Salon.com > Denis Johnson

“The Name of the World”

Mon, 18 Dec 2000 17:38:00 +0000

After dessert, Ted took three or four of us up to a parapet above the house.

From the third floor a corkscrew staircase entered a dome on the roof, a curious structure like a glassed-in birdcage, about eight feet in diameter, say, and without illumination, so that the little group of us stood suddenly in the night, and in the sky. The weather had cleared, the snow had blown off the glass, and there were stars and moonlit, decorative clouds in the black heavens. "This used to be a sort of widow's walk," Ted explained, "but you can see it's been turned into -- well, I don't know what it was turned into, to tell you the truth. I bring people up here because I'm curious whether it's something with a recognizable purpose." None of us recognized its purpose. In the end, I was left up there to ponder it all with a woman named Heidi Franklin, a historian from the Art Department. A friendly but awkward woman, precise and despairing -- a homely woman, and I think I have license to make such a remark, because I'm homely, too, and older than she, so I was homely first. I'm cherubic, baby faced, past fifty but taken for years younger, with cheery blue eyes, and for all of that, homely. In the glittering dark we stood talking very softly, probably about the stars. Heidi may have been interested in a nightcap somewhere downtown; I might have been, too. That neither of us put out finger to the balance, so to speak, and urged it in that direction owed to a sense we probably shared, and I certainly felt, that we'd been left up here alone together by design. If I'd asked, I might have learned that she was single, as I was, or worse, maybe recently divorced, as I was recently widowed.

Denis Johnson’s “Hippies”

Wed, 04 Oct 2000 21:42:00 +0000

The Paris Review, "the biggest little magazine in history," was founded in 1953 by George Plmpton, Peter Matthiessen and Harold Humes. It has published some of the most important writers of the 20th century and remains in the literary vanguard today.

Its latest issue, No. 155, features "Hippies," an essay by Denis Johnson on the Rainbow Gathering festival. Johnson, the critically acclaimed author of "Jesus' Son" and "The Name of the World," will publish a collection of his nonfiction work, "Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond," next year.

To celebrate its latest issue, the magazine recently hosted a party at the Culture Project in New York. Plimpton, who continues to serve as editor, read from Johnson's essay, which explores ideas about drugs, friendship and alternative lifestyles then and now.

School is out

Wed, 01 Oct 1997 10:37:00 +0000

I really do look around at times with a little surge of bewilderment, even mild panic, at finding myself here in the middle of the dropout's dream, and it's teaching the kids at home that makes it all happen. Right at this moment, while other parents are starting the day's work and other kids the first week of school, I'm in my ragged bathrobe drinking tea and writing these very notes, and lounging on one couch while my daughter Lana, wrapped in an afghan on another, reads a French-Indian War novel called "Flame-Colored Taffeta" and my wife Cindy and son Dan play chess ... and when, in the interest of being specific for this article, I wonder out loud what time it is, nobody seems to know.

Personal Best: Fat City

Mon, 30 Sep 1996 10:25:00 +0000

exactly which year of the 1960s the book came out, I can't remember, but I remember well which year of my lifetime it was -- I was discovering that it wasn't a joke anymore, I was actually going to have to become a writer, I was too emotionally crippled for real work, there wasn't anything else I could do -- I was 18 or 19. Newsweek reviewed "Fat City," a first novel by Leonard Gardner, in a tone that seemed to drop the usual hype -- "It's good. It really is." I wanted to get a review like that.

I got the book and read about two Stockton, California boxers who live far outside the boxing myth and deep in the sorrow and beauty of human life, a book so precisely written and giving such value to its words that I felt I could almost read it with my fingers, like Braille.

The stories of Ernie Munger, a young fighter with frail but nevertheless burning hopes, and Billy Tully, an older pug with bad luck in and out of the ring, parallel one another through the book. Though the two men hardly meet, the tale blends the perspective on them until they seem to chart a single life of missteps and baffled love, Ernie its youth and Tully its future. I wanted to write a book like that.