Denis Johnson - "Already Dead"

Amazing writing. Not go to through quickly. Savour it.



"She was victorious," he said, "in trying to destroy me with lingerie."


One day he was driving on the coast, on those cliffs north of Jenner. Have you seen that place? Five or six hundred feet straight down, no shoulder-you'd have time to shit your pants and change into clean ones before you hit. He was driving along behind this black Corvette. Corvette downshifts, Corvette accelerates, Corvette sails half a thousand feet down to the Pacific Ocean. Right over the edge. Turned out the guy had just bought the car that morning, brand-new Corvette. Some jilted kid. The brake lights," he said, "never winked."
    His partner asked, "What year Corvette?"
    "A year that don't concern us," the first man said impatiently. "A year you probably never heard of."
    The chemistry between them was suddenly familiar to Van Ness. Their connection gave off a sour smoke, like bad wiring. He sensed they'd served time in prison together, or belowdecks.



Let me tell you about this girl. Her eyes are brown and wet. Her mouth twists from the effort of hiding her bad teeth when she smiles. But when she's drunk she laughs widely and her gold bridgework flashes. Bartenders like to lean forward to light her cigarettes and in the match-glow examine her as closely as a lover would. It's all exactly there. The punished child in the stolen makeup. Eyes that are never going to look at anyone again. And then she leans back, receding into that wonderful posture, her left hand in her lap. Sometimes she wilts, and sits hunched over a drunk drumming her fingers on the bar, and then she looks like a whore. She's capable of sneering. Awoman this vulnerable and perverse is usually taking time out from being tortured to death slowly by a mon who looks exactly like her father. Things come to me in images. I see the image of a man strangling an orchid. Oh, flowers!



    "Good night, I'm going to sleep in my clothes," she said, "and I hope I dream I'm not drunk," and didn't even kiss me.
    When she'd gone into the trailer, one of the rounded, aluminum ones, a Silver Stream, I laid my head, which was suddenly full of sorrows, against the steering wheel. The night wind stirred through the treetops on the ridges. The distant commotion got the sheep bleating - a word that just doesn't invoke the aged, human grief, in their voices. Across the drive the owner of this property - the Sheep Queen, a Mediterranean-looking woman in her fifties, a nice enough person but perfectly crazy - sat eating dinner in the kitchen of her ranch-style home, feeding bites from her plate to a big dog that loomed over her, standing up, as it were, with its forepaws on the table.
    It's sad to love a woman who won't love back - it tears at a man - to love a woman who gives herself to others and uses his good intentions and sets his meaning aside. But I have a feeling that this stupid torment is the nearest thing going, for me, to what life is all about. I don't just sense it dimly. The feeling is overpowering that this is the closest I can get to the truth behind the cloud.

Kim Addonizio - "Bukowski in a sundress"

Amazing words (from her of "Red Dress") that made me sad and happy, laughing and crying. She writes with a verocity and rawness that I want to dive into and never surface.



All that year my friend wanted to kill herself. She would call me late at night, drunk and sobbing, talking about her gun. Finally I convinced her to throw it into the river. Eventually she got much better, but I still worried about her. I thought of her as the little bullet-size ballerina on my jewelry box, spinning and slowing, then spinning again. That she gave me the box was a complete fabrication. She did not give me the box. What she gave me was a picture book called Six-Dinner Sid, about a cat that goes from door to door getting fed by everyone on the block, and another one about a farting dog at a garage sale, and once, to celebrate the publication of my first novel, she gave me a plastic baby bottle with a blue ribbon on it. The truth is that she's much better now. The truth is also that I still worry.



Still, you may lay down sentence after lovely sentence and follow them for months only to find yourself, in the middle of your journey, in a dark wood. Structure can still elude you. I don't necessarily mean the structure of a sonnet or Freytag's Pyramid of the story, though they are useful to know. I mean figuring out the structure to hold what you have to say, the best structure for the material at hand. The way in, through, and finally out the other end. You must, in other words, learn how to shit flowers. A peom or story or memoir, however gorgeously written, has to be able to stand up, and it will not stand up unless you structure it, unless you give it a skeleton. If there is no patter, there is no art. Think hard about what holds your piece together, how the pieces connect, why and how each contributes. Remember that you are creating a world. Do not let it descent into anarchy. To hold anything together in life - especially oneself - is nearly impossible, but in art it is essential.



My mother dropped her spoon in her lap, mashed-potato-side down, and I picked it up and wiped it on a napkin and started to hand it back to her, but she had closed her eyes. She was shifting her shoulders a little, raising the right one and then the left, in barely perceptible movements. She lifted her hands just above the table, so they hovered over her meal like two little spaceships above a tiny city-maybe one they were planning to destory, or maybe one they had come to in peace, to teach us how to cope with the pain and loss of life on earth.
Then i saw that my mother was trying to snap her fingers and couldn't quite. But for the couple of minutes until the song ended, looking as though  she were in a kind of beautiful trance, she danced.



It was a little like bear baiting. Then again, [Charles Bukowksi] seemed like someone who practiced self-acceptance rather than the guilt and self-loathing that drive so many lesse alcoholics into AA. He never quit. He went on drinking and wrote book after book.
So even though I suspect that critic was being a dick about my work, I've decided I'm going to be proud of my new nickname. If I am truly honest with myself, I have to admit that I have always wanted someone to touch my soul with his cock. Since childhood, I have wondered where my soul was, and I'm glad to discover it's up there somewhere in my lady parts.
And who knows. Maybe one day, when Bukowksi's up for a posthumous literary award, some critic will say, "Oh, him? Kim Addonizio in pee-stained paints," and then I Hope whoever said it pukes on his shoes.

Ken Liu - "The paper menagerie and other stories"

Not all of them are great, but some breathtaking stories, such as the "The paper menagerie" itself of course, as well as "State Change" of a girl with an icecube as her soul.


"Everything passes, Hiroto," Dad said. "That feeling in your heart: it's called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transcience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: we are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell, and we are all ephmeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon."

Lauren Groff - "Under the wave"

Short story in the New Yorker about a woman who has lost her family but finds her lost son in a lost child. Short, distant, and quite nice.