Looking back to the mid-Eighties when I stumbled unto the opportunity to publish a hip downtown magazine I am not clear on how I fell into the habit/practice of arranging conversations/interviews with contemporary writers, photographers, film directors, cartoonists, poets, painters and all manner of creative individuals. Though it is not exactly an explanation for ‘why’, I have come to look upon this habit, which has persisted these twenty odd years, as a grand post-graduate education.
Many of these confabulations were first published in Stuff magazine before 1998. In 2000, I found a regular niche at the nascent literary magazine (of sorts) Identitytheory. And, over the fullness of time, I found myself contributing to cultural news venues such as The Morning News, The Millions, The Virginia Quarterly Review on -line, The Daily Beast, and the LA Review of Books among others.
Along the way, some of these countless ( have lost count on how many I have participated in) dialogues have been anthologized (mostly regularly )in the University Press of Mississippi’s “Conversations with…’ series. These I am proud to list below (click on the name to go to Publisher’s page for each book):
I expect to continue with these gabfests though I am ruminating on ways to refresh my methodology. So, let’s see what happens…thanks for reading all the way to the bottom
Mile Marker ZeroThe Moveable Feast of Key West by William McKeen
Aesthetic ranking is a fool’s gambit or vacuous journalism. Having said that I merely want to point out that the fraternity of writers and artists—Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, Richard Brautigan, Jimmy Buffet and Hunter Thompson— that coalesced around Key West in the 70’s is at least as significant as America’s Bloomsbury, The Lost Generation and the Beats. Now comes Boston University journalism mentor William Mckeen’s Mile Marker Zero The Moveable Feast of Key West(Crown) which piles on a readable plethora of anecdotes and quotes accounting for the much publicized shenanigans of the above mentioned characters, while giving a history of the US’s southernmost land’s end.
Both Harrison and McGuane have continued to provide American literature with wonderful stories (McGuane also has a best selling fishing book. In addition to his singular fiction, Harrison has also written an endearing memoir, Off to The Side, and a notable collection of food columns he had written for Esquire, anthologized in The Raw and Cooked.
Tom Bissell who hails from the Jim Harrison’s neighborhood in Michigan reprises an enlightening profile he wrote for Outside magazine in his recent anthology Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation( McSweeney’s)
Harrison and McGuane, long time friends and fishing buddies, have participated in a correspondence that may well be (for obvious reasons) the last great American literary letters.
Something to look forward to.
Currently reading Infinity: The Story of a Moment by Gabriel Josipovici (Carcanet)
As the world of storytelling and literature currently stand—small but steady trickles in the great shit stream of info-tain-advertorial, we must take our gems from whatever dark places they shine. In today’s instance, the New York Times Book Review is to be applauded for departing from its well-worn path of siccing/assigning dyspeptic and petulant authors to review their peers and betters—and we are presented with the delightful occasion of Pete Dexter musing on Jim Harrison and his new opus.
A pleasure that could only be equaled by Harrison meditating on Dexter. Or Thomas McGuane reflecting on one or the other or both. Or the publication of the 30 something year correspondence between Harrison and McGuane. But I digress.
Though a National Book Award (Paris Trout), Pete Dexter who has continued to gladden readers with a string of audacious and rip roaringly amusing novels (and some quality screenwriting, the screenplay for an excellent iteration of Paris Trout and Lee Takahara’s Mullholland Falls) is not a literary household word commensurate with his worthy oeuvre. Not the least his 2003 novel Train, set that rivals Walter Moseley and James Elroy in capturing with a cinematic verisimilitude (the Barry Levinson film adaptation of Train,sadly, was never turned around) the tone and color early 50s LA.
His last opus Spooner (Grand Central) ought to have come with a label warning of the risk of laughter induced fits of incontinence
… Dexter takes a look at himself, implicitly admitting that he’s a little on the high-strung side, to put it mildly. He attempts — if I read him correctly — to answer the question: What makes a person turn out to be like Pete Dexter? It’s a hard question for a person trained as a journalist who’s used to looking outward, or for a man of action who prefers boxing to many other pastimes. How do you look inside and come up with an answer that makes sense? (The project must have been hard. The author writes that the book went 3 1/2 years beyond its publication deadline. “When you come across sentences you particularly don’t like, keep in mind that I probably didn’t like them either.”
Nevertheless, here’s a novel that’s different from anything Dexter has written before. His namesake, Spooner, born in 1956, comes second in a cluster of four siblings. His mother is a martyr whose family lost its fortune in the Great Depression, and his father died too young for Spooner to know him. Most of the first 50 pages are given over to describing the back story of a paragon — the saintly man who became Spooner’s stepfather — who makes a hardscrabble living for his new family as a teacher in the hardscrabble town of Milledgeville, Ga., all the while bearing ill-concealed dismay and sometimes contempt from Spooner’s mother…
This is strange material for a man who wrote unsparingly of the grossness of smallpox in “Deadwood,” the merciless rape and destruction of a little girl in “Paris Trout” and the eating of raw flamingos in “Train.” It’s new ground and a new tone. Jocose, ironic, even cheery. (The author’s photo shows the man smiling!) Dexter seems to look at this life as something of a tall tale, and he’s right — there are sentences that don’t seem to be exactly his. The book has a Mark Twain feel to it: Of journalists, Spooner remarks: “Some of them drank too much after work and threatened to write books…”
Currently reading The Foreigners by MAxine Swann (Riverhead)
ourmaninboston 