Jordan Dotson

Writer

about

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where people reside

December 31, 2018 By Jordan

While yearning to gain
The depths of the mountains,
I’m drawn against my will
To the places
Where people reside.

…Musashi, by Eiji Yoshikawa

Filed Under: 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

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

Green

July 31, 2018 By Jordan

Green is made of yellow and blue, nothing else, but when you look at green, where’ve the yellow and the blue gone? Somehow this is to do with Moran’s dad. Somehow this is to do with everyone and everything.

…David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

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

Strange the Dreamer

July 15, 2018 By Jordan

Sometimes a moment is so remarkable that it carves out a space in time and spins there, while the world rushes on around it. This was one such.

…from Strange the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer

Among the seasons

May 11, 2018 By Jordan

Your heart, Bessie, is an autumn garage.

…J.D. Salinger, from Franny and Zooey.

A waitress gave me this book in 2003. Then she disappeared.

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: JD Salinger

Saturday

April 21, 2018 By Jordan

The world is old, it was always old,
There’s nothing new in it this afternoon.
The garden could’ve been a padlocked window
Of a pawnshop I was studying
With every item in it dust-covered.

…from “Emily’s Theme,” by Charles Simic, in Walking the Black Cat.

Filed Under: Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: charles simic

There are characters, and there are characters

January 21, 2018 By Jordan

Nena Daconte was almost a child, with the eyes of a happy bird, and molasses skin still radiant with the bright Caribbean sun in the mournful January gloom, and she was wrapped up to her chin in a mink coat that could not have been bought with the year’s wages of the entire frontier garrison. Her husband, Billy Sánchez De Ávila, who drove the car, was a year younger and almost as beautiful, and he wore a plaid jacket and a baseball hat. Unlike his wife, he was tall and athletic and had the iron jaw of a timid thug. But what best revealed the status of them both was the silver automobile whose interior exhaled a breath of living animal; nothing like it had ever been seen along that impoverished border. The rear seat overflowed with suitcases that were too new and many gift boxes that were still unopened. It also held the tenor saxophone that had been the overriding passion of Nena Daconte’s life before she succumbed to the disquieting love of her tender beach hoodlum.

…Gabriel García Márquez, “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow,” Strange Pilgrims

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Strange Pilgrims

The Greatest Flash Fiction Ever Written

December 12, 2017 By Jordan

296 words. Pay attention.

Filed Under: Flash Fiction, Hip tunage, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Pancho and Lefty, Townes Van Zandt

Like a Smoke Ring

November 26, 2017 By Jordan

…said Perry, whose voice was both gentle and prim – a voice that, though soft, manufactured each word exactly, ejected it like a smoke ring issuing from a parson’s mouth.

…Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

Springs

November 21, 2017 By Jordan

How many passions lay spent within his body like a tangle of rusted springs?

…This book has the most beautiful cover art I’ve ever seen.

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Spring Snow, Yukio Mishima

A Weapon Struck

November 2, 2017 By Jordan

He had merely fallen face down across the bed, as though sleep were a weapon that had struck him from behind.

…Truman Capote, In Cold Blood.

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

This Little Butterfly

September 26, 2017 By Jordan

She’s certainly bewitched me
with her innocent airs.
As light as blown glass, her figure,
her bearing seems like a figure off a screen.
But she instantly frees herself
from the glossy lacquer background.
This little butterfly flutters and
settles with such silent grace,
That I am overtaken by the urge to pursue her,
Even if I have to tear off her wings.

…not from a Charles Simic poem, surprisingly, but the plangent first act of Puccini‘s Madama Butterfly.

Filed Under: Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: charles simic, Madama Butterfly

Hey, I know that guy

September 16, 2017 By Jordan

One of my father’s real social skills, however, was carving out space in a crowded bar. Someone would pivot slightly and there he’d be, one elbow on the mahogany, clearing somebody’s highball glass out of the way with a sophisticated sleight of hand, a twenty-dollar bill materializing in its place. Given this small opening he then managed somehow to look for all the world as if he’d been right in that spot since the building was erected. The illusion was so overpowering that those he displaced often apologized when they discovered him there.

…Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

How to Write

September 6, 2017 By Jordan

He began to pace every room, like a happy lunatic, waving his hands and reciting the film in great shouts. We listened to him, dazzled, and it seemed we could see the images, like flocks of phosphorescent birds that he set loose for their mad flight through the house.

…from “The Saint,” by Gabriel García Márquez, in Strange Pilgrims.

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Strange Pilgrims

Grand chords

April 7, 2017 By Jordan

I like men who have known the best and the worst, whose life has been anything but a smooth trip. Storms have battered them, they have lain, sometimes for months on end, becalmed. There is a residue even if they fail. It has not been all tinkling; there have been grand chords.

…from Burning The Days, by James Salter, above whom no one stands any better at writing, simply, of men.

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Burning the Days, James Salter

Literary Agent Form Response No. 23

March 27, 2017 By Jordan

Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.

…from a tedious book about a fish.

Filed Under: Things I wish I'd written Tagged With: Herman Melville, Moby Dick

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