LITERATURE: Current Reads

Posted on January 7, 2006 by Susan

So the winners are:

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

And Metamagical Themas by Douglas F. Hofstadter.

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LITERATURE: Glimmer Train #50 – To A Stranger

Posted on January 7, 2006 by susan

All set to complain again; after three good stories, I thought I’d found a stinker.  And, to find out that To A Stranger by Daniel Villasenor was the top prizewinner of their Fiction Open made me doubly frustrated (as a writer–although reader too, I suppose).

But then, a few pages into it (stalling and putting it down several times, as it went on and on about good God of all things—thoughts and feelings!) some action took hold of the story, very subtle, just another few pages of interaction between two men in a locker room, but the story arose.

Written in third person pov–which by the way was an excellent choice because I would have dumped this story as rambling thoughts of ego if in first person–the story unfolds as a man is on his way downtown, thinking of his relationship with his wife, bemoaning the loss of closeness and wondering how and why.  In this depressed state, he sees the people around him in a very condescending and sardonic way:

That morning, looking at all the faces in the subway, he could see that there was not a spark of originality or intelligence on any face, that not a one had what could be called an internal life; a respectful conversation with oneself; that they stared blankly in stupefied un-wonder at their feet or each other or their own alienated jostling images in the darkly teeming glass;  (etc.) (Glimmertrain #50, p. 66)

At this point, I didn’t like the character (Peter) as much as I wouldn’t like him in real life.  But then, after a swim at a gym and sitting naked in the locker room, another man walks in, also naked (nah, this didn’t make me like the story yet, but I was getting more interested) asks Peter to help him clasp a braclet on his wrist. 

The action here is slow motion, as Peter tries while he’s still thinking his own thoughts as well as dissecting his reaction to this soft-spoken man.  He feels a connection of sorts, an attraction that is clearly sexual as well as a silent communication between two people.  The man thanks him, dresses and just as Peter leaves, the man hands him a poem that clearly shows the connection between strangers that almost always remains unspoken. 

On the ride home, his view of those around him:

And he thought that behind each window someone must be mulling over sentences, words in the mind that he or she was trying to shave closer and closer to the truth, so that they might thereby untrouble themselves; that people everywhere, this very minute, were answering the terrible summons of their souls, together or privately, performing small acts of bravery which would release them from the prison of their fears.  (p. 74)

So Peter is facing himself through the honesty of the man he has met.  He goes home to further attempt to be honest with his wife and with himself. 

So I ended up liking this story, although it did get tedious in the beginning, and I had to keep my "you think you got problems, you pompous ass" attitude in check.

As is my habit, I then go to check out the photo and short bio or thoughts of the author as Glimmertrain so neatly supplies.  Mr. Villasensor looks like a raven-haired Fabio.  Then I liked the story even more.

Check out Bud Parr’s post on New Companions to Literature which does address the question of historical background of both author and era of a story. 

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LITERATURE: Reading & Writing

Posted on January 7, 2006 by Susan

Foolish Woman, say thee? 

To fall within the words webbed by a nobleman?

Nay Sir, for foolish would I nought have been with mortal man;

But he was yet a god, golden-haired and beautiful

Well-spoken and melodious in the speech of love

To twist a maiden’s head to seek the drowning

in eyes of crystal sea, and sing and dance

in beds of scented heather

and rejoice in smiles far brighter than the sun

and comfort self in arms like boughs of hemlock

For that was he, and poor and wretched now am I.

(Svsin, MMVI)

Okay, so I’m no poet.  But with Boethius by my side I may be talking funny for a while.  Or maybe just in the writing.

Sandstorm asks an interesting question of writers:  Do you read when you’re writing? 

I do, but it has always been a source of worry as well as inspiration, enjoyment and knowledge, for I take on the voice of that which I am reading and worry that the voice will seep and stain the words I write as well.  Plagiarism of voice, of thinking, if not of words exact.

Interesting question.

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LITERATURE: Choices

Posted on January 6, 2006 by Susan

Augustine, Boethius, or Hugh of St. Victor?  Hugh’s sitting on the hearth, but Augustine’s available online, and Boethius beckons with philosophy.

Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas or Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality?  One intrigues with promise, the other is more relevant to interests.

Nonfiction is harder to select.  And any of the above are perhaps months of reading.  But I must get started on them; they’ve sat too long waiting.  (And no, don’t worry, I won’t be excerpting and dissecting them here!)

Meanwhile, I skip gaily through Glimmertrain, and perhaps hit Best American Short Stories (2003) after that.  Or maybe, just to be more open to conversation, I’ll break rules and hop to the latest first.  That’ll warp my orbit a bit.

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LITERATURE & WRITING: Glimmertrain Issue 50

Posted on January 6, 2006 by susan

Pressured by the lack of space on my hearth, I decided to try to play catchup once more with the lit journals and so selected the earliest Glimmer Train, that being (blush) Spring 2004.  Making my mind up beforehand to skip through those stories that didn’t do it for me, as I’ve groused here before about quality, I was happily surprised to be pulled into the first three of this issue.

But something surprised me; after noting Plot is all–according to Aristotle, these stories had very simple plots:  one is based on a man’s returning to dating after the death of his wife; one is the resolution of a childhood memory of the protagonist’s possible responsibility in the death of her mother’s lover; the last, a pet bird flies off and returns and brings back meaning to two people.

These are reactions displaying Thought and Character, made the point of the stories.  They are relative, moving, enjoyable to read.  All three stories are well written (according to my own standards, anyway), and I think that was what drew me in.  Nothing outstanding or heavy with lesson or meaning, nothing really new or surprising in delivery or outcome.  Except for the prizewinning story, Victor’s Bird, by N. Nye, which was more metaphoric–or can be taken that way to elicit some afterthought at least.  This particular story did have the elements of imagery, a bit of tension, although Plot was weak as it was simply a glimpse into the lives of two people and how the bird’s absence and return affected them.  But, as I said, the writing style and voice was excellent.

So here am I, ready to put together a cover letter for one (maybe two) short stories I’ve completed (maybe) and realize they center on Plot.  There is much less of my character study into them, must less stringing out of drama of emotion rather than action.  I’m not only measuring mine against what has been published (I just can’t get myself out of that mode) but measuring instead my own reaction.  If I liked these three stories, would I like my own?

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STORIES: Mrs. Farley’s Mind

Posted on January 5, 2006 by Susan

Mrs. Farley caught the tip of shadow in the corner of her eye.  It disappeared before she had the key completely turned in the lock of her kitchen door.  She took a deep breath and let it out as a small sigh, glad it had gone, glad it didn’t want to come inside tonight.

Sometimes, she didn’t mind it, didn’t worry about its need to follow her around her day.  She didn’t like it at all at first, it frightened her, showing up one evening as she came home from her Thursday night bridge club.  For a while, she only noticed it at night and that’s why perhaps it scared her.  The second time she saw it, about a week later, she told her son.

Jeffrey and his clingy marshmallow wife were most concerned at first.  But after a while it seemed that he grew more annoyed and the marshmallow quite bored after the initial fear and worry.  He’d installed an alarm system in the house, "You should have one since Dad’s not here," he’d said.  One time, when the shadow lingered and tried to slip inside the house, she’d slammed the door and breathless, called Jeffrey right away. 

"Mom, it’s just that you’re lonely now with Dad gone.  It’s only been six months.  It’s normal, so they say, to see him, or things, or shadows even where they’re not."  He hadn’t come, but called her in the morning.

Sometimes, when it came in the early morning or mid-afternoon, she saw it as a movement, a flash or an awareness just of something that was there.  No matter how quickly she turned her head, it was always gone.  Mrs. Farley got used to it eventually, after all, it never harmed her.  And too, she learned that how you teach your children haunts you even more. 

"Maybe you shouldn’t be living alone, Mother," the marshmallow had said.  Knowing this was not an invitation but a threat, Mrs. Farley learned to keep the thing’s visits to herself. She’d learned, as they did, that this veiled concern meant Willow Manor, where Mrs. Farley’s own father had had to be the last few years of his life, and only then because he was incontinent, preferred the velvet sofa in the living room, and didn’t know who she was or how to eat.

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LITERATURE: Next Up

Posted on January 5, 2006 by Susan

For my next read in the short story path of my journey I will be reading what is tentatively titled "Murphy’s Sampler."  Unpublished–as yet.  The author is one of our Narratives members who writes exceptionally well in style and voice, and has the ability to see the story in the commonplace that gives his fiction a depth that makes for enjoyable and thought-provoking reading.

Jim Murphy has been published in otto, but we’d like to push him further along with his own collection of short stories, and so are in the process of selecting, editing and putting together this first step right now. 

While I won’t be commenting or reviewing Jim’s work here, we will let you know the details of publication as soon as we have them.  In the meantime, I’ll as well be selecting a book from my hearth as next up for review, and digging as well into the past to learn the present and the future.

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LITERATURE: Cannery Row – Wrap Up

Posted on January 5, 2006 by susan

It is a great matter to observe propriety in these several modes of expression, as also in compound words, strange (or rare) words, and so forth.  But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor.  This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.  (Aristotle, Poetics,  Part XXII)

And here lives Steinbeck’s gopher. 

Cannery Row is well described in detail of "across the street" and "down the tracks," etc., and it is a neighborhood held together by the canneries.  It is a working part of town; it is not sleek and beautiful.  Yet, I do not see it as grimy or poverty ridden.  This, I believe, is what Steinbeck’s message is in part; that the place is the people, the people are the place.

Within the narrative structure of Cannery Row and the stories of its primary characters, Doc, Mack, Lee Chong, and the rest, we met Mary Talbot, who loved parties; two little boys, Joey and Willard, who sparred mentally dangerously close to cruelty; and a gopher, who makes his home in the vacant lot and builds an underground paradise, lays in a larder, and goes out to seek the one thing missing, the one thing that will not come to his door–a female gopher.

The gopher goes outside his territory in his quest because this pull of companionship–or simple need–is more important than his home.  He finds one, but she is kept by an old battle-worn male, and the gopher is forced to fight and flee.  Even in his gopher palace he is not content.  He must travel outward, far from the safety and beauty of his chosen home to the more likely possibilities of a garden, where traps abound yet promise of a female awaits.

There is a Chinaman who does nothing but wander from one place in town to another every dusk and dawn.  He is a thread of "within" and "without" the boundaries of Cannery Row.  He is alone and no one knows him; a child named Andy boldly questions him and is frightened off by what he sees within the Chinaman’s eyes.  It is, I think, the unknown, the unfamiliar.

Cannery Row becomes more than embellishment or Spectacle as Aristotle would proclaim it.  It is, I feel, the grounding and the proper place for the action and the characters to belong.  Their world, as they created it.  As Mack near ruined it with the dishonoring of his deed.  As it recovered and became a good place again with the coming together of all the residents at the second party. 

It is a living thing.

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LITERATURE: Cannery Row – In Review

Posted on January 5, 2006 by susan

I stopped too soon, and yet while another party rages as before–again, intent gone astray as led instead by human nature–the meaning is there and vague, unclear.

Doc enjoys this second party; a surprise he soon finds out about and plans as well, buying whisky and food, locking away the valuables to keep them safe.  It starts out slow and tentative, builds with booze and banter, yet controlled and well-enjoyed by all.  Then slows down, as Steinbeck tells us: 

The nature of parties has been imperfectly studied.  It is, however, generally understood that a party has a pathology, that it is a kind of individual and that it is likely to be a perverse individual.  And it is also generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended.  (Cannery Row, p. 172)

After the raucous dancing music is replaced with Monteverdi, as the whiskey dries up and is supplanted with the mellowing of wine, Doc reads from a book of poetry.  The poem tells of an aching for lost love.  All are moved and quiet. 

The next morning, Doc wakes up to a similar mess as to the first party, yet he is smiling, content.  Is the difference in the being there?  To have partaken of the feast, to have enjoyed despite one’s own intent of best behavior?  To have known a first love, to have a right to the memory of it–is that what makes the difference in a life?

I think that Aristotle’s theory of the Character as being central by mode of Thought and moral leaning to react to actions here is what’s at work.  Is giving in to the revelry a moral flaw?   These are good people gathered here to share in an event.  Is weakness what allows enjoyment of the party, of life itself?

Mack, Doc, and all the residents of Cannery Row have been affected by the string of events that are no more serious to world matters than a bringing together of people in appreciation of the goodness inherent in one of their own.  By knowing to appreciate, they too are to be considered good, and this, despite Aristotle’s insistence on class as part of nobility, is what makes them real and grants them access to a Tragedy in their lives, however small in import on a scale of human wrongs. 

I’ve finished this most exquisitely written novel, and enjoyed the writing as much as the story, and gained quite a bit in having taken the time to study the elements of story as put forth in Poetics.  Even as I seek out the next bit of fiction to read, I find myself insisting that the book is done and over with…but then, there is the gopher…

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REALITY?: Middle-Age in America

Posted on January 4, 2006 by Susan

"Do you have a pill-cutter," the man asks.  His dark eyes are sad, hopelessness hidden within the fierce determination of his stare.

"Yes," she says, and finds it, the red one that her father used to use to multiply her mother’s stash of monthly meds. She chews her lip, resolved to keep inside the need to stop him.

In the darkening dusk of the kitchen, pills laid out as carefully as any powder line upon a mirror, the new old ones carefully and precisely cut them all in half.

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LITERATURE: Cannery Row – Metaphor

Posted on January 4, 2006 by susan

"The element of the wonderful is required in Tragedy.  The irrational, on which the wonderful depends for its chief effects, has wider scope in Epic poetry, because there the person acting is not seen."   Aristotle, Poetics, Part XXV

Mary Talbot, Mrs. Tom Talbot, that is, was lovely.  She had red hair with green lights in it.  Her skin was golden with a green cast and her eyes were green with little golden spots.  (…) When she was excited, and she was excited a good deal of the time, her face was flushed with gold.  Her great-great-great-great-great grandmother had been burned as a witch.    John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, p. 142

The element of the wonderful, as Aristotle suggests, is a necessary part of Tragedy.  While at this point in Poetics he is speaking of Epic Tragedy, poetry format rather than narrative or stage play, when speaking of story style of one such as Steinbeck, I would not hesitate to apply it and slap "poetry" labels upon it.

The above excerpt is one of several that Steinbeck slips in among the story of Mack and Doc and Cannery Row.  It is an encapsulated metaphor as is the book, the party being, I suspect, life itself.  In the brief chapter (24) that is the exclusive story of Mary Talbot and her husband Tom, we meet another idealist who believes deep in her heart that attitude is all.  Despite the bill collectors, the joblessness with no near prospects, Mary believes that parties can cure Tom’s depression, his realistic view: "Mary came softly in, for the blue-gray color of his gloom had seeped out under the door and through the keyhole.  She had a little bouquet of candy tuft in a collar of paper lace.  (p. 25)

As a determined realist, my fantasy reserved for escape rather than to cotton-candy wrap the world as it exists, I seek the answer to the optimistic attitude that claims it offers opportunities closed to those with dour expressions, hopeless outlooks.  A smile alone will never do it, but it may, by reason of its own false bravado and effect allow another person entry into one’s space and leave a glow within that thus inspires. 

Action, though, action I agree (with Aristotle) is the Plot.  That Diction, Thought and Character are only the modes.  For plot is carried by action, and reaction is a direct response born of character and thought.

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POETRY: January

Posted on January 4, 2006 by susan

Afterstorm day, white laden branches black beneath cut sharply into bluest sky alit by yellow morning sun, all so pure it hurts the eye to see it.  Is is real?

By afternoon grey clouds creeping cover all, for just a brief glimpse of perfect beauty should be enough.

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REALITY?: Resolutions

Posted on January 4, 2006 by Susan

Never made them; not as a point of fact dependent on a calendar at least.  I am weak beneath my strength, tumors grow and punch the armor leaving bumps and boils that in my ignorance I feel invisible.

Dragging into man’s new year a burden, a hurt and rage that rides the blood the length and breadth of me, returning to the heart to only reinfuse itself with life and cycle through again.

Control is not oblivious nor forgiving.  Control is merely self-smothering and deadly to the soul.  A resolution then, to set the evils free, to let the devils dance a song of written words and send them to a proper hell of hidden file upon a hard drive.  There they can reside and spin unseen, unfelt, unspoiling of any lives.

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LITERATURE: Cannery Row – Story

Posted on January 4, 2006 by susan

I’m finally getting to finish this novel, having sidetracked myself for the better part of a week or more in analyzing it.  I find, having ventured a few chapters further that the episode of the planning and the party for Doc has had a profound effect on the characters, and must say that I am glad at least that I recognized it as the story, although feel now that I perhaps should have read the book through before focusing on it to write the essay (which I’m now calling "done," even as I feel it could have been less unwieldy had I not jumped so quickly into it).

There are two chapters in particular that Steinbeck has slid in among the pages of the story that need to be delved into a bit deeper.  They are metaphorical, they are to be pondered; they are meant to offer commentary and inspire thinking about the story in a way other than strictly narrative.  I believe that the story is both better understood and expanded by these additions, and will need to complete the book before I can go back and apply them. They seemed to be narrator input that came of understanding that which we could not be completely aware of without having read through the scenes presented to the characters of Cannery Row, and yet I’m sure that they reveal a knowledge of man himself and his world not completely related to Mack and Doc and Lee Chong and the others exclusively.

Meanwhile, I find Steinbeck’s voice and style thoroughly absorbing, pleasant and skilled, much as in the way of Cormac McCarthy where character takes on the burden of the human race and is of primary importance to the story in revelation of human nature and its action and reaction to the world regardless of circumstance and time.

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REALITY?: Weather

Posted on January 3, 2006 by Susan

Nice safe topic:  It’s snowing.  Looks to be  eight to ten inches–which doubles already the forecast. 

I have to go to the dentist’s at 2:00 p.m.  If I’m plowed out, if he is open, if I feel like walking the mile if necessary. 

I take the snow as a no-school day–I checked; CCSU is closed for the semester and that’s where I’d be I suppose if I were still taking classes for which my "paper" would be due.  I set the deadline.  I went beyond it.  I gave me an extension of today in my imaginary class, but the reality gave me the snow-day.

I should finish this up, all weekend I worked, today since midnight till now.  Just a bit more to be done so I’ll do it.

Or maybe instead build a snowman.

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