What do writers listen to when they write?

What do writers listen to when they write? In these media-saturated days that doesn't seem like such a far-fetched question for an interview any longer, but it remains unasked most of the time. Even more rare is the chance for an author to write about the music that inspired an idea or enhanced the form of a story.

Perhaps it seems more appropriate to ask a writer simply if he turns the music off or on when he sits down to write. To many, music is only a distraction. But it turns out that many contemporary authors find music forms a soundtrack to their writing. And for some authors, music can help find a way into a story.

The Largehearted boy site has a regular feature, Book Notes, which asks writers to comment on music they listened to while they worked on their books. Thaisa Frank writes about her first novel Heidegger's Glasses, a story of World War II, that the music of Beethoven was her first choice while conceiving the story. But there were other inspirations as well: California rain on skylights, and an iPod shuffle that included Cat Power, Bob Marley, and The Cranberries.

Frank decided early in framing her characters that the camp Commandant would be listening to Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, the "Pastoral." But she changed her mind: "after listening to the Pastoral, I decided the dissonance was heavy-handed and remembered Mozart's Piano Concerto in C, which my boyfriend gave me in college. It joined my iPod shuffle. The Commandant played it, too."

...Since I studied piano perhaps it's not surprising that I chose the Concerto or made the one of the characters a pianist, although at the time I didn't give it much thought. Nor did I give it much thought at first when she played Scarlatti sonatas. Then I listened to Scarlatti and remembered how much I loved playing his sonatas and the sense of a clean, well-ordered world. I found as many Scarlatti piano sonatas as I could and they also joined the iPod shuffle.

At some point -- perhaps toward the middle of the novel -- I began to watch documentaries about WWII, documentaries in which Germany's national anthem at the time was played again and again. I heard this anthem in a curious way -- distancing myself, trying not to hear it. Perhaps I listened the way people who were threatened by, or unsympathetic to the Nazi Party listened.

In one documentary, however, I found a song that became emblematic -- a song I then listened to again and again. This was from Lotte Leyna's German recording of The Three Penny Opera. It is called "Solomon" in English, "Saloman" in German. I first heard it on a documentary about Leni Riefenstahl. While Riefenstahl insisted that she didn't know about the concentration camps it was played over and over, like a dirge. The song sounded less ironic in German than it does in English. It sounded mournful. The rhythm is insistent and relentless. It washes over Riefenstahl's denials like waves.

Thaisa Frank

I also listened to Cat Power, blues piano by Jimmy Yancey, and The Cranberries. Each piece of music felt close to the novel or the act of writing it. The Cranberries and Cat Power are close to the feelings of love and betrayal that persisted in Germany during WWII. And Jimmy Yancey's piano seemed closest to the way I seemed to disappear when the writing went well. His blues are deceptively simple--as though the piano is a guitar and he is picking out tunes. I always see him at an old upright late at night in a smoky Chicago bar. There's a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and he's playing as if no one is listening. ...

The music of the blues and the reality of German concentration camps in World War II make an unlikely pairing, but that was Frank's way of "disappearing" into the story and letting the story tell itself. Most writers, if pressed, would have a difficult time explaining where their inspiration comes from. It seems that an author's music playlist is one small facet that can make the mystery of creativity a little clearer, even as the connection between source and inspiration remains as inexplicable as ever.

Excerpt from "The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following" - Ramona Ausubel

For generous donations in support of their preservation, the animal mummies wish to thank the Institute for Unforbidden Geology, the Society for Extreme Egyptology, the Secret Chambers of the Sanctuary of Thoth Club, and President Hosni Mubarak, who may seem to have been around a long time, though not from a mummy’s point of view. They wish to thank the visitors who make it to this often-skipped corner of Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, which bears none of the treasure of King Tut’s tomb. And to the British colonial government, without whom the animal mummies might still be at rest, deep in granite tombs, cool and silent.

They would like to thank Hassan Massri of Cairo, Alistair Trembley of London, and Doris and Herbert Friedberg of Scarsdale, New York, for their support of climate-controlled cases to house the animal mummies for the rest of time. The animal mummies will admit they are somewhat surprised that this is what the afterlife has turned out to be: oak and glass cases, Windexed daily; a small room, tile floor, chipping paint; the smell of dust and old wood. Even for the permanently preserved, the future is full of surprises. ...

The museumgoers wear shorts and hats and T-shirts with names of places on them: Kenya, Paris, Cleveland, as if they are trying to communicate their origin to the dumb natives. We do not care what dirty modern city you sleep in, what sad vacation you once took, the cat mummies think. Where they came from? Where they lived? At the feet of queens; on the banks of the mighty river. The cats were a million gods. In those days, when a cat died, its family shaved their eyebrows in mourning. If a man killed a cat, whether he meant to or not, he was sentenced to death. Those were days of justice.

Last week, when the squat man in a blue suit clomped up the stairs to their dusty little museum tomb and hung a plaque on the wall stating The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following, with a list of donors, the cat mummies thought, Do we? Do we really? Doris and Herbert Friedberg? Next, they figured, they would be told to bow down to a group of ten-year-olds and their imbecilic drawings of pyramids. You’ll have to find a vole to do that, the cat mummies snickered. If the cat mummies must be grateful for one thing, it is that they are forever-cats, and not forever-rodents. The cat mummies can think of nothing so embarrassing as that—the great gift a vole gets is, finally, to die. If he is very lucky, his toothy little life comes to an end at the paw of a stealthy feline.

The cat mummies allow themselves one fantasy: if only there had been no such thing as an archaeologist. To think of the day they were dug up makes the cat mummies sick. Awake for the first time in thousands of years, they peered out, wanting to see, finally, the afterlife. Instead: the inside of a crate, the inside of a canvas tent, and then someone began, with fine tipped tools, to dissect them. If only they had remained entombed in the cool earth with their kings. We were not afraid of eternity, of forever, they think. They would have made the journey to the other side, no matter how long it took. No matter how furiously, how magnificently long. ...

This is an excerpt from "The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following" which was originally published on The Paris Review blog. Ramona Ausubel is the author of the novel Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty. Image from The Paris Review.

from "Batting Against Castro," Jim Shepard [1996]

(Castro with the Minneapolis Millers 

at the Junior World Series, 1959) 

 

... The Marianao skipper overmanaged and ran out of pitchers. He had an outfielder come in and fling a few, and the poor guy walked our eighth and ninth hitters with pitches in the dirt, off the backstop, into the seats. I was up. There was a conference on the mound that included some fans and a vendor. Then there was a roar, and we stretched forward out of the dugout and saw Castro up and moving through the seats to the field. Someone threw him a glove. 

He crossed to the mound, and the Marianao skipper watched him come then handed him the ball when he got there like his relief ace had just come in from the pen. Castro took the outfielder's hat for himself, but that was about it for uniform. The tails of his pleated shirt hung out. His pants looked like Rudolph Valentino's. He was wearing dress shoes.

I turned to the ump. "Is this an exhibition at this point?" I said. He said something in Spanish that I assumed was, "You're in a world of trouble now."  

The crowd, which had screamed itself out hours ago, got its second wind. Hurricanes, dust devils, sandstorms in the Sahara -- I don't know what the sound was like. When you opened your mouth it came and took your words away.

I looked over at Batista, who was sitting on his hands. How long was this guy going to last if he couldn't even police the national pastime?

Castro toed the rubber, worked the ball in his hand, and stared at me like he hated everyone I'd ever been associated with. He was right-handed. He fussed with his cap. He had a windmill delivery. I figured, let him have his fun, and he wound up and cut loose with a fastball behind my head.

The crowd reacted like he'd struck me out. I got out of the dirt and did the pro brush-off, taking time with all parts of my uniform. Then I stood in again, and he broke a pretty fair curve in by my knees, and down I went again.

What was I supposed to do? Take one for the team? Take one for the country? Get a hit, and never leave the stadium alive? He came back with his fastball high, and I thought, enough of this, and tomahawked it foul. We glared at each other. He came back with a changeup -- had this guy pitched somewhere, for somebody? -- again way inside, and I thought, forget it, and took it on the hip. The umpire waved me to first, and the crowd screamed about it like we were cheating.

I stood on first. The bases were now loaded for Charley. You could see the Marianao skipper wanted Castro off the mound, but what could he do?Charley steps to the plate, and it's like the fans have been holding back on the real noisemaking up to this point. There are trumpets, cowbells, police whistles, sirens and the god-awful noise of someone by the foul pole banging two frying pans together. The attention seems to unnerve Charley. I'm trying to give him the old thumbs-up from first, but he's locked-in on Castro, frozen in his stance. The end of his bat's making little circles in the air. Castro gave it the old windmill and whipped a curve past his chin. Charley bailed out and stood in again. The next pitch was a curve, too, which fooled him completely. He'd been waiting on the fastball. He started to swing, realized it was a curve breaking in on him, and ducked away to save his life. The ball hit his bat anyway. It dribbled out toward Castro. Charley gaped at it and then took off for first. I took off for second. The crowd shrieked. Ten thousand people, one shriek. All Castro had to do was gun it to first and they were out of the inning. He threw it into right field.

Pandemonium. Our eighth and ninth hitters scored. The ball skipped away from the right fielder. I kept running. The catcher'd gone down to first to back up the throw. I rounded third like Man o' War, Charley not far behind me, the fans spilling out onto the field and coming at us like a wave we were beating to shore. One kid's face was a flash of spite under a Yankee hat, a woman with long scars on her neck was grabbing for my arm. And there was Castro, blocking the plate, dress shoes wide apart, Valentino pants crouched and ready, his face scared and full of hate like I was the entire North American continent bearing down on him.

-- from The Paris Review Book, 2003

 

(Fidel Castro, President of Cuba 1959-2008)

Edgar Allan Poe and "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket"

"Shall I ever forget the triple horror of that spectacle? Twenty-five or thirty human bodies, among whom were several females, lay scattered about between the counter and the galley in the last and most loathsome state of putrefaction. We plainly saw that not a soul lived in that fated vessel! Yet we could not help shouting to the dead for help! Yes, long and loudly did we beg, in the agony of the moment, that those silent and disgusting images would stay for us, would not abandon us to become like them, would receive us among their goodly company!"

(from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, 1838)

Terry Southern once quipped that the Edgar Allan Poe tale The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was never found in high school reading lists "by virtue of its extreme weirdness." Today, it seems that the Gothic overtones of Poe's own life (and death) continue to make his an American story of excess and a mythic, singular literary weirdness of its own.

By the standards of any age, it was a miserable way to go; in his surviving papers he left begging letters to magazine editors asking for as little as $10 to pay the fare to Richmond or Baltimore. Edgar Allan Poe, dark romantic writer and poet credited with inventing the genre of detective fiction, then suffered a death far more Gothic and gloomy than any of his stories.

It began badly when he was found, aged 40, wandering the streets of Baltimore, penniless, raving unintelligibly, dressed in someone else's clothes, possibly having been beaten up. He died four days later, on October 7, 1849, in the hospital, having uttered the final words: "Lord, help my poor soul."

From there it only got worse, although he was at the time probably the most famous writer in America. His cousin Neilson Poe omitted to tell anyone he had died, and so fewer than ten people turned up for the funeral. The priest couldn't be bothered to give a sermon, and the entire ceremony lasted three minutes.

But since his pauper's death Poe has left a rich and extraordinary literary legacy. His innovations in detective writing can be seen as the direct antecedent to Sherlock Holmes, for instance, and to the story-telling style of the films of Alfred Hitchcock. His stories also sparked the expansive and creative imagination of Jules Verne.

His "Balloon Hoax" of 1844 - in which he wrote a newspaper article reporting as fact the fictitious crossing of the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon -- cuts a straight path to Orson Welles's famous radio broadcast of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds 94 years later. And Dan Brown's huge success with The Da Vinci Code would have been impossible without Poe's "The Gold-Bug," in which Poe incorporated ciphers as part of the story.

But it is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket -- Poe's only complete novel -- that sends grisly shivers down the spines of many readers. Its bizarre images of cannibalism, unexplained plague, and travelers shouting to the dead on a doomed vessel (and the fear of the dead receiving them "in their goodly company") are elements in a unique horror tale that should find a prominent place in today's ever-expanding pop market of vampires and zombies and flesh-eaters of all kinds:

At this instant another sudden yaw brought the region of the forecastle for a moment into view, and we beheld at once the origin of the sound. We saw the tall stout figure still leaning on the bulwark, and still nodding his head to and fro, but his face was now turned from us so that we could not behold it. His arms were extended over the rail, and the palms of his hands fell outward. His knees were lodged upon a stout rope, tightly stretched, and reaching from the heel of the bowsprit to a cathead. On his back, from which a portion of the shirt had been torn, leaving it bare, there sat a huge sea-gull, busily gorging itself with the horrible flesh, its bill and talons deep buried, and its white plumage spattered all over with blood.

Poe himself brings the story to an uncertain, abrupt edge-of-the-world end that leaves the tale unresolved: the boat is headed through a final portal guided by a ghostly, white figure that suggests beyond is the South Pole -- or another world entirely, marked with Arabic signs and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

In 2009, to the amusement of Poe experts, the double anniversary of the start and end of his life led to an unseemly scramble between several US cities -- notably Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, New York and Boston -- to claim "ownership" of the writer.

In Baltimore, nearly 160 years almost to the day since his sorry passing, Poe finally was given the send off that his multitude of fans passionately believe he deserved. A life-size recreation of his body was carried in a horse-drawn carriage from his home in Amity Street, to the Westminster Burying Ground, where not one, but two full-length ceremonies were held in front of an estimated 700 admirers.

Playing their ace card, organizers of the Baltimore funeral put out a press release: "We have the body!"

"There's a somewhat symbolic struggle going on to claim him," said Stephen Rachman, president of the Poe Studies Association. Of all the great classical American writers of the 19th century -- Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to name but three -- Poe had the most hapless existence. "Poor Edgar Allan Poe, of them all he was the poorest; his life was very precarious," Rachman said.

Inner demons and outer space: forgotten classics for Halloween

 

 

Mary Shelley's idea of "a modern Prometheus" that took shape in her novel Frankenstein is still a classic horror tale. Since then the boundaries of the scary and horrible have expanded to include inner demons and outer space. Whatever the spooky territory is now, it's bound to be fraught with thoughts of impermanence, the fragility of life, the world of something unknown or unimaginably strange. When the curtains are closed and shadows leap upon the walls, there's always Poe and Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley to scare us, of course. But what else?

 

Plenty: there are lots of writers these days willing to scare us or spook us. But there is much more in the dusty stacks of forgotten and near-forgotten fiction, from serious writers like H.G. Wells to pulp master H.P. Lovecraft. (It wouldn't be much of a stretch to include William Burroughs in the ranks of the weird and spooky: Cities of the Red Night is a mind-melting nightmare of a diseased, dystopian world.)

 

As is often the case, poet and publisher Jonathan Williams's view from Skywinding Farm was much more inclusive and forgiving of such matters as what our well-meaning teachers of English literature would deem worthwhile of our time spent reading. JW himself has gone ahead to join company with forgotten authors for "our dummified times" since he died in 2008. As he sadly noted, in this essay from the Jargon Books website, how much worthy reading eventually slips away nearly forgotten, and how "each of us has read almost nothing."

 

Williams -- himself "internationally overlooked," with a bit of honor and pride in such a distinction -- was asked by Dennis Cooper, of Little Caesar magazine, to guest-edit an issue called "Overlooked & Underrated." He happily complied, and the result was an extensive list of nearly forgotten novels in every genre, a list which was published eventually in 1981, added to in 1989, and once more in 1998. More than ten years later, it would be easy to imagine that the list in "our dummified times" would be longer still. Here's an excerpt from his letter to Ian Young, with an emphasis on stories of horror and the supernatural.

 

"What a civilization! Nobody even remembers who wrote THE MOON POOL." Often I think of that ultimate lament by Kenneth Rexroth. However, good buddy, I remember that Honest Abe Merritt wrote THE MOON POOL, and I was very turned on by its unique art-deco, sci-fi eroticism back in the ur-sexy days of Flash Gordon and Batman and Robin.

 

... I'd love to write you a whole book on marvellous caitiff writers who go unread in our dummified times. But, I remain up to my hunkers in chores for the Jargon Society -- all that reading and writing that serve to make me internationally unknown, like one had better be these days. "Of making many books, there is no end." That's in, I believe, Proverbs ... "The flesh is sad and I have read all the books." That's Mallarmé. These quotations remind us that each of us has read almost nothing.

... If you asked the poet Basil Bunting to name the few, world-class masters, he would name you twelve, half of whom you'd never heard of. Viz: Homer, Ferdosi, Manucherhri, Dante, Hafez, Malherbe, Aneirin, Heledd, Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney, Wordsworth ... For Basil, that was it. No one in the 20th century, even his great mentor, Ezra Pound, made the Top Dozen. I know a lot that's "readable" and that will help get a reader through good and bad days and nights. I'll select a few genres and see what I think of, off the top of my head. One thing to mention at the start is that our friend, The Devoted Reader, is going to need the services of a very excellent library system.

... Horror and the Supernatural? Howard Phillips Lovecraft was my transition from boys' adventure books to the surrealism of Henry Miller and Kenneth Patchen. Nothing wrong with a "third class" writer with a peerless imagination. THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME and THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD are perhaps better than I remember. They stick in the conk.

 

Others that do: THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND, by William Hope Hodgson; THE PURPLE CLOUD, by M.P. Shiel; THE HILL OF DREAMS, by Arthur Machen; and a lot by H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, M.R. James, Saki, Lord Dunsany, E.F. Benson, A.E. Coppard, Walter de la Mare, Clark Ashton Smith, Algernon Blackwood, and Colin Wilson.

The two current writers of boogieman prose I like best are Stephen King (The World's Richest Writer, who rivals the Big Mac for style and usability) and the more literate Peter Straub. 'SALEM'S LOT and THE SHINING are first-class books by Mr. King. And IF YOU COULD SEE ME NOW, GHOST STORY, and MYSTERY by Mr. Straub. Two other writers of interest: Whitley Strieber (THE HUNGER, THE WOLFEN) and Robert R. McCammon (MYSTERY WALK). Check your local drugstore.

"The Composites:" Drawing a rogues' gallery of fictional characters

Humbert Humbert, as described by Nabokov in Lolita,sketched by Brian Joseph Davis

What does Emma Bovary really look like? Sam Spade? How about "that lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows"?

 

In the reader's imagination literary characters have a way of becoming real people, and film adaptations imprint a visual image that may be once- or twice-removed from the printed page. (It's difficult to imagine Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade without seeing Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon.)

 

Brian Joseph Davis curates a website called The Composites which interprets literary characters using police-artist techniques and composite sketch software, using descriptions from the books themselves. The straight-ahead interpretations feature wide eyes and expressionless faces, a rogues gallery of the fictionally famous and infamous.

 

Here are a few, with the authors' descriptions included:

Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.

Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

… Combed his light-brown hair neatly in front of the mirror, and set off for Radio City. He had always thought he had the world’s dullest face, a thoroughly forgettable face with a look of docility that he could not understand, and a look also of vague fright that he had never been able to erase. A real conformist’s face, he thought … Really it was only his darker hair that was very different from Dickie. Otherwise, his nose—or at least its general form—his narrow jaw, his eyebrows if he held them right … He wasn’t really worried. Tom had at first amused himself with an eyebrow pencil—Dickie’s eyebrows were longer and turned up a little at the outer edges—and with a touch of putty at the end of his nose to make it longer and more pointed, but he abandoned these as too likely to be noticed. The main thing about impersonation, Tom thought, was to maintain the mood and temperament of the person one was impersonating, and to assume the facial expressions that went with them. The rest fell into place … He might play up Tom a little more, he thought. He could stoop a little more, he could be shyer than ever, he could even wear horn-rimmed glasses and hold his mouth in an even sadder, droopier manner to contrast with Dickie’s tenseness.

Emma Bovary, Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

She was pale all over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils, her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three grey hairs on her temples, she talked much of her old age…Her eyelids seemed chiseled expressly for her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black down.

The results, as expected, can be a little spooky: the intent isn't a three-dimensional portrait, but an artist's sketch of characters rendered through the writer's words. "The program and process is quite manual and interpretive. We're not in CSI-territory yet,* Davis writes.

His renderings benefit from the ideas readers bring to the characters themselves -- these are all creations authors and readers have imagined as strong, willful, and even (as in the case of Emma Bovary) more than a little cautious of revealing too much. Davis invites suggestions, and asks those interested in submitting character ideas to include the novels' descriptive passages. Next up, according to Davis's recent note: Mrs. Dalloway, Kilgore Trout, Holden Caulfield.

Banned Books Week 2016: the naughty bits of "Slaughterhouse Five"

It's ALA's Banned Books Week, 2016. The outrage of Huckleberry Finn is still a thrill, over 120 years since its publication. Congratulations to Mr. Twain, who continues to make the national conscience uncomfortable more than a hundred years after his death.

Here are some of the naughty bits of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, a book often banned and often cited as objectionable, as enumerated in the dissenting opinion of Justice Powell in the 1973 Supreme Court decision. For more First Amendment decisions and lots of fun reading, visit the First Amendment Center.

 APPENDIX TO OPINION OF POWELL, J., DISSENTING

"The excerpts which led the Board to look into the educational suitability of the books in question are set out (with minor corrections after comparison with the text of the books themselves) below. The pagination and the underlinings are retained from the original report used by the board. In newer editions of some of the books, the quotes appear at different pages. 

 SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

PAGE / QUOTE

32  'You stake a guy out on an anthill in the desert -- see? He's facing upward, and you put honey all over his balls and pecker, and you cut off his eyelids so he has to stare at the sun till he dies.'

34  'He had a prophylactic kit containing two tough condoms 'For the prevention of disease only!' . . . He had a dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a shetland pony.'

94 & 95  'But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected . . . The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ who didn't look like much, was actually the son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought . . . 

Oh boy -- they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch this time! And that thought had a brother: There are right people to lynch. 

People not well connected . . . . The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really WAS a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections then he had . . . . So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought . . . since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was. And then just before the nobody died . . . . The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son . . . God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections.'

99  'They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals.'

122  'And he'll pull out a gun and shoot his pecker off. The stranger'll let him think a couple of seconds about who Paul Lazzaro is and what life's gonna be like without a pecker. Then he'll shoot him once in the guts and walk away. . . . He died on account of this silly cocksucker here. So I promised him I'd have this silly cocksucker shot after the war.'

173  'And the peckers of the young men would still be semierect, and their muscles would be bulging like cannonballs.'

175 ' They didn't have hard-ons . . . Everybody else did.'

177  'The magazine, which was published for lonesome men to jerk off to.'

178 ' and one critic said. . . . 'To describe blow-jobs artistically."

Huxley's "The Crows of Pearblossom": seriously kidding around

First published as a children's chapter book in 1963, The Crows of Pearblossom is a story Aldous Huxley created for his niece in 1944 while she was staying with the Huxleys in the Mojave desert.

In an Abrams picture-book edition with illustrations by Sophie Blackall, Mr. and Mrs. Crow are still bedeviled by the snake who lives at the bottom of their tree and steals their eggs. The book is meant for kids ages four to eight, and if there are any parallels to Brave New World it's that the world may not be all that it seems. As a Christmas gift to his young niece Olivia during World War II, Huxley's story has dark edges that were likely meant as an introduction to the adult world that faced very uncertain challenges ahead.

The story itself was nearly lost when fire destroyed the original manuscript. The Huxleys' California neighbors had a copy, and gave it to Olivia when her uncle died in 1963. In the book, Mrs. Crow catches the snake eating her 297th egg that year -- she does not work on Sundays, you understand -- and requests that Mr. Crow go into the hole and kill the snake.

The Rattlesnake (as snakes throughout literary history are wont to do) thoroughly enjoys his thievery:

"I cannot fly -- I have no wings;
I cannot run -- I have no legs;
But I can creep where the black bird sings
And eat her speckled eggs, ha, ha,
And eat her speckled eggs."

Instead of killing him, Mr. Crow decides to teach the snake a painful lesson and confers with his wise friend Mr. Owl. Mr. Owl bakes mud into the shape of eggs and paints them to look appealing. These dummy eggs are left in the nest to trick the Rattlesnake, who unknowingly eats them the next day.

When the eggs get to his stomach, they cause the Rattlesnake such pain that he thrashes about, tying himself in knots around the branches. Mrs. Crow goes on to hatch "four families of seventeen children each" and "uses the snake as a clothesline on which to hang the little crows' diapers."

It's a story that young readers will probably thrill to be scared by, filled with the kind of darkness that children instinctively suspect hides out in the trees and woods. The new illustrations are colorful and swirling, owning more than a bit to Huxley's history of LSD use, and fans of Tim Burton and Edward Gorey will like Brooklyn artist Sophie Blackall's artwork.

Olivia de Haulleville

And little Olivia? In 1982, Olivia de Haulleville entered Indonesia as member of the entourage of H.H. The Dalai Lama during his consecration of Borobudur. She continued her pilgrimage there by the name of "Tara" and was requested to write a history of Buddhism in Indonesia by the ethnic Javanese Buddhist teacher, pak Sumarsoeno. In 2000 she published Pilgrimage to Java, An Esoteric History of Buddhism. Her son, Michael A. Cassapidis is a Tibetan monk in the Gelugs-pa order. She now lives near Joshua Tree National Park and has a Facebook page with the following quote:

If I were given a wish

To be what I wish

I would wish to be

Who I am

—mySelf

"Buffalo Lockjaw," Greg Ames: Emotional freeze-out in upstate New York

The phrase upstate New York has become artistic shorthand for a kind of American emotional exile, a place where it seems the weather, the economy, and alcohol combine to defeat the hopes of successive generations of Irish and Italian families.

When the lake effect snow starts piling in off Lake Erie, usually early in a cold and gray November, it does not seem too harsh to compare upstate's present condition to an American Siberia, where the only real currency of the young is the hope of getting out before they put in thirty years on third shift at the bottle factory or the bar next door to it. Bottle Factory, come to think of it, would not be a bad name for one of the beer joints in Greg Ames's debút novel, Buffalo Lockjaw (Hyperion).

The title refers to the facial condition achieved out-of-doors during an upstate New York winter, but it's equally as effective in describing the spiritual condition of the novel's main character, James Fitzroy, a still-young (or young enough to care) member of one of those families facing hard choices in hard times. There are traces of paralysis throughout this story in many of Ames's characters, and not a slight tilt of alcoholic haze to their perception of the way things are or ought to be.

Reading Buffalo Lockjaw for moral or spiritual uplift will be hard for those who haven't spent a dark night of the soul buzzed and freezing on State Street, in Buffalo or any upstate New York town. The experience of just "living through it" -- whatever the difficulty may be -- is enough for these characters.

In other, less bleak settings, much would be made of that current pop-psychology catchphrase, "seeking closure." Characters would have options. Fitzroy and his family don't have the luxury, or the money, to see it that way. Nor, at the end of Buffalo Lockjaw, does anyone claim to be a "survivor" of anything. It's just what people do, every day, after the bars close. Fitzroy tries to convince himself of ideas that sound as though they could come from any chipper and well-meaning self-help book, but here the practicalities of achieving those life-affirming goals seem still beyond his grasp:

"Start living, I tell myself. That seems to be the only moral in this fable. Live now. Don't wait for a future that might never come. Don't trade this moment for a false promise of security, or a pension, or an afterlife. But saying 'live now' is about as practical as telling a depressive to 'just be happy.' How do you actually do it? Maybe what it requires is a shift in perception. Okay, fine. And how do you bring that about? Because if you're thinking about being in the moment, you're not in it."

Such circular reasoning is self-defeating pop-culture speak, ideas reflected in fun-house mirrors pretending to be thinking. But it's a very contemporary and American approach to life -- 21st-century upstate New York really isn't 19th century Siberia after all -- which makes the desperation and hesitation in Buffalo Lockjaw familiar to anyone facing difficult family issues like illness and aging.

The novel's story is set against the barren landscape of drugs-and-alcohol and tells the very personal struggle of families in the process of losing their battles with time, with hope, and with each other. Fitzroy describes seeing his 56-year-old mother with the effects of early-onset Alzheimers in the senior-care dayroom of "The Elms": the disconnect between the facility's elegant-sounding name and Ellen Fitzroy's appearance is heart-breaking and sharp.

"Today she's wearing baggy gray sweatpants and an oversized rainbow T-shirt that belongs to someone else. Where are all her sweaters? She's in a line-up of wheelchairs near the door: a motorcycle gang whose members all ran out of gas at the same time ... my mother looks at me, blinks. She's wearing her spare glasses today -- the good ones must be missing again. The fingers of both her hands are interlocked, as if she's playing a silent game of 'here's the church, here's the steeple.' Around her neck she wears a crumb-crusted harness , a padded horseshoe, so she can lean her head back and snooze, just another weary traveler on a cross-country flight."

Greg Ames

The self-aware narrator Fitzroy, nearing thirty, seems to know that at The Elms, as well as in his own family, the unwritten future will bear a frightening resemblance to the too-real present as well as the long-gone past. There are echoes of Russian writers -- Chekov, maybe -- whose harsh landscapes loom as shaping and inescapable forces. How does one escape fate in a place where time itself seems frozen? Self-awareness only makes the knowledge more painful:Where can I find beauty in this situation? Fitzroy muses early on. I read somewhere this is a good exercise for cynics.

Ames found the same dilemma in writing Buffalo Lockjaw. In an Artvoice interview the Buffalo native outlines the struggle he had writing and re-writing the novel, trying to find the proper story to tell. He found his solution by focusing not on the plot, but on the characters: "I think that Buffalo Lockjaw is sort of about the passage from selfishness to selflessness. James is certainly not selfless, but I thought of it as this Buddhist idea: I wanted to write an entire book about a guy who takes one step. After 275 pages, he takes a single step toward being a better guy."

Much is made about the south as a regional influence on its authors. In Buffalo Lockjaw, Ames, who left upstate for New York City ten years ago, has written of upstate New York a kind of "northern Gothic" also centered on family and fate, death and survival, dissolution and resolution. It's a first novel that captures its woozy characters as they are, and sometimes even as they see themselves. Just as satisfying as finishing a story of an unsettling adventure in a Southern town populated by its ghosts and ancient widows, after the last pages of Buffalo Lockjaw the reader is one of the few who get to leave. The novel's characters aren't that lucky.

"Yonder Stands Your Orphan," Barry Hannah: "you laugh with them and at them"

"This Sunday morning Man Mortimer and Max Raymond sat in the pews of the same church, a little white steepled one in a glen set among live oaks and three acres of clover. The jungle swamps encroached on and squared the glen, deep green to black. Loud birds and alligators groaning in their mating season roamed in songs from bayou to bayou. Some fish walked on land in this season."

(from Yonder Stands Your Orphan)

Barry Hannah's novels are a traveling circus, full of wonders and (luckily for readers) writing that is just as entertaining. He wanders a Southern route this side of Gothic, but that faded and overworked territory -- land of the Jim Beam dysfunctional, the bloody macabre, or the just plain good-ol'boy weird -- really doesn't contain him.

His first novel, Geronimo Rex (1972), was a funny coming-of-age tale nominated for the National Book Award. He achieved some fame with his book of stories, High Lonesome (1996); his last, Yonder Stands Your Orphan (Grove Press, 2001), a lyrical tale of murder and mayhem, evoked comparisons to "Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, Peter Dexter and Clyde Edgerton all squished together." That's some company, and each with their own potent mix of summer honeysuckle and rye whiskey.

Hannah has gone on ahead to scout new and even more mysterious locations (the Oxford, Mississippi writer died unexpectedly March 1, 2010 at the age of 67). He should enjoy discussing the dissipations of family and kin with Mr. Faulkner himself after having won the Faulkner Prize for Geronimo Rex. Here he talks to Fiona Maazel in an excerpt from a 2001 interview published in BOMB magazine, and in it he describes the idea of the novel's small town characters -- a group that gathers on a pier to trade boasts and outright lies, that is aging rapidly but not yet wise, and familiar to themselves in their habits.

Barry Hannah: I wanted to get a grouping. It’s kind of an Our Town. Only darker. And more conscious of real evil. These folks appeared in my stories. I already had a cast, except for Man Mortimer and a few others.

Fiona Maazel: Right, the pier crowd. Why do you keep returning to them, to these old cranks who figure in so many of your other stories?

BH: Obviously, I’m obsessed with the people on the pier. People desperate and older and almost frantic to have a moment of clarity and some peace. I just found it to be a comfortable theater to work in. I also wanted to see how they would react to modern, true evil.

FM: They are all old, but they seem to lack the one thing the old are supposed to have, namely wisdom.

BH: They are the uneasy old.

FM: You do have a lot of stuff in the novel about how people need to seek out evil and hurt and pain to feel vivified, to feel alive, uneasy or not.

BH: That’s right. Max Raymond certainly does. He even says so. It does seem strange that one would make that conscious choice. I actually believe that’s why people live in big cities. They kind of like the idea of the Mafia around.

FM: Funny, I actually think evil is more likely to find me out where you live in Mississippi—that if I were a homicidal maniac, I’d do my worst in the country. But I think that’s a city phobia.

BH: Nothing bad has ever happened to me in Manhattan. But nothing like what’s happened in my book has ever happened to me in Mississippi, either.

FM: At least one of the organizing principles of the book seems to be the lake where all these old zombies congregate. I know that lakes and water in general show up a lot in your work.

BH: You’ve got it. Water is contemplative. It’s a magnet. Except for Dr. Harvard, none of these characters are well-off vacationers. It’s not a high-scale lake, you know. It’s a fishing lake. It’s more rural, more isolated. It’s more possible for evil such as Man Mortimer to exist there. And nobody seems able to strike against it. There’s no organization. The sheriff himself is unqualified and inept. It’s a kind of backwater place where the civilized codes don’t work. ...

FM: On some level, though, isn’t there fear that you will end up laughing at your characters instead of with them?

BH: You do both. You laugh with them and at them over the course of a novel, certainly. But it seems like I just cannot write in a straight, stern manner for very long before I find that these are human beings, and that the things you read in the paper will always surpass everything you put down. That’s why I don’t feel like I’m a master of the grotesque. I think I’m exploring through human comedy. ...

Hannah's dark humor comes from simply not looking away: "Those that don't avert their eyes are the real artists," he told an interviewer in 1997. "A man will reveal himself quickly, as if a witness at a trial. ... They say that the most natural writer born in America was Mark Twain. He just seems to have begun talking. I think that’s what I’m after."