Tuesday, September 27, 2005
It's a shame he didn't make it to 86...
KAOS agent: Look, I'm a sportsman - I'll let you choose the way you die.
Maxwell Smart: Alright, how about old age?
You got it! Don Adams, life-long smoker, dead at 82.
Maxwell Smart: Alright, how about old age?
You got it! Don Adams, life-long smoker, dead at 82.
Re-convening with the Monks of Autumn
Unless something momentous springs to mind and simply has to be expressed, this is likely to be my only posting this week. On Friday I'll be meeting with a bunch of cobbers for the 17th annual gathering of the Nick Adams Society, and part of the collective bargain requires a piece of prose from each member. I've got my work cut out for me.
The NAS is a mongrel assembly (or "motley crew", if you prefer - the moniker is in fact more applicable to us than it is to the band that claimed it, since we are more demonstrably prone to sea changes of the heart than they ever were. If my use of "motley" confuses you, you're not alone. Look it up in the dictionary, or simply trust me on this: Yeats knows his English better than Nikki Sixx does. But I digress.)
We're twelve guys, most of whom are veterans who survived the academic and emotional carnage of a particular "Bible College". Some of us, in our early 20s, fixed onto Hemingway's macho post-religious musings ("Nada y pues nada" - damn straight) for succor. Someone else scored access to a cottage in the Kawartha Lakes, and we indulged in a weekend of unbridled (and unexceptional) craziness.
For some inexplicable reason, we kept returning every fall. The craziness took on a gentle shape, and now the event serves as a yearly retreat for diverse people of surprisingly common ground. The fury of our heresies is no more (or less) remarkable than the immovability of our orthodoxies. So ... same time next year?
Absolutely.
The NAS is a mongrel assembly (or "motley crew", if you prefer - the moniker is in fact more applicable to us than it is to the band that claimed it, since we are more demonstrably prone to sea changes of the heart than they ever were. If my use of "motley" confuses you, you're not alone. Look it up in the dictionary, or simply trust me on this: Yeats knows his English better than Nikki Sixx does. But I digress.)
We're twelve guys, most of whom are veterans who survived the academic and emotional carnage of a particular "Bible College". Some of us, in our early 20s, fixed onto Hemingway's macho post-religious musings ("Nada y pues nada" - damn straight) for succor. Someone else scored access to a cottage in the Kawartha Lakes, and we indulged in a weekend of unbridled (and unexceptional) craziness.
For some inexplicable reason, we kept returning every fall. The craziness took on a gentle shape, and now the event serves as a yearly retreat for diverse people of surprisingly common ground. The fury of our heresies is no more (or less) remarkable than the immovability of our orthodoxies. So ... same time next year?
Absolutely.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Friday, September 23, 2005
What a glorious time to be free....
I climbed behind the wheel of my car, shut the door, got the thing rolling and drove off at a nice, slow pace. My friend had borrowed the car earlier, and left this in the CD player:
It was playing at a lower volume than I usually have it, so that the bass was almost lost while the highs hissed and tapped away, holding down the backbeat. I thought, This is the soundtrack of a mature man, driving car with the windows rolled up and the a/c on.
It was playing at a lower volume than I usually have it, so that the bass was almost lost while the highs hissed and tapped away, holding down the backbeat. I thought, This is the soundtrack of a mature man, driving car with the windows rolled up and the a/c on.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Tijuana Straits by Kem Nunn: The Sound of One Fan Squawking
The sun was climbing fast by the time he reached the Sea View, heating up the streets, and the machinery of the town was heating up as well, moving into high gear now, the boomer gear, greased with hash oil and cocoa butter, hot-wired with cocaine, chugging to some New Wave anthem, and his heart was beating time, hammering erratically as he reached his room and stepped inside. What (Ike) knew for certain, leaning against his doorjamb, staring into the shabby room, was that he was not the same person who had stood there the night before.
*****
The mud had already engulfed the great tabernacle of his chest and much of his neck and there was little (Nacho) could do by the time the others found him, save tilt that great head in one last effort to draw breath, so that as Armando and Chico reached the edge of the bog, all that actually remained of their companion was his face - as if that appendage had been flayed then spread upon the muddy ground in performance of a ghastly ritual. Or perhaps that scarred visage had been no more than a Halloween mask all along, fallen now in the aftermath of some reverie. But this sank too, even as they watched it, the mud closing over it, until all that lingered were a few unctuous bubbles. And finally these too were gone and everything that had been Nacho was gone with them, taken into the earth even as the bubbles were taken into the air, yet to what depth and station of hell he might descend, there were none there to say with certainty.
These two passages were written by "surf noir master" Kem Nunn. The first comes from Tapping The Source (published 1984), the latter from Tijuana Straits (2004). People luuuuv Tapping: it has a cult following that grows little by little with every passing year. Tijuana Straits, on the other hand, is likely fated to be one of those items which "Nunn completists" late-to-the-fold will seek out and pay scant few bucks for.
I frankly think the first passage is superior, word for word, to the latter. We get a fairly straight-forward picture of Ike, Tapping's protagonist, in the throes of a well-deserved hangover. In one night's extended stretch of bacchanalian excess, he has indeed opened the doors of perception. He now sees everything differently: the town he's come to save his sister from, his relationship with the girl down the hall (addressed in an earlier paragraph - I left it alone to avoid any spoilers), and most importantly, himself. Not too many metaphors here, but we have a sensual juxtaposition between hash oil and cocoa butter which covers a wide swath of territory, and neatly sums up the mess he's in. Nice.
Twenty years later, we now have a very different "voice" - it seems to originate from the Cormac McCarthy school of writing, which shuns no metaphor as too extreme. I'm a fan of McCarthy - he takes wild risks with his prose, and I think he pulls it off. I also think McCarthy is McCarthy, and no-one should try his stunts at home, especially if (as in Nunn's case) you've already proven yourself to be more than competent at the basics.
In the Tijuana paragraph, the metaphors snap out like firecrackers (heh!). "Great tabernacle" might hold some symbolic water, what with the chest containing the heart and all, but the metaphor is ornate, a choice which clashes with the subject: an enormous thug who has proven himself to be less than clever, as evidenced finally by his fate in the bog. Consequently, "tabernacle" sounds alarm bells. The rest of the paragraph - "appendage...flayed" "scarred visage" "ghastly ritual" - lurches to a crescendo with all the subtlety of a wheezy circus organ. "Unctuous bubbles" I rather like for its percussive comic interruption. But then we get the capper, a gassy meditation on this lunk's eternal fate.
Why, you might reasonably ask, should I pick on Nunn, and why should he bother to care? He's secured cult status; guys like me make a point of buying whatever comes next, and guys who are considerably less prone to thinking about prosaic choices really dig his stuff. He's even got trade rags like Publisher's Weekly and Booklist singing his praises, and hipsters in the trenches of glossies like GQ eating out of the palm of his hand.
I parse because I care. To my mind, Nunn's writing has slipped by steady increments since Tapping. I'm clearly crazy for Tapping; I also loved Unassigned Territory's quixotic exploration of the connection between religious certainty and desperate debauchery; I thought Pomona Queen was funny, scary, and terribly sad. But with each successive title, Nunn has increasingly indulged in arcane "scenic meditations", which (as in the above scene) are either beside the point, or worse, inflate the significance of events that would otherwise have played as melodrama (as in The Dogs of Winter).
Nothing wrong with melodrama - it has a respectible lineage, and when it works, I cry. But even if Dogs' language had been pared down, this business of "death by surf".... I'm not a surfer; I clearly don't understand why this "tragic" ending holds appeal to surfers, but I guess it must, since documentaries, memoirs, and movies go back to it again and again. As a landlocked reader, it's disappointingly predictable (another reason why I liked Tapping - no death by surf scenes).
I'll conclude with a quick look at two of Nunn's overleaf promoters: Elmore Leonard ("Kem Nunn is one of a rare breed, a novelist who knows how to plot and tell a story. There is amazing energy here." - Tapping) and Robert Stone ("The all-time great surfing novel" - Tapping; "He has wrought a harrowing and moving story of unforgettable characters living, literally, on the edges." - Tijuana). Leonard's impramatur is polished up and used for every publication, as is. Stone's support is unwavering, and specific to each novel. Are they friends? Does Nunn consider Stone a contemporary? Whatever the case, I know a little bit about Stone's lifestyle, and suspect that, like Stone, Nunn is something of a "character".
On the other hand, everything I've seen on Leonard suggests the opposite. He has an understated charisma, people who meet him like him, but mostly he sits at the table and writes (with pen and paper). His risk-taking, such as it is, is reserved for topicality: Rwanda or Cuba might get lifted from the headlines and plonked into a book, but the research is solid (and attributed) and more importantly the characters are Leonard characters, resorting to the usual mixture of charm, cunning and lethal force to get to the book's conclusion. One thing Leonard never falls back on is writin'.
So here, then, from a guy with a heap of upublished paper in a drawer, is my modest proposal to Kem Nunn: a little more Leonard, and a little less Stone, please. There's no question the Stone-approach garnered spectacular work in your first three novels. I'm not saying reject it outright. I am saying, a little stretch in the other direction wouldn't hurt.
*****
The mud had already engulfed the great tabernacle of his chest and much of his neck and there was little (Nacho) could do by the time the others found him, save tilt that great head in one last effort to draw breath, so that as Armando and Chico reached the edge of the bog, all that actually remained of their companion was his face - as if that appendage had been flayed then spread upon the muddy ground in performance of a ghastly ritual. Or perhaps that scarred visage had been no more than a Halloween mask all along, fallen now in the aftermath of some reverie. But this sank too, even as they watched it, the mud closing over it, until all that lingered were a few unctuous bubbles. And finally these too were gone and everything that had been Nacho was gone with them, taken into the earth even as the bubbles were taken into the air, yet to what depth and station of hell he might descend, there were none there to say with certainty.
These two passages were written by "surf noir master" Kem Nunn. The first comes from Tapping The Source (published 1984), the latter from Tijuana Straits (2004). People luuuuv Tapping: it has a cult following that grows little by little with every passing year. Tijuana Straits, on the other hand, is likely fated to be one of those items which "Nunn completists" late-to-the-fold will seek out and pay scant few bucks for.
I frankly think the first passage is superior, word for word, to the latter. We get a fairly straight-forward picture of Ike, Tapping's protagonist, in the throes of a well-deserved hangover. In one night's extended stretch of bacchanalian excess, he has indeed opened the doors of perception. He now sees everything differently: the town he's come to save his sister from, his relationship with the girl down the hall (addressed in an earlier paragraph - I left it alone to avoid any spoilers), and most importantly, himself. Not too many metaphors here, but we have a sensual juxtaposition between hash oil and cocoa butter which covers a wide swath of territory, and neatly sums up the mess he's in. Nice.
Twenty years later, we now have a very different "voice" - it seems to originate from the Cormac McCarthy school of writing, which shuns no metaphor as too extreme. I'm a fan of McCarthy - he takes wild risks with his prose, and I think he pulls it off. I also think McCarthy is McCarthy, and no-one should try his stunts at home, especially if (as in Nunn's case) you've already proven yourself to be more than competent at the basics.
In the Tijuana paragraph, the metaphors snap out like firecrackers (heh!). "Great tabernacle" might hold some symbolic water, what with the chest containing the heart and all, but the metaphor is ornate, a choice which clashes with the subject: an enormous thug who has proven himself to be less than clever, as evidenced finally by his fate in the bog. Consequently, "tabernacle" sounds alarm bells. The rest of the paragraph - "appendage...flayed" "scarred visage" "ghastly ritual" - lurches to a crescendo with all the subtlety of a wheezy circus organ. "Unctuous bubbles" I rather like for its percussive comic interruption. But then we get the capper, a gassy meditation on this lunk's eternal fate.
Why, you might reasonably ask, should I pick on Nunn, and why should he bother to care? He's secured cult status; guys like me make a point of buying whatever comes next, and guys who are considerably less prone to thinking about prosaic choices really dig his stuff. He's even got trade rags like Publisher's Weekly and Booklist singing his praises, and hipsters in the trenches of glossies like GQ eating out of the palm of his hand.
I parse because I care. To my mind, Nunn's writing has slipped by steady increments since Tapping. I'm clearly crazy for Tapping; I also loved Unassigned Territory's quixotic exploration of the connection between religious certainty and desperate debauchery; I thought Pomona Queen was funny, scary, and terribly sad. But with each successive title, Nunn has increasingly indulged in arcane "scenic meditations", which (as in the above scene) are either beside the point, or worse, inflate the significance of events that would otherwise have played as melodrama (as in The Dogs of Winter).
Nothing wrong with melodrama - it has a respectible lineage, and when it works, I cry. But even if Dogs' language had been pared down, this business of "death by surf".... I'm not a surfer; I clearly don't understand why this "tragic" ending holds appeal to surfers, but I guess it must, since documentaries, memoirs, and movies go back to it again and again. As a landlocked reader, it's disappointingly predictable (another reason why I liked Tapping - no death by surf scenes).
I'll conclude with a quick look at two of Nunn's overleaf promoters: Elmore Leonard ("Kem Nunn is one of a rare breed, a novelist who knows how to plot and tell a story. There is amazing energy here." - Tapping) and Robert Stone ("The all-time great surfing novel" - Tapping; "He has wrought a harrowing and moving story of unforgettable characters living, literally, on the edges." - Tijuana). Leonard's impramatur is polished up and used for every publication, as is. Stone's support is unwavering, and specific to each novel. Are they friends? Does Nunn consider Stone a contemporary? Whatever the case, I know a little bit about Stone's lifestyle, and suspect that, like Stone, Nunn is something of a "character".
On the other hand, everything I've seen on Leonard suggests the opposite. He has an understated charisma, people who meet him like him, but mostly he sits at the table and writes (with pen and paper). His risk-taking, such as it is, is reserved for topicality: Rwanda or Cuba might get lifted from the headlines and plonked into a book, but the research is solid (and attributed) and more importantly the characters are Leonard characters, resorting to the usual mixture of charm, cunning and lethal force to get to the book's conclusion. One thing Leonard never falls back on is writin'.
So here, then, from a guy with a heap of upublished paper in a drawer, is my modest proposal to Kem Nunn: a little more Leonard, and a little less Stone, please. There's no question the Stone-approach garnered spectacular work in your first three novels. I'm not saying reject it outright. I am saying, a little stretch in the other direction wouldn't hurt.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Bad Jeans = Bad Posture
For as long as I can remember, the belt on my jeans has rested on the top of my hipbones. I must be the "average build" that jeans designers have in mind, because I've never had a problem with "Plumber's Crack", or any other denim-design flaw. No reason for me to be adventurous, either - the Jordache jeans with the little horsey stitched into the change pocket was fun in the early 80s, but since then I've been happy with 501s, or (more likely) their closest generic knock-off.
Recently, for some reason that escapes me now, I bought a pair of jeans designed to be buckled around my actual waist (roughly 1 inch below my bellybutton). "They ride a little higher than usual," was my wife's tactful comment. She was also quick to add, "They look okay - really." I looked in the mirror and wondered what possessed me. At best, I felt like the scary dude on those Bantam Doc Savage covers. Well, actually, that's not entirely true. At best, I felt like Jerry Seinfeld sans fame, fortune and sex appeal.
Then there's the posture issue. Posture is something I have to pay attention to under the very best conditions, but these jeans make it almost impossible to imagine "the string pulling you from the top of your spine", or "the book on the head" or any of the other inner-visual clues I'm supposed to remember. These jeans are built for slouching, and that's just what I'll do. It's the high waist. Show me one vintage picture from the day when men buckled their pants below their armpits, and I'll show you a picture of a guy with execrable posture. Just look at Bogie, here. He's got a gat, and he's got the girl (not just any girl, either, but the whistle-inducing Bacal) - and he still can't find it in himself to stand tall. (Now that I think of it, even Doc's posture could use a little help. Bring those shoulders back and tilt your chin up, Clarke!)
That was certainly a part of Bogie's charm, but it's not a look I can pull off. Better for me to donate these jeans to Goodwill, and beat a hasty retreat to the box-store clothier, while it's still warm enough to wear shorts.
Recently, for some reason that escapes me now, I bought a pair of jeans designed to be buckled around my actual waist (roughly 1 inch below my bellybutton). "They ride a little higher than usual," was my wife's tactful comment. She was also quick to add, "They look okay - really." I looked in the mirror and wondered what possessed me. At best, I felt like the scary dude on those Bantam Doc Savage covers. Well, actually, that's not entirely true. At best, I felt like Jerry Seinfeld sans fame, fortune and sex appeal.
Then there's the posture issue. Posture is something I have to pay attention to under the very best conditions, but these jeans make it almost impossible to imagine "the string pulling you from the top of your spine", or "the book on the head" or any of the other inner-visual clues I'm supposed to remember. These jeans are built for slouching, and that's just what I'll do. It's the high waist. Show me one vintage picture from the day when men buckled their pants below their armpits, and I'll show you a picture of a guy with execrable posture. Just look at Bogie, here. He's got a gat, and he's got the girl (not just any girl, either, but the whistle-inducing Bacal) - and he still can't find it in himself to stand tall. (Now that I think of it, even Doc's posture could use a little help. Bring those shoulders back and tilt your chin up, Clarke!)That was certainly a part of Bogie's charm, but it's not a look I can pull off. Better for me to donate these jeans to Goodwill, and beat a hasty retreat to the box-store clothier, while it's still warm enough to wear shorts.
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