Motel Chronicles

One of my favorite collections of playwright-actor Sam Shepard (the others being CRUISING PARADISE and HAWK MOON). This is a collection of short stories, poetry, rants, observations, etc., from Shepard's own life. Each section is separated by date and city (though NOT in any particular order, as sections skip from the '70s to the '80s and back again to the '70s); my favorite is "9/24/80, San Francisco, Ca." (in my edition, pp. 43-46), a short story detailing a boy's train ride to his grandparents' home in Chicago, during which he meet a beautiful barefoot girl who looks like Tuesday Weld.Some of the other stories in this collection formed the basis of Wim Wenders' 1984 film PARIS, TEXAS, which Shepard wrote, and which happens to be one of my all-time favorite films. MOTEL CHRONICLES would be a wonderful introduction to Sam Shepard; I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered about the desert, the road, and America (the beautiful & the ugly).

I knew of Sam Shepard from seeing him act in movies, and was aware of his plays. Deciding to read some of his work, I picked up Motel Chronicles and found it deeply moving. His writing is very calming and free...just straight-forward without artifice. This collection of poems, short stories, observations and vignettes was published in 1982 and reminds of simpler times and places--but with hard-edged realities (as Shepard offers reminiscences of his childhood as well as his adult travels and experiences). Read this for its serenity and down to earth prose.

I had always been drawn towards Sam Shepard's plays but this collection of short prose and poetry went one further step for me. The beauty is in the telling of the story, the conjuring of an image and the creation of emotions that almost transport one to the desolate and shifted locations where these scenes take place. I have taken this book with me to many places, have constantly thumbed through it and never fail to find joy in it.

I was drawn to this book more than a decade ago because of its link to that precious, spectral, surreal, fundamentally American film, "Paris, Texas." If you liked the film, this book will recreate and deepen the experience. If you know nothing of the film, or little of Shepard's work, and seek the realism of someone like Bukowski, without the same depth of cynicism, then you'll like this book. More of a short, powerful montage than a cohesive whole, it combines prose vignettes and poems with cryptic black and white photos to achieve an effect best described by the author (quoting his favorite poet, Cesar Vallejo) near the frontspiece: "never did far away charge so close." A good little book for those struck by that special sense of dislocation, silent sadness, and heavy joy that define the Western American spirit, or maybe those who just spend a lotta time in motel rooms.

Somewhere between a diary and a journal, this book is a must for Shepard fans. Loaded with well-written passages, memories and observations. His reactions to Hollywood are especially insightful and telling. The geography is all over the map and sequence of events shifts, but the quality of the writing stays true. It deserves a much larger following, but it did inspire Wim Wenders to make "Paris, Texas."