How lovely that driving is,/ how deadly.

I spent today preparing to teach a two-week short-story-writing class to high school students. I always like to start over, when I teach, rather than fall back on old class plans and lessons. Otherwise I might start to think I'm really only a teacher, and am done with learning. It's a pleasure to be using short stories of Roberto Bolaño for the first time in this context. "The Grub," from Last Evenings On Earth, should lead to a different series of questions and writings than I'm used to, or at least that's what I'm hoping.

Bolaño. Bolaño. Bolaño. I read and read and read him, but I can't explain why--what in his writing is so appealing? There's some sort of recovery happening when I read his stores and novels. (Not so much the poetry.) He makes me want to write. He makes me a little more disgusted by other writers.

I was surprised, rereading John Cheever stories in my search for interesting models and talking points for these high schoolers, to find more mystery and sympathy in his work than I ever used to, and I think it's because they remind me of Bolaño--a similar patient spokenness in both, a similar composed and devious honesty. It's an odd match, I acknowledge, but there's some metaphor between them. Check out "The Death of Justina" or "Clemantina."

Another writer who seems fresher in context of Bolaño is John Newlove, a Canadian poet who also died in 2003. He was from Saskatchewan, as unlikely a place on earth as Chile. He lived for a while around Deep Springs College in Death Valley, though I'm not sure if he taught there.

This John Newlove poem is worth a whole life. It's from his 1986 book The Night the Dog Smiled. I found it in a small bookstore in Victoria, or rather Kurt Slauson found it and encouraged me to buy it. At the time the buzz in the english department at the university of victoria, apparently, was that Newlove had disappeared after the book came out, was in hiding, maybe for drink or health, or maybe stealth. This poem should be on the Canadian dollar, on its flag. I hate the poet laureate trend in North America, the condescending nationalistic nod it implies. Yet Canada should make John Newlove the Canadian permanent posthumous poet laureate for writing this poem.

Driving

You never say anything in your letters. You say,
I drove all night long through the snow
in someone else’s car
and the heater wouldn’t work and I nearly froze.
But I know that. I live in this country too.
I know how beautiful it is at night
with the white snow banked in the moonlight.

Around black trees and tangled bushes,
how lonely and lovely that driving is,
how deadly. You become the country.
You are by yourself in that channel of snow
and pines and pines,
whether the pines and snow flow backwards smoothly,
whether you drive or you stop or you walk or you sit.

This land waits. It watches. How beautifully desolate
our country is, out of the snug cities,
and how it fits a human. You say you drove.
It doesn’t matter to me.
All I can see is the silent cold car gliding,
walled in, your face smooth, your mind empty,
cold foot on the pedal, cold hands on the wheel.

Roberto Bolaño: The Insufferable Gaucho

I like this New Yorker story--not new, but newly translated--by the author of The Savage Detectives; it has a lot in common with the book I'm trying to rewrite, and is sophisticated but simply told. I'm embarrassed to admit this is the only thing I've read of Bolaño's; now I will have to go get that novel.

In the story, a retired judge from Buenos Aires falls into idleness, and then, in the wake of the Argentinian economic collapse, retreats to the abandoned family ranch far off in the pampas. On the train ride there, the judge observes through the window a quartet of rabbits as it chases, catches, and eviscerates a fifth rabbit. The rabbits become a running theme, as the judge attempts to make a life for himself in the middle of nowhere; they are all that's left now that nobody is bothering to raise any cattle.

The judge forgets how to be urban and begins to lose his mind. At one point, his son, a writer, brings some friends to visit, including a book publisher. The judge and the publisher take a ride out to visit a cluster of decrepit buildings:

For two hours, the publisher held forth in praise of the idyllic, unspoiled life led, as he saw it, by the inhabitants of Capitan Jourdan. When he spotted the first of the ruined houses, he broke into a gallop, but it was much farther away than he had thought, and before he got there a rabbit leaped up and bit him on the neck.

Really?!!? Awesome. Bolaño's story is profoundly odd, but amiably presents itself as perfectly normal, unwrapping its peculiar pleasures dispassionately, in the language of a fairy tale. The judge eventually goes back to the city to see to his house, and briefly considers staying for good--but when a cocaine-addled weirdo accosts him in a cafe, the judge, instead of ignoring the man, stabs him in the groin, and soon decides to return to the ranch.

Bolaño is a pro at the slightly-strange detail, like a strip of rabbit jerky "literally seething with protein," or a meal "which they ate in a room full of old photographs." The story is like a painting with almost nothing on it, which by its sparseness magnifies what little is there.