Mythologize your friends -- or just make them up

It's really a very simple strategy. You have a small group of friends and you declare them all to be geniuses and you laud all their work and ascribe to them sweet and stormy qualities worthy of the Greek gods. What you're selling is not just your writing but your personal legends.

That's Edmund White, writing in the Aug. 19, 2010 New York Review of Books, reviewing photographs of the Beat writers by Allen Ginsburg, talking about how Jack Kerouac turned his real-life friends into not just fictional characters but mythical ones.

And when I read that, I immediately thought: Yes, that's just what Bolaño did in The Savage Detectives, which for that reason among others has been compared to On the Road and the rest of Kerouac's work. And in a previous generation Henry Miller did something similar (though most of the weird characters and hangers-on in The Rosy Crucifixion didn't turn out to be famous writers or artists -- not including Anaïs Nin and her crowd who showed up later).

You may think to yourself, right, my friends are just as nutty and proto-famous as that collection of characters in New York in the 1920s/New York in the 1940s/Mexico City in the 1970s. The poet-barista you have a crush on -- surely she's the equal of June Miller. That pretty flash fiction author who reads at every open mike is just like Gregory Corso. The hairy, almost inarticulate author of chapbook verse who hangs out in the park every Sunday is another Ulises Lima.

Or not. Maybe you're singularly unimpressed with the talent around you. Maybe you just realized they do a lot more talking about their art than working on it. Maybe they're boring. Very well. Make up characters -- that's creative writing.

Today's fake: Italian journo fabricated interviews with famous writers

Via Galleycat: An Italian journalist called Tommaso Debenedetti may have fabricated interviews with Philip Roth and John Grisham. The fake interviews were published in Italian newspapers.

technorati: fakes, fraud, writers

An understandable confusion

He was gradually, I wouldn't say losing his mind, but he would get confused about things. I remember when my daughter was born, he would refer to her as a book. And he would refer to his latest book as a child. He really had things turned around.

Screenwriter Robert Towne on novelist John Fante
in an interview in Stop Smiling magazine, no. 32

technorati: Robert Towne, John Fante, writers

Bourgeois abroad

I've really enjoyed reading n+1, the lit mag, so I was disappointed to read this interview with Benjamin Kunkel, its editor and founder, because he ends up sounding like a complete douchebag.

• He moved to Buenos Aires just because he was "tired of being in New York. I felt I was a bit too close to the publishing industry." He is "drifting a bit right now, in terms of my domicile."
• Asked about "the expat scene," he protests, "I'm not really a seeker out of scenes" but adds, "I don't mind taking some relatively inexpensive flights down to South America."
• He recently finished writing a play, but professes not to care much about what happens next. "I'm just waiting to see what, if anything, happens with it. But I've been working on that, working on another book, and doing a lot of journalism..."
• Finally, he is asked: "What do you think the role of the intellectual is in society?" and responds: "On this, I kind of have a Maoist view."

Oh, clearly. Because those Maoists were famous for jet-setting to international capitals, hanging around writing plays for no reason, and moving to another country just because they were a little bit tired of where they were at.

What a douche!!

Today's peak experience not so isolated

Today's NYT has a prominent feature on one of the dwindling corps of human (as opposed to robot) fire lookouts. It carefully catalogues the firewatch tower, one of thousands built in the 1930s by WPA workers, and name-checks the most famous fire watchman ever, Jack Kerouac.

Kerouac chronicled his summer of 1956 atop Desolation Peak in his novel Desolation Angels, which has become my favorite of his books. (He published a shorter description in "The Dharma Bums," a more widely read book.) A few years ago, an absolutely beautiful companion book, Poets on the Peaks by John Suiter, revisited Kerouac's outpost, along with those of fellow Beat writers Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, who also served as fire watchers during the 1950s and whose understanding of Zen Buddhism was greatly enhanced by their experience of solitude.

One of the most vivid passages in "Desolation Angels" is the anxious scene in which Kerouac, whose only pair of shoes had fallen to pieces during the summer, hastily descends the mountain with bleeding feet to a lake cove where a Forest Service boat would pick him up. The sequence makes clear how isolated the Desolation Peak outpost was -- reachable only on foot by a steep trail after a boat ride up a lake. (The trip to the isolated Holden Village retreat center, where I spent six weeks in 2003, is somewhat comparable, though you don't have to hike into it on foot.)

The writer of the Times article seems to suggest the lookout he visited is similarly isolated:

One travels back in time, road-wise, going from asphalt to dirt to a treacherous stone-filled path that acts as the lookout's driveway. And then you hike. Up past an outhouse, up past the spot where rattlesnakes like to sun themselves and up two flights of metal stairs...

But a close look at the photograph published with the NYT piece shows a truck parked only a couple hundred yards away:



The article doesn't say, but I'd bet that's one reason that particular lookout cabin has survived as a human-staffed lookout: its accessibility.