Friday Freebie: Rosanne Cash's "Composed"

Congratulations to Lauren Bufferd who won a copy of Mary Sharratt's Daughters of the Witching Hill, last week's Friday Freebie.

This week's giveaway is Rosanne Cash's new memoir Composed.  I'm about halfway through the book right now and am really enjoying it.  I usually avoid celebrity autobiographies like orchards of poison ivy, but Cash is bracingly honest and offers some surprising behind-the-scenes tales which add a new perspective to her songs.

If nothing else, Composed takes me back to my freshman college dorm room, circa 1982.  If you had a time-travel camera, you could geo-locate me there in Laramie, Wyoming (White Hall, 11th Floor) and see me standing in the middle of the closet-sized room, singing into a ballpoint pen microphone:

We'll rendezvous on Venus
And dance on Saturn's rings
We'll drink a little moonlight
And ride the old man's wings
I do believe you love me
I wish with all my might
Somewhere in the stars
I'll be meeting you tonight

Oh yeah, I was a fanboy in the worst sense of the word.  This was back in the cassette-tape era and it was pretty hard to skip over songs you didn't like.  In this instance, it didn't make one hound-dog tick of a difference because (despite what Cash writes in Composed) all the tracks on her early albums Seven Year Ache and Somewhere in the Stars were perfect and I took them to heart as if they were written just for me--which, in my teen-movie-addled head, I actually thought they were.  Rosanne Cash was just one of my Teen Dream Queens (Linda Ronstadt, Nicolette Larson, and Emmylou Harris were also in the club).  Sadly for her--but happily for me--she was dethroned one year later when I found Elizabeth Jean, the one true love of my life (and it wasn't "somewhere in the stars").  Yes, reader, I married her.

But enough of my post-adolescent confessions.  You're asking: "How can I get me some of that country-western tell-all goodness?"  All you have to do is answer this ridiculously-easy question (hey, I know you're busy and don't have time to waste with a bunch of Googling):

What is the name of Rosanne Cash's father?

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

One entry per person, please.  In order to give everyone a fair shake in the contest, please e-mail the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  The contest closes at midnight on Aug. 26, at which time I will place all the correct respondents in a hat and draw the winning name.  I'll announce the winner on Aug. 27.

Paperback Flashback: Combat by Van Van Praag

Celebrating vintage paperbacks--both the cheesy & the profound.

But mostly the cheesy.

Men.  War.  Killing.

Post-war pulp fiction like this either brought back fond memories of gunning down Germans or it triggered horrific flashbacks to those maelstroms of screaming bombardments.  I don't know much about this book by the man with the stuttering name, other than it's about KILLING.  The Wikipedia page for the movie based on the book (1957's Men in War, starring Aldo Ray and Robert Ryan, changes the setting from World War II Normandy to the Korean War) offers a more intriguing plot summary--assuming the movie was faithful to the book, which is hardly ever the case.

Opening Lines:  Through the ground mist dawn began to light the battered fields.  Shafts of gray appeared between the leaves of the gnarled trees, and night shadows faded.  Some miles to the south, scattered flashes tore open the hovering day, baring the skies in brief nakedness.  Following the flashes came solemn rumbles which echoed from hill to hill, bounded off house and barn and shed doors, and reached down into holes in the ground with mournful promise.

Page 100:

I captured this one about a year ago while browsing an antique store in Bigfork, Montana.  Okay, that's a bit of a lie--I never just browse an antique store, I power-shop!  I haven't read Combat, and seriously doubt I ever will, based on the adjective-heavy, plodding sentences quoted above.  BUT....

I seriously love that cover: the Sgt. Rock crouch, the blood-red box behind the title, and the perfect silhouette of the falling German and his weapon.  If I lean close to the cover, I can even hear the "Aiiii-yeeeee" of the falling/dying sniper.  Perfect in all regards.

But that back-cover prose.  Oh me, oh my!  It's about as turgid as what's between the covers.  I picture the copy-man writing that "Kill"-filled crap as some flat-footed adenoid who never made it past the Fort Dix, N.J. typing pool during the war.

Apart from the interesting Dutch-y name, the only thing I know about the author comes from this brief bio inside the front cover:  "The simplicity and natural power of Van Van Praag's writing can be partly explained by the fact that he has led an informal life.  Born in New York City in 1920, he has been a truck salesman, a World's Fair lecturer, a tentative and temporary hobo, and a soldier.  Mr. Van Praag spent five years in the army.  After enlisting he was promoted through the ranks until he was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant.  He fought in France as a platoon leader, was wounded and returned home a casualty."

My only question is: what th' hell's a "tentative and temporary hobo"?

Balzac, Lolita, and Coffee

Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac informs me that today is the deathday of Honore de Balzac--"a death," Keillor says, "that was probably fueled by his coffee addiction."

I can relate to Monsieur Balzac.  While I don't drink "between 20 and 40 cups of intense Turkish coffee every day," I can't begin my morning routine without a steaming William Faulkner mug of cream-laden joe.  Four sips and the morning cobwebs evaporate; nine sips and I'm limbering the fingers, tapping words into the bulk of Fobbit; twenty-one sips and I'm gone, man--three-quarters of the way to Jittersville.

For the past year, my addiction has been fueled by Tap 'Er Light Coffee Roasters here in Butte, Montana.  The java beans are hand-crafted to bitter perfection by a wonderful couple, Ed and Susan Renfro, who also run the town's bike shop, Bad Beaver Bikes.  The coffee is just a side gig for Ed and Susan, but my tastebuds believe they should go pro.  They may be great at tinkering with sprockets, but they're even better at blending African, Hawaiian and South American beans into wake-up calls like Madison Morning and Dark Angel.

Sadly, there's no website for Tap 'Er Light Coffee, so you'll have to make the trip here to Butte for a taste of caffienated heaven.

Balzac probably would have found Butte's coffee too tame for his deep-espresso habit (but then, the French generally scorn American tastes, so Ed and Susan shouldn't take it personally).  But whatever he was drinking, it seemed to work.  Mr. Keillor reminds me that in his 51 years of life, Balzac produced nearly 100 novels, short stories, and plays--collectively known as La Comedie Humaine.  Coffee was key to that prodigious output, the Writer's Almanac notes:

Balzac suggested drinking strong coffee on an empty stomach as a writing method.  He said: "Everything becomes agitated.  Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages.  Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink — for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder."

Much as I've always wanted to, I've never read a single word written by Balzac.  I have a goodly portion of La Comedie Humaine sitting on my bookshelf right now, but all those novels remain unread.  Until I double-checked my Library Thing account, I thought I had read at least one Balzac.  Nope, not a single word.  I must have been getting him confused with Zola.

Today, the Writer's Almanac also reminds me that I haven't read Lolita, which was released in the U.S. on this day in 1958:

It had been published first in France, three years earlier, by Olympia Press, which mostly published erotica.  The first Olympia edition of 5,000 sold out quickly, but it didn't get any serious reviews until Graham Greene got his hands on it and wrote a review in a major London newspaper calling Lolita the best book of 1955.  Then it got so much interest that the British Customs started confiscating copies coming into the country, and it was banned in various places on counts of pornography.

American publishers were reluctant to publish Lolita.  The story goes that one of the young editors at Putnam had a girlfriend who was a showgirl in Paris, and she heard about Lolita and recommended it to him.  That editor took it on, and when it was published, it set off a huge controversy.  But it was also an immediate best-seller — reviews calling it filthy and pornographic certainly helped its sales — and it sold more than 100,000 copies in one week, the first novel that had done so since Gone with the Wind.

When someone asked him why he wrote Lolita, he said: "Why did I write any of my books, after all?  For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions."

One of these days--One.  Of.  These.  Days.--I will crack the spine of Nabokov's novel and make my way past the first paragraph (which, admittedly, teases me with linguistic delights that lie in wait, crouched in the pages to come):

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.  My sin, my soul.  Lo-lee-ta:  the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.  Lo.  Lee.  Ta.

Inside the Writer's Notebook

Ernest Hemingway did it.  Marcel Proust did it.  And now I've done it.

The three of us, along with countless others, spent a goodly chunk of our days sitting in a sidewalk cafe handwriting lines and lines of text, both tight and sloppy, drinking cups of bitter coffee, blocking out the babble of those around us as the sun soaked into our shoulders and we sharpened our focus, our imaginations, and our pencils.  Hemingway had his Closerie des Lilas, Proust had his Brasserie Lipp, I had my Starbucks in Helena, Montana.

The state's capitol city is a far cry from Paris and Prospect Avenue is no Left Bank, but if I concentrated really hard, I could conjure up my own miniature "moveable feast" as I brainstormed some notes for Fobbit.  I was on a business trip to Helena and was making good use of my free time between attending sessions of the legislative interim committees.  I hunched over the metal table, the lattice-work pattern digging into my elbows, and held my pen with a death-choke grip.  My earbuds were drilled into my head and the "Classics and Soundtracks" playlist was dialed up on the iPod: Mozart and Ennio Morricone filled my mind in equal measure, blocking out the inane romantic cooings of a young tattooed couple at the next table and the static-hiss of traffic passing five feet away.

You should know that this is not normal behavior for me.  I write in solitude and always on a laptop computer.  My justifications:
• I hate the sight of my handwriting
• I get distracted by my aching fingers
• I need the safety net of all the words in my novel
On this day, however, I had no choice because my beloved HP Pavilion had caught a Trojan Horse virus and was in the shop for three days.  I spent the first two of those days bemoaning the fact that I couldn't get any work done on the novel.  I'd planned to make good headway during the five days I was in Helena, but those ambitions collapsed like a deck of cards in the wind when my computer went on the fritz.  Oh me, oh my, whatever will I do now? I moaned, wringing my hands.

Then I used one of those hands to reach up and slap myself.  Come back to reality, you lazy son of bitch.  You've got a pen, you've got a notebook, you've got a couple of dollars left on that Starbucks gift card.  Do the math.

And so I spent a morning on the left bank of Prospect Avenue, drinking coffee and writing until my fingers cramped into a grotesque claw.  I started slowly--at the top of the page, a character description: “Vaughn Strong, 46 years old, West Point grad...”--but then started to pick up speed and steam. Before I knew it, an hour had passed and I had four full pages of notes about Lt. Col. Vaughn Strong. When the computer tech called to say my computer was ready to be picked up, I was almost melancholy to leave behind the black notebook.  I've since returned to the notebook to work out another character's backstory and the results were pretty satisfying, so maybe there's something to this handwriting thing after all.

Here are scans of the pages from my Starbucks session last month.  This is pure brainflow--unedited, pockmarked with things I need to fact-check, and, thanks to my terrible penmanship, hard to read in places.  I have no idea what (if any) of this will make it into the final manuscript.  If nothing else, they're interesting artifacts from the day I got my Hemingway on.

On the Lam

As of 2:38 p.m., Saturday, August 14, 2010, John McCluskey and Casslyn Welch were still running loose, leaving a cooling trail of false sightings and lawmen kicking the dirt in frustration.  At this moment, they are the most-wanted man and woman in the U.S. and, according to the most recent reports, they could be hiding out in western Montana.  Who knows, maybe I'll bump into them down at the Town Pump gas station, buying a six-pack and a carton of Marlboros.

McCluskey and Welch are a pair of fugitives cut from the cloth of pulp fiction.  Until July 30, he'd been serving a 15-year sentence for attempted second-degree murder and armed robbery; she had been on the other side of the Arizona State Prison's barbed wire, impatiently waiting for him to catch the wire-cutters she tossed over the fence.  He was John Garfield, she was Barbara Stanwyck, and they were making a break for it, baby.

(The fact that Welch is McCluskey's fiancee and cousin only adds an extra-delicious seamy layer to the whole story.)

Once McCluskey snipped his way out of prison, he and fellow convicts Tracy Province and Daniel Renwick, along with Welch, started a new life of crime on the run. Renwick was arrested the next day in Colorado, after a shootout with police.  Province and McCluskey are believed to have killed a married couple whose charred bodies were found in a camper in New Mexico.  Province was later nabbed in Meeteeste, Wyoming, surrendering without incident shortly after he attended a church service there.

Which leaves the lovers on the run.  The U.S. marshal for Arizona said McCluskey and Welch "have nothing to lose" and may not surrender without a battle. "It changes by the minute, but we are convinced that they are not going to go down lightly," David Gonzales told CNN.

A lot has been made of the fact that they're the modern-day Bonnie and Clyde--and that's not too far off the mark.  "McCluskey and Welch" may not roll off the tongue like names of the Depression-era bandits, but their elusive getaways and seemingly callous crime spree have all the marks of Mr. Barlow and Ms. Parker.

One of the best books written about Bonnie and Clyde is Jeff Guinn's Go Down Together, which I reviewed last year for The Barnes and Noble Review, calling it a "riveting dissection of the life and times of the romantic robbers."

Though Bonnie and Clyde were never criminal masterminds on the order of John Dillinger or Pretty Boy Floyd -- Guinn writes that "their two-year crime spree was as much a reign of error as terror" -- to the law-abiding public downtrodden by the Depression, they were "the epitome of scandalous glamour."  The short, scrawny Clyde loved fast cars and was devoted to his family; Bonnie, "a borderline alcoholic," wrote poetry and yearned for an exciting catalyst to pull her out of the slums of West Dallas, Texas.  Guinn's inside look at their "brief era of roaming banditry" is at times sympathetic to the doomed pair -- neither of whom would live to see their 25 birthday.  "Their fatalism was tempered by their youth," he writes.  Subtitled The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, the book relies heavily on a pair of unpublished memoirs from Clyde's mother and sister.  Impeccably researched and drawing on interviews with surviving family members and those who came in contact with Bonnie and Clyde, Go Down Together chips through the layers of legend and outright fabrications (both from the prevaricating Clyde and self-aggrandizing lawmen) to get as close to the truth as anyone can.  The result is a book pulsing with a narrative rhythm that has all the shock and excitement of a tommy gun's rat-a-tat-tat.

As Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway proved, fugitives make some of the most compelling characters in fiction and film.  The act of running itself provides a simple plot arc, but also entails very complex emotional wiring for the characters.  In his book On the Lam: Narratives of Flight in J. Edgar Hoover's America, William Beverly writes, "The hunt for the fugitive provides an uncommonly satisfying narrative structure among news items.  Manhunts erupt from a distinct beginning, the commission of a crime or identification of a suspect; they match recognizable adversaries in deadly conflict; they barrel toward a climax, shootout or arrest, or toward an eerie silence."

One of the best "on the lam" novels I've read is Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us.  I read the 1937 novel while I was in Iraq; Anderson's no-nonsense style kept me glued to the page despite the sectarian violence and gunbattles erupting in the streets less than half-a-mile from my hooch.  The novel was so good, two of our greatest American directors have put it before the camera: Nicholas Ray in 1949 (retitled as They Live by Night) and Robert Altman in 1974.  As good as those movies are, however, neither can compare to Anderson's pulp fiction which is dunked in hardboiled noir.  As the story opens, three convicts are on the run: Elmo "Chicamaw" Mobley, T.W. "T-Dub" Masefeld and Bowie Bowers.  Before long, a teenage girl, Keechie, joins the gang and ill-fated romance blooms between Bowie and her.

Anderson tightens the screws all through the narrative; you know the inevitable conclusion--which may or may not be the blood-bullet ballet of Bonnie and Clyde (and, possibly, McCluskey and Welch)--but you're still gripped by the succinct, realistic style.  Here, for instance, is how Anderson describes the fugitives' first hours on the lam:

The highway still stretched emptily.  They're finding out things back there now in the Warden's Office, Bowie thought.  The Colonel's bowels are gettin' in an uproar now.  Get out the stripes for that bunch of no-goods, he is saying.  That's what you get for treatin' them like white men.  No more baseball and passes to go fishing for that Bowie Bowers and Elmo Mobley.  That T.W. Masefeld is not going to work in this prison commissary any more.  Get out the dogs and the shotguns and the .30-30's and run them sons of bitches down...

Another great stylist of the noir era, Jim Thompson, wrote a much-lauded "lam novel" called (rather obviously) The Getaway.  In that 1959 hardboiled classic, he wrote about the very things McCluskey and Welch must be feeling while they're running like rabbits somewhere here in western Montana:

Flight is many things.  Something clean and swift, like a bird skimming across the sky.  Or something filthy and crawling; a series of crablike movements through figurative and literal slime, a process of creeping ahead, jumping sideways, running backward.

It is sleeping in fields and river bottoms.  It is bellying for miles along an irrigation ditch.  It is back roads, spur railroad lines, the tailgate of a wildcat truck, a stolen car and a dead couple in lovers' lane.  It is food pilfered from freight cars, garments taken from clotheslines; robbery and murder, sweat and blood.  The complex made simple by the alchemy of necessity.

Who knows what, if anything, McCluskey and Welch are reading while they zigzag across the U.S.  But if they're anywhere near a used bookstore, they might want to stop in and pick up Thieves Like Us or The Getaway.  (On behalf of indie booksellers everywhere, I ask that they please pay for their purchase.)  I think they'll find those books are the roadmaps for a successful elusive chase.

At least until they get to the end, and go down together.

Friday Freebie: Mary Sharratt's "Daughters of the Witching Hill"

Congratulations to Jon Horton who won last week's Friday Freebie!  Jon will soon be enjoying John McPhee's Silk Parachute.

This week's giveaway is a new hardback copy of Mary Sharratt's Daughters of the Witching Hill, a novel based on a real-life witch hunt in Jacobean England.  Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review, calling it "a gorgeously imagined novel."  At her website, Sharratt talks about the origins of the novel:

In 1612, in one of the most meticulously documented trials in English history, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest were hanged as witches, condemned on “evidence” provided by a nine-year-old girl and her brother, who appeared to suffer from learning difficulties.  The trial itself might never have happened had it not been for King James I’s obsession with the occult.  His book Daemonologie—required reading for local magistrates—warned of a vast conspiracy of satanic witches threatening to undermine the nation.

I haven't had the chance to read Daughters of the Witching Hill, but I thoroughly enjoyed Sharratt's other novels, The Vanishing Point and The Real Minerva.  In an earlier review, I said of The Real Minerva:

Sharratt sets several subplots in motion, then wisely steps back and lets them play out with a minimum of authorial intrusion. This is the kind of writing which engages the reader without word gymnastics, verbal fireworks or symphonic sentences. We have plot, we have characters and both work in harmony to drive the reader forward.

If you want free gymnastics, fireworks and symphonies courtesy of Mary Sharratt, all you have to do is answer this question:

What more familiar nickname does Bess Southerns, the central character in Daughters of the Witching Hill, go by?

Email your answer (which can be easily found on Sharratt's website) to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

One entry per person, please. In order to give everyone a fair shake in the contest, please e-mail the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section. The contest closes at midnight on Aug. 19, at which time I will place all the correct respondents in a hat and draw the winning name. I'll announce the winner on Aug. 20.

"The Language of Elk" by Benjamin Percy

Near the beginning of the first story of Benjamin Percy’s first book, The Language of Elk, there is a scene so startling, so unexpected that, if you’re like me, you’ll do a spit-take of your morning coffee.  It’s like you were at a peace rally with Mahatma Gandhi and he suddenly walked up and kicked you in the nuts.  Percy’s prose is not necessarily that painful, but it will leave you gasping.

In “Unearthed,” a mother enters her son’s room. We’ve already been told she’s bipolar and strung out on a cocktail of Prozac and Lithium. But then…

And he remembered, finally, the night she shook him awake and said, “You know I love you, right?”  Somewhere between waking and dreaming, he saw her hovering above him in the dark and he said, “Yeah, Mom.  Love you, too.”  She left him then and he lay there, still tangled in his dreams’ cobwebs, realizing too late—after he tossed away the covers, after he hurried down the hall, down the stairs, after he heard the snap of the rifle—that something was wrong.

She left him a red carnation of brain matter on the wall, and on the kitchen table she left him a letter, its handwriting so sharp and hurried it reminded him of barbed wire.  “I’m so sorry,” it read.  “And I know that doesn’t mean anything.  I know that’s just a bunch of shitty words.  But I’m really truly sorry.”

There are a lot of good things at work in those two paragraphs—elements of style that, in your hurry to get to the next word, you might bypass the first time you read them.  There’s the sensory detail of being wrapped in dream cobwebs, then there’s the tumbling action set off by the hyphens which culminates in that chilling “snap of the rifle,” and the sinking-stomach conclusion of “something was wrong.”

Then we jump over the horrible event itself—Percy doesn’t even give us the sound of the shot—and we’re presented with that “red carnation of brain matter” and the handwriting that resembles barbed wire.  Not only are those finely-crafted images, they’re also freighted with symbolism: funereal flowers and an indication of the way the mother (with the equally-telling name of Misty) fenced herself off from the rest of the family.

This scene comes on the third page of The Language of Elk. You still have 181 more to go.

If I tell you that “Unearthed” was probably my least favorite story in the collection, then you might begin to get some sense of how much I loved this book.  Benjamin Percy proves to be a nut-kicker at least once every ten pages.

I’m big.  They call me Big Boy.  Back in the heydays, some ten years ago, I was the star linebacker for the Mountain View Mountain Lions.  I am six-foot-five, two hundred sixty pounds, with hands the size of T-bone steaks.  Without much effort I can throw people around like cloth dolls, and I did.

I’m not proud of this but one time I hit my buddy Barney so hard his eye popped out.  No kidding.  This happened during practice, during a blitz drill, and I remember his eyeball hanging there by a red thread.  Somehow we managed to shove it back inside him.  I said, “Are you all right? Can you see?” and he blinked a few times before giving the thumbs up.

“As clear as mud,” he said.  To this day his left eye wanders as if possessed by its own strange life.
--“The Iron Moth”

There was a stretch of highway, just outside Sisters, Oregon, where semis—with their engines roaring, their grills gleaming silver—came rumbling down from the Cascade Mountains, a long steep descent, and slammed into deer, dragging them sometimes thirty feet, tearing them open.

--“Winter’s Trappings”

In that one opening sentence, notice how Percy uses the comma and hyphen to great effect. Rhythmically speaking, the sentence moves like the semis: rolling slowly as it goes downhill, gathering speed, until it smacks into that word “slammed.”

And Percy is funny.  He’s damned funny.  For example:

I have been searching for years.  I have seen the footprints, the rough reddish hair, the plum-sized piece of poop.  I have heard his sad sweet cries rising from deep in the woods.  Bigfoot exists.  Believe me, believe it, and know that I am this close to proving it.

All I need is a body.

My wife of three years, Heidi, she is beginning to believe.  At first she was all yeah right.  We would argue six days to Sunday.  Then I showed her the poop.  She has since changed her tune, I think.
--“Bigfooting”

Or this moment in a story about a love triangle involving a bucktoothed best friend and a Bearded Lady. The narrator, smitten with the BL, catches his friend and would-be lover in flagrante delicto and a fight ensues.

What happened next I would never have guessed.  George came after me.  He was naked save for a pair of white tube-socks.  His gonad stood at attention.  I thought he would stab me with it.  I dodged him and brought my fist to his mouth.  His teeth cut me to the bone.  I still bear scars.

I believe he meant to kill me.

Again he charged, scepter at the fore.  Fighting a naked man is not difficult.  This time I tripped him.  He fell upon himself.  There was a sound not unlike the snap of a bite of celery.  I will not go into the details, but know this: George will never be the same man.
--“The Bearded Lady Says Goodnight”

(Men, I don’t know about you, but that celery snap made me double over and clutch myself.)

More than just a fine stylist, however, Benjamin Percy is a writer who goes right to the heart of his characters, and he does it with an economy of language as arrow-sharp as Raymond Carver, for instance, or Ernest Hemingway, or Richard Ford.  Percy belongs on the same shelf as those titans of the short form.

These stories are funny, compact, stunning, and have the capacity to break your heart—particularly the story which closes the collection, “Swans,” in which a pudgy teenage boy pines after a squad of high school cheerleaders, secretly watching them while floating at eye-level in a secluded lake where they like to sunbathe.  He only makes himself known when he rises to defend the girls against a flock of intruding swans.  Without giving too much away, let me just say that the final image of the book is one of heart-splitting beauty.

Don’t get me wrong—the stories in The Language of Elk aren’t so Teflon-coated that they aren’t without a couple of flaws.  In his laziest moments, Percy lets a few clichés slip through and some of the weirdest moments seem thrown into the stories just for the sake of being weird.  But it’s easy to spot the problems because they’re surrounded by so much that he gets right.  They are, you might say, plum-sized pieces of poop in a field of diamonds.

Percy writes of love, pain, loyalty, and betrayal in a clear, crackling voice that invigorates the short story genre.  His tales—all of them set in rural Oregon—go to dark, sweet places of the imagination and when he takes us there with him we hear a new music that prickles the skin—a sound that’s as beautiful and odd and haunting as the language of elk in the titular story: the full-throated bugles that roll off the Cascade Mountains and make grown men shiver.

Don't Know Much About Guns (an excerpt)

This is a short interlude in the novel (Fobbit), presumably from Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding's perspective (though it could be any Fobbit who didn't know the first thing about weapons).  This is just one of the sections I worked on today as I continue to burrow my way deeper into the revision process.

You’ve always been afraid of firearms.

One time in particular comes to mind:

When you were a kid—12, maybe 13—your Dad brought you along on a hunt for elk high in the mountains of Wyoming, the two of you walking for hours into what, at the start, had looked like distant purple folds of landscape.

Earlier that day, the two of you heard an elk bugle.  It sounded like a cross between a whale song and a creaking door and it got your Dad all excited, like the animal was calling, “Here I am! Come get me!”

This was only the second time he’d taken you out with a gun; the first was the previous hunting season when the pair of you had gone after sage grouse near Riverton.  That day, you’d carried the shotgun in two hands, holding it out and away from your body, unsure how it should fit with your posture.  It was heavy and you wondered if you’d be able to lift it to your shoulder.  But when your Dad stopped short and whisper-shouted, “There!” you brought it up, like a barbell, and slammed it against your collarbone.

You shot wild and high when the grouse exploded from the prairie.  Then you fell backward, sagebrush snagging at your clothes, and writhed on the ground, your shoulder burning from the kick of the gun.  At the time, you were certain a bone was broken.

Your father had looked at the vanishing bird, then spit off to one side and left without another word, his pants whispering through the sage as he walked back to the car.

So, you were surprised when he shook you awake that mid-winter day and told you to get dressed, and not to dilly-dally because the elk were waiting.  Apparently, your Dad was all about second chances.

The gun you carried this time was heavier and smelled of fresh oil.  Your mittens were black where they held the barrel.

You and your Dad climbed the hill toward the meadow his co-workers had told him about, assuring him there were easy elk to be found at that elevation.  The two of you post-holed through the knee-deep snow, churning even faster after you heard the elk bugle.  Your Dad didn’t even stop to give you time to eat one of the candy bars you knew he was carrying in his coat pocket.  You panted and high-stepped and you were all for finding the nearest log and telling him to go on while you waited, maybe helping yourself to a candy-bar snack as you did so.

Then the two of you stepped out of the trees, the promised meadow opening before you, and there it was, three hundred yards away: a young bull, neck as long as a swan’s, coat the color of toast.  The elk lifted its head and the small rack stood up like a candelabra.

Your Dad grabbed your shoulder and pulled you forward. “Hurry, before he bolts.”

You stripped off your mitten, tossed it to the snow, and lifted the gun.  The barrel wavered and dipped, that’s how heavy it was.

“Safety!” he hissed, then he reached over and pushed it off himself.  “Okay, now, breathe….aim….pull!”

You looked down the length of the gun.  The elk looked back along that same aperture of barrel.  Unchewed grass poked from both sides of its mouth.  It stared, chewed once, then snorted a puff of foggy breath through its nostrils.

You jerked the trigger.

At once, the world was filled with thunder and you were toppling backwards, the blue sky rushing down across your sight like a curtain, the gun flying out of your hands and soaring through that same blue sky.  Your head hit the snow with a loud WOOMPH!, digging a skull-shaped tunnel.  The powder-soft flakes crumbled down over your face.  You couldn’t feel your right arm and thought it had been severed at the shoulder.  You heard your Dad’s muffled voice and the crunch of snow as he came near to yank you up from the little grave you'd dug yourself.

For the second time in as many years, you had been shamed by a gun which threw you to the ground.

The two of you walked unspeaking and empty-handed down off the mountain, not even stopping to have a post-hunt candy bar along the way.

Elegy for a Dying Cat

This has been a hard week at Chez Abrams.  On Thursday, we got the news that our two-year-old cat has cancer.  He is my daughter's cat, but for the last eight months he has belonged to all of us: my wife, my daughter, and me.  He came west with my daughter when she moved back into the empty nest.  My wife helped drive the tightly-packed car from Georgia to Montana; the cat spent much of the time sleeping on top of her head.  We all still laugh at the story of how, after someone released a particularly noxious fart in the car, Gonzo stepped across my wife's lap, put his paws on the buttons of the door console, and unwittingly lowered the window.  It was a classic sitcom moment--something we all could use more of in our daily lives.

Our cat is the color of licorice and slips through the rooms of this large house like a dark reassurance.  Where's Gonzo?  Ah, there he is in the window, on the sun-drenched chair cushion, swirling around the table legs, fluffing himself a nocturnal nest in the crook of our knees when we're asleep.  It seems he has always been there; it's hard to fathom that his blackness will soon be blankness.

Gonzo Is My Co-Pilot

I don't always get sentimental about our pets, but when I do, I usually turn to poetry.  This is what I wrote this morning.


A Week, Two Weeks, Six Months

Our dying cat crouches
Above a plate of Meow Mix
As if recalling his days as a lion
Slurping a zebra on the savannah.
He remembers all the things he never knew.
Legs tucked, shoulders cutting the air,
He goes to town on the herbed chicken in gravy
Like it was his last meal.

Which it could very well be.

We are just back from the vet,
Tear-streaked and disoriented,
Trying to adjust to this new time limit
Imposed by the tumor pushing
All the important organs to one side.
The warden of our cat’s new prison, the vet said:
“A week, two weeks, six months at the outside.”

We stopped at Safeway on the way home.
Dry food seemed like a punishment now,
So we decided that from this day forward
Every day would be a birthday
Full of moist treats easy on the throat
And the wrongly squeezed stomach.

We stand in the kitchen, looking down
At the way he’s buried
His face in the food.
Someone should say a few words
At a moment like this.
My wife and daughter weep in tandem.
We are not consoled by the fact
There will be other cats.
“Yes,” my daughter says in vibrato,
“But they won’t be this cat.”
We stare at the floor, the walls, the ceiling,
Each in separate cells of grief.

Our dying cat, possessively crouched
Over his unexpected ambrosia,
Knows nothing of this, probably doesn’t even care.
He can’t hear the clock under his ribs
Ticking toward his funeral.
Focused on tongue-lap and tooth-grab,
He only feels the primal joy
Of the chicken that goes down like zebra.
He can’t even taste the tears
We stirred into the food.

Get the Lead Out

Pencils.  Remember them?

We're living in a post-Eberhard Faber world these days.  The keyboard is our new lead, the BKSP and DEL are the new erasers.  If anyone does use a pencil anymore, chances are good that it's one of the mechanical variety: a few clicks on the butt of the instrument and you get a length of lead.

I was always more of a typewriter man myself, but there were (and probably still are) whole armies of writers who went through pencils like beavers through forests.  According to Wikipedia, John Steinbeck "was an obsessive pencil user and is said to have used as many as 60 a day. His novel East of Eden took more than 300 pencils to write."

We have lost something valuable: the intimacy with a object which brought us closer to the creation of words.  For writers of a certain age, the mere smell of a pencil freshly-churned in a sharpener is enough to transport us to days of English-class essays, sore fingertips and graphite dust along the curve of the hand.  Not to mention the nightmares associated with filling in bubbles with a No. 2.

My wife and I watched Shutter Island last night and there's a key scene during which Leonardo DiCaprio scribbles a pencil across a piece of paper.  He presses hard and you can hear the squeak of the lead.  Yes, our pencils once talked to us!

If you held the woody tip of a pencil under my nose, rested it on the philtrum of my lip, I could instantly recall a very specific time, place, and piece of writing (1977, Mrs. Schlinger's English class, a book report on Where the Red Fern Grows).  Do the same with an HP laptop and I get...nothing.

So what do we do with all those abandoned, cherished artifacts from the pre-digital age?

Dalton Ghetti has transformed them into art.  The gallery of his intricate, fragile pencil sculptures was enough to drop my jaw straight to the floor the first time I saw his carved lead.  I stumbled across these mini-masterpieces via the Accidental Mysteries blog, which tells us,

The 49 year old said: “At school I would carve a friend’s name into the wood of a pencil and then give it to them as a present.  Later, when I got into sculpture, I would make these huge pieces from things like wood, but decided I wanted to challenge myself by trying to make things as small as possible.  I experimented sculpting with different materials, such as chalk, but one day I had an eureka moment and decided to carve into the graphite of a pencil.”

Dalton uses three basic tools to make his incredible creations – a razor blade, sewing needle and sculpting knife.  He even refuses to use a magnifying glass and has never sold any of his work, only given it away to friends.  He said: “I use the sewing needle to make holes or dig into the graphite.  I scratch and create lines and turn the graphite around slowly in my hand.”

The longest Dalton has spent on one piece was two and half years on a pencil with interlinking chains.  A standard figure will take several months.  He said: “The interlinking chains took the most effort and I was really pleased with it because it’s so intricate people think it must be two pencils.”

Though it's an art gallery best viewed through a magnifying glass, I still think these are the most beautiful things ever created from pencils.  After The Grapes of Wrath, of course.

Friday Freebie: John McPhee's "Silk Parachute"

Congratulations to Jennifer Lauture, winner of last week's Friday Freebie.  Jennifer gets to pick one of 75 Penguin paperbacks as the prize.

This week's giveaway is a new hardcover copy of John McPhee's latest collection of essays, Silk Parachute.

I've been a fan of McPhee for nearly my entire adult reading life.  I've paddled along the Yukon River with him, chipped away at the geology of Wyoming, and fished for shad in the Delaware River (when you hook one on the line, he writes in The Founding Fish, it feels "as if you are tied to a working trampoline").  In an early review, I raved about McPhee's Rising From the Plains, saying "(he) has the uncanny knack for sidling up to his subject, appearing to look at it from the corner of his eye. With a casual flick of his wrist, he turns geology into something profound."  As I said back then, "Money spent on McPhee is never wasted."

But today, you don't have to spend anything to get a copy of Silk Parachute.  All you have to do is correctly answer this question:

What state provides the setting for McPhee's 1976 masterpiece Coming Into the Country?

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

One entry per person, please.  In order to give everyone a fair shake in the contest, please e-mail the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  The contest closes at midnight on Aug. 12, at which time I will place all the correct respondents in a hat and draw the winning name. I'll announce the winner on Aug. 13 (somebody will be having good luck on Friday the 13th).