The Try-Works

That’s a question.  Why is Harry Crews almost entirely ignored by academia?  Another question.  Why doesn’t anyone read his books?

Was he killed by McSweeney’s?

By Oprah?

At the recommendation of the Florida Arts Council, the secretary of state recently named filmmaker Victor Nunez and sculptor Augusta Savage to the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Nunez has made humane and luminous movies such as Gal Young ‘Un and Yulee’s Gold. Augusta Savage of Green Cove Springs spent the 1920s sculpting Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois, and the 1930s fighting for the inclusion of African-American artists in WPA projects.

Nunez and Savage richly deserve this accolade. But, for some reason, Harry Crews, the great University of Florida novelist, memoirist, teacher and hellraiser, author of The Gospel Singer and A Feast of Snakes and also nominated for the Hall of Fame, got turned down flat.

Full disclosure: I was among the people who wrote letters supporting Harry Crews’ nomination. It’s a no-brainer. He’s the heir of William Faulkner and the godfather of Cormac McCarthy. He’s Maileresque (if Mailer had been born on a tenant farm). He’s the poet of the low-down, the back roads, the broken heart of old Florida. His milieu is the green-shadowed swamps and tar-paper shacks tourists never see, and the hamlets promising not tropical paradise but deer processing, cheap beer and salvation at the Full Gospel Church.

So why was Crews not acceptable? It’s not as if the Hall of Fame pays out big money: the only material reward is your name on a wall in the Capitol. And it’s not overcrowded. The statute (265.2865, if you’d like to look it up) says the secretary of state can pick up to four people per year, as long as they have made “significant contributions to the arts in this state.” Singer Jimmy Buffet’s in; actor Burt Reynolds is in; and dancer Edward Villella. I like margaritas and cheeseburgers as much as the next person, but for 30 years Crews’ fiction has been telling us of the invisible, the poor, the outcast: people who try to survive in the face of deprivation.

I understand not wanting to get close, even in prose, to mules and madness and drunken rages and families so dysfunctional they make the Borgias look like the Waltons. I understand the state wanting to include in the Hall of Fame people who are amiable, school visit-friendly and generally sober. Dead people are good: there’s only so much they can do to embarrass us. Maybe Harry Crews is too scary; he’s not known for decorum and delicacy. Maybe a member of the Arts Council once had the bracing experience of encountering him in a Gainesville bar.

But being a nice guy should not be one of the state’s criteria for recognizing its literary treasures. Was Shakespeare a nice guy? Who knows? William Faulkner, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner, was not a nice guy. He’d get liquored up, say outrageous (occasionally racist) things and hit on teenaged girls. Does it matter? These are artists, not Scout troop leaders or candidates for pastor of the First Baptist Church.

The rest.

Christopher Hitchens, who still brings a smile to my face when writing about the thoroughly inconsequential, tells one of my favorite literary fables.  (And I’ll apologize to all of you who’ve ever had a drink with me before; you’ve heard it.)

In my squandered youth I was a friend of Ian Hamilton, the biographer of Robert Lowell and J. D. Salinger and a justly renowned figure in London’s Bohemia. His literary magazine The New Review was published from a barstool in a Soho pub called the Pillars of Hercules, and editorial meetings would commence promptly at opening time. One day, there came through the door a failed poet with an equally heroic reputation for dissipation. To Ian’s undisguised surprise, he declined the offer of a hand-steadying cocktail. “No,” he announced dramatically. “I just don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t like having blackouts and waking up on rubbish dumps. I don’t like having no money and no friends, smelling bad and throwing up randomly. I don’t like wetting myself and getting impotent.” His voice rising and cracking slightly, he concluded by avowing that he also didn’t like being repellently fat, getting the shakes and amnesia, losing his teeth and gums, and suffering from premature baldness. A brief and significant silence followed this display of unmanly emotion. Then Ian, fixing him with a stern look, responded evenly by saying, “Well, none of us likes it.”

The rest.

Jim Harrison, who’s on my list of writers to read a hell of a lot more of (perhaps following my current Harry Crews tear — or at least after Larry Brown, whom I had slated for the next gorge-fest) on Charles Bukowski.

Charles Bukowski was a monstrously homely man because of a severe case of acne vulgaris when he was young. Along the way he also had bleeding ulcers, tuberculosis and cataracts; he attempted suicide; and only while suffering from leukemia in the last year of his life did he manage to quit drinking. Bukowski was a major-league tosspot, occasionally brutish but far less so than the mean-minded Hemingway, who drank himself into suicide. Both men created public masks for themselves, not a rare thing in a writer’s paper sack of baubles, but the masks were held in place for so long that they could not be taken off except in the work.

Throughout his life, Bukowski held a series of low-paying jobs so dismal that they are unbearable to list, though he did keep a position as a mail carrier for many years. Early on he was a library hound, and there are a surprising number of literary references in his work. (Quite by accident while I was writing this, the French critic Alexandre Thiltges paid a visit. He confirmed my suspicion that Bukowski had closely read Céline.) Even more surprising in this large collection are the number of poems characterized by fragility and delicacy; I’ve been reading Bukowski occasionally for 50 years and had not noted this before, which means I was most likely listening too closely to his critics. Our perceptions of Bukowski, like our perceptions of Kerouac, are muddied by the fact that many of his most ardent fans are nitwits who love him to the exclusion of any of his contemporaries. I would suggest you can appreciate Bukowski with the same brain that loves Wallace Stegner and Gary Snyder.

The rest.

The long list for my favorite literary award has been announced.  Stay tuned for more excerpts as I run across them.

Ian McEwan may have been passed over for the Booker, but he may yet end the year with a gong in his hand. Although the climax of On Chesil Beach revolves around the fact that it is, in fact, an anti-climax, it is enough to garner him a nomination for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex award.

He is joined on the longlist of what the organisers call Britain’s “most dreaded literary prize” by Jeanette Winterson with a passage about robotic sex from The Stone Gods; Ali Smith for Girl Meets Boy, and Gary Shteyngart with an athletic description of his crass hero from Absurdistan bedding one of his many conquests (”Her vagina was all that, as they say in the urban media - a powerful ethnic muscle scented by bitter melon, the breezes of the local sea, and the sweaty needs of a tiny nation trying to breed itself into a future”).

The late Norman Mailer makes a posthumous appearance with a passage from The Castle in the Forest in which the male protagonist’s “Hound” is described as “soft as a coil of excrement”. More poetic bawdiness is on offer from Christopher Rush’s life of Shakespeare, told in the Bard’s “own words”, and his maritime-themed description of coitus with Anne Hathaway, in which “I clung like a mariner to her heaving haunches, the deep keel of her backbone dipping and lifting through July, through the green surge of growth … Our vessel ran shuddering onto the rocks, a wave of wetness ran through us, the air was rent with screams and I became aware that the bank on which we lay drenched and grounded was journey’s end, love’s end, the very sea-mark of our utmost sail.”

The rest.

But, you should read The Shock Doctrine. I finally turned the last page not too long ago, and it never let up. The best book about neoliberalism yet, and by the time I got to the chapter about Sri Lanka and tsunami reconstruction, I was banging my head on the floor, black blood running from my eyes.

If you ain’t sold, check out this interview with Naomi Klein (conducted by John Cusack, of all people), here.

Also, Alexander Cockburn has a rather typical critique of The Shock Doctrine, here. He seems primarily to be taking Ms. Klein to task for not including every instance of capitalist exploitation and unethical business practice known to man. I heard the same theme from Ed Champion, in a really disappointing interview, here. I like Mr. Champion’s interviews a lot, but this one was thoroughly petulant, with the questions running to the borderline inane. (Can you really tie a spike in suicide rates among financial workers to economic crashes? Huh? Really? Couldn’t there have been other factors? Mightn’t their wives have left them? Their dogs died? Were they bottle-fed? And what about IBM? They did bad things too, and that was before Milton Friedman gained prominence? Doesn’t that prove that businesses are, like, inherently evil?)

Anyway, the fact that the book’s being nit-picked to death seems a good indication of its power. After all, trolling for errata is the surest indicator of a lack of substantive response to an argument.

Sound familiar?

One thing I’m finding interesting is the furiously indignant response to Ms. Klein’s work by so many. Her specific analysis is stunning, but, overall, the book is not arguing any radical solutions, not even close. Her argument, as I understand it, is for a Keynesian mixed economy. She doesn’t argue against markets, she just considers those who believe in a purely utopian free market as insane as those who believe in a purely utopian Marxist society.

And for this she’s receiving the kind of venom usually reserved for folks like Noam Chomsky and old whatsisname. That one can be painted as a bomb-throwing anarchist for proposing the private and public sectors ought not be inseparable is only evidence of how violently far to the right we’ve swung in this country.

Anyway, next on my list for current events is Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater, which seems a natural corollary. But I’m also reading Jack London’s The Road, Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, Harry Crews’ The Mulching of America (still), and a book on cowboy gear called $10 Horse, $40 Saddle, so it may be a few days.

I’m realizing you can split Harry Crews books into two categories: the ones that include a beautiful, buxom young lady who also happens to be a Karate expert, and the ones that don’t.  My favorites are definitely falling in the latter category.  I thoroughly enjoyed Car, the tale of a man who tries to eat an entire automobile (you just have to love it enough to take the pounding and suppress the gag reflex), which has a beautiful hooker for a love interest, but she’s got no karate experience.  Likewise, The Hawk is Dying has a sharp-witted college student who smells vaguely of urine for a love interest, and it’s my favorite so far.  Conversely, I’m having a hell of a time getting through The Mulching of America, and it includes, of course, a beautiful female Karate expert.  As does Karate is a Thing of the Spirit, which is paling rapidly as the weeks go by.

I remember reading somewhere (Harold Bloom?) that sexual jealousy is the ideal topic for the novel, in that to be sexually jealous is to implicitly imagine oneself in a life that is not one’s own; that sexual jealousy is the desire to live more than life, as it were, and that the great human tragedy is that we’re all trapped only in the one life we live.

I probably butchered that, but it’s always stuck with me, and I think it’s the reason I’m having a harder time with Harry Crews’ novels which foreground gorgeous Karate-kicking love interests.  It’s pretty obvious that’s Mr. Crews’ bag: beautiful women who can kick the shit out of most men.  And, as such, it seems like the novels that feature said women don’t have enough at stake.  They’re missing that fundamental desperation necessary to the novels I like.  It doesn’t mean they’re bad.  They’re often quite readable, and very funny.  But the novels penned by Mr. Crews which I like best ain’t about people who get to bag their dream fuck.

For some reason, I just read Salman Rushdie’s Fury, and spotted the same problem.  Sexual tension, sexual jealousy needn’t be foremost in a novel for it to resonate with me, but absolute sexual gratification flattens characters.  As Willie Nelson put it, “ninety-nine percent of the world’s lovers are not with their first choice. That’s what makes the jukebox play.”

Jeffrey St. Clair has a really nice piece on Norman Mailer’s generosity (not something, I’m gathering, usually associated with Mr. Mailer) over at Counterpunch.  I’ve read very little by Mr. Mailer, but I was just given a copy of Miami and the Siege of Chicago which is on my short list.

Hey, we’re all prepping to Re-create 68 in our own way.

I met Mailer for the first time in 1978 in Indianapolis, where he was giving a reading before a thin and bland crowd. Somehow Mailer had offended his host, who had abandoned him after the event. I offered to take him to dinner (secretly hoping he would pay, which, of course, he did) and drive him to the airport for a late flight to Chicago. I was twenty then, and almost certainly not the type of company he may have been longing for that evening. If so, he didn’t let on. He was generous to young writers–generous to a fault, which is how he landed in so much trouble with Jack Henry Abbott.

Somehow we ended up in that architectural artifact of the Seventies, a fern bar. There was so much foliage creeping through the place that it could have been a scene from The Naked and the Dead. I was braced for Mailer to begin draining a vast amount of alcohol, fretted over whether I could keep up and still get him to the airport. Instead, he ordered a nice bottle of French wine, a vintage he said Jimmy Baldwin had recently recommended to him-a minor miracle that such a wine was available in an Indianapolis fern bar. We eased into a relaxed conversation about music, movies and Muhammad Ali, who I had just met a few days earlier in an elevator at the Hyatt-Regency.

At some point, I told Mailer that I was working feverishly on a novel. “Imagine An American Dream, set in a cow town like Indianapolis,” I said.

He laughed loudly.

“Novel?” he said. “Hell, don’t you know the novel is dead? Give it up, Jeffrey. Go write a screenplay or a book about The Clash. Just get out there and mix it up.”

This advice was coming from a man who hadn’t written a novel in ten years. Of course, in the next decade he would publish three big ones, The Executioner’s Song, Ancient Evenings and Harlot’s Ghost.

I met Mailer again six months later at Blues Alley, a jazz club in Washington, D.C., where I was bussing tables trying to pay my way through college. Mailer was there to hear the great saxophone player Dexter Gordon, who was then making a radiant American comeback after a decade of exile in Paris. Although Mailer wasn’t sitting at my table, he recognized me, called me over between sets and introduced me to the most beautiful woman in a room of beautiful women. I don’t remember her name, but she looked a lot like the woman who would soon become his wife, Norris Church.

“How’s that novel coming, Jeffrey?” Mailer inquired to my astonishment.

“But … ” I began, trying to explain that I had followed his advice and incinerated 500 pages of my juvenile novel about sex, death and black magic (none of which I knew much about at the time) in the crossroads of America.

“Oh, forget that all that crap. Just write, man. And do it every fucking day.”

The rest.

Y’know, ’cause he’s dead.

I’ve tried to watch it four or five times. Even fortifying myself with a glass or two of Jim Beam.  Each viewing ended with a blackout. And, upon returning to consciousness, me finding myself with a bleeding head wound, my right hand clutching a bloody ball-peen hammer.

There are many bizarre phenomena in this world that have yet to be adequately explained - the disappearances on board the Marie Celeste, the advanced astronomical knowledge of the Dogon tribe of Mali, people laughing at Little Britain - but few are as strange or inexplicable as the American cable channel Book TV. Mercifully restricted to weekend broadcasts, it is quite possibly the worst channel in the US - worse than the KKK phone-ins and home-made comedy shows on cable access, worse even than C-Span, the non-stop live feed of all the men and women in Congress striving so selflessly to improve the lot of the rich. It’s bad. Really bad.

Readers in the UK who have never seen it may think I exaggerate. Surely a TV station dedicated to books is a good thing, something of which America should be proud? The answer, alas, is no. Let us begin with the issue of production, which could not be more amateurish. Usually a programme on Book TV consists of a single camera pointed at an author talking and reading in a shop, which is then broadcast unedited, after which another single camera will be pointed at another author talking and reading in a shop, which will then be broadcast unedited, and so on and so on for about 48 hours. Book readings are of course dull and pointless affairs at the best of times, but there are a few authors who can chat entertainingly, perhaps even informatively, and tell amusing stories. Unfortunately none of them ever appear on Book TV.

Instead the channel lays emphasis on heavy tomes about history and politics, usually American, and if an author with knowledge of a foreign country appears then he will probably be interpreting it in relation to US foreign policy. The viewer is therefore treated to readings by smug academics flogging their most recent eruption of careerist logorrhea, books on the likes of Thomas Jefferson that will be read by no-one save their own unfortunate captive audience of undergraduates. Worse still are the sinister performances given by the shady denizens of Washington think tanks, peddling the fiction of their wisdom in yet another volume of solutions to the world’s problems. These dodgy characters would of course be better employed wiping floors in a McDonald’s. Fiction rarely appears; humour never. The programmers appear to have a weird, puritanical aversion to make-believe, a Gradgrindian faith in facts, and are out to prove that BOOKS ARE SERIOUS - something they do by being mercilessly dry, ruthlessly academic, and aggressively tedious.

When I discovered the channel I watched it quite regularly, though now I realise I was actually gaping in horror: like the first time I saw a bottled mutant baby at the Kunstkamera in St Petersburg, I was trying to persuade myself that the thing was real. It can’t always be as bad as this, I thought. Something good will turn up eventually. It didn’t; I stopped watching.

The rest.

(Thanks to Return of the Reluctant. To which I also owe thanks for the previous post. But I’m an idiot.)

I’ve hated The Atlantic Monthly ever since I was old enough to pick the magazine up. I hate everything about the rag. Cover to lousy cover of their horseshit middlebrow literature and neoliberal analysis, all delivered with the kind of classist here’s-shit-in-your-eye sneer that would look better on Hannibal Lecter.

In other words, I hate the Atlantic Monthly because they represent pretty much everything summed up in this takedown of their 150th anniversary bash.

And, good God, do they get fucking dumber than Arianna Huffington?

I just returned from The Atlantic Monthly’s 150th anniversary bash–surely one of the most dispiriting parties I’ve ever attended (and that includes the ones I’ve thrown). Picture this: as you enter the auditorium at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, the first thing you see is 150 or so people on the stage. They’re having a cocktail party. You, the audience, are not. Catering guys and gals in black circulate onstage with trays of food and drink. There’s loud, funky music on the sound system–Prince, Annie Lennox, David Bowie–and a Calder-like mobile hanging overhead, emblazoned with the magazine’s logo. But again, all the action is on the stage. Everybody else is there to watch.

For about two minutes, this scenario had a certain Pirandellian charm. That quickly evaporated. One celebrity guest, a woman in a black dress with phenomenal back muscles, was dancing at the lip of the stage, doing all sorts of Isadora Duncan moves. Even her fellow celebs seemed a little bemused at this exhibition, snapping pictures of her with their cell phones.

At this point it was clearly time to ratchet up the theater of cruelty. An Atlantic employee came up the aisle with a video camera, interviewing the pathetic audience members. “What do you think is going on here?” he asked me. “I think the celebrity guests are up there, and the groundlings are down here,” I told him. No argument from Errol Morris. “And how does that make you feel?” he said. I thought about it. “It makes me feel special,” I replied. “Well, you can still say you were at a party with the mayor and Robert De Niro,” he told me, moving on up the aisle. I jotted down a few notes with my complimentary Atlantic pen, which kept skipping, and wondered if maybe the magazine needed to hire a new party planner.

I scanned the stage for recognizable faces. The only one I could pick out was Ben Schwarz, the magazine’s book editor, plus several bald men with glasses, all of whom I assumed were Moby. The privileged guests kept their backs turned to the audience most of the time, which made it harder to identify them. Finally Justin Smith, publisher of The Atlantic, welcomed the common folk to “this incredible party.” Gee, thanks! Editor-in-chief James Bennet said a few words (”In this business, you’re only as good as your next story”) and turned the microphone over to Master of Ceremonies P.J. O’Rourke.

To his credit, O’Rourke couldn’t help but allude to the petting zoo arrangement. “Us having a party up here, while you watch it from down there, is stupid.” He then lost all credit for his defense of what he called “an appropriate kind of stupidity”–something to do with the magazine being very staid, very Old Media, which I assumed O’Rourke had just dreamed up while the waiter refilled his Chardonnay. The theme of the evening, he went on to explain, was the American Idea. He would pursue it with his fellow panelists, all of them standing awkwardly around a pair of little round tables.

First up: Arianna Huffington. She recited four haikus of 17 syllables each (I’m not making this up). Here’s the second one, in its entirety:

Our Founding Fathers
Said to pursue happiness.
We pursue the latest vice.

Call me nuts, but that sounds like 20 syllables to me. But who’s counting? Having done her bit, Huffington passed the microphone to Mark Bowden, who immediately answered the question on everybody’s mind: yes, there is a Black Hawk Down video game. Bowden is a tremendous journalist, but he wasn’t going to rise above this mess without some major effort. “The idea of an idea about America is antithetical,” he ventured. And “being properly ignorant” ensures that you ask the right questions. Next.

The rest.

I just heard Stan Goff’s head explode.  (Good riddance.)

In the 1980s, conservatives and feminists joined to fight a common nemesis: the spread of pornography. Unlike past campaigns to stamp out smut, this one was based not only on morality but also public safety. They argued that hard-core erotica was intolerable because it promoted sexual violence against women.

“Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice,” wrote feminist author Robin Morgan. In 1986, a federal commission concurred. Some kinds of pornography, it concluded, are bound to lead to “increased sexual violence.” Indianapolis passed a law allowing women to sue producers for sexual assaults caused by material depicting women in “positions of servility or submission or display.”

The campaign fizzled when the courts said the ordinance was an unconstitutional form of “thought control.” Though the Bush administration has put new emphasis on prosecuting obscenity, on the grounds that it fosters violence against women, pornography is more available now than ever.

That’s due in substantial part to the rise of the Internet, where the United States alone has a staggering 244 million Web pages featuring erotic fare. One Nielsen survey found that one out of every four users say they visited adult sites in the last month.

So in the last two decades, we have conducted a vast experiment on the social consequences of such material. If the supporters of censorship were right, we should be seeing an unparalleled epidemic of sexual assault. But all the evidence indicates they were wrong. As raunch has waxed, rape has waned.

This is part of a broad decrease in criminal mayhem. Since 1993, violent crime in America has dropped by 58 percent. But the progress in this one realm has been especially dramatic. Rape is down 72 percent and other sexual assaults have fallen by 68 percent. Even in the last two years, when the FBI reported upticks in violent crime, the number of rapes continued to fall.

Nor can the decline be dismissed as the result of underreporting. Many sexual assaults do go unreported, but there is no reason to think there is less reporting today than in the past. In fact, given everything that has been done to educate people about the problem and to prosecute offenders, victims are probably more willing to come forward than they used to be.

No one would say the current level of violence against women is acceptable. But the enormous progress in recent years is one of the most gratifying successes imaginable.

How can it be explained? Perhaps the most surprising and controversial account comes from Clemson University economist Todd Kendall, who suggests that adult fare on the Internet may essentially inoculate against sexual assaults.

The rest.

The porn debate is something I stay out of for the obvious reason; it quickly degenerates into the kind of idiot platitude fest evidenced by Ms. Morgan above.  But I’ll say this:  I won’t be told what I can read or look at.  Not by Fox News clones who’d burn Ward Churchill’s books on Main Street, and not by self-righteous lefties out to incinerate copies of Hustler.  The idea that there’s a direct causal relationship between violent crime and art is an absurd remnant from our anti-intellectual past.  I can’t help but be reminded of nineteenth-century cautionary tales about upper-crust young ladies who, gasp, read racy novels.

I don’t care about the intentions of censors.  I don’t care about the feelings of censors.  My library’s mine, and when I hear censors start their sniveling, I’m only reminded that the second amendment exists precisely to protect the first.

Update:  The kind of horseshit that the anti-porn movement breeds.

No Country for Old Men starts November 9th, in select theaters. This is one of my favorite Cormac McCarthy books. Running pretty much contrary to all opinion on Cormac McCarthy, I enjoyed the book as thoroughly as anything since Blood Meridian. I’ve been convinced, and have become more so since re-reading the Border Trilogy over the summer, that Mr. McCarthy’s later work has to be viewed through the filter of the Santa Fe Institute — where Cormac McCarthy serves as some kind of mascot — and their work in complexity theory. Now, granted, I barely know what complexity theory means, but I do understand the fictional necessity of lives gone wrong, and the fictional and real inability to trace the pivotal decision that sent said lives out of control. And, of course, that trying to trace them is as useless as trying to herd cats.

It’s a theme I think McCarthy stripped down to its bare essentials in The Road, with the protagonist’s attempt to follow a nonsensical straight path (the road, that is) to safety; a path that kills him and damn near kills the only thing he’s trying to save.

Anyway, I’d post YouTube trailers, but the best ones are on the movie’s official website. Just click on the Video tag at the bottom.

And, since Mr. McCarthy seems to have abandoned his world-disdaining ways altogether, following is a wholly weird conversation between him and the Coen brothers, appearing in the current issue of Time.

It’s puff, and it’s horseshit. And the last thing I needed was an image of Cormac McCarthy chatting up Richard Gere. Call me an elitist, but one rather pines for the days when Mr. McCarthy sold at most 5,000 copies of his latest effort, and entirely shunned the press. To paraphrase Matisse (I think), artists should have their tongues cut out.

If you were going to play the parlor game of arranging the most interesting, improbable, imaginary conversation among American entertainers, you could do worse than the one that took place in midtown Manhattan earlier this month. The participants were the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, known for smart, stylish and slightly silly movies like Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who won the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses and the Pulitzer Prize for The Road. If it were a reality show it would be called Eccentric Genius Island.

McCarthy and the Coen brothers have just collaborated on a movie version of McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, a thriller about a serial killer and a busted drug deal. It’s a searing, shocking movie that plays like a eulogy for the great American West. It also features the best scene ever filmed of a dog chasing a guy in a river.

McCarthy is famous for two things: his omnivorous curiosity and his extreme reclusiveness. In his 74 years, he’s given a total of three interviews. But here he chats freely with the Coen brothers, who have a tendency to finish each other’s sentences. Time’s Lev Grossman was invited to observe. The conversation took place in a fancy hotel room with stunning views of Central Park in early autumn. Nobody glanced out the window even once.

CORMAC MCCARTHY What would you guys like to do that’s just too outrageous, and you don’t think you’ll ever get to do it?

JOEL COEN Well, I don’t know about outrageous, but there was a movie we tried to make that was another adaptation. It was a novel that James Dickey wrote called To the White Sea, and it was about a tail gunner in a B-29 shot down over Tokyo.

C.M. That was the last thing he wrote.

J.C. Last thing he wrote. So this guy’s in Tokyo during the firebombing, but the story isn’t really about that. He walks from Honshu to Hokkaido, because he grew up in Alaska and he’s trying to get to a cold climate, where he figures he can survive, and he speaks no Japanese, so after the first five or 10 minutes of the movie, there’s no dialogue at all.

C.M. Yeah. That’d be tough.

J.C. It was interesting. We tried to make that, but no one was interested in financing this expensive movie about the firebombing of Tokyo in which there’s no dialogue.

ETHAN COEN And it’s a survival story, and the guy dies at the end.

C.M. Everybody dies. It’s like Hamlet.

E.C. Brad Pitt wanted to do it, and he has this sort of remorse or regret about it. But he’s too old now.

J.C. But you know, there’s something about it–there were echoes of it in No Country for Old Men that were quite interesting for us, because it was the idea of the physical work that somebody does that helps reveal who they are and is part of the fiber of the story. Because you only saw this person in this movie making things and doing things in order to survive and to make this journey, and the fact that you were thrown back on that, as opposed to any dialogue, was interesting to us.

C.M. David Mamet has a collection of essays called Writing in Cafés, or something like that. He says that the ideal venue for a playwright is to write radio plays, because then you have nothing, just–this is what somebody said. That’s it. You have nothing to fall back on. That’s quite interesting. Plays are hard, and I suspect that a lot of people who write plays don’t really know how it’s going to play. I mean, how do you know? Like some years ago, my wife and I went to see Ralph Fiennes do Hamlet. And I’d seen movies of Hamlet, I’d seen kind of amateurish productions, and I’d read the play. But we walked out of that theater, and we stood there, and we went, “Holy s—.” Now how did Will know that was going to happen? [Everybody laughs.] So my question is, At what point do you have some sense of whether a film is going to work or not, as you’re working on it?

J.C. I can almost set my watch by how I’m going to feel at different stages of the process. It’s always identical, whether the movie ends up working or not. I think when you watch the dailies, the film that you shoot every day, you’re very excited by it and very optimistic about how it’s going to work. And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.

C.M. See, I don’t see how you could feel that. I would think that when you see the damn frames go by for the 45th time, it just doesn’t mean anything anymore. Obviously that can’t be true, but …

E.C. Well, you’re problem-solving at that point. You’re working on it. It’s only painful when the movie’s done.

C.M. So tell me about this horrible dog. Was Josh [Brolin, who plays Moss] just terrified of this animal? You pushed a button, and it leapt for your jugular?

J.C. It was a scary dog. It wasn’t a movie dog.

C.M. It was basically trained to kill people.

J.C. It was basically trained to kill people.

E.C. The trainer had this little neon-orange toy that he would show to the dog, and the dog would start slavering and get unbelievably agitated and would do anything to get the toy. So the dog would be restrained, and Josh, before each take, would show the dog that he had the toy, he’d put it in his pants and jump into the river …

J.C. … without having any idea of how fast this dog could swim. So the dog was then coming after him …

E.C. … so Josh came out of the river sopping wet and pulled the thing out of his crotch and said–he was talking to himself–he said, “What do you do?” “Oh, I’m an actor.” [Everybody laughs.]

C.M. There are a lot of good American movies, you know. I’m not that big a fan of exotic foreign films. I think Five Easy Pieces is just a really good movie.

J.C. It’s fantastic.

C.M. Days of Heaven is an awfully good movie.

J.C. Yeah. Well, he is great, Terry Malick. Really interesting.

C.M. It’s so strange; I never knew what happened to him. I saw Richard Gere in New Orleans one time, and I said, “What ever happened to Terry Malick?” And he said, “Everybody asks me that.” He said, “I have no idea.” But later on I met Terry. And he just–he just decided that he didn’t want to live that life. Or so he told me. He just didn’t want to live the life. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the films. It’s just, if you could do it without living in Hollywood …

J.C. One of the great American moviemakers.

C.M. But Miller’s Crossing is in that category. I don’t want to embarrass you, but that’s just a very, very fine movie.

J.C. Eh, it’s just a damn rip-off.

C.M. No, I didn’t say it wasn’t a rip-off. I understand it’s a rip-off. I’m just saying it’s good. [Everybody laughs.]

E.C. Do you ever get, in terms of novel writing, stuff that’s too outrageous? One wouldn’t guess that you reject stuff as being too outrageous.

C.M. I don’t know, you’re somewhat constrained in writing a novel, I think. Like, I’m not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it’s hard enough to get people to believe what you’re telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible.

E.C. So it’s not an impulse that you even have.

C.M. No, not really. Because I think that’s misdirected. In films you can do outrageous stuff, because hey, you can’t argue with it; there it is. But I don’t know. There’s lots of stuff that you would like to do, you know. As your future gets shorter, you have to …

J.C. Prioritize?

C.M. Yeah. Somewhat. A friend of mine, who’s slightly older than me, told me, “I don’t even buy green bananas anymore.” [He laughs.] I’m not quite there yet, but I understood what he was saying.

Not one of my favorite documentaries.  But I watched the whole goddamned thing not too long ago for the glimpse of Harry Crews it provided.  So here you are.

Gotta jump left, gotta jump right, can’t stay where he is.

As usual, it’d be a hell of an interview if Bill Maher’d shut the fuck up.

Along with the other three books I’m currently reading — The Devil in the White City (dumbest fucking book I’ve read in a decade; was supposed to fill in the blanks on a Buffalo Bill obsession I’ve been nursing), The Shock Doctrine (you know what I think of that one) and The Mulching of America (it’s damn good, but it’s my fifth Harry Crews book in the last couple weeks, and I’m getting a little burnt) — I just started Hakim Bey’s T.A.Z. I’m a little skeptical of his notion of ontological anarchism, but it’s fun to read. The reason I picked it up is that I remember hearing that the Ben Ishmael tribe — which I first encountered in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers — is mentioned therein. I’ll probably post more on the Ben Ishmael tribe later, but for now, this caught my eye.

Art Sabotage

ART SABOTAGE STRIVES TO be perfectly exemplary but at the same time retain an element of opacity–not propaganda but aesthetic shock–apallingly direct yet also subtly angled– action-as-metaphor.

Art Sabotage is the dark side of Poetic Terrorism–creation- through-destruction–but it cannot serve any Party, nor any nihilism, nor even art itself. Just as the banishment of illusion enhances awareness, so the demolition of aesthetic blight sweetens the air of the world of discourse, of the Other. Art Sabotage serves only consciousness, attentiveness, awakeness.

A-S goes beyond paranoia, beyond deconstruction–the ultimate criticism–physical attack on offensive art– aesthetic jihad. The slightest taint of petty ego-icity or even of personal taste spoils its purity & vitiates its force. A-S can never seek power–only release it.

Individual artworks (even the worst) are largely irrelevant- -A-S seeks to damage institutions which use art to diminish consciousness & profit by delusion. This or that poet or painter cannot be condemned for lack of vision–but malign Ideas can be assaulted through the artifacts they generate. MUZAK is designed to hypnotize & control–its machinery can be smashed.

Public book burnings–why should rednecks & Customs officials monopolize this weapon? Novels about children possessed by demons; the New York Times bestseller list; feminist tracts against pornography; schoolbooks (especially Social Studies, Civics, Health); piles of New York Post , Village Voice & other supermarket papers; choice gleanings of Xtian publishers; a few Harlequin Romances–a festive atmosphere, wine-bottles & joints passed around on a clear autumn afternoon.

To throw money away at the Stock Exchange was pretty decent Poetic Terrorism–but to destroy the money would have been good Art Sabotage. To seize TV transmission & broadcast a few pirated minutes of incendiary Chaote art would constitute a feat of PT–but simply to blow up the transmission tower would be perfectly adequate Art Sabotage. If certain galleries & museums deserve an occasional brick through their windows–not destruction, but a jolt to complacency–then what about BANKS? Galleries turn beauty into a commodity but banks transmute Imagination into feces and debt. Wouldn’t the world gain a degree of beauty with each bank that could be made to tremble…or fall? But how? Art Sabotage should probably stay away from politics (it’s so boring)–but not from banks.

Don’t picket–vandalize. Don’t protest–deface. When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate. Smash the symbols of the Empire in the name of nothing but the heart’s longing for grace.

The rest.

For those few of you who ain’t figured it out from the last post, on the advice of a wise and learned friend, I’ve been real interested in Naomi Klein lately. And according to Amazon, my copy of The Shock Doctrine is in the mail right now.

In the meantime, a short movie about the book, directed by Alfonso Cuarón of Children of Men fame, can be downloaded here (medium quality) and here (high quality).

And if you can’t get enough, Ms. Klein’s handlers have been kind enough to post links to a whole feast of audio and video, here.

Ayn Rand’s gross novelistic failure, Atlas Shrugged, turned fifty today. In her honor, I’ll remind you of her infamous opinion on American Indian land rights, given at a speech to West Point cadets in 1974.

They didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using . . . . What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.

It’s a pretty good summation of Ayn Rand’s historical model: racist, dead stupid, and based on a brand of horseshit that’s been thoroughly debunked. I finished 1491 not too long ago. Not a great book, but what it does well is to lay out, in a broad and very shallow fashion, the many arguments that’ve been punching massive holes in most everything those in the scientific and historical communities have thought they’ve known about Indians for the last several centuries.

The idea of an unpopulated, or underpopulated continent, gone. Hunter/gatherers barely eking out a living, gone. Primitive peoples with no concept of agriculture, gone. The entire concept of “virgin” forest, or an unmodified continent containing naught by vast wilderness, gone. The Bering Strait land bridge theory, way, way, fucking gone.

Not that all of this hasn’t been covered at great length for the last thirty years, of course.

You can find it all in the works of, say, Vine Deloria and Ward Churchill.

So there’s two things that I keep being struck by as I’m reading this pile of Harry Crews books.  The first is his extreme humanism, a notion he relates to Goethe in a recent documentary, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus.  Goethe believed that each human carries all the potentiality of humanity within them.  And, not, obviously, just the potentiality of the charity worker and the Samaritan, but that of the Jeffrey Dahmer and the Henry Kissinger as well.  That’s Harry Crews’s ground.

People make too much of the so-called freaks that populate his books.  It’s a way of dismissing him.  And it’s pretty obvious in his interviews that he doesn’t consider his characters freaks.  They’re people he’s known, people he’s very serious about, people he carries a considerable amount of sympathy for.  When you get into a Harry Crews book, you’re gonna have your knee-jerk moralities pushed, no matter where on the political spectrum you stand.  You’ll have no choice but to question your own snap judgments of others.  And to question others you have no choice but to question yourself, if you’ve got a fraction of intellectual honesty.

I ain’t sure I’m buying that that’s the great end of literature: the forcing of the reader into a radical revisioning of their own moral order.  But I don’t have to.  Harry Crews buys it, and his books are a convincing argument.

The second thing is Harry Crews’s belief in physical, or athletic, truths.  He talks about it in the interview I linked to here.  He digs athletic truth because it’s measurable.  You say you can bench 500 pounds?  Well, come on over here and lets hit the weights.  There’s no fucking around.  As Crews admits, it’s a paltry truth, but a truth nonetheless.  And he believes it’s possible to extrapolate it to greater truths.

All right, sure.  I hear what he’s saying, but I ain’t sure what the hell it means.  How exactly does one get from one to the other?  I like the idea, and I like the tangibility of his model, but I don’t see the process.

But, and a big but, I’m very interested in why authors, particularly American authors, are so entranced with physicality.  Why did Hemingway used to brag he fought the British heavyweight champion to a standstill?  Why did Mailer spend so much time in the boxing gym?  What the fuck is Crews doing driving his hands through wood planks?

The following is a short excerpt from Karate is a Thing of the Spirit.  See what you think.

“A demonstration of truth,” said Belt.  “It is called tameshiwari.”

He knelt with his eyes closed for a moment.  Then he opened his eyes and stared at the stack of tiles in front of him.  John Kaimon nervously counted the tiles.  Twenty.  A kyai exploded from Belt, and simultaneously with the jarring cry, Belt struck the stack of tiles with his head.  Tile flew across the room.  Bits of it struck John Kaiman in the face.  The twenty tiles split cleanly through the center.

John Kaimon knew that what he had seen was true.  And impossible.

Belt, still kneeling, calmly watched him.  “And,” he said, pointing his finger, “and Milon, the greatest of Greek wrestlers, once carried a bull around the Olympia Stadium, killed it with a single blow, and ate it all himself.  All—bone, skin, and guts—by himself.  And five centuries—that’s five-before Christ, another Greek, Theogenes, a boxing champion, knocked out two thousand, one hundred and two opponents, and eighteen hundred of them died.”

Belt stopped and watched him.  John Kaimon felt he had to say something
.
“That’s a long time ago.  Before Christ is a long time.”

“A man alaive today,” Belt patiently explained, hamming his forefinger into the cement floor to mean this very day, “the Grand Karate Master Masutatsu Oyama, in October of 1954, fought a bare-handed duel with a bull at Tateyama in Chiba Prefecture.”  Belt leaned forward on his brutal fingers and put his face next to John Kaimon’s as though he meant to kiss him.  Belt’s eyes were lighted with pleasure.  “He shaved that bull’s horns like hair.”  Belt made a knife-hand and held it up, red as raw meat and swelling, pulsing like a heart.  “And killed it with a single shuto to the head.”

John Kaimon would not be intimidated.  Hadn’t he shaved his head, and suffered himself to be violated by two men and a girl?  He had come too far to back off now.  He leaned toward Belt.  Their noses actually touched.  Neither of them blinked.

“They say Faulkner wrote over twenty books!”  His voice was a savage whisper.  That’s twenty.  Have you ever actually looked in a book?  I mean really looked?  All them little words in there.  All them letters.  Did you ever think what that might take out of a man?  Have you ever thought about sitting down with a pencil and copying a book?  Just word for word, writing it down on another piece of paper?”

Belt blinked.  “No,” said Belt.  “Never.”  Then they both blinked and pulled their noses back.

“I have,” said John Kaimon.  “I bought a tablet once and sat down with a pencil.  I copied the first twenty pages of a book called The Sound and the Fury and saw that it was impossible.  It was there in front of me so it was true, a fact, but impossible.”

“Impossible?” Said Beld.

“Impossible,” said John Kaimon.

The title is my favorite quote from this Harry Crews audio interview.

Following some quotes from Harry Crews, some of which I’ve probably already posted somewhere, sometime. I’m getting interested in Mr. Crews. I’ve finished the first two of the books checked out last week, This Thing Don’t Lead to Heaven and Karate is a Thing of the Spirit, and have a couple of posts coming, for those four of you who care about the books portion of this blog. One about the literary fascination with physical competition, and the other about Harry Crews’s extreme humanism.

I’ve started Car, which is the great American gearhead novel. More coming on that, probably, but I also finally saw Quentin Tarantino’s gearhead flick, Death Proof, last weekend, which seems to run a similar motif. It’s been nagging at me all week, and I finally figured out why this evening: it was the adaptation of JG Ballard’s Crash which the purported adaptation wasn’t. Y’know, “the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology,” to crib from Amazon. I don’t think I’ve ever been quite as disappointed in a flick as I was in Crash, and it was because it captured none of the vigor, violence, and psychosis of JG Ballard’s work. Death Proof did. To a lesser degree, but it did. I’d have had Kurt Russell win out in the end, but, hell, that’s me.

Anyway, Harry Crews in his own words, culled from around the Internet. I’ll post a link to a full audio interview later.

So, the dumbasses out there that are watching television until they are rotting in their souls, watching Walter Cronkite and Happy Days, who cannot read my fiction, and say that it’s gratuitous, I say they have no eyes, no ears, no heart, no mouth, no sympathy, no charity for the human predicament. And they think that the human predicament and situation is living over in suburbia with a high wall around yourself and worrying about your annuities and your tax-sheltered income.

. . .

You have to go to considerable trouble to live differently from the way the world wants you to live. That’s what I’ve discovered about writing. The world doesn’t want you to do a damn thing. If you wait till you got time to write a novel or time to write a story or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read–if you wait for the time, you’ll never do it. Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.

. . .

I never wanted to be well-rounded, and I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.

. . .

For many and complicated reasons, circumstances had collaborated to make me ashamed that I was a tenant farmer’s son. As weak and warped as it is, and as difficult as it is even now to admit it, I was so humiliated by the fact that I was from the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp in the worst hookworm and rickets part of Georgia I could not bear to think of it, and worse to believe it. Everything I had written had been out of a fear and loathing for what I was and who I was. It was all out of an effort to pretend otherwise. I believe to this day, and will always believe, that in that moment I literally saved my life, because the next thought–and it was more than a thought, it was a dead-solid conviction–was that all I had going for me in the world or would ever have was that swamp, all those goddamn mules, all those screwworms that I’d dug out of pigs and all the other beautiful and dreadful and sorry circumstances that had made me the Grit I am and will always be. Once I realized that the way I saw the world and man’s condition in it would always be exactly and inevitably shaped by everything which up to that moment had only shamed me, once I realized that, I was home free.

. . .

I’ve never had any notion of shooting myself. You know how they put that [shapes hand like a gun and awkwardly points his finger against the roof of his mouth]–eat the gun. Put that son of a bitch in there and pull the trigger. Well, yeah, you put brains on the ceiling. But it also–the blow back–you got brains come out of your nose, out of your fucking ears. Out of your mouth. I mean, you’d think it would blow, but it’s like a blow back in a fire. And I just–nah. I don’t think so.

. . .

I’m old enough now . . . I thought, back 30 years ago when I started–well, I didn’t start 30 years ago, but that’s when The Gospel Singer came out, 30 years ago this year–and I thought I was gonna be better than I am. I mean, I’m all right, and I’m not whining, but I thought I was going to be better than I am. I was thinking about this–thinking about it a lot, more than I should–but two or three days ago, I thought to myself, ‘Well, y’know, I wouldn’t be surprised if the very best novelists don’t think that. At least sometimes.’ I always think of that thing Faulkner said–well, I think of a lot of things that Faulkner said–but he said, ‘We all start as poets, find that too difficult and go to short stories, find that too difficult and go to the easiest of all forms, the novel.’ It’s the easiest because it’ll tolerate more errors and false moves without the reader stopping and putting it down and making a sandwich and forgetting about it.

. . .

If you’ve heard one story about pissin’ in an ice box when you’re drunk, you’ve heard ‘em all.

. . .

How many marriages have you known that the man and the woman would come into parties, they were smiling to one another? They were holding hands, they were arriving in the same car. They, as they say, ‘maintained appearances.’ And then one day you hear from a friend, ‘Did you know that Pete and Sally’s gettin’ a divorce?’ And you think, ‘No man! Wait a minute. I didn’t know that. No, you gotta be wrong. Pete and Sally came to my house and they were all huggy-bear, kissy-mouth and that kind of bullshit thing.’ But no. Underneath, the worms were crawling. They’re eating eyeballs… All very sad. All very tragic. And all very ugly enough to make a man almost murderously angry. But that’s the nature of the world. I don’t know about you, but the only world I know is the one I see.

. . .

Alcohol whipped me. Alcohol and I had many, many marvelous times together. We laughed, we talked, we danced at the party together; then one day I woke up and the band had gone home and I was lying in the broken glass with a shirt full of puke and I said, ‘Hey, man, the ball game’s up’.

. . .

The reading public bothers me, though. They don’t want to read about the blood and bones and guts of an issue. They want to read about something they’re not going to have to think about, and if it does hurt them, as say Love Story does, it won’t last very long. What has happened in this country is a failure of the imagination.

. . .

I had possessions once. I mean, I had them up around my fucking neck. I thought and felt that I was not in control, that they owned me. After all, if you have a house and a car and nine jillion pieces of furniture, you’re not mobile. You’re not anything. You’re stuck. Some people will say it’s a great way to be stuck, and maybe it is for them, but the notion of having a bunch of shit that I have to stay around and take care of doesn’t wear well with me.

. . .

But in terms of the satisfaction you get from doing something or the way you feel about it, money ain’t shit. Money does not count. It just simply does not. If money meant anything, then you would never become a writer anyway.”

. . .

Contrary to popular belief, I’m not a violent person. But if you wrong me, I’ll kill your fucking ass, and I’ll spend the rest of my life in jail. I’ll kill your fucking ass and you can count on it; depend on it.

. . .

Faulkner’s rhetoric is the sea around us whose depth more than one of us has drowned. He is such an overwhelming talent that he has damaged a whole generation of writers, because they all come along and try to be Faulkner and to write about the stuff that to him was a blood-and-bone issue and to them only a kind of romantic nonsense. You see, you can’t fake any of this in art.

. . .

Being a fiction writer is a good way to go crazy, it’s a good way to be a nervous wreck, it’s a good way to become a drunk. You continually pick at yourself, the little sores that you have. They scab over and you pick them open again. Other people not only let them scab over, they let them scar over. They leave it alone. Writers don’t do that. They can’t keep their fingers out of the sore. They’ve got to keep it bleeding. And it’s off that blood that they make their stuff.