Jordan Dotson

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The Very Engine of Life

July 17, 2022 By Jordan

He might have been in a deserted village. We picture the world as thick with conquering and elate humanity, but here, with the bugles of the tempest pealing, it was hard to imagine a peopled earth. One viewed the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb. The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life. One was a coxcomb not to die in it. However, the Swede found a saloon.

In front of it an indomitable red light was burning, and the snowflakes were made blood-color as they flew through the circumscribed territory of the lamp’s shining. The Swede pushed open the door of the saloon and entered.

…from The Blue Hotel, by Stephen Crane

Filed Under: Prose Porn Tagged With: Stephen Crane, The Blue Hotel

Women and Horses

April 4, 2022 By Jordan

That’s how we lost Khlebnikov. I was very upset about this because Khlebnikov had been a quiet man, very similar to me in character. He was the only one in the squadron who owned a samovar. On days when there was a break in the fighting, the two of us drank hot tea. We were rattled by the same passions. Both of us looked upon the world as a meadow in May over which women and horses wander.

…”The Story of a Horse,” from Isaac Babel‘s Red Cavalry, which, and I say this with complete honesty, is among the two or three most astonishing, most blinding, most important things I’ve ever read in my life.

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The Wonderful Women in Bath

February 1, 2022 By Jordan

The worst of Bath was the number of its plain women. He did not mean to say that there were no pretty women, but the number of the plain was out of all proportion. He had frequently observed, as he walked, that one handsome face would be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he had stood in a shop in Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, one after another, without there being a tolerable face among them. It had been a frosty morning, to be sure, a sharp frost, which hardly one woman in a thousand could stand the test of. But still, there certainly were a dreadful multitude of ugly women in Bath; and as for the men! they were infinitely worse. Such scarecrows as the streets were full of!

…from Persuasion, by Jane Austen, the apparent queen of low blows. Woof. Remind me to never visit Bath.

Filed Under: Prose Porn Tagged With: Jane Austen, Persuasion

Principles

May 7, 2021 By Jordan

Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.

…René Mathis, agent of the French Secret Service in Ian Fleming‘s Casino Royale.

Filed Under: Prose Porn Tagged With: Casino Royale, Ian Fleming

Opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity

February 16, 2021 By Jordan

She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengeance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother’s sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor – was consuming herself.

….from The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende

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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

The true joy of a moonlit night

May 16, 2020 By Jordan

The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night.

…from the incomparable Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata.

Do these vintage international Japanese novels have the most incredible covers ever, or what?

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata

Rewitnessing

March 5, 2020 By Jordan

You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.

…from Warlight, by the great Michael Ondaatje.

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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

Sweetest Fanny

January 4, 2020 By Jordan

You are always new. The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest.

…John Keats, from Selected Letters.

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: John Keats, Selected Letters

Calendar Magic

December 6, 2019 By Jordan

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

…Naguib Mahfouz, Palace of Desire: The Cairo Trilogy

Filed Under: Prose Porn Tagged With: Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy

Open Space and Weather Nights

October 15, 2019 By Jordan

But a man dancing close to her? I imagine a response of claustrophobia in her. She thrilled to open space and weather nights, as if she could never be contained or fully revealed there.

…from Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje

Filed Under: Prose Porn Tagged With: Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

Perfection

August 16, 2019 By Jordan

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

…from The Razor’s Edge, by Somerset Maugham

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

Love-Dream of our Adolescence

July 19, 2019 By Jordan

Weeks went by, then months. I am speaking of a far-away time – a vanished happiness. It fell to me to befriend, to console with whatever words I could find, one who had been the fairy, the princess, the mysterious love-dream of our adolescence – and it fell to me because my companion had fled. Of that period … what can I say? I’ve kept a single image of that time, and it is already fading: the image of a lovely face grown thin and of two eyes whose lids slowly droop as they glance at me, as if her gaze was unable to dwell on anything but an inner world.

…from the still miraculous Le Grand Meaulnes, by Henri Alain-Fournier

Filed Under: Prose Porn Tagged With: Henri Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes

All Kisses Are Calibrated

July 6, 2019 By Jordan

To his surprise, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, a kiss so full of affection that it dispelled the awkwardness, even as it caused Miles’s heart to plummet, because all kisses are calibrated and this one revealed the great chasm between affection and love.

…from Empire Falls, by Richard Russo.

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Empire Falls, Richard Russo

Metro Gnomes

June 4, 2019 By Jordan

The rhythms of Metro Gnomes’re in rain and poems too, and breathing, not just tocks of clocks.

…from the neverending well of David Mitchell‘s Black Swan Green.

Filed Under: Prose Porn Tagged With: Black Swan Green, David Mitchell

Stones

May 17, 2019 By Jordan

Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.

…from The Ground Beneath Her Feet, by Salman Rushdie.

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Yes

May 2, 2019 By Jordan

Have all beautiful things sad destinies?

…from Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys.

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A Dangerous Thing To Have

March 24, 2019 By Jordan

He had a dream and it shot him.

…from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and hopefully a description of how Mark Twain felt after writing such a terrible, abysmal ending to a novel.

Filed Under: Prose Porn Tagged With: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

Women

January 8, 2019 By Jordan

To acquire even a degree of self-control, he had had to ponder the question of life and death for many years, discipline himself at every turn of the road, force himself to undergro the rigors of a samurai’s training. With no training or conscious self-discipline, this woman was able to say without the slightest hesitation that she, too, was prepared to die if he did. Her face expressed perfect serenity, her eyes telling him she was neither lying nor speaking impulsively. She seemed almost happy over the prospect of following him in death. He wondered, with a tinge of shame, how women could be so strong.

…Musashi, by Eiji Yoshikawa.

I love this book.

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi

The Country’s Done For

December 23, 2018 By Jordan

I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

…A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, who is grossly underrated.

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

The most ardent and soul-destroying kind

December 10, 2018 By Jordan

When this picture was taken she was head over heels in love with Tom Evans, but for some reason love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera. One would almost think it didn’t exist.

…William Maxwell, from So Long, See You Tomorrow

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: So Long See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell

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

Water has its own archaeology

October 1, 2018 By Jordan

Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present’s surface.

…from “The Woman at the Pond,” by Ron Rash, collected in Nothing Gold Can Stay.

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Nothing Gold Can Stay, Ron Rash

Reading is the opposite

September 4, 2018 By Jordan

Fitting words together makes time go through narrower pipes but faster.

…David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Black Swan Green, David Mitchell

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