In my book life, a few choice finds  have come into my hands. One was a pristine first edition of Dharma Bums, two were the first privately printed translations of Cold Mountain and Stonehouse by Red Pine, a few were signed D.T. Suzuki books, but by far, the best discovery was this Hunter Thompson book, a hardback first edition of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. That would have been good enough for me, but when I turned to the first page what did I see but a nicely filled out dedication to “Doug” talking about their meeting in Bangkok, an exchange of “acid,” and a promised reunion in Colorado. Ok, I was lucky, but the book found its way to me as it should have––because I had just completed a story about Hunter’s stay in Vientiane, Laos, and the book dedication he wrote came either just before or after his visit there. See “Hunter Thompson in Laos” under my “On the Record” listing. What can I say: luck, yes, but the book found its rightful home resting on my bookshelf, at least for now. After a short while, I will sell it so it can roam the world. If anyone is interested, please get in touch.

This came to me today on the Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Day , and is associated with Theodore H. Sturgeon (1918–85, born Edward Hamilton Waldo), a U.S. science fiction writer.

Very rich in multiple meanings, it speaks in that fine musical way beyond concreteness of language, moving on into another unfixed place in our mind.

The Annals of Imperial Rome

The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius: The Emperors of Rome show the whole range of human proclivities from monstrously evil to sublimely enlightened. Depravity and democratic principles existed simultaneously in the same city and state, and yet the structure of the government itself and the influence it wielded across its Empire had a lasting effect in jump-starting the spread of civilization. If only all the great libraries could have been saved.

The Letters of  the Younger Pliny: Pliny offers a window into the mind and culture of relative normalcy in imperial Rome. A lawyer and literary man, he shows the workings of power, influence, a passion for justice, administrative efficiency, wit and friendship. The voice is wrapped in reason and civility and shows that power needn’t be self-serving, vengeful or disrespectful. His letters demonstrate the power of the individual who can personalize their professional and daily life in words, therein creating a record of  their time rivaling any historical narrative. Without such writing we are forced to rely on a storybook reading of history. As Emerson said, “All history is autobiography,” because he saw it as the best history.

Alfred Kazin’s America: (an anthology) by Ted Solotaroff. One of the critics-as-artist, Kazin’s views on Twentieth Century American literature are part and parcel of the dream of American uniqueness and “democratic contentiousness,” and I’m still a sucker for this view, a blend of realism and romance. He does it well, and the man can put together streams of sentences that coalesce like honey around clear thought. Read him with Edmund Wilson and you’re well prepared to know wherein to read deeply and fully in American letters, from Jefferson to Mailer.

By ROY HAMRIC

Henry Witt Jr. is holding court in the pit area for drivers and crew at Heart o’ Texas Speedway in Elm Mott, north of Waco. The evening Texas sun floats orange on the horizon. Witt’s yellow and red open-wheel race car, No. 701, basks in the mellow Technicolor glow. The pit area is a heady brew of dust motes, down-home jokes and barbs, maneuvered avoidances, carefully voiced respect and an occasional fistfight.

But the fights have to be done just right. If a race promoter sees a fight, a driver can be stripped of his points, barred from racing for 30 days and fined $1,000. “It’s usually the unprofessional suckers who fight,” Witt says. “Usually, I don’t like it.” Over his 22-year career, he has had four or five fistfights – one last year. “If they have time to think, most people cool down after a race,” he says. “I try to be cool.”

Witt won the title of IMCA modified national champion for 2000, and he’s in the hunt to repeat this year. The International Motor Contest Association, or IMCA, has about 150 sanctioned dirt tracks around the country that offer weekly “affordable racing,” with a race class for everyone who wants to compete, from kids with a few thousand dollars to high rollers. Organized in 1915, IMCA represents the lowest level of nationally sanctioned racing and has the most member drivers. Drivers race for points and purses of a few hundred dollars. At year’s end, local champions are determined by total points earned at the same sanctioned track in a season; regional and national champions are determined by the best 30 finishes at sanctioned tracks in their regions.

With an estimated 2,000 dirt-track drivers and 19 IMCA-sanctioned tracks, Texas has more tracks than any other state in the nation.

Witt sometimes races three or four times a week, averaging around 90 races a year. For a purse of just a few hundred bucks, he and 15 to 20 other drivers hurl their juiced-up, finely tuned cars around an oval dirt track for 20 laps, collectively roaring like a NASA engine test. Fans ask him why he does it. He wishes he had a good answer. He knows his stock response isn’t good enough. “I just like winning,” he says sheepishly.

If you win often enough, as Witt does, the small purses can add up. And there are endorsements and free contributions in the form of car parts from various companies. But Witt doesn’t race for money or merchandise, although they don’t hurt.

In dirt-track racing, he’s discovered what it’s like to be inside a manmade tornado, a sonic fury racing around and around in a tight, roaring circle. When he rides through the whirling chaos unscathed – it takes only a few minutes to race 20 laps – and shuts off the engine to sounds of “Way to go, Henry, thataway, Henry,” and starry-eyed kids rush to his side and an amplified voice says, “The No. 1 winner,” it’s a feeling beyond words, something he can’t find in hobbies like poker or golf.

Most dirt-track drivers look fairly average outside their cars. But looks deceive. You’re either very physical or you don’t race on dirt. It takes sensitive hands, sensitive eyes and a steady stomach. You have to synchronize mind and body in inches-apart racing at nearly 100 mph on a short, banked oval track. Given the right education and some computer skills, some of these guys might qualify to become jet fighter pilots.

At 42, Witt is still very physical. He lives in Waco, where he owns an auto glass business, works his 800-acre farm, raises four children with his wife, Kayren- and races every chance he gets. He exudes youthful charm. His trim, full-shouldered body moves with the catlike smoothness of a linebacker. His deep tan comes from outdoor work. He’s friendly, and he likes to encourage good young drivers. But better than that, he likes to beat them all – young and old.

In his mind, he’s already running his private movie of tonight’s race. The stars will be Chris and Chase Glick of Buffalo, Texas, two hot young drivers; veteran driver Keith Green, 47, of Waco; and Witt. Green, a near neighbor of Witt’s, is the Waco track’s No. 1 modified point leader this season. Green won the NASCAR-Winston Sunbelt Region title in ’97, and he’s raced with legends like A.J. Foyt.

During this year’s IMCA racing season, Witt and his crew drove to distant tracks in Louisiana, Oklahoma and New Mexico to race as many nights as they could. Their goal is to win No. 1 in as many races as possible. Whoever has the most No. 1 wins in a season is national champion. Witt and his crew are like gunfighters, pulling into distant towns with the goal of leaving No. 1. Nothing else will do. If No. 1 looks beyond Witt’s grasp, he will pull out of a race and wait for the next one. By withdrawing and not finishing in the top four positions, he’s assured a higher starting position for the next race. It’s a tactic used by a few select drivers across the nation – all trying to be the national winner. Second-, third- and fourth-place finishes don’t mean anything to Witt. He wants The Big One.

With 30 IMCA modified wins this year, Witt is ranked second nationally. He has a shot at the national No. 1 modified title, but he needs a string of back-to-back wins in the next three weeks. It’s not uncommon for him to enter four races in four cities in four days.

“What you have here,” Witt says, “is some of the most competitive people in the world. Winning isn’t everything, but second place is nothing – nobody ever asks, `Who placed second?’

“But if you win too much on one track, they’re going to hate you, and they’ll `claim’ you.”

A claim refers to an IMCA rule that allows a driver who places second, third or fourth to “claim” a winner’s engine. If a winner is claimed, he must give up his engine block in return for a $525 payment. The rule helps keep drivers from putting too much money into modifying their engines, thus keeping races competitive.

It also keeps costs down for most racers. The economics of “affordable racing” attract drivers ranging from those who might spend $1,000 a season to those who spend more than $100,000, including the cost of free merchandise. Most tracks offer a broad range of racing in one night. At the Waco track, competition classes include sprint, modified, hot stock, street stock, pure stock (all IMCA-sanctioned), cruisers and mini-stock (drivers 12-16 years old).

Witt has been claimed four times this year. “When they claim us, we’re ready the next night,” he says. “We always have one engine in reserve ready to go.”

His longtime, devoted mechanic, Glenn Wilson, nods his head. “One time we changed an engine in 28 minutes,” he says.

IMCA modified race cars start out as simple frames. Racers add support bars to protect the driver, special suspension and shocks, minimal sheet-body covering and open racing wheels. Most of the engines cost around $2,500 – and up.

Witt’s No. 701 has a JR Motor Sports “400 Claimer” engine (a 406-cubic-inch Chevy block with a flat tappet cam). It has a Gaerte 750 cfm four-barrel carburetor, an Ernie slide transmission (low, high and reverse), General Motors brakes and 5-by-16-inch coiled racing springs.

“I ain’t never claimed, myself,” Witt says. “Kind of an honor deal. You got a guy making $400 a week, and to put a guy like that out of business – that’s bad.”

Witt and Wilson take a break to walk through the pit area and look at some of the competition. Witt chuckles at the crews frantically changing engine parts. “You win by working on your car during the week,” he says, “not by working on it at the race.”

When they return to their own car, a few fans are staring at the left rear wheel of No. 701, which looks flat, although it’s not – quite. “You know you got a flat tire?” one man asks.

“You got a bicycle pump?” Witt snaps back. “Naw,” he goes on, “we always let the air out of the left rear so it don’t grow, keeps it shrunk – makes it smaller, gives you more roll and bite on the turns.”

As other drivers walk past his crew area, Witt quietly offers a running commentary on the talent. “Guy right there will push you on the turns,” he says. “Guy right there, he’ll spin out by the fourth lap. Guy right there, he might slam you.”

Slamming is a common occurrence in modified racing. Some drivers use it as a tactic to bump past cars. It keeps IMCA racing on the wild side, and often it causes festering grudges, if not outright fistfights. “You slam a guy, most of ‘em will slam you back,” Witt says. “It’s an unwritten rule – you spin a guy out, they spin you back. I don’t drive dirty myself. Maybe I should, but I don’t. Sometimes a young kid will spin you and not mean it. You go over and have a friendly talk. But an older driver . . . you get ‘em back.”

IMCA racing, while wilder than high-speed NASCAR competition, has slower speeds and fewer serious crashes and injuries than you would expect. Speeds hit 85-100 mph on the quarter mile, and the action on the turns is fiercely competitive. Witt flips his car about once a year. “I flipped in Odessa,” he says. “Car hit me, and I spun like a top.”

The drivers begin moving to their starting positions. Wilson, whose day job is being Waco’s assistant fire chief, makes a last-minute measurement of the distance between Witt’s chassis and the dirt. He wants the car to be exactly 6 3/4 inches above the ground on the right side and 6 1/4 inches above on the left. He adjusts a large bolt, pulling the body weight off the right side of the chassis.

Witt slips his helmet on. “Now I’ve just got to watch the X’s and O’s,” he says, referring to slams and spins.

Witt starts in the seventh position. Green is 17th. By the ninth lap, Witt has passed inside to take the lead. The earlier leader, trying to adjust, has spun out. Green moves from 17th to second, right behind Witt. Green was “lovin’ on ‘em,” Witt says after the race, meaning his car was rubbing and bumping its way through. A yellow caution flag comes up on the 16th lap, putting Witt and Green bumper to bumper, one and two, with a near-even start for the remaining four laps. When racing resumes, Green’s car dives to the bottom of the first turn and bumps the lap car. Witt pulls ahead three car lengths, and barring car failure, he won’t be passed.

Within minutes Witt is standing in the winner’s circle, clutching the No. 1 trophy and a microphone, surrounded by kids who run out of the stands to share the brief moment that Witt lives for – feeling what the word “winning” can’t really describe.

The purse is $450. A photographer snaps the official photograph, and a voice announces the next race. Both Witt and Green enter the crew area happy. Green, with a second-place finish, is still ahead in local track points. Witt has his track win, boosting his national point wins to 31, only two behind the national leader, Jonathan Thompson of Superior, Neb.

On the next Friday, big trucks pull into the Heart o’ Texas crew area as the sun pauses above the tree line on the flat western horizon. There are a few tractor-trailer rigs capable of carrying two race cars and a rolling mechanic’s garage, but most modified race cars arrive on flatbed trailers pulled by big pickups.

Country girls with Farah Fawcett hairdos and tight Wrangler jeans prance about. Some seem pumped up and wild-eyed, ready for their 10 minutes on the Jerry Springer show. Many of their teenage male counterparts sport mullet haircuts.

In the far corner of the pit area, Charles Robinson of Waco, a rookie driver, works at setting up car No. 7, his cruiser-class ’76 Chevy Monte Carlo. On the side of the car is his handpainted logo, cribbed from Elvis: “Taking Care of Business.” A small figure of the King is lodged next to the passenger’s window. About nine months ago, Robinson’s car had rested, and rusted away, in a farm field. Robinson gave the owner $100 and, surprisingly, drove the car out of the field. Three months later, after spending $300 on safety bars and $2,500 on engine repairs and tires, he was a race driver. Three months later he had his first track win. Tonight is his 96th race.

He remembers the first race. “It was awesome,” he says. “Terrifying. This is the most exciting hobby I’ve every had, and I’ve had ‘em all. Now I can’t get racing out of my blood.”

He points to the rippled indentations that pockmark the roof of his car. “Those dents on the top I made myself, jumpin’ up and down on the top of the car after my first win.”

Unlike the modified class, the cruiser class is pure stock car racing, with cars right off the street, a popular way for drivers to break in. It’s “bumping and grinding” racing, but most of the knocks are unintentional.

Tonight will not go well for Robinson. After a good start, he will pull out of the race with a flat tire.

Over in his crew area, Witt mulls his odds for the remaining two weeks of the season. With his 31 national points, he is still two points behind the national leader. Witt plans to race five more times.

“I got a shot at it,” he says, but he doesn’t sound happy. “In Texas, there’s maybe seven drivers who could win on any night. But there’s always some guy who comes out of nowhere and can beat you. Maybe they’ve never won a race, but on that night they’re unbeatable. Anybody can have their night and nobody can beat them.”

Before the qualifying heat, which determines the starting order of the racers, Witt worries that the dirt is too wet and sticky. A thunderstorm had passed through the day before, and water stands in low spots on the track. He and Wilson had talked on the phone all week, finally deciding to switch to a heavier 25-pound spring on the right rear and to install new brakes. Wilson had told Witt, “I got all week to think about what to do. You got one turn.”

Freddy Bottoms, one of Witt’s volunteer crew of four to five members, has sprayed the car with “mud-off,” a liquid that prevents mud from sticking to the frame and body and adding weight and air drag.

Witt looks tired. His week has been routine. He worked at his glass business. He worked on his farm and looked after his cattle. “It’s always a hustle-bustle deal,” he says. But there’s one piece of time in his hurried life when time seems to slow: “When you’re leadin’ the race, it seems like time is going really, really slow,” he says.

A full yellow moon is rising, looking like somebody punched a hole in an ink-blue curtain. As starting time nears, Witt’s crew attaches 40 pounds of lead bars to the back of the chassis to push the frame down. Chris Glick’s car roars up and stops next to Witt.

“Wait up on me, kid!” Witt shouts.

“Come and get it,” Glick says.

Witt glides to the passenger window, leans in and smiles. “Now, don’t get your pretty car banged up,” he says.

“I know, I hate that,” Chris says, and they both beam.

At the last minute, Witt’s crew makes adjustments to the “bleeder” attached to each tire, a device that lets air out as a tire heats up, keeping the air pressure constant. The bleeders are set very low, at 6 pounds for the left rear and 10 pounds for the right rear, and 10 pounds for the left front and 12 pounds for the right front.

Witt slips into his fireproof, red racing suit and gloves. He wears Simpson “Power Shoe” fireproof boots with soft rubber soles, and a neck brace under his helmet. As he settles behind the steering wheel, he attaches two shoulder straps designed to keep the driver’s arms inside the car and to prevent his body from being tossed out during a wreck. It’s time to roll.

By the second lap of the race, Keith Green has pulled from 12th to sixth. Witt is fourth. Two cars crash on the fifth lap. When racing restarts, Witt is second and Green fourth. At the start of lap 18, Green and Witt restart at numbers one and two with two laps to go. Green shoots ahead. Witt moves up to within three car lengths of Green on the 19th lap, but Green holds and crosses the finish line three lengths ahead.

In the crew area, Witt is unhappy. He stands slope-shouldered. The new brakes grabbed, and he couldn’t drive smoothly on the turns, he says. “You can’t win ‘em all, but you can want to, and it hurts to lose when I could’ve won. Ah, well, we’ll get ‘em tomorrow.”

Green is happy. With one week left in the season, he knows he’s got the local track’s modified title in his pocket right now. “I just had to get through there,” he says. “It was a tricky track tonight – one of the hardest. When I got the lead, I told myself don’t make a mistake. The competition was there, but whoever got through Turn 4 best had the advantage.”

A friend walks up, shakes Green’s hand and says, “Good drivin’, old man.” ”I survived it,” Green says, smiling.

Within minutes, Witt’s 350-horsepower, twin-wheeled pickup is hauling out his 30-foot trailer with car No. 701 inside, engine still hot. As he rolls past car No. 52, Green and his crew are still celebrating.

On the last Friday night of the racing season, Witt has the No. 2 national ranking in IMCA modified competition wrapped up. He also won his fifth South Central regional championship. But he was too far behind to catch the national leader for first place. “I ain’t real proud of that,” he says, “but it’s still pretty good.”

The No. 2 position ensures he’ll receive an $8,700 national purse and maybe $30,000 in endorsements or merchandise certificates. Although Witt is already thinking about next year, he’s not quite through with this one. He’ll race this month at non-IMCA races where bigger purses are offered, ranging from $5,000 to $25,000. Then he’ll take December off. In January he’ll start preparing No. 701 for the next IMCA season.

He and his crew have run in more than 90 races during the season and won 32, a 3-to-1 average. (During his 2000 national championship year, he won 47 races, or almost one win for every loss – a sweet ratio.) He’s also pulled in around $100,000 in material contributions from auto-related companies and pocketed about $35,000 in winnings.

In the crew area, mechanic Wilson works at setting up No. 701. The banter flows.

“Track don’t look as sloppy tonight,” Witt allows.

“Yeah, maybe it will hang,” says Wilson.

The past week Wilson had changed the shocks and the springs and adjusted the panhard bar, which controls how the rear weight of the car is placed. He also changed the engine, estimating it was about the 20th engine change of the season. “We spend maybe 60 to 80 hours a week working on it.”

His hands constantly work over the parts. He adjusts the chassis based on Witt’s running description of how the car feels. Wilson says his work really is about mathematics and physics. “All the angles of the bars in the chassis need to come together like they’re supposed to, to get optimum traction,” he says. It’s also about the condition of the dirt – information the driver supplies.

“Henry has to tell me what the car feels like,” he says. “I got to get it from Henry.”

Witt and Wilson both look tired. They’ve driven about 60,000 miles to tracks this season. The daily grind is both exciting and exhausting. “But we’re jealous of what we got, and we don’t want to give it up,” Wilson says. “We’ve spent many a dang hour getting where we are.”

Witt nods. “Winning’s a big part of it, but it’s also some of the other drivers. It’s the fellowship, the cuttin’ up. But other nights you go home and you got people mad at you if there was bumpin’ and rubbin’.”

Both worry about being “claimed” on their engine. “We’d give up the motor for a win, but not for a second, third or fourth place,” Witt says. When the checkered flag falls on the last modified race of the season at Heart o’ Texas Speedway, the race ends, in its way, a picture perfect for almost everyone. Keith Green wins the race flat out and becomes track-modified champion. Chase Glick finishes at No. 2, ending the season in eighth place in the competition for national rookie of the year.

Witt never worked his way up from his fifth starting position. On lap 7, his car started shooting sprays of white sparks from the inside right rear brake, not three feet from the 32-gallon tank of methanol racing fuel.

The race had eight yellow flags and numerous wrecks. Witt drove through the wrecks unscathed. But on lap 12 he drove No. 701 over the high bank into his crew area. He switched off the ignition. The piston roar faded into an eerie stillness. He felt a trickle of small consolations. He had lost, but he had avoided an engine claim. The sparking brake hadn’t caused a fire. Most important, “anybody” didn’t win. First and second place went to skilled dirt drivers.

Witt ends the season national No. 2 in the modified class, three wins behind the champion. He knows nobody ever asks, “Did you win No. 2?” But there is next season. Witt is eager for it. He plans to race around that earth-scented oval in hot pursuit of that feeling he can’t describe.

“You find out you’re good at something and you like it,” he says. “It makes it kinda hard to quit.”

Article first published in the Houston Chronicle’s Texas Magazine in 2002.

photograph by Cindy Johnson

Denis Johnson has a new novella, Train Dreams. An excellent review by Anthony Doerr says it might be the most powerful story and writing he’s published. That makes you pause because how can you better perfection in almost everything Johnson’s published, but you know what he means. Here’s a quote from the review that makes a nice point, reminding me of why Jim Harrison’s novellas are so powerful:

“In an 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales, Edgar Allan Poe said that apart from poetry, the form most advantageous for the exertion of  ’highest genius’ was the short prose narrative, whose length he defined as taking ‘from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal.’ Novels, Poe argued, were objectionable because they required a reader to take breaks.

“’Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal,’ he wrote, ‘modify, annul or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book.’ Because you have to stop reading novels every now and then — to shower, to eat, to check your Twitter feed — their power weakens.

Short stories and novellas on the other hand offer writers a chance to affect readers more deeply because a reader can be held in thrall for the entirety of the experience. They offer writers, in Poe’s phrasing, ‘the immense force derivable from totality.’”

Look for the real and it becomes more distant/ try to end delusions and they just increase/ followers of the Way have a place that stays serene/ when the moon is in the sky it’s reflection is in the waves

I haven’t read much in Zen for the past year, because I had over read. It’s ok to read too much Zen starting out because there’s a need to be filled, to be satiated, a lot of history and people to absorb and put into place. Afterwards, moderate careful re-reading is called for to check your new perceptions against old feelings and understanding. As we get older, all re-reading quickly becomes less satisfying or more rewarding––it’s a test of earlier states of mind.

Like a Dream, Like a Fantasy by Nyogen Sensaki (1876 to 1958) is a fruitful return to one of the most enigmatic and admirable Zen men in America. His Japanese mother died at his birth in Russia (his father may have been Chinese). He was adopted by a Japanese monk-Kegon scholar and raised in monasteries in Japan where he eventually rejected “Cathedral” Zen. The clue to his subsequent vagabond wanderings from Japan to San Francisco to Los Angeles (to the Heart Mountain World War II internment  camp in Wyoming) is his growing up without knowing his mother or father.  He felt most comfortable losing himself  in anonymity, disappearing, but his calling was Zen and he always had a group of Zen students attending his “floating” zendo; he supported himself in humble odd jobs and donations from students. He was quietly teaching Zen in the 30s-40s when there were no Zen teachers in the US. A beautiful poet, he wrote a poem each year dedicated to his teacher-mentor, Soen Shaku, which he read in a talk he would give in a rented auditorium. Other Zen greats who were kindred spirits and friends were D.T. Suzuki and Soen Nakagawa. There are at least four or five key books of his writings in English besides LDLF: Buddhism and Zen and The Iron Flute, where he comments on 100 Zen koans are highly recommended. See also Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Reps which contains more of his essays.

The Zen Works of Stonehouse translated by Red Pine. Subtitle: Poems and talks of a 14th Century Zen Master. Stonehouse (born 1272), a largely unknown Zen-hermit-poet before Red Pine’s book, ranks alongside Han-shan as the two exemplar hermit-poets of China. The reason is simple: he wrote a fully shaped, free verse  picture of his life in the mountains, an unsentimental summing up, and his clear voice takes you into his daily routine. Autobiography underrates the accomplishment.

The Poems of Cold Mountain translated by Red Pine; Writen sometime between 600 to 900 A.D., Han-shan epitomizes the free-spirited, go-my-own way Zen life. Stories about him and his buddy Pick-Up who worked in the kitchen of the Kuo Ch’ing Monastery abound for their exploits as crazy talking, carefree misfits.

The Nature of the Universe by Lucretius. I’m totally deficient in reading Greek and Latin writers and philosophers so after reading about Lucretius’s shaping influence on critic Harold Bloom this book caught my eye at the neighborhood used bookstore, plus it’s a beautiful 1955 copy of a Penguin Classic with a purple-bordered cover.

Unraveling Zen’s Red Thread by Covell and Yamada. Ikkyu was one of the premier Zen men of Japanese popular culture who is known for his iconoclastic life among the wine shops and ladies of the night, all well documented in his tangy poems. This reading, including Crow With No Mouth translated by Berg and Wild Ways by Stevens, seems to have let me down. Maybe it’s related to a fundamental loss in the movement of his particular language from Japanese to English. I’m far less taken in by his mind and perceptions, and that’s a loss because I’m fascinated by his life.

]]> http://royhamric.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/bedside-books-4/feed/ 1 royhamric IMG_0720 http://royhamric.wordpress.com/2011/07/17/clive-james-on-wittgenstein/ http://royhamric.wordpress.com/2011/07/17/clive-james-on-wittgenstein/#comments Sun, 17 Jul 2011 05:36:02 +0000 royhamric http://royhamric.wordpress.com/?p=2431 ]]> Here’s to Clive James. Call it a herd, a brood, a pack, a platoon, a circle, a gang, but each has a person others look to in order to know where it’s at. Where it is at: what’s really happening, going on. James is one of these people. In his recent essay collection, Cultural Amnesia, he writes about Wittgenstein. You can wade through many books on LW and not find what’s in his seven-page essay. Just one example:

The Wittengenstein that matters to a writer might be mistaken for his meaning by ordinary readers, but he can never be mistaken for his poetic quality, which is apparent even in his plainest statement. The precision of his language we can take for granted, and perhaps he should more often have done the same. His true and unique precision was in registering pre-verbal states of mind. In The Blue and Brown Books (p. 173), he proposes a “noticing, seeing, conceiving” process that happens before it can be described in words. That, indeed, is the only way of describing it. It sounds very like the kind of poetic talent that we are left to deal with after we abandon the notion––as we must––that poetic talent is mere verbal ability. “What we call ‘understanding a statement’ has, in many cases, a much greater similarity to understanding a musical theme than we might be inclined to think” (p. 167). But he doesn’t want us to think about music as a mechanism to convey a feeling: joy, for example. “Music conveys to us itself ” (p. 178). So when we read a sentence as if it were a musical theme, the music doesn’t convey a separate sense that compounds with the written meaning. We get the feeling of a musical theme because the sentence means something. I thought he was getting very close to the treasure chamber when he wrote this. In 1970, reading The Blue and Brown Books every day in the Copper Kettle in Cambridge, I made detailed transcriptions in my journal every few minutes. It didn’t occur to me at the time that his prose was doing to me exactly what he was in the process of analyzing. It sounded like music because he was so exactly right. 

Laos is as different from Vietnam as Big Sur is from Long Island––Hunter S. Thompson

The next morning, two Russian hookers waited in front of the visa gate on Friendship Bridge. They talked in agitated bursts with a small Russian man who had the body of an acrobat and a face like a famous French pantomimist. One of the ladies was very young and beautiful. The other was worn away inside and out. They were mother and daughter. The bra strap on the daughter’s right shoulder read, “Midnight Angel.”

Soon I was bouncing down the road in a taxi,  a 1978 Toyoto Corina with the original black crusty leather upholstery, for the 23-mile ride to Vientiane. The door panels were stripped out exposing the bracing and gears for the roll-up windows. You could see the ground below through rusted holes in the floorboards. A half dozen Buddha amulets dangled from the arm of the rearview mirror which had no mirror. A miniature bamboo fish trap dangled between the Buddhas amulets. It was a good luck charm to help catch money.

“You like to fish?” asked the driver. “Good fishing. Every night. Lake here.”

We had just passed a shop with dozens of modern rods and reels displayed on the ground alongside the road. It made a strange impression. Then another fishing shop passed, very new. Then two or three more. In the fields between the houses and shops, grey-white cattle displayed the perfect outlines of their skeleton covered by sagging skin like a  thin, frayed blanket. Old women sold bright red chillies from bamboo mats next to the roadside. A solitary, barefooted old man in his underware squatted next to the road, a long cherrot dangling from his lip. Many cinder-block buildings were new and quickly put up with the cement oozed out from between the blocks. We passed the new spic and span Australian Embassy, very white in the afternoon sun. Then the Lao-German School of Technology. The usual Internet shops began to appear and more outdoor restaurants. Foreigners on motorbikes. Newly built guesthouses. As we entered Vientiane, scattered old French villas in faded white-beige colors stood silently with long, wooden shutters tightly closed. A sign that Laos was a country still strictly controlled could be seen in the motorbike riders, who all wore helmets. Laos wasn’t Thailand. In Thailand, the law required it but only a few safety-minded bikeriders wore helmets. You could see Thailand’s lack of discipline too in its soldiers and policemen. In their off-hours they wore their uniform pants and shoes but stripped off their tops down to a white T-shirt, and they sat casually sipping a beer or eating in a restaurant. In Laos, soldiers and police always wore a full uniform so weighed down with epaulets and finery that privates looked like generals.

Emerging from 33 years of Communist rule, Vientiane, the once delicate Laotian capital numbering about 500,000 people, has the frayed look of an Eastern European city, signalled by the dominance of official governmental buildings. The highest buildings are hotels. There are no skyscraper office buildings. The center of the city’s night life has always been on  Fa Nyum Road, named for Laos’ first king, now a strip of restaurants and guesthouses facing the Mekong River. The city was overflowing with backpackers and hardy tourist types. Laotian women, with their elegant long skirts and coal-black hair, made up for the  city’s  controlled feel.

Following the Communist Pathet Lao takeover in 1975, Laos was a closed society until 1989, when it slowly began to allow Westerners back into the country. The Communist regime officially proclaimed 1997 the “Year of the Visitor.” Years later the country still scrambles to accomodate itself to the growing number of tourists. There’s a handful of ATM machines. The  local media is still heavily censored. Personal mail is routinely inspected. The sewer system has been under construction for decades. But at night, the riverside area fills up with Laotian couples and tourists, all eating, drinking and people-watching along the boulevard with its floating bamboo restaurants and food stalls, all lit up like a carnival with the Mekong flowing and Thailand on the other side of the river.

The driver let me out at the Lan Xang Hotel, once the finest in the capital, and I confirmed my reservation for Room 224.  For two weeks during the 1970s, the room had been the home of the writer Hunter Thompson, who checked into the Lan Xang, which means Place of a Million Elephants, late one night after spending a few pressure-filled weeks reporting on the final days before the fall of Saigon for Rolling Stone magazine. Thompson left a curious account of his stay at the Lan Xang in an short piece called “Checking into the Lang Xang,” published in Generation of Swine, Gonzo Papers II.

the lan xang hotel

He arrived in late April 1975 around 2 a.m. during a drenching monsoon rain. He told the desk clerk he wanted a king-sized bed, quick access to the swimming pool and a view of the Mekong River that flowed past only a few hundred feet in front of the hotel. The hotel is a long, two-story building with a massive lobby, cavernous dinning room, a special English-style Billiards Room, and an exotic disco with soft-eyed hostesses. The hotel is still noted for its Massage and Sauna Center beside the pool, and the masseuses who provid expert room service.

Room 224 was almost exactly as Thompson described it, but with no view of the Mekong River: “A rambling suite of rooms half hidden under the top flight of a wide white-tiled stair ramp that rose out of the middle of the Lan Xang lobby. When I first went into 224, it took me about two minutes to find the bed; it was around the corner and down a fifteen-foot hallway from the refrigerator and the black-leather topped bar and the ten-foot catfish-skin couch and five matching easy chairs and the hardwood writing desk and the sliding glass doors on the pool-facing balcony outside the living room. At the other end of the hallway, half hidden by the foundation of the central stairway, was another big room with a king-size bed, another screened balcony, another telephone and another air-conditioner, along with a pink-tiled bathroom with two sinks, a toilet and a bidet and deep pink bathtub about nine-feet long.”

The Lan Xang was perfect for Thompson. Built by the Russians, it still had Soviet air conditioners and signs in Cyrillic here and there. The disco then and now offers a classic Asian band with rotating singers and lovely hostesses in spiky high heels who lay a hand on your leg very quickly and rest their head on your shoulder.

There’s no written account of how Thompson filled his two weeks in Vientiane. The best guess is that it

a cobra and other snakes in moonshine whisky

involved burst of manic writing, wiring dispatches to California, lots of Laotian marijuana, long stretches of sitting at an outdoor restaurant next to the Mekong River, probably some of the local rice whisky, probably some opium, probably long stretches of  meditation on  the star-filled sky over the river.  I’m certain some nights were spent in the dark recesses of The White Rose, checking out the night life in one of the most legendary bars in Asia renowned for its spunky floor shows and hostesses. Down the road was Lulu’s where nightly pipes of opium could be found. At any rate, Thompson had successfully decamped from the manic desperation of crumbling Saigon to seemingly tranquil Vientiane. But with his acute sense of the possible and probable, he knew Laos’ days were numbered.

Shortly after arriving, he scheduled a meeting with The New York Times correspondent, David Alderman, and they spent some time traveling around Vientiane together.

“He looked me up as soon as he pitched up in Laos. I had been filing quite relentlessly from there for some weeks). I had, of course, heard of him, though I was not aware that he’d been in Vietnam before he arrived in Laos.  As I recall, he said that he was finishing up a major Vietnam piece and then intended to turn his attention to Laos.  But I’m not sure how intense that attention was. Most of the time, as I recall, he spent trying to score the ‘finest weed ever produced on the planet.’ And he seemed to be quite successful.

“At the time, Vientiane was very much an open city.  The bar girls still plied their trade nightly at the White Rose which Peter Kann and I closed up some weeks later, with the girls going across the river to Thailand the next morning, really marking the end of the Royalist regime in Laos and the arrival in power of the Pathet Lao. For a price, and Hunter did seem quite flush at the time, there was very little that was not obtainable.

“Hunter vanished as suddenly and mysteriously as he arrived. I don’t remember seeing any piece that materialized out of his visit to Vientiane. I was aware of his gonzo reputation, so his search for the perfect weed more amused than surprised me. He seemed so intense about it­­––more so than any other goal in fact––even though he was soaking in all sorts of details, scenario, dialogue, that could have produced a vivid piece if he ever got to the point of writing it, which seemed only a part of his ‘mission’ to Laos.  I also recall that at times his circuits seemed pretty fried.”

In May, 1975, a few weeks after Thompson’s visit, the Vientiane government fell to the Pathet Lao. The Communist isolated the country from the West and sent tens of thousands of Laotians and ethnic group members to prisons and reeducation camps.

Indeed, Thompson had a long strange trip through life. His writing captured his times and the imagination of millions of readers. Thirty years later, on Feb. 20, 2005, Thompson, like Hemingway, shot himself in the head at his “fortified compound,” Owl Farm, in Aspen, Colorado. What reads like a short, personal note written to himself a few days before his death, titled “Football Season is Over,” is now called the “suicide note”: “No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax—This won’t hurt.”

Of all American writers, Thompson, in his prime, somehow seemed to be at home in Vietnam and Laos with their benighted strangeness and beauty. The country seemed to have found him. The country’s deep strangeness could swallow up most writers, and no doubt gave even him pause. He glimpsed the final days of Vientaine before the weird storybook kingdom was smothered in a long, totalitarian vengence. At the moment of its descent into Communism, the country had so little, yet it lost the open days of its future. Thompson innately understood, despised and raged against repressive forces wherever he found them but in Laos he sensed something walking the land far different than the politics of America and the resurgence of Richard Nixon. Laos had defied generations of writers who tried to decode the internecine feuding between its former kings and princes. All were swept away conclusively by the Communists. A lock was snapped shut on the future.

Things quickly turned very dark in Laos, there were lost decades, but slowly the country began to emerge and it still is and you saw that some things never went away or  were coming back. The next morning as I ventured out of the Lan Xang, I learned that drugs were everywhere in Vientiane, in spite of the Communist government or probably because of it. The taxi driver turned, grinning.

“You want gangha?”

“No ganja,” I said. “Too dizzy.” He nodded, appearing to understand.

“Opium?” he asked. There was something about him. His body was too sure of itself. He was not a taxi driver. The body had a military bearing, the authority of a policeman. Yes, this was Laos and it was as different as Big Sur is from Long Island, in a world where all is strange if we can only see.

Part III to follow

Empson: The heart of standing is you cannot fly. 

Harold Bloom talks about this back and forth influence that writer’s share. This is from Empson’s Let It Go:

It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
The more things happen to you the more you can’t
Tell or remember even what they were.