Carnet. Issue 6
This week - Train Dreams, Val Kilmer, photojournalism in Pinochet's Chile, & pictures of belonging
Books
Train Dreams tells it how it is
A Good Read - Douglas Stuart and Sian Eleri | BBC | Listen to podcast
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson – review | The Guardian | Read book review
Train Dreams Is a Staggering Work of Art | Vulture | Read film review
A reviewer writing in 2012 called Train Dreams a book of “gorgeous economy”. This characterisation applies to both form and style. Denis Johnson chronicles Robert Grainier’s life across the early to mid-20th century in just 111 pages, written in spare, direct prose.
A story told by a character Grainier encounters whilst working on a logging crew showcases Johnson’s hard boiled mode.
I worked on a peak outside Bisbee, Arizona, where we were only eleven or twelve miles from the sun. It was a hundred and sixteen degrees on the thermometer, and every degree was a foot long. And that was in the shade. And there weren't no shade.
He is also very capable of pulling off a flourish, as demonstrated by this passage taking place in the aftermath of the critical tragic event of his protagonist’s life.
The blaze had climbed to the ridges either side of the valley and stalled halfway down the other side of the mountains, according to the reports Grainier had listened to intently. It had gutted the valley along its entire length like a campfire in a ditch. All his life Robert Grainier would remember vividly the burned valley at sundown, the most dreamlike business he'd ever witnessed waking - the brilliant pastels of the last light overhead, some clouds high and white, catching daylight from beyond the valley, others ribbed and gray and pink, the lowest of them rubbing the peaks of Bussard and Queen mountains; and beneath this wondrous sky the black valley, utterly still, the train moving through it making a great noise but unable to wake this dead world.
Train Dreams crossed my path when it was featured by Douglas Stuart on BBC Radio’s A Good Read. The panel’s discussion of what makes it work is worth listening to.
A film adaptation premiered at Sundance in January and has been acquired by Netflix for distribution. The film stars Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, and William H Macy - a review in Vulture calls it a “staggering work of art”.
Film
Val Kilmer’s life and career
What Happened to Val Kilmer? He’s Just Starting to Figure It Out. | The New York Times | Read profile (from 2020)
Val Kilmer died on April 1st, leading to a series of tributes from collaborators that reflected on his idiosyncratic personality in various ways. but all agreed about his obsessive commitment to living a creative life.
I was reminded of a 2020 profile by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. The story shone a light on an actor who was seen as having been prevented from reaching the very top rung due to difficult behaviour and bad film choices.
She writes:
Before you can understand the story of what happened to Val Kilmer, you have to determine for yourself who he was in the first place. Trying to compare him to any movie star working either now or then will fry your mental circuit board: He was an upwardly mobile conventional movie star; he was equally a fringe weirdo who would soon disappear.
She found Kilmer in a reflective mood:
“Everyone has to work out their own salvation,” he told me. “How to live and by what morality, and I found that the part that I feel bad about is hurting somebody in the process.”
The story also acts as an eerie time capsule of the unmoored feeling of the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic:
South by Southwest was canceled before I even landed. Cannes was postponed. Eventually, the Olympics were too. In the coming weeks, everything was canceled: school, outside, hugs. Peter Beard went missing, and Kilmer took a walk with Ali Alborzi, who was distraught. It was the longest walk Kilmer had taken in a long time, and he realized that two hummingbirds had been following him, had been following them for three days.
The actor David Thewlis shared a fitting epitaph to Kilmer in reposting a note he received from him after their troubled epic The Island of Dr Moreau had wrapped - “What an incredible story we lived, you and I. One of the greatest.”
Art
Pictures of belonging
Pictures of Belonging | Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C | Visit exhibition website | Until 17 August 2025
With Their Lives Upended, They Practiced the Art of Resilience | The New York Times | Read review
I had the chance to see this excellent exhibition of works by Miki Hayakawa (1899-1953), Hisako Hibi (1907-1991), and Miné Okubo (1912-2001) at the Smithsonian American Art Musuem in January. This video gives a walk through of the show.
Photography
Photographing authoritarian Chile
The Photographer Who Saw the Brutality and the Fragility of Authoritarianism | The New Yorker | Read essay (from 2023)
A Fire That Feeds Our Life: Evandro Teixeira Talks About Neruda and “Chile 1973” | New City Brazil | Read interview (from 2023)
These stories showcase a series of photographs taken by the Brazilian photojournalist Evandro Teixeira in Chile at the dawn of the Pinochet regime, starting a short time after the military coup. The collection includes pictures taken at the funeral of Pablo Neruda.
Teixeira described the funeral in an interview:
Neruda’s casket was taken to their home, La Chascona, a house painted bright blue, in a leafy neighborhood of Santiago. La Chascona, where the wake took place, was also the name the poet affectionately called his wife Matilde. The place was in very bad shape, the military police had looted it, windows broken, everything scattered, a mess, all his books taken. Through the property garden ran a small stream, but we found the land all flooded because they had expressly broken the barrier of the watercourse to swamp the place and make things even more difficult. So, we had to improvise by taking down some doors to pave our way into the house for the wake to happen. Considering Neruda’s importance, there were few people at the wake except for a few friends and some ambassadors. On the way to the burial crowds started to gather silently on both sides of the streets, when we arrived at the cemetery there was a huge crowd waiting. A part of the crowd cried: “Pablo Neruda!,” the other answered: “Presente” (Present). And together they all chanted: “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” The people united will never be defeated!