Jordan Dotson

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Works of War

August 17, 2021 By Jordan

The Boeotian and Chalcidian peoples were tamed
by the sons of Athenians in works of war,
Who quelled their arrogance in dark bonds of iron,
And set up these horses as a tithe for Pallas.

…from Herodotus‘s Histories, Book 5, 5.78, describing the inscription on a bronze chariot dedicated at the gateway of the Acropolis in the 5th century BC.

There’s something about a world where men conclude war with works of poetry and sculpture.

Something.

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: Herodotus, Histories

Paris Review “The Art of Fiction” Complete List

July 24, 2021 By Jordan

The nearly 250 interviews within the Paris Review “The Art of Fiction” series contain, I suspect, the only education any hopeful writer of fiction ever needs. Perhaps far more. It is a remarkable achievement. There are no MFAs more valuable.

Were one to read each interview, and the authors’ work, it would take lifetimes, and be ridiculous. But to read the work of every author they reference, their inspirations – the Chekhovs, Balzacs, Wolfes, Sophocleses, Maupassants, and one another – an unusually devoted and introverted teenager might complete this effort by the end of high school. Then, they’d walk away terrified, either persuaded to never write again, or to never do anything else.

The numbering conventions are sometimes odd. The interview styles vary. But for the $49 price of a year’s subscription, this series offers a modern library of Alexandria, worth more than a dozen literature degrees, and hopefully this list will make it easier to browse.

Happy reading,

—Jordan

The Paris Review: The Art of Fiction

1. E. M. Forster
2. François Mauriac
3. Graham Greene
4. Irvin Shaw (Part 1 and 2)
5. William Styron
6. Alberto Moravia
7. Joyce Cary
8. Ralph Ellison
9. Georges Simenon
10. James Thurber
11. Nelson Algren
12. William Faulkner
13. Dorothy Parker
14. Isak Dinesen
15. Françoise Sagan
16. Thornton Wilder
17. Truman Capote
18. Robert Penn Warren
19. Frank O’Conner
20. Angus Wilson
21. Ernest Hemingway
22. Henry Green
22. James Jones
23. Lawrence Durrell
24. Aldous Huxley
25. Boris Posternak
26. Ilya Ehrenburg
27. Mary McCarthy
28. Henry Miller
29. Katherine Anne Porter
30. Evelyn Waugh
31. S.J. Perelman
32. Norman Mailer
33. Louis-Ferdinand Céline
34. Jean Cocteau
35. Simone de Beauvoir
36. William S. Burroughs
37. Saul Bellow
38. Blaise Cendrars
39. Jorge Luis Borges
40. Vladimir Nabokov
41. Jack Kerouac
42. Isaac Bashevis Singer
43. John Updike
44. John Dos Passos
45. John Steinbeck
46. Jerzy Kosinski
47. Eudora Welty
48. Anthony Burgess
49. Christopher Isherwood
50. Gore Vidal
51. Joseph Heller
52. Bernard Malamud
53. J. P. Donleavy
59. Kingsly Amis
60. P. G. Wodehouse
61. Stanley Elkin
62. John Cheever
62. Erskine Caldwell
63. P. L. Travers
63. William Goyen
64. Kurt Vonnegut
64. Jean Rhys
65. William Gass
65. Rebecca West
66. Donald Barthelme
66. Marguerite Young
67. Paul Bowles
67. Jessamyn West
68. Carlos Fuentes
68. Anthony Powell
69. James M. Cain
69. Gabriel García Márquez
70. Margaret Drabble
71. Malcolm Cowley
71. Joan Didion
71. William Maxwell
72. Joyce Carol Oates
73. John Gardner
74. Heinrich Böll
75. Guillermo Cabrera Infante
76. Raymond Carver
77. Nadine Gordimer
78. James Baldwin
79. Elie Wiesel
80. Arthur Koestler
81. Milan Kundera
82. Edna O’Brien
83. Julio Cortázar
84. Philip Roth
85. J.G. Ballard
86. John Barth
87. Elizabeth Hardwick
88. Rosamund Lehmann
89. Thomas McGuane
90. Robert Stone
91. Alaine Robbe-Grillet
92. John Hersey
93. John Irving
94. E.L. Doctorow
95. Cynthia Ozick
96. Francine du Plessix Gray
97. Walker Percy
98. Anita Brookner
99. Peter Taylor
100. Hortense Calisher
101. William Gaddis
102. Dorris Lessing
103. Marguerite Yourcenar
104. Jim Harrison
105. Edmund White
106. John Mortimer
107. Robertson Davies
108. William Trevor
109. John Fowles
110. Elizabeth Spencer
111. William Kennedy
112. Josef Škvorecký
113. Max Frisch
114. Manuel Puig
115. Nathalie Sarraute
116. Mary Lee Settle
117. Iris Murdoch
118. Wallace Stegner
119. Maya Angelou
120. Mario Vargas Llosa
121. Margaret Atwood
122. V.S. Pritchett
123. Tom Wolfe
124. Günter Grass
125. Wright Morris
126. Harold Brodkey
127. Reynolds Price
128. Claude Simon
129. Naguid Mahfouz
130. Italo Calvino
131. Grace Paley
132. Mark Helprin
133. James Salter
134. Toni Morrison
135. Don Delillo
136. Ken Kesey
137. Alice Munro
138. Louis Auchincloss
139. Chinua Achebe
140. Primo Levi
141. P.D. James
142. Patrick O’Brian
143. Susan Sontag
144. Richard Price
145. Camilo José Cela
146. William F. Buckley Jr.
147. Richard Ford
148. Amos Oz
149. John le Carré
150. Jeanette Winterson
151. Martin Amis
152. Russell Banks
153. Ismail Kadare
154. V.S. Naipaul
155. José Saramago
156. William Styron
157. Peter Matthiessen
158. Shelby Foote
159. Tahar Ben Jelloun
160. Mavis Gallant
161. T. Coraghessan Boyle
162. Gustaw Herling
163. William T. Vollmann
164. Beryl Bainbridge
165. Julian Barnes
166. Rick Moody
167. Lorrie Moore
168. A. S. Byatt
169. Budd Schulberg
170. Luisa Valenzuela
171. John Edgar Wideman
172. Louis Begley
173. Ian McEwan
174. Guy Davenport
175. Richard Powers
176. Amy Hempel
177. Jonathan Lethem
178. Paul Auster
179. Jim Crace
180. Andrea Barrett
181. Paula Fox
182. Haruki Murakami
183. Tobias Wolff
184. Barry Hannah
185. Shirley Hazzard
186. Salman Rushdie
187. Orhan Pamuk
188. Peter Carey
189. Stephen King
190. Javier Marías
191. Harry Mathews
192. Jorge Semprún
193. Norman Mailer
194. David Grossman
195. Kenzaburo Oe
196. Kazuo Ishiguro
197. Umberto Eco
198. Marilynne Robinson
199. Annie Proulx
200. John Banville
201. James Ellroy
202. Ha Jin
203. Ray Bradbury
204. David Mitchell
205. Norman Rush
206. Michel Houellebecq
207. Jonathan Franzen
208. Louise Erdrich
209. Ann Beattie
210. Samuel R. Delany
211. William Gibson
212. Nicholson Baker
213. Dennis Cooper
214. Alan Hollinghurst
215. Jeffrey Eugenides
216. Bret Easton Ellis
217. Roberto Calasso
218. Deborah Eisenberg
219. Mark Leyner
220. Imre Kertész
221. Ursula K. Le Guin
222. Edward P. Jones
223. Joy Williams
224. Aharon Appelfeld
225. Herta Müller
226. Hilary Mantel
227. Lydia Davis
228. Elena Ferrante
229. Jane Smiley
230. Dag Solstad
231. Jay McInerney
232. Alasdair Gray
233. Elias Khoury
234. Walter Mosley
235. Percival Everett
236. Ali Smith
237. Dany Laferrière
238. Elena Poniatowska
239. Charles Johnson
240. László Krasznahorkai
241. Penelope Lively
242. Sam Lipsyte
243. Pat Barker
244. Alice McDermott
245. George Saunders
246. Rachel Cusk
247. Enrique Vila-Matas
248. Allan Gurganus
249. Arundhati Roy
250. To be continued

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot

As a man incapable of dancing, I agree

May 18, 2021 By Jordan

I submit that there is nothing that anybody in the world has ever done that is more civilized or sophisticated than to dance elegantly, which is to state with your total physical being an affirmative attitude toward the sheer fact of existence.

…writer and music critic, Albert Murray, describing swing jazz in From the Briarpatch Files

Filed Under: Hip tunage, Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: Albert Murray, From the Briarpatch Files

Poets

April 1, 2021 By Jordan

If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses’ madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.

…Socrates was as weesh as they come, but in Phaedrus, Plato got this right.

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: Phaedrus, Plato

An affirming flame

January 3, 2021 By Jordan

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

…from W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939“

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: W.H. Auden

How Men Comfort Themselves

January 1, 2021 By Jordan

I wouldn’t call Musashi ordinary.

But he is. That’s what’s extraordinary about him. He’s not content with relying on whatever natural gifts he may have. Knowing he’s ordinary, he’s always trying to improve himself. No one appreciates the agonizing effort he’s had to make. Now that his years of training have yielded such spectacular results, everybody’s talking about his ‘god-given talent.’ That’s how men who don’t try very hard comfort themselves.

…Musashi, by Eiji Yoshikawa

It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

…Ernest Hemingway

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: Eiji Yoshikawa, Ernest Hemingway, Musashi

Grace is Somehow Violent

November 18, 2020 By Jordan

Zeus, who guided men to think,

who has laid it down that wisdom

comes alone through suffering.

Still there drips in sleep against the heart

grief of memory; against

our will temperance comes.

From the gods who sit in grandeur

grace is somehow violent.

…Strophe C, lines 181-182, Agamemnon by Aeschylus, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Haiku

November 16, 2020 By Jordan

To con-vey one’s mood

In sev-en-teen syll-able-s

Is ve-ry dif-fic

…John Cooper Clarke, by way of Nick Cave‘s remarkable Red Hand Files

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: John Cooper Clarke, Nick Cave

Two golden mangoes bobbing for breastplates

August 11, 2020 By Jordan

Hector Mannix, waterworks clerk, San Juan, has entered a lion,
Boysie, two golden mangoes bobbing for breastplates, barges
like Cleopatra down her river, making style.
“Join us,” they shout. “Oh God, child, you can’t dance?”
But somewhere in that whirlwind’s radiance
a child, rigged like a bat, collapses, sobbing.

…from “Mass Man,” in Derek Walcott‘s The Gulf and Other Poems.

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: Derek Walcott

A faint smell of sulphur

July 22, 2020 By Jordan

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is “merely relative,” is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.

…Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: Modern Philosophy, Roger Scruton

The Great Stories, the Ones That Live On and On

July 8, 2020 By Jordan

Thus, in criticizing fiction we must be careful to distinguish those books that satisfy our own particular unconscious needs — the ones that make us say, “I like this book, although I don’t really know why” — from those that satisfy the deep unconscious needs of almost everybody. The latter are undoubtedly the great stories, the ones that live on and on for generations and centuries. As long as man is man, they will go on satisfying him, giving him something that he needs to have — a belief in justice and understanding and the allaying of anxiety. We do not know, we cannot be sure, that the real world is good. But the world of a great story is somehow good. We want to live there as often and as long as we can.

…from Mortimer J. Adler‘s How to Read a Book, which, I admit, is not an easy read.

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot, Prose Porn Tagged With: How to Read a Book, Mortimer J Adler

Utopias, Rock and Roll Bars, and Writing in China

June 26, 2020 By Jordan

A few weeks ago, Spittoon Monthly published a story of mine, and today they followed it up with a fun and not-too-lengthy interview.

In it, we discussed my fifteen years of writing in China, the raucous Shenzhen arts scene during the late-2000s, utopias, transnationalism, and how one manages a writing habit as the world seems to dissolve around you.

Really, in the realm of literary magazines, Spittoon does a champion’s work. They also have a rocking graphic designer:

 

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: Spittoon Monthly

Three rules for writing a novel

April 22, 2020 By Jordan

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

…the great and powerful Somerset Maugham

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: Somerset Maugham

The Oldest Spell

March 8, 2020 By Jordan

Storytelling is the first and oldest spell, cast around lamps and fires since before there were cities, alphabets, and domesticated herbivores. The lives we live through stories intermix with our own memories, and because of stories our experiences multiply; our apprehension of the humanity of others is broadened, improved, and complicated, and each voice we hear becomes a small part of our own experience on this earth.

…Anthony Doerr, from his introduction to the 2019 edition of The Best American Short Stories

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: Anthony Doerr, The Best American Short Stories

Your poems

February 8, 2020 By Jordan

Upon your penitential morning,

some skull must rub its memory with ashes,

some mind must squat down howling in your dust,

some hand must crawl and recollect your rubbish,

someone must write your poems.

…from “Mass Man,” by Derek Walcott, in The Gulf and Other Poems

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: Derek Walcott

We Cannot Walk Alone

January 20, 2020 By Jordan

….their destiny is tied up with our destiny.

…their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

…from what may be the single greatest piece of writing the American continent has ever produced, delivered as a speech on August 28th, 1963 by Martin Luther King Jr., whose birth we celebrate today.

Both listening to and rereading this speech are visceral, unifying joys. It gives you chills. It’s the height of achievement with the English language, and it’s as important today as it’s ever been.

This is why young men and women fall in love with the composition of the written word: the belief that they too can make people feel something so immense that their lives, and their worlds, are irrevocably changed.

I urge you to read the great man’s greatest speech today. It will remind you of all that is good and worthwhile in humanity.

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot, Prose Porn Tagged With: I Have a Dream, Martin Luther King Jr

The Pleasure Principle

October 29, 2019 By Jordan

It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects or things normally regarded as complicated. Take, for instance, the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. The stages are interdependent and all necessary. If there has been no preliminary feeling, the device has nothing to reproduce and the reader will experience nothing. If the second stage has not been well done, the device will not deliver the goods, or will deliver only a few goods to a few people, or will stop delivering them after an absurdly short while. And if there is no third stage, no successful reading, ,the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all.

…the first paragraph of The Pleasure Principle by Philip Larkin. Feel free to substitute poems for songs, essays, or the baking of a cake.

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: Philip Larkin

Authority

May 23, 2019 By Jordan

This philosophical way of speculation is not unpleasant among friends in a free conversation; but there is no room for it in the courts of princes, where great affairs are carried on by authority.

…from Utopia, by Sir Thomas More.

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: Sir Thomas More, Utopia

Live Like a Mighty River

November 4, 2018 By Jordan

In 1986, Ted Hughes wrote this letter to his son, who suffered from depression.

It is a small miracle of words.

Dear Nick,

I hope things are clearing. It did cross my mind, last summer, that you were under strains of an odd sort. I expect, like many another, you’ll spend your life oscillating between fierce relationships that become tunnel traps, and sudden escapes into wide freedom when the whole world seems to be just there for the taking.

Nobody’s solved it. You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you’ve tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.

I came to America, when I was 27, and lived there three years as if I were living inside a damart sock — I lived in there with your mother. We made hardly any friends, no close ones, and neither of us ever did anything the other didn’t want wholeheartedly to do.

(It meant, Nicholas, that meeting any female between 17 and 39 was out. Your mother banished all her old friends, girlfriends, in case one of them set eyes on me — presumably. And if she saw me talking with a girl student, I was in court. Foolish of her, and foolish of me to encourage her to think her laws were reasonable. But most people are the same. I was quite happy to live like that, for some years.)

Since the only thing we both wanted to do was write, our lives disappeared into the blank page. My three years in America disappeared like a Rip Van Winkle snooze. Why didn’t I explore America then? I wanted to. I knew it was there. Ten years later we could have done it, because by then we would have learned, maybe, that one person cannot live within another’s magic circle, as an enchanted prisoner.

So take this new opportunity to look about and fill your lungs with that fantastic land, while it and you are still there. That was a most curious and interesting remark you made about feeling, occasionally, very childish, in certain situations.

Nicholas, don’t you know about people this first and most crucial fact: every single one is, and is painfully every moment aware of it, still a child. To get beyond the age of about eight is not permitted to this primate — except in a very special way, which I’ll try to explain.

When I came to Lake Victoria, it was quite obvious to me that in some of the most important ways you are much more mature than I am. And your self-reliance, your independence, your general boldness in exposing yourself to new and to-most-people-very-alarming situations, and your phenomenal ability to carry through your plans to the last practical detail (I know it probably doesn’t feel like that to you, but that’s how it looks to the rest of us, who simply look on in envy), is the sort of real maturity that not one in a thousand ever come near. As you know.

But in many other ways obviously you are still childish — how could you not be, you alone among mankind? It’s something people don’t discuss, because it’s something most people are aware of only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle.

But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it.

So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances. And when we meet people this is what we usually meet. And if this is the only part of them we meet we’re likely to get a rough time, and to end up making ‘no contact’.

But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It’s an intangible thing. But when they too, sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child.

Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced.

Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim.

And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth having, or it’s worth having only as a tool — for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful.

So there it is. And the sense of itself, in that little being, at its core, is what it always was. But since that artificial secondary self took over the control of life around the age of eight, and relegated the real, vulnerable, supersensitive, suffering self back into its nursery, it has lacked training, this inner prisoner.

And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line — unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears.

And yet that’s the moment it wants. That’s where it comes alive — even if only to be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt. And that’s where it calls up its own resources—not artificial aids, picked up outside, but real inner resources, real biological ability to cope, and to turn to account, and to enjoy.

That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember.

But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells — he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself.

The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

It was a saying about noble figures in old Irish poems — he would give his hawk to any man that asked for it, yet he loved his hawk better than men nowadays love their bride of tomorrow. He would mourn a dog with more grief than men nowadays mourn their fathers.

And that’s how we measure out our real respect for people — by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate — and enjoy.

End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot, Prose Porn Tagged With: Ted Hughes

What you get with goddesses

September 10, 2018 By Jordan

Destiny, not guilt, was enough
For Actaeon. It is no crime
To lose your way in a dark wood.

…Ted Hughes, “Acteon,” from Tales from Ovid

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: Tales from Ovid, Ted Hughes

Show and Tell

December 4, 2017 By Jordan

For many years, I’ve taught young writers that there are only two things that matter, two things they need to learn, and that the entire universe of literature is contained within those elements: images, and (honest) emotions. Now, it seems, I’ve been proven correct:

Notably, readers did not at all agree on what poems they found appealing, an outcome that supports the notion that people have different tastes; nonetheless, there is common ground—vividness of imagery and emotional valence—in what explains these tastes, even if they vary.

…What Gives Poetry Its Aesthetic Appeal? New Research Has Well-Versed Answer (NYU)

It’s always fun to see the academy catching up to that which artists and musicians have known for, oh, fifteen thousand years?

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot

The Beautiful Toilet

September 17, 2017 By Jordan

Blue, blue is the grass about the river
And the willows have overfilled the close garden.
And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth.
White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door.
Slender, she puts forth a slender hand;

And she was a courtezan in the old days,
And she has married a sot,
Who now goes drunkenly out
And leaves her too much alone.

…”The Beautiful Toilet,” written by Mei Sheng in the second century BC, as interpreted by Ezra Pound in Cathay.

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot Tagged With: Ezra Pound, He Sen, Mei Sheng

Talking Magic

August 25, 2017 By Jordan

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

…Mark Twain, from Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

For those (like myself) who still read Twain with a kind of absorbing awe, and also those (not like myself) who read academic writing, I’m quite proud to point to this month’s issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, which features a lengthy work of mine titled “The (Magical) Voice of Community in Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger,” in which I argue that Twain was America’s (and perhaps the world’s?) first magical realist novelist, and also that magical realism itself is little more than…well…how southerners talk.

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot, Stuff I wrote

“L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle”

September 28, 2016 By Jordan

Nothing’s as far away as love is,

not even the new stars,

Though something is moving them

We hope in our direction, albeit their skin’s not on fire.

…from “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle,” in Charles Wright‘s 2014 collection, Caribou.

Moments like these remind me of Don Williams’s classic song from 1980, “Good Ole Boys Like Me,” which is in my estimation among the ten or so greatest country songs ever written. Its chorus begins: “I can still hear the soft southern wind in the live oak trees, and those Williams boys they still mean a lot to me, Hank and Tennessee.” This lyric is stunning for ten thousand reasons, but strikes me in a personal way, as this is precisely how I feel about the Wright boys, James and Charles.

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Caribou, Charles Wright

Ah, that kind

August 5, 2016 By Jordan

At the end of a dark corridor
There is a lit match in a trembling hand
“I still have stage fright,”
The beautiful woman says,
And then she leads us past wardrobes
With mirrors and creaking doors
Where whispering dresses hang,
Whispering corsets, button shoes –
The kind you’d wear while riding a goat.

…from “Makers of Labrynths,” in Hotel Insomnia, by Charles Simic.

Audrey

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: charles simic

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