Clouds pass over, white puffed with promise, black with doom, sometimes stopping dropping rain for me instead of crying. Tandem random even super Doppler radar didn’t know. My heart left my umbrella in my mind.
Wet and wanting, waiting for some son to dry me out.
It looks like Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace has won out; a scan of the back cover that offers murder and mystery, coupled with my own liking of Atwood’s short stories, and that it has had such rave reviews from anyone who has read it made up my mind.
The bad news is that it is another four hundred-plus pager, so it’s going to take up quite a bit of my time. I don’t think it will require the indepth study such as those by McCarthy or Marquez, so I shall try not to make it an every day blow-by-blow description review, but rather post as I’m taken by the writing which is a sure bet with an Atwood piece.
I’m looking forward to this adventure in reading of both story and author. My immediate problem however is that for some strange reason I have been referring to it as A-LI-as Grace, rather than A-lias. Good thing I don’t use an audio weblog.
So I pick the book back up off the top of the "Read" pile (Read as in red, not as reed, which pile is still ten times as large) and head to the garage, first flicking the lightswitch on and grabbing a cup of cold morning coffee (stop wincing, I like 24, even 48-hour-old coffee). I grab a cigarette and as I flick the Blick, I spill coffee on the last page as I read and walk back to sit on the doorstep. This upsets me; I am one to keep a book as pure and pristine as when I opened it, but not as upset as had it been Solitude.
I realize that in losing that closing post and condensing a replacement, I have been unfair in not offering some excerpts as I poke the words to find the holes. Here then, an example of my accusatory "authorly" statement. Lauren is heading into her bedroom, half expecting to see not Mr. Tuttle, but her husband, Rey:
He sits on the edge of the bed in his underwear, lighting the last cigarette of the day.
Are you unable to imagine such a thing even when you see it?
Is the thing that’s happening so far outside experience that you’re forced to make excuses for it, or give it the petty credentials of some misperception?
Is reality too powerful for you?
Take the risk. Believe what you see and hear. It’s the pulse of every secret intimation you’ve ever felt around the edges of your life. (p. 122)
At this point, I’m singing Hallelujah! I BELIEVE! But in truth, I don’t. And neither does Lauren. She’s still messed up, but in accepting a Rey hallucination even for a flash of moment, and realizing it is memory and wish, she is coming to accept herself. This is real important to her. More so than wondering why her husband committed suicide. And this:
Her mother died when she was nine. It wasn’t her fault. It had nothing to do with her.
And this closing:
She walked into the room and went to the window. She opened it. She threw the window open. She didn’t know why she did this. Then she knew. (MY NOTE: This "then she knew" is a welcome change to DeLillo’s constant "Or maybe she did.") She wanted to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was. (p. 124)
So while I think that the narrator is getting sort of preachy in the first excerpt, the last couple hit me as revealing Lauren as a self-centered individual incapable of having the deep questioning thoughts that DeLillo accords her. This is my basis for wishing to hear more of what DeLillo has to say on the matter of time and how our lives figure into it–or out of it, but do not feel that he has given us believable characters to voice it for him.
This would definitely have been a good book for discussion because while I can see the alternate perceptions, I would love to have been convinced.
8:15 each morning, crossing lawns, leaving size five footprints in the frosted grass. Warming hands with lotion soothing as my voice to heal a sewn-together knee. Last year to Chris I was Nurse Fuzzy and Fran was called Nurse Jane because she really is a nurse and did all proper, perfect, hide the heart beneath the white cap of the necessary professional. I flounder, scared now with B as then with C to move something the wrong way, cause more harm than help; especially now because here there is a future.
Leaving with slippers she can wear over a plastic heel if I can fix them and I can. Leaving with a check for service rendered and a heart heavy with the wish I didn’t need to take it.
I’m wandering through my lineup of books and trying my darnedest to keep my sticky fingers off McCarthy. There are four or five of them there just screaming "Read me! Read me!" I think he (and Marquez–I’m playing the field) has come to be my literary fantasy man just as Willie fulfills my musical sexual needs.
What I’d really like to do is get into Austen, Faulkner, and so many of the classic contemporaries, as well as hit some of the heavies on my professionally prepared reading list. Since I can’t really justify the expense right now of buying more books when so many are staring me in the face, I must select something that I have. It’s a toss-up between Atwood’s Alias Grace, The Edible Woman, and a novel written by one of my instructors at the Wesleyan conference this past summer that I’m also anxious to get into. By morning I shall have one pulled out and opened.
In the meantime, I’m working my way through Ploughshares and not doing so with Didascalicon. I seem to have a mental block against this book, and have read the first pages of it about six times already because I keep putting it down and starting over, but haven’t progressed much beyond. Also haven’t gotten into the video narratives now that I have a working computer (though inadequate in o/s for the games) in the shop and don’t take the laptop in there with me anymore.
I guess this post was unnecessary, but what the hey, it’s 2:30 in the morning and I’m writing though I suppose I could instead continue on one of the short stories I’m working on or the pseudohypertext project of three stories that are in progress. Yes, yes; that’s what I shall do…
Been thinking about my long-sought-after-and-thought-I-found-it-voice in writing. And while voice is usually considered to be that of the narrator in fiction, it also may contain that of the author I would think, although that may be considered style rather than voice.
Be that as it may (in other words, I probably don’t know enough to even be allowed a voice), it dawned (and in the past few months, I’ve seen just about every dawn that dared show its damnable sunny face) on me that whatever this voice I have discovered in myself is unreadable–therefore, undoable–in writing anything longer than a paragraph. In posts I’ve usually labeled "Reality: Blah-Blah" is where my voice usually settles in. Mostly metaphorical gibberish written because the fact is that I just can’t verbalize it anymore and avoid talking to people because the reality right now plainly sucks, so I write. (I’m sure it will get better, and then maybe I’ll become my cheery (!) outgoing (?) self again sometime soon, so this is a temporary condition.)
But the point I’m trying to make is that you just can’t write a whole book or even a short story in that voice. It’d be as annoying as DeLillo’s Mr. Tuttle. This voice is better suited to poetry. However, it’s never been pointed out to me that I’m anywhere near the poet. So, what to do?
Ah, perhaps a book of flash prose?
Damn. I just lost the final wrap-up post on The Body Artist and I’m in no mood to do it all over again from scratch. I pressed "enter" instead of "save".
But since I want to get this monkey off my back, I’ll offer a condensed version:
I didn’t find the odd Mr. Tuttle to be enlightening, warm, or any type of sorrowful time traveler. To me, he was just personalityless and spoke either from what he had memorized or just blurted out (the one big point made in the book was when he says "Don’t touch it. I’ll clean it up later." prior to Lauren’s saying it, but to me, that’s a common enough occurrence to call it coincidence or a case of her repeating back instead of him. Not convincing.)
I found the dialogue of irrelevant and unfinished sentences even between the normal characters to be overdone and annoying.
While I found the ideas of life and death, time and space intriguing, I felt DeLillo’s authorly input would have been better put in essay form.
It bothers me that I found myself taking the resistant and hardheaded realist viewpoint rather than allowing myself suspension of belief in who or what Tuttle was. Even granting him to be a figment of Lauren’s imagination would have been preferable, but I lost my connection to her character midway through the book. In self defense, I easily believed Marquez in whatever he told me happened in 100 Years of Solitude and took it as utter truth.
That’s all, folks.
Took a break and rode out for an errand. Down by the river, trees naked gray their hair fell out with autumn chemotherapy, revival and survival. Leaves in golden curls on grass no longer green. Centuries of mowings, leaves, and people turned to earth.
Odd Sunday morning driving seeing all I pass thought: Is New England higher now then what it was before, absorbing, growing every passing year I pass?
Our fall/winter issue of otto no. 2 is out, and as soon as I figure out how to sell it off this site it will be made available here and at related websites. In the meantime, you can check out the otto website for details on submission as well as get a taste of the poetry and fiction included in this issue.
Before I get to a final conclusion on Don DiLillo’s The Body Artist, I must make it clear that while I was not thrilled with this book, it is one I am holding onto for another read someday. Whether it is my current frame of mind or my resistance to the reviews (at which I finally took a cheat-peek) and DiLillo’s concept of time and space versus my own, there is no doubt that he is an exceptional writer who has honed the writer’s tools and developed some new ones. First though, I would think that I shall delve into one of his better known and more conventional books such as Underworld or White Noise.
I should be closing this book out tonight in a final post. Maybe I’m just still stuck in Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, or antsy to get back together with McCarthy in any of his five more books I have lined up to read on the hearth.
Well, maybe because I worked a standing fifteen-hour shift yesterday, but when I came in and finished this book I was reading it hard and heavy with the idea of getting it done. So maybe that’s why I’m less than enchanted with it.
The little man disappears, leaves, whatever, Lauren has a performance of her body art based on her experience, and I’m not convinced at all that he meant anything except what she wanted to make of him and his visit.
Perhaps because I personally am so intrigued by the question of time I was really hoping to find some depth to DeLillo’s story. It may be there and I am just resisting it, but his observations, ruminations and explanations–while offering the reading the two roads to take of reality or otherly–aren’t, to me, backed up in any way that made me sit and ponder or question possibilities.
More later. I’m back in the shop and freezing.
Rough day today, long night ahead tonight in the frameshop. Little time to read or write. But I did get a story started–the one I have planned out–though this is just the very first rough draft of the opening. It’s titled, The Player:
The sodden tissue held all the impressions of her fingers, like Silly Putty gripped in her hand. She fiddled it from one hand to the other, changing its maleable form, sometimes bringing it up to dab uselessly at her eyes since it was really incapable of absorbing any more. She listened, seldom breaking into the stream of pacifying words that droned like flies in the stifling sunlit office on the second floor of Catalooga High School. Now and then she still attempted a halfhearted "But, he…" that fell off into an unfinished whisper that left no impression on the man or the room at all.
And with only twenty pages to finish on The Body Artist, and very anxious at that to be done with this reading, I must hold off till tomorrow, unless I cannot sleep again tonight.
From the AP news: Expert: Suicide-bomb Couple May be a First:
AMMAN, Jordan (AP) – Al-Qaida in Iraq claimed Friday that four Iraqis, including a husband and wife, carried out the suicide bombings against three Amman hotels, and police arrested 120 Jordanians and Iraqis in the hunt for anyone who might have aided them.
If their involvement is confirmed, the husband and wife would be the first married couple yet known to take part in a suicide bombing, a top Israeli counterterrorism expert said.
How sweet. I’m just glad these people find each other.
Someone graciously made a comment about one of the reality entries here and while I preen with temporary pride and satisfaction, I’ve come to look at it for what it means. Writing gets better with practice of writing, reading good writing, and living. Even the tarnish hides silver beneath in the lining of clouds.
Unmetaphorically speaking, whatever goes into us, whatever we absorb good and bad, can be used in our writing. In fact, we probably can’t keep it out, the understanding of not the feeling, but the reaction. The way we learn to hide within the words of a song, a poem, all stories with the reality just a thread that weaves through like a basket that holds it all together, too fragile to hold apples without it.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology