written by Kurt Baumeister June 13, 2019
Intro
Wherein Constance Squires shares how Iris Murdoch taught her not to be afraid of plot, Michael Gillan Maxwell discusses how Gary Snyder’s writing turned him on to philosophy, Sean Beaudoin lauds the life and work of cultural icon Jim Carroll, and Dr. Nancy Hightower explains how Kafka taught her about “the elasticity of truth.” There’s no outro this month, or, rather, there’s a different type: I will be back at the end with my own submission on the great Martin Amis. Please read and enjoy.
Franz Kafka
by Nancy Hightower
I had always appreciated Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and The Trial, but I could not escape the nightmare world of his short story “A Country Doctor.” Kafka has an uncanny ability to collapse landscapes and rooms, but the concrete details of unearthly horses, supernatural groom, and eerie village are what shows the power of the surreal, which can infiltrate reality to the point where the reader becomes destabilized and cannot argue against the logic of the text, no matter how illogical. The boundaries we try to draw around “truth” or “reality” become frighteningly elastic in Kafka’s world, and we see just how fragile our own narratives are. In my flash fiction, I want readers to get lost in this tangle of the familiar and the strange; I want them to experience the most fantastical parts of the story as the most true.
Nancy Hightower‘s work has been published in Joyland, Entropy, Gargoyle, Sundog Lit, Sojourners, Flapperhouse, Vol 1. Brooklyn, and elsewhere. She is the author of Elementari Rising (2013) and The Acolyte (2015), and currently teaches at Hunter College.
Jim Carroll
by Sean Beaudoin
When I was 13 I wanted to be a power forward for the Knicks. Then I found The Basketball Diaries under my sister’s mattress and wanted to be a power forward for the Knicks who did lots of heroin. What was it like being a tough street kid from the Bronx in the late 60s? Fortunately, there’s a record so vivid it’s almost Studs Terkel. I spent years stealing from Jim Carroll, and then years trying to write sentences half as hilarious and vivid. Oh, yeah, he also sang in a great art-rock band, wrote one of the best dead-buddy homages of all time, appeared in Tuff Turf with James Spader, penned a lot of pretty crap poetry, and for a while was Mr. Patti Smith. Now that’s a life. The Catcher in the Rye gets all the bluster, but for the hip set, everyone knows Basketball Diaries is the best book about disaffected youth ever written.
Sean Beaudoin is the author of The Infects, Wise Young Fool, and the short story collection Welcome Thieves. His latest novel, This Unlovely Monster, is due imminently from Algonquin Books.
Gary Snyder
by Michael Gillan Maxwell
I’ve been under the influence of Gary Snyder since the early 70’s. I was obsessed by the Beat writers and infatuated with the colorful portrayal of him as “Japhy Ryder,” a central figure in Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. Snyder’s seminal collections Rip Rap and Cold Mountain Poems, The Back Country and Regarding Wave cast a life-long shadow along my own path as a potter, visual artist, musician, writer, educator, environmental activist, student of Eastern philosophy and as a seeker questioning our purpose and role in the universe. “Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” – Gary Snyder
Michael Gillan Maxwell roams the Finger Lakes Region of New York state. Maxwell is a visual artist and a writer of short fiction, poetry, songs, reviews, essays, lists, recipes and irate letters to his legislators. A teller of tales and singer of songs, he’s prone to random outbursts and may spontaneously combust or break into song at any moment. His hybrid collection of visual art and prose, The Part Time Shaman Handbook: An Introduction For Beginners, was published by Unknown Press. Maxwell’s art and intermittent ranting and raving can be found on social media and Your Own Backyard http://michaelgillanmaxwell.com.
Iris Murdoch
by Constance Squires
Iris Murdoch came into my life in a lit class in which ten 20th century novels were assigned. We only had time for nine, and for whatever reason, Under the Net was the one cut. I kept it, despite being willing to sell just about anything else for beer money. When I read it, she showed me a way out of my deepest insecurity about being a fiction writer: I didn’t think I could write plot. I’d been trained as a poet, so I was good with language, image, and psychology. But, plot? That was too much like math. Murdoch’s novels, though, are suffused with the patterns of the Greeks and Shakespeare that she recombines, modernizes, and redeploys with total freedom. I didn’t have to invent plots, I only had to know how to work with the deep structures of storytelling that have always been there. And that did it for me.
Constance Squires is the author of the novels Along the Watchtower, Live from Medicine Park, and the forthcoming short story collection, Hit Your Brights. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Guernica, The Atlantic, Shenandoah, The New York Times and others.
Martin Amis
by Kurt Baumeister
The son of a famous novelist who became, himself, a famous novelist, Martin Amis writes black-comic fiction heady with language; multi-layered, often nihilistic symbolism; and subtle metafictional conceits. A dark moralist, Amis’s work focuses on the class system and mass culture and is filled with acid wit and unlikable, sometimes grotesque characters. For me, his magnum opus is his sixth novel, London Fields, a book which I have, coincidentally, read six times.
An apocalyptic murder mystery narrated by a dying writer, London Fields brims with unforgettable scenes and characters, erudition, comedy high- and low-, and countless turns of linguistic brilliance; perhaps the book’s most perfect line coming as it ends with the confession of a literary killer Nabokov would surely have appreciated, “So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren’t even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe – it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.”
Kurt Baumeister 