Mallory's Camera

Cool car I saw in the parking lot at the gym:



Shortly, I must toddle off to the New Paltz garden for more weeding as it's supposed to get hot this afternoon.

Yesterday, I did very little of anything except tromp (Winding Hills, steep) and start rereading Tracy Daugherty's biography of Joan Didion—which is not as good as Tracy Daugherty's bio of Larry McMurtry.

I suspect Didion simply did not engage Daugherty as much: She is an excellent prose writer, but comes across as an unsympathetic human being, unspontaneous, unlikeable, studied to an extreme. One gets the impression that Didion hovered over her words like a vulture hovering over a skull, wondering, Did I miss anything the first time I picked this clean? It probably took her half an hour to write a single sentence.

McMurtry, in contrast, was a kind of mad, slapdash writer. Every morning of his life, he was up and at that typewriter by 7:30 a.m., typing away like a maniac. By 9 a.m., he'd have produced 10 pages. And then he'd stop.

Ten pages in an hour and a half! That's crazy fast!

And probably accounts for his uneven output: Easily half of what McMurtry wrote is really baaaaad.

But McMurtry draws the reader in in a way that Didion is simply not capable of doing. One must parse Didion's sentences. And that is exhausting when one is reading for pleasure. Hence, one never reads Didion for pleasure.

Interestingly, both Didion and McMurtry are ultimately what you might call regional writers. Didion's region was California; McMurtry's region was Texas. And each writer's finest output amounts to kind of a harvest of regional tropes: Didion's basket is "the pioneer," while McMurtry's is "the American West."

What's been saving my sanity this past couple of months is a strange little radio station out of Jersey City called WFMU.

It's totally non-commercial. Operating expenses are generated through marathons several times a year. The volunter DJs are a motley crew. There's X-Saturday Night Live writer Andy Breckman who upon release from the Lorne Michaels gulag went on to create the TV show Monk and has been doing a weird Andy Kaufman-esque show called 7-Second Delay on FMU for the past quarter century; a classical music program called Why Do We Only Listen to Dead People?; a Latin American show, Secret Canine Agents; Mr. Fine Wine's Downtown Soulville; Strength Through Failure (highlighting the failure of rock, the failure of sound, the failure of noise, the failure of the 21st century); and dozens more.

Mostly I listen to FMU on the drive to the Y.

But honestly? If I were at the top of a cliff and could be assured I'd end up in a world where FMU was the elevator Muzak, I take the plunge in a heartbeat. And if I were a character in a Thomas Pynchon novel, I'd rely upon FMU to decipher the Grand Conspiracy for me.

###

Also still working my way through Larry McMurtry-Land.

Terms of Endearment is such a bad book! But has such a powerful ending.

Next up on the jukebox: All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers. (I must say, however uneven McMurtry's prose is, his titles are always genius.)

###

Mostly this week, I have been sad, sad, sad, sad, sad.

Nothing I can really do about it.

I pull it together when I'm interacting with other people, (and there's a lot of that), but my ground state right now is melancholy.

Human beings suck, you know?

But it's a sunny day for the first time in a week and afternoon temps are supposed to flirt with 70°, and I'm gonna tromp the Highland side of the Walkway, so maybe I'll change my mind.

Another dream about Rick Raffanti & the House of Usher! (Should I start skimming obituaries?) Only this time, the House of Usher was a very grand place, filled with crystal chandeliers, stained glass, & gleaming mahogany. Rick stood on a balcony high above me, calling, "DiLuch!" (My nickname in the volleyball days.)

We embraced.

He told me he had recently remarried. Connubial bliss was the term he used.

Do you own this house now? I asked. It's the house I grew up in—Well. Kinda, sorta.

But, no. He didn't.

###

Meanwhile, yesterday, I toddled off to the gym & repurpled my hair—two activities designed to cheer me up because Black Chicken was making me very sad: She would not eat the corn tortilla bits I lavished upon her, & she would not leave the henhouse. She is clearly depressed—but I can't do anything about that because she is not my chicken!

It seems like a waste of time to expend emotion on a situation you can't do anything about. Yet I couldn't help grieving for her. The plight of animals often moves me more than the plight of humans. I mean, fuck humans. I suppose that makes me cloyingly sentimental.

###

When I got back from the gym, I played around with SquareSpace. Watched tutorials—which always moved too slowly, so I'd give up & dash downhill through the software itself, trying to find the elusive backend.

After a while, I developed a begrudging respect for SquareSpace. Saw how I might actually come to like the software if I got better at configuring it.

SquareSpace is design-oriented rather than content-oriented, and that means they have many fail-safes in place to prevent you from undermining the layout. I can see the utility in this: Professional websites must have a certain look. But it also makes it exceedingly difficult to tweak the content.

Anyway, I came up with a design & basic verbiage for the Adrienne homepage, & sent a screenshot to fresh-faced little Brian, the campaign manager.

Fresh-faced little Brian shot an enthusiastic email back: He loves the direction I'm going in!

I actually think that's true.

I'm pretty confident I can finish the website this weekend.

Which will be a relief since I didn't actually volunteer to do Adrienne's website. In the runaround, I was somehow volunteered.


###

I'm on my second reread of Tracy Daugherty's Larry McMurtry bio. It continues to delight.

One of the most interesting things about McMurtry was that while he was an obsessive literati, he was not necessarily obsessive about writing. In his youth, he thought he was obsessive about writing and produced one perfect novel: The Last Picture Show.

Later on in his life, he carved out the novel most people think of as his masterpiece—Lonesome Dove—from a mess of half-finished manuscripts & screenplays that had accumulated on a series of desks over a span of 20 years or so.

But his true passion was not for writing books; it was for collecting books. McMurtry was a kinda modern-day priest of the Library of Alexandria! And the most interesting parts of his biography are his rare book scouting adventures.

###

About Lonesome Dove itself, McMurtry was ambivalent. He likened it to Gone With the Wind—a very apt analogy, I think.

Now, I happen to think Gone With the Wind is a great American novel!

But I didn't attend a graduate program in English literature at a major university, and McMurtry did. I am a post-modernist: I see absolutely no difference between so-called high culture and so-called low culture. Ovid's Metamorphoses, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills—they're absolutely equivalent to me.

Larry McMurtry was not a post-modernist.

###

Lots of other fascinating things in this book—as, for example: McMurtry had a long relationship with Ken Kesey that started when they were in the Stegner Fellowship together.

About Kesey, McMurtry wrote, "He made it plain that he meant to be the stud-duck... There were about a dozen of us assembled when Ken made his entrance, and he was hardly the only competitive person in the room. Like stoats in the henhouse, we were poised to rend and tear... we were all young males. Ken plopped himself down at the right hand of Mr. Cowley and got set to read what turned out to be the first chapters of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. This was stud-duckery indeed."

Now, I happen to think One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a steaming pile of shit.

Sometimes a Great Notion is better—but, you know. A Look Homeward Angel imitator.

Back in the Jurassic when I was young, Kesey was a mega-cultural icon. Literary excellence was one of many laurels heaped upon his brow.

I do understand how One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest got nominated to its place in the American literary canon: The literary pantheon back then was male-dominated, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the Male Castration Fantasy made print.

But I simply loathe it.

Anyway, Kesey's mental decline is episodically chronicled throughout the McMurtry biography, & I, for one, enjoyed reading about it.

Woke up in the middle of the night from a vivid dream:

I was on a bus, but then the bus took a turn off the familiar route, & I realized it was the wrong bus.

So then I had to think about which stop I should get off to have the best shot at getting where I wanted to go. Rick Raffanti was on the bus, too—a very old & withered Rick Raffanti. And I thought, Yes, of course: He has MS (in real life, he doesn't.) And I also thought, Those preternaturally young-looking men—the ones who look 18 when they're 35—always age badly when they finally start to go.

I decided to get off the bus where Rick got off the bus. And I kissed him on his cheek—which was papery and... moist at the same time.

There were two ways out of the street I found myself on.

The first was an alley that ran along the back of a clutch of little stores. Except the alley deadended against this massive cliff with very eroded stairs. I watched two young vigerous girls struggle up those stairs & thought, You (meaning me) will never make it up.

The second way was through one of the stores. And it was the most amazing store filled with all sorts of rare & beautiful treasures presided over by a kindly Black man.

Sadly, in waking up & then willing myself back asleep, I have forgotten what all those rare & beautiful treasures are.

###

Anyway, I neither Remunerated nor web-designed yesterday because early in the morning, I stumbled across Tracy Daugherty's absolutely terrific biography of Larry McMurtry & began reading that instead.

Tracy Daugherty is also an excellent fiction writer & the Larry McMurtry bio reads like fiction, not necessarily because the events of Larry McMurtry's life are so picaresque—though in many ways, they are—but because Daugherty sows so much backstory into them that the book is as much a biography of Texas as it is of McMurtry. Thus, the opening chapters about McMurtry's family & his boyhood—first on Idiot Ridge (!) and then in Archer City—read like Jim Harrison's most elegaic myth-making about the Old West:

This was the new Cold War Texas, redrawing the map of the state McMurtry had known, on which he could pinpoint, in this same area near Amarillo, the spot where, in the late nineteenth century, the sad last running of the buffalo occurred in the Panhandle. It was a single buffalo, begged from Old Man Goodnight on his famous ranch by a small, ragged band of Comanches who'd slipped away from their reservation in the Indian Territory. They showed up one day riding old, emaciated horses, wearing tattered feathers and scraps of white man's clothing. They asked Goodnight to release an animal to them. He complied out of compassion, giving them a ropey young bull, assuming they'd take it back to the reservation and eat it. Instead they let it loose and chased it across the plains—to the extent that their horses could run—the way their ancestors had once pursued millions of animals here. They killed the bull with lances and arrows, just to taste the old ritual, then sat silently on their exhausted mounts staring at the dead animal, reckoning with their longing and the staggering absence of what once was. A chilly wind from the north ruffled the rags of their clothing.

That is a perfect paragraph—from the way geography balances on the conditional, comma-separated clauses of its opening sentence, as elegantly as a gymnast on the bars, to the way a myth condenses from the mists of its imagery and the unsentimental dismissal of that last understated sentence.

The hackles on the back of my neck stood up when I read it.

###

If I close my eyes very tightly, I can still summon up the smell of the McGill University stacks where I first discovered Larry McMurtry. (What was I doing at McGill University? Don't ask.)

The book was Moving On, generally considered one of McMurtry's less successful novels. But I liked it.

Moving On was the saga of the lachrymose Patsy Carpenter, filled with aimless graduate student angst and rodeos and Houston heat, so I don't know why I liked it. I didn't like any of those things. I suppose I liked it because it was immersive, and I like to be immersed.

I was in the library stacks at McGill University hiding out from a complicated love life and also from a physics class that I was flunking. I didn't much care that I was flunking because it was clear my complicated love life would shortly take me very far away from Montreal, back to California where I would never, ever mention my McGill transcripts.

That was also the winter I discovered Joseph Campbell. The Masks of God! As a child, I had been obsessed with Greek, Egyptian, & Roman mythology, used to organize complicated role-playing games with my fellow students at Hunter High School, then an all-girls school: You be Zeus, I'll be Hermes. (Trickster gods have always appealed to me.)

Campbell offered validation for the syncretism I saw everywhere. Still see everywhere, beneath the forces of social conformity constantly rallying to restrict human imaginations.

###

McMurtry himself turns out to be a fairly unpleasant character. Not only looks like my old Monterey neighbor Bill Sullivan but seems to have that same obsessive personality, hiding out behind a cloak of gee-whiz affability.

One thing that really surprised me: I had always assumed McMurtry was kind of a laidback writer, as casual as his casual prose. In fact, he was not: He was deeply steeped in the canonical literature of the 19th century. Like the structure of The Last Picture Show—my favorite McMurtry novel—was actually patterned after the structure of Middlemarch.

Who knew?

And, of course, McMurtry is a very uneven writer. Not just from book to book, but also within the same book. Like The Evening Star is mostly drek but right at the end of the novel comes one of the most moving scenes I have ever read.

I got about 200 pages into the biography, and I can tell I am reading it too fast.

So today, I will try to do some Useful Work before scampering off to socialize.