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I n f o r m a t i o n
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 76:
Margaret Laurence - "The Mask of the Bear" - 1970
Although I spent so much of my life listening to conversations which I was
not meant to overhear, all at once I felt, for the first time, sickened by
what I was doing. I left my listening post and tiptoed into Aunt
Edna's room. I wondered if someday I would be the one who was doing
the talking, while another child would be doing the listening.
"The Mask of
the Bear" revolves around the need to tell a story. As in Anderson,
her narrator is a young person when the events of the story occur. And
it is clear, as in "Death in the Woods," that this young person is now much
older, perhaps even dealing with a newer generation of eavesdroppers
listening to her conversations while she tries to make sense of her
hard-hearted grandfather. The young Vanessa has an incredibly
difficult time understanding his need for release when his wife dies; in
fact, his hug and sobbing deeply disturb her. The bear coat he wears
represents his thick skin, a protective shell like the basement's squeaking
rocking chair. The mask Vanessa sees as an adult reminds her of the
coat, of her grandfather, and the whole story flows from this flood of
memory. This theme of a compulsion to tell a story is a constant one
among writers, and seems to represent both a justification for their work
and a way to make a reader understand why one would dedicate so much of
their life to creating something so imperfect, so subjective and so,
cosmically speaking, insignificant. In another way it also projects a
vulnerability. It says to the reader, "Just follow me for a minute and
I'll tell you why this story was important to me...maybe it will be
important to you, too." It allows the reader to make his/her own
connections rather than being forced to accept an author's sweeping
assertions. The effectiveness of such stories lies always in their
ability to forge a personal connection with the reader, so themes of
rejection or inaccessibility, as in "The Mask of the Bear," frequent them.
The reader is then made to feel the same longing to break into the
character's inner feelings, and thus empathize with the protagonist.
Top
Day 77:
D. H. Lawrence - "Odour of Chrysanthemums" - 1909
Was this what it all meant—utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of
living? In dread she turned her face away. The fact was too
deadly. There had been nothing between them, and yet they had come
together, exchanging their nakedness repeatedly. Each time he had
taken her, they had been two isolated beings, far apart as now. He was
no more responsible than she. The child was like ice in her womb.
There is a
gravity that accompanies Lawrence's writing; in truth it's quite startling.
Some months back while reading
The Rainbow
I was struck by this seriousness in a passage describing Anna. I
should have known this after reading Lady Chatterley's Lover—give me
a break. The seriousness comes because Lawrence is always talking
about fundamental human emotions: love, death, acceptance, greed, god—and
with experience behind it.
"The child was like ice in her womb." In the aforementioned encounter
with LC'sL, I can't say that I agreed with every word written, but
its depth astonished me. It astonished the hell out of the generation
of folks that banned it, too. One is not to ask questions
about established notions of society. There is an order!
Apparently this sentiment still exists: "Lawrence, in these novels [The
Rainbow, LC'sL] and others, tried to explore new alternatives to the
traditional Western structures of marriage, family and Christianity. He
hoped to recreate humans and human relations in new forms, unbound by
tradition and reason. It is for this fundamental attack on the great
accomplishments of Western Civilization that his books should have been
banned, not because of some wildly melodramatic sex scenes in the haystacks"
(site
here). The previous comes from a review that gives The Rainbow an
"F." Perhaps Lawrence could've tried to set many of his heavy-themed
stories or novels differently; that is, he could have omitted the colliery
more often (as he does in our next story). While asking such profound
questions, he often seems to be supplying us with not only the symptoms of
what he saw to be civilization's crises, but also with the causes
(industrialization, the mindless acceptance of convention, withholding
honesty...). I think we often want a writer to tell us the reason for
everything, or we want them to leave it completely for us to decide; halfway
suggesting something leaves a peculiar taste on the tongue.
Nonetheless, it is hardly a fault of his, technically speaking, but more a
style (for he's consistent).
"Odour of Chrysanthemums" describes a wife waiting for her
husband to return from the coal mine after his day's work. As each
hour passes (time is important), she suspects he has once again gone to the
local tavern, neglecting his family and his dinner. She, obviously,
gets very upset. Later, when he comes through the door, carried by
fellow workers and merely a corpse, her anger hardly subsides. Who
is that man they've brought here? she thinks. Her son, perpetually
living in the shadows and hardly a part of the story now completely mirrors
his father. What is living, anyway? "The horror of the distance
between them was almost too much for her," Lawrence writes. Of course:
he's dead. But we're not dead and look at our distance? We hide
behind masks (of bears, as Laurence suggests) and we present ourselves as
characters and binary digits in a cyber world. Life, we learn, is our
immediate master, and Death our ultimate master. To the former
Elizabeth submits, to the latter she winces "with fear and shame." And
us? Who will plead for our salvation? Andrew?
Top
Day 78:
D. H. Lawrence
- "The Rocking-Horse Winner" - 1926
There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages,
yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to
dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon
her, and she could not love them. They looked at her coldly, as if
they were finding fault with her. And hurriedly she felt she must
cover up some fault in herself.
I read this
story—seriously—like a hundred and fifty times in the last three weeks
because I'd been reading about that Oceanbiscoot horse that won the double
crown a bunch of times and I was fascinated with those hundred-pound
jockeys—seriously—they just fascinate the hell out of me.
My dad had just gotten this tape—this was years ago—it was
the Traveling Roxburies or the Traveling Wilburs or something—and he brought
me to the races and I was thinking, "Oh, man, win place and show, trifecta
whatever!" I mean all these racing terms I didn't know about came into
my head and so my dad brought me into the races and I guessed that Mad Glory
would come in second. Won ten bucks!
But in the last three weeks I've been taking riding
lessons—seriously—because I think the whole automobile thing is going to
collapse and these roads are going to become useless. How are we going
to get around? Horses...the logical answer.
So this story had the "horse" part in the title and I
thought I'd get some pointers but it was just a pretty messed up story.
You've got a kid riding a rocking-horse till he's about twenty (slight
exaggeration) and a mother who's always wanting more more more. No
wonder they all hear voices! I hear these voices, too. Mine say,
"Get the hell out of bed you lazy ass...Pay your child support you
dope...Register your car before they tow it dumb ass," but it's exactly what
Lawrence is talking about. He was on Oprah either last week or...no,
it was last month—THAT's why I read this story. Never mind.
Yeah, I saw him on Oprah (rerun?) and he was talking about his rocking-horse
story. He joked with her: "Too bad I'm not a
Book-of-the-day-Oprah-book-of-the-whatever!" The whole audience
laughed in unison and looked under their chairs and found an ionic hairdryer
and a Lawrence book. They cut to one old woman who was crying.
She'd lost the elm tree in her front yard to some zoning thing (I learned
this the episode before) and it just really made her day.
Anyway, so Lawrence is saying, "Man, you don't have to go for
all that bling bling, man. Man, just chill out and be thankful for
what you've already got." Yeah. And there's some psychological
stuff going on, too. Of course! My cousin's got a degree in
psychology...I should ask him what the deal is. But I liked the story.
Man, it was crazy at times with all the money they all won. All of
them. Seriously.
Top
Note: For the next series, I
will choose from one of the following. Visitors may wish to recommend
one of these or another idea entirely. Email
here.
Flannery O'Connor, The Complete
Stories; Ernest Hemingway, The Short Stories; Vladimir Nabokov,
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. The following are all
anthologies of short fiction: Points of View; You've Got To Read
This; The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; The Scribner
Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. Others recommended: Bible
chapter/book-a-day; Encyclopedia Entry-a-day (don't be ridiculous, now);
Shakespeare play-a-day; Plato dialogue-a-day; movie-a-day; hit myself on the
head-a-day.
Day 79:
David Leavitt - "We Meet at Last" - 1995
They had known each other eight weeks but they'd never met.
Well—"met." What does it mean, to "meet?" Their
relationship—begun as a routine business transaction that required
negotiation by telephone—had evolved, with alarming speed, into something
else, something neither of them felt quite prepared to name, much less
trust: was it a love affair? A love affair of voices?
Charles
Bukowski wrote "Of course it's possible to love a human being—if you don't
know them too well." There's a song that goes "Everyone is perfect,
till you know them." We have at our disposal the ability to
communicate with a great number of people without ever meeting them, and
this breeds the problem of unmet expectation. In this story, two
people who have formed a telephone relationship meet up and instantly
realize that all is over between them. The yearning heart has a
tendency to create that which isn't really there. I once heard my
mother say, "You can spend the leftover change after you buy groceries,"
when she actually said nothing of the sort.
The characters in the story understand that meeting will
fundamentally change their relationship, but they are still compelled to do
it. We are compelled toward one another. We are compelled toward
something. Maybe entropy causes all this movement; I tend to think
it's the attraction of molecules and atoms and electrons and ions and quarks
and units of love (?) that does this. Call it "loneliness"; call it
"boredom." Have you ever met someone who never formed an unrealistic
expectation in his or her partner? Is it possible? We are so
complicated. Stop being complicated.
Top
Day 80:
Ursula K. Le Guin - "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" - 1976
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and
sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason
of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible
boredom of pain.
This story made
me smile. It also made my cheek itch. Maybe the latter was
caused by some unrelated circumstance—my faulty nerve end, I suppose.
It reads a bit like an author trying to create a utopia
(though the narrator (N) defiantly states that Omelas is not a
utopia), but when N finds the task impossible the blame is put on the
reader, not the author. It is my inability to accept what is
presented...my disbelief and cynicism that prevent me from picturing this
utopian non-utopia. N is right, too. I'm not believing it even
if I do appreciate the desperate attempt.
So, N says, you don't believe me. But you don't know
everything...let me tell you everything.
And soon you learn the frightening secret to Omelas'
happiness: the wretched imprisonment of a child in some dusty,
excrement-ridden cellar. Was the narrator going here all along, or was
it purely the inadequately realized town that forced it? Is this
simply a contradiction of the earlier diatribe against the acceptance of
pure happiness? (yes) What we have now is a "Lottery" that takes place
in Omelas, but whereas Jackson tells us something about who we are (that we
tolerate it), Le Guin tells us whom we could become (if we walk away from
such propositions). Can you believe that a person's happiness directly
results from the suffering of another? It's an interesting question.
Does John Doe, smiling on his way home from the grocery store, achieve
felicity because he knows that his countrymen are suffering in his name?
It's all so big, so out of control. People feel they
have no control, and they're starting to seem right.
Omelas... Salem O backwards.
Top
Day 81:
Doris Lessing - "The
Old Chief Mshlanga" - 1966
Pushing her way through the green aisles of the mealie stalks, the leaves
arching like cathedrals veined with sunlight far overhead, with the packed
red earth underfoot, a fine lace of red starred witchweed would summon up a
black bent figure croaking premonitions: the Northern witch, bred of cold
Northern forests, would stand before her among the mealie fields, and it was
the mealie fields that faded and fled, leaving her among the gnarled roots
of an oak, snow falling thick and soft and white, the woodcutter's fire
glowing red welcome through crowding tree trunks.
I never go
to New York City these days: something 'bout the buildings in Chelsea that
kills me.
Lessing can write a sentence, but a story? Hmm.
The verdict is still out. I wonder sometimes about putting people into
categories based on one (somewhat) randomly selected story (thanks,
Charters), but really, now...how else can we do this? Ought I read
every story these authors have written? I suppose I should focus on
praising or punishing the story itself, and not the author. We all
have bad days, right? Isn't it possible that Lessing, her friends,
husband, trusted readers and editor all woke up on the wrong side of the bed
that day? Those days, I mean. Why is the story so bad?
It's not that bad. Lessing captures images very
well, but there were a few things that bothered me about this story.
1. The POV shifts from 3rd to 1st person on the second page—why? If
this is a device, its meaning is lost on me. 2. The story builds to a
climax with Chief Mshlanga and prematurely dispatches with him—why?
We're left to wallow in the narrator's arrogance and forced to endure a
scene that ultimately has no purpose. 3. This sentence: "On another
occasion one of those old prospectors who still move over Africa looking for
neglected reefs..." Subject-verb agreement? Is it only me?
A Charters' typo? 4. Tokens: "kraal," "vlei," and "kopje" are flaunted
so we know that Lessing looked up some words, but she forgets about them and
they end up meaningless. 5. Character development: what character
development?
In her intro, Charters writes that Lessing is often compared
to Lawrence...yes, both names certainly do begin with an "L." I have
an "L" in my name—does that count too? I've got Lawrence's
"A," "R," "E," and "N" also: are these extra "David Herbert" points?
Boy, my Nobel prize is right around the corner, I'm guessing. (I know,
Rainer, I'm trying to be nice—well, I'm trying not to be too mean)
Top
Day 82:
Clarice Lispector - "The
Smallest Woman in the World" - 1960
And she kept on enjoying her own soft laugh, she who wasn't being devoured.
Not to be devoured is the most perfect feeling. Not to be devoured is
the secret goal of a whole life. While she was not being eaten, her
bestial laughter was as delicate as joy is delicate. The explorer was
baffled.
Usually I
loathe crowded buses; today I found an exception. While desperately
trying to hold onto a matte steel rail (for my life), I used my free hand to
pry open The Story and Its Writer so I could read "The Smallest Woman
in the World," by Clarice Lispector. Somebody over my shoulder soon
said, "I've read that story," and one next to him asked, "What are you
reading?" Soon several people at my side, those behind and in front,
and even a few underneath me asked that I read the story aloud to them.
I said, "Only on one condition: I write something about these stories, and
so long as you all give me a little feedback, I'll read it aloud." It
being a rather brief enterprise in the realm of fiction, I began somewhere
on 19th Avenue (at about Taraval) and concluded in the Marina. To my
surprise, many stayed past their stops to finish listening.
The group being relatively large (n=22—23 if you count the
deaf woman who responded to my questions but probably didn't hear the story
(I was facing away from her). Her name is Martha and she offered to
help me with my ASL...), the information I collected seems useful. For
instance, 73% of the people found the story "heartwarming" when given the
choice between "heartwarming," "existential," "intellectual," or "romantic."
Nine of the 22/3 people agreed with the statement "I can relate to the
smallest woman in the world," four of those nine being female.
Surprisingly, only three people had heard of Lispector before; one did a
report on Brazilian authors born in the Ukraine and couldn't pass her up.
The responses varied when I asked the question "What is this
story about," one arguing it is "about the Western bias and people's
need to conquer the world," while another said "describing the essence of
being human" was the author's main goal. A high school student from
the Sunset argued that "the tiny woman represents our inner selves, that
which we repress and hide away in the jungles of our soul." A nurse
from SF General argued "Lispector hops from perspective to perspective to
show the voyeur in all of us...to show our need to constantly focus on
something other than ourselves." A security guard for a bank in the
Embarcadero Center liked to think that "the explorer is an artist looking
for his prize; when he comes upon it he tries in vain to study and name it
but it is fleeting because it has motives of its own." Ralphie, a
single mother of three, was disturbed by this story because "it reminds
[her] how sick we are—how sick everyone is."
Though none of the sample would go far enough to say this was
the best story they'd ever heard, all of them (including Martha) agreed it
was the best story they'd ever been read on a bus. Eighty-six percent
thought it was the best story they'd heard in two months. One man said
it was something he'd always remember.
Top
Day 83:
Jack London - "To Build a Fire" - 1909
The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick
and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the
significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of
frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and
that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a
creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to
live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did
not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the
universe.
This is the
story of a man and a dog. It is cold outside. Seventy-five below
zero. The dog is not given a name. The man is not given a name.
When you read this story, you will have a hard time accepting the outcome
even though this outcome is hinted at from the first paragraph. Yes,
what is that pallor? You will wonder about the man, what makes him go
on. The truth is this man is not thinking. This man is not
thinking so we have to think for him. The passage I quoted shows that.
It shows why this story is remarkable.
The dog doesn't die in the story. The dog lives on.
Presumably the dog will return to camp. This may alarm the men at the
camp for where is the dog's master? It is seventy-five below zero.
Past fifty you are not supposed to travel alone. The man thinks little
of this until he is knee-deep in water. How water? How water at
seventy-five below zero? Doesn't everything freeze at
seventy-five below zero? There are springs. That is how there is
water. The springs bubble up water that may never freeze. The
man knows these things and once even sends the dog ahead so that if one of
them is to fall through ice, it will be the dog. Indeed, the dog falls
through the ice, one paw's worth, and quickly recovers and bites out the
ice. The man helps pull out the ice with his fingers. And when
the man falls through the ice, knee-deep, he thinks to himself that maybe he
will gut the dog and crawl into his carcass. He heard a story about a
man crawling into a steer. That saved the man's life, climbing into
the carcass did. This man has no steer, only a dog. But the dog
will not come. The dog has been too oppressed. London was a
socialist. There may be something to this: the oppressed will never
come to the rescue of the oppressor if the oppressor never shows kindness or
compassion. Is this what the story is about?
Maybe. But what is remarkable takes place in the
passage I quoted. That passage shows everything. The man doesn't
think enough about his place, about his animalism, about his cosmology.
The man thinks about: snow, ice, sunless sky, cold, camp, friends, walk.
This is all the man thinks about. And look where he ends up. He
ends up stuck. Frozen? Yes, frozen. Ice can be a metaphor.
The man has no more instincts; he has severed them somehow. I don't
know how one severs instincts, but it happened with this man: "Possibly all
the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of
cold one hundred and seven degrees below freezing point." But the dog
knew. "But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited
the knowledge." The poor man, he is to be pitied. Pity him
because his ancestors were ignorant. Pity him because he was ignorant.
Pity yourself? Okay. Pity yourself. Maybe you are ignorant
too. Maybe you ought to be pitied, says London. If you are to
bring knowledge to the man, and the man is pitied, then maybe it is you who
should be pitied. Why does this man deserve knowledge? Is that
what London is saying? Is he saying everyone deserves knowledge,
everyone deserves enlightenment? London was a socialist. It is
possible he believed that.
The cold is unbearable. It makes your room cold.
Top
Day 84:
Lu Xun - "Diary
of a Madman" - 1918
Can't think about it anymore. I just realized today that I too have
muddled around for a good many years in a place where they've been
continually eating people for four thousand years.
What to do when
madness prevails—that is the question. But first: what is madness?
Who is mad? Can we agree on this? Often yesterday's madman is
today's savior (Mark 3:21) or today's philosopher (Nietzsche) or today's
painter (Van Gogh, Pollack) or today's author (too many to list).
There's a lot riding on "Diary of a Madman."
Everything—the style in which it was written, the zeitgeist that
contributed to its authoring, the subtle attacks against China or
Confucianism or for China or Confucianism and Darwin's theory of
evolution—contributes to the effectiveness of this story. I freely
admit that it doesn't seem as critical when you read it. I suspect the
title invites the expectation of drama: this madman is not nearly mad enough
for modern times (the title, by the way, was lifted directly from a
Gogol story). That's not the point, though. Whereas we're
supposed to feel the freezing man's slide toward death in "To build a
Fire," we're supposed to keep our head in "Diary of a Madman"—just enough
to see that the madman is not as crazy one might think; in fact, maybe he's
completely sane.
No, not sane. His fears (ala Swift's "A Modest
Proposal"—cannibalism) are quite irrational, but his charge does not go
unacknowledged. Many people allege that it is Xun's dislike of
Confucianism that forced this perspective. Confucianism?
I happen to be an amateur scholar in the realm of
Confucianism (how I wish I could read the original characters!), so I
thought I would approach the story from this angle. Though I have a
respect for the Analects (what survives of them), I don't agree with them
all. I have a feeling that rather than his disciples' specific
teachings, "Diary of a Madman" aims at the meritocracy inherent in the
system, the ability for anyone to rise to any level based on their ability
and drive. But where is this in the Analects? The supposition
that Confucianism represents a continually new group displacing
another (hence, metaphorical cannibalism) may not be grounded. It is
true that Master K'ung traveled from state to state in a vain attempt to
spread his philosophies (vain only in his lifetime); in this sense he was
insistent upon usurping the old Way.
Specifically, see Book IV, 13: "The Master said, If it is
really possible to govern countries by ritual and yielding, there is no more
to be said." Perfect: we have what we want. Here he admits that
"yielding" (to those young cannibals) is an acceptable way to carry on.
But what about the second sentence? "But if it is not really possible,
of what is ritual?" Does it negate the first or enforce the "yielding"
while ignoring the "ritual"?
Since this is a lengthy topic, and I have many more quotes
from the Analects, I thought I might take some time, every day or so, to
write a little on the subject. Thank you.
Translation by William A. Lyell
2
Things are going better for me today, so I thought I'd take up that
issue of Confucius again.
Do you think that its great respect for elders and the
establishment could be construed as a sense of cannibalism? In this
way the old would eat the new? I'm not sure anymore what I'm really
talking about. I admit to feeling a bit unwell, but there are no
physical manifestations; I merely feel strange. "The Master said, A
gentleman is distressed by his own lack of capacity; he is never distressed
at the failure of others to recognize his merits" (Book XV, 18). What
is my capacity? I will get to the bottom of this at once.
3
I am feeling no better. My thoughts seem to be caught
up in tautology; what good can I be to this discussion now? Confucius
said/wrote/yelled "If I know I am crazy I cannot be crazy," or was that
Yossarian? I am very confused.
4
Ah.
Top
Day 85:
Bernard Malamud - "The Jewbird" - 1963
The window was open so the skinny bird flew in. Flappity-flap with its
frazzled black wings. That's how it goes. It's open, you're in.
Closed, you're out and that's your fate. The bird wearily flapped
through the open kitchen window of Harry Cohen's top-floor apartment on
First Avenue near the lower East River.
A Jewbird flies
into the Cohen household and finds he bears the wrath of
anti-semitism...irony? Morris Sr. is constantly attacking Schwartz,
the "black-type long-beaked bird," but for what reason? He smells?
The bird is a freeloader? "What have you got against the poor bird?"
Cohen's wife asks. "Poor bird, my ass. He's a foxy bastard.
He thinks he's a Jew." What we have here is not that the bird is
ostracized for being Jewish, but for not being Jewish enough. Cohen
wants to know about the bird's hat and phylacteries after the prayer.
As if identity wasn't fickle enough already, people cast away from certain
groups have to fear being booted from within.
We have perhaps the most complicated caste system in the
world in America today, and this story takes a look at its reconfiguration,
a change that's been in progress for centuries. Judaism exists as a
religion, but also as an ethnicity, further complicating things. Yet
the situation applies across ethnicities. Nearby is a venue titled
"Not a Genuine Black Man," by Brian Copeland. Mix in social/economic
standing and we have a big mess. Sometimes the worst discrimination
comes from the group with which you identify (as in Schwartz's case).
The snoring bird's dilemma also mirrors the split between the Orthodox,
Reform, Hasidic, and other sects of Judaism.
But how can we forget Malamud's The Natural and Robert
Redford in the hollywood-ized movie version? I never did find an
acceptable name for my bat...
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Day 86:
Katherine Mansfield - "Bliss" - 1920
Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she
wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the
pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it
again, or to stand still and laugh at—nothing—at nothing, simply.
Rare is the
story that makes me smile out loud, the sort of grin that is undeniable if
you're in the company of others, something you'd have to explain.
"Well what's so funny?" your company would ask. Then you'd have to
explain.
In this case it's not the bliss mentioned in the title or the
general felicity exuberated by Bertha Young (names in short stories can be
too symbolic—there's rarely room for them to feel natural), but
rather a simple device of Mansfield's. I'd describe it in detail, but
it would be foolish since I may one day decide to use it myself, and since
this story isn't the first place I've seen it, I now won't feel any
particular debt to one writer or another but instead to the entire flowing
history of creative artists. Still, making a big deal about it here
doesn't very well help me. I'm hoping that people will say, "By GOD,
what is he talking about?!" and pick up the story. If they do, this is
what they'll find:
Bertha Young has everything a person would want (hence the
bliss). "Harry and she were as much in love as ever," and they had "an
adorable baby," an "absolutely satisfactory house and garden," wonderful
friends, and "their new cook made the most superb omelettes."
In a Chekhovian setup, the Youngs are having some of their
"modern, thrilling" friends over for dinner. It really is sad that
Bertha's husband Harry doesn't get along with Miss Pearl Fulton, one of the
guests. Bertha looks outside briefly to see a pear tree in the garden
"with its wide open blossoms as symbol of her own life." The guests
soon arrive, and amidst her bliss—she's overwhelmed with the excitement and
stimulating conversation—she frowns that poor Harry is so cold to the
enigmatic Miss Fulton. An older couple, nicknamed Mug and Face, join
the poet Eddie Warren as guests. Luckily Bertha finally feels a
momentary connection to Miss Fulton—shares an understanding with her.
"How long did they stand there? Both, as it were, caught in that
circle of unearthly light, understanding each other perfectly, creatures of
another world, and wondering what they were to do in this one with all this
blissful treasure that burned in their bosoms and dropped, in silver
flowers, from their hair and hands?"
Ah, but there's a reason they have so much in common...
It makes me wonder—well, first it makes me wonder if you can
write just a happy, love-infused story. None so far (86) have been
that way. Sure, some have happiness and love, but always triumphing
over pain, suffering, or a critical divide (and still rare). That's
why when one begins "Bliss," they likely understand that the title is either
misleading or ironic.
The story also makes me wonder if happiness can ever be
"pure" happiness or "true" happiness, or if happiness is one of those
subjective things that can look better or worse depending on your
perspective. Bertha's happiness in this story might be preserved or
eliminated depending on what she hears, sees, understands or admits;
likewise with many of us. But bliss, how wonderful it can be.
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Day 87:
Katherine Mansfield - "The Garden-Party" -
1922
"Tuk-tuk-tuk," clucked cook like an agitated hen. Sadie had her hand
clapped to her cheek as though she had toothache. Hans's face was
screwed up in the effort to understand. Only Godber's man seemed to be
enjoying himself; it was his story.
"What's the matter? What's happened?"
"There's been a horrible accident," said Cook. "A man
killed."
Can you blame
the poor girl for wanting to stop the garden-party? I can't blame her.
I can't blame Laura or her brother Laurie. I can't blame anyone,
really. But I do. I blame people all the time. Maybe I can
blame people. Maybe I ought to blame more people. Whom
shall I begin blaming?
This story reminds me of another story. It is called
La Règle du jeu, a film. But I shouldn't go into that or you'll
start blaming me for getting off track. But I'm already off track—you
can't blame me twice so I ought to continue.
But back to "The Garden-Party," I'd say it's safest to blame
the aristocracy, the hierarchy of classes...but more specifically people who
assert their superiority over others, people who expect subordination from
at least one person. Perhaps we're all guilty of this—leave it
to this one person to blame us.
But back to "The Garden-Party," it's safe to blame the mother
and Sadie and Jose for their callousness. "But we can't possibly have
a garden-party with a man dead just outside the front gate." Laura
says this. Wasn't Gene Tierney in that movie Laura ?
Back to the story...have you read it? I mean, have you
read the story? Because if you had you'd know just what I'm trying to
say. I'm trying to say something and I can't say it. I'm not
trying not to say it...I'm trying: honestly. Laura tries to
tell her brother something at the end: "'Isn't life,' she stammered, 'isn't
life—' But what life was she couldn't explain."
Things are like that, sometimes. You come up with
nothing to say. A writer, a person like Mansfield, makes a summation
seem pointless. I can't tell you what it's about or what it's about
or why it's brilliant or funny or heartwarming. I can't explain.
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Day 88:
Bobbie Ann Mason - "Shiloh" -
1982
Now Leroy has the sudden impulse to tell Norma Jean about himself, as if he
had just met her. They have known each other so long they have
forgotten a lot about each other. They could become reacquainted.
But when the oven timer goes off and she runs to the kitchen, he forgets why
he wants to do this.
I was just
thinking, while flossing, about that line in "The Heat Death of the
Universe" by Pamela Zoline, "The entropy of a system is a measure of its
degree of disorder," and how that line is so scientific and objective, but
when you put it smack in the middle of this housewife's chaos, the line
becomes something so much more. By the time the toothpaste foam was
seeping from the corners of my mouth, I'd brought the idea back to "Shiloh"
and Leroy and Norma Jean's struggles.
Struggles? The gist is that Leroy is home now all of a
sudden after going on long-term disability after his rig flipped.
Though his wife has a job, they're around each other much more often now
than they had been before. He spends his time assembling model kits
and ranting about building a log cabin home for Norma Jean.
Not so much struggles as realizations. Norma Jean is
growing, stretching. With her opponent, adversary and true love
suddenly around for comparison, he seems to hinder her development. If
she's not cooking strange new foods or implementing an exercise regimen then
she's taking a class on composition at the adult school. Their life is
constantly monitored by Mabel, Norma Jean's mother who produces little in
the way of positivity. If anything she serves to remind the couple of
what they'd lost. Was it the child, Randy, whom they'd lost? Or
was it potential. (note the absence of a question mark)
"Everything was fine till Mama caught me smoking," Norma Jean
says.
Was everything fine? I didn't think everything was
fine. The present-tense narration suggests that we're not looking back
so much as living these moments, and yet all was not fine.
But we're always looking back, always trying to make sense of
the entropy we observe. Order from disorder: that's the source of all
this misery. "Is true misery the source or is the perception of
entropy the source?" someone asks. Yes. True misery results from
the ordering of chaos.
So it is Leroy for whom I feel sorry (strangely enough).
It is Leroy who has a new misery inflicted upon him. Norma Jean lives
her misery in the story as we watch her primed (?) for her sudden rejection
of her husband. Is any rejection not sudden? Regardless, it is
now Leroy's turn.
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Day 89:
Guy de Maupassant - "The Necklace" - 1884
She dressed plainly because she could not dress well, but she was as unhappy
as though she had really fallen from her proper station, since with women
there is neither caste nor rank: and beauty, grace, and charm act instead of
family and birth. Natural fitness, instinct for what is elegant,
suppleness of wit, are the sole hierarchy, and make from women of the people
the equals of the very greatest ladies.
It was nice of
Charters to include James' "Paste" in here since it so clearly draws upon
Maupassant's story and serves as a good example of the parlay between
authors. And though it has a Chopinesque or O. Henryish ending (both
subsequents, of course), "The Necklace" has more moral, more substance (for
comparison I'm thinking of "Story of an Hour" and "Gift of the Magi").
Maupassant's story is of someone reaching beyond their station in life and
facing reprehension. But what about that paragraph I quoted?
Women have no caste, no rank, the narrator says. Is it, then, her
husband's fault for suppressing his beautiful wife with his meager clerk's
salary? It can only be that Mme. Loisel invented for herself a caste
when one before did not exist. So this is a story not about the
indefatigable quest of humanity's march up the social ladder, but about the
invention of such a ladder and the consequences of it.
Maupassant, writing from his own voice and not a narrator's,
said that the serious writer's "goal is not to tell us a story, to entertain
or to move us, but to make us think and to make us understand the deep and
hidden meaning of events." It is hard to take this seriously when "The
Necklace" offers such a sudden climax, one which elicits more of an
exclamation than a meditation about the inequity and turmoil in the human
soul.
It strikes me, though, that this inequity and turmoil is
precisely what every writer is yearning to capture, to present, to dissect
and analyze. Well, maybe not the author of "Who Moved my Bleu Cheese"
or "101 Ways to Flog a Dead Horse," but authors who feel a compulsion to
write, not a necessity due to their vanity or penury. Why do people do
what they do? Why do people do things that kill them, love people who
hate them? And my question of the day: Why do people feel compelled to
think about all this thought in the first place? I consider this the
aesthete's crisis. Because in that desire to know why we thirst for
knowledge, there too is a desire for perfection, for beauty. That
combination of beauty and knowledge/insight/inquisition is, for me, art.
Translation by Marjorie Laurie.
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Day 90:
Herman Melville - "Bartleby the
Scrivener" - 1853
For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy
seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a not unpleasing
sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to
gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons
of Adam. I remembered the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen
that day, in gala trim, swan-like sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway;
and I contrasted them with the pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah,
happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides
aloof, so we deem that misery there is none. These sad
fancyings—chimeras, doubtless, of a sick and silly brain—led on to other and
more special thoughts, concerning the eccentricities of Bartleby.
Presentiments of strange discoveries hovered round me. The scrivener's
pale form appeared to me laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its
shivering winding-sheet.
Forgive the
verbosity of my excerpt (or if you don't, you're entitled to review
copyright law which exempts this particular tale—quoted not from Charters'
text by my own "private," hoary copy). The text of "Bartleby" flows so
quickly that it is over much too soon despite the fact that it is probably
the third or fourth longest story in the book. It does that because of
Melville's careful writing, of course, but also for another important
reason: there is no story for Bartleby. You might suppose that I
anticipated such an aesthetic crisis (and hence mentioned it prior), and you
would, in some small sense, be correct; I have read "Bartleby" before.
But I cannot take full credit; Providence deserves her due.
Amazingly, in the first paragraph of the story, we are told
that a simple visage and a solitary account are all that survive of this
indefinable entity, Bartleby the scrivener. So the narrator proceeds
to tell us in detail the digestive problems of one trusty copyist, Nippers,
and the impetuousness of his other, Turkey (one ante meridian, the
other post, rather humorously). Let us not forget Ginger Nut, a
twelve-year-old gopher who assists in the office by performing menial tasks.
Logically enough Bartleby enters the story as a hired
copyist, a scrivener. But when propositioned to help ensure the
precision of his work, he responds, calmly, "I would prefer not to."
And thus begins a series of unfathomable denials issued by the emaciated
worker. His boss, the narrator, can scarcely understand the behavior,
let alone formulate a plan to force his capitulation or dismissal. By
this time it is clear that Bartleby lives at the office and never leaves.
No plan is successful (not even the goading of the other workers who, like
angels and devils governed by the sun's position, alternate in their
castigation and ambivalence toward the screened-in scrivener) so the
narrator is ultimately forced to relocate his office, leaving the problem
for the next lessee.
Soon the "problem" is back when the next tenant arrives with news
of a stubborn fixture. The narrator gives it one more shot; finally
Bartleby is taken to prison. Not one to ignore his conscience, the old
boss pays extra to ensure his former employee is fed well, but it is all for
naught since the scrivener neither eats nor speaks other than to tell us—yes
us—that he has nothing to say and knows where he is. "I know
where I am," he says. Purgatory, I suspect.
The story is done but for the narrator's posthumous (for Bartleby,
and thus humanity, is dead) addendum. He informs us of a rumor he'd
heard, one that suggested Bartleby had once been employed by the Dead Letter
Office, presumably the place that receives all undeliverable mail.
So what is Bartleby, who is Bartleby? How do I know?
That's the point! We don't know. Here is a man haunted with a
story to tell, a man who, by compulsion, retells an otherwise
meaningless story hoping for some judgment—any judgment. By God, send
me to hell, just don't let me rot here. The narrator's account is
honest as if inviting reproach, though in truth we can find none. We
might take up a bit of his cross, try to alleviate his pain, his inability
to connect with another soul. "Bartleby" is about rejection and it is
about confinement. When offered a position at a dry good store, he
says, "There is too much confinement about that." It is the
categorization that confines, not the job. It is our distilment of
beauty, the re-rendering of God, that kills us, that kills the narrator,
that represents our earnest attempt to connect with the humanity we have
somehow lost, an attempt at which we will inevitably fail. And so the
narrator laments "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!" We can only
lament with him and read his story, his and Melville's, yours and mine.
"Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!"
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Day 91:
Yukio Mishima - "Swaddling Clothes" - 1966
I am the only person to have witnessed its shame, the thought occurred to
her. The mother never saw her child lying there in its newspaper
wrappings, and the baby itself of course didn't know. I alone shall
have to preserve that terrible scene in memory.
No way!
This guy Mishima was really Hiraoka Kimitake and killed himself
samurai-style! The things you learn! So he's fighting off some
bad guys in this army he made, and he tells these guys to stop being so
Western and the people laugh at him so he disembowels himself and has an
assistant (probably not wearing pantyhose and bunnytail) cut off his head.
No way!
And I guess he wrote this story. It's about a baby who
is dressed in newspapers and then attacks this woman twenty years later but
really it's just a few days. "Ah, so the twenty years have already
gone by!" she thinks. It's about this lady and the shame she knows and
how it's going to eat her up inside knowing that the baby was wrapped in
newspapers. After all, he's a bastard baby. I don't know.
So the lady who is going home by herself (her husband is an
actor?), she's thinking about this baby—can't get it out of her head, in
fact. That happens to me when I get a commercial jingle or something
stuck in my head. I guess this is a little different because the lady
is haunted by it, but one time I had the Skippy song in my head for two
months and I thought I was going crazy. Technically I was crazy,
though, for having that thing in my head for so long. But with the
Skippy song you just want to get it out. This lady is really bothered
by what she knows and she doesn't know how to get it out. I think she
needs to write. That's what everyone should try. At least once.
Try everything once, that's what I pledged when I signed on to Delta Beta
Omega or was it Beta Delta Delta...
Translation by Ivan Morris.
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Day 92:
Lorrie Moore - "How to Become a Writer" - 1985
You spend too much time slouched and demoralized. Your boyfriend
suggests bicycling. Your roommate suggests a new boyfriend. You
are said to be self-mutilating and losing weight, but you continue writing.
The only happiness you have is writing something new, in the middle of the
night, armpits damp, heart pounding, something no one has yet seen.
You have only those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when
you know: you are a genius.
I'm having
trouble seeing the plot of this story.
Kidding! I'm kidding. Looking for its plot would
be a bit like interrupting your roommate who is making a castle out of hot
glued rock salt and asking "What are you doing?" Moore rather
comically and poignantly discusses the tenuous profession of writing, mixing
clichés and specific narrative facts that appear in the life of "Francie," a
girl with a penchant for writing stories about people who are blown up.
This is rather funny because in any setting, some people inevitably explode.
There's the one titled "Schubert Was the One with the Glasses, Right?":
"It's not a big hit, although your roommate likes the part where the two
violinists accidentally blow themselves up in a recital room."
But while the explosions are humorous, they're also quite sad
when we consider that Francie's brother suffered a similar fate in Vietnam.
We're given few facts about her life, but all of them are incredibly
important if you want to read this story as anything other than "sorta
funny." "Call me Fishmeal," right? Again, again, again we have a
story about the need to tell a story. Repeated theme...huh.
Maybe this a "big" one? Everyone seeks validation; some people buy
flashy cars, others run for political office. My friend feels
noticeable when he puts on a nametag. Some people I know think they
have something to say. Moore (though not someone I know "personally")
is one of them. Writers, drawing upon an exhaustible supply of
material, still feel they have something new to say, and if not new then
something old in a new context. But maybe writers feel a need to carve
their niche, leave a trace of their existence, prove to their selves or the
world that they processed even just a little piece of all this collective
knowledge. Or maybe they want to connect, to help; in a sense this
might in turn satiate some longing in their own hearts. Some people
argue that every action can be interpreted devoid of altruism and motivated
purely by selfishness (thus giving money to a charity lets the giver feel a
certain way; they didn't necessarily care if their action helped).
What does it mean to the writer if this scenario is accepted? Moore's
story asks these questions while reiterating a common theme.
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Day 93:
Bharati Mukherjee - "The Management of Grief" - 1988
A woman I don't know is boiling tea the Indian way in my kitchen.
There are a lot of women I don't know in my kitchen, whispering and moving
tactfully. They open doors, rummage through the pantry, and try not to
ask me where things are kept. They remind me of when my sons were
small, on Mother's Day or when Vikram and I were tired, and they would make
big, sloppy omelets. I would lie in bed pretending I didn't hear them.
Is this story
important due to its handling of grief, or for another reason? Do you
ever just feel completely unable to answer a question—overwhelmed, perhaps?
Like any good story, this one functions on many levels, the most obvious
being the narrator's coping strategy for losing her husband and two children
(in a plane crash). But Mukherjee makes a careful distinction between
"two worlds," and sets her narrator precisely in the middle. Shaila
feels rejected from two cultures, unable to comfortably rest as a North
American (like Pam) or an Indian (like the widowers who remarried so
quickly).
I noticed on the second reading that the Sikh/Indian issue
was subtly important throughout the story. We're told, later in the
story, that the crash was not an accident, that it had been a bomb; and
we're directly told that Shaila "stiffen[s] now at the sight of beards and
turbins." While this comes as part of her assimilation into North
American culture, it also represents a religious/ethnic divide in her heart
(and the world), a divide she and her family left India to escape.
Grief is managed several different ways in the story, but maybe
"manage" is the wrong word. We know it is wrong to suppress grief,
that we must somehow deal with the event that brings such a terrible
feeling, yet simply expressing or saying whatever you truly feel is
considered inappropriate. Grief must be doled out in specific
allotments, kept under quota. But in a way the management itself
causes unnecessary repression, as happens when Shaila hears her husband's
words. She fights to stay on the side of rationality to protect her
image (and "manage" her grief), but it really just causes her to turn
further inward.
When was the last time I counted how many of these stories involve
death? Maybe we need a recount.
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Day 94:
Alice Munro - "Meneseteung" - 1990
And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong. I
don't know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don't
know if she ever made grape jelly.
Thank you.
Alice: it's so nice to be able to read one of your stories with the intent
to say something about it; it's a privilege, really.
"Meneseteung" reminds me very much like a story titled
"Andrew" (though they were written in opposite order, this is the sequence
in which I read them). A major difference is that Munro admits her
conceit very early on, and this in fact deepens the reader's emotional
connection to her subject. Let me explain.
"Meneseteung" is about the "poetess" Almeda Roth. The
narrator describes an old book of Roth's titled Offerings, listing a
few poem titles and brief summaries of them. Part of the Preface is
reprinted and we are told about the Vidette, the town's newspaper.
Oh, and the year is 1879; all these people are dead now. With
photographs, the newspaper and Roth's poems, the narrator reconstructs a
melancholy tale of a developing town and their poet who died a spinster
after a short illness, her parents and siblings all long dead before her.
Jarvis Poulter (nice given name, by the way) is an entrepreneur who might be
courting Almeda. We're told that she's excited by this prospect.
"Andrew" is a about a man. His youth and life are
discussed, time moving back and forth like the tide. The narrator
speaks much of a trip to France that changed the young man somehow and of
his sister and nephew. Andrew later becomes a professor (of
Philosophy?), but as a person he is concerned with fundamental questions of
humans' mortality, the question of a soul, the idea of Justice, of Right and
Wrong and inherent order in the universe. Theoretically, the readers
are made to believe in these questions, too.
"Meneseteung" concedes the facts immediately; the narrator
tries to avoid deception. Yet the reader gets involved in Almeda's
story, wants to believe it—wants to believe in it.
"Andrew" startles the reader with Andrew's sudden death
toward the end; still the text goes on. Is "Andrew" about Andrew?
Does his life make up his story? Does his story need to exist to
justify his life? What if his story isn't told? Does the
narrator, since he knows the story, have an obligation to tell it? Are
we obliged to judge people's lives?
Both narrators feel a compulsion to tell their respective
stories. This is a theme oft repeated in Charters' collection.
One of the stories focuses more on our need to believe a story, and one more
on the need to tell a story, but they're really both the same story.
"Meneseteung" is beautiful:
"She has to think of so many
things at once—Champlain and the naked Indians and the salt deep in the
earth, but as well as the salt the money, the money-making intent brewing
forever in heads like Jarvis Poulter's. Also the brutal storms of
winter and the clumsy and benighted deeds on Pearl Street. The changes
of climate are often violent, and if you think about it there is no peace
even in the stars. All this can be borne only if it is channelled into
a poem, and the word 'channelled' is appropriate, because the name of the
poem will be—it is—'The Meneseteung.' The Name of the poem is the name
of the river."
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Day 95:
Joyce Carol Oates - "Where Are You
Going, Where Have You Been?" - 1966
"We'll go out to a nice field, out in the country here where it smells so
nice and it's sunny," Arnold Friend said. "I'll have my arms tight
around you so you won't need to try to get away and I'll show you what love
is like, what it does. The hell with this house! It looks solid
all right," he said.
It was warm
Monday night when I went to see Joyce Carol Oates. Nights aren't
usually muggy in San Francisco, but this was an exception. Poor Joyce
had flown trillions of miles 'round the planet to see me—just me—and
talk (not with me) but to me. She had some very interesting
things to say. Should I repeat them here? Pepper them in?
Salt them in? I grew terribly excited when someone from the audience
(yes, I concede there was an audience) asked about "Where Are You Going,
Where Have You Been?" but this excitement was premature for the answer
(whose question you should be able to surmise) was primarily a caveat that
Oates did not follow Bob Dylan's career to date, and thought specifically of
his mid-sixties work (and especially "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue").
If you didn't know before, this story is dedicated to Bob Dylan, who just
released Part 1of his autobiography; Oates confessed to reading some of it.
This story by Oates is noticeably lacking violence even though evil
is swirling around the characters. It is very "A Good Man Is Hard to
Find"-ish (written 11 years before by Flannery O'Connor) and very Bob
Dylan-ish if you think of his allegorical songs ("Jack of Hearts" comes to
mind as well as "Baby Blue"). Oates does not always omit the violence
in her works, however, and this was a topic she discussed on Monday.
She very aptly noted that she thinks this question is put to her unfairly
due to her sex. "Other authors," she said (me paraphrasing), "have
much more violence but the question is never asked of them because they're
men, and we can explain it away much easier when it appears in their work."
One need only look at her frail body sitting on an average-sized fauteuil
that could have tolerated two people of her size to understand her point.
A frail, mature woman is not associated with violence. But the
violence that comes from Oates isn't physical violence but intellectual
violence that represents some aspect of society or the human soul. I
cannot precisely define "intellectual violence," but can say that it is
imagined and not real.
Similarly, when asked about her four thousand books (I
exaggerate), she suggested that men probably aren't asked that question.
Do we find it problematic that Alexandre Dumas wrote some 272 books and Ezra
Pound wrote 90? I think part of has to do with Oates' intellect; we
find it hard to understand that someone can be prolific and
thoughtful at the same time. We've come to assume that authors who
publish frequently are people who simply use the medium of literature to
make money (and there are a good many...). But if you read Oates
you'll see that that is not the case: hence the confusion. Could it be
that she's just a hard worker? Maybe that's where the sexism begins.
"She can't be a hard working woman," people think. Oates
confessed that not having children helped her work.
It was significant that Michael Krasny, who chose Charters'
collection The Story and Its Writer in the first place, was the
person interviewing Oates, because in a way the three of us represented some
magical trinity of artist, pedagogue and student. Trinities can be
wonderful, especially when they change, when the father becomes the son, for
instance. When Oates becomes the student and I the teacher and when
Krasny goes for coffee, wonderful things can happen. If only we hadn't
have gotten lost in the stairway of the Herbst theatre, I may have had this
opportunity.
Read the story
here.
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Day 96:
Tim O'Brien - "The
Things They Carried" - 1986
The typical load was twenty-five rounds. But Ted Lavender, who was
scared, carried thirty-four rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than
Khe, and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than twenty pounds
of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water and
toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear.
I don't like
Hamlet all that much. I mean, it's okay. It might be
Shakespeare's best drama (I still take King Lear) and it might even
be the best drama of all time, but I don't need it. My response
to Hamlet is governed (ever so slightly) by other people's praise, and this
might even be a trait general among us snobs. Well, a true snob would
love Hamlet and have more than "To be or not to be..." memorized. In
high school I thought about becoming a snob: I got to "slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune..." but suddenly gave up. I suppose the logic goes
this way: in evolutionary terms, there's no real fear that we're going to
"lose" Hamlet. The play is here to stay. Thousands of
scholars have spent crucial life moments worshipping and commenting upon
that one play; how could we lose it? The first type of snob mentioned
fears that lesser-known works may slip through the cultural cracks and be
lost to future generations.
If this logic held true, I wouldn't like "The Things They
Carried" because it's a HIGHLY anthologized story. I see it at college
campus bookstores every year as required reading (the story appears in a
collection of short stories by the same name), and I had to read it myself
in three different classes. Well, two anyway.
Luckily, there is no logic in "snobbery." I like "TTTC"
(for short) and, well, I like Hamlet too. But back to "TTTC,"
it truly is an amazing story. The language, the imagery, the themes,
the metaphor (that hits but doesn't preach)...all of it makes this a great
story. A troop's first casualty is relayed in quasi-flashback through
the list of items that each man carried. Through this list, we see the
transformation of the leader, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, whose love for
"Martha" distracts him in the field and, he feels, compromises his ability
to perform necessary duties.
This is a great story about human beings, about their search
for order in the universe. "Henry Dobbins asked what the moral was."
What is the moral? Is there a moral in war? If we know war is
bad before we fight it—in other words, if we don't need to be in a
war to know it's bad—then what moral can we possibly derive from witnessing
its horrors? There may or may not be a moral in "war," but there's
certainly a moral in "TTTC." A few, perhaps...
Top
Day 97:
Flannery O'Connor - "Everything That Rises Must Converge" - 1965
He opened the door himself and started down the walk to get her going.
The sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it,
bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no two were
alike.
"Flannery
O'Connor was a Catholic," Alison says. "'Our Father' and all that."
It's dawn or close.
"I see the Trinity in this story," she says, referring to
"Everything That Rises Must Converge." I ask her where the Trinity is.
"The Trinity is metaphor, image and symbol," she says, "like
that class by Dan Langton. Did you know he was a Beat poet? Knew
Kerouac and all them."
At this point the wine doesn't appear to be making us more
drunk, but keeping us awake and alive.
"If I were a man," I say, "I'd want to marry Flannery
O'Connor."
"You are a man," Alison says and we both laugh.
"What I meant was if she was alive."
"Let's read it again," she says and we do. Heads
pressed together, purple drops of cheap cab dripping onto the page, we read
the story. "Wait," she says when I look up. "Wait...okay."
I turn the page and get to the part that has Julian imagining
the woman next to him as an "angry cat," and I say "Ready?" but Alison is
asleep. Her glass is seconds away from hitting the floor but my real
concern is my own glass: I can't seem to find a place for it. With her
glass and my glass in my left hand and my other holding her up so she doesn't fall—I trip on some
papers we'd been flipping through earlier and the glasses crunch and spill
to the floor in a glimmer of crystal. "I'm awake," she says.
"To bed."
"Kiss me," she says, standing.
"I'm blotting."
She's swerving in concentric circles.
When they get big enough she'll tip over and land in this glass.
"Stop
that."
"Do you think he loved her—Julian?" she asks.
"Everyone loves their mother."
"But the Trinity..."
"Yeah, them, you and me."
Alison falls to the couch looking like a disappointed child.
"If I were a girl," she says.
"Yeah?"
"I'd marry Flannery O'Connor."
"You'll have to get in line."
With the glass gone but the wine still seeping into the
carpet I wonder when the dawn will come. It seems I can never make it
till the dawn when I've been drinking—it's a punishment, I suppose.
"The sunrise will be beautiful," I say, "You want to stay up
and watch it?"
Alison bites her lip and nods eagerly. We sit side by
side watching the sliding glass door like it was a TV. I turn off the
floor lamp so that we can't see our reflections anymore.
Knowing that the silence will end everything, she says, "It
was a ridiculous hat," and we both think about it. I think about how
everyone wore hats thirty years ago, and now—nothing but baseball caps and
cowboy hats. What happened to women's hats? I wonder.
Things get brighter. I can see more than Alison's
silhouette but I can't find the light's source.
"You're glowing," I say.
"What?"
"Radiant," and she's gone. Asleep and I'm
jealous. If I just
close my eyes for ten seconds, I think. I count upwards slowly, out
loud. "ONE...TWO..."
Alison becomes soft, a pillow. I lean on her and watch
the sliding glass door like I'd see something never seen before out there.
If only I could wait, I think. "I won't forget: I'll trade this
morning's sunrise for tonight's sunset," I say, as if it were a proverb.
Write that down, I think, and then I'm asleep too. We're asleep
together.
Top
Day 98:
Flannery O'Connor - "Good
Country People" - 1955
He took her elbow, smiling down on her as if he could not stop. "You
can never tell when you'll need the word of God, Hulga," he said. She
had a moment in which she doubted that this was actually happening and then
they began to climb the embankment. They went down into the pasture
toward the woods. The boy walked lightly by her side, bouncing on his
toes. The valise did not seem to be heavy today; he even swung it.
They crossed half the pasture without saying anything and then, putting his
hand easily on the small of her back, he asked softly, "Where does your
wooden leg join on?"
This story is
hilarious. All of the FOC I've read thus far has been hilarious in
some sense. I first [was supposed to] read "A Good Man is Hard to
Find" in high school and I thought it was the most comical story I'd ever
said I had read. This story is even funnier than "Good Man...Hard
Find," a fact I found out in Dr. Green's class when we read it along with a
few other FOC stories. Why is it hilarious, you ask?
Well, read that up there—"Where does your wooden leg join
on?" There's nothing intrinsically humorous about a woman with a
wooden leg, but when you take the leg as a symbol of Hulga's
insecurity—Hulga being "Joy" after she changed her name—then it's a riot.
FOC wrote a riot. Let me try again.
So Hulga and her mother, Mrs. Hopewell, are just hanging out
doing not too much (chatting and whatnot) when this bible salesman called
Manley Pointer calls on them. Hulga, ever since she switched her name
from "Joy" (and probably long before that), doesn't get along too fancy with
Hopewell. Joy—I mean Hulga—has got a Ph.D. from somewhere and studies
philosophy. She's thirty-something and has, as you read, a wooden leg.
She's an atheist and, allegedly (for her reading material suggests it) a
nihilist. Pointer shows up and tries to sell a bible but it's a
"no-go." Hopewell is making dinner and has no time; still, he edges
his way into the house and tells his life story. Finding out that he
has a heart condition just like her daughter, Hopewell asks him to stay for
dinner. Afterward he goes out and talks with Hulga for a minute
before he leaves. The next day he's back and they walk to the barn
(see above). I don't want to ruin the story for you—what the hell;
next after Hulga thinks she's seduced Pointer, he steals her wooden leg,
leaving her up in the loft alone sans leg. And it turns out this guy
didn't believe in the religion he was selling...! "Say what you want
about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude..."
Isn't this hilarious!?!!? Joy...oops...Hulga hates her
mother for thinking that the greatest things in the world are simple, "good
country people," but turns out assuming the same thing of Mr. Pointer.
And this bible salesman isn't all he's cracked up to be—he does this sort of
thing all the time, he says.
The humor and symbolism and allegory in FOC's stories are
entwined in a convoluted jumble. This is a highly pleasurable thing
for someone like me. I can appreciate the inconsistencies in life—the
irony—that she writes about. I don't mind people telling me my fly is
down, there's something in my teeth. Got that? One more FLANNERY
O'Connor story left...two more O'Connors in all.
Top
Day 99:
Flannery O'Connor - "A
Good Man Is Hard to Find" - 1955
"Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued,
"and He shouldn't have done it. He thown everything off balance.
If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but thow away
everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do
but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best you can--by killing somebody
or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No
pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.
"Much of my
fiction takes its character from a reasonable use of the unreasonable,
though the reasonableness of my use of it may not always be apparent."
So says Flannery O'Connor sans narrator in an essay published in 1969
titled, aptly, "A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable." That "apparent"
business is what first ticked me off about Miss O'Connor, so much so that I
wrote a paper about my anger. I titled the paper "A Good Author Is
Hard to Find," and while it seems harsh to me now, I still largely agree
with my thesis.
In the aforementioned essay, O'Connor responds to suggestions
put forth by her public, suggestions which she vehemently denies while
allowing for the existence of multiple interpretations. She says that
"there are perhaps other ways than my own in which this story could be read,
but none other by which it could have been written." What a
concession! What people don't understand about this story, she argues,
is that The Misfit is not a Christ figure, and the grandmother is not evil.
Was it that O'Connor had an intention and later felt it had
been betrayed thus forcing her clarification? Or was it that she felt
her belief had been betrayed by the public's reading of her story.
I don't mean her personal faith, exactly, but the belief she was trying to
impart through her story. And by this I don't suggest she was trying
to instill Catholicism through her writing, per se.
This story is about Grace, she says. It's about the
moment of redemption when the grandmother extends a hand to The Misfit after
she realizes he is her child (metaphorically). I've witnessed heated
discussions about the end of King Lear--regarding the King's madness
(specifically, Did he know that Cordelia was dead at the end of the
play?)--and I myself can see the logic in both interpretations. So too
can I see that the grandmother's final gesture was one of self-preservation
(since, in a way, everything to this point was justified for the same
reason). Does the story pivot on this ONE speck of action?
Hardly.
What confounds me is the author's personal dissatisfaction at
alternate interpretations of her story. Wisdom arrives in fits and
bursts on blustery days, so the only reconciliation I can see is to analyze
both the story and the author's comments on the same level: fiction.
In this realm everything works perfectly. Besides, there is plenty of
non-fiction that feels like fiction, why not include her
"unreasonable" essay. It's exactly that: unreasonable.
Read the story
here.
Top
Day 100:
Frank O'Connor - "Guests of the Nation" - 1931, 1954
"You don't want to say a prayer?" asks Donovan.
"No, chum," he says. "I don't think it would help.
I'm ready, and you boys want to get it over."
"You understand that we're only doing our duty?" says
Donovan.
Belcher's head was raised like a blind man's, so that you
could only see his chin and the tip of his nose in the lantern light.
"I never could make out what duty was myself," he said.
"I think you're all good lads, if that's what you mean. I'm not
complaining."
"Frank O'Connor" was the
pseudonym for Michael Francis O'Donovan. Do we have a pseudonym count?
Someone once told me that everyone technically has a pseudonym because we
don't have a name when we come into this world. "We have skin and a
soul and a smile," he said, "That's all." I don't know; it's hard to
refer to someone without a name. And names are interesting. Why?
Because they carry baggage? I think baggage is interesting.
Here's a name for you: "Belcher." And "Noble."
And Bonaparte and Donovan and Hawkins. "Belcher" reminds me of
"Turkey" in "Bartleby the Scrivener." Bartleby: that's another name
for you.
When I was a kid I wanted to change my name. I don't
know why. I guess we all go through that phase when we hate our name,
hate our identity. We collect names as we go through life, each one
attributable to a different time, meaningful to different people.
This story reminded me of Le Grande Illusion a bit.
It also bothered me when it flipped to the present tense for a paragraph.
I tolerated the present-tense dialogue tags, though; those were fine.
"Present Tense" is a song by Pearl Jam that mentions trees bending to catch
the sun's light. I remember riding down Market and asking the driver
what the words were when the singer mumbles. She told me.
There are prisoners English, soldiers Irish: they're all
chums. Playing cards each night, they talk about life and the Church
and God and whatnot. They're pretty much chums. I've never been
to England or Ireland but I know someone who has. I wonder if I know
someone who has done everything. I mean, collectively. Six
degrees of separation.
So far, I count three pseudonyms but there are also women who
have ta'en their husband's names or their middle names (Mansfield) and
people with names that were given in characters not capable of being
depicted with these twenty-six letters. They get pseudonyms, too, I
guess. Porter--he's got a pseudonym but we're not there yet.
We're here and not there.
We're at 100. A milestone. A benchmark.
I've chosen the next X-a-day. It'll be a surprise.
I've chosen the X-a-day after the next X-a-day (perhaps the former
should be called "Y-a-day"), too, and that's the one I'm really excited
about. You can expect Y-a-day in about another 100 days. Seems a
long time, no? One hundred days marked and tallied and accounted for.
Thirty-one more stories in W-a-day...THIS here, I mean. Less than 300
pages. The book itself has 1405 pages, roughly. Afterward are
the commentaries (which I'm reading along with the stories but commenting
upon the comments seems redundant). I confess I'll take a few days off
after Richard Wright tells his "ultimate" story.
As for the chums in this story, they have to do something
because duty dictates it. Duty? Right. Duty is one of
those things like Love and Freedom and Heaven that you could contemplate for
hours as the stratocumulus clouds pass o'erhead. Unknowingly, I've
written this whole passage in iambic pentameter. Simply count the feet
and line-break accordingly; it's a masterpiece.
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Writing Home
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A - Ca
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Margaret Laurence
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Lawrence #2
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Clarice Lispector
Jack London
Lu Xun
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25 stories 21 authors
285 pages
3 translations
11 ♂ / 14 ♀
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