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Story-a-Day - 1 What exactly IS "Story-a-Day"? Well, Story-a-Day (also known as "Story-A-Day") is my goal to read one story every day from Ann Charters' collection "The Story and Its Writer" (5th Ed.) which is quite an amazing collection of short stories from around the world. So here is a list (alphabetical, for that's how they appear in the book) of the stories I've read beginning June 5, 2004. I'll include an excerpt before any comments.
New! Click on the names (on this side of the
dashed line) to find more info on the writer!
Day 1: Abe Akira - "Peaches" - 1972
I know all too well that memory can be deceptive, and I have surely heard
this said by others. But I am constantly being shocked anew at how
outrageously deceptive memory is. Yes, it beguiles us at every turn.
Not too long ago I was taken by surprise again. So what about these peaches, huh? I'm reminded of this short story writing exercise in which we students were doled out (by the teacher) an object and a setting and a name, etc. The guy in my group had "a sack of tangerines" and strangely I remember his story quite well—it was about a boy who worked at a small store and was riding his bicycle with a bag of tangerines with the nubs on them—tangelos, I think they're called. Anyway, this same guy wrote a short story about a pharmacist who heard some random confession and was changed to his soul all of a sudden one day for no apparent reason. Maybe that was someone else in the group, though. Anyway, "Peaches" is a story that deals with the fickleness of memory and through the narrator's doubting of it, he comes to tell you a concise version of his life story. It starts with his recollection of a nighttime walk with his mother: she pushed a baby carriage full of peaches. But suddenly the narrator doubts this since his mother had had a shawl to keep warm so it must have been winter, he reasons. "Peaches in the winter? Frogs and mudsnails in the winter? How could I have failed to notice that until now?" Personally I thought of the connections we make with other people and how those connections are necessary to preserve our inaccurate versions of memory. It's only when we're alone—when the narrator's mother and father are long dead—that we have no one to confirm our faulty memories and so we start to question a past that is necessarily imperfectly etched in our heads and hearts. And by the way, his first name is pronounced "Ah-bay." The translation is by Jay Rubin. Day 2: Chinua Achebe - "Civil Peace" - 1971 He had come out of the war with five inestimable blessings—his head, his wife Maria's head, and the heads of three out of their four children. As a bonus he also had his old bicycle—a miracle too but naturally not to be compared to the safety of five human heads.
I first
heard of Achebe in high school, in my Global Studies class taught by the
eccentric, young, hoola-hooping, theatre-leading, piano playing, bearded Mr.
"TODD" Decker. We read Things Fall Apart, and other than the
(to me, then) mystical name "Okonkwo," I remember nothing about the story
(filed away in that pile of books marked "Read Later but Not Too Much
Later"). Achebe is a writer I admire and I always fear it is for the
wrong reason (if Wilde or any other art-for-art's-sake critic had anything
to do with it). I like "Civil Peace" because it forces me into an
uncomfortable world; the feeling in me is analogous to the feeling I get
from watching an old
Capra movie, "Meet John Doe" or "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." The
reader/viewer becomes entwined in the political and social themes of the work,
sometimes ignoring a sloppy cut or a wordy monologue. But try to find
Achebe's aesthetic fault: I dare you. It's not there. So my
first read left me wondering what I had ignored to empathize so deeply with
Jonathan Iwegbu and the second proved that I ignored nothing. Day 3: Sherman Alexie - "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" - 1993
"No," I said and paused. "Give me a Cherry Slushie, too." Threes, mystical threes. The title of this story suggests a confrontation, and Alexie delivers three. This is a rather modern story, set inside a 7-11 in the recent past, in Seattle with her in the distant past, and in the present in an Indian reservation in Spokane; and told concisely using widely understood cultural allusions (Slushie mentioned above) that cut down on superfluous language. But the title... I was intrigued by the title, and too young to have watched "The Lone Ranger," it left me wondering. But then Alexie was only born in 1966—he would have been too young to have watched the show too (reruns, perhaps?). What was important was the theme of white man and Indian, of two friends playing aggressors, and more importantly, in the realm of Heaven where outcomes have already been decided. And when you look for these roles in the story, they are there: three pairs of whites/Native Americans—first the 7-11 employee ("There was something about him I liked, even if it was three in the morning and he was white."), then his girlfriend ("She was white and I lived with her in Seattle.") and finally the basketball champ back on the reservation ("But on the night I was ready to play for real, there was this white guy at the gym, playing with all the Indians.") And each time the narrator is bested, and goes on in self-defeat. "'I love you,' she said as I left her. 'And don't ever come back.'" The story is one of conflict but not of battle. It is of two friends engaged in an eternal grapple, but the one on top—the Lone Ranger—never realizes his constant domination and the inequality intrinsic to their roles as they ride off into the sunset. Alexie finishes: "I know how all my dreams end anyway." Day 4: Woody Allen - "The Kugelmass Episode" - 1977
Persky tucked the bills in his pants pocket and turned toward his bookcase.
"So who do you want to meet? Sister Carrie? Hester Prynne?
Ophelia? Maybe someone by Saul Bellow? Hey, what about Temple
Drake? Although for a man your age she'd be a workout." Last week they re-ran an old Terry Gross interview with Christopher Walken that reminded me of his hilariously frightening role in Annie Hall. "Sometimes when I'm driving at night," he starts, "I imagine myself swerving into the oncoming traffic..." Allen is later shown frightened to death as Walken's character drives him to the airport. What a movie. And what a writer. Allen is a capable writer. Do a search on this story and you'll find people call it "satiric" and "allegorical" but no one seems to capture why this story is so popular. The first clue should be the ending. It's the sort of ending that seems pulled from Allen's...hat. Kugelmass is stuck in a textbook running from the verb "tener." Great. Funny. But why a few thousand words to get to that? And why does Allen rush to the Great Persky, skimming the details of Kugelmass's unhappy marriage first? The answer is that Allen is offering his suggestion on the branch of criticism known as Reader-Response (see The Dynamics of Literary Response, 1968, Holland). And this is widely known and accepted, but what is rarely discussed (I couldn't find anything mentioned of it), is Allen's specific indictment: He's critical of a Draconian interpretation that forces itself upon other people, that is at once a monistic yet fearful of challengers. Read any book on criticism and you'll encounter this. Kugelmass enters the text of Madame Bovary, but instead of getting something personal from it and then returning to the "real world," his effects are felt by everyone who reads the book: "'First a strange character named Kugelmass, and now she's gone from the book. Well, I guess the mark of a classic is that you can reread it a thousand times and always find something new,'" says a Stanford professor. For revealing to someone else the fruits of your reader-response interpretation invariably extends it to them whether they want it or not. Leave the text alone, Allen argues. Take from it what you want, but be sure you don't actually take anything. Sort of like those signs in National Parks: "Take only pictures; leave only footprints." It is no accident that Kugelmass's world collapses when he decides to bring Emma Bovary back to New York in the present. Allen suggests this is where the transgression lies: "For adultery with Madame Bovary, my wife will reduce me to beggary." Some criticism crosses the line from interpretation to adulteration; hopefully competent readers can figure out when this happens and avoid it. Day 5: Dorothy Allison - "River of Names" - 1994
I would like to turn around and talk to her..."I've got a dust river in my
head, a river of names endlessly repeating. That dirty water rises in
me, all those children screaming out their lives in my memory, and I become
someone else, someone I have tried so hard not to be." I once wrote a short story called "Two Halves" and I was reminded instantly of it as I began "River of Names." Luckily Allison didn't make the same mistake I made when I wrote my story, and fortunately, for us, she finished hers. With the tragedy that fills the halls of her narrator's memory, a reader could be pushed the brink of madness and despair, but the narrator's careful release of information ensures we are never led down that path. The vignettes of memory are concise and discombobulated from their milieu so that it's: hanging miscarriage abuse car wreck suicide rape accident—rapid fire like a machine gun. Allison's narrator is the one who survived, and it is her with whom we are supposed to empathize. Yet juxtaposed alongside that repository of tragedy, that river of names, is her pure, naive and innocent lover Jesse who wants to both know the truth and be protected from it. At least that is what the narrator presumes, for it is she who decides to lie ("I realize I do not really know what lavender smells like...") and she who decides to present a facade to the person she ostensibly loves. This is the tragedy in the story, not the countless acts of violence and abuse recounted in the pages. That the narrator can't reconcile her memory of the past with her potential for the future, that she has gradually refashioned her gruesome stories into pleasant reminiscences, and that she knows of her potential for destruction but disables it through deception and then writes it all down, is proof that the river of names will dry up with her passing, a fact doubly ensured by her barrenness. Day 6: Sherwood Anderson - "Death in the Woods" - 1933
Her dreams couldn't have been very pleasant. Not many pleasant things
had happened to her. Now and then one of the Grimes dogs left the
running circle and came to stand before her. The dog thrust his face
to her face. His red tongue was hanging out.
This story was one of my favorites
when I first encountered Charters' anthology in early 2000. Strange it
is when we revisit something that touched us long ago and once more see the
faint underscoring, exclamation points and, tucked away in the margin, emphatic quips that we felt compulsory to our understanding and digesting of the
text. Day 7: Sherwood Anderson - "Hands" - 1919 The story of Wing Biddlebaum's hands is worth a book itself. Sympathetically set forth it would tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men. It is a job for a poet. In Winesburg the hands had attracted attention merely because of their activity. With them Wing Biddlebaum had picked as high as a hundred and forty quarts of strawberries in a day. They became his distinguishing feature, the source of his fame.
This has absolutely nothing to do
with that Jewel song that came out a few years ago, but maybe she read it.
Maybe not. Maybe a lawyer at her record company read it just to be
sure the Anderson trustees wouldn't sue her for something (calumny? slander
by association?). Day 8: Margaret Atwood - "Death by Landscape" - 1990 She looks at the paintings, she looks into them. Every one of them is a picture of Lucy. You can't see her exactly, but she's there, in behind the pink stone island or the one behind that. In the picture of the cliff she is hidden by the clutch of fallen rocks toward the bottom, in the one of the river shore she is crouching beneath the overturned canoe.
This has absolutely everything to do
with that Jewel album she put out a while ago—it had a painter in one song
and a canoe accident in another. Maybe my intertextuality has spread a
bit too far. As long as no one reads this, I'm safe. Otherwise
you'll find a twenty-something writer strumming his guitar in Atwood's
story, right before Lucy disappears but after the girls go to Lookout Point. Day 9: Margaret Atwood - "Happy Endings" - 1983
John and Mary meet.
A somewhat whimsical but thought
provoking piece, I'd actually read it before in another anthology.
A couple is given a fairytale life summated in one small paragraph (A).
What follows (B-F) are continuations/alterations of the first rendition,
recounted in terse diction and filled with clichés ("He purchases a handgun,
saying he needs it for target practice—this is the thin part of the plot,
but it can be dealt with later—and shoots the two of them and himself.").
Atwood is emphasizing elements other than plot in writing, allegedly
respecting a higher order of aesthetic value, though this story hardly gets
her there. I get the feeling this brilliant story was a compromise to
a thought Atwood had that would have essentially said the same exact thing
but been six hundred thousand words, voluminous and poetic. Oh, that's
just me. It asks the question, though, how important is plot in
fiction, this of course undermining our whole notion of a story.
Additionally it asks the reader to appreciate the work involved in writing
and their own person act of reading rather than just reading a book to
finish it. Day 10: Isaac Babel - "My First Goose" - 1925
"Landlady," I said, "I've got to eat."
Babel's brusque story is
remarkably rich for its brevity. In it an educated soldier with a law
degree reports for duty and earns his comrades' respect by exhibiting the
force described above. Tie this into the revolution (only eight years
prior to the publication of this piece) and the conflicting opinions of its
success, and "My First Goose" serves as a symbol of the desperation of the
populace. Though loyal and sympathetic to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, it
paints a realistically bleak picture of the hard times that necessarily
follow such a violent upheaval. Day 11: James Baldwin - "Sonny's Blues" - 1957
I wanted to say more, but I couldn't. I wanted to talk about will
power and how life could be—well, beautiful. I wanted to say that it
was all within; but was it? or, rather, wasn't that exactly the trouble?
And I wanted to promise that I would never fail him again. But it
would all have sounded—empty words and lies. The longest story so far, and the one which brought me to the hundredth page of Charters' collection, it brought about inside me a deep admiration for Baldwin's accomplishment. He succeeded on so many levels in this story: in capturing a vivid picture of big city life in America in the 1950s; in describing the divide between white and black at that time; in describing the sometimes painful/sometimes wonderful fraternal love between two brothers; and most powerfully, in describing the connection between musicians while they play improvisational blues or jazz. Feeling all the while like a failure now that their parents are both dead, Sonny's brother watches remorsefully as his brother slips into the usual Harlem routine of drugs and no good. The epiphany comes beautifully. The narrator (Sonny's brother) goes to see Sonny play the piano at the end of the story, and Sonny's success proves that there is more than one way out of the Harlem slums, that music lets the soul speak in a way that transcends the evil garbage of the world—including even language. The description of the band playing is musical itself, but also unique because it describes the emotive gestures of the musicians rather than the notes they are playing. "All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it," the narrator begins. What Baldwin does with time in the last few paragraphs is truly amazing. Day 12: Toni Cade Bambara - "The Lesson" - 1972 "Why don't you check that out," she says, "and report back to the group?" Which really pains my ass. If you gonna mess up a perfectly good swim day least you could do is have some answers. "Let's go in," she say like she got something up her sleeve. Only she don't lead the way. So me and Sugar turn the corner to where the entrance is, but when we get there I kinda hang back. Not that I'm scared, what's there to be afraid of, just a toy store. But I feel funny, shame. But what I got to be shamed about?
As you can see, Bambara employs a
vulgar narrative voice for her story (vulgar-common, not vulgar-obscene),
thus expressing a level of emotion that otherwise would have taken many more thousands of words
to do the same thing. A group of black kids
are taken by the curious Mrs. Moore to F.A.O. Schwarz on Fifth Avenue, New
York City, for a lesson in democracy, economics and social strata. The
narrator, though unrelenting and stubborn, learns the lesson whether she
wants to or not after seeing a twelve-hundred-dollar toy sailboat. By taking such an obstinate position, the story doesn't feel overtly didactic even though it subtly is. Day 13: John Barth - "On with the Story" - 1996 On the other hand, I haven't yet managed to get it said (what the "Freeze Frame" story declares somewhere in that digressive pause before the space-break beyond which Alice is currently reading) that all stories are essentially constructs in time, and only incidentally in the linear space of written words. Written or spoken, however, these words are like points in space, through which the story-arrow travels in time. Just now it rests at this point, this word, this—yet of course never resting there, but ever en route through it to the next, the next, from Beginning through Middle et cetera.
I like John Barth. I met him
once, actually, at a book-signing and that rather informal and ostensibly
impromptu gathering that one has after a lecture or speech given by an author
who just happened to have published a book. It's an interesting story,
actually. It is a story. Day 14: Donald Barthelme - "At the Tolstoy Museum" - 1987 After they had lowered the pictures we went back to the Tolstoy Museum. I don't think you can peer into one man's face too long—for too long a period. A great many human passions could be discerned, behind the skin.
The only story in the collection
with pictures, "At the Tolstoy Museum" took me by surprise. There are,
after a brief paragraph, two side by side photos/portraits of Count Leo
Tolstoy, his hair parted down the center and his beard long and bushy.
The narrative is in the first person from the perspective of a visitor to
the museum who is moved by the exhibits. It at once finds an empathic
response due to the terse prose and blunt facts. "His mother did
not know any bad words." One can easily see something different is
going on in this story, and to me it does not seem contrived or pretentious,
as some of Barthelme's critics have labeled his work. They say he's a
postmodernist too dense to penetrate. They say... they say... Day 15: Ann Beattie - "The Burning House" - 1979 Freddy will always be more stoned than I am, because he feels comfortable getting stoned with me, and I'll always be reminded that he's more lost. Tucker knows he can come to the house and be the center of attention; he can tell all the stories he knows, and we'll never tell the story we know about him hiding in the bushes like a frightened dog. J.D. comes back from his trips with boxes full of post cards, and I look at all of them as though they're photographs taken by him, and I know, and he knows, that what he likes about them is their flatness—the unreality of them, the unreality of what he does.
I wanted to address this now
because it comes up story after story. I mentioned before that I read
all of these twice, and let me extend that recommendation to you, at least
with shorter, manageable stories. I can't tell you how much more I'm
able to enjoy the story the second time around, how much more admiration I
develop for the author's technique, and meaning I get from the
interpretation. A married housewife, Beattie's narrator in "The Burning House," has such a dry-but-descriptive voice, and the action in the story
is so removed from its context, that re-reading this story made it clear as
day. Day 16: Samuel Beckett - "Dante and the Lobster" - 1934 Still he pored over the enigma, he would not concede himself conquered, he would understand at least the meanings of the words, the order in which they were spoken and the nature of the satisfaction that they conferred on the misinformed poet, so that when they were ended he was refreshed and could raise his heavy head, intending to return thanks and make formal retraction of his old opinion.
Once I dreamed that I had a part
in "Waiting for Godot," though I'm sure it wasn't Estragon or Vladimir or
even the visitors who wander in—maybe it was Godot himself. What a
good role. Come to think of it, the play may have been "No Exit";
perhaps I was on a Sartre kick that weekend... Day 17: Ambrose Bierce - "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" - 1891 Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fibre of his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well-defined lines of ramification, and to beat with an inconceivably rapid periodicity. They seemed like streams of pulsating fire heating him to an intolerable temperature. As to his head, he was conscious of nothing but a feeling of fullness—of congestion. These sensations were unaccompanied by thought.
A man is hanged. Peyton
Farquhar is hanged. Note: for an interesting comparison, read Jorge Luis Borges' short fiction "The Secret Miracle." It too has a man whose last moments before execution stretch out beyond the grasp of time. Borges' story is less interested in realism and more interested in fate, time and how the mind processes these complicated subjects. Day 18: Jorge Luis Borges - "The Garden of Forking Paths" - 1947 I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
The regular synopsizer/commentator
of these stories has temporarily stepped away from his duties, it seems, for
I have found, among his personal belongings, the charge to read this blasted
"Forking Paths" story and write something of it. I read through a
couple of his earlier paragraphs (see above) but they seemed dry, tedious.
I could tell you how I attended a lecture of Borges back in the late 60s,
how his impeccable English vocabulary reached my ears over the heads of the
other students too incompetent to recognize the genius that had visited them
that day (it was a Thursday, I remember). That day he spoke of a story
in his collection Labyrinths, specifically "Pierre Menard, Author
of the Quixote," and it was truly fascinating. Enough of that, though,
and back to these confusing Paths. The story at hand clearly has
something to do with Labyrinths (for it too comes from that collection), and
it has to do with time and parallel universe theory (that at each moment
there are universes that reflect each possible outcome—each forking path).
But the story is confusing for Borges constructs a narrator who, while
reading a history of WWI, finds some stray pages of testimony from a spy
awaiting execution, a spy who communicated his final directive by choosing
to murder a man whose name would be recognized by his superiors. Then
there is something about the subjective/objective, for Borges writes:
"Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless
men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is
happening is happening to me..." I really cannot say much more than
this, except to add that the story was intriguing if only because I didn't
understand a damn word of it. I do hope the usual story-reader returns
soon; I was merely supposed to feed his cat and water his orchid, which, by
the way, seems to be rather healthy despite the absence of flowers.
However, I suggest he re-pots it in the fall, the dormancy period for his
particular species. Day 19: Tadeusz Borowski - "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" - 1948 It is the camp law: people going to their death must be deceived to the very end. This is the only permissible form of charity. The heat is tremendous. The sun hangs directly over our heads, the white, hot sky quivers, the air vibrates, an occasional breeze feels like a sizzling blast from a furnace. Our lips are parched, the mouth fills with the salty taste of blood, the body is weak and heavy from lying in the sun. Water!
Le Grande Illusion,
directed by Jean Renoir, is a fascinating war movie because the good and bad
sides are difficult to identify. Renoir's depiction adeptly notes that
social class often separates people more than ethnicity or national
alliances. Borowski's short story depicts a narrator who is faced with
the prospect of food and plunder if only he agrees to unload the passengers
of trains entering the camp, people who, mostly, will be gassed and
cremated. Already the reader has seen the prisoners' own social
stratification: the French relatively high with their internal connections
that occasionally bring in exquisite smuggled goods; the Greeks low, "their
jaws working, greedily, like huge insects...on stale lumps of bread."
Not justifying the treatment of the S.S. necessarily, it does invite
consideration into the apparent human necessity to justify existence, to
tolerate misery, and "turn against someone weaker." And as any story
in this setting should, it implores the reader to consider xenophobia, the
fear of others, and how it can unknowingly take root at the most peculiar
times. How about now? Fifty-six years later what can we say of
ourselves? Day 20: Paul Bowles - "Mejdoub" - 1988 Always when the first rains fell he would announce to his friends that he was about to travel abroad. Then he would leave secretly, never allowing anyone to see him off. He was delighted with the pattern of his life, and with the good luck he had been granted in being able to continue it. He assumed that Allah did not mind if he pretended to be one of His holy maniacs. The money was merely his reward for providing men with an opportunity to exercise their charity.
The theme of Bowles' story is
identity. His brusque narration follows a man—a vagabond who sleeps
wherever he is when he feels tired—through his extraordinary good luck that
ultimately leaves him rich. The man, who calls himself Sidi Rahal ("a
name for the townspeople to remember"), goes to a neighboring village to beg
after witnessing his hometown's overwhelming generosity toward the crazy
mejdoub, and makes a handsome living during the dry season. When the
rains come he returns home in relative opulence; he repeats this routine for
several seasons. Abruptly (as everything is abrupt in this
short-short) the government orders beggars be removed from the streets, and
Sidi Rahal finds himself an empty person. Eventually he is arrested
and lives his life as if he were a crazy beggar in a cramped prison
cell. Are we who we feel we are, or how other people see us?
Does repetition form an identity or does it come from within? Is all
identity learned from the personalities we witness in others? Are
charity and altruism artificial or natural in the human realm of instincts?
Day 21: Italo Calvino - "If on a winter's night a traveler" - 1981 The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph. In the odor of the station there is a passing whiff of station cafe odor. There is someone looking through the befogged glass, he opens the glass door of the bar, everything is misty, inside, too, as if seen by nearsighted eyes, or eyes irritated by coal dust.
The comment, too, begins in a
railway station; it is perhaps chance that I am traveling while I happened
to read Calvino's story. Unlike the narrator, the "I" of the story, I,
me, the commentator/reviewer/etc do not intend to switch my suitcase
with another—an empty one. You see, my suitcase doesn't contain
something secret, something I can't pretend to forget. The contents of
my suitcase are "carefree." I'll admit freely that I'm a bit
rushed, though, because at any moment a woman will arrive, the ex-wife of a
doctor (blast this nosy soul who can't forget the past!), and she will
escort me to the train. I will watch her go, smelling on her the
bitterness of tanned leather from the suitcase shop at which she works.
Ms. Marne. But there is something about these moments of waiting.
First I was reading Calvino's story; disgusted I moved on to something
lighter, a refutation of Zeno's famous paradoxes. But when I started
there was only six minutes till Dr. Marne's ex-wife was to arrive, now my
watch shows twelve: I should have grabbed the digital watch powered by an
enduring quartz crystal. I'm always confusing the hands on this sacred
watch (it was my grandfather's pocket watch)—always mistaking the second
hand for the minute hand, always looking at it upside down or seeing it
imperfectly. Additionally, there is something linear about my digital
watch, something that comforts me when I consider it will never again hit
the same number on the same day. Yes, the 2's and the 5's can be mistaken
upside down, but it is so rare that this happens. My grandfather's
gold pocket watch—I think I've spotted her! Perhaps now she is early.
How very peculiar! It does appear to be her, standing there
twenty feet away leaning against the station column that holds this
ornamental roof up: she is casually skimming a newspaper and beside her
feet—this is what is peculiar—she has a suitcase identical to mine. We
make eye contact briefly but she doesn't seem to recognize me. I
thought of calling out to her "Marne!" but instead I just look down, down at
my shirt and my shoes to see if I have accidentally donned a disguise.
Yes! These black corduroy pants! She's never seen them on me
before so I should approach her. But that suitcase she has next to
her—I wonder what's inside of it. I wonder if my clothes and innocuous
belongings have somehow been switched while I wasn't paying a bit of
attention...yes! In the cafe! I was watching the most
fascinating pinball game and someone could have easily switched them.
Perhaps she is waiting...waiting for the chief—what's his name—Gorin?—the
chief of police. Yes, I can smell the sinister, burning leather on
her. And a moment ago the corner of her newspaper dropped slightly to
reveal a novel underneath. What could she be reading now? Now
when she's to meet me in... impossible! It's 6:36pm! I was to
meet her at 7 and — is the watch upside down? She's moving...moving
away! It's not her at all. And from the corner of my eye—no,
don't look right at him—I think I see Gorin. Yes, he's followed me and
knows exactly what is in my suitcase... Day 22: Albert Camus - "The Guest" - 1957 A little later, however, when the Arab stirred slightly, the schoolmaster was still not asleep. When the prisoner made a second move, he stiffened, on the alert. The Arab was lifting himself slowly on his arms with almost the motion of a sleepwalker. Seated upright in bed, he waited motionless without turning his head toward Daru, as if he were listening attentively. Daru did not stir; it had just occurred to him that the revolver was still in the drawer of his desk. It was better to act at once.
Not to leave you hanging...well
read the story! Daru is a schoolteacher who lacks pupils due to the
harsh weather of late. Isolated in the middle of nowhere (French
Algeria), he is left an Arab prisoner who allegedly killed his cousin (I've
been reading too many newspapers, you can see by my "allegedly" language).
The Arab, never given another name, stays overnight and is to be led to
another military outpost and prison the following day. In that
nighttime scene,
the most emotive of the story, the Arab gets up for a drink of water and
goes back to sleep. But Camus is so acutely aware of every taut
psychological string he manipulates in the reader. Confronting our
fears alongside us is Daru, who logically pegs himself as egalitarian; we
realize that fear is deep within when "the other" is so close and capable of
attack. A rabbit on the table is capable of attack, too, yet we do not
fear it. The Arab has been stripped of his humanity and Daru, Camus,
the narrator, the reader—we are all trying to give it back for it is
earned...equality should not be taken for granted! Still, while he does
the right thing—what feels right to him—he fears this man, the Arab, for
what he has done and what he might do. Camus, a Nobel laureate, is
superb in this story that deals with colonialism, pacifism and racism. Day 23: Ethan Canin - "The Carnival Dog, the Buyer of Diamonds" - 1988 What's the one thing you should never do? Quit? Depends on who you talk to. Steal? Cheat? Eat food from a dented can? Myron Lufkin's father, Abe, once told him never get your temperature taken at the hospital. Bring your own thermometer, he said; you should see how they wash theirs.
And so begins Canin's story about
a medical student on the verge of dropping out. Well, it's not really
so much about the medical student, Myron, as it is about his father, Abe.
Abe Lufkin, the basketball star who almost made it swimming across
the San Francisco Bay as an older man. Abe who seems to have an
undying spirit (I couldn't write "had" for 2 reasons), and who revitalizes
his son. The story is lighthearted, and Abe is a bit of a caricature
instead of a character; overall, though, it analyzes the human body, its
frailty and shortcomings but mostly its strength and perseverance. It
is a story that clearly celebrates life even while decades flash by,
signifying a nearer end for Abe (and even Myron). It is about a
younger generation accepting the torch from its predecessor, not "giving" up
("I give," says Myron to his father at the end of the story in a wrestling
hold) but giving into. Accepting, loving, acknowledging... Day 24: Angela Carter - "The Company of Wolves" - 1977 You are always in danger in the forest, where no people are. Step between the portals of the great pines where the shaggy branches tangle about you, trapping the unwary traveler in nets as if the vegetation itself were in a plot with the wolves who live there, as though the wicked trees go fishing on behalf of their friends—step between the gateposts of the forest with the greatest trepidation and infinite precautions, for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you. They are grey as famine, they are as unkind as plague.
Another first. Werewolves.
Folklore and fairytales mixed in a way that compares the rich symbolism that
fosters fear. Think about it: Snow White and the witch, Little Red
Riding Hood and the wolf in Grandmother's clothing; they involve crimes,
supernatural or otherwise, and all seem to scare the wits out of us.
Are they really lessons? Don't eat a gingerbread house...don't hang
out with grandma if she seems to be donning sharp, shiny canines? I
thought most of the transmission of fear in society, of the ways we use
them—subconsciously or otherwise—to instill loathing or hatred or
something we don't understand. The first few pages are dedicated to
describing the blood lust of wolves (something obviously exaggerated), and
then we are taken through a... modern... no... mature... no... realistic...
a version of the Red Riding Hood myth that ends rather unfamiliarly
(Hood tosses the wolf's garments into the fire, thereby condemning him to
life as a wolf [for he was a man/wolf before, akin to the devil], and then
they form some type of union [marriage is mentioned, but not implied
directly]). Regarding Hood herself (my name, not Carter's), I would
say there's also the issue of submission/domination regarding men, women,
werewolves. I'm trying to say that in this second "half" gender is
important. Day 25: Raymond Carver - "Cathedral" - 1981 I put in windows with arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great doors. I couldn't stop. The TV station went off the air. I put down the pen and closed and opened my fingers. The blind man felt round over the paper. He moved the tips of his fingers over the paper, all over what I had drawn, and he nodded.
Raymond Carver's name always
reminds me of Ray Parvin, that guy who wrote "Smoke" about the painted tea
leaves up in Humboldt County. It, in turn, reminds me of two
Australians in an old silver mine—the same two characters in "Smoke"
transplanted there by a burgeoning writer in an exercise for a short story
writing class. It was a good exercise, a bad transplantation.
When I read "Cathedral" I somehow think that nothing about any writing could
be bad. Carver has a unique approach, a unique voice (ignore those who
compare him to Hemingway or Chekhov). No. Everything and nothing
are influences. They don't exist. Read "Cathedral" and see.
Art is a current, a spirit which we tap into if we are so inclined, and
something that drags our life histories along until something meaningful
flops out of our beat-up corpse. Bub, that's great. Page 1 /\/\/\/ Page 2 /\/\/\/ Page 3 /\/\/\/ Page 4 /\/\/\/ Page 5 /\/\/\/ Info
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25 stories 23 authors 247 pages 6 translations 20 ♂ / 5 ♀ |
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