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Story-a-Day - 5
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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 101:
Tillie Olsen - "I
Stand Here Ironing" - 1961
She was a beautiful baby. She blew shining bubbles of sound. She
loved motion, loved light, loved color and music and textures. She
would lie on the floor in her blue overalls patting the surface so hard in
ecstasy her hands and feet would blur. She was a miracle to me, but
when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes with a woman
downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all, for I worked or looked for
work and for Emily's father, who "could no longer endure" (he wrote in his
good-bye note) "sharing want with us."
You're not a girl
anymore, mother. I know you told me once, but I can never remember
whether to capitalize that word, "mother." It's one way if it's a name
and one way if it's a noun that just means "mother." Bill had one way
I could eat my spaghetti and you had another; I can never remember whether
I'm to slurp or bite off the ends. But let me tell you, earnestly,
what you must know, because I worry that you carry around an unnecessary
burden. You have fought so much in your life, Mother, that you have
earned your rest.
I know the story of my life—my whole life—from your lips. In
dreams I see the faded, yellow-rimmed photographs printed from Safety film
that lies dormant in musky shoeboxes neath your bed. And when, every
few months I help you flip the mattress, and that layer of dust—my own
mother's skin—hits my nose I'm taken back through the bed to the photographs
even though we don't look at them much anymore. And with my husband,
with my son, I tell story after story that I remember only from your telling
of it. I become a character in the story of your life, I suppose.
You have so little bitterness, so much real, raw emotion, that I
can only conclude you have struggled too long and you should simply relax
knowing that everyone whom you love loves you in return. When I look
back, I too see my lack of wisdom that could have led to better outcomes for
my family and my son, but I wholeheartedly accept blame for this whereas you
admit none. How can I possibly explain this to you?—that I want you
never to feel guilty but yet admit guilt. I love you for everything
you've given me and I wouldn't have one second of my life different.
We lived that life together, but please know we could have both done
better. I'm sure the origin of my feelings is in my own sense of
inadequacy—not yours—and I wish to convey that to you, to issue you one
giant apology that will set right everything between us. You already
seem to feel things are right, but can you not see the strain between us?
Can you not sense the hesitation in my voice when I tell you that everything
in my life is fine?
Between us—between every parent and child—there is a gulf. We
can never expect to bring our shores closer together so that I may see
myself from your vantage and vice versa, but we can build a bridge, we can
hold up mirrors, we can use our imagination, and we can seek absolution even
if no authority can bequeath it. What I want, Mother, is your peace.
It is unlikely you will live more than a few years—can we admit this?
Have we lost everything if we admit this? I love you so much, so much.
I look at my son and it's as if I see him through your eyes, with your
struggles in mind. For what we've taught each other; for what we've
given, taken and replaced; and for the abstract notion of "love" and what it
means when I smell the skin of the woman who bore me—for all this— let us
have peace finally.
Top
Day 102:
Cynthia Ozick - "The Shawl" - 1980
Sometimes the electricity inside the fence would seem to hum; even Stella
said it was only an imagining, but Rosa heard real sounds in the wire:
grainy sad voices. The farther she was from the fence, the more
clearly the voices crowded at her. The lamenting voices strummed so
convincingly, so passionately, it was impossible to suspect them of being
phantoms. The voices told her to hold up the shawl, high; the voices
told her to shake it, to whip with it, to unfurl it like a flag.
When I sit here (I
sit) digesting the story, one thousand and one things go through my head.
I wonder if I could really count them all. Really, the burden is this
intertextuality that I drink like a drug. Is it madness, I wonder, to
keep at this, I wonder.
When I sit here (I still sit), I think about the story I've
read once, twice or one thousand and one times, and I wonder what to say
about it. It's about a shawl that Magda sucks on. A shawl.
The shawl.
When I sit here typing in my words from my head to the screen
from the keys and my fingers, I dwell upon the Holocaust and human
suffering. How, I wonder, can we do these things to each other, I
wonder. The sickness, the delusion, the madness.
When I sit here with Ozick's corpses at my feet, stray
wandering, greasy bantering—the green ring of iridescence on a mallard as
he takes to flight. Watch it close—you're in tight, close—as
he flies. You see the body move up and down; you see the patterns in
clouds behind; you feel the buckshot at once into your eyes and all
is nothing for a moment while you both plummet down: ground.
When I sit here I think about the people in this story who
suffer, of Cynthia Ozick, who must also suffer, and for myself that I should
wonder at such things. What is it that makes us read, that makes us
retreat into a world that shows us another and another and another?
When I sit here (I sit) finishing my words (far from one
thousand and one), I wonder at the pictures the sounds the smells in Ozick's
portrayed hell. Almond and cinnamon, almond and cinnamon.
Top
Day 103:
Grace Paley - "A Conversation with My Father" - 1974
I would like to try to tell such a story, if he means the kind that
begins: "There was a woman..." followed by plot, the absolute line between
two points which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but
because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves
the open destiny of life.
The gentleman labeled
"Beard Boy," I'm told, has pledged to defeat the Postmodernist plague,
hoping that the staples of Truth and Beauty and Justice (with a CAPITAL T, B
and J, note you) will swiftly return. I find this a hilarious quest
though I can certainly understand it. If you have a system that
reminds you the ridiculousness of "Us vs. Them," some people will merely
hear the words "us," "versus," and "them" and become excitable. Let me
end this digression (it would have been a digression had I actually began
some meaningful commentary) by saying that Beard Boy's battle with
Postmodernism ought to be taped and shown on pay-per-view since it will
largely amount to a man tearing at his own hair and dropping his own body to
the mat.
We sometimes catch glimpses of the extraordinary long before
we are prepared to understand or rationalize it. (How I wish I could
digress for real on the subject of rationalization!).
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute was such an experience for me.
This book, which contains "A Conversation with My Father," changed my life
even as Paley's nuanced, clever wit flew right over my head. But
"Wants," "Faith in the Afternoon," and "A Conversation with My Father," have
stayed with me in some mystical sense. At least regarding the latter,
here's why:
The narrator informs us that her eighty-six-year-old father
is near death, and the one thing he asks of her is if she can write a normal
story, a "simple" story. For the sake of argument, let the father =
Beard Boy. Beard Boy: "Listen, the [expletive] Russians could tell a
[expletive] story; Chekhov knew what a [expletive] story was, for crying out
loud." Beard Boy's Daughter (let's call her Pace Graley), Pace: "Okay,
Pa, here's the story, an 'unadorned and miserable tale.'" But Beard
Boy isn't satisfied. WHY? I think it's because Pace didn't
really try, because Pace feels her way through a story and feels
her way right in-around-and-through Chekhov and Turgenev and Tolstoy.
Gogol, too. At a later date we can argue which is more real.
Pace: "People can change."
Grace: "Well, it is not necessarily the end, Pa."
Pa: "In your own life, too, you have to look it in the face."
Poe: up next...
Top
Day 104:
Edgar Allan Poe - "The
Cask of Amontillado" - 1846
The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he
ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the
nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a
threat.
This story is Poeish,
for sure. And how could I arrive at Poe without mentioning what he
"did" for the short story? Many say he stood up for its cause; I can't
say for sure since I wasn't around. Sure, I've heard things,
but I wouldn't wish hearsay upon my enemies, and you are hardly that.
Poe wrote that the prose tale, next to the poem, could "best fulfill the
demands of high genius" ("The Importance of the Single Effect in a Prose
Tale," on Hawthorne). It should be no surprise that Poe wrote poetry
and "prose tales" all the time, and then wrote what we know today to be
literary criticism reinforcing what it was he had done. One can hardly
blame him for this; I give him credit, in fact. Then again, I think it
"neat" when authors anonymously review their own work (to good favor).
I'll do this for sure.
This story has accompanied me for at least ten years, and each
reading brings new meaning. This time it was the motley apparel for
Fortunato: profound! But before I get into the subject of Fools, let
me tell you how Poe shot himself in the foot. Extrapolating from that
key phrase "Single Effect" mentioned parenthetically above (part of the
title, of course), I'm reminded of Aristotle's Poetics. Poe's
stories often have a single line of action, one unified plot/chart/course.
"The Cask of Amontillado," beginning where I quoted, then follows through
with the narrator's revenge; nothing extraneous is added to the story;
everything pertains to the hatred and retribution promised. So too
with the next story and (perhaps) most of his others [more may come of this
analysis when I read his COMPLETE works]. In many ways Grace Paley's
story, while directed toward her "father" and Beard Boy, is also intended to
be read to/by Mr. Poe, deceased as he is. "It takes all the hope
away," she writes. I don't whole-heartedly agree with this; I believe
that each method creates a different feeling within a reader and allows the
author different possibilities. For example, what do you do with the
bits of Poe's stories that don't seem to add the "unified" plot?
Do you chalk it up to laudanum? Do you feel a failure for not
incorporating it into to the story? What does Fortunato's motley
contribute to the story (nice segue, to pat myself on the back)? In
Poe's story you can debate the issue ad nauseam; in Paley's you would ignore
it and deem it irrelevant. Each story promises depth upon subsequent
readings, but Poe's depth narrows into a centrality, an event horizon, while
Paley's broadens into a multiplicity. I think authors develop and go
through "phases" that dictate the focus of their stories. I also think
that artists—people—have tendencies that steer this in a particular
direction. It is so nice to not have to worry about a right or wrong
reason.
So the motley? Oh, never mind.
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Day 105:
Edgar Allan Poe - "The
Tell-Tale Heart" - 1843
If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the
wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night
waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I
dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.
"But why will you say
that I am mad?"
In this [short] short story Poe offers a narrator who confesses one
crime (twice) and denies one accusation (once). In the former
instance, he (I'm assuming it's a "he") rather plainly tells how, after
murdering the "old man," he confessed to the police because he thought he
heard a heartbeat coming from below the floor. That same confession
is, of course, made to us the readers. This second confession is
rather significant because it results from his desperation to prove his
sanity. Think about this: just to prove that he's not crazy someone
tells you how he hacked up a man whose "vulture eye" tortured him to no end.
Poe, if nothing else, should be commended, by the ill-favored of
this world (viz. artists) for his handling of madness since it is
omnipresent in his work. People have alleged that he had good reason
to take up this cross—I mean "cause"—since he himself was mad or crazy or
unsound. I have always been interested in the subject of
aesthetic-induced madness or aesthetic-related madness. I find
it intriguing when a narrator, writing to you for some reason,
attempts to prove to you that he or she is mad. Email your favorites
in; I'll post some somewhere someday. Or maybe I'll go mad and forget
(or go mad and simply be mad).
Top
Day 106:
Katherine Anne Porter - "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" - 1935
While she was rummaging around she found death in her mind and it felt
clammy and unfamiliar. She had spent so much time preparing for death
there was no need for bringing it up again. Let it take care of itself
now.
The loss of a life,
of a soul—no more can be done as you lie on the bed that will carry you over
to the opposite of what you'd known for so long. We have the 'what is'
and the 'what is not,' and spending time on what ought to have been is
useless. The resistance is useless, it is useless to resist it.
Thematically, this story is about loss, not death. It's all
about death, though, about purpose and death. Charters, you morbid
editor, you. And can one get tired of death? Can you say,
"Enough, death; I've had enough for now,"? No. Death will come;
it always comes. As sure as life, so too does death come. This
inevitability, this fact of no compromise, shall bear down on us forever if
we let it. So long as we define a life by what came before and after
it—death—we will be forced to live in a cloud of mortality...morbidity.
I imagine a gray cloud; maybe yours is black.
Can we, then, control death?
I think "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" should not be read as a
warning: "Be careful that your life isn't empty, invalidated." Nor is
"Andrew," mentioned in earlier writings. Porter's intention—no, the
story's result—is that the reader should answer the following
question, posed by Granny Weatherall: "Can't a body think, I'd like to
know?" It aims at the essence of spirituality, consciousness, and
humanity. Who jilts Granny? God? Her absent husband?
Her dead child, Hapsy? Or is it us; are we guilty of jilting.
Hmm.
Top
Day 107:
William Sydney Porter - "The Gift of the Magi" - 1905
Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag.
She stood by the window and looked out dully at a grey cat walking a grey
fence in a grey backyard. To-morrow would be Christmas Day, and she
had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present.
This guy
Porter—OOOOO Henry—isn't the best writer but he knows the sounds of words
alright. When you're locked up you find phrases like "Coney Island
chorus girl," and you have nothin' better to do with your time than say
things like "Bing, ring, ding, sting, fling," so that the shape of
something sticks. But I ask myself time and time again, would Porter
himself ever win the O. Henry prize?—I think the answer is no way...no way.
What I remember from "Magi" the other time is the "oh, man!"
feeling of lost hair and watch, gained combs and chain, but not so much the
shape of the words that can't be no accident. There's "pier glass in
an $8 flat," and seven o'clock/chops and ran/panting/hand. It's all
the shape of things coming out of Porter's mouth. The magi business is
thrown in—the Babe in the manger. The best line may be this: "Within
forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made
her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy."
I know this lady, Death Rattle, who always looks like a truant
schoolboy and she ain't even got curls plastered on her head like Della did.
Rattle won't be 'round much longer so I shouldn't linger on her else I may
have jinxed the whole thing. S'fice it to say that Chopin might have
something going for her and had this guy not written so many darn stories
(the "pen" gives you plenty of time, believe you me), he'd have never gotten
so famous. I don't see the big 'ol deal.
Read it for yourself
here and
see.
Top
Day 108:
Philip
Roth - "'I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting'; or, Looking at
Kafka" - 1973
Yet there is more here than a metaphor for the insanely defended ego, whose
striving for invulnerability produces a defensive system that must in its
turn become the object of perpetual concern—there is also a very unromantic
and hardheaded fable about how and why art is made, a portrait of the artist
in all his ingenuity, anxiety, isolation, dissatisfaction, relentlessness,
obsessiveness, secretiveness, paranoia and self-addiction, a portrait of the
magical thinker at the end of his tether, Kafka's Prospero....
The first half of
this story, whose title is too long to mention here (or almost anywhere),
reminds me of Carver's "Errand"
in that it takes a factual look at Kafka's life (as opposed to Chekhov's).
But whereas Carver gradually fades from biography to fiction, Roth does so
abruptly with the use of white space and a number "2." Aiding me is
the understanding I've derived from three Roth books that found their way
into my hands this year. Prior to a happened-upon Fresh Air
interview with Roth late last year, I'd never heard of the fellow (whom many
suggested as a candidate for this year's Nobel Prize in literature, I'm
told). I consider this a humbling admission. In fact, I've never
heard of a million writers—at least. I've never read War & Peace
(though Anna K got me through 2003) or Oliver Twist (the
manuscript of which sits beneath my screen). There was a day that I
believed a man in a red suit delivered presents to all the world's children,
and a day I believed that all of humanity was fundamentally good and
uncorrupt, and that everybody living was a friend if only I asked their
name. So that twenty-three, the age I discovered Philip Roth, doesn't
seem to be the mark of some deficiency, but a sign of some innocence I had
and lost (if you've read American Pastoral, you know exactly what I
mean) and if you beat me there, well then, good for you.
SO, in reading this story (twice the beginning to see if I knew
where the "2" would lead), I came to appreciate its form and its rather
surprising, powerful ending. Now, coming directly after O. Henry, I
should probably clarify this "surprising" ending, as I've called it.
Roth's purpose in the second half of the story is not quite clear until the
last page; a reader might assume he was working subconsciously with the
themes dredged up in "A Hunger Artist" and Kafka's other major works (among
them The Castle, The Trial, "The Judgment," and "The
Metamorphosis"). I would argue that that is of little concern to Roth.
His point, clearly stated—hence the surprise, is that the Kafkaesque
occurrences in Kafka's own life did not singularly make the man who he
was. The second Kafka, Dr. Kishka, can never become the Kafka,
and we're a little let down by this, even in Roth's fantastic-autobiographic
dream world. But that little burrowing vermin—can he become
Kafka?
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Day 109:
Gabrielle Roy - "The Well of Dunrea" - 1955
And my father turned into something like a madman. He waved his arms,
he shouted insults, thinking perhaps that the Little Ruthenians would at
least understand those words. But the foolish wretches through all the
thick smoke madly concentrated on pushing their ploughs around the
settlement. Others carried water from the river to the houses to wet
down the walls; still others drew pailfuls from the communal well, in the
centre of the village, which was deep and almost icy.
What if someone told
you reading would make you blind—would you continue to read? For many
people this isn't a dilemma, but I, in these hours of blurred lines, think
about it. Is it more important to read, feel and know Gabrielle Roy,
or to see? Should I keep my vision in a tin at my breast pocket—save
it for something essential ? Too often do we think about
self-preservation, saving our money, our faculties; too often do we waste
them senselessly. "We can always buy others," we think. Save or
waste: that's how we move from moment to moment. No one knows how to
simply live anymore.
In this story we learn that Edouard, the narrator's father, has
established a settlement at Dunrea, and that it burns terribly after a long
stretch of extraordinary prosperity. Apparently a government official
in charge of such matters, the father makes an error in his explication of
good and evil to a people who don't speak his language. Desperate to
convince them to leave the burning village, he tells "of God's wrath.
All his life [he] believed that there had lain his crime: to have
interpreted God, in a sense to have judged Him."
The father never tells the narrator this story, never tells anyone
but Agnès who, in turn, tells her narrating sister. I'm sure this was
a random thing that Roy threw in there because she was bored and thought, "I
know how to tell this story," and came up with this meaningless approach.
It means nothing.
Roy is a Canadian; Charters seems to favor them over the British.
But as for me I could think about whether it was worth it to have
used my vision reading Roy's story. I could make a list of pros and
cons; I could argue with an invisible audience. But it's not worth it.
I'll just live: Rushdie tomorrow.
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Day 110:
Salman Rushdie - "The Firebird's Nest" - 1997
There are no princes now. The government abolished them decades ago.
The very idea of princes has become, in our modern country, a fiction,
something from the time of feudalism, of fairy tale. Their titles,
their privileges have been stripped from them.
This story is about a
woman and her man. The story is strangely told from her perspective.
He is a prince, she is a businesswoman. Rushdie has a certain way of
telling a story. Simple but elegant, terse but poetic. The
reader is bequeathed the story by its author: "Here is a quarry."
The story is broken into parts as if the story suddenly remembered
more of itself.
Yes, I'll call her soon.
In the story there is a drought. The blonde woman is
pregnant: it will be a boy, they say in the village. People burn in
this story. Miss Maharaj says, "We are caught in metaphors." I
feel this way, too. I'm supposed to tell you about the Firebird but
all I can think about is...
When she answers the phone there might be a silence. You
will get past this if you simply speak.
The baby is born, the woman returns to her country.
Say "hello." This will lead to something else.
I write like Rushdie because I am like Rushdie. We're alike
in some way.
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Day 111:
Carol Shields - "Mirrors" - 1995
He and his wife have claimed their small territory of sacrifice, too.
For years they've become "known" among their friends for the particular
deprivation they've assigned themselves: for the fact that there are no
mirrors in their summer house. None at all. None are allowed.
Shields lives in
Winnipeg, Canada it says in her bio. She teaches writing. Is
that all writers do: teach? Teach with their writing, teach with their
person?
I remember Short Story Writing II and this girl who wrote a story
titled "The Mirror." I wrote in my response: "Crashing an airplane
seems overly dramatic for the story." It was a story about people who
see their future/death in a hotel mirror. I happen to know she's been
published now, but not "The Mirror." I'd tell you her name, but what's
the point?
Shields mirror story is about the perseverance of love, the quest
for identity, the external vs. internal. The perspective is tricky—I
warn you about that. It is not a third-person narrative even though
you will think it might be. The story is not about the
husband's affair. That is unimportant and important at the same time.
After working on a deck at the summer house, the husband wants to say, "This
is what I've dreamed of all my life, being this tired, this used up, and
having someone like you, exactly like you, waking up at my side." He
doesn't need to say it.
That people can be mirrors is the point of this story [noun clause
as subject]. That love is a connection and a reflection is Shields'
point, I think. It is necessarily so but we don't always swallow it.
What will it take to swallow it other than a taste of longing for that
perfect black night when he or she is beside you and you want to say, "This
is what I've dreamed of all my life..."
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Day 112:
Leslie
Marmon Silko - "Yellow Woman" - 1974
I came back to the place on the river bank where he had been sitting the
first time I saw him. The green willow leaves that he had trimmed from
the branch were still lying there, wilted in the sand. I saw the
leaves and I wanted to go back to him—to kiss him and to touch him—but the
mountains were too far away now. And I told myself, because I believe
it, he will come back sometime and be waiting again by the river.
A woman, a Pueblo,
standing by the river, with her husband Al watching their baby at home,
walks down to the river and sees ka'tsina spirit hewing willow leaves from a
branch; she spends the night with him, he a spirit or a Navajo or a cattle
rustler named Silva. She wants the magic, mystery and intrigue that
accompany even the shallowest of legends. She wants to leave behind
the school, the highways, the pickups. She longs for an earlier time.
This resonates...
I was talking to somebody about this story, and she said that the
reservation was a metaphor for whatever boundaries the human heart knows.
She said, "In the story, it's the inevitable meeting with the white man.
In our lives it might be a border or it might be fear." I nodded like
I'd thought of it, too. I wanted to ask about the hunger, the warmth
and the cold that the narrator feels and relates. Does she really
sense those things or is she mocking that tranquility? I wondered.
In a way, my friend said, Silko and the narrator form a harmonious
union when they think of their lives as being fodder for future generations.
"I was wondering if Yellow Woman [the mythological person to whom the
narrator is connected] had known who she was—if she knew that she would
become part of the stories." Silko or Joyce or Paley might have all
wondered this about earlier authors who wondered this about even earlier
authors. The ka'tsina spirit tells her that "someday they will talk
about us, and they will say, 'Those two lived long ago when things like that
happened.'" The spirit is right, my friend said. "Say the spirit
is wrong, and you'll be wrong," my friend said.
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Day 113:
Isaac Bashevis Singer - "Gimpel the
Fool" - 1953
When the pranksters and leg-pullers found that I was easy to fool, every one
of them tried his luck with me. "Gimpel, the czar is coming to
Frampol; Gimpel, the moon fell down in Turbeen; Gimpel, little Hodel
Furpiece found a treasure behind the bathhouse." And I like a golem
believed them.
If you, like me, read
this story, and then years later pick it up again, read it, and then read it
three days later when your head is spinning with sympathy for Gimpel, you
won't remember that Singer wrote it in the first person. Presumably
this was no accident.
Gimpel is betrayed by almost everyone. He marries a whore
(both figuratively and literally, I think) after being tricked into
believing her chastity (her bastard son is but a little brother, the
townsfolk tell him); in all she bears six children and none are Gimpel's.
What an idiot! What a fool!
The rabbi said to Gimpel, "It is written, better to be a fool all
your days than for one hour to be evil." Does foolishness equal
purity? Was Christ a fool? Is Gimpel merely gullible? Naa.
He's not because when he comes home to find his wife sleeping with another
man, he decides not to make a scene because he might wake the child—and a
bastard at that. Is Gimpel a pushover? Naa. His wife,
dying, begs for forgiveness and he grants it. He didn't have to do
this.
Why would we find these things foolish? I'd say because
most people, after being hurt by somebody or something, either
desensitize their ego or put up a layer of protection to prevent further
infractions. This usually turns out later to nip us in the arse since
1. we've changed for a silly reason (viz. not for an internal desire)
and 2. when we subsequently encounter a genuine soul, we assume they're
crying wolf. It seems this is Gimpel's concern: if he stops trusting,
how can he trust god (or his instincts that there is a god)? "No doubt
the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from
the true world," Gimpel writes/says. Heaven, he concludes, is the once
place he shall never be deceived, the one time (eternity) that he'll be at
peace with himself and his surroundings. Meanwhile the rest of us will
be endlessly stripping away the useless protective layers we've gathered
through years of pain and suffering and joy and loss.
Translated by Saul Bellow.
Top
Day 114:
Susan Sontag - "The Way We Live Now" - 1986
It's undeniable, isn't it, said Kate on the phone to Stephen, the
fascination of the dying. It makes me ashamed. We're learning
how to die, said Hilda, I'm not ready to learn, said Aileen; and Lewis, who
was coming straight from the other hospital, the hospital where Max was
still being kept in ICU, met Tanya getting out of the elevator on the tenth
floor, and as they walked together down the shiny corridor past the open
doors, averting their eyes from the other patients sunk in their beds, with
tubes in their noses, irradiated by the bluish light from the television
sets, the thing I can't bear to think about, Tanya said to Lewis, is someone
dying with the TV on.
Sontag might have
broken one or two grammatical rules in this story, but to an extraordinary
effect. Indeed, there are enough dangling modifiers to make a
rhetorician ill. But their danglingness isn't the issue here, it is
compassion, helplessness, love, sympathy, pity, selfishness and death.
Someone has AIDS, and is hospitalized upon falling ill. The
story itself is comprised of gossip exchanged by his closest friends who
visit him as regularly as possible (or don't, thereby giving them something
else to talk about). My story-a-day partner asked, "Does this relate
at all to Hempel's 'Jolson' story?" bringing up an interesting question.
Both deal closely with the impending death of a friend and both are set
largely in hospitals. Both feature fractured narration (they jump, I
mean). But Sontag's story is social, relatively impersonal.
Because the information comes from a chorus of voices, the reader never
identifies with one in particular (their idiosyncrasies even begin to blend
them into each other), instead getting a montage effect regarding the man
who is actually dying. Apropos of Trollope's indictment of English
avarice (by the same name, The Way We Live Now, written in the
late nineteenth century), I can say nothing.
What I felt, though... What I felt... Futility toward the
disease, toward human beings that will never remember how to deal with death
so long as they put it into someone else's hands. Is the point of
keeping a diary to stake out a claim to a future time? Is that the
point of a story, of literature?
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Day 115:
Gertrude Stein - "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene" - 1922
To be regularly gay was to do every day the gay thing that they did every
day. To be regularly gay was to end every day at the same time after
they had been regularly gay. They were regularly gay. They were
gay every day. They ended every day in the same way, at the same time,
and they had been every day regularly gay.
Never has it been so
easy to pick an excerpt because every paragraph says the same thing. I
was thinking "Cubist, cubist rabbit," the whole time. It's difficult
to explain.
There's this guy I know who takes a shovel every time I yell the
word "snow" and he asks "Where? Where?" He follows me around.
Stein sat for Picasso, Charters tells me. I've seen it,
though; it's nothing to call home about.
So every paragraph says basically the same thing about the women
being gay. They're gay here, they're gay there, they travel, they
stay, they're gay, they're not quite gay, they do the same thing every day,
which is to say be gay and do that again. They meet some men, go their
separate ways and learn to be gay again. They were learning how to
speak with articulation: that's how they met.
Stein lived with her brother in France, living off an inheritance;
her father invested in San Francisco railcars.
Alice B. Toklas. Alice.
Miss Furr, Miss Skeene.
Top
Day 116:
John
Steinbeck - "Chrysanthemums" - 1938
"Well, I can only tell you what it feels like. It's when you're
picking off the buds you don't want. Everything goes right down into
your fingertips. You watch your fingers work. They do it
themselves. You can feel how it is. They pick and pick the buds.
They never make a mistake. They're with the plant. Do you see?
Your fingers and the plant. You can feel that, right up your arm.
They know. They never make a mistake. You can feel it.
When you're like that you can't do anything wrong. Do you see that?
Can you understand that?"
I never told anyone
that while I was in the ocean at Morro Beach, moments after I'd cut the
bottom of my foot on a jagged clamshell sticking up in the sand back on the
shore, but before I'd felt the slippery brushing-by of a jellyfish or kelp
strand on my calf, while my friend was retrieving my shorts which I'd
foolishly spurned, shorts swallowed by the riptide, I heard a voice say to
me, amidst the chaos of waves crashing over my head—rhythmic baptisms
repeated at lunar intervals salt-stinging mine eyes, "Everything goes down
to your fingertips," and I could feel my digits tingling as if they'd been
grazed with man-of-war tentacles or serpent's venom, perchance deadened by
the repetitive holding of chords among these ocean strings.
I never told this to a soul. I found the trunks (bright
orange) and moved on. Was the sea beckoning me like a siren?
Sirens scare you out of the way but you must look, must follow.
Stories like Steinbeck's make me regret the end of this book.
Fourteen stories, twenty days away. A long December, and there's
reason to believe: maybe this year will be better than the last. How
do the days seem so long when the light grows so short? How does
Steinbeck write such a brilliant, beautiful story?
It's love but it's not. Elisa tells the man-passing how to
prune the mums..."Maybe I know," he said. Love and sex and death.
I just reread the story.
"She brushed a cloud of hair out of her eyes with the back of her
glove," it says.
"Triumphantly definitive 'Fixed' below."
We fix relationships: they get better; we fix cats: they lose
something vital to their sex; we fix a bet: it's rigged, fake; we fix a
stance: it becomes permanent. The dress is the "symbol of [Elisa's]
prettiness."
I never told anyone that once I walked silently into a
bathroom only to hear a man-child whispering a prayer that said, "Don't let
my mother hate me, don't let my mother hate me, don't let my mother hate
me." Hearing me he flushed the toilet, exited the stall and washed his
hands at the sink next to mine. "If she only knew," I thought.
He fixed his hair up a bit and bore his teeth to the mirror. He
smacked his lips.
She was crying weakly—like an old woman.
That last is in quotes: Steinbeck wrote it.
Top
Day 117:
Amy
Tan - "Two Kinds" - 1989
I would play for him, the simple scale, the simple chord, and then I just
played some nonsense that sounded like a cat running up and down on top of
garbage cans. Old Chong smiled and applauded and then said, "Very
good! But now you must learn to keep time."
Ts, terrible twos,
copper joints. I's talking to this guy onda bus today with the
watermelon skin of a thin leather helmet onis head. "HEY," I said.
I didna like this story. No modern glory. Was goofy
like when you put in a movie, like a real old tape, and it ends up beinna a
soap opera. Like when you pick up a shakespeare bookplay and read it
and it happens to be one of his soap opera plays. I know how to say
it. It's like Tan read a bunch of these stories among anthologies and
said, "step one, make me to a cute character; step two, make me ugly so
everyone will like me; step three, make this about my family and how they
never understand." I don't know. You know what I mean?
Sometimes I dream about Miss Furr, Miss Skeene.
In this story this girl ducks away when her mama says she's a
brilliant genius. It's because brilliant geniuses like Tan are so
humble that they don't want to put everyone to shame, right? Or it's
because the girl in the story with the lopsided bangs is afraid to realize
her full potential. An episode of The Ed Sullivan Show decides
her fate as a pianist. The other tests showed nothing. Nothing.
The Joy Luck Club—it's mentioned in here, but it's not nearly as
interesting as the introduction to Thurber which says he lost an eye as a
child. It really says boy—"When he was a boy he lost an eye," but
"child" sounded better with the eye plus the diphthong and the lengthened
ending all made it one way for me as I was writing the sentence in my head
moments before it appeared here. I did it again.
Yesterday a writer "was found dead" in her car, the victim of an
"apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound." I wonder how Hemingway
would have written it having been in the same lucky Joy Luck Club himself:
"Barrel to the chest, she pulled the glorious trigger. Alcohol
dripping down her throat as she died..." Better than rocks in the
pocket (or is it?). Leave it to Tan to give us a story with no death,
and leave it to me to go there, to come here. Look how "here" is just
"there" without the "t." It's beautiful like that. Pleading
Child, Perfectly Contented—give me a break.
Top
Day 118:
James Thurber - "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" - 1942
The District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising from his
chair, Mitty let the man have it on the point of the chin. "You
miserable cur!" . . .
"Puppy biscuit," said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking
and the buildings of Waterbury rose up out of the misty courtroom and
surrounded him again. A woman who was passing laughed. "He said,
'Puppy biscuit,'" she said to her companion. "That man said, 'Puppy
biscuit' to himself." Walter Mitty hurried on.
Charters has got this
hilarious n.p.a. on Thurber in her bio of him: "James Thurber (1894-1961),
the humorist, was born...." Isn't that hilarious? The humorist.
I wish I could be called "The Humorist." Maybe I'll sign my name
"T.H." I never know what to do with those periods of initials when
ending a sentence in quotes.
What is a humorist? Is it like Lucio, the fantastic, in
Measure for Measure ? Shakespeare would never have called Lucio a
"humorist" even if he was one (whatever one is) because back then someone
who was "humorous" was basically moody. That or they were influenced
by one of the known humors (being bilious, sanguine, etc). Is
Thurber's story funny? Yes.
Walter Mitty is a (I'd say) middle-aged fellow in town to run
errands with his wife when he suddenly lapses into fantastic delusions about
his situation. First he's the Commander of an eight-engined Navy
hydroplane, then a doctor performing heart surgery, then a witness at a
murder trial, then a man preparing to be executed.
"Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?" Walter
asks his wife when she interrupts his day-dreaming.
What's funny is Mitty's entry to reality. Trying to save the
crew aboard the hydroplane, Mitty is jarred when his wife tells him he's
driving too fast. Preparing to dive into the thoracic cavity of a
millionaire patient, Mitty is accosted by the parking attendant who
recommends a better driving strategy.
What's not funny is that imagination is scarcely rewarded and
completely underappreciated for the solace it gives us. The more you
dream, imagine, plan and reflect, the healthier (and crazier) you'll be in
life. Like right now I'm hardly thinking about Mitty or Thurber
anymore. I'm wondering where I can see someone play the Presto agitato
of Beethoven's Sonata No.14 Op.27/2 in C#m, and how many more of these
golden leaves will fall from the hybrid walnut tree. Okay, let's say
it's a Japanese Zelkova tree.
Top
Day 119:
Leo Tolstoy - "The
Death of Ivan Ilych" - 1886
It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before,
namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after
all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts
to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed
people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately
suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.
And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his
family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been
false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly
felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to
defend.
Between the
Geary theater and the Powell street Metro station lies a stretch of San
Francisco that, if visited at night, is enough to dampen anyone's spirits
even if they are incredibly moved by what they had seen at point A, and what
prospect lay ahead of them at Point B. It is not so much the smell of
stale urine or the police cars that, in such numbers, give the impression of
a riot zone, as it is the ingrates who, at given street corners (let us
suppose Ellis and Taylor), say things like, "You shouldn't give them any
change; they're like pigeons that way." Yes, people are like pigeons;
feed them and they will live and multiply. Strange how we can find
ourselves Gods...
The death of Ivan Ilych is quite moving. "The Death of Ivan
Ilych" is also quite moving, but not to the same degree as the first.
I have a step-niece (politics of relations was never my forte),
Alyssa, who loves to draw. She actually sends me pictures in the mail.
For the last three drawings or so, I have had to tolerate her most recent
fetish: connect-the-dots pictures. Though these receive the same
amount of refrigerator real estate at my house, I miss the original works
(you should see her birds now—they're easily better than mine). But
the last one, whose dots were misconnected (meaning she took the dots
and drew her own picture with them), had the strangest addition: she'd
written four or five nonsense words (five: I just checked), one of them
being "life." Having to look at this every time I enter my writing
room and living quarters, it struck me profoundly tonight (after having
finished "TDII") that she was absolutely correct, my step-niece. Life
is about connecting the dots in your own way. Everyone must
live first in ignorance in the concept of dots; then they try to place their
own dots here and there. One day they deny the existence of life's
dubious dots, and another they show so little concern that they're
considered Dot Agnostics. At some point each person accepts the dots
in our periphery—our history—and begins to forge the painful (and
delightful—so delightful) path from dot-to-dot. This may sound
rudimentary, but I assure you it's not. The problem is that the idea
came from the extraordinary mind of my step-niece and has been filtered
through my sluggish brain.
My point, then, is that Ivan Ilych lives his entire life according
to custom, according to the "I need a higher rank so I can provide for my
family" plan. His biggest crime in life was that his ultimate
happiness came because of what he owned, not what he saw, appreciated
or gave. It can be empowering to stand above men and call them
pigeons, but take a closer look at yourself.
Ivan (Jean, as he is occasionally called by his wife) is blessed
with his son, his schoolboy son, who grants his final epiphany before death.
It is witnessing his son's suffering (caused by Ivan's own pain and
complaint of pain) that teaches him he holds power over others even to his
last breath. His reason to live and his reason to die are the
same: he can do good to others. "What had happened to him was like the
sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks
one is going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly
becomes aware of the real direction."
Tolstoy originally wrote this story as (largely) a diary of Ivan
Ilych, but later revised it since the epiphany would have had to be told by
some other character and because he considered the style too didactic.
The story is wonderfully circular in that it begins and ends with Ivan's
death; the reader wishes, at the end, to return to the beginning to see once
more how Ivan Ilych's life went so terribly wrong. It didn't go
terribly wrong, just wrong. And I don't know what Louise and
Aylmer were doing when they were supposed to be TRANSLATING, but whatever it
was, I hope they had fun.
Translated by Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude.
Top
Day 120:
John
Updike - "A&P" - 1961
By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag—she
gives me a little snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time
they would have burned her over in Salem—by the time I get her on her way
the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a
pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the checkouts
and the Special bins. They didn't even have shoes on.
No shoes no
shirt no service, the sign read (as signs do), the sign
hanging—dangling—down from the top jamb toothpick piece of wood, as if
giving the impression that you'd have to be a moron to bump the sign with
your head and not have read it. Sherry Ann passed through and I could
see by the way the sign spun round her face that she had not an ounce of
makeup on, that her skin was smooth as a summer peach with fuzz but no dew,
that she'd persist through that door breaking all the rules for she had no
shirt or any shoes. But wait. She carried sandals in her hand,
and in a basket with string handles carried her top which she'd taken off
from the heat: underneath she wore a thin halter thing tied up with two pale
blue strings round that neck of hers. Strings of the bag matched the
strings of her neck; Sherry'd effected that coincidence for the clerk
counting the day-minutes left he had to work and wanting nothing less than
this girl through this door at this second, the manager peckin' his head
round from each corner of the store, each floating, rolling cart of clothes
as he smacked the hangers together and apart not to look so much as to sort.
But you know Sherry Ann, the one "who always rode with that guy in
his slick car his hair marble and his arms thick as your head."
J.U. and I were good friends back before...before...before he
trampled on J.D.'s soul and left us here with no one to believe. I
take J.K.'s soul in a handbag like the one Sherry Ann-bag was looking for
that day in the store when Jeffrey wiped his brow and said timorously, "How
can I help ya, Sherry," the manager purple as a huckleberry still peckin',
always peckin'.
But I never worked in any A&P, never found out what it was like to
be in service of another for the stretch of an encounter. Sherry'd say
things like that: "Remember the encounter." Yes, Sherry Ann
"who always had lipstick on her teeth at the dance and wore a dirty
newspaper rubberband in her hair." Goodbye Sherry Ann; goodbye to you.
Top
Day 121:
Helena María Viramontes - "The
Moths" - 1985
My hands were too big to handle the fineries of crocheting or embroidery and
I always pricked my fingers or knotted my colored threads time and time
again while my sisters laughed and called me bull hands with their cute
waterlike voices. So I began keeping a piece of jagged brick in my
sock to bash my sisters or anyone who called me bull hands. Once,
while we all sat in the bedroom, I hit Teresa on the forehead, right above
her eyebrow and she ran to Amá with her mouth open, her hand over her eye
while blood seeped between her fingers. I was used to the whippings by
then.
You: Did you
like this story?
Me: Well, at first, no. Later, yes.
You: What changed?
Me: The story, I think.
You: You think?
Me: I could be wrong. I could always be wrong.
You: Something specific?
Me: Well, I used to think I had forever, but now I
don't know.
You: No, I meant specific about Viramontes' story.
Me: The image, the final image of the narrator lowering
her grandmother into the tub. A word like "beautiful" won't do much to
explain it, but I'll say it nevertheless: It was beautiful.
You: Why "Moths"?
Me: The Vicks in the hand and then the moths that fly
out of the grandmother's body in the tub.
You: What went through your head when the narrator began
washing the body, described in detail, after it had stopped functioning?
Me: "Now I'm glad I've read this."
You: What's going through your head right now?
Me: "I'm exhausted." I'm a little depressed to
have only ten more stories left.
You: Are you pleased with the overall Story-a-Day situation?
Me: I could have been more faithful. It shouldn't
have taken me four days to read "Heart of Darkness."
You: But technically you think that the story should be cut
from the book!
Me: That's not true; it's not confirmed.
You: If somebody offered you a thousand dollars for your
words concerning "Story-a-Day," would you take it?
Me: Are you offering?
You: No.
Me: I'll say this: If somebody offered me a thousand
dollars to NOT finish the story-a-day, I'd refuse.
You: Why?
Me: It's too important.
You: Does it have to do with Viramontes?
Me: Entirely: I translate that into "Do they see the
mountains?"
You: That would me "Miramontes," don't you think.
Me: So it's true you don't know anything.
You: Absolutely true.
Me: Good; we're agreed.
You: It might mean "One who changes mountains."
You: It might mean "One who finishes stories with moths."
You: It might mean "I love you."
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Day 122:
Kurt
Vonnegut - "Harrison Bergeron" - 1968
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only
equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way.
Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than
anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.
All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the
Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States
Handicapper General.
More of a
morality tale than a character-driven, richly textured narrative, this story
delivers a strong message: though we claim to want supreme equality
among all human beings, such a state would be ridiculous and
counter-productive. Vonnegut shows us the ultimate egalitarian
society, wherein a Handicapper General ensures that every citizen is equal;
some folks are slowed down if they are too fast, some are masked if they are
beautiful, and others are given earbud receivers that blare annoying sounds
to disrupt thought if they are intelligent. The author's point is
rather remarkable in that it seems to prove that despite this "leveling," we
will always retain a notion of the good, the beautiful, the superior.
Faster will always be preferred to slower, whether it be in thought or on
foot. This does seem to reflect Plato's universal ideals, but it also
shows a shade of myopia on Vonnegut's part, for he ignores the question of
how our upbringing, environment and society shapes or creates these ideals.
For instance, it's conceivable that tallness as a trait may someday be
frowned upon. It's also conceivable that the ideals themselves are a
byproduct of a larger-than-natural or rapidly expanding global society.
We want justice and we want equality. At the same time we want to
witness excellence. Is there a disparity in these two desires?
Vonnegut might be making the case against mediocrity and for the
pursuit of the good, but he might also be attempting to deconstruct the myth
of equality, namely that two people can ever be equal. Is there ever
an equitable situation between two people, whether lovers, family members or
friends? Can we all be ranked on a hierarchical scale according to our
traits? Or can some deficiencies in character be balanced with a
sizeable excess in another trait?
A husband and wife, George and Hazel Bergeron (clearly not equal
since Hazel took her husband's name—fix this Kurt!), are only modestly
bothered (spl inf) when their son Harrison is taken by the H-G men
(Handicapper General) (f/pass). Later they see him on TV as he
declares himself the Emperor. At seven feet tall and with a "genius"
mind, Harrison is a logical target for the H-G men. He takes a wife
(an empress), a ballerina, and dances with her on TV while his parents watch
(only mildly bothered). Afterward they don't even remember what they'd
seen. To be honest, I don't even remember this story since this
buzzing in my ear began about ten minutes ago. I originally thought it
a joke but now I don't know. Sixty-six pages left. Nine stories.
Top
Day 123:
Alice Walker - "Roselily" - 1973
The rest she does not hear. She feels a kiss, passionate, rousing,
within the general pandemonium. Cars drive up blowing their horns.
Firecrackers go off. Dogs come from under the house and begin to yelp
and bark. Her husband's hand is like the clasp of an iron gate.
People congratulate.
Tell me
about it, then.
Well, it's a piece about marriage. I don't mean
marriage as a cultural institution so much as the act itself and its impact
on the participants. The perspective is removed but focused on one
person, a woman, Roselily. Instead of linear narrative, each paragraph
is broken up by the familiar lines spoken by the presiding priest, pastor or
justice of the peace: "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of
God to join this man and this woman...." The story tells a little of
Roselily.
And why am I supposed to publish this?
Supposed to? I don't know why you're supposed
to publish anything, as if to say there's a divine intention with your
books. I know why I would publish this if I had any money:
because it's true. It's good and true. To me? Yes, to me
and to everyone who reads it and thinks I'm being honest. Well I don't
know how that honesty is formed; I guess it's formed somewhere in the words.
People will read it and it will either feel true or it will push them away.
Since I wrote "Roselily" with true intentions, I suspect it will appeal to
people on this level. No, I don't know what "true intentions" are,
either.
What is your theme? Literary precursors?
Listen, I don't need all this. You read the
story and if you like it, then print it. I'm not going to fill you up
with big ideas of mine just so you can sound smart when you talk among your
friends about the authors you publish. Yes, you just want to say, at a
soiree will millionaires and whores in sequin dresses with sashes and silk
scarves and animal furs, "Well I was talking with Miss Walker just the other
day, as a matter of fact, and she said that 'Roselily' came from here."
I don't care if you think I'm shooting myself in the foot by saying this.
Do you think I care? Would I come here saying these things if they
weren't true? How do you know what's true? How do any of us
know? Portrait of a lady as a wife? I'm leaving.
Top
Day 124:
Eudora Welty - "Why I Live at the P.O." - 1941
I said that oh, I didn't mean a thing, only that whoever Shirley-T. was, she
was the spit-image of Papa-Daddy if he'd cut off his beard, which of course
he'd never do in the world. Papa-Daddy's Mama's papa and sulks.
Stella-Rondo got furious! She said, "Sister, I don't
need to tell you you got a lot of nerve and always did have and I'll thank
you to make no future reference to my adopted child whatsoever."
I read this
story about fifty times in prep for this class I had on American lit.
The teach says to us, he says, "I want you all to read this story and tell
me next week what it's all about," and the funniest thing happened: I was
the only one who'd read it. I suspect someone else had read it because
the class had about twenty folks in it, but no one fessed up, so I was left
alone to say what it was all about, and this is what I said. I said,
"Well, it seems to be about a girl whose sister is now back home and giving
her problems." "Yes," teach says. "And Stella-Rondo" (that's the
sister) "comes back to bug the girl" (called "Sister," to confuse things)
"with this child of two years who is supposedly adopted, but some folks
suspect otherwise." "Right," teach says, but I can tell he wants
something else from me so I start to ramble on: "The title talks about the
girl going to live at the P.O., by which is meant the Post Office, not a
P.O. box like we'd think today for this story was written in 1941—quite a
long time ago—and by E. Welty out in Mississippi where they maybe have a
different way of talking about things." (Teach is nodding a bit now, staring
down into his book.) "And so the story is about this family who has got this
crisis now on its hands of the one sister home with child and the other
sister—the older sister (by one year)—living away at the P.O. It's a
crisis story." "Lighthearted or serious?" teach asks. "Well,
serious it seems but the words don't make you take it all with too much
salt." "Salt," says he. "Yes, salt. Everything sort of
comes together on the Fourth of July which is Independence day here—" (I
said this because teach was from Canada though I guess he might have already
known judging by the chuckle I heard from the other students) "—that is,
everything that leads to Sister leaving for the P.O. where she works."
Now try as I may, and I don't say such things in jest for they're never
really funny, I couldn't go much further even though I'd read the story a
hundred times. I talked myself hoarse in that class trying to say what
it was that happened in the story, but now I realize that it was not too
much. Not too much happened in the story. Sometimes we just look
too hard and find things that others might call b.s. and they're not too far
from the truth. But if we're talking about the truth, you can always
look deep into writing whether it's good or bad, and you can always talk
about characters and voice and whatnot of a piece. What sort of
bothered me after a hundred-fifty read-throughs of this story was, why?
Why am I doing this? I didn't know and then I said, well, I've got to
draw the line somewhere, and so I put it down. Down and away.
Now I'm here reading it again for the last time I suspect.
You can just read it yourself
here.
Top
Day 125:
Eudora Welty - "A
Worn Path" - 1941
Then she went on, parting her way from side to side with the cane, through
the whispering field. At last she came to the end, to a wagon track
where the silver grass blew between the red ruts. The quail were
walking around like pullets, seeming all dainty and unseen.
Welty has won
awards. One place says, "She's the only living author to be re-edited
by the Library of America." She's known by where she comes from, her
origins I mean: Mississippi, the South. She's compared to other
Southern writers. She has an out-of-favor email program named after
her (for real). In 2001, she died.
In her mid-nineties, I wonder what went through Welty's mind
when she picked up a book of modern fiction. I wonder what went
through her mind when she read the newspaper, went to the grocery store or
called her niece. This is what people do: they wonder.
"A Worn Path" describes "an old Negro woman with her head
tied in a red rag" as she makes her way by hook or by crook (I love that
phrase) to town, to the "paved city" where it was Christmas time.
Wasn't it Christmas time outside the city? No. Don't look at me;
I didn't write the story.
I found myself noticing tiny tiny details. Maybe I did
this because I was very focused. Maybe it was because I was reading by
the light of a flickering candle. Here's a detail: "Down in the hollow
was a mourning dove—it was not too late for him." Another detail: her
hair, "in the frailest of ringlets...with an odor like copper."
Another detail: "Phoenix." Another: the scarecrow.
My favorite favorite part of this story came in the second
paragraph: "She looked straight ahead." It's just that line but it may
be the best line I've ever read and I'm not just messing around.
Welty—the narrator, I mean—is describing the main character of the story
beginning with clothing/dress. The old woman's dress is followed to
her feet: now look at her shoes. But the old woman in the story has no
reason to look at her own untied shoes; WE want to look down at the shoes
and so we have the old woman, the one in our head(s), look down at her own
shoes. Welty—the narrator, I mean—says "NO!" and so writes, "She
looked straight ahead." This is brilliant. It has changed me.
If I can write just one line like this, I will have not lived in vain.
I'm not joking, either. I wouldn't waste your time or mine.
Did I mention what the story was about? There's a sick
boy. That's all. Old woman—town—back. Thank you.
Top
Day 126:
Edith
Wharton - "Roman Fever" - 1936
Mrs. Slade gave an unquiet laugh. "Yes; I was beaten there. But
I oughtn't to begrudge it to you, I suppose. At the end of all these
years. After all, I had everything; I had him for twenty-five years.
And you had nothing but that one letter that he didn't write.
Where have I
been? Charters dropped Wharton on my lap—and BOOM. This was an
amazing, I'd-actually-pay-for-it story. I was expecting the book to
peter out, but I know now not to doubt the latter half of the alphabet (more
on this later).
I can't say enough good things about "Roman Fever." It
is well-written, well-planned. The narrative strategy is brilliant for
its secret intention to align you with one of the characters (Slade) effects
the reader's powerful emotional response to the information at the end.
The dialogue is compact and perfect-play-like (smells of a dramatist's work,
I guess you could say). I even had to look up a few words from the
dictionary (this is always a good thing). First more story:
"Two American ladies of ripe but well-cared for middle age" lounge
on the "terrace of [a] Roman restaurant" talking and remaining silent
alternatively. They share a long history (childhood friends,
neighbors, fellow socialites) and now, on their daughters' leashes, are in
Rome together once more. Below them are ruins, the setting of their
youth. One of the women, Mrs. Slade, while generally more
introspective, has a vendetta against her old friend Mrs. Ansley.
Initially we think it is only her envy driving it (she thinks this, too),
but soon we're told she has no reason to envy anything (except, perhaps, the
brilliance of her friend's daughter; though Slade's own daughter is far from
lacking in positive traits, we're told). I can't continue for ethical
reasons.
Did I mention this was an amazing story? It never
leaves the restaurant terrace; the characters remain
guarded—constricted—by the parapet through which they look down to
the Roman ruins that figure prominently into their past lives. "Roman
Fever": a delicate balance of characterization and plot. Wonderful.
Thank you, Edith.
Top
Day 127:
John
Edgar Wideman - "All Stories Are True" - 1993
If the downtown wedge of skyscrapers where three rivers meet is the city's
Golden Triangle, this could be its Green Triangle. A massive tree
centuries old holds out against the odds here across from my mother's house,
one of the biggest trees in Pittsburgh, anchored in a green tangle of weeds
and bushes, trunk thick as a Buick, black as night after rain soaks its
striated hide. Huge spread of its branches canopies the foot of the
hill where the streets come together.
It took me a
page to feel comfortable reading this story. At first, you see, I was
thrown from my hobby horse after each /frag/, each /dm/, each /f.npa/, each
/rts/, each /f.coord/, each /f.sub/, each rule broken like a horse gallops [sic].
We do that when we read a lot: we form expectations, we get used to an idea
(I hate writing "used to") and we're rubbed the wrong way when we get
something else. "All Stories Are True" is something else.
All of it (the story) is a prison, and all we have to do is
get out. We? You, me, the narrator. The narrator is going
to get out with the help of his words that will break rules until we learn
new rules, one by one, until we accept the new rules, one by one, so that
then what we're focusing on is our own prison break. Page break,
prison break, reality break—same thing break.
And with poetry, with the words and sounds-etry, he gets us
there (here).
Look at this:
a massive tree centuries old holds out against the odds here across
Most easily hear the alliteration of "old holds," an effect
achieved by introducing the adjective after the noun (as they do in many
other languages), but LOOKing at the letters do you see: Old hOlds Out Odds?
Do you hear trEE/centurEEz? Odds/acrOss? Do you mind the fact
that "one of the biggest trees in Pittsburgh" actually modifies "my mother's
house"? I mind. I minded (mound?), so I read it again and again.
I'm still reading it. Aloud: "from my mother's house, one of the
biggest trees in Pittsburgh." Again. "From my mother's house,
one of the biggest trees in Pittsburgh, anchored..."
Are we there yet? No?
Again.
[never forget the leaf blowing overback]
Top
Day 128:
William Carlos Williams - "The Use of Force" - 1938
Get me a smooth-handled spoon of some sort, I told the mother. We're
going through with this. The child's mouth was already bleeding.
Her tongue was cut and she was screaming in wild hysterical shrieks.
Perhaps I should have desisted and come back in an hour or more. No
doubt it would have been better. But I have seen at least two children
lying dead in bed of neglect in such cases, and feeling that I must get a
diagnosis now or never I went at it again. But the worst of it was
that I too had got beyond reason. I could have torn the child apart in
my own fury and enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to attack her. My
face was burning with it.
For some reason
I remembered this story being better than I thought it was. Isn't
funny how that happens from time to time? There are movies I think
funny again only a month after swearing I was the stupidest human alive for
watching them. I suppose this is a protective strategy of memory.
But how about the story that gets better the longer you wait after reading
it? Sometimes when I pick up a Hemingway novel, the prose seems much
different than I remembered. This may be an issue of the "parts" and
the "whole." What an intriguing thought: Hemingway's prose is a
certain way; let us say "X." But Hemingway's entire novel distorts the
remembrance of his prose, turns it into "Y." Complicating matters
further is the external, extra-logical (beyond-word) data that affects the
sentient human being: an author was this way or that, a drunk, celibate, a
monk, decrepit, a lesbian, a heathen—whatever. Now we have the prose
at "Z." An example of the latter, you ask? Let us assume that
everyone knows Williams (yes, this Williams) is a romantic.
He's the nicest guy in the world (when he was alive). You read a story
by him: it's a third-person narration that tells a touching story but has a
sarcastic undertone that runs counter to the notion of Williams the author.
While you're reading the story you forget whatever you knew about Williams,
of course; you're not blinded by that to see the narrator (or if you are,
it's another matter entirely). But after the fact, you'll look back, I
assert, and forget the tinge—whatever it was in the first place. Now
you're at "Z." Perhaps this thing goes all back and through the
alphabet...that's fine so long as we don't land back at "X"; it will have to
be "XX."
But now that I've written all this and stopped thinking about
the story so much, I'm already moving toward "Y." "The Use of Force"
is a story about a doctor who grapples with his quite young patient so that
he can see down her throat while he's on a house call. In truth he
grapples with himself, and it was so surprising to see Williams blatantly
state that. I don't think he needed to.
Top
Day 129:
Tobias Wolff - "Say Yes" - 1985
They were doing the dishes, his wife washing while he dried. He'd
washed the night before. Unlike most men he knew, he really pitched in
on the housework. A few months earlier he'd overheard a friend of his
wife's congratulate her on having such a considerate husband, and he
thought, I try. Helping out with the dishes was a way of
showing how considerate he was.
Thus begins
"Say Yes" by Tobias Wolff. I don't know why I say it now, but I hope
you understand that all of the previous excerpts don't necessarily come from
the beginning of each story. Sometimes they come from very close to
the end (although no end-endings are included). This one, however,
comes right at the beginning. How do I choose the excerpts?
Usually while I'm reading my excerpt-o-meter starts buzzing and I either
gently make a mark in the margin with a pencil or, without such an
instrument, make a faint marginal line with my thumbnail. The latter
technique, refined after years of laziness (pencil too far away, you see),
often fails with Charters' collection since it has such thin pages.
One has to hold them to the light to determine where the thumbnail line
seems the deepest. I readily admit that you might have read the wrong
excerpt because I incorrectly decoded the line mark. Other times I
choose the opening passage (if it's good and appropriate). What I look
for, what makes my excerpt-o-meter light and buzz, are passages that tell
something about the writer, the story, or the characters. Look at
Williams' excerpt up there... That passage comes at the moment the doctor
loses his grip. Wharton's comes nearly from the end of her story:
Slade is bragging and readers know she is about find out some shocking
information. The Welty excerpt is just a passage that struck me as
beautiful. It doesn't tell any of the story, but it does give you a
sense of Welty's style in the story and her method of narration.
"Say Yes" is a top-notch story, I say. I had read one
other story by Mr. Wolff (a story I liked, though I won't tell you what it
was) and earlier this year I read his memoirific/autobiographical book
This Boy's Life. I seem to prefer his stories, but the book was
good, too.
As I was saying, "Say Yes" is a top-notch story. It is
simultaneously about the people discussing a certain matter, and the matter
they are discussing. The couple, washing dishes, "somehow [get] on the
subject of whether white people should marry black people." An
argument ensues. The husband eventually concedes and says he'd marry
his wife even if she were black. Something (indescribable) happens
after he turns out the lights. Hmmm.
This story is like a scene from a Chekhov play. It
provides enough fodder for character analysis to fill a voluminous treatise.
Top
Day 130:
Virginia Woolf - "Kew Gardens" - 1919
Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men,
women, and children, were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then,
seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and
sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow
and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue.
I remember
thinking this story was about a snail. A snail? Yes, a snail.
The little guy is mentioned a few times. This isn't a story about a
snail, though. It's about the Kew Gardens. The story is a
camera—macro focus enabled—mounted in ONE spot in a garden. As people,
snails, colors come before the camera, it records them in Color-poetry (a
term coined here). Normally people exit stories; we follow them away
because the story is WITH the people. Look at this: "They walked
on past the flower-bed, now walking four abreast, and soon diminished in
size among the trees and looked half transparent as the sunlight and shade
swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches." !!! Woolf
is giving you a quick scene with these people—dialogue included—but then she
flips them around (we're looking at their backs) and has them diminish.
The people are no more important than the snail who is deciding whether he
ought to climb over or under the leaf in his path.
"Kew Gardens" is a painting.
The story has a foreground and a background. It has
dripping impressionistic flower-beds and surreal knolls, hollows and ponds.
All of the life in the story becomes art, and all of the art becomes life.
"The ponderous woman looked through the pattern of falling words at the
flowers standing cool, firm, and upright in the earth, with a curious
expression." The words have become a part of the landscape: it
is the ultimate sense of nature. Everything is reduced to the same
banal level of mortality, and everything is exalted to the supreme level of
perfection. This story, above all, is a leveler. The reader can
alternate between the beauty of the story, the beauty of the words, the
beauty of the gardens, and the beauty of the self. Snails, pah!
Top
Day 131:
Richard Wright - "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" - 1961
When he reached the top of a ridge he stood straight and proud in the
moonlight, looking at Jim Hawkins' big white house, feeling the gun sagging
in his pocket. Lawd, ef Ah had just one mo bullet Ah'd taka shot at
tha house. Ah'd like t scare ol man Hawkins jusa little.... Jusa
enough t let im know Dave Saunders is a man.
What's that
song in The Sound of Music--goodbye, farewell, blah blah blah blah
blah blah-ah! It's over. One hundred thirty-one stories down,
sixty-four million, nine hundred fourteen thousand, two hundred twenty-seven
left. Did it end on a good note?
Happy? No. Positive? Yes. Dave
Saunders boards a train headed for some "better" place. Wright leaves
the realm of gardens and snails, and forces us to examine inequality and
human development. What he's trying to show, I think, with the
juxtaposition of what Charters calls "the black farm boy's speech" and
"standard English," is the oppression of language.
I confess I poked around the web for tidbits on this story,
and what I found were many unanswered questions. Two of them struck me
as interesting: 1. Why is the story titled "The Man Who Was Almost a
Man" instead of "The Boy Who Was Almost a Man"? 2. Why does Jenny
die/what did she symbolize? If you didn't already know, Jenny is a
mule. My answers (I might as well try to answer a question now that
I've come this far) are as follows: 1. This speaks to the ambiguity of
language and the power it holds over us. We're told, somewhat
objectively (in the title), that Dave is a man, but others in the story (and
perhaps his actions) invalidate that claim. So it's everyone but
Dave who decides when he'll truly be a man. 2. Jenny is a
representation of Sherman's promise. Why Dave kills (accidentally) the
mule seems more important than what the mule stands for (though they are in
some ways complimentary). It may be Wright('s narrator) arguing that
while blacks may have been freed, they were never given opportunities to
succeed, and that more often than not, they're given only the means to fail.
There's something wonderful about the short story that lets
it probe deep social issues one minute and impressionistically portray a
colorful garden the next. Let us take the Poes, the Hawthornes, the
Gogols and the Wrights, and let us read the words they labored over, for I
promise you will find something worthwhile. Short stories in some ways
command more attention and respect than do novels: so much is at stake in so
little time. Action is compressed, time is distorted. More
importantly, once you become comfortable in the world you're experiencing,
the story is over--done--and you must either reread it or move on.
From Charters' collection, I will move on to bigger and better things, to a
life examined as much as lived; I will remember these months with profound
joy, so let these entries serve as a testament to my madness as much as my
will to persevere through it with a daily dose of literary brilliance bound
in a worn, encyclopedic book.
Read the story
here.
Top
Final thoughts
on Story-a-Day
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Writing Home
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A - Ca
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Tillie Olsen
Cynthia Ozick
Grace Paley
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Poe #2
Katherine Anne Porter
William Sydney Porter
Philip Roth
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Page 5 statistics:
31 stories 29 authors
277 pages
2 translations
15 ♂ / 16 ♀
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