Spotlight on … Rudy Wurlitzer Nog (1968)

 

‘Nog is the kind of novel that suffers from being called “experimental”. Actually, it is part of a clear, established tradition. I would place it between Samuel Beckett’s trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable) and Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street – closer to Beckett in spirit, to DeLillo in time.

‘The narrator of Nog, who may or may not be called Nog, shares with Beckett’s M-people a deep desire for inertia: “It is better to stay indoors and not mess around with useless experiences. A small room in a boarding house. Anonymous… Do nothing, want nothing, if you feel like walking, walk; sleeping, sleep.” With DeLillo’s Bucky Wunderlick, he shares an absurd paranoia: “I have nailed the pillowcase to the wall, as a sign or a flag. I asked for and I received a hammer and nail. It’s not safe here any more. And yet I am unable to creep out and establish some new space. Something has to happen, a new noise, a sense of something impending. Is it safe to say that?”

‘The whole performance, rap, trip, is highly self-conscious, ‘There are times when the voice of the narrator or the presence of the narrator should almost sing out.’ But never, or very rarely, annoyingly so. The hippyisms are kept to a minimum – which for a novel set in California in 1968 is stunningly restrained. In fact, it is the craft of the prose which redeems Nog. There is no sentence here of which Wurlitzer isn’t fully in control – he may not know exactly what its overall long-term effect will be, but this is very unwild writing.

‘The opening paragraph of Nog is one of the most carefully constructed I have ever read: ‘”Yesterday afternoon a girl walked by the window and stopped for sea shells. I was wrenched out of two months of calm. Nothing more than that, certainly, nothing ecstatic or even interesting, but very silent and even, as those periods have become for me. I had been breathing in and out, out and in, calmly, grateful for once to do just that, staring at the waves plopping in, successful at thinking almost nothing, handling easily the three memories I have manufactured, when that girl stooped for sea shells. There was something about her large breasts under her faded blue tee-shirt, the quick way she bent down, her firm legs in their rolled-up white jeans, her thin ankles – it was her feet, actually; they seemed for a brief, painful moment to be elegant. It was that thin-boned brittle movement with her feet that did it, that touched some spot that I had forgotten to smother. The way those thin feet remained planted, yet shifting slightly in the sand as she bent down quickly for a clam shell, sent my heart thumping, my mouth dry, no exaggeration, there was something gay and insane about that tiny gesture because it had nothing to do with her.'”

‘It was reading this passage convinced me I needed to read this book. I was at Waterstones Deansgate, in Manchester, and had just done a reading from Beatniks. I’d browsed a few other books, but Nog was the one which had caught me. When one of the booksellers told me I could choose any book I wanted from the shop, Nog was it.

‘A number of things came to mind whilst reading Nog: The Monkees’ film Head, Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue”, Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pascal, Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur, Charlie Chaplin. But it is very much its own book. “I bought the octopus, and for a year I travelled through the country with it.”‘ — Toby Litt

 

RW reads from ‘Nog’

 

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8 movies written by Rudy Wurlitzer

Trailer: Jim McBride’s ‘Glen and Randa’ (1971)

 

Trailer: Monte Hellman’s ‘Two Lane Blacktop’ (1971)

 

Trailer: Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ (1973)

 

Trailer: Alex Cox’s ‘Walker’ (1987)

 

Clip: Robert Frank and RW’s ‘Candy Mountain’ (1988)

 

Trailer: Volker Schlöndorff’s ‘Homo Faber’ (1991)

 

Trailer: Carroll Ballard’s ‘Wind’ (1992)

 

Trailer: Bernardo Bertolucci’s ‘Little Buddha’ (1993)

 

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Further

* Rudy Wurlitzer Matter Enterprises
* Rudy Wurlitzer @ IMDb
* RW interviewed @ The Chuck Palahniuk Site
* RW interviewed @ Pop Matters
* ‘The Countercultural Histories of Rudy Wurlitzer’ by Jonathan Rosenbaum
* ‘ON THE DRIFT: Rudy Wurlitzer and the Road to Nowhere’
* ‘The resurgence of Rudolph Wurlitzer’
* ‘How the West was Fun’
* ‘Dead Man was stolen?’
* RW ‘This Long Century’
* RW ‘Riding the Dharma Trail’
* ‘Early “Ghost Dog”‘ @ The Jim Jarmusch Page
* RW’s books @ Two Dollar Radio

 

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Rudy Wurlitzer interviewed by Scott McClanahan
from Ain’t it Cool News

 

Scott McClanahan: Screenwriters always talk about the concept of beats and tone. Usually these are tools that tend to make something more commercial. However, the tone of your screenplays are typically used to produce an unexpected emotional reaction from the audience. For instance, the whole car crash, grandma section from TWO LANE BLACKTOP, which creates this strange anxiety in the viewer. Do you think it’s important to undermine the audience’s typical expectations and maybe even leave them uncomfortable?

Rudolph Wurlitzer: I don’t know what screenwriters talk about, having met very few of the breed. In any case, I prefer not to be trapped into self conscious refrains about concepts of “beat and tone.” Of course, it’s always, one hopes, any artist’s intention to write something original, something that hasn’t been seen or experienced before, the theory being that if one surprises oneself, then possibly the audience might be surprised as well, one way or the other, even if it produces jeers and walk-aways. I never try to “undermine” or know about anyone’s expectations and don’t really care if folks are uncomfortable or even over the top with applause. The wonderful free-wheeling enthusiasms I experienced working with such originals as Monte Hellman, Hal Ashby, Robert Frank and Sam Peckinpah came from their encouragement to read something they had never read or experienced before. Of course, those days are long gone, slammed into oblivion by glassy-eyed marketing dudes, ignorant venal producers, self consciously academic film school imprints, insane pitches delivered inside corporate rooms crowded with cynical sales people obsessed with being secured by what they’ve already seen or read, and thus proved to be commercial, and so on … and on … perhaps that’s one of the reasons why I no longer feel it necessary to be represented by an L.A. agent for what essentially is a broken engine. At least, as it appears to me.

SM: A number of critics mention your work being linked to the European tradition of Bresson and Antonioni. This is probably because of the slower pace of your work. What does a slower pace create in a film? Why do you think the typical American audience rebels against this?

RW: I love Bresson and Antonioni – two maestros who followed the dictates and dynamics of a visual medium for its own sake. Their work is never slow for me. In fact, once inside the zone of their intuitive imaginations, I’m usually relieved of a sense of manipulated, linear time. A script I wrote years ago with Antonioni, TWO TELEGRAMS, the last one before his massive stroke which took him out of the game, has recently been optioned. So, I’ve been thinking about him lately – his ferocious uncompromising purity, the way his language was always sublimated to image, but was at the same time, always supportive, always resonant, and on the point, and how fearless he was in defending his vision. Of course, American audiences are increasingly manipulated by the lowest common denomination of banal escapist mono-culture, so independent artists, such as Bresson and Antonioni, could no longer exist in today’s paradigm and no doubt probably most corporate film honchos have barely heard of them, or if they did, they’re easily dismissed as being “not relevant.”

SM: You’re often looked at as a maverick in your portrayal of the frontier. For example, the frontier becomes a frontier of the mind rather than an actual physical place. But do you see yourself falling in a tradition of films about the American frontier? For example, WALKER could probably be viewed as the flipside to John Ford’s view of national expansion.

RW: Everything for me is a “frontier of the mind.” Which is not to say that I don’t love Ford’s THE SEARCHERS, and many of his films. But I try not to be saddled with a conceptual idea of “national expansion” involving any traditional historical period. Our myths of origins are inevitably invented, along with everything else in what passes for reality.

SM: How has the writing of screenplays influenced your fiction? I understand THE DROP EDGE OF YONDER started out as an idea for a screenplay, and even influenced Jim Jarmusch’s film DEAD MAN (“heavily” influenced from what I can see). For example, the chapters in the book are paced quite wonderfully. For all of our talk about your slow pacing, the novel zips along.

RW: The less said about Jarmusch’s pillage of my original script ZEBULON the better, a script that several directors, including Peckinpah and Ashby expressed interested in directing but who unfortunately died before the project could be realized. After all is said and ‘done’ about Jim Jarmusch, I ended up feeing strangely grateful to him for being ripped off because it made me circle back into my essential story and obsession with that time period, and I was able to rescue added layers and complex adventures that otherwise I wouldn’t have come up with. In the end, if one is lucky, which one hardly ever is, one becomes grateful for primal wounds, which are sadly often personal betrayals, but these wounds often propel one into the unknown beyond conventional boundaries as well as uncovering new ways of surviving and observing life’s inevitable tribulations. In the old days, I would slide off the grid enough to write a book and then pay for the privilege by writing a script, back and forth, for a while a great innocent rhythm, but then as the script scene became more corporate with the whole process becoming insanely labored and damaging as well as endlessly and uselessly taking too long, I drifted away, just to survive. As for my fiction, I’ve never thought of it as being “slow or fast paced.” The content and desperation to find out what one is thinking, determines the interior rhythms.

SM: The literary critic Harold Bloom talks about an “anxiety of influence” in the work of many writers. Would you talk about the influence of Samuel Beckett on your own work?

RW: Beckett has always been a major figure for me, so much so that I had to stop reading him for a number of years in order to survive. In the end, in order to go on, one has to discover one’s own language and voice, but recently I’ve been reading Beckett again, and remain stunned and blown away by his precisely evolved language and his extraordinary courage to address what can’t be addressed. When I was first in Paris a long time ago, I used to wander every evening over to a Montparnasse cafe and wait for Beckett to show up at his usual table. I was always too shy and nervous to speak or introduce myself to him, but I never tired of seeing him wait at his table, slowly having a drink until Giacometti sat down opposite him, and I would sit watching them as they silently drank for an hour or so, not saying a word to each other, until they stood up and shook hands and walked off towards their separate destinations.

(continued)

 

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Slow Fade: Rudy Wurlitzer & Will Oldham

‘Novelist and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, has joined forces with Chicago’s seminal independent record label, Drag City, to launch their new line of alternative audio books. His 1984 novel Slow Fade, is a portrait of a director descending into the dark side of the Hollywood film world. This audio release is narrated by singer songwriter, folk music legend, Will Oldham (Palace Brothers, Bonnie Prince Billy). Both Wurlitzer and Oldham participated in this unique literary event. The reading was accompanied by guitar player Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) and photographic projections by acclaimed photographer Lynn Davis.’ — Basilica Hudson

 

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Book

Rudy Wurlitzer Nog
Two Dollar Radio

‘Nog is a journey without end. A journey through Time past and Time present — a journey of one man without history, without tradition.

‘Nog is about a man riding through American Space, space that is vast and choked and silent. Space that one fills with obsessive monologues, disintegrating memories, hoped-for horizons, buried myths, paranoid plans. Nog rides through this space because that is what we do, that is the great and original promise, the central fact. He explores or suspects he might be exploring The Great Space. He tries to define it, to know he is in it, to embrace it, to settle it, to get through it, to be a witness to it . . . there is a terrible anguish about inhabiting space without a beginning or end. Memories disintegrate as fast as they are brought up. They become arbitrary. words are too fragmented, there is no locus, no safe symbols, no totems that don’t endlessly transform beyond our understanding, no relationships that aren’t brutalized by the speed with which we pass each other. All we know how to do is to keep on, loosed by our own momentum, going faster and faster. The road is brutal and energetic and frantic, and sometimes funny, and certainly insanely fast. There is hardly time to make notes.

‘This book begins in a small town on the coast of California, moves to San Francisco and the desert badlands of the Southwest, from there to Los Angeles through the Panama Canal to New York — and perhaps back again.’ — Two Dollar Radio

 

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Excerpt

Yesterday afternoon a girl walked by the window and stopped for sea shells. I was wrenched out of two months of calm. Nothing more than that, certainly, nothing ecstatic or even interesting, but very silent and even, as those periods have become for me. I had been breathing in and out, out and in, calmly, grateful for once to do just that, staring at the waves plopping in, successful at thinking almost nothing, handling easily the three memories I have manufactured, when that girl stooped for sea shells. There was something about her large breasts under her faded blue tee shirt, the quick way she bent down, her firm legs in their rolled-up white jeans, her thin ankles – it was her feet, actually; they seemed for a brief, painful moment to be elegant. It was that thin-boned brittle movement with her feet that did it, that touched some spot that I had forgotten to smother. The way those thin feet remained planted, yet shifting slightly in the sand as she bent down quickly for a clam shell, sent my heart thumping, my mouth dry, no exaggeration, there was something gay and insane about that tiny gesture because it had nothing to do with her.

I went to Smitty’s, a roadhouse a quarter of a mile down the beach. When I came back, she was gone. I could not sit in my room. The walls closed in on me. I could see the walls closing in on me, and my situation, if that is what it is, a situation, seemed suddenly so dull and hopeless; this cheap thrown-together guest house of imitation redwood on the California coast with its smell of mold and bad plumbing, the inane view from my window of driftwood and seaweed, flat predictable waves, corny writings in the sand, pot-bellied fishermen and bronzed godlike volleyball players. I had to pull out, I thought, I was beginning to notice things, lists were forming, comparisons were on the way. And now I don’t have the octopus. I suppose that is what there is to tell about. Then I’ll move on. Last night there was a storm, and I abandoned the octopus. I didn’t really abandon the octopus, it’s still in the bathysphere on the truck bed, and the truck bed is still up on blocks, but it’s not the same any more. I’m going to move on alone.

I have money and I can make money. I want to say that now. I’m no reprobate, nor am I a drain on anyone. My great aunt left me two thousand a year, and I have, or had, an octopus and a truck. A man sold me the octopus and truck in Oregon. I met him in a bar in one of those logging towns on the Coast where the only attractive spot is the village dump, which at least has the advantage of facing the sea. Nog, he was apparently of Finnish extraction, was one of those semi-religious lunatics you see wandering around the Sierras on bread and tea, or gulping down peyote in Nevada with the Indians. He was dressed in black motorcycle boots, jeans and an old army shirt with sergeant chevrons still on the sleeves. His face was lean and hatchet-edged, with huge fuzzy eyes sunk deep in his skull like bullet holes. He kept complaining about a yellow light that had lately been streaming out of his chest from a spot the size of a half dollar. We drank and talked about the spot and the small burning sensation it gave him early in the morning and about his octopus. He had become disillusioned about traveling with the octopus and had begun having aggressive dreams about it. He wanted to sell it. We bought a bottle and walked out beyond the town into logged-off hills that looked like old battlefields. A low mist hung over a struggling second growth of redwood and Douglas fir. The tracks of giant caterpillar tractors wound everywhere. Pits and ditches were scattered about like shell holes. Thousands of frogs croaked and salamanders hung suspended between lids of green slime and rotting logs. I felt vaguely elated, like a witness to some ancient slaughter.

Nog lived in what had once been a water tank in the middle of a rough field. The octopus was there, all right. It was sitting inside a bathysphere on a truck bed. Nog had built a mold out of plaster of Paris for the tentacles and another one for the obese body with its parrot-like beak and bulging eyes. Then he had poured liquid latex rubber into the molds. The bathysphere was carefully fashioned out of a large butane gas tank and stolen pieces of metal from a nearby bridge. There were three portholes from which you could watch the octopus move its eight tentacles around in the bubbling water. Nog had been traveling to all the state and county fairs through the West and Midwest, charging kids a dime and adults a quarter. Most people believed the octopus was real, but whenever there was a loud doubt Nog would tell them the truth. He would never give money back, and occasionally there would be fights. In Bird City, Utah, the bathysphere had been tipped over by three men who had just been on a losing softball team. He was weary of the whole thing, he kept repeating. We sat down on a bench in front of his house, and he filled me in on octopus lore. The crowd appreciated the devilfish myth the most, and it was important to tell them how dangerous octopi are and how they can drown and mangle a human or sink a small boat. One should never tell them the truth, which is that octopi are quite friendly. I refused any more information. We sat quietly and it grew dark. Finally Nog said that he had stopped knowing how to entertain himself. He said he guessed that was my trouble, too, but that I should take a chance with the octopus. He suggested I transform it into a totem that I didn’t mind seeing every day.

I bought the octopus, and for a year I traveled through the country with it.

Nog is not quite clear enough. I have to invent more. It always comes down to that. I never get a chance to rest. I have never been able, for instance, to understand the yellow light streaming from his chest. But now that the octopus has faded away, Nog might emerge into a clearer focus. Those were sentimental and fuzzy days, those trips through the West with the octopus, and sometimes I find myself wishing more of it were true. (I find, when I ruminate like this, that I invent a great deal of my memories – three now, to be exact – because otherwise I have trouble getting interested.) But I have gotten faster with myself and more even-tempered since I met Nog. Perhaps not even-tempered but certainly more dulcet. I think about trips, bits and pieces of trips, but I no longer try and put anything together (my mind has become blessedly slower), nor do I try as much to invent a suitable character who can handle the fragments. But I don’t want to get into all that. There is always the danger that I might become impressed by what once was a misplaced decision for solitude.

I’m thinking about trying the East. I will go to New York and get a small room on the top of a hotel.

When I was on the road with the octopus I did a lot of reminiscing about New York. New York was, in fact, my favorite memory for four or five months, until it got out of hand and I had to drop it. I lived in a comfortable duplex apartment on top of an old hotel overlooking a small park and harbor. I was sort of an erotic spy on myself then, but managed to survive, at least for those four or five months, by keeping an alert and fastidious watch on the terrifying view outside. I watched ships glide and push into huge docks, and far below, through silvery leaves, the quiet violence in the park. At night I stayed up with the fantastic lights of cars and subways as they flowed over the concrete ramps that weaved around the hotel. I lived precariously in the center of brutal combinations of energy, and gradually, as I closed in on myself, the bridges transformed into massive spider webs imprisoning the subways as they rumbled like mechanical snakes across the black river. The subways shot off green and yellow sparks in defense, in specific relays of time, always getting through. I had to drop that memory. But now, with more miles and memories in control, I might attempt New York.

(continued)

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, my coat is nearly constant companion again, yes! I fantasise sometimes that I’ve been unknowingly learning French just from being here, and I wake up one day and, bang, I’m fluent. I actually do have a friend who’s insanely obsessed with Heath Ledger. Unique guy. I of course optimistically think that all those animals died of natural causes, but my logical side says, What are the odds of that? Thank you for the playing-it-safe gift. Love giving me salt water taffy because I really want some, G. ** Misanthrope, Hey. Franzen was such the big literary bugaboo for a while there. That was fun, but I don’t miss it. Best of luck to David with his self-shaping. ** Dee Kilroy, Ah, thank you! I’ll, uh, go give it its identity. Eagle eye. I was there for at least the waning days of the ‘Cruising’ era in NYC, and I have to say I think there’s a shitload of over-orchestrating nostalgia going on re: that. But that wasn’t my thing. I do miss the hustler bars though. I will watch ‘Stranger By The Lake’. It’s been a goal for going on forever. The ‘Frisk’ film is miserable. From the little I’ve seen, no, nothing of interest in Verow’s other films unless you crave very soft-edgy conventional homoerotic blah. We’re applying for funding for the film in numerous places, but, for now, for the festival submissions, we are bereft and having to try to fake it. ‘Safe’? I would recommend he start a little later in my oeuvre. That one’s a little … early. The middle section ‘My Mark’ is pretty good. But cool. Thanks! Stay moist as opposed to drenched. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha, the ultimate taxidermy. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thank you, whew! Horse racing. Have you ever been to a horse race? I went twice, I think. Very odd experience. The super ‘into it’ crowd was very interesting. ** Cody Goodnight, Hi. I’m ok today, thanks. My grandmother was a taxidermist, and she gave us taxidermy animals all the time, so I grew up immune to their horrifying aspect. I only really fully like ‘El Topo’. ‘Holy Mountain’s’ set-pieces are impressive though. I mean that he set those insanely extravagant sets and decor for a 10 second-long shot. Crazy. I’ll be editing all day today, so that’s my day, and it should be pretty alright. I hope you found a beloved new album. ** Nick., Me too. When I found my 10:30-ish to bed, 6:30-ish to wake up schedule, everything fell into place. Dude, FI, so boring, seriously, trust me. If I was forced to go to a beach-y gay mecca, I’d choose Provincetown even though I have less than zero interest in going there (again) ever. Did you get de-bored? ** Charalampos, Then I’ll try to remember not to mention Brandy around you. Should be pretty easy. Good luck on your Athens trip today. I still feel really bad that Coil and Lee Ranaldo did all that effort to do the score for that stupid film. They did it as a favor to me back before the shoot when I still hoped it would be good. I apologised to them, but they were cool about it. I’m sure killer poems are bubbling inside you. Patience, I guess. Vibes of a positive nature from Paris. ** Darby🐿, Hi. I don’t mind feeding that addiction. You sound like you know your stuff. Hats off. My grandmother was a taxidermist, as I mentioned up above. Our house was full of stuffed animals when I was growing up. Birds, lizards, coyotes, tigers, even a bear. They all rotted away, so I think maybe she wasn’t the best taxidermist. Your mom doesn’t have to know, does she? ** Billy, Hi! Oh my god, what an amazing story! Thank you a ton. I’m going get that into the blog somehow if it’s the last thing I do. Happy day. What’s good? ** Mark Stephens, Mark, old buddy!!!!!! Love, love, love. I’d hoped to see you guys when Zac and I were there getting ready for the film and shooting it, but it was a full-time 24/7 job, it turned out. But I’m pretty sure I’m coming back for good old Halloween! Then: you + Julie + me = a fucking must. You good? Miss you big time, my pal! <3 ** Steve Erickson, When Ru Paul was still part of the Atlanta scene and doing stuff with Pop Tarts and Deaundra Peek and all of those amazing, weird Atlanta drag artists, she was pretty fun, yeah. Sally Rooney, right, and there’s another lit bugaboo too, but I can’t remember the name. ** John Newton, Hi. I saw that Body Art show when it was in LA. No, I would never donate my remains to them or to anyone, no. You? Um, I wouldn’t say my friend went full-on psychotic with me ever. I think he must’ve at the very end of his life because he did some quite awful stuff. I guess my crystal phase was maybe, I don’t know, 6 months? It was in Holland. It was called Pep there. Crystallised powder, snortable. Ecstasy had the seemingly classical effect of making me feel blissed out and enraptured by everything and everyone around me. But that was back when Ecstasy was still quite pure. Oh, man, I’d have to give a big think about the recommended presses. There are really so many, and it would depend on what kind of work a writer does since most of them have some kind of bent/preference. I was really tall as a kid, and I was going to porn bookstores with no problem starting when I was about 13. I didn’t know about Zampogna. That’s very interesting, thanks. There’s one very good Mexican restaurant in Paris, and one or two doable ones. I go there. Or to one of Paris’s two Chipotles. I don’t cook, I microwave, and there’s no microwaveable Mexican food here. I was just being glib about doctors. I just meant that when I see a doctor I automatically trust them and think they know what’s wrong and how to fix it. My health’s pretty good, yeah. I’m lucky. Thanks! ** Okay. I’m spotlighting an early novel by the wonderful, psychedelic-ish prose stylist/novelist Rudy Wurlitzer, and obviously I recommend you give it your attention. See you tomorrow.