![]() ![]() He asked what books I taught at Boston University and when I came to Denis Johnson’s masterwork, Jesus’ Son (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), about a nameless Midwestern wastrel in the stranglehold of heroin and booze, he reached into his weed-packed satchel and produced a paperback copy as if to say, “Ta-da!” He then did what I’ve come to expect from his lagging species of outlaw literati-he recited the most famous line of the book: “I knew every raindrop by its name.” He couldn’t land a job in writing, couldn’t convince anyone to publish his work, and so had become a not-so-reluctant hawker of weed. Once he introduced me to a recent graduate of Emerson’s MFA program, a fiction writer in his mid-twenties whose grievance was planted on his face like a flag. ![]() He’d often ask me to his weekend saturnalias, to which he would invite bohemian literary types and multihued ladies of the night, and at which I never felt quite bacchic enough. Denis Johnson, the author of eighteen books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |