“The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change" (2007)

I liked this long story with the long title by Kij Johnson a lot. It’s perfectly unclear about some things—notably, “the Change”—but highly specific about other things, such as oral storytelling traditions of domesticated dogs. After the Change, domesticated animals can talk. It’s part of the Change. The result for many dogs (as well as other household and farm pets) is to be rejected and abandoned by their owners or caretakers. Johnson is likening their situations in some ways to slavery, which doesn’t entirely work, but she pays close attention to the way pets are often abused. Whether it’s “good training” or just lost temper episodes doesn’t matter as much now that they evidently have something to say about it. It’s somehow just not going well with many people. I like the way Johnson boils it down to primary evolutionary terms, the latest chapter in the uneasy alliance between wolves and monkeys. There’s a lot of natural pathos to this story too, as domesticated dogs are much closer to “cute” and further from their fiercer wolf origins. Johnson ducks what these dogs are saying that is so upsetting to people, which is probably the wise course. Anything specific could well have been disappointing. It’s enough to know they are being abandoned in large numbers. The really great part of this story are the stories the dogs tell. They come across like ancient myths, with certain tics and conventions always observed. The story is always about One Dog and the first sentence is always, “This is the same dog.” They’re numbered, starting with #2. A lot of odd business here and some quirks of style. The story is very big and very focused all at once, with vignettes from the history of monkeys and wolves. I found it in the Edited By anthology edited by Ellen Datlow, a kind of retrospective or self-selected greatest hits from Datlow’s long and prolific editing career. In turn, this story was published originally in a 2007 themed anthology called The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, edited by Datlow and her long-time Year’s Best partner Terri Windling. I like how Johnson really fell all over it and how a themed anthology sparked one of the best stories from this century I’ve read yet. Caveat: I haven’t read that many stories from this century yet. But this is a good one—eerie, funny, heartbreaking, and effective. I also have to agree with Datlow’s afterword: “Here is where you find out that I’m a sucker for animal stories, especially bittersweet ones.”

Edited By, ed. Ellen Datlow
Read and/or listen to story online.

"Emergency" (1991)

Read story by Denis Johnson online.

Denis Johnson's story takes place, loosely speaking, in a hospital emergency room, where the orderly and ward clerk on duty steal drugs, enter Hunter Thompson mental states, and carry on. The ward clerk is also the first-person narrator (unnamed). You feel reverberations of Ken Kesey in the setting, and of Thompson in the drug effects. The nurse on duty ("Nurse") is a better person that Nurse Ratched, but not by much. The doctors are busy and officious. The emergency room is generally slow, there's not much happening, which makes it seem more unlikely and closer to metaphorical, and that might weaken it a little. I would be surprised if this isn't based on Johnson's life experience—the hospital setting feels right in many ways. But then come emergencies that feel suspiciously like urban legends. A man shows up with a knife plunged to the hilt into his head above one eye. He says his vision is not affected but he can't make a fist. His and everyone's thought is brain damage. But the anecdote turns out to be little more than another joke about Georgie, the orderly, who is as close as this episodic story gets to a main character. He's high as a naked jaybird and hallucinating, operating on instincts which comically prove out. I liked the story a little more when it left the hospital. The events it recounts are not believable, but I hung with the suspension of disbelief, and was rewarded by indulgent images and flights that somehow work, such as coming upon a drive-in theater in a winter storm, where the movie plays to no one. In his collection that includes this story, Jesus' Son, Johnson is like the Nick Tosches of fiction writers; or maybe that should be that Tosches is the Denis Johnson of rock critics. He's erratic. He's wild. His punches often miss. But when they land they make a serious impact—life-changing, in small fragmented ways, but life-changing. With this particular story, for me, it's more the art. It's small-scale in impact, but real too. I think there's better in Jesus' Son. Yet for every cooptation of Kesey or Hunter Thompson, there's language that surpasses even what they did, with an imagination fiercer and more enveloping. Raymond Carver is another obvious source. It's the details that tell, not the lunacy. It's the getting lost, not the drugs. The hospital is there because it has to be a hospital, because of the necessity of grounding Georgie's closing declaration in something tangible. A hitchhiker they have picked up asks Georgie what he does. "I save lives," he says. It's a joke but it's also true. And it's true in many different ways—just as it's also untrue in many different ways.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

Tree of Smoke (2007)

I wonder if there are others like me when it comes to novelist, story writer, and poet Denis Johnson. I really loved his story collection of 1992, Jesus' Son, but never found a novel I could finish until I made a project of this one. I was happy to see critical regard coalescing around it (National Book Award winner, Pulitzer finalist, etc.), but the first thing that surprised me is that it's about Vietnam, which seemed to belong to another era altogether in 2007. Born in 1949, Johnson is of the generation. His father worked for the State Department and the family lived abroad and moved frequently. He's done his homework too. But in many ways there's nothing new or interesting going on in Tree of Smoke—it's the usual familiar business of the hallucinatory dangerous conditions on the ground and the knavery of those calling the shots. That's deepened here with spies and spooks missions that read as plausible enough, and it's caustically humorous in its treatment of anticommunism thinking and cant. The "tree of smoke" term itself could tantalizingly be anything, as Johnson takes pains to spell out: a bible verse (Book of Joel, and elsewhere), a wartime scene, the dread mushroom cloud of course, or the maddening vaporous insubstantialities which are too often the basis of life and death—"mistakes were made," and like that. Johnson's language is in good form: studied, precise, lancing, vivid. But I kept getting an undertowing sense that the setting and scene work against this novel. A good novel is always good, but somehow I wonder if this wouldn't have been more effective published 20 years or more earlier. That's a terrible question to ask and one for history to decide anyway. Tree of Smoke is populated with interesting, mysterious characters we have met before, in the movies The Year of Living Dangerously and Apocalypse Now, and in Michael Herr's collection of journalism, Dispatches. Johnson cleverly covers himself with the explicit discussion of the "tree of smoke" term as metaphor, by name-checking both The Ugly American and The Quiet American, and by otherwise finding ways to step aside from the action and acknowledge its overfamiliarity with a casual shrug. Yeah, we've been here before, he seems to be saying, which might have been a provocative statement to make in 2007 on another very obvious level, one played to quite directly. So there's the motivation, I suppose—Iraq. What's a novelist to do? But are subtlety and nuance the way to make the point? Maybe so, judging by the favorable reception. Maybe so. But it also reminds me a little of Paul Krugman and Barack Obama winning Nobel Prizes. Not quite playing to the right audience in the right way to accomplish your goals, but appreciate the sentiment.

In case it's not at the library.

A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971)

(Uncorrected short version here.)

A Tribute to Jack Johnson is a great example of "electric Miles," a late phase of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis's career begun in 1968 with In a Silent Way. Electric Miles not only wired and amped up his icy attitude and complex sound, but began looking to more contemporary sources as well, such as Sly Stone and James Brown, for the self-conscious explorations of identity that provide so much urgency here, still, for this and for so much of his work from the time, at once operating inside a tradition and yet feverishly innovating and expanding it. This album is well known, much loved, and there's not a lot I can add except to echo the sentiment that it's one of the greatest albums ever made, jazz or rock, and you should probably go listen to it right off.

Making History (1983)

Linton Kwesi Johnson's great moment—or at least the one I happen to know best—is out of print now and looks to have become a pricy collector's item, so I recommend the Independant Intavenshan anthology, which contains all of the tracks from Making History and 28 more besides. Absolutely worth it. Widely characterized as a "dub poet," which is close enough—the musical accompaniment is heavily atmospheric strains of Jamaica and Johnson is a highly regarded poet (published in the Penguin Modern Classics collection). This is another album, I have since figured out, that we all seemed to have found out about from the "A" Robert Christgau gave it, so credit due thatwise. It actually bears a fair amount of musical variety across its seven tracks—including one, "Reggae Fi Radni," that sounds plucked from parts of Nino Rota's soundtrack for the Godfather movies. The last track ("New Crass Massahkah") settles into unaccompanied vocal recitation, spacing out its simple musical statements. The first four songs, which are as good as it gets, work lively, satisfying strains on uptempo grooves. On all of them Johnson steps in reciting polemic in a thick, deep patois, which can be heard as musical itself, blending in nicely, but is difficult to understand. Certain fragments swim up unmistakably: "Di eagle an' di bear people livin' in fear of impending nuclear war fear," "From England to Poland / Every step across di ocean / The ruling class is dem is in a mess, oh yes / Di capitalist system are regress / But di Soviet system nah progress / So which one of dem yuh think is best," and "it was in april nineteen eighty wan / doun inna di ghetto of Brixtan" (the latter available in full at The Poetry Archive). Well, we already knew the drift from the song titles: "Di Eagle an di Bear," "Wat About di Workin' Class?," "Di Great Insohreckshan." And we knew the level of ambition from the title of the album. What was harder to guess was how musically it would be delivered. Until that last track, this thing moves with propulsive force. Perhaps some drag to the vocal, it can be rumbling and monotonous, but the charge of the words as they clarify counterbalances that well, for me at least, and there is an amazing force to the album sustained surprisingly well.