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Duane’s Depressed

By Dan Krotz

476 Words

 

     Constant readers often connect an image, memory, or idea from one book to another book, and sometimes several. A pastor from one of our local Methodist churches stopped by the shop the other day and bought a two-volume set of Remembrances of Things Past by Marcel Proust. I struggled not to chuckle because I connected Proust to a joke Norman Maclean told in his book, A River Runs Through It. Norman’s Dad, a Congregational pastor with strong negative opinions about Norman’s “inter-faith” dating, asked him in warning, “Well, son, you do know that a Methodist is just a Baptist who can read, don’t you?” 

     Remembrances of Things Past (in French A la recherché du temps predue) is one of the great literary masterpieces produced in the twentieth century, and at 1300 plus pages replete with 600 word sentences, it is all the proof anyone needs that Methodists certainly can read.  I recall my own several months long battle to finish it, along with here and now admiration for our local cleric and his erudite ambitions.

    I strung these two book related connections together like pearls on a string with a third book I was reading just as Proust and my Methodist left the shop. It was Larry McMurtry’s Duane’s Depressed, the final book of his Texasville Trilogy, which is about a man who—Ta Da—is reading Remembrance of Things Past on the advice of his psychiatrist.

     Duane’s Depressed is not McMurtry’s best book, but it is a book I love. I have read it more than a dozen times. It is about Duane Moore who, in his 60^th year, parks his pick-up truck under the carport and starts walking. In rural Texas, pedestrianism is an unusual occupation and Duane’s adamant refusal to use motorized transportation is taken by his family and neighbors as a sign of mental illness.  Duane’s actual problem is longing for a different way of living. He dimly comprehends that he’s spent his life racing from one crisis to another. He has begun to obscurely realize that he has responded to life rather than lived it. And all that he knows for certain is that his futile racing and responding has been done in the cab of a pick-up. When Duane throws the keys to his truck away he assumes control of his life for the first time, but he is left to figure out what it is he is supposed to control.

    McMurtry fans will have seen Duane on the brink of adulthood in The Last Picture Show, as a father and husband in Texasville where he is—like most of us—utterly bewildered by the messiness of middle age. In Duane’s Depressed, we see Duane find out that life means treating every event in each day of the 29,000 days we are given as special and sometimes even holy.

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God is Not Great

By Christopher Hitchens

Reviewed by Dan Krotz

 

    Christopher Hitchens has written a book titled God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It is a splendid book, witty, outrageous, funny, and occasionally erudite. It is about the fallacy and delusion of theism and it sets out to prove, in the words of Robert Pirsig that,  “if one man believes something that is not real, we call it insanity. If many people believe something that is not real we call it religion.”

    Hitchens is a regular contributor to Vanity Fair, where excerpts of the book have been appearing lately. There, he describes the Mormon Church as an organized racket and the Catholic Church as a League of Peculiar Gentlemen with dreadful and peculiar tastes. Muslims are condemned not only for being fools, but lunatics as well. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell—who have publicly expressed the opinion (as does Hitchens) about Muslims—are taken to the woodshed and given a thorough flogging. There is no mote, nor beam that Hitchens fails to toss into the eye of Christianity and organized religion in general. It is all great fun.

    And it is a stunt. Hitchens is, without putting too fine a point on it, the Eval Knieval of the essay. He does with a pen or keyboard what Knieval did with a Harley Davidson: his audacity takes our breath away; he leaps stylishly over Great Ideas and First Principles… and when he crashes and burns he does it brilliantly.

    You have to love Hitchens. He is a boozer and a smoker and a fulltime literary rascal and precisely the kind of guy that God so loved. That he writes elegantly, gallantly, and daringly—and probably better than any other essayist in the West—is certainly proof of a Necessary Being: talent such as Hitchens’ does not spring from nothingness. Hitchens is also a writer of enormous courage. He is perhaps the last Public Intellectual in either the United States or Great Britain who continues to believe that our intervention in Iraq is noble and indispensable to the causes of liberty. Advocating that belief has caused Hitchens to become a pariah to his “base” constituency, the educated elite. Yet, he has not run to the right: God is Not Great is proof of his unfettered and fearless free agency. He is that rare being, a capital “C” classical Conservative: he makes everyone mad.

    God is Not Great is only the most recently published book among anti-theism tracts on the bestseller lists these days. Biologist Richard Dawkins has written The God Delusion and neuroscientist Sam Harris has written The End of Faith.  These three writers, sometimes referred to as “the Unholy Trinity,” are smart guys, and they know what they know.  They know that God does not exist. The problem they run into is that other guys know that God does exist, and with the same degree of certainty, and with the same evidential basis. Dawkins solves this problem by referring to atheists as “Brights” with the implication I guess, that theists are “Dulls” or knuckle-draggers. Hitchens, to his (expected) credit, avoids Dawkin’s schoolyard “Na na Na na Na” and sticks to (the many) examples of how man’s inhumanity to man plays out in the name of religion.

    When folks around our little town drag their knuckles into church on Sunday mornings they seem to do so with a sense of contentment and gratitude. They like the people who comprise their church family and seem to know that they can depend on these families to bury them when they are dead, and to comfort their loved ones when they are gone. They see Goodness as a practical, physical expression everywhere they look—and say so. All this Goodness, contentment and gratitude I take as evidence of God’s existence. I can’t help it: like Hitchens, I know what I know.

A few years ago when we opened our independent bookshop, folks thought we were nuts for going up against the Big Guys (you all know who they are). We have found that our ebay store, Sow's Ear Antiques, is a great addition to our marketing mix and would encourage any retailer to add ebay's online services to their lineup.  Any thoughts from the rest of you?

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Dissipated Assets

By David Zimmermann

Reviewed by Dan Krotz

736 Words

 

Let me give you a treat. Here is the worst modern poem ever written:

 

My kite is beautiful!

Green! Red! Yellow!

High! Sky!

It cuts wind!

 

Our good friend David Zimmermann has written a book of poetry—Dissipated Assets—that contains two howlers along similar lines. I’ll get one of them out of the way here and leave it to you to apprehend the other when you get the book:

 

I am, you are, love is

Next to that what is poetry?

What are the meanings of words, what are words?

 

The poem above, of course, is not remotely in the running for “worst” poem ever written. But it is evidence that the best poets and the bravest soldiers alike don’t know that discretion is the better part of value. Consequently, they risk an occasional bad poem or a hopeless battle that the non-combatants among us would never consider. It is Dissipated Assets’ lack of discretion that makes it a rather gallant and touchingly brave collection.

 

It is also a rakishly funny book (The secret of his happiness?/He doesn’t even want to help.) and it is frequently witty (They also surf who stand and wade.). Several of the poems, especially those preoccupied with death and dying, are teachable moments or cautionary tales about living gracefully in the shadows of inevitability:

 

The days I wear the pendant that you made,

Your handiwork is riding on my heart.

What you’ve touched touches me and I’m

Reminded I’ll rejoin you on the day

I take my leave of flesh and gold

And like you rise as smoke into the wind.

 

 Dissipated Assets seems an odd choice of title for a book that is mostly constructed of love poems and aphorisms on the comeliness of the world. True, there is a current of skepticism running through the book, but it is the skepticism of a man who knows his wife is plain but loves her, that his house is ramshackle but charming, and that his children, while dull, still delight him. Above all, Dissipated Assets is a book that shows us, if laconically, the look and feel of gratitude. In “Nautilus” Zimmerman writes,

 

A strong man comes to love

Towards the end of time

And brings with him the power of his age,

 

Each tender feeling amplified

Through all the chambers of the years

The ardor of an ancient, well-worn heart.

 

What I am grateful for in “Nautilus” is that it captures much of what I feel about myself as an old man—fierceness and domesticity—and how I think about my old pals and companeros.  It made me a bit weepy—and self proud—when I read it.

 

That said, don’t think that you can run your hand along the spine of every poem and have no worries of thorns. Some poems are consciously weary. Poem “96”, for example…

 

A church should be a way of saying thanks,

A bank should be a place where there is enough,

Policemen should be helpful when we’re tired.

 

…Struck me initially as more pleasing aphorism than poem. Churches, banks, and policemen “should be,” should have, those attributes. Certainly, we are taught so as children, and they are so commonplace in our adult lives that we take them and the frequent absence of their “should be-ness” for granted. Isn’t it pretty to think about calling a cop to bust a banker or preacher the next time we feel tired about something they’ve done or said—or refused to do or say? And isn’t sad that it is unlikely to happen.

 

A fair number of poems in the book are anti-war poems or poems about the gay experience or about homophobia. These seem less effective. In “A Modest Proposal Modified to Meet our Present Needs” Zimmermann does a funny/ghoulish riff on Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal that puts forward various practical uses for homosexuals including:

 

Their eyeballs and their testes plucked

Right off the searing grill

Then served on seasoned chips will make

Our fabulous hors d’oeuvres

 

Gays and fellow travelers may enjoy gustily singing these stanzas around the campfire keg, but one still wonders, why waste a poem on a homophobe? They won’t get it, and if they ever do get it, it will come from the Maker and not from a poem. Good poems and certainly great poems, do more than preach to the choir.

 

Instead, let us consider:

 

As merest cosmic dust,

I orbit you, an ardent, happy man.

 

Dissipated Assets is available: $14.95 + S/H

 

 

 

 

 

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