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New Yorker Fiction 2014

8/28/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Lend me your vast noise, your vast gentle speed, your nightly slipping through a lighted Europe, O luxury train! And the agonizing music that sounds the length of your gilt corridors, while behind the japanned doors with heavy copper latches sleep the millionaires . . .
Valery Larbaud
Born August 29, 1881

Poor References

September 1, 2014, Joseph O’Neill, “The Referees”. Thirty-six-year-old Rob Karlsson moves back to Manhattan from Portland, Oregon, after a divorce, and requires referees to let an apartment in a co-operative building. ¶ At first the focus of the story seems to be Rob’s search for two of what Americans call references. He contacts first one person then another, but most decline to help him. A friend of his former wife, for example, feels that she must remain aligned with Samantha—there’s nothing inherently wrong with him. Then Rob’s cousin offers to sign a letter if Rob will write it. And Rob finally does receive a second letter of reference from Billy—a childhood friend from whom he has been disengaged over a decade. So it would seem that there is a certain irony by way of his receiving references from parties who are now least acquainted with him. ¶ The story concludes with Rob’s own rundown of his character, basically claiming, “I’m an okay guy who won’t make trouble.” His rant continues with a short biographical sketch that further demonstrates why he is one who should be trusted to occupy a certain piece of urban property . . . even if, over most of his life, he isn’t exactly the most reliable . . . friend. I suppose one must experience this kind of dehumanization to get what O’Neill is going for here. His book, The Dog, is out in September. [The magazine gives no credit for the story’s simple illustration.]

NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD

Vintage Cars on Parade

8/26/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
I formed a resolution to never write a word I did not want to write; to think only of my own tastes and ideals, without a thought of those of editors or publishers.
C. S. Forester
Born August 27, 1899

Reno, Nevada—August 3, 2014

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

Heart

8/25/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
“A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.”
Christopher Isherwood, from his novel, *A Single Man*
Born August 26, 1904

My Book World

O’Brien, Edna. A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories of Edna O’Brien. With a foreword by Philip Roth. New York: Plume, 1984.

These twenty-nine stories are the best plucked from four of O’Brien’s prior collections plus four previously unpublished stories. Yet when I read them, they all seem of a kind: all of them taking place in various decades of her native Ireland. Moreover, one hears the same bells going off in different stories, but always with a slightly different timbre. One of these ringing motifs is men who drink heavily and cause one kerfuffle or another for the women in their lives. Is it the hard edge of Irish life itself—the damp cold, the grinding poverty—that cause men to act badly, or is it a man’s will to do so? Another motif is brash women who yet still have a small fear of the Catholic church, its strictures. And yet another one is the woman hungry for the flesh of love, whether it is with a man or a woman. And yet each time O’Brien presents the reader with one of these jeweled motifs, it is fresh, not much like the bell that went off previously. The collection might be compared to a musical form: variations on a theme, in which these various themes crop up again and again until their final rendering is heard.

One of my favorite stories is “Sister Imelda,” in which a teenage girl in a Catholic school falls in love with her teacher, also a nun. It is a love that is mutual, and yet her friends only think she is sucking up to the sister. No trouble arises. The turmoil between them—whether they should associate in any way but as teacher and pupil—lies just beneath the surface. And then Sister leaves the school.

“I knew that there is something sad and faintly distasteful about love’s ending, particularly love that has never been fully realized. I might have hinted at that, but I doubt it. In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things” (143).

In another passage, from the story, “Paradise,” a woman performs the following action ever so subtly that one almost does not recognize what is happening:

“Then she knelt, and as she began he muttered between clenched teeth. He who could tame animals was defenseless in this. She applied herself to it, sucking, sucking, sucking, with all the hunger that she felt and all the simulated hunger that she liked him to think she felt” (214).

In “A Scandalous Woman,” the reader learns that another character has had a certain procedure:

“She had joined that small sodality of scandalous women who had conceived children without securing fathers and who were damned in body and soul. Had they convened they would have been a band of seven or eight, and might have sent up an unholy wail to their Maker and their covert seducers” (252).

Though all these stories were written more than thirty years ago, they still are fresh. The language. The situations. The conclusions. All fresh. O’Brien’s brogue is always something you feel as well as hear: sweet and rough, like chocolate candy with nuts.

NEXT TIME: PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY OF A PARADE IN RENO

New Yorker Fiction 2014

8/21/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.
Annie Proulx
Born August 22, 1935

Fragility of Childhood

Joss McKinley

August 25, 2014, Tessa Hadley, “One Saturday Morning”: Ten-year-old Carrie of 1960s London is mesmerized by and also a bit frightened by a family friend, who shows up at their door while her parents are out shopping. ¶ The circumstances lead the more lascivious reader to suspect that Dom, the visitor, has some evil purpose in mind, primarily because Carrie innocently lets him into the house when, for now, she is all alone. ¶ It turns out that Dom has recently lost his wife. This is the reason why he’s so goofy: playing her Bartók piece on the piano, as she skulks around upstairs, bearishly embracing her mother on a balcony below Carrie’s room, his grief overwhelming her mother’s presence with something that resembles dancing. ¶ As often happens in life, a child doesn’t understand until years later the evanescence of that moment:

Already, Carrie hardly knew if she’d actually seen Dom dancing on the balcony with her mother, or if that had happened only her imagination, a vision of what consolation might be—something headlong and reckless and sweet, unavailable to children.”

Hadley’s Married Love: And Other Stories was published in 2012.
Joss McKinley, Photographer

NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD

Reno/Lake Tahoe

8/19/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Salvatore Quasimodo
Born August 20, 1901

Some Pictures

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

Stunned by Stoner

8/18/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
What divides men is less a difference in ideas than a likeness in pretensions.
Pierre Jean de Béranger
Born August 19, 1780

My Book World

Williams, John. Stoner. With an introduction by John McGahern. New York: New York Review Books, 1965.

My aunt, who lives in the Netherlands, recommended this book to me almost a year ago. Evidently, years after its release, the book has become a great success in Europe by way of various translations. I bought the Kindle version, figuring I would read it in airports during my travels but actually didn’t get around to it until now. Stoner is a difficult book to read at times, not because of the prose or the structure. No, the words flow in a sort of drudge-like way, like the protagonist’s life as an academician at the University of Missouri in the early part of the twentieth century. I’ve never read a novel that so flawlessly used a spare amount of dialogue. Instead, Williams reveals much by way of interior monologue or narrative description. He pens entire decades in the stroke of one sentence, and yet the act seems natural. We were there; now we’re here.

The novel is also difficult because there are a number of emotionally grueling scenes or sections. William Stoner is born to Missouri farmers in 1890—about the age of my late grandparents. At eighteen he is mildly encouraged by his parents to attend the University of Missouri in agricultural studies. The idea is that he will return to the farm one day. Instead, however, he is drawn into the world of literature by a rather cynical professor, and after his first two years Stoner changes his major to English. He does so without informing his parents, and when graduation nears, Stoner’s professor sees that he is awarded some money to pursue his master’s degree and then a PhD. Then in sort of a fluke, he applies for and receives a position on the faculty at MU.

Williams, perhaps more than any writer I’ve ever read, reveals what it is like to teach university level students. Any number of novels take place in the university setting, but Williams actually takes the reader into the life of a professor: the books he teaches, his classroom, his office as he advises. We see him as he grows, becomes more confident in his field. Williams, like Stoner, enjoys teaching, loves it in fact.

“His job gave him a particular kind of identity, and made him what he was . . . It’s the love of the thing that’s essential. And if you love something, you’re going to understand it. you’ve got to keep the faith.”

Stoner is stubborn and adheres to his opinion, no matter what it may be—whether he flunks a student or prevents a PhD candidate from advancing because he believes the young man will be a menace to the classroom. In this slim novel we see William Stoner move from age eighteen through his reluctant retirement at age sixty-five. In between, we see him shut out of his own family by a neurotic wife, so that beyond a certain point, he doesn’t even become acquainted with his own daughter. He falls in love with a woman in the department and carries on an affair with her until they are found out. Because of departmental politics, he is demoted to teaching nothing but freshman classes, which is a blow not only to him but the graduate students who have depended on him for his wisdom and guidance. Stoner’s end is equally gripping, and the reader should be prepared for it. I was not. And yet Stoner is; he always has been prepared.

“He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marveled at the bitterness, the terror, the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to the death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living” (41).

Stoner is a brief but significant read, well worth the time, whether you’re an academic or not. It’s as arduous as any war novel. It may be the best portrayal of the war that can rage on between the sharpest minds found at any university English department.

Black Witch Moth

Found on our patio door the evening of August 18. Two shots of same moth. Located mostly in desert Southwest and other arid or semiarid regions. Whee!

NEXT TIME: PHOTOS OF RENO/LAKE TAHOE AREA

Dr. Z Continues to Edify

8/14/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Too much rest is rust.
Sir Walter Scott
Born August 15, 1771

My Book World

The Tattered Cover of My Copy

Pasternak, Boris. Dr. Zhivago. New York: Signet, 1958.

As a high school youth I saw the film Dr. Zhivago at least twice. Then when I went to college I was required to view it for a humanities class, whose theme for the semester was “creativity.” Among other titles we also read Leo Tolstoy’s What is Art?. The book cost a dollar. One evening early in the semester the entire college, who was required to take humanities, showed up at the local theater to view Dr. Zhivago; the venue was capable of holding all 700 of us. Even out of the three showings all my tender mind could derive from the three-hour film was that Dr. Zhivago simply wished to live his life, free of political wranglings. He had no thoughts of being rich; he merely wanted to live his life creatively—mainly through writing poetry. Through the years I’ve continued to revisit the film, and, as an older man, derive different gifts from it.

Back when I was in college I was not required to read the novel but bought a Signet paperback version (the cover says) for ninety-five cents. I estimate that Dr. Zhivago, the novel, moved with me at least a dozen times from Winfield, Kansas to Dallas to Lubbock, Texas, each time packed up in a box and then placed in its alphabetical niche on various shelves. But only recently did I find the time to pull the yellow-paged copy off the shelf and read it—close to fifty years after I bought it. I’ve not been disappointed in Pasternak’s novel first published in Italy in 1955. It caused a furor both in Russia, where it was officially denounced, and in the Western world, where it was heralded as a realistic account of Tsarist Russia’s shift to communism.

The plot, of course, is only too familiar. Dr. Yuri Zhivago comes from a rather well to do family, and he receives his education with grace and anticipation of living a charmed life. He marries Tonia, and they have a son. At some point he works with Lara, a nurse, and though he is attracted to her, he does not admit it. Years later they are reunited by working in the same hospital, and they fall in love. Zhivago is then swept up in Russian history as he is captured by the partisans, who conscript him as a medical officer. He “serves” with them for a long period, and he never again sees Tonia or his son, Sasha, who have moved to Paris. As an older man he marries and fathers two children, but this part is left out of the film. Unlike the film, which seems to conclude with Yuri’s heart attack on the street, the book ends with a detailed account of the life of Tania, the love child of Yuri and Lara. The film devises a frame by which Zhivago’s brother searches out Tania and the entire book seems to be told as one flashback.

The following passages are but two that indicate how Pasternak seeks to portray the savagery of the war.

“Zhivago had told him how hard he found it to accept the ruthless logic of mutual extermination, to get used to the sight of the wounded, especially to the horror of certain wounds of a new sort, to the mutilation of survivors whom the technique of modern fighting had turned into lumps of disfigured flesh” (99).

“On one stretcher lay a man who had been mutilated in a particularly monstrous way. A large splinter from the shell that had mangled his face, turning his tongue and lips into a red gruel without killing him, had lodged in the bone structure of his jaw, where the cheek had been torn out. He uttered short groans in a thin inhuman voice; no one could take these sounds for anything but an appeal to finish him off quickly, to put an end to his inconceivable torment” (101).

I’m glad finally to have read Pasternak’s novel. His words continue to reach out to us, imploring us, worldwide, to find diplomatic solutions to human conflict. War does nothing but separate people, obliterate their lives into something that is forever after incomprehensible. War serves to separate those who might love one another and raise children in relative peace, and that ought to be the least people can expect out of life.

New Yorker Fiction 2014

8/9/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Born August 8, 1896

The Dangers of Owning a Picasso

Joel Holland

August 11 & 18, 2014, César Aira, “Picasso”: A man encounters a genie while visiting the Picasso Museum and is offered a choice: would he rather own a Picasso or become Picasso himself? ¶ The narrator explores the ramifications of both positions. If he chooses to be Picasso, he is presented with a particular set of problems. If he elects to have a Picasso, he is presented with another set. Perhaps Aira wishes for the reader to wonder about the meaning of art. What is its value for the artist? The individual viewing it? After subconsciously wishing for a Picasso, the narrator is granted his wish. Now what? Aira’s The Musical Brain and Other Stories will be released in 2015.
Hand lettering by Joel Holland

NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD

New Yorker Fiction 2014

Poor References

Vintage Cars on Parade

Reno, Nevada—August 3, 2014

Heart

My Book World

New Yorker Fiction 2014

Fragility of Childhood

Reno/Lake Tahoe

Some Pictures

Stunned by Stoner

My Book World

Black Witch Moth

Dr. Z Continues to Edify

My Book World

New Yorker Fiction 2014

The Dangers of Owning a Picasso

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