خيلي دوسش داشتم، چقد دنيس جانسون خوب مينويسه.. خوشحالم كه كتاب رو خريدم و ميتونم بازم بخونمش و لذت ببرم.

1. Car Crash While Hitchhiking
“He couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.”

2. Two Men
“It doesn’t matter what his problem is, until he’s fully understood it himself.”

3. Out of Bail
“Some of the most terrible things that had happened to me in my life had happened in here. But like the others I kept coming back.”

4. Dundun
“For a moment I fell asleep, right while I was driving. I had a dream in which I was trying to tell someone something and they kept interrupting, a dream about frustration.”

5. Work
“Because, after all, in small ways, it was turning out to be one of the best days of my life, whether it was somebody else’s dream or not.”

6. Emergency
“I could understand how a drowning man might suddenly feel a deep thirst being quenched. Or how the slave might become a friend to his master.”

7. Dirty Wedding
“And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead?
What would you care? How would you even know the difference?

8. The Other Man
“My feet carried me away down the hill. I danced on my despair.”

9. Happy Hour
“People entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies. Then only the demons inhabiting us could be seen.”

10. Steady Hands at Seattle General
“Well, maybe I mean alive in a deeper sense. You could be talking, and still not be alive in a deeper sense.”

11. Beverly Home
“And sometimes a dust storm would stand off in the desert, towering so high it was like another city—a terrifying new era approaching, blurring our dreams.”


And as I turned the last page, I had to run outside just to make sure the world was still there. When did it get so dark? I looked at the night sky and, God, did I feel small. The moon and the stars were still up there and a cold wind was blowing. In that moment I could have sworn there was no one left in the world. I felt lonely, and cold. But so happy to be alive.

“All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”
― Denis Johnson, 'Jesus' Son'



Sometimes while reading this I thought I was reading Burroughs (just not so dark), other times J.G. Ballard (just not so cold), sometimes even Palahniuk (but with more of a poet's heart). It was madness, a fever dream, tied together with beauty. It was fragments of insanity stitched together with the stars. And sometimes the night of this novel was so dark, I couldn't see the stars, and the blood all looked black.

I didn't personally like it as much as Train Dreams, but that was just personal preference. I can see how some readers would absolutely adore it. It felt like a painting of blood or a beautiful photograph of a corpse. You are both attracted to and repelled by the art and the vision.

The novelization of the Mountain Goats album We Shall All Be Healed. Or We Shall All Be Healed is actually Jesus' Son: The Musical! Either way.

_____
Note:

In "The Art of Reading Denis Johnson" (Poets and Writers, Nov/Dec 2013, pgs. 23-27), the guest columnist suggests that the line I knew every raindrop by its name is symptomatic of a "want of Wordsworthian affinity for the natural world, or a groping after a kind of Buddhist cohesion with the cosmos..."

I call bullshit on this Boston University fellow's twee reading of the line.

My take, if I'm allowed one, is that the line isn't some Adam's grand glorious reach towards the sparkling fingertip of a past Master, but rather the tossed-off remark of somebody (the narrator, Fuckhead) so storm-tossed and exhausted that, yeah, at this point in their journey, after so many hours standing in the rain, they have had enough. Enough. It's sarcasm. Like, for example, if you were stuck at an airport for half a day (or more in these airport times) you'd say, "Man, I should have my mail delivered here." So, if you're stuck in the downpour drunk and high and coming down and going up and veering sideways, yeah, you, too, would know every raindrop by its name. You're acquainted. You've become familiar.

I wouldn't feel the need to vent, but the article's author takes gleeful pains to paint Jesus' Son's main readership as "mid-twenties, white and male...revere On the Road and third-raters such as Charles Bukowski and William S. Burroughs...want to be fiction writers but have never read Henry James".

But despite the snarky attitude, "The Art of Reading Denis Johnson" is worth tracking down if you see an old pile of Poets and Writers magazines, or are spinning at the microfiche machine wondering what to call up on-screen with that beautiful antique, as the article's author makes some helpful parallels between Johnson's novel and the works of Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor.

Oh, and you'll learn more about good, clear writing from Bukowski than James. You will. You just will.

Last Exit to Brooklyn in the boonies is what Jesus' Son feels like. It's an interconnected series of short stories starring the very down and very out in rural Iowa as they stagger through young adulthood. Its protagonist's name is Fuckhead, so there you go.

There's this great confused quality that's familiar to me from my own experimental days, which were much less dire (not at all dire) but, like, in one story they're all having a sendoff party for a friend who's going to jail, and midway through Fuckhead realizes that he has this all wrong, it's actually a welcome home party for the friend who's just gotten out of jail, so the entire story changes on a dime: "Oh shit, wait, that's not what's happening." I remember that sort of thing! Except it was more along the lines of whether we'd eaten all the gummy bears yet or not, so the stakes were a little lower.

I like this better than Last Exit. I like both, but Jesus' Son avoids Last Exit's desperate shock tactics; my problem with that book was that every story basically ended, like, "and then everyone got raped," and it felt a little obvious. Plus I like that "Jesus' Son" is from the Velvet Underground song "Heroin."

The thing with Fuckhead is that he has no self-esteem at all. He feels no shame when he peeps in some lady's window, because he has no shame left. He's made it down to raw animal level. I feel catharsis when I read characters like this, if they're well-done, as he is. I've dipped a toe or two into low self-esteem, at moments in my life. I don't think about it real often, because those were bummer moments. It's nice to understand that others know what it's like way down there where you can't see in front of your face. You don't read stuff like this too much. Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, maybe - Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays. But you don't see it often, because it's dark down there. Paradoxically, so, this book feels like a little light.

1999-ųjų filmas pagal šiuos apsakymus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C7Kj...

[...]"And, you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you." (Car Crash While Hitchhiking)

"I know they argue about whether or not it's right, whether or not the baby is alive at this point or that point in its growth inside the womb. This wasn't about that. It wasn't what the lawyers did. It wasn't what the doctors did, it wasn't what the woman did. It was what the mother and father did together." (Dirty Wedding)

Ridere delle proprie fragilità? Si può, eccome se si può e Johnson ci riesce.
Ci tiene perfettamente in equilibrio sull'orlo dell'abisso.
Personaggi sull'orlo del fallimento, dipendenti da qualunque genere di droga e alcol.
Riesce a distillare umanità, compassione e umorismo in così poche pagine. Storie di dolore, dove la sofferenza è la routine. Quella stessa sofferenza che ti mostra la bellezza del mondo.

"Ma ogni cosa che tocchi si trasforma in merda?"
Direi di si, ma con questa collezione di racconti si è trasformata in oro.

These stories hold each other up like a house of cards. An excellent example of a composite novel. One of these stories has joined my list of all-time favorites.

A poetic, disorienting book of short fiction about semi-criminals, heroin addicts and idlers squandering their lives on the fringes of urban northern Idaho.

The narrator is a study in contrasts: irresponsible, irrational . . . and yet gifted with moments of almost mystical clarity.

Look, I don't know how else to put this. I recognize what Johnson's accomplished here, I acknowledge that he has a gift for phrase-level shine, and I concede that these semi-linked stories evince a remarkably coherent and vividly-depicted worldview that I might call "hopelessly optimistic," or maybe "tending to carry on when there's clearly no good reason to do so," or else, more succinctly, "Conradian" . . . but, I'm sorry, what I couldn't help but think/feel, wading through one after another of these stories was, Yeah, I know:
I understand that the human elevator has no bottom floor, that a man can keep on falling til he's ready to pull the emergency brake and haul himself out onto some sublevel way below the bright clean fenestrated floors traversed by shiny people too stupid and lucky (so far) to know how shaky their footing is, how frightened they ought to be, and that the fallen subterraneans tend never to make it all the way back up to the light, but that this doesn't prevent them (us) from continuing to wriggle around through murky sub-basement muck, and that this perverse expression of the irrepressible will to move and breathe, to go on, no matter how shitty the environs or rancid the air, is what makes the condition of being human so simultaneously stupid and beautiful –
sure, I get this, but it's something I feel like I'd already got, i.e., I didn't need Denis Johnson to tell me, and if I did need to be informed that this is the way things are, I'm not at all convinced this book would have done it for me. Sorry.
Hope this doesn't get me kicked out of the writing program; I gather most of my fellows here sort of revere the man. As I say: he can clearly write. Let the angry response-posts commence.

براي من كتاب جالبي نبود.باز هم گول پيمان خاكسار و تعاريفش از كتاب هايي كه ترجمه ميكنه رو خوردم.
خريد اين كتاب مثل اينه كه بريد كافي شاپ و از ميان ٢٠ تا عنوانِ متنوع ،فقط آب معدني سفارش بديد.
از يازده داستان كوتاه فقط دو تاي آخر برام جالب بودن.(دستان بي لرزش در تيمارستان عمومي سياتل وخانه بورلي).
اما در كل نويسنده خيلي شجاعانه دست به اعتراف به اعتياد و بدبخت بودنش توي اون زمان ميزنه.
داستان ها سر ته درست و حسابي نداشت و در كل از خواندن كتاب لذت نبردم.

"دستان بی‌لرزش در بیمارستان عمومی سیاتل" معرکه بود.