Inside Jacket

As you would expect, there has been much more written and unearthed about Barry Hannah since our first note about his passing on Monday. Here are a few highlights:

The Paris Review has posted a full PDF of their 2004 interview with Hannah. A favorite exchange:

INTERVIEWER
What was wrong with the third-person voice?

HANNAH
In my case, a third person just led to too much wisdom I hadn’t earned. And I like the first person—just a guy blasting through with the little he knows.

INTERVIEWER
So switching to third person is a rite of passage?

HANNAH
Third-person singular, past tense, is most natural and inevitable, I guess. But you’d best beware the monotone in it and the temptations toward false wisdom, cleverness. First person is where you can be more interesting as a fool, and I find this often leads to the more delightful expedition. You don’t have to be much but a stumbling fool. The wisdom there is more precious than in the sage overview, which in many writers makes me nearly puke. I’m also wary of the glibness that third person invites.

And Terry Gross replayed her 2001 Fresh Air interview with him yesterday and it’s now available online. It begins with Hannah reading from his 2001 novel, Yonder Stands Your Orphan, about whose main character he says, “His kind of crime is a crime that begins out of laziness and being admired by women.”

On the Vanity Fair site, Claire Howorth, who grew up in the family bookstore that’s the center of literary Oxford, Miss. (her dad’s the mayor), collects reminiscences, including this from Richard Ford:

Frontally, he presented you with what seemed to be a recognizable
southern type—the swaggering, impudent, small-town, pool-hall residing,
wise-cracking, occasionally bibulous little smart-ass. Who then
incongruously but absolutely legitimately wowed and amazed you with his
celestial-quality literary sentences and constructions that could’ve
come from no other brain but his, and that you never forgot. Many
people have had the experience of Barry’s stories and novels changing
their lives forever. I think that’s precisely what he aimed for.

HTMLGIANT also has tributes from former students. From a 2007 syllabus:

This semester let’s concentrate on entertainment as apposed to mere
“character study,” and stories of no passion but still-life “insights.”
Why does lack of action, red-blooded emotion, plague graduate school
fiction? This old flag has waved too long.

What happened to pirates, storms, fiends, horror, temptresses with
cleavage, lies, theft, greed, lust, random acts of meaningless (or
meaningFUL) violence? Have the news media captured all the good stuff?

Old interviews also in Bomb, Tin House, and the Oxford American. And the Rumpus has both a first-person reminiscence and, apparently, a recipe of his for three-bean soup, but their site is acting weird right now. But here’s the recipe, via the Faster Times:

You start with three kinds of beans: kidney, white (navy) and
black-eyed peas. Take a big–real big–pot of water, dump ‘em in, and add
some shredded onions. Saute either pork or beef, cut up in little
chunks, and dump it in. Bring it to a boil. Add salt mixed with pepper,
to taste. Turn up the heat and bring it up again. Add water if needed;
dump in a small bag of rice, and bring it up. Boil until it thickens.
For extra seasoning, I sometimes add some crab-boil, Tabasco, or
whatever’s handy on the shelf. Serve it with French bread and butter.
It’s all the nutrition you can stand.

–Tom

P.S. Meanwhile, I’ve just noticed that my 1994 paperback of Airships (still the one in print), despite being published by Grove Press, has on its last page one of those old ticklists of other books in the Vintage Contemporaries series, apparently a holdover from when the paperback was previously published by Vintage in the ’80s. (That list of VCs–Ford, McGuane, McInerney, Carver, Williams–almost takes my breath away as an evocation of my self-directed reading at the time.) Further confirmation, I guess, of my longtime suspicion that Morgan Entrekin and Gary Fisketjon are just anagrams of each other.