjo-picking, Southern soliloquizing, bourbon-poisoned, frat-boy-followed and/or cop-chased musicians. Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan wrote a song, “Long Way Home,” inspired by Mr. Brown’s stories, and the country star Tim McGraw optioned some for movies.

On Thursday Mr. Keen, Mr. Escovedo, Mr. Chesnutt and others gathered here to celebrate Mr. Brown, play music in his honor and, as they say down here, tell stories on him. The occasion was the Oxford Conference for the Book, which focuses each year on a Southern writer, usually a long-dead one like Tennessee Williams or Walker Percy. Mr. Brown died in 2004, at 53, after a heart attack, and with so many friends, and his wife, Mary Annie, in the back row, the conference seemed less like a scholarly endeavor than an Irish wake.

Mr. Brown was a lion of the literary movement known as Rough South. His novels, funny and tender and violent, include “Joe,” about a family of squatters and their depraved alcoholic father; “Dirty Work,” about two disfigured veterans, one black and one white, in a hospital room; and “Father and Son,” about a man’s return home after doing time for manslaughter. An unfinished novel, “The Miracle of Catfish,” has just been published by Algonquin Books.

The panel discussions included students of Mr. Brown like Steven Rinella, author of “Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine”; young people he had literally taken in when they were down on their luck, like Ben Weaver, a singer-songwriter who now lives in Minneapolis; and friends who had known him all his life, like the Oxford fire chief, Jerry Johnson. Debra Winger and Arliss Howard, who made a movie based on Mr. Brown’s short stories, were there, as was Gary Hawkins, who made the documentary “The Rough South of Larry Brown.”

The panels were rounded out by a concert at Proud Larry’s, a local music club, and the release of a tribute album.

Into microphones or over whiskey, people recounted Mr. Brown’s long letters, his meticulous list of rejections from editors and the tours of nearby Lafayette County he would give to friends, pointing out where one of his characters had found warm beer in a ditch or where a real, live family member had run off the road; how Mr. Brown once, seeing some people he believed had wronged him, climbed on their restaurant table and danced, slowly and calmly, on their food; how he plunked a bong down on the kitchen table to announce to his family that he would not longer conceal his pot-smoking habit; how he loved to play the guitar but refused to learn more than three chords.

Larry Brown was a native son in this town where William Faulkner scrawled the outline of a novel on his study wall and John Grisham frequents a bookstore owned by the mayor, Richard Howorth. The son of a sharecropper, Mr. Brown joined the Marines after high school; he returned in 1972, married and joined the Oxford Fire Department. The Browns lived in a trailer outside town.

At 29 he began to teach himself to write, reading obsessively and turning out dozens of short stories and several novels on his wife’s typewriter and sending them off to magazines. One was finally published in 1982, in Easyriders, a biker magazine. In the late 1980s Shannon Ravenel, an editor at Algonquin Books in North Carolina, stumbled across one in a journal and called him, beginning a long and sometimes contentious relationship. She returned one manuscript with a note that said, “Start the novel on page 134”; he called her, she said, “a prissy old lady.” Usually, though, he took her suggestions, as he did once when she wanted him to cut a particularly raunchy scene. ‘The cow thing can go,” he wrote her. “I don’t know when I’m offending people unless you tell me.”

At the concert, in a good-size room off the town square, the contours of Mr. Brown’s musical taste emerged. The show had been sold out for weeks. In the first set four Mississippians with guitars — Duff Dorrough, Cary Hudson, Tim Lee and Clint Jordan — traded off, mixing their own songs about catfish and hush puppies with Hank Williams covers. Next was the less traditional, younger set: Mr. Weaver, Mr. Chesnutt and Brent Best, of a defunct band from Denton, Tex., called Slobberbone. Last were the headliners, Mr. Escovedo and Mr. Keen, who played with his bassist, Bill Whitbeck.

At one point Lisa Howorth, the mayor’s wife, was asked if she would open her home to a postconcert gathering. “I don’t have any bourbon,” she protested. The party went elsewhere.

On Friday morning a group of remarkably unhungover people made a pilgrimage to Mr. Brown’s grave.

The polished black tombstone is on the bank of a pond on a piece of land he owned in Tula, Miss. Beyond the trees was a little writing shack he spent years building with no power tools. It took so long his friends suspected he did not actually want to finish it.

“He would write you letters about it, and he would know exactly how many buckets of dirt he had carried,” said Jonathan Miles, a friend and magazine writer who organized the tribute concert. “And he would have a story for every bucket of dirt.”

During the 20-minute trip to Tula Mr. Keen, Mr. Whitbeck and Mr. Chesnutt jokingly critiqued their friend’s guitar playing but seriously discussed his prose. Mr. Whitbeck said he preferred Mr. Brown’s work to that of a kindred writer, Harry Crews. “There’s more soul to it or something,” he said. “And less pretension, in a way.”

Mr. Chesnutt, who lives in Athens, Ga., compared Mr. Brown with another of his favorites, Cormac McCarthy: “Larry’s the opposite of Cormac. You’ll never need a dictionary with Larry.”

Mr. Keen, who is from Texas, sprawled in the back seat of the van and grinned. The title of one of his songs, “The Road Goes on Forever,” is engraved on Mr. Brown’s tombstone. The song itself is about Sherry, a waitress with a reputation, a dollar in her tip jar and a pot-dealing, Navy-reject boyfriend.

It could easily have been one of Mr. Brown’s stories, except in the song, the six-pack she buys is cold.

I just picked up the first book in my promised Larry Brown binge from the local branch of my library. It’s Joe. I couldn’t help but read a few pages in the car, and what I read was fucking spectacular.

There’s a paucity of information on the web about Mr. Brown. The best I could do for a biography was this bit from this New York Times obituary.

William Larry Brown was born on July 9, 1951, in Oxford, a town with a literary tradition stretching from William Faulkner to John Grisham. But for much of his life Mr. Brown, the son of a restless sharecropper father and a mother who was a store owner and postmaster, seemed to be anything but the bookish type.

Before graduating from high school in 1969, he failed senior English and had to attend summer school, he told an interviewer in 2000. Soon after, he enlisted in the Marines, serving for two years in noncombat positions.

After his discharge Mr. Brown returned to Mississippi, where he worked a variety of odd jobs - over the years they included lumberjack, house painter, hay hauler and fence builder - before joining the Oxford Fire Department in 1973.

He remained a firefighter for 16 years, during which he began to teach himself how to write, reading obsessively the work of Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy and, of course, Faulkner. For years afterward he would be referred to as “the fireman-writer,” enough so that he tired of that designation and discouraged its use.

Though he took one writing course at the University of Mississippi, he honed his craft by writing scores of stories, many of which were rejected before he got one published in 1982 in, of all places, Easyriders, a bikers’ magazine.

Five years later another story, “Facing the Music,” published in the Mississippi Review, a literary journal, caught the attention of Shannon Ravenel, a founder of Algonquin Books. “I called him and asked if he had other stories,” Ms. Ravenel recalled. “He said he had a lot.”

Algonquin published nine of them in a 1988 collection, also titled “Facing the Music.” A novel came a year later: “Dirty Work,” about two Vietnam veterans from Mississippi - one white, the other black; one with his face blown off, the other missing all four limbs - who find themselves in adjacent hospital beds.

“Right from the beginning he was willing to look very straight into the depths of human pain without blinking,” Ms. Ravenel said. “If you didn’t blink and were willing to stand there and look with him, you could learn some remarkable things.”

Mr. Brown’s characters had dark, brutal lives, often overtaken by drinking and sex and ruinous relationships. But Mr. Brown, though as spare in conversation as in his writing, was neither brooding nor a wanderer. He is survived by his mother, Leona Brown, of Tula, Miss., near Oxford; his wife of 30 years, Mary Annie Coleman Brown; his children Billy Ray, Shane and LeAnne, all of the Oxford area; and two grandchildren.

Being from Oxford, Mr. Brown was frequently compared to Faulkner. But his prose was direct and simple - perhaps better compared to Carver or Hemingway - as in the opening of “Fay,” based on a character that first appears in “Joe.”

“She came down out of the hills that were growing black with night, and in the dusty road her feet found small broken stones that made her wince,” he wrote. “Alone for the first time in the world and full dark coming quickly. House lights winked through the trees as she walked and swung her purse from her hand. She could hear cars passing down the asphalt but she was still a long way from that. More than once she stopped and looked back up into the ridges that stood behind her, thinking things over, but each time she shook her head and went on.”

The rest.

He’s my favorite kind of writer: dedicated to playing it his own way, win or lose. As he said, “I think it is necessary to sit down and work for years and years to get it right. I think that’s the main thing, that’s what the emphasis has got to be on: individual work.” He means it, too. He decided to be a writer at the age 29, and spent the next ten years banging out five novels and a few hundred short stories before publishing a word.

More to come.

Blood and Grits wrapped up my Harry Crews obsession. At least for now. That don’t mean I won’t be reading more of his work — I never did make it to A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, for instance — but I’ve read damn near ten books by him in that last few months, and I’m getting a little burnt.

That said, Blood and Grits couldn’t have sent me off on a better note. Reviewers like to paint Mr. Crews’ fictional characters as the product of his whiskey-soaked, fever-ridden imagination. It ain’t the case. His characters walk. They inhabit our world. You just don’t see them in the sorts of places book reviewers are likely to frequent. Which is probably why Crews is so much fun to read.

The subjects include Charles Bronson, dog-fighting (Free Michael Vick!), fatherhood, taking LSD with rednecks, alligator poaching, saving a wounded hawk, and, of course, drinking beer. Particularly drinking beer while hiking. Something which made me damn near tearful in gratitude at seeing such a glorious topic on the printed page.

There’s a cult of horror-filled little shits in these parts who think they know something about walking in the woods. They wear space-age fabrics and pedometers. They leave, as a friend put it succinctly, pointing out the indents made by hiking poles, yuppie tracks. As with most things, they miss the point. I was raised as rural as it’s possible to get, and I’ve lived most of my life in the woods. There are few necessaries when taking a walk, and one of them is a backpack full of beer.

It’s a spiritual necessity. And in this world of assholes who treat the woods like a treadmill, who live their lives in a training regimen, it’s a fucking moral necessity.

Anyway, I’m in the middle of a Hitler: A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock, Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, Hayduke Lives by Ed Abbey and Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, for the umpteenth fucking time.

And as soon as I’m done with that set, or at least any one of them, I’m moving on to Larry Brown.

Snippets to follow.

Holocaust hucksters and racist shitheels who make their living by defrauding the poorest people in the nation.  Sounds just like Joseph Trimbach’s kind of people, don’t it?

Eight decades after the massacre, the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation was known mainly by its trading post.  The post was a descendant of one of the many franchises the Indian Bureau had granted white businessmen to keep Indians in food (usually rotten), clothing (usually thin), and hardware (usually frail).  General William Tecumseh Sherman had observed in the nineteenth century, “A reservation is a parces of land inhabited by Indians and surrounded by thieves,” but the trading post franchises brought the thieves onto the reservations.  The Wounded Knee Trading Post was a superior specimen.  Its owners, the Gildersleeve and Czywczynski families, had strewn billboards for seventy-five miles that announced, SEE THE WOUNDED KNEE MASSACRE SITE, VISIT THE MASS GRAVE.  POSTCARDS, CURIOUS, DON’T MISS IT!  The postcards showed slaughtered Indians, including Chief Big Foot, frozen in the 1890 snow.  The traders enlivened their commerce with beadwork, quilts and other cuious bought low from Oglalas and sold high.  A Catholic priest once watched Mrs. Czywczynski barter a beader to a stingy $3.50 for an exquisite work, then turn around and sell it for $12.00.

The traders doubled as creditors, lending their Indian patrons $10 at humble interest of $2.25 a week.  As village postmasters, they also offered a rudimentary auot-payment–opening the mail of customers who had run tabs, cashing their checks without asking, paying their bills at the post, and calling other shopkeepers across the reservation to see if debts were owed them too.  There had been calls to boycot the post, but none had worked.  The post was the only story for a dozen miles, and the many carless Oglalas of Wounded Knee had no choice but to buy groceries and other wares at its inflated prices.

Steve Hendricks — The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country.

For those of you excited to some interest about FBI thug Joseph H. Trimbach’s lies by Court Reporter’s excellent work, and who would like to continue reading, Peter Mattheisson’s In the Spirit of Crazy Horse is completely searchable on Amazon.

My favorite tidbits:

• Wherein Joseph Trimbach begs an army colonel to lead an assault on Wounded Knee. A request the colonel refuses, of course (72).
• Wherein said colonel, after speaking to Mr. Trimbach, recommends the murderous, trigger-happy motherfuckers in the FBI revoke their shoot-to-kill orders (72).
• Wherein Judge Nichol, from the Wounded Knee trials, flat-out calls Trimbach a liar (121).
• Wherein Trimbach tells yet another lie: that he had no idea AIM was even on Jumping Bull land (541).

And for those of you who have no fucking idea what the last couple of posts are about, see here:

And here:

As noted last month, the always gullible anti-Churchill bloc has been spending its collective free time slobbering over the pages of the vanity press offering American Indian Mafia, penned by Joseph H. Trimbach. Mr. Trimbach is a former FBI Special Agent in Charge responsible in part for the carnage visited upon the Pine Ridge Indian reservation during the 1970s.

Now, I haven’t read the book — it’s a quirk of mine, I tend to eschew the vanity press dribblings of drooling lunatics — but our own Court Reporter has been providing a little backstory on Mr. Trimbach, here. Turns out that Mr. Trimbach’s got a well-deserved reputation for lying like Bill Clinton on Viagra night.

Court Reporter’s posts as follows, in full. (The Laurie who he’s addressing is one of the aforementioned anti-Churchill bloc. A remarkably — though not atypically — ditch-water dumb example thereof.)

I came across this while doing a little bedtime reading last night, Laurie. Since you profess such concern with lies and the lying liars who tell them, I thought you’d be interested. It’s based on the trial transcript for U.S. v. Dennis Banks and Russell Means (374 F. Supp. 321, 331 (S.D., Feb 12-Sept. 16, 1974), and will be found in Rex Wyler, Blood of the Land (1982) at pages 114-115. I’ve added emphasis at certain points, for what will be obvious reasons.

“The first government lie was not discovered until a year after the trial, but was suspected throughout: because of apparent government knowledge of supposedly secret defense strategy, the defense began to suspect that one or more of the volunteer defense aides was an FBI informer. On March 24, 1974 lawyer Mark Lane asked witness JOSEPH TRIMBACH, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI for Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota, if…FBI…informers had infiltrated the defense camp, TRIMBACH said: ‘The answer is no.’ Judge Nichol ordered that prosecutor [Richard] Hurd check FBI informer files against a list of defense team personnel, and to report any material that might indicate government infiltration of the Banks/Means defense. On March 28, Hurd met with Attorney General William, Saxbe and FBI Director Clarence Kelley, and then submitted an affidavit to the court claiming that FBI files contained no material ‘which would arguably be considered as evidence of an invasion of the Legal Defense Camp.’ Both TRIMBACH and Hurd had lied to the court, although the truth was concealed behind FBI ‘top secret’ status, not to be revealed until [February 1975].”

What was the lie, you ask? That the FBI had not infiltrated the Banks/Means defense team, when in fact Trimbach’s office was paying Douglass Durham—Dennis’s Banks’s personal bodyguard and AIM’s nominal “Security Director”—$1,000 per month as a “key informant.” Durham attended every defense strategy meeting before and during the Banks/Means trial, and met regularly with Trimbach’s agents to report what he’d heard.

It’s marginally possible that Hurd was not deliberately providing false to Judge Nichol in his affidavit, but this would be true only if Trimbach had lied to him as well as the court about Durham.

Either way, Trimbach himself unquestionably lied under oath.

Okay, Laurie, that’s one very well-documented example of Trimbach’s dishonesty. There’s more, but I find it appropriate to follow your lead and dribble the examples out, one post at a time.

. . .

Round 2, Laurie, using the same citations and with the same emphasis as last time.

“Other lies…were discovered by the defense. On March 12, [1974] TRIMBACH assured Judge Nichol that there had been no illegal FBI wiretaps during the Wounded Knee occupation or investigation. On March 20 he testified on the stand that no such wiretap interceptions had taken place. But on March 29 the defense obtained from FBI agents Gerald Bertinot and Susan Rolley-Malone an affidavit signed by TRIMBACH which outlined conversations illegally monitored by Bertinot and Rolley-Malone. It was further discovered that prosecutor Hurd’s secretary had notarized a wiretap affidavit signed by TRIMBACH…”

There’s a legal term for this sort of lie, Laurie. It’s called perjury.

. . .

Round 3, Laurie, again relying on the same sources.

“Following TRIMBACK’s lies…the court learned that the FBI had worded a teletype to its agents warning them to tailor responses to court questions so as not to provide a basis for a motion to dismiss. Nichol considered this a green light to the agents to shade the truth. The court also discovered that the prosecution and the FBI had mislead the court by earlier denials that there were paid informers assigned to AIM prior to the Wounded Knee seige, and that there was a general FBI Wounded Knee File” (facts which TRIMBACH, for one, had denied under oath—although, once again, at least some of the paid informants reported to Trimbach’s Minneapolis Field Office).

Having fun yet, Laurie?

. . . .

Hi, Laurie, ready for Round 4?

Bearing in mind that there’s more than one way of lying, consider the fact that the FBI, as the Justice Department’s investigative arm, is responsible for locating and vetting the credibility of witnesses whose sworn testimony is then elicited by federal prosecutors before a jury. Remember as well that, in the Wounded Knee cases, the FBI’s responsibilities were carried out under the direct authority of Joseph Trimbach.

With those things in mind, it is quite revealing to discover that, “a sixteen-year-old youth, Alexander Richards, was given immunity from prosecution on Wounded Knee charges in exchange for testimony against Banks and Means. Under cross-examination, Richards admitted that he had lied on the stand, and documents surfaced showing that he had been in jail during the time of events which he claimed to have witnessed at Wounded Knee. It was later revealed that Richards had signed three affidavits for the FBI prior to his release from prison,” only one of which was introduced at trial, mainly because the other two directly contradicted it (and each other, for that matter).

This is called subornation of perjury, Laurie, and, like perjury itself, it’s a crime. It is, moreover, hardly the only time Trimbach and his agents resorted to such tactics during the Banks/Means trial.

“By late August, six months into the trial, the prosecution had yet to connect either Banks or Means to any of the alleged crimes. Hurd, however, produced a surprise witness, Louis Moves Camp, who testified that he’d witnessed virtually every crime with which the defendants had been charged… If Moves Camp’s testimony was true, the defendants could be found guilty of every charge contained in the eleven-point indictment presented by the government” (Weyler, Blood of the Land, p. 118).

Rather convenient, wouldn’t you say? Here’s the reason.

“The witness’s mother, Ellen Moves Camp…told the court that her son Louis had left Wounded Knee about March 12, 1973, not on May 1 as he had testified. She said he had traveled to California, had not returned, and could not have witnessed some of the events which he had described to the court. Further investigation revealed that a BIA employee had seen Moves Camp in California from March 17 through the end of June. Records from the Monterey Peninsula Cable Television Company revealed that Moves Camp had appeared on a television show there on April 23 and 26, days that he supposedly witnessed events at Wounded Knee. Other witnesses testified that he had been on the San Jose State College campus in April.” (Weyler, pages 119-119).

Ready for the best part?

“Investigation further revealed that legal aides for the proosecution had suggested that, prior to his court appearance, Moves Camp be given a polygraph (lie detector) test, but that FBI Special Agent TRIMBACH hard ordered that the test not be given.” (Weyler, p. 119).

Getting the picture yet, Laurie?

The longer I lived in that city the stronger became my hatred for the promiscuous swarm of foreign peoples which had begun to batten on that old nursery ground of German culture.

Adolf Hitler, from Hitler: A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock

People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.

Richard Russo, Empire Falls

Joel was recently kind enough to inquire on an old post if I’d read any of Harry Crews’ non-fiction since talking to him in the comments. The answer is hell yes. Thanks to the wonders of our local library system, I finished Florida Frenzy a couple of days back and am about half-way through Blood and Grits, which is criminally out of print. He’s right, Harry Crews may be be a fine novelist, but he’s a fucking monster essayist. More to come.

I posted a clip from the documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus awhile ago which wasn’t the clip I wanted. Following are the clips I wanted. They sum up kinda what makes Mr. Crews so fucking special.

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

Okay, the only reason I’m bother with this is to illustrate that one can spend one’s entire fucking life catching the Ballerinas in monumentally stupid lies. This one comes from serial liar, Noj, whom I just nailed last week.

See, the Ballerinas have been going apeshit about the release of Joseph Trimbach’s self-published screed American Indian Mafia (which was penned on Mr. Trimbach’s basement walls in his own feces, I hear). I’m a little amused at the fervor generated by a barely literate vanity press offering, but hell, I’ll get around to it somewhere between Sherman and Goebbel’s memoirs. Assuming, of course, that our local library system starts stocking vanity press leavings, which seems unlikely.

Anyway, Noj offered up the following in Ballerina #1’s comments, and it was too good to pass up.

And which of Churchill’s own books were not published with a vanity press? I can only think of one.

The rest.

Really? Because, though I can’t speak for every book Mr. Churchill has put out, I can’t think of a single one that’s published by a vanity press. Help me out, Noj.

And might I suggest that if you’re so singularly fucking ignorant of the history of twentieth-century American literature as to refer to City Lights as a vanity press, you might be better served restricting your book discussion to those texts which include boy wizards?

Just a thought?

And she not only collected science fiction novels, but she also read them.  She enjoyed them.  She said they made her think, which meant she was dumb in the gravest kind of way.

Harry Crews — Florida Frenzy 

Most of you will recall that I’m an avid T. Roosevelt hater. I’ve often stated that his weird brand of metaphysical racialism, combined with his extermination and expansionist rhetoric, would not be out of place in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. So, since Mr. Martin seems to be calling Ward Churchill a liar for pointing out that Adolf Hitler notes America’s racial expansionism as part of his own model, I thought I’d offer up the following.

Adolf Hitler’s abridged version in Mein Kampf:

In North America, where the population is prevalently Teutonic, and where those elements intermingled with the inferior race only to a very small degree, we have a quality of mankind and a civilization which are different from those of Central and South America. In these latter countries the immigrants–who mainly belonged to the Latin races–mated with the aborigines, sometimes to a very large extent indeed. In this case we have a clear and decisive example of the effect produced by the mixture of races. But in North America the Teutonic element, which has kept its racial stock pure and did not mix it with any other racial stock, has come to dominate the American Continent and will remain master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit of adulterating its blood.

T. Roosevelt’s expanded version which sets the tone for his entire Western expansion epic — of which I’ve read all four volumes, God help me — in The Winning of the West, Volume One:

After the great Teutonic wanderings were over, there came a long lull, until, with the discovery of America, a new period of even vaster race expansion began. During this lull the nations of Europe took on their present shapes. Indeed, the so-called Latin nations–the French and Spaniards, for instance–may be said to have been born after the first set of migrations ceased. Their national history, as such, does not really begin until about that time, whereas that of the Germanic peoples stretches back unbroken to the days when we first hear of their existence. It would be hard to say which one of half a dozen races that existed in Europe during the early centuries of the present era should be considered as especially the ancestor of the modern Frenchman or Spaniard. When the Romans conquered Gaul and Iberia they did not in any place drive out the ancient owners of the soil; they simply Romanized them, and left them as the base of the population. By the Frankish and Visigothic invasions another strain of blood was added, to be speedily absorbed; while the invaders took the language of the conquered people, and established themselves as the ruling class. Thus the modern nations who sprang from this mixture derive portions of their governmental system and general policy from one race, most of their blood from another, and their language, law, and culture from a third.

. . .

It is of vital importance to remember that the English and Spanish conquests in America differed from each other very much as did the original conquests which gave rise to the English and the Spanish nations. The English had exterminated or assimilated the Celts of Britain, and they substantially repeated the process with the Indians of America; although of course in America there was very little, instead of very much, assimilation. The Germanic strain is dominant in the blood of the average Englishman, exactly as the English strain is dominant in the blood of the average American. Twice a portion of the race has shifted its home, in each case undergoing a marked change, due both to outside influence and to internal development; but in the main retaining, especially in the last instance, the general race characteristics

What I find particularly interesting is Roosevelt’s entirely insane notion of blood purity. It is inseparable from Hitler’s.  I have a hard time believing Hitler had not read Roosevelt, and to a large degree, internalized the metaphysical racialism inherent to lebensraumpolitik.

And more food for thought: Hitler and Roosevelt shared points of inspiration, both being avid devourers of the Western romances which exemplified their shared racial vision. (Quotes from Hitler and His Secret Partners, lifted from Blue Corn Comics.)

Hitler drew another example of mass murder from American history. Since his youth he had been obsessed with the Wild West stories of Karl May. He viewed the fighting between cowboys and Indians in racial terms. In many of his speeches he referred with admiration to the victory of the white race in settling the American continent and driving out the inferior peoples, the Indians. With great fascination he listened to stories, which some of his associates who had been in America told him about the massacres of the Indians by the U.S. Calvary.

He was very interested in the way the Indian population had rapidly declined due to epidemics and starvation when the United States government forced them to live on the reservations. He thought the American government’s forced migrations of the Indians over great distances to barren reservation land was a deliberate policy of extermination. Just how much Hitler took from the American example of the destruction of the Indian nations is hard to say; however, frightening parallels can be drawn. For some time Hitler considered deporting the Jews to a large ‘reservation’ in the Lubin area where their numbers would be reduced through starvation and disease.

. . .

Always contemptuous of the Russians, Hitler said: “For them the word ‘liberty’ means the right to wash only on feast-days. If we arrive bringing soft soap, we’ll obtain no sympathy…There’s only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.” Having been a devoted reader of Karl May’s books on the American West as a youth, Hitler frequently referred to the Russians as “Redskins.” He saw a parallel between his effort to conquer and colonize land in Russia with the conquest of the American West by the white man and the subjugation of the Indians or “Redskins.” “I don’t see why,” he said, “a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.”

One Ms. Mindy Wilson of the University of Georgia was kind enough to leave the following in the comments:

The Georgia Review will be publishing an excerpt from Crews’ second, unpublished, autobiography in the Winter 2007 issue (due out in late December.) The issue also includes an essay about Crews by fiction writer Larry Baker, a selection of letters from Crews to various editors, and a handful of photographs.

I’ll be tracking down a copy through the Denver Public Library. I’ve also, thanks to the kind recommendation of another commenter, Joel, ordered A Childhood, Blood and Grits and Florida Frenzy through Denver’s interlibrary loan system.  I seem to have tapped out the main branch . . .

I’d meant to move on to Larry Brown and Jim Harrison by now, but I’m looking forward to reading the non-fiction stuff.  It was catching video clips of Mr. Crews doing his shtick that got me interested in him in the first place.  I’d heard the name for years, been recommended him, but always resisted for some reason I’ve never been put my finger on.  But then, watching him do his thing on Dennis Miller, I got blown away.  It was like watching the best of the barroom bullshitters I grew up with spin their tales.  Lively, grotesque and not without cruelty, but always funny, and with something primeval lurking just beneath the surface.

Before trying my hand at college, I worked for a while in manufacturing (among many other shitty jobs).  There was this guy on the line next to me who I always think about when I try to think about why I like the kind of literature I like.  He was a drifter and something of a scam artist.  Running up credit cards, passing bad checks, that sort of thing.  He’d been in prison a couple of times.  He wasn’t a very imposing figure.  Not a hard ass or anything, and not real interested in being one.  Nor did he seem that interested in people.  No romantic partner as far as I could tell, and no deep friendships, no family around that he seemed to give a shit for.  He drank some, had a thing for Scotch, but he did it alone.

What he was interested in were books.  The motherfucker read all the time, grinding his way through everything from the classics on up.  And he fucking hated all the Edith Wharton, Henry James type shit, and could rip the upper-crust NY Times bestsellers like Hitch taking on Bill Clinton.  The stories he was interested in had to have stakes.  Not semi-polite comedies of manners — who the fuck lives in that world anyway?  who the fuck wants to? — but stories about the rest of us, who either get pounded out of fucking existence by the day-to-day, or annihilated by our attempts to screw out from under the piledriver, who are one stupid mistake away from absolute ruin.

He’s my sole test market when I pick up a book.  He’s the only motherfucker worth writing for, in my opinion.  And I’m sure he’s already read Harry Crews, but if he ain’t, he’d sure as fuck like him.