Twelve Random Reading Observations
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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1. Just read This Won’t Take But a Minute Honey, a small collection of essays and stories by Steve Almond. I liked the stories a lot, especially the one about Fenway Park, but loved the little essays. If you enjoy the writing advice that Bill sometimes doles out on this website, then you’ll really enjoy the same from Almond, who writes about writing with similar wit, panache and common sense.
2. Not long ago I posted a picture here of a pile of books sitting on the desk of my writing shack and got a little healthy hell about many of the author in that pile being dead and male. A few perceptive (and kind) viewers came to my defense and pointed out that they had discovered Mary Oliver, Joan Didion, and Annie Dillard in the pile. But one they missed was May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude. Does anybody else still read Sarton? I used Continue reading →
“Just Kids” by Patti Smith
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe
As she gained prominence in the mid and late seventies, Patti Smith was on my radar, but only barely. I was graduated from college in 1976, and my tastes and enthusiasms were largely in place. Plus, I was a musician, which took a certain amount of knowing where you were coming from. Not a musician who was going anyplace, but. I moved to SoHo in 1979 and spent a little time at CBGB’s, often going to see friends perform, even getting onstage myself a couple of times, but I found the whole punk scene kind of sloppy and overly anarchic, also androgynous, though sloppy and anarchic and androgynous was what a lot of rock had always been about. But not like the punk scene. I’d adopted the long-hair hippie style and valued a studied musicianship. One band I saw did a great thing one night where one by one they handed off their instruments to people in the crowd, people who couldn’t play a note. The hard-driving song held together for a few seconds even after the drummer departed, amazing, then just came apart into noise, Continue reading →
Shack Reading
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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I have never been much of a linear reader. My wife Nina, a novelist and short story writer, starts a book at the beginning and reads straight through to the end. She sensibly has one book on her bedroom table, addresses it with purpose, and then takes it down page by page. Meanwhile I jump from book to book, sentence to sentence, seemingly by whim. I used to feel bad about this, but I don’t anymore, my conscience eased over the years by two of the ghosts I talk to regularly, Montaigne, whose own jumpy mind makes mine look systematic, and, Samuel Johnson, who while considered by some the best read man of his time, claimed to have only rarely finished a book. He read, as he putting it, “by inclination,” putting one volume aside when he got bored and dipping into another.
If I’ve always been a whim reader, the building of my writing shack a couple of months ago has exacerbated this tendency. Writing shack, it turns out, is a misnomer. Though I occasionally write out here in the morning–my main writing time by the way—I still do most of my writing in my study in the house. What I have done out here is read a lot, sip beer, birdwatch and think. The place is built for short bursts not long dives. Yesterday, for instance, while I was Continue reading →
Three Wishes
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 4 comments
Don't Let Your Dad Find This One
“I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of shameful. And this novel is the furthest I’ve gone. To me it is beautiful and tender and frail as the naked self is.”
D. H. Lawrence (re: Lady Chatterly’s Lover)
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Sorting books recently I found all sorts of old lost favorites in various categories from juvenilia to biography to popular science to spiritual to gardening and on and on, none so nostalgic as Candy by one “Maxwell Kenton,” really Terry Southern, a film writer mostly, working with his friend Mason Hoffenberg. My copy (not my first, which was an original Olympia Press edition, much pawed in my early teenage years: a genuine dirty book) is a Canadian edition with Marlon Brando and Ewa Aulin on the cover—he’s playing the phony guru, she the naïf. The movie’s not great, but the book is pretty funny, meant as a spoof, and in 1968 (in an era when porn was hard to come by and I fifteen) it was a turn-on, frequently referenced. Southern and his friend took turns writing chapters, and the chapters Continue reading →
Apes of God
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 10 comments
Never read it, might one day
I cleaned out my studio, everything including desk, shelves, chairs, bedroll (I’m a serious napper), and books. Lots and lots of books, about 900, too many to keep in the new, ergonomically uncluttered space of my dreams, and including atlases and dictionaries and a seriously outmoded Columbia Encyclopedia that I love nevertherless, fifteen pounds if it’s an ounce, endpapers red. That joined the elite group of books that would stay, safely out of the way of my renovations in the long row of shelves under the windows. Another group of keepers were headed to the house, where I’d have to make room for them. The final group, the tough-luck crowd, were going to have to leave the property altogether. Continue reading →
Drive Yourself Crazy with Thomas Wolfe
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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If a young person were to come to me and sit at my knee and say, “Old Professor Gessner, you seem so wise. (Here I would nod.) Could you tell me the best book for me to read if I want to drive myself insane with ambition and dreams of glory?” I would reply: “Yes, son/young lady. I recommend that you run out and buy a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and a River. That will do the trick.”
And it will, it will!
I should admit right now that this is really an advertisement of sorts. Here at Bill and Dave’s we have sworn off real ads, (though Pepsi has been pretty persistent.) But this is an ad for a very worthy product—this month’s issue of the Oxford American! The OA has lots of great stuff and this issue includes pieces by my colleague Clyde Edgerton and my former student, the talented Erin Sroka, who has a great and funny piece on bingo halls. And of course I probably Continue reading →
Johnson-mania!
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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If you have peeked at my cartoon serial, Talking to Ghosts, you will already know that Walter Jackson Bate, the author of biographies of both Johnson and Keats, has been a huge influence on my life and art. He was a great teacher and great man, and if he was somewhat kooky, his ability to marshal that kookiness, in Johnsonian fashion, made him all the greater. (For “Benediction,” my essay on Bate, click here.) There is not much more I can say about his monumental biography of Johnson except it is one of the books that would make my top 5 list, a book that I have read and re-read throughout my life, starting in college, and a book that has inspired me and steeled me for the often-unexpected difficulties of the writing life. Continue reading →
Jonathan Franzen and the Great Swamp Warbler
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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(Roorbach, Gessner, Franzen)
My brief relationship with Jonathan Franzen began, like his own rise to fame, with a triumph and a blunder. In March he flew down here to our southern University to give a talk, and as our creative writing department’s token nature writer, I was drafted to fulfill his one unusual demand. His request was not to be picked up at 
the airport by a limo, or to have six down pillows on his feathered bed, though what he asked for would be considered by many equally if not more eccentric: He wanted to see a brown-headed nuthatch. Really. He had done his homework and knew that the pine forests near our school were the perfect habitat for Sitta pusilla, the tiny good-natured bird that has the odd habit of working its way down trees upside down while pecking at bark. And so I did my homework, too, calling Continue reading →
Reading Under the Influence
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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In fact, I can’t read very successfully under the influence. Generally I fall asleep within about a page and half—though I can get pretty passionate about whatever I’m reading in that time. When I wake up, a half-hour or so further along of an evening, sobered and abashed, a little groggy, I might make some tea and walk outside, then back to the book or article or whatever it is I’m reading. And then it clicks. But it’s a catchy title. Continue reading →
The Humbling
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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Philip Roth in The Humbling (Houghton Mifflin 2009) manages to dazzle and depress me at once. His central character is familiar from earlier novels, but different, too, so solipsistic and narcissistic that the other characters are barely even there to notice. Axler is an actor in his middle sixties who’s lost his stuff, can’t act, has blown two big Shakespeare roles at the Kennedy Center, and not only in his own mind but in the mind of critics, too, and audiences, and no doubt bloggers and twitterers, though these contemporary types don’t exist in Axler’s world. Continue reading →
