Blog Archives

New Yorker Fiction 2014

5/29/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call "the breaks." In order for a writer to succeed, I suggest three things - read and write - and wait.
Countee Cullen
Born May 30, 1903

Ba Ba Ba Boom!

Leslie Herman

June 2, 2014, Thomas Pierce, “Ba Baboon”: Brooks, a forty-four-year-old brain injury patient, and his sister Mary break into the house of Wynn, her married boyfriend’s place, to locate sex tapes that Wynn has made of Mary. ¶ Because of Brooks’s brain injury some of the story seems to be told from his stream-of-consciousness point of view, although the author hands Mary the POV in alternating sections to tell about things Brooks might not remember. In any case, they’re hiding from, then running from, Wynn’s guard dogs. After an encounter in which Brooks is bitten by one of the dogs, he learns from a figure hiding under the covers the secret words, Ba Baboon, that will cause the dogs to become docile. ¶ The story begins in a satisfying manner with a proper complication, but somehow the narrative gets lost in the home somewhere, meanders to a point that leaves one wondering what the story is about. An account of brain injuries? What to do when one’s boyfriend makes a secret sex tape of you and you wish to recover the evidence? How to handle vicious dogs? The relationship between the two characters does not seem wholly developed. Pierce’s House of Small Mammals will be out in January.
Leslie Herman, Illustrator

Photography

5/28/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
I do not see ghosts; I only see their inherent probability.
C. K. Chesterton
Born May 29, 1874

Monument to an Old Sea

On May 9, Ken and I visited Gove County, Kansas, east of U. S. Highway 83, to see the Monument Rocks National Natural Landmark. As you will note, monument rocks are the remnant of an ancient ocean, out in the middle of what is now the country's breadbasket. During inclement weather the roads are impassable. There is no admission fee, no rangers or other workers, no parking lots, and (the website makes clear) no facilities. I include a bit of the botanical life we saw there. The place is one of those little surprises that one encounters along the way. Google even helped us find it!

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

Photography

5/27/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.
Ian Fleming
Born May 28, 1908

Additional Shots

For a couple of days, I want to feature a number shots I didn't show last week when highlighting our trip up through the backbone of America, May 8-17.

Land of Contrasts—Near Stratford, Texas

Field Near Stratford, Texas

Mid-America Air Museum—Liberal, Kansas

Finney County Court House—Garden City, Kansas

Site of Trial Depicted in Capote's In Cold Blood

Sculpture—Garden City, Kansas

Band Shell, Park, Garden City, Kansas

NEXT TIME: MORE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM MID-AMERICA

Bird House of All Bird Houses

5/26/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
John Cheever
Born May 27, 1912

My Book World

Proulx, Annie. Bird Cloud. New York: Scribner, 2011.

In this memoir author Annie Proulx speaks of what it means to build a home. She begins with an almost unlikely tale in which she and her sister are delayed by a very weird merchant, so much so that they come upon a car accident they might have been a part of if it hadn’t been for the weird man who is instrumental in delaying them. When she tells her mother of the incident, her mother reveals that the man’s name was Proulx, too.

Proulx has lived in many locales but seems to have taken quite a liking to the West, most assuredly New Mexico and Wyoming, where she decides to purchase land and build a place where she will live out her days:

“A bald eagle perched in a dead tree, watching us. The landscape was bold. Not only was the property on the North Platte River but the river ran through it, taking an east-west turn for a few miles in its course. The land was a section, 640 acres, a square mile of riparian shrubs and cottonwood, some wetland areas during June high water, sage flats and a lot of weedy overgrazed pasture” (46).

Proulx purchases the land as the site for her house, Bird Cloud. She then gives the reader a treasure trove of history concerning her patch of land. The archaeological. The environmental.

“Trying to understand Wyoming’s landscape where I could see the remains of Indian trails, stone flakes from their toolmaking, the tools themselves, images scratched into the dark desert varnish of rock faces, cairns and fire pits forced recognition: where there are humans there is always ecological change” (165).

The political wranglings.

“White men never understood the Indian way of consensus and insisted on dealing with a tribal leader or “chief,” another concept alien to Indians who learned to greatly distrust the lying, devious white men whose treaties were worthless. On the other side, most whites regarded Indian oratory as a kind of obstructionist filibustering, boring harangues, though some admired them and saw them as akin to classical Roman oratory” (171).

The two most interesting aspects of the book, to me, are following the narrative of Proulx's house’s construction, and two, the observation of bird life. It’s as if she, while telling of the building of her “nest,” recounts another story, as if she herself is just another bird attempting to make a home in the area. They seem to observe her as much as she observes them.

“The first day I saw Bird Cloud, in July 2003, I was astonished by the great number and variety of birds in this river habitat. A bald eagle sat in a tree near the river’s edge. Pelicans sailed downstream. I saw swallows, falcons, bluebirds, flocks of ducks burst up the the North Platte and flew over my head in whistling flight. Ravens croaked from the cliff. I thought my great avocation for the rest of my life would be watching these birds and learning their ways” (191).

Proulx does much to depict the arduous nature of living in the mountainous setting. At times strong and constant winds. Foot after foot of snow. Impassable roads. Bitterly cold temperatures day after day.

“Gerald kept smashing a path through the drifts on the county road and managed to get in and out most days, taking a risk lover’s joy in the nauseating slides toward the ditch, the scrape of ice and packed snow on his truck’s undercarriage” (119).

Even after the house is finished, even as Proulx remains until the last day of December before fleeing to her other home in New Mexico, she finally sees she will never be able to realize her dream of living in this environment year round.

“So ended the first and only full year I was to spend at Bird Cloud. I returned in March and for several more years came in early spring and stayed until the road-choking snow drove me out, but I had to face the fact that no matter how much I loved the place it was not, and never could be, the final home of which I had dreamed” (231).

Sad. And yet something to admire: her almost unstoppable desire and courage to see the building of her home through to its completion, something most of us can only dream of—making Proulx a rare bird indeed.

NEXT TIME: PHOTOS

New Yorker Fiction 2014

5/22/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.
Margaret Fuller
Born May 23, 1810

A Lifetime Friendship

May 26, 2014, Alejandro Zambra, “Camilo”: Two men and their sons meet and form relationships with each other over a life time. ¶ I love this kind of story, one that moves back and forth lazily through time and across various spaces—as if the various parts represent one journey. Zambra’s story is sophisticated—revealing little bits of information at a time, each piece of the puzzle falling into place until the very end, when they all make sense. Harder to accomplish than one might think! Zambra has achieved acclaim for his novel, Bonsai.
John Brownjohn, Design

New is Old Again

Melinda Beck

May 19, 2014, Robert Coover, “The Waitress”: A woman working at a diner is granted three wishes by an old bag lady who “turns out to be a fairy godmother in disguise.” ¶ An odd little story, a fairy tale, with few, if any, revisions over the old ones. This is the second of Coover's fairy tales that the magazine has published recently. Why? one wonders. To show that we’re still children? That we still enjoy experiencing a certain suspension of disbelief? That we, too, wouldn’t mind receiving three wishes, by which we would make fools of ourselves? The Brunist Day of Wrath, a novel, is Coover's most recent novel.
Melinda Beck, Illustrator

NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD

Nine States/Ten Days 3

5/21/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbably must be the truth.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Born May 22, 1859

WY, CO, NM

Perhaps my favorite part of the trip was a north to south swing through the eastern third of Wyoming. I'd always pictured Wyoming as part of the Wild West. And it is. But it is also a very genteel place, with great hotels and restaurants, polite people who help visitors. Devil's Tower, of course, was featured in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is easy to form sort of a mystical attachment to the tower. There is a 1.2 mile-long asphalt path built around the tower. So much to observe as you stroll or climb the lane. The wind, at least the day we were there, blew constantly. It shushed and whistled through the trees. The place is rich with something that is difficult to explain.

Cheyenne experienced a ferocious snowstorm just three days before we arrived, and you can see the results are still on the ground as we arrived at the Little America Motel, which has maintained its 1960s decor. Yet all is up to date. Spacious rooms but with the amenities people have come to expect. Iron/ironing board. Microwave. Fridge. You could spend an extended amount of time there and be quite comfortable. There is a fine restaurant located in the main building. You never have to seek out places to eat if you don't wish to.

One afternoon, we took a trip to Laramie, forty-five minutes northwest on I-80. What we had time to see was the Wyoming Territorial Prison / Museum. And one of the aspects that made this museum different was that large photographs and histories of nineteenth-century prisoners were posted throughout the prison. They weren't all rough and tumble sorts of guys. Each had his or her own interesting story.

We spent our last night in Pueblo, Colorado. We visited two interesting places: the local raptor center, where we saw, among others, forty-year-old bald eagles that had been injured long ago. The other spot we enjoyed was Rosemount, a historical home built in the early 1890s by a wealthy merchant. The 24,000 square foot home was amazing, and I managed to get one photograph of the exterior (none were allowed inside).

In our ten days, Ken and I traveled nearly 3,000 miles, and except for the drive between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs on I-25, which was a nightmare, the driving was enjoyable. Hardly ever less than a ten-car space between you and the next driver. Ahhhh.

I lied. I didn't mean to, but we didn't drive back through New Mexico but reentered Texas by way of the Oklahoma Panhandle, where once again, you could burn up all state gas reserves by traveling at a cool seventy-five mph!

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

Nine States/Ten Days 2

5/20/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
Alexander Pope
Born May 21, 1688

SD, ND, & MT

The thing I appreciated most about the Dakotas and Montana is just how long winter lingers. We were there in the first half of May, and many trees had not even begun to bud out. There was still snow on the ground, not only on the mountains, but in lower areas as well. Of course, Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse are great monuments, worth visiting twice, but not once did we break a sweat!

One nice day, though it was windy, we drove to North Dakota so that I could put it on my list of states visited. We ate lunch at a Subway, where things seemed to be booming because of the oil . . . boom. From there we drove fifty miles to Bowman, Montana, another state to cross off. Hope to return to both of these fine places some day, when Montana is warmer and North Dakota's boom has leveled off.

NEXT TIME: WY, CO, & NM

Nine States/Ten Days

5/19/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
Honoré de Balzac
Born May 20, 1799

OK, KS, & NE

Roadside Park, Stratford, in Texas Panhandle

For some time I’ve wanted to make a road trip to visit a number of states I’ve never been to before. To get there, however, Ken and I had to travel through a few we were quite familiar with. It didn’t seem to matter; we found new and different sights to see.

Mid-America Air Museum

As we crossed the Oklahoma Panhandle, it seemed about as spare and barren as parts of the Texas panhandle—the leanest thirty-five miles you’ll ever see (for us, about sixty miles, since the highway crossed at an angle). Just over the border into Kansas we visited the Mid-America Air Museum in Liberal. I’d previously toured the Smithsonian’s new Aerospace Museum outside Washington, DC, in Virginia, but the Liberal museum was a fair match, boasting over a hundred planes. We spent about an hour there, and I shot a number of photographs. Then onward we drove to Garden City, Kansas, where we would spend the first night.

Garden City KS City Park

It’s amazing, but establishments such as Holiday Inn Express and Hampton Inns and many others have become ubiquitous, even in a place as isolated as Garden City. I’d visited the town once before, when my college choir was on tour. It was 1968 and I’d brought Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood with me to read on the long bus rides between concerts. That January day had been cold, the elms stripped of their leaves. Now, the town of 26,000 seemed refreshed, with signs of money flowing through it like the underground water used to keep everything so green. We ate dinner at the Golden Dragon, not far from our hotel. Talk about ubiquitous. I’m always amazed that Asian restaurants can be found in even the most remote locations of our country. And the food was good.

Ken and Friend (Antelope)

The next day we hunted down the Monument Rocks National Natural Landmark in Gove County. You have to follow a number of dirt roads that are deemed impassable during inclement weather (according to its website), but on May 9 the roads were dusty and relatively smooth. Ken explained to me how such a sea formation came about, how it has lasted throughout the millennia. The rocks are apparently unmanaged, and there is no charge, no asphalt parking, no facilities. While we were there, only one other party pulled up in their car to check it out. After thirty minutes of listening to the bird life, observing the bovine populations, marveling over this natural structure, we found Highway 83 once again and headed north.

Cooper Barn at Prairie Museum

In Oakley we attempted to visit the Fick Fossil and History Museum, but its new structure was still under construction, and so we drove on to Colby, Kansas. There we stopped and visited the Prairie Museum of Art and History. It is similar to Wichita’s Cowtown or Lubbock’s National Ranching Heritage Museum, but each region has its own particular gems, and if such structures are maintained, they will continue to inform school children and adults alike what our frontier country was like.

Late afternoon, continuing to follow Highway 83, we headed for North Platte, Nebraska. Though I grew up in Kansas, I’d never visited this state before. The highway took us through Nebraska’s central region, gently rolling hills in places, smooth agricultural surfaces in others. We easily found our motel, in spite of its sort of hidden location, and we walked across a dusty path to eat at Whisky Creek Fire Wood Grill instead of waiting in line for thirty minutes at a nearby franchise restaurant. We shared a meal in a booth and talked about our day.

On May 10, because we were anxious to reach Rapid City, South Dakota, we headed straight for our destination instead of stopping off to see much in between. There would be much to observe once we arrived.

NEXT TIME: SD, ND, & MT

New Yorker Fiction 2014

5/7/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Through thickest gloom look back, immortal shade,
On that confusion which thy death has made.
Phyllis Wheatley
Born May 8, 1753

Still Fleeing

Riccardo Vecchio

May 12, 2014, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, “The Fugitive”: Boris, a Soviet dissident, to avoid arrest, flees Moscow to live in the countryside. ¶ Boris’s crime is that he is an artist who expresses bitter political satire through his work. He begins his exile in the winter by spending it with Nura, an old woman who only wishes to receive vodka as pay. Boris passes the long winter by drawing on rolls of old wallpaper. They are later sold to help Boris earn income. He evades arrest until 1976, four years after leaving Moscow. ¶ More and more post-Soviet literature may now find its way into the world. This story seems so timeless because it reads like a “tale,” the fictional narrative of what may have been real events. And like the Holocaust, there is no way authors can write too much about the over seventy years of suffering the Russian people experienced. Their narratives contribute to a tapestry of human history. The author’s novel, The Funeral Party, was published in 2002.
Riccardo Vecchio, Illustrator

I WON'T POST AGAIN UNTIL MAY 20 OR 21. SEE "ARCHIVES" IN SIDEBAR ABOVE TO CATCH UP WITH PREVIOUS POSTS.

Backyard Birdcam Returns

5/6/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
Archibald MacLeish
Born May 7, 1892

More Antics

The photos below are brought to you courtesy of our backyard birdcam by Wingscapes. You can set up the camera in a variety of ways. The most successful way for us has been to prop it up several feet from a small pool. The movement as well as the creature's heat trigger the camera. It has some faults. You can't control the exposure, getting some shots that are underexposed and some that are overexposed. The lens isn't the best. The smaller birds seem to evade its powers, but I think it's a matter of going into the bowels of the camera and changing the settings, which we plan to do soon . . . if we can figure out how. We believe the directions originated in Chinese and then were fed into Google Translate, and we all know how that works.

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

Past Empires

5/5/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Two can live as cheaply as one—if they both have good jobs.
Sigmund Freud
Born May 6, 1856

My Book World

Ballard, J. G. Empire of the Sun. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984, 2007.

The author, born in Shanghai, China, in 1930, explains in the Foreword that this novel is based on his experiences during World War Two, during which he was interned from 1942 to 1945, in his early teens. Indeed, the main character Jim is separated from his parents. The 1987 film by Steven Spielberg makes a big to-do of their separation, but in the book it seems to happen as it might happen to a child. One moment his parents are present, as he is knocked down in a certain melee. The next moment his mother is gone: “Jim’s mother had disappeared, cut off from him by the column of military trucks” (32). Then his father lies down with him, but mysteriously, the next day Jim finds himself alone in a hospital, hoping his parents will come for him soon.

This bright boy must now negotiate the muddy and treacherous waters of wartime virtually on his own. I was inspired by a recent viewing of the film to read the book. I recall many of the movie’s scenes as they unfold on the pages. However, Spielberg takes some liberties, as film directors are wont to do, in order to tell his story. The novel is multi-layered, with countless poignant and sad scenes, but Spielberg turns it into a boy’s adventure story. Both are great, but they are not equally great works.

In the beginning, the eleven-year-old Jim, intelligent though he is, possesses childish and feckless notions:

“He thought of telling Mr. Maxted that not only had he left the cubs and become an atheist, but he might become a Communist as well. The Communists had an intriguing ability to unsettle everyone, a talent Jim greatly respected” (15).

And like a child he tends to think about things with a limited point of view:

“Jim had little idea of his own future—life in Shanghai was lived wholly within an intense present—but he imagined himself growing up to be like Mr. Maxted” (16).

Early on Jim grasps what death is all about, yet also a certain irony he may not fully understand until later:

“In many ways the skeletons were more live than the peasant farmers who had briefly tenanted their bones. Jim felt his cheeks and jaw, trying to imagine his own skeleton in the sun, lying here in this peaceful field within sight of the deserted aerodrome” (17).

As a child might, Jim feels he is responsible for things that are not really his fault, again, largely because he lacks the full picture that an adult would see.

The novel, like a children’s story, moves from one episode to the next, one scene to the next. I found it hard to follow at first. But then I realized that perhaps Ballard wishes for the reader to experience this daze that Jim is in, the chaotically episodic nature of his life over a period of several years, as he struggles to stay alive. Even though he periodically wonders where his parents are, even wonders what they look like, his main focus is on staying alive. His body suffers malnutrition. He develops pus-laden gums.

In my Kindle I highlighted the word sun, sunlight, and many synonyms for the word. Ballard seems to be saying two things. One, the Japanese empire, whose symbol seems to be that big red sun on its flag, is stretching its domain to include China. The sun also seems to symbolize a brighter day for Jim and the thousands of other refugees of their war. Ballard’s use of it is never heavy-handed; the “sun” just seems to appear as a natural part of this war-torn world.

I’ve read other war (anti-war) novels: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Heller’s Catch-22, and others. This novel captures yet a different war, part of the Pacific theater, but it is seen through the eyes of a boy, who at times perceives things poorly because he is a child, and at the same time grasps what’s happening precisely because his innocence allows him to see the truth. And his point of view often allows him to sidestep the callous or evil actions or adults, even those who profess to be looking out for him. Ballard seems to cast little judgment over this war. It is only where this young man is trapped, alive, yet half dead. Ballard’s last paragraph works as a précis of his entire novel:

“Below the bows of the Arrawa a child’s coffin moved onto the night stream. Its paper flowers were shaken loose by the wash of a landing craft carrying sailors from the American cruiser. The flowers formed a wavering garland around the coffin as it began its long journey to the estuary of the Yangtze, only to be swept back by the incoming tide among the quays and mud flats, driven once again to the shores of this terrible city” (279).

Jim and his parents are reunited very quietly (unlike the film). Though they return to England, others are not so fortunate. Many, like the child's coffin, are swept back to Shanghai.

NEXT TIME: MORE SHOTS OF BACKYARD BIRDS

New Yorker Fiction 2014

5/1/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
Jerome K. Jerome
Born May 2, 1859

Naturally

May 5, 2014, Sam Lipsyte, “The Naturals”: Caperton (great name) flies from Chicago to Newark to be with his dying father, and during his flight back to Chicago his father . . . dies. ¶ Lipsyte packs so much into what seems like a simple narrative about a grown man unable to accept his father’s impending death. On the plane to and from Newark, Caperton meets the Rough Beast—a professional wrestler who acts as sort of a surrogate father, though he may be younger than Caperton—one of those literary coincidences that must happen in a narrative though it rarely does in life. His stepmother Stell has a “deal” with her fridge, mainly that she wants no one rooting around in there except her. She and Caperton have a major argument over his intrusion, and he winds up crushing a tomato against his bare chest—making his years of cumulative rage palpable. ¶ Every character in this tale is a “storyteller,” particularly Burt, Caperton’s father’s best buddy, who now tells stories to children at the library to occupy his old-man time. Lipsyte has created the ultimate story for any man with a dying father. There’s always a story, a narrative between those two men, and it is, in many case, a sad one—just is, that’s all. Lipsyte’s latest book, The Fun Parts: Stories, was out in 2013.
[The magazine gives no credit for the story’s illustration.]

NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD

New Yorker Fiction 2014

Ba Ba Ba Boom!

Photography

Monument to an Old Sea

Photography

Additional Shots

Bird House of All Bird Houses

My Book World

New Yorker Fiction 2014

A Lifetime Friendship

New is Old Again

Nine States/Ten Days 3

WY, CO, NM

Nine States/Ten Days 2

SD, ND, & MT

Nine States/Ten Days

OK, KS, & NE

New Yorker Fiction 2014

Still Fleeing

Backyard Birdcam Returns

More Antics

Past Empires

My Book World

New Yorker Fiction 2014

Naturally

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