Bee-loud glade

Some nice ink for ESCAPE VELOCITY: A CHARLES PORTIS MISCELLANY, edited by Jay Jennings and published by Butler Center Books (a division of the Central Arkansas Library System [!]):

Carlo Rotella at the NYTBR:

You can enjoy “Escape Velocity” as a stand-alone collection, but a Portis miscellany will always be read too as a key to the experiences and craft lessons that shaped the novels. Take the opening sentences of a piece Portis wrote in 1962 when The New York Herald Tribune, the writer’s newspaper where he worked alongside Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin, sent him to check out an upstate hospital’s antismoking program: “Another day of lethargy in this bee-loud glade, trying to kick the smoking habit. It appears everyone will make it but me.” That “bee-loud” borrowing from Yeats perfectly catches the tetchiness of a two-pack-a-day man marooned among health nuts, and the second sentence pits the resistance implied by the first against the urge to compete with the other inmates for their clean-living oppressors’ praise.

And Alex Heard at The New Republic:

He once broke the arm of a loudmouth from The New York Times who had challenged him to arm-wrestle at Greenwich Village bar. “It was a just a freakish thing,” he insisted. “A weak bone or something.”

Escape Velocity features Portis's newspaper journalism, various magazine pieces (stories and a memoir), and a play. The back end is padded with some appreciations of Portis, by Ron Rosenbaum, Donna Tartt, Wells Tower, and myself (my 2003 Believer piece, now anthologized for the second time—I'm getting a lot of mileage out of it!). 

"Often as not a boy or girl of normal height resulted"

Today on his blog, Levi goes from Portis to Peter the Great to Portis again. He wonders if he should quote quite so much from the bio he read last week (Robert K. Massie's Peter the Great, 1980), but I'm glad he did! And I'm going to just copy the passage he quotes because it's so wild. (I kept thinking: Really?)

The King's most famous obsession was his collection of giants, for which he was renowned throughout Europe. Known as the Blue Prussians or the Giants of Potsdam, there were over 1,200 of them, organized into two battalions of 600 men each. None was under six feet tall, and some, in the special Red Unit of the First Battalion, were almost seven feet tall. The King dressed them in blue jackets with gold trim and scarlet lapels, scarlet trousers, white stockings, black shoes and tall red hats. He gave them muskets, white bandoleers and small daggers, and he played with them as a child would with enormous living toys. No expense was too great for this hobby, and Frederick William spent millions to recruit and equip his giant grenadiers. They were hired or bought all over Europe; especially desirable specimens, refusing the offer of the King's recruiting agents, were simply kidnapped. Eventually, recruiting in this way became too expensive--one seven-foot-two-inch Irishman cost over 6,000 pounds--and Frederick William tried to breed giants. Every tall man in his realm was forced to marry a tall woman. The drawback was that the King had to wait twenty years for the products of these unions to mature, and often as not a boy or girl of normal height resulted. The easiest method of obtaining giants was to receive them as gifts. Foreign ambassadors advised their masters that the way to find favor with the King of Prussia was to send him giants. Peter especially appreciated his fellow sovereign's interest in nature's curios, and Russia supplied the Prussian King with fifty new giants every year. (Once, when Peter recalled some of the giants lent to Frederick William and replaced them with men who were a trifle shorter, the King was so upset that he could not discuss business with the Russian ambassador; the wound in his heart, he said, was still too raw.)

Lazy Literary Musings™

I liked that Levi appreciated The Dog of the South last year, but felt that...well, his appreciation of Charles Portis was a touch restrained. So it's fun watching him rave over Portis's Masters of Atlantis—in two posts (and counting?)!

And it's also great to see him enjoying Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes.

I will just say that I finished Barry Gifford's Wild at Heart last night. What a book! I was reading a few other things and suddenly Wild at Heart overtook them. (I'm hoping Levi will read it and write something about it.) It's the first in the single-volume Sailor and Lula: The Complete Novels, which Seven Stories put out last year.

*

I like this fake book cover by Scott at Erasing:

Vamos

Novelist Roderigo Fresan on Charles Portis:

A LA HORA SEÑALADA “Como Cormac McCarty; pero divertido”, sintetizó Ed Park en la revista The Believer. Y la definición es ocurrente, maliciosa pero, a la vez, apropiada. Porque True Grit funciona como la contracara complementaria e inseparable de Meridiano de sangre, ese otro western bíblico donde la sangre corre y no deja de correr. Y hay signos y señales que la reciente atención sobre Portis –vía una de las películas de vaqueros que más recaudó en toda la historia y el film de más éxito en toda la filmografía de los Coen– tal vez signifique que algo nuevo se viene acercando desde el Oeste o del Este. Antes de todo esto, la editorial Overlook reeditó su obra completa con éxito y fuegos artificiales por parte de crítica y nuevos seguidores y Portis comenzó a publicar artículos autobiográficos en revistas así como un relato de fantasmas titulado “I Don’t Talk Service No More” en The Atlantic. Quién sabe. Portis ya avisó que irá al cine pero no dirá nada a la salida. Hace poco, alguien lo alcanzó por las calles de Little Rock, lo invitó unas cervezas, Portis accedió advirtiendo antes que no estaba concediendo una entrevista y que nada de lo que dijera podía ser citado entre comillas y, finalmente, dejó un billete de cinco dólares. Leí la crónica del encuentro hace poco, en The New York Times y –como suele ocurrir cuando se lee a Portis– me quedé con ganas de más, de saber más y de que Portis dijera algo como “Tengo nuevo libro. Estoy corrigiéndolo”. Pero no. Y aquel que se lo cruzó y lo interceptó, un tal Carlo Rotella (nombre muy pero muy portisiano) cerró todo evocando aquella perfecta línea con la que abre un capítulo de Gringos: “Te pasas la vida dejando cosas para después hasta que un buen día te levantas de la cama y te dices ‘Hoy voy a cambiarle el aceite a mi camión’”.

Vamos.

*

A rocky translation via Google:

At the appointed time "as Cormac McCarthy, but fun," summed Ed Park in The Believer. And the definition is witty, mischievous, but at the same time appropriate. For True Grit serves as the complementary and inseparable counterpart of Blood Meridian that other western Bible where blood flows and continues to run. And there are signs and signals that the recent attention to Portis, via one of the cowboy movies that grossed more in history and the most successful film in the entire filmography of the Coen-may mean that something new has been approached from the West or East. Before this, the editorial Overlook reissued their complete work successfully and fireworks by critics and new fans and Portis autobiographical began publishing articles in magazines and a ghost story titled "I Do not Talk Service No More" in The Atlantic. Who knows. Portis already said it will go to the movies but did not say anything to the output. Recently, someone will hit the streets of Little Rock, invited a few beers, Portis agreed earlier warning that it was giving an interview and that anything he said could be cited in quotes and finally left a five dollar bill . I read the chronicle of the meeting recently in The New York Times and, as often happens when reading a Portis-I kept wanting more, to know more and that Portis would say something like "I have new book. I'm correcting it. " But no. And anyone who crossed him and intercepted him, a certain Carlo Rotella (very, very portisiano name) closed all evoke that perfect line that opens a chapter of Gringos: "You spend your life and then leaving things until one fine day you get out of bed and you say 'I'm going to change the oil in my truck'. "

Come on.

More on "Norwood"

Our man in Arkansas, John Moran, sends us Shock Cinema's 2001 review of Norwood, the film based on Charles Portis's novel. Starring Glen Campbell and Kim Darby (who played LaBoeuf and Mattie in True Grit), the film inspires Steve Puchalski to wonder: "What were the producers thinking?!"

I started this post a week ago

I. Jenny D on her new feline: "His name is Max, and he used to frequent a fruit stall in Brighton Beach."

II. Speaking of which: Over Xmas I reread—quite at random!—A Cricket in Times Square...and I just saw David Ulin's appreciation of it at the L.A. Times. I didn't know it was the book's 50th anniversary!

All in all, I enjoyed revisiting the book—though I did raise my eyebrows during the Chinatown scenes...

III. Dogs in New York: The New Yorker
on the NYC cult, ca. , around Charles Portis's great novel The Dog of the South

IV. Speaking of Portis: My friend in Little Rock, John Moran, alerted me to this tidbit in a local paper: one of its bloggers noticed that the film version of Portis's first novel, Norwood, is now streaming on Netflix!

Joe Namath and Dom DeLuise are in it...

Here's what I said about it in a footnote to my 2003 Portis piece in The Believer:

If the film of True Grit somewhat revises the book, the less-known screen adaptation of Norwood (Jack Haley, Jr., 1970), also scripted by Marguerite Roberts, scrambles both Norwood and True Grit. Glen Campbell (Grit’s LaBoeuf) here plays Norwood, and Kim Darby (Mattie) is Rita Lee Chipman; Mattie’s unacknowledged teenage longing for LaBoeuf (“If he is still alive and should happen to read these pages, I will be happy to hear from him,” Mattie writes at the novel’s close) becomes consummated in Norwood, or just about. Roberts’s Grit script shunted Mattie in favor of the bigger-than-life Rooster; for this film the screenwriter dilutes some of Norwood’s cool by revealing that Rita Lee has been made pregnant by another man before they meet—a significant, possibly feminist tweak of the original plot. (Incidentally, the contra-hippie theme that runs through Portis, made more explicit in Gringos, is elaborated in this film, most notably when Campbell-as-Norwood takes the stage after a numbing sitar exhibition. He sings a good-timey country number presciently called “Repo Man” to the uncomprehending, wigged-out crowd, until a more lysergically inclined combo unseats him.) As it’s unlikely I’ll ever have the chance to write about this film again, let it be noted that the date of Norwood’s theatrical release, a year after Midnight Cowboy won the Academy Award for Best Picture, lends Campbell-as-Norwood a certain Voightian frisson during the scenes in New York, where he sticks out like a Stetsoned sore thumb. Which makes the bit in Cowboy where Voight regards himself in the mirror and says approvingly, “John Wayne,” a sort of anticipatory gloss on Wayne co-star Campbell’s future appearance in Gotham. (The celluloid True Grit also spawned a 1975 sequel, Rooster Cogburn, starring Wayne and Katharine Hepburn.)

V. Speaking of New York: Doree Shafrir put together a list of her favorite New York fiction...Personal Days is in there between Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Richard Price's Lush Life!

Roald Dahl on True Grit

The back of the first edition of True Grit has blurbs by Roald Dahl, Walker Percy, Robert Crichton, William Eastlake, and A.C. Greene. Here's Dahl had to say:

"True Grit is the best novel to come my way for a very long time. I was going to say it was the best novel to come my way since...Then I stopped. Since what? What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last twenty? I do not know. I expect some have, but I cannot recall them right now. Marvelous it is. He hasn't put a foot wrong anywhere. What a writer!"

Now that's a blurb!™

Counting down to TRUE GRIT...

...remember when I compared Bill Clinton's prose to that of fellow Arkansan Charles Portis? A sample:

ON BELIEF

Clinton: "Baptists require an informed profession of faith; they want people to know what they are doing, as opposed to the Methodists' infant-sprinkling ritual that took Hillary and her brothers out of hell's way." [p. 30]

Portis: "[The Cumberland Presbyterians] broke with the Presbyterian Church because they did not believe a preacher needed a lot of formal education. That is all right but they are not sound on Election. . . . I confess it is a hard doctrine, running contrary to our earthly ideas of fair play, but I can see no way around it." [TG, p. 109]

Arms and the woman

I would recommend Charles Portis to anyone (and I think I have recommended him to everyone), but I was especially eager for Levi to read him. He did...and I've been on pins and needles wondering what he thought. (Is it possible he didn't love it?)

My anxieties have disappeared—here's Levi on Portis's The Dog of the South! After some comparisons with Kafka-as-laughmeister and Melville's The Confidence-Man, Levi writes:

The result is unlike anything else I've ever read, crammed from start to finish with oddballs, dropouts, and failures, all of whom cling to this world all the more intensely for the fact that they can't quite figure out what to do with it. Ray Midge, the energetically sad-sack copy editor who is the novel's protagonist, seems to regard all the world's facts as equally important; though paring them down or assigning importance might reveal hints of a pattern, it's as if he feels an obligation not to discriminate, as if each and every detail deserves his full care--as if the world is a manuscript, and his job is to check it out. It's as admirable as it is crazy, and when he sets out on a road trip to Latin America to retrieve his runaway wife, the reader can't help but harbor some hope that, when he finds her, she'll see his awkward strangeness that way, too.

He includes some trademark Portis dialogue, too:

"The singing school was an entirely different thing, Melba. This was a restaurant they were talking about. Little Bit of Austria. Sybil was going to sing some kind of foreign songs to the customers while they were eating. She said she was a night-club singer, and a dancer too. She planned to dance all around people's tables while they were trying to eat. I thought these night clubs had beautiful young girls to do that kind of thing but Sybil was almost as old as Reo."

"Older," said Melba. "Don't you remember her arms?"

(Moreover, I'm also remembering that Melba "broke the transition problem wide open" in her own writing by starting every paragraph with "Moreover.")


____________
Courtesy of Parkus Grammaticus, here's a brief rundown of some of my writing on Portis (one of those writers who I seem to write about even when I'm writing about something else):

Longish Believer feature
Comparing Bill Clinton's My Life with the CP oeuvre
Portis's Invisible Library entry
A Donald E. Westlake character sort of reminds me of Ray Midge
A few more words on DOTS-as-comic-novel for Bookforum

Mattie's sense of snow

"The snow came thicker and the flakes grew bigger, as big as goose feathers, and they were not falling down like rain but rather flying dead level into our faces. In the space of four hours it collected on the ground to a depth of sixth or seven inches." —Charles Portis, True Grit

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In fake True Grit casting news, what if the Coen Bros. got Shia La Beouf to play Laboeuf?

New "Grit"

(From Brandon)
(More on True Grit and Portis here, including a report on the little-seen screen version of CP's Norwood)

From the Parkives

Jenny's link to a review of Taylor Branch's Clinton book reminded me of some little Portis-like goodies from My Life, which I wrote about here:

ON BELIEF

Clinton: "Baptists require an informed profession of faith; they want people to know what they are doing, as opposed to the Methodists' infant-sprinkling ritual that took Hillary and her brothers out of hell's way." [p. 30]

Portis: "[The Cumberland Presbyterians] broke with the Presbyterian Church because they did not believe a preacher needed a lot of formal education. That is all right but they are not sound on Election. . . . I confess it is a hard doctrine, running contrary to our earthly ideas of fair play, but I can see no way around it." [TG, p. 109]

READ HARD — Believer Music Issue — Beatles post-Beatles — AUGUST 5 PARK-LIT EVENT

I. Read Hard is out! It's a collection of some great pieces from the last five years of The Believer. We could have easily filled several more volumes of equal thickness—and hopefully we will someday...As an appetizer, McSweeney's excerpts my essay on the work of Charles Portis, a piece that appeared in the very first issue of The Believer, back in 2003. I've always like this list of food in Portis's first novel, Norwood:

With reportorial precision, and without condescension, Norwood captures all manner of reflex babble, the extravagant grammar of commercial appeal − stray words bathed in the exhaust of a Trailways bus. This omnivorous little book has a high metabolism, digesting everything from homemade store signs (i do not loan tools) and military-base graffiti to actuarial come-ons and mail-order ads for discount diamonds. Appropriately enough, the characters are constantly chowing down. On one leg of the journey, Edmund B. Ratner (formerly the "world's smallest perfect man," before he porked out) and Norwood's new sweetheart, Rita Lee Chipman, are described as having eaten their way through the Great Smoky Mountains. Norwood's decidedly humble (call it American) menu nails the country's midcentury gastronomy with a precision that today takes on near-archaeological value: canned peaches, marshmallows, Vienna sausages, cottage cheese with salt and pepper, a barbecue sandwich washed down with NuGrape, a potted-meat sandwich with mustard, butter on ham sandwiches, biscuit and Brer Rabbit syrup sandwiches, an Automat hot dog on a dish of baked beans, Cokes and corn chips and Nabs crackers, a Clark bar, peanuts fizzing in Pepsi, a frozen Milky Way.

II. The Believer Music Issue is also out! Q: What's in it? A: A lot.

Arthur Phillips (The Song Is You) on writing about music (or, as they say, dancing about architecture); Brandon Stosuy interviews Phil Elverum (here's a taste); Joe Hagan—author of the classic Bill Fox piece that rounds out Read Hard—on another underappreciated songwriter, Benji Hughes (the online version features two streaming songs that will make your day); Blvr editor Ross Simonini does double duty, writing about Jamaican dancehall and violence, and interviewing Radiohead's Thom Yorke; Greil Marcus; Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black...a long piece by Michelle Tea...Justin Taylor with an excellent appreciation of David Berman's Actual Air, upon its 10th anniversary...a piece on Lawrence Welk...Ben Greenman...Hilton Als "performing" a sentence (à la Barthelme) about PJ Harvey...the inimitable Paul Collins, and more! Double issue! Get it before the newsstands run out! Because they always do with this one...

And I haven't even mentioned the Daniel Handler-curated CD, a real ear-opener, featuring names you know—Lloyd Cole (?!!!), Dave Wakeling, the Waterboys' Mike Scott, Sam Phillips, Stephen Duffy (!!?), David Sylvian (!!?!), Lisa Germano, and more—all great, but you cannot miss the Mike Scott song. It is an EPIC, like the best Waterboys songs (though also different).

(Blvr music issue trivia question: Who wrote an article for an earlier Blvr music issue entitled "The Song Is You"?)

III. One last thing I'll mention—David L. Ulin imagines the ideal Beatles '70s albums, using material from their disparate solo albums. In a nice bit of cross-magazine fertilization (eh??), the Utne Reader blog did an "imeem" playlist of the Ulin-imagined post-Fab Four album, Too Many People. It's fun to listen to...and it kicks off with "Imagine"...

IV. I won't be in New York for this, alas, and neither will Heidi, but the Believer and McSweeney's will be taking the stage for a Park-Lit event next Wednesday, August 5, at Bryant Park, 12:30 p.m.—lunchtime edification! (Here's more info at New York mag.)

Aforementioned music issue contribs Messrs. Phillips, Hagan, and Stosuy will be there, as will two new McSwy's novelists: Jessica Anthony (The Convalescent) and my old-PTSNBN colleague James Hannaham (God Says No). Amanda Stern hosts. (Copies of Read Hard and the music issue and the novels should be available.)

Postscript to the Invisible Library — Parker druthers

One of the longer titles in the Invisible Library is Mattie Ross's unpublished MS, “You will now listen to the sentence of the law, Odus Wharton, which is that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead dead! May God, whose laws you have broken and before whose dread tribunal you must appear, have mercy upon your soul. Being a personal recollection of Isaac C. Parker, the famous Border Judge."

Readers of Charles Portis's True Grit get a glimpse of Parker; now, Bookgasm reports, Loren D. Estleman has written a book about the (real-life) "hanging judge" of Arkansas:

Parker believed that executions should be public — not to provide entertainment, but to teach a moral lesson. Murderers and rapists should receive in a public display the wages of their sins. With hangman George Maledon as the man with the rope, and deputies of the caliber of “The Three Guardsmen” — Bill Tilghman, Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas —the Hanging Judge was ready to get to work....

Work for Parker was made up of holding court six days a week, for up to 10 hours a day. In 21 years as the judge presiding over the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, Parker sentenced 156 men and four women to death by hanging. Only 79 eventually dangled from one of the six nooses — “Parker’s Tears” — for which Maledon cared.

(From Elijah)

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Speaking of Parkers: Darwyn Cooke is promoting his graphic novel adaptation of the first of Richard Stark's Parker novels, The Hunter, by giving away copies of the book to the best five reader illustrations. Here's my favorite so far, by George Pfromm II:

More wrongitude

John Anthony West on Portis's Masters of Atlantis, in the NYT, 1985:

Mr. Portis followed that novel with ''The Dog of the South,'' again based upon a quest. A young man sets out from Arkansas for Mexico on the trail of his runaway wife, her lover and his stolen Ford Torino (it's the car he really wants back). Though well received, ''The Dog of the South'' lacks the drive and purity of ''True Grit.'' There are ominous, extended sojourns on the other side of that elusive line that separates being funny from trying to be funny.

Unfortunately, ''Masters of Atlantis'' rarely veers to the right side of that line. For some unknown reason, Mr. Portis has chosen to ignore the rich and varied material offered by history.

Hot fuss

Vincent Canby in 1969:

I must say that I couldn't quite understand what all the fuss was about when the Charles Portis novel hit the best-selling lists last year. The book was strictly freeze-dried nostalgia, which imitated the flavor of nineteenth-century American writing without ever making you believe it was as good as the real thing (Mark Twain, Bret Harte).

The movie has its own formidable heritage with which it has to contend, but since the men who made it are the ones who contributed to that same heritage, True Grit seems more authentic as a film than as a piece of written literature.

Last Vulgar thoughts

It seems likely* that Lethem's upcoming novel is a tip of the hat to that song on the Vulgar Boatmen's second album. And I always assumed that the group's first album, 1990's You and Your Sister, got its title from the song by ex–Big Star member Chris Bell. (The VB album also has a very good song by the same name, though not a cover of the Bell song.)

Bell was recording a solo album when he died in a car crash in 1978; it was released as I Am the Cosmos by Rykodisc in 1992, around the time I started listening to the Vulgar Boatmen. Whether this reflects Bell's final vision for his first album (six years in the making) can't be known—my feeling is that it's a shadow of his ideal version. The title track and "You and Your Sister" are seared in my memory—gorgeous, stately, the voice making hairpin turns in the ether—but the rest of the album has faded. (There are 15 tracks, but the last three are alternate takes of the two aforementioned tunes, which Amazon tells me shared either side of a single, the one solo release in Bell's lifetime.)

(Much more detail at this site called "Wikipedia.")


I like the idea of the Vulgar Boatmen titling their first album after a song by an artist who was barely there. (The VB album precedes the release of the Bell album by two years, so they must have been fans of the single—released, Amazon tells me, by dB'er Chris Stamey's Car label, the name grimly ironic given Bell's death.) Hopefully the Lethem book will create an uptick in interest in the Vulgar Boatmen...I'd like to end today's sermon with this quote from Charles Portis's Gringos:

Frank didn’t write anything, or at least he didn’t publish anything… The Olmecs didn’t like to show their art around either. They buried it twenty-five feet deep in the earth and came back with spades to check up on it every ten years or so, to make sure it was still there, unviolated. Then they covered it up again.





*But—maybe I'm completely off base! Check out what the Driftwood Singers have posted—a Roky Erikson tune also entitled "You Don't Love Me Yet," from 1985, which might actually be closer to the time period of the new Lethem book. (Curious iPod-as-memory fact/coincidence: In the early ’90s, I liked the band Poi Dog Pondering; the only PDP songs that have survived in iPodded form are the covers of "Love Vigilantes" and...Roky Erikson's "I Had to Tell You," which came up on the shuffle yesterday. And the only currently iPodded VB song I have is "You Don't Love Me Yet." This all connects somehow, yes?)

UPDATE: Breaking news — Dizzyhead Benno reports that the book's epigraphs are quotes from both the VB song and the RE song. Brilliant!

UPDATE (2/23): From Rob Sheffield's memoir Love Is a Mix Tape—check out the first song on the first mix (via Very Short List):