Butcher’s Crossing is set in 1870, and centers on Will Andrews’ search for the ineffable and ultimately untameable wildness inherent in the American landscape and in, John Williams’ seems to posit, most Americans.  Andrews leaves Harvard to seek this spirit out, coming to Butcher’s Crossing, Kansas.  Having a decent amount of money, Andrews gets hooked up with a veteran buffalo hunter named Miller.  Miller had, years ago, found an undiscovered valley in Colorado that was almost completely inaccessible, and in which a veritable sea of buffalo live.  Now with the buffalo nearly extinct, Miller uses Andrews’ means to assemble a team and the two set out with a skinner and moderately insane ox-driver for the valley he found long ago.

Williams’ book has quite a lot in common with Melville’s Moby-Dick.  Andrews is an easy descendant of Ishmael, and Miller is quite clearly Ahab.  Miller’s dedication to the hunt, his arrogance and ignorance, ends up trapping the hunters in the valley for the winter.  Shy of 300 pages, Butcher’s Crossing is not a particularly big book.  Williams spends quite a lot of time with the set up and leaves himself about 200 pages for the execution.  The actual hunting and the whopping six months spent in the mountains take up a comparatively little space for being the point of the novel.  Where Andrews is supposed to develop, where we’re supposed to be in, dirt-level, with these men, Williams gives us an all too brief glimpse and moves us on.  This contrasts strongly against Melville, who, some would argue, throws the reader in too deep.

I argue that the greatest short work of fiction ever told will not match up to the greatest long work.  I’m not about to claim titles for those positions, but I’ll say that Butcher’s Crossing and Moby-Dick have similar premises, dissimilar lengths, and dissimilar places in the literary canon.  Williams has written a forgettable story because the reader is not submerged in it.  Butcher’s Crossing is easily a book of another hundred pages than what was written.  The author flies over six crucial months and skims the slaughter of thousands of buffalo.  It’s this sort of detail and depth, even repetition, to a degree, that imprint themselves upon a reader’s mind and make the story live on.  I had to look up Miller’s name, and I finished the book about two weeks ago.

To bring things full circle, Blood Meridian is not a very big book, but there isn’t a moment in it that’s really skimmed over unnecessarily.  McCarthy spends 4 pages introducing us to the Kid and his backstory, throwing us immediately into action and spending the rest of the book in dizzying detail until he again scoops us up through time in a few pages and sets us down at the end.  Williams manages the opposite.  By cutting through the middle, racing past the changes in these men (and letting Andrews state the changes rather than reveal them) Williams undercuts his ending, which I think would have been excellent had we spent proper time in the events before.  The disorientation and frustration the men experience on their return is on the brink of being powerful, but ultimately the reader has been distanced, and the ending falls short.

While Googling, I found out that Joe Penhall, screenwriter for The Road, is actually adapting Butcher’s Crossing into a screenplay. I happened to catch The Road a little over a week ago.  Pretty good.  I teared up a few times, which is strange for anyone who knows my reaction to the book.  Apparently I’ve grown enough to relate in the past few years.

In other news, I read Brian Hart’s debut novel, Then Came the Evening, a little while ago, and am currently powering through Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling, which I am enjoying immensely.  I think I’ll try for a true review of the former.  Will let you know if that comes out anywhere.  Chauffeur won the race by 3000 words, as I got a little too tied up with some craziness over break that I might let you in on sometime.  My novel currently stands at over 60k, and I just finished a rewrite of the beginning of the first novel.  Great to see how much my characters have matured over time.  I think that’s it.

• The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan.  The only non-fiction I read, discounting a little of Ernest Hemingway on Writing and Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.  Egan does a wonderful job of bringing the Dust Bowl to life, and it is a world apart, let me tell you.  You can’t even imagine.  Comes with pictures that, if you’ve got any tie at all to the land, will chill you to the bone.
• Shadow Country by Peter Mathiessen.  Pick two of the three novels this was formed from, and read those.  Damn good writing, but not worth retelling a story three times.
• 2666 by Roberto Bolaño.  Another book I’d choose parts to read and parts to leave behind.
• Twilight by William Gay.  You thought I meant something else, didn’t you?  His most disappointing work.
• A Mercy by Toni Morrison.  I don’t know why you’d call this a novel.  It’s a novella, tops.  Good, for how short it is.  Needed more meat to it, I thought.
• Secret Son by Laila Lalami.  Dickensian, in that Great Expectations sort of way, plus Morocco.
• Slouching Toward Nirvana by Charles Bukowski.  The first poetry I read this year.  A letdown from the superb Last Night of the Earth collection.
• News of the World by Philip Levine.  Really good, really heavy, dirty, depressing poetry.
• The Speed Limit of Clouds by Jon Veinberg.  Go read it, now.
• The Bell Jar by you oughta know who.  Didn’t like it.  Don’t get why others like it.
• Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis.  It’s not American Psycho, but it is as plotless.  Good for his first novel– Ellis’ prose was masterful right from the start.
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck.  Timshel.
• The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.  The only good noir I read this year.  Never read Mickey Spillane.  Just don’t do it.
• Double Indemnity by James M. Cain.  Not too bad?  Not very good.
• Reread Blood Meridian, Suttree, No Country, Islands in the Stream, Provinces of Night.

Though a reread, Islands in the Stream was my favorite for the year, I think.  It kept me company through some hard times this summer, and for a while turned my inner monologue Hemingway-flavored.  I doubt I’ll be able to pick it up again without thinking of the pool and the lounge chairs and the sound of the palms overhead.  It’s really a wonderful book.  The beginning is Hemingway at his best–simple, evocative, powerful.  Thomas Hudson is a painter living on the Isle of Bimini, and the novel opens just before his three sons come to visit.  The book involves drink, sport, and war–Papa’s holy trinity.  People don’t read his posthumous works enough.  I suggest you do.

Friday I went to a potluck with a number of people in my MFA program.  I made goulash from a simple recipe my mother sent me– the first such dish I’ve ever made.  Talked with Susan Straight, received a number of books.  And at about 8:30 I left and headed to Portland to see her.  Made it there around 1:00PM.   I won’t dwell on things because that’s not what this is about.

Portland is an amazing town.  I hate cities and I loved Portland.  It’s beautifully laid out.  The new buildings are pretty, the old buildings are gorgeous.  There’s enough old industry and there’s an absolute ton of art-blood to be found.  Hawthorne Street.  Wonderful place.  Buskers, coffee shops, record stores.  We saw Mimicking Birds at the White Eagle saloon, and they were pretty stellar.  I recommend them, highly.  We went to Powell’s and I picked up John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing, which I’m very excited to read.  We watched the premiere of the new season of Californication in my hotel room, along with Bored to Death, a pretty neat new show.

It didn’t work out.  Simply.  And I’m sorry for that.  Every girl I’ve ever loved I’ve wanted to love forever, but it hasn’t happened yet.  We tried our best, I think, I hope.  I fought like a bloody old cur, I know that much.

So, gave it my best, came home with my tail not quite between my legs.  But I didn’t feel all that bad.  I feel good about where my life is.  It’s strange, going 1000 miles in a day.  But good.

I got to see most of the land heading back that I missed going out.  Ridiculously golden hills.  Rolling gently but huge.  Plains covered in smoke.  Mountains.  There’s a good bit of Oregon that I actually liked, leaving.  Sheep country, from the looks of it.  I’m always rewarded by the country, the land.  Driving did me good.  A strange thing is that it felt good to get back into California.  That seemed somewhat odd to me, but it did.  And so did getting home.  This damn empty place and its poor lighting.  Life has carved away from me everything that tied me to any other place.  Right now it’s just me.  I talked to a friend that night before I left, pretty long into the night, and I told her that the one thing that hasn’t fallen through for me has been writing.  And that’s true.  Perhaps fittingly, it’s me and my writing from here on out.  Whatever comes after comes free of those old attachments.  You and me, California.  I’ve got the spirit of Bill Hicks on my side, so I think you’re fucked.

First fiction workshop was today and I was on the block, came out pretty well.  Lots of praise for my prose, dialogue.  Corrections for clarity and pacing.  Which were what I expected.  It was good just to do that again, to hear people talk about it.  And to get ideas for fixing things.  To think critically about fiction, to pit myself against my classmates and my professor– he said I was right about a certain line of dialogue, wrong about what fiction should do with it.  We construct lines to inform our reader, not just to recreate a reality as exactly as possible.  That’s a rough paraphrase.  I don’t know that I agree, and regardless, having reality as a standard is not a bad thing.  A lot of what is wrong with my work is a balance that needs to be struck between keeping a tone and letting the reader know more about the world.  I’ve always known that, but it seems like I’m going to get a little closer to a solution.

The good news finally came through.  I’m gonna have a short story out on Splinter Generation sometime in October.  Woo.  That everything?  I think so.  Lots of reading to do, not much writing.  Them’s the breaks for the moment.

Mm.  Couple odds and ends.  Some fun Byron corrrespondence, and an interactive map of banned books.

She made a 19 second video of herself, in her room, at the mirror.  All manner of disarray, bottles of all those mystifying things men have no use for–scarves(?), beads, makeup brushes.  There’s a nice song playing in the background.  I can see her chair, her desk, something on the mantel.  But it’s taken me a long time to see those things.  I have to force myself to look away from her.  Head cocked, curious.  Just that little gesture, perhaps the only personality you can glean from the clip.  And I’m entranced.  She’s beautiful.  Each time I see her, each new picture, she seems to change.  And in each she is beautiful.

She had the day off today, so we got to talk.  She helped me with some writing, we joked, we imagined, we quizzed each other on our futures.  I insisted on cows, chickens, pigs.  She would have none of it.  Well, okay, maybe chickens, because you don’t have to kill chickens.  I told her if she would bear with me these two years I would follow her anywhere.  We talked and talked and said goodbye three times and each time we came back.  She teased me about saying I love you.  I won’t say it until I meet her.  And that’s how we both want it.  But in the meantime it feels so natural to say, it’s been so long since I’ve said it.  After each part of our last goodbye it came, flitting in between, almost escaping.  She told me that she wants me to say it when she doesn’t expect it.  I thought, surely she won’t expect it now.  But of course I didn’t say it.

It’s a very childish thing, this.  When you don’t look at it sympathetically.  From inside it’s wonderful, and if you know how it feels it can be, from the outside, too.  That’s a very backwards way for me to acknowledge that this isn’t the sort of thing you’re probably coming around to read.  I promise more literary things are on their way.  I have more misadventures to share, and hopefully some good news following that.  In the meantime, a long-neglected meme from my friend, Clowncar.

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Fifteen books that will stick with you through life.  Whether by irritation, enlightenment, or pure enjoyment.  Feel free to add your own in the comments.

1. The Sun Also Rises ~ Ernest Hemingway
2. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West ~ Cormac McCarthy
3. All the Pretty Horses ~ Cormac McCarthy
4. Gilead ~ Marilynne Robinson
5. White Noise ~ Don Delillo
6. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle ~ Haruki Murakami
7. On the Beach ~ Nevil Shute
8. The Iliad ~ Homer
9. The Grapes of Wrath ~ John Steinbeck
10. Moby-Dick ~ Herman Melville
11. Paradise Lost ~ John Milton
12. The Antichrist ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
13. The Collected Works of Lord Byron ~ Lord Byron
14. The Executioner’s Song ~ Norman Mailer
15. Islands in the Stream/ The Garden of Eden ~ Ernest Hemingway

I cheated a little.  You’d get quite a litany of Hemingway and McCarthy up there if I didn’t throw in a little variation.  Honorable mentions go to Suttree, For Whom the Bell Tolls, No Country for Old Men, The Complete Plays of Sophocles, some Mencken, As I Lay Dying, aaand…let’s say a smattering of Bukowski and Yeats.  You see how I have to bend.