Recent reading:

Bob Woodward, State of Denial
Pete Dexter, God's Pocket
Stephen King, Lisey's Story

"It was almost incidental, what you had for issues. But how you saw things, how physical things went into your eyes and what your brain took and what it threw back, that told you who you were."

The musings of Dexter's alcoholic reporter, Richard Shellburn, the "people's voice," about to compose a long and maudlin essay meant to get himself laid, which unfortunately generates 134 calls of complaint to the paper -- "They're pissing into the phones," says his worried assistant -- and Shellburn's subsequent beating death at the hands of a mob outside the Hollywood Bar.

There is a line of fictional alcoholic journalists that goes straight from Shellburn to the hapless unnamed reporter in Faulkner's Pylon:

"'[I]t's not the living breath of news. It's just information. It's dead before you even get back here with it.' Immobile beyond the lamp's hard radius the reporter stood, watching the editor with an air leashed, attentive, and alert. 'It's like trying to read something in a foreign language. You know it ought to be there; maybe you know by God it is there. But that's all. Can it be by some horrible mischance that without knowing it you listen and see in one language and then do what you call writing in another? How does it sound when you read it to yourself?'

'When I read what?' the reporter said. Then he sat down in the opposite chair while the editor cursed him."

I have a lot of sympathy for these busted losers: Pylon's reporter, who would like to be Hemingway, but somehow lacks style's internal swing, and Shellburn, with his white corpse skin and sexually predatory ways (A typical Shellburn line: "She was a pretty girl, but she wasn't troubled enough to be much of a piece of ass."). Both men are professionally and emotionally crippled failures who still manage, from time to time, to articulate something like aesthetic sense. Shellburn's attachment to "physical things," above, is a good epigraph for the art movements which, for lack of a better term, we call realism.

- posted by cjb @ 10:29 AM