November 23, 2015, Ann Beattie, “Save a Horse Ride a Cowgirl”: Bradley, a widower presumably in his sixties, sells his old house in Maine and purchases one from which he can still view, across an expanse of water, his old one. ¶ This point of view may provide a literary device by which Bradley can examine his former life: a childless union with a woman he has loved but to whom he may not have been all that close; the damaging period in Vietnam; a fuck-up of a brother, who continues to fuck up by wrecking Bradley’s old pick-up; Bradley’s career as a lawyer; his unproductive therapy with a Dr. McCall. Only people over sixty may get the film reference, the fact that a minor character is named Bree, same as the prostitute from the 1971 film, Klute. This narrative, 7,000 words, seems to wander aimlessly, forcing the reader to learn the names of characters who turn out to mean little to Bradley’s story, perhaps the author’s intent—all of them filtered through a title based on a bumper sticker that itself may or may not successfully portray Bradley’s real attitude toward his late wife. The author’s collection, The State We’re In: Maine Stories, came out in September.
Illustration by The Heads of State.

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"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

Norris, Mary. Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. New York: Norton, 2015.
 
People sometimes wind up working in a place that is far afield from their original degree program or their original intent. Mary Norris, copy editor for The New Yorker for over thirty years, is no exception. She begins, as a fifteen-year-old, by “foot-checking” at a public swimming pool in Cleveland, Ohio. She goes on to earn a degree in English from Douglass College, “the women’s college of Rutgers University” (2). Later, she toils as a self-described “milkman,” because she feels that “milklady” is not feminist enough and “milkmaid” a bit fanciful. She begins her career at The New Yorker by occupying the lowest level possible in what is called the “editorial library.”
 
I first become acquainted with Norris and her book, as I do many nonfiction books, by way of C-SPAN’s Book-TV featured every weekend. Whether you view Norris live or read her prose about how American English works, she has a number of serious points to make, and she often does so through humorous or comical means. She makes a strong case for why, even as common citizens, we should pay attention to a number of linguistic issues. About “spelling” she says: “A misspelling undermines your authority. And an eye for the misspelled word can give you an edge in the workplace” (30). Norris goes on to tell how catching the misspelling of the word “idiosyncrasy” (sometimes people try to sneak in a “c” at the end) places her in good stead with one of the more curmudgeonly of the magazine’s many curmudgeons. She's promoted, where she further demonstrates her abilities.
 
While nothing might replace a solid textbook on grammar (and she references a number), Norris’s book provides a refresher course that may be a lot easier and more fun to understand. She discusses homophones, types of clauses and whether they are set off by commas or not. She learns to check her work at least three times. Personally, I find that when I publish a blog post, I must allow myself at least three separate sessions with it (fresh eyes each time), in order to catch (I hope) all of the typos. Even then, I’m sometimes horrified to return to a post published sometime last year and discover an error. Thankfully, unlike with print media, I can go into the bowels of my server and correct the error and update it with little fanfare. I digress.
 
As much as I like Norris’s book and highly recommend it, it seems to run out of steam toward the end. The chapters about the apostrophe, the asterisk, and her obsession with always possessing a full cache of perfect pencils are less substantive than the first seven chapters of the book. She does end, however, with a touching epilogue about a former colleague, a fellow copy editor, who, upon her death, leaves a modest million dollars to her local library in Connecticut. The gesture seems to say to Norris, at least, that even comma curmudgeons can be generous, if not in this life, then in the next!

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2015

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"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

November 16, 2015, Mark Haddon, “The Weir”: Fifty-three-year-old Ian spots a figure on the weir (British for "dam," I discover), and when she goes over into a rushing river, he dives in to rescue her. ¶ Haddon prepares the reader for what is to come: that buttercups contain the same chemicals as semen and corpses; that a day is warm and cold at the same time; that an invisible boundary exists between town and country, at very nearly the spot where Ian saves Kelly, a twenty-four-year-old woman who has mental difficulties. In spite of her initial anger over Ian's having saved her life—he nearly loses his own—they continue to meet in tea shops and cafés to exchange information: he about his failed life, and she about the voices that cause discomfort when they’re not present. ¶ Ian finally puts in a garden in the back of his house: “I’m sick of looking out onto a piece of wasteland” (79). The story ends philosophically, echoing all the imagery Haddon has introduced earlier, swirling together toward a deep drain in that river:

Haddon’s most recent work, published in 2015, is The Red House.
Photograph, Steven Barritt
Design, John Gall

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"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

Isherwood, Christopher. The Memorial. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, (1932) 1999.
 
Isherwood’s second novel is not a comfortable or cozy read. He is a bright, young author attempting to impress the literary world with perhaps a Modernist book, one like his heroes, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, write. This novel, as the title would suggest, revolves, at first, around the World War I memorial that one English town erects to honor its own 130 fallen men, including one Richard Vernon. But the narrative is so much more: it tells the story of his surviving widow, Lily Vernon, her son, Eric, a host of other relatives, and a man, a friend of the late Mr. Vernon, who, as it turns out, is a homosexual. By novel’s end this man, Edward Blake, is living in pre-Nazi Berlin with a young man named Franz—perhaps heralding Isherwood’s courage to write more about gay life in his The Berlin Stories, which is to follow in 1934.
 
Isherwood, who later works in Hollywood as a screenwriter, writes here as if he is unreeling a film, endeavoring to tell his narrative without the aid of authorial explanation. For example, the four major parts shift from 1928, to 1920, to 1925, then back to 1929. Chapters unfold by way of various characters’ points of view, sometimes, from person to person, within a single chapter. If you wish to know who is related to whom you must pay careful attention; you rarely see such words as “cousin,” “aunt,” or “uncle.” Moreover, certain symbols or motifs are sounded in the background, like distant chimes: clocks of all kinds, some that tick loudly, some that stop entirely; conservative people who pine for the past; rituals of how life has unfolded before the war. One way Isherwood mitigates the distance that he may create with his disjointed threads is that he is particularly adept in portraying the inner lives of his characters, without telling too much. Here, Eric Vernon contemplates his Aunt Mary juxtaposed with his mother:

And yet there is good reason, isn’t there? The woman, since the death of her husband, has treated Eric as if he is a grandchild who only comes to visit on special occasions, not a youth, who is attempting to reconstruct the world around him following such a catastrophic event. This novel may not be among Isherwood’s most noted, primarily because of its youthful, experimental nature, but it is still a solid, well-written book. Isherwood’s editors must sense his talent, are anxious to hurry him toward that next phase of his career.

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"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

November 9, 2015, Julianne Pachico, “Honey Bunny”: A young Columbian-American woman in New York lives off her trust fund by investing in little baggies of a substance that alters her reality. ¶ Good fiction often takes readers to places they would like to visit vicariously--rather see than be one—and this story about someone addicted to cocaine is no exception. I, for example, would not want to go where this young woman travels—into a subterranean world of unlikely perceptions. I don’t like feeling what she must feel, as if she’s inside a Laundromat’s drier, tumbling here, tumbling there until the damn thing stops because she's run out of coins to feed it. I don’t like having lost most of my native tongue yet not being in total control of my new one. The world of assignations in Volvos to buy more stuff, in which the driver is your lover’s wife, is all too crazy for most of us to enter into, but through well wrought fiction I can go there, and then like commuting via the A Train, I can get off conveniently when I’m finished gawking. Pachico’s collection, The Tourists, came out in 2014.
Photograph Hannah Whitaker.
Design Rodrigo Corral

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"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!

Maier, Thomas. Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love. New York: Basic, 2009.
 
For the last several years, I have watched Showtime’s series by the same name, perhaps the only reason I've come to know this book at all. In 1999, I read James H. Jones’s Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, and, in 2004 T. C. Boyle’s novel, The Inner Circle, in which Boyle delves further into Kinsey’s organization. Maier’s book seems to pick up where Kinsey’s story of investigating Americans’ sex lives leaves off (he dies in 1956). Whereas Kinsey uses an interview method with obvious limits and weaknesses, Masters and Johnson pioneer primarily an area of laboratory research investigating how the female in American culture achieves sexual satisfaction.
 
Maier’s research seems thorough, exploring the early lives of both William Masters and Virginia Johnson. As with all human beings, no matter how lofty their research aims later become, Masters and Johnson both have their strong and weak points as both scientists and human beings. Masters, after helping thousands of people in the St. Louis area achieve successful fertility, actually conceals from his first wife, Libby, that it is he who is the sterile partner. Because of her own initiative, Libby becomes informed of the situation and is artificially inseminated with Masters’s own semen (for some reason frozen). Moreover, Masters is a cold man emotionally, more than likely due to having been physically abused by his father; he is virtually estranged from both of his children though they all live in the same house. Virginia, a free spirit since birth, owns her sex life from an early age, experiencing a full sex life with various men, including her business partner, William Masters. Their relationship in the TV series is deemed more romantic than actually seems to happen. Like everything else in their lives, marrying becomes the easier choice: to work and live together. Legally bland.
 
One of the amazing elements of their research is that they are able to keep it under wraps from the local and national media:

Among Masters and Johnson's failures is their third book, one about homosexuality. It is basically panned and really begins a long, slow decline toward their ultimate demise in the 1980s. I annotated far more interesting points than I can present here. If you are at all interested in the research that most assuredly has brought our culture to where it is today—for good or ill—you need to read this four hundred page tome. Soon.

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"
Also available on iTunes. Watch for more podcasts!