Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

David Dobbs's Somatic Marker

My catch-all first filter for web-worthy offerings and gleanings

Denis Johnson's "Train Dreams"

Reading, as I ride a train toward the old rebounded forest I live amid, Denis Johnson's Train Dreams. It's fabulous. He has early forestry work and its people down beautifully. 

Sometimes Peeples set a charge, turned the screw to set it off, and got nothing for his trouble. Then a general tension and silence gripped the woods. Men working half a mile away would somehow get an understanding that a dud charge had to be dealt with, and all work stopped. Peeples would empty his pockets of valuables — a brass watch, a tin comb, a silver toothpick — lay them on a stump, and proceed into the darkness of his tunnel without looking back. When he came out and turned his screws again and the dynamite blew with a whomp, the men cheered and a cloud of dust rushed from the tunnel and powdered rock came raining down over everyone. 

It looked certain Arn Peeples would exit this world in a puff of smoke with a monstrous noise, but he went out quite differently, hit across the back of his head by a dead branch falling off a tall larch — the kind of snag called a "widow maker" with just this kind of misfortune in mind. The blow knocked him silly, but he soon came around and seemed fine, complaining only that his spine felt "knotty among the knuckles" and "I want to walk suchways — crooked." He had a buber of dizzy spells and grew dreamy and forgetful over the course of the next few days, lay up all day Sunday racked with chills and fever, and on Monday morning was found in his bed deceased, with the covers up under his chin and "such a sight of comfort," as the captain said, "that you'd just as soon not disturb him — just lower him down into a great long wide grave, bed and all." 

 

At Kathy's house

I had the pleasure of taking the kids to Houston last week for some vacation. We stayed, as usual, with my dad and his wife, artist Kathy Hall. Below are some of my favorite things at their wonderful house. It's a small bungalow in a part of town in which most such bungalows are being bought up and torn down and replaced by 4,000-s.f. behemoths. It's one of the nicest houses I've ever known. 

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The house

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The vegetable patch

 

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Weathervane

 

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St Francis contemplates

 

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Fish a-swim

 

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Popeye

 

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Combustible

 

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Kathy & Popeye. One of my favorite photos ever

 

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House & live oaks

 

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Dressed up

 

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Kathy, in early riding days

 

 

(download)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why, sometimes, you just gotta use the pen

<blockquote class='posterous_long_quote'><p>If I’m really stuck, I go back to longhand. There’s something about the privacy and the immediacy of it that seems to help. When you’re writing longhand, your attention is on the sentence—you’re not looking at the full page. The remove between the keyboard and the screen can hamper me and mess me up. The trick is to will yourself into the hypnotic state where you believe your own language and your own story. You have to pare out distractions, especially the vast banality of the Internet, which I find lethal to fiction writing. Fiction is so much harder and scarier to write than nonfiction. It requires an enormous amount of concentration and faith to carve out that little bit of space into which you can insert a world that feels real. </p> </blockquote>
via newyorker.com
From a wonderful snippet of interview with Wells Tower, who goes both ways -- fiction and non. I very much like this too: I have a nonfiction desk and a fiction desk, and I’ve deliberately not gotten wireless Internet. In order to go online, I have to go over to the nonfiction desk. Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/04/the-tool-box-we.html#ixzz...

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