January 25
A novel of violence, of love, and introspection, Barry Gifford's The Up-Down follows a man who leaves home and all that’s familiar, finds true love, loses it, and finds it again. Pace’s voyage is outward, among strangers, and inward into the fifth direction that is the up-down, in a sweeping, voracious human tale that takes no prisoners, witnesses extreme brutalities and expresses a childlike amazement. Here the route goes from New Orleans, to Chicago to Wyoming to Bay St. Clement, North Carolina, but the geography he is charting is always first and foremost unchartable.
Collected in
The Best of Barry GiffordHe had read that in ancient times, various societies believed there were five directions: North, South, East, West and the Up-Down. He liked the idea of a fifth, mysterious direction.
Happy Belated Birthday to Barry Gifford
Happy belated birthday (it was the 18th) to Barry Gifford, one of America's most enduring and inspiring storytellers—in novels from Landscape with Traveler to Wild at Heart to The Up-Down, in pioneering oral history biographies like Jack's Book, and collections of stories and poems, constantly renewing the heart and the dark side of the American dream and the American reality.
Here's a new poem by BG, printed here by permission of the author.
Blood Moon in February
Here I am wasting time again
writing poems to keep myself company—
The Chinese masters of the T'ang dynasty
thought the same, but mostly
they were rural government functionaries
or already collecting a pension,
out of favor with the emperor—
So they drank rice wine
and kept their opinions to themselves,
sneaking hidden meanings into poems
they knew only a very few people
would read during their lifetime—
Who cares about a barking dog
nobody sees, or what kind of bird
sings just before light—
Only in darkness do my thoughts
cohere, vagrant ghosts
passing in dreams, difficult
if not impossible to find again—
Perhaps there never was anything
to worry about, and now know
when the dog barks or the bird sings
there aren't any thoughts
worth keeping
BARRY GIFFORD’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in thirty languages. His novel Night People was awarded the Premio Brancati, established by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia, in Italy, and he has been the recipient of the Maxwell Perkins Award and Syndicated Fiction Awards from PEN, as well as awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. He has also been awarded the Ingmar Bergman Chair on Cinema and Theater from the National University of Mexico. His books Sailor’s Holiday and The Phantom Father were each named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, and his book Wyoming was named a Novel of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. He has written librettos for operas by the composers Toru Takemitsu, Ichiro Nodaira, and Olga Neuwirth. Gifford’s work has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Punch, Esquire, La Nouvelle Revue Française, El País, La Repubblica, Rolling Stone, Brick, Film Comment, El Universal, Projections, Cosmopolitan, and the New York Times. His film credits include Wild at Heart, winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Perdita Durango, Lost Highway, City of Ghosts, Ball Lightning, American Falls, and The Phantom Father. Barry Gifford’s most recent books are Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels, The Up-Down, Imagining Paradise: New and Selected Poems, ;Writers, Southern Nights, Black Sun Rising / La Corazonada,and Roy’s World: Stories 1973–2020. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information visit www.BarryGifford.net
