Nature is art, art is writing, writing is books, books are film, film is music, music is people, people are nature. More...
Esker
I have published two volumes of a chapbook titled "Esker." The most recent volume, "Nowhere Else But Here," was released in January 2010. It features writings from every day of June 2009 in an old Japanese form called haibun.
I’ve been a fan of Sam Shepard for a while, and not just because he and his wife the actress Jessica Lange lived in my town for 10 years (and when I was in high school he read a few of my stories, long story).
Shepard is out with a new collection of stories, Day Out of Days. He has had two stories published in The New Yorker in the last few months (here is one) and they have been subtle, wry tales of relationships and aging, written with his usual imagination and precision.
“Have you got a girlfriend?” she asks me out of the blue.
“A girlfriend?” I say, checking to see if our daughter has overheard this, but she, too, has been lulled to sleep by the heat.
“Yes, that’s right. A girlfriend,” my wife repeats.
“Where did this come from?”
“Don’t act so surprised. You could very easily have a girlfriend and I’d never know it, would I? How would I know?”
“I’m sixty. Those days are over.”
This is not the Sam Shepard of the 1960s, ’70s and 80s, when he wrote edgy plays like “Buried Child” and “Fool for Love.” Those were the works of a young writer pushing the envelope of art, challenging convention, and expressing a dark, modern vision.
Today, his work seems to have mellowed in subject matter, as he is a father and husband and getting a bit older. His last collection, Great Dream of Heaven, was well-written, but the subject matter frankly focused a bit too much on his time in Stillwater, shuttling the kids to school and the such.
This review of Day out of Days on NewWest.net gives me the idea that his latest effort has more in common with his 1997 collection Cruising Paradise, and finds him returning to the western U.S. and its cowboys, con men, cheap motels and long open highways:
Day out of Days is a road trip of the spirit through the American West, a book that should cure anyone’s mental rut with its quirky tales and unexpected observations. In this collection, Sam Shepard has proved himself an enormously inventive writer, working in territory that seems familiar, but that proves to be surprising and revelatory.
I bought my copy of Jack Kerouac’s novel “Big Sur” at City Lights Bookstore when I visited San Francisco in 2006. I then proceeded to read it during a camping trip down to the namesake region of the California coast with my friends Zack and Steve.
It’s a dark book about Kerouac’s struggles with fame and alcohol. In it, he is plagued by hangers-on and wannabes; the “King of the Beatniks” can find no relief in the wake of the publication of “On the Road.” It can be argued that Kerouac never really recovered from the publication of that book and the demons he confronts in “Big Sur” led to his alcoholism-related death in 1969.
My own trip down to Big Sur was more about camping in the redwoods and hiking at a state park than suffering through delirium tremens, but it was poignant to read the book near where it was written. And I heard the song of the crashing waves that Jack famously meditates on in the book.
The new soundtrack album for the documentary “One Fast Move Or I’m Gone” by Benjamin Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) and Jay Farrar (Son Volt) has received quite a bit of airplay and other attention, but the film for which it was produced has been fairly under the radar. “One Fast Move or I’m Gone” takes a look at Kerouac’s life through the lens of his novel “Big Sur.”
The film looks like the typical talking head thing, but with some pretty good heads: Tom Waits, Sam Shepard, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to name a few. Also, through digging around the film’s website a bit, I learned that the guy who played restaurateur Artie Bucco on The Sopranos is also a Kerouac “interpreter” (he provided voice-over work on the documentary).
I’ve been slowly working my way through James Taylor Dunn’s exhaustive history of my favorite river, dubbed “The St. Croix: Midwest Border River” (orginally published in 1965 and revised in 1979). It’s a fun read, though he chooses some strange topics for in-depth focus, sometimes, and it’s inevitably a bit outdated.
Now, I see that there’s a new history of the river coming out in October: “North Woods River: The St. Croix River in Upper Midwest History.” Could be good!
January 13th, 2010
