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The Perfect Prefect

9/25/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
I have to admit that I don’t care as much for The Great Gatsby as many people do. I think it should have been a hundred pages longer and that Fitzgerald should have developed the characters and their relationships more meticulously and in more detail.
​Jane Smiley
Born September 26, 1949

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureKent Andreasen
​September 26, 2016, Petina Gappah, “A Short History of Zaka the Zulu”: Zaka, a Zimbabwe boy of seventeen, becomes head prefect in a rural boys’ school but later in life is accused and convicted of murdering a former schoolmate. ¶ An intricately compressed tale, this story opens a window onto this Jesuit school located in rural Zimbabwe. The author spends a great deal of time portraying the regimented yet torrid nature of such an institution: middlers, juniors, seniors, and each with his role, demerits, traditions, uniforms, alliances and betrayals. The latter is what ultimately concern this story. What happens when one boy is caught lying with another, and all but one of the witnesses agrees to keep his mouth shut? When one party decides to blackmail the two paramours, a boiling pot can only do one thing. Gappah’s Rotten Row comes out in December, for now only available at Amazon UK. 
Photograph by Kent Andreasen.

NEXT TIME: My Book World


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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.

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Her Sister's Helper

9/19/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
​William Golding
Born September 19, 1911                                 

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureGeoff McFetridge
​September 19, 2016, Rivka Galchen, “How Can I Help?”: Hayley, twenty-four, works for a call center, and discovers she is pregnant with twins. ¶ The story’s narrator is Hayley’s sister, the youngest of three adult children and yet perhaps the most mature; she is also responsible for getting Hayley her job. The narrator claims several times that she is non-judgmental, yet backtracks and admits that she is a bit, attempting to help right Hayley’s ship. She even has the opportunity to transform her judgment into something positive. Earlier Hayley has asked the narrator to adopt one of the twins (after they arrive)—almost as if it were a puppy. At the time the transaction does not seem possible to the narrator until Hayley experiences some alarming symptoms and checks herself into the hospital without the help of her judgmental sister. When she shows up at the hospital to help Hayley, she says:

“‘I’m here for Hayley Ward,’ I said. ‘I’m the nanny for the Ward twins.’ Though I had made no decision, I felt happy, expectant. I needed a family. And here Hayley was bringing one to me. Love was about practice, the book on happiness had said. Or maybe it hadn’t said that. I think it was that winning at squash was about practice, and then it turned out that victory had been insufficient? I didn’t know. Maybe I could learn on the job” (79).
​This quiet “relationship” story is satisfying for its full but brief exploration and yet “positive” but unsentimental ending. Galchen’s fiction, Little Labors, came out in May.
Illustration by Geoff McFetridge

NEXT TIME: My Book World

Picture
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.

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Isherwood's Bio of Ramakrishna

9/17/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.
​Lynn Abbey
Born September 18, 1948

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 nineteenth in a series of twenty-four.

My Book World

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​Isherwood, Christopher. Ramakrishna and His Disciples. New York: Simon, (1959) 1965.

By way of his own studies and attempted practice of Hinduism, Isherwood becomes interested in writing the biography of Ramakrishna (1836-1886), who spends most of his life meditating and teaching in Calcutta. Isherwood promises the Swami he is studying with in 1950s Los Angeles that he will write such a biography and spends a number of years compiling a fairly extensive bibliography and writing the text. After studying Volume Two of Isherwood’s Diaries, I believe that Isherwood sees himself as a vessel by which to relate the teachings of Hinduism, even if he sometimes falters in his own faith and practices. Yet Isherwood’s unfailing prose—its elegant readability, its lyricism, its invisible service to its subject—makes this book equal to the best of his fiction and nonfiction alike. I list below a number of nuggets from the text.

Isherwood straightaway explains the idea of caste: “To understand Caste as an idea rather than as a system, we have to go back to the Bhagavad-Gita, which dates from about the fifth century b.c. and is still the most widely read work of Hindu religious literature. In the eighteenth chapter of the Gita, we find Caste presented as a kind of natural order. The four castes are described in relation to their duties and responsibilities, without any mention of their privileges” (7).
 
“Ramakrishna replied calmly that this was the right way to meditate [naked]. Man labours from his birth under eight forms of bondage, he told Hriday: they are hatred, shame, fear, doubt, aversion, self-righteousness, pride in one’s lineate and pride in one’s caste-status. All these forms of bondage tie man’s mind down to worldly thoughts and desires and prevent him from raising his mind to spiritual things. The sacred thread reminds a man that he belongs to the highest caste, that of the brahmins; therefore it makes him proud of his birth. And so it must be discarded, along with every other pretension, possession, desire and aversion, before one can approach the Mother in meditation” (59).
 
“The Hindu will therefore entirely agree with Oscar Wilde’s epigram that ‘every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.’ But a saint is still a human being and an avatar is not; he is other than a saint. An avatar has no ‘past’ in this sense, for he has no karma. He is not driven by his karma to be born; he takes human birth as an act of pure grace, for the good of humanity” (94).
 
“In India, when a disciple comes to his guru for initiation, he is given what is called a mantra. The mantra consists of one or more holy names—Om is usually included—which the disciple is to repeat to himself and meditate upon for the rest of his life. It is regarded as very private and very sacred” (106).
 
“Mother heard the news and expressed some grief—but then she started to console me. ‘This world is transitory,’ she told me, ‘everyone must die some day, so what’s the use of grieving?’ and so forth. It seemed to that the Divine Mother had tuned Mother to a high pitch, like a stringed instrument keyed up to a very high note” (149).
 
“Something has already been said, in Chapter 4, about the influence of the British upon India. One of the many evils of foreign conquest is the tendency of the conquered to imitate their conquerors. This kind of imitation is evil because it is uncritical; it does not choose certain aspects of the alien culture and reject others, but accepts everything slavishly, with a superstitious belief that if you ape your conquerors you will acquire their superior power” (154).
 
“We have seen that Ramakrishna did not expect too much of the Brahmos; their previous conditioning had left them incapable of any radical change of life and mind. Contact with them made Ramakrishna long all the more earnestly for some really dedicated disciples—young ones preferably—who would be ready to renounce every worldly desire and follow his teaching without any reservations. The others, he was accustomed to say, could no more be taught true spirituality than a parrot can be taught to speak after the ring of coloured feathers has appeared around its neck” (167).
 
“During his first visit, Ramakrishna subjected Baburam to certain physical tests. Ramakrishna often did  this, saying that an examination of a man’s physical characteristics revealed his spiritual character—at least, to the insight of an initiated person. For example, Ramakrishna would say that eyes shaped like lotus petals betokened good thoughts; that eyes like those of a bull betokened a predominance of lust” (219).
 
After a long parable about a snake and a cowherd, and how the snake lets the cowherd beat him: “You have to hiss at wicked people. You have to scare them, or they’ll harm you. But you must never shoot venom into them. You must never harm them” (270)
The last part of the book profiles each of Ramakrishna’s disciples and their continuing work throughout the world.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016
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Franke's Wedlocked

9/17/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
We've forgotten how to remember, and just as importantly, we've forgotten how to pay attention. So, instead of using your smartphone to jot down crucial notes, or Googling an elusive fact, use every opportunity to practice your memory skills. Memory is a muscle, to be exercised and improved.
​Joshua Foer
Born September 23, 1982

My Book World

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​Franke, Katherine. Wedlocked: the Perils of Marriage Equality, How African Americans and Gays Mistakenly Thought the Right to Marry Would Set Them Free. New York: New York University Press, 2015.
 
Ms. Franke, Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Director for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University, puts forth an interesting, almost quirky thesis for her book. She believes that same-sex couples receiving the right to marry is similar to laws that compelled African-American men and women who had been co-habiting prior to the end of the Civil War, to marry following its end. And she asserts some compelling arguments or at least some ideas to ponder.

In her introduction, Franke states: “State licensing means your relationship is now governed by law, and that you have to play by law’s rules. An affair or a breakup now has legal in addition to emotional consequences. Put most bluntly, when you marry, the state acquires a legal interest in your relationship. Cloaking freedom in state regulation—as the freedom to marry surely does—is a curious freedom indeed, for this freedom comes with its own strict rules” (9).
 
The author points up a number of problems with marriage equality, one of which is the following: “Given that sexual orientation-based discrimination is legal in twenty-nine states, many Americans in same-sex relationships find themselves in the situation where they have a right to marry but exercising that right could result in losing their job once their employer learns of their marriage” (59).
 
“Lawyers who advise non-traditional families on their legal rights have noted that once states started to allow same-sex couples to marry, the rights of couples in non-marital families began evaporating. Whether it be relationship contracts between unmarried partners, de facto parental rights, or rights that might accrue between two partners as a matter of common law, little by little courts are saying: you could have married, and since you didn’t we won’t recognize you as having, or being able to create, any kind of alternative family relationship between or among you that is legally enforceable. The right to marry, thus, extinguishes a right to be anything else to one another” (98).
 
Franke later reasserts what she claims in her introduction, which is worth repeating, for it seems to reinforce her thesis: “Getting married means that your relationship is no longer a private affair since a marriage license converts it into a contract with three parties: two spouses and the state. Once you’re in it you have to get the permission of a judge to let you out. And what you learn when you seek judicial permission to end a marriage is that it’s a lot easier to get married than it is to get divorced” (121).
 
As Franke begins to conclude her arguments, she often shifts to speculative language. “Of course we can’t know for sure, as the court documents tell us far too little. But I have a couple of guesses about why these unwed mothers went to court and filed form papers announcing the fathers of their children” (174). “Another possible explanation for the frequent filing of bastardy petitions was the mothers were initiating these cases not for a local legal audience, but for one up north” (176). “It’s not hard to imagine unmarried mothers’ turn to ‘bastardy petitions’ as a way of healing the deprivation of kinship that all enslaved people suffered” (177). “The police had been summoned by another of Garner’s lovers who was jealous and had reported to the police that ‘a black man was going crazy’ in Lawrence’s apartment ‘and he was armed with a gun’ (a racial epithet rather than ‘black man’ was, in fact, probably used)” (181). Well, which is it: “probably” or “in fact”? The latter example, in particular, seems inauthentic if the author cannot, in fact, locate a proper citation to prove her assertions.
 
Near the end of her book, Franke sets up an important and stimulating question: “One might also provocatively ask whether marriage is better suited for straight people. By posing this question I don’t mean to align myself with those, such as the conservative National Organization for Marriage, who feel that only straight people should be allowed to marry, but rather to ask whether the legal rules and social norms that make up civil marriage have heterosexual couples in mind. Put another way, is there something essentially heterosexual about the institution of marriage? Are marriage’s rules and norms well suited to govern the lives and interests of same-sex couples?” (209). Yes or No? Her question would make for an interesting debate!
 
“One lesson we can draw from the early experience of same-sex couples with the right to marry is that marriage may not be for all of us. While we might all support the repeals of an exclusion from marriage as a matter of basic constitutional fairness, we need not all jump into marriage to demonstrate our new rights-bearing identity. If this book has any overarching message it is that we ought to slow down, take a breath, and evaluate whether marriage is ‘for us’” (225).
In an appendix, Franke issues “A Progressive Call to Actions for Married Queers.” I won’t list them here, but the eight points do seem to summarize what her book is about: making sure that that marriage laws help rather than hinder same-sex couples as they seek equality in this arena. The fact that her book comes out shortly before SCOTUS makes its historic declaration does not diminish the issues she raises. Hers is an important book.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016
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Members Only?

9/10/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable—like I'm about to cry any second—and wrong. I've found that when that happens, it usually means I'm writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.
Andre Dubus III
Born September 11, 1959

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureJason Ford
September 12, 2016, Robert Coover, “Invasion of the Martians”: While in the middle of a three-way with a young woman and the female Secretary of the Interior, a US senator from Texas must return home, where Martians have landed their spacecraft. ¶ When he attempts a certain diplomacy—never mind that they speak no language—they apparently shoot his dick off (a whooshing flashlight, very clean, no blood). Perhaps only a man of Coover’s age could write such a story, in which the US’s best retaliation is to nuke the Martians (voicing fear leftover from the 1950s?). The Senator’s younger paramour indiscreetly reveals the Senator’s delicate condition [“Nothing but a pimple!" (68)] on TV, and he must appear on a late-night show to expose the truth about his member (a word used more than once). Perhaps the author’s solution to the Senator’s problem reflects a subliminal message from his aging libido: what good is it to me now anyway? And perhaps he is satirizing more fleshly squabbles the US is having over aliens, particularly along the Mexican border—where there seems to be no communication and annihilation is threatened. Coover’s novel, Huck Out West will be released in January.
Illustration by Jason Ford.
 
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016

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Backgammon Royale with Cheese

9/4/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are.
Jonathan Kozol
Born September 5, 1936

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureAlex Merto
September 5, 2016, Jonathan Lethem, “A Gentleman’s Game”: Two men—one a backgammon expert, one not—travel to Singapore to play. Very very Casino Royale without the . . . royale. ¶ Upon arriving, Bruno, the backgammon player spots a high school acquaintance from Berkeley. After this astounding coincidence (fiction is full of them), Bruno winds up playing backgammon with his high school friend for $500 a point, and Edgar, his traveling companion, disappears from the plot. The journey to the game is not without its fun: women, massages, drinks, cocaine—but in the end both the predictable and unpredictable happen: Bruno wins most of the games but then for inexplicable reasons chooses to double the stakes, and, oh, guess who has staked all of Bruno’s games? Come on, guess! This story is excerpted from Lethem’s novel, A Gambler’s Anatomy, due to be released October 16.
Illustration by Alex Merto.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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