I'm afraid I have some bad news. My former student Dominic Downey died last week. He was twenty-three. Dominic was a bright, creative, energetic, and fun human being. I'm not going to blabber on too much about this. He wouldn't have wanted that. Last spring he hiked down Enchanted Rock with me and we discussed the idea of happiness. He shared with me a memory of his from when he was young and just received a new skateboard for Christmas. Dominic told me how he went outside with some friends that afternoon, new skateboard under his arm, and how he felt that he was so happy right then and there. He said it was one of those moments you try to hold onto. Dominic was wise for such a young guy. Happiness is always fleeting. Happiness is precious. May we all remember those good happy moments. Those short good times.
Goodbye, Dominic. You'll be missed.
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Harper Lee
1926-2016 She may have only written one book (okay, technically two)but Harper Lee was a giant in American letters. It takes a lot of talent to write a book that stands the test of time the way To Kill a Mockingbird has. It is not just a coming-of-age novel, it is not just a tale of the race issues that fracture our country; To Kill a Mockingbird is one of those rare books that captures life itself. Like a lot of people, I first read Ms. Lee’s classic when I was a freshman in high school. I expected it to be preachy, and I hate it when anyone gets up on a soapbox, but I quickly discovered that Harper Lee did what all good writers do: she tells the story honestly and lets the good, the bad, the blood, the honor, and the sins of her characters spill out naturally. Atticus, Scout, and Jem felt as real to me as the people who lived on my street. And I can honestly say that was the first time I felt that way about any novel. When I was in graduate school, back in the dark ages it feels like, I remember we discussed if there could ever be a life-affirming novel. For a bunch of cynical grad students the answer came to a general “No.” And to be honest most novels are not that life affirming. But I think To Kill a Mockingbird is life affirming. Scout and Jem survive, Atticus fights for human dignity, and though there is tragedy, as there is everyday, the protagonists come out the other side with love, empathy, and courage. But besides being a positive novel, To Kill a Mockingbird is simply incredibly written on a technical level. A lot of writers who achieve a certain fame suffer a type of backlash from the literary and academic community. But To Kill a Mockingbird is almost a perfect novel—its architecture, use of archetypes, and sentences are so strong that you read it like you would some suspense novel: ravenously. You see the small town, you feel the heat, you can smell the courthouse. Ms. Lee isn’t just in the same ballpark as J.D. Salinger (to whom she is often compared), she writes on the level of Tolstoy and Twain. Ms. Harper Lee, you once wrote that courage is “when you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.” I hope more people read your work and face the world with that type of courage today, tomorrow, and tomorrow. I'm thrilled to announce that my next story will be published in the upcoming issue of North Dakota Quarterly!
Click on the link below to go to their website and buy a subscription and support this amazing literary journal. Welcome to 2016. It still feels a lot like 2015. I’m sure that will change. Last year I went to Europe for Christmas but was back in Texas for New Years. This season I stayed in Texas but went to Memphis, Tennessee, for New Years. I was sick the entire trip, but luckily I was able to drink enough cough syrup to keep me going. On the drive there I stopped in Shreveport, Louisiana, to see my pal Chris who just recently moved there from Austin. Chris and I have known each other for almost a decade and are pretty close so it was awesome getting to see him again. Originally he wanted to show me a lot of the city, but because of a tornado (yes, a tornado!) I didn’t get to Shreveport until after 9:00. This made it a late start for carousing. Especially since I was feeling under the weather. Regardless, Chris showed me the boardwalk and the casinos and gave me a growler of local beer called ‘Awkward Uncle.’ It was a tasty brew. I pulled into Memphis the next day. I was coughing pretty bad by then so I wasn’t going too wild. But I got to see Sun Studios where Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash all recorded their first hits. Having grown up listening to those guys, it was a pretty big deal to me. I also got to see some live blues down on Beale Street. I’d been on Beale Street once a long time ago, but I didn’t really get to check it out. I was on some bus trip going somewhere and just ran out and ran back. This time I got to see Blind Mississippi Morris play at the Blue City Café. I also got some pretty good ribs, too. By New Year’s Eve I was starting to feel better, but I still had congestion in my nose and chest. I was able to stay up until midnight but not much longer. The next day was the long drive back through Arkansas and the back roads of East Texas. The past few weeks have been incredibly busy. After Reno—which was a great success—it seems like I’ve been going non-stop. A week before Halloween I went to the most awesome haunted house I've ever visited. This place wasn’t your typical haunted house where people in rubber masks jump out at you, this place was an interactive insane asylum you had escape. And it was the most fun I’ve had in years. I drove out to Manor, Texas, with my friends Adam and Rachel. We had to buy our tickets in advance and had to go on a Thursday because the other nights were already sold out. And you can only go in groups of six or less. They start you off by sitting you in a lobby type area where “patients” come talk to you. One large man wearing clown makeup wrote my name on top of my head. After a while a “nurse” calls your group and you begin your tour but first they have you take some “medicine” and then things get weird. Lights start flashing, the room starts spinning, and then large bunny rabbits start coming up to you and threatening you. As you make your way down the hallway, an “inmate” gets your attention and you have to follow her through a good hour of chaos, exploding toilets, dead bodies, blood, psychotic doctors, giant spiders, and homicidal children. At almost every turn you and your group have to make choices about which way to go and what to do so you can all escape alive. By the end of the tour everyone is covered in gore and pumped up on adrenaline. And the best part? It’s all done by volunteers and all the money goes to finding a cure for breast cancer. I can’t wait for next year. Check out their website at: http://www.scareforacure.org For Halloween a bunch of us planned on driving down to the Renaissance Festival outside Houston but the extreme weather kind of ruined that. Kind of. The day before Halloween it rained so hard that it was basically a repeat of Memorial Day. There was even a tornado warning. A lot of folks I know east of I-35 got flooded or evacuated or both. The tornado warnings covered the area of the festival too. So instead of driving down to my motel on Friday, I ended up helping a buddy take care of his floors after the flood. I drove down on Saturday instead and got there around lunch time. And you know what? It was a total blast. We didn’t get any rain or anything. Just good times. And there were so many great costumes and shops, I felt like I could spend the whole weekend there. I don’t even think I got to see everything it was so big. I may even try to go again before the season ends. And as if that wasn’t enough this weekend was the start of Wurstfest! And I love Wurstfest. Wurstfest happens every fall down in New Braunfels and is a large celebration of German culture—beer, sausage, music, beautiful and detailed steins, and more beer! Every year I have an amazing time at Wurstfest. I can’t wait to go again! So in a few days I’m heading off to Reno for the Western Literature Association conference. I’ll be reading my story “A Quiet Place to Hide” and handing out my business card to people. I go every year and I’m excited to see Reno again. It’s a great city. The WLA always has a lot of interesting people and panels. I only wish I could go to them all. My pal Steve Davis will be up there and reading an essay he published in Southwestern American Literature. Mark Busby who ran and co-edited the journals for years will be there, too. I know my student Christian Wallace got accepted, but I’m unsure if he’s going. I hope to see a few other familiar faces while I’m there. Last year the conference was in Victoria, British Columbia. That was one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen. I still can’t believe how wonderful the hotel was. One of the best things about last year was that my friend David Latham was able to come up. David went to grad school with me, and he now lives in Seattle with his wife. Last fall David caught a ferry from Seattle and made it to Victoria in time to see my panel. It was the last one of the conference so afterwards he and I hit up the pubs and shot the bull and had a great time. David is a white guy but he has lived a majority of his life in China and speaks the language like a native. It turned out that Victoria has a thriving Chinatown so he and I walked around there, and David freaked out one lady when he approached her and started speaking in her native tongue. Her eyes got real big and she said, “Holy shit!” That was pretty funny. Victoria had some great pubs. I had a beer called Vertical Winter Ale that was one of the tastiest brews I’ve had in a long time. If anyone knows where I can get that here in the states, please let me know. Anyway, I hope Reno is just as much fun this year. I hope to get some good food, meet some nice people, and maybe pick up a T-shirt or two to prove I went. Who knows. Maybe I’ll even play a hand of Blackjack or two for my old man. I’ll write all about it before Halloween. A lot is going on this October. The Sacred Springs Pow-Wow is tomorrow, WineFest is going on in Gruene, and the Renaissance Fair is starting up down near Houston tomorrow. It looks like I’ll be going there for Halloween if you can believe it. That will definitely be a blog post. Happy Friday! There are a lot of writers I admire. There are a lot of writers who have influenced me. Like a lot of guys, I was floored when I first came across Hemingway’s sentences. I spent years imitating Faulkner. Raymond Carver hit home for me, too. Of course all of those men were talented, but they were not the nicest of fellows either. The one writer I feel closest to, the one who I look up to not just as a man of prose but of human decency is James Jones. Though he is not as well read today, and some of his writing can feel clunky, even a bit dated, I believe that Jones is the closest thing America has to a Tolstoy. Besides writing wonderful, sprawling novels, Jones’s life was filled with compassion and honesty.
James Jones grew up in Illinois—the pre-war mid-west would be a place of love and hate for Jones just as the South was for Faulkner. Because of the depression, Jones didn’t feel he had too many options after graduating high school, and he enlisted in the army in 1939. James Jones found himself stationed at the Schofield Barracks in Hawaii—just sixteen miles from Pearl Harbor. Jones witnessed the attack on December 7, 1941, and he became the attack's only witness to write a successful novel about it. Jones later fought on Guadalcanal and was discharged in 1944. For the next few years Jones drifted around America and worked on his fiction. He had developed a love for Thomas Wolfe and imitated his style and structure. Then Maxwell Perkins—the great editor of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Jones’s idol, Wolfe—asked Jones to write a book about the peacetime army. Jones went back to his typewriter and wrote the National Book Award winning novel From Here to Eternity. It became a sensational best seller and made Jones rich and famous. From Here to Eternity is one of my favorite novels, which surprises a lot of people since Jones was not a stylist, his language can even be described as flat. But the man had a distinct voice—one that was masculine and confident and aware of the absurdity and tragedy of the world. Jones is clearly an author with roots in the mid-west harkening back to writers such as Dreiser or Lewis. He is interested in character and story, not literary trickery or gymnastics. The book is massive, and after finishing it you feel as if you were there on the islands. Similar to War and Peace, the novel is like life itself. From Here to Eternity came out in 1951, and it explores how society can corrupt the individual. The novel is actually pretty anti-authority, and it portrays women and homosexuals with a compassion way ahead of its time. A lot of folks tried to label Jones as some type of literary barbarian. The big, tough war writer. The macho American. It is true that Jones cursed a lot, he drank a lot, and he wrote openly and frankly about sex. He enjoyed guns and knives. Some of the New York literati labeled him the hick from the sticks. But Jones believed that man’s greatest attribute was sensitivity. He ridiculed Hemingway for being a lover of war and violence. Jones had pacifist leanings, and he adored the ballet, Virginia Woolf, and Emily Dickinson. Jones was a cultured and intellectual man who distained narcissism, elitism, and snobbery. He liked people, all types of people. He was just as comfortable discussing Stendhal as he was bowling or playing poker. On top of that, Jones was a dedicated family man and a loyal friend. Novelists such as William Styron and James Baldwin adored him. He helped out struggling young writers whenever he could. After Jones died in 1977, Willie Morris wrote a book about their friendship out of respect and out of love. For me these are the things that really make James Jones one of my biggest heroes. Though he died pretty young, he died having lived a life of joy, adventure, romance, and warmth. He didn’t blow his brains out with a shotgun, he didn’t curse his daughter for wearing shorts and tell her that no one remembers Shakespeare’s children, he didn’t beat his wife—he wrote some amazing books that are brutal but true, and he left behind a legacy of kindness and generosity that continues to endure. I admire Jones as a writer. I admire Jones as a man. For more information about James Jones please click on the link below. A couple of months ago Victor Holk, one of my graduate students, got caught in a house fire. Victor, who always tried to help others before himself, rescued his wife, a friend who was staying over, and their pets but received burns over most of his body. After weeks of being in the ICU with his loved ones praying for him, I’m afraid Victor died a few nights ago. Victor was a really great guy who didn’t deserve to die so young. He had just graduated with his MA in philosophy and he had just gotten married. Victor had a lot ahead of him—he was a talented singer-songwriter, he wanted to become a teacher (and I have no doubt he would have been a marvelous one), and he and his wife were ready to head out into the world and make it a better place. That was the type of guy Victor was. He liked people and wanted to help them. He studied philosophy because he felt it was a way to not just understand our existence but how to experience it. He rejected cynicism at every turn and loved being alive. I won’t lie, I’m angry and disturbed by his passing. But I don’t want to write about me right now. I want people to pay attention to the memory of Victor. Please visit http://www.victorholk.com and listen to some of his music. Goodbye, Victor. Goodbye, friend. “Have you news of my boy Jack?”
Not this tide. “When d’you think that he’ll come back?” Not with this wind blowing, and this tide. “Has any one else had word of him?” Not this tide. For what is sunk will hardly swim, Not with this wind blowing, and this tide. “Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?” None this tide, Nor any tide, Except he did not shame his kind -- Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide. Then hold your head up all the more, This tide, And every tide; Because he was the son you bore, And gave to that wind blowing and that tide! Today is my birthday. I won't mention how old I am because I don't want to remind myself of how many years I've wasted. Getting old sucks but then living ain't for sissies. I don't have much planned. I'm at work right now and should probably be doing work stuff. I have a meeting after lunch and then I'm going to get some cupcakes this evening. I think I may treat myself to a ordering a new chess board online. Not a very exciting day. But I'll have lots of fun this weekend. I plan on hanging out with my buddy Chris on Friday, then I'll spend Saturday with my mother, and then Nick will crash at my place Sunday night and on Monday I'll go to Six Flags with Nick and a bunch of folks I play ultimate frisbee with. Woah. That's an intense weekend. Anyway, I better get some stuff done today and start this new year off right. Or at least productive. First time for everything! |
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September 2022
William JensenWriter living in Central Texas. Categories |