Publication Day, No Stopping Train
Tribute to Les Plesko—’No stopping train.’
It's been a full year since my friend, the writer Les Plesko, died. That night, I watched his YouTube station, over and over again, and wrote the poem On Watching Your YouTube Channel Late at Night. At the time, I wrote that his magnum opus, the brilliant No Stopping Train, "set in the Hungary of his birth and circulated privately among his friends" had never been published. Now, a year later, that book is entering the world. Prospects look good. So many emotions crowd in on me tonight. I did a long email interview yesterday with David Ulin, the book critic from the L.A. Times, which ran in short form on the Times literary blog Jacket Copy, and at full length on the Les Plesko website Pleskoism. But the thinking, and remembering, has brought me to the place of--as a student of his posted, "very glass half full." I don't know if the glass is half full or empty or completely overflowing or downright broken. All of the above. He wanted that book to be published so much, published well, appreciated. And here it is. And he is not. I want to celebrate, and I know I will, but tonight I just feel bereft.
Your book born today
Into the arms of old friends
How like you it looks.
Tomorrow, an interview on KCRW, our local NPR station, with Lisa Napoli, on its 'journey to publication.' That torturous path. Can I get my chin off my knees? It is such a beautiful book, a rigorous book, a real barn-burner. If I think about the book and not the 'journey to publication', I feel so incredibly happy. So glad such a thing has come into the world, and is being greeted properly. One of the questions Ulin asked me was whether there was a hierarchy between his books, did he value some over others. I said that he'd worked so very hard on this novel, there was such beauty, such labor, such rigor, he really wanted to see it — as an old friend put it— “walk down the aisle in a white dress.”
Now here it is, and he's not there. And it's so beautiful in that dress, its shining veil.
An excerpt was from No Stopping Train was published in The Nervous Breakdown this week. Read it--it's everything I teach, everything I value in prose--the lyricism, the word choice, the rhythms, the tightness of the dialogue, the moodiness and texture of the landscape, the poetic devices--assonance and alliteration and rhyme. Such music. The bigger issues interlocked with the human ones, love and betrayal, honor and affinity. All honed to a glinting edge.
On Sunday, October 19, 6 p.m. in the Charles Young Salon at UCLA, where he taught so many students, for so many years, we, his old friends and students, will walk his book down the aisle. If you're in town, please come. For more information, click here.