A Word on Words; 1013; Robert Love Taylor

words have their own this week robert love taylor writes about words mr johnson chairman of the freedom forum's first amendment center at vanderbilt university in the new league i guess is leading is robert love taylor and tennessee in an that's a famous tennis a name welcome to world words i fed in to talk about your new book lays blame and i have to ask you at the outset that question has nothing to do with the year to the ceo of heritage know we named robert look at it could not have to the sea route and what you play the accordion i have no no i didn't while back with clyde edgerton how he broke out in song i

try it i won't love a player leaves miami most appropriate for my publisher tried to talk i gave up i started reading this and that and the us army leaves they lived and they'd go my god at these marvelous happened to contain a half and the vacant you know of those in the audience who are very very very young was the koreans who was a very popular in atlanta for longer than an awful lot of money and more arts world before actually him but yeah sure and the music was it was you know it really is vying for an arabic and i gave you know are violated by yes i do i did i guess i really haven't there picked up the court well actually when

my my father died about ten years ago i found that he had there never sold my the court and i thought years ago he would've so certainly the money for that i would've sold five i need the money badly but he hadn't and i so i found that the korean and brought it home with me and for me all couple months there i tried playing yeah i play fiddle is what i play fiddle player and i play a plate that time a group called buffalo rebar drivers so i thought i'd spring his accordion on on him and i i did a new area power i guess is the word for a while an emeritus silent and finally i put us i know that thirty yards and so in oklahoma and you teach about well i take it you don't play the

accordion for your students is is sacred leno our leno now i guess really amazing is as you noted then they were played phil i had no shame for that i should frankly i'm not a you know no great fiddler all strictly a middling fiddler but i no shame enjoy it and they know it and again i suppose though they're little flabbergasted by because music i play is certainly not the music their generation is the is the korean teacher in leaves blame your accordion teacher marina harris oh with some intelligence but he certainly resemble verify i'm a terrible a lot sexier frankly in my korean teacher was a young woman and the huge house

or near a pond over and enjoyed the those those lessons but she was not the kind of the moon about it last over the way really really low so we're pouring now she wasn't but they're in the book it seemed appropriate some sense a relish somewhat to make are low more interesting than american school where she was into real them all mine actual teacher didn't that get married at some point guerrillas years and i do remember being someone strangely urge alice and this strangely no i think billy was very unclear yet to rule in the arm for this started as a short film that's right that's what they all they all began as the short stories i had no huge chapter stands as a separate be well yes yes and no

let me let me just explain how how they came about i was asked by a friend i was at a rider's chronicle yellow in new york and at that time i was working on my first book gurwitch clucking outlaw stories based on telstar didn't and this friend the poet asked me whether innocently want it was like growing up in oklahoma and you never heard me frankly it the question would be interesting and i started thinking wow what was i decided i would try to write the stories of my impulse to write a story based on some memories childhood memory and i would try to stick as much as possible to what actually happened not in advance no no

now that all and i wrote the stork store called colorado which became sentimental journey this bookstore about a summer cabin tile what i do there was our occasion turned in as an essay here for an english class but then that does lead to know did you write that more and bugs facto experience or do you write a fictional account of the colorado vacation a bill and billy through the moon one night i tried i haven't heard too to stick to the facts and that story much as i remembered them now you know my sister can be a story correctly on sale this didn't happen or you got this wrong am and he does that effort but i tried i tried to stick as much as possible

to be a fact in that particular story but in other stories in it i decided that was just too limiting after all a fiction writer i'm interested in taking large and day you simply cannot expect what happens to be alive to translate into our without some change and then lays blame as a short story was a hit the three well the decree will be awarded surprise surprise well a service like well i mentioned that i'm asking whether that will the centerpiece for what then became a book i mean you put similar journey and end in a post or five in front of it then a few more behind but there is a life pattern where there is there is a stream to flow they're all conceived as a muse or improvisations

new musical term ever conceived as improvisation on them and they start another word from some significant remember an incident thereafter there there's there's some improvisation on it does that definition might take a familiar melody in but keeping the same chord structure work creating other melodies and dolphins we're trying to do something like that and these stories would be true feelings in other words to keep that analogy i suppose you'd say the memories provide the underlying chord structure the art comes an improvisation that overlay that you know this is in the book of bill and bill if not who the woman there lives a woman i love woman build life still at that point

we cook together a bill lee salesman has taken billy long so i guess not the backrooms of oklahoma but but not mainstream by a meat and he is hustling graduation ranger captain down asking and the billy wants to see of all places guthrie oklahoma i mean as owners i mean you've got to see the sandstone houses in guthrie oklahoma has it's awe he hopes it's the result of the okra i mean do you still know and understand immediately that video is a very self love billy joel in some ways is really gets back together

and start a new life billy's more piece of baggage that is to say is the number two show up to marsh well no i don't think it's unfair now this that particular piece represents the father's father's point of view and of course it's also reflecting obliquely the signs point to sons feeling them as that someone remembered that story a shift rather suddenly at the end to the year and the science point of utah until you out but i'd hope that that would suggest that the that that we are really seeing someone buys point doing that maybe you it felt privileged fell on bag but i live by that that's based on memory that something i did i've i went along with my father on the sales trips while enjoying immensely i love going out on the streisand

seeing a strange hands and going into those big schools the sense of my father is an important figure some sort you know we're selling his classroom beautiful sample cases velvet lining but i was on simon's and you know sometimes i felt as if i was par sales strategy too early my son my son a lot in here with me laughter you know the part of the corps the air but i dont i dont feel that there's any anything terrible about that but i think the father is gonna make a living now and selling is rough and traveling road like that is run and he did what he had to do while i hope a father's income office too much of the bill although it comes off as a very human being as a very has very a real human

being your nose as you manipulate assault when you know our fathers and sons and wives and husbands sometimes of the sea flows merrill with more clarity and feel pain more deeply that flows from and there is i guess the most painful moment is when billy for the first time he's told dr paul again families over and laid in her latest lame with the latest brain chapter and i must say new work into that emotional moment that is motivating with real subtle

she realizes at that point i guess for the first time that the marriage is beyond repair and that's how you tell us about well wonder woman what i hope is the truest aspects of the book is the way it does present the mixture of a child's innocence and the adult world which is constantly challenging that in a sense one way or another sense of a very complex set of struggles going on with the parents even wilder the young boy is undergoing own complexity are just too different to different stories is in all lives there are at least two hundred or better police sometimes come together in sometimes going monteiro on and so the moments when the two stories come together in interest me when the young boy's

story when it when we can sense what the young boys going through them at the same time getting the memory of that an adult world we don't really get much sense what does jesus as we know and like my sister's the point that out to test like my older sister we are led to we wept tonight we let live that's exactly what she said and since to me she said what i'm going to do is some rare sit down with a tape recorders i can't write down the tape recorder and i'm gonna put on tape what i remember and listened to those tapes and said i'd lied ipod you know it i realize is and writing and presenting the boys' point do it would it would have taken out of the way you think her perceptions are different oriental is it that he just feels that that you know

adequately express for over what he views i think her perceptions are different she argued she said another thing she said to me was what the what i had to understand was that one had a different point of view and she saw her experience says that shaped in part because she was she grew up as a girl and that was a boy and that for her was made for one significant difference but i know that in aside from mad girl growing up she was a great storyteller and she always saw things the nba season may go you see tonight billy what they were playing it was one more no no i hope not and i didn't mean it to be a book that that though wanted to the point the finger in any body i worried

that you know my mother especially might react in that way i in fact the ira didn't show her the stories and as they were being written out of that concern yeah and richard marriott says new book reviews on the program not long ago and week we talk with him about this work of fiction that he's created and he was very candid this is as close to all of our fears i'm ever going to get bummed but he shrouds reality with a great deal more shadowing then you'd i mean this

is that almost a permanent it seems to me the moment of telluride i think very much so many ways always for me i think they're riding his is perky though not as this book what others always a way of coming to terms with with feelings of emotions that that can be dealt with in any other way but certainly the feeling when i finish a story it works works you know that always work but it works it feels good and is a kind of cleansing heard that and yes to us less give us the bum and as the quotation from that it's so annoying and no not at all and it is not helpful but i don't suppose we can convincingly feature

the world to drop quotation marks where you are and i think they are in i think they knew how the writers but you prove a comedic that it can be done and not be annoying totally of the wisest and seo you mention english teachers or call amnesty but also my first book came out and done it all in all levels of lead the quotation marks and in the first book i took quite a number liberties so with punctuation as well what we call cost weiss is wrong fences and how apple policy before signing and lonely old my high school english teacher came to that this idea of using this book to your son as he knows it recognize herself to she's a beer person just about your person but she came to the signing and i i was really apologize in this morning was wiser more and this is

why i hope you know that those common spice isn't run on sentences and we're are intended i really do no better and she does trigger have said oh bob i know you know and it was a student who gets an f for me that says michael joyce and about a lot about your audience i know well i i telling you know you do what you have to do but you better know what you do and i'm gonna tell em if they don't use a quotation mr brian noto and they say well i did it on purpose on say ok what's someone is the rule and they don't find their way there is on the back cover of quotation an excerpt what to do in the backseat of a nineteen fifty two or so the criteria is through i think

i think the publisher who must uphold about us a good idea of what a wonderful example first of all it's bound so both it's terrific and secondly i think it gives the character and the tone the towel and i just want to share it with with her voice her or situation before you know it's the situation is this is from the ladies playing at chapter and billy be a hero protagonist is working at an orange julius standpoint of the horns you it stands now that that they do in many parts of the country right so that those days says was a few jobs that girl boy my age could get as a car off debts and zofran a minor car option when jewish and i'm drawn that memory here the conversation that there might've occurred

while we were cropping one of them i should say to one of the things about that job for you know fourteen year old kid was that teenage girls came in one car loads sometimes in a mild a lot didn't get much as you say as ryan is alerted authorities but you know and you are just really very nice for bonus didn't mind alacrity of state so this is that's the context of this conversation what would you do i ask him if you were in the backseat one of those cars with girls and then i would know he said i know what to do or i want it all depends if they let you kiss them then what would you do it still all the pans on a wire steve seemed annoyed by my question but alas said and what you did after gerlach you cancer depended on whether she lead to cancer on the cheek or on the mouth on the

mouth i said then you just keep getting her until she says queer why she doesn't think we are they always equipped with a lot of what they did back then well again about that they dont always say what that's right well that's right later later on that is right here and i'll let me ask you about this of this business of riding from such a perfect bike visit possible view the outside or so and write fiction that does not touch life and family much of their workers before we came along we spoke about the limbo you're a famous

great great uncles who ran against each other for governor tennessee again your father there who wrote that your grandfather great grandfather brought the role of those three probably in that in that were well i era i think maybe i will first thought i have to believe that you can you can get outside yourself as a fictionalized you can and through imagination create convincing characters that represent points of you they're not your own i think that's that's the thing a craft us korean something imagination and the power of imagination that there's never going to be a convincing character i think that has nothing to be a writer and i think you always have to find some something in your cell that you

can draw on that will permit you to create a convincing character even if the character circumstances are wholly different from yours in writing film both for example i've tried it they points of view of the ancestors and unchanging and i used a photograph all photographs leave him i try to get my sense of who they were what they wanted what would it felt like to live in those days but he you know my family reading the book said well you know that's really you there the common thread running through all of gather and so you can't you can't skip a self english and try to emulate know it's it's fun i supposed to crime fiction do it i do try and try but i think increasingly it's difficult for me to to do to do so to get away from those constraining boundaries and so

they're trial next aryan is illinois guess is how far raul for forty fifty pages this is in a hard or easy at this hour are very are always are now is know it's hard i think with that with the earlier books this place vying for example one thing i've tried to do is trick myself trip myself scientists writing short story writing a book and then maybe a target six or eighty short stories burns's book and play a little game with myself that that's difficult to do increasingly somehow and they are they are in but it's fine to it so but the book that i'm thinking about is going to draw on the history of country music is in

some significant way i hope you think that they're in there and that in a world that has become saturated by visual images societies dominating both to vet the appreciation of the written word hertz is being destroyed the thickly monks didn't know your teacher why it's it's so it's been damaged coral i write i think i think though perhaps at the same time i can't say that there is there's just as much as a thirst for narrative has all the narrative that you do five narrative expand that to include their homes and tv

robert love taylor explained as that our guest on a word on words your host as ben johnson this program was produced in the studios of wbez in nashville he's an