Bøger af Jim Levy

Corazón (and Merkle) is an account of how an older man acquires a mutt and welcomes her into the family. Corazón is a shepherd-like mongrel whose ways are eccentric and endearing. Living in northern New Mexico, the man and the dog encounter squirrels, snakes, tarantulas, deer and bears. The author draws on his wide reading to discuss dogs portrayed in art and literature and to speculate on the relationship between dogs and people.

Levy's poems, over 200 of which appear in this book, were written over a span of fifty-five years. They range from early love through a period of drugs and psychedelics and the dark humor of his 50s into an unlikely tranquility in old age. Combining precision of observation and language with an ironic worldview, Levy explores the nature of desire and the pull of death. His subject matter includes the Spanish Civil War, acequias and ravens, cacti and sirens, Goya and a historian of zero, Empedocles and ants, and as a backdrop to all, the open sea and its associations. Mythological and historical figures are represented by Daedalus, Bob Dylan, Proust, John Larson the explorer of North Carolina, the minotaur, Machado, Padre Martinez of New Mexico, Susanna and the Elders - all make their appearance in narrations, monologues and lyrics. Many of the poems are for and about his family as he explores the feelings and meaning of being a husband, father and son. Five poems are about his mother, who died at the age of sixty-six. Also included are a selection of Levy's translations and adaptations from Rimbaud's A Season In Hell, The Gilgamesh epic, as well as poems from the Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, French and Italian. Intimate, impersonal, confessional, formal, heart-felt, ironic, these paradoxical meditations and narrations range from the lyrical to the operatic, the elegiac to the mystical, the satirical to the erotic.

Jim Levy's father was a Freudian psychoanalyst in Beverly Hills, his mother an aspiring writer, and the struggle between them defined his sensuous and troubled path to manhood. Although he had a privileged childhood, he sought out "real life" in this teens by prowling the sleaziest parts of Los Angeles and hopping freight trains to San Francisco. Rowdy was both his dog and his preferred behavior. Rowdy's Boy is a memoir of the author's first twenty years: childhood growing up in Bel Air, adolescence at an intensely academic boarding school, and young manhood at Pomona College and in Europe. Levy goes from being, in his own words, a big slow kid whose interest is in girls and sports to a sensitive, at times morbid poet in Italy and Spain. The transformation is subtly portrayed as he describes his physical and psychological development. The author is emotionally sided with his mother, but intellectually with his father. In a close examination of his father's worldview as it is revealed in a monograph from World War II, he discovers a refutation in Joseph Heller's Catch 22. From Rowdy's Boy In Taos, New Mexico, where we spent five summers, Mabel Dodge Luhan wrote to my mother: "If Jimmy rides his horse through my cornfield one more time, I'm going to evict you." As a Freudian family, we were never angry at each other; we were hostile. We were not confused; we were ambivalent. His office had masks and figures just like the Master's except these were replicas rather than originals. At first I was in awe but as a young teen, I plopped myself down on the couch and said, "shrink me Dad. I walked rather than ran up the final slope, reached the pueblo, and threw myself down with my back against a house. A Hopi elder came over and thanked me for participating. Finally, humbled, I had a small understanding that I had engaged in, even served in something more than a competition. On the drive to Flagstaff, my father said, "You may be the only non-Indian to ever run in that race." Mom didn't think I had much of a mind and I suspect she wasn't so sure of my morals either; she feared that I would end up a rascal or worse. This didn't reduce her love one bit. For a year Colin Wilson's The Outsider was my Michelin Guide to every disoriented, pissed-off, alienated writer in the western world: Nietzsche, T. E. Lawrence, Nijinsky, van Gogh, Sartre. When a fleshy peasant girl joined us, the old man grinned and poked me, waved his arms inviting the girl and me to get together. Two teeth missing, ripe, half- asleep, she was willing. The moon rose and had a shining ring around it. We agreed, we had never seen anything like that before. In the glow of the moon and the brandy, we looked at each other with affection. We felt romantic, almost like sophisticates, sitting in the plaza de Zocodover in Toledo, Spain.

In Mar Egeo, a man leaves his wife and stepchildren to catch a freighter to Spain. A village council in T'ang era China selects a bright young man to go to the largest city in the Empire to study how it administers its citizens. A young woman dying of leukemia meets a man on a plane and begins an impossible relationship. Using memoir, fiction and journals, Jim Levy tells about his travels and adventures in vivid, sensual prose. At age twenty he wanders in Italy and Spain. Ten years later he catches malaria in Ghana and witnesses torture in Ethiopia. Over ten days in France, he visits his sister, whose marriage is ending just as he is beginning a life-long love. The book ends with journal entries from trips to Belize, Greece, France, and Baja, Patzcuaro and Guanajuato in Mexico. "Suddenly I realized where I was, in a hash house (the opium was being smoked upstairs), in a room full of stoned Arabs. The boy who'd given me the hash said he was leaving, could I after all give him something. I had no change and gave him the smallest bill I had - saw the look of disgust pass over the Frenchman's face - I'd paid too much." "I move through the world lost but navigating like crazy. "Yes," says Harvey, "navigating by women." He is right; I must find a better way, if I am to return home. And what is home? A familiar bed? A wife? A dog? Every hotel, cabin, floor and field is a home of sorts. Look up; there are sun-torn clouds. There is the sun itself, hydrogen fire. These are home, and I am always home."

In February of 2002, at the age of sixty-one, Jim Levy went to the coast of Oaxaca and tried to kill myself. It was a serious attempt and nearly succeeded. The Fifth Season is a record of that attempt and the next five years of recurring depression and eventual recovery. Levy's story is not told in a traditional narrative, but consists of nineteen sessions of therapy, journal entries, short essays, vignettes, aphorisms and quotations that address the moods of old age: despair, black humor, hope, nostalgia, joy and revelation.