Blog Archives

Grog for the Game

1/31/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern.
Reynolds Price
Born February 1, 1933

DK's Grog

For the last two Christmases a kind friend has left on our doorstep an icy milky potion that leaves the body relaxed, the mind supple, clear. But because it is a family formula, our kind friend will not release the recipe. And I respect that. Sort of.

So what does one do but head for the Internet, the god of all knowledge, and Google (the Internet's favored son) "drinks with milk and bourbon." One can determine that much. There one finds several of the recipes lacking, not quite like the friend’s mixture, so one tinkers with them a bit and the following is what one comes up with:

2 oz. of Jack Daniels

1 or 2 oz. of Amaretto (or some other tasty liqueur)

3 oz. of Half and Half (some recipes indicate whole milk, ye gods)

1-2 tsp. of powdered sugar (to taste; I happen to have TWO sweet tooths . . . teeth)

Nutmeg

Caloric Intake: at least 5,000

This is one of those concoctions that MUST be shaken with ice until homogeneous, never stirred or mixed. Save the nutmeg until you have poured the drink into a tumbler and sprinkle a tiny bit across the top. The pleasing arrangement, rather like tea leaves, will forecast which team is going to win the Super Bowl. If you do it right you won't care. Otherwise, the dots of nutmeg may spell out your future, if you’ll win that case in court, whether the boss you hate will choke on his or her sandwich and die all alone in his or her chair. It’s powerful stuff, so be careful with the knowledge you attain.

Finally, you must be sitting down. The effects of this drink—mesmerizing, enlightening, need I say intoxicating—may last up to an hour or two. Consume a second at great risk.

The world has a long history of gathering in an arena to watch men smash each other up. It's the reason why high schools still teach Beowulf. Even today we must have dragons to slay, and as we look on, we must have grog . . . gobs of mighty grog!

TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD

New Yorker Fiction 2014

1/30/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
Norman Mailer
Born January 31, 1923

An Emerald Indeed

Zohar Lazar

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 Story: Part 4

1/29/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.
Shirley Hazzard
Born January 30, 1931

Untitled: Part 4

Parts 1, 2, and 3 are reprinted here if you did not read them previously. If you did or if you don’t wish to refresh your memory, scroll down to Part 4, the final installment.

1. It’s your second day, Ariella Pines, and since you made it through your first, you show up early and make the coffee. You remove the pouch of rich cinnamon mocha from a box, dump its contents in the basket with a brown paper filter, and pour water in the tank. The maker begins to sputter, and feeble brown liquid trickles into the carafe. In a few minutes the aroma is enough to gag you, but it’s what she likes, Eloise Markham, owner and manager of Markham Finer Toyotas. MFT reads the silver logo they slap on the back of every vehicle on the lot, next to that solid oval emblem.

It wasn’t your idea to work here, but since you were dismissed from a job you’d held for twenty years, you took what you could find. Yes, Ms. Markham took pity on your soulful female face, as you poured out your heart to her. Though you didn’t cry, she handed you a tissue as you told her how the school district let you go because you dared to teach a certain book—not because you were a poor teacher, not because you approached one of your more approachable male students or even slapped someone silly for talking during your lecture. No, it was because you chose to teach a book about a young girl who gets pregnant and has it terminated. On your last day, you saw a total of nine mothers-to-be among your one hundred and fifty pupils—squirming in their seats, wondering why no one had told them their rights about participating in such a process. By sixth period, when you got to the part of the book where the young heroine is lying spread eagle in the stirrups and her parents barge into the procedure room (it’s not an operation), the principal dismissed your last class and ordered you to his office. For an hour you screamed at him. From your cell phone, you called a union representative, who dispatched posthaste an attorney before the last bell. All to no avail. You were canned. Over and out. With all those years under your belt, you’re only now eligible for a pension. But you will have to wait another twenty years to actually draw the funds, because you know no other school district will ever hire you. Should you withdraw the retirement money, or start over in a different career? It’s a conundrum; you’ve never known anything but teaching.

Markham Finer Toyotas is located at the edge of the city on one of those monster lots. A luxurious, low-slung showroom of four thousand square feet is attached to a larger warehousey building where mechanics keep Markham Finer Toyotas in shape and meet all the finer Toyota requirements for routine service. It’s not like any dealership you’ve ever seen before. To begin with, the people in sales must meet challenging quotas, or it’s buh-bye, take the highway. Eddie Klaas has been at it the longest, so he’s sort of assigned the silver-haired set, although he could sell a Toyota to just about anyone. The walls of Eddie’s little glass cubicle are lined with Plexiglas Salesman of the Year awards, going all the way back to the eighties. Yesterday you listened in on his pitches, which are very warm and genuine. No high pressure. He offers some kind of discount right off the bat, to let the customer know he’s not trying to take them for everything they’ve got. Very disarming.

After savvy customers realize they’re getting all the options for free, they also realize Eddie’s got them where he wants them. If they’re really savvy, they’ll deal for a Toyota on the last day of the quarter, when sales personnel have to file quota reports. They can take Eddie down to where he makes five hundred dollars a car, and if he feels like it, he’ll let them have it for that. Sweet. Eddie’s sixty-eight, with long silver hair he keeps slicked back. He has a bit of a paunch, too, but he enters the dealership each morning with great purpose, as if he were going to teach War and Peace (your all-time favorite novel), when at most, all he’ll be doing is selling one of those huge Sequoias.

In a free moment, you think ahead to what a dealership might look like in a hundred years. Little women in individualized hovercraft will be offering you hits of cinnamon coffee that you snort instead of drink, because by then the species will have evolved to plump little piggies with tiny mouths and big limp ears from all the iPod listening, all that truncated cell phone banter (yo, dude, sup)––not to mention enlarged thumbs from, well, you know. It’s frightening to think about, so you move on to your next chore. You recall the brief encounter with Mrs. Markham the day before.

“Ariella,” Markham said. “I want you to check on the rest rooms.”

“What?”

2. The men’s and women’s rooms are side-by-side, of course, set off very symmetrically from the service area, another pair in the sales area (and ne’er the twain shall meet). You stick your hand in and flip on the women’s light first. The fluorescents flutter into existence and begin to buzz in a monotone that will sear your brain for the next few minutes. The cleaning service has spiffed up the room. All you have to do is make sure the stalls have TP and that the dispensers are filled with pink liquid soap. Yes, the custodians are supposed to do it, but sometimes they forget. You unlock a closet in the hall and find a box of packets of pink liquid soap. (Never lend this key to anyone, Markham tells you. Lie and tell them you don’t have one.) You fritz with the dispenser until it opens and you slide the packet into place, making sure it actually dispenses soap into your hand—gobs of it, it seems. You take a roll of toilet paper and put it in the disabled stall, which you could lease it as a studio apartment. In the hall you knock on the men’s door, just in case. Not even Eddie-the-Eager-Beaver is here yet, so you enter and check it out. Just as spiffy as the women’s, but wait. One of the fluorescents is flickering wickedly. You hesitate, but then you realize you must make a good impression, be a go-getter. So you fetch a ladder from a different hall closet (yet another key) and set it up. You withdraw one of the long cylindrical fixtures out of a box and find your way up the ladder. You ease the old one out—you used to do this in your classroom because if you asked the custodians to change it, they would just look at you and laugh—and lay it carefully on the floor. You step up and gingerly install the new one (sometimes they can pop or even explode). It click click clicks on and warms the room with its added luminescence. Your head bumps loose one of the panels of the drop-down ceiling, and you note something funny up in this ether. You’d expected to see the flimsy crisscross network of metal that holds those squares of sound-absorbing material, but instead you see what looks like a very deliberate system of tunnels. You grunt, disregarding your new pantsuit, and pull yourself up into the nearest tunnel, crawl a bit, and look down. You notice that, through a charcoal black square of plastic that must appear to be a ceiling tile to the casual observer below, you can see into every stall of both restrooms. You crawl further out over the sales area. There you can peer into every office cubicle. Same for the business office, the service offices, the service waiting room. Not only that, but you observe that there are cameras set up to view parts of the entire dealership.

This set-up seems very un-Toyota. You crawl back to the men’s rest room and grope your way down the ladder. You replace the ceiling tile, just as you begin to hear rustling of skirts and the click of heels against the floor in the hall (and those are just the men, har har). Yes, very un-Toyota. Why, you just have to look at the finished product. Such honest and clean lines. Such fine workmanship.

3. You spent yesterday acquainting yourself with the entire line of cars that Toyota has to offer, from the Prius to the Sequoia and the Tundra pick-up. You’ve always driven Fords, so you had no idea that such a butter smooth transmission could really exist, that upholstery could caress your body, that fake walnut paneling could look so real and feel so rich beneath the tap of your fingernails. You are allowed to test drive each model, so that you become acquainted with its features, so many you can’t enumerate them all. When someone pulls out of the Ford agency in front the Avalon you’re testing, you hit the ABS brakes and learn what that’s all about, hearing this deep rumble as they pulse you to a stop, but without that annoying and scary wheel lock-up. You stop just short of slamming into the bastard’s F-150. You make a stop in the park and learn to program radio stations, and not just the locals, but all the Sirius XM stations. You learn to set the cruise control. You learn all the colors, interior and exterior, from pearl white to Sonora gold. You learn what to do when the tire inflation light comes on, that you either raise or lower the pressure. By the end of the day, you are sold. If you could afford a new car, you’d drive out the door with something to replace your decade-old Taurus.

“Ariella, we like all our employees to know the feel of the line,” Ms. Markham told you near closing time. You still didn’t really know what your job was all about. You’d done nearly everything except sell a Toyota. “That way you will want to work your hardest. We’re all about team effort at Toyota.”

Everyone is so nice, really nice. You never hear a cross word. You never hear anyone curse. You never hear a heated argument or even one of those held in private, with loud asides. People hold doors for one another. They bring cake on someone’s birthday. Well, they even do that on The Office, often with hilarious results, but then TV life is always so much funnier than your own very real life.

At the end of the day, you report back to Ms. Markham and ask about the tunnels.

“Very good,” she says, tapping the edge of her desk with her long red red nails. “Otherwise, I would’ve had to let you go. And that would’ve been a shame. You’re so smart and attractive. So young.”

“I’m forty-two,” you say.

“We won’t split hairs,” she says. “I’m twice your age.”

“No, really?” you say, because she could pass for seventy, seventy-five.

“It’s what happens when you keep working. All my retired friends are dead, even one of my sons who quit working at fifty-five.” She pauses a moment, as if to pray.

You keep quiet, hoping she’ll dismiss you, so you can go home and check your messages, scroll through your e-mails for job appointments.

“That business up there is left over from the last agency,” she says, pointing to one of the barely recognizable charcoal squares in the ceiling. There exists a checkerboard of black-and-white acoustical tiles, so unless you’re informed, it’s rather hard to discern which ones are use for surveillance. “A GM agency that didn’t make the grade.”

“But spying . . . it’s so top-down,” you say. “I thought Toyota was above it all. Teamwork and all that.”

“Righto,” she says. “But things have begun to disappear.”

“Like what?” you ask.

“Oh, honor. Loyalty. Integrity.”

Not toilet paper? you think. Pink soap? Packets of coffee?

“I can’t figure it out,” she says. “On paper we’re selling everything but the kitchen sink, but at the end of each month, I, the owner, am making less and less. I’ve called in my accountants, and all they do is scratch their heads. I’d fire them but then everyone would know something was awry.”

“What do you want from me?” you say.

“Good old fashioned snooping,” she says. “People won’t suspect you, Ms. Pines. You haven’t developed any alliances yet. Have you?”

“Hardly.”

“So you see what’s at stake here,” Markham says, standing and smoothing her expensive knit dress of red and gold. She is a thin woman, but not shrunken like many people over eighty. Statuesque and well groomed, she may be kidding about her age. But then you catch sight of her hands; no longer smooth and white, they’re mottled, the joints accentuated, though you don’t believe they’re arthritic. No, they don’t look crippled, just old. “I could play along as if nothing were wrong. I’ve plenty of funds. Whoever’s doing this could run the place into the ground, and I’d be fine, personally. No, it’s for all the employees who’ve been faithful to me and Toyota.” She momentarily lifts a blind and looks out into the showroom.

Then she sits again. “It’s a very fine organization. You know, my late husband hated the Japanese. He fought at Iwo Jima. He knew how stubborn and vitriolic they could be. Before he died in 1970, he was only forty-five, he knew they’d stage a comeback some day, he just didn’t know it would be like this.” She lifts one of her mini-blinds again and points out to the floor, to all those beautiful cars. “I think that one could be our problem.”

4. You slip in next to her and take a peek. In a sales cubicle located diagonally from her office is a handsome young man.

“Marcus Whitfield,” she says. “He’s twenty-eight and been with us since he graduated from university. He’s Eddie’s nearest competitor. Every month he gains on Eddie’s totals a bit more, and yet there’s something wrong. He doesn’t sell near as many units as Eddy, and I keep losing money, to boot.”

“Seems like something your accountants should be able to spot, doesn’t it?” you say. “That’s where you ought to start, isn’t it?”

“I’ve already had them in twice. Besides, that’s what I want you to figure out.”

“Ridiculous,” you say. “I teach . . . taught youth . . . how to read and analyze fine works literature. My checkbook is always off a dollar . . . or five.”

“But don’t you see,” she says. “That’s why I plucked you from the edge of your dilemma.”

“Yes?”

“During your interview, I could tell by your wardrobe, your jewelry, that you like nice things, that on your salary––I was on the school board at one time, a travesty if you want to know what I think––you probably have no savings.”

“Astute.”

“I’ve announced that I’m bringing you in as my personal assistant, in charge of boosting sales.”

“And that’s why I was changing light bulbs this morning at six forty-five?” you say.

“A ruse. I wanted it to look as if you were learning the business inside out. From bottom to top.”

“From the floors to the tunnels.”

“Righto.”

“I don’t think we’ll fool him, or anyone else for that matter.” You stand, and she hands you a key and remote.

“Here, take that silver Avalon home tonight. I’ll have your car delivered to you. You’re exactly whom I need. Someone objective, who can read the situation and make an analytical assessment.”

You realize that anyone who elects to use whom correctly can’t be all bad. You realize when you get home that there will be nothing on your machine, no e-mails, no shining offers. You realize that if you do this and do it well, you will get to keep living in the house you’ve mortgaged for another fifteen years. You will be privileged to drive a beautiful car. You may even get to read a few minutes each day, pretend like you’re studying sales reports on your tablet. You’ve been dying to get at Kerouac again. Yes, something about traveling appeals to you right about now.

* * *

You continue to observe, as you go about your duties, which seem more nebulous as the days go by. One day Markham has you serving croissants and coffee to staff during an early-morning meeting, where most of the croissants are ignored in favor of crème horns and bear claws. Another day, Markham has you perusing financial records, as if, with your lack of training you might know what trail of breadcrumbs you’re looking for. And on yet another, she asks you to accompany her to Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. in California. It’s an event she attends every year. You feel strange, leaving your “work” behind, fearing that MFT might fall under heavy attack, in your absence.

“Things will be fine,” Markham says, as you board the tiny jet at your local airport. It has exactly eight seats, two facing two in one configuration and another set of four near the back. An attendant takes your coat and hangs it up, tucks your luggage away as well.

“I keep a place near the headquarters, so I never pack anything. You’ll be staying in my guest room over the weekend . . . unless you have other ideas.”

“Oh, no, sounds fabulous,” you say. “What a treat.”

You’d like to nod off for the next three and a half hours, but Mrs. Markham keeps you busy, first with her plans for an expansion of the dealership, and then with her family problems. Seems that one of her nephews is hitting her up for money.

“I’ve never trusted him. All his siblings have professional degrees, have real careers. He did two years at the university, then has been floating from thing to thing. I’ve written check after check for dear Lenny, all loans, mind you, but he’s never lifted a finger to pay them back. Now he’s close to fifty-five, and he wants in on the action.”

“He couldn’t be siphoning funds off your profits, could he?” you ask.

“I don’t see how, he has no access to my business . . . as far as I know. I’ll just put in a call to my lawyer.”

And she does, while I lie back in my chair. The rush of air on the outside of the flying machine puts me to sleep, and when the pilot informally announces that we’re almost there, I awake with a start. Mrs. Markham is staring at me.

“You look so like my niece,” she says. “So lovely.”

Such talk makes you uncomfortable, but you try not to show it. You land and in a few minutes, you step down off the jet. You take a copter (wow) to the place in Torrance, just south (Markham says) of the 405. She and the driver bandy about inside/outside the 405 as if it’s supposed to mean something. All you see when you get there is the sprawl of urban blight at its worst. Huge, meandering buildings, at least ten times the size of MFT back home.

[Here, fine reader, is where I’m stuck. Don’t know where to go. Help! Not only what should happen next, but is this story worth saving? Do you like either Mrs. Markham or the narrator? The point of view? Let me know, either by way of the Comment feature or the Contact feature. I would love to hear from readers. Thanks. RJ]

FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014
SATURDAY: GROG FOR THE GAME!

Las Vegas: Misc. Signs

1/28/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
Germaine Greer
Born January 29, 1939

Las Vegas: Misc. Signs

THURSDAY: FOURTH AND LAST PART OF AN UNFINISHED STORY

My Book World

1/27/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Give me a dozen such heartbreaks, if that would help me to lose a couple of pounds.
Colette
Born January 28, 1873

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

New Yorker Fiction 2014

1/23/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Culture in France is an eminently social quality, while in Anglo-Saxon countries it might also be called antisocial.
Edith Wharton
Born January 24, 1862

Fabulous?

Melinda Beck

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 Story: Part 3

1/22/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.
Stendhal
Born January 23, 1783

Untitled: Part 3

Parts 1 and 2 are reprinted here if you did not read them previously. If you did or if you don’t wish to refresh your memory, scroll on down to Part 3.

3. You spent yesterday acquainting yourself with the entire line of cars that Toyota has to offer, from the Prius to the Sequoia and the Tundra pick-up. You’ve always driven Fords, so you had no idea that such a butter smooth transmission could really exist, that upholstery could caress your body, that fake walnut paneling could look so real and feel so rich beneath the tap of your fingernails. You are allowed to test drive each model, so that you become acquainted with its features, so many you can’t enumerate them all. When someone pulls out of the Ford agency in front the Avalon you’re testing, you hit the ABS brakes and learn what that’s all about, hearing this deep rumble as they pulse you to a stop, but without that annoying and scary wheel lock-up. You stop just short of slamming into the bastard’s F-150. You make a stop in the park and learn to program radio stations, and not just the locals, but all the Sirius XM stations. You learn to set the cruise control. You learn all the colors, interior and exterior, from pearl white to Sonora gold. You learn what to do when the tire inflation light comes on, that you either raise or lower the pressure. By the end of the day, you are sold. If you could afford a new car, you’d drive out the door with something to replace your decade-old Taurus.

“Ariella, we like all our employees to know the feel of the line,” Ms. Markham told you near closing time. You still didn’t really know what your job was all about. You’ve done nearly everything except sell a Toyota. “That way you will want to work your hardest. We’re all about team effort at Toyota.”

Everyone is so nice, really nice. You never hear a cross word. You never hear anyone curse. You never hear a heated argument or even one of those held in private, with loud asides. People hold doors for one another. They bring cake on someone’s birthday. Well, they even do that on The Office, often with hilarious results, but then TV life is always so much funnier than your own very real life.

At the end of the day, you report back to Ms. Markham and ask about the tunnels.

“Very good,” she says, tapping the edge of her desk with her long red red nails. “Otherwise, I would’ve had to let you go. And that would’ve been a shame. You’re so smart and attractive. So young.”

“I’m forty-two,” you say.

“We won’t split hairs,” she says. “I’m twice your age.”

“No, really?” you say, because she could pass for seventy, seventy-five.

“It’s what happens when you keep working. All my retired friends are dead, even one of my sons who quit working at fifty-five.” She pauses a moment, as if to pray.

You keep quiet, hoping she’ll dismiss you, so you can go home and check your messages, scroll through your e-mails for job appointments.

“That business up there is left over from the last century, the last agency,” she says, pointing to one of the barely recognizable charcoal squares in the ceiling. There exists a checkerboard of black-and-white acoustical tiles, so unless you’re informed, it’s rather hard to discern which ones are use for surveillance. “A GM dealership that didn’t make the grade.”

“But spying . . . it’s so top-down,” you say. “I thought Toyota was above it all. Teamwork and all that.”

“Righto,” she says. “But things have begun to disappear.”

“Like what?” you ask.

“Oh, honor. Loyalty. Integrity.”

Not toilet paper? you think. Pink soap? Packets of coffee?

“I can’t figure it out,” she says. “On paper we’re selling everything but the kitchen sink, but at the end of each month, I, the owner, am making less and less. I’ve called in my accountants, and all they do is scratch their heads. I’d fire them but then everyone would know something was awry.”

“What do you want from me?” you say.

“Good old fashioned snooping,” she says. “People won’t suspect you, Ms. Pines. You haven’t developed any alliances yet. Have you?”

“Hardly.”

“So you see what’s at stake here,” Markham says, standing and smoothing her knit dress of red and gold. She is a thin woman, but not shrunken like many people over eighty. Statuesque and well groomed, she may be kidding about her age. But then you catch sight of her hands; no longer smooth and white, they’re mottled, the joints accentuated, though you don’t believe they’re arthritic. No, they don’t look crippled, just old. “I could play along as if nothing were wrong. I’ve plenty of funds. Whoever’s doing this could run the place into the ground, and I’d be fine, personally. No, it’s for all the employees who’ve been faithful to me and Toyota.” She momentarily lifts a blind and looks out into the showroom.

Then she sits again. “It’s a very fine organization. You know, my late husband hated the Japanese. He fought at Iwo Jima. He knew how stubborn and vitriolic they could be. Before he died in 1970, he was only forty-five, he knew they’d stage a comeback some day, he just didn’t know it would be like this.” She lifts one of her mini-blinds again and points out to the floor, to all those beautiful cars. “I think that one could be our problem.”

NEXT THURSDAY: A STORY PART 4
TOMORROW: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

Las Vegas Photos: Architecture

1/21/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.
Francis Bacon
Born January 22, 1561

Las Vegas: Architecture

THURSDAY: A STORY PART 3

My Book World

1/20/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Myths . . . gossip grown old.
R. P. Blackmur
Born January 21, 1904

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.

'Where's your absence report?' she demanded. 'They're waiting for it in the office. It's holding everybody up. Haven't you been told that you're supposed to take the roll first thing and get it down there?' Her tone was sarcastic and patronizing.

'I'm just taking it now,' I said. 'I'll have it down there right away.' I was furious but determined not to show it in front of the students. Molly turned and marched out, and I followed her, closing the door behind us. I hadn't had my morning coffee yet, and my anger was getting the upper hand. 'Miss Bendixon,' I said, 'let me explain something.' She sighed and turned, evidently expecting an excuse. 'My classroom is off limits to you. You are never again to enter it unless I invite you. And if you ever humiliate me in front of my students again, I will knock you on your ass. You can tell that to the principal if you want to, and if you don't believe me, try me.'

I went back to my classroom and slammed the door, hard. Several of the students had slipped up to the door and had been straining to hear what I was saying to Molly, but they scuttled back to their seats when I came in, and everybody was very quiet."

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

New Yorker Fiction 2014

1/16/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Believe not those who say
The upward path is smooth,
Lest thou shouldst stumble in the way
And faint before the truth.
Anne Brontë
Born January 17, 1820

New Yorker Fiction 2014

Gerald Slota

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

A Story: Part 2

1/15/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
To err is human, but the contrition felt for the crime distinguishes the virtuous from the wicked.
Vittorio Alfieri
Born January 16, 1749

Untitled: Part 2

If you read Part 1 last week, scroll on down to Part 2. Otherwise, you can catch up by starting here.

Las Vegas: Landscape and Pattern

1/14/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I'm right.
Molière
Born January 15, 1622

Las Vegas: Landscape and Pattern

THURSDAY: PART 2 OF THE STORY

My Book World

1/13/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Unused capacities atrophy, cease to be.
Tillie Olsen
Born January 14, 1913?

My Book World

Unless I stop writing, I'll probably always have more books to read than I have time. Even then . . . I don't know. I still can't help buying more books.

Recently, I received another shipment I've been wanting to read. By next Monday I hope to have completed something I can review. For now I'll merely list.

Friend and guest blogger, Marian Szczepanski, has written what looks like a fascinating novel, Playing St. Barbara. It's next and I can't wait to get to it.

A man who went to the same college I did in Kansas has written, along with his former wife, a memoir entitled Our Family Outing. In their book, Joe Cobb and Leigh Anne Taylor share how they deal with the fact that Joe realizes thirteen years into his marriage that he is gay.

A translation, The Neruda Case, by Roberto Ampuero, gives the famous poet Pablo Neruda a featured role as a character in this novel set in pre-Pinochet Chile. Yum.

My aunt recommended Stoner by John Williams, and it's now on my Kindle . . . awaiting my attention.

And I'm looking forward to reading Annie Proulx's memoir, Bird Cloud, the name she gives to the house she builds in Wyoming.

I'm almost finished with a rather interesting award-winning book, Going Back to Bisbee, by Richard Shelton, given to me by a friend of mine, also an Arizonan. It's a delightful memoir, and I plan to profile it next week.

I don't necessarily write about new books. I'd rather share what I've learned or observed in titles from all periods and a variety of genres.

Happy Reading, all!

WEDNESDAY: LAS VEGAS PHOTOS: LANDSCAPE AND PATTERN

New Yorker Fiction 2014

1/9/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Prejudice, which sees what it pleases, cannot see what is plain.
Aubrey de Vere
Born January 10, 1814

Overpopulation?

Because of last week's 2013 presentation, I chose not to profile the January 6 story until today. From now on I will consider one story per week, presented a few days before the cover date, so that readers might locate a copy and read the story if their interests are so piqued. RJ

Grant Cornett

January 6, 2014, Antonya Nelson, “First Husband”: This outing provides a short, or long, few wee hours in the morning, when a middle-aged woman is called upon by her youngest stepdaughter, her favorite, to sit with her three children, while she hunts down her alcoholic husband. ¶ This story seems to have too many characters for the modern reader to keep track of (you expect to do so while reading a novel): an ex-husband, three stepchildren and their spouses, their offspring, in this case two squalling girls and one dutiful boy, whom Lovey, the step grandmother loves more than the others. In their ongoing game of Monotony (Caleb’s renaming of Monopoly), Lovey keeps allowing him to win, even if he is the banker. It may be emblematic of Lovey’s relationship with all of her relatives, all her spouses and lovers: she’s the ultimate "loser," putting everyone’s happiness above her own. ¶ Nelson’s natural milieu seems to be this nexus of modern relationships, who somehow rule each others' lives in a stranglehold of angry love. She understands this tangle (though I hate so many names to keep track of for no apparent reason than to show how many people are in this family) and distills it for us with loving insight. Caleb’s last words of the story, when he discovers that Lovey has been hiding the money she was winning at Monopoly:

“‘Lovey,’ he said, ‘what happened to your money?’ ¶ ‘What do you mean?’ ¶ His face was suddenly furious, his rage as rare as his laughter, and this time aimed at her. ¶ ‘Don’t let me win,’ he demanded. ‘Don’t you dare let me win!’” (61).

Nelson had three stories published in the magazine in 2012 and none in 2013. She gets 2014 off to a rousing start! Just not so many characters, please! The magazine states that Nelson “will publish Funny Once, her seventh short-story collection, next spring.” Watch for it.
Grant Cornett, Photographer

Quiet Revolution

January 13, 2014, Dinaw Mengestu, “The Paper Revolution”: Two young men enter a university in Kampala, Uganda, in the 1970s, and quietly go about starting or involving themselves in a “revolution.” ¶ The “boys,” Isaac and “Professor Langston,” the narrator, wish to become noticed on campus and devise ways to do so on “paper.” The narrator, at least, has been inspired by a historical writers’ conference that had taken place about a decade earlier. As a result, they “publish” pamphlets (handwritten) with clever sayings, but they don’t have much bearing on the current politics, nor are the two young men influenced much by such politics; they simply wish to forge a future for themselves in their new Africa. Mengestu’s novel All Our Names will be out in 2014.
[The magazine gives no credit for the story’s illustration.]

TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD

A Story

1/8/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
The word 'love' has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.
Simone de Beauvoir
Born January 9, 1908

I began this story several years ago. It’s one of those that came very easily at first, and then I didn’t know in what direction to move. I’m soliciting the reader’s help. By the fourth installment, when the story abruptly stops, maybe you’ll have some ideas to send my way. Also, a title?

Untitled

1. It’s your second day, Ariella Pines, and since you made it through your first, you show up early and make the coffee. You remove the pouch of rich cinnamon mocha from a box, dump its contents in the basket with a brown paper filter, and pour water in the tank. The maker begins to sputter, and feeble brown liquid trickles into the carafe. In a few minutes the aroma is enough to gag you, but it’s what she likes, Eloise Markham, owner and manager of Markham Finer Toyotas. MFT reads the logo they slap on the back of every vehicle on the lot, next to that solid oval emblem.

It wasn’t your idea to work here, but since you were dismissed from a job you’d held for twenty years, you took what you could find. Yes, Ms. Markham took pity on your soulful female face, as you poured out your heart to her. Though you didn’t cry, she handed you a tissue as you told her how the school district let you go because you dared to teach a certain book—not because you were a poor teacher, not because you approached one of your more approachable male students or even slapped someone silly for talking during your lecture. No, it was because you chose to teach a book about a young girl who gets pregnant and has it terminated. On your last day, you saw a total of nine mothers-to-be among your one hundred and fifty pupils—squirming in their seats, wondering why no one had told them their rights about participating in such a process. By sixth period, when you got to the part of the book where the young heroine is lying spread eagle in the stirrups and her parents barge into the procedure room (it’s not an operation), the principal dismissed your last class and ordered you to his office. For an hour you screamed at him. From your cell phone, you called a union representative, who dispatched posthaste an attorney before the last bell. All to no avail. You were canned. Over and out. With all those years under your belt, you’re only now eligible for a pension. But you will have to wait another twenty years to actually draw the funds, because you know no other school district will ever hire you. Should you withdraw the retirement money, or start over in a different career? It’s a conundrum; you’ve never known anything but teaching.

Markham Finer Toyotas is located at the edge of the city on one of those monster lots. A luxurious, low-slung showroom of four thousand square feet is attached to a larger warehousey building where mechanics keep Markham Finer Toyotas in shape and meet all the finer Toyota requirements for routine service. It’s not like any dealership you’ve ever seen before. To begin with, the people in sales must meet challenging quotas, or it’s buh-bye, take the highway. Eddie Klaas has been at it the longest, so he’s sort of assigned the silver-haired set, although he could sell a Toyota to just about anyone. The walls of Eddie’s little glass cubicle are lined with Plexiglas Salesman of the Year awards, going all the way back to the eighties. Yesterday you listened in on his pitches, which are very warm and genuine. No high pressure. He offers some kind of discount right off the bat, to let the customer know he’s not trying to take them for everything they’ve got. Very disarming.

After savvy customers realize they’re getting all the options for free, they also realize Eddie’s got them where he wants them. If they’re really savvy, they’ll deal for a Toyota on the last day of the quarter, when sales personnel have to file quota reports. They can take Eddie down to where he makes five hundred dollars a car, and if he feels like it, he’ll let them have it for that. Sweet. Eddie’s sixty-eight, with long silver hair he keeps slicked back. He has a bit of a paunch, too, but he enters the dealership each morning with great purpose, as if he were going to teach War and Peace (your all-time favorite novel), when at most, all he’ll be doing is selling one of those huge Sequoias.

In a free moment, you think ahead to what a dealership might look like in a hundred years. Little women in individualized hovercraft will be offering you hits of cinnamon coffee that you snort instead of drink, because by then the species will have evolved to plump little piggies with tiny mouths and big limp ears from all the iPod listening, all that truncated cell phone banter (yo, dude, sup)––not to mention enlarged thumbs from, well, you know. It’s frightening to think about, so you move on to your next chore. You recall the brief encounter with Mrs. Markham the day before.

“Ariella,” Markham said. “I want you to check on the rest rooms.”

“What?”

RETURN NEXT THURSDAY JANUARY 16 FOR PART 2
FRIDAY: A SHOWCASE OF 2014 NEW YORKER FICTION

Las Vegas Photos: People Watch

1/7/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters.
Wilkie Collins
Born January 8, 1824

A crisp December day in the desert city of Las Vegas, and you see all kinds of people doing all kinds of things!

THURSDAY: A STORY

Along the Border

1/6/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
Zora Neale Hurston
Born January 7, 1891

My Book World

To peruse my reading journal for 2013, click on 2013, or see Reading Journals above.

Bowden, Charles and Alice Leora Briggs. Dreamland: the Way Out of Juárez. Austin: University of Texas, 2010.

I read this book, illustrated by my friend Alice Briggs, in 2010, when it came out, but for some reason, I did not make a note of it in either my blog or my reading journals. Perhaps it is too disturbing. Perhaps I could not fully grasp what Bowden & Briggs have accomplished. Both Bowden and Briggs spent months, if not years, researching their book, exposing themselves to the same dangers that the residents of Juárez do every day. To get the story of the informant who murders a man while U.S. agents listen in and do nothing, to understand the dynamics of this and a thousand other stories, they both make themselves vulnerable to the ragged life on the border, where, because of a few political decisions made in the past, life is a constant battle between those who are selling drugs and those who would steal the contraband and/or the money it generates. It is a bloody war, one that the United States quietly participates in with its insatiable thirst for more and more illicit drugs. It is a war the U.S. ignores as well, for it is a war so deeply entrenched in the two countries’ economies, whose balance will be tipped if an “Immigration Policy” is ever brought to light. Bowden provides the illuminating prose, and Briggs the exquisite drawings that expand that which he cannot say with words.

The gist of Bowden’s entire narrative might be captured in the following passage:

“One of the early priests after the conquest of Mexico, Fray Durán, knew the old tongue and listened to the old men and wrote down their tales of what their world had been and what it had meant to them. They had been very rich and feared by other nations. They told the priest of the tribute once brought to their emperor: mantles of various designs and colors, gold, feathers, jewelry, cacao, every eighty days a million Indians trudged in bearing tribute and the list was so complete that even lice and fleas were brought and offered. The tribute collectors told the emperor, ‘O powerful lord, let not our arrival disturb your powerful heart and peaceful spirit, nor shall we be the cause of some sudden alarm that might provoke an illness for you. You well know that we are you vassals and in your presence we are nothing but rubbish and dirt.’ ¶ That was half a millennium ago and yet the rich still get tribute and the people who give them tribute feel as dirt and rubbish. ¶ For years and decades, for almost a century, people have looked at this system and sensed change or noticed hopes of change. And yet they all wait for change” (67).

Bowden is well aware that this journey the Mexican people make is one that started long ago and continues, for all we know, far into the future:

The combination of Bowden’s stunning and lyrical prose combined with Briggs’s dramatic but subtle sgraffito illustrations make a powerful statement of our problems on the border. No wonder some want to fortify the barriers that already exist there. It is an ugly world, and we certainly don’t want it spilling over into ours.

“In the Florentine Codex, a record of the Indians’ ways that Cortés crushed with his new empire, it is noted that men who die in war go to the house of the sun and then they become birds or butterflies and dance from flower to flower sucking honey. In the old tongue, flower is xochitl, death is miquiztli” (80).

Sáenz, Benjamin Alire. Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club. El Paso: Cinco Puntos, 2012.

The Kentucky Club is a bar on Avenida Juárez in Juárez, the twin city to El Paso, Texas. Most of these seven stories reference a number of things in each one: The Kentucky Club itself, bourbon (or some other strong liquor), stout coffee, fathers who fail their sons in a variety of big ways, and mostly men who fail each other in love.

Sáenz’s style is deceptively simple, strong on declarative sentences and plenty of pages with a lot of white space because his dialog is, if not terse, then spare, lean. Most of the characters, gay men of various ages, live in Sunset Heights, a neighborhood in El Paso, but plenty of them cross the bridge between the two cities, the two countries as easily as most of them switch from Spanish to English—as if they are two forms of the same language. That’s life on the border: with its own lingo, its own culture, like many of the men in these stories, crossing easily from one life to another, but not without a price.

And one must not construe that this is a "narrow" book of gay men’s fiction, many of which made their way onto the shelves in the late eighties because gay men were hungry to read about themselves. It is not one of those books. Some of the protagonists are straight, some gay, some are bisexual. Each one is his own person, whether he is yet whole or not.

In the final story, “The Hunting Game,” the main character, a high school counselor, speaks of one of his students, who has been abused all his life by his father. Sáenz’s metaphors, like his prose, are deceptively simple:

“We grabbed a bite to eat. He ate as if he’d never tasted a burger before. God, that boy had a hunger in him. It almost hurt to watch. ‘I’ll be eighteen in three months. And I’m going away. And he’ll never be able to find me’” (209).

The image is so simple, yet so profound, the hamburger that symbolizes a future that might just satisfy the boy’s hunger to be loved. It has little to do with food; it has to do with hunger, the hunger of the human spirit to find meaning.

On the same page, Sáenz demonstrates through “dream” how the paths of these two males (one older, one very young) will cross one another by virtue of the pain both have suffered at the hands of their fathers:

“I wanted to tell him that his father would always own a piece of him, that he would have dreams of his father chasing him, dreams of a father catching him and shoving him in a car and driving him back home, dreams where he could see every angry wrinkle on his father’s face as he held up the belt like a whip. He would find out on his own. He would have to learn how to save himself from everything he’d been through. Salvation existed in his own broken heart and he’d have to find a way to get at it. It all sucked, it sucked like hell. I didn’t know what to tell him so I lied to him again. ‘He’ll just be a bad memory one day.’ He nodded I don’t think he really believed me, but he wasn’t about to call me a liar” (209).

This PEN/Faulkner award winner has written seven striking stories I believe I should read again and again because I sense there is much I may have missed the first time around. This book is one that my friend Alice Leora Briggs gave me. For me, it is a bookend to the one she illustrated, Dreamland, profiled above. This one gives the reader yet another view of life along the border between Mexico and Texas.

Men in power can easily change borders on maps with the quick exchange of currency, but borders that exist in people’s hearts are much more difficult to traverse.

WEDNESDAY: LAS VEGAS PHOTO ESSAY

New Yorker Project 3 - Stories Least Liked

1/2/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
Cicero
Born January 3, 106 B.C.

Stories I Liked Least and Why

Although my selections are about as subjective as one can get, I have attempted to include in my discussion a spirited and logical argument as to why I believe these stories may fail.

Tomer Hanuka

45. February 25, 2013, Paul Theroux, “The Furies”: Ray Testa divorces his wife and marries Shelby, a young (thirty-one) assistant from his office; together they attend his fortieth high school reunion, and all the women the man has ever wronged begin to appear before him as hags that haunt him. ¶ A very simple story by comparison to many of the finer ones this year—the sort of story perhaps you might think a good amateur could write. (Can I say that?) Intriguing idea, but Theroux seems so obvious about his purpose. He tells more than shows what he wishes to convey to the reader. Theroux’s latest book is The Lower River.
Tomer Hanuka, Illustrator

Bryan Christie

46. April 15, 2013, T. Coraghessan Boyle, “The Night of the Satellite”: A young couple argue over whether to intervene in a lovers’ quarrel and help a young woman, and, along with the descent of an old satellite, it colors their relationship one hot summer in the Midwest. ¶ Boyle certainly knows how to reel you in. The sensory details. Emotions. Visual clues. He manages to make the falling debris of the satellite intersect with the fighting couple—a catalyst of sorts—but his denouement seems as heavy-handed as a bus-sized satellite:

“Space debris that collides in two wide bands of low Earth orbit, at six hundred and twenty and at nine hundred and thirty miles up, can fragment and fragment again—things as big as satellites and rocket boosters and as small as the glove the astronaut Ed White lost on the first U.S. space walk. Eventually, it’s all going to come down, and whether it’ll burn up or crush a house or tap somebody on the shoulder in a dark field on a dark night is anybody’s guess” (69).

This narrative about the petulance of a young straight couple, while being utterly familiar, seems overwrought. Read Boyle’s When the Killing’s Done.
Bryan Christie. Illustrator

Owen Freeman

47. July 1, 2013, Joyce Carol Oates, “Mastiff”: A man and woman hike up a mountain and near the end of their trek down are attacked by an English mastiff that breaks from its young owner’s grasp. ¶ I’ve not read much of Oates’s writing since her novel Blonde came out in 2000 (which I found fascinating), and I realize why. Something about this work seems overwrought: too much detail, even an essence of deus ex machina immediately following the dog’s attack:

“But a hiker, who had witnessed it from a distance, had alerted the rangers and taken down the plate number of the young man’s Jeep” (62).

Why is this bit of knowledge necessary? It seems inserted to make the story become part of a civilized culture, which is truly incongruous in this tale. Justice concerning the dog’s owner, who allows this to happen, is another story—irrelevant to the one Oates is relating about two lonely adults reaching out yet not reaching out to mean something to one another. ¶ With even the subtle use of the omnipotent narrator, Oates wishes to leave no stone unturned, but is it not a bit too much? One likes to feel that a story unfolds, not that it is so hermetically sealed that it winds up with not a breath of air. Oates’s The Accursed was released in 2013.
Owen Freeman, Illustrator

Simon Landrein

48. August 5, 2013, Shirley Jackson, “Paranoia”: A Manhattanite, on his way home from work, believes he is being pursued by, among others, a man in a light hat. ¶ Compared to contemporary stories, this one, most likely from the 1940s, does not move. Oh, yes, it has a plot. Mr. Beresford moves from place to place. But what of it? Jackson may be attempting to demonstrate his paranoia, but I think she fails. Moreover, we’re supposed to believe, I think, that, in light of the very last line spoken by Mrs. Beresford, she is somehow complicit in his difficulties in getting home for her birthday. ¶ This story was discovered by Jackson’s children and obviously submitted to the magazine. Like Hammett’s story, there may be a reason why Jackson never saw it published in her time; perhaps she didn’t wish to have it published. Perhaps she felt it wasn’t up to snuff. Perhaps it was even rejected. ¶ There is something disconcerting about publishing a story that is clearly inferior to the author’s best stories, say, “The Lottery.” I believe it may dishonor Jackson and her entire oeuvre.
Simon Landrein, Illustrator

Martin Ansin

49. August 12 & 19, 2013, Zadie Smith, “Meet the President!”: Bill Peek, fifteen, citizen of the future (in maybe a hundred years), meets an old woman and young girl, the latter of whom he escorts to the “funeral” of her sister, “a real girl.” ¶ Drones the size of gulls? (I think.) The White House now in Scotland, presumably because the U.S. has sunk beneath the ocean? Tsunami season? The “reconstruction” of an original animal, one known as a reddish fox? We’re definitely in the arena of sci-fi or speculative fiction, never a place I’m very comfortable, primarily because I cannot seem to relax and believe what the writer is telling me. It is a language only Zadie Smith knows, and while she reveals the “etymology” of some of her vocabulary, the rest is up to us. ¶ On the face of it, Bill Peek meets the President briefly before a blackout occurs (this image can never leave Brits who’ve seen even one WWII movie)—to what end, I’m not sure—then attends, in the same location, ostensibly, the funeral of the little girl, Aggie’s sister. I rather enjoy speculating, along with Smith, what might happen in this dystopian future, but as with all good fiction, I like to feel that the narrative consists of more than plot. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World both provide something about what might become of the human race. I admire Smith for making the effort and the magazine for adding this story to the repertoire of literature presented in 2013, but I think this piece might work better if it were expanded as a novella, at least. If there were ever a story that needed to be covered in the “This Week in Fiction” section of the magazine’s Web site, this is it! Smith is the author of NW.
Martin Ansin, Illustrator

Marco Mazzoni

50. September 9, 2013, Dorthe Nors, “The Heron”: The story seems to be a first-person monologue in a stream-of-conscious fantasy that considers all the elements of the narrator’s life: a pond in Copenhagen’s Frederiksberg Gardens, a murder from his childhood, a friend Lorenz, young mothers with their prams, a heron. ¶ The narrative is so brief and yet confounding in its impenetrability. Is it because it’s a translation, and I find translations wanting? Is it because the symbols never seem to translate into something else, quite? Provide feeling or emotion for the reader? Am I poor reader? Nors’s Karate Chop is out in February.
Marco Mazzoni, Illustrator

Javier Jaén

51. October 28, 2013, Haruki Murakami, “Samsa in Love”: Gregor Samsa, having existed previously as a bird-fearing beetle, is transformed into a man one morning in Prague. ¶ Kafka may have done it better in his novel The Metamorphosis, by transforming Gregor into a beetle. Clever by half seems an appropriate description of this story, for there exists a problem with point of view. First of all, how is it that the transformed is familiar with the language the story is written in? Okay, one might cite suspension of disbelief as a tool, a great feature of magical realism. Still, it is disconcerting that Gregor is able to name all the items in front of him, call foods by their proper names, speak so fluently with the hunchback woman—and at such a glacial pace. Oh, yes, perhaps it is the author who is using an omniscient POV, not Gregor's POV at all. Yet, for a moment, the POV shifts to the woman hunchback, to affirm in some way this new creature’s humanity. Perhaps Murakami relies too much on the reader’s suspension of disbelief and . . . perhaps he hasn’t given the reader anything that is worthy of suspending his or her disbelief. Perhaps the conceit of playing off a famous novel has failed. For me it’s always a toss-up with translations. Is the reader getting the real story? Murakami’s three-volume novel 1Q84 came out in 2009-10.
Javier Jaén, Illustrator

Until next year, when I undertake this once again . . . .

TUESDAY: MY BOOK WORLD: ALONG THE BORDER
WEDNESDAY: RECENT PHOTOS OF LAS VEGAS
THURSDAY: A SHORT STORY
FRIDAY: I SHOWCASE THE LASTEST NEW YORKER STORIES

New Yorker Project 3 - The Big Middle

1/1/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
“I went to jail to preserve the time-honored principle that a journalist must respect a promise not to reveal the identity of a confidential source. The principle was more important to uphold than my personal freedom.”
Judith Miller
Born January 2, 1948

The Big Middle

These stories, too, are strong, (A- or B+) satisfying, but may possess some quirk that does not amuse me, and I usually describe it in brief.

Adam Stennett

18. January 7, 2013, Rivka Galchen, “The Lost Order”: The anonymous narrator apparently resigns from her job as a corporate lawyer and has trouble handling unemployment. ¶ The reader is drawn in by the narrator’s apparent honesty. Okay. Why is she on the couch almost pretending to be a carry-out Chinese place when she’s gets a wrong number? All the answers are delivered in the last three columns of the narrative. Certain stories are successful because their authors break the rules (like giving a reader all the answers in the last few paragraphs) and get away with it. To write this story any other way would be to make it a non-story. To learn of her unreliable-narrator problems at the end is the only way . . . or is it? Author of Atmospheric Disturbances.
Adam Stennett, Illustrator

Eve Arnold

19. January 14, 2013, William Trevor, “The Women”: In an earlier time perhaps, a young girl is spied on by two older women: Miss Keble and Miss Cotell. ¶ The women dare approach Cecilia with gifts after they see her in a school performance. One woman reveals a secret of Cecilia’s past, a secret that puts her entire life in a new perspective. Trevor provides a beautiful layering of the story, to which the readers are privy to two alternating points of view, making it more novel-like. I quite enjoyed Trevor's My House in Umbria, both the novel and the film.
Eve Arnold, Photographer

Martin Ansin

20. February 4, 2013, Nicole Krauss, “Zusya on the Roof”: This is a compressed story of Brodman’s life, steeped in Hebrew tradition to the point that it squelches him. ¶ Like a poet, Krauss travels back and forth between the concrete and the abstract, in a manner in which the result is delivered like a beautiful child:

“When he left the apartment, he locked the door quietly behind him, and on his back he carried his mother, with her blue ankles, and his stooped father, and their parents, too, dead in a trench at the edge of a pine forest” (64). The crux of Brodman's life: “He had allowed himself to be crushed by duty. He had failed to fully become himself, had instead given in to ancient pressures” (65).

From the specific, concrete details, Krauss limns the abstract universality of millions of readers, whether they see this story or not. They will live it. Krauss is the author of Great House.
Martin Ansin, Illustrator

Zohar Lazar

21. February 11 & 18, 2013, Zadie Smith, “The Embassy of Cambodia”: Fatou, a young woman is employed as a maid in Northwest London and is treated in a rather cavalier manner by this Pakistani family. ¶ Oddly, Smith uses the first person plural (“we, the people of Willesden”), the manner in which Hawthorne does in The Scarlet Letter or as Cheever does in his Wapshot novels, but why? one wonders. It seems to bear no great purpose. ¶ The story is so full of rich contradictions—like one sees in everyday life. The richest may be when Fatou performs the Heimlich maneuver on the eldest daughter in the home, thus saving the wretch’s life. Yet, on the very same day, when Fatou confesses that she has forgotten to remove lamb from the freezer for the evening meal, the woman of the house is furious. Fatou eventually loses the job, but she doesn’t much care. Smith is the author of NW.
Zohar Lazar, Illustrator

Grant Cornett

22. March 11, 2013, Will Mackin, “Kattekoppen”: Soldiers in Afghanistan search out and bring back two bodies of their fallen comrades. ¶ Mackin does a phenomenal job of representing the Dutch dialect on paper (as one with Dutch relatives I can attest). It is this eye and ear for detail that brings this story alive. Why do some of us avert our eyes upon hearing a war story, and others of us eat it up as if it were a piece of rotten-tasting candy? Some may be envious that this is Mackin’s first story in a major magazine, but he tells a tale that no one else can tell, and we should hear it, read it, taste it in its fullness.
Grant Cornett, Photographer

Chiara Goia

23. March 25, 2013, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, “The Judge’s Will”: An old judge in Delhi bequeaths money to his longtime mistress, Phul, and his wife Binny must determine whether she will carry out his wishes. ¶ The story’s significance seems to be lost on me. Is it that the jealous wife, finally, in the end understands that she must care for the helpless Phul (flower)? There seems to be no fanning out from there. The son Yasi’s growth as a character? The judge’s growth? Is it only Binny who, almost begrudgingly, agrees to care for Puhl after the judge’s death? And perhaps that is the point, the strong tie to the title of the story. The judge’s will—not just his written document, but his utter desire—is what is all important. Not any other person’s. The late author was a Merchant/Ivory script writer and novelist of Heat and Dust.
Chiara Goia, Photographer. Extraordinary photographs!

Beata Boucht

24. April 8, 2013, Tessa Hadley, “Valentine”: A young teenage couple in 1970s London—Stella and Valentine—become enamored with one another. ¶ Sometimes it is so difficult to capture the past, yet Hadley does manage at times to make this story fresh, though we’ve all read or even lived it somewhere before. Hadley’s novel Clever Girl will be out early in 2014.
Beata Boucht, Illustrator

Owen Freeman

25. April 22, 2013, Roberto Bolaño, “Mexican Manifesto”: The male narrator and his girl friend Laura frequent Turkish baths in Mexico City for the purpose of titillating themselves into a sex life, or so it seems. ¶ Homoerotic in spite of Bolaño’s efforts to make this a heterosexual story, this tale reveals the dehumanizing yet comforting nature of the Turkish bath, where people become part of the hard yet melting landscape:

“The color of the pool’s rocks, doubtless the saddest color I saw in the course of our expeditions, comparable only to the color of some faces, workers in the hallways, whom I no longer remember, but who were certainly there” (101).

Owen Freeman, Illustrator

Weegee

26. May 6, 2013, Jonathan Lethem, “The Gray Goose”: Miriam, raised by Communist parents until her father returns to Germany, seeks to continue their rebellion. ¶ This is an absorbing, enjoyable story with a great deal of information. Much of the narrative occurs on one night in which Miriam tries heartily to lose her innocence, and if her mother wouldn’t burst into Miriam’s room as her boy blurts "his goop into her palm,” (70), Miriam might accomplish her goal. But perhaps not, given her boy friend’s sensitivity to touch. ¶ A Burl Ives song about the gray goose seems to be the author’s choice for a certain motif. Miriam finally, at age seventeen, realizes the gray goose is emblematic of her mother, the Communist revolutionary, Rose Angrush Zimmer: And the knife couldn’t cut ‘em, Lord, Lord, Lord! And the fork couldn’t stick ‘im, Lord, Lord, Lord. Lethem’s most recent novel is Dissident Gardens.
Weegee/ICP/Getty, Archive

Tim Flach

27. May 13, 2013, Fiona McFarlane, “Art Appreciation”: Henry Taylor, twenty-eight, believes his ship has come in when his mother wins £10,000 in the Australian lottery, circa 1961, and he seeks to marry a young woman in the insurance office where he works. ¶ In this story the world of art seems to collide with that of materialism. Ellie, Henry’s fiancée, attends Friday night art appreciation lectures and is from an educated family of modest means. Henry is now counting money before it has been given to him. With such a windfall and in light of Henry’s otherwise good fortune, he finds it difficult to see who likes him for himself and who likes him for his money. ¶ The situation colors how he views women, his mother, his mother’s fiancé. The story ends with Henry’s acceptance of his lot: a mother who more than likely will not share her wealth with her son but with her newfound mate. Even though this is an Australian story, funny how the British notion of class still seems to seep into the narrative, as if it just can’t be helped. McFarlane’s novel The Night Guest was published in October.
Tim Flach, “Kinda Ready”

Brendan Monroe

28. May 20, 2013, Ben Marcus, “The Dark Arts”: A young American man, Julian Bledstein (hm), spends a cold February in Düsseldorf, Germany, taking experimental treatments for an inexplicable autoimmune disease that has been untreatable at home. ¶ The clinic doctors suck his own marrow out and in some way inject it back into his body, perhaps among other procedures, all failing to make him, Julian, feel better. His female companion, Hayley, has sent him ahead, probably to evade, for a while, his misery, which includes staying in a male hostel, where other young men crawl into each others’ cots for comfort in the dark. One day Hayley appears, and Julian can’t bring himself to tell her that now there is a tumor inside his head. The doctors can do nothing for him. He walks off and leaves her standing in a frigid German wind with nowhere to go. Marcus’s story collection Leaving the Sea is out soon from Knopf.
Brendan Monroe, Illustrator

Balint Zsako

29. May 27, 2013, Steven Millhauser, “Thirteen Wives”: Man recounts his thirteen wives with whom he (apparently) lives simultaneously. ¶ I say “apparently” because one is really not sure. At the outset the story seems quite literal, though one’s credulity is stretched by the fact that in most Western cultures polygamy is disallowed. Then one wonders if the thirteen wives aren’t all different aspects of the same woman. After all, how could he find time to do all the things he must do with each wife, including make love to her? When one sees that wife number eleven is quite ill (but not near death), maybe each “wife” has been the same woman but at a different stage of her life. ¶ Frankly, the story seems to be one of those exercises that writers design for themselves to keep themselves interested, though the exercise may not mean much to the rest of us. Or am I being lazy? Millhauser’s We Others: New and Selected Stories was published in 2011.
Balint Zsako, Illustrator

Victo Ngai

30. June 3, 2013, Akhil Sharma, “We Didn’t Like Him”: Manshu is a self-centered boy, who continues his ways into adulthood, where he cheats friends, family, and strangers alike. ¶ The reader learns much about Hindi customs in this story: rituals for death of family members, mostly. The narrator doesn’t care much for Manchu, his “father’s sister’s husband’s sister’s son” (57)—quite a distant relationship by comparison to Western culture. ¶ The narrator covers nearly an entire lifetime as the reader watches Manshu continue to cheat the family. So strong, however, are the bonds of family and ritual that the narrator continues to allow Manshu to use him—even though he doesn’t like Manshu. ¶ So different is this tale about duty, compared to our own culture, where often siblings and first cousins can easily fade from our care, certainly from our memory. But no matter who you are it is instructive. Sharma is the author of An Obedient Father.
Victo Ngai, Illustrator

Goodman, Cornett, Thornton

31. June 10 & 17, 2013, Ed Park, “Slide to Unlock”: The persona of what seems like a prose poem ponders the efficacy of passwords in contemporary life, when someone with a gun stands behind you at an ATM. ¶ A very impersonal story, with no protagonist unless it is the ever-present “you.” A very chilling tale, however, because it could happen (if it hasn’t already) to any of you. Always thinking of new yet clever and more powerful passwords so that no one can invade your private yet so public lives. The first paragraph says it all:

“You cycle through your passwords. They tell the secret story. What’s most important to you, the things you think can’t be deciphered. Words and numbers stored in the lining of your heart” (62).

Park’s debut novel, Personal Days, was released in 2008.
Timothy Goodman, Lettering
Grant Cornett, Photographer
Lawrence Thornton/Getty, Archive

Goodman, Cornett

32. June 10 & 17, 2013, Sherman Alexie, “Happy Trails”: The narrator provides a sort of eulogy for his late uncle, Hector, who has been dead for over forty years. ¶ The story is also a brief paean to the First Nations culture, Uncle Hector symbolic of all Indians who were (are) killed simply because they were (are) Indians. Alexie always amazes me at his fresh yet uniquely Indian turn of phrase and meaning:

“Then at the graveside, as the starlings pulled down the sun and the mosquitoes raised the moon, it was just my mother and me. She whisper-sang an old mourning song” (65).

And he ends with the proclamation:

“Standing in the cemetery, I felt like the only Indian that mattered and the only Indian that didn’t. I was alive, damn it, and I planned to live longer than every other Indian in the world” (65).

Alexie’s Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories was released in October.
Timothy Goodman, Lettering
Grant Cornett, Photographer
Art Wolfe/Getty, Archive

Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum

33. June 24, 2013, Thomas McGuane, “Stars”: Jessica Ramírez, a female astronomer/professor, antagonizes nearly every person with whom she comes in contact in the mountainous university town where she lives. ¶ McGuane, unlike some male writers, is quite capable of occupying the center of a female character. Though we do not learn immediately the source of Jessica’s anger, we certainly see its alienating effects. Early in the story Jessica witnesses a man about to shoot a wolf he’s trapped, and it angers her. Later at the dog park, she’s ired by the passive nature of the canines found there. These both may be Jessica: trapped by having to work among civilized beings, discontent because she has always been wild like the wolf and she always will be.

“She stopped to listen more closely, to see if she could hear something new through the wind. A pure singing note rose, high and sustained, then another, in a kind of courtly diction. ¶ Wolves” (68).

The author’s Driving on the Rim was published in 2010.
Chris Steele-Perkins, Photographer
Magnum Photos

Grant Cornett

34. August 26, 2013, Yu Hua, “Victory”: Lin Hong discovers that her husband Li Hanlin has been seeing another woman (ostensibly without sex), and sets out to punish both of them. ¶ However, Li Hanlin rather turns the tables by acquiescing to all of Lin Hong’s demands and punishments: sleeping on the sofa, eating out instead of expecting her to cook for him, not watching the TV, sleeping in a chair (instead of their bed) when she decides to sleep on “his” couch. Finally, Li Hanlin says he can no longer endure the situation and asks for a divorce. Lin Hong is shocked but agrees. On the way to the courthouse, they stop at a café where they’d gone after registering for their wedding. One of fiction’s coincidences: the “other woman” happens to be there and Lin Hong figures it out. Her “victory” occurs when she convinces Li Hanlin to kiss her quite passionately in front of the other woman. ¶ The ending allows both parties to save face. Lin Hong has punished the woman and exacted a promise of fidelity from Li Hanlin, calls him back from the cold. Hua’s Boy in the Twilight: Stories of the Hidden China comes out this month.
Grant Cornett, Photographer.

35. September 2, 2013, Robert Coover, “The Colonel’s Daughter”: The Colonel of an unstated country’s army is planning a coup to remove the current President from office, and he engages his voluptuous daughter to serve refreshments to his fellow conspirators. ¶ Coover, interestingly enough, passes the point of view from conspirator to conspirator—none of them a very savory personage. It is a shrewd move because otherwise the reader might not be aware of the betrayal that is brewing.

“The Colonel himself, who seems increasingly removed from the events around him, as if, with a placid smile, communing with the beyond, would, should things go wrong (does he hear a whimper? A slap?), undoubtedly disavow his involvement and betray his own conspiracy” (65).

Yes, deftly Coover causes the Colonel to leave the room, and when he returns he is executed. When his daughter enters, she’s wearing black, so is the President, who publicly eulogizes his targeted assassin in a positive light. The chronology seems to be a bit skewed here, with her entering in black before the execution, or is this my misreading?

“But we are characters who do not exist, in a story composed by no one from nothing. Can anything be more pitiable? No wonder we all are grieving” (65).

Indeed. In spite of the great strength of this story—the daughter’s actions and apparel providing the reader with a metaphoric blueprint of the betrayal—a lack of specifics about nationality seems to strip the story of a certain flavor, as if a chef has omitted oregano from the lasagne. Ultimately, the Colonel is deceived by one of his conspirators, just as he has predicted in the beginning.
Coover’s The Brunist Day of Wrath is recently out from Dzanc Books.
Scott McKowen, Illustrator

Eric Ogden

36. September 23, 2013, Tessa Hadley, “Bad Dreams”: A nine-year-old girl wakes from dreaming and on a whim upsets the living room furniture of her parents’ basement Victorian flat. She has read and re-read a certain book so many times that she may conflate it with her "daytime" life.

“Perhaps it would be funny when her parents saw it in the morning. At any rate, nothing--nothing—would ever make her tell them that she’d done it. They would never know, and that was funny, too” (103).

The point of view shifts to the mother who rises to find the mess in the living room. She believes it is her husband’s doing, a kind of rebelliousness against her domestication.

“Nothing--nothing—would ever make her acknowledge what he’d done, or the message he’d left for her, although when he saw the room restored to its rightful order, he would know that she knew” (105).

The very last section of the story pulls back as the camera would do in a film. A young wife fries bacon for her husband. The child is once again interested in reading her book, the very thing that may have set her mischievous mind to working.

“The child was insistent, though, that she needed to start reading it all over again, from the beginning. Her mother took the book away and chivvied her along” (105).

Hadley employs POV effectively in her writing, as she does charmingly in 2012’s “An Abduction” (six characters)—a writer’s tool that is often ignored or forgotten. By shifting the POV twice, Hadley moves the narrative to one about a little girl’s dreams to one with much wider implications: about the married relationship of a young couple, their subterranean life in an old Victorian house in England.
Hadley’s novel Clever Girl will be out early in 2014.
Eric Ogden, Photographer

Clang

37. October 14, 2013, Lara Vapnyar, “Katania”: Two young girls in 1970s Soviet Russia become friends until they fight over a male doll with a broken leg. ¶ The story seems to do so many things at once. First, it makes us witness to a place most of us have never been before: the physical and cultural poverty of the USSR. Yet there exists a richness to the inventive nature of the girls’ play, the same inventiveness that allows them to survive their poverty. Second, we are also invited to enter the world of these girls, with their broken or maimed or otherwise incomplete dolls. ¶ As adults who meet later in America, via Facebook, one woman seems to have matured. She smiles to herself when the other woman proudly shows off her large house in the Berkshires, photos of her beautiful family, including a handsome husband. Katya doesn’t actually get to meet Tania’s husband, but she watches from her car has he emerges from his, a fine physical specimen except for the fact that one leg seems defective—like the male doll, over which they had fought as girls so long before. Vapnyar has determined a fine, O. Henry sort of irony that is almost as satisfying as a headful of hair and a watch fob. Vapnyar’s The Scent of Pine is out in 2014.
Clang, Photographer
Trunk Archive

Bryan Adams

38. October 21, 2013, Alice Munro, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”: Grant is forced to place his wife Fiona in an institution to treat her apparent dementia. ¶ Having read this wonderful story at least three times (first published in the magazine on December 27, 1999), not to mention viewing the film based on it (a fine performance by Julie Christie as Fiona in Away from Her), I stand with my opinion that, while this is a distinguished story by a revered writer, publishing it a second time aces another writer out of one of the fifty-one spots in the magazine in 2013. It might have been more desirable to publish a new Munro story honoring her recent Nobel status. Munro’s Too Much Happiness was published in 2009.
Bryan Adams, Photographer

Grant Cornett

39. November 4, 2013, Thomas McGuane, “Weight Watchers”: An older man who refuses to meet his wife’s demand that he lose weight travels to stay with his middle-aged son, a bachelor contractor. ¶ McGuane spares no detail with regard to building character—backstory galore—even minor personalities, and yet there are no first names for the primary characters or the son who narrates the story. His dry wit sets the tone, a way, I should think, of processing what bitterness might survive. On the one hand, he claims to hold no grudge against his embattled parents though each in his or her own way has abused him through their dysfunction. Yet at the very end, the son tips his philosophical hand:

“I’ve always enjoyed the idea of nonexistence. I view pets with extraordinary suspicion: we need to stay out of their lives. I saw a woman fish a little dog out of her purse once, and it bothered me for a year. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with my ability to communicate: I have a cell phone, but I only use it to call out” (99).

By accepting no incoming information, the son maintains a very careful control over his life—one that is neither happy or un, just hermetically sealed. McGuane’s Driving on the Rim was published in 2010.
Grant Cornett, Photographer

Merlin

40. November 11, 2013, Chinelo Okparanta, “Benji”: Benji, a Nigerian man of forty-two, short in stature but wealthy and an astute business man, becomes involved with Alare, an older married woman. ¶ The story slowly reveals via carefully laid clues that Benji has been taken for a lot of money by Alare and his gardener, Godwin, no less! What’s most remarkable about this narrative may be the ending. Okparanta avoids the most satisfying solution in Western literature, that of revenge. Instead, Benji decides that his days shall continue as before the one on which his mother had introduced him to Alare.

“He would walk around to the front door. He would take a seat at the mahogany table. The house girls would place his breakfast before him, and he would eat it zestfully, the same way he always ate it, the way he would have eaten it if today were just another ordinary day” (71).

There is no emotional need for retribution on Benji’s part. And yet this ending could also be very un-African, as well, considering all the plots of hatred and revenge that have been taken out by one tribe on another. Perhaps it is the author’s way of making peace in the midst of all the continent’s turmoil, her way of creating an ending that is satisfying on its own merit. Benji has no need for Alare before he meets her; he has no need of her after. Okparanta’s Happiness, Like Water was published in 2013.
Merlin, Illustrato

Jens Mortensen

41. November 18, 2013, Jeffrey Eugenides, “Find the Bad Guy”: Charlie D, sixty-year-old Houstonian (by way of Michigan) marries Johanna, a German woman, in a “green-card” marriage that lasts until it can no longer bear the weight of failure. ¶ Eugenides can do very little wrong, although some of his Texas stuff is a bit out of kilter. The Lübeck/Lubbock joke (69) gets old to those of us who actually live in one of those places, and I don’t think any home in Houston has a “boiler,” (77) as most houses are equipped with forced-air central heating/cooling. After all, winter in Houston is not a real season, more like a reprieve. ¶ Throughout the story Eugenides employs a number of tropes: 1) In couples therapy, Charlie D and Johanna discover that Finding the Bad Guy is a game most couples play: You left the cap off the toothpaste; you left the front door wide open. Again.

“What you have to realize, as a couple, is that there is no bad guy. You can’t win an argument when you’re married. Because if you win, your spouse loses, and resents losing, and then you lose, too, pretty much” (72).

2) Another trope is Charlie's honesty, the kind that hurts, cuts through all the crap, the kind a reader finds hard to forgive, like Charlie’s abusing the family dog, porking the live-in babysitter who’s nineteen. But such honesty also endears the reader to Charlie D. 3) The author also employs strong metaphors: Ötzi, the Ice Man discovered in Switzerland, for example.

“That’s what Johanna and I were doing, going to marital therapy. We were living through an Ice Age, armed with bows and arrows. We had wounds from previous skirmishes. All we had if we got sick were some medicinal herbs. There’s a flint arrowhead lodged in my left shoulder. Ouch. But we had this ember box with us, and if we could just get it somewhere—I don't know, a cave, or a stand of pines—we could use this ember to reignite the fire of our love” (74).

Wow. But even Charles D. realizes the marriage has been a sham in spite of all that he admires and loves about Johanna. If you fake marry someone, what can you really expect to happen in the end? And what keeps couples together? Charlie D recommends the following:

“It’s just checking in with each other. Doing little kindnesses for each other. At breakfast, you pass the jam. Or, on a trip to New York City, you hold hands for a second in a smelly subway elevator. You ask ‘How was your day’ and pretend to care. Stuff like that really works” (76)

Can we believe him? Eugenides’s most recent novel, The Marriage Plot, was published in 2011.
Jens Mortensen, Photographer

Eric Ogden

42. November 25, 2013, Lionel Shriver, “Kilifi Creek”: A young American woman, Liani, invites herself to visit friends of friends of friends in Kenya, nearly dies during a swim in Kilifi Creek that feeds into the Indian Ocean, and yet fails to learn what should be the most important lesson of her life. ¶ The entire story is contingent on Liana’s close call with death. Before straying too far from the shore, before cutting her foot open on a rock, before crawling back to her hosts’ house in the dark—Liana is one way. Selfish. Overconfident. Arrogant. After the incident she seems changed.

“It was funny how when some little nothing went down you played it for all it was worth, but when a truly momentous occurrence shifted the tectonic plates in your mind you kept your mouth shut” (115-6).

Liana is smaller. Quieter. More circumspect. ¶ The story jumps to when Liana is thirty-seven. She is in marketing in New York City. She is a runner. When the locale of the story shifts to an evening party on the roof of her stylish apartment, your stomach flops from the vertigo. You know what is about to happen. And a certain part of your psyche is not disappointed. Which part it is may be difficult to determine: the part that is watching yourself go over the edge or the part that is about to hit rock bottom. Shriver’s Big Brother came out in 2013.
Eric Ogden, Photographer
Trunk Archive

Jamie Kripke

43. December 9, 2013, Rivka Galchen, “The Late Novels of Gene Hackman” (Galchen's second story this year): J takes Q, her late father’s wife, on a trip to Key West to speak at a writers conference. There J does a poor job of presenting and perhaps a poor job of presenting herself to the group of mostly older writers. ¶ Using initials in place of characters’ names creates a secret, a distance. I know; I’ve done it in my own work. I wonder why Galchen does it here. If it is to create a gulf between the story and the reader, perhaps she does so to reflect the impersonal way society treats older people, as if they are invisible—no longer viable, incapable of being a proper person. ¶ The group discusses Gene Hackman—not present at the conference; he lives one island away—repeating the news, quite impersonally, that he was hit by a truck but that even at eighty-one he is doing fine. He’s co-written almost four novels, the last one aptly titled Justice for None. The story contains some one-line zingers, but I don't think this is a particularly "happy" story. Galchen (see link attached to photo) states that she modeled this after a Roberto Bolaño story, one I have not read. Her short-story collection American Innovations will be out in May.
Jamie Kripke, Photographer
Awesome photographs!

James Casebere, John Brownjohn

44. December 16, 2013, Steven Millhauser, “Coming Soon”: Levinson, a forty-two-year-old man, moves from the city to a nameless suburb, where constant change is so ubiquitous that he ultimately doesn’t know where he lives. ¶ Seems that Millhauser has delivered a small satire of suburban progress. The adage—the more things change, the more they stay the same—seems true even if you say it backwards. Levinson has left the city to experience small-town life, its familiarities, its friendliness. But then, as in the city, things begin to change, ostensibly overnight. His favorite shops disappear and he must find new ones. At the end—we’ve all been there—he enters a six-line freeway he never knew was there until it’s too late. And we have the feeling he’ll never find his way home again. It is a bitter irony, Millhauser gets the taste just about right, of capitalism gone way wrong. Capitalists, conservative by nature, create much that is apparently new, but underneath all the glitz, all is the same. Coming soon to a town that used to be yours. Millhauser’s We Others: New and Selected Stories was published in 2011.
James Casebere, Photographer
John Brownjohn, Design

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