Another treat from the keyboard of Dale. In this essay we have music, writing, drugs, drink, rock and roll and even a bit of heartbreak.
Memory Motel by Dale Williams Barrigar
“I hit the bottle, I hit the sack and cried.”
If you’ve ever wondered what it might have been like to hang out with Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, teenage author of Frankenstein, her husband Percy, or any of the great Romantic writers or composers in person, there’s an interesting thought experiment you can try. Turn to YouTube, and immerse yourself in the songs, interviews, videos, documentaries, and commentaries of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and the Rolling Stones.
This humanist, Einsteinian experiment can be enhanced via a micro-dose of psilocybin; a glass of wine; or a Leary biscuit, now known as a marijuana edible. Or all of the above, depending on your addiction levels, tolerance or preference.
The Stones’ song, “Memory Motel,” from their 1976 album, “Black and Blue,” is an overlooked and underappreciated masterpiece. This story-song is well worth looking at and listening to again. And again and again. One of their very best works, it’s a shining, enduring example of the Anglo/English ballad tradition which was incorporated into the black American blues idiom and then re-worked again by white singers and groups like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, and later on to the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, Van Morrison, and Eric Clapton, leading to crucially important artists of today like Nick Cave; Lana Del Rey; Taylor Swift (“All Too Well (Sad Girl Autumn Version)”); Snoop Dog; Eminem; Bonnie “Prince” Billy; Conor Oberst (of Nebraska); and Wilco.
These cross-cultural exchanges, sometimes violently resisted by mainstream society, were moral acts which led to more than just rock and roll, bending the arc of the human universe toward greater justice by vastly increasing integration and racial equity throughout the world. Real music isn’t just music, from Bach, Beethoven and Mozart to now.
“Memory Motel” is a song which connects everyone by exploring the gnawing ache in the bones of lost love and the passing of time which all humans experience, no matter their race, creed, income levels or gender. In seven minutes and seven seconds, in a song recorded in Germany, the Stones tell the tale of a heartbreaking, breathtaking love affair starring a beautiful, hazel-eyed, long-haired, wild-haired woman who grabs the guitar from the hands of her man; drives a green and blue, broken-down pick-up truck; and sings genius songs in a bar in Boston. The narrator is an equally brilliant rock singer on the road. The setting a haunted motel on a remote seashore.
Shakespeare’s Juliet, Robert Burns’ Highland Mary, William Wordsworth’s Lucy, Keats’ Fanny Brawne, Mary Shelley, and Byron’s half-sister Augusta Leigh are all somehow drawn together in this intense mini-drama told in the idiom of the English blues.
Long-haired, unshaven, shirtless, piratical Richards, holding a Jack Daniel’s bottle and a cigarette, absconds on the guitar and only sings for most of this piece, which means he’s bringing everything he can to his vocals; while long-haired, unshaven, checkered sport coat-wearing, show-biz Jagger pounds the piano keys as if they were a typewriter and he were trying to write an entire Emily Bronte romance novel within one song (bottle of Jack Daniel’s next to his ankle and his red socks on).
Richards enters the song half way through as a third character in a shadowy performance worthy of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s rival, establishing an emotional threesome in the song’s situational dynamics that lends a profound layer to this public closet drama. His voice continually praises the intellectual and emotional uniqueness of this special woman, never expressing jealousy or anger, but sometimes grief at her loss. The mainstream cliches about Keith are completely undercut by his progressive feminist perspective and his depth of emotional expression in this autobiographical story performance, which is heart-breaking, realistic and long-enduring in human terms.
(Keith only sings co- or lead vocals on a double handful of Stones tunes. Almost every one of them is one of their best works.)
Richards co-wrote a fascinating, Hemingwayesque autobiography called “Life.” He was an obsessive reader of Byron at one point. The Byron who went around the higher levels of English society with gigantic dogs, a laudanum bottle, and sometimes a monkey (or a trained bear at college). Byron’s girlfriends and friends were collaborators, competitors, and rivals. One of his beautiful, regal, and intellectually intimidating ladies labeled him, the great lord, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
“Memory Motel” implies this kind of tragic history, as surely as Mick Jagger read aloud portions of Shelley’s elegy for Keats, “Adonais,” in honor of Brian Jones. (Jones is a member of the eternal 27 Club. Keats was 25 upon dying. Percy Shelley was 29. Wordsworth was 80. At this writing, Jagger and Richards are 81 and 80, recently on tour here in Chicago, home of Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and where the Stones recorded their second album sixty years ago in 1964.)
“I hit the bottle, I hit the sack and cried.”
As I grow older, every time I go back to my own Memory Motel, I hear more.
I had become a failed literature professor at the age of 52, because they took my job away. Also, another relationship had ended. I couldn’t bear to keep the photos of her and us, nor place them in the dumpster either. So I took one of the small, black-and-white, photo-booth photos of beautiful, genius, red-haired her from when we were on our trip to Nashville seeing a retrospective of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash at the Country Music Hall of Fame. And I placed the photo deep in the middle of a library book which I put in the middle of a bunch of other library books I returned.
A librarian named Veronica called the next day and returned the photo to me.
literally stories 
Dale
I had Kafka on my mind then I remembered that essay is scheduled for one month from today.
This is excellent in its own right. Wonderful blend of wise performers and writers who spoke (some still do) of the heartache and pain of life, as you so eloquently do of your own, with the insertion of the picture in the book. Not exactly the same as placing a note in a bottle and tossing it into the sea, but similar because it is at root a hopeful act like a prayer. Alas most prayers are returned, usually with postage due. But as Fitzgerald wrote, (from memory, hope it’s right) “We beat on, boats against the current, ceaselessly borne back into the past…”
Great work!
Leila
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Leila
Thanks for mentioning Fitzgerald, Gatsby, and Daisy in the context of this, which is so humbling that it makes me bow my heavy head in shame…
We all have our own Memory Motel we go to or that comes to us in the middle of the night, usually when we least expect it…
I read an article the other day that said, when your heart gets broken, you’re not losing another person…you’re meeting yourself.
Because one’s Self will never leave you, at least if you stay true to it!
Thanks for your beautiful words about this essay…
Dale
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Leila
I also wanted to mention that I perused your short story “Advice From the Otherside: How to Avoid Literary Success in Life and Be Considered a Genius in Death By the Late Judge Jasper P. Montague, Quillemender,” last night.
I felt somewhat akin to what I sometimes feel when reading Shakespeare, that is, like I’m not so much reading, as BEING READ.
“At the center of your Personality Blackhole must be an incomprehensibly dense ego supported only by its own delusions,” is just one line that had me rolling in the aisles, LOL no end…
Thank you!
D.
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Thank you Dale
I love the Judge! I saw Vincent Price do a one man show as Oscar Wilde on TV a long time ago. That was when the Judge was born. Thank you so much again. Now I hope I can find that production on YouTube.
Leila
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Leila
THANKS for revealing the origins of the Judge, Vincent Price as Oscar sounds WILD, I had never heard of that before!
There’s a great 1960 film that has Wilde played by Peter Finch…THE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE…surely one of the greatest FILM representations of a literary artist ever created (I saw it on You Tube)…(based on an unproduced play)…
Dale
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Thank you Dale
I liked Peter Finch, will check it out. Oscar was one of a kind.
Leila
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“There is a slight chance that the gibberish you produce might be of value. Almost certainly not…”
Where did the Judge ever get such wisdom?
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I just happened to be by checking to approve comments and saw this!
I didn’t have to think much with Judge Jasper. I like the old way of playing rough but only with your wit, against equal matches who can not only dish, but can absorb punishment. For some reason I can be a wiseass on demand. Another trait that runs in the family.
This was before joining as an editor, but I had been around a couple of years. In that time Hugh and Diane made me feel both comfortable and as though I had something to say. I had been published before elsewhere but all that stuff was pretty impersonal. I relax around “here” and am “myself” which, of course, is impossible to try to be. Like Bukowski says “Don’t try.”
Off topic but he had the coolest speaking voice “Booorrn into this, Deeeegraded by this.” Burroughs is a close second. His narration of Junky Christmas is priceless.
Thank you again!
Leila
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Leila
Yes…the two B’s, plus Jack Kerouac reading the end of “On the Road” on the Steve Allen show…cannot be beaten at their own game. Thanks again!
D.
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An interesting and informative blend of classics, old and new, with some personal experiences. Thanks for sharing this with us, Dale.
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Dear David
THANKS for reading this piece and commenting upon it! Your consistent and long-standing engagement with this fantastic site is truly admirable and something I aspire to!
Sincerely,
Dale
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Hey Dale
After reading your essay and doing ‘The Memory Hotel’ 7 minutes and 8 seconds several times, I did the walk around the empty house, empty except for me for five years next month, looking at the photos of her and of us (she had red hair, too), looking at the books in the bookcases and on the floor. And when I was finished, I did it again. Why was that?
I didn’t find me on either trip. Maybe I didn’t want to.
Gerry
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Gerry
I know exactly what you mean, about the red hair and all of it! Thanks for having the courage and heart to admit it…and thanks for reading and commenting…
Dale
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Another finely tuned Sunday Whatever. Memory Motel was entirely unknown to me; this write-up would make the song appealing to even a die-hard non-fan. And yes, Keith R. altogether more interesting than his public persona might suggest. (Many a zoom-lens has caught him reading a “highbrow” vol – rather than, say, falling out of a tree) A sobering read too, the personal note poignant.
Looking forward to the Kafka.
Geraint
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Geraint/Honestly
Thanks for reading! And more great comments…
The Kafka piece focuses on some of his lesser-known works (I try to say something new about him) and it also has a few words to say about the roles of real readers and writers in the “now” era…Thank you! Deeply appreciated…
Dale
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Underappreciated Stones – Tell Me, Live With Me (rocks your socks off and fine lyrics), Hand Of Fate.
Rock history – Celtic traditions in the USA (Mystery Train might be an example), African influences, Southern White urban music. Some great cultural appropriate – Ray Charles country, Fats Domino pop, Elvis r&b covers.
While I write – Time keeps on shifting into the future. Steve Miller Flies Like An Eagle.
Possibly not common knowledge: While doing research on a modern Prometheus Unchained (The “Hanley” series) I learned that the electrical rebirth of the monster was inspired by contemporary experiments showing dead frogs twitching when electricity was applied.
Now it’s “Like A Hurricane” by not so Young Neil.
Keep on something in the sometime
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Doug
Attempting to resurrect an expired frog via electrical currents applied to its mid-section has got to be one of the most outlandishly noble scientific experiments ever attempted by woman or man!…
Mary S. was also amazing because they say that she, as a teenager, could hold her own in a conversation with none other than Percy B.S. and Lord B., two of the most endlessly volcanic (and full of it) talkers who ever stalked the English or Italian soils…they never stopped talking until they did, at which point they were known to not utter another word for months at a time…which wasn’t too popular with the significant others…
Neil is not a spring chicken but at least he’s still kickin’! (“Don’t feel like Satan, but I am to them / So I try to forget it any way I can…”)
Thanks for reading and commenting…Deeply appreciated!
Dale
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Dale
With you all the way on the quality of Keith Richards’ material – the guy’s a genius hidden in plain sight.
I was very taken with your celebration of ‘Memory Motel’, mingled with personal memoir. It put me in mind of Richard Holmes’ brilliant essays in ‘Footsteps’, particularly his search for the home in Italy of Percy & Mary Shelley.
Great stuff. Thank you.
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Hi Mick!
Thanks very much for your kind and sympathetic words on this…I hadn’t heard of the Richard Holmes work, but will definitely check it out…I saw the Stones back in the early 2000s and while Keith doesn’t do anywhere near as much as Jagger on the surface, his presence is equally, or more so, impressive…
Dale
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I read the Keef, Keef, where’s the beef autobiography. Suburban dad in Connecticut? Who’s have thunk it? Offered a mix view of Mick. I’m a few months older than they are, but my much softer life has caused fewer facial ruts and valleys.
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Doug
Yes, I haven’t looked at that book in a while, but I devoured it when it came out…I was pretty impressed with quite a few aspects of it, not least the prose style, which I don’t think was only his co-writer’s doing by any means, and on the contrary…I read an interview where Keefie said he’d been working on that book for decades, from ideas and note-taking stages to later drafting, dictating, etc etc…
Dale
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Oh goodness, this rang a bell, struck a chord, hit a high note … I’m working my belated way through Andrew Hickey’s podcast History of Rock in 500 Songs, so those opening lines resonated powerfully. As did that ending – stunning!
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Hi Steven
THANKS for reading this and reaching out with a great description of your reader-reaction, happy you liked it, that podcast sounds excellent, I’ll check it out!…thank you!
Sincerely,
Dale
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Dale
You did a lot with 1000 words! I liked the description of the “Piratical Kieth Richards” that is very apt. The intermingling of Lord Byron almost makes me think Kieth could be his incarnation.
“Memory Motel” is on the list. This essay is powerful, man. It made me want to hang out in the cobwebs with the “cool people” back then in Byron’s castle. Having their little ghost story contest. Shelly had a nightmare and Frankenstein was born.
Then the absolute cool people are up on stage. Kieth singing which is strange, “Absconding from his guitar.” And the “TV Jagger in a checkered sport coat.” That’s a great description!
Rock n’ rolls’ contribution in the fight against inequality is a true observation, stepping outside the redneck paradigm. All of those black blues guitarists that influenced the British invasion. When Huey Lewis sang “Heart of Rock N’ Roll” maybe that’s what he meant…Not sure–probably not.
Then a story within a story unfolds about lost love. A rock star and a literature professor in the throes of loss. (Even so, I think it’s pretty cool reading and discussing writing with a literature professor). Ending with a photograph slipped inside a library book. Excellent!
Christopher
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Christopher
Thanks for reading this with such writerly brilliance and responding with the language of enthusiasm! Your line about the cobwebs and the castle, and the nightmare, paints the scene vividly through a few simple details, the true short-story writer’s art. I’m unofficially dedicating this essay to the ghost of Denis Johnson and his stories in Jesus’ Son, thanks to the way you reminded me how great that book is! Here’s to trying to do a lot in 1,000 words or less, many times! For me, the best rockers are the most literary, to name a few besides the Stones: Loud Reed, Pete Townshend, Patti Smith, Bowie, Jim Morrison, Lana Del Rey, Conor Oberst, Dylan, Lennon, or Eminem who, while a rapper and not a rocker, incorporates rock into many of his best songs, and also sometimes hits the heights of literature with his best lyrics! Speaking of black blues artists, I have pieces on Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker coming out in LS over the winter! Thanks again for reading and commenting, your kind of understanding and enthusiasm makes it all worth it…Someone once said if you can’t say a lot in 1,000 words, you can’t say a lot in 10,000, or 100,000, words either! I think it was me!
Dale
PS,
I have another essay on the Stones in the works wherein I discuss two of their songs, “Sister Morphine” and “Wild Horses”…
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Hi Christopher!
Hope you’re doin’ good…I remembered a cool quote by Denis Johnson, where he said somewhere that he wanted his prose style to be like Jimi Hendrix playing guitar…Also, don’t know if you’ve seen it yet, but he has an essay collection called “Seek” that’s pretty cool…some of the essays aren’t the best but overall it’s got some great prose in it, and some interesting autobiographical writings as well…it’s one of those books that’s best to skip around in and not worry about perusing it cover to cover…
I was listening to the song “Sister Morphine” by the Rolling Stones again, and realizing/thinking what a GREAT soundtrack song it is to Johnson’s “Jesus’ Son”…(ALCOHOL can be substituted for morphine for those who have that preference instead)…”Sister Morphine,” I realized, is probably one of the very, very greatest rock songs of ALL TIME…in its realism and complexity. Completely and totally like a short story in song, too…This song is as good as a Denis Johnson story, and we both know that’s saying a lot! A person can ROCK OUT to it while internalizing its WARNING at the same time! Brilliant! Rock and roll doesn’t get any better than this, or any more literary…not even Dylan…
Here’s a little poem I wrote for the downhearted for whatever reason, called “For Paranoid Job Seekers”:
“Hey don’t sweat it so much, something will / appear when you least expect it to / so stay real drunk on water like Rodin’s Balzac / statue, if that’s what it / takes from you. / Walk on land, contemplate water, and / if you end up on the beach scavenging / for sardine tins, you will have joined / the First Christians, / they who were played / for dead, / just like / you and me.”
How’s the writing and reading going!?
Dale
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Dale
Thanks. Doing well. Hope you are too. I was trying to read “Seek” last week, but couldn’t get it to download on my library app. That was a bummer, because it sounded interesting. Like a travelogue of essays. I got absorbed awhile back by “Train Dreams.” I tried, “Tree of Smoke,” but even though I liked listening to Will Patton. I kept waiting for the fighting, and got disinterested.
“Sister Morphine,” sounds great! Like Neil Young’s, “Needle and the Damage Done.” I’m a big fan of the Stones. Hey. “I know some Puerto Rican girls just dyin’ to meet cha.” Lol. I Do Do Do Do Heartbreaker” Might be my fave not sure. ”
Police in New York city chased a boy through the park…”
“if you end up on the beach scavenging / for sardine tins, you will have joined / the First Christians.” Very cool! Some irony there I think. I’ve been going through, sort of re-writing old stories expanding — then kicking them to the curb. But some stories seem to say there’s something good here, find it, dam you. I’m listening to an audio of “Revival” by SK and read a good one by Ambrose Bierce, “Four Days in Dixie.” His civil wars stories are great! He was a soldier in an Indiana Regiment, then in his older years riding with Pancho Villa. I think Kurt Vonnegut said “The Incident on Owl Bridge,” was the greatest short story ever written. IDK that’s hard to call. How about you on your writing and reading?
Christopher
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Hi Christopher
I know what you mean about a piece of writing telling its author to FIND what’s good in it…I just finished a “fictional essay” (Leila’s term) about my misspent youth in Quincy, Illinois…and it’s also about the Mississippi River, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, with some T.S. Eliot thrown in for good measure…I saw the Stones LIVE one time many years ago…I had great tickets and at one point I was about fifteen feet away from Keith Richards…I could read the expressions on the band members’ faces, I was that close…of course, Jagger is one of the most explosive humans on the planet and he was at least 60 by the time I saw him…
I’ve been reading Samuel Johnson’s biography of John Milton (PARADISE LOST author) which is universally considered one of the greatest literary biographies of all time…Milton was a trip because he was a pamphleteer as well as poet, and at one point he wrote in support of the king’s being beheaded…later they tossed him in prison and threatened to burn him at the stake and they say it was only the strength of his personality that stopped them from doing so…he spent the rest of his life in internal exile, nearly penniless, and BLIND…and wrote Paradise Lost, which he finished in his late 50s and said he’d been working on since he was six years old…he would lay in his bed at night and compose the poem, then in the morning he’d have one of his daughters or anyone he could find around him write it down and read it back to him, etc….Probably the single greatest, longest poem in the English language…all the British Romantics like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, the Shelleys, etc, thought Milton was a better writer than Shakespeare….and he was also the first pamphleteer to write widely in favor of divorce, the free press, and the freedom from state religion, as well as public education…a wild dude!
Denis Johnson’s novels usually don’t hold my attention either, I know what you mean…I think it’s a case of he was being paid for it (not much, but something) and so he would pad out the novels to WAY longer than they should have been, which made for quite a few very FORGETTABLE (and even unreadable) novels…but his best work (short stories and novellas) stands firm…and NOW (that he’s passed on), that’s the only thing that matters about his work…
I re-watched THE TRIAL last night, directed by Orson Welles…his adaptation of the Kafka novel…one of the greatest movies ever made, better than CITIZEN KANE by far…and it was a huge box office flop that was roundly ATTACKED by critics at the time…It’s an autobiographical piece about Welles himself as much as a Kafka adaptation…also a horror film, an endless dream sequence, a hilarious vision of Kafka himself as person, with three of the most beautiful actresses I’ve ever seen….At one point Kafka (Anthony Perkins) is standing in front of a mirror but the reflection in the mirror is a Van Gogh painting that’s behind him on the wall…only Orson Welles could have created such genius images…which would have been totally missed by the vast majority of critics…the film was made in the early ’60s and it has a giant computer in it that can read peoples’ minds…anyone who likes Kafka should see this film one of these days!….
What are you writing about lately?
Dale
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Hi Dale,
Wow you’ve really packed in a lot of interesting content here! The misspent youth essay sounds like that would draw people in, like, “The Outsiders.” I’m going to put that on the list–showing my literary ignorance I’ve yet to read it, just saw the movie. I’ve only seen the Mississippi on trips driving out west on Hwy 70 & 80. Magnificent backdrop for a story and those other historical figures plus TS Elliot. He was from St’ Louis I believe, so I see how that works.
I would love to see the Stones! The last time I talked to you on here about, “Sister Morphine” that got me on the Stones on You Tube. What you said about Denis Johnson wanting to write how Hendrix played was electric, excuse the pun, if there is one.
John Milton is a person people should learn about. It sounds like he had an advanced sociological viewpoint. He would have been a good choice for the professor in “The Stand.” I usually watch you tube videos about people. I listened to Denis Johnson, and Raymond Carver, which was pretty cool. I think both of those guys had struggles with money. Gordon Lish hacked up “Cathedral.” There is another fuller version called, “The Beginners.”
I would definitely like to see “The Trial!” Orson Welles was one of the greats. Anthony Perkins would play Kafka well I’m sure. He was phenomenal in “Psycho.” Jeremy Irons plays a sort of version of Kafka in “The Castle.” That was pretty good, too.
I’m still pitching around in my old stories. Had a lot of starts and stops too, those go into a file called “Doodling.” Last count it’s over 14000 words of a mishmash I started a few years ago. Never know when something might be plugged into a story. My other computer has a similar bloated file.
I might have something…I started today. One of those town stories that wants to be like “The Lottery” but will probably end up at a bar or a funeral. My mind wanders to the occult but these days I end up writing or trying to write “dirty realism” that term that Carver didn’t like. Probably too much of “Jesus’ Son” in my mind. The magnitude of that book is unbelievable on the writer’s psyche. The images, and his poetic powerful language.
Christopher
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Hi Christopher!!
It’s totally WILD that you mentioned Gordon Lish in your last message, as I was already planning on mentioning the time I met him in Bloomington, Indiana…this was back in the late ’80s, possibly very early ’90s…I was in my early 20s (born in 1967) and had submitted a story to a journal Lish was editing. He invited me to attend a writing workshop he was conducting in Bloomington, Indiana…so I went. The conference/workshop took place in a writer’s house, and consisted of nothing other than LISH himself TALKING endlessly for six or seven hours per day, for a week straight…and the man at that time could talk almost like no one I’d ever heard, or since, although I do know a few people who can outdo him…he literally almost never became silent, or boring!, even though he would TALK nonstop for HOUR after hour, after hour, his energy was that incredible…the one subject he refused to speak about at all was Raymond Carver. He started the “conference” by stating “There’s one name I will never talk about nor allow to be mentioned by anyone in this workshop…” Everyone knew who he meant. I’m pretty sure Carver was recently deceased at that time. Lish butchered many of his stories, but I think he also helped Carver’s writing become what it was, so it’s a mixed bag…anyway, Lish has/had PASSION for literary writing to a level that few I’ve ever seen can match. His arrogance, ego, nuttiness, and deluded nature were probably also close to unmatched…I spent my evenings during that week alone in the local Motel 6, smoking endless packs of cigarettes (three to four packs a day at that time) and drinking endless cans of beer (sometimes 18 in one sitting) while trying, and failing, to write…but it’s so WILD that you mentioned him when I was already thinking of telling you about this Indiana experience I had with him!!!! (I quit cigarettes and alcohol a long time ago…)
At the beginning of Book 9 of Paradise Lost, John Milton claims that he isn’t writing the poem himself and that his “celestial patroness” is visiting him every night and depositing the words in his brain…he says he believes this is true because he thinks he’s too weak, ill, and unhealthy (and blind, and poor) to write so well otherwise…but then he says, “unless all be mine, not hers, who brings it nightly to my ear.” SO he both posits, and completely undercuts, the notion of a “celestial patroness” in the exact same place…that kind of complexity and paradoxical nature, and fast thinking, not to mention the irony, the classical references, the biblical references, and the skeptical intelligence two or three centuries ahead of its time, are just a very FEW of the reasons why Paradise Lost is such a great, great, and lasting, enduring, “immortal,” and eternal poem…
Again, can’t get over the LISH thing…it’s totally wild that you mentioned him when I was planning on mentioning him!
Dale
PS, I used to spend time in the Indiana Dunes area where Chicago writer Nelson Algren, author of The Neon Wilderness, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Walk on the Wild Side, had his cabin…I visited Algren’s cabin there in Indiana a few times…don’t know if it’s still there…it was/is a tiny little thing in the middle of nowhere, Algren brought his girlfriend Simone de Beauvoir straight from Paris to his Indiana cabin one time….
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Dale
Wow that’s quite a coincidence about Gordon Lish! I tend to agree with you. Lish certainly advocated the minimalist style, which Carver did so well. His professor from Chico State, John Gardner had a big influence, too. I was blown away by “Cathedral.” It’s that ego thing you were talking about too…. Was there a Carver before Lish or after? Posthumously it still seems to lurk in the annals of conjecture. “Furious Seasons” was the first thing I ever read from Carver. After I heard Stephen King mention him.
That is an amazing thing you getting invited to a workshop hosted by Gordon Lish! You should, if you haven’t already, write an essay about the event and submit it to LS. Including all of your Motel 6 drinking and smoking… Not that I could ever criticize anyone for that since I lived in a state of drunkenness for a long while, lol. Lish sounds like a wholly interesting person. That must have been a roller coaster ride trying to write something for a literary legend!
John Milton must have thought he was taking divine dictation, and perhaps he was. “Paradise Lost” is such a famous work I have probably missed on Jeopardy, but not now.
I’ve been to Bloomington a few times, and once lived five miles away from Gene Stratton Porter’s house on Sylvan Lake in Rome City Indiana. There’s a neat place that’s on the eastern side of the state called Limberlost Swamp the setting for her novel “The Girl From Limberlost.” Good place to see wild life.
That’s pretty cool about Nelson Algren living on the Indiana Dunes.That’s a crazy deal about his girlfriend coming from Paris to the dunes, I’ll bet she was shell shocked by all that lonely sand. Iv’e been to the Warren Dunes in Michigan.
Christopher
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Hi Christopher!
AH YES, THE BOTTLE, thanks for mentioning it again! It’s been an integral part of the writing life since Socrates and Plato sat around chugging wine together and Li Po in China wrote nearly every single one of his worldwide immortal poems about none other than WINE and his own sacred drunkenness, except for a few of them…There are quite a few writers who don’t drink (especially these days) but sometimes it seems like there are quite a few more who do (or did)!…Drinking is such a big writing/writers topic that numerous entire volumes have been penned on nothing but this, of course, and it penetrates in to the realms of psychology as well as literature.
A short list for/of heavy-drinking writers (current and former) that I know of (after studying this for decades) includes: Shirley Jackson, Dorothy Parker, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Elizabeth Bishop, Jane Bowles, Sam Shepard, Tennesse Williams, Eugene O’Neill, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, John Gardner, Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, Fitzgerald and Zelda, Ernie, Bill Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Jack Kerouac, Jack London, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Rimbaud, Samuel Beckett, Bukowski, Tolstoy, Samuel Johnson, Baudelaire, Garcia Marquez, Hammett and Chandler, James Dickey (author of Deliverance), Mark Twain, S. King, Philip K. Dick, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Chrisopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Bill Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lord Byron, Dylan Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Stephen Crane, Norman Mailer, Rabelais, and John Berryman…just a few I can think of who admitted their extreme alcoholic and overly-bibulous tendencies at one point or another, if not their utter addiction to the holy substance “demon rum”…
Crucial points in my new essay “Roughing It” are about the teenaged discovery / usage of booze in the American Midwest, an unavoidable topic in a country that used to get everyone deliberately trashed on alcohol before voting, and my Illinois neighborhood has a 24/7 liquor store on every corner next to the THC/Vaping and Tobacco outlets and the questionable massage parlors, none of which are my cup of tea, although I was a frequent visitor of the convenient smoking outlets until 7 months ago.
I quit alcohol back when I realized it was not only killing my body, but my brain as well, which is connected I think! (Same with cigarettes but not the brain part…)
And of course, HIS first miracle was turning water into wine so folks could go on partying, for which they applauded him no end, unlike some of his other doings…and at the Last Supper he said, “Make sure you bring the red wine, and lots of it.”
Dale
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Dale
That is quite a list of imbibers The one name that stands out is Sam Shepard. Only because I read a story of his in the New Yorker called, “Indianapolis (Highway 74).” I thought it was a great setting in the middle of a snow storm.
Yes, Proverbs made it clear about strong drink. The Wayward Son, too.
Looking forward to reading “Roughing It.” I’m sure I could relate. That’s an excellent description of your neighborhood. World building is an art unto itself.
Happy Thanks G!
Christopher
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Christopher
Once again your references are totally WILD and right on the money, and great minds must think alike!…Because that Sam Shepard short story you mentioned is one of my very, very, very, very favorite stories of all time…the first time I read it I was blown away, and devoured it numerous more times…I haven’t read it since, but I don’t need to, because I can (it seems like) remember all of it….Shepard lived in Minnesota for many years.
Shepard’s best play (by far) that I know of is TRUE WEST, about two brothers reuniting in their disappeared mother’s house (she hasn’t been kidnapped or anything, has only disappeared on a cruise to Florida or something like that). You Tube has a GREAT, great FILM of this starring John Malkovitch and Gary Sinise, filmed at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago…a lot of people don’t know that many of Tennessee Williams’ most famous works were first played in Chicago. If you ever get a chance, I recommend the TRUE WEST starring Malkovitch and Sinise…in my opinion, American drama doesn’t get any better…TRUE WEST is one of those works that truly is Hilarious and Heartbreaking same time…and Malkovitch and Sinise are brilliant in this version. I once saw TRUE WEST played in the back of a bar in Chicago on a small stage, and the actors were getting drunker and drunker for real, just like the characters in the play do…
You mentioned earlier that you’ve got 14,000 words of fiction drafts going…that’s a pretty solid amount. Two of the most famous books in America of all time are almost that length…NATURE by Ralph Waldo Emerson = 12,000 words, and THE PROPHET by Gibran = 15,000 words…they are SMALL BOOKS with a world-changing BIGNESS to them…where the Word truly becomes an art form…
When I mentioned 24/7 liquor stores, smoke shops, and questionable massage parlors around here, I forgot to mention all the storefront gambling parlors that also line the strip malls and corners of the neighborhoods in these parts…as with the massage parlors and the liquor stores, I steer 100% completely clear of the gambling locations…sometimes it seems like someone or something wants to keep the population drugged and-or distracted so the revolution never begins?…
Again, wild about the Shepard story, and thanks for mentioning! Awesome!!
Happy Holidays! (For me, Thanksgiving = the beginning of Christmas…)
Dale
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Hi Dale
Almost missed your comment! Glad I didn’t. Hey that’s cool to hear your great enthusiasm for “Indianapolis (Highway 74)!” I’ve read it twice and it takes a person away in the blizzard and the bizarre car show, sort of taking place somewhere. To write a story like that would span time, become more real than cities that fall. TRUE WEST I will check that out. I really like Gary Sinise and John Malkovich they were great in “Of Mice and Men.”
Those small books you mentioned I’ll have to check them out too. “Nature,” sounds especially down my alley. Those gambling joints must be pretty dangerous. Raymond Chandler joints or maybe “Straight out of Compton, Chicago style.
Happy holidays!
Christopher
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Christopher
I watched a documentary about a writer last night. This writer, like most of us, received hundreds, if not thousands, of rejections…They included a few in the movie. Here was one of them, written to the person representing the writer at that time:
“Dear Mr. Ober,
I am very sorry but this J.D. Salinger just doesn’t seem quite right for us. Thank you for letting us see it.
Sincerely yours,
William Maxwell of The New Yorker.”
D.
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Dale
Yes the dreaded form rejection letter. They roll in like the tide, but once in awhile there is a message in the bottle, that’s good. JD Salinger had some troubles with The New Yorker at the beginning. Crazy huh. I find these kinds of stories comforting.
Christopher
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Christopher
Someone once asked a famous painter why he painted so slowly. He replied, “I paint slowly because these works are meant to last a long time.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson is definitely worth checking out. At one point, he was friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne, they used to go ice skating together…And of course he was good friends with Henry David Thoreau.
Harold Bloom called Emerson “the mind of America.” He’s definitely our best essayist and nonfiction writer (only Thoreau can compete). He’s not always easy to read, especially if one tries to read him the wrong way. But he’s also a strange writer, because almost every single sentence he wrote, and definitely every single paragraph, can and does stand on its own as a separate work. He’s THAT GOOD of a writer (which is one reason he’s often somewhat difficult to read too, because people try to plow through it when it’s meant to be read slowly…savored…thought about…re-read a few times before you go on….etc).
His two big topics are NATURE and FREEDOM/INDIVIDUALITY and within all that, CREATIVITY and IMAGINATION (and spirituality and rebellion.) “Self Reliance,” “The American Scholar,” his essay on Shakespeare, his little book NATURE, “The Poet,” or pretty much anything he wrote are a few of his best works!
“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” “The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization,” “The reward of a thing well done is having done it,” “All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen,” “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” “It is not length of life, but depth of life,” “Always do what you are afraid to do,” “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment,” “Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting,” “What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you,” are a few of his sentences. He was also an early proponent of Western writers reading translations of Eastern writers like Confucius and Lao Tzu, etc.
He should be MUCH better known than he is (although he’s still well-known in Massachusetts), but this culture likes to forget itself, not unlike how everyone already forgot how bad Trump was during the pandemic, etc., when he had trouble finding his own ass with both hands, and told us all to inject bleach as an alternative therapy!! And the man has never read a single good book in his entire life…They asked him to give ONE QUOTE from his so-called “favorite book,” THE BIBLE, and he couldn’t even think of a single answer! Not even one! (“Turn the other cheek” and “Love your neighborhood” fly way above his head, big time, as Stephen King knows well and says often…)
Dale
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Dale
You have convinced me to read “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thanks for the reading guide for interpretation. I think that will be very useful for taking each sentence into account.
That is a profound statement to summarize “Civilization ending civilization.” How true, where the idea of progress and so called “beautification” (like something the Nazis would say) is to develop and destroy nature. “Seminole Wind,” by John Anderson is a great song along the same lines.
Marx said Capitalism would collapse and usher in Communism. Maybe so, but greed will be the end of every living thing. A total lack of sustainability. I’m going to enjoy reading, “Nature.” These giants of literature from the 1800s should not be forgotten.
I do not trust leaders that are not well read. without the foundations of these wisdom’s that are just laying around for everyone to pick up, disasters can happen, especially world leaders that ignore history. I prefer the JFK and Marcus Aurelius mold. Bill Clinton too, who was a (Rhodes Scholar). JFK was a voracious reader and a prolific writer himself who published “Why England Slept, and “Profiles in Courage.” Even winning the Pulitzer prize for the latter. He had an astounding knowledge of world affairs.
Yes, the good book has to be a foundation for any education. The bedrock of those holy and practical words go to the core. BTW, that’s cool about those guys ice skating together. I would like to go to New England.
Christopher
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Christopher
As it says at the start of the Gospel According to John: “In the beginning was the Word.”
Your understanding of the word, The Word, and the importance of good books and good reading is exceedingly impressive, deep and profound, and totally true, not to mention very rare and unusual in a good way! That was a great brief description of Kennedy’s all-important qualities that are MISSING from so many leaders we have now! I’m an obsessive, periodic re-reader of Marcus Aurelius…In fact, I even quote him at the beginning of an upcoming LS essay I have called “Buk the Philosopher,” on Bukowski! (Richard Harris plays a cool (fictional) Marcus Aurelius at the beginning of the first “Gladiator” movie…it even shows him writing if I remember rightly…)
And of course, old Honest Abe Lincoln was a great, great reader too, everything from much of Shakespeare (over and over) and all of the King James Bible (even more over and over) to contemporary humorists, Montaigne the essayist, Scottish genius Robert Burns, Lord Byron, and even Edgar Allan Poe…Walt Whitman has the greatest writing on Lincoln, including “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.” Whitman used to watch Lincoln in Washington and it’s said that they sometimes nodded to each other in the street….
You mentioned the dangers of gambling around here…mostly it’s just state-run computers now, but it can still get very bad too…Twenty years ago I had a friend who suddenly disappeared. Two or three years later I ran into him in a bar in a town about fifty miles outside of Chicago. When I called his name across the bar (I wasn’t sure if it was him, he had a new beard, etc), he freaked out and almost bolted out the door. When he saw it was only me, he collapsed into total relief…It turned out he owed the Mob fifty grand or so. He had to “leave” and disappear from town in order to protect himself, and it wasn’t paranoia either…I know of a few other people who also disappeared for the same reason, never to be heard from again, literally. (They either managed to save themselves by disappearing to somewhere else, or were disappeared by the Mob for their debts…just like in the movies, literally.)
Am planning to check out the song “Seminole Wind” by John Anderson soon, it sounds cool, looking forward to checking it out, thanks for mentioning and being such a great reader, understander, and writer!
Dale
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Dale
Thanks for the kind words! Lincoln for sure is the kind of President we need. The interventionist. A scrupulous lawyer who earned his moniker “Honest Abe.” Before he got into politics. You can see it in his face. That was interesting what you said about Marcus A and Lincoln being kings. The way you said it made them seem almost holy, in performing their duties toward civilization. Unlike history’s bloodbath of power hungry kings (dictators) including a few queens as well, like Bloody Mary.
That’s crazy about that guy owing the mob. That was a really good description of your old friend at the bar and his “new beard.” I could feel the fear in the man. That’s always the goal, I think to engage the reader.
I’m sure “The Outfit,” is alive and well in Chicago. I read a book about Sam Giancana written by his son who made a very strong case of him ordering the Kennedy assassination, perhaps another rabbit hole. Who knows?
There’s an old movie “Flashpoint” with Kris Kristofferson where he plays a border agent that leads to a surprising conclusion.
Christopher
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Hi Christopher!
This is just to let you know that I’ve been rocking out to “Seminole Wind” by Anderson numerous times! Beautiful song! (Once I get onto a really good song, I tend to listen to it dozens or hundreds of times…) This song is worthy of Kristofferson, or even Bob Dylan…Beautiful use of piano and fiddle, and the lyrics are staggeringly good…
“I’m calling to you like a long-lost friend / But I know who you are…” are two haunting lines….and a good example of how every single word matters…if he had said “And I know who you are,” instead of “But I know,” it wouldn’t have quite the same effect…
SO the song is haunting…beautiful…and true. I have pictures of Black Hawk, Black Elk, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo on my wall, and my grandfather was half Iroquois, so my interest in Native American history/culture is more than just interest….written a few poems about this topic, too, some of my best. Also, I’ve spent time in the Everglades on at least half a dozen occasions (and man is it filled with alligators and bugs, and birds!), and I tend to wander around in places like swamps all by myself or with dogs…so the song hits home.
A lot of people don’t know that Geronimo and Black Elk were both Christians…not the kind where they had it jammed down their throat, either, but the kind who truly understood the teachings of Jesus and accepted them, without giving up their own religion which they incorporated into the Christ teachings…I’ve also known several Native American folks in northern Wisconsin. All Christian, more truly Christian than the vast majority of so-called white Christians probably…near as I can tell. I’m not saying there weren’t horrible things done to Indians in the name of white nationalist/supremacist (and so-called) “Christianity,” because there were…but I am saying that many Native Americans, as underdogs themselves, know what REAL Christianity is, and is supposed to be….not unlike the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Church…
Anyway, THANKS for the song…it really hit home, it’s one of those songs you can rock out to and be emotionally/intellectually affected by same time…
Dale
PS, I recently found out that Stephen King’s daughter is a Unitarian minister…
(Jim Morrison of The Doors has some good poems about Indian history, and claimed to have the spirit of one inside himself, which occurred on an acid trip in the desert, if I’m not mistaken…)
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Hi Dale
“Seminole Wind” had the same effect on me when I first heard it. I shared the you tube video with my ex-wife hoping she would like it and then we were playing it over and over just like you are. California Dreamin’ had the same effect. Now were stuck on “You Can Do Magic” by America. Love these You Tube videos. Yeah, I like that part too… “I’m calling to you like a long-lost friend / But I know who you are …” Haunting.
That’s cool about your grandfather being Iroquois. The Indian peoples are the best example of how to live on the earth. Their lifestyles were advanced to the point of being almost one with nature, rather than what humankind is now. I have great respect for them.
I read a few stories from a really good Indian author named Sterling HolyWhiteMountain.
Yes I heard Stephen King mention that about his daughter. I thought he said it in a sort of skeptical way. I not sure what religion Steve invokes. His son Owen and the one who writes under the name Joe Hill seem pretty popular. Tabitha King, too. Talk about about a family of writers, except for his daughter, but maybe she’s on to what’s really important.
The Lizard King was a strange dude.
Christopher
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Christopher
Hi! Just want to let you know that I re-read your “Where Everything Got Broken” and “A Starless Street Corner,” as well as a few of your other pieces on the internet, and I was simply knocked off my feet by these creations!
I knew they were good, and I liked them a ton on the first readings, but going back to them and re-reading again, a careful and attentive reader can see how truly, truly, truly EXCELLENT these short stories are! I want to say (even though I know you will anyway), KEEP WRITING!!!!!!!!!!!
The re-readability factor on these stories is so HIGH! Not only are they fearless and real, deeply fearless and deeply real, they’re also filled with a subtle sympathy and symbolism that’s so subtle and true, a non-attentive or casual reader, or a one-time reader, might totally miss it. Writing with this kind of depth to it simply does NOT come along very often. The characters, the situations, the understanding of the world, the knowledge of evil, the recognitions and revelations of goodness anyway that are contained in these tales can be partly missed on a first reading, and that’s a GOOD thing!
I can tell you’ve read Hemingway by reading these pieces, but at the same time they seem to owe nothing to him or any other writer (including SK). This is a sure sign that a writer has FOUND her or his own voice. In my opinion, Hemingway is hard (or impossible) to escape in the good old USA. I can’t think of another American writer since the year 1900 who’s had anywhere near the influence he has had (and it stretches even into the East, Asia, Japan, massively in the Spanish-speaking world, all over Europe and Africa too. There are photos of him holding hands with African tribesmen in the bush). Even people who hate him or haven’t read him are influenced in their hatred or influenced by everything else he influenced without knowing it. As just a couple of examples, Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, creators of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe (sometimes known as Humphrey Bogart in other incarnations), and Bogart himself, plus Lauren Bacall, Joan Crawford, Marilyn (she was also a HUGE fan of James Joyce and a GREAT poetry reader, not to mention married to one of America’s best playwrights at one point); and great film directors like Orson Welles, John Ford, John Huston, Howard Hawks, all claimed Hemingway as a primary influence (or favorite writer). John Wayne and Charles Bukowski are walking, talking, breathing Ernest Hemingway characters come to life on the streets. (Hemingway is one writer Bukowski NEVER criticized, and he criticized everyone, including Shakespeare relentlessly, which was totally MAD but also accurate in his case.) (In music, Frank Sinatra, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, etc etc also hugely influenced by EH. The Beat writers – also hugely influenced by EH. I could go on.)
And your stories are Hemingwayesque, even though, as I stated, your own writing voice rings loud and clear and on one level there’s no discernible influence.
I defy anyone to spend time re-reading, pondering, and living in these two stories, “Broken” and “Street Corner,” and tell me I’m wrong about this! To be truly, fully grasped, like all great writing, these need to be returned to at a later date, again, and lived in a little while.
There’s something very, very AMERICAN about these pieces, too. They say things about the USA now that need to be said. They DEPICT the entire country, on one level, in their short, contained spaces (from coast to coast). The UNDERSTATEMENT in these pieces is GREAT, fantastic and fabulous! Somehow they make me think of Woodie Guthrie, too!
HYPERBOLE is one of my favorite literary devices of all time (I think I learned a bit of it from Mark Twain, not on purpose, but via reading him), but, while truly enthusiastic about your writing, I’m NOT exaggerating here.
SO KEEP on rocking and WRITING in the Free World!!!!!!!! (even though I know you will anyway).
Dale Williams Barrigar
PS:
A cool F. Kafka quote I found: “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions – mercilessly.” (I think he was writing to himself…)
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Dale
Thanks, that wonderful praise! That means a ton coming from a literary professor! And from someone who writes so well with such effortless clarity.
Sometimes–most of the time writing fiction for me is stumbling around in the nothingness almost deaf and blind until something makes a noise or a crack of light comes from under the door. Hemingway’s “Write short sentences,” made quite an impact. Like how he influenced all these other writers you have mentioned. I do love EH’s stories. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” might be my all time favorite title for a story. It sounds so beautiful. I like how he has influenced foreign writers. H. Murakami is my favorite Japanese writer–right up there with anyone. “Town of Cat’s” is really good and “The Wind Cave.” actually everything he writes is great. He wrote a novel called “Kafka on the Shoreline.”
The voice is tough to quantify. Sometimes I look for that familiar ring in my writing–asking what is my voice? It’s not as easy as a speaking voice, but even the speaking voice listened to can be like… Is that me? Is that how I sound? I hear things like how writers have an ear for dialogue. I try not to use the F-word (sounds naive, I know probably got that from some magazine that frowns on profanity) in writing, but some stories don’t make sense in how people talk. Like guys in jail or people at the dope house.
Yes indeed I will keep writing. It seems to be a combination of the typical catharsis and obsession. I heard Colson Whitehead once say about his own writing (probably meant tackling historical fiction about slavery)”Why bother.” The way he said it was kind of striking considering all of his success.
I like the Kafka quote. It’s easy to edit things to death after a rejection or trying to conform to a magazine’s style or the politics of the day. SK said, “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society have ended anyway.” “Jackals and Arabs” love that one by Kafka. Short and other worldly.
Also, thanks to you… I’m reading “Tales of Ordinary Madness” by C. Bukowski. Powerful and disturbing so far… Like .”A .45 to pay the rent.”
Christopher
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Christopher!!!!!
That is an awesome S. King quote! Tales of Ordinary Madness is a great book (used to carry it around with me in my car). Buk was a great short story writer. He typed a million of ’em, and they’re not all masterpieces, but quite a few of them ARE masterpieces, and all of them have his strange, unusual energy and stamp on them (no pun because of his job in the Post Office…)
Two of my favorite Buk Books are WAR ALL THE TIME, and YOU GET SO ALONE AT TIMES IT JUST MAKES SENSE. His writing started out good and continued getting better his entire life. He did a lot of his BEST work in his 60s….The 1980s. But all of his stuff is good.
One thing that made a huge impression on me from my Gordon Lish experience was his absolute passion for the short form and the short story. He talked FAR, far more about the short story than he did about longer forms of fiction…like 90% short story and 10% novel, which maybe shouldn’t come as a surprise from the guy who helped discover Raymond Carver and Barry Hannah. And for years, Lish was the short story/fiction editor at Esquire Magazine.
The short story is super important in American literature, starting with Washington Irving, Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, and through Poe and Hawthorne, and up until now….Something about the internet and the short story also fits really well. The lack of money for it is also nothing new….Cervantes was not paid directly for DON QUIXOTE, greatest novel of all time, even when it became a best-seller in Europe and the Americas…(he had patrons later but he was never directly paid for his fiction in a world of zero copywright laws etc etc etc). Poe was paid a pittance for his poem “The Raven.”
Some of the very best American writing of all time is in the short form…..
That’s one reason I’m so stoked about your short stories (and LS). They’re kind of like a synthesis of Hemingway and Stephen King but again, they do NOT look derivative at all. The strength of the original voice you’ve developed is amazing.
Kafka was another writer who was best in the short form, including his most famous work, (about THE BUG), which is either a long story or a very short novel…(“novella”)…
Here’s a cool Oscar Wilde quote: “The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.”
Dale
PS, Raymond Carver was a massive Bukowski fan and has a hilarious poem about the time he saw Buk give a reading of his poems….
PPS, (I restrict my own use of profanity in my writing too, I’m not against it and HUGH does it masterfully but it’s somehow just become a part of my style not to….I drop F bombs all the time in speaking (without even knowing it half the time)…rarely if ever in writing.)
PPPS, If I was still teaching creative writing and/or literature in the classroom I could absolutely use “Broken” and “Street Corner” as inimitable models of the form…
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Dale
That’s pretty cool about Bukowski and Carver. I like the idea of being a short story writer. There is endless fun in writing them. I tend to read them more than novels. Mostly online because of the access. Lately I’ve been on this library app and have access to seemingly everything. I’ve been doing a lot of audio books. Just finished “Revival” by SK narrated by David Morse. Now I’m onto “Neon Rain” by James Burke–police story New Orleans style–very cool. That one is narrated by Will Patton. I switch back to the “Tales of Ordinary Madness,” in written form. It’s harder to study a person’s writing in audio but it’s pretty entertaining with the right narrator. Hopefully the rhythms of their paragraphs or something will enter the subconscious. I had Carver’s “Cathedral” going but I didn’t like the narrator, which I found the same guy narrates the other books, too. I could almost listen to “Jesus’ Son” again. The line from Lou Reed at the start, about heroin…”and I feel just like Jesus’ Son.” Wow, this is like the best opening I’ve ever read.
Thanks for the kind words about the voice in my stories. I think writers want to find this voice to be recognizable to the reader. and themselves.
I found the F-bombs creeping back into my stories, lately. Mostly in the dialogue. Yes I agree Hugh’s Fs work very well. I can hear the Scotsman which I find fascinating. His Fs sound natural and funny, too. Humor is not easy. I love reading people’s work from different cultures. I think that’s partly what drew me to Chekhov without even knowing it. Stephen King drops Fs sometimes and they definitely work. Bukowski definitely does. He’s rather disturbing and powerful. I constantly use it too–talking and thinking. Each one like a natural accumulation of dusty sin. It’s such a universal word. I hear what your saying about it being your style, not too. I think that’s where I’ve been at… Limiting it and other types of profanity. If it came out like a stream of consciousness my stories would be one long list of Fs and MFs. It is a powerful word that has to be used lightly or expertly. I guess in editing that’s the one word I try not have any more than like one or two in something short. I feel the same about exclamation marks. I think some of that comes from getting criticized in a rejection, and SK’s book. But as SK said “rules (if these are rules) are made to be broken, but you have to know the rules first.” Those kinds of statements stick with me and I think refer to grammar and writing in the active voice–all that good stuff. But then he goes on to say something like fiction isn’t written for the grammar teacher–(that’s not word for word). He talks about “making the reader welcome to the story.” Such great insight in his “On Writing,” book.
Christopher
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Christopher
As usual, it’s wild and crazy (in a good way) that you mention James Lee Burke, because I met him one time!!!!!! He was no longer drinking in those days, and myself and the guy who introduced me to him (writer Stephen Hathaway) were definitely drinking (one hell of a lot), so we didn’t spend too much time with him, but we did have a short conversation for 15-20 minutes…Burke is one HELL of a cool guy!!!!!!!!!!! I met him in Wichita, Kansas…he used to be an instructor in their creative writing program before his detective novels started selling really well later in life.
If I were to use profanity in my writing as often as I do (without meaning to half the time) in my real life, it would be one endless stream of the most profane words there are in the English language, including every last vile and nasty word you can think of……..well, not all the time, just when I get revved up, or angry, or whatever it may be. Mark Twain was known to use profanity in an endless streeeeaaaaam all the time, but of course one also knows when to switch codes and who NOT to let the tongue be free around (except for accidents)……You should hear some of the things I call these crazy-ass Chicago drivers around here when they cut me off, tailgate my ass or drive like maniacs in my vicinity, etc!!!!! (I’m working on my temper problems in an effort to keep my blood pressure down.) Jack Kerouac said, “I am a hoodlum and a saint.”
Yeah, the exclamation point………..I use it, I have to admit. Not so much in fiction, though. You’re right, rules are made to be broken, but you can ONLY BREAK THEM right when ya know what the hell they are first!!! (And I spent a lot of time learning them….)
Cool about the audio books!…
When I saw Lish, the short story he talked about most, hands down, and very much so, and claimed was one of the very best short stories he’d ever heard about or known, was “Water Liars,” a four- or five-pager by Barry Hannah, of Oxford, Mississippi…a great writer in his best work who died too young. I re-read “Water Liars” the other day. Lish was right, it’s great…and lasting. (Barry Hannah was a huge influence on Johnson and Jesus’ Son.)
Fyi, I plan on adding some comments under your “Broken” and “Street Corner” stories and saying why I like them so much, some time in the near future, just so my opinions appear with or alongside your stories and not just over here…
Thanks for writing back all the time! Hope to hear from you again soon!
Dale
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Dale
I’m amazed by J L Burke’s writing! I’m reading “Neon Rain.” I think it might be the first in a series of the Dave Robicheaux novels (I would have to copy and paste that last name every time if I were writing it). I saw “In the Electric Mist “with Tommy Lee Jones ( Leon Helm plays a dead Confederate general) and I realized it’s one of his books. How Burke takes the reader into his world of surreal violence–makes me a bit envious. That’s really cool that you met him! It seems like a lot of literary giants have taught in this part of the country Iowa-Kansas.
That’s the way it is about using profanity. I like the part you said about code. The when’s and when not too. Sometimes being around an elderly person or some “perceived dignitary” it’s interesting to see this stark lack of the profane. Like a little click in the tongue that switches off.
Profanity on the road. Yes this is a whole different deal. I would go nuts up in Chicago with that bumper to bumper traffic like on Cicero or the semis lined up eight deep on the 80-90 turnpike.This is where we are revealed for who we are, I think. Everything stripped away to core riding in these two ton shells. A place for the psychologist or the AA meeting to conduct the therapy sessions. Get to the real truth of all these irks and mental twist.
Mark Twain is/was such an interesting persona. The way he took his brand to Europe and promoted himself. I could see him cussing like a sailor with those bushy white eyebrows. Val Kilmer played him in a theater road production, before Val got sick. He looked just like him in the ice cream suit.
The exclamation point is bold and I think it’s needed, for sure, in commentary.
Now I have to read “Water Liars.” Thanks for another great tip! That would be cool to get your insight on those two stories! Oops exclamation point. !!
Christopher
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PS Dear Christopher
As an RIP for Barry Hannah fourteen years after the fact (I met him briefly one time as well, in Mississippi), here are the first and last lines of his immortal short story “Water Liars,” once lauded so very highly (for an entire week) by Gordon Lish in Bloomington, Indiana:
“When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another.”
“We were both crucified by the truth.”
D.
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Christopher
The Chicago traffic is one thing I’ll never miss, if I ever get out of here alive. At the same time, you gotta work with what you’re given, and it can be an adventure. I go up and down Cicero Avenue all the time for various reasons (I live very near there). (I bounce around a lot, and there have been stretches of years when I’ve been nothing but a couch surfer who didn’t have his own place…homeless in other words. Just not on the streets (but kicked out a lot)).
I’ve seen folks pull pistols on one another in the Chicago traffic and wave them around. Last week an Oak Park police detective was shot dead three blocks away from where I’m sitting (not in my own house) by a kid with a gun in a bank parking lot. Now the kid will never get out of jail (or at least for decades) and the detective’s family are fatherless. It wasn’t even the detective’s job to respond to the call but the police were short of officers. He went over without a vest and another person was gunned down in the good old USA over $, or lack of it. Both individuals are black. God bless.
Burke is a great writer and Twain was a wild one! There’s a great nonfiction book called TOUCHED WITH FIRE: MANIC-DEPRESSIVE ILLNESS AND THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT, by Kay Redfield Jamison. Twain was bipolar and he’s in there. So is Poe. The book starts with Poe. A fascinating and great nonfiction read all the way through. There’s a very long and great chapter on Lord Byron in it. (Talk about a wild MF!!!)
I’m still thinking about how to phrase my commentary to put under your “Broken” and “Street Corner” stories. Also working on a fictional essay (Leila’s term) about Poe that I’m almost finished with. It focuses on Poe and his relationships with women, from his mother to his wife and everyone in between. (Stay tuned this Sunday for a peek at why Kafka is great from my point of view.) (My FK essay also wages word war on AI and global warming.)
You have an original mind, original thoughts, and an original way of putting it out there! (Writing it down.) You mentioned the bipolar feelings of writing before. Say more when you get a chance….(I’d be interested to hear it)…And/or where you get your inspiration from. Writing is hard and lonely in this cold world (but if it was easy, it would be boring!)….Are writers born….or made?
Dale
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Dale
“Are writers born….or made?” The age old question… I think people are born with a certain amount of talent to write. The craft has to be learned so I think it’s a combination of the two. I think David Eddings started the “Write a million words rule then toss it.” Kind of makes you think that you can improve on what God has given you. But If writing is like playing basketball then some people might be born 6’10 and can palm the ball. It is hard to quantify what lies in the imagination and the ability to transcribe it. How does one go about this? I don’t think the IQ test covers this either, because of bias.Even so, it is the only concrete rule in psychology with the demarcation of around 70 pointing to mental retardation. Other psychological disorders point more too symptoms than a usually accurate IQ test. There may be symptoms that a person was born with this ability to write. Like the little book worm that loves words and has a quick affinity for language and pretty soon they’re writing little stories. Like Stephen King earning pocket change for his stories from his mother when he was in pull-ups, (maybe not that young, pretty young though).
Does the IQ test apply to the writer? Sure to some degree. But if you can write sentences (maybe simple are better) some say you are a writer. I like that idea. I don’t think a person should weed themselves out of the art, or let the general scuff of the non-writers get you down, or the elites who might snicker and say over a snifter of Sherry, “What a hack.” I read an essay that Raymond Carver wrote “On Writing,” and he said at one point that something clicked or changed in his writing. Kind of gives credence to the write your ass off rule.
I guess some of my opinions to this question have come in Internet searches and from Stephen Kings “On Writing.” Stephen King thinks a person can become a competent writer, but playing in the NBA might be a stretch (he didn’t actually say it like that). Which comes back to the born or made question.
Iv’e typed questions in the search bar usually at some low point. “Am I a writer? Am I a bad writer? Then waiting for some awful news… Then, Can a bad writer become a good writer, or at least become a competent writer? It’s like asking the magic eight ball. Now AI knows everything so with the right phrasing of the question it may be favorably answered. AI might say quick as a snap of the fingers. Yes, You are a born writer. No, writing must be learned.
So I will for sure want to hear what you say about AI and global warming in your FK essay. I’ve noticed many submission forms say, “You did not use AI in the creation of the work,” or something. Check this box. I would never use AI in writing. But in response to your question in this case the writer could absolutely be made, felonious, but still… I hate listening to AI reading stories in the New Yorker. Makes me say fuck it. Totally loses me.
Yes I definitely want to read your essay on Kafka! His name itself is like some mystery that must be fathomed.
Be safe in “The Windy City.” I hear on the news all the time about the murders, but what a grand place!
Christopher
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Christopher
Your last commentary was brilliant as usual! Yes, the Windy City is a grand place; I think I have a kind of love/hate relationship going on with it…..I’ve lived (or stayed) in these neighborhoods at one point or another: Lincoln Square, Lincoln Park, Logan Square, Rogers Park, Wicker Park, Pilsen, Greektown, and a few others I can’t think of right now. Some of the old scruffy (cheap) neighborhoods I used to stay in have now been (sadly) gentrified…and all the cool folks kicked out. I also know the suburbs, having lived in (or spent time in) Oak Park, Wheaton (an old abolitionist town), Cicero, Forest Park, Berwyn, and others…
William Faulkner once said, “I was hurt into greatness.” Btw, don’t know if you’ve ever read his novella “The Bear” (an expansion of his short story “The Bear”) but it’s awesome, kind of like the fiction version of “Seminole Wind.” The story of Sam Fathers, an old Indian, and Ike McCaslin, a white teenager, and the Bear, and the destruction of the Mississippi wilderness in order to turn it into cotton fields. Anyone who loves trees, swamps, or animals, or humans who love spending time alone in nature, will weep at this tale….
Look out later today for some brief, but completely awesome, commentary on your work which I’m gonna put in the comments section of “Street Corner.”
More soon!
Dale
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Dale
Thanks! Great description of Chicago. I remember that movie with Josh Hartnett “Wicker Park.” I didn’t realize that was Chicago–very cool movie.
“The Bear,” by Faulkner sounds tragic. I can’t stand what these profiteers are doing to the land. They clear it, then they die and their miscreants sell it to others that build on it, and care nothing for the animals. The animals don’t have to suffer the peril of hell so they might have the last laugh. I don’t consider many, if any of these people good stewards of the land. That went out with the Indians. The Indians are the true good stewards of the land.
The takers spread poison on the fields killing us one grocery sack at a time. I can only imagine what they will say of these generations a 100 years from now. If those times come considering where the world is going.
Thanks for your awesome comments on “Starless!” I saw that and left a message.
Christopher
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OK Christopher,
I added new commentary under “A Starless Street Corner.” It’s under “Leave a Comment,” not “Reply.” I forgot to mention that the editors also celebrated your story by quoting it in their Ten Year Celebration, so I’ll say that here.
There will be more from me, this time on “Broken,” in the near future….Today or next couple of days.
As Neil Young said, “Don’t feel like Satan / but I am to them / so I try to forget it / any way I can / Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World…………..”
Dale
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Dale
Thanks! I’ll check it out. Keep Rockin!
Christopher
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Christopher
I added one more comment under “Street Corner;” two total today over there.
DWB
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A song of intensity for sure, living life to the fullest “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” wrote Tennyson. And there are different kinds of romance… this song is memory of youth perhaps even more than love. For a bunch often thought of as decadent, the Stones have lived a long time. I heard Jagger was running 13 miles a few times a week in his sixties. That was a cool last paragraph about the real life parallels. Photos are some of the only time machines we have, they take you back to that very instant, in image and mind, with all the memories and some of the intensity. I have photos like that.
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Harrison
Thanks so much for reading this essay and great commentary on it…I love your Tennyson reference, he’s one of my favorite poets…no one could “do” heartbreak better than he could, he felt it so INTENSELY in his own life that it comes through even in the bad lines he wrote…I read somewhere that Keith quit cigarettes five years ago at the age of 75 and hasn’t done heroin since the 1970s…Yes, photos bring us back to what it was like when we were there, and we can look at them as it were looking at one’s self and companion/s in a living movie that will never be over (until it’s over) even though it’s OVER…Thanks again! Deeply appreciated!
Dale
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I love your love for this song and will be giving a play, or several, later today as you’ve completely and utterly sold it to me via this brilliantly described saunter through literature, music and your own life. That final line, with the librarian’s name used, sitting as it’s own paragraph is a beautiful and heartbreaking touch. PS – I would have liked to hang out with Byron et al, but it would also have to be The Beats for me – a drunken, substance fuelled night in the 50s with that mob would be one to remember (or perhaps never remember!)
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Paul
Thanks so much for reading, understanding, and commenting on this essay…Yes it would be WILD to hang out with the American Beats, probably just as wild as it would’ve been to hang with the British Romantics…perhaps it would be fun to gather them all together in one bar room and see who could dominate the conversation, drink more alcohol, or consume more drugs…awarding prizes in all of the categories might also be fun…Really glad you mentioned the Beats in the context of this essay, as the Stones were admittedly influenced by folks like Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, and Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac were all admittedly influenced by the British Romantics, especially Thomas de Quincy for William S. Burroughs, William Blake for Ginsberg, and Lord Byron/Percy Shelley/John Keats for JK, the “King of the Beats” himself, who died suddenly in his mother’s house while watching television and trying to open a can of tuna which he planned to wash down with yet another bottle of whiskey…Thanks again, deeply appreciated!
Dale
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Paul
To this day, I sometimes see Veronica still in the library when I go back in there to get something else…I see her, but we never converse, and have never conversed…she has no idea what she did to me by returning that photo a few years ago…I sometimes think of it as an example of the ways we all affect each other, very often without even knowing we’re doing so at all…When she returned the photo, of course, she thought it had ended up in the book accidentally…when I went back in to get it after her phone call (she had my number from my library account), she said, “Here’s the picture of the woman…” She had placed the photo in a pink envelope…the envelope and the photo now reside in one of my closets stuffed with papers in my humble apartment in a run-down neighborhood outside Chicago, many of which papers are poems inspired by the person in the photo…The Dylan song “Tangled Up in Blue” is the soundtrack for all of this, in my mind, along with “Memory Motel”…Thank you!
Dale
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Hi Dale,
You are a total scholar of the written word and I adore your enthusiasm and knowledge. It is refreshing and informative. Actually an even better word is ‘Infectious’!!
When it comes to songs, I’m a wee bit different. Songs and lyrics mean very little to me in the context that they are written. HOWEVER, the memories that I have from them them can put a tear in my eye or a smile on my face.
Don’t get me wrong, the words to Queen’s ”Is This The World We Created.’, Billy Joel’s ‘She’s Always A Woman To Me’ ,John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, Marvin Gaye’s ‘Abraham, Martin And John’ do something to me but most songs are about memories!!!
Which ties in brilliantly to the title of this. No offence meant but in 1976 the Stones did one of the worst albums ever (Can’t mind the name) It was a weird funk type thingy that was awful.
I love the idea of a ‘Memory Hotel’ as that are what songs are for me.
HAH – Leila loves her lists and maybe she will take on this:
Terry Jacks – Seasons In The Sun (Jesus that is a fucking terrible song!!!) I was around six, and that was the first time I thought on death. Fuck – I was a serious kid…HAH!! I was on prescribed Librium at ten!!!
The Cars – ‘Drive’ – Gwen! That and ‘Foreigner’ – ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’ (Shit song!!) Those songs were always played at the ‘Disco’ where we went.
Prince – ‘Purple Rain’, ‘The Ladder’ – See above.
Fox To Fox – ‘Precious Little Diamond’ -See above above!
Tainted Love (Soft cell Version) (Although Gloria Jones and Marilyn Manson’s versions are superb!!) Was something that about twelve of my school mates sang to in a pub called ‘The Plough’ when we were fifteen!!
My dad’s funeral brought another few songs – ‘Lara’s Theme’ from Dr Zhivago (Sp??) ‘Strangers On The Shore’ and Jim Reeves ‘Distant Drums’.
HAH!! An old pal had a song that I knew but couldn’t place and I reckon that I will get this wrong, ‘My Pony, My Rifle And Me’??? Was her last song at her funeral. Dean Martin’s voice is stunning.
This may a wee bit bit personal so I won’t say too much. When we were younger, ‘The Cocteau Twins’ album ‘Treasure’ had a lot of meaning as did ‘Rainbows’ ‘Down To Earth,’
I think you may see that the songs lyrics ain’t that much important. The memories mean a lot. But I totally understand when words mean something to someone!!
…Oh and when my old gran died, I got a taxi to take me from Ayr to Auchinleck and the first song that was playing was ‘Take My Breath Away’ by ‘Berlin’!
Sorry my man!!! That came out as a wee tad self-indulgent!!
You continue to enhance the site with whatever you do!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
All the very best.
Hugh
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Hi Hugh!
It’s pretty WILD that you mention the song “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me,” as my kids and myself were just singing that song to each other (in a joking way) about a month ago!!!!….Because the song comes from one of our favorite “family” movies, “Rio Bravo,” directed by Howard Hawks, and starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan, Ricky Nelson, etc….I first watched that film ten years ago with my kids when they were 7 or so, and they loved it at the time…We still re-watch it once a year or so…Dean sings the song while laying in his bunk and smoking a cigarette…one of the finest musical moments of any movie I know of!…Dean plays an alcoholic gunfighter John Wayne sidekick…
Also wild that you mention “PURPLE RAIN,” as just the other day, I was making notes on the song for an essay I’m planning to pen upon it…Prince was a genius. I also have an idea for a narrative essay on the song “Little Red Corvette”…
THANKS for sharing the way you experience music…the memory-connections are a profound way to engage with song, those kinds of connections add up to an entire vision of life in a life well-lived, as yours is…
You’re absolutely right, the Stones’ BLACK AND BLUE album is one of their very, very worst BY FAR…except for two songs…”Fool to Cry,” and “Memory Motel”….They should have just released those two songs and scrapped the rest of it, but I imagine that’s what happens when you’ve got some record company exec’s ordering you to produce another album every six months or so…and you can’t help yourself, so you listen to them…far too common in the music business, now as well as then, and probably a huge reason why the world is so glutted and filled-to-the-brim with so much deplorable, bad, terrible, horrible, only-to-be-ignored-as-much-as-you-can, so-called “music”!
Thanks again Hugh, your commentaries are always thought-provoking and intriguing…AND encouraging!!
Dale
PS, When I think of my mother’s funeral, I always think of the song “Death Is Not the End,” by Dylan…
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Hi Dale,
I can’t remember who said about Deano’s singing performance of that song, ‘Dean Martin can sing better lying down than most folks can do standing up.’
And I have done a few terrible Karaoke versions of ‘Little Old Wine Drinker’!!
I also loved to find out that one of his last live shows, he didn’t want to do so he asked for thirty six million (I think) and got it!! He didn’t even know why he came up with that figure!!!
I’m not the best John Wayne fan – However, ‘Rio Bravo’, ‘The Sons Of Katie Elder’, ‘El Dorado (First time I ever seen the brilliance of James Caan) True Grit and of course, ‘Rooster Cogburn (Not sure about the spelling) are amazing films.
However Mr Wayne as Ghengis Kahn and him stating with that drawl he had in the ‘Greatest Story Ever Told’ ‘He shhhhhooooorrrleee waz the son of god’ should have had him hung!!!!!
Quick story – My brother-in-laws mum’s funeral (The legend that was Mary Bell) had one of those Huminist folks. The wee soul must have been the only person on the planet that didn’t know anything about The Duke as she stated – Mary loved cowboy films especially those of James Wayne. I don’t think she understood why she got such a laugh at that!!!!
Thanks as always my fine friend. You instigate and inspire and that can only be good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hugh
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Hugh
You have a chilled-out, super-cool way of encouraging creative writers that makes you A GREAT EDITOR (as well as writer and keeper of names for the lost)….
Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra are LEGENDARY HEROES here in Chicago and environs. EVERYONE knows who they are, and everyone loves them…Don’t know if that’s true in other parts of the world, or if it’s a Chicago thing because of the huge Italian influence on this city?
You nailed John Wayne… I’ve also admired the way he battled his lung cancer and came up with the term “The Big C”…I’ve seen more than one person die of lung cancer back when it was really deadly (and FAST), and I know one person who has it right now. Also how he was doing his own stunts within two months of having 75% of one lung removed…jumping on horses! and into ice-cold mountain rivers! and taking fake punches at people…then sneaking off behind the trees for a few more puffs and a few shots of tequila…The vast majority of his movies fall definitely into the category of “unwatchable” for more than a few minutes…Some of his right-wing opinions can be passed over in silence, just like with Gary Cooper….”Stagecoach” and “The Shootist” can be added to your list of the Duke’s timeless movies.
THANKS for your skills as an EDITOR, as well as writer, which don’t get praised enough, Hugh! This is a RARE thing these days (in an unfunny plastic and corporate world either apathetic or greedy or both and worshiping the latest unstoppable billionaire!!)…and something which needs to be kept alive! and passed on…more important than ever now.
Sincerely!!!!!!!!!!!!
Dale
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Hi Dale,
Just a quick response with an ‘I wish your friend all the best’. We watched my dad die of it over seven weeks. The consultant was spot on when he said that my dad had weeks not months. My dad had been a mad smoker from the age of six and he reaped what he sowed. He knew that. Even though he gave up the cigarettes around fifteen years back (Doctor had told him it was either the tobacco or his voice box) it still got him. I will probably have my own fight due to excess but I understand that. (Have a look at my story ‘Ian’) that sort of explains the mind-set us Scottish numpties have!!
I love you mentioning Gary Cooper and I hope this isn’t just an Urban Myth???? Seemingly he was the first ‘Gary’ ever??? He had the name of another actor and had to change it and it was his agent who suggested he call himself where he came from???? (Gary – Indiana?????)
Also, another shite piece of trivia or Urban Myth…He was supposed to be the first male actor in Hollywood who got a face lift.
Thanks for everything my fine friend – You and the other commentators have lifted us to another level!!!
Hugh
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Hugh
I read your short story “Ian” and was wildly impressed. Your writing style is extremely original in the way it’s both very readable and “simple” in a good way, yet also based on life and realistic in a way that gives it many layers of added depth and human meanings…”Ian” is a fine story-homage to friendship, sympathy, understanding, and to doing it “My Way,” as Sinatra, Elvis, and Sid Vicious all sang of it so eloquently while also LIVING it and putting their money where their mouth was…
“Ian” sits firmly in your catalogue (the LS vault) of great modern tales that bring realism to a new level and reinvigorate the short story and its importance! Also, you have the short story writer’s art of seizing on the single, small, everyday, revelatory detail, as in the character’s memorable vest in this story!!!!!!!
Thank you!!!…
Dale
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Thanks so much for that Dale, your understanding is much appreciated.
I had a few…emm, disagreements with someone who pulled me up for swearing and accused me of being misogynistic. To be honest, I don’t think they knew what that word meant!! My ‘argument’ with them was simple, I went where the story took me. They either didn’t have the skill or confidence to do that. They mentioned drug taking, drinking, robbing but their characters didn’t swear and were more likely to say ‘Gosh’. That was my point, when you write, the character will tell you about them. You can NEVER dictate your values, if you do, then you just come across as beige and bawless!!
An essay is completely different, something that you are a master of. With this medium you can put in your own thoughts! But when writing about an out-of-it psychopath, they are highly unlikely to say, ‘Oh my giddy aunt’!!!
Writing stories is easy if at first you listen to where you are taking the inspiration from and then you listen to your characters. They will always see you right!!
Thanks again my fine friend.
Much appreciated. Look after you and yours and always, give the dogs a pat!!!
Hugh
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Hugh
As I’ve said before, and wish to say again, anyone who gets down on you for your realistic, natural, and often humorous language use is most probably a self-righteous, uptight, persnickety, hoity-toity, stuffy, stuffed-shirt, joyless, and arrogant…fool…because your language usage is NOT gratuitous or “too much,” and your female characters are as realistic as your male ones, you’ve been married for years, and you work closely with other, female writer/editors, as well as having discovered the best living American short story writer BY FAR (male OR female), and applauding her work no end, so accusing you of being misogynistic is absolutely outrageous and unfair, not to mention ridiculous, silly, unfounded, and not perceptive.
You are a true and natural ARTIST of the written word, and that is always sure to make for a lot of resistance from plenty of less talented people…I think that’s one reason why you get such shit for your language usage. James Joyce, DH Lawrence, William S. Burroughs and Henry Miller all had the exact same problem! And God bless them for not giving in to the critics standing up outside their walls and hurling their tiny little stones…same goes for you, Hugh!!!!! THANKS for all you do! I can add that I’m proud to be involved with a literary site that contains the likes of you who pushes the boundaries…
dale
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You are a true gent my fine friend!!!
Thanks so much for the very kind and understanding comments!!!
Hugh
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