A WRITER'S WIT
. . . romance is invariably flavoured with the extreme.
Walter de la Mare
Born April 25, 1873
Whose Myth?
Edel Rodriguez, Illustrator
NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD
A WRITER'S WIT Whose Myth? April 28, 2014, Shirley Jackson, “The Man in the Woods”: Christopher, a college student, finds himself walking in a forest for several days. ¶ The story unfolds as a myth, each element and each character having its own purpose. Even the trees are personified, have their purpose of welcoming Christopher to the forest, “bending their great bodies toward him.” A cat joins him, acting more like a dog would. An old woman named Circe enters the story. ¶ I believe one reason Ms. Jackson may have left this story unpublished is that it has no tension. It unfolds from beginning to end with little variation in tone. I don’t mind reading a story that ends a bit mysteriously, causing the reader to wonder, but if the entire story is uttered in the same breath without a clear shape, it may not, FORGIVE ME, be a story. And once again this selection aces out a younger and LIVING writer from being published in the magazine. Garlic in Fiction is, as I write, being edited by Ms. Jackson’s children for a Random House release next year. Edel Rodriguez, Illustrator NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT My Book World Carr, Cynthia. Fire in the Belly: the Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Long book (over 600 pages). Long post. David Wojnarowiz (voyna-ROW-vich) was born in 1954. His father beat him, and he was sexually abused by older boys. He barely finished high school and did not attend college, yet in the 1980s he became, for a short time, an art sensation in New York. He didn't care about success, often living hand to mouth, and refused to take the next step that would ensure stability. That would have been selling out. Click here to view his work. "David's work was full of sex and violence—politics expressed at the level of the body. He painted distress. Soldiers and bombers. Falling buildings and junkies. His images had the tension of some niceness opened up to its ruined heart. In the montages he began to develop, David would expose the Real Deal under the artifacts—wars and rumors of wars, industrial wastelands, mythological beasts, and the evolutionary spectrum from dinosaur to humanity's rough beast" (231). David was gay but arrived at that place by way of a rather indirect route. He preferred the intimacy of a relationship but often turned to the anonymous sex prevalent in New York City until the AIDS crisis became a problem. In the late eighties, he and his longtime companion were tested and both came up HIV positive. "David was beginning to consciously connect his family's pathology to a larger worldview. He added an anecdote in the Eye about watching a cop kick a dope-sick junkie while arresting him: 'And I'm feeling rage 'cause in the midst of my bad mood this cop is inadvertently reaching in with his tentacles and probing in ice-pick fashion some vulnerable area from years ago maybe when my dad took me down in the basement for another routine of dog chain and baseball bat beatings or when he killed my pet rabbit and made me eat it . . . blam . . . blam . . . blam'" (312). The death of so many men may be one of the reasons why I continue to write. Not only must I do so in order to stay sane, alive, but I must do it for these people whose lives were cut short by a hateful and unrelenting disease—and a still indifferent culture. I'm surely not as gifted as David Wojnarowicz, but I must not waste the time given me. I participated in some of the same risky behaviors that many of my contemporaries did, and I was fortunate enough to emerge with a different roll of the dice. I must work to honor David and Tom. Would they still be together now? Would David have embraced his success? Would his burgeoning career have matured or fizzled out? Multiply his life times the hundreds or thousands of gifted gay men of that era who died. Their voices continue to shout at us from their discordant chorus. We owe a great debt to Cynthia Carr for allowing us to hear one of these voices loud and clear.
Click one of the links below to purchase a copy of Fire in the Belly. Amazon Barnes and Noble Powells NEXT TIME: BACKYARD BIRDCAM PHOTOS A WRITER'S WIT Something Stolen April 28, 2014, Thomas McGuane, “Hubcaps”: Owen, a child of two heavy drinkers, develops a quiet life that includes hiding a couple of small turtles at the bottom of his lunchbox and stealing hubcaps for his collection. ¶ As always, McGuane’s story is rich with details about the setting, the characters. Owen’s inner life, like that of many lonely children, is both desolate and rich. He may collect other people’s hubcaps as a way of feeding his bereft inner life. But this life is also rich with kindness and an awareness that others do not have. He, for example, is able to enumerate both the gifts and the deficits of all the Kershaw brothers’ abilities as baseball players—without judgment. He is able to befriend the mentally challenged youngest Kershaw brother without gathering much attention. The subtle climax seems to occur when something precious of Owen's is taken from him. As his parents separate, he continues to steal hubcaps at football games. “As time went on, it wasn’t only the games: any public event would do.” McGuane’s Driving on the Rim was published in 2010. Design by Radio. NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT Boxed In April 14, 2014, Roddy Doyle, “Box Sets”: Sam, a Dubliner who has lost his job, takes his dog for a walk and is run into by a cyclist. ¶ Prior to his accident, Sam has thrown a coffee mug at the kitchen wall. He’s angry, not necessarily at his loving wife, Emer, but at his circumstances. It’s like stirring a pot of anger over slights he feels their friends have committed, over not having a job, over Emer’s suggestion that he should volunteer until something turns up. As in all good short stories, the protagonist experiences a change. How does his transformation relate to all that has happened, to the boxed sets of TV dramas like Mad Men and The Wire mentioned so early in the story? Tune in to see! The Guts is Doyle’s latest novel. Grant Cornett, Photograph Wescott at 113 Glenway Wescott is one of those writers who perhaps never received the attention he should have. As deft and nuanced in his writing as E. M. Forster or Christopher Isherwood, also gay writers born about the same time as he, Wescott never quite got the breaks as those two. Because today marks his birthday, I recommend two books, the first one about him, the second by him. Rosco, Jerry. Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2002. Rosco makes clear that Glenway Wescott was a writer who wrote because he loved to, not because he felt he should make a living from it. A contemporary of Isherwood, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Wescott was befriended by most of these people (except for Hemingway who, in a homophobic fit, used Wescott as a model for a character in one of his novels). Protagonist Alwyn Tower speaking: “Indeed, it was an instinctive law for Americans, the one he had broken. Never be infatuated with nor try to interpret as an omen the poverty, the desperation, of the past; whoever remembers it will be punished, or punish himself; never remember. Upon pain of loneliness, upon pain of a sort of expatriation though at home. At home in a land of the future where all wish to be young; a land of duties well done, irresponsibly, of evil done without immorality, and good without virtue” (39). Wescott, Glenway. The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story. New York: NY Review, 1940. Michael Cunningham, introduction. Short but piercing novel set entirely in one afternoon in 1940, one that turns out to be quite a charade. A woman “owns” a hawk as a pet, and it sets up obvious symbolism of control, freedom, but also a more subtle symbol for her marriage. TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD
A WRITER'S WIT O'Brien, Master of Form I love O’Brien’s stories, and I know I shall return to them again and again because they do not unfold easily, necessarily, the first time. In “Shovel Kings,” a first-person narrator recalls another character (Rafferty) who then tells the story—rather by way of being interviewed by the narrator. Interesting approach, and I’m not sure why it is so effective. If Rafferty tells the story himself, alone, then perhaps there is inherent some sort of weakness in it. If the narrator alone tells about Rafferty without his input . . . then again the story is weak for it. I must remember this approach to see if it might work. It is rich; it is effective. In “Black Flower,” I like how O’Brien develops the character in such a manner that is so facile—but isn’t really. The black flower is a subtle metaphor for the man, but also the malaise existing between the two factions. “The petals were soft, velvety black, with tiny green eyes, pinpoints, and there was something both beautiful and sinister about it” (76). “Old Wounds” is the story I like best in this collection. The lazy back-and-forthness through time, I suppose. The wounds, the healing of the wounds, the wounds again. Fight, make up. Like many families. Wounds. Heal. THURSDAY: PHOTOGRAPHY A WRITER'S WIT Seafaring Landlubber April 7, 2014, Jonathan Lethem, “Pending Vegan”: Paul Espeseth is coming off an antidepressant and visits San Diego’s Sea World with his wife and twin four-year-old daughters. ¶ Lethem seems to capture that netherworld between an on-drug/not-on-drug life. His nameless wife is but an aloof caregiver, as if he is another one of her children. And in any number of ways he is. Paul renames himself Pending Vegan, fully aware of the questionable methods by which meat-eating is achieved, yet loving the saltiness of pork. With the thought of having to postpone his hunger-busting behavior, Paul buys a turkey leg to gnaw on. His wife is annoyed, and he becomes a victim of his love for meat. ¶ I enjoy Lethem’s writing very much. His literary references, his cultural and spiritual references, are all in service of the narrative, in this case, about a man caught between two worlds. Paul Espeseth, too, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he cites, has the “capacity to keep two opposed ideas in mind at the same time.” Read to find out how! Lethem’s most recent novel is Dissident Gardens. Patrik Svensson, Illustrator TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT Erdrich's Cat is Elusive March 31, 2014, Louise Erdrich, “The Big Cat”: A nameless narrator, over time, marries two different women—one who snores and one who does not. ¶ As always, Erdrich’s story contains a bit of the mystical. The narrator and Elida, his first wife, spend a Christmas with her parents in a poorly insulated house, whose interior walls exude frost early in the morning. He tells his daughter the layers of frost are the snores of his wife and her sisters. Later, he divorces his first wife and marries Laurene, a rich woman who does not snore. Having sacrificed so much sleep early on, the narrator now takes afternoon naps to catch up. ¶ He has monthly meetings with Elida over their daughter’s issues. One day he kisses Elida, and they conduct an affair, then get back together and remarry. Of course, the narrator is faced with living with the snoring again. In the last scene, Elida’s snores now take on the “gurgling purr of a big cat digesting prey meat.” The narrator wakes, in a sweat, perhaps realizing that he may be the prey meat. Erdrich’s book, The Round House came out in 2012. [The magazine gives no credit for the story’s illustration.] TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT Gray's Monumental Project Gray, James. Teachers at the Center: A Memoir of the Early Years of the National Writing Project. Berkeley: National Writing Project, 2000. James Gray, founder of the National Writing Project, writes of his many experiences with teachers who are also writers. The idea he develops is to send teacher/writers back to their classrooms to teach writing, not just English grammar. The earlier part of the book—filled with personal anecdotes about his own development as writer, anecdotes about teachers—seems more interesting than later sections about the political nuts and bolts of the organization’s formation. Some nuggets from James Gray: “I had thrived in Miss Popham’s class because she was in charge of her own curriculum. She had a wonderful idea and freedom to teach as she wished. I still think hers is the best way to organize a literature class in high school if the goal is to encourage wide reading and the love of books. My own best teaching in high school reflected my attempts to replicate the spirit of that 1943 class” (2). “When teaching or learning new skills like reading Shakespeare or writing well, a teacher needs to keep at it. One way we learn to read and write is by reading and writing regularly and frequently” (15). “This was a teachers-teaching-teachers idea, rare for its time [1961] and transparently sensible. Effective and experienced classroom teachers, rather than professors, did the job of teaching and supervising beginning student teachers. I accepted, and every year for the next fourteen years I taught fifteen beginning English teachers how to teach and visited them in their student teaching classes. Year after year, I had groups of gifted young teachers who, I always thought, could have chosen any career, but chose teaching because teaching is what they had always wanted to do” (25). “I was thinking that I should have listened to my parents and gone to law school. The thought of facing thirty-four sixth-grade students on Monday without the slightest notion of what I was going to teach was terrifying. In frustration, I kicked at a rock partially buried in the mud. Out scurried several small green crabs. One half-dollar-size specimen picked the edge of my shoe as its next hiding place. I carefully kneeled down without moving my foot to take a better look. The obtuse angle of the setting sunlight caused the crab to light up. She was blowing phosphorescent bubbles from her gill slits. I crouched in the mud absolutely transfixed. Each cell of that animal was illuminated in flame. I momentarily lost my breath . . . as if I had been jolted to consciousness. I knew then that if I could share this type of feeling with my students, I would be teaching them something worthwhile” (74). “During the summer institutes, BAWP [Bay Area Writing Project] works to maintain a balance between knowledge gained through practice and knowledge gleaned through research and literature in the field. As teachers prepare for their demonstrations, they are asked to describe not only what they do but why they do it” (95). “From the outset, the writing project adopted a different take on inservice. We believed that if school reform was to be effective, inservice programs must be conducted by the folks on the ground. Classroom teachers are the linchpin of reform. School reform can’t happen just by passing laws, publishing mandates, requiring courses, or reading one more book. But real school reform can happen when teachers come together regularly throughout their careers to explore practices that effective teachers have already proven are successful in their classrooms. Inservice of this sort equals professional development, two terms that, alas, have not always been synonymous” (103). I was heartened by this book even though I left teaching some time ago. Gray helps to reinforce the idea that I may have done a fairly good job of teaching. If nothing more, his book helps me to see that teaching composition was not a waste of time. Instead, it may be the most important thing that I did with my life, topping, in terms of consequence, anything that I’ve ever written. WEDNESDAY: MORE PHOTOGRAPHY FROM YELLOW HOUSE CANYON A WRITER'S WIT Hadley Wins Again March 24, 2014, Tessa Hadley, “Under the Sign of the Moon”: Greta, in her sixties, travels by train from London to Liverpool to visit her daughter and experiences a chance encounter with a much younger man. ¶ Hadley’s greatest gift may be developing character. She so thoroughly creates interesting individuals that the plot seems to unfold as a result of their willful actions—as if they are actual people. We are drawn along with Greta from her past—two husbands, her life as a wife and mother—to the present, as a woman recovering from cancer. The young man’s attentions seem odd; she speculates he must have a mother fixation to be so attentive to her needs. At the same time she feels rejuvenated. . . . the way you might describe a limb getting over an attack of pins and needles—that she was coming back to life. When Greta has a second stranger-on-a-train encounter with the young man, he awkwardly spills his drink in her lap, and while he moves to clean her dress, he places his head on her knee. She insists that he leave the establishment immediately. He has left her a gift, a worn copy of a historical novel, in which he has written what turns out to be her name (though he'd said her name was the same as his mother's): Greta was confused, and for one long moment she really believed that it was fated, that this stranger had known her before he ever met her, and that he had written her name inside his book before she even told him what it was. Hadley is comfortable with Greta’s ambiguous feelings, and it feels natural because often it is the way we feel about our own lives.
The New Yorker published three of Hadley’s stories in 2013, and with this one, she gives this year a great start. Hadley’s novel Clever Girl is out now. Benoit Paillé, Photographer TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT Cunningham's Charms Cunningham, Michael. By Nightfall. New York: Farrar, 2010. I’ve now read everything Michael Cunningham has ever written, including several readings of The Hours, and I believe he may be a genius. A rare author it is who can create a world so airtight and yet breath-like, flexible, that it, itself, seems like a living thing. Rare it is that a contemporary author can compel me to sacrifice an entire morning to finishing a novel as if it were a conversation of the utmost importance. In By Nightfall, a couple in their forties are forging a life for themselves in SoHo. Peter owns his own gallery, and is on the precipice of either making it big or falling into an acceptably mediocre state forever: Get Groff (and really, would he blame Groff for going with a bigger gallery?) and he settles, quite possibly for good (he hasn’t been up and coming for almost a decade now), into a career of determined semidefeat, a champion of the overlooked and the almost-but-not-quite (228). His wife Rebecca is an editor. When Rebecca’s brother Ethan (called Mizzy, because he, arriving quite late in the family’s life, is a mistake) comes for a visit, both are rather knocked for a loop. He is one of those charming, good-looking young men who can get almost anything or anybody he wants because he’s always been told that he is special. In reality, Mizzy is a charming and functional drug addict. But the reader senses that it’s only a matter of time before he must go into rehab again, and who’s up for it this time? Certainly not Mizzy.
To give more of the plot would be to ruin the joys of this book. Cunningham is a master of structure, characterization, and storytelling. The chapters, themselves titled, become short stories, yet each chapter leads in a linked manner from one to the other. Cunningham has a way of realizing character by way of reflection. Although he’s a master of dialogue, as well, we often learn more through what seem like the meanderings of the characters’ minds. Their inner and outer expressions combine to form characters that are as real as our friends, our family members. Cunningham creates an overarching structure, in which the characters are one way in the beginning, we watch them metamorphose, and then at the end, we see them broken, like shards of pottery that have been dashed against the floor. With the last sentence of the book, however, we realize Peter and Rebecca going to put their lives back together. At least they’re going to try. In an interview Cunningham once said that with each book he tries to challenge himself to something larger than the last time. At first, this seems like a smaller, quieter, novel, compared to his previous tomes, but I'm not so sure. With this one he manages to equal, at least, what he has written in the past. Only time will tell if it is better. WEDNESDAY: PHOTOS OF YELLOW HOUSE CANYON A WRITER'S WIT Reliving it Up? March 17, 2014, T. Coraghessan Boyle, “The Relive Box”: A nameless man narrates his tale of a “relive” box, by which he can recite a date and time and relive that moment. ¶ What makes this an enjoyable story is the universality of the conceit. Which one of us wouldn’t like to say “Reset,” and go to a time in our lives when we were younger, happier, livelier, sexier? Who wouldn’t like to relive those times we can’t quite recall in order to get them straight in our minds? Boyle’s characters make clear the potential problems with using such a device. We would wear ourselves out reliving the past. Oh, hm. We often do that anyway: reliving the times we were in love, in the throes of passion, relicking our wounds from some sort of battle so that we can “win” it the second time around. The narrator sums up the situation best in the last lines of the story. When his fifteen-year-old daughter Kate asks him—mid-trance by way of the relive box—if he is there, he replies, “I’m not here. I’m not. I’m not.” When we live in the past—with or without a relive box—we’re definitely not here. Boyle published When the Killing’s Done in 2011. Julien Pacaud, Illustrator TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT Read a passage from my latest published story, "A Certain Kind of Mischief," a narrative of two boys with way too much time on their hands. I watch as he gingerly undoes the thin cambric material concealing his box springs and pulls out a miniature copy of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. “Found it on my teacher’s desk in fifth grade,” he whispers. “I’ve read it like twenty times.” He replaces it by wedging it between a spring and the mattress. Untying some strings, he produces a jar filled with grasshopper legs. You can find out what happens to this latter-day Tom and Huck, in the latest issue of the Beloit Fiction Journal. Buy it for $10 by clicking here. My Book World: On Neruda's Case Ampuero, Roberto. The Neruda Case. Translated by Carolina De Robertis. New York: Riverhead, 2012. Ampuero’s novel, The Neruda Case, is divided into five parts, each one named after a woman whom Pablo Neruda is involved with over his lifetime, either as mistress or spouse. This novel is one of those in which a historic figure, in this case, a distinguished South American poet, is employed as a fictional character (names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously). A kind of realization of Neruda’s life, the novel takes place against the backdrop of a pre-Pinochet Chile. In the early 1970s, Cuban Cayetano Brulé meets Neruda at a party, and the poet hires Brulé to help him locate a daughter he never really knew, the only child he believes he ever sired. Even though Brulé has never worked before as a detective, he agrees to help Dan Pablo. In the part titled “Josie,” Brulé realizes Neruda has cancer, and the poet first engages him to locate a certain oncologist in Mexico. Brulé’s “training” as a sleuth takes place by way of reading certain detective novels that Neruda recommends. Throughout the novel, Brulé compares and contrasts his methods, his capabilities, with the fictional detectives of this one author. In order to make Brulé look like a detective, Neruda dresses him, presenting him with a lilac-colored tie dotted with small green guanacos (llamas): “It had a coarse texture, though a nice feel. On the lilac background, the guanacos leapt joyfully, grazed placidly, or contemplated the horizon” (55). Don Pablo declares the tie is over forty years old. He wore it when he met “some of the greatest European intellectuals” (55). He also wore it when he “went underground” in the 1950s. Essentially, Neruda means for the tie to be a talisman, to bring Brulé luck as he heads out on his mission to find Neruda’s daughter. This visual cue appears many times throughout the novel. Is it also a motif representing Don Pablo when he is not present? A reminder of Brulé’s mission, his amateur status? One is not quite sure, but it is one of those delightful images that makes the reader feel that he’s returned to familiar ground. Throughout, author Ampuero recaps certain points in order to keep the reader apprised (and interested): “My women never gave me children. Not Josie Bliss, who was a tornado of jealousy, not the Cyclops María Antonieta, who gave birth to a deformed being; nor did Delia del Carril, whose womb was dried up when I met her; nor Matilde, who had several miscarriages. I’ve had everything in life, Cayetano: friends, lovers, fame, money, prestige, they’ve even given me the Nobel Prize—but I never had a child. Beatriz is my last hope. It’s a hope I buried long ago. I’d give all my poetry in exchange for that daughter” (132-3). Oh, come on! one has to say. Really? Such a statement makes for good character motivation, but would a renowned poet have said such a thing? Brulé’s trip continues throughout the world, including East Germany’s Berlin. One comes to believe that each of the five women in Don Pablo Neruda’s life has inspired him to be the poet he becomes; each is an integral part of the work that expresses the human being he is. Without each, or by remaining with only one woman, he would never produce the work that he does. With three chapters to go, Neruda dies, and Brulé is never able to inform the poet the truth about his daughter. As part of the novel’s denouement, one sees the lilac tie with green guanacos three more times: “He wiped his tears with his guanaco tie, and studied the corpse’s face again through the shadows” (361). This seems to be Brulé’s way of connecting with the poet one last time. The way is not easy, in the time of great political upheaval, but Brulé is able to attend Neruda’s funeral. “He wore his best suit, a white shirt, and the violet tie covered in small green guanacos” (363). “He bit his lips, still unable to place Ruggiero, who now pressed his index finger against Cayetano’s green-and-purple guanaco tie, and smiled. ¶ ‘A friend of mine pushed you into that truck,’ he said. ‘They took you to Puchuncaví” (371). This scene brings Brulé full circle to the point where he was at the beginning of the novel. The Neruda Case is a very finely constructed and enjoyable novel—not only as a sophisticated whodunit, but as a literary novel, as well. And even though I usually dislike reading translations (something is always lost), this one is superb. Read it! WEDNESDAY: PHOTOGRAPH AND SHORT ESSAY A WRITER'S WIT A Small But Beautiful World Ackerley, J. R. We Think the World of You. New York: New York Review Books, 1960. Several years ago (I’m always behind in my reading and follow-up) in the New Yorker, I became acquainted with writer J. R. Ackerley for the first time. From the same generation as my grandparents, as F. Scott Fitzgerald, he was a British man who published only four books in his life. Seems that it took him a long time in between to develop each one. The novel is about Frank, a young man in London, in love with a man named Johnny, Johnny’s wife, Megan, and Evie, Johnny’s German Shepherd pup. We Think the World of You is built somewhat around the motif of the cliché embodied in the title. No less that seventeen times does Ackerley employ a form of it to demonstrate the offhand way the characters have of treating one another and Evie. And though the reader notices the repetition, it becomes an acceptable motif. While we were talking about [Johnny, who is in prison], the scullery door was pushed open and a dog came in. Evie continues to insinuate her way into Frank’s life, at least, while everyone else seems to shove her away. She’s destructive, probably because she is not exercised properly. How she loved running, using her muscles, her strong young limbs! If Tom or the rebuffed boy took her out every day on the lead round these mean streets what use would that be to her? She ought to be bounding a daily ten miles over grass. She ought to be in the country (59). There is some wrangling between Frank and Johnny’s wife and sister over the care of Evie, though they “think the world of her.” After Johnny is released from prison, Johnny spends some time with Frank and brings Evie with him. He is stunned how much she prefers Frank's company to his. There is an extremely tender love scene that, oddly enough, transpires with the three of them. It was now, as the rest of our garments followed, that Evie began to exhibit an increasing perturbation as though whatever was happening before her eyes was having, upon the confidence she had hitherto shown in the distinctness of our identities, a confusing effect. Uttering little quavering cries of doubt and concern, she sat first upon our mingled clothes, gazing at us with wild surmise, then upon our mingled bodies, excitedly licking our faces as though she would solve her perplexing problem either by cementing them together with her saliva or by forcing them apart. She lay with us throughout the afternoon, her fur against our flesh, and we talked of her most of the time (177). Throughout this trim novel, Frank is put in charge of Evie for short periods of time. Once, he even keeps her past a deadline, thinking that he will just keep her, to save her from the ineptitude of the others in her life. Finally, he promises Johnny he will pay him forty pounds for the dog. “Did you mean what you said about the forty quid?’ In some way it seems a painful price; in other ways not. Forty pounds means little to Frank, who has some means. At the same time, it demonstrates how little Johnny thinks of Evie, to let her go for any price, and rather easily at that. After that Evie and Frank live peaceably for many years, yet for such peace, Frank pays a price. Advancing age has only intensified her jealousy. I have lost all my old friends, they fear her and look at me with pity or contempt. We live entirely alone. Unless with her I can never go away. I can scarcely call my soul my own. Not that I am complaining, oh no; yet sometimes as we sit and my mind wanders back to the past, to my youthful ambitions and the freedom and independence I used to enjoy, I wonder what in the world has happened to me and how it all came about . . . . But that leads me into deep waters, too deep for fathoming; it leads me into the darkness of my own mind (209). Anyone looking for a superficial and positive sort of dog story will be disappointed. We Think the World of You is so much more.
WEDNESDAY: TRIP TO A CASINO A WRITER'S WIT Terms We Should Remember: Masscult and Midcult Macdonald, Dwight. John Summers, editor. Louis Menand, introduction. Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain. New York Review Books. New York, 2011. I became interested in this book when I saw it reviewed in The New Yorker. Then after I received my copy, I found that this blurb from the back cover gives the reader a great introduction to Macdonald, who published most of these essays prior to 1972: “An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon ‘Midcult’ and he attacked it not only an aesthetic but political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free.” Wow! Some Nuggets from a Book Filled with Them On the Mags: “This is a magazine-reading country. When one comes back from abroad, the two displays of American abundance that dazzle one are the supermarkets and the newsstands. There are no British equivalents of our Midcult magazines like The Atlantic and the Saturday Review, or of our mass magazines like Life and The Saturday Evening Post and Look, or of our betwixt-&-between magazines like Esquire and The New Yorker (which also encroach on the Little Magazine area). There are, however, several big-circulation women’s magazines, I suppose because the women’s magazine is such an ancient and essential form of journalism that even the English dig it” (59). 1960 On Speculative Thinking: “Books that are speculative rather than informative, that present their authors’ own thinking and sensibility without any apparatus of scientific or journalistic research, sell badly in this country. There is a good market of the latest ‘Inside Russia’ reportage, but when Knopf published Czeslaw Milosz’ The Captive Mind, an original and brilliant analysis of the Communist mentality, it sold less than 3,000 copies. We want to know how what who, when, where, everything but why” (208). 1957 Middlebrow: “The objection to middlebrow, or petty-bourgeois, culture is that it vitiates serious art and thought by reducing it to a democratic-philistine pabulum, dull and tasteless because it is manufactured for a hypothetical ‘common man’ who is assumed (I think wrongly) to be even dumber than the entrepreneurs who condescendingly ‘give the public what it wants.’ Compromise is the essence of midcult, and compromise is fatal to excellence in such matters” (269). 1972 I was fascinated with this man’s informed opinions because essentially little has changed since he made these assertions (when I was but a child or youth). If anything, such conditions have worsened. What can be more Masscult than People Magazine? And has even The New Yorker slipped a bit? Are we getting stupider as a culture, or was Macdonald too smart for his own good?
WEDNESDAY: SHORT ESSAY AND PHOTOGRAPH A WRITER'S WIT A Dictionary of Errors When Porter Cresswell thinks of the vast number of mistakes that we speakers of English make each and every day of the year—for how can we help it, we’re only human, after all—there are a few that stick in his craw like a toothpick caught crossways in his throat. And he writes a letter to the editor of his local newspaper. Online, no less. Dear Fellow Citizens, You would do well to recall that grammar books are written based on usage. Yes, through the long lineage of our language, crafters of such books have discarded that which no longer works (thee and thou, for example) and accepted or transformed a former mistake into something that is now acceptable usage. Over time, after humans insist on melting the “h” out of a certain word or making one agree with a verb that it didn’t in the beginning, the writers of the Great Grammar Book of Inviolate Rules often acquiesce to the hoi polloi . . . and change the rule. Still, I think we should uphold certain rules of grammar, as long as we can. I or Thou. I hear people of all ages violate this inviolate rule, but mostly it is the young, and such usage is appalling. Appalling, I tell you! Me and my friends went to the store. Yack! Me and coach decided I should pass the ball off instead of trying to take the entire game on my back. What makes either of these sentences unacceptable is that the speaker has chosen to use the wrong pronoun, indeed the wrong type of pronoun. Me is an object pronoun. Not in a million years can it really serve as the subject of a sentence (well, we could wait around and see). One can put it before the verb and pretend, but no no no, I protest. Me cannot ever be the subject of the sentence. I is the subject pronoun one wishes to use. My friends (to be polite) and I went to the store. Coach and I decided (equally) that I should pass the ball off instead of trying to take the entire game on my back. The rule is so simple. I performs the action; only me can take it up the you know what. (Or is it Only I can take it . . .?) FRIDAY: END OF PORTER CRESSWELL'S "Dictionary of Errors" RANT See Ken Dixon's most recent post at kendixonartblog.com. In it he talks about his latest show at the William Campbell Gallery in Fort Worth. Exciting stuff!
A WRITER'S WIT What a Childhood, What a Writer! Dillard, Annie. An American Childhood. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. In this memoir, author Annie Dillard recalls the freedom she was given as a child. Is this childhood lived in 1940s and 50s, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the sort of childhood that helps create artists? From her book I developed the following tenet: Parents who allow their children to be their own person have no equal: “I had essentially been handed my own life. In subsequent years my parents would praise my drawings and poems, supply me with books, art supplies, and sports equipment, and listen to my troubles and enthusiasms, and supervise my hours, and discuss and inform, but they would not get involved with my detective work, nor hear about my reading, nor inquire about my homework or term papers or exams, nor visit the salamanders I caught, nor listen to me play the piano, nor attend my field hockey games, nor fuss over my insect collection with me, or my poetry collection or stamp collection or rock collection. My days and nights were my own to plan and fill” (149). When she is not even twelve, Dillard and her friends, the Fahey brothers, form what they call iceballs and throw them at cars for sport. At one point she lobs one that hits a man’s windshield inches from his head. He throws open the door of his Buick and leaves it agape as he chases them block after block until, breathlessly, he catches them: “‘You stupid kids,’ he began perfunctorily. I witnessed a similar event one year, when a man who lived next door to my elementary school in Wichita stacked dead branches in the area of land between the sidewalk and the street. When a kid picked one of the large branches and began to drag it down the street, the man raced out and dragged the boy toward the school to report him to the principal. Just watching that act of violence froze me to the sidewalk. I could never have thrown a snowball at a Buick traveling haplessly down the street. Perhaps Dillard’s childhood equipped her with a certain courage many of us do not have. Parents who leave their children alone can produce results that go a variety of ways. For Dillard it seems to have helped to produce one of the most creative writers in America. I'm sure I’ll read this work again.
WEDNESDAY: A PHOTO AND A SHORT ESSAY A WRITER'S WIT Does Story Come Together? February 17 & 24, 2014, Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Come Together”: Boy meets girl. Boy is enticed by girl to go “out.” They kiss for fifteen minutes, breaking a record of the boy’s friend. Girl calls it off, breaking boy’s heart. ¶ Coming-of-age stories are tricky to write. If they’re too generic, they can be horribly uninteresting, except perhaps to other twelve-year-olds. The perfect modulation is needed, and such an element seems to be missing from this story. It seems a bit disingenuous for an adult writer to pretend that he is twelve again. A bit of the retrospective point of view is needed, I think, to put the story in its proper place. ¶ Also, I keep expecting something new or different to happen: Karl’s older brother is setting him up for a fall or his parents are going to catch the two mid-kiss or something! ¶ And I issue the same disclaimer I often make with regard to translations. Something seems to get lost, indeed! Perhaps I’ve missed some finer nuance of the story, but I don’t think so. It seems like a very elemental narrative by someone who must be a very fine writer in his own language. Knausgaard strikes a number of chords—music albums, song titles, rock groups from the period—but they fail to make a sound that I can hear. This story is part of the author’s forthcoming title, part of his My Struggle series of novels. Javier Jaén, Photographer. A WRITER'S WIT Playing St. Barbara Not Easy Szczepanski, Marian. Playing St. Barbara. (City): High Hill Press, 2013. In October author Marian Szczepanski wrote a guest post in this blog about how she came to pen her book. Before beginning my profile, you may wish to click on her name for a link to that post. Publishing a book today is as dependent on word of mouth as it has ever been, more so if you consider that most publishers either don’t have the budget for reading tours and other expensive forms of publicity or else save their millions for their top-earners. What follows is my word-of-mouth entreaty to read a fine book. A COMPELLING STORY Playing St. Barbara begins in 1929 with an eighth-grader’s winning essay describing the seventh-century legend of St. Barbara, patron saint of miners. The salient features of Barbara’s life—a cruel and unyielding father, her unbending conversion from paganism to Christianity, her apparent disappearance into the earth—play out in various ways throughout Szczepanski’s novel, and it is important for the reader to internalize the saint’s story before moving on. The narrative reveals the lives of three daughters, one of whom writes the winning essay, and the wife of a coal miner, primarily during the decade of the 1930s in southwestern Pennsylvania. As an aside, in 1957, my family’s car broke down in a coal mining town in this region, and we spent three days there in a “hotel” waiting for our car to be repaired (my parents wound up buying a new Pontiac before we returned to our home in Kansas). Coal dust was so prevalent that my mother felt compelled to wipe every chair before we sat down, even the toilet seat. She must have prayed before each meal we ate, that we would not breathe in any more of the powder than necessary. Such fine dust is spread throughout this story like a black veil. The father, Finbar Sweeney, is an abusive brute. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t verbally abuse his wife, Clare, or physically harm her by way of a brutal slap or unwanted sexual advances. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t abuse one of his three daughters. All three seem like shards of the same person, and they are, in a sense, all reflections of their mother, Clare. It may be because of their suffering that Clare in some way consumes what seem like magic seeds to free her body of a number of pregnancies. One bright thread in the lives of the coal miners and their families is the annual St. Barbara pageant (the other is baseball), offered up to the martyred life of the patron saint of miners. Each of the Sweeney daughters, very close in age, is called upon to play the life of the saint over several years—and each in her own way fails. The event emphasizes the class differences in that the play is directed by a woman the youths call The Queen, a wife of an “upperhiller,” a woman whose husband is in management. However, The Queen must depend on the miners’ children to play the parts and is not always pleased with their performances. Each of Clare's daughters, in her own way, manages to escape from the town: the eldest by marrying well, another by becoming a nun, though she sacrifices her own love of a man to do so, and the third by her very wits, bidding good-bye to the town and venturing off to nearby Pittsburgh to start a new life. Clare, too, long-suffering wife must make a decision with regard to Finbar. After the mine experiences a huge explosion and collapse and Fin must spend time in the hospital, she goes to see him every day, and each day, unless sedated, he lashes out at her. Temporarily free of his ill treatment at home, she, of course, drinks in her freedom. Her friends and daughters urge her to leave Fin, an act of desperation at a time and place where the strictures of the Roman Catholic Church are clear, where most women wouldn’t leave their husbands for any reason. But the women in Clare’s life are clear: Finbar, alcoholic brute, is never going to change. BUY THE BOOK Playing St. Barbara is a rich amalgam of many things: historical novel, romance (capital R), crusade for the rights of nonunion workers (Pennsylvania Mine War of 1933), exposé of the Klu Klux Klan’s work in the 1930s, the plight of women since time immemorial. But most of all, it is a window into a small fragment of life that must have begun somewhere in Germany, where coal-mining was developed long ago, and continues through today in the States. Though the conditions and rights of miners have improved, the delicate and flammable nature of their work will probably never change. And sadly, though the lives of women everywhere have improved, as well, there are still souls today who are being subjected to men like Fin, trapped in lives that are as dark and dirty as the mines themselves. Szczepanski’s book will not allow us to forget. Today’s writers depend heavily on the “platform” they themselves build: websites, blogs, readings in indie bookstores (that they themselves must arrange), Facebook pages, Twits (you know what I mean), Google+. But most of all, steady sales depend on the hardy word-of-mouth transfer from one reader to the next. Marian Szczepanski has written a highly literate and transformational book. It is a book for women. It is a book for men. It is a book for the old and the young. Anyone who loves a great story, a significant one. To get your copy, click on any of the links below. I highly recommend that you do! Amazon High Hill Press Powell’s Books As an added note, click here to follow a link to Marian's website for a PDF of the cast of characters and a number of other aids for readers, as well. WEDNESDAY: PHOTOGRAPHY A WRITER'S WIT Minister of Whose Interior? February 10, 2014, Zadie Smith, “Moonlit Landscape with Bridge”: The Minister of the Interior of an island nation deluged by a typhoon abandons his place in the world by using his last shred of power to board a plane to Paris, where this man in his sixties will join his family, whom he has sent ahead. ¶ The Minister’s internal turmoil is the engine that propels this story: along his way to the airport, his last ride in an official SUV of black, with a driver whose courage is fading fast; a look back at his purpose as he stops and unloads crates of bottled water to islanders so crazed with thirst that they are more greedy than grateful. During the water delivery, the Minister loses a shoe in the muck of the storm—emblematic of something else he is leaving behind. Then his one-hour trip to the airport evolves into a five-hour ordeal, and he suffers a broken elbow in a melee while stopping to take a leak in a public place. A knife-wielding maniac, a man the Minister was once comrades with, “hails” a ride to the airport only to shout BON VOI YAH GEE at the minister as he boards his jet. One senses, as the minister grimaces and moves toward across the tarmac, that his elbow will be the least of his pain. Smith is the author of NW. Gil Inoue, Photographer TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD A Black-and-White Day on 32nd Street A WRITER'S WIT History of a Manuscript When I first began writing in the 1970s, I studied a book written by a woman who had experienced a great deal of success creating children’s books in the 1950s, and she shared what she knew, in a very “how to” fashion. One of the forms she passed onto the reader was one she called "The History of a Manuscript.” On it included space for about eight spots in which the writer could list his or her rejections and acceptances for the same story title. I still use that form to track the six to twelve stories I’m trying to place with journals at any given time. This past year I didn’t have to check any records to realize that I had not placed a story since April, 2011, and I was wondering if the universe was making different plans for what I’d frivolously called my career. In checking through some of these histories, I see that I’ve sent the same story out as many as eighty times before stopping to think. What’s wrong with this manuscript? Is there something about the subject matter that turns editors off? Is it the tone? The point of view? Is it poorly written? It has taken me many years to realize something I always sensed, that the selection process is a very subjective one. I’ve now reached a point where as many as forty or fifty percent of my rejections are of the “A” variety; that is the type in which editors say they like your work and invite you to submit again. Type “B” consists of what might not be more than a two-by-four-inch shred of paper that contains a generic message, one with absolutely no encouragement to submit again. How is it that fifty percent of these editors think I’m pretty good, but that the others can’t be bothered? In 2012 I wrote a story that seemed to come to me by divine intervention (it would be good if I believed in such a thing). It seemed to be channeled to me by some force all of a single weekend in the mountains of New Mexico. Then, of course, I polished and polished the story. I submitted it to my local writing group, a network of knowledgeable writers with MFAs and PhDs. Not that I always think they’re correct about their opinions, but I do believe they always help me to see certain things I hadn’t before—and through the eyes of people I would hope to gain as my audience. So I revised it and began to send it out. Written about a very timely subject, though not really, for I always think the best stories are about human existence, if “about” anything. The topic is merely a way to get at the narrative about life on this earth. I received some rejections very quickly, within the first few weeks. Geez, didn’t you make it past the first paragraph? I wanted to ask. Then a few “A” rejections rolled in. I can’t tell you the number of almost wistful regrets that were handwritten by some of the editors at the bottom of their “submit again” message. Then the editor of one journal wrote and said he’d overridden the opinion of his collegiate staff and said he like to publish my story. If I would be willing to change the title and reinvent the ending, which he felt was a bit facile, and resubmit it ASAP, he would see that it got a fair rereading for the 2013 edition. I thought about it. But I liked the eponymous title based on the central character’s name. I also didn’t agree with the editor about the ending and wrote him an e-mail declining his offer. What? you might be thinking. In my mind I was thinking that one of the journals listed on this story’s manuscript’s history would surely want to publish it. I just needed to sit tight. But slowly, the remaining thirty journals sent their rejection notices of my timely story, the one that ought to have been on store shelves for almost a year now . . . had the editor accepted the first round of revisions. If, if, if. Always the narrative of a loser. After a number of months, as my history of a manuscript sheet revealed more and more rejections, I begin to rework the story of my own volition, and, hey, guess what? I decided that my story did deserve a better title. And in working through the manuscript again, I made a subtle change to the ending—the very aspects that particular editor had indicated. By now it was a year after having sent the ms. the first time. In checking my records for The Beloit Fiction Journal, I realized that in eight years I had submitted six previous titles, none of which has subsequently been published anywhere. And my plump notebook of writers’ guidelines for over 300 journals is full of notations like these. I swallowed and wrote another cover letter to the editor, Chris Fink, at Beloit Fiction Journal, and asked him if he would consider looking at the story again. I’d changed the title, the ending. In addition, I believed I’d fleshed out the story to make it more substantive, of a higher quality. At the end of January, 2014, I received a phone call from Chris, saying, if the story was still available, he’d like to publish it. Eek! (As the Mary Louise Parker character on Weeds once said, “Do people still say ‘Eek’?”) The Beloit Fiction Journal began publication in 1985, almost thirty years ago, a long period for a print journal to have survived, especially when one considers it is published by the English department of a small liberal arts college in Beloit, Wisconsin. So many journals in similar situations or at even larger institutions have failed since 2008, especially since the advent of the online journal. Work first published by BFJ has been reprinted in award-winning collections like the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, the Flannery O’Connor, and the Milkweed Fiction Prizes. Fine writers I admire, like Rick Bass, Lan Samantha Chang, Gary Fincke, and Maura Stanton have been published by the BFJ. So . . . I feel very proud to announce that my story “A Certain Kind of Mischief” will be published in the next edition of the journal, which comes out in March. I’m grateful to Chris Fink, Beloit professor and writer, for having the patience to deal with a bit of authorial ego and publish my story after all. If you read the history of the BFJ at their website, you’ll see that the key may lie with who looks at a story. As Fred Burwell, historian, states, “Best of all, we learned a great deal about writing through winnowing the slush pile. And out of those stacks of paper-clipped manuscripts came our ‘eureka’ moments, the delightfully shivery feeling when we recognized an artist at work, a writer with the gift to move us. That’s when the Beloit Fiction Journal became magic.” I am happy to become part of that magic, shiver, myself, to think that my story has passed the muster of the journal's editorial process. When the issue comes out, I plan to set up links so that my readers can buy their copies from the journal. For now, I simply wish to share a procedure I go through with each and every short story I attempt to publish. If you’re not into a certain masochism, well, you may not wish to create such a history. I am. FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014 (I intended to publish some photographs on Tuesday and failed to post. Look for them next week.) A WRITER'S WIT An Emerald Indeed February 3, 2014, Donald Antrim, “The Emerald Light in the Air”: Billy French, a man in his fifties, a man who has suffered through a number of family deaths and whose wife has left him, muddles through a series of experiences that serve up a certain redemption. ¶ Some stories envelop the reader from the first sentence. Then the second one swallows you further. And then you’re mired, like Billy, in the muck of the road, where, in his vintage Mercedes, he gets stuck. The man, a middle school art teacher, has endured the loss of his wife who’s left him. “'I’m searching for something that isn’t quite there,' she once said" (63). Billy has endured electroconvulsive therapy, which the author describes in such vividly seductive detail that you sense he may have experienced it himself. Billy endures one more test, one that even in his potted sensibilities, he manages to surpass himself—and most of us—as a human being. This story, you must read. Antrim’s story collection The Emerald Light in the Air, in which this story appears last, comes out in September. Zohar Lazar, Illustrator SATURDAY: Some Grog for the Game TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT A Literary Hero I didn't have time to post this when I recorded it in my reading journal in 2012. Now that I have space . . . and time, I humbly present my findings. Prior to 2009 I had not read the novels of John Cheever. But in perusing an old bookstore in Berryville, Arkansas, I found several of them, plus his journals—clean hardcover first editions. I became so enamored with his work that I ordered his complete novels from the Library of America. Cheever, John - The Wapshot Chronicle I used to sneer at the Library of America covers when I saw them at the bookstores: black with the author’s photograph featured across the cover, a signature font used to depict the author’s name—I was under the impression they were just cheap reprints. But having read Cheever’s Wapshot novels for the second time in three years, I find the editions to be enlightening, well-edited, and a bargain. For $31.50 I was able to get all five of Cheever’s novels: $6.30 apiece. Each LOA edition offers so much more: scholarly editing, in this case by Bruce Bailey, noted Cheever scholar and author of Cheever: A Life (see my reading journal for 2009); a chronology of Cheever’s life; and notes that gloss Cheever’s allusions to past events, historical and literary, everything from how St. Botolphs resembles "various towns around the south shore of Massachusetts, where Cheever grew up" to what the G. A. R. is (Grand Army of the Republic) (925). Cheever uses a very sly but clever point-of-view in which readers believe they are witnessing a third-person narrative until they see the word “we” and it shifts to first-person plural for a sentence or two: “Looking back at the village we might put ourselves into the shoes of a native son (with a wife and family in Cleveland) coming home for some purpose—a legacy or a set of Hawthorne or a football sweater—and swinging through the streets in good weather what would it matter that the blacksmith shop was now an art school?” (16). Funny that Cheever should mention Hawthorne—because he is another author who employs this method (in The Scarlet Letter), as if the speaker is the author peeking out from his sheaves to draw us in, or is it an unnamed resident of St. Botolphs luring readers into this long, long tale that will cover two tomes before it is finished? Readers feel as if they are in cahoots with Cheever, peering over a valley to see what the story is all about. And the method is quite effective. The thirty-seven chapters seem, at times, to fit together incidentally. The novel is largely linear though some chapters seem out of order. Cheever might write about one character—Honora, the spinster cousin, for example—and then not mention her until many chapters later. She appears throughout both novels, the child of a long lineage of Wapshots, but by the end of The Wapshot Scandal, she is an eccentric dowager who’s time to die has arrived. Cheever seems to have a feel for the whole of humanity, never judging his characters—almost as if he himself has at one time or another been inside the skin each one of them. Male. Female. Old. Young. Smart. Thick. Heterosexual. Homo. Sexually active. Not. Drunk. Sober. Cheever, John - The Wapshot Scandal This novel seems to be more developed in many ways than the Chronicle, Cousin Honora particularly. Seems that for years, both as a Libertarian and as one who doesn’t care, she fails to pay her federal income taxes. In Chapter XVII she solves the problem by withdrawing all her money from the bank and fleeing to Italy. The chapter is a pleasant stand-alone narrative that makes a great short story, one of Cheever’s greatest gifts. On board she befriends a young man who turns out to be a stowaway. When she catches him stealing her money, she attempts to use her great gift of gab to talk him out of it. When that action fails, she strikes him on the head with a lamp and drags him into the corridor. She leaves to find help, but when she returns the man’s body has disappeared. She’s positive she’s killed him, but later as she debarks the ship, she spots him with another of the ship’s matrons. The chapter begins and ends with Honora blowing the ship’s circuit breakers by plugging in her antiquated curling iron. Is Cousin Honora too much for the world, blowing circuits wherever she goes, forging her way as does an icebreaker in the north Atlantic? Seems so, and such a quality makes her a delicious character (she might even be a distant relative of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge). As the Chronicle was otherwise about Leander Wapshot and his wife Sarah, Scandal is largely about their sons, Moses and Coverly, and Moses’s wife Melissa and Coverly’s wife Betsey. The novel seems to limn the Wapshots as typical New Englanders (mostly British or Scottish stock): aloof, fiercely independent, and as eccentric as they come. Yet the Wapshots are softies, too, never really hurting or maiming one another or their fellow citizens. Cheever can’t seem to kill off his characters unless they die of natural causes, as Cousin Honora does near the close of the novel, returning to the United States—knowing she, as the daughter of missionaries, has lived a most fulfilling life. The novel ends with the reappearance of the first-person narrator, and I can’t for the life of me figure out who is speaking. Cheever? An anonymous Botolphsian? God? Someone tell me, please. WEDNESDAY: MORE LAS VEGAS PHOTOS A WRITER'S WIT Fabulous? January 27, 2014, Robert Coover, “The Frog Prince”: A princess kisses a frog, and he becomes a handsome prince (sort of), while retaining many of his amphibian qualities. ¶ This story looks like one of those exercises in which a (famous) writer takes a (well-known) fairy tale and retells it from a fresh, new perspective—perhaps on a day when he can’t think of anything else to write. (Actually, according to Coover, this is true; he’s planning an entire book around reimagined fairy tales.) Only in this instance, Coover seems to leave out the fresh and new parts. Oh, yes, the prince does retain a certain number of his froggy characteristics, but to what end? Humor alone (ha ha)? To show that he would still rather be a frog than a prince (uh, yeah)? Maybe that’s Coover’s fresh and new take on this brief fairy tale. In all other renditions (including the way I heard it as a child) the reader is led to believe that frog would rather be a prince and project his muddy-tasting goop into a beautiful human princess. Is Coover telling us that this assumption just may not be true? Ribbit. (That’s frog talk for “Amazing!”) Coover is the author of The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director’s Cut. Melinda Beck, Illustrator TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD A WRITER'S WIT Bisbee Rediscovered . . . Twice Shelton, Richard. Going Back to Bisbee. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992. In this long-heralded memoir, Shelton accomplishes many things. For one, he takes the reader on an extended journey, not only over his life on this earth, but, citing sources, he also brings an awareness to us of the fascinating town that is Bisbee, Arizona. He achieves a certain paradox by seemingly moving forward through time and backward at the same time. Shelton seems to know so much. He knows botany. "The popular, as opposed to scientific, names for plants and animals are often based on figurative language, the language of impression and comparison, the language of poetry. These names are descriptive, concrete, highly compressed, and usually require some kind of imaginative leap. I am not a linguist, but it seems to me that the more 'primitive' a language is by our standards, the more it relies on such names" (16). He knows archeology. He knows history. "Gradually, a terrible tension developed between life as it was actually lived in Bisbee and the deeply felt moral, spiritual, and religious impulses of the day. Starting just before the last decade of the nineteenth century and lasting until well after World War I, most of the non-Hispanic residents of Bisbee were trapped between the hardships of life in a small Western mining community, including the horrors of mining itself, and the pressures of an uncompromising Calvinist God. It is no wonder that those two pressures, one from below and one from above, created a society that was basically fatalistic and often hypocritical. The wonder is that the society survived at all" (265). That's Bisbee! Richard Shelton knows, of course, literature, a great big chunk of it from the Greeks, to prose, to poetry. My favorite chapter may be Chapter Ten, in which he relates what his first year of teaching in Bisbee's Lowell School—seventh and eighth graders—is like for a young man who has already served time in the army. He's not wet behind the ears, and yet he is honest enough to admit how astounded he is by the experience, how profoundly it affects him. He develops enough courage to tell off a rather officious faculty member who seems to have been after him since his first day (every school has a Molly Bendixon): "Whatever it was, it caused me to be late getting the roll taken, and I had just turned to that task when the door opened and Molly Bendixon walked in abruptly. I love this guy! Not only for his courage, but he goes on to say that when Ms. Bendixon is ill and in the hospital, he makes a point of visiting her. They do not speak of the incident, but instead, share a kind of camaraderie, just the two of them against all the other stupid sons of bitches in their school, the world at large. Yes, courage on the one hand, but also compassion on the other. Makes for great teaching.
Having made a visit to Bisbee myself, about ten years ago, I consider Shelton's book my trip back to Bisbee, too. I can visualize so very much that he puts before the reader, and I can see the town in a different light. If, like me, you've never read Shelton's book, check it out. Still available in fine bookstores everywhere! Click on title above. I wish to thank my friend Peter for turning me on to this book, in fact, for getting me my copy! WEDNESDAY: PHOTOS OF LAS VEGAS ARCHITECTURE A WRITER'S WIT New Yorker Fiction 2014 January 20, 2013, Akhil Sharma, “A Mistake”: An Indian family of four move from Delhi to Queens in the late 1970s to establish a new life. ¶ The title of a story, usually, is the harbinger of what is to come, and yet we’re often surprised by what happens. Here we think the mistake might be the move to America, where everything is strange to the seven-year-old narrator who gets bullied in his new school—until his father puts a stop to it. Then we think the mistake might be his older brother Birju’s application to a science academy—studying day and night for months—and then Birju is accepted! But the “real” mistake may occur when Birju sustains a serious accident, and it is clear his life will never be the same. ¶ The story reads like autobiography at first—all the delicious details that a child recalls of his world—then it shifts. All of these events could have happened in one’s life—the exchange of humor among family members, affection, fun, then tragedy—but fiction has a way of making us sustain the most difficult part of it last—after the fun is over. A great story. Check it out by clicking on its title above. Sharma’s novel Family Life is forthcoming from Norton. Gerald Slota, Photographer. TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD |
AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
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April 2024
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