Blog Archives

Ladies Who Lunch Have Staying Power

2/27/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Sometimes, I think the best kind of poem is one in which there is an acute balance between what is humorous and that which is very serious. That balance is very hard to strike. But it can be done.
N. Scott Momaday
Born February 27, 1934

N. Scott Momaday

New Yorker Fiction 2017

Rating the Story
***—Excellent [includes profile]
** —Above Average [one-sentence description]
* —Average [one-sentence description]

** February 27, Lore Segal, “Ladies’ Lunch”: Five elderly Manhattan women—Lotte, Ruth, Bridget, Farah, and Bessie—meet for lunch every other month for over thirty years until Lotte’s health fails, and then the others fall away, too; Segal relates this old story in a way that is fresh.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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NO ONE LEFT TO SPEAK?

2/20/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
. . . the most dangerous shortsightedness consists in underestimating the mediocre . . .
Georges Bernanos
Born February 20, 1888

G. Bernanos

Something to Think About on Presidents' Day

For more than five years I have blogged mostly about literary issues because I find the act pleasing—from time to time veering over to other subjects that interest me, travel and the like. Today's post is decidedly political, but it is straight from the heart. On this Presidents' Day I ask you to think about #45.

First 45 comes for the women because they are the many (51%) and vocal and on the right side of history, and we do not speak out because many of us are not women and some who are women also have good reason to be afraid.

Then 45 and his followers come for the Muslims because they are easy prey, and we do not speak out because many of us are not Muslim.

Then 45 and his followers come for the Mexicans because they have little power and must hide, and we do not speak out because many of us are not Mexican.

Then 45 and his followers come for black people because these descendants of slaves are ready for the fight; will we not join that fight because we are not African-American?

Then 45 and his followers come for the LGBTQs by way of the rest room issue—and do we not speak out because a large majority of us are not Lesbian or Gay or Bisexual or Transgendered or Queer?

Finally, will we believe 45 and his followers when they say they are in support of Israel, or are the Jews safe because surely no one would come after them again?

My thoughts are adapted from the words of Martin Niemöller (1892–1984), a Protestant minister who openly criticized Hitler and spent many years in concentration camps for speaking out. Consider his writing:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Niemöller’s style, not to mention that last line, is more eloquent than mine, but nonetheless the gigantic slice of history to which he refers is one we cannot afford to repeat. In fact, the parallels to events and peoples in our time are chilling.

We must speak out in a variety of ways, even if we’re afraid, even if we’re persecuted for doing so.

All who are NOT in support of 45 (56% disapproval rate) have an opportunity, perhaps an obligation, to help.

What We Can Do:
Select one group or one cause and support it with small monthly donations—I’m talking $5 to $25 a month. Look at what such a practice did for the Bernie Sanders campaign; there is great power in the many consolidating resources.

Or short on money? Let's give of our talents (verbal, physical, philosophical, musical, artistic).

A social person? Let's go to the local office of our favorite political party and donate our time working for a cause we believe in. Demonstrate. Act up. Occupy.

Most of all, old or young, let's speak out! Today, with social media outlets, we have the same opportunity as Mr. 45 to put out a message and engage in dialogue.

Now that I’ve dismounted my high horse, I shall return to my study and write, but forget me, and just do something.

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2017

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Forty-One Years Later, Minus One

2/14/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.
A. A. Milne

NOTE: I wrote this post a year ago. For reasons I can't recall I decided not to put it up. Today Ken and I celebrate our forty-first anniversary together, and I share last year's post belatedly!

Ken and I met forty years ago, in 1976, at a rather notorious bar, late at night on Valentine's Day. Located off Marshall, David’s Warehouse of Lubbock, Texas, was a foreboding place, like a remote outpost of a foreign land. Eerie fluorescents contributed to an apprehensiveness, almost a fear, and patrons' cars were clumped close like horses with their reins loosely tied around a hitching post. Inside, amid the warmth and the steady thump of disco music someone introduced us. Ken asserts that I had been snubbing him for weeks. I maintain that I was just shy. In those days I felt compelled to pound down three beers at my apartment before heading out to face the meat rack at David's.

Well, we now talk as little about that as possible—just what followed. Seeing each other every day—Ken would bring little gifts like tiny potted cacti—we became acquainted rather quickly, and by June made the decision to move in together. We had an open house, and a few of the items we received—some dessert plates and four blue plastic glasses—are still part of our daily use.

Not long after that we made the trip to Kansas and Missouri and Michigan, to introduce our newly formed union to, respectively, my family, Ken's family, and friends where he’d taught in Kalamazoo. It was like a honeymoon. We even took a mini-cruise by placing our yellow Datsun on a ferry that transported us from northern Michigan to Green Bay, a pleasant four-hour voyage.

Our first seven years were the most difficult. It was the 1970s! Open Marriage, the Sexual Revolution, and Gay Liberation all conspired to make us think we could have it all—that is, have every man we saw, plus the one at home. AIDS, whose clutches we were fortunate enough to escape (don’t think that we don’t still suffer some survivor’s guilt), made us stop and think. Once we committed only to one another, what, I suppose, history had been trying to tell us, we became much closer, committed.

In 1986, for our tenth anniversary, we threw a party. Ken gave me a ring with a fire agate as the setting. Funny story: years after his Grandfather Dixon died, Ken watched as his Grandmother cleaned out a drawer. He eyed his grandfather's gold dental work and asked if he could have it. His grandmother was more than glad to be rid of a ghost's smile. Prior to our special day he asked a jeweler friend to shape the gold into a ring. In the future, whenever Ken's relatives would comment on my beautiful ring, he and I would exchange winks. I even think you could hear his grandfather chuckle. In a similar vein, the ring I presented to Ken was made, in part, from my discarded wedding ring.

BELOW: Left, the ring Ken gave me and his Kappa Alpha frat pin. Right, the ring I later gave Ken and my Phi Mu Alpha pin. We occasionally wear the pins on a night out, our little joke.

In 1996 we celebrated our twentieth anniversary with a Hawaiian cruise. The eight-day voyage was only marred by the day on which we left Honolulu, the very morning the bomb went off in Atlanta. At the airport, everyone’s luggage was dump-searched, and we arrived home exhausted. What survives, however, are great memories of cruising the peaceful Pacific.

Having never traveled much by train, we celebrated our thirtieth in 2006 by taking Amtrak from Fort Worth to New York, by way of Chicago. During the forty-eight-hour trip in First Class, we reminisced about our first thirty years, some of the same things we’d always reminisced about when we got sentimental: our beginning at a tawdry bar in north Lubbock. But what else? Art. Music. Literature. Film. Gossip. Very little ever seemed out of range for our discussions. And as with all good friends, we daily seem to pick up where we left off last time we talked.

So here we are again, Sunday night, February 14, 2016—our fortieth anniversary, the same night of the year as always. We usually avoid eating out—selecting an adjacent evening—not finding it very festive to celebrate such a special day with the hoi polloi and their sentimental frills like chocolates and roses. That’s just not us. I take charge of glasses. Oh, get the doorbell, would you. It is our pizza! Then an episode of Downton Abbey. Later, we raise our glasses to the next ten years, and the next! We, same as Mr. Milne, can hope, can’t we!

BELOW would appear some photos from our fortieth-anniversary trip, a Caribbean cruise to Aruba, Panama, Columbia, Costa Rica, and the Caymans . . . ONLY WE NEVER GOT TO GO!

Due to a health crisis in our duo, we were forced to cancel our October trip at the last minute. When Ken would share with the nurses and doctors at University Medical Center that we were to have celebrated our fortieth on the cruise, most emitted an authentic "Awww." Gee, how the world has changed. Forty years ago we wouldn't have even shared such information with strangers, especially those holding needles. Since our travel insurance check arrived, we are determined to go SOMEWHERE for our forty-first year. Now the fun comes in deciding WHERE?

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Riddle Me, Riddle Me Not!

2/13/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
If you’re really a gaucho, you can’t change, because wherever you go, you’ll go with your soul leading the way.
Ricardo Güiraldes
Born February 13, 1886

Ricardo Güiraldes

New Yorker Fiction 2017

Rating the Story
***—Excellent [includes profile]
** —Above Average [one-sentence description]
* —Average [one-sentence description]

Grant Cornett

***February 13 and 20, 2017, Curtis Sittenfeld, “The Prairie Wife”: A married woman with two sons becomes jealous of the success of a woman she once knew when both were young. ¶ What a perfect Valentine’s story! Yes, Kirsten is jealous of someone she once worked with at a kids’ camp when she was nineteen. Now the woman, Lucy Headrick, has an insanely successful career as “The Prairie Housewife,” a Christian persona that is a far cry from the less-than-angelic girl Kirsten knew in 1994. For a number of spoilerish reasons, I will only say that her jealousy forces her to recall her past and reevaluate her marriage to her spouse, Casey. This story is cleverly devised, written à la the following riddle:

A father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital; just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate—that boy is my son!”

Figure this out and you'll have a leg up on Sittenfeld's story, which you should read now and enjoy! Her collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, comes out next year.
Photograph by Grant Cornett.

NEXT TIME: A Valentine's Anniversary

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Life or Death Crisis not always sudden

2/6/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
Should not the Society of Indexers be known as Indexers, Society of, The?
Keith Waterhouse
Born February 6, 1929

Waterhouse

New Yorker Fiction 2017

Rating the Story
***—Excellent [includes profile]
** —Above Average [one-sentence description]
* —Average [one-sentence description]

Floc'h

***February 6, 2017, David Gilbert, “Underground”: Forty-seven-year-old Michael Salter, divorced father of two daughters, meets his mother and brother at a fashionable Manhattan restaurant for lunch and then is confronted with the imminent threat of his own death. This crisis, however (no spoiler here), is only a metaphor that has unfolded throughout the story: his new ami whom he meets through Grindr, a young man with “tens of thousands of followers” (61), the loss of his father as well as a childhood friend, the fact that as a poster dealer his bank account is shrinking daily, an ex-wife reminding him of the monthly check he owes her. His entire life is a crisis and yet at story’s end, where he has the opportunity, faced with a real life-or-death situation to save someone else, his own crises take on a different patina.

“But at least he was doing something, something bigger than himself and full of possible meaning, courageous—right, this was courageous, rather than stupid, a sign that he was special, or, at a minimum, useful” (69).

A very nuanced story in which a gay man happens to be the protagonist instead of the subject of a story. Normalcy may just have arrived at last. Gilbert is the author of the novel & Sons, and his November 12, 2012 story, “Member/Guest,” is one of my all-time favorites of recent New Yorker stories.
Illustration by Floc’h

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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A Surprise That Shocks

2/4/2017

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A WRITER'S WIT
There seems to me a thousand occasions when my soul knows more than it can tell, and a has a spirit of its own which is far superior to my everyday one. It seems to me too, that men are far superior to all the books they write.
Pierre Marivaux
Born February 4, 1688

My Book World

Mallon, Thomas. Henry and Clara: A Novel. New York: Vintage, 1994.

At times, reading historical fiction seems much like painting by numbers. The skeletal outline is there; you merely select the correct colors and recreate a picture as it should be. With regard to the novel, the historical outline is there; you can’t deviate much from the actual timeline. But you can focus on characters who perhaps have been lost to history, in this case, Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, who are in the box with Abraham Lincoln when he is assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, in 1865. The novel focuses on these step-siblings who grow up in the same house when one’s widowed father marries the other’s widowed mother. They fall in love, and in due time, get married, when both are in their thirties. Mallon bases his novel on a myriad of research about these two historical figures—turning Lincoln’s life and death into a mere backdrop for this story.

The only aspect of the novel I don’t care for is Mallon’s occasional peek at the future, when the characters of 1875 would have no such knowledge:

“If only men might devise some way of preserving sound, so their voices might be kept with photographs and engravings, not just sent out from the body to die upon the air” (261).

Yes, yes, I know. Mallon makes a good case by comparing such a desire to the already invented photograph, but still, it seems unnecessary to include such an idea in the character’s inner thoughts. Why can’t Clara lament the loss of her father’s speech without this glance to the future?

Otherwise, the novel is impeccably written, and, though the pace may seem slow, one’s reward for finishing it is to experience a climax that is both shocking and yet a surprise for which one has been well prepared.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

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Ladies Who Lunch Have Staying Power

New Yorker Fiction 2017

NO ONE LEFT TO SPEAK?

Something to Think About on Presidents' Day

Forty-One Years Later, Minus One

Riddle Me, Riddle Me Not!

New Yorker Fiction 2017

Life or Death Crisis not always sudden

New Yorker Fiction 2017

A Surprise That Shocks

My Book World

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