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?

A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors July 2nd: Franz Kafka, "The Judgment"

now reading: Best Short Stories/Die schönsten Erzählungen, A Dual-Language Book
by Franz Kafka (ed. and trans. by Stanley Appelbaum)
+ like 6 other books at the same time, but it's not as bad as it sounds

Yesterday as July commenced I explained that I have (yet) a(nother) little reading project wherein I shall read and reflect on one short story and/or its author per day throughout July. We kicked it off with Margaret Atwood's "Happy Endings" and my jabber about both my experience reading her novels and how I totally hated/didn't get The Handmaid's Tale upon first reading it. Today, we continue with another author I've read before, the mighty Franz Kafka. Since I have the abovementioned book of his stories checked out from the library right now and it's due back in a week or two, he shall be my story of the day author a few times this month. (By the way, I think the word "erzählungen" is more like "narrative" or "story" than "short story" as we know that term in English; am I right, my fluent German peeps?)

Today's Story: "The Judgment"/"Das Urteil"
Author: Franz Kafka
My rating:  A -

First of all, let's start by saying that the word "judgment" drives me crazy because I never know how to spell it. Everyone has that one word that they can never feel they are spelling correctly (well, everyone except you people who suck at spelling, who presumably have lots of words like that) and mine has always been "judgment" although the thing is that it can also be spelled "judgement" and therein lies the problem. For years I would write one and then the other, but no matter what I wrote, it felt wrong. Only to find out both are right. Argh. However, since this book/translator goes with no 'E' we shall do the same in this blog entry.

Although "The Judgment" is weird, it is immensely likable. What do I mean by "weird"? Well, this is Kafka, after all. But it's not absurd-weird or non-linear-weird or magical-realism-weird, it's more like emotional "What just happened?" weird. I don't want to give spoilers, but I will say that when the father gets angry and "judges" I found myself very confused. What is he mad about? Was he pretending not to know the friend, or was he really going crazy? And then there's all the stuff leading up to that: I really had no idea what to make of it, either, namely the relationship between Georg and his friend. Is this supposed to be a closet homosexual thing, and that's why he doesn't want to announce the engagement?  I mean, color me severely confused. And yet! The confusion in no way makes you want to not read the story or throw the book across the room or anything like that. You just keep reading and reading and get right on to the end and you think, "Whoa!" and only then do you ask, "Wait, why did that all just happen? What does it mean?"  (Like life?)

Therefore, confused about what the actions of the story mean on the surface, I happily turn to the symbolic realm, which is where Kafka's real writing genius lies, no? The friend is the true inner Kafka...bachelorhood is Kafka's writing/art/career/life's purpose from which engagement will snatch him away...the father is perhaps a god-like ultimate Judge, perhaps the judge within Kafka himself...the bridge is all that connects two people...

And speaking of that bridge, a cursory "what the heck just happened?" internet search upon finishing reading "The Judgment" leads me to many different literary critics (plus, even Wikipedia goes there) who point out that the German word "Verkehr" can mean both "traffic" and "intercourse, of the sexual variety" and that word's appearance in the end of the story is thus fraught with all kinds of meaning. Which is interesting, but I still see the bridge as having a lot of layers, not just one sexually symbolic point, especially because Georg stares at it in the beginning of the story after finishing his letter.

I do love the German language. German was the first foreign language that I studied, and I'm really sad that I could take only two years of it in high school (there wasn't enough student interest for a third year class my junior year, sadly, as SO many high-schoolers dutifully took the two years that look good on a college application and then bailed) and I'm even sadder that as I then studied French, and began dabbling in other languages, I let my mad German skills slip away. I need to rekindle them. Anyway, in this particular story I loved the word  korrespondenzverhältnis, which describes the relationship between Georg and his friend who is off living in St. Petersburg, so they only communicate by letter these days. Correspondence-relationship doesn't have nearly the same ring in English (not to mention it's not a word), but in my life I have totally had a korrespondenzverhältnis or two. He knows his friend -- they grew up together or whatever -- but now they are living in two different countries so they have a korrespondenzverhältnis. Maybe this just speaks strongly to my expat soul or my adolescent dozens-of-pen-pals soul, but I've had several other korrespondenzverhältnis, too, in which my relationship with a friend or family member became truly richer and deeper through letters, after or in between seeing them in person. I miss writing letters, damn it!!!

Franz Kafka. Just as with yesterday's Margaret Atwood whose famous The Handmaid's Tale was the first thing I read by her, the first Kafka I ever read was his mega-famous "The Metamorphosis," back in the AP English day. I've since also read The Trial, but I *think* that's it for the Kafka and me. (I know -- pathetic. I don't know why people think I could ever qualify as a literary snob, having read so little Kafka, not to mention less than half of Atwood's oeuvre. What the heck, people?) I liked "The Metamorphosis,"  although I kind of recall not love-loving it (it sure beat the hell out of Faulkner, though, I'll give it that!) because I wanted the weirdness to be more wacky and fun instead of darkly brooding and stuff. You have to understand that my sister was two years ahead of me in school and therefore in English literature classes, so she was forever dropping hints about things I would get around to a couple years later (in some cases the hints became major spoilers, i.e, SPOILER ALERT Anna Karenina and her train, while other times the hints just allowed me to be a particularly precocious high school freshman, randomly dropping Beowulf into conversation with other juniors who I knew were in my sister's English class when she wasn't around).  So she had talked up this story about "a guy who turns into a cockroach" and one does not easily forget that, now does one? After two years of interpretation, I suppose in my head it had become incredibly grotesque and cartoonish and spectacular, but really it's kind of sad and drudgery-laden. (I repeat: like life?)

Anyway, "The Metamorphosis" ("Die Verwandlung") is in this library book I have checked out now, so I'll reread it this week and see how it and I have aged since high school. The Trial was also weird, but not absurd-weird or magic-weird or wacky-weird, just more "What's happening here?" with an eerie calm hanging over it all. (Again: government, society, life.) Kafka is one of those authors who is constantly on my to-read-more-of list that I stupidly never get around to reading more of. I'm glad to remedy that at least a tiny bit this month!

A Month of Short Stories & Their Authors July 1st: Margaret Atwood

now reading:
for a variety of reasons, too many books to get into here

Two things I can't believe: that I haven't posted on this Lit Supp blog since the day Maya Angelou died, and that the day Maya Angelou died was in freakin' May, more than a month ago. Where, time, June, where...? 

Well, that brings us to July, in which month I pledge to read a short story a day in addition to all the regular reading and other things that I am doing. Why? Oh, don't look too hard for a reason: this is strictly from the WhytheHellNot? files. I suppose you could say I was "inspired" (but please don't) by an online article I read that listed fourteen short stories (which the web site, Arts.Mic, called "brilliant pieces of literature") that can be read in the time it takes to eat lunch. Now, some people (hi Brian!) are unspeakably annoyed by all of the click-bait pieces that insist on two things: having a number in the title and being a list, but I kind of got used to that early, a few years back, when I was writing for About.com and they encouraged us to make list articles...I don't know what weird psychological thing makes people eager to read those, but pondering that is not our quest today. Our quest is to discuss the first story I read to kick off my month of stories, and also the author of said story. (And I suppose I have to confess that the handy article did provide links to the 14 brilliant stories they selected -- two of which I've already read -- making my read-a-good-short-story-every-day-in-July project very quick and simple for at least twelve of the days.) With no further ado, then: 

Today's Story: "Happy Endings"

Author: Margaret Atwood

My rating: B+

This story is short. You can read it in the time it takes to eat maybe a third of your lunch. If that. Like most Margaret Atwood writing, it puts its finger on some things that go on in women's minds and in women's interpersonal relationships, and in doing so, it slowly, emotionally builds so that the reader gets kind of angry at all the injustice in the world, although the author never seemed to have an agenda coming. 

The "Happy Endings" gimmick is that it starts out with John and Mary meeting, then goes through different "choices" of possible endings. But you don't really choose A, B, C, etc. You just read them all in a row, and that IS the story. 

Why do I give it a B+? I hate to be at all negative about my girl Margaret Atwood, but it didn't really blow my mind; rather, it's just a fun and you might say inventive little rumination on the prototypical male-female relationship. 

Like many, many readers, my first exposure to Margaret Atwood was The Handmaid's Tale. Unlike, apparently, many, many readers, when I initially read it (early 20s, L.A., had heard about it for years, totally wanted to finally read it) it struck me as remarkably anti-feminist. I know, what? I guess I was in bizarro-land. Maybe it's like when I recently read Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and it struck me as pro-military despite the fact that no one else evidently perceives it that way--maybe I'm just so far past this particular "Wow, the Iraq war sure was a horrible idea" political standpoint that where others see preaching to the choir, I see a tiresome placating...  Of course, The Handmaid's Tale isn't exactly preaching to the choir, as it was a bold, truly inventive dystopian imagining of Where We Are Headed (and with the whole Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision, we may have been edged a little further down the path this week) that rocked a lot of people's worlds, but I just interpreted it as pretty much the exact opposite of what everyone else got from it and what Atwood herself is and stands for. Still really not sure why. I seem to remember it being really in favor of women having (and caring for) their own children and instead of picking up on all the male-control-of-women's-bodies I guess to me as the twentysomething renegade  that I was, it seemed to be just a big defense of women having and raising their children (and not doing anything else). I wish I could remember why else I hated it, but it really angered me - then.  

Now, naturally, as a literary-type person, I am aware that this is not the book's message at all. I get it. I may have even reread it later in Boston, because I specifically remember reading a Q&A with Atwood printed in the back of it in which she talked about how Dubya was basically exactly the image of her worst nightmares realized and how the USA was going to be led to its most dismal fate by someone spouting religious jingoistic nonsense, not overtly fascist Orwellian stuff. Bam! 

But before that, it was a different Q & A, a live one, in Los Angeles, that helped me see the error of my ways about Ms Atwood. We went to hear her speak at some UCLA event and I realized she was absolutely brilliant, in fact totally feminist, and pretty much the embodiment of wisest-author-ever cool. So I shook off my lack of Handmaid's enjoyment and moved on to other books of hers, enjoying: The Edible Woman, Lady Oracle, The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake. I think I enjoyed The Robber Bride the most; I definitely still think about it a lot when contemplating the march of historical events. (Which I do often, while plugging away on my Prez Bios project -- we're now up to FDR.) Sadly, I don't remember that much about The Blind Assassin and I kind of want to reread it. I remember more the feeling it gave me and random images of it. I actually have a distinct visual setting that pops to mind when I think of each of those books. I did enjoy Oryx and Crake -- it was weird, but good -- and I want to read the rest of that trilogy (is it a trilogy now? Just the three?) 

It's actually been a few years since I've read an Atwood book. I still mean to read lots more of her stuff. I try keep up on her in the news and on the internet, more or less. Margaret Atwood is awesome. I don't know why on Earth The Handmaid's Tale came across so differently to me than the rest of the world, but I do know that a lot of feminist truths Atwood speaks are things that I take as absolute givens on Earth; maybe that had something to do with it. I definitely feel inspired to read another Atwood or two this summer, to raise them up a few notches on my oh-so-long to-read list.