Kesey

[Steelhead]

>The steely-eyed trout from Oregon responds with barbed fins:
>
>>Cal McInvale puts Steelhead in his place:
>
>No, no: I would not even venture to guess where that might be, pal.

If it's not at least the 8th or 9th Circle of Hell, I've really screwed
something up in my life, Cal. Barbed fins...on a trout?


>What happened:
>get a bad grade in some 200-level lit course & now you're going to take it
>out on the world? ....to dismiss criticism itself is the act of an
>insecure mind.

Hey, no problem with that psycho-analysis either. Though to be truthful, it
was an entry level reading and comp course at the Douglas County, Oregon
Community College that doomed my promising academic career...a long-winded
explication of Thanantopsis that pushed me over the edge and left such a
mess on the floor.

>I may have made a mistake in believing Notion was Kesey's first book, but
>I'm adult enough to admit it.

Uh, I didn't hear you admit it, Cal.  O-or did I miss something.

>That you would even attempt some
>sort of "top 30" list of books is good evidence of a shallow approach to
>literature.

I'm not a deep water species.

>Grow up, would you?

A-nd fade away? Never.


>I am indeed asserting this. I'm from the South but did not fully appreciate
>Faulkner until I met a professor at the University of New Mexico...

Cal, you're a fine mind, but not a close reader. I said having an
understanding and an experiece of a given sub-culture or ecology adds
"depth--t-that's DEPTH" to certain books that take the land, people,
culture and politics seriously (admittedly a lot of post-modernist
scribblers could care less about these subjects--Barthleme the Great comes
to mind). But I never said you _have_ to live there, or even _have_ to read
anything outside the text at hand, to "fully appreciate" a work. Indeed, I
hope I never come to the point of "fully appreciating" a favorite work like
Notion or Absalom, Absalom!--then why re-read them, eh?

As for the, how did you call it, Latino Lit for Honkies class...Don't you
think that, to use your phrase, "to fully appreciate" Borges, Garcia
Marquez, Fuentes, Lorca, Vargas Llosa et.al., it might help to have at
least little familiarity with _their_ language, if not (hiss) their
culture? I mean I learned spanish (painfully to be sure) just to be able to
read Garcia Marquez and not his damn translator--I don't like or trust
"translators" be they linguists or critics. Period.  When you have a critic
translating a translator, then you're really sunk.

>(Vineland, by the way, seems to use NoCal as a macrocosm [or is that
>>microcosm?] for all of America.)

Glad to hear that. I thought the micro- (or isn't macro-?) cosm stuff went
out of favor after the Metaphysical Poets. Good to see it make such a
smashing return.

>(And another thing: you're one helluva name dropper, Steely.)

Admittedly. I'm a groupie. A literary roadie. A snoop. An investigator by
training and instinct. I have no real life of my own. Just a shadow of
other people's egos.

But the etiology of this malady is partially traceable to the fact that my
wife is one of the managers of the largest bookstore west of Manhattan.
Sometimes she's left with the _awesome_ responsibility of arranging and
escorting the 20 or so writers that breeze into town each month to give
readings or shamelessly promote their books. Most of the store's attention,
of course, goes to foax like the Pulitizer Prize winning Dave (eat your
heart out TRP) Barry or the wildly prolific Martha Stewart.

When one of those hard-to-read-without-instructions-from-those-who-know
writers comes to town, I often get to escort them to the three or four
sorry souls that show up for the reading and then console them afterwards
with a few pints of Terminator Stout at the local microbrew pub. Sometimes
they end sleeping over (their publishers being too cheap to put them up at
the Red Lion) where they have to vie our Newfoundland for space on the
couch.

My favorite encounter of the past year was with William Vollman, who has
also been mercilously ripped by NYC and academic "critics." One of the
things about Vollman is that he is almost totally blind..can't see his hand
when its fully outstreched in front of his face, but as he was "reading"
(from memory?) a particularly complex chapter (zipping back and forth
across the centuries in mere sentences) from his latest volume (the Rifles)
in the 7 Dreams series, he pulled a pistol from his backpack and, while
continuing to read, missing neither caesura nor synecdoche, pulled angrily
on the trigger and fired. I think he was aiming at one of the sniggering
literature professors from Reed College hiding behind the "transactional
analysis" stacks at the rear of the room. But the shot was wildly
misplaced, blasting into the ceiling, instead. The next time you're in the
pink room at Powell's, look up, where you will see a bullethole the size of
a quarter and Wm. Vollman's primative scrawl beside it.

>So then you're agreeing with what I said, that Notion is closest to his
>heart? You know who Janus is?

Again, your putting words in my mouth--not wise, we're a piscivorous lot us
Steelhead--I said merely that Kesey felt he'd never "top the feeling he
had" after writing Notion. Take it how you want. But I agree, it could be
interpreted as meaning "closest to his heart." And, yes, as a dangerous
paranoid schizophrenic, I know who "Janus" is. Plus, I've read Suetonius in
the original--damn, nuns (o-ops, there I go name dropping again). I mean
I've read all about him in the columns of the Kenneth Anger of Ancient
Rome.

Steely