Friday, November 18, 2011
Books Go See This Guy: John Jeremiah Sullivan at Nashville Public Library Saturday
Posted by Jim Ridley on Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 9:23 AM
Anyway. The typically reserved person who sent me Sullivan's link included the endorsement, "This motherfucker can write!" Maybe it's too late to slap this money quote on the jacket for Sullivan's highly lauded new essay collection Pulphead, but it fits. (Hey, there's always the paperback.) As proof, here's the first graph of Sullivan's piece, which restores the color to its subject's cheeks with each fresh detail:
When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. His two grown daughters did call him Daddy. Certainly I never felt even the most obscure impulse to call him Andrew, or “old man,” or any other familiarism, though he frequently gave me to know it would be all right if I were to call him mon vieux. He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, “Breath of My Nostrils.” He was about to turn ninety-two when I moved into his basement, and he had not yet quite reached ninety-three when they buried him the next winter, in a coffin I had helped to make—a cedar coffin, because it would smell good, he said. I wasn’t that helpful. I sat up a couple of nights in a freezing, starkly lit workshop rubbing beeswax into the boards. The other, older men—we were four altogether—absorbedly sawed and planed. They chiseled dovetail joints. My experience in woodworking hadn’t gone past feeding planks through a band saw for shop class, and there’d be no time to redo anything I might botch, so I followed instructions and with rags cut from an undershirt worked coats of wax into the cedar until its ashen whorls glowed purple, as if with remembered life.
Sullivan will appear at Nashville Public Library 1 p.m. tomorrow (Saturday, Nov. 19) as part of Humanities Tennessee's Salon @ 615 series. Will he read from his GQ and Harper's essays, his epic takes on Axl Rose and a Christian music festival, or from the Lytle piece? It's worth attending to find out (especially since the event is free and open to the public). Stop by on the your way to or from Parnassus.
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His "Rough Guide to Disney World," about the misadventures of a pair of middle-aged dads who bring their own brand of magic to the Magic Kingdom, is almost as epic as the Lytle piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/magazine…
"There’s something I should mention about Trevor, though I wouldn’t if it weren’t relevant to much of what came later, but he smokes a stupendous amount of weed. Think of a person who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, that’s 20 cigarettes. Trevor smokes about that many joints, on a heavy day, the first one while he’s making coffee. And yet is highly functional in all social and professional senses, or almost all. I’ve definitely seen him muff some conversations. Still, 90 percent of the time he’s one of the sharpest and most interesting people I know. But to repeat: the brother is always, always high. We’re not talking about stuff your roommate grew in the side lot, either; this is California high-grade he obtains through a kind of nationwide medical-marijuana co-op, moving the legally obtained stuff out of California and into other states. It works the same as regular weed dealing, apparently, but you’re not supporting a criminal network. Except insofar as you are part of a criminal network. It is one of the many contradictions of living at a time when half the country thinks of weed as more innocent than alcohol and the other half thinks of it as a stepping stool to hard drugs. I needled Trevor once for details on his source. He said that, unfortunately, there was one rule: don’t tell your friends."
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