Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Search Results for: Denis Johnson

Maiden Voyage at Tale’s End: Denis Johnson’s Final Masterwork

By Leave a Comment

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
Reviewed by John Biscello

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories
Random House, 224 pp., $27.00

Picture the sibilant music of blood-red sand shifting from one bulbous half of the hourglass to the other. Or black-and-white film footage, bearing a scarred geography of squiggles and motes and hyphens, bleaching a darkened room in a ghostly light. Picture the slow and deliberate turning of calcified pages in a vinyl photo album, which provides evidence of the people you were, the friends you had, the family you loved, and hated and loved again. Any one of these notions, or those of a similar ilk, could serve as the tonal prelude, the lo-fi trailer, to Denis Johnson’s collection of stories, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, completed just before his death. [Read more…]

Forthcoming Work From The Late Denis Johnson

By Leave a Comment

The title story from Denis Johnson’s forthcoming collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, which was completed just before his death in May of this year. See Riot Material’s earlier tributes to Denis Johnson here.

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
By Denis Johnson

Silences

After dinner, nobody went home right away. I think we’d enjoyed the meal so much we hoped Elaine would serve us the whole thing all over again. These were people we’ve gotten to know a little from Elaine’s volunteer work—nobody from my work, nobody from the ad agency. We sat around in the living room describing the loudest sounds we’d ever heard. One said it was his wife’s voice when she told him she didn’t love him anymore and wanted a divorce. Another recalled the pounding of his heart when he suffered a coronary. Tia Jones had become a grandmother at the age of thirty-seven and hoped never again to hear anything so loud as her granddaughter crying in her sixteen-year-old daughter’s arms. Her husband, Ralph, said it hurt his ears whenever his brother opened his mouth in public, because his brother had Tourette’s syndrome and erupted with remarks like “I masturbate! Your penis smells good!” in front of perfect strangers on a bus or during a movie, or even in church. [Read more…]

New Work From The Magnificent Denis Johnson: “Strangler Bob”

By Leave a Comment

“Strangler Bob” is one of five stories from Denis Johnson’s forthcoming collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, which was completed just before his death in May of this year. See Riot Material’s earlier tributes to Denis Johnson here.

Strangler Bob
By Denis Johnson

You hop into a car, race off in no particular direction, and, blam, hit a power pole. Then it’s off to jail. I remember a monstrous tangle of arms and legs and fists, with me at the bottom, gouging at eyes and doing my utmost to mangle throats, but I arrived at the facility without a scratch or a bruise. I must have been easy to subdue. The following Monday, I pled guilty to disturbing the peace and malicious mischief, reduced from felony vehicular theft and resisting arrest because—well, because all this occurs on another planet, the planet of Thanksgiving, 1967. I was eighteen and hadn’t been in too much trouble. I was sentenced to forty-one days. [Read more…]

Denis Johnson’s “Emergency”

By Leave a Comment

In further tribute to the great Denis Johnson, who died late May, an excerpt from Jesus’ Son:

Emergency

I’d been working in the emergency room for about three weeks, I guess. This was in 1973, before the summer ended. With nothing to do on the overnight shift but batch the insurance reports from the daytime shifts, I just started wandering around, over to the coronary-care unit, down to the cafeteria, et cetera, looking for Georgie, the orderly, a pretty good friend of mine. He often stole pills from the cabinets.

He was running over the tiled floor of the operating room with a mop. “Are you still doing that?” I said.

“Jesus, there’s a lot of blood here,” he complained.

“Where?” The floor looked clean enough to me.

“What the hell were they doing in here?” he asked me.

“They were performing surgery, Georgie,” I told him.

“There’s so much goop inside of us, man,” he said, “and it all wants to get out.” He leaned his mop against a cabinet.

“What are you crying for?” I didn’t understand. [Read more…]

Denis Johnson

By Leave a Comment

1949 | 2017

Excerpted from Jesus’ Son

Car Crashing While Hitchhiking

A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping . . . A Cherokee filled with bourbon . . . A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student . . . 

And a family from Marshalltown who head­onned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri . . . 

. . . I rose up sopping wet from sleeping under the pouring rain, and something less than conscious, thanks to the first three of the people I’ve already named–the salesman and the Indian and the student–all of whom had given me drugs. At the head of the entrance ramp I waited without hope of a ride. What was the point, even, of rolling up my sleeping bag when I was too wet to be let into anybody’s car? I draped it around me like a cape. The downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts. My thoughts zoomed pitifully. The travelling salesman had fed me pills that made the linings of my veins feel scraped out. My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside it I knew we’d have an accident in the storm. 

I didn’t care. They said they’d take me all the way.  [Read more…]

In Memoriam, 20 January 2017: What Have We Done?

By Leave a Comment

Denis Johnson 
From Tree of Smoke

Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed. Seaman Houston and the other two recruits slept while the first reports traveled around the world. There was one small nightspot on the island, a dilapidated club with big revolv­ing fans in the ceiling and one bar and one pinball game; the two marines who ran the club had come by to wake them up and tell them what had happened to the President. The two marines sat with the three sailors on the bunks in the Quonset hut for transient enlisted men, watching the air conditioner drip water into a coffee can and drinking beer. The Armed Forces Network from Subic Bay stayed on through the night, broadcasting bulletins about the unfathomable murder. [Read more…]