It was wrong I know, to materialize in this dimension, this shade of grey between the blurred primary colors. Each life a rainbow arc of climbing to the noon, sliding down to end again with blue or yellow soles.
Oft in the warp of time the flicker of identity is missing. Between the strings, no melody exists.
By what pale moon does the good lady hunt her mirrored pools? By what thin light does her reflection know the beauty? Or does Diana seek the dodging of the fox, strength of black haired bear or speed of stag? What says her prey in the sun by which her days abide.
Okay, so I guess I must already retract my musings and admit to being a "poor" close reader: On page 59, the doctor Simon Jordan is looking at the same portraits I mentioned seeing on page 10, and reading underneath which is clearly written: Grace Marks, alias Mary Whitney.
But where have I lost my discipline in remaining attuned to all words, phrases, meanings? Was I thrown back to my Golden Book days of the visual upon seeing the line drawings, awaiting my father’s voice to confirm or supply a new story to go along with the image?
Maybe I have become a text person, despite the new media training to look at all. In a recent reading by Steve Ersinghaus of his flashfictional "Stoning Field," I realized that I was reading the screen along with him, thinking only that my tendency was due to my editing nature when with the sound of both film audio and human voice along with graphical images I should have been involved in the event of it rather than still concentrating on the written words.
But here, perhaps, a reason why I love written words:
Dora is stout and pudding-faced, with a small downturned mouth like that of a disappointed baby. Her large black eyebrows meet over her nose, giving her a permanent scowl that expresses a sense of disapproving outrage. (…) He has tried imagining her as a prostitute–he often plays this private mental game with various women he encounters–but he can’t picture any man actually paying for her services. It would be like paying to be run over by a wagon, and would be, like that experience, a distinct threat to the health. Dora is a hefty creature, and could snap a man’s spine in two with her thighs, which Simon envisions as greyish, like boiled sausages, and stubbled like a singed turkey; and enormous, each one as large as a piglet. (p. 57)
Well now, we certainly have a picture of Dora, the serving woman who works at the house where Simon is renting a room. Instead of merely describing Dora, Atwood uses the third person omniscient narrative voice (switching from the first person in the beginning of the story from Grace’s pov) to draw her in Simon’s head. It does make it more interesting, as well as adding some information about Simon himself, and how he thinks, without telling us anything but what he is thinking. If the POV remains in both first person from Grace, and third omniscient focused (maybe it will turn out to be limited) on Simon, then we will have to decide which, if either or both, to believe and trust, since it appears that Atwood is setting us up for this conflict between the two. Nicely done.
While I’m tossing Christmas catalogs without so much as a glance this year, the Vermont Country Store is one I can’t avoid. For decades I had been ordering their fruit slices for my mother, their old-fashioned horehounds for my father as special Christmas treats. They have a wealth of the memory candies, condiments, cotton underdrawers and hard-to-find or no-longer-made (but where did they get them? Was the stuff stocked in warehouses for thirty years?) lotions and soaps that bring the Vicks VapoRub scent immediately to the mind spanning the years of absence in a flash of moment.
Their catalog, once printed in black and white line drawings that added to the nostalgic effect of old magazine ads, now comes in full color photos that entice with the visual effect of adding brand recognition. Along with the Yardley lavendar bottles and pink Sweet Heart soap (3 bars for $9.90!) I come to this typical practical New England but startling product for an all-natural Bath Soak "for the Overworked and Underappreciated": Tired Old Ass Soak.
You just can’t beat that.
The more I try to learn of human character, the more I wonder at the need or justification for the fictional character with body, soul, emotions and those almighty conflicts. I am resisting a gradual growing tendency to see that if we cared more about the depth of those around us, we might not need to get lost in some novel’s hero or heroine to learn of life.
I see less interest, more distance with which we deal with friends, family and acquaintances. This is, of course, a generalized statement borne of notice, watching, reading weblogs, hearing conversations and the like. But more than ever, aside from tsunami or hurricane or oppression and poverty–anything on a grand scale that we can oooh and aaah and tsk, tsk, ain’t it terrible to show we are caring human beings–we close our ears to the daily woes of others. It’s the old "Laugh and the world laughs with you; cry and you cry alone" mindset. Talk to me, but let’s leave it on the professional level, or "Oh God, don’t really let him tell me how things are with him, I only asked "How’s it going?"
Everybody’s busy these days, everybody has their own basket of troubles and often we are just too self-centered or focused to lift the lid to carry someone else’s for a bit. I’ve done this often enough myself and only recognized it later to my sincere regret. Not only can it help someone if we merely listened, it can help us as writers too to learn the depths of human nature.
Why then do we need to create stories without real characters without real troubles? Is it safer that way?
A post at The Great Lettuce Head on Alice Munro has me rethinking yet again about where my own writing is going, and why it is perhaps stalling at the stop signs.
With quite a bit of Munro ready to sink into lined up on my hearth, I recall her realism in story and have maybe consciously avoided her for a bit while I explore the outer reaches of contemporary narrative. It has of course occurred to me that beyond the mundane–although Munro has the skill to make that come alive–the more emotionally traumatic, the conflicts of the day can well be entertaining and moving if I chose to write them. But the sense of the personal that I try to keep out of story (although obviously not out of weblogging without severe restraint) can be put to work. Can even, as GLH puts it, "pull at the notion of memory from many directions" in depending upon perception to make it interesting. As fiction, I can play with fact. Even make myself out to be the winner.
We racked the wine the second time tonight. Seventy five or more pounds of purple grapes turned ruby liquid in two five gallon carboys. Removed the must, the top of floating skins and seeds; the bottom is the lees, the small debris and yeast; between the clearing crystal red jeweled wine. By law each household is allowed to make two hundred gallons–just about the glass each day for each as recommended for the heart. Ah but the color, the ruby color of the working fermentation does the heart good just to watch before the tasting.
Don’t tell me time is ticking tocking like a heart beat flub and dubbing uncontrolled by human mind and film still doesn’t make it so.
Waiting makes an hour a hundred-twenty minutes longer on some days that could instead see seven sunsets happening all together on a single Friday afternoon. It takes a longer minute to await arrival of a want than the shorter minute when a deadline looms, and bad news travels fast and good news slow we know this in our flub-dubbing hearts we know inside our minds that time’s not true.
Perhaps because I just finished Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist I find this comparison with Atwood’s Alias Grace: the opening is in the present, getting us immediately involved in the characters. Both writers use as their next step a device to quickly provide the necessary details of story; in The Body Artist DeLillo provides us with a newspaper obituary that includes background, then proceeds in linear narrative. In Alias Grace, Atwood uses two devices; a newspaper-like account of the past murders, and a poem that reveals the sequence of events of that past. She then proceeds back to the linear present (so far).
Very skillful use of these devices to give the reader information in a straightforward, condensed manner that goes outside of the normal storytelling technique.
I’m pleasantly surprised by this novel, realized that I’m reading it much faster than Marquez’s Solitude which I thoroughly enjoyed plodding through even though it stopped me every other page with fascinating writing, metaphors and concepts. And faster than DeLillo’s miniscule The Body Artist which stopped me with its vague details to attempt to discover a meaning that may or may not have been there.
Being a murder mystery and based upon a real case in Canada in 1843, the book naturally has the appeal of story, but Margaret Atwood doesn’t handle anything just as is. She creates more just by her manipulation of time elements and the hints I’ve grown used to from her short stories. You learn to listen closely when Atwood speaks, and you get used to the nuances of the language she uses, chooses specifically to achieve the effect she wants the reader to catch and question.
While I’m sure I’ll come to various conclusions as I read along, I’m wondering about the choice of title: Alias Grace. While we have no reason to believe so far that Grace used other names, we question whether she uses another if not many sides of herself. I have a feeling that Atwood will offer us a character loaded with personality to discover for ourselves, and just as there was opinion at the time that ranged from innocent child to psychotic murderess, we’ll have a chance to explore our own perceptions based on Atwood’s fascinating manner of presentation.
Just thirty pages in and struck by Atwood’s manipulation of story, one based on a murder purportedly committed by then sixteen year-old Grace Marks of her employer Mr. Kinnear and his housekeeper/mistress Nancy Montgomery. Magic in the opening lines:
Out of the gravel there are peonies growing. They come up through the loose grey pebbles, their buds testing the air like snails’ eyes, then swelling and opening, huge dark-red flowers all shining and glossy like satin. Then they burst and fall to the ground. (p. 5)
Already we have the image, beauty and tender life pushing through hard gravel. The temporary finding a place to poke through the forever. Color and life doomed to death. Great way of putting it.
Atwood gives us this opening statement from Grace herself, now twenty-four years old and resident of the penitentiary, working at the governor/warden’s home, revealing why she is there. That’s the background from the protagonist’s point of view as well as an almost admitted sense of regret:
(…) this time it will all be different, this time I will run to help, I will lift her up and wipe away the blood with my skirt, I will tear a bandage from my petticoat and none of it will have had happened. (p. 6)
Atwood covers much ground in the next few pages, using various techniques to tell the story. She follows with a very brief scene of the execution of James McDermot, Grace’s partner in the crime, and a short list of prison rules and punishment. A page of line drawings of the defendents, and then, a poem:
Grace Marks she was a serving maid,
Her age was sixteen years,
McDermtt was the stable hand,
They worked at Thomas Kinnear’s. (p. 11)
The poem is obviously not great poetry, but it is written in the narrative style of the time, and tells the story through to the hope of Grace’s repentence. What a clever way to give us the details quickly through the use of this form.
In the next chapter we hear from Grace of her present situation, that of day maid at the prison governor’s house, and we learn from her some of what the governor’s wife’s days are like, her friends, and brilliantly interwoven in this are glimpses of Grace’s possible self. From a note she finds signed "Nancy" her thoughts return to Nancy Montgomery:
(…) and I must say the first time I saw that, it gave me a fright, although of ourse it was a different Nancy. Still, the rotten bones. They would be, by now. Her face was all black by the time they found her, there must have been a dreadful smell. It was so hot then, it was July, still she went off surprisingly soon, you’d think she would have kept longer in the dairy, it is usually cool down there. I am certainly glad I was not present, as it would have been very distressing. (p. 27)
I like this lady, Grace. She’s cool, practical. And, with the visit of a doctor to the house for the purpose of measuring Grace’s head to study the criminal mind, Atwood gives us an intrigueing hint of Grace’s past:
And then I see his hand, a hand like a glove, a glove stuffed with raw meat (…) and I know I have seen a hand like that before (…) Because it’s the same doctor, the same one, the very same black-coated doctor with his bagful of shining knives. (p. 29)
Raining hard this evening, ended up not having heart, not going out almost to a class for inspiration. Home watching I Walk the Line: A Night for Johnny Cash and feeling good from lyrics written from life, like stories set to music, like multimedia but wishing for the man in black to be the visuals. No voice like his, grittier than the sensual growl of Waylon (yeah, I miss him too), sadder than the softened Willie twang that twitches the soul. Will we ever see the likes of them again? Fancy concert hall to hold the voices that sing his words sees performers, fans dressed down, Jerry Lee Lewis no longer able to jump up on the piano but fingers flying just as always and I spot some plaid among the crowd. Real people, real stories. Kristofferson still can’t sing but knows the soul of man to write it. Beautiful voices of Allison Krause, Nora Jones, Sheryl Crow, Dwight Yokum singing the haunting If I Were a Carpenter, Burning Ring of Fire.
It never rains but it pours.
The shop computer will not turn on. Somewhat similar to what happened to it last time and I found it may have been either the power supply or the hard drive and these have been replaced or at least moved around.
Strangely enough the story I started below titled Where Is Alice? may have been a precursor to these troubles and I may just go with the flow, losing all on this hard drive as well. Nine years of my life wiped out and maybe it would be best to start anew again.
I must have been a real badass in a previous life.
Sometimes I really hate people. But take this post as a WARNING:
Last week I received an e-mail from (possibly) Amazon.com regarding my account. The e-mail said that they had been notified by my bank that my credit card may have been retrieved and used by thieves so that I should follow the links provided to update my information within 48 hours. I followed the link and it brought me to the (possibly) Amazon.com website where I carefully read and started to fill out a form. When it got to my social security number I stopped, cleared all the boxes and backed out. Though it looked totally official, I hesitated and instead, checked my credit card where I found no illegitimate charges and figured I’d check back with Amazon.
Today I got another e-mail from (possibly) Amazon.com regarding my account. They claim that they were "phished," that I may receive a bogus e-mail that leads suspiciously to what appears to be their site and that I need to go back because they changed my password to protect me.
Which is the true Amazon correspondence if any? Coming at a time when I know that I can’t even buy anything from Amazon right now–and knowing of all the books I need to read, it upsets me that there are people in this world who would still take advantage of me. So please, do watch out for one or the other of these scams.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology