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A Short Short Satire

11/28/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual.
​
Rita Mae Brown
​Born November 28, 1944

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureAlain Pilon
​November 28, 2016, Robert Coover, “The Hanging of the Schoolmarm”: In some iteration of the Old West, a schoolmarm closes down a saloon by winning it in a card game. ¶ One supposes that this short short story is a satire of our civilization in general. Schoolmarm rules the roost until the sheriff usurps her power and condemns her to hanging. She is a brave one, claiming that self pity “is the lowest state to which a person’s mind can fall” (81). One wonders if schoolmarm isn’t a mouthpiece for Coover:

“A landscape of rocks evokes a time before time, and the end-times as well, forcing us, while contemplating it, to live in all time at once, where words have nothing to attach themselves to” (81).
​Is this old man’s story deliberately attributed to two-dimensional characters, or is it an example of philosophic sophistication that one admires? The reader must judge the schoolmarm’s words:
“‘That is what rocks express. Though they are otherwise meaningless, they are, in this respect, the most meaningful thing we have, putting us in touch with oblivion. Which is the ineffablest thing of all’” (81).
Coover, eighty-four, not even listed in the Contributors for this issue, has a novel coming out in January: Huck Out West.
Illustration by Alain Pilon.

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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!

At new prices. Paper: $10.75 |
£7.75 | €8.50  Kindle: $2.99

 
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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We Are Flower Hunters

11/21/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. 
​
Voltaire
​Born November 21, 1694

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureJessica Roux
​November 21, Lauren Groff, “Flower Hunters”: A young Florida mother, on Halloween night, is left alone to dispense candy and reflect on why she has lost her best friend down the street. ¶ This nameless woman is afraid of many things, most of them on behalf of humanity or the animal world. She is heavy into reading early naturalist William Bartram, which may be one source of alienation from Meg down the street, her sons, or even her husband. She perhaps feels too much on behalf of the earth and its dwindling life. When the rain begins to pour, the woman tromps out to the corner of their yard to note that their new sinkhole is not filling with water, that the flood is more than likely filling a network of underground limestone canals.

     “For a minute, she lets herself imagine the larger sinkhole below the baby one opening very slowly and cupping her and the house and the dog and the piano all the way down to the very black bottom of the limestone hollow and gently depositing them there so far down that nobody could get her out, they could only visit, her family’s heads peering once in a while over the lip, tiny pale bits against the blue sky.
     From down there, everyone would seem so happy” (83)
Groff’s story is a subtly moving one about the full range of friendship, perhaps the flower that is most hunted. Groff’s novel, Fates and Furies, came out in September.
Illustrated by Jessica Roux

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!

At new prices. Paper: $10.75 | £7.75 | €8.50  Kindle: $2.99

 
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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October, a Lovely Month

11/19/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.
​
Allen Tate
​Born November 19, 1899  
                         

My book World

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 twenty-third in a series of twenty-four.
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Isherwood, Christopher, author, and Don Bachardy, artist. October. Los Angeles: Twelvetrees, 1981.
 
In October of 1979, these two men who were longtime companions produced material for this art book with pages of twelve by nine inches. Isherwood wrote text for each day of the month, and Bachardy produced thirty-two portraits of their friends or associates. The text is not coordinated in any way with the drawings, nor should it be. This is one of print run of 3,000 copies, and much of the text repeats or is a variation on material that Isherwood has already covered in either his diaries or other contemporary books, such as Kathleen and Frank, a memoir of his parents.
 
Nuggets:

​“The beginning of October is a joyful, hopeful, inspiring time of the year for me—it always has been. For me, born so late in the summer, autumn is my spring. This is the season which I associate with fresh work-projects in their earliest, most creative phase—the phase of discovering what the project is really about, rather than how I can execute it” (8).
 
“Since 1973, I’ve been gradually reading through the Marchand edition of Byron’s Letters and Journals, volume by volume, as they are published. Now I’ve nearly finished volume nine, which covers October 1821 to September 1822” (15).
 
“There are students who are doing term-papers or these about my work or the work of my friends. They expect me to drop everything and answer pages of questions, instead of themselves looking for the answers in the library. All right, I sympathize with their laziness. But, too often, they make the crudest of all mistakes; they think they can flatter me into helping them by claiming, ‘I’ve read everything you’ve written’—a statement which could only be true of maybe twenty people in the Unites States” (17). And I’m now one of those twenty (surely more by now)! Frankly, I wouldn’t tell an author such a thing but would hope my questions or our discussion would reflect that I had read all his books.
October is a project the two men designed so that they might work together (although they did also collaborate on a number of scripts). Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading the book and look forward to viewing the drawings again and again. 

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016
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Portals of War and Peace

11/14/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine-qua-non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?
​
Karen Armstrong
​Born November 14, 1944

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureLarry Towell / Magnum
​November 14, 2016, Mohsin Hamid, “Of Windows and Doors”: Saeed and Nadia, a young unmarried couple, seek to escape their war-torn city. ¶ Hamid’s elegant prose and subtle omniscience take the reader inside the war of collateral damage. Both have lost family and friends. As the title suggests, both windows and doors figure importantly. Windows, once broken out by bombs or bullets, are really not capable of being resealed, but people attempt to do so with bookshelves, mattresses, or packaging tape and cardboard. 

“A window was the border through which death was possibly likeliest to come. Windows could not stop even the most flagging round of ammunition: any spot indoors with a view of the outside was a spot potentially in the crossfire” (71).
Doors, too, alter in their significance, become a means of escape
​. . . or doom, life or death: 
“Nadia, who had not considered the order of their departure until that moment, and realized that there were risks to each, to going first and to going second, did not argue but approached the door, and drawing close she was struck by its darkness, its opacity, the way that it did not reveal what was on the other side and also did not reflect what was on this side, and so felt equally like a beginning and an end, and she turned to Saeed and found him staring at her, and his face was full of worry and sorrow, and she took his hands in hers and held them tight, and then, releasing them, and without a word, she stepped through” (76-7).
The story limns not only all wars but specifically the war that threatens one the most, the war happening where one lives now. Hamid’s novel, Exit West, comes out in March 2017.
Photography by Larry Towell/Magnum.

NEXT TIME: My Book World
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An Author's Tribute to His Parents

11/12/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
It's expected of novels that they should explain the world and create the illusion that things are ultimately logical and coherent. But that's not what I see around me. Often, events remain mysterious and unresolved, and our emotions reach no catharsis.
​Damon Galgut
​Born November 12, 1963

My Book World

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 twenty-second in a series of twenty-four.
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Isherwood, Christopher. Kathleen and Frank. New York: Simon, 1971.
 
Kathleen and Frank makes the twenty-second book of Isherwood’s that I’ve read in about a year, and I thought perhaps that his work couldn’t get any better, that his best writing occurred when he was younger. But I was wrong. Mr. Isherwood, in his late sixties when he pens this book, distinguishes his latter years as a writer by undertaking, instead of fiction, nonfiction. In this tome of over 500 pages, he culls through letters that pass back and forth between his parents in the early part of the twentieth century, as well as his mother’s daily diaries. He then stitches them together in not only a seamless narrative about his parents’ courtship and marriage but a curiously interesting one, by inserting commentary or historical information from third sources. Even after having read all of Isherwood’s diaries, I believe he saves some intimate or startling details for this book.
 
In his previous works Isherwood’s parents always seem rather cardboardy, perhaps purposely, or perhaps because of a blind spot Isherwood has. In this book, one finds his mother, Kathleen, a very early feminist, one who sympathizes with the Suffragist movement in England. Not only that. She’s not really that keen on having children at an early age. She is well past thirty when she marries and nearly forty when she gives birth to Richard, Christopher’s younger brother by eight years. She is highly cultured, and very opinionated about any bit of theater that she’s seen or literature that she’s read. One can almost hear Christopher’s voice in hers or vice versa. At the same time, one might have thought that Christopher, as a gay man had a distant father, but if that were true it would have only been in the geographical sense. His father, Frank, was a soldier who fought with distinction in the Second Boer war in South Africa, and later died in World War I in France. Frank made a point of telling Kathleen that he didn’t wish to make Christopher conform to societal norms for being a boy; he preferred that Christopher make his own way. What a gift from a father to a son who is different. Frank, before he leaves for war, is also interested in the theater, so much so that he plays the piano, performs in certain kinds of musicals. But he isn’t a soft officer. He is a distinguished one, an officer whose men honor and respect him. His loss in 1915 is exaggerated by the fact that his body cannot be accounted for. Months pass before Kathleen gives up all hope, in fact, receives official notice from the Royal army.
 
There is a third character, one that is not present in most American family sagas. In fact, there are two additional characters: Marple Hall, the Bradshaw-Isherwood home, and Wyberslegh, the younger Isherwood home. Both are over three hundred years old at the time Isherwood writes. His vivid descriptions of both halls (he defines “hall” loosely as the home of the owner of a large estate) are not necessarily flattering. Of Wyberslegh he says that it is damp most of the year, and that may be the kindest thing he has to say. The upkeep and maintenance on a large residence is quite costly. Yet Wyberslegh is the home where Christopher lives until his father is stationed in Ireland and before he is sent to boarding school at a rather early age. It is the estate Christopher signs over to his brother Richard, when he realizes he is never returning to England to live—quite a generous act.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016

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Life is a Cherry Pit Bull

11/7/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will. 
Helen Garner
​Born November 7, 1942

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureKristian Hammerstad
​November 7, 2016, T. Coraghessan Boyle, “Are We Not Men?”: This plot-driven story accomplishes what the author intends for it to. ¶ When the reader realizes one has entered the future of engineered genetics, of perfect little pigs and docile pit bulls and a statuesque young woman with a high IQ, one realizes that such beings are still capable of harming one another. According to Boyle, fucking with nature in this manner will never be satisfactory, down to grass that glows in the dark, not to mention Greek-chorus crowparrots spitting obscenities at the humans below who’ve allowed these atrocities to be committed in the first place. Boyle’s novel, Terranauts, came out in October.
Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

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