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Story-a-Day - 3 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 51: Mavis Gallant - "1933" - 1987 Of course, M. Grosjean did not know that all the female creatures in his house were frightened and lonely, calling and weeping. He was in Parc Lafontaine with Arno, trying to play go-fetch-it in the dark.
Nobody
understands me when I say that I love the sentimentality of post-modernism.
Just because something is self-aware and at odds with your existent notion
of literature doesn't mean it can't be filled with wonder and love.
The realism of this piece, a snapshot of the year 1933, heightens our
receptiveness to such a small slice of the characters' lives. How much
do you need to make a story? What is a story? Two girls and
their mother rent a portion of a house in Montreal; the landlord plays with
his dog. Day 52: Gabriel Garcia Marquez - "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" - 1955 The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his time trying to get comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had been placed along the wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for angels.
I say
this is rather Kafka-esque but not so brusque, with a sincerity that comes
from the superfluous words, an objective narrator who is just a little aloof
and terribly biased. (rts-no) When I came upon that fellow
Conrad I couldn't foresee something as radically simple as all this.
Have you read One Hundred Years of Solitude? It got a good
write-up in Vanity Fair, I think. Remember that guy, Gregor
Samsa—who woke up as a humongous bug?! Oh, yes. The old man—I
thought he was going to die in the hen house. I certainly saw that the
spectacle would pass (who would have thought due to a giant spider-woman!) but I
never thought he'd fly away like...oh, who was that chap...yes, Icarus, who
flew too close—no that was his father's name. What was his son's name?
Dear, I think Icarus was the son and Daedalus was the father.
Nonetheless, it was horrid about the vulture imagery; just think—an angel
with black, torn wings! I never! Wait...Daedalus? Well
then who was Theseus? My uncle Roger had a Greek coin—a reproduction,
I'm sure—with some sort of little head on one side and a horse on the other.
It rather sounds like a meteor shower: the Thesieds. Day 53: Charlotte Perkins Gilman - "The Yellow Wallpaper" - 1892 But there is something else about the paper—the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here.
"John
laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage." "The
Yellow Wallpaper" is a clever first person narrative from a woman suffering
a form of post-partum depression. It shows a wife's submission to her
physician husband's orders with a defiant undercurrent: she must continue to
write. Much has been said of Gilman's feminist slant in this story
(much of it apt and correct), but I'm interested by something I'd never
noticed before (perhaps I've been trained). The narrator slowly slips
into a form of madness in which she envisions crawling women in the lines of
the wallpaper—actually sees them moving around the room.
People—critics/students/readers—have lauded Gilman for trying to present a
woman's perspective, but without giving her her full authorial due.
What I'm verbosely trying to say is that Gilman's story is analyzed as a
women's story and not as a writer's story. This is just how
things work if you're in the minority of the canon. People first focus
on what makes you different and then they see that you're wonderful
in your own right. Day 54: Nikolai Gogol - "The Overcoat" - 1840 After taking out the overcoat, he looked at it with much pride and holding it in both hands, threw it very deftly over Akaky Akakievich's shoulders, then pulled it down and smoothed it out behind with his hands; then draped it about Akaky Akakievich somewhat jauntily. Akaky Akakievich, a practical man, wanted to try it with his arms in the sleeves, too. In fact, it turned out that the overcoat was completely and entirely successful.
This is
one of those stories. I don't want to make sweeping statements like,
"It's the best in here," or "Put it under your pillow at night," but it's so
meaty (21 pages in this edition) that includes commentary on everything (by
which I mean czarist Russia, government, society, work, people, emotions,
life, economy) and in the meanwhile tells a good story. Leave it to me
to be fascinated with the narrator who, at times, cannot remember pithy
details ("our memory is beginning to fail sadly") and finds it necessary to
justify his/her own existence: "We have reported it here so that the reader
may see for himself that it happened quite inevitably...." Anyway,
what Gogol does in these twenty-one pages is amazing but requires a careful
eye. You'll be busy fussing with the story on the first one or two
reads, so take your time with it. Let the aroma linger on the roof of
your mouth. Day 55: Nadine Gordimer - "Country Lovers" - 1980 When the farmer's son was home for the holidays she wandered far from the kraal and her companions. He went for walks alone. They had not arranged this; it was an urge each followed independently. He knew it was she, from a long way off. She knew that his dog would not bark at her.
The mind
is a peculiar thing. Why in the midst of such a methodical and
gossamer undertaking it should suddenly and without notice fail, no one can
truly say. There are those that would hazard a guess: that it may have
to do with the extant fragility of this one's particular gray matter; that
it is something about with the number "54" and its mythical tradition (at
the moment I can only think of "Car 54, Where Are You?" but this is my
deficiency); that Gordimer's poignant tale somehow pushed him over the
edge. Nonetheless, we should not "guess" about matters which will
likely never be resolved; it is much like purchasing a lottery ticket for a
drawing that won't take place. What we do know is that here—perhaps
before reading this story or after it—our subject, our author
extraordinaire, regrettably lost his mind. This doesn't sound
paramount in the grand scheme of things since we hear of this acquaintance
or that
suffering such an outcome almost daily, but it will mean an end to these
interesting trifles. I am sorry to say so, really. That I am now
forced to write an entry for a story I have only skimmed (I do wish authors
would stop using "alternative" name varieties, Nobel laureates
notwithstanding), is something that deeply troubles me and I wish the burden
could be shifted back upon the poor sap who alighted upon this collection so
many months ago. Day 56: Nathaniel Hawthorne - "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" - 1832 "Nay, the Major has been a-bed this hour or more," said the lady of the scarlet petticoat; "and it would be to little purpose to disturb him to-night, seeing his evening draught was of the strongest. But he is a kind-hearted man, and it would be as much as my life's worth, to let a kinsman of his turn away from the door. You are the good old gentleman's very picture, and I could swear that was his rainy-weather hat. Also, he has garments very much resembling those leather—But come in, I pray, for I bid you hearty welcome in his name."
Man, you
leave the helm for ONE minute and you're a "goner" in the eyes of the world.
I really need someone else to housesit for me while I'm away. The
orchid can wait a few days. Sorry to disappoint, but there are still
roughly seventy stories to go; the book stops for no one. And let me
say that I've already compiled a list of collections to follow Charters'. Day 57: Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Young Goodman Brown" - 1835 Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street at Salem village; but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the wind play with the pink ribbons of her cap while she called to Goodman Brown. Well, it's that "YGB" was published 64 years before "Heart of Darkness" and the latter is just a blown up version of the former plus [insert racism here]. Hawthorne, and what was he a tax collector or a repossessor or something, wrote this—and, yeah, I know, people say it's allegory—"allegorical"—and all that, but what it's got going for it is that Faith, Goodman's wife, is faith itself and is lost when she's lost that night while he's either out bewitching with the devil or asleep dreaming about it. I don't care what Melville says if it's as deep as Dante or as vexing as Virgil, I think it's good since Goodman's lost his faith not because of what he actually does but for what he doubts. For doubt is the opposite of faith (the devil is in the details), and somewhat of an impossibility. I was talking with Davis in Carson City and he said, "You know how you know something? Like when you put twenty-five cents in your pocket in the morning, and then right as you go to make a payphone call at night you think to yourself, 'I know that I have that quarter.' Well, the thing is you don't know—it's more instinct than anything, maybe a belief. It's so because if you stop to think about it for even two seconds before you went grabbing you'd say, 'Well maybe I left it on the counter.' It's sort of like when you look at a word—'ripen' or 'ham' for example—so long that it doesn't make sense and you doubt that the letters really do anything." That's what Davis said in Carson City and I sorta think he's on to something because belief and faith and doubt are all different notions completely, though related somehow. Goodman can believe in evil or he can believe in god or he can believe in both. But faith is something altogether different. To put your faith in something you believe in—that's the true measure of Goodman's aim. Does he ever get there? Does any mortal man ever get there? Christ almighty got there but by the skin on his neck! I even remember Austin telling me that in one of the Gospels he damns the Lord his father as he's crucified. I looked for it once but without patience (as usual) and didn't find what I was looking for. I did find Methuselah, the old old guy. That was back when people lived some nine hundred years. I wonder what you talk about after nine hundred years. By then you must know just what's happening with life. Sam says that when you travel at the speed of light you don't age but a fraction of normal time, so maybe the nine hundred years were like that, just whizzing by so that Methuselah was on his death bed asking his dear wife "Where did the time go?" sad as ever. His wife? I don't know, I never found her in there either. Day 58: Bessie Head - "Life" - 1977 A few month's after Life's arrival in the village, the first hotel with its pub opened. It was initially shunned by all the women and even the beer-brewers considered they hadn't fallen that low yet—the pub was also associated with the idea of selling oneself. It became Life's favourite business venue.
I was
kind of skeptical at first. The story didn't seem worthy of assemblage
in such a collection, but more like something I'd profoundly enjoy in a
magazine (perhaps Atlantic Monthly or the New Yorker) lying on
the table in the waiting room at, say, the financial aid office at the local
college. Yes, moments before demanding my equal right to an education,
I'd like to have Head's story running through, well, my head. But
Charters' collection is Charters' collection, and if I could profoundly
enjoy it in a magazine, there's no reason why I can't enjoy it here. Day 59: Ernest Hemingway - "Hills Like White Elephants" - 1927 The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was a warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out the flies. There's this collection of Hemingway short stories titled, aptly, "Ernest Hemingway: The Short Stories," (and let me recommend "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,"—one of the last ones he wrote before his death—and "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio," though I've not read the latter; I'm recommending it purely because the title is quite intriguing (I've always had trouble with titles (though a professor of mine (Jones?—no, Walker) once said, "A title is always in a story; you've just got to wrestle it out,")) and must signify a story worth reading. I bought this collection (about five hundred (average-sized) pages) as a used text (at the campus bookstore) after I read "Hills Like White Elephants" (what a title!) in my English 214 class. I'd been charged to write a paper on this story, in fact, and I'll fess up and admit that the first time I read it, I had no idea what was going on. I registered no intensity in Hemingway's austere language (I'll say!) and brushed over "letting the air in" as a reference to "Jig's" operation. But now—now—oh boy! This guy has the dialogue down. The story is almost all dialogue (excepting the intro paragraph and a few anomalies (most of which occur to disarm the tension built between the couple)) with only a couple dialogue tags. The miracle (not really a miracle considering who wrote it!) is that while reading it, it flows so beautifully that you never get lost, and all the inflection and pronunciation is apparent and natural which adds to the terse realism. But that paper of mine...whoah! I don't know what I was thinking (probably still of F.O.C.'s "Everything that Rises Must Converge" or Kafka's "The Metamorphosis"). I got all symbolic (think: cockroach): "...the girl looks off at the line of hills which were white in color, and says, 'They look like white elephants' (756). These 'elephants' might represent pregnant women to her, or show her ability to create life from the earth—either way, it is carefully placed there by Hemingway to enforce Jig’s position on what to do about the baby." And look how it ended (!): "Hemingway did an excellent job of showing both sides of the story in a unique way." To my younger self's credit the paper was also on two other short stories; nonetheless..."both sides"? What was I thinking? There is only one side to this story: an insensitive man rejecting his girl's worth and forcing her to have an abortion. (And also let me say that Hemingway is rather sensitive to her plea, for though the language is dry, devoid of emotion and "objective," it's clear that "the American" is arrogant and conceited.) Oooh, Hempel is coming!) which sits on my bookshelf sandwiched between The Celebrant (perhaps the best baseball novel ever written (The Natural was ruined by the movie—terrible ending!)) and David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Day 60: Amy Hempel - "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried" - 1985
"Tell me things I won't mind forgetting," she said. "Make it useless
stuff or skip it."
You know
how there are some things that really touch us, and years later when we're
reminded of it, we think longingly, "It sure was great but if I came into it
again I'd think it was lousy," so we stay away out of the fear of its
continual degradation even though everything points to the contrary? The
book Cold Sassy Tree is like that for me. I first read it in
high school. Hempel's story is like that for me as well. Day 61: Langston Hughes - "Thank You, M'am" - 1958 The woman said, "Um-hum! You thought I was going to say but, didn't you? You thought I was going to say, but I didn't snatch people's pocketbooks. Well, I wasn't going to say that." Pause. Silence. "I have done things, too, which I would not tell you, son—neither tell God, if He didn't already know. Everybody's got something in common."
"When I get through with you,
sir, you are going to remember Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones."
Hughes, well-known for his poetry, claims he was enlightened to try his hand
at short stories after reading a collection by D.H. Lawrence in the 1930s,
especially "The Rocking-Horse Winner" (which is in this collection—good
story!). It's wonderful to think of the chain of writers, of
inspiration passing from person to person like some magical inanimate
spirit. Instant motivation. I was motivated last night reading a
biography that mentioned 1001 Arabian Nights...for some reason
inspiration appeared and the ideas came as a woven chain. Nothing
seems complicated until we think about purpose and temporal causality
(when did this start and when will it end?). For now, let us be
content that Lawrence did something for Hughes, as another did something for
Lawrence. Day 62: Zora Neale Hurston - "The Gilded Six-Bits" - 1933 Missie May grinned with delight. She had not seen the big tall man come stealing in the gate and creep up the walk grinning happily at the joyful mischief he was about to commit. But she knew that it was her husband throwing silver dollars in the door for her to pick up and pile beside her plate at dinner. It was this way every Saturday afternoon. The nine dollars hurled into the open door, he scurried to a hiding place behind the cape jasmine bush and waited.
Duped.
Taken advantage of. Looked down upon. The sidewalk lined with
bottles pushed into the dirt. Ol' gilded four-bit spinnin' his gold
'round flaunting his treasure on a chain like a pirate with gilded teeth,
gilded arms, gilded wings...he sinks. Day 63: Zora Neale Hurston - "Sweat" - 1926 "Naw you won't," she panted, "that ole snaggle-toothed black woman you runnin' with ain't comin' heah to pile up on mah sweat and blood. You ain't paid nothing' on this place, and Ah'm gointer stay right heah till Ah'm toted out foot foremost." Hurston seems to choose protagonists that are taken advantage of. In the case of "The Gilded Six-Bits," both of the main characters are taken advantage of, and since her subjects in general are (comparatively) uneducated blacks, you could argue that their lives are a microcosm of the world at large (country at large?—no). The injustice done upon them on a domestic level, to Delia Jones, say, mirrors that done to them by the rich, by whites. These metaphors stretch deep into the fabric of our cosmology when we read Hurston's stories, for they invoke religious comparisons as well as historical remembrances. The efficacy is measured not by her characters' well-roundedness (for some come across as very flat) but in their patience, their determination to stay on the side of Good rather than fight evil with evil. The first Joe, in "Six-Bits," desperately wanted revenge, but didn't need to take it because the guilt was felt in Missie May's heart. Delia Jones never once commits and act of aggression; even in watching her husband die of his wound, we're assured that the doctor is too far away to help. Day 64: Washington Irving - "Rip Van Winkle" - 1819-20 On waking, he found himself on the green knoll whence he had first seen the old man of the glen. He rubbed his eyes—it was a bright sunny morning. The birds were hopping and twittering among the bushes, and the eagle was wheeling aloft, and breasting the pure mountain breeze. "Surely," thought Rip, "I have not slept here all night."
All night and more! Van
Winkle's enduring coma (?) has become somewhat of a cultural reference these
days. "I opened the paper and said, 'Who is this that's been
elected?—have I been asleep for twenty years? Have I been "Winkled"?'"
So it goes for poor old Rip. People tend to see this story for its
allegory, so I'll take a different tactic, and try to assess his character
(which usually is overlooked to some degree). Rip Van Winkle is a very
unhappy man. He's always trying to come up with some excuse for Dame
Van Winkle, and always trying to get out of his labor on the farm. He
and his dog are terribly persecuted for their inactivity (the former's,
anyway). The narrator (twice removed—very "clever," Irving) tells us
of Rip that "the changes of states and empires made but little impression to
him; but there was one species of despotism under which he long groaned, and
that was—petticoat government." I think Irving's layered narrators can
tell us something about the story we're told: it is inaccurate to the point
of pure fantasy. Rip was dissatisfied at home, and decided to flee to
the mountains where he lived in some small organization/cluster of people
(this based on his fancy that he'd seen such a group of long-dead men the
night before he went to sleep). The rusty firearm? A relic he
found to bolster his story. Day 65: Shirley Jackson - "The Lottery" - 1948 Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box. Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. "Come on," she said. "Hurry up."
Born in 1919 right here—well,
a few miles down and around the corner—Shirley Jackson went on to write one
of the most anthologized stories of..."all time," "the last twenty years,"
or "high school English textbooks." "The Lottery" has a theme
ubiquitous to the modern reader: that of sacrifice. In the story it
serves as allegory, for the continual acceptance of loss in exchange for
modest gains in technology and efficiency. The story is timeless and
not limited to one age. I rather like Jackson's own commentary on the
aftermath of "The Lottery" (which resulted in her receiving many letters):
"Judging from these letters, people who read stories are gullible, rude,
frequently illiterate, and horribly afraid of being laughed at." YES,
we are! Day 66: Henry James - "Paste" - 1899 The pair of mourners, sufficiently stricken, were in the garden of the vicarage together, before luncheon, waiting to be summoned to that meal, and Arthur Prime had still in his face the intention, she was moved to call it rather than the expression, of feeling something or other. James, an established writer and with a brother who, I'm learning, had quite an impact in the fields of psychology and pedagogy, sometimes got lost in those long, drawn-out sentences of his, jungles of words which the reader is expected to miraculously navigate (we in the "biz" call that last clause an "NPA," a construction upon which James draws heavily―that was another). I'm thinking of that old saying about the forest and the trees (and that Tom Petty song "You folloooow your feelings, you folloooow your dreams...) because it seems as though James' writing is a bit of an impediment for his reader. Don't get me wrong—I can follow it. At times I even appreciate the clever way the narrator says something. But I look at one of those "monster" paragraphs and I say "Kerouac, where are you," because James reminds me that grammar and rules can hurt as much as they can help. In Of Grammatology, Derrida talks about society's presupposed hierarchy of writing, a fact I heartily accept when I read "Paste" (to Derrida's chagrin). Because the writing seems subordinate to oral language, distorted and hopelessly tied in a Gordian knot. I'm sure neither Derrida nor Petty ever thought they'd be mentioned in the same paragraph; alas, it is so. Sadly, there is an interesting moral dilemma buried in "Paste," one which I haven't time to discuss since I've lost my wind on James' style. Now that the Heartbreakers are accompanying Mr. Petty on my CD player, I must take my momentum elsewhere. Day 67: Gish Jen - "In the American Society" - 1987 When my father took over the pancake house, it was to send my little sister Mona and me to college. We were only in junior high at the time, but my father believed in getting a jump on things. "Those Americans always saying it," he told us. "Smart guys thinking in advance." My mother elaborated, explaining that businesses took bringing up, like children. They could take years to get going, she said, years. There's this funny story about a pancake house called "The Muffin Treat" (strange name, huh?) over there on Texas street past marigold (what a flower) over yonder in the county seat of Solano wherein a boy, cash-strapped and hungry, takes his eleven-year-old date 'cross the street for an early dinner 'cause the theater kicked them out of the PG-13 movie. The boy, his mother having given him just enough for two matinees' worth plus maybe a small sodie and corn, is seriously rationing the funds when his date orders a spaghetti dinner with a salad and a large Pepsi-cola. He's actually got his wallet out (it was the kind that velcroed around the edges so he had to cough to conceal the sound it made opening) under the table leafing through the bills to see if he can square the cash necessary to get himself a bite to eat. "And you?" the waitress asks. There walking by is a boy—nine—carrying dirty plates back into the kitchen. This bus-boy-boy and the boy on the date are to become step-brothers through the workings of a death-insurance salesman with enough cajones to ask his client out on a date (fifteen years after our story takes place, notice). "I'll just have a side salad," he says, and then to his date, "I had a big breakfast, you see." I had a point...what was I talking 'bout? Oh, yes, in this American society, I was, um. Seem to have lost my train-a-thought. What was that movie, anyway? It was a comedy I seem to remember. I was sellin' the tickets at the theater and let the little ones pass when my boss comes over and says, "How old you two?" and to this they just look up innocently. "You can't come into this movie if yore not thirteen. Are you thirteen?" She was addressing the boy now. He mumbled something. "And you—are you thirteen?" The girl looked to the boy. They started walking away but I stopped them. "Wait," I said, "here's your ticket-money back right quick," and the boy snatched it just as quick as you could imagine, sort of proving he was in charge. Cindy who did the slushee machine, she was the daughter of Max somebody-or-other and Max was friends with the mom of the boy on the date. That's how I heard the whole story and what happened. About the death-insurance thing and all that—well I'm omniscient, ain't I? I can know things without having to explain how. Day 68: Sarah Orne Jewett - "A White Heron" - 1886 There was hardly a night the summer through when the old cow could be found waiting at the pasture bars; on the contrary, it was her greatest pleasure to hide herself away among the high huckleberry bushes, and though she wore a loud bell she had made the discovery that if one stood perfectly still it would not ring.
I'm tired of praise.
Have you read these little blurbs? "Wonderful" this and "amazing"
that. Where are the bad stories? Do bad stories not exist?
Is every story published good? NO! What I can finally point out
now that someone else is in charge, is that this is a terrible story.
Thank god for that. Day 69: Charles Johnson - "Menagerie, A Child's Fable" - 1984 Among the watchdogs in Seattle, Berkeley was known generally as one of the best. Not the smartest, but steady. A pious German shepherd (Black Forest origins, probably) with big shoulders, black gums, and weighing more than some men, he sat guard inside the glass door of Tilford's Pet Shoppe, watching the pedestrians scurry along First Avenue, wondering at the derelicts who slept ever so often inside the foyer at night, and sometimes he nodded when things were quiet in the cages behind him, lulled by the bubbling of the fishtanks, dreaming of an especially fine meal he'd once had, or the little female poodle, a real flirt, owned by the aerobic dance teacher (who was no saint herself) a few doors down the street; but Berkeley was, for all his woolgathering, never asleep at the switch.
Joyce is coming: he'll get the
bitterness. Johnson, unfortunately, deserves praise. I know, I
know, I've got to work on this. But look at that THIRD sentence up
there! Noun clauses serving as appositionals, as appositives,
adjective clauses parenthetically thrown in like they were floating through
the air, verbals listed almost instinctively, each one developing the next
so that whereas once you had a dog, by the end of the sentence you have a
sentient, conscious canine. I was wondering when animals were going to
talk in Charters' blasted collection. I'm bitter that it took 745
pages. It's interesting that if an artist works outside the realm of
reality, their work is rarely considered "literature"; this work only
receives that distinction (I'm guessing) because of its HIGHLY allegorical
implications (think Animal Farm). I was thinking: how do you write "animals turn on each other" without implying they arouse one another? Know what I mean? Day 70: James Joyce - "Araby" - 1914 North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.
You know what I hate?
Those people that read into things that aren't really there. "I'm
blown away by Mencken's use of the word 'red' on page four since we all know
it was his least favorite color, and even though it's mentioned alongside
the word 'brick,' it still shows a mastery over language and his ability to
overcome his childhood fear of roses." Day 71: James Joyce - "The Dead" - 1914 Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.
I once dreamt I attended a
play based on "The Dead," but such a thing could never be reality because to
"attend" something you must be able to retain enough presence of being to
"attend" anything, and I scarcely think one of us in a thousand has it today. Besides, it would have been a terrible play. How could an
audience capture the personal agony Gabriel feels when his wife is longing
after a long-dead boy, Michael Furey? How could we understand, among
the commotion of the dinner party, the subtleties and nuances of attraction
and lust that swirl around Joyce's text? Day 72: Franz Kafka - "A Hunger Artist" - 1924 During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one's own management, but today that is quite impossible. We live in a different time now.
This from a speech given by
a president: "...but what's more important, I think, is to look at
Kafka's symbolic stance of the artist within society. People have
discussed the community's perspective inward at the hunger artist, but what
about the way the hunger artist himself feels about his art? (And make
no mistake about it—though Kafka starts the story speaking in
generality—'there were people who...' and 'there were also...'—he soon
speaks of one hunger artist in particular...perhaps the last hunger
artist, whom we almost project to be the narrator (an impossible conclusion
if we are to take the ending as literal within the elapsed metaphor rather
than a metaphoric one-upmanship of the rest of the story)). Day 73: Franz Kafka - "The Metamorphosis" - 1915 They grew quieter and half unconsciously exchanged glances of complete agreement, having come to the conclusion that it would soon be time to find a good husband for her. And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and excellent intentions that at the end of their journey their daughter sprang to her feet first and stretched her young body.
Overheard from a round table
discussion of seventh-graders who read "The Metamorphosis" one night
previous: Day 74: Jamaica Kincaid - "Girl" - 1978 ...soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school?; always eat your food in such a way it won't turn someone else's stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming; don't sing benna in Sunday school; you mustn't speak to wharf-rat boys, not even to give directions; don't eat fruits on the street—flies will follow you; but I don't sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school... "Girl" is, like this here, just one single solitary sentence comprised of a string of independent clauses (many of these are dependent, however), all of which are directions from a judgmental mother to her burgeoning daughter who only manages to get two clauses of her own into this jungle of aphorisms that ultimately climaxes with the girl accused of being "the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread," though this is really no fault of hers as the reader sees it in the story, which, at this point, has haughtily dealt with every necessary aspect of life and culture in this place—Antigua?—from the mother's perspective, dealing mainly with lessons on becoming a respectable, feminine woman capable of domestic tasks and "not like a slut," a theory which we can neither confirm nor deny even though the story leaves one with the feeling that the girl has been wronged and harshly judged—oppressed really—for no good reason other than the fact that in some ways life must do that, must be harsh, and the techniques of living must be transmitted from one stubborn generation to another no matter what degree of reluctance accompanies the listener's closed mind (and boy wouldn't semicolons be easier). Day 75: W. P. Kinsella - "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa" - 1979 "And how did he get a name like Shoeless Joe?" I would ask my father, knowing the story full well but wanting to hear it again. And no matter how many times I heard it, I would still picture the lithe ballplayer, his great bare feet white as baseballs sinking into the outfield grass as he sprinted for a line drive. Then, after the catch, his toes gripping the grass like claws, he would brace and throw to the infield. I could complain about the over-descriptiveness or the completely unnecessary image of Annie's nipples poking through her shirt or I could talk about my little league experience. I could argue that Kinsella has all the trademarks of a "popular" writer: he's image-driven, oscillates between experience and memory in an unintentionally fractured manner; the formula for the story is―rather than internal―covering the piece like an exoskeleton. Then again, I could tell you about the bird and my broken toe and this boy Joey who could throw seventy miles an hour at age eleven. I could go into the whole "Field of Dreams" angle, Kevin Costner, "Waterworld," "The Postman Always Rings Twice"―NO―"Il Postino"―NO―"Going Postal"―NO―whatever that mail movie was of Costner's...OR I could tell you about the Ding-Dongs, the post-win pizza parties, the yearly trophies that have ended up as a collection of faux marble bases (plastic tops discarded) in my basement. There is Shoeless Joe, the Blacksox scandal―even Ty Cobb. There is Kinsella's use of the scandal (the throwing of the 1919 world series) as allegory and then the vague role of the narrator's father. How about heaven and its relation to the ball field? Or the time I hit a line drive into some poor kid's eye causing the game to be called in the third inning (they didn't have anymore players)? How about Don, the coach whose job was professional paper delivery-man? There was this girl who put her hair up when she played on our team and even wore a cup so the ump would think her a boy―what was her name? How about father as mentor, as coach?? Heck, I can't decide. You pick. Page 1 /\/\/\/ Page 2 /\/\/\/ Page 3 /\/\/\/ Page 4 /\/\/\/ Page 5 /\/\/\/ Info
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Mavis Gallant
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5 Page 3 statistics: 25 stories 21 authors 276 pages 4 translations 14 ♂ / 11 ♀
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Irkland
1998-2007