Onward

now finished: March by Geraldine Brooks 

up next: something written by a woman because I am reading only books written by women in 2022 

Well, damn me if there isn't trouble and forgiveness all around, and within, us. 

That is my takeaway from my gal Geraldine's book here. Including that this mirrors my very reading of it. At first (say, 70 to 80 pages in), I was put off, uncomfortable, thoroughly not into her taking this silent side character and imagining him whole, totally disturbed by Mr. March's objectifying of women, of Black women, of people enslaved. I went so far as to not like the book at first. My, how the pages changed me. Because, you will see when you read it, Brooks has done something quite intense in depicting our awfulness without shying away from it, while also solidly reinforcing my very favorite themes: 

1. Is redemption possible? 

2. Life is a mess, an absolute total mess.  

3. You will absolutely fck things up. You will. And you must go on, keep stumbling forward, and try to do better the next day. 

(This is the part where I once again cite my favorite MILD SPOILER line from the fantastic film In Bruges SPOILER: "Well, save the next little boy!" I mean, sometimes it's all we can do.) 

I am very specifically not going to spoiler March at all, and I hope that you will read it. If you have already read it, feel free to talk to me privately, or talk without spoilers in the comments here, because I would love to know your thoughts. 

I am simply going to say that I changed in the course of reading this book from being so powerfully uncomfortable with it existing to realizing the talent and raw power of what Geraldine Brooks has done. And do I now want to read every damn word she has ever written? I do. Do I now regret shelving her and stacking her and mindlessly touching her books over the years without getting around to reading them? I do. 

It was inevitable that I would read this one sooner rather than later because hello, Pulitzer. But now I want them all. And I also love reading about her, and ahout how she wrote this book, and about her Bronson Alcott research, and her Australian, worldy, and UnitedStatesian-ness, and her marriage with Tony Horwitz, and how he brought her in some literal and figurative ways to see so much Civil War history. 

This book is vivid, and hard to bear.   (Do I really need to say it? LIKE LIFE.) 

And the insight she has about war with her foreign correspondent experience is next level, combined as it is with her artistic and emotional genius. 

Little Women has always, always been about so much more than it might initially seem, and I do think many people realize that, which is good. Despite my resistance to taking it, that something-more aspect, and all the layers of Louisa May Alcott and Concord, are part of why this book March works, too. 

Stunned, I immediately wanted upon closing this book to go walk around some Civil War battleground and feel the ghosts. And guess what, turns out that living in Georgia as I randomly do now, I can do just that. But it gets better: where I am in Decatur, in DeKalb County, I just learned, the majority of residents voted in January 1861 to NOT secede, unlike neighboring Atlanta/Fulton County. And during the Battle of Atlanta, Confederate troops attacked General MacPherson's Union troops near the Decatur Courthouse (walking distance from my house), driving them back down the North Decatur Road (my intersection). 

I mean... as Amy (Ray, Indigo Girls) sings, "...before I realized / everywhere I stand..." 

Amy Ray being from Decatur and having taken those names Jonas and Ezekiel from tombstones she saw one day in a slave cemetery... 

My godz but we are all so fortunate to get to live and learn and feel pain and grow and read and write about it. 

Interpersonal relationships (as other Indigo Girl Emily Saliers would say) are so hard. 

Geraldine Brooks has scarred me. She's wondrous. 

Christ Nailed

now finished: Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
now reading: My Life by Bill Clinton
up next: The Wife by Alafair Burke

I've just finished reading Wise Blood, and I am here to say -- what a weird little book. Of course, for Flannery O'Connor that's a pretty tame comment. We emerge from so much of her writing with comments more along the lines of "Damn, that was dark!" or maybe "That was so fucked up!" so, you know, "weird" is no big, really. Then again, please don't get me wrong - there is twisted shit a-plenty in this novel, and I don't believe I'm spoilering you as a Flannery O'Connor reader by saying please don't expect a happy ending. But somehow this one, despite its showcase of the usual gothic depravity that is humanity, didn't leave me reeling as some of her others have.

And that, I think, is because I was so amused and delighted by her central character's invented not-religion, the Church Without Christ. Early-ish in the novel, Haze, who in Wise Blood is what passes for our protagonist, declares, "I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything" (p. 72 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631) and I perked right up. It reminds me of one of my favorite Pretty Woman lines I'm forever quoting at people: "I can do anything I want; I'm not lost."

A bit later, this man -- who, like everyone else in the novel, is pretty much a lost wreck -- begins "preaching" his Church Without Christ. Basically in response to someone on the street one day who mentions the Church of Christ, Haze invents his Church Without Christ and says, "I'm member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I'll tell you it's the church that the blood of Jesus don't foul with redemption...I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redepmption because there was no Fall and no Judgement because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar." (p. 101 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631)

Good stuff, right? I mean - this book is hilarious. Even though it's also Flannery-dark-and-twisted. Now, O'Connor herself was Catholic, right? To the end? I've finished this book but am still unsure of exactly what she is trying to say about religion herein. Or about people. Or wisdom or blood. The plot, such as it is, mostly involves a few characters running into and from one another in a weird little small town as they try to figure out something, anything about their weird little days, and there's all kinds of grotesque imagery, animals-in-cages symbolism, notions of freedom, automobiles, whorehouses...a real nice range of human fuckery. But it's peppered throughout with Haze's "sermons" and it's therefore kind of fun.

There is also a great (terrible) argument with an even-more-pathetic-and-stupid-than-Haze (if that's possible) (and it is) character, named Onnie Jay, who tells Haze, "It don't make any difference how many Christs you add to the name if you don't add none to the meaning, friend." See what she does there? This clown actually thinks Haze is trying to preach Christ because, I'm telling you, he's reeeeallllly dumb, but O'Connor manages that jab at religious hypocrisy nicely. Onnie Jay goes on to say, "You ought to listen to me because I'm not just an amateur. I'm an artist-type. If you want to get anywheres in religion, you got to keep it sweet. You got good idears but what you need is an artist-type to work with you." (p. 157 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631)

Ha ha ha ha ha. That last sentence there in those exact words might be the very advice I'd give to, well, the whole world, if I were a consultant to the world. (And really, am I not, though, a consultant to the world? Just a decidedly unpaid one.)

Now in this book Flannery has touched me with not just the darkness, the worst zoo ever, an exploited gorilla, the religion, and this little artist-type bit, but she outdoes herself with one more passage that became my favorite with how nicely it sums up my religious worldview, like, really and truly.

I'll get to that in a second, but let me remind you that this is not to say I 100% agree with Haze. His nihilist Church Without Christ (it still makes me smile every time I type it) is actually antithetical to me in some ways, such as when he delivers this sermon: "I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there's no truth...No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach!"  I dig his blasting of religion and all there is to unpack in O'Connor's literature, but I definitely DON'T believe in "no truth." There absolutely are absolute truths. I just think they're not being taught by religions, on the whole.

However, he moves from this directly into some of what I DO think, starting with his very next sentence:

"Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. 

"Nothing outside you can give you any place," he said. "You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backward into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was a Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?

"Where in your time and your body has Jesus redeemed you?" he cried. "Show me where because I don't see the place. If there was a place where Jesus had redeemed you that would be the place for you to be, but which of you can find it?"   (pp. 165-166 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631)

That, my friends, is some excellent preaching. In the past, when I have tried my ablest to get people to explain to me how Christianity works, perhaps I should have just hurled that question at them, demanding to be shown where in your time and body Jesus has redeemed you. Show me, people. Show me damn where.

And just for some icing on this cake of Wise Blood, there's a (fucked up, obviously) character who swears, and boy does he swear excellently. He has introduced me to two new excellent swears, in fact: "Jesus on the cross!" and "Christ nailed."  I shall endeavor to incorporate them into my vocabulary at the earliest opportunity.

Why We Need a Manual for Writing (Wo)men

just finishedabandoned: A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin
now reading: Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
up next: What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves by Benjamin Bergen

I'd heard a lot about A Manual for Cleaning Women around the time it was published to great acclaim and mass pronouncements of self-on-the-back-patting "I've discovered an overlooked writer!" And it's been on my radar since then, making me think I should maybe check it out.

Ugh.

For me, reading this collection of "short stories" (more on that in a sec) is excruciating, and therefore I am abandoning ship. I made it through 163 out of 399 pages, and I dutifully read some of the foreword, biographical info, etc., so I thoroughly get the "importance" of this. What I don't get is why y'all enjoy it so much. To each her own! Speaking of "her," the reason I was reading this is that it was this month's selection for my Women's Classics Book Group. I therefore had all kinds of motivation to actually finish it, such as the book group ladies, a deadline, adding it to the list of our completed selections (you know I love me a checklist!), the discussion at the meeting, etc. But nope.

However, the book group meeting did help me clarify why I hate it, namely that the selected stories are neither a satisfying whole nor a satisfying sum of parts. You see, Lucia Berlin wrote lots of fragments and story bits over several decades, the vast majority of which drew on her real life experiences (so far, so any writer). Sometimes she was published, and sometimes even acclaimed in small literary circles, and a few academic ones, but obviously did not hit the world fame jackpot or anything. After her death, some peeps saw fit to collect these stories -- so very many -- into A Manual for Cleaning Women, which naturally includes the story titled "A Manual for Cleaning Women" and have I mentioned that it's SO DAMN ANNOYING when short story collections have a title lifted from one of the stories - the pretentiousness starts there and I can't even, because selecting the title of one story to represent a collection either means you see this title as representative of the writer's life and work overall or you were too lazy to think of a title, and it's usually the former, and it's stupid because when writing ONE story, the writer is not writing all of their life's work. And if they were, if that there were anything that centrally important, then it should maybe have been shaped and crafted into a full-length book -- ever try that, Lucia Berlin and other "wondrous" short story writers? No, no you did not. Because writing a book is hard, and writing short stories and snippets and fragments and paragraphs about things that happened to you is not as hard. Crafting a truly great short story IS hard, though, and that's why so many short stories suck.

And all of that is why so many collections of short stories are published. I might even publish one myself someday, because we writers definitely churn them out. I will hope that each story is a good story and do my damnedest to make sure they're all good individually if they're published together in a collection. Lucia Berlin couldn't do that, because she was dead. Would she have wanted all of these stories published? Would she have wanted them ordered and collected like this?

Because here's the thing: as much as this book is excruciating to read in long stretches of snippet-after-snippet-after-snippet, it's also not as if you could read one "story" a day and then move on because you'd be super left hanging, as most of them don't really have things you need to feel complete, such as a beginning, middle, end, plot, or point. They don't really stand individually. But they also don't really go together quite right. They are wisps and fragments of her life. Which brings us to the next part of the problem: she should have shaped these ideas and words and life bits into a memoir. (I can't believe I'm actually saying that anyone "should" have written a memoir. Seriously - if I say that, it's worth at least a glance, based on my usual call for widespread memoir eradication). But she didn't. Yes, I get that she was busy, and an alcoholic. But. She didn't do the work that needed to be done, so I don't need to sit here reading her and praising her to high heaven for her fragments and bits. And I definitely don't need to praise stories that aren't good stories, just because they're collected together and show this woman's life rendered as sort-of fiction.

The strongest moments are the occasional story with either a point ("Carpe Diem") or a beginning, middle, and end ("Friends") or, very occasionally, both, as in "Her First Detox," which also contains some of her strongest writing because she is at her best when describing alcoholism and withdrawal symptoms. I mean, that is her strength, and she actually struggled as an alcoholic and overcame her problem. That is amazing. And she writes so well about it. So what's with the pretending to write fiction and refusing to admit it's true?

Believe me, I've thought about this, as most writers have: am I writing fiction or memoir? Yes, it's OK to use real-life true shit in your fiction. No, it's not OK to make up shit in your memoir. Blending means fiction. So that's where we're at with Lucia Berlin, her fictional blend. BUT! But! But! the entire book group, as my fellow group members heaped praise on the book (yes, I was the lone voice of dissent), they kept coming back to "Her life is so fascinating" and "She overcame so much" in their defense of her. Which means that they, too, see the strength here in her writing about her life. So then, just do it, lady. Or, if you don't, that's fine, but IF you are going to call something a story (or the people who posthumously collect it are going to call it a story), the writer has to have something more than just a way with words and an arrangement of fragments to have crafted a literary work.

But this is not a beautiful literary work. This is Ms. Thang breaking the fourth wall in "Point of View" to tell us, meta-ly, that if great short stories such as Chekhov's "Grief" and, apparently, her stories, were written in first person we'd feel "embarrassed, uncomfortable, even bored" but because the narrator tells us authoritatively and third-personly that so-and-so with blue eyes went to the store or whatever, we "feel, hell if the narrator thinks there is something in this dreary creature worth writing about there must be. I'll read on and see what happens."  A.) She is comparing herself to Chekhov, and I'm thinking, hmmmm, maybe not. B.)Spare me the meta-analysis, but thanks for admitting, Lucia, that your content might be a bit lacking, but hey, nothing a third person point of view can't fix. Sheesh.

She admits in the next line, though, "Nothing happens, actually. In fact the story isn't even written yet." I find that an apt description of much of her book.

As for what IS written, this is a heap of things like "Toda Luna, Todo Año, in which our protagonist abandons her touristy resort and hangs out with divers (real ones, fishing under deep water for seafood) and falls in lust with one who inexplicably teaches her to scuba dive in five minutes and then on one of their underwater adventures, "They embraced, their regulators clanking. She realized then that his penis was inside her." What? Are we still seriously heaping praise on this, Publisher's Weekly and The New York Review of Books and Elle and Entertainment Weekly and The Boston Globe and on and on and on; are we really? She just suddenly realized that it was inside her, did she? Wow. Did she also realize she was secretly a 12-year-old writing in a note to her best giggly friend about what she thought a sexy story might sound like? Because then the sperm "drift[s] up between them like pale octopus ink" and you have got to be kidding me. Don't forget the big payoff ending to this story, when she literally pays off the man - this diver/lover of hers - who comes to her room as she packs the night before she leaves, where he asks for 20,000 pesos to pay off his boat. She writes him a check. Oh, after their supposed "romance," how disillusioning. Kind of like reading this crappy book.

There's a foreword by Lydia Davis that slathers all kinds of fawning lackey praise on the stories, citing examples of "incredible" things Berlin does that would have me giving Davis a C-minus on her paper if she'd handed it in in my English class. There's also a note by editor Stephen Emerson, in which he kowtows to Lucia Berlin and then says he "can't imagine anyone who wouldn't want to read her." Well, you don't have to imagine, buddy, because here I am, in the flesh.

My Own Canoe: A Tale of Linda and Louisa

There was that one day early on I related to Bronson Alcott. ("Although Bronson Alcott was unfortunate in never being understood by the many, he was singularly blessed by being understood by the distinguished few.")  But then, I kept reading Invincible Louisa and shit got real and I came to see how scarily similar I am to Louisa herself. And not just 'cause we both got names that start with an L and end in an A, yo.

Let's check it out.
(Quoting from Invincible Louisa by Cornelia Meigs, Alcott Centennial Edition, ISBN: 0-316-56590-3)

"At the end of the day, both little girls would write in their journals, Anna [sister] filling hers with quiet, pleasant reflections and a record of the work she had done, Louisa covering her blotted pages with accounts of her turbulent thoughts, of her glorious runs on the hill, with the wind all about her, and, alas, of her quarrels..."    p. 41

I, too, have an older sister. We did keep journals when we were young, but I'd say that passage above is basically an apt description of Lesley's and my Facebook pages.

Oooohhh, here's a part about life's work....very much related to current work...which is NOT my life work...? (Don't worry, I've already had this conversation with my boss...)

"What she had learned...made her a good teacher, but it could not make her love the task of instruction. Besides knowledge, she brought to the task energy and an enthusiasm for succeeding, along with that boundless friendliness which is the heart of a real teacher's success.  [That's me, ever "establishing rapport"...]  The little girls got much from her; she in turn got much from them....Louisa gave generously and taught well, but she could not learn to like her work. She was too restless and impetuous..."  p. 63

Right, then. Moving on, to her sister's marriage:

"...after going to see Anna in her new house and observing her sister's happiness in her new life:
'Very sweet and pretty; but I would rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe.'" -p. 94

Seriously. I would rather paddle my own canoe. Who can put it any better than that?

From personal back to professional, she struggled at first, as we all do, don't we? to write and succeed at making a living writing, and specifically to write a novel.

"She remarked finally that she was tired of long stories, that she would rather 'fall back on rubbishy tales, for they pay best and I can't starve on praise.' It was a belief unworthy of her, unworthy of her real powers, of her father's principles, of Emerson's teaching..."   p. 134

Ahh, that's my problem - falling short by slacking off and being unworthy of Emerson's teaching! But there's still hope because:

"Things, just the same, were bound to be better for one of Louisa's spirit. She was a strange mixture of impetuousness and toiling perseverance, of wild, impossible fancies and practical sense."

I'm pretty sure no one has ever summed up Lindouisa so well.

Eventually, she gets to travel the world (Louisa without borders?) and "stopped at Frankfurt to see the house of Goethe, for Louisa would never be anything but an ardent hero-worshipper, and here was the shrine of one of her literary idols."  p. 137   The problem with this trip, though, is that she was able to go abroad by working, as the companion/helper/nurse-ish personal assistant to a woman with issues. "It was very hard for her to be hampered by the inabilities of another." p. 138, which is basically my motto. But she does meet a good guy whom she befriends (and who inspires Laurie, for ye Little Women aficionados) but who is not her suitor -- he's twelve years younger than her, for one thing. She does have suitors, though, in her life, but...

"She was so busy...that she rarely gave thought to matrimony...Life was so full for her without marriage, so beset with activities and responsibilities, that certainly matrimony was something which she never consciously missed. She had a great desire for independence, which it would have been hard for her to give up for any person's sake."  p. 140

I have had that exact conversation in those exact words so very many times.

"On the other hand, she had great capacity for affection and sentiment, for romance and for happiness."  p. 140

See, e.g., crying at Coca-Cola ads and the like.

Writing is a struggle. At one point, "she planned various novels later -- indeed, her mind was always a seething ferment of plans..."  p. 182  Check and check! And there's the obligatory moment in every writer's life (mine has lasted for a decade) in which she lives in a pleasant house with the family but, natch, "There is no mention of a study or of any privacy for herself, where she could write in peace." - p. 183  The eternal goddamn fucking struggle.

Yet, as we all know, she meets with success! Will this be my future, too?

"With Little Women, Louisa achieved what she really wanted, a piece of work which she actually knew to be her best. With it she achieved also the appreciation of the world and such prosperity as gave her full power, at last, to do just what she wished. It is delightful to read of how her name came to be on every tongue; how she grew to be not merely famous, which mattered little to her, but universally beloved, which mattered much. After all the years of doubting her own power, of looking for her true field, of thinking of herself as a struggling failure, she was obliged at last to admit, even in the depths of her own soul, that she was a success."  - p 155

May it become so.

Walking a mile/life in Aurora Greenway's (many) shoes

I finally read Terms of Endearment,  which means that I finally have come to know the character of Aurora Greenway.  I have never related so much to anyone who is so different from me.

It was my first Larry McMurtry in quite some time. It has been more than a decade since I read and adored Lonesome Dove, which I am still forever telling people to read, and another Gus and Call book, Dead Man's Walk (which wasn''t as good as Lonesome Dove- few things are - not that I had much hope as I am always super wary of prequels, even more than of sequels.) During that time I have always meant to get around to reading more McMurtry, but you know how I am with my books and projects and piles and lists of things to read...

Terms of Endearment, however, was always steadily up there on the urgency scale, if nothing else because of another looooooongtime but almost finished project of mine, that of watching all the Oscar winning Best Pictures. The movie Terms of Endearment is one of the few Best Picture winners I haven't seen, largely because I wanted to read the book first. Well, I've at long last attended to the reading portion of that goal.

Frankly, I don't know that the book was all that great. Kind of like Ordinary People, which I also finally read recently, for reasons of see above. I mean -- these books are okay, but to spawn super famous Best Picture winners? Hmmmph. It remains to be seen whether Out of Africa, my last lingering '80s-Best-Picture-winner-source-material-so-I-can-finally-watch-the-movie, underwhelms similarly.

But Aurora. Holy cow. We are the same. I wasn't even born when Larry McMurtry wrote this, but it's as if he channeled my spirit, the entity that would soon be me. It's weird, because, as I said, she's not actually like me. She is into, just to name a few things, cooking, shoes, and having lots of suitors hang around her. I'm not like that. AND YET, we are so very, very similar in our sort of essential (as in essence) approach to being in this world. I will here and now share a few quotes to show you what I mean. Let's start with Aurora speaking to her daughter Emma, early on, page 94:

"When I'm mellow and the air has a nice weight I do so love to speak elliptically, you know...As for your question, which happily you phrased grammatically, if rather dully, I can tell you quite distinctly that I don't care if I never hear the phrase 'really felt' again....No, I've not finished...I may have new heights to rise to. For all I know, my dear, good grammar provides a more lasting basis for sound character than quote real feeling unquote."

There's more. On page 225, for example there's another exchange with her daughter:

"Everybody's afraid of you. Why don't you try being gentle for a change?"
"I do try--it's just that I seem to be prone to exasperation," Aurora said .

How about her early days with Vernon?

"Yes, you're much too polite, I know that," she said. "It's a pity I'm not..."

"I don't want you to be scared!" she yelled. "I"m just a human being! I just wanted you to sit and drink some tea...with me...and be my companion for a few minutes.  ... I'm not scary! Don't tell me I'm scary! There's nothing frightening about me. You're all just cowards!"

I mean, clearly we could stop there. But what the heck, let's continue.

"...she was as she had been that afternoon--spiritless, convinced of nothing except that there was not much point in trying to make things right. Things would never be right."

"For all I know the whole point of civilization is to provide one with someone to drink tea with at the end of an evening."

As she sat at the window, looking out, her sense of the wrongness of it was deep as bone. It was not just wrong to go on so, it was killing. Her energies, it seemed to her, had always flowed from a capacity for expectation, a kind of hopefulness that had persisted year after year in defiance of all difficulties. It was hopefulness, the expectation that something nice was bound to happen to her, that got her going in the morning and brought her contentedly to bed at night." 

"Oh well, you know me," Aurora said. "I'm not one to hold grudges. I acquire so many of them that some have to be discarded."

How will we top that one?  Let's try.

"Why, after all these years, do people still think I mean anything?" she asked.

Once, Emma tells her: "I hope I never become arrogant, like you...You dismiss whole classes of people with a wave of your hand."

Later on, the General has some words: "You just talk to hear yourself talk." In her reply: "I've gone to quite unusual lengths to be accommodating to you, and we still seem to fight all the time. What's life going to be like if I suddenly decide to be troublesome?" "You can't be any goddamn worse than you are," the General said. "Ha ha, little you know," she said. "I've made almost no demands on you. Suppose I decided to make a few."  

Moving on. "Of course, being away from home has always made me feel quite gay," she added. "I believe I'm a born gadabout. One of my problems is that I frequently need a change."

Don't overlook this conversation with Rosie.

"Don't like to impose," Rosie said.
"No, I'm the only one who seems to. I'm only sorry there aren't more people willing to be imposed upon."

Those are just the choice lines whose pages I noted along the way. Reading these bits of Aurora was almost unnerving, like, is someone inside my mind? And if so, why is that person Larry McMurtry? Apparently there was a lot of praise heaped on him for writing women so well in this and a few other books. Well, I don't know about all that -- and much of what happens in Terms of Endearment is bizarre, implausible, or straight up farcical. But McMurtry is certainly onto something. Or someone. (Me.)

Once more, with feeling:  "There's nothing frightening about me. You're all just cowards!"

Yeah.

The Reivers

Well, if one is going to return to one's literary supplement blog after far too long away, The Reivers is certainly a good choice with which to do it.

Y'all, Faulkner is one of those writers that we've all heard of and many have even dabbled in (by literature teacher force) or come to have ideas about. But how many among ye have actually read a bunch of his stuff? Lots of people get turned off early, like in high school. I did, but not by slogging through As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury -- no, I was horrified by the experience I had reading a mere (as if anything is "mere" with Faulkner) short story, "Barn Burning." I hated it. I hated it in an intense, passionate, irrational way. I can't really remember now, decades later, why I hated it so, so, so very much, but I loathed it. I'm pretty sure I hated the characters and I know I hated the outcome. So I did what any self-respecting, literature-loving 16-year-old would do: I took a stapler, sat down with my AP English textbook, and stapled shut the pages containing that story, starting with the page before and ending with the page after, a series of staples advancing like a row of ants around the edges of the pages, so as to prevent myself from ever  accidentally letting the book fall open to that horrid story and making me see it ever again.

I then spent my next several years -- in which I was, mind you, an English major with an emphasis in American literature-- complaining about Faulkner and telling anyone who would listen how much I hated his writing (and occasionally throwing in the "Barn Burning" stapling story for good measure). Of course, I had also read "A Rose For Emily" in high school and didn't hate it nearly as much, but I conveniently overlooked that.

Fast forward a decade or so from high school, and by my mid-to-late 20s I had become obsessed with the Pulitzer prizes and decided to embark on my project of reading all the Pulitzer-winning fiction. This came with a realization that I would be reading not one but two novels by Faulkner, although I didn't do those right away, of course. (In fact, I'm still in the midst of that project, because I mix projects together and read other stuff in between, instead of just blazing through one project at a time, which is very not-Charles-Emerson-Winchester-the-III-like of me.)  Not to mention Faulkner's appearances on other lists of greats with which I concern myself, such as the Modern Library's Top 100 and the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die. But before I got to any of that, during the summer of 2014, a summer in which Brian and I had many a day at his family's Lake Michigan vacation home (that I am Southwesternly unable to refer to as a "c*ttage" as they all do), I spent some time reading The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Yes, all of them. One of them was by Faulkner.  "That Evening Sun Go Down" (published in slightly different form sometimes as "That Evening Sun") was a good story. A really good, well-written story. And there I was, a thirtysomething, forced to sit on a porch one summer, in the midst of being back from Asia and kind of sort of settling down in the U.S. again, in a day-of-Americana-reckoning, realizing that my high school self really might have not had that good of a reason to hate "Barn Burning," ya know? Not that I can particularly remember that much about it...

Well, now here we are, with me having finally rectified this major gap in my literary life, having finally got around to reading a full Faulkner novel, and it is The Reivers. Yes, this is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by our boy William Faulkner. His other Pulitzer winner? A Fable. What't that you say? You've never heard of these novels of his? You figured he must have won the Pulitzer for As I Lay Dying, or The Sound and the Fury? Or at least Absalom, Absalom!  Fun fact: No novels with exclamation points in the title have won the Pulitzer, although Swamplandia!  was a finalist for the year 2012, when no award was given. Well, Faulkner may have won the Nobel Prize after writing those famous novels (those of you who've been with me a while will undoubtedly recall that you don't win the Nobel for a book; you win it for a body of work), but his Pulitzers came later, for A Fable and then for his last book, The Reivers.

And yes, I had to look up what on Earth a "reiver" is. Turns out it's an old word for "robber" used in the Scottish borderlands -- at least that's what I read -- and brought to the U.S. by people from there. An interesting choice of Faulkner's definitely, for the title.

I hate describing/spoilering plots, but the "robbery" in this book is more of a free-wheeling escapist weekend journey that ends up being a coming of age experience. It's definitely not about, like, career burglars or street thugs, but rather people who get swept up in an opportunity and plunge themselves into a feverish few days of learning and growing, from mistakes and other things that come along.

What this book does incredibly well is take you into long, winding sentences without letting you get so lost that you can't find your way out of the paragraph; it also gives the reader a vivid sense of place and the characters inhabiting the places rendered.

What it did for me, more importantly, is get me fired up to read more Faulkner novels. He has a beautiful command of sentence structure (long and involved though that structure may be), life journeys, introspection disguised as regular-ol'-folks-livin'-life, and the striking interpersonal turmoil of life. He makes you want to crawl inside the book and hang out with these people, even though no part of you would rationally want to, say, have Everbe's job, or Boon's...or necessarily live in rural early twentieth century Mississippi...

What I also loved about The Reivers: his social commentary, particularly about the way cars and the automobile society we've embraced have erased some very real things. Nature, for one thing, in the form of wild, untouched spaces; those are basically gone. Also, some part of our human selves has been forever altered. The car/train/horse/walking layers of symbolism that pile upon themselves in this story could take years of literary analysis to fully sort out.

One thing I must point out, though: I've seen multiple reviews/commentaries where people describe the book as "funny" or "one of his funniest novels" or "a comic masterpiece," Um, hello? Do these people also work for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association slating Golden Globe nominees into categories? To me, The Reivers was anything but a comedy. It was a coming-of-age tale and a slice of life. Sure, there was wit -- there were clever and sly bits slipped in all sorts of places in this book. It was real and endearing. A "comic masterpiece" though? Did we get what Faulkner was showing here at all?

If you've read The Reivers, what do you think -- comic masterpiece or no?

Project Finally: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

now finished: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Um. Well. Comic books. Golems. Books I started more than a decade ago and got a hundred pages into and never finished and took this long to get around to re-reading...it's all here, folks!

This was for sure going to be a two-star rating until the last 60 pages or so. You redeemed yourself a little, Chabon, but barely. Escapistry, indeed! By the way, the three stars should not be construed in any way to mean that I suddenly liked the characters at the end of the book, because the big three are still pretty dismal attempts at How to Treat Each Other Well, but the ending was just better than the rest of the book, is all I'm saying. Weirdly, it was set on Long Island while most of the rest of the book is in The City (that would be New York) (except that part in Antarctica! yeah, don't ask...) so you'd think that wouldn't be a selling point for me, but anyway...

Have I mentioned this book is about comic books? And that there's a golem? Basically my two least favorite things ever. I was really, really starting to love me some Michael Chabon back in the day (circa 2001) and Wonder Boys made my list of Greatest Novels Ever and I read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and A Model World.. and I was just devouring it all and I worked on a production of the play Poor Super Man and was totally digging the profound secret identity/comic book superhero as growth metaphor and was so ready to just love! and adore! The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Then I started reading it.

Slow going. Got to around page 90 or 100. Never finished. Haven't read any other Chabon since then, either.

But, you know, what with this being a Pulitzer-winner and all, I knew I was going to read it eventually, and I meant to and meant to and meant to and now I have FINALLY done it and my entire experience while reading it, before those last 60 pages, was that it drags and drags and that everyone in it does some stupid stuff and that the woman's feelings don't much seem to matter, and a few other spoilery things that aren't even worth going into because who cares?!

I actually think the whole overarching metaphor works; I don't think Chabon was reaching or trying to be too grandiose or whatever in conceiving this -- although that Antarctica part could maybe try to make a bit more sense -- but I just think the straight-up page-to-page writing was borderline snoozy a lot of the time. Especially during the flashbacky tales of escape.

I'm sure there are people who don't love comic books who were nonetheless able to love this book. I am not one of them.

But, wheee! I finished another Pulitzer book! Always a fun day.

July 31st: William Faulkner A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading: Missing Justice by Alafair Burke

Wheeee!  Made it to the 31st of July, my Month of Short Stories. And for the last day? That sweet southern nemesis o' mine.

Today's Story: "That Evening Sun Go Down"
Author: William Faulkner
My Rating: A

A-minus? A? Did I round up to try to make up for being so mean to William Faulkner over the years?

I did not enjoy reading William Faulkner when I was a teenager. In high school, I famously hated his "Barn Burning" so much that I stapled it together in my AP English text so that my book would never accidentally fall open to those pages. "A Rose for Emily" didn't quite rub me the wrong way, but "Barn Burning" just eclipsed everything about him for me. Why did I hate it so much? Who knows? I can barely even remember it now, but I generally loved English class, and I hated that story. All through my English major college years, I continued to badmouth Faulkner at every opportunity and I studiously avoided reading his novels, even The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, which I now feel like everyone but me has read. I haven't even read his two (two!) Pulitzer winners yet. But I will. Once I decided to read all the Pulitzer-winning fiction and sample every Nobel author, I knew I was doubly doomed and would have to dip back into the Mississippi maestro's writing. Someday.

Anyway. It's not like I thought I'd get through a month of short stories without some Faulkner. How could I possibly dream that The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike of all people, wouldn't present me with some Faulkner? And so today, the last day of July, the end of my short-story-a-day project, here we are, with "That Evening Sun Go Down." At least that's what this book calls it. Apparently it's also known as "That Evening Sun." Does it really matter, since the sun is not around much in this story? Darkness is everywhere.

And for those keeping score: we're up to 1931 now, and still authors are freely using the n-word. To be fair to my southern man here, he also uses "Negro", while "n*****" is basically used in dialogue, spoken by white and black people, and it's absolutely part of the point of the story, with Nancy saying she is "just a n--" as she has been taken advantage of by white men and basically violently and horribly dealt with by all the men, white and black, although our narrator's father does try to help, to a certain extent. But Nancy knows her doom is coming.

Sharp dialogue? Vividly rendered setting? Action that incorporates flashbacks while propelling the story forward? Realism? Spooky commentary on humanity? It's all here. How do you not give Faulkner an 'A'?

What, seriously, did I hate so much about "Barn Burning"? Should I go back and read it to find out, or will it put me off of him all over again, when I really need to be checking his novels off of my life things to read list?

Anyway, we now wrap up July, and my Month of Short Stories and Their Authors has come to an end.
Later, we shall have a post-month reflection and examine the results!

July 30th: John Cheever A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now finished: 
Good Wives aka the second half of Little Women, ugh, by Louisa May Alcott

Almost the end of the month! It can take a lot out of a person to read a short story for each day of the month, excepting the 4th (holiday). It also makes the time pass differently for a month. I recommend such a project to you!

Today's Story:  "Reunion"
Author:  John Cheever
My Rating: B+

I'm hovering, mentally, over the grade of 'B' but for the moment rounding up, giving John Cheever the benefit of my doubt. He's another author that I should have read by now but haven't. Why haven't I? Have you read any Cheever? Have you read this story, "Reunion"?

It comes across as a kind of what's-the-point story. (Am I the only one who thinks there's been a lot of  what's-the-point to be found in this month of short stories? What does this tell us about how often short stories fail to have the thrust of novels or ever, dare I say, the great poems? And yet writers think they are good at them just because they can churn them out.) It does have a point, though, or maybe several. There is stuff in there about fathers and sons, about parents and children, about families and expectations, but you have to work out what's really going on.

Like, it might take you a bit after reading it to start asking yourself whether, in fact, the father has a club up in the sixties. Whether he was drunk, or not welcome in these establishments from previous drunkenness. Whether he's down and out. Whether this is why the mother left him. Whether he tried to see his son again...

Cheever doesn't sum it up for you. He makes you try to figure it out. Good idea on his part.

What I basically know about Cheever is that he explores different facets of humanity, including the dark side in all of us, that kind of thing. I will say this -- in choosing whether to read the next story in my book, The Best American Short Stories of the Century, or one of the stories I have left to read from the list of 14 in the original article that inspired this project, I saw that the next story in the book was by William Faulkner, and it was more than a few pages, and I just couldn't do it. Not today. It's been a long day. Faulkner takes a lot out of me. Mostly my remembrance of reading him (and trying to swear him off) in high school takes a lot out of me. It's late, and I decided to save him for tomorrow and read a short little Cheever story tonight and blog about it really quick.

Cheever might not take as much out of me right away, but he packs enough of a memorable punch in very few paragraphs that I could be affected more deeply than I yet realize by this one.

July 29th: Katherine Anne PorterA Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading grudgingly (long story):  
Good Wives aka Little Women Part Two by Louisa May Alcott

Hey there! It's the first day of my new blog appearance. I had to do it for Blogspot reasons, basically, and it isn't quite what I wanted, so further tweaking must needs occur.

Today's Story: "Theft"
Author: Katherine Anne Porter
My Rating: A

I've read a little Katherine Anne Porter before, and what I mostly remember is being blown away by her writing talent. Intelligence without being pretentious, complexity without being confusing, whimsy without being shallow...she's a fantastic writer, pure and simple. And she surprises you, and writes about interesting things you weren't necessarily expecting.

So in a story like "Theft," though at first you're a little bit caught off guard, the "what's-going-on?" isn't in any way unpleasant nor does it make you want to roll your eyes; it's not unlike the actual drunkenness the main character and her friends are experiencing, I suppose! Reading Katherine Anne Porter is a great way to remind yourself how terrible some other authors really are.

Though light on linear this-then-this-then-this action, there is in fact a linear narrative happening, but the story is perfectly introspective and deep as well. By the end, when an accusation is made, and when it is initially resisted with a bit of righteous indignation, you find yourself just this side of advocating for your main character and wondering if she could have in fact been wrong. This story is a lot like life.

"In this moment she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her own fault, things she had forgotten and left in houses when she moved: books borrowed and not returned, journeys she had planned and had not made, words she had waited to hear spoken to her and had not heard, and the words she had meant to answer with bitter alternatives and intolerable substitutes worse than nothing..."
--quoted from "Theft" on page 109 of The Best American Short stories of the Century

The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter  won the Pulitzer in 1966, you know. You could do worse than to get a little Katherine Anne Porter in your life. Or a lot of her.

July 28th: Grace Stone Coates A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading, somewhat grudgingly: 
Good Wives, better know as  "Part II of Little Women"(apparently), by Louisa May Alcott
now listening: To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

Four days left to go, still home-stretchin', and I found a Trojan! Well, kind of. An attempted Trojan.

Today's Story: "Wild Plums"
Author: Grace Stone Coates
My Rating:  C+

Grace Stone Coates went to USC! (That, for you uninitiated, is my alma mater, the University of Southern California.) Apparently she didn't get her degree from there, nor from any of the other three colleges she attended, but she did get a teaching certificate (because you could do that in 1900) and taught for a while and then wrote poems and stories and worked for a literary magazine and eventually went a little nuts. She had battled mental illness, but reached a point decades later where she would forget to eat or sometimes wander into the street and stuff. I should mention that I have barely verified any of this--it's just the Wikipedia highlights of Grace Stone Coates, of whom I don't believe I've ever heard a mention before today, but I did bother to click a couple of source links and see most of these facts in a university/library online digital archive that includes her papers, so I think we're good.

Oh, her story?  Right. "Wild Plums." Um, yeah--I guess I found the author's random details a little more compelling. The story was a bit of a bore. Also, it was one of those, "Wait, what's happening here?" I have no idea what is wrong with the Slumps, the family the parents refuse to join in plum-picking. Are they disliked because they are poor? Loud? Non-conformist? Irish? Black? Atheist? It's never really made clear. I had the feeling I was supposed to know, though.

What can I say, 1929? You confuse me. Also, the beginning paragraphs about tasting wild plums and knowing a thing or two about them seem fraught with some risqué innuendo that never quite makes sense, either, but seems to be really about actual plums, despite talking about nether regions and such.

Our narrator seems to be a young girl, maybe a Scout Finch kind of girl, and the big thing that happens to her is that SPOILER ALERT!! she secretly tastes a plum. I think we are deep in the realm of symbolism as this girl has a life awakening about a World Outside of Her Family She's Always Known, but the actual narration and sequence of events/dialogue/thought processes are rather clunky. So between the awkward pacing/feel and the why-on-Earth-don't-we-like-these-people?! confusion, I just don't have a lot of praise for this particular story. Maybe I'll try another one some time, Grace!

July 27th: Willa Cather A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now finished: 10 Años con Mafalda by Quino
 and Zola and His Time by Matthew Josephson
now about to read, maybe: Good Wives by Louisa May Alcott

We're in the home stretch, folks! The home stretch being, in this case, the last five days of my Month of Short Stories, in which I am reading a short story per day and then jabbering about it here on the Lit Supp. In other words, posting more to this blog in a month than I have in the last year. Pathetic! I know! But I never met a reading project I didn't like (and, invent).

Today's Story: "Double Birthday"
Author: Willa Cather
My Rating: B

Not my first Willa Cather, although I believe it's my first time being in Pittsburgh with her. I've previously read her novels My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and the Pulitzer-winning One of Ours. This story was pleasant enough, as stories go, and the characters are good--well-drawn, likable, flawed, sometimes forlorn, sometimes non-conformist--and there's a narrative, if not tons of plot, that leads you along. It's all, well, fine. But not exciting. And you would think I could get far more excited about a bunch of people who are thinking about what one should do with one's life and whether one has lived well if one has not gone down the traditional, prescribed path of marriage-family-home-ownership-pleasing-society. I mean, hello! C'est moi!

"His old schoolfellows went to New York now as often as he had done in his youth; but they went to consult doctors, to put children in school, or to pay the bills of incorrigible sons.
He thought he had had the best of it; he had gone a-Maying while it was May. This solid comfort, this iron-bound security, didn't appeal to him much. These massive houses, after all, held nothing but the heavy domestic routine; all the frictions and jealousies and discontents of family life. Albert felt light and free, going up the hill in this thin overcoat. He believed he had had a more interesting life than most of his friends who owned real estate."
- from "Double Birthday," on p. 91 in The Best American Short Stories of the Century

That would be me. So, I can apparently relate to 55-year-old Albert, celebrating his birthday on the same day as his 80-year-old uncle, both of whom are judged too harshly by the an actual judge, whose daughter the old friend of Albert likes the two birthday boys well enough to ditch some plans with her regular society in order to hang our with them. Also, there is prohibited alcohol (as in , Prohibition-prohibited), kindly provided by the judge and his daughter. Nice! All in all, the story is an okay glimpse into this little world, and offers some decent reflection on being independent and meeting your own standards and no one else's, but it takes a while to get around to this and as it goes along it jumps all over the place. It's the old "Here we are--here's an explanatory flashback--here we are back to now" structure that is acceptable but sometimes just comes across as really expository, like someone was more concerned with sharing an idea that writing fiction.

The judge judges Albert for being "young when he should be old, single when he should be married, and penniless when he should be well-fixed." This judge would obviously have something to say to me, too. But: we find a similarity between the judge and the uncle, both of whom like to have their time to themselves in the libraries in their respective houses, although they read quite different books. So, let's just say I can relate to pretty much every character in this story.

Not bad or anything. Just not mind-blowing.

I did rather enjoy how it started, though:

"Even in American cities, which seem so much alike, where people seem all to be living the same lives, striving for the same things, thinking the same thoughts, there are still individuals a little out of tune with the times..."  -- on p.77 in the aforementioned volume, if you care

I like when I read something from 1929 by Willa Cather that is how people would describe the totally Walmartized fast food strip mall nation of today and it reminds me that life has always been like life and people have always been like people, and every time you're about to talk about how unique your generation is, it probably isn't.

July 26th: Kate Chopin A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading: Zola and His Time by Matthew Josephson

Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and...

Today's Story: "The Story of an Hour"
Author: Kate Chopin
My Rating: A-

I was thinking B+, but this story definitely packs more of a punch than a B+ story, no? It's just so sad. The poor Mallards -- both of them. You're heartbroken at the end, and more for him than for her, with whom you have identified...

I think I've read this before, actually. Another one, just like yesterday's Hemingway story, that I didn't realize I'd already read until I had (re-)plunged in. Guess some of those English classes I took are just lying dormant in my brain somewhere...?

What I do remember reading is Kate Chopin's more famous feminist work, The Awakening, maybe in multiple English classes (although still not assigned as often as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"). These stories run together a little in my mind, thematically and where they sort of hover, historically.

"The Story of an Hour" just makes me too sad. Why did we have to set up the world so that when we are companioned (whether married, living in sin, or whatever) that we lose our autonomy? I know that's what's at the bottom of Louise Mallard's joy. She even says she loved him, or did she? She did! It doesn't matter! and so on. This wasn't by any means the worst marriage. Yet, she just can't have her whole self, and I know what she means. But we're precluded from saying it somehow. You just find yourself missing the weirdest little things about independence, like "buying the flowers yourself," as Mrs. Dalloway might do.

I really almost gave this a B+ because it's barely a story. But it does pack that punch. That saddening punch.

July 25th: Ernest Hemingway A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading: too many to list. various projects in progress. 

A giant of American Literature today. (By the way, for those who don't know me, "American" is not synonymous with "from the United States." But this guy is, still, a giant of American literature. And he had the good sense to live in a few other places besides the U.S., so there's that.)

Today's Story: "The Killers"
Author: Ernest Hemingway
My Rating: B

I tend to like the idea of Hemingway more than I enjoy the actual act of reading his work. Tend to.

I am pretty sure that I read "The Killers" in one of my American Lit classes at USC. I didn't realize it until partway through reading it today. In that class, our Hemingway book was the collected Nick Adams stories, I believe. I forget the exact title. I wish I had all my college syllabuses and notebooks and stuff here with me. Gotta work on that.

If you had asked me thirty minutes ago which Nick Adams stories we read in that class, I'd have had no idea, but now I'm sure this is one of them. Don't ask me what the others were (no idea!) but one had some part about sneaking up some hills at night in the moonlight. After that semester, I went to Cuba for the summer (really!) and read The Old Man and the Sea there. I think. I definitely owned the book there and my journal says I was reading it. I also saw the movie The Old Man and the Sea there. Sometimes I can't remember actually finishing that book, but it was so short, so why wouldn't I have finished it? Later, in my twenties, I read For Whom the Bell Tolls. (Spoiler: thee.) What I remember about that book is that it took a long time to finish. Nonetheless, I miss my twenties. I miss the massive pleasure of a)reading whatever I wanted and no longer reading assigned things b)feeling like I had enough lifetime ahead to read everything on the life to-read list. Those two dovetail during your twenties. Take advantage, twentysomethings!

Back to "The Killers." What's the point?

Waiting. The clock ticks. Still waiting.

Ahhhhh, no point. Got it. Slices of life. Humanity. Consider yourself. What would you do if you were Ole Andreson? What would you have done if you were Nick--would you have been afraid to go warn him? What if you were George? Sam?  OK, OK, it's all very interesting. But I can't quite say I love the story or its non-ending.

Any bets on which year, as I make my way chronologically through The Best American Short Stories of the Century, will be the last with a story using the n-word to describe a black person? We're up to 1927 now, and here was Hemingway using it. (Yes, yes, in dialogue, in the mouth of the diner guy as well as a couple of sleazeballs who walk in. But still.)

I should really get around to reading A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises. For someone who tends to like the idea of Hemingway so much, I haven't really read enough of his stuff. I have, however, visited his home in Cuba and the bars there where he used to hang out and the Old Man's fishing village on the Sea. So I am ahead of some United States-ians in that way.

But I haven't been to Key West! Ahhhh, the trade-offs of life. "It's a hell of a thing," as George a million different Hemingway characters would say.

I respect the hell out of my boy Ernest, but on the pure enjoyment factor this story is B material.

By the way! This is day 25 of July, and I've now read 24 short stories (I granted myself a holiday on the 4th), so I'm on my way to completing a total of 30 for July, my month of short stories. Will I make my goal? Want to put some money on it --for a good cause? Well, this month I also happen to be raising money for my upcoming Habitat for Humanity build in Poznan, Poland. How about a little donation--say, 50 cents per story read and blogged about?
You can click here to visit my Habitat fundraising page or find out more about my trip.

Coming up at the end of the month, we'll take a look back at the authors and stories and do a little ranking and review!

July 24th: Jean Toomer A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading: Zola and His Time by Matthew Josephson

and 10 años con Mafalda by Quino

now listening:
To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

This was a rough one. 

Today's Story: "Blood-Burning Moon"

Author: Jean Toomer

My Rating: C+

Where to begin? It gets the + instead of just a 'C' for being about such a haunting subject, and describing it realistically and painfully, and making you disgusted that you live in this world that behaves that way, and so on. But it really is a C story, in a few different ways. 

Now, author Jean Toomer is an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and this work has literary merit and all that. But you know what? The writing is just straight up not that good. We are in eager-creative-writing-student territory here. Example: The second paragraph of the story begins, "Louisa sang as she came over the crest of the hill from the white folk's kitchen. Her skin was the color of oak leaves on young trees in the fall. Her breasts, firm and up-pointed like ripe acorns. And her singing had the low murmur of winds in fig trees." 

About the only thing interesting there is "winds," plural, not "the wind." The rest of it is as if the creative writing teacher said to put a character in nature and describe the scene. It's like an imagery exercise, with a nice frat-boy touch. It's also far from the only sentence in the story like this. The title, after all, is "Blood-Burning Moon" and we get lots and lots of talk about the moon, the full moon, the full moon which is an omen, the full moon which is an omen hanging in the sky above the plantation, sorry, former plantation. For god's sake, there is treachery and evil about! Does it have to be so dully written? 

Jean Toomer, the author, whose work I don't think I've ever read before today, apparently "passed for white" sometimes during his life and married a white woman. This background informs (perhaps) "Blood-Burning Moon," in which Louisa likes/is liked by both the white Bob Stone and the black Tom Burwell. Come to find out, Bob Stone is an asshole and has a temper, and Tom Burwell has brute force strength and a slightly more righteous temper.  Think this is going to end well? 

OK, so it's fine, average, whatever, doesn't really do it for me, wish it did more. Here's a serious thing to consider: the use of Black English vernacular in dialogue. Necessary? Improves the story? Lessens the story? Should be written (only?) by African-American authors? Makes the characters more/less sympathetic? Creates the mood? Affects the theme? etc. So many questions. (By the way, this story, published in 1923, frequently uses the "n-word." You have been warned.) Here's a question I do want answered, though: What's up with "gwine"? 

This isn't the first time I've come across "gwine" or "agwine" -- it always has bugged me. I just don't hear it right, I guess. Example from this story: "What y'think he's agwine t'do t' Bob Stone?" 

Everything else I can "hear" as I'm reading it:  "Yassur he sho' is..." and "An' here I is, but that ain't ahelpin' none..." and "Cut him jes like I cut..."  I hear those words, because I've actually heard such speech. I have never in all the regions in which I've lived and traveled heard someone pronounce the word "gwine" or "agwine" in talking about what they will do. Who says this? Where is it pronounced this way? What have I missed? 

Also, Toomer writes the voices of all these southern characters, not just the black characters. For example, white Tom Stone says, "Fight like a man Tom Burwell an' I'll lick y'." Does that mean that Toomer is or is not making literary use of Black English vernacular? Discuss. 

I'll be over here falling asleep while you students work on your compositions about this story. 

(But "agwine"? Seriously?? I just don't get it.) 

July 22nd: Sherwood Anderson A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading: too much. it's all just too much.
on the bright side, I feel validated by James Lee Burke

There really are quite a few B-plus stories out there in the world, folks. 

Today's Story: "The Other Woman"

Author: Sherwood Anderson

My Rating: B+

I first read Sherwood Anderson in Los Angeles when we were doing our The Books We Should Have Read in High School book group. We read Wineseburg, Ohio. I'm not entirely sure I thought then (nor think now) that Winesburg, Ohio qualifies as a Book We Should Have Read in High School, but, you know, my fellow book groupies were from the Midwest, so, what can I say? 

Anyway, it was all right. I can't really remember plot/character specifics about it as much as I remember the mood and tone. It seems to fit in with the whole 1910s/1920s literature ilk like the early Pulitzer winners (The Magnificent Ambersons, One of Ours, So Big, etc.)  All Midwestern-y and our-world-is-changing-like. Well, this short story didn't really strike me as that. For one thing ,I couldn't place where we were: the Midwest? New York? A city? A town? It didn't really matter. But let me just say, this story is male, male, male, male, male. 

For any of you who start twitching and having heart palpitations whenever feminism is brought up, let me just say that it's not a bad thing to be male. (For a person, or a story.) You can be a male piece of literature and be acceptable or even brilliant. But it is also acceptable to talk about the fact that a totally male thing has been written. Though I don't remember much about ol' Sherwood from the book group Winesburg encounter, I certainly don't remember him seeming off-putting or limited. But this story? Let's just say it's easy to see why John Updike, as editor of the The Best American Short Stories of the Century, selected it for inclusion in his volume. 

I mean -- gasp, sputter! -- the woman doesn't say anything!  That shows us what we are doing here. This story is male, male, male all the way through, told by one male to another, about the women only as they affect male narrator, and that is IT. 

But this story is also about sex. Specifically, about how young unmarrieds, in a world before sex education (or, one might assume, after sex education, that latter being a world we soon might live in if the Republicans' lobbyists have their way), don't really know what the !@*$%* is about to hit them on their wedding night. Now, I have never really bought this innocent ignorance theory, at least not totally. I think people reasonably talked at least a little about things. And if they were farm kids, and rural, and whatnot, then they understood a thing or two about basic biology from the annual livestock cycles, if nothing else. So, apart from a few VERY sheltered urban kids, who really didn't know at ALL what s/he's getting into upon getting married? But satisfaction is another matter. And Sherwood Anderson all but says this outright in "The Other Woman." You're reading along thinking male, male, male, anecdote, anecdote, anecdote, marriage, marriage, marriage, blah, blah, blah, and then suddenly WHAM! You're like, oh--hey--how to be satisfied in love and life. 

And you then have to give some kudos, I suppose, to Sherwood (I just can't be all formal and call him Anderson; it's hopeless) for having the wherewithal to be like, I'm gonna set this right down in a short story under all the prudes' noses... Is that how it went down? I like to think that's how it went down.

Should I read some more Sherwood Anderson?  Yeah, maybe I should. Have YOU read any Sherwood Anderson? 

July 18th: Susan Glaspell A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading: Plum Island by Nelson DeMille

Step right up, folks! This here selection is what we call a magnificent short story. Come one, come all, and experience something marvelous. 

Today's Story: "A Jury of Her Peers"

Author: Susan Glaspell

My Rating:  A+

That's right! I said plus. The first one handed out during this, my month of short stories. This is top notch stuff. The scene is so vivid; the characters come alive; the threat is looming; the pieces fall into place (are they quilted or knotted, those pieces?!); the theme is developed; the point is made. And it's all so gripping! And so simple. And yet so not, right? 

I hesitate to give spoilers, to the point that I don't want to describe anything about the plot, but I will say this: these people are out in the boondocks, there has been an incident for which the sheriff and other officials must be called in, and there is a woman who hangs out with the sheriff's wife discovering some pretty important things, and I'll tell you what: the dialogue in this story and the dialogue/action mix are pitch perfect. Do yourself a favor, if you ever want to read a short story a day for the month of July as I am doing, and include this one! 

What about the author, Susan Glaspell? Are we not familiar? (We are not. That's OK.) Well, this story, "A Jury of Her Peers," was published in 1917, but apparently she adapted it from a play she had written a couple of years earlier, called Trifles. And apparently this play is very famous. Well-known enough to be written about and included in anthologies and... why? Why don't I know her as I clearly should?  Today I officially feel so dumb. I do love that she worked it so well as a short story, too. And I totally want to produce and direct the play, like, right now. Furthermore, Susan Glaspell hung out in Provincetown, although she was originally from Iowa, and she won the Pulitzer (!) for Drama in 1931, for the play Alison's House. The Pulitzer, as you may know, is my favorite, so right on, Susan Glaspell!  (Also, Provincetown is awesome, too.) 

In short: more Susan Glaspell, please!

July 9th: James Joyce A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now finished re-reading: "The Metamorphosis"/"Die Verwandlung" by Franz Kafka
now reading: Sophie's Choice by William Styron

Kafka, Styron, and Joyce...someone might call these guys "writer's writers," if that weren't such a weird way to talk about creative people. (Not that it stops the critics. "She's a real songwriter's songwriter," you sometimes hear. We understand what it means, but it still seems like a phrase to use when you can think of no other words to describe the artist -- truly no other words, so you just use "artist" again.)

Today's Story: "Clay"
Author: James Joyce
My Rating: B

Reading this story, "Clay," puts me in mind of the eternal question I ask myself as a writer (well, one of them): do I want any and all readers to understand my work? Do I care if they don't get it? Does it matter if I refer to things that are clear and obvious now, or known to many people, but that in the future will be confusing, or baffle some folk?

In short, do I want to be one of those annoying pieces in the Norton Anthology where the footnotes take up more of the pages than the actual text? No, I do not. But will I be?  ???  Over time, the things which we find so familiar will be altered beyond recognition. And even now, I know some people have a hard time keeping up with my allusions, although I don't say that in a literary snobby way, just an "I-talk-a-lot-and-throw-in-a-lot-of-random-Clue-and-Designing-Women-references" way.

Then again, even a one-footnote story puts forth this eternal question, because were it not for the footnote in this particular case, and despite the story's title, I wouldn't have known that Maria had stuck her hand into the clay, nor known that choosing the clay is ominous. Is this an Irish thing? A 1915 thing? I have no idea. Never heard of it. Never heard of the Hallowe'en game they're playing, in fact. So maybe I'm just unimpressed because I'm confused, but James gets a deduction and the grade is a B. Not fair? (Who ever said I was a fair grader? It's my freakin' blog, after all.) Well, I hardly think that anyone coming to the defense of James Joyce's writing is going to try, "You're just ignorant; he doesn't make any obscure allusions" for the thrust of their argument.

Oh, James Joyce. Good writer, that boy. Are his short stories deceptively simple? Are his deft turns of phrase like Forster's, with more than meets the elegance-beholding eye? Is he as wise as Tolstoy about the human condition? (OK, no on that one, sorry.) Is he the Dante of his generation? The Da Vinci? The Bono?

In AP English my senior year of high school, we were all set to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. We knew this was coming, because as I previously mentioned in my Kafka entry, my sister and several of my classmates' older siblings were two years ahead of us and the English department pretty much kept the biggies of the curriculum the same, at least not altering them in just a couple of years. Now, it wasn't to be our first time around the James Joyce block cul-de-sac, as we had studied "Araby" the year before, but anyway, the novel loomed. And then our teacher, who had taken over AP English that year from our sisters' teacher who departed in the wake of a messy life/divorce incident, discovered that we had not yet read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She was incredulous. At first she thought one student was saying he alone hadn't read it, like, he had blown it off sophomore year or whatever. No, we explained, to this teacher who had in previous years taught the "average" and remedial English classes and wasn't familiar with us, the accelerated/Advanced Placement crowd who'd gone through our four years of high school together, we didn't read that in sophomore year American Lit. None of us read it. We read The Scarlet Letter  and Moby Dick that year and assorted other things, but no Huckleberry Finn. She immediately scrapped Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and hauled out her set of Huckleberry Finn  classroom copies, which we AP seniors surely eyed with disdain, as they were normally handled by, you know, sophomores. And not even advanced  sophomores. Do I now look back on her decision approvingly? Do I agree with her that any self-respecting English student must study Huckleberry Finn in American Lit?  Yeah, sure. But we hated the very idea of being senior AP English students reading the same book as the average sophomores. What a delicious whirlwind of meta-pretentious thought, no? Joyce should be proud.

Before you can become an artist, you must rid yourself of all the baggage of your "influences." But what games did you play on All Hallows' Eve, James Joyce, that now haunt Maria and me? What twists of fate await us, blindfolded, when we try to reach for our destiny? And when the hell will I ever get around to reading Ulysses?

A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors July 5th: John Updike

now finished (hurrah! finally!): Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H.W. Brands
now reading: a book of poetry, a book of short stories, a novel in French, a novel in English, the non-fiction audio book I'm listening to on my mp3 player on walks and such, and a biography. the usual. 

Happy Independence Day, U.S.A.! I took the holiday off from my July short-story-per-day project. Sorry! I actually took the day off from computer/internet/posting entirely, so it's nothing personal, literature.

Today's Story: "Pygmalion"
Author: John Updike
My Rating: C+ or B-

Am I some kind of John Updike contrarian? Actually at first I was thinking about rating this a B but the more I thought about it the more annoyed I got. There's no there there, as a certain other writer would say. It's really quite a small fragment of an idea and I wouldn't even say it's very fleshed out. I wish it had been a bit longer. This is just a blip. I could have seen our boy Updike doing a bit more with the idea of what men want from women they are married to and/or don't realize they don't want, but then again, there are those who would say Updike is too steeped in his own sexist world view to really examine such issues... who knows.

What I do know is that basically nothing happens in this shorter-than-short story. Short-short stories weird me out a little. I know some people don't care for short stories, preferring novels that fully develop/realize characters and action. I don't feel that way, but I think I do about short-shorts, as compared to normal short stories. This is more like just a thought. A fragment. It's shorter than some blog entries.

And, it doesn't really make sense. Why does Gwen suddenly start imitating people, too? What's the point of this particular little snippet of a marriage? What's the point of this story?

Now, let's think about Updike. First of all, I realize now that I have read a short story of his before, "A &P." Read it in high school, and if you had asked me a few years ago, I would have absolutely remembered the story, but had no clue who the author was. But yup, apparently that's by John Updike. That was certainly a more fleshed-out piece (in more ways than one). Secondly, I first read an Updike novel as the 'U' author in my A-to-Z Literary Blog Project. I chose The Centaur - which definitely breaks the tradition these last few days of my saying "Hey, I've read [insert most famous work here] by this author." I liked his writing enough to select him as one of the privileged thirteen in my A-to-Z Top Half Authors, and the second novel I read was Rabbit, Run.  Even though I didn't advance him to my A-to-Z Blog Project Semi-finals, I know I'm going to end up reading Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest because they won the Pulitzer, which means I need to read Rabbit Redux, the second of the four Rabbit novels, before I read those other two, of course. Rabbit, Run annoyed me (hence my calling myself an Updike contrarian) for many of the same reasons that this "short story" "Pygmalion" did. So, so, so male-centered. You can write a male character, with a male point of view, without having a male-centric worldview (as in, to the exclusion of women). Lots of authors do this (Tolstoy, etc.)  Updike not so much. He's a really, really good writer. He knows his way around a sentence, boy, does he ever! And I completely get what he's doing with Rabbit, and with the fact that Updike wanted to offer some kind of counter to Kerouac and the other Beats' free-spirit drop-out-of-society run-away-from-responsibility mentality, but does it have to come across as so alienating to all of womankind?

What do you think about Updike?  Is he challenging? Is he profound? brilliant? misogynistic? Is his writing good, boring, fascinating, or none of the above?

A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors continues July 3rd: Ray Bradbury

now reading: still lots of books
in the home stretch of Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H.W. Brands, though

After Atwood and Kafka, a little Bradbury? That seems about right. And once again, I will say that unless I read some short story at some point in some lit class that has gone completely out of mind, the first time I read Ray Bradbury was his mega-famous work, Fahrenheit 451.

Today's Story: "The Last Night of the World"
Author: Ray Bradbury
My Rating: B -

Ahhh, sorry Ray. Is B-minus a little harsh? This story just didn't really do it for me. But it's not bad -- maybe I should elevate it to a B. Maybe if Ray comes to office hours to whine about his grade like law students do, I will change it.

So, "The Last Night of the World" is a tiny little thought experiment about arguably the biggest thought you could have, and he develops it into a conversation, a glimpse of a setting, two characters' words, a quiet meditation. What's not to like, right? Well, for one thing, how do they know tonight's the night? Why did he have the dream four days ago but she (and all the other women on the block, apparently) have it last night, and yet we know it's tonight the world will end? Why isn't it, say, four nights from now? And don't even get me started on the fact that all the men at the office had the dream first, then the ladies in the neighborhood later, in those neatly divided 1951 social groups. I know I shouldn't fault Mr. Bradbury for that horrible gender division of labor of his time, but does he have to divide his end-of-the-world revelation along the exact same lines?

On the plus side, the story is so short I don't see why you'd even need to read it at lunch, or on a break. You could probably just read it at your desk while you're waiting for something to download.

Yes, I like the lesson of the story: that in contemplating the utterly normal actions of people facing the end of the world, you realize that you are going to face the end of your world one day by dying, and you should live your best life in each moment which means the quiet moments watching your daughters play with blocks ARE the pinnacle of living, etc. I see echoes of this in the sneaks-up-on-you make-something-of-your-life theme in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. At any given moment, you should be doing something you want to be remembered for, and you shouldn't put off doing the Things You Want to Be Remembered For.

Let me say about Bradbury in general that he is nothing if not an inspiration to not put things off. Like I mentioned, I first read him when I read Fahrenheit 451, and of course I liked it; it's meant for people like me, I think. (We like books and raise our eyebrows at society.) I wouldn't say, though, that it sucks you in or envelops you in a War and Peace or Lonesome Dove-y way. Bradbury has a style that I can best describe as methodical. His writing isn't, in my opinion, particularly pulse-pounding or whimsical or propelling; it just goes along with the story, with bigger themes quietly asserting themselves. And in this he is amazingly talented, and dedicated. I mention the latter because I read his book Zen in the Art of Writing and found it quite inspiring; his writing habits are pretty much perfect. He is the master of "Instructions for Writing: Apply ass to seat. Write." In Zen in the Art of Writing, he offers lots of tips and inspirational turns of phrase, but he also tells how he basically just sat down every Monday to start a new story, then revised it on Thursday, sent it out on Friday or whatever, every week, for decades. I mean - hello. We procrastinating writers suck. Ray Bradbury most assuredly did not suck.

However! I also think that that kind of persistence, while it could have been AWESOME for launching your writing career, especially in the early 20th century, and getting your work out there in a billion periodicals, pulp magazines, and the like, can lead to some less-than-meaty stories. Isn't that just a fact? If you write a story every week, you'll have your best story of the year and your 52nd best story of that year.

So, maybe the prolific Bradbury is bound to have some of his lasting, famous stories not resonate as much with some of us as other (of his) lasting, famous stories do. I loved reading what he had to say in Zen in the Art of Writing, but most of his fiction that I've read is less thrilling. (So far -- I'm holding out hope and am nowhere close to wanting to write him off or anything.) It's just like (and oh my god, I know I'm opening this can of worms again, oh boy, here they come slithering out) with most science fiction or, as I like to think of it, sigh-fi, in that I like the ideas and the what-if?s and the symbolism and the social commentary so much more than I tend to like the actual process of reading the fiction material I'm given to read about those things. Which, you might say, brings us back to Atwood and Kafka, both of whom have definitely been categorized as Literary rather than as Science Fiction, although both have grappled with a bizarre what-if? scenario or two. Why the difference? Atwood herself has talked about how "science fiction" shouldn't be a negative label, but then again, you don't see her rushing out to bookstores to insist they move her books into that genre. In the end, Ray Bradbury for me might be sort of like a few other authors with whom I find myself so, so simpatico -- but it's more about them and their take on the world and their have-a-beer-with-me talk than their actual work: Michael Cunningham. Jack Kerouac. Jodi Picoult.

What's the best Ray Bradbury story you've ever read?