Blog - www.richardjespers.com

Inherited Philosophies

1/30/2016

A WRITER'S WIT
We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.
Lloyd Alexander
Born January 30, 1924

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Mirka Laura Severa

February 1, 2016, Adam Ehrlich Sachs, “The Philosophers”: In this exceptional story divided into three parts, the author utilizes satire, hyperbole, and paradox to portray the complexities of father-son relationships. In “Our System,” a chain of father-sons covering nearly fifty years passes along the eldest man’s philosophy—depicting perhaps how a particular habit or even one’s imperfect DNA can pass from one generation to the next. In “Two Hats,” a philosopher’s son employs a ball cap and a fedora to distinguish his “son-of-Perelmann” role from his “biographer-of-Perelmann” role; eventually this collection of hats burgeons to over twenty, delightfully exaggerating the number of traits a son can inherit. In “The Madman’s Time Machine,” one tortured as the most intelligent being alive travels to 1932 Berlin to murder his grandfather so that he, the grandson, will not be born, thus eliminating his agony. Of course, this plan fails in a most paradoxical and delicious manner. Sachs’s Inherited Disorders: Stories and Syndromes, including this one, will be out in May.
Photographic illustration by Mirka Laura Severa.

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!

Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

The Gay Revolution, Never Over

1/26/2016

A WRITER'S WIT
Getting out of bed in the morning is an act of false confidence.
Jules Feiffer
Born January 26, 1929

My Book World

Faderman, Lillian. The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015.

There are two things the world may not realize: one, that homosexuality has been in existence since the beginning of time (with variations worldwide of how homosexuals are treated throughout history and by which culture), and two, that “being gay” (more of a political declaration someone once said) is not much more than a half-century old. Lillian Faderman, noted LGBT author, addresses the latter struggle with great clarity and insight. As with much of the nonfiction I read, I first hear about this tome through C-SPAN’s forty-eight hour weekend programming, Book-TV. If your cable system doesn’t carry C-SPAN, you can access Faderman’s reading on Book-TV by clicking this link to its Web site. Her presentation is very compelling.

I’m also not sure the citizen-at-large understands how, legally, the deck has been stacked against gay people in this culture for decades if not centuries. There is a time, according to Faderman, when not even the ACLU would handle Gay Rights cases. There is a time that the mere whisper of your name in the wrong circles could cost you your job or career. She documents this assertion with notable case after case. The first real fighter for men is the Mattachine Society established in the 1950s. For lesbians it is the Daughters of Bilitis.

Faderman’s book, including copious Notes and Index, is nearly 800 pages long, but she leaves no story untold: Gay Liberation of the jubilant seventies, the AIDS crisis of the eighties and nineties. The struggle for gay men and lesbian women to serve in the military. The struggle to achieve the right to marry. The transgendered. She documents every stage of our struggle with accurate, historical detail, yet with a prose that is compelling.

A few golden nuggets concerning this valiant struggle:

“In California, there was Atascadero State Hospital, constructed in 1954 at the cost to taxpayers of over $10 million (almost $110 million in today’s money). Atascadero was a maximum-security psychiatric prison on the central coast where mentally disordered male lawbreakers [including homosexuals] from all over California were incarcerated. Inmates were treated at Atascadero by a variety of methods, including electroconvulsive therapy; lobotomy; sterilization, and hormone injections. Anectine was used often for ‘behavior modification.’ It was a muscle relaxant, which gave the person to whom it was administered the sensation of choking or drowning, while he received the message from the doctor that if he didn’t change his behavior he would die” (10).

“They agreed the manifesto must say that lesbians are just like other women, but more so. ‘A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion’ would be their opening line. They’d say that heterosexual women become feminists when they finally understand that society doesn’t allow them to be complete and free human beings—but lesbians had always understood that. Feminists are finally realizing that sex roles dehumanize women—but lesbians had always understood that; they’d always refused to accept the limitations and oppressions imposed by the womanly role” (233).

“To be sure, in the years after Frank Kameny’s [one of the pioneering activists] death the advance in rights hasn’t been without setback and confrontation. For instance, the continued failure of Congress to pass a no-exemption Employment Non-Discrimination Act wreaked mischief, as in the case of a much-loved fifty-seven-year-old physical education teacher at a Catholic school in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio” (631).

Even as late as 2013, this long-time teacher, Carla Hale, loses her job because her sexuality is made known by way of her lover’s newspaper obituary! Private school or no, this kind of action must stop.

For anyone, old or young, struggling to understand the history of the LGBT community in this country, Faderman’s book is required reading. I found a copy at our local B & N. Go figure.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!

Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

Aspic: Traditional Recipe for Tears

1/23/2016

A WRITER'S WIT
American history contains much matter for pride and congratulation, and much matter for regret and humiliation.
Herbert Croly
Born January 23, 1869

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Bianca Bagnarelli

January 25, 2016, Tatyana Tolstaya, “Aspic”: The narrator, a contemporary denizen of St. Petersburg, Russia, prepares the ancient, ritualistic, and gelatinous recipe for aspic. ¶ In the second-person account in which she addresses herself, she muses over the ancient tradition requiring hooves or even muzzles of particular animals. It is a tradition she traces back to pre-czar leaders like “Truvor, who, as it turns out, never even existed” (59)—making the reader ponder the origin of any tradition. The author employs a certain personification of the animal parts involved to sensitize the reader to this pointlessness of tradition: “The chopped-up legs . . . [t]hey’ll twitch, break free, and run away, clacking across the ceramic tile: clippity-clop . . . .” (59). Then our narrator takes us step-by-step through the six-hour ordeal/joy of preparing aspic, at the end of which you take “the bowls and plates out to the balcony, cover the coffins with lids, stretch some plastic wrap over them, and wait” (59). She remains outside, crying, for this is a New Year’s tradition, a time for all the ugly aspects of the old year to fall away, like the tears from her face. Tolstaya's novel, The Slynx, came out in 2007.
Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli.

NEXT TIME: My Book World, Lillian Faderman's The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle.

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!

Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

Accompanying Sheila . . .

1/22/2016

A WRITER'S WIT
We share what we know about fear, about the obvious
risks of loving
men we can’t resist, their arms, the gentle rafts where we would drown
while the real dangers
wait inside what we rarely trust: other women,
ourselves, and the sound of children
weaving through our voices.
Sheila Zamora
Born January 22, 1947

A Poet Remembered

Sheila Zamora, Soprano

When as a pianist you accompany someone, particularly a vocalist, you develop a certain intimacy; her breathing is yours, her phrasing. You become both her shadow and her guide. You must follow her, but at the same time, she must know where she’s going, what key you’re in, the time signature, the composer's pace, and when to release a phrase. At best, you’re her chauffeur for the duration.

Perhaps the most memorable instance in which I accompanied Sheila Zamora was when she performed “Once Upon a Time,” a selection from a long-forgotten Broadway show, All American. She was a junior, and the spinet I played was shoved against the natatorium wall at South High in Wichita, Kansas. The smell of chlorine was nearly overwhelming, the edge of the spotlight barely illuminating my sheet music. While Sheila sang on behalf of what was called the Water Show, certain mermaids performed a synchronized swimming number. When the spectacle was over, a crowd in the stands applauded, and later Sheila drove me home.

I accompanied a number of vocalists in high school, college, and beyond. I followed and guided them all, but Sheila seemed more of a poet in her stylings than a mere soprano—I would seem to lean with her as she stretched a phrase or paused for a silence only she heard. One scorching summer day, while we were both in college, I ran into her downtown, near the old Henry’s store. In the crosswalk, we stopped to talk until any further exchange became impossible. I never saw her again.

Many years later, while perusing a publisher’s catalog, I ran across an ad for books of poetry. There, in print, I saw her name, Sheila Zamora, but was it my Sheila Zamora? In this book of poetry, the one I ordered out of great curiosity, the editor begins with a short biography. She reveals that Sheila, of Mexican-German parents, grew up in Wichita, Kansas, and graduated, in 1970, from Wichita State University with a BA in English. This Sheila had also married a man fourteen years her senior, had given birth to two sons, and eventually was accepted into a graduate program in creative writing at Arizona State. This Sheila's marriage later went sour, in fact, became untenable and dangerous. In 1978, when the Sheila I'd accompanied was thirty-one, her estranged husband, within view of her two boys, shot her four times and killed her.
*
“Dick, let’s see,” Sheila writes in my 1965 yearbook:

“How many songs are there that I could never have sung without you? I don’t think I could count. Thank you for being my accompanist, and my friend.” Then on what becomes a more poignant note, she ends by saying, “Remember to keep your chin up and keep playing when the going gets tough. I’ll miss you so much . . . . Good luck. Sheila Z.”

As youths we often express and embrace emotions so freely, never really knowing whether or not we’ll meet in a crosswalk, never knowing whose chin will remain up or down.

I’ve read Sheila’s collection a number of times. As fine as they are, her poems may not be of equal maturation, having been frozen before the poet, no doubt, could reach her full potential. Still, I keep re-reading them, perhaps searching for the high school girl I once knew, the one who, if she had lived, might now be singing “Once Upon a Time” in a lower key, with a huskier voice, from the viewpoint of a mature woman. On this, the anniversary of Sheila's birth, I share below the entire poem from which today's "A Writer's Wit" is excerpted—one that exhibits how she may have wrestled with an idea of the man who took her life.

The Talk of Two Women

for Dina

In the study, I turn
the Wandering Jew in an opposite
direction from where it has leaned
toward the light, find in the deep
glossy purple of underleaves
the underside of words. I ask
to see your sculpture and you
meet my two small sons who are suddenly
between us as in a photograph taken years ago; it

barely distinguishes their arms, the color
of desert earth, or strands
of their hair like the startled
meticulous patterns of ceramic. We compare

our lives, using language
which is a second language, intangible
as instinct. I care most
for the hollows inside
your bottle-hangings where I imagine
breath might swirl, and you
listen to the breath shaped like woodwinds
inside my poems. We share

what we know about fear, about the obvious
risks of loving
men we can’t resist, their arms,
the gentle rafts where we would drown
while the real dangers
wait inside what we rarely trust: other women,
ourselves, and the sound of children
weaving through our voices. Yet
we find ways to talk, touching lightly,
as instinct turns us in other directions
from where we lean apart. We turn

toward the polish of art
or chairs
shaped like violins twisting us
from the idea of risk
into a mutual light.

Zamora, Sheila. Leaf’s Boundary. With an introduction by Pamela
Stewart. New York: Hoffstadt and Sons, 1980, 6-7.

Sheila Zamora, Senior Portrait, Class of '65, Wichita HS South

Swamplandia! a Wild Ride

1/19/2016

A WRITER'S WIT
I have Graham Greene's telephone number, but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.
Patricia Highsmith*
Born January 19, 1921
(*Recent film Carol based on her The Price of Salt)

My Book World

Russell, Karen. Swamplandia! New York:
Vintage, 2011.

I began, as usual, to annotate my copy of Swamplandia! because that’s what I do when reading a book. However, with Russell’s novel I repeated a habit I had as a child: I got lost in time and turned page after page, absorbed word after glorious word (a few of which I had to look up). Her narrative beckoned me to travel as quickly as she does.

Swamplandia! is an amusement park on an island, which is part of the Florida Everglades. The park features, among other things, alligator wrestling, and the main wrestler is a woman, Hilola Bigtree, who is struck with cancer. Her husband, the Chief, operates the place, and their three children help out. With the death of Hilola Bigtree, which occurs on page eight, her family must cope, but what happens, instead?

Without their star attraction, the business begins to fail. The Chief decamps, and the children aren’t even sure where, on the mainland, he has landed. Teenage Kiwi, the only son, also leaves. He realizes he must send money home to keep the park afloat and takes a job at a competing park called World of Darkness. The elder daughter, Ossie, exits with an entity she believes is a ghost, and for a time, the reader might be fooled into thinking she actually does. Ava, the young narrator of most of the novel (her chapters are the only ones written in first-person), is left to fend for herself, and she does a most unwise thing: trusts a male adult who is not a member of her family, not even someone she knows tangentially, to help her locate her sister. To tell any more is to spoil your read.

I can say, however, that in the same manner in which I envy someone’s great photograph, I wish I’d written a book like this. At first, it fools you into thinking it’s sort of a comic romp, but then these people Russell has created are too smart for that alone. Though home schooled (by way of Florida state curriculum), all three children have great vocabularies, use their common sense to help them out of the trouble that even smart kids can get into. They pay attention (to some things, anyway). They become acquainted with the unjust and tragic history of the Seminole Indians. Russell’s metaphors are apt, growing naturally out of this swampy environment. Here, little Ava compares alligators to her lost sister:

“Even if she’d [Ossie] gotten away from him [her ghost fiancé] the prognostications were grim—alligators with unusual pigmentation can’t camouflage themselves in the dust-and-olive palette of the swamp. Their skin is spotlit for predators. That’s why you don’t see albino Seths [Ava’s pet name for alligators] in the wild. Once an alligator reaches a size of four feet its only real predator is man” (338).

Ava’s mind is using the image of alligators to speak the unspeakable: that her sister has probably disappeared with a ghost, who has the unlikely name of Louis Thanksgiving. Yet Ava faces her own trials (this is NOT a Young Adult novel), and in the end, by what seems a great coincidence that the author has earned the right to employ, the family is united, or reconstituted. At any rate, Russell, who has also published fiction in The New Yorker, is sure to garner our attention for a long time if she can create other exciting narratives like Swamplandia!

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!

Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

Modern Russian Tale Retains Feel of Folklore

1/16/2016

A WRITER'S WIT
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beauti- ful in feminine women is something masculine.
Susan Sontag
Born January 16, 1933

New Yorker Fiction 2016

January 18, 2016, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, “The Story of a Painter”: In this contemporary Russian tale, a painter, in a convoluted and circuitous chain of events, first loses his apartment, then gains it back. ¶ Igor is an honest, caring, but gullible man, and the only time in the story that he lies is to fool Adik, the very man who has swindled him out of his property. Several pages into the story Petrushevskaya skillfully releases information when the hungry reader must finally know about the thieving scoundrel:

“Full of compliments, Adik had offered to help such a gifted painter sell his apartment at a profit and buy a cheaper one. The same day, he’d given Adik the power of attorney for all his property. We know how that ended” (68).

And that is how we learn of the original sin. Even though written in the twenty-first century, this narrative—because of a refined magical realism—creates a feeling of a folk tale. To have our nonmagical, realistic eyes fall upon this kind of story is a welcome change, at least once in a while.

The author has written more than fifteen books, including There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In and a memoir, A Girl from the Metropol Hotel, which will be published in America next year.
Illustration by Henning Wagenbreth.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!

Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

Isherwood and Auden's Drama, The Ascent of F6

1/14/2016

A WRITER'S WIT
We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.
John Dos Passos
Born January 14, 1896

I'VE MADE IT MY GOAL to read the entire oeuvre of late British-American author, Christopher Isherwood, over a twelve-month period. This profile constitutes the sixth in a series of twenty.

My Book World

Isherwood, Christopher and W. H. Auden. The Ascent of F6: a Tragedy in Two Acts. London: Faber, (1936) 1957.

After having taken in so much of Isherwood’s material, I feel strange reading a collaboration between him and Auden. Whose idea belongs to whom? Where do the words of one author pick up and words of another leave off? The allegory seeming somewhat dated, would anyone produce it today?

The main character, Michael Ransom, succumbs to his mother's persuasion and his brother James’s urging, and leads an expedition up F6, a mountain peak on the border between Britain and a fictitious nation of Ostnia. Some of his men die on the trip, and he himself perishes at the end. In interspersed scenes, a sort of Greek chorus—Mr. A and Mrs. A speaking in rhyme—comment on his expedition and contrast it with their mundane lives. If I have to guess, I would suggest that Isherwood models Mrs. Ransom after his mother (a domineering woman, we learn from his Diaries), and Auden is responsible for the lines the chorus recites. Benjamin Britten, friend to both men, writes music for the play.

Some passages worth noting:

“James [Ransom]: Merely that the mountain is said to be haunted by a guardian demon. For this reason, no native will set foot upon it. As you will notice, it stands exactly on the frontier line. Both Ostnia and ourselves claim it; but, up to the present, no European has ever visited the district at all . . . [t]he natives have begun telling each other that the white man who first reaches the summit of F6, will be lord over both the Sudolands, with his descendants, for a thousand years” (25-6).

“Announcer: There are many legends about this mountain and the troll who lives on the summit and devours all human beings who dare approach it. No Europeans have, so far, ventured into this region, which is barren to a degree and inhabited only by monks who resent foreigners” (31).

“Mr. A and Mrs. A.: Why were we born?

James [Ransom]: That’s a very interesting question, and I’m not sure I can answer it myself. But I know what my brother, the climber, thinks. When we take, he said to me once, the life of the individual, with its tiny circumscribed area in space and time, and measure it against the geological epochs, the gigantic movements of history and the immensity of the universe, we are forced, I think, to the conclusion that, taking the large view, the life of the individual has no real existence or importance apart from the great whole: that he is here indeed but to serve for his brief moment his community, his race, his planet, his universe; and then, passing on the torch of life undiminished to others, his little task accomplished, to die and be forgotten” (115).

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!

Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

Anne Carson's "1 = 1" a Delightful Prose Poem

1/11/2016

A WRITER'S WIT
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
Born January 11, 1842

New Yorker Fiction 2016

January 11, 2015, Anne Carson, “1 = 1”: This work rather resembles a prose poem in which a female persona speaks of swimming, refugees, chalk, and foxes. ¶ The poet, yet using also the tools of fiction, weaves together a morning in which the persona swims in a lake:

“She peels a swim cap onto her head, goggles, enters the water, which is cold but not shocking. Swims” (61).

reads of European refugees:

“Back at home, the newspapers, front-page photos of a train car in Europe jammed floor to door with escaped victims of a war zone farther south . . . [f]ilthy families and souls in despair pressed flat against one another in the grip to survive, uncountable arms and legs, torn-open eyes . . . .” (61).

tells of her mushroom-loving neighbor, Comrade Chandler:

“ . . . . he had been able to see a patch of mushrooms, boletus, from his window and he used to go hunting for those in the woods with his mother when he was a kid and it made him sad . . . John Cage was out mushrooming with his mother, after an hour or so she turns to him and says, We can always go to the store and buy some real ones” (62).

and the fox Chandler draws on the pavement with colored chalk:

“The finished fox drawing is under a streetlamp. It glows. He has used some sort of phosphorescent chalk, and the fox, swimming in a lucent blue-green jelly, has a look on its face of escaping all possible explanations” (62).

Carson’s collection of performance pieces and other works, Float, will be published later in 2016.
Illustration, Jon Gray/Gray 318.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!

Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

2015 New Yorker Stories in Review

1/6/2016

A WRITER'S WIT
Writing is a completely private act. It's in a way like play but very serious play, and sometimes I can escape into the fictional world that I'm creating so fully as to see hours go by without my noticing it. I think that kind of suspension of time and that mindfulness is a real gift.
Antonya Nelson
Born January 6, 1961

Fifth Annual New Yorker Project

Ninetieth Anniversary for New Yorker

In 2015, for the fifth consecutive year, I made a close reading of every short story published by The New Yorker (fifty-one). This undertaking—the reading of 255,714 words or the equivalent of three story collections—involves at least 115-120 clock hours (approximately one and a quarter hours to read and compile critique, an hour to construct my post). The process might be likened to writing a mini-essay over each story and might just have honed my critiquing skills when it comes to examining my own fiction; or perhaps it is a self-indulgent project that interests no one but me. No matter; I’ll probably continue to do it as long as the process provides a certain satisfaction!

In the first year, 2011, I believe my purpose may have been to unearth the elusive key to achieving publication in The New Yorker, and sometimes I was too critical of, say, the bottom third of the stories. In the second and third years, I became more respectful of every writer’s gifts. The longer I’ve persisted in pursuing this project the more I have come to appreciate the broad spectrum of fiction that writers of English throughout the world are creating; there is no one type of New Yorker story, except that it is usually entertaining in one fashion or another.

Moreover, this year’s eight translated stories, not to mention the twenty-seven set in foreign countries, compel me to realize that we are in this global life together. As I move forward through 2016, I hope to deepen my understanding of this humanity and invite the reader to join me. Each week you can read a story for free at The New Yorker Web site.

Rather than spread my analysis over four posts, as I have in the past, this year I’ve limited it to one and set up a file below for STATISTICS: average length of a New Yorker story, the number of male or female authors, for example. I also created a file that discusses THEMES. Below I’ve set up links to my profiles of what I call the Crème de La Crème, what I believe are the top New Yorker stories for 2015. From there you can click on a link to read a particular story, and I hope you will!

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1. January 5, 2014, Colin Barrett, “The Ways”
2. February 23 & March 2, 2015, Haruki Murakami, “Kino”
3. March 9, 2015, Stephen King, “A Death”
4. March 16, 2015, Sarah Braunstein, “All You Have to Do”
5. March 23, 2015, Colm Toibín, “Sleep”

6. April 27, 2015, Luke Mogelson, “Peacetime”
7. May 4, 2015, Milan Kundera, “The Apologizer”
8. May 11, 2015, Sheila Heti, “My Life Is a Joke”
9. May 18, 2015, Justin Taylor, “So You’re Just What, Gone?”
10. June 8 & 15, 2015, Jonathan Franzen, “The Republic of Bad Taste”

11. June 22, 2015, Ben Marcus, “The Grow-Light Blues”
12. June 29, 2015, Louise Erdrich, “The Flower”
13. August 24, 2015, Alice McDermott, “These Short, Dark Days”
14. August 31, 2015, Jensen Beach, “The Apartment”
15. October 12, 2015, Rivka Galchen,
“Usl at the Stadium”

16. October 19, 2015, Ben Marcus, “Cold Little Bird”
17. November 16, 2015, Mark Haddon, “The Weir”
18. November 30, 2015, Rachel Kushner, “Fifty-Seven”
19. December 7, 2015, Martin Amis, “Oktober”

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016

"The Beach Boys" a Fine John-and-Marcia Story

1/3/2016

A WRITER'S WIT
Children are not only innocent and curious but also optimistic and joyful and essentially happy. They are, in short, everything adults wish they could be.
Carolyn Haywood
Born January 3, 1898

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Geeting | Fulford

January 4, 2016, Ottessa Moshfegh, “The Beach Boy”: Dermatologist John and wife Marcia, both in their fifties, vacation on a tropical island, where young male prostitutes offer their services. ¶ At first, this narrative seems to belong to Marcia, but after the couple return to their home in Manhattan and share, over dinner, with their friends the features of their trip, Marcia dies of an apparent heart attack (subtly foreshadowed with two mentions of a severe headache). Okay, now where does the story go? one wonders, because up until now Marcia has been the life of their marriage:

“John always wished for whatever Marcia wished for. ‘This way, we both win,’ he said” (66).

When, after Marcia’s demise, he picks up her photos from the trip (of course, only old people, you see, still use throwaway cameras) there is a half-shot at the end of the roll indicating to John that his wife had hired one of the beach boys, and he suddenly seems to hate her because of her infidelity, blames her for having commandeered his life. He decides to return to the island to spread Marcia’s ashes on the beach. When he is finished doing that he heads for the hotel bar.

“He ordered a Glenfiddich, saluted the bartender, and drank. ‘How much for the whole bottle?’ John asked. ‘No, don’t tell me. Just charge it to my room.’ He flashed the number on his key. A whole bottle just for him, out from under Marcia’s shaming gaze. Why had he let her control him like that? He’d lived his entire life on his best behavior, a slave to decorum. For what? John shook his head and poured himself more whiskey. He could do whatever he wanted now” (70).

This perhaps includes hiring one of the beach boys, just as he’d suspected his wife of doing. The closing scene, particularly the last finely honed sentence, poignantly profiles his predicament.

“He collapsed on the sand. The boy stood and stared for a while, then yawned, turned, and walked away. It was clear to him and to the other beach boys watching from their perch in the dunes that the old man wasn’t carrying any money” (70).

The author’s novel, Eileen, came out last August.
Photograph by David Brandon Geeting
Design by Jason Fulford

READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!

Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
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