by Tim Garvin | Essay
In 2010, James Ellroy and Otto Penzler edited an anthology of noir fiction, The Best American Noir of the Century. A writer for the New Yorker asked Penzler what accounted for the popularity of such dark tales. He said, “Have you ever lifted up a rock and seen slugs and millipedes and other ugly creatures come out? We like to watch them.”
I’ve been wondering about that. In the end, I think Penzler is sort of right, sort of not.
by Tim Garvin | Essay
I began thinking about how art works and got lost in thought. Art led to desire which led to what we really want which continued on until I was elsewhere in a hurry. Still, I’m starting with art, and I’ll get back to it. Which is a bit like raising a toast at a party, “To art!” Then Jesus walks in, and you continue, “And to Jesus too!” Anyway, here’s how I got happily lost:
Forty years ago I saw the movie My Dinner with Andre…
by Tim Garvin | Essay
The first advice you get when you want to write fiction—MFA programs are full of this advice—is to show and not tell, which is to say the writer must offer readers visualizable scenes. Chekov, in a letter to his brother, said, “In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes, he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.” This seems to demonstrate…
by Tim Garvin | Essay
It’s hard to talk about God, not just because he’s invisible and elusive, but because he’s surrounded on one side by confident deniers and on the other by confident believers, and neither usually have any experience of God. The deniers don’t need to, but the believers don’t either, which is why that’s what they’re called. Both erect formidable idea systems and are a lot of trouble to talk to, especially for someone in search of the truth.
by Tim Garvin | Essay
One of my college classes met in the living room of the professor. He had a little statue on the coffee table there. It was a Rodin-like figure—maybe even a Rodin copy—of a man encased in clumps of what looked like mud from about his chest down. He was struggling to be free, straining upwards out of his mud cocoon. The class was on Heidegger’s phenomenology. We read Being and Time. Heidegger had done a lot of hard thinking in that book, and we had to do a lot of hard thinking to keep up with him. I don’t think he saw all the way to the bottom of things…
by Tim Garvin | Essay
I read an essay in which the writer recalled a dinner event where the first speaker, a catholic priest, had to stall for time until the main speaker could arrive. The priest was a raconteur and entertained the audience with the anecdote that his first penitent confessed to a murder. A moment later the main speaker arrived, thanked the father, and added as an aside that he and the father went back many years. In fact, he was the father’s first penitent.
by Tim Garvin | Essay
The other day, my granddaughter made a heartfelt observation about the meaning of life. She did not know what it was! The next morning, I wrote her the following letter:
I want to write something for you to honor and recognize the questions you asked about the meaning of life. How lovely and ringing that phrase is—the meaning of life! It suggests one of two alternatives…
by Tim Garvin | Essay
This is about food eating. A good place to start is to note that the self is an unruly rascal that wants conflicting things. Our food self wants plenty of food and that conflicts with another self that wants health and looking good. We call all these selves me to keep things sane, but they’re different because they want different things.
Controlling the food self is hard because it involves enduring the pain of hunger and resisting the pleasure of deliciousness. But is it always hard? Here’s a thought experiment…
by Tim Garvin | Essay
Donald Trump is currently President of the United States. I’m not a fan, but I’m not enthusiastic about the media that flails at him either. Here’s a concise poem describing their attitude:
Trump!
Harrumph!
Why is the media so ineffectual? For the same reason that you can win an argument and lose a friend. Anger and indignation inspire anger and indignation and can’t get to the problem, which is…
by Tim Garvin | Essay
I’ve been thinking about what in life we notice and what we don’t, which might be better phrased as what we are able to notice and what we cannot. I started thinking about this after rewatching the movie, Silver Linings Playbook, which then made me think of a song and then a poem I like, and then, interestingly enough, about how we live, and also about the meaning of life. I’ll start with the song.
It’s Jim Reeves’ “He’ll Have to Go.” There are a variety of lyrical versions of the opening. Here’s the one I like:
by Tim Garvin | Essay
In Alaska, as a young boy, walking alone in the forest, I sometimes came upon a place—perhaps breaking from the cover of blueberry bushes onto a vista of rocky seashore—that stopped thought with beauty. I would stand and feel a wordless need that this beauty must enter me and change my state. It didn’t, at least immediately, since I went about my twelve-year-old’s business, which was the murder of squirrels, but…