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.

Reflections on A Month of Short Stories

We're all forced to read a lot of short stories in school, from those elementary level "Reading" or "Language" segments of our day right on up through secondary English studies. Those of us who go on to be English majors tend to love novels. How many of us read as many short stories in adulthood as we did when we were young? 

Yet, there are certainly plenty of us writing short stories. It's just what so many of us writers do, and while we all read novels (yes, all writers--if someone says "I'm a writer" but doesn't read, then that someone is lying to you), we don't all spend as much time perusing short fiction, despite the fact that we want some magazine somewhere to publish all the stories we've written. Don't we owe it to ourselves to read some regularly, then?  

This, coupled with a random piece I stumbled across on Arts.Mic called "14 Brilliant Pieces of Literature You Can Read in the Time It Takes to Eat Lunch" inspired me to read a short story per day throughout the month of July and blog about each one. The fourteen suggestions from the online article were, overall, just OK, in my opinion (though definitely short! you can read them in the time it takes to eat a few bites of your lunch!) but to fill out my month I also delved into a Norton anthology and The Best American Short Stories of the Century as well as a book of Kafka's collected stories that I had from the library. 

And now, we shall examine the results of the 30 stories from 27 authors (I allowed myself a holiday for the 4th!) of my July project: A Month of Short Stories (and Their Authors).I gave them each a grade, and I'm happy to report that no one failed; the grade distribution was like this:

A+: one, A: five, A-: six, B+: seven, B: four, B-: three, C+: four

My short story champion is "A Jury of Her Peers" by Susan Glaspell. It was so well-done! A rural couple of a previous era (the story was published in 1917) are drawn into the death of a neighbor; there's a sheriff, a home without its residents, an element of mystery, a decrying of sexism, a subtextual plea for people to be nicer to one another... I adore this story. It's, as we like to say, deep. 

There were several great stories that received an A but I think my other favorite, thus perhaps the best of the As or perhaps just the one that most spoke to me, was Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen." Oh my, do I like that one. It packs a punch in thematic ways I totally dig. I was also impressed by Ring Lardner, adored Katherine Anne Porter's writing (as always), and managed to give an A to both Chekhov and Faulkner, who have tormented me in the past. Really, my sixteen-year-old self  who read them previously was probably just tormented anyway, and I projected it onto those guys. It's interesting to read them in the cold, hard light of adulthood. 

All right then, so here's the list of my July short stories, by grade: 

A+  "A Jury of Her Peers" by Susan Glaspell

A  "To Room Nineteen" by Doris Lessing

A  "The Looking Glass" by Anton Chekhov

A  "The Golden Honeymoon" by Ring Lardner

A  "Theft" by Katherine Anne Porter

A  "That Evening Sun Go Down" by William Faulkner
A-  "In the Penal Colony" by Franz Kafka

A-  "The Judgment" by Franz Kafka

A-  "The Mark on the Wall" by Virginia Woolf

A-  "The Gate-Keeper" by Francois Coppee

A-  "Little Selves" by Mary Lerner

A-  "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin

B+  "Happy Endings" by Margaret Atwood
B+  "The Road From Colonus" by E.M. Forster

B+  "A Country Doctor" by Franz Kafka

B+  "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros

B+ "Adams" by George Saunders

B+ "The Other Woman" by Sherwood Anderson
B+  "Reunion" by John Cheever

B   "Clay" by James Joyce

B   "The School" by Donald Barthelme

B   "The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway

B   "Double Birthday" by Willa Cather

B-  "The Last Night of the World" by Ray Bradbury

B-  "Zelig" by Benjamin Rosenblatt

B-  "Pygmalion" by John Updike

C+ "The Sock" by Lydia Davis

C+ "Boys and Girls" by Alice Munro

C+ "Blood-Burning Moon" by Jean Toomer

C+ "Wild Plums" by Grace Stone Coates

Those were the original grades I gave them, and as I think back over the month, they are still for the most part how I feel.  Of the C-plussers, "Blood-Burning Moon" I at least have to give credit to for being a decent story, structured, with substance, etc., but I just didn't really enjoy it. Those other three at the bottom of the list were pretty weak. Two of the B-minuses, also nothing to write home about, are already faded in my memory, but I remember Bradbury's "The Last Night of the World" really well, so maybe it should be bumped up to a B for being so vividly rendered?  Lots of B and B+ stories, definitely. 

What was the best thing about this project? Well, probably that I found myself reading stories by fantastic authors. In how many given months of your life do you spend time with even one of those classic, prize-winning, critically acclaimed, famous, sometimes beloved, sometimes loathed, solidly-entrenched-in-the-canon authors, let alone a dozen of them? (Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Chekhov, Kafka, Forster, Joyce, Cather...) along with other 20th century stalwarts (Lessing, Updike, Atwood, Cisneros, Saunders, Bradbury, Cheever) and fantastic past writers whose stars have faded a teensy bit but definitely need to be revived (Glaspell, Lardner, Anderson...)? It's a great experience! 

What was the worst thing? Well, the hardest thing was definitely those few days that I didn't get around to reading a story until late in the evening; I was tired, it was 11:30, but I had to read a story and get something up on the blog about it before the day was done. Luckily, I had that "14 Brilliant Pieces..." article, whose stories were almost all very short, and on those days I clicked through to one of those, whereas on the other days, when I did my story in the morning or afternoon, I tended to go to the books that risked bringing me longer stories. 

Did I notice any patterns among my favorites? I suppose one could point out the feminism of my two favorite stories I read this month, Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers" and Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen." Actually, all of the top-grade stories, the As and A+, had to do with marriage--"Theft" perhaps less than the others, but with it still in there a little bit. That's an interesting pattern I wouldn't have predicted. 

A C+ for Alice Munro, who recently won the Nobel Prize?!?!  What can I say? "Boys and Girls" didn't impress me much. Don't worry; I'm going to give her another chance. I just didn't care for the story, despite its apparent effort to challenge gender roles. It just left me reeling from all the acceptance of fur farming it oozed. 

Did I read anything else during month? Of course! This is one of those things like how busy people sometimes get more extra stuff done, like by forcing themselves to schedule a workout, and errands, and whatnot, they manage to fit it all in, unlike the person having some lazing days who thinks s/he has enough time to get to it all and then never does. Because I had to read my short story every day, I would often get that done and be pumped up for more reading time. I love to read anyway, but I was definitely focused on my reading plans. In July I also read Little Women (parts one and two, as they say), a couple of mysteries, two bios (of Martin Amis and Emile Zola -- this literary blog's A & Z from my original blog reading project, how about that!) and a few other things. 

Am I going to repeat this project? Well, I'm actually continuing with the rest of the stories in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, although I'm not forcing myself to blog about them and I am trying to do three or so per day, in order to get through them all before having to return the book to the library. And I have a couple of other books of short stories from the library right now, too, that I am working my way through (Chinua Achebe's Girls at War and Other Stories because I-came-across-it-why-not? and a book of Polish short stories in anticipation of my upcoming trip to Poland -- fingers crossed, as I'm trying to raise another $500 for Habitat for Humanity here in order to take that trip). 

What other reading projects do I have going right now? Well. First of all, I'm still reading a poet or two a day from The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry: From Ancient to Contemporary, the Full 3,000-Year Tradition), and I am also continuing to read Pulitzer-winning novels, my A-to-Z follow-up "semi-finalists," and a bio of every president in order to see where we went wrong, a project obviously conceived and begun during the Dubya administration; I'm on FDR. 

And with that, let's get back to our reading, shall we!

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 23rd: Ring Lardner A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading: Zola and His Time by Matthew Josephson
and 10 años con Mafalda by Quino

Ding ding ding ding ding we have a winner. Thank goodness, because some of the past week's stories have just been annoying, really. Like they aren't what they think they are. But this one is great!

Today's Story: "The Golden Honeymoon"
Author: Ring Lardner
My Rating: A

Fabulous, funny, fresh, funny, fabulous. Good job, Ring Lardner. I'm pretty sure this is the first thing I've read by him. (?) I couldn't even place why the name sounded familiar, but now that I've looked up about his baseball writing/columns/Chicago connection it seems familiar but I don't know if I'm telling myself some of it is more familiar than it is because I've been reading about him now. Do you ever do that? I hate when I do that.

Anyway, this story is great. A couple take a trip for their fiftieth anniversary and it just warms the cockles of my heart to consider that the parent characters in a story published in 1922 can be just as parentally out of touch and set in their ways as the parent characters in our lives today. Not that Lardner plays up the generational divide; he doesn't, really, but it's just in the way these parents are so used to doing what they do and certainly won't spend any extra money frivolously (eating at the more expensive diner where the meal costs $1.10 or $1.20 instead of $1.00 is duly noted; the son-in-law pays for the train compartment upgrade and you can just hear him shaking his head at the parents' refusal which was undoubtedly along the lines of not being able to afford such an extravagance, etc.)  We (who is "we"? Gen X? Baby Boomers and Gen X? Everyone alive today?) have a tendency to blame this thrifty stubbornness on "the Depression" and people are forever going on about their grandparents' or whoever's Depression life that shaped their Attitudes Toward Money and stuff, but this story was published years before that happened, so as usual, we tell ourselves our experience is unique but it rarely is, from a historical perspective.

The vernacular in which this story is written is genius. "Well, he come over to set here, and I set facin' the other ways, and we jest talked about this and that..."  It totally sounds like some of my small-town western Mass. relatives. That's not a direct quote; that's just me trying to imitate the character-narrator's speech. Ring Lardner is pitch-perfect -- and funny. By the way, how annoying is it that the husband calls the wife 'Mother'? What is that about? That has always annoyed me so hard, when old couples do that. Twentysomething and thirtysomething couples never do that, but it's always, like, an old farmer couple calling each other "Mother" and "Pa" or "Dad" or whatever. Why? And at what age do they start doing that? Ugh.

So, on "The Golden Honeymoon" good times are had in Florida, sure (not that the couple is going to readily admit this, of course) but also they run into an ex-flame of the wife from years before. Coincidence? Yeah, but hey - narrator did make it clear previously in the story that basically every old person in the country is vacationing in Florida, so it's not too surprising to find them there.

Here's the deal: this story is funny. It's enjoyable, it is sharp and observant, and it is the furthest thing in the world from overwrought.

Ring Lardner!

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 21: Donald Barthelme A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now finished: Little Women, Part One by Louisa May Alcott
(which, fun fact, was the whole of Little Women when originally published in 1868, but there's a Part Two, published in 1869, which is now always published with the first part as Little Women, and I'm annoyed that I have to read Part Two

Let's just get right to it.

Today's Story: "The School"
Author: Donald Barthelme
My Rating: B

Maybe I'm being unfair. It's more enjoyable than, say, Alice Munro's "Boys and Girls," but it's still very much an "Um--what?" kind of read.

I've not read Mr. Barthelme before. He's on my radar and all, but I just haven't got around to it. I see that he likes to be a little dark, a little wacky, a little surreal. OK, that's all well and good. And god love him for killing a puppy instead of a cat; I've had it up to here with the !@$^&* shit treatment of cats in stories and books. But the end of this story seems like a total 180 from the first two thirds. Why the tone switch? Perhaps because the teacher is trying to explain. But, it just seems to come out of nowhere and make not a lot of sense (how old were these kids, anyway, to be asking for such a demonstration? The previous trees/puppy/fish stuff would lead a reader to believe they are young!)

And yeah, he should be given credit for the profound thoughts about what makes life meaningful. But overall, this is just a jumble. Its main (only?) attraction is that it's weird; it just starts flinging death at you so it can be all edgy and whatnot. Meh.

July 20th: George Saunders A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now (re)reading: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Thought: Is there anyone who doesn't know that Little Women is by Louisa May Alcott? That title and author seem to me to be more undeniably attached to each other than about any other title/author I can think of.

Today's Story: "Adams"
Author: George Saunders
My Rating: B+ 

Um.

What?

So this is fiction that challenges you. Many people hate that, when they are given (let's say, in a college class) fiction that challenges them, or when people (who, let's say, are accused of being literary snobs) enthuse about challenging  fiction. But really, that's what this story does. Because after finishing it (yeah, MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD, so you should probably go read the story right here first if you care, OK, ready? here come the SPOILERS!!!!! Now.) I'm like, okay, so, why the hell was he in the kitchen in the underwear? And I'm as annoyed as my unreliable narrator, still, even though the unreliable narrator has proven himself, well, unreliable. And crazy. And although I'm thinking about how regardless of what happened, he probably shouldn't have broken in, or refused to use lawful methods to solve the problem, or taken all the knives and then all the chemicals and stuff, leaving the Adams family defenseless, I nonetheless want to know why the hell Adams was in the kitchen in the underwear in the first place. And then, only then after a few seconds of being annoyed and maybe wanting to give the story a C for not telling us that, do I realize that maybe the narrator, who is unreliable and delusional, has only perceived this slight that set him off on his psycho rampage, and that Adams really did nothing wrong. And I realize that this story is symbolic and is about, like, Gaza and Israel and Hamas, really. It's about humans and fighting.

But, "I am what I am." What does that mean if he wasn't in fact actually in the kitchen in his underwear? Did anything that happened in this story happen? That's annoying to have to wonder. So, B+.

This is my first George Saunders. Yes, yes, everyone has been jabbering about Tenth of December and I have dutifully added it to my to-read list, but haven't got around to it yet. And yes, yes, he has been writing short stories and winning prizes for, like, years. Great. Well, I haven't been reading those stories. Until today.

I will read more, and look forward to it much more than I'm looking forward to my next Munro! Still feeling yesterday's ugh on that one.

July 19th: Alice Munro A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now finished: Plum Island by Nelson DeMille
now (re)reading: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Well, hello there, Nobel Prize-winner. Thanks for making me confront the important question of who the !@#$* actually still thinks it's OK to buy a new fur coat?? Bloody hell. I hated reading this story.

Today's Story: "Boys and Girls"
Author: Alice Munro
My Rating: C+

I was repulsed from the early paragraphs in this story because it's about a family living on a fox farm -- as in, farming the fur of the foxes so that assholes can buy that fur in the form of a coat, which is pretty much shitty and terrible and disgusting. The story rambles along with the young girl narrator doing young-child-on-a-farm things, such as helping with chores, preferring to play outside and help dad in the barn/stables/fox pens (gross) than to do "ladylike" things inside with mom. OK, so this is all obviously insidious and the point of the story, apparently, is that this girl and her brother are being relegated early on to their gender roles. There is "evidence" of this gender separation, such as our narrator letting a horse run free when it is being chased by the father and the hired hand so that they can slaughter it and feed it to the foxes; when her "misbehavior" in leaving the gate open (for the eventually doomed horse, who is later caught) is revealed there's a lot of "Oh ho ho, she's just a girl, so she can't go out there being tough and slaughtering things with no emotion like we do, ho ho ho."

Fucking Canadians. Jesus the shit Christ. A fox farm? I hate this story. It was written in the 1960s, so I get it, the whole feminist awakening parts, but my f*****g god do you have to be so praiseworthy of f*****g fox farmers?!?! If there is supposed to be any discomfort in here about the whole slaughtering-animals-for-coats thing, I wasn't picking up on it, Ms. Nobel Prize Winner. Instead, your characters were portrayed as Good Solid People Doing Their Best. Gross. All noble and salt-of-the-earth-like. It definitely comes across as this sort of ode to the complicated feelings below the surface of a family and blah-blah-blah. But the not-wanting-to/not-being-able-to kill things is declared to be a Girl Thing. And if you're a boy or man?  Apparently, you will like to go skin the fur off of foxes with matted bits and clumps of blood and a powerful odor all around you, after feeding the poor tortured animals who have been kept in cages for years as you "raise" them. And killing the horse food for the foxes will be no problem; you won't have any silly "girl" emotions to hold you back. Because killing animals for stupid jackass humans' selfish pleasure?  Is apparently cool like that in the Great White North. Screw that. I can't believe people actually buy fur coats. And screw them just as much for buying fox furs in the 1960s. Basically, electricity and gas heat had been invented, so screw you. But even before that, try not living at the 49th !@#$%^* parallel, how about, if you're cold? Cradles of civilization, where humans built their societies? Warm places. Deserts. You don't deserve fur. You aren't entitled to fur, people. What goes through their pitiful brains?

I'm trying not to just be disgusted by "Boys and Girls," but I might add that in addition to my abject horror, the main other thing I felt while reading this was boredom. It dragged on quite a bit, description-wise--lots of babble about farm stuff, land, dirt, weather, grass, who the hell knows what all. Foxes, definitely, stuck in cages and pacing in anger (wouldn't you?)  And so on.

Ugh.

Oh yeah, and, whoopty-do, this was made into an Oscar-winning (!) live action short! It was totally the 1983 short film winner! I am so excited; don't we all want to watch it and watch a whole bunch of of foxes and horses get slaughtered? Gross.

Yes, yes, I'm eventually going to read more Alice Munro. But ugh.

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 17th: Mary LernerA Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading: Plum Island by Nelson DeMille

Another day, another story from The Best American Short Stories of the Century ed. by John Updike. Like anyone else who would embark upon reading stories from this volume in order (with the ambition to read, yes, the whole thing), I think part of the fun is seeing the progression of time and culture through the century along with, perhaps, progression of writing style from the so-called "traditional" right on through the so-called "modern" and "post-modern." Those terms and whatever familiarity/bizarreness they evoke aren't as important as the point that it's fun to embark upon projects that let you see the chronological march of things, whether those things are cinematic, like watching all the Best Picture Oscar winners, or historical, like reading a biography of every U.S. president in order to see where we went wrong (a project obviously conceived of and named during the Dubya "administration"), or literary, like this project and, ahem, maybe a few others. (I never met a reading project I couldn't invent for myself! Or, er, uh...something like that.)

Today's Story: "Little Selves"
Author: Mary Lerner
My Rating: A-

We're still in the 1910s, this being only the second story in said Best...Century volume, and so after yesterday's Russian Jewish immigrant man Zelig, we have today's Irish Catholic immigrant woman Margaret O'Brien, who looks back at the end of her life on all the little selves, i.e., past versions of her, that made up her life: herself at age four, herself at age ten, and so on. Because early 1900s = immigration! "That's what made this country great! Then, anyway!" and so on.

Today's immigrant isn't quite as distraught with the New World and her total lifetime achievements as yesterday's seemed to be, but I should probably stop comparing them--now that they have appeared together as the first two stories in this collection, I think they're getting more comparison than they ever did in the first eighty years of their existence. (If they were compared at all!)

Little is known about the author, Mary Lerner. (Research project, anyone?) Was she a die-hard Catholic? Did she miss the old country? Was she unmarried and childless, like Margaret O'Brien, or weary with marriage and children, like the niece? Or are these two selves both aspects of Lerner's self, and are the married and unmarried little selves each intact aspects of every woman's self--although married, the person who she was before she ever knew this guy is still there?

That's the point of "Little Selves." She is sad about dying only because she worries that it means forever the end of these selves that made up her past. Who will remember them now that she's gone? So she sits around endlessly replaying the story of her life in her head, to revisit each of the selves. It's not an orderly procession of ghost-memories, but we go back and forth between past and present, and little supernatural bits of whimsy are evoked when she thinks back to Ireland childhood, namely leprechauns and fairies, although each parent who tells her about them is doing so with a knowing wink-wink, like parents do with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, and like they should be doing when they talk about Jesus, Adam & Eve, etc.

Basically, a solid short story with an interesting point and some decent profound thoughts, if a little heavy on the nature imagery that seems like it's there just to show how well the author can describe nature rather than for any real purpose. (I really hope creative writing classes aren't still encouraging this.)

July 16th: Benjamin Rosenblatt A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now finished: Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford
and Men Against the Sea (The Bounty Trilogy #2)
by Charles Bernard Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

Today's selection is precisely the kind of short story I dislike.

Today's Story: "Zelig"
Author: Benjamin Rosenblatt
My Rating: B -

It just doesn't do it for me. I'm not familiar with Mr. Rosenblatt or his other work, and not particularly inspired to learn more, but let's see what a quick breeze through the interwebs can't rustle up...wow, next to nothing. Most of the top results are, in fact, about "Zelig" and specifically in connection with it being the first story in the very volume in which I just read it, The Best American Short Stories of the Century ed. by John Updike. So this is the 1915 piece that kicks off a collection of what I hope is a whole lot better work.

This is how I perceive it: immigrant blah blah New York blah blah poor blah blah family blah blah stoic blah blah --oh! warmhearted surprise!

Because of said warmhearted surprise and the fact that you get a good image of Mr Stoic Russian Jewish Immigrant, I'll give ol' Rosenblatt a B-. But does it have to be so painful to get there? We don't understand his motivations, we don't really understand much of anything that happens, other than life is hard, so let's make it try to suck less for the next generation. Frankly, that's not really a short story plot. I think this one was supposed to make our boy Zelig seem mysterious, but he just seems -- unknowable. Which is different. Also, the whole tough-love thing and the my-ends-justify-my-obnoxious-means thing are annoying.

It's short, though.

All in all: meh. Not so inspiring. This was the best 1915, had to offer?  Really, Updike??

July 15th: Anton Chekhov A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading: Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford

I must say that my first experience with Chekhov didn't go so well. But I was fifteen years old at the time. What did I know? I've since fallen in love with all things Russian literature. Isn't it high time I revisit ol' Chekhov?

Today's Story: "The Looking Glass"
Author: Anton Chekhov
My Rating: A

This is a short but sweet (or well, you know, bittersweet...emotional...a little worrisome...depressing...take your pick) story about a girl ("young and pretty") who is gazing into her looking-glass while dreaming about getting married. Let's talk about the term "looking glass" for a second. This is one of those things that is absolutely positively one hundred percent not used in USA English (I have no idea about Canada, I realize...Canadians?) but that we are easily able to understand is a mirror. Once we learn it, that is. When we are eight or nine years old and have finished reading Alice in Wonderland and pick up the sequel Through the Looking Glass, we might not know that a looking glass is a mirror and we might at first be unsure of what exactly is happening to Alice and what sort of glass she is falling through, thinking maybe it's a window or something, until we are finally bonked over the head with a sort of "Duh!"  Because, simply put, it's a mirror. So this just gets me feathers all ruffled thinking about how stupid it is to "Americanize" (and or "USA-ize, pending what we hear from Canadians) English-English books. FOR EXAMPLE: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone. Ugh. I like the idea of learning about one another's English usage, with footnotes if necessary, not translating English-English to USA-English, when I read. Who's with me? I know that it can lead to confusion sometimes when you don't have footnotes, but that's OK. It's a learning experience! Anyway, whoever translated the Chekhov obviously used the term "looking glass" and not mirror. And so here we are.

True or False: Chekhov writes a lot about women. I'm totally cool with that, Anton, but I really need to read more of your stuff. It was Three Sisters that did me in, at age fifteen, at theater camp. Had to perform an abridged version of it. Was miserable. Can't even remember the name of the acting coach who directed us in that scene, but I remember actually hiding out in the bathroom one day trying to figure out a way to not return to his classroom and not have to rehearse the scene. With hindsight, I think that whether or not he was a great acting coach of teenagers (especially sheltered and immature ones), I was clearly the pathetic one. I do believe it was Lori and Penny and I playing the three sisters--and I'm not even sure which one I was. I'm thinking maybe Irina. Really, the plot is lost to my memory, everything is lost to my memory except the utter misery I felt the entire several weeks of rehearsing. What's funny about that is that I had to burst into tears in the scene, acting-wise, and you'd think I should have been easily able to do that, what with being miserable and all. Why was I so miserable? I don't know! It was just miserable! Which is just so weird seeing as I have grown very fond of angst, drama, and Russian lit over the years. Did I just not know myself yet? (This is a distinct possibility.) How did the performance go? Well, all three of us were nominated for acting awards, and the director of the entire workshop did initiate a standing ovation for us. (But really, not for me. Probably mostly for Penny; she was actually a good actress.) I think it's just because he adored Chekhov, and Three Sisters was famously his favorite play, which, you know, no pressure! That's probably why our director was so hard on us and why I was so miserable. I swore off Chekhov after that summer.

And now here I am, in a cold and gray and windy Michigan summer (yes, this is what passes for July around here; might as well be in exile in Siberia or something) reading a little more Chekhov. "The Looking-Glass" has a plot that is entirely imagined but that is vividly rendered. It makes sense when you read it. It leaves you with lots of profound questions like "What does it mean to join my life with that of another?"  and "What do we owe our neighbors?" (not to mention our horses) and "Is life at all worth living, since it will inevitably be filled with sad and terrible events?"  That Chekhov, fun guy. Let's all have a beer, no?! Seriously. !@#&*Russians. Love them.

And so, I hereby heartily recommend this great story and I hereby also pledge to reread Chekhov's Three Sisters and try to figure out just exactly what was wrong with my unable-to-appreciate-it-fifteen-year-old-self (perhaps Taylor Swift can weigh in?), and I also apologize to the universe for allowing my personal adolescent misery to prevent me from fully appreciating the beautifully rendered misery of others.

July 14th: Three for the Price of One! A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading: Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford
in memoriam: Nadine Gordimer, my 'G' author

All right, y'all, today it's three-in-one. I accidentally took the weekend off from reading and posting about short stories. What can I say? It was a whirlwind World Cup weekend and we had a little moving and shaking going on, in addition to soccer-watching. Also, although I missed posting on Friday the 11th, I am totally counting my Thursday the 10th Kafka double duty as two stories, so that takes care of Friday also. Now, it's Monday, and we'll have to do a three-story burst to make up for Saturday the 12th, Sunday the 13th, and today.

Today's StoryStories and AuthorS: 
"The Sock" by Lydia Davis
"Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros
"The Gate-Keeper" by François Coppée
My Ratings:  
C+
B+
A-

In honor of today being Bastille Day, I had to read a French author for my third short story. Turns out, author François Coppée was a totally nationalist anti-Dreyfus born-again Catholic who is sometimes seen as politically controversial, so that seems to be about in the right spirit! (ha)  I think his was the best out of these three particular stories, but more on that in a second.

We'll start with the most underwhelming, Lydia Davis. Now, first of all, I know some people find short stories to just not deliver as much as a novel does, and I don't generally agree with them in writing off short stories as a form, but when I read stories like "The Sock" I completely get where they're coming from. To hear the interwebs tell it (not to mention the PEN/Hemingway Award, Whiting Foundation, and Man Booker  International Prize), Davis is a genius who writes short and ultra-short stories that are masterful, precise, powerful, urgent, and revolutionary. Well, I certainly hope that "The Sock" is one of her weaker efforts, because it was none of those things. It's getting a C+ (as opposed to a C- or lower) only because it managed to get a couple of visuals going despite being an extremely inside-my-head character meditation kind of story and because it moved along. It was definitely short. I won't argue with all the people lauding her for her brevity. But on that note, do we really need short stories that are only two sentences, which she has apparently written? (Not this one -- this one's a couple pages.) I mean, come on. That's the literary equivalent of the artist whose "painting" is a blank white canvas. Yeah, everyone is just pissed because they didn't think of it first--so it's arty. But it tells you nothing about the painter's painting talent. Ditto for a "writer" whose "story" is two sentences. What do you actually know about their writing?  Nothing. As for this, "The Sock," her couple-of-pages story about a woman who finds her now-remarried ex-husband's sock (and some other items) in her house, it is missing a few key things that generally are part of a story, such as plot. And beginning-middle-end. "The Sock" is a fragment, and I look with disdain upon the late twentieth century writers (because I do think that's when it started) who think that every fragment can stand by itself as a short story. Just, no.

On to Sandra Cisneros! I've read her before. In fact, I've read The House on Mango Street a few different times; I'm not sure if you could get out of a mid- to late-1990s English class without being asked to read that book at least once -- in the American West, anyway. I also was assigned her collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek, in one of my English classes, and I recently saw that book sitting around in my old bedroom in the house in Phoenix, and I'm terribly afraid I might have blown it off, as I can't remember much -- OK, anything at all -- about its short stories. For example, "Eleven," which I read online today, was apparently in Woman Hollering Creek. Whoops! Not familiar!  Well, now I am. It was a nice little tale, and I immediately wanted to send it to my nine-year-old niece, so it's fun for all ages. Or maybe sadness for all ages. It does have a beginning, middle, and end, though barely; one can argue about substance and depth, certainly, but "Eleven" does show how very little can happen and there can still be a story, unlike in "The Sock" where very little happens and you aren't sure what you're reading -- a letter fragment? a diary entry? a blog entry?  etc.  "Eleven" is just a glimpse at the life of a girl, newly turned eleven, in one brief moment of her school day, and yet you get to know her pretty deeply in that moment, and even her parents, and you get to feel hope (Esperanza!) for her, which is nice. Her life is bittersweet--you know that too, from just this brief glimpse, and she has to face challenges at school, and this day might suck for her right now, but she is learning the most important lesson of all, that she is the sum of all of her years and not just any one day. This is good stuff, if a little light on actual, you know, words and length. I should probably read more Sandra Cisneros than I do. Why have I read The House on Mango Street so many times and so little of her other stuff? (My blowing off of at least some of Woman Hollering Creek notwithstanding.)

And now for a dead white male. (Things were getting just a little too diverse up in here, wouldn't you say?) (Oh my god, that is a joke. Please tell me you get it, on both levels. Please?)  François Coppée was a French guy in the late 19th century. I love me some 19th century French lit, in general, but I also always want to learn more about it and be exposed to more authors, and I've often thought about just going for broke and getting a master's in French literature because I have an idea for a thesis and everything. Anyway, I don't think I've ever read Coppée  before today. He wrote some plays, some poems, some stories, and also some polarizing stuff like an essay on his (re-)conversion to the Catholic church after a near-death illness and some anti-Albert stuff during the Dreyfus affair. (Another thing I should know more about...hence my reading up on Emile Zola lately, so I'm working on it, thank you very much.)  Anyway, this story, "The Gate-Keeper," is about parenting (!) and not just on the part of the mother (!!) and it throws the wit around, like this: "Her Majesty the Queen of Bohemia -- for story-tellers there will always be a kingdom of Bohemia -- is travelling..."  This is more of a "traditional" story (at least a few pages long, characters actually go somewhere and do something and have conversations, there's a point, etc.) I liked it because it has a cool-ass gate-keeper out in the middle-of-nowhere railroad countryside who schools our young queen about how to be good (but not in the way you might initially think he would) and because it is well written with fun turns of phrase and because it has that kind of Pretty Woman-esque "She rescues him right back" sentiment, but in reverse, I suppose. Apparently our boy François Coppée was known for writing about the poor and the humble and such, before he joined the Académie Française and came to be known as a racist-nationalist (not that those last two things are connected). He definitely lobs a few accusations at cheating, lecherous royals and other wayward spouses in this tale. Sadly, Rimbaud apparently didn't like Coppée at all, but you know, it was hard to please Rimbaud.

Vive le conte!