30 Words on Denis Johnson

for Jim Dikel

"There isn't an American voice I love listening to more than Denis Johnson's"-Michael Herr

Denis Johnson

Biographical information from enotes.com:

Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany, to Vera Childress Johnson and Alfred Nair Johnson. His father worked for the United States Information Agency, which took the family overseas to Tokyo during Johnson's childhood and to Manila in his adolescence. Johnson completed his high school education in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1967. Already an aspiring writer, he applied to the University of Iowa, well-known for its creative writing program, where he completed his bachelor's degree in 1971 and a master of fine arts degree in 1974 under the tutelage of poet Marvin Bell. Johnson published his first book of poetry, The Man among the Seals (1969), while still an undergraduate. After leaving Iowa, Johnson taught briefly at Lake Forest College in Chicago but, finding academic life dissatisfying, he resigned and left for Washington, where he worked odd jobs in the Seattle area. After the publication of his second poetry collection, Inner Weather (1976), Johnson sought treatment for alcohol and heroin addiction. He subsequently worked as a teacher at the Arizona State Prison in Florence. After receiving a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1981, Johnson resettled in Cape Cod, where he completed The Incognito Lounge and his first three novels—Angels (1983), Fiskadoro (1985), and The Stars at Noon (1986). During the mid-1980s, Johnson relocated to Gualala, California, and later found a new home in northern Idaho near the Kanishu National Forest in 1989.

Johnson maintains a strong interest in contemporary music and film and has acknowledged the influence of musicians Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix, and painter Edward Hopper. He has received considerable recognition for his writing, including a National Poetry Series award for The Incognito Lounge, an American Academy Kaufman prize for Angels, the Whiting Foundation award in 1986, a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1993, and a PEN/Faulkner award nomination for The Name of the World (2000).

Complete Biography:

http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/johnson-denis

FICTION:

Nobody Move '09

From The New York Times: Arts, Briefly
Channeling Noir, Dickens-Style
Compiled by Ben Sisario:
Published: June 11, 2008

Last year Tree of Smoke, a sweeping novel by Denis Johnson, about the Vietnam War, won the National Book Award for fiction, and this year it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.But Mr. Johnson is not resting easy. Beginning with its July issue, which arrives at newsstands on Friday, Playboy will publish his next novel, Nobody Move, in four monthly installments of 10,000 words each, to be written on deadline each month through the October issue. The magazine described Nobody Move as a hard-boiled noir in the style of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but Mr. Johnson said he was also inspired by an earlier writer. “I’ve always admired Charles Dickens, who wrote big, involved novels in monthly installments,” he said in a statement, “and I wanted to find out what it was like. It’s a little nerve-racking.”

From The New Yorker:

So noir it’s almost pitch-black, this follow-up to Johnson’s National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke concerns a lovable loser named Luntz—barbershop-chorus member, Hawaiian-shirt wearer, and inveterate gambler—who is in debt to an underworld bad guy. “My idea of a health trip is switching to menthols and getting a tan,” he tells Anita Desilvera, a beautiful Native American woman whom he beds after a boozy night out, and who has bad guys of her own to escape.

Tree of Smoke '07

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
From Amazon Editors’ review by Tom Nissley:

Denis Johnson is one of those few great hopes of American writing, fully capable of pulling out a ground-changing masterpiece, as he did in 1992 with the now-legendary collection, Jesus' Son. Tree of Smoke showed every sign of being his "big book": 600+ pages, years in the making, with a grand subject (the Vietnam War). And in the reading it lives up to every promise. It's crowded with the desperate people, always short of salvation, who are Johnson's specialty, but despite every temptation of the Vietnam dreamscape it is relentlessly sober in its attention to on-the-ground details and the gradations of psychology. Not one of its 614 pages lacks a sentence or an observation that could set you back on your heels. This is the book Johnson fans have been waiting for—along with everybody else, whether they knew it or not.

From the novel Tree of Smoke:

Viet Nam

I bought a pair of Ray Bans from the Devil
and a lighter said Tu Do Bar 69
Cold Beer Hot Girl Sorry About That Chief
Man that Zippo got it all across

Man when I'm in my grave don't wanna go to Heaven
Just wanna lie there looking up at Heaven
All I gotta do is see the motherfucker
You don't need to put me in it

Turn the gas on in my cage
I drink the poison
Send me an assassin
I drink the poison
Dead demons in my guts
I drink the poison

I drink the poison
I drink the poison
And I'm still laughin

By Denis Johnson

Train Dreams '02

Originally published in The Paris Review-Summer 2002
Selected by and published in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003
(O Henry Awards) edited by Laura Furman:

This anthology contains Train Dreams, a novella set in the American West in the early 20th Century and the best thing Johnson has done in years.




The Name of the World '00

Nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

From: Fantastic Fiction UK:

Michael Reed is a man going through the motions, numbed by the death of his wife and child. But when events force him to act as if he cares, he begins to find people who - against all expectation - help him through his private labyrinth. Poignant and beautiful, The Name of the World is a tour de force by one of the most astonishing writers at work today.

Already Dead: A California Gothic '98

From Booklist:

Johnson's northern California is a gothic land peopled by the emotionally damaged, the walking wounded, veterans of wars and drugs and drug deals gone bad; it is a coast inhabited by real spirits and lost souls, madmen and hitmen.

From Salon, by Gary Kamiya, Aug. 8, 1997:

“Without a lot of supporting evidence, Johnson refuses to despair, and his tough, compassionate vision illuminates the place where we all make our stand, or where we run, or just wait. Right here. Real Life now.”

Jesus' Son: Stories '92

From Publishers Weekly:

Taking its title from a line in Lou Reed's notorious song Heroin, ("When I'm rushing on my run / And I feel just like Jesus' son"), this story collection by with-it novelist Johnson focuses on the familiar themes of addiction and recovery.

From the Poetry Foundation:

Jesus' Son received numerous positive reviews. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani lauded Johnson's "dazzling gift for poetic language, his natural instinct for metaphor and wordplay." The Nation reviewer Marianne Wiggins found that "reading these stories is like reading ticker tape from the subconscious."

Interestingly, Johnson, himself a recovered drug and alcohol addict, was at first reluctant to publish the collection, even though most of the stories had already appeared in various periodicals. He considered the work too autobiographical, too personal. As he remarked to a Washington Post interviewer in 1993, "The reason I wasn't publishing them is I didn't want people to say, 'Oh, look at this guy!' But I don't think we really have the right to make decisions like that. Authors should think of themselves as dead."



Resuscitation of a Hanged Man '91

Resuscitation of a Hanged Man revolves around Lenny English, a former medical instrument salesman who leaves Kansas after a failed suicide attempt and subsequently takes a job in the resort town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, as a disc jockey and private investigator.

From the Kirkus Review:

A cosmically charged fiction that combines hard-boiled theology and a redeeming wit—the perfect spiritual tonic for tough time.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

An utterly brilliant and original talent, a novelist who reminds us just how wonderful fiction can be.

Author photograph by Robert Miller

The Stars at Noon '86

From the Poetry Foundation:

Set in 1984 in Managua, Nicaragua, the story revolves around the activities of its self-destructive narrator—a "North American female prostitute-drifter with a press card, which has been revoked"—and her lover, referred to only as "the Englishman," who is on the run after passing Costa Rican industrial secrets to the Sandinistas.

Fiskadoro '85

From The Washington Post:

A marvelous book, beautifully written and constantly entertaining. . . . With it Johnson firmly establishes his place as one of the very best contemporary writers. He is a wonderful storyteller, and if at times Fiskadoro seems a mixture of Samuel Beckett, Phillip K. Dick and Road Warrior, that is only to his credit.

From the Poetry Foundation:

In his second novel, Fiskadoro, Johnson wrote of life after a nuclear holocaust. Set in the near future, Fiskadoro presents a world of mutants, primitive fisherman and traders.

Critics have noted a variety of influences on Johnson's work, particularly his fiction—one critic compares Fiskadoro to both Samuel Beckett's work and reggae music. In The New York Times Book Review, Johnson acknowledged an eccentric assortment of influences ranging from the writings of Robert Stone and Flannery O'Connor to the songs of Bob Dylan and the music of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. Johnson added: "Other influences come and go, but those I admire the most and those I admired the earliest . . . have something to say in every line I write."



Angels '83

From the Poetry Foundation:

Johnson followed the poetry collection The Incognito Lounge with his first novel, Angels, which tells of two desperate characters—Jamie and Bill—and their decline into crime.

"A small masterpiece... prose of amazing power and stylishness."

—Philip Roth

NON FICTION:

Homeless And High '02
by Denis Johnson

The New Yorker

Issue of 2002-04-22 and 29

http://web.archive.org/web/20051024061745/http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/020422fa_FACT5

Seek: Reports from the Edge of America & Beyond '01

From Publishers Weekly:

As a fiction writer and poet, Johnson is known for his surreal portraits of the dispossessed lurking at the fringes of American Life: the drifters, the jobless, the junkies and midnight DJ's. In this collection of 11 essays, which brings together pieces written over a 20-year period, he prefers to look at how those same individuals band together to form a new, often threatening identity. His America is peopled with Christian Bikers in Texas, Alaskan frontiersmen, hippies both young and old, and right-wing militia members, all striving to create a life apart from the values associated with the mainstream middle-class.

photo by Cindy Johnson

School is Out '97
By Denis Johnson

Why I Teach My Kids at Home.

Salon:

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/1997/10/01school.html

POETRY:

The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly:
Poems Collected and New '95

Titled after the monumental creation of custodian James Hampton, who built the "Throne" over a period of years from junk and scraps gleaned from federal government offices. At the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Amazon, By A Customer:

“Doubtless, Denis Johnson is an extraordinary writer of fiction: his stories and novels are terrifying, delightful, hilarious, and bleak. But it remains, even in the prose, the quality of the language, the strange otherworldly perceptions he distills to image and figure, that drives the work. Jesus’ Son is a great work, as is Angels. The other novels and stories would be enough to give him a reputation as a first rate writer. But the poems! That's where he started, and if you want to see how he got where fiction has taken him, go to the poems. It's not like any other poetry. He's a kind of dark, dwarf Rilke, a kind of misbegotten, doesn't-want-to-be-bad-but-can't-help-it Neruda.”



The Veil '87

From enotes.com:

The Veil contains cultural satire as well as self-analysis, describing strange facets of American culture while sounding like a transcript from a hallucination. As in his earlier poetry, Johnson assumes unusual points of view in this work, including the voices of a mental hospital inmate, a gas station attendant, and a drug-addicted monk. The volume consists of stylistically diverse poems marked by their vivid imagery, esoteric vocabulary, and frequent shifts from colloquial to abstract language.

The Incognito Lounge '82

From The New York Times Book Review, November 21, 2004
The Poetry Symposium by Jorie Graham:

''The center of the world is closed,'' Denis Johnson writes in the title poem of his seminal collection The Incognito Lounge: And Other Poems (Random House, 1982), ''The Beehive, the 8-Ball, the Yo-Yo, / the Granite and the Lightning and the Melody. / Only the Incognito Lounge is open.'' Although they seem random, and might have been so in the hands of a lesser poet, each of these names has crucial meaning to disclose: the wisdoms of nature, of the archaic, of chance, of mathematics, of sacred texts, of transcendent forces, of song, of the epiphanic as such, are all closed to us. The only way through this ''night'' is to go without name, without face, to go, spiritually, off the grid."

Complete Essay:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/books/review/21SYMPOSI.html?_r=3&pagewanted=2&sq=jorie%20grahm%20on%20denis%20johnson&st=cse&scp=1

Inner Weather '76

From enotes.com:

Inner Weather is a slim collection of fifteen poems in which Johnson tempered his stylistic experiments while continuing to probe the despair of everyday individuals, including characters such as train commuters, insomniacs, divorcees, and a debt-ridden writer.

The Man Among the Seals '69

From the Poetry Foundation:

Denis Johnson's poems and novels provide candid, slice-of-life perspectives on offbeat subjects. In his first verse collection, The Man Among the Seals, published when he was 19 years old, he included poems about a man imagining an auto mishap and one speculating about the lives of two mice trapped in mousetraps.

PLAYS:


Shoppers: Two Plays by Denis Johnson '02

In 2002, Johnson published Shoppers, a collection of two of his plays, Hellhound on My Trail and Shoppers Carried by Escalators into the Flames. Both plays focus on flawed lead characters who inhabit the American West.

From Library Journal:

The author of short stories (Jesus' Son) and novels (e.g., The Name of the World), Johnson is also playwright-in-residence at the Campo Santo Theater Company at San Francisco's Intersection for the Arts.

When Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames was performed in San Francisco in 2001, The Chronicle said, There's an enormous appeal in Johnson's bleak-comic vision of a semi-mythic American West. That appeal derives from the author's perfect vision of imperfection, embodied with such energy and courage in these marvelous pieces of theatre.


Additional Material:

DVD: Jesus' Son '99

Adapted for the screen, the film was named one of the top ten films of 1999 by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Roger Ebert and others.

In Alison MacLean’s movie of the book, Johnson plays the patient with the eye wound:

DVD: HIT ME '96

An Amazon list author:

A film noir adaptation of Jim Thompson's A Swell-Looking Babe, with a script by Johnson. Pretty good. Features one of Elias Koteas’ best performances.

CD: Inhabiting the Ball by Jim Roll '02

From All Music Guide by Matt Fink:

“This album features songs co-written with two of Roll's favorite modern authors, Dennis Johnson (Jesus' Son) and Rick Moody (The Ice Storm) and was very well-received. It was named in the top ten on Amazon editors' Best of 2002 rock list, among others.”


Interview: San Francisco Reader '03
Andrea Clark interviews Denis Johnson:

Clark: "A recent review in the New Yorker about writing under the influence describes the whole genre of drug literature as remarkable only in its mediocrity—with one exception: Jesus' Son."

Johnson: "I was straight when I wrote that; I didn't write it under the influence. I don't know how you can. I mean, your hands get real big. How could you type? Did they say I was under the influence? I think it's silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they'd like to think that, I'd like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus' Son and I just didn't know it."

Interview: S.F. Weekly '03

Poet of the Fallen World

How an S.F. theater troupe helped turn a reclusive novelist into a full-fledged playwright.

http://www.radiofreemike.com/johnson.html

Denis Johnson reading at Cornell University, April 16, 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbdVKF-TuII&feature=related

Additional reviews in The NY Times Book Review:

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/features/books/bookreviews/index.html?query=JOHNSON, DENIS&field=per&match=exact

OUR SADNESS

Denis Johnson 1999

There’s a sadness about looking back when you get to the end:
a sadness that waits at the end of the street,
a cigaret that glows with the glow of sadness
and a cop in a yellow raincoat who says It’s late,
it’s late, it’s sadness.

And it’s a sadness what they’ve done to the women I loved:
they turned Julie into her own mother, and Ruthe--
and Ruthe I understand has been turned
into a sadness...

And when it comes time
for all of humanity to witness what it’s done
and every television is trained on the first people to see God and
they say
Houston,
we have ignition,
they won’t have ignition.

They’ll have a music of wet streets
and lonely bars where piano notes
follow themselves into a forest of pity and are lost.
They’ll have sadness.
They’ll have
sadness, sadness, sadness.

Thanks to Jessie Dunn-Gilbert & Scott Alumbaugh,
(sea@seadogdesigns) for edit, design & support. ♥

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