Carver’s Dog

My review of Bruce Olds’ new novel, The Moments Lost, is running at Pop Matters:

Historical revisionist Bruce Olds commits heinous acts against the English language in his sprawling, incoherent novel, The Moments Lost. At times impressive in scope and range, the narrative ultimately suffers and strangulates under the weight of the author’s use and abuse of alliterations and arcane verbs and nouns.

You can read the entire review here.

Previously: Musings For A Thursday

There’s quite a bit on my plate these days. Carver’s Dog needs daily fodder, of course. And taking care of my ailing mother and her personal affairs is a full-time job for me and Miss L. Plus I just picked up three new writing gigs: an industrial film, a feature-length documentary, and book reviewing for Pop Matters. So, one might logically ask what the hell I was thinking when I decided this weekend to launch a new venture.

The new project, Hemingway’s Shotgun, is strictly an editorial task for me. From the call for submissions:

Hemingway’s Shotgun is an online magazine devoted to all manner of poetic verse but with a particular emphasis on poetry on the topic of literature, books, and reading.

Send us your poetry today. We’re not particular. Iambic pentameter? Cool. Sonnets? Sure, why not? Haiku and haiku sonnets? Absolutely. Anything that displays the art of rythmical composition and speaks to the subject of literature will be considered. And of course all authors retain their copyright(s). Include a two-line bio.

What we’re doing is community building and exposing good craft with verse. Which is another way of saying that there is no compensation.

Our first contribution, from poet Scot Young, is already up and running. Have a look-see and feel free to contribute.

Some families, it seems, are touched by madness and despair in measures unequal to the general population.

On July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. It was reported at the time that the renowned author “rested the gun butt of the double-barreled shotgun on the floor of a hallway in his home, leaned over it to put the twin muzzles to his forehead just above the eyes, and pulled both triggers.” Hemingway’s father, Clarence, also committed suicide, as did his siblings Ursula and Leicester.

On July 1, 1996, one day before the 35th anniversary of her grandfather’s death, actress and super-model Margaux Hemingway was found dead in her studio apartment in Santa Monica, California. She was 41. The official cause of death was an overdose of phenobarbital and was ruled a suicide.

From today’s AP wire:

Bill Hayward, the associate producer of “Easy Rider,” has died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 66.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office said Hayward shot himself in the heart with a handgun on March 9 in Castaic. The suicide occurred in the trailer where he was living.

Hayward was the son of agent Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan, all part of a Hollywood family whose talent and beauty was often outshone by its demons.

Sullavan and her daughter Bridget Hayward both died of drug overdoses in 1960.

Bill Hayward’s other sister, Brooke, was once married to “Easy Rider” star Dennis Hopper, who said Thursday that Hayward “was a wonderful man and this is a great tragedy for our family.”

Hayward also produced “Haywire” (1980) for CBS, an account of his mother’s suicide based on a memoir by his sister Brooke.

RIP.

I watched an elderly woman patient helping the orderly to serve the afternoon tea … She began to stare at the bobbing liquid, then stepped forward and carefully inverted the brimming cup in her hand. The hot liquid dripped everywhere in a terrible mess, and the orderly screamed: “Doreen, why did you do that?”, to which Doreen matter-of-factly replied: “Jesus told me to.” … I like to think that what really impelled her was a sense of the intolerable contrast between the infinitely plastic liquid in her hand and the infinitely hard geometery of the table, followed by the revelation that she could resolve these opposites in a very simple and original way.

– J.G. Ballard

     Atrocity Exhibition, 1990

Related: J.G. Ballard On Writing

At the depths of his despair, convinced that he would be relegated to the dust bin of literary history, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the now-famous line “There are no second acts in American lives.” This was a personal notion of Fitzgerald’s, of course, a reflection of his self-pity and remorse over his inability to kick-start his once-glorious career back into gear.

Today, decades after Fitzgerald penned that phrase, it’s hard to think of a literary quote that’s become as shopworn. It’s maddening actually. A quick run of “There are no second acts in American lives” in Google News, for instance, unveils the following:

In the March 16 edition of the U.K. Guardian, Tim Rich begins his profile of soccer great David Beckham with the following:

After taking a Beckham-sized salary to decamp to Los Angeles to recreate the glories of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night for Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald remarked sadly that “there are no second acts in American lives”. Fitzgerald conclusively proved his point by drinking himself to death while producing unusable scripts that had no chance of ending up as a film.

Fitzgerald was relatively clean and sober at the time of his death on December 21, 1940. It was the second of two heart attacks that laid him low. But that’s another matter.

Moving on. On March 16, Noelle Crombie writes in the Sunday Oregonian:

And here’s the Seattle Times’ take on the spectacular fall of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. If you think Spitzer’s career is all washed up, think again. Bottom line: F. Scott Fitzgerald may have been all wrong when he famously said, “There are no second acts in American lives. Says one American history prof, “In fact, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong. It happens all the time.”

Well, I’m glad the Prof set the record straight. On the same day as the Guardian and Oregonian nods, Augusta Chronicle columnist Bill Kirby remarks:

F. Scott Fitzgerald is famous for saying “There are no second acts in American lives,” implying that you get one chance to get it right.

Of course, that’s not true.

There are second chances all around us

I suppose if Fitzgerald had struck the words “American lives” from his reflection — again, a personal reflection — lazy journalists the world over would be forced to defend or deconstruct some other literary phrase that snuck into our cultural anthropology by accident.

Get some new material, people.