How do you like your blue eyed boy Mr. Death?

06 June 2008

"In the hands of a novelist, the most abnormal actions can be used to illuminate what we call the normal world. Only the hopelessly illiterate are unaware of this fact and waste time arguing about it."



On account of the man's birthday tomorrow, Dogmatika tips a hat to America's greatest literary secret Harry Crews.

"Graham Greene—you've probably heard me quote before, because god knows, it's true—"The writer is doomed to live in an atmosphere of perpetual failure." There it is. There it is. Nah, you write things and write things—write a book for instance—and write and write and write and write and write, and you know, it's not—every writer writes with the knowledge that nothing he writes is as good as it could be. Paul Valery: "A poem's never finished, only abandoned." The same thing with a novel. It's never finished, only abandoned. I've had any number of novels where I've just at some point said to myself, well, unless you're going to make the career out of this book—spend the rest of your goddamn life chewing on it—you might as well just package it up and send it on to New York. Go on to something else. Because between conception and execution there is a void, an abyss, that inevitably fucks up the conception. The conception never gets translated to the page. It just doesn't. I don't think it ever does." - Everything is Optimism, Beautiful, and Painless


"I've got a temper that has not served me well, and when I was younger, I'd be standin' in a bar somewhere, and some guy'd come up and say, 'You're Harry Crews,' and I'd say, 'Well, yeah, but you're one up on me, bud, I don't know your name.' I'd stick out my hand, and he'd leave his hand down and say, 'No, you're the guy that thinks you're the badass.' And right away, I'd be thinking 'Oh, shit,' and right away, it'd be nose-to-nose time. Then there came a time, and I can't say when, maybe my middle 30s, something like that, when I would just tell the guy, 'Nooo.' Usually, see, he'd tell me a story that I was supposed to have been involved in in one way or another. and I'd say, 'Bud, I've never been near the place, and I wasn't there the night you're talkin' about' and he'd say, 'Yes, goddammit, you were, and we're gonna do such-and-so right here." - Stories Told in Blood

Related:
A Large & Startling Figure,
Out of the Gates, Slowly Bleeding, Naked Truth, New York Times article, Wired for Books interview, Harry Crews' Mother is his Best Critic, Still Fully Charged, Searching For The Wrong Eyed Jesus

[DA]