Books in the city

Nick Tosches: Night Train: the Sonny Liston story

When I was growing up I always thought of my father as someone who looked down on sports, but later I realised that it was just team sports he didn’t like. He loved top performers. He watched Wimbledon. He watched the Olympic divers and sprinters and skiers.  And he watched boxing. He saw Sonny Liston lose the heavyweight championship of the world to Cassius Clay, and I remember overhearing him afterwards saying that Sonny Liston had thrown the fight. I wanted to know what it meant, and I guess once I knew that I asked why. Never one to underestimate children, he would not only have mentioned organised crime, but probably attempted an exposition of the Faustian bargain as well.

Well, it was a fascinating riddle to me and it must have lodged itself inside my brain, so that last week when I was looking up a biography of Jerry Lee Lewis by Nick Tosches on the library catalogue and discovered that he had written a book about Sonny Liston I found myself rushing upstairs to grab it off the shelf, like the brainwashed agents in that old Charles Bronson spy movie who twenty years later are reawakened by a line of poetry and compelled to go and blow up missile sites.

Nick Tosches is a writer I’ve always liked. In the first picture I saw of him he looked a bit like John Cassavetes (but he doesn’t really) and the first book  of his I picked up had a great dedication, with lines like “to those who broke and entered with me / into the cathedral of the heart, / to those who took my back / in right and in wrong.” That’s what his prose is like, Little Italy tough-guy with moments of sentiment but not sentimentalism, and an echo of Dante, except that Dante was never brutal, and he rhymed.

The book is called Night train, after the song Liston liked to train to, and I read it in two nights. I would have read it in one if I didn't have to go to work the next day. It’s dark and disturbing, like Sonny Liston, who turns out to have been the archetype of “bad”. I didn’t know. The book quotes him comparing boxing to a cowboy movie, with the good guys and the bad guys. “’The bad guys are supposed to lose. I change that,’ he had said. ‘I win’.”  But Tosches's take is, “He rode a fast dark train from nowhere, and it dumped him at that falling-off place at the end of the line.”

On the lighter side, this book was directly responsible for me watching the DVD of Fight Club last night. I had never wanted to see it because I had heard of it as something World Wrestling Federation types watched, not to mention the problem of pretentious, shallow Brad Pitt, but it was proposed to me, and after Night train men beating each other up didn’t sound so shallow after all, so I watched it. Once I would have cried “foul” about the scene where the narrator pounds the guy’s face into pulp, but not any more. Now I’m looking forward to the book, my first Chuck Palahniuk novel ever. I see a whole new world opening up here.

Vice versa, ie after me finally reading the book everyone has read, here’s a book I’ve read which everyone should read: The fight, the book Norman Mailer wrote about the Rumble in the Jungle -- the famous fight held in Zaire where Ali won his world championship back from George Foreman. Boxing fans have deemed it the best book ever about boxing, but I just love it for how convulsively funny it is, not to mention exceedingly sharp, and, just often enough, from-the-heart eloquent. It's Mailer totally in command. Here he is on George Foreman:

"He came out from the elevator dressed in embroidered bib overalls and dungaree jacket and entered the lobby of the Inter-Continental flanked by a Black on either side. He did not look like a man so much as a lion standing just as erectly as a man. He appeared sleepy but in the way of a lion digesting a carcass."

And lastly, there's Hemingway’s classic, great story about the shadowy world of boxing and the mob, “The killers”, which you can now read online, hard to believe if you are acquainted with the Hemingway family’s possessiveness with regard to their precious “brand”, including an attempt to stop the Hemingway look-alike contest in Key West from proceeding as not being respectful enough (or not having paid them enough). This from the family which had the bad taste to bring us the Ernest Hemingway line of rifles. I saw the advertisement in an American magazine with my own eyes.

Read "The Killers"

I’ve been carrying Naked Lunch around with me for at least a month and I think it’s time to realise that I am just not going to read more than the approximately 50 scattered pages I read during the first 36 hrs after I picked it up: about 25% of it, more or less the same amount as I read the first time I encountered it.  That was in the guise of Il pasto nudo, in Italy, at some point in my twenties, at the house of a friend who I seem to recall had once seen William S. Burroughs at JFK Airport.  Or maybe it was a pilgrimage to Burroughs’s house, and Cousin Joe (also very old and very cool, but a bluesman) that he stood in line behind at JFK?

Never mind. I think it’s right in the spirit of Burroughs to just read bits and pieces, my own personal cut-up, you might say. The official caretaker of the Burroughs house in Lawrence, Kansas cheerfully admits to never having gotten through Naked Lunch either. In fact, I could even have read less of it, and still appreciated it just as much. These lines alone, just at the start, when he has run into the subway fleeing from a narc and is racing for the train, would have sufficed for me to unreservedly call it a great book:

"Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea of a character. You know the type: comes on with bartenders and cab drivers, talking about right hooks and the Dodgers, calls the counterman in Nedick’s by his first name. A real asshole."

How do I know the track record of the official caretaker of the Burroughs house? Because it’s the 50th anniversary of the publication of Naked Lunch this year, and that intrigues me, so I've been reading up. Of the many, the one I liked the best was the one Duncan Fallowell wrote in the New Statesman in July. He had some interesting things to say about Naked Lunch. First he amazed me by calling it the last of the landmark modern novels. What? It’s revolutionary. How can it be the last of something?

So I asked myself, well, what does Fallowell probably think the first modern novel is? And I realised it would be Ulysses. And then it made sense. I had a sudden vision of all these grand old men of modernity, in those black and white photos we see of them, aged, ravaged, intense.  Joyce, Beckett, Orwell. W.H. Auden. Ezra Pound. Burroughs.  It’s like The Wild Bunch, and he is definitely one of them, and yeah, probably the last.

At the end, this stabbing observation: 'His essential message – escape the machine – could well be more relevant, and difficult to emulate, than ever.'

You can read the article online.

When Burroughs died in 1997, salon.com phoned J.G.Ballard and asked him what Burroughs had meant to him. Absolute honesty, he said:

"Burroughs called his greatest novel "Naked Lunch," by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine."

You can read all the interview on salon.com. It's good to remember J.G. Ballard, who departed from this world he believed so strongly in seeing and writing about from "both sides of my retina", as he used to say, earlier this year.
 
Some other things I found:

A website with the covers of all of Burroughs’s novels, and their translations, through the years. Really fun to look at. Syringes of all shapes and sizes of course, but also serious attempts to depict a hallucinating eye, and even a naked… woman for the Yugoslavs. I see that the French translator, rather than Dejeuner Nu, which would have seemed the obvious choice, with its echo of Dejeuner sur l’herbe -- what more naked lunch than that? some say it was Burroughs’s inspiration --   chose Festin Nu, or Naked Banquet, as in Cezanne’s great painting Le Festin, the Banquet, quite energetically Nu itself.

On Nakedlunch.org  you can read about the anniversary celebrations around the world. I quote from the Parisian symposium programme “The session before lunch makes connections between Burroughs, French culture, and traditions of drug-taking through three very different approaches". No mention of what happens at lunch. Aperitif hour, however, offers “Fiona Paton focuses on the spiritual dimension in Naked Lunch by focusing on recurrent imagery of ectoplasm”.

Lawrence Kansas was the one I liked the most, for the photo of Burroughs they chose, for having a show of WSB’s art called “Naked leftovers”, for putting on the program (have to spell it this way) an accordion serenade and “some of the Old Man’s favorite songs on the iPod”.

Lawrence Kansas reminds me of a good book: “Driving Mr. Albert” by Michael Paterniti – it’s actually Albert Einstein’s brain which he is driving across the US (it's a true story), together with the pathologist who had kept it after the autopsy. This pathologist happened to have lived next door to WSB in Lawrence and they stop in to visit him. I drove through Kansas once and I am sure we stopped in Lawrence for either the world’s deepest well, or the world’s best catfish. Unfortunately it wasn’t when Burroughs was living there. I checked. What do I remember about Kansas? The wind, the cowboy boots, and the way the natives threw around names like "Dodge City", as in "There's a great shopping mall up in Dodge City."

Other things that 1959 brought the world besides Naked Lunch:

1. Picasso was working on the sketches for his Dejeuner sur l’herbe. He didn’t actually put his brush to the canvas until 1960 but I had to put this in anyway. The Musee d’Orsay had an exhibition this year on the Picasso- Manet Dejeuners.
 
2. Asterix 

3. The first Barbie doll.

4. The first Mini

5. The first Aluminum Beer Can

6. The Historic Monkey flight, ie the first time a living being (actually 2) went into space and came back alive. You just know this had to have influenced Burroughs.

Two recommended online reads

William Burroughs Interview by Paris Review, 1965

Beats In Kansas: The Beat Generation in the Heartland

And a book to get from the library

Last words : the final journals of William S. Burroughs

 

Chalk one up for New Zealand, even if she didn’t know it!  From the August 17th entry on the website of Stephenie Meyer, yes, the Stephenie Meyer, the only author to merit her own voice on Auckland City Libraries’ book-buying budget for 2009-2010:

"I didn't have a ton of time to read this summer, but I did discover one really wonderful two-book series. Dreamhunter  and Dreamquake  by Elizabeth Knox. It is like nothing else I've ever read. The characters are so real, you'll feel like you know exactly what they look like and how their voices sound and what they would say or do in any given situation. More than that, you'll want to hang out with them. Then the world is so amazing and unique. You will want to go there. You will want to walk into "the Place." And you will want to sleep in a dream opera."

I was surprised that with all that gush she wasn’t struck at all by the uncommon New Zealand component, whether of the author or the place. It’s not yelled about, in fact on the first book the publishers didn’t see fit to mention it, but the back cover flap of number 2, Dreamquake, definitely states that Elizabeth Knox lives in Wellington, New Zealand. And as for the setting, an island republic called Southland, settled by the English, with a capital city called Founderston, where there are “bush bees” buzzing around, mossy forests and waterfalls, well, you can see why Wikipedia’s entry for Elizabeth Knox calls it an”alternate New Zealand-like republic”, expanded in the entry on Dreamhunter to “an alternate universe Edwardian version of a New Zealand or Tasmania-like island republic” (I'm guessing that would be the Dream component).

But when we move to the teens, somehow, New Zealand disappears:  Teenreads.com unquestioningly declares that Dreamhunter is "set in the beginning of 20th-century Australia”.  I’ll refrain from being pedantic about the syntax, but I can’t help wondering if this teen reviewer learned geography at that superb piece of Americana which is the International House of Pancakes restaurant chain (International = 100 American pancake-types plus Swedish pancakes), at one of which a few years back I overheard a vacationing Kiwi family commenting on how New Zealand had been left off the colour-in map of the world on the back of the kiddie menu.

Or was it from one of the many boardgames included in the list “Oh my god, we have fallen off the map OR New Zealand, the amazing disappearing country” on  “boardgamegeek.com” which was started by an Aucklander (I am loathe to give the name as I am sure I will do something uncool like think it’s his name when it is actually his cyber persona) noticing that there’s no New Zealand on the Risk gameboard.

I think I only played Risk once or twice in my life, we didn't have it in our house as my parents didn’t see the point of buying any board game more modern than Scrabble, but the little girl next door did, just one of many typical Southern California things she had and we didn’t, come to think of it, such as toy ponies, Dr. Suess books, a television and divorced parents. I didn’t show any talent for it anyway, so thought it a better investment to spend my time lobbying for a Clue game. However Risk appears to have been so popular as to have inspired many more world-map games, involving also timely things like pandemics and historical things like exploration, all bearing the gene for No-New Zealandness, including, ironically, one about 18th century exploration called Endeavour.

Is this the other side of the coin of that comment by someone named Eric Korn in the TLS, who, reviewing the book Spike and Co, related how he had learned with horror that the BBC had inadvertently wiped eighty of the first hundred Goon shows:

“The Saga of the HMS Aldgate, Operation Bagpipes, and The Building of Britain’s First Atomic Cannon, all gone into the dark, unless some Goonophile in Wellington or Ouagadougou has a tape.”    (TLS, Feb. 23 2007)

Now what do Wellington and Ouagadougou have in common, you might ask? All I found, in a quick browse of traveler feedback on the internet, is no noted tourist traps.


 

Happy Anniversary!

Books in the City made its debut one year ago with a post called “Dedicated to the one I love”, honouring the well-written book dedication. Since then I’ve run into a few more good ones and here they are, in celebration of a year in which I’ve really enjoyed the blog!  and hope all of you out there reading have too.

1.
To Leanora:
WE ARE MY FAVORITE STORY

A book called 20th century ghosts caught my eye because the author was named Joe Hill, as in “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night”, an old song my father used to sing (as did Joan Baez) about the ghost of a slain union organizer. I flipped through the first pages to see if maybe it was a pen name –  and found instead this dedication.

For the pen name, I still don’t know, but think probably so: our very knowledgeable, and very lovely, fiction selector told me he is Stephen King’s son. I’m very tempted to read the whole book, or at least the story “Pop Art” which Christopher Golden, the introducer, says is his favourite, and which opens with these lines:  “My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable. His name was Arthur Roth, which also made him an inflatable Hebrew, although in our now-and-then talks about the afterlife, I don't remember that he took an especially Jewish perspective."

2.
"To Remington Portable No. NC69411".
Cornell Woolrich, author of Rear window, father of noir fiction, alcoholic recluse and tortured soul, dedicated The Bride Wore Black to his typewriter.

3.
Tad Williams dedicated the four volumes of his “Otherland” Science Fiction series like this:

Book 1:
"This Book is dedicated to my father Joseph Hill Evans with love.
Actually Dad doesn’t read fiction, so if someone doesn’t tell him about this, he’ll never know."

Book 2:
"This Book is dedicated to my father Joseph Hill Evans with love.
As I said before, Dad doesn’t read fiction. He still hasn’t noticed that this thing is dedicated to him. This is Volume Two – let’s see how many more until he catches on."

Book 3:
"This is still dedicated to you-know-who, even if he doesn’t.
Maybe we can keep this a secret all the way to the final volume."

Book 4:
"My father still hasn’t actually cracked any of the books – so, no, he still hasn’t noticed. I think I’m just going to have to tell him. Maybe I should break it to him gently. 'Everyone here who hasn’t had a book dedicated to them, take three steps forward. Whoops, Dad, hang on there for a second...' "

4.
“For C.K. Stead who, like execution, concentrates the mind.”
Michael King, Tread softly for you tread on my life. Thanks to Steve Braunias for this one. 

5.
For Kelly (my dedication):
"The Faithful but Unpretending Record of A Remarkable Adventure is Hereby Respectfully Dedicated by the Narrator ALLAN QUATERMAIN to All The Big and Little Boys Who Read It"
H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s mines