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Here is Court Merrigan channeling Ecclesiastes on the subject of books and our common Fate, a stern reminder.
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When I moved my family back to the US from Thailand in 2009, I left two bookcases worth of books stranded in the tropics. Last month we went back. The two years have not been kind.
Here is a six-year-old copy of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men:
This paperback is being eaten alive by some orange tropical mold.
Here’s a lovely addition to the growing list of Numéro Cinq “Childhood” essays from Court Merrigan who grew up in Nebraska and lives just across the state line in Wyoming. Court was raised on a farm. He has that authentic Western voice, a voice bred in the dirt and heat and the smell of oil from the farm machines and the chink of irrigation pipes and sound of distant thunder (farmers watch the sky far more than city folk). I have a fondness for the piece based on personal history—the first story I published was about a hail storm on the farm where I grew up. Court’s father towers over this story, his laugh, his exhortations and his reading. What’s really particular and authentic here is that father, Catholic, Jesuit-trained, literate, and wise. He’s appeared before on NC, just in passing, in Court’s “What it’s like living here.”
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First water, we called it—the first water of the summer irrigation season—first water was coming. On the Fourth of July, 1988, the summer before I entered seventh grade, my father had my whole family at the end of a field of Great Northerns laying ten-inch irrigation pipe over new corrugations. It was 111 degrees in the shade and all I wanted was to be at the lake with the guys, riding in a motorboat, waterskiing, maybe sneaking a can of beer from a cooler to pass around. But beans don’t irrigate themselves.
My father was talking about Cincinnatus, the hero that saved Rome and then refused to be dictator, returning instead to his fields.
“This country could use a Cincinnatus or two,” he said.
My grandparents, resolute Catholics, had deemed it their duty to apportion a son to the Church. My father had been shipped off to seminary at age thirteen, joining the last wave of men to receive a pre-Vatican II education. Just shy of ordination, he decided celibacy was too heavy a cross to bear. He bolted for co-ed college and Vietnam and this farm, toting along his classical education like sharp jeweled shards. It has always seemed to me that these shards jab his brain even when he is about the grittiest of farm labor. Perhaps more so then.
Cincinnatus was a favorite theme. We heard the story many times. I think about him still in moments of reverie, dreaming of accomplishing heroic deeds myself in the camera’s unblinking eye, refusing all offers of position and prestige, returning to my farm with a final wave to the hushed TV masses.
Put your birthday into the Birthday Bestsellers search engine to see a list of New York Times bestsellers the week you were born. Here’s mine:
Are all of these Top 10 books from February 1976 exemplars of fine literature? Surely not. Are at least a couple? Almost certainly. How to know?
As for me, I recognize some of the names – Tennessee Williams, Agatha Christie, Saul Bellow, William F. Buckley, E.L. Doctrow. I’ve read some of their books, but none of these. That includes Humboldt’s Gift, which was part of the oeuvre that got Saul Bellow the Nobel Prize, or that American classic Ragtime. Sadly, the work with which I am most “familiar” is Shogun – at least as it appeared as a TV miniseries years later.
And these are just the lucky 10 books that made the list, for one week during the disco era. Thousands of others– some vastly superior, no doubt – remain totally unknown to me, because the search engine limits my enquiry to bestsellers only.
Read the rest of this entry
A deeply shocking and poignant “What it’s like living here” from Court Merrigan in Torrington, Wyoming. Neither a former student, nor a VCFA graduate (he doesn’t have an MFA), Court is just a writer and a human being who joined the conversation and became part of the NC community. DG wishes there were more like him, more nominal outsiders who join the blog just because they like writing and a supportive camaraderie. We’re not a closed shop. This text reminds dg of something Tomaso Landolfi once wrote: “…is not this a world in which incredible things take place and, I would say, only incredible things?”
dg
Bedside
Four extra bedtime stories for your daughter, five. She grows fidgety and irritated, wants to be left alone to sleep. Once she would have stayed up all night with you. Now she’s three and those days are gone. You trudge upstairs. Your wife is in bed. She goes to bed early nowadays. It’s too early for you. Time to get yourself occupied.
Two weeks it’s been. Two weeks of closing your eyes to see Todd.
1.5 miles up Laramie Peak Trail
At first Todd looked like he was taking a nap, or had just leaned against the warm rock on that perfect seventy-degree day, looking across Friend Creek through a golden-leafed bough of aspens to the 
sheer mountain slabs across the rift valley. I thought he was on the lookout for mountain goats. He really wanted to see a mountain goat, kept on asking if we thought we’d spot one.
“Well, this is about where we expected to catch up with him,” my father said.
Irritated, I thought that he ought to be further along than this, that he was going to start talking about the goddamn mountain goats again – all he wanted out of Wyoming, it seemed – and at his trudging pace, it would be hours before we got back to the trailhead. He was semi-retired and at his leisure, but I had a pregnant wife and a kid to get back to.
Then I noticed the odd angle of his neck, the wrist twisted behind his back, legs folded in an Asian posture he could not possibly have adopted at sixty years of age. I began to run. His face was slack jawed, sunglasses askew, lips a pale violet. When I knelt and touched his face a skein of spit dribbled onto his new denim shirt, so new you could see the store creases, smell the store shelf.
The judges, as usual, fell for all the entries and had a terrible time deciding amongst them, all from friends, former students and fellow inmates. (This makes judging NC contests an extremely debilitating sport.) It’s a sad thing to force distinctions when everyone has entered the fray with such zeal and enthusiasm. All entries did what they were meant to do: tell a story in terse, stern prose. They all had élan. Many played with the idea of being in or outside a box (or a bottle, or a literal box). Jonah wrote his as an acrostic, an ancient form much used in the Bible, a different sort of box. There was a huge battle over Anna Maria’s actual box entry. But it was decided to include it here as a sixth finalist simply because making art out of the conventions (rules) of art is a legitimate artistic form. It wouldn’t be fair just to give her the prize for best Off The Page entry (though the judges are doing that, too).
The judges admired Vivian Dorsel’s entry for its use of literary allusion (the fairy tale) and for putting the heroine in the box. They admired Rich Farrell’s entry for its loopy adventure and romance, for the word “cavitate” and for that ending (the whole thing reminded the judges of their favourite movie Joe vs. the Volcano). Julie and Christopher put their novel in a bottle with, well, Noel Coward and wrote a pseudo-Edwardian romp with redemption at the end. Shelagh put her character in a metaphorical box and made him think of poetry. And Jonah wrote the acrostic. All this is wonderful.
Of those left behind, the judges want to mention Court Merrigan, who entered twice and wrote a lovely little thing about plague and love, and Cheryl Wilder for the old man in the closet asking for the toilet paper and her surprise ending.
But the competition was exceedingly fierce and the judges love you all.
Jacob, the contrarian, during the EPE (Photo by Jonah Glover)
[Augusto] Monterroso is perhaps most famous for his short story “The Dinosaur,” which is said to be literature’s shortest story. It reads in full:
When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.
In an 1996 interview with Ilan Stavans for the Massachusetts Review, Monterroso recalled some early reviews of “The Dinosaur”: “I still have the very first reviews of the book: critics hated it. Since that point on I began hearing complaints to the effect that it isn’t a short-story. My answer is: true, it isn’t a short story, it’s actually a novel.”
Brevity was, to say the least, an important concept for Monterroso. His essay “Fecundity” is included in The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays. It reads in full:
Today I feel well, like a Balzac; I am finishing this line.
—from Tom McCartan’s Crib notes on “What Bolaño Read”
Okay, the long-awaited next Numéro Cinq literary contest, The First Annual Numéro Cinq Novel-in-a-Box/Memoir-in-a-Box Contest. The rules are pretty simple this time. You have to write an entire (don’t cut corners) novel or a memoir (personal narrative) consisting of 9 (a mystic number) chapters and each chapter can be no more than 5 lines long. (By lines, I mean the number of lines that appear on the comment box on the blog.) Fewer lines if you can. Try to remember what a novel is like: at least a couple of characters or more (usually), a conflict, development through a series of dramatic actions, etc. Alternatively, try to remember what a memoir looks like: a first person narrator (and a couple of other people or more), a thematically continuous narrative line often based on a conflict and or theme, development through a series of dramatic moments or incidents, etc. Indicate on your entry whether it is fiction or non-fiction (there will be separate prizes). (Note that in the Monterroso story quoted above there ARE two characters, the guy and the dinosaur.)
The contest is open to any living, sentient being in the universe. It is not limited to people who are already on the blog or VCFA students or former students. Everyone is welcome, and also welcome to join in other conversations or suggest topics.
Entries will be accepted between September 1 and September 15, 2010 (midnight), and should be written in English (Gary) and attached as comments to this post (the usual practice at NC).
Remember the values we hold dear here at Numéro Cinq: WIT & ARROGANCE. Remember Gordon Lish’s phrase ATTACK SENTENCES!
P.S. Anyone who mentions the insidious phrase “flash fiction” will have his or her comment deleted from the blog. I mean this! Delete it from your minds. This is not a flash fiction contest.
dg