I was traveling when my friend BK wrote and asked me if I had seen the New Yorker piece about Gordon Lish’s editing of Raymond Carver’s stories. That winter fiction issue hadn’t arrived by the time we left (you have to allow the postman time to read your magazines) so it was news to me. But BK was my first and best editor; she knew I liked Carver and that I had the same occasional misgivings about editing that all writers do. (Also her husband Charlie had actually studied with Carver and swore I was the spitting image of the man; her subject line was “Well, I still think he looks like you,” though my wife disagrees.)

I read the piece upon my return last week. Some of the controversy was familiar to me: that Carver’s widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, wanted to reprint all of her late husband’s stories in their unedited, pre-Lish fashion; and that Lish, in turn, felt offended and betrayed by the whole contretemps. As the fiction editor at Esquire in the seventies, he gave Carver entree to the world of high class magazine publishing and it was his editing of his first two collections (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) that put them on the literary map.

Now it seems that Lish’s hand may have been what made those early pieces “Carveresque”; that spare laconic style was imposed on him, to a large degree, by an editor who definitely thought less was more. And that as he gained confidence (helped in part by his sobriety, to say nothing of the critical acclaim What We Talk About received) he demanded less redaction and even reprinted one of his better known stories (A Small Good Thing) the way he wrote it in his third collection, Cathedral. I always thought the later “true” version was baggier and more sentimental. But it is Gallagher’s contention, backed up by a collection of letters Carver sent to Lish, that the heavy cutting of his prose was anguishing for him, to the point that he begged Lish to help cancel the publication of his second book.

Anguish, of course, is relative. Writing is anguishing, for many good writers anyway, and being edited is an alogether different kind of torture. Even when it’s good for you. Which is the question the Gish-Carver relationship raises: not just did he make the writer’s stories better but did he make them truer to the writer’s intentions? Is the “minimalist” style (a word Carver hated) the true Carver? (And then there’s the anguish of the alcoholic; reading Carver’s freakout letter was painful for me, because that life-or-death sense of melodrama seems awfully close and personal.)

Now the New Yorker has published, online at least, the edited version of Carver’s story “Beginners” with all of Lish’s cuts and additions clearly marked. The edited version became the title story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” The editor removed forty percent of the writer’s prose, including a whole backstory about an old couple who were nearly killed in a car accident, and several final moments of drunken epiphany experienced by the narrator. You can’t really say that Lish has altered the feeling, or meaning, of Carver’s story but he certainly gets you there quicker. I’ll leave it for you to decide if that’s a good thing.

I was still on Roman time the night of the Iowa caucuses and fell asleep to the sights and sounds of election results being posted on CNN. When I awoke, a few hours later, Barack Obama had been declared the winner and as I struggled for consciousness (not to mention some firm footing), I saw his victory speech. Five minutes into it I was tempted to wake my wife and kids but couldn’t be bothered to pause the Tivo to roust them. When Peggy finally watched it on YouTube the next day she said, “I know I’m jet-lagged but that brought tears to my eyes three times.”

And how often in her years of following HRC, whom she has been supporting, has the until-recently presumptive party front runner done that? “Never,” Peggy allowed.

Getting votes and being president should be about more than just movng people, you say; a candidate has to do more than just stir the pot. But did our big melting pot of a nation ever need stirring more? When Obama said, “We are one nation, we are one people and our time for change has come,” he wasn’t just preaching to the converted. He was talking to you.

The junior senator from Illinois plainly gave some thought to this address. It had elements of his standard stump speech (which we’ve only seen in bits and pieces on the evening news) but it had reach as well. He knew this was his largest national audience since he spoke at the Democratic convention in 2004 and he showed them how it was done, with a hint of gospel rhythm even, and some rock star touches. When he asked the crowd to “give it up” for his wife Michelle and pointed at her offstage saying, “You! you!” I thought he might burst into song.

What has been funny watching the news since is the sense of discomfort his decisive 38% victory has caused, not just among the Clintonistas but the traditional news commentators. Forget about the usual suspects, the party apartchiks like Paul Begala and William Bennet who are paid to carry water for the establishment. Even the ordinarily even-handed commentators like Jeffrey Toobin sounded as if they were defending the castle, suggesting that any negative campaigning Clinton would do against Obama was more than justified. Circle the wagons, boys.

It reminds me of the early days of punk, when the mainstream rockers derided the new sounds; “oi bands” is how Mick Jagger described the Clash et al; Billy Joel gave an “angry” interview in Rolling Stone and everywhere the lament was the same: New fads come and go but once consumers have tired of this latest hula hoop, they’ll come back for professionalism, musicianship and ten-minute guitar solos. Thirty years later and Mick has called London Calling a great rock album, and Billy Joel is driving off the road out in Long Island.

Joe Strummer is dead, of course, but as anyone who saw Julien Temple’s documentary, The Future Is Unwritten can testify, his spirit lives on. He was no simple punk, not just an anarchist here to ring in a new order. He was an ex-hippie, a Woody Guthrie admirer whose first band was made up of fellow squatters; like Obama, Joe lived in foreign lands growing up and he was forever collecting and indulging in new sounds. He was a uniter, not a divider. And his message could move you to tears.

I just got back from vacation in Rome, having done the old house swap routine again, which afforded me the opportunity to finallly read Denis Johnson’s new novel Tree of Smoke. My friend Jess had given it to me for my birthday, two months ago now, and there it sat by my bed, all 624 pages of it, waiting for the kind of time that only travel and jet lag allows.

Tree of Smoke is, as you have probably read, a novel about Vietnam, though that seems like a rather paltry description, like saying Anna Karenina is novel about a woman having an affair. Not that Johnson is a Tolstoy, or that he even has that much affinity for the Russians. But like the Count, and his dark sibling Dostoevsky, he is interested less in the surface of things (this world and its evils) than the people who struggle for grace in the grip of it. I won’t bore you with a detailed account except to say that the war is seen through the experiences of a host of individuals — a CIA operative, a couple of soldiers, a woman missionary who has lost her faith, a VC soldier who becomes a double agent — and that gives even the most jaded reader of Vietnam books some fresh perspectives. (The Tet Offensive of 1968, for instance, is seen from multiple perspectives and the overall effect is like looking into both sides of a fractured mirror.) There are some passages I would like to read again for fun, some just to see how he pulled them off, and some that I would like to memorize to read at a funeral.

Because death is both booby prize and ultimate gift in this book. As in his first novel Angels, Johnson makes room for the misbeggotten, men whose roads seem marked for a shallow grave almost from the beginning. In that book a man on death row sees a line from a Wallace Stevens’ poem written (rather improbably) in the gas chamber: “Death is the mother of all beauty.” In Tree of Smoke, tortured souls torture themselves (and sometimes, literally, other people) in search of fun or freedom or the face of God, which appears, and disappears, in many guises. By the book’s end I was reminded of another writer’s story: Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” That bit of comic grotesquery ends when an escaped convict called The Misfit murders a grandma who won’t shut up:

“She would have been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
“Some fun!” Bobby Lee said.
“Shut up, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”

Like O’Connor, Johnson is a Catholic; he converted late in life, after overcoming the alcoholism and addictions that color the characters of many of his works (the central figure of Jesus’ Son, known chiefly as Fuckhead, is a DJ stand-in; his arch from delirium to recovery mirrors the writer’s own). IIn that sense, Rome was actually the perfect place to read Tree of Smoke; much of the imagery is Biblical and angels and demons get their turns at bat.

I gather from press reports that Johnson doesn’t give many interviews these days, so I feel doubly blessed to have been able to spend a few days with him about 20 years ago, after the publication of his third book, The Stars At Noon . I asked him then about Catholicism, and the whole hell thing. “There is a hell,” he told me, “and we can go there all the time. I’ve been there by total selfishness.” His answer weighed on my soul; it was years before I confronted my own alcoholism and the story I wrote (for the Sunday magaine of the SF Examiner) resonated in other ways. It was the only story of mine that my father — a troubled soul and failed writer who took his own life — ever praised.

I have no idea if Johnson liked the story. It had one of those stupid coverlines — “The Soul of a Young Writer” — that some editor must have signed off on but that looks, in retrospect, like the kind of message you write with refrigerator magnets. For all I know my story was what convinced him to stop talking to the press. But it brought me into his world, in many senses, and it’s one I have been happy as hell to return to.

Teaching college students can be depressing. It’s the end of the semester and I am already hearing a shocking array of excuses for why work is not being handed in and class not being attended (my favorites so far have included a severed thumb, a dead rabbit and a dream involving a paint factory) and I am starting to refer students to the MP-YP scene in Boogie Nights. They seem at times like a generation mired in excuses.

And yes they can often seem a generation mired in itself as well. Several times, in my memoir class, I have had students (usually the same ones) ask me of the reading we are doing: Why should I care about this person? The person in question being Nabokov and Paula Fox and most recently, Robert Graves, whose autobiography, Goodbye To All That, left some of them gobsmacked. Graves was, after all, describing events of almost one hundred years ago. But hearing that something “doesn’t speak to my experience” is depressing in a college setting (where I thought you went to learn about others’ experiences), especially when coming from aspiring writers (who are supposed to be curious about all manner of experience). Forget about the fact that the aftershocks of WWI are still being felt today: in the Balkans, the Middle East, the arts, psychology…

So I asked those students to come up with some ideas for what might be their WWI; what event could have the same effect on their generation that the Great War did on the Lost Generation? And the answers were surprising. Yes, at least one mentioned 9.11 and the events that followed, the endless war. But more mentioned some form of global apocalypse (climate change, vanishing resources) while the number two candidate for chief concern/generation shaping event was…isolation.

This might surprise any parent of a teenager (and most of my students are just leaving Teendom) who think this is a different kind of lost generation — lost in iPods, cell phones, laptops. The good news, I guess, is that many are aware of it and hate that the ideal of unification, of some shared experience, has been lost to forms of endless self-expression and self-reference. The feeling I had was that the two concerns — apocalypse now and ostrich defense — were related and some are dying to lift their heads up, even if they are afraid of smelling the smoke.

I picked up a book entitled My First Movie: 20 Celebrated Directors Talk About Their First Film and on the first page found the Coen brothers reminiscing about their early education in film: a local TV program that featured Fellini films beside Roman sandal movies like Son of Hercules. This was followed by college, specifically the film society at the University of Minnesota “that showed the kind of stuff you wouldn’t normally be exposed to,” said Joel: “Godard and the Marx Brothers — who were both kind of hip at the time.”

“I guess that doesn’t exist any more,” Ethan added. “But for a period people would show black and white 16mm prints on some crappy projector in a basement in the university building somewhere. I guess video ended that.”

Do we value those early movie experiences more because of how hard it was to have them? I’m still trying to get used to the idea that everything is available all the time, thanks to the internet. I can’t quite imagine what it’s like growing up with the idea that I can have/see/listen to anything just by Googling the title, or going to Netflix. (Though don’t bother searching for “Son of Hercules” — there were a million Steve Reeves movies with something like that in the title and I think JC meant the name to stand in for all such body-building, history-bending epics.)

When I was a senior in high school, attending a “free school” in Auburn, California, my English teacher told me that if Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses was ever playing anywhere (the campus at UC Davis, say, or one of the art house cinemas in San Francisco) I would have to drop everything and go. And not long after that I did: I can’t remember if I hitchhiked to SF (three hours) or took a bus, but I went to the Cento Cedar cinema on Polk Street and saw Stolen Kisses on a double bill with the 400 Blows. And then hitchhiked home…

I wonder now if my English teacher had wanted me to see the film (in which Jean Pierre Leaud plays an older version of the kid in 400 Blows, a young man with female trouble) because he was encouraging me to cheat on my girlfriend (we all have ulterior motives) or he was just trying to give some direction to my rather directionless life. The ultimate message of Truffaut’s romance (maybe all Truffaut romances) is of the carpe diem variety: All kisses, all love, are stolen from death. Get it while you can.

That’s a good thing to hear when you’re 17 (hell, that’s a good thing to be reminded of when you’re 67) but I wonder if the lesson was all the more memorable for me because I had to stand on an off-ramp in the rain just for the privilege of hearing it. Would it be the same, watching in on my iPod while instant-messaging my friends?

Please promise to kill me before I become a grumpy old man.