A working list of what to put in a story (How to write like a son of a bitch, part 2)

Psalms and blue yodels, a muddy-brown Merc with steer horns. A woman named Delia. Or Ida. A pistol. Pack of smokes. Enough whiskey to float a muddy-brown Merc. The ghosts of Elvis, Hank and Muddy. The second coming of Patsy Cline, with one hand on her hip and another wrapped around a Schlitz. A crucifix. The big river, seen through bloodshot eyes. Or stained glass. Electricity. Running water. The Band on the box singing, "The Shape I'm In." Innocence. Guilt. A dog named Prophet. Dry ribs, a mess of beans, and whatever's on tap. Jesus. Furry Lewis. A stranger with a match. And the second coming of Patsy saying to the ghost of Elvis, "Don't even think about it, boy."

How to write like a son of a bitch

A good friend and writer e-mailed me with another writer's treatise on writing, but it made my hard head hurt, beginning as it did, with a line from Martin Amis about what makes a "good narrative" -- that is, "pattern and balance, form, completion, commensurateness."

I would have added hooch and a blues song, sex, train tracks, a lonesome whistle blowing. But whatever works for you, Martin.

That start put me off, but I read on -- about "Linguistic Surface" and "Desire as Engine" and such. Linguistic Surface? I love that band. I've got their "Live at Budokan" album.

I don't mean to be a smartass. It's just that I have a philosophy about writing. It's not as flippant as it sounds. I consider this to be serious work -- nay, sacred doings. My philosophy: Learn the rules; strap a stick of dynamite to the rules; light.

My philosophy on writing (much like my philosophy of religion) is that you can't be told how to write. You can't be instructed -- handed a set of rules and $32 terms -- and be expected to turn out anything but factory work. Write your story -- the story only you can write. That's my opinion and I think Lance the greyhound, lounging on the floor nearby as I write this, would concur, if he were a talking dog. (Lance the greyhound devours literature; well, he tried to eat "Bleak House" the other day.)

Death to writing teachers, then? No, no. Hooch all around, for the good ones. There's one in particular whose aid and wisdom has meant everything to me. But the best ones, seems to me, don't so much instruct as they do encourage, prod, guide, muse, and hold forth on what works for them. Then you're on your own. As it should be. As it must.

Steinbeck forever

Jonathan Yardley, the Washington Post's man on books, recently asked in print, "But why do adults continue to read Steinbeck in such numbers? ... Probably the explanation for this will forever be a mystery."

Yardley, writing on the occasion of having re-read "Cannery Row," goes on to say, "The only reason I can come up with for the high esteem in which Steinbeck is still held is his transparent sincerity. It has long been my pet theory that in the popular marketplace, readers instinctively distinguish between writers whose work draws on genuine feeling and those who rely on art or artifice, and that they reward the former while repudiating the latter. From Jacqueline Susann to Danielle Steel, from James Michener to James Patterson, readers have recognized the sincerity of feeling beneath the utter lack of literary merit, and have rewarded it accordingly.

"Steinbeck was scarcely so bad a prose stylist as any of these -- though his Nobel Prize is a reminder that literary distinction matters less to the Swedish Academy than political orthodoxy -- but his books shine with conviction that comes from the heart."

Let's see that on a dust jacket of some new Steinbeck edition -- "Scarcely so bad as Danielle Steel"! Reminds me of the newspaper editor I had, couple of decades ago, whose idea of a compliment was, "It didn't stink too bad."

So that's Yardley on Steinbeck -- the man couldn't write; easy to read and so good for school kids, but that's about it. Jesus, what a load of it. Steinbeck wrote with depth and wisdom. He wrote big sweeping books of great social import and he wrote little books of warmth and wit. He was a writer, one of our best. Alas, Steinbeck doesn't need me to come rushing to his defense, for a couple of reasons that add up to the fact that Yardley's slings can't touch him: He's dead and he's eternal.

Fact is, they'll read "The Grapes of Wrath" on other planets some day. They'll read "Cannery Row," "Tortilla Flat" and "Travels with Charley" on the ride there.

Faulkner's liquor

Yesterday in Borders, I heard a girl reading Barry Hannah's "Airships" aloud to a friend. The first girl seemed to think the world (or at least the second girl) ought to bow down to the mighty "Airships" (or at least stop and listen to the rhythm of words, the swing of them.)

Well, I listened. (Imagine that -- literature breaking out in a big-box book store! Call security!) I like Hannah. I've got a post on "Ray" somewhere down below. Anyway, I was rummaging the shelves and found the coolest book, "William Faulkner -- A Literary Companion," all full of what the critics said of our man's books at the time he dropped them.

Henry Nash Smith, writing in the Dallas Morning News on Feb.17, 1929, was reviewing "Sartoris" in the newspaper's "Amusement Section," page 3, when he observed of this wildly talented young Faulkner fellow, "like the hero of his new novel, he carries his liquor steadily."

May they, my good friends, say that of us some day.

Blue Yodel #11

Saturday afternoon, Jimmie Rodgers on the box singing the "Blue Yodel #11." It seems his sweet mama's doing him wrong, a bad condition, to be sure, though not quite so bad as the TB that would kill him.

It's hot as blazes outside, but I'm thinking of braving it. Well, I'm thinking of going out back to the patio, sit in the shade and read some more of Tennessee Williams' "Summer and Smoke," see if John and Alma are getting along some better than Jimmie and his sweet mama.

Beulah Land, East Motherless or bust

Thursday morning in Memphis. The day outside my window looks like it hasn't quite shaken yesterday's rains. Thad Cockrell is on the box, singing, "I've been searching for a country of my own..." Me, I'm trying to write one.

Rock, and also roll

Currently playing on my iPod: "Take My Country Back," the Silos

Number of Silos songs on my iPod: 37

Best Silos song title: "Let's Take Some Drugs and Drive Around."

Songs on my iPod with "drugs" in the title: 3 (including the crazy uncle of them all, "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll," Ian Dury & the Blockheads.)

Songs about sex on my iPod: 6,814

Total songs on my iPod: 6,821

Versions of "Satisfaction" on my iPod: 3 (Rolling Stones, Television and Todd Snider.)

Soul shot to Patsy Cline

Patsy Cline, Patsy Cline
There’s no more to this song
just the one line

Patsy Cline, Patsy Cline
Can we go walkin’ after midnight?
Can you give me a sign?

Patsy Cline, Patsy Cline
Have you met Otis?
Have you sung ‘These Arms of Mine’?

-- Luther Gaunt

It's the Fourth of July (Delia, oh Delia)

From my novel, "The Long Gone Daddies." Happy Fourth, y'all.

Luther steps outside the car. He lay across the hood with his guitar on top – she likes to be on top – and his beer within reach. He picks, he strums, he drums that thumb. But he’s misplaced the song, and so he sits in the dark and silence and drinks from the snub-nosed brown bottle.

He closes his eyes and lets his mind fetch some vestige of that strayed radio signal. It’s Johnny Cash doing another number, this one about a woman named Delia – it would be a woman named Delia – as the sticky, stifling air coats him and the emergency blinker tick-tocks, killing time just to watch it die.

Johnny says his Delia was low down and trifling, she was cold and mean. Johnny says if he hadn’t shot poor Delia, he’d have had her for his wife. Another Delia, the one Blind Willie McTell sang of, she was a gambling girl. She gambled all around. She got her damn self shot, too.

“Delia,” Luther says, as if a wind might kick up and carry a message to all the women of song with that name, summon them, tell them of their latest namesake. He somehow doubts she’ll meet their fate; she’d never allow it.

Luther says the name again, but there’s no wind. He’s alone on the hood of his car. He listens as the crickets chirp their songs of love and lust or whatever gets you through the night. He watches the black, empty sky. The sky is starless; the sky has been looted.

Now from the distance come fireworks: reds, yellows and blues streaking across the canvas of night, lines of light crossing, colliding, splintering with sparks trailing. The sky is a-bloom and the sky is a-sputter. Luther traces the faint designs left by the fading lines, closes his eyes and opens them, close and open, every time a new sky, neon dusted.

He’d forgotten. It’s the Fourth of July.

How far would you go (to get gone)?

Wednesday morning. Lynyrd Skynyrd singing, "Simple Man." I'm meaning to get some writing done. But first, a bit from my novel, "The Long Gone Daddies":

Malcolm sat on the kitchen counter, bent over his guitar, playing low and whispering words you couldn’t hear for the sounds from outside the open window over the sink. There was a screech of tires and wheeze of brakes, a horn’s blare, some sort of near-accident, sounded like. He stopped playing but didn’t look up.

Eula stood at the sink watching, bare-assed in a man’s black jacket with white piping.

He started playing again, his thumb brushing the top strings and his first finger picking the bottom ones. It was a new song, a country blues for a bare-assed woman and her guitar-playing man.

How far would you go?
I said, how far would you go?
How far would you go, to get gone?

How far would you go?
Tell me, how far would you go?
How far would you go, to get gone?

A little ways on

His thumb brushed some more and his finger picked. One shuffled and the other loped. The latter doubled back on the former, urged it on, coaxed, pleaded and begged, showed its bare ass and then was gone.

“A little ways on,” he sang again, in a whisper now. “A little ways on.”

The gospel according to Thad Cockrell

Monday morning in Tennessee. Thad Cockrell, country boy out of North Carolina, is singing, "Pride won't get us where we're going..." Sing it, Thad. You've made a hell of a little record, with this "To Be Loved" EP. But in fact, it's quite heavenly. It's gospel, but doesn't shout or preach. It doesn't wag a finger or shake a fist. Beautiful songs, really. Really beautiful songs.

Lord of the thrifts

Today, a bit from my novel, "The Long Gone Daddies." It's Memphis, 1953. Malcolm Gaunt has arrived in the city and promptly met a woman he knows as Eula.

Malcolm wore black slacks, a white shirt, a black jacket with white piping. The Memphis heat didn’t bother him. He looked like the lord of the thrifts, and black shoes, too. He was tall and lanky, had those long, long fingers. There was some gray in his stubble and in his thick head of blackish hair.

He believed in Heaven and he believed in Hell. He believed they were cities on his latest tour, same as Tupelo and Montgomery and Hot Springs. He believed a good man’s eternal reward would fit in a shot glass without a drop wasted, and that a bad man’s pain of damnation could be tempered with a couple of headache powders. He was a Goody’s man.

He had that failed marriage back home. This you know. He had been shot at four times and hit once – nicked, more like; he was playing at the time and made sure to finish the song. He had spent a week in jail, spread over two decades and four cities. Yea verily, those songs from the old Cassandra guitar got him hot in some stew.

“Thirty-eight,” he said when Eula asked his age. They were sitting at Miss Taylor’s Restaurant, next door to Sam Phillips’ recording studio. They were drinking coffee. Eula was eating a piece of apple pie.

“Like the gun,” she said, waving the fork about like she might have in mind a stick-up of Miss Taylor’s establishment.

“Well, I wouldn’t say a gun. Or anyway, I wouldn’t say that one.”

“Pistol, ain’t it?” Eula leaned forward, let that bleached blonde hair fall over the black shades. She let the shades fall down to the end of her button nose. She had brown eyes: big, round chocolate drops. She smiled and said, “Oh, yeah, you’re a pistol.”

He leaned back in the booth, smiled broadly. “Pearl-handled,” he said.

And she snapped his picture.

“Half-cocked,” she said.

A cold beer and a muddy hymnal

Songs on my iPod with beer in the title: 3 ("Punks in the Beerlight," Silver Jews; "There's a Tear in My Beer," Hank Williams; "Beer Run," Todd Snider.

Beers in my refrigerator: 16 (but I don't like their chances tonight).

Songs with whiskey in the title: 9 (not including Whiskeytown's "Drank Like A River.")

Songs with wine in the title: 10 (including "Sip the Wine," from Rick Danko's magnificent post-Band solo record. Find it, buy it. You can't get it on iTunes and you can't borrow mine, but you've got to have this record.)

Iron & Wine song that could be the title of a Faulkner story: "Muddy Hymnal."

Iron & Wine songs on my iPod: 54

Songs with drink, drinkin' or drinking in the title: 11 (including "Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You," by John Prine.)

Songs with drunk in the title: 14 (now playing: "Drunk Kid Catholic," Bright Eyes.)

Word of the day, with beer

The "word of the day" on our Earthlink homepage is:

Cockaigne \kah-KAYN\, noun:
An imaginary land of ease and luxury.

Give me a good book and a case of Falstaff and you can hold the luxury.

'If dogs run free, why not me / across the swamp of time'

Lance the greyhound's new playlist:
"If Dogs Run Free," Bob Dylan
"One-Eyed Black Dog Moses," Mark Olson & the Creekdipers.
"Dogsong 2," the Be Good Tanyas
"Hound Dog," Elvis Presley
"Watch Dog," Eddie Hinton
"Old King," Neil Young
"I Got a Bulldog," Sweet Brothers & Ernest Stoneman

God, Casey Jones and Pete Seeger

Sunday morning, Gillian Welch is singing, "God moved on the water, like Casey Jones." Just finished the A section of The New York Times; good story in there about Pete Seeger, still being Pete at age 89, with his banjo and his songs and spray-painted "Peace" signs, stooping to pick up some trash on the roadside.

“This is my religion now,” said Mr. Seeger. “Picking up trash. You do a little bit wherever you are.”

'a vexed god called the Mississippi'

They sandbag by moonlight. The school superintendent and the judge, the police sergeant and the mechanic, the Amish man in a straw hat and the young man in a Budweiser T-shirt, they lay down sandbags as if making peace offerings to a vexed god called the Mississippi.

That's Dan Barry of The New York Times, my favorite newspaper writer, out in floodland.

I've been everywhere, man

Thursday morning. Leeroy Stagger is singing, "Yeah, the rain is falling hard on a town with a woman's name." Nice line, Leeroy. It reminds me, sort of, of the Tom Waits line about all the doughnuts having names that sound like prostitutes.

Speaking of towns: Here's a bit from my novel, "The Very Last Night." The girl Lucy is telling the boy Billy about all the places her beloved guitar-banging uncle Till has played:

“Uncle Till,” she said, “he’s been to all those places. He’s been to every bitty town in Arkansas and most every one between there and the ocean deep. His guitar’s taken him there. His guitar has wheels and wings and a burro’s sense of getting there. He’s been to big cities and little towns and lost hamlets, from Dallas, Texas, to Lordover, Georgia.”

“Dallas, Texas,” Billy said. “Lordover, Georgia.”

“There’s this song called 'I’ve Been Everywhere,'” Lucy said. “Well, the guy who wrote it, one time he stopped my Uncle Till to ask directions.”

There's not really a town called Lordover, Ga. I made that shit up.

The good morning medicine show

Tuesday morning. The Old Crow Medicine Show is singing, "My good gal ain't no good to me." I had to change the music -- Lance the greyhound seemed a bit uneasy about Blind Lemon Jefferson. A little dark and spectral for the boy, I think, on such a fine, bright day. I'm still trying to figure out his sonic wants and needs and favorings. He seems to like the sound of a good string band. Same back at you, Lance.

I've got two hours before work. Writing time. The Old Crows are singing, "If you want it, God's got it." Yeah, well, but those stories aren't going to write themselves.

The rocket ship in retirement

Monday morning. Lance the greyhound is resting after a rousing early morning of tear-assing around the backyard and rough-housing with an empty Michelob Ultra carton. We're listening to the Avett Brothers. They're singing about that pretty girl from Chile.

Work soon. Well, for me. Lance the greyhound doesn't have a job. He's retired from a life of racing. Like Richard Petty, say, or another Lance -- the one what rode a bike. But our Lance was a different sort of racer. He was his own stock-car, his own bike. He was his own Roman candle rocket ship pistol of a popped-cork from a bottle of pure white-dog hooch -- still is, in short, little bursts of tear-assing. Mostly he's a good boy.

Monday morning. The Avett Brothers are singing about that pretty girl from San Diego. I'm typing this sentence. And Lance, good boy, he's lazing on the living room floor and dreaming of ...

Lance the greyhound's playlist

Lance the greyhound listens to my iPod:
"To the Dogs or Whoever," Josh Ritter
"The Shepherd's Dog," Iron and Wine
"Come a Little Dog," Palace Brothers
"Dog Treat," Tom Waits
"Don't Dog Your Woman," T-Bone Burnett
"The Cat's Got the Measles, the Dog's Got the Whooping Cough," E. Walter Smith
"Hellhound on My Trail," Robert Johnson
"Like a Dog," Greg Brown
"Salty Dog," Johnny Cash
"Two Dogs and a Bone," Los Lobos

Wands for hands: a novel excerpt

A bit from my novel, "The Very Last Night." Tammy Miles is talking about her girl, Lucy, the pale, plain-faced, skinny-as-a-broomstick girl who has Billy Heavens mesmerized down in the nothing-doing Mississippi town of Roost:

Tammy Miles waved her cigarette like a child with a sparkler. She was smiling and laughing, telling Miss Annie about Lucy.

“She’s tall and skinny like her daddy and wild like her mama and she’s got my love for fancy ways of saying things but she’s her own thing, too. She got things in her we didn’t put there. She’s tougher than me. She can fend. She don’t fold. I seen her slug boys and separate fighting dogs, one about to maul the other and Lucy just reached in and said something sharp – she’s got a mouth on her, my girl – and they just stopped what they was doing. Lucy, Lucy. You can see clear to her bones how tough she is. She’s skinny and plain faced and she knows it, but it’s like she’s got wands for hands, the way she can cast a spell. She can make even dirt poor Mississippi a place worth living – if you know where to look. She knows. She got leads on buried treasure and towns that was lost to history. Can even pick a lock, my girl! Ain’t so hot on boys, leastways she ain’t found one that she likes in that special sort of way. She’s particular that way. I never was.”

Tammy Miles sighed. She snuffed one cigarette and lit another and watched the flame on the match until it liked to burn her fingers. She let it burn, a little. She didn’t know why. The frown on her face looked like a prop from some dramatic staging of a lesser tragedy.

War charms and a sky of soot: Reading Faulkner and listening to Sun Kil Moon

"How'd you like the army, Buddy?" Bayard asked.

"Not much," Buddy answered. "Ain't enough to do. Good life for a lazy man." He mused a moment. "They gimme a charm," he added in a burst of sly, diffident confidence and sober pleasure.

"A charm?" Bayard repeated.

"Uhuh. One of them brass gimcracks on to a colored ribbon. I aimed to show it to you, but I fergot. Do it tomorrow. ... I'll watch a chance tomorrow when pappy's outen the house."

"Why? Don't he know you got it?"

"He knows," Buddy answered. "Only he don't like it because he claims it's a Yankee charm. Rafe says pappy and Stonewall Jackson ain't never surrendered."

From Faulkner's "Sartoris." It's late in the book. Bayard Sartoris, his grandfather dead from Bayard's latest wreck in that damn-fool car, has repaired out to the MacCallum place in the country. It may be my favorite stretch of Faulkner, ever. But maybe that's because it's the latest I've read.

Now, what to listen to when you're reading Faulkner? I've wrestled with this. Sometimes the mind demands silence, so as to summon all its power of comprehension. (Faulkner can be a mother to read, I believe is the technical way to put it.) But other times, music helps. And so: Sun Kil Moon's new one, "April." It's a drowsy record, cinematic in its somber way. It's music for a soot-colored sky. A storm, somewhere off the distance, is thinking about thinking about moving in. Is that thunder? Or guitars?

When the light you see is neon

Here's a bit from my novel, "The Long Gone Daddies." It's about three generations of guitar players, the latest of them being on the road to Memphis, chasing his kin and other ghosts.

The cattle are lowing. Some are. A few gather by the fence to watch, death-eyed, as the car blows by.

The weatherman on the radio says it’s coming a storm. Luther closes his eyes, battens those hatches.

He dreams he’s standing in a field. He’s alone. It’s summer, and dusk, the mosquitoes have been cleared for landing. He kicks at a clump of dirt, as if a clue is inside it, or a diamond, but the dirt becomes dust and it settles on the tips of his shoes. He’s wearing old brown shoes, what the old ones call brogans. Now he hears the notes and sees the neon, far across the field. Flat as the land is, it might be days away, might be ages. The notes are slow, droning, bluesy. A heavy foot stomps time, a woman screams, and in the scream is sheer delight, sexual abandon and the house’s best hooch. And the singer sings,

I saw the light
I saw the light
I saw the light

Neon, she said

On mighty big cars

28 feet from bumper to bumper
The last of the sweet old time gas guzzlers
Hard to drive, harder to park
But when you do somebody remarks
That's a mighty big car
That's a mighty big car
That's a mighty big car
-- Fred Eaglesmith

I've never had a mighty big car. I've never even had a particularly big car. But the band in my novel "The Long Gone Daddies" gets about in a big ol' muddy-brown Merc. That's a mighty big car. It was based, sorta, on a college buddy's car. We used to take it on bootlegger runs, back when it was dry up in Morehead, Ky. The bootlegger was always open, had a drive-up window on his shack, you just knocked if he wasn't there waiting. Two-fifty a six-pack, Bud or Miller. I started a story one time about the bootlegger. He sold so much beer to college students he began to think his name was Bud Miller.

But I was talking about mighty big cars, and so: in my other novel, "The Very Last Night," Lucy Miles' beloved Uncle Till has a band called Cherry Ball that "toured the Southland in a big, pale-yellow Checker Marathon station wagon with a standup bass strapped to the roof and the name of the band painted in black script on the front doors. Uncle Till would send Lucy postcards from places like Bossier City and Pass Christian; he’d send word of speed traps and what he called sweet mamas and road stretched out long, flat and straight like the neck of his guitar. Cherry Ball wasn’t famous or anything like that, but Uncle Till was Lucy’s hero because he was seeing the world and singing it songs, and he didn’t have to climb anything higher than a stage to earn his groceries."

Neither here nor there, but I always did think Pass Christian would be a good name for a NASCAR driver.

The Memphis blues again, and again

Friday morning. Dylan singing, "Oh, mama. This might be the end. I'm stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again."

Memphis, for not rhyming with much at all, sure gets mentioned in a lot of songs. Dallas rhymes with Alice and Nashville with cash deal, but Memphis goes them some better. It stands as a character in any song it enters, a survivor who shook off yellow fever and went on to give the world all manner of things it didn't even know it needed: rock 'n' roll, the Piggly Wiggly, Black Moses. I could go on.

Anyway, a bit from my book, "The Long Gone Daddies":

Memphis is the sacred muck, the shining jewel of all sad backwaters. Memphis is the great lost city of sound. You can walk on whiskey, in Memphis. You can bang your blue guitar.

"Your guitar,” says Memphis to the pilgrim at the river banks, “is it blue?”

Says the pilgrim, “Oh, it’s as sad as can be.”

Faulkner the conjurer

Afternoon drew on; evening was finding itself.

Sometimes Faulkner will write a sentence, simple as all that. But only sometimes. Rarely, actually. If to read Faulkner is to climb inside Faulkner's head, imagine that head to be a factory where a world is ever under construction. That simple, little sentence is a shift change. The machines are shut down. The grinding has given grudging way to silence, footsteps to nothing but the sound of a clock ticking. Afternoon draws on. Evening is finding itself. Then the moment is gone, and the place is all a-clatter and bang. A new shift hits it running.

The second hand of that factory clock has nothing on what comes next in that book, "Sartoris." It's one of those sentences Faulkner didn't write so much as unspool, a 63-word wonder in which time becomes "a dark unhurrying stream into which she gazed until the mesmerism of water conjured the water itself away."

The Devil is a Leg Man

A bit from my novel, "The Very Last Night" ...

They crossed open field until it gave way to thicket and they crawled in, almost taking the thicket with them as they went, the brambles and thorns scratching dares on their pale skin. Free of the thicket, they came to a rise and climbed it, crossed a clearing and then down again – more brambles, more thorns, a thicker thicket – and then a small river they didn’t know by name.

“My oh, but it’s a hard road to hell,” Lucy Miles said. “Paved with good intentions, my skinny white one.”

Billy Heavens crouched, watching the small river’s green shallows and slow wander. He rocked on his heels, reached for a stick. He dipped the stick in the river and drew in the dirt a pitchfork.

So they were going to see the devil.

“Not the devil,” Lucy said. “He sure don’t live in walking distance of Roost, Mississippi. He lives up the 61 Highway in Memphis – your town, boy – in a house big as your grandparents’ place. He lives on Peabody Avenue with all the other rich folk. It’s mansion after mansion on that street. It’s white columns and hanging gardens and wraparound porches of stone and poetry.”

Billy looked up at Lucy. She was wearing a tan, straw cowboy hat with her long, sundown-red hair stuffed up inside it, a white T-shirt with black letters on it that said “Hank is Coming,” baggy, cutoff blue jeans and some brown old-lady shoes that laced up. He looked at those shoes where they gave way to Lucy’s pale, long, skinny legs and followed those pale, long, skinny legs until they gave way to shadow up inside those baggy, cutoff blue jeans.

Lucy caught him looking and said, “Wait’ll I get big legs like the women in those old blues songs and you won’t be able to take your eyes off me. Nor either your hands.”

Billy smiled and he blushed, too. He looked again at that likewise skinny river. He wondered if it wanted to be a big, rolling river like the Mighty Mississippi.

Why the hell we write

Her hand was warm, prehensile, like mercury in his palm exploring softly, with delicate bones and petulent scented flesh. Her eyes were like hothouse grapes and her mouth was redly mobile, rich with discontent.

That's some Faulkner for you this morning, from "Sartoris." Redly mobile -- I love that.

If I ever teach writing, I'll tell my students: Write the story that only you can write. That won't make it good, whatever good is, or God forbid, publishable. But anything else is redundant, pointless.

Write your story, your way. It's the answer to the question, "How does a writer even drag ass to the keyboard in the morning when 'The Sound and the Fury' has already been written?"

The devil's cologne

The blues isn't really such evil music, by and large. (It's old gospel that scares the hell out of me.) The blues isn't even so dark, or so low-down sad. The blues is Blind Willie McTell singing, "I drink so much whiskey, I stagger when I sleep," but it's not a moan from the depths of humanity. It's Blind Willie saying, Keep 'em coming, barkeep. Blind Willie said his dreams were "dark and cloudy, my mind's going to my feet," which sounds like a Bob Dylan lyric from "Time Out of Mind." More sad times, sounds like. But a bit later in that same song, "Dark Night Blues," he says, as an aside, "Ah, play it Mr. McTell..." The man's an entertainer. They most all were. When you hear "Dark Night Blues," you've just been winked at by a blind man.

But Robert Johnson, he really was haunted. Or anyway, he looked haunted, sounded haunted, sang haunted songs. "Me and the devil, were walking side by side," he sings, sounding like he could give you the make of ol' Scratch's cologne.

Robert Johnson, he was a man on the run, stopping only to check his heels for hellhounds, take a swig of poisoned busthead, and maybe sing a haunted little song about those devil blues.

Rats, a cat and a bat

Friday morning. I guess I could talk about symbolism in Dylan or subtext in Faulkner or who would've made a better poet laureate, Chuck Berry or Blind Willie McTell. But no. I've got a critter update.

The people hired to trap the squirrel in our attic have, after two years, taken their traps and gone home. This year's guy said last year's guy must've used the wrong kind of trap. Then, when this year's guy's trap didn't work, he said the squirrel must've recognized it as a trap and avoided it. So great, we've got a brainy squirrel up there in the attic. She's up there, I guess, having a good laugh at the guys with the traps, and at me, $400 poorer, and doubtless, in her more reflective moments, writing light verse or considering the symbolism in "Chimes of Freedom."

But, we've seen no evidence of roof rats. You may recall that the latter of our squirrel trappers told me of their horrors. He said they were coming. He said I might want an expensive gutter system to ward them off. My wife, you may recall, said there was no such thing as a roof rat. But, we do have chipmunks. We damn sure do. They're tunneling through our yard. Now, this may not so sound bad. Except that both of the squirrel trappers told me a story about a woman whose driveway collapsed because of all that chipmunk tunneling that was going on underneath. They quoted me a price on trapping chipmunks. They also told me how I could trap my own chipmunks, with a bucket filled about three-quarters with water, a layer of sunflower seeds on top, and a plank the chipmunks could walk. The chipmunks, I'm told, would walk the plank, peer into the bucket, and, thinking it to be full of sunflower seeds, dive in. (While our squirrel, doubtless, looks down from her rooftop perch and thinks, "Dumbass chipmunk.") Anyway, the chipmunk then drowns. Presumably.

Now, let me say, friends: no chipmunk has been harmed in the writing of this blog. But -- but. But we do have a stray cat that's nosing around the grounds, and the cat, for sport or lunch, does like to catch chipmunks. I saw the cat yesterday, walking away from our front stoop with a limp little critter in its mouth.

We are not animal people here. I particularly do not like cats. I don't want to encourage this cat, which has taken to lounging on our back patio furniture and, when you bang on the window for it to shoo, only looks up at you with something like insouciance -- but the cat does seem to be, um, killing our chipmunks. So you see my position. Maybe it's time to give this cat a name, at least.

One final note: My parents called last night. They've got a bat in their bedroom. I told them not to worry; it'll keep the roof rats away.

Bessie Smith's orchard

Wednesday morning. Rain. Bessie Smith singing, "I got a man in Atlanta, two in Alabama, three in Chattanooga, four in Cincinnati, five in Mississippi, six in Memphis, Tennessee. If you don't like my peaches, please let my orchard be."

That's 21 men, by my math. Guess that's why the song's called "Mama's Got the Blues."

And there was Furry Lewis, who sang about having 19 women and wanting just one more. Furry said if the one was good he'd let the nineteen go.

Faulkner on fallen angels

Some Faulkner for you this morning. From "Sartoris":

"I've been good too damn long," he said aloud, and he fell to talking of the war. Not of combat, but rather of a life peopled by young men like fallen angels, and of a meteoric violence like that of fallen angels, beyond heaven or hell and partaking of both: doomed immortality and immortal doom.

Real human creatures: a very short story

Today, a very short story. Flash fiction, I suppose. Or maybe the start of something.

“Let me tell you, boys, of sweet mayhem,” said the old man to the children scattered about him. “Let me tell you about the flash of knife.” They were his grandchildren and their friends of the neighborhood. They sat about him with their heads cocked, watching, and their ears perked, listening. They were barefoot to a boy. They were scattered about the old man like bones awaiting assembly into real human creatures that would grow tall and go to school and learn about Henry Ford and the Founding Fathers and the cotton gin but not, the old man silently lamented, Pretty Boy Floyd and the Light Crust Doughboys and the trick leg.

The old man sighed. He didn’t know what he’d say next. He rarely did, any more. He would make something up, some tale spun from scratch and his old brittle wanting. He had lived a tame live, married a tame wife, and together they had two children that didn’t so much raise as tame. He worked in an office. He wore a white shirt and a tie. He counted beans and pushed pencils. The clock had nothing on him for clockwork. His name was John – never Johnny, not even when he was a pile of bones and boy. But now, just shy of dying, he had decided to try living.

“Let me you, boys, of bitter wisdom,” he said now. “Let me tell you about twenty to life.”

The old man had moved into the tree fort, pretty much. He took his meals up there and whiled away his days up there, reading his books and blowing his trumpet and talking to his dead wife, Willa was her name, and welcoming what visitors he had. Lately it was the boys. They had all but stopped going up into the tree fort until the old man took up residence there with his books and his trumpet and his tales of blue ruckus.

“Where was I, boys?”

“Sweet mayhem!” they sang.

“No, uh-uh,” said one of the old man’s grandchildren. The boy was five. His name was Walker and the old man called him Walk the Dog, after an old Memphis soul song he was learning to play on his trumpet.

“What then, Walk the Dog?”

“That flash of knife!”

“Sweet mayhem and the flash of knife!” they sang now, though too loudly and with too much glee, for the old man’s daughter-in-law, mother of three of the boys in the gallery of scattered bones, heard through an open window.

She acted in an instant. “Boys!” she called out, reaching back to her own girlish summers for all the sweetness and sunshine and blue skies she could gather. She said it again. She filled the sky with parrots and balloons and a winged horse with a dashing knight aboard.

“Boys!”

She sang it now, like the word was the national anthem of All Hallow’s Eve and the sky had turned black and taken to raining chocolate. It was as much evil as she could conjure. But she was no match for the old man’s sweet mayhem and knife flash, so she said it mean this time.

“Boys!”

These were the suburbs and there would be no blue ruckus here.

If a mix tape could be president

Mix CD for my friend Allan:
1. "Outlaws," Joe Purdy
2. "Miss Idaho," Ox
3. "Poison the Hit Parade," Ike Reilly
4. "Mighty Big Car," Fred Eaglesmith
5. "Kerosene," Bottle Rockets
6. "Speaking in Tongues," Greg Brown
7. "In My Mind I was Talkin' to Loretta," Pieta Brown
8. "Woods Hag (Modern Life is Such a Drag)," Amy Honey
9. "Jesus is a Friend of the Family," Roadside Graves
10. "I Found Jesus," Sunshone Still
11. "Letter From Heaven," Bill Morrissey
12. "If a Song Could Be President," Over the Rhine
13. "Frankie's Gun," Felice Brothers
14. "Goalhanger," Billy Bragg
15. "Euphoria," Holy Modal Rounders

This sounds to me like a road CD -- one of those trips where you're making great time but not having such a, you know, great time. So you leave the highway for the sideroads, the sideroads for the gravel lanes. You never know what you might come across, out on those gravel lanes. Jesus. Men with guns. From the gravel lanes it's a foot path. Fred Eaglesmith's "Mighty Big Car" ain't going down that son of a bitch. But what the hell ... ?

Mix CD for my friend Andy:
1. "If a Song Could Be President," Over the Rhine
2. "You Turn Me On I'm a Radio," Joni Mitchell
3. "I Don't Wanna Grown Up," Hayes Carll
4. "England's Latest Clown," Graham Parker
5. "Goalhanger," Billy Bragg
6. "Daddy's Little Pumpkin," Josh Ritter
7. "Party Generation," Dar Williams
8. "Looking for a Job," Todd Snider
9. "The Highland Street Incident," Todd Snider
10. "Happy New Year," Todd Snider
11. "Little Wing," Neil Young
12. "Memorial Day," James McMurtry
13. "Holiday," James McMurtry
14. "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," Mason Jennings
15. "Ballad of Paul and Sheila," Mason Jennings
16. "Dad's Gonna Kill Me," Richard Thompson
17. "From a Distant Shore," Willard Grant Conspiracy
18. "Dress Blues," Jason Isbell

This one, I think, sits on the porch and lets the world comes to it -- here comes the neighborhood. I don't hear a theme. I tried for good hooks and great words. ... Some cool covers: Hayes Carll sings Tom Waits, Josh Ritter sings John Prine, Mason Jennings sings Bob Dylan. ... And my favorite Joni Mitchell song. I know, I know, a throwaway song, not the one Joni'd want to be beloved for. But Joni just sings 'em. We choose. They're ours. ... It all gets a little heavy at the end. The end is a long way from "You Turn Me On I'm a Radio." Best get yourself inside. Batten down those hatches, my friend.

Drunken poets, vagabonds, some dogs and horses: 17 songs and the stuff of dreams

A mix CD for friends in Mississippi. There's no theme, really, except that there's a run of Dylan covers fairly early on and, later, a string of political songs of which "The President's Dead" is not, in fact, a part. And then there's "When I Grow Too Old to Dream," by Nat King Cole with Stuff Smith on violin. I put it on lots of mix CDs. It may be my favorite song. I love everything about it, but especially Stuff Smith's violin, which makes a sound you can see. It up and dances across the room. It shimmies up to you and whispers sweet somethings: your dreams and such. That song, with Stuff Smith on violin, could save the world, if we'd all only just listen. I guess that makes it a political song.

1. "Vagabonds," Gary Louris.
2. "Drunken Poet's Dream," Hayes Carll
3. "Got Me A Woman," Levon Helm
4. "100 Days, 100 Nights," Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings
5. "Oh Sister," Andrew Bird
6. "Goin' to Acapulco," Jim James and Calexico
7. "Pressing On," John Doe
8. "Girl in the War," Josh Ritter
9. "To the Dogs or Whoever," Josh Ritter
10. "Ode to LRC," Band of Horses
11. "Tennessee Blues," Steve Earle
12. "Omaha Nights," Gary Louris
13. "God Bless America," James McMurtry
14. "Cheney's Toy," James McMurtry
15. "Steve's Hammer," Steve Earle
16. "The President's Dead," Okkervil River
17. "When I Grow Too Old to Dream," Nat King Cole w/ Stuff Smith

Charley Patton, a whiskeygirl, and some thoughts on flutes

So what are you doing?

Blogging. Drinking coffee from my beloved Charley Patton coffee mug. Listening to the Drive-By Truckers. Watching the rain. Casting about for some new music.

Hear anything promising?

I listened to a snippet of a song called "Whiskeygirl Of Mine," but I liked the title better than the song. Really, I liked the look of those two words -- whiskeygirl -- the way they seem to cozy up together. Then, I came across a band called folklabor.

And?

Well, the band's got one song called "Synthesizer" and songs called "Sid and Flute I" and "Sid and Flute II," and, well, I don't like synthesizers and flutes. But I do like the look of those two words -- folklabor -- the way they seem to --

I know. Cozy up.

No, more like fall into somber step. Trudge alongside one another. Off to work, you know.

What do you have against synthesizers and flutes? And who is this Sid fellow? You got anything against him?

When the machines start to take over, that's when I tend to stop listening. Give me dead old Charley Patton with his gravel chant, thumping his old Stella guitar. Give me Dylan and The Band. Pretty much, I like musicians who sound like they might do their creating in a cave or a basement, or on a back porch, not in some tricked-the-shit-out studio. That's why I don't like synthesizers. As for flutes, I don't know. Just don't like the sound of the damned things. Now, do I want to break every flute I see? Yes, I do.

And Sid?

I don't have a thing against him. But if his song were called "Sid and Stella Guitar I," I would have listened to a snippet of it.

You're a --

Music snob?

I was thinking son of a bitch.

Am not.

Are too.

Well, maybe a bit of one.

Musing on self-assurance

In Sunday's New York Times, there was a story about a literary critic turned novelist named Keith Gessen, and this paragraph:

Mr. Gessen, 33, boyishly handsome and possessing the self-assurance of a writer twice his age, has never had an easy relationship with literary fame, even as he has gradually amassed it.

Now, what struck me was that phrase "possessing the self-assurance o