I don't often do this - although since almost no one reads this, I can pretty much do whatever the hell I please - but I'm going to write about a few writers I admire and why I admire them. Mostly, I'm going to talk about books, or poems, that make me say, "fuck, I wish I had written that." (and I must confess that even that quote has been borrowed, though I cannot remember the source)

I have always had a soft spot for bourgeois, white, male, American writers - which should not be surprising as I am, in fact, all of the above. Updike, in particular, is a writer I have routinely referenced. And yet, I must confess, I don't really like Updike's writing all that much. I was fortunate enough that my first encounter with him was a short story by the title "Packed dirt, churchgoing, a dying cat, a traded car," or I might never have discovered the story. "Packed dirt..." is a wonderful piece of writing. Updike reins in his propensity for loquaciousness (a curse I share), and explores the vaguely melancholy attachments of suburbia - our paths, our pets, our motor vehicles. Mostly, it's a story about impermanence, but it's one of those stories that seems to exist, or to move, mostly beneath the explicit surface of the narrative. Updike's writing, at it's best, has an ineffable, numinous quality to it - you're moved by something dark and amorphous that you can't quite place.

My fondness for Updike rests almost solely on the brilliance of that lone story, but I don't know if a single work has shaped me more. And although I find Updike's novels to be, quite often, overly nuanced and turgid, his interviews were always enlightening. His philosophies on writing were usually better than his ability to execute them. In an interview from way back in 1967, a few years after "Rabbit, Run," he talked about the dichotomy between a writer's two selves: his actual self, the person that is engaged with his emotional life, and then his writer self, who exists in some ethereal realm between reality and fiction, and who can transfigure any kind of loss or failure into something beautiful.

It's an idea I'd held for quite some time but never been able to express, and it captures, as well as anything I've heard or read, the peculiar nature of being a writer (or at least thinking one's self a writer). After you cross that threshold, the one where you decide "you know what, fuck it, I'm going to give this a try," you cease to have pure emotional experiences; everything is viewed through the aperture of art. Your relationship of two years falls apart? You experience the loss, sure, but then you think "how can I turn this into something productive?" And while inititially, that seems to be rather healthy, it ensures you wallow in the melancholy of loss far longer than necessary - and yet in such a superficial way that you never truly sense what has been lost.

Does that make sense? Probably not. But it's why I love Updike.

Another white, male, American favorite of mine is Updike's everyman successor, Richard Ford, whose Frank Bascombe occupies the same hallowed literary ground as Updike's Rabbit Angstrom. Ford's prose never quite reaches the lyrical heights of Updike's (few do), but it also avoids the treacly too-muchness that litters the latter's novels. His tone, written in the first person, is more casual.

Ford has a remarkable ability for writing relatively simple lines that absolutely stop your heart. He manages casual incisiveness. For instance, from The Sportswriter: "...for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined."

Like Updike, Ford masters the ennui of the suburban male (to quote Anne Enright, another writer I am fond of, "the man whose life will come to nothing, who is already forgotten"). And while the whole genre can seem trite, it chases something larger, which is the transitory nature of our existence, the deep and profound desire to find some lasting niche in this world. Although the perspective is all too often affluent, male and American, the sentiment - the sprawling sense of wonder at existence, the cavernous fear that sometimes envelops us all, the Sisyphean search for some concrete purpose - is decidedly universal. Even the most uneducated woman in the farthest corner of the earth, even the most sociopathic tyrant, has at some point looked skyward on a clear night and been overwhelmed by the prospect of empty space and the smallness of their own lives (at least I hope they have).

Ford's prose becomes less concise with each of his three Bascombe novels. The first was written in his "gritty realist" stage - a movement he shared with another white, American male I admire, Raymond Carver - a style embodied by short sentences and spare language. The final novel of the three borders on stream of consciousness. It is digressive, parenthetical, and occasionally long winded. The middle book of the trilogy, "Independence Day," manages a balance between the two, a kind of colloquial spareness that fits nicely with Bascombe's everyman-ness.

One last note on Richard Ford: he ends all three books with drop dead perfect lines, the kind of lines that leave you scurrying for air (and that leaves writers in jealous awe). My favorite is the line which ends "The Lay of the Land," and also the whole trilogy: "A bump, a roar, a heavy thrust forward into life again, and we resume our human scale upon the land."

I'll conclude this now. I've covered two writers, but they're a good starting point - and quite honestly, whatever spirit moved me is fleeing with a sleepy celerity. However, I'll try and continue to write about writers I enjoy, as I find it therapeutic (and those 1 or 2 of you reading might find it enlightening). I realize the writers I mentioned today were prose writers, and for many years I considered myself to be a short fiction writer. Quite clearly my focus has shifted, but that is a topic for another time (perhaps next time even...)