No Stopping Train. Les Plesko
Читать онлайн.| Название | No Stopping Train |
|---|---|
| Автор произведения | Les Plesko |
| Жанр | Историческая литература |
| Серия | |
| Издательство | Историческая литература |
| Год выпуска | 0 |
| isbn | 9781619024182 |
Has there ever been a writer so committed to the page and what went on it as Les Plesko? He believed in Art, in all its honesty and beauty. The only thing he loathed was that which affronted the Real—anything false, slick, self-serving. He was in rebellion from all that. In a time which applauds those values, he was purposefully anti-trend. You saw it in his unregenerate smoking, the mismatched socks, the wild head of straggly hair, his carlessness in vast, far-flung Los Angeles. From time to time, his students said, people dropped money into his coffee cup outside a favorite Venice Beach coffee house, thinking him homeless. It was all part of his High Beat Aesthetic, which was both a conscious embrace of his romantic ideal and an increasingly involuntary corner he’d lived himself into.
I met him in the early 1990s, in the days of the legendary Kate Braverman’s writing workshop held every other Saturday in her apartment on Palm Drive. There I saw him finish his first novel, The Last Bongo Sunset, and start the book that would become No Stopping Train. Even in those early days, his views on fiction became our mantras. “Don’t have ideas,” he’d say, which always made me laugh. What could that possibly mean? How could you write and not have ideas? It was only as I struggled with my own writing that the meaning—and the wisdom—became clear. It meant: don’t force the work into a shape. It meant: don’t lead with your head. Don’t know so much. Leave room to discover something.
Writing for Les was an activity of soul, of memory, of sound and dreaming, not an intellectual exercise, not a game. He shared so much with those around him—time, friendship, passion, a subtle intelligence, a wacky humor, but most of all, the flame of his purposefulness that this was the noble endeavor. His presence was a reminder to treasure the deep and the true.
But now he’s gone. Dead, by suicide, on a September morning in Venice Beach, at the age of fifty-nine. He had become a cult figure in Los Angeles literary circles, a writer’s writer, as Mayakovsky called Khlebnikov, “Not a poet for the consumer. A poet for the producer.” A brilliant teacher, he taught over 1,000 creative writing students across a twenty-year career at UCLA extension. Yet at the time of his death, he was virtually unknown outside California.
Many of his friends from the old Braverman group wondered what would be done with his papers, especially the famously unpublished Hungarian novel No Stopping Train. It had been born in wisps and curls of smoke, and grew denser and more layered over a period of six years—though never less mysterious. It was the finest example of the unique process of addition and especially erasure, which was the essence of Plesko at work.
The tragedy of Les, as well as his greatest virtue, lay in his absolutely uncompromising stance on art and life. Unfashionably, he recoiled from any hint of commercialism. He fought against any sort of pandering to the reader, “smoothing out the bumps,” planting “helpful” directional arrows, catering to the American preference for the shout over the whisper. He instinctively moved to the edges, deserts, marginal people. Suggestion, nuance, abraded surfaces were his métier, and he had confidence in readers who could walk through the doors he had opened. He required a certain sort of skilled reader who could bring his or her own sensitivities to the task, a reader able to enter his elusive work and let it unfold on its own terms.
One cannot read quickly through a Les Plesko book—don’t even try. It’s not meant for speed-reading. A reader who wants to “cut to the chase” will find it vaporizing in his hands. But be patient, reader, and this book will unlock itself for you.
Les wrote for those of us who can hear a confession, who know how to hear behind halting words to the depths of a soul revealing itself. Reading Les Plesko is like listening to a broadcast late at night, an urgent communication textured by distance and static. It’s a lover’s reception of an intimate call in the middle of the night. You hold your breath for the cadence, wait for the meaning to unfold.
His imagination has a certain texture—like overexposed film, a Polaroid taken at noontime in a desert in the 1970s. Light and sanded glass and desperate romance, these are Les’s signatures. As a man, Les was the ultimate romantic, always in love with someone, and there seemed to be no shortage of women ready to be entranced by his rumpled, Beat self.
Love was his subject, forever complicated, not so much by the conventional external obstacles—family, money, even the dire obstacles of