I’ve never been to a film festival, but I’ve read about 10-minute standing ovations at the end of a Cannes screening.
The closest I came to anything like that was the night that Annie Hall opened in my hometown. There was an ass in every seat, no loudmouth back-talkers, and everyone laughed in the right places. Then, of course, the Standing O.
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It was one of the highlights of my movie-watching career.
Not every Woody Allen film has gotten that kind of reception.
His humor and storytelling were briefly in planetary alignment with mass taste for a few years, but then he spiraled off to his own galaxy, making his quiet, esoteric films — some of which occasionally found a decent-sized audience (Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Midnight in Paris, to name a few).
I’ve enjoyed more of his movies than I’ve disliked. That’s wrong. I don’t think I’ve disliked any of them, but now and then I find one a wee bit boring or self-indulgent.
I’ve always found Allen’s prose to be more consistent.
He published three collections of his short stories and comic pieces in rapid succession — Getting Even (1971), Without Feathers (1975) and Side Effects (1980). He began publishing prose in the New Yorker in 1966 and kept up a pretty vigorous schedule of contributions.
Some of these stories were the kind that made me laugh out loud. Some were honored with recognition that had before been lavished on Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty and John Cheever. (Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode” won the coveted O. Henry Award in 1978.)
He maintained a film-a-year schedule and still produced short stories — until his prose work slowed to a trickle, then stopped, in the 2010s.
Twenty-seven years after Side Effects, Allen published a collection calledMere Anarchy, but his prose output has ramped up in the last five years. First came Apropos of Nothing, his hilarious and touching autobiography, a collection called Zero Gravity and now, at 89, his first novel, What’s With Baum? (Post Hill Press, $28).
Certain doors are no longer open to Allen. He signed a deal with Amazon Studios but has still struggled to release his films. His previous big-time publishers (Random House, Little Brown) no longer publish his work, so he has aligned with Arcade and Post Hill Press, two smaller pubishing companies.
Woody Allen in Stardust Memories.
Too bad that his books and films are not getting the distribution he used to get. His work has not lost a step.
Reading What’s With Baum? Is like watching one of his films. It’s structured that way and has a plot and a narrative approach that lends itself to screen treatment.
Baum is a once-promising writer experiencing several varieties of writer’s block. His third marriage has come with a son who loathes Baum. The boy is poised for success, including magazine and television profiles, and with his new book being hailed as a work of genius.
But Baum discovers a dirty little secret about the boy and the book and becomes, at least among his family and social set, the avatar of ethics.
It is a masterfully written book. Few storytellers have Woody Allen’s gifts. I hope he is able to continue sharing his stories.
Truth is stranger than fiction, which is what makes fiction such a comfort.
We often turn to fiction to escape, but so many of the novels I read turn on tangents so close to the life I lead. I read the echoes of my existence in many of these stories.
The Book of I by David Greig (Europa Editions, $24) is unlikely to remid you of your sputtering love life or your fellow proles dwelling in neighboring cubicles.
To start, the story takes place in 825. It may not look like it, but that’s a date — as in 825 A.D.
The main characters are a young monk, an aging Viking and a woman who makes mead that can change the course of history.
Since Grimur the Viking is a major character, you can expect a certain amount of pillaging and sword-wielding violence.
Yet the book is funny. I might even venture to say hilarious.
Reading it, I was reminded of a Coen Brothers film. I remember sitting in a theater lo those many years ago, watching Blood Simple. That was the first Coen film and I knew nothing of them. How well I recall my reaction. There was violence, followed by humor. Then those elements merged. The audience was perplexed, to find itself laughing at brutality.
Click on the cover to order.
There’s a lot of violence in The Book of I, but much hilarity ensues. It’s an intoxicating blend, a work of deft writing. No surprise the author, David Grieg, is a playwright, a man aware of the power of words.
The story is so well told.
The island of I (I think we’re to pronounce it ee) is a bleak place off the coast of northern Scotland. Today known as Iona, it’s in the inner Hebrides, and has long been famous for its abbey. It’s a spiritual place, y’understand?
Brother Martin, one of our three protagonists, is loweest on the totem pole among the monks.
When the Vikings arrive to do their pillaging, the monks are delighted, because they have been joyfully awaiting martyrdom. They get it, of course — the Vikings are nothing but thorough — killing all of the monks, save Brother Martin.
The Vikings don’t find and kill Martin because he has a supreme hiding place, lurking undernearth the rancid shit in the monk’s trough of excrement and urine..
While he hides there, Una, the mead-maker and beekeeper, is being assaulted for the last time by her husband. It’s the last time because Grimur the Viking happens upon the bickering couple and he severs the husband’s arms. However, Grimur is later knocked unconscious and his fellow Vikings bury him.
When the Vikings depart, the stench-covered Brother Martin happens upon the Grimur’s hastily-made burial spot — a hand reaching up throuhg the dirt is a dead giveaway — and digs him up.
David Greig
Now liberated from her brutal husband, Una joins Grimur and Brother Martin to and form an alliance and begin to rebuild.
The book hits that high note that connects comedy and tragedy — again, much like the Coen Brothers.
Or maybe Coen Brother. Now that they are making films separately, we can see it’s Joel immersed in drama (he made The Tragedy of MacBeth) and Ethan who’s the funny one. He’s finished two entries in his Lesbian Trilogy (Drive-Away Dolls and Honey Don’t) and more fun no doubt awaits. The Book of I has that Ethan Coen tone.
Together, the Coens create an excellent blend of comedy and tragedy. This book matches that tone.
. . . . .
A couple of years ago, my sister-in-law had us all do the ancestry.com thing. My sibings and I all had a blend of Irish, Scottish and German blood.
But me? I had a whiff of Viking blood.
How did that happen? I well recall the aphorism that motherhood is fact and fatherhood is speculation.
Nonetheless, I am working to embrace my inner Viking and therefore award The Book of I my first Viking Seal of Approval.
Bombarded by communication we may be, but there is still the possibility for something personal within our over-ripe and festering mass media.
We can watch television — doesn’t matter if it’s traditional network or streaming — and not really have a sense of who’s running the business.
Same thing goes with traditional news organizations, those things we used to call newspapers that now have little to do with paper. We may read The New York Times, but where do we see the publisher’s personality reflected?
Those big media conglomerates that produce our music and entertainment are as bland as soda crackers — and could well aspire to be that imaginative and crunchy.
But consider the magazine. Good and important magazines still exist and carry forward the DNA of their founders or longtime editors.
Hugh Hefner
Think of Playboy. Its founder. Hugh Hefner, made sure his magazine reflected his interests and tastes.
When he hopped off to the bunny ranch in the sky, the magazine went into an immediate skid.
Does it still exist? Does it matter? Let me know, will ya?
In the early 1960s, Helen Gurley Brown took Cosmopolitan, a men’s magazine that had published fishing and hunting stories by Ernest Hemingway, and turned it into the bible of the single working woman.
It was a brilliant move because it created an ever-renewing demographic. Brown is getting mani-pedis in the sky, but her work lives on.
Helen Gurley Brown
The New Yorker has been blessed with strong editors. Its founder, Harold Ross, liked humor, cartoons and fiction. There was no doubt who ran the place in his lifetime.
But when Ross died, his No. 1 assistant, William Shawn, became editor and changed the magazine as he served for the next 35 years.
This is the New Yorker issue that published John Hersey’s masterpiece of reporting, “Hiroshima.”
Shawn’s interests in long-form nonfiction reinvented the magazine. Few venues of any kind will give storytellers the space that Shawn allowed.
This is a blessing yet also a curse. Some New Yorker writers began writing sentences in the 1980s that have yet to conclude.
Time shuffles on.
Esquire magazine (under Harold Hayes’s editorship) became the defining voice of the 1960s.
The magazine published so much brilliant stuff in that era that it’s difficult to think of a publication with a better voice for the times.
Its collection of articles from that decade was titled by Hayes: Smiling Through the Apocalypse. (Has there ever been a better title for anything?)
Harold Hayes
As Hayes was leaving the editor’s chair, along came a rowdy rock’n’roll magazine based in San Francisco that put itself on the cultural map by publishing a full-frontal nude photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. (This exposure of celebrity genitals drew the fans-of-famous-foreskin demographic.)
College dropout Jann Wenner founded Rolling Stone in 1967 and for the next quarter-century, under his tight control, the magazine published things he found interesting. Those things became our interests.
Wenner also liked to put his friends on Rolling Stone’s vaunted cover, which was fabled in song.
As Wenner withdrew to the ski slopes and left running the magazine to others, it began losing its way and discovered its problem was the reverse of what happened at Cosmopolitan.
Whereas there will always be single working women to read Cosmo, Rolling Stone was faced with a critical problem: its core readership was tied to a generation that was rapidly aging and dying. In the early years, when Wenner was young, so were his readers. He published the magazine for his peers.
Advertisers looked at Rolling Stone as a clear connection to young, affluent buyers.
But then we got old. The magazine had a core interest in popular music. As the subscribers aged, the magazine sometimes tried to push flavor-of-the-month artists at the Classic Rock audience. It was like the old guy showing up at a college kegger wearing a gold medallion in a desperate stab at youth.
Jann Wenner, when Rolling Stone was in San Francisco
For a while, Rolling Stone was the magazine that defined its times.
I was part of its target demographic from the start. When it would arrive in the post, I used to go into what my then-wife called my “Rolling Stone coma” until I had sucked all of the marrow from all of the worthy articles I found between the covers.
The magazine peaked in the early 1970s, when its roster included David Felton, Grover Lewis, Hunter Thompson, Ben Fong-Torres and Annie Leibovitz, among others.
You’ll notice Leibovitz is the only woman mentioned. The only way a woman could get a job on Rolling Stone‘s editorial staff was to start as a secretary — perhaps another reflection of the founder’s personality. (Leibovitz was the exception. )
Wenner developed so much talent at the magazine, but once the magazine had made it, he sought the big names — Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Caroline Kennedy, who acquitted herself in her coverage of Elvis Presley’s funeral. (Her kicker quote was from the Elvis minion who shaved the King’s sideburns one last time before he was planted in the back yard.)
But Rolling Stone’s relevance dried up by the end of the 1970s, around the time it moved from San Francisco to New York.
Tina Brown
The magazine that assumed the mantle of most-likely-to-send-me-into-a-reading-coma came along in the 1980s: Vanity Fair.
The original VF had died before the Second World War, and when it was revived . . . who could tell? It was underwhelming.
The revived magazine committed the worst sin in journalism: it was boring.
Fortunately, it was saved by Tina Brown, the British editor brought over to turn it around, two years after its weak re-launch.
For the subsequent three decades and change, few magazines could compete with Vanity Fair.
Brown left the magazine after eight years to breathe life into its sister publication, The New Yorker, which was staggering along after the departure of Shawn.
Brown prepared that venerable publication for the 21st Century by making necessary overdue changes. For one thing, she acknowledged the existence of photography. Until she took over in 1992, the magazine had never published a photo with any of its editorial copy.
Graydon Carter
It’s Brown’s successor who deserves the lion’s share of credit for Vanity Fair’s brilliance. He made it into the must-read magazine for a couple of generations.
Graydon Carter recounts his life as a magazine editor in his new memoirWhen the Going Was Good (Penguin Press, $32).
Journalism is my jam, so naturally his inside baseball stuff is appealing to me.
But I ended up liking the book more for the pleasure of getting to know this guy.
I think this is what I admired the most:
Carter at Spy.
Here is the editor of one of the greatest magazines on the planet. Sure, there are a lot of social obligations and events and dinners and balls. That’s what we expect of the high life, right?
Instead, we find a guy who passes up all of that stuff in favor of a family dinner. He’s home by six every night, and the whole Hee-Haw gang sits down to the table. Everyone talks, everyone learns about what everyone else did all day … you know, wholesome stuff.
Graydon Carter is Ward Cleaver with a better wardrobe. I admire parents who take their job seriously.
He could be hanging out with some boldface names, but prefers family dinners, game nights and fishing in the wilderness with his children.
His tale is a successful story of work-life balance.
Carter was born in Toronto and attended a couple of Canadian universities without graduating. The rigidity of schooling sometimes gets in the way of education, which is something best left to the individual.
He learned on the job, starting with The Canadian Review, which unfortunately went bankrupt.
He moved to New York, worked at Time and Life, co-founded Spy magazine, edited The New York Observer, then took over Vanity Fair in 1992.
Carter belongs in the history books if for no other reason than this: while at Spy, he coined the term “short-fingered vulgarian” to describe President 45-47. What a rush it must be to have a quip remembered so.
Still, this isn’t a book of journalism gossip. It’s an absorbing, superbly-written account of a well-lived life with a lot of accidents and surprises that led to the pot of gold. It could serve as a guidebook on how to be a good parent.
When Carter edited Vanity Fair it was a work of art, essential to life. Each issue was a king’s feast to be devoured.
Since he left — and started the digital-only Air Mail — Vanity Fair is skidding. It’s no longer a must-read.
Magazines are bound to the personality of the editors. They follow a life cycle, like a human being.
Carter has left the building and that great magazine is having a midlife crisis.
For now, read Carter’s book and remember the great times and the great stories.
John Cheever came up with an interesting premise for one of his greatest short stories.
In “The Swimmer,” Cheever’s protagonist, Neddy Merrill, lounges, hungover, poolside at a friend’s home on a Sunday afternoon.
It’s a muted gathering, suburbanites recovering from the night before, questioning the wisdom of drinking so much.
As he sits there, Neddy hatches a plan: he will swim home.
“The Swimmer” appears in Cheever’s Pulitzer-winning collection. Click on the cover to order.
All of the homes in his neighborhood have pools, so he will follow a chain of them to home.
It’s an odd story that takes a surreal twist and ends in a gut-punch of sorrow and devastation.
If you haven’t read it, you should. It’s a brilliant piece of work.
Last week, I decided to follow Neddy’s lead, but with my own twist.
I never learned to swim and few homes in Massachusetts have pools anyway.
But I found myself in my former town for a doctor’s appointment.
When I was done, it was a brilliant summer day and I thought, “I’m going to do a Neddy.”
Instead of driving straight home, I decided I would go home via the libraries in each of the small towns that freckle the South Shore.
Every library has a Friends of the Library book sale. Maybe I’d find some books for sale — books for which I have no more room in my house (but that’s another story).
Here’s some of what I found.
. . . . . . . .
John O’Hara, The Big Laugh (Random House, $4.95)
Before you get all excited about that bargain price, I should point out that $4.95 was the list price when the book was published — in 1962.
I got this one at the Scituate Library, which has the best second-hand store of all the South Shore libraries.
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I’ve read a lot of John O’Hara — a lot. Yet I’d never encountered this novel. How did I miss it on the “Books by John O’Hara” pages?
O’Hara seems to be largely forgotten today, which is a shame. He’s been credited with sort of inventing the New Yorker short story, and was an early and prolific contributor to that magazine.
His writing was tight. I’ve read some stories of his that were all dialogue, yet he managed to describe without describing.
He’s one of those writers I encourage students to read. There’s nothing flaccid in his work. Reading him [and James M Cain, Robert B Parker, Michael Connelly and others], I tell my class, is like giving your mind a suppository. You empty your brain of needless words, in the manner of a colon cleanse.
In addition to his terrific short stories, I’ve read his big novels — Ten North Frederick and From the Terrace — but The Big Laugh was a tremendous surprise. It told a stirring tale over the course of two decades and never did it drag. Turned out to be a quick read, unlike some of his other novels, which went on too long.
It’s the story of a shithead who goes from black sheep of his family to one of the reigning movie stars in the early days of talking films.
Don’t wait for a redemption arc, though the main character does prove himself to be more likable by tale’s end. There are some surprises along the way, and O’Hara keeps the story moving. He was a master at that.
John O’Hara in his natural habitat
Now to folks of the current generation, whatever your moniker may be: you did not invent sex.
Same goes for my generation. We Baby Boomers like to think that various carnal acts were unknown until our arrival and that we invented many non-Euclidean variations on the basic premise.
So here is a novel written by a man who was there in the 1920s and 1930s when the novel takes place. And the characters fuck like monkeys. There’s a lot of fucking here.
A lot.
I was a little surprised — not that people sportfucked so much back then but that the novel was so frank, being as it was published in 1962.
That’s either a note of caution or encouragement.
For me, I’m always happy to find a book by a favorite author that I have not read. The presence of so much fucking is like finding a bonus track on an album.
. . . . . . . .
Ben Mezerich, The Midnight Ride (Grand Central, $29)
This one caught my eye at the Norwell library.
Ben Mezrich
I knew of Mezerich from his nonfiction books — The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House, two books I have not read.
But he’d always gotten good reviews and I was curious how he was as a novelist.
Turns out he is deeply entertaining.
This novel takes place in Boston, and those sorts of stories are always of interest to those of us who trudge through that insane city’s streets daily.
The book also focuses on a local mystery — the unsolved theft of priceless artwork from the Isabella Gardner museum decades ago. It brings together a plucky card-counter who makes her living at the gaming tables of the Encore casino, and an ex-con trying to start over.
Click on the cover to order
These protagonists — Hailey Gordon the card counter and Nick Patterson the ex-convict — have an unusual meet-cute: it happens over a dead body in a hotel room.
The Gardner theft is only part of the story. The rest is steeped in Boston’s rich history and, as the title suggests, Paul Revere plays a part.
It has echoes of The DaVinci Code and National Treasure, but it’s a lot more fun.
Hailey and Nick returned in The Mistress and the Key, which came out last fall.
Looks like it’ll be back to the library-swim to find that one.
. . . . . . . .
Mario Puzo, The Fortunate Pilgrim (Random House, $25.23)
I read Puzo’s The Godfather not long after it was published and always considered it kind of trashy, because of one particular narrative thread.
Turns out Francis Ford Coppola felt the same way about that part of the book and it was a reason he initially balked on making a film of Puzo’s book.
We both were repulsed by the subplot that led to a character paying for his girlfriend’s surgery. He had this young woman go under the knife so she would be tightened up — in the non-Archie Bell & the Drells meaning — giving, presumably, greater sexual pleasure to both of them.
Mario Puzo
As I learned more about Puzo’s back story, I’d heard of his first two novels, The Dark Arena and The Fortunate Pilgrim. Both were tagged as “literary fiction” and both were failures.
So he wrote The Godfather strictly to make money. It was a paycheck book, so the trashier the better.
(In the years since, I’ve relaxed more and found The Godfather to be a generally entertaining book and I skip over the surgery scenes.)
I happened across The Fortunate Pilgrim at the library in Hanover and grabbed it immediately.
I’m not sure I’d say this was literary fiction, but it was a compelling story of New York’s Italian population in the 1920s and 1930s. Putting this story next to Puzo’s own, we can see the elements of autobiography.
Click on the cover to order
The primary character is Lucia Santa, an emigre from the farms of Italy, who comes to the New World and is deposited into poverty in Manhattan.
She marries, has children, and is left to raise a family herself on the mean streets. It’s a tough, often tragic, life.
Puzo made no secret of the fact that Lucia is based on his mother and that the protagonist of his most famous novel, Vito Corleone, is also based on his mother.
It’s a good and enthralling novel that shows how much American lives have changed in the last century. The violence and the spectre of death look over the shoulder of us all.
This is an entertaining story and becomes a tribute to the immigrants who built America.
But it also has some irritating touches. Puzo has a group of elderly Italian women who sit on the tenement stoop and form sort of a Greek chorus. Puzo calls them crones. One use of “crone” is probably okay. He uses it six or seven times over the course of a couple pages early in the book.
Consider this your crone warning.
. . . . . . . .
I couldn’t go by the Norwell library without stopping at John Cheever’s grave.
A few years ago, I discovered that his body rests just a few miles from my house, and across the street from The Tinker’s Son, a Irish pub where my youngest son has worked for the last four years.
Odd, to find one of your literary heroes buried just six feet away from a parking lot serving a convenience store.
Fortunately, Cheever was honored by a local denizen of business who built The Cheever Tavern adjacent to his grave.
I have the feeling he would approve of the place named in his honor. The food and the booze are excellent.
If you’re nearby, visit the place and seek out his grave. Then you can say you were truly (an) over a Cheever.
Back to the swim.
I recently picked up a few more books during my swims– State of Wonder by Ann Patchett and a Pete Townshend novel. I have a lot of good reading ahead.
I sing when I’m alone. I have to; no one wants to hear me.
And the song I sing in the shower, or in the kitchen or while mowing the yard — it’s often this one particular song I choose over the others in my cranial repertoire.
I did not hear the original version first. It came my way thanks to one of my favorite groups,The Byrds.
The Byrds introduced me to lots of things, because the members of the band came from a folk background and weren’t a typical rock’n’roll band.
Thanks to The Byrds, I heard the lovely “John Riley,” a 17th Century English ballad based on The Odyssey.
I first heard the stark and haunting “I Come and Stand at Every Door” on The Byrds album Fifth Dimension. The song was narrated by a child who died in Hiroshima. Now the child appears — “no one hears my silent tread” — to remind us all of the horrors of nuclear war.
Roger McGuinn
It began as a poem by Turkish writer Nazim Hikmet. American writer Jeanette Turner took a translation of the poem to Pete Seeger and urged him to set it to music. With some help, Seeger did so and then The Byrds took the grim message to us kids.
I was an ignorant 14 year old, but I knew who he was. Two years before, I was a junior high student in Fort Worth, Texas. There was a music-loving girl who sat next to me in Mrs Brock’s speech class. She was a non-stop talker and that spring, she was obsessed with Arlo Guthrie, who had just released his debut album, Alice’s Restaurant.
Woody Guthrie
“He’s Woody’s son, you know.”
I nodded; she was cute and I pretended I knew more than I did.
Guthrie — was that the guy who wrote “This Land is Your Land”?
“You know, Woody died the same month Arlo’s album came out,” she said. I nodded again. “I hope Woody got to see Arlo’s album before he died.”
Nothing ever happened with that nice girl, due to my ineptitude with women. But she began to open me up musically.
The first album I ever bought — years before — was The Concert Sound of Henry Mancini. Thanks to that nice girl and her recommendations, by junior high I was beginning to listen to Simon & Garfunkel and a few other rock artists. I still had a lot of catching up to do if I wanted to be a card-carrying Baby Boomer.
Two years later, Texas in the rear-view, Ballad of Easy Rider came out (I refer to The Byrds album and not the Easy Rider soundtrack) and there, in a spot of honor near the end of the album was “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).” Roger McGuinn, the head Byrd (and the only original band member left at that point) sang the song in his flat-tire matter-of-fact voice.
I was in better company by then. We’d moved to Bloomington, Indiana, and my classmates rated much higher on the hip meter than had my fellow scholars back at Monnig Junior High. [Though the cafeteria at that school served, every Monday, the best chicken-fried steak I’ve ever eaten. Also, our football coach, Spud Cason, was the inventor of the Wishbone offense.]
I began listening to a lot of stuff. I discovered Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Crosby, Stills and Nash. And, of course, The Byrds.
McGuinn sang “Deportee” in a somewhat neutral voice, and didn’t need to push any buttons to elicit a response. He wanted us to hear this story, which Guthrie had written as a poem, and he wanted us to feel. He did not want to feel for us.
His stark singing gave the song heart-breaking power. It was also in my vocal range. I think.
Looking for survivors in Los Gatos canyon
What we learned: a plane had crashed in a California canyon. In addition to the small flight crew, there were migrant workers on board, being deported to Mexico after the end of harvest. Without being told the story was true, we could tell this crash had really happened. Later, we’d learn that the plane caught fire and crashed on January 28, 1948.
There was a problem with a gasket in the left engine. As the plane lost altitude, it splintered into flame and the left wing fell off.
Witnesses to the crash said they saw some passengers jump from the plane before it hit the ground.
When Guthrie heard news of this on the radio, he was enraged by the off-hand way the announcer dismissed most of the passengers on the plane. As he told it:
The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon, A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills, Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves? The radio says, “They are just deportees”
Guthrie had long championed the cause of migrant workers. One of his best songs, in my mind, is “Pastures of Plenty.”
In the angry verses of that song, Guthrie spoke in the voice of farmworkers addressing those who lived off their backs and labor:
California, Arizona, I harvest your crops Well it’s North up to Oregon to gather your hops Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine To set on your table your light sparkling wine
Further back in my musical history, I recalled third grade in South Florida, on the southernmost military installation on the mainland, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (But that’s another story.)
When the denizens of Air Base Elementary congregated in the cafetorium, we sang Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” and other American songs, including the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
When I was a kid, I’d hear rumblings now and then about “This Land is Your Land” becoming our new national anthem. Everybody, it seemed, hated “The Star Spangled Banner.” Me, I always liked it because we only sing one verse of the song at ballgames and it ends with a question we can ask ourselves every day: Are we still the land of the free and the home of the brave?
What I didn’t learn until much later was that “This Land is Your Land” was an angry answer song to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” That uber-patriotic song infuriated Guthrie.
The original chorus to what became “This Land” was: “God blessed America for me.”
And, in another key verse, Guthrie may have been supplying a Marxist answer to Irving Berlin’s jingoism:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me. The sign was painted, said ‘Private Property.’ But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing. That side was made for you and me.
Some might say his songs were bitter, but to me they carried the fragrance of optimism. We can do this, we will endure. Those were the sentiments I took away.
Often attributed to Guthrie: “A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it.”
But then: “Deportee.” There was no optimism there, just human beings whose lives were devalued because of their skin color.
The passengers, the friends scattered like dry leaves, do not even earn the dignity of being known by name. They were “just deportees.”
The plane’s manifest named the crew, but for passengers, they were listed as a group of “Mexican nationals.” The passengers were buried in a mass grave.
Demonize the immigrant, demonize the undocumented. It’s the American way. The more things change, they don’t.
Guthrie wrote the “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos” poem on his kitchen table, within hours after hearing of the crash. He didn’t write it as a song because he was beginning to lose his musical ability, as the degenerative neurological condition known as Huntington’s disease began its destruction of his body. He was beginning a long, slow decline that within a few years would leave him without his voice.
It took 20 years to kill him.
A decade after the crash, Pete Seeger was on a campus tour, singing the songs that had gotten him blacklisted during the McCarthy Era.
At Colorado A&M in Fort Collins, he did his show then gathered afterward at the home of a member of the college’s folk song club. Seeger played more songs, the students played some songs, and Seeger was about to fall into slumber on the couch, when one of the students — it was his living room — said he’d taken a poem of Guthrie’s, the one about the plane crash, and set it to music.
Pete Seeger
Martin Hoffman based his melody on a Mexican waltz, which made such sense with the words. Seeger listened as Hoffman sang “Deportee” but didn’t say much. He was tired.
But when Seeger got back to New York, he called Hoffman and asked him to send a tape of him singing the song, so he could get it copyrighted, with authorship split between Guthrie and Hoffman. That was 1958.
And then Seeger began performing the song. Judy Collins recorded it. Arlo Guthrie recorded it, as did Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen and Joan Baez. And so did The Byrds.
Recently, a 1948 recording of Guthrie talking / singing “Deportee” has been unearthed. He was losing his ability to sing, but he got through it. It was not long after the crash and he wanted to make sure his poem would live longer than he would.
Hearing that voice from 70 years ago, despite Guthrie’s pain and ravage, the song that began as a poem still has its power.
And the question returns: “Who are these friends who are scattered like dry leaves?”
It began with a poem, so it’s fitting that a poet answers the questions in the song.
Tim Z Hernandez is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is a renaissance man, producing art in a variety of media.
Tim Z Hernandez
Hearing “Deportee” had the effect on Hernandez that it had on me, but he did something about it. He set up a website to solicit donations to his project to make a documentary about the crash and the plane’s passengers.
He found out who those dry leaves were and he told their stories. No longer were they “just deportees.”
He deserves to add “historical researcher / journalist” to his list of talents.
Where the passengers had been listed a “Mexican Nationals” on the manifest, he now offered names and stories of the passengers — what their lives were like, what dreams they had, how their families carried on.
With his poet’s license, he indulges in speculation about the last moments on the plane, but he has researched the passengers enough to know them and his conjecture is not out of line.
Hernandez is transparent in the book, bringing readers into his interviewing process and gathering stories from descendants of the crash victims.
Across the decades, Hernandez answers the song’s question about the doomed passengers. Guthrie would approve of this other poet’s work.
Writer Joe Klein called “Deportee” Guthrie’s last great song before the disease crippled him. Guthrie recorded it with only the whisper of accompaniment, chanting the words, unable to sing as the disease began its torturous dance on his body.
Martin Hoffman in 1970, a year before his suicide
The words waited a decade before they were found by Hoffman and his Mexican waltz, which gives the song its razor edge of tragedy and beauty.
One evening in 1971, Martin Hoffman walked through his neighborhood and knocked on doors, telling his friends how much he appreciated them.
Then he said goodbye.
The next evening, he played guitar, took a slug of Scotch, then went into his bedroom, pulled out his double-barrel shotgun from under the bed. He put the barrel square in front of his face, then pulled the trigger with his big toe.
The song leaves us another mystery.
With the grace and beauty of a poet, Hernandez tells the story of the passengers, the small crew, Guthrie’s life and work and Hoffman’s short and tragic time on earth.
I marvel at his achievement. The storytelling tribe can do great things, right past wrongs, and find the truth behind the stories.
If just for a moment, Hernandez brought those friends back to life, honoring them by giving us their names and telling their stories.
All They Will Call You is a beautiful piece of work.
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The passengers: Ramon Perez, Jesus Santos, Ramon Portello, James A. Guardaho, Guadalupe Ramirez, Julio Barron, Jose Macias, Martin Navarro, Apolonio Placentia, Santiago Elisandro, Salvadore Sandoval, Manuel Calderon, Francisco Duran, Rosalio Estrado, Bernabe Garcia, Severo Lara, Elias Macias, Tomas Marquez, Louis Medina, Manuel Merino, Luis Mirando, Ygnacio Navarro, Roman Ochoa, Alberto Raygoza, Guadalupe Rodriquez, Maria Rodriguez, and Juan Ruiz. The pilot was Frank Atkinson and the co-pilot was Marion Ewing. Both Atkinson and Ewing were deeply experienced and flew with distinction in the Second World War. The regular flight attendant had called Atkinson that morning and said she was unable to fly. Bobbie Atkinson — the pilot’s wife, newly pregnant — said she would fill the flight-attendant role. She’d get to spend more time with her husband. There was another passenger: Frank E. Chaffin was with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He was to escort the passengers back to Mexico. His job was to make certain the farmworkers got safely home.
“What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer’s imagination that I set most high.”EUDORA WELTY
Too true, Ms. Welty, too true.
I used to write fiction — and published several short stories — many years ago. Not sure why I gave it up except that I started publishing nonfiction and I had only one life to live. Rather than live it as a blonde, I decided to live it as a nonfiction writer.
But I know the excitement of which Ms. Welty speaks. I loved entering the “mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself.”
I wrote several stories in the voices of people unlike me: a woman bullied by her family into selling the trinkets and baubles of her lifetime, a barber who served in the Second World War and put off his dreams until it was too late, and a radio evangelist shredding fire and brimstone on your AM dial and rhapsodizing about finding a good roasting ear for the church barbecue.
I think that’s why I read so much. I love stepping into some else’s life for a while.
I read a lot of fiction. Our lives are short, so I feel I get more out of living by adopting these lives for the time it takes me to learn about them and hear their stories.
Here’s some commentary on three books — lives — into which I have recently leapt.
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Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood (Europa Editions, $27)
Sara Byrne is a correspondent (not a full-time staffer; a contract reporter) for a London newspaper and she’s assigned to Gaza.
This isn’t 2023. This is the Gaza of 2013.
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Byrne is good at her job. Dropped into the brutality of war, she can still compose an intelligent and accurate account of what she has seen.
But of course, that doesn’t mean she sleeps well and unaffected. When you’ve seen a child severed at the waist and trailing entrails as his father carries him to the hospital, it’s something you are cursed to remember to your deathbed.
I’ve never been a war correspondent but Greenwood tells a good, evocative story and is excellent in giving us a sense of place and drawing memorable characters.
Byrne is one of the younger journalists at the bar of The Beach Hotel in Gaza. It’s the nicest lodging around, even if its walls are freckled with shrapnel. The older reporters are irritating and condescending but Byrne holds her ground.
I wrote my thesis in graduate school about how journalists are portrayed in popular culture. I studied the first two-thirds of the 20th Century, reading a ton of novels. Some were excellent and some were mediocre.
Phoebe Greenwood
I discovered a change in the portrayal of journalists over the years. In the early years, they usually appeared as society’s guardians — not in the noble sense of protecting the free flow of information — but in withholding from audiences anything damaging to society’s heroes or to the myths that keep a nation propped up.
That changed over the decades. In later years, journalists became destroyers of those beliefs and heroes they used to preserve. All that’s good, right?
But the private lives of the journalists were consistently marred by alcoholism, infidelity and ethical breaches. Of course no one trusts the press anymore. When they see reporters portrayed as drunks who sleep with sources to get stories, no wonder they consider journalists to be purveyors of fake news.
It’s a pretty consistent portrayal across books, television and film. I’ve kept up with this stuff for decades.
So of course I was fascinated by Greenwood’s novel. It’s a great portrayal of the press and despite the blood and gore, there are moments of dark comedy. Greenwood draws her characters well — not just Byrne, but also Nasser, her fixer, and the staff of the hotel, still trying to please guests while bombs rein down.
This is is about the Hamas of years ago, and Byrne has the urge to tell her readers back home that these guys are the Keystone Kops of terrorists. Unfortunatly, we know what Hamas became and there’s nothing comic about it.
Byrne is under pressure — she’s in a war zone doing what is, in essence, a yearlong audition for a full-time staff position with her newspaper. In addition, her father has just died, her mother is losing her shit, and she’s still wrestling with the fallout from an affair with a much-older man, a pal of her father’s.
Vulture gives us a sense of time and place and heartbreaking descriptions of war visited on the civilian population. Journalists generally have to develop shells for protection from the horror and some of these exercises of humor might be too dark for those outside the tribe. Byrne suffers collateral damage to her soul.
It’s an intriguing blend of strong narrative storytelling, satire and ruminations on the physical and psychological effects of war.
I look forward to more from Phoebe Greenwood.
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The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley (Knopf, $28)
Sometimes I’m drawn to a novel by the geography. The late Tom Corcoran’s novels took place in Key West. That place has become so expensive that it made economic sense to read one of Corcoran’s books — just plop down $24.95 — in lieu of a trip to the island. Corcoran had the ability to engage our senses of smell and taste. It was like tripping to Key West without leaving the Barcalounger.
Click on the cover to order.
So the first thing that drew me to The Girls Who Grew Big was its setting — a stretch of the Florida pandhandle, near but not part of the high-rise condominiums that have begun to tower over the once-desolate beaches.
I used to camp there a few decades back, at a place called Grayton Beach. It was at once wild and pristine. Over the years, I watched the coming of the condos and the inevitable spoilage. It was heartbreaking.
The protagonists here are single teen-age moms. Some have birthed, some are soon to birth.
Simone’s twins are four now and she becomes the spirtiual leader for these younger girls. They congregate on the beach — the Redneck Riviera part — and hang out around Simone’s red truck, her only home and the temple of support for these young, discarded girls.
Leila Mottley
There are three narrators. Simone is the group’s griot. Emory is a local girl who idolizes Adela, the new girl in town. Adela’s been exiled from Indiana by her parents who cannot deal with the shame of her pregnancy.
Adela’s pregnancy frames the story. The girls argue, fight, and commit acts that others consider betrayal. Simone basically lives in her truck and she’s wary of the social workers from the Department of Children and Families who threaten to take away her twins. Now she’s she’s pregnant again and access to reproductive care is … well, it’s a fucking mess.
The boys in their lives serve only as sperm donors. The boys fall on various spots of the responsibility continuum, mostly at the take-none end. With a few mild speed bumps, they can go on with their lives. The girls all have dreams that now will be deferred.
It’s an engrossing novel and a great example of why I love to read. I’ve stepped inside the minds of these young women as they wrestle with their intense drama.
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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Knopf, $28)
This book came out three years ago, but it’s new to me. I’ve seen lots of copies of it in backpacks and on the subway, so I know it was a hit. It appeared in front of my face when I was cruising a used book store. How could I pass it up when it was a mere $2?
Click on that hideous cover to order.
I have to tell you about it, because only once or twice a year, as I go through the course of my regular reading, do I fall into a book and enjoy being smothered by the story.
I loved this book, which is about something completely alien to my life. It’s about gaming.
I am not a gamer. I could never be one because it requires hand and eye coordination. The key word is coordination and, since I am from Indiana, that it something I lack.
But this is the story of two young folks from Los Angeles who meet in tragic circumstances as mid-teens and who later end up in the same town for college (Harvard and MIT).
They begin to collaborate on making games — this takes places a couple decades back — and their circle begins to widen with roommates and friends who help with some of the nuts and bolts stuff. Two sophomores huddled together in front of aa computer screen grows into an industry leader over the years.
Gabrielle Zevin
Our protagonists, Sam and Sadie, love each other but are not in love. Don’t wait for them to hook up. Not gonna happen — and that’s not really a spoiler.
Sadie is having an affair with her professor, which is all right with Sam. He wants to use an engine designed by the prof to run the game he and Sadie have made. Later, Sadie is repulsed that her friend did not convince her to abandon the teacher earlier in life.
Sam and Sadie have a complicated, angry and loving relationship. I wanted to leap into the book and get to hang with them. That’s when you know you’ve found a good book.
There were some twists and tragedies I didn’t see coming. When you invest so much in characters as arresting as these, you feel the loss severely.
(Take a look at that book cover. I know what they were going for, but it’s hideous and not worthy of such a fine book. Don’t let it scare you away.)
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William Faulkner said, “The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.” I practiced journalism and later taught it, so I might need to wrestle Ol’ Bill in a vat of creamed corn to settle that debate.
But I know what he meant. I think when we check out of life, we should do our best to make sure we’re better than we were when we checked in. Reading can help us develop the compassion and understanding that makes us better human beings.
I was in a state of panic and Duane Moore rescued me. I get that way — nervous, itchy — when I don’t have a book going. I look over my shelves but nothing speaks to me.
And I had just been on a run of great books and had a series of wonderful reading experiences.
I also have this quirk. If I read a book by an author and really enjoy it, I won’t allow myself to read another book by the same writer until I’ve put five or six books in between them. This helps me avoid burnout.
Even if it’s someone whose books are like drugs to me — Michael Connelly, Anne Tyler, Carl Hiaasen, etc. — I still follow that no back-to-back rule.
So I was stuck. None of the books were speaking to me.
Then I went to the second-hand bookstore at that temple of wonderfulness, the public library.
Browsing the shelves, eavesdropping on the cashier and another customer, I found it. Duane’s Depressed.
It’s the middle book in Larry McMurtry’s series featuring Duane Moore, and the only one in that series that I had not read and did not own. The title was a little off-putting. Who wants to read about someone else’s depression?
McMurtry, who died in 2021, left us a tremendous amount of work and he had published books in several series, taking place across three centuries.
He’s most known for Lonesome Dove (1985), the Pulitzer Prize winning epic about two aged Texas Rangers, Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae, in the waning days of the West. //// Spoiler alert: Gus dies in that book. //// The characters were so beloved — by readers as well as McMurtry — that he spun off a couple of prequels featuring the cast of Lonesome Dove: Comanche Moon (1997) and Dead Man’s Walk, (1995) as well as a sequel, Streets of Laredo (1993), which concerns Call’s adventures alone, post-Gus, tracking a sadistic killer.
McMurtry also wrote a series of books set in the 20th Century, featuring a screenwriter named Danny Deck. He was the star of All My Friends are Going to be Strangers (1972) and Some Can Whistle (1989) and appeared in several other novels in what McMurtry called his Houston series. Terms of Endearment (1975) was part of this series, and Danny Deck made a cameo, as he did in Moving On (1970), a huge, brawling, deeply wonderful novel about rodeo folk. (By the way, Some Can Whistle was one of the most moving books I’ve ever read. It gripped my heart and brought me to tears. Read it and you will understand.)
There’s a series of four novels known as the Berrybender Narratives, published in the first decade of this century, about a pioneer family. Good stuff.
All of this brings me to Duane Moore. Duane first appeared as part of the cast of horny teenagers in The Last Picture Show (1966). He was a football player and then a roughneck, and he was apparently headed toward the ol’ life of quiet desperation.
But … surprise. When Duane and the other denizens of Thalia, Texas, returned two decades later, our boy had become a successful oil man. Texasville (1987) brought the horny teenagers up to middle age. The earlier book focused on a large cast. There was Sonny Crawford, the simple, quiet kid who carried on an affair with the much-older Ruth Popper, wife of his football coach. We had Jacy Farrow, the prettiest girl in town, who liked to flirt with anything in a cowboy hat and tight blue jeans. The moral center of the cast, the one who served as the town conscience and mentor to Sonny and Duane, was Sam the Lion. And there were so many more rich characters.
Texasville moved Duane Moore to the center of the narrative and he starred again in Duane’s Depressed (1999), When the Light Goes (2007) and, finally Rhino Ranch (2009).
As I say, I skipped Duane’s Depressed but reviewed When the Light Goes on its publication, and was shocked at how much I’d missed Duane.
He was a widower in When the Light Goes, which served as an advertisement for elderly eroticism. The characters were what we would call “mature,” but they still fucked like rabbits. Truly a wonderful (and inspiring) book.
I came across the last Duane book, Rhino Ranch, a few years back, enjoyed it immensely but panicked as I neared the conclusion, realizing this was the end of the series..
So when I picked up Duane’s Depressed at the bookstore, it was like walking into the middle of a film. I know what’s going to happen in the 20 years after the events in the book, but that didn’t lessen my enjoyment.
Here’s the outline of the story: Duane is a prosperous oil man and his kids are lazy and worthless. They leave the rearing of their children to the housekeeper and to their parents, Duane and Karla. Their grown daughters go off and party in Dallas and leave their kids in front of the television, with Grandma.
So Duane comes home one day, parks his pickup and starts walking. There’s a small cabin on his property, about six miles away from his house, and he finds himself hoofing it there. He’s done with pickup-truck culture and decides he will henceforth walk everywhere.
Naturally, no one can understand his behavior. Duane, you got a perfectly good pickup. What’s wrawng with you, Son? Karla is threatened by Duane’s walking, thinking his walking away is the first step toward divorce. His two daughters think he’s gone crazy. His coked-up son thinks dad’s going through menopause.
All of these lay people think Duane is depressed. He doesn’t think so. He thinks he’s a pilgrim, trying to find a path through this ridiculous catastrophe of life. The cowboy culture mocks Duane for the walking. He upsets his friends by openly seeing a therapist, of all things. The therapist is in Wichita Falls, so Duane gets a bicycle. He also discovers the depths in his soul, thanks to Dr. Honor Carmichael. Nothing sexual happens between them because Duane is faithfully married and devoted to Karla. But Honor and Duane acknowledge their deep attraction. (They eventually fuck like monkeys in When the Light Goes.)
McMurtry’s storytelling is, as usual, masterful. I haven’t liked every book he’s written — the motherfucker published 47 books! — but I’ve loved most of them and have actually reread some of them.
One of my primary reasons for loving Larry McMurtry: It was 1986. I was living alone, recently separated, in a minimalist apartment. I had a mattress on the floor, a lawn chair and a recently acquired copy of Lonesome Dove. The book was my only entertainment. I’d read, then fall asleep and dream I was with Woodrow and Gus. It was sometimes hard to remember what was dream and what was McMurtry’s narrative. Reading that epic novel leads my list of Top Ten Glorious Reading Experiences. (Along with Fanny by Erica Jong, The Nuclear Age by Tim O’Brien, In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason and The World According to Garp by John Irving.)
I was already a fan of McMurtry. A decade before my Lonesome Dove experience, I was working for a magazine and sent him a note, asking if he had a short story we could publish. He replied promptly: “I can’t write short fiction. I just can’t.”
Thank God he wrote such powerful and absorbing novels. He created so many worlds, spanning the 19th through 21st centuries. To me, Duane Moore has been one of his richest characters and a companion for so much of my life.
Books can do that — give us glimpses into other worlds and other lives. I’m lucky to graze McMurtry’s bibliography and find such astonishing people and stories.
Welcome to the season of loss. I’ve lost some close friends recently. At this age, perhaps it’s expected, but that makes it no more welcome.
My friend Tom Corcoran has died. Let me tell you about this wonderful, generous man.
Corcoran in Key West, May 1979
One morning many years ago, I awoke to an interesting message in my email inbox. “I put ‘Bob Dylan’ and ‘Hunter Thompson’ into Google and your name came up. Why?”
I told this unknown correspondent that I’d written books on Bob and Hunter and was, in fact, in the middle of writing another book on Hunter. He’d killed himself the year before and I wanted to write the first whole-life biography of Hunter Thompson. I wanted to talk about his work and the real man, whom I’d met years before and with whom I maintained an intermittent correspondence. To much of the world. Hunter Thompson was a drug-addled clown. I was revolted by that and sought to write a book that would focus on his art and craftsmanship.
So anyway — after the email from a stranger, then came the phone.
After several minutes of banter, Corcoran revealed that he knew Hunter well. He’d babysat Hunter during the time he lived at Jimmy Buffett’s Key West home in the late Seventies.
In return, Uncle Hunter babysat Corcoran’s young son, Sebastian. Hunter was reliable, if eccentric, caretaker. A bullhorn was essential to his surrogate parenting style. (For more details, read Outlaw Journalist.)
So now, years later, a pre-breakfast email and a phone call. A Potsdam conference was in order.
Corcoran lived squarely in the middle of Florida. I was upstate at the University of Florida, so I took a day off and made the two-hour drive to meet this guy.
Visiting Corcoran was like two middle-aged men having a play date. He had so much stuff – books, art prints, mementos – that he had two houses, side by side, to hold it all. I also discovered that in addition to a rich archive – this dude saved everything – that he had a steel trap mind.
While everyone around him had been snorting coke and getting drunk, Corcoran had managed to remain relatively clean and sober.
There’s no doubt that meeting Corcoran enriched my book. Historian Douglas Brinkley served as Hunter S. Thompson’s literary executor. After Thompson’s suicide, there had been a lot of books devoted to the iconoclastic writer. But Brinkley said my book stood out, in part because I was the only one to deal with the “missing years” of Thompson’s life in Key West.
All credit, of course, to Corcoran.
I was nearly finished with that book (Outlaw Journalist, available wherever fine books are sold) when Corcoran began telling me that I needed to write a book about Key West in the Seventies.
He even showed me a message from Thompson, dated less than two months before the suicide, suggesting that such a book must be written.
“Why don’t you write it?” I asked.
He was too close to it, he said. It needed to be written by someone on the outside. It needed to be me, he said.
It didn’t take a lot of convincing. I’d married a woman from Key West and both of her families went back several generations on the Rock. I had always wondered what a life hatched there would be like.
Yet my wife spoke of “getting out” of Key West, as if it was something bad, a place to be avoided. It was paradise, yes, but also dangerous.
As I thought about that era and considered the writers working and playing in Key West, I began to see it as a parallel to Paris in the Twenties, when Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and the others redefined the landscape of American literature. Key West in the Seventies even had Thomas McGuane, the writer so often called the “new Hemingway” that he probably flinched at mention of the name.
Even before I’d read a book by McGuane, I knew who he was. Like Thompson, he was a writer so famous in his era that even people who didn’t read books knew who he was.
McGuane in 2010, on the Raw Deal Ranch in Montana. I took this picture.
McGuane was portrayed as that drug-crazed new Hemingway they talked about in all the magazines, the one who was doing all that crazy stuff and getting married every 20 minutes or so down there in Key West.
That had been the public portrayal, at least. I’d seen what being a celebrity writer had done to Thompson. Yet I knew McGuane and his friends not only survived but prospered.
Whether that press portrayal was accurate or not, it intrigued me enough to want to know how McGuane, novelist/poet Jim Harrison, painter Russell Chatham and the others lived their lives.
Hunter Thompson playing front-yard football with Sebastian Corcoran in Key West in the Seventies.
I’d gone on to read their books and saw writing this book as an opportunity, among other things, to revel in their work.
I saw the potential of the story that Corcoran had told me. After generously giving me the idea, he stepped back. I think he had no interest in being the focal point of the book. That part was my idea.
That book, Mile Marker Zero, could not have been written without Corcoran’s monumental help, cooperation and steadfast kindness.
After Outlaw Journalist, I wanted to write a book with a happy ending. (Spoiler alert: Hunter Thompson kills himself at the end.)
I saw the Key West book as a redemption story. After earning fame as the greatest drug and alcohol user of his generation, Tom McGuane got sober. After being wed three times in 18 months — once to my dream woman, actor Margot Kidder — McGuane was thirty years into what he called a “jubilant marriage” with Laurie Buffett. (Yes, Jimmy’s sister.)
That was the story I wanted to tell. Redemption. A happy ending, on a Montana ranch.
But as I wrote the story, weaving together the adventures of McGuane, Harrison and Chatham, I realized it was really a book about Tom Corcoran and how he held together this world.
Over the years I’d worked on the books, I learned all about Corcoran’s life, including his marriage to Judy. They’d had problems — don’t we all? — but in his case, that relationship was unresolved. Judy went missing. She was with friends, sailing on a spectacular afternoon in the Keys. Everybody jumped in the water to take a swim. All were high.
They never found Judy.
So much for a happy ending. Before I turned the manuscript into the editor, I sent it to Tom, for fact-checking and editing suggestions. Corcoran was a brilliant writer and when he gave me a compliment — “You write like a pro, Bubba” — it made my heart soar like a hawk (Apologies to Thomas Berger for that one.)
When he read the section about Judy, he was taken aback. He’d told me the story but didn’t think it would be in the book. I was ashamed of hurting him and said I’d take it out.
“No,” he said. “That’s part of the story.” This was followed my a long sigh. I offered again to take it out but he said the story was mine to tell.
We remained friends. When I was in cancer treatment, he sent me messages of support … and some good books.
He died of cancer, but we never knew he was sick. It wasn’t like him to share his pain. I have two extremely wonderful big brothers (one’s a brother in law, but he’s been in my life since I was 9.) But Corcoran was a big brother to me. I admired him so much.
I wanted to be like him when I grew up. To quote Paul Simon, “Who’ll be my role model now that my role model is gone?”
Tom Corcoran with Judy and Sebastian in the Seventies.
Perhaps I ramble, so let’s gather the facts: Tom Corcoran has died. He was gifted as a writer, a photographer, a songwriter, a pal and a human being. He touched so many people and we all loved him.
Maybe I should just end this with the ending of Mile Marker Zero — one of our nights together, when we went out to dinner and had another evening of spectacular conversation.
Here:
Tom Corcoran now owns two houses, side by side, in a central Florida town at the outer reaches of Orlando’s gravitational pull. His adult son, Sebastian, lives in one, presiding over Corcoran’s huge, moody Russell Chatham lithographs and some of the artifacts from his life and career. Corcoran lives a few steps across the manicured yard in the house he reserves for his other possessions – a magnificent collection of books, more lithographs, more of his beautiful photographs of a golden age of Key West.
Corcoran in 1979, working on the screenplay for Cigarette Key in Buffett’s apartment, where his collaborator, Hunter Thompson, was bunking.
Corcoran sleeps here.
It’s hard to find a seat. The place is more warehouse than home. It is also where Corcoran works. There are no couches, no tables, no bar stools. The dining room holds most of the inventory for his small publishing business, The Ketch and Yawl Press. More books and boxes of Jimmy Buffett calendars, another Corcoran enterprise, fill the living room.
There are two chairs in the larger of the three rooms devoted to his library. One is a remnant from Buffett’s Waddell Street apartment. Corcoran could put a plaque on it and sell it to the Hard Rock Café: “Jimmy Buffett Sat Here.” It could also say, “Tom McGuane Sat Here” or “Hunter S. Thompson Sat Here,” but so far, no one has devised a theme restaurant built around literature.
In the office, where Corcoran writes his novels, there is a desk chair and a small chair for visitors, usually covered in piles of manuscript pages.
Tom Corcoran was long ago priced out of Key West, and lived in Fairhope, Alabama, for several years. Eventually, he found work writing about automobiles and became editor of a magazine about the cult surrounding the Ford Mustang. That job brought him back to Florida and he settled smack dab in the middle of the state this time. He published three books about cars, but knew it was time for him to realize that long-dormant ambition to be a novelist. His muse, of course, was Key West.
He couldn’t afford to live there, but when he left the magazine job, he moved to the Keys in the Nineties, buying a home on Cudjoe and finally beginning to write the novels he’d always planned to write. They were mysteries set in Key West, built around a photographer who knew the island and all of its history. The character, Alex Rutledge, gets pulled into solving crimes.
“How much of Alex Rutledge is Tom Corcoran?” a visitor asks.
“Quite a bit,” he says.
Corcoran with Hunter S. Thompson on Sugarloaf Key, during their collaboration as screenwriters
In his fiction, he’s dealt – tangentially, mostly – with a lot of the real mysteries of Key West, including the disappearance of Bum Farto. He has not, and will not, write about the disappearance of Judy Corcoran. That would cause a raft of pain.
When his first novel, The Mango Opera, was published, his friends lined up to praise his books with dust-jacket blurbs that would be the envy of any American writer: Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, Hunter S. Thompson, Jimmy Buffett. He became one of the best mystery writers in America. Though he does not sell books by the truckload, as does a Michael Connelly, he earns the praise of such masters of the craft. Connelly called one of Corcoran’s books “the reading highlight of my year.”
He gave up the Cudjoe Key house some years back and now shares the twin houses with Sebastian. He goes to the Keys a half dozen times a year, usually staying with Dink Bruce. He also writes songs with John Frinzi and Keith Sykes. He still collects a handsome royalty each year for a few minutes of collaboration with Jimmy Buffett three decades ago.
Out at dinner, he is kind and solicitous to his young waitress. The talk turns to music and Corcoran’s dinner companion tells her, “This dude wrote songs with Jimmy Buffett.”
“Really?” she asks. Though he’s grandfather age to her, you can see that celebrity remains a powerful aphrodisiac.
“Not only that,” the companion says. “He once wrote a movie with Hunter Thompson. And he’s a big-time mystery writer.”
“Really?” It’s drawn out three or four extra syllables.
It’s dark in the restaurant, so it’s not clear if Corcoran is blushing, but the smart money is on it.
He tells her a few stories about Buffett and Thompson in the old days in Key West. She’s smiling, ignoring all of her other tables.
“I’ve never been,” she says. “Key West, I mean. I’ve lived in Florida my whole life, but I’ve never been.”
“You should go.” Corcoran’s matter of fact, serious even. “It’s not what it was in my day, but you should still go.”
She smiles.
“I can’t finish this,” he says, nodding toward his plate. “Could you bring me something to pack it up in?”
“Yes, sir.”
Back at his house, he’s getting out of his car when he hears a hello as a bicycle speeds past in the dark. It’s Sebastian, home from an evening with friends. Corcoran walks over to his other front yard.
Tom Corcoran as I knew him
“Hello, Son,” he says. “I couldn’t eat all my dinner. Would you like it?”
“That’d be great,” Sebastian says. “I haven’t gotten around to eating yet.”
“It’s Italian. It’s good. I just wasn’t that hungry.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
Corcoran turns back toward his other house. “Goodnight, Son.”
“Good night, Dad.”
But Corcoran isn’t ready for bed just yet. If he didn’t have a visitor, he might be at work on his next Alex Rutledge novel. Instead, he looks through his files of photographs of Key West. He’s published one book, a limited-edition art book, of black and whites. Now he’s contemplating a companion book in color.
The photographs are sharp and vivid, not faded and blurred with time. Corcoran examines each one carefully, seeing occasional flaws, remembering the instant each photograph was taken.
Here’s McGuane, serenely high from the look in his eyes, with Richard Brautigan and Guy de la Valdene. That was on Duval, he thinks. Here’s Hunter S. Thompson, probably in 1978 or so, looking over a manuscript page in Buffett’s apartment, sitting in that chair that’s in the next room. And speak of the devil, here’s a young and hairy Jimmy Buffett, wearing the smallest of cut-off shorts, hanging off the side of his sloop.
Must’ve been 1974 or thereabouts. He wasn’t the multi-millionaire entrepreneur then, but aside from the hairline and the income, Corcoran isn’t sure all that much has changed.
He treats everything with surgical care: photographic prints are in plastic slipcases; valuable books have mylar covers. He has a whole bookcase devoted to his Key West collection, many of them rare, precious and beautiful.
You should turn this into a museum, the guest says.
He nods. “Perhaps I will.”
It’s well after midnight when he finally puts away the pictures and announces he’s ready for bed.
He locks the front door, turns out the lights, crosses the hall to his bedroom, and gets between the covers.
Thinking about Key West again invigorates him, but he’s tired, so he falls asleep quickly, slipping into a dream before very long. Soon, he could see the blue water.
As I contemplate the many pleasant afternoons in my life, oddly enough, it’s one of the non-carnal ones to which I often return in memory.
It was an afternoon in the Tune Town record shop in Bowling Green, Kentucky. I was still in my twenties, a young dad, and I was there to pick up a book I’d lent to the guy behind the counter, Bill Lloyd.
Bill Lloyd in his Foster & Lloyd days.
Yes, thatBill Lloyd, A few years later, he was half of Foster & Lloyd and on his way to his career as one of the most admired, beloved and respected musicians in Nashville.
But on that day, he wanted to return my copy of It’s Too Late to Stop Now, a book of essays by Jon Landau, who had forsaken writing about music to become Svengali for Bruce Springsteen.
I went to pick up the book but luckily the afternoon went as I’d hoped and elongated. It became an adult playdate.
You’ve got to hear this, he said — again and again.
It was a weekday, so the store was essentially ours. A few customers came and went, but Bill kept pulling records from under the counter and popping them on the store turntable.
He guided me through an afternoon of songs — wonderful, swirling music, stuff I’d never heard before. With the record shop at his disposal, he took me through his world, and played me stuff from Buddy Holly’s demos, recorded in his apartment just weeks before his death. He introduced me to The Dictators Go Girl Crazy and I became a lifelong fan of Handsome Dick Manitoba. I was stunned by the import-only White Trails by Englishman Chris Rainbow. That was a thrilling collection heavily influenced by the Sunflower / Surf’s Up era of The Beach Boys.
I kept notes in the plain pages at the back of the Landau book. Within a couple of years, I’d tracked down and bought all of the records Bill played for me that day.
I love adult playdates and now I feel as if I’ve had another rewarding musical afternoon, this time with Bob Dylan.
Dylan’s new book,The Philosophy of Modern Song, is sort of like that long-ago afternoon with Bill Lloyd, only without the music. (I hope a soundtrack album to Dylan’s book is imminent.)
Bob Dylan
It’s as if we’re seated on the floor in front of the turntable, and Dylan is flipping through his albums saying, You’ve got to hear this.
He’s picked out 66 songs from all across the musical map, and he tells us about them. There are no details about recording and only once or twice does he examine the songs from a professional songwriter’s viewpoint. He never indulges in self-reference, about a particular song’s influence or ways in which he would approach the same material.
So it’s not a discographical reference. Like a lot of Dylan’s prose, it’s fanciful, often hilarious, and notoriously unreliable. We assume the recording details at the front of every chapter are correct, but all bets are off when it comes to his flights of fancy.
And he takes such flights frequently. With several songs, he goes off on wild tangents.
Consider this meditation on footwear, which I excerpt I from his commentary on “Blue Suede Shoes” by Carl Perkins:
There are more songs about shoes than there are about hats, pants and dresses combined. Ray Price’s keep walking back to him. Betty Lou got a new pair. Chuck Willis didn’t want to hang his up. Shoes reveal character, station and personality. But for all that shoes revealed, they did not give up their secrets easily. [Consider] the white buck, a shoe so proud if its immaculate surface that it came with a small brush to buff any blemish from existence. And one can’t forget blue suede shoes. Has ever a shoe proclaimed its frivolity more joyously? Has any article of clothing ever said more plainly that it wasn’t meant for the farm, that it wasn’t meant to step in pig shit? Poor Carl Perkins, watching Elvis Presley sing his song “Blue Suede Shoes” on TV in 1956 from a hospital bed. At that point, Carl’s version had sold a million copies, but a car accident slowed the momentum of Carl’s career and it never truly recovered. Elvis, on the other hand, was all sullen eyes and sharp cheekbones, backwoods-born but city-livin’, truck-drivin’, hip-shakin’ with a feral whiff of danger. Carl wrote this song, but if Elvis was alive today, he’d be the one to have a deal with Nike.
Feral whiff? It’s writing like that that makes me wish Dylan published prose more often.
Turns out he’s not just the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, he’s also the master of the Dad Joke.
These vamps are like transcriptions from those off-the-wall monologues Dylan used to deliver when he hosted his Theme Time Radio Hour on satellite radio. The book is much like the show in the sense that he wants to educate us about the music that made him.
A treatise on the bluegrass music of the Osborne Brothers’ 1957 recording of “Ruby, Are You Mad?” somehow morphs into a discussion of heavy metal music. He concludes the two forms of music have a lot in common: “This [bluegrass music] is speed metal without the embarrassment of Spandex and junior high school devil worship.”
He loves tall tales. Discussing Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou,” he references Linda Ronstadt’s hit version of the song. “A lot of people cite The Dickson Baseball Dictionary as listing ‘Linda Ronstadt’ as a synonym for a baseball,” he deadpans, because the ball “‘blew by you.’ When Herb Carneal announced a Twins game and the opposing team’s batter would take a strike off a fastball, Herb would giddily exclaim, ‘Thank you, Roy Orbison.’”
There’s no such entry in my edition of the Dickson book, but why quibble. I’m not sure Dylan’s writing would last more than a couple of minutes in the fact-checking department of The New Yorker. Those carnivorous Keepers of Truth would roll up the manuscript and toss it in the dustbin. But who cares? Dylan’s obviously having fun.
Except when he isn’t. There are a couple startling essays on music than turn tragic and unforgettable. You’re laughing along with his word play and then suddenly shocked into silence.
Ry Cooder
Somewhere, Ry Cooder is blushing. Dylan lavishes the great guitarist with Himalayas of praise. His chapter on “Old Violin” reminds me that I need to rethink Johnny Paycheck. I’m suddenly questioning if I missed something in the singing of Perry Como. And what love Dylan’s shows Judy Garland.
The artists range from hillbillies to rappers, with Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby thrown in, alongside The Clash, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes and artists you’ve never heard of. He cares little for political correctness and says, at one point, that as a field of knowledge expands and is stretched tighter, the skin of society becomes too thin for the comfort of ideas.
There’s a lot of pocket wisdom in the book and it’s as if he just used the premise of writing about records to reveal this wonderment of prose writing.
Note: There are no entries for The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones or Dylan.
It’s a beautiful book, filled with oddball and esoteric illustrations. The cover features Little Richard, Alis Lesley (she called herself the Female Elvis) and the great and doomed Eddie Cochran.
As much as I love hard copies, I supplemented this purchase of paper with the audio version of the book. I heard Bob was doing part of the narration. He ends up doing his fantasias, which sound like coffee-shop beat poetry read aloud. His segments have a different audio texture than his other narrators.
And what a cast of collaborators. The lineup includes Jeff Bridges, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Oscar Isaac, Helen Mirren, Rita Moreno, Sissy Spacek, Alfre Woodard, Jeffrey Wright and Renee Zellweger.
Helen Mirren, part of the narration crew
You’ve got to hear this. Bob doesn’t point us to any of his recordings, but he does include some contemporaries — Willie Nelson, Cher, Jimmy Webb and others — and, of course, honors the forefathers of rock’n’roll: Little Richard, Rick Nelson, and Johnny Cash.
But — and here’s where you need to take notes — he introduces us to recordings that mean so much to him: “Take Me from This Garden of Evil,” an unreleased song, recorded by Jimmy Wages in 1957; Harry McClintock’s 1927 recording of “Jesse James”; and “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy,” recorded by Uncle Dave Macon in 1924. I know I’ll be tracking down “Doesn’t Hurt Anyone” by John Trudell, released in 2001 … one of only two songs from this century to make Dylan’s cut.
And that makes sense. Bob Dylan is, after all, a pure product of America. He is the American musical experience wrapped up in the bones of sinews of one human being, and he wants to share his love with you.
I don’t do my Creative Loafing book blog anymore and had to cut back to 2-3 newspaper book reviews a year for the Boston Globe or the Tampa Bay Times.
But that doesn’t mean I read any less and have lost the desire to share news of a good book.
So this — a brief word of praise for Altamont by Joel Selvin.
It is a thoroughly engrossing account of what the subtitle calls ‘Rock’s Darkest Day.’ If you believe in a Higher Being and the concept of Heaven and Hell, then this is a preview of coming attractions should you think you are headed to the latter.
Three-hundred thousand people, fucked up on various combinations of acid, amphetamines and booze, cram into a small space and many get the shit beat out of them by Hells Angels as some of the best bands of the day (Burrito Bros., Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Crosby etc. and the Rolling Stones) try to perform.
It’s a wonderful book about a horrifying day.
About two years ago, Selvin wrote another great book – Here Comes the Night – about Bert Berns, one of the under-sung behind-the-scenes guys in rock (he wrote ‘Twist and Shout’ and many others).
I don’t do my Creative Loafing book blog anymore and had to cut back to 2-3 newspaper book reviews a year for the Boston Globe or the Tampa Bay Times.
So this — a brief word of praise for Altamont by Joel Selvin.