“One book you should read is the non-political “Impossible Owls,” a book of essays. It is great writing.”
This was a comment on the latest post of a blog I’ve been following for a while. I’m always drawn to “great writing”. Thus I discovered Brian Phillips, a “gonzo journalist”. You can see an extract from Impossible Owls here, and a definition of gonzo journalism here. His tale of tigers in India is vivid and springy. But my expectations had gone sky-high after reading an Amazon review:
Brian Phillips barely believes anything. He writes about tigers and … … … Phillips can hardly begin to believe what he’s seeing. He takes himself to the farthest places (…) to interact with people and things on the most distant edge of certainty. Lost there, he reports back his findings.
Phillips drives himself into the space where things are so real, so undeniable (…), there’s a reasonable chance they’re not actually happening. He pushes and pushes on this doubt via prose and wit and punctuation so staggeringly beautiful, conclusions on reported events become irrelevant.
Sounds like Todd McEwen, I thought. Which is to say the kind of writing I newly aspire to.
So why did I not even finish the piece on tigers? Because it is journalism. It quite properly and faithfully reports on the surface of things. Stopping short of art.
What then do I mean by art?
To attend to the soul of things ignoring a distinction between subjective & objective. Knowing the distinction can be made, but ignoring it—while conducting a tender love-affair with the medium: the pencil, the pastel, the home-cooked dish; the words of the language, arranged; living one’s daily life within the constraints one’s given. Also a conjunction of two bodies and souls, whether in love or not.
Which leads me to Who Sleeps with Katz an extraordinary novel about New York, consisting of obsessional rants by our lung-cancerous hero McK on a picaresque pilgrimage starting from Broadway or somewhere to his school-friend Isidor Katz somewhere on the East Side via memory of food, girls and whatever he thinks about. (“Somewhere”: my only knowledge of New York is a frantic taxi ride from La Guardia to JFK via Queens.)
He has 5½ pages on someone he calls Tumbleson:
The Seventies and Eighties were not overly difficult at work, but what did make them years of struggle, said McK, suddenly chilled, was Tumbleson, she was the trouble.
Twenty years later, she’s working at the Yale Club. He has a thing about Yale alumni in New York, rants about it on page 1:
Yale and its foreign insistence on maintaining whiteness at the altars of, in the citadels of power—I’m telling you it’s the one thing which prevents New York from running utterly smoothly, man, the dream of polyglot democracy that it is and must become.
He calls on her unannounced. They meet in the club bar, where it’s almost dark, nobody else there.
Forget Brian Phillips. That was journalism. This is art, which I hope to describe in a subsequent post as GENEROSITY.
I think the “cold grey silver” refers to a key she’d always hung around her neck.
Niña was one of three ships in Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to the Americas.
a wayfarer’s notes 