The Drop Edge of Yonder
Dave Monroe
against.the.dave at gmail.com
Thu Jun 5 10:41:34 CDT 2008
Wandering 'Round 'Yonder'
Rudolph Wurlitzer gets the 'Drop Edge' on the American West
By Anthony Miller
There's nothing new about the old West, it seems. It's long been a
place where writers of novels, movies, and television shows ruminate
on questions of history (personal and national), violence, justice,
redemption, and mortality. In The Drop Edge of Yonder (Two Dollar
Radio), his first novel in more than two decades, Rudolph Wurlitzer's
West is a sacred space, an American dreamtime, and a carnival of
travesties and transfigurations.
Wurlitzer is best known as the author of two classic
screenplays,Two-Lane Blacktop and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid; he is
also the author of three intoxicating cult novels (Nog, Flats, Quake),
a novel about the movies (Slow Fade), and a contemplative travelogue
(Hard Travel to Sacred Places). He knows more than a little something
about Americans and their wanderings into the ineffable. Inspired by
Beckett and Buddhism, Wurlitzer's works are bold adventures into the
consciousnesses of characters hounded or haunted by forces outside
their control and comprehension.
Although my CityBeat colleague Ron Garmon esteems Quake among the
author's novels, I prefer the "headventure" Nog. Thomas Pynchon
anointed Wurlitzer's first book as "another sign that the Novel of
Bullshit is dead and some kind of re-enlightenment is beginning to
arrive, to take hold," and I suspect that's not just because the
narrator's traveling companion is an octopus....
[...]
... If Zebulon's on-the-edge-of-death scenario sounds reminiscent of
that of improbable gunslinger William Blake in another metaphysical
Western, Jim Jarmusch's 1995 Dead Man, it's because Wurlitzer and
Jarmusch spent time discussing the story when Wurlitzer was still
working it up as a screenplay.
Wurlitzer's wonderfully tall tale incorporates and alters all the
conventions of the Western and offers reflections on quests for gold,
land, and other expressions of our American imperialism. Drop Edge
occupies a space between the whimsical and the mystical, the silly and
the sublime. Wurlitzer's philosophical, humorous, and visionary yarn
guides the reader into a landscape in which to wander around and get
lost, a West that leads into the numinous terra incognita between
sleep and waking, life and death, and toward the contemplation of what
it means to cross a frontier.
For info on The Drop Edge of Yonder and Two Dollar Radio press, go to
http://www.twodollarradio.com.
http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/wandering_round_yonder/7098/
The Drop Edge of Yonder
A new novel by Rudolph Wurlitzer
http://www.twodollarradio.com/books-dropedge.htm
Zebulon Lives - official site for the book.
http://www.zebulonlives.com/
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