Headed out of town for a few days. Gangrey is left to the masses.
Topic of discussion: Who do you read? When you need to get in the right head, who do you look up? Is there something you go to time and again? Do you browse? Do you meditate? Do you drink?
Discuss.
Additional question: Which newspapers should I aspire to work at that appreciate/nurture/will let me do the type of writing I see on Gangrey? Looking for a list.
John Steinbeck works for me, especially East of Eden; also The Known World by Edward P. Jones; as well as this passage from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian:
They were remote places for news that he traveled in and in those uncertain times men toasted the ascension of rulers already deposed and hailed the coronation of kings murdered and in their graves. Of such corporal histories even as these he bore no tidings and although it was the custom in that wilderness to stop with any traveler and exchange the news he seemed to travel with no news at all, as if the doings of the world were too slanderous for him to truck with, or perhaps too trivial.
He saw men killed with guns and with knives and with ropes and he saw women fought over to the death whose value they themselves set at two dollars. He saw ships from the land of China chained in the small harbors and bales of tea and silks and spices broken open with swords by small yellow men with speech like cats. On that lonely coast where the steep rocks cradled a dark and muttersome sea he saw vultures at their soaring whose wingspan so dwarfed all lesser birds that the eagles shrieking underneath were more like terns or plovers. He saw piles of gold a hat would scarcely have covered wagered on the turn of a card and lost and he saw bears and lions turned loose in pits to fight wild bulls to the death and he was twice in the city of San Francisco and twice saw it burn and never went back, riding out on horseback along the road to the south where all night the shape of the city burned against the sky and burned again in the black waters of the sea where dolphins rolled through the flames, fire in the lake, through the fall of burning timbers and the cries of the lost.
One of my favorite writers has always been Richard Brautigan. He's just insanely original. His writing is also quite beautiful, but in a much different way than, say, Cormac McCarthy. The guy's writing, however weird, even at times nonsensical, literally reminds me that anything is possible, and always has. Not stories, but I mean wordplay, rhythm, just ... anything.
As best I can tell, this is a link to most of his book "Trout Fishing in America."
http://books.google.com/books?id=Qe8nSj13h_UC&printsec=frontcover&dq=richard+brautigan+trout+fishing+in+america&cd=3#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Also the poetry of Charles Simic. A link to some of his poems:
http://books.google.com/books?id=ugtsc5_87XQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=charles+simic&cd=7#v=onepage&q=charles%20simic&f=false
I usually pick up Raymond Carver. Bare bones in terms of structure and not a lot of flowery prose, but the details he uses in his scenes and use of dialogue just floors me. At first, I think it's inconsequential and near the end it all binds together. Other times, I grab some James Agee. "Let us Now Praise Famous Men" and "A Death in the Family" always do the trick.
Raymond Carver is an excellent example for reporters. No wasted words. I like Annie Proulx too, especially her short stories. Jhumpha Lahiri. The novels of South African J.M. Coetzee (most of them log in at about 200 pages).
For newspapers to aspire to, I'd exclude the obvious (Times, Post, L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal). Break the others into two groups smaller/mid-sized and larger dailies. For smaller/mid-sized: Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star ; Wichita (Kan.) Eagle; Lexington (Ky) Herald-Leader; Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, WI); Providence (R.I.) Journal; Raleigh News & Observer. For larger dailies: St. Pete Times, of course; Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (forgive the plug); Boston Globe; Philly Inquirer (may be on the rise again); Charlotte Observer; Seattle Times.
There are probably three nonfiction stories that I've gone back to more than any others. When I was in college, nearly every week I read the first few paragraphs of "The House That Thurman Munson Built", which was written by Michael Paterniti (one of my favorite writers). It's from the September 1999 issue of Esquire, and is no longer online. I read it to experience the rhythm of the writing. Here are those first few paragraphs:
"I give you Thurman Munson in the eighth inning of a meaningless baseball game, in a half-empty stadium in a bad Yankee year during a fourteen-season Yankee drought, and Thurman Munson is running, arms pumping, busting his way from second to third like he's taking Omaha Beach, sliding down in a cloud of luminous, Saharan dust, then up on two feet, clapping his hands, turtling his head once around, spitting diamonds of saliva: Safe.
I give you Thurman Munson getting beaned in the head by a Nolan Ryan fastball and then beaned in the head by a Dick Drago fastball--and then spiked for good measure at home plate by a 250-pound colossus named George Scott, as he's been spiked before, blood spurting everywhere, and the mustachioed catcher they call Squatty Body/Jelly Belly/Bulldog/Pigpen refusing to leave the game, hunching in the runway to the dugout in Yankee Stadium in full battle gear, being stitched up and then hauling himself out on the field again.
I give you Thurman Munson in the hostile cities of America--in Detroit and Oakland, Chicago and Kansas City, Boston and Baltimore--on the radio, on television, in the newspapers, in person, his body scarred and pale, bones broken and healed, arms and legs flickering with bruises that come and go like purple lights under his skin, a man crouched behind home plate or swinging on deck, jabbering incessantly, playing a game."
The second is from "The Last Cop in Camelot" by Tom Junod, published in the June 2000 issue of the same magazine. In particular the lede, which shows that there are always new ways to describe anything, and later on in the story in which he describes the way Timony's phone rings, using a 400-word sentence, which, to me, is kind of a "fuck you, I can do this" type of exercise. I happen to love stuff like that.
The lede:
"Aye, that face. There's a story about that face, you know. About what he was willing to do with it ... with that splatted knob of a nose, that shadowed dent of a mouth, that bulletproof brow, those broken-glass blue eyes, those flyaway ears, that whole topography of furrow and ditch and crevasse, all topped by the reddish-brown hair of a little boy, without a strand of gray."
The phone paragraph:
"Now, he gets a lot of phone calls in his office in Philadelphia; indeed, come to think of it, basically all he does when he's in his office is get phone calls, and they all sound like this, blip-bloop, a sharp, a flat, and given the nature of his work and the tirelessness of human perversity, they're all generally pretty unpleasant, because if Timoney's the most popular man in Philadelphia, that's only because Philadelphia has so many problems, given that most people don't call the police commissioner until something bad has happened or a cop dispatched to fix something bad wound up doing something worse, so while he's answering one phone call, the other phone calls keep coming, until the office is filled with an arpeggio of sharps and flats, a maddening, synthesized chorus of blips and bloops, each one representing murder and rape and reporters and car crashes and Chrysler Cordobas and cops going bad and union officials trying to protect them from Timoney's wrath, and Timoney sits in his swivel chair or stands in front of all that 1970s wood paneling decorated for the most part with pictures of Himself, as his underlings in the Philadelphia Police Department call their boss, and his suit jacket's slung over a chair and he's squirming around in his white dress shirt, reaching around with a ruler or a pen for some unreachable itch, his collar squeezing his neck so tight that the blue veins look thick as bones, his face existing solely in variations of the rufous end of the spectrum, starting pink and ending pinker, while he verges between apostrophized exasperation and extemporized complaint, his boggy voice snorting and rising into a tenor of pure choleric engagement ... and so, anyway, he's in his office, and gets a phone call."
And "Bottom of the Ninth" by Charles Pierce. That whole story.