tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9314449608867157012024-02-18T19:27:55.337-07:00Year of One Hundred Stories<center><b>Come for the milk glands, stay for the ferret gods!<br><br>
Also, there will be some talk about writing.</b></center>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.comBlogger55125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-79385526093133867972012-01-19T03:11:00.002-07:002012-01-19T03:12:37.149-07:00Beginning on a Great Ending - #50<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGUJgV_cD6u3XP3fhcyuEnz6q6r2LW-wDqwqgg7cz1JPyfmCWk6hPiB5hos7MvDAjhDU5_UfmB0R56cJvU5wHHITCk2K5O-Dn_wgSewbWKBmULKh4xf-jmZWqH4ZloMUalmugg6JvW37M/s1600/Fowler+-+What+I+Didn%2527t+See+004.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGUJgV_cD6u3XP3fhcyuEnz6q6r2LW-wDqwqgg7cz1JPyfmCWk6hPiB5hos7MvDAjhDU5_UfmB0R56cJvU5wHHITCk2K5O-Dn_wgSewbWKBmULKh4xf-jmZWqH4ZloMUalmugg6JvW37M/s320/Fowler+-+What+I+Didn%2527t+See+004.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New";">STORY: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">“The
Last Worders” by Karen Joy Fowler – </b>It’s so cool that you can read it </span><a href="http://www.lcrw.net/fictionplus/fowlerlastworders.htm"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">,
isn’t it?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New";">FROM: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">WHAT I DIDN’T SEE (Small Beer Press, 2010) </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New";">BASICALLY:
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The narrator and her twin sister
are searching for the boy they both loved in high school. Precisely the same in every thought, wish, and
fear, the sisters have agreed that the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">boy</i>
must be the one to choose between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">them.</i> They arrive by train in remote San Margais,
where he’s recently been spotted at the Last Word Café, a venue infamous for
its <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poetry Slam. To the death.</i> But the locals evade all their questions
about the place. Amid anecdotes about San
Margais’ curious history (its stain of slavery, an exquisite poet, and the despotic
ruler that erased her every poem from living memory), the narrator is stunned
to discover that her twin can still surprise her.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">In </span><a href="https://www.librarything.com/work/7920"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">THE
LIE THAT TELLS A TRUTH: A GUIDE TO WRITING FICTION</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";"> (a book I like quite a lot), John
Dufresne counsels writers, “You start your ending when you write the first line
of the story.” It’s true in a very
literal way (you know, just like the cheerful notion that every single breath you
take is one breath closer to your last), but I prefer to think about it as an
approach to beginnings. Some stories seem
one way throughout, but take on an entirely new meaning once we’ve reached the
end. And holy crap, how I love to read a
story like that—I’m participating in it because not just the characters, but
also I, the reader, have changed. “The
Last Worders” is a fantastic example of this kind of story. Here’s the opening paragraph:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">Charlotta was asleep in the dining
car when the train arrived in San Margais. It was tempting to just leave her
behind, and I tried to tell myself this wasn’t a mean thought, but came to me
because I, myself, might want to be left like that, just for the adventure of
it. I might want to wake up hours later and miles away, bewildered and alone. I
am always on the lookout for those parts of my life that could be the first
scene in a movie. Of course, you could start a movie anywhere, but you
wouldn’t; that’s my point. And so this impulse had nothing to do with the way
Charlotta had begun to get on my last nerve. That’s my other point. If I
thought being ditched would be sort of exciting, then so did Charlotta. We felt
the same about everything.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">(Spoiler-Avoidance Reminder: You
can totally go read the whole thing for yourself at </span><a href="http://www.lcrw.net/fictionplus/fowlerlastworders.htm"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";"> before I ruin everything. Okay?
Okay.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">You guys, this is a brilliant
first paragraph. There are SO many
things right about it. I will use a
handy bulleted format to break it down.</span></div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">We get the narrator’s particular
voice right off—conversational, kind of wry and dark (“It was tempting to just
leave her behind”), but prone to equivocation.
We’re not sure where she stands, morally speaking.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">Charlotta’s name gets mentioned
three times right off the bat, which, considering her importance, is no
accident. We’re immediately introduced
to the way that her thoughts and the narrator’s thoughts are so intertwined as
to be nearly indistinguishable. Most
crucially, the tension between the sisters is already seething.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">Not just tension, either. Thoughts of abandonment. Competition.
Acting on impulse.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">And the setting? On a train, traveling to a remote place
called San Margais. The train evokes
romantic travel scenes of yore, but then the narrator muses about “the first scene
in a movie,” so we know it’s more or less modern. The atmosphere here, as in the rest of the
story, is steeped in desire and insecurity and a heady sense of adventure.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">Basically, this paragraph is a
microcosm of the whole story.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">And the big thing, the main number
one thing, is that all this information is conveyed without the sentences
seeming to do anything at all except provide a beginning. There’s nothing beating a reader over the
head with its self-conscious cleverness, no blinking neon sign imploring us to TAKE
NOTE IMPORTANT FOR LATER, nothing to suggest that this paragraph contains
anything at all except vital narrative that eases us into the story.</span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">But the entire ending is encased
in the thoughts that begin the story. The
abandonment of one sister by the other does actually take place—what’s so
fascinating, of course, is that it means the narrator was right: the twins really
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">do</i> think exactly alike. She’s right and yet she’s wrong, because one
of the story’s last lines is her claim, “I would never have done to Charlotta
what she had done to me.” So is she an
unreliable narrator or a reliable one? Every
piece of the story must be reconsidered in the light of the ending—all the
characters’ vagaries and biases take on new weights as we mull over the
evidence. The story’s final image, with the
narrator climbing the interminable stone steps from the gorge and arriving at
the top alone, in the dark, also recalls the beginning’s sense of adventure
while simultaneously changing its meaning.
Karen Joy Fowler uses her beginning and her ending to form a circular
kind of structure in her story, and man, it’s a powerful technique. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">* * *</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">Soooo…Hi.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";"> It’s been a while. Like, a big little while. I’ve missed my lovely readers (the few, the
delightful, the fairly nerdy) and the indulgence of an outlet for my incurable
over-analysis. Stupid life, getting in
the way of my blogging. Still, Story
Number Five-Oh is an exciting place to pick up the thread in an exciting new
year, and even if I might have to change the name of this blog to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Hundred Stories in About a Year and a Half
Or Maybe Two But I’m Not Promising Anything,</i> I hope you’ll continue to hang
out and enjoy the journey with me. I
revamped a couple of things (see, for example, the new page of <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/p/optional-explanations.html">Optional
Explanations</a>) so please do take a look around and let me know if I broke
anything else on the blog in the process.</span></div>
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<br /></div>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-11209751384409069462011-10-01T02:45:00.000-06:002011-10-01T02:45:21.043-06:00If this blog were called "Year of 50 Stories," I would have totally kicked ass.<div style="text-align: center;">Incredible time-crunch/time-suck events of late.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;">We'll be back soon, folks. I promise.</div>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-18416019064482204332011-08-21T22:12:00.000-06:002011-08-21T22:12:31.982-06:00Walk A Mile in My Chaps, Cowboy - #47, 48, and 49<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFsCoiQUl9T-OkexmdNXxSfGQGs6cjQejhKJOWSRgZOmNCGjEkEO4amaR662AqF8AT4nMVZpY89BUQ-LfLyWfWmRBgRGmOQeYceL9_fdOuqTqyTIq_OfYaY-RBNcWX-I5xNnQLLTH3RCs/s1600/47+48+49+-+Leonard+-+Colonels+Lady+etc+pic1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFsCoiQUl9T-OkexmdNXxSfGQGs6cjQejhKJOWSRgZOmNCGjEkEO4amaR662AqF8AT4nMVZpY89BUQ-LfLyWfWmRBgRGmOQeYceL9_fdOuqTqyTIq_OfYaY-RBNcWX-I5xNnQLLTH3RCs/s320/47+48+49+-+Leonard+-+Colonels+Lady+etc+pic1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">STORY: </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">“The Colonel’s Lady” – “Blood Money” – and “The Nagual” - by Elmore Leonard</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">FROM: </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">THE COMPLETE WESTERN STORIES OF ELMORE LEONARD (William Morrow, 2004)</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">BASICALLY: </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Action-packed Westerny goodness.</span></b></div><ul style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"><li> <div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">“The Colonel’s Lady” (1952) – </span></b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">An infamous Apache bandit kills a party of travelers and takes the lone woman hostage, hustling her upstream. They’re pursued by a US Army tracker who hopes against hope he’ll reach them before she’s the victim of further atrocity. Twist ending.</span></div></li>
<li> <div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">“Blood Money” (1953) – </span></b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">A gang of five bank robbers has apparently killed a man during its most recent heist. The marshal and his posse pursue the four hardened criminals and one boy, trapping them in an old dead-end mining canyon. Then the wait begins. Another twist ending.</span></div></li>
<li> <div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">“The Nagual” (1956) – </span></b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">An old man, a vaquero his whole life but now disabled and unable to do much more than mend fences, is aware of the affair between his boss’s wife and the man who breaks his boss’s horses. When the boss gets wind of the affair and takes a drastic action, the old man has a decision to make. Cute ending, but not really a twist.</span></div></li>
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Amazingly, even after my gargantuan (sorry!) analysis of a formulaic noir story </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/08/three-differents-and-one-menace-46.html"><span style="color: blue;"><u>in #46</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">, I still wasn’t tired of reflecting on how pulp writing does what it does. And even though I think TYoOHS’s <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Library Month</b> started, like, ninety-two years ago, I’ve still got plenty of great material to go through. (Hooray for online renewal.) This collection of Elmore Leonard Western stories was a perfect fit for my mood. On one level, these are basic pieces of fiction that are easily categorized—good guys, bad guys, classic otherworld setting, lots of men doing archetypally manly things with guns and horses and whiskey. Being a Western raises certain expectations in readers; it has to deliver if it’s going to succeed.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">But what I discovered in reading these three Westerns is that Elmore Leonard knows how to use the formula as a jumping-off point, not an end. Formulaic conventions are unarguably present—after all, that’s part of what it means to be a story in the Western genre—but what’s impressive is how well he masks them. The guy is clearly brilliant. In the introduction, Leonard’s quoted as saying that when he decided to become a writer, “I looked for a genre where I could learn how to write and be selling at the same time…I chose Westerns because I liked Western movies.” But then he went and wrote “twenty-seven of the thirty stories in this volume” in the five years between 1951 and 1956, which is a pretty fantastic learning curve. Of course, he benefited from a thriving market for the Western story, a market that dried up by the end of the fifties. But you’ve gotta admire his practicality and drive, combined with what’s clearly a significant natural talent.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">In that formulaic murder story discussed in #46, as well as in Dashiell Hammett’s formulaic detective story </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/06/lets-start-gumshoe-revival-39-plus.html"><span style="color: blue;"><u>discussed in #39</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">, a single POV narrates the action in a straight linear arc. That’s what makes those stories so simple and so analyzable. They’re fun, but they are not complex. These three Westerns, on the other hand, feel far more complicated. Where Elmore Leonard breaks away from the pack, I think, is in his manipulation of point of view (POV).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">All three of these stories are told in third person—never “I,” always “he”—but it’s mostly a close third person. That means that instead of some distant god-like narrator, we’re as close to the character as if it were in first person. We see the individual’s thoughts and feelings, and we’re in their head as they take in the world. For example, in “The Colonel’s Lady,” we begin inside the POV of the Apache bandit Mata Lobo:</span></div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">He inched his body upward until he was standing, placed a foot on a rung of the baggage rack, and pushed his body up until his head was above the coach. He was confident of his own animal stealth. A gun could be waiting, but he doubted it. Only a fool would have moved, knowing he was just outside. A fool, or a child, or a woman.</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">But Leonard doesn’t stay there. After Mata Lobo captures the woman and sets off, we switch POV to the unit of soldiers that find the ruined stagecoach. The narration begins distantly, but soon settles onto the POV of their young leader Phil Langmade. Like his men, he’s exhausted and filthy from their most recent patrol, and finding this horrific scene is the last thing he could have wanted—especially because the coach contained the Colonel’s wife. Experience tells him there’s almost no chance she’s still alive.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">During this part of the story, Phil Langmade is unsure what to do, and he’s even scared to look inside the coach for fear he’ll find the corpse of the Colonel’s wife. But civilian scout Simon Street has already noticed her footprint on the riverbank and reports that the bandit—he surmises that there was only one, and who it probably was—has taken her away on foot. We stay in Langmade’s point of view and so get introduced to Simon Street through his eyes; mainly, he admires the scout’s abilities and trusts his judgment. By the time Leonard changes the POV again, this time to Simon Street himself, we understand that this guy is the best of the best—and even <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">he</i> doubts this episode will turn out for the best. The stakes feel very high indeed.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Leonard uses POV switches in all three of these stories. In “Blood Money,” the change-ups are even more freewheeling, moving liberally between the escaping criminals and the lawmen pursuing them. When you think about it, a standoff between a bunch of robbers and a marshal’s posse is about as formulaic as Western plots come. But by building the story up through successive layers of POV, Leonard complicates the narrative. A simpler story might keep us in the POV of the criminals, and then the lawmen become their antagonists, and either our bad guy protagonists succeed or they don’t. Or it might make the lawmen the POV protagonists, the criminals the antagonists, and then the same question would hold. But by jumping around between POVs frequently, the reader is never sure <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">whose</i> side they’re supposed to be on—which allows Leonard to make this a story about a young criminal’s chance at redemption, instead of what you think at first, that it’s just a story about whether or not some bank robbers get caught.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">You’re probably wanting to know how Leonard switches POV so often without being annoying about it. It’s a good question. I feel sure it’s a good question because I can’t quite figure out the answer. It has something to do with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">purpose</i>, I know—every time the POV changes, it’s for a specific narrative purpose. It might be to increase tension (as when we leave Mata Lobo with his helpless hostage), or it might be to set up another character (Phil Langmade’s evaluation of the scout Simon Street), or it might be to give the reader more information than a character has (as when we learn from a “Blood Money” lawman that the kid involved in the bank hold-up and attempted murder can probably avoid being hanged for his crime). In any case, the changes in POV aren’t arbitrary and they don’t repeat information.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">In “The Nagual,” Leonard chooses to use <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fewer</i> changes in POV, providing an interesting contrast. Most of the action occurs through the eyes of seventy-year-old Ofelio Oso, who keeps to himself and goes often into the hills to look at the stars and meditate on the approaching end of his life. Unlike in “Blood Money,” “The Nagual” has a single unambiguous protagonist. Even so, we don’t stay inside his mind the whole time. For example, when Ofelio is waiting to pick up his boss from the stagecoach station, he hangs out with some other roughnecks who get a kick out of teasing him about going off into the hills. They try to goad him into talking about “the devils” he says he sometimes sees, just so they can laugh at him. But the POV shifts to the most sympathetic listener:</span></div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Billy-Jack Trew listened, and in a way he understood the old man. He knew that legends were part of a Mexican peon’s life. He knew that Ofelio had been a vaquero for something like fifty years, with lots of lonesometime for imagining things. Anything the old man said was good listening, and a lot of it made sense after you thought about it awhile—so Billy-Jack Trew didn’t laugh.</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">You might be surprised to know that, in the story, this isn’t really new information—earlier, in Ofelio’s POV, we learn about the long career as a vaquero and the propensity for thinking. But having Billy-Jack think it, too, sort of validates it as an actual characteristic of Ofelio, not just the way the old man sees himself. And it builds on that, too, by showing that Billy-Jack considers Ofelio to be a source of some wisdom.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">“The Nagual” is the least formulaic of the Elmore Leonard Westerns I read—really, it’s pretty rad how much the stories, despite having been written within just a few years of one another, get progressively more sophisticated. Although they all have formulaic elements, sometimes even employing Western tropes that border on the cliché, they overcome their humble foundations thanks to Leonard’s skill in making each story feel fresh. When I talked about </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/08/calculation-of-other-meanings-44-and-45.html"><span style="color: blue;"><u>stories #44 and 45</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">, I said that Margaret Drabble’s literary pair seemed strangely alike at heart, even though they had very different plots. Remarkably, despite a shared nineteenth-century setting and masculine outlook, Elmore Leonard’s tales <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">don’t</i> project that feeling of sameness. His handling of POV seems to be a big part of this, allowing him to inject change and tension into his stories at every turn. So, go on, whether or not you think of yourself as the kind of person who reads Westerns, enjoy him for his writing chops and his ability to spin a great yarn.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
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</div>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-36250914999778234672011-08-18T13:01:00.000-06:002011-08-18T13:01:12.484-06:00Three Differents and One Menace - #46<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpLKjAHX3M8A6Er33OPxn_qS7qEkh6U7vWxEUm_CkXpObXBZrVU3qhh2RILed9uCgki6ILtGt3EDV7t1AG9MM7JAL2kjwXBTXmt0HgIijgN2UreML2-5jTsjb-r5YgR00VoHmpTbJrlHM/s1600/46+-+Scott+-+The+Most+Beautiful+Apartment+in+NY+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpLKjAHX3M8A6Er33OPxn_qS7qEkh6U7vWxEUm_CkXpObXBZrVU3qhh2RILed9uCgki6ILtGt3EDV7t1AG9MM7JAL2kjwXBTXmt0HgIijgN2UreML2-5jTsjb-r5YgR00VoHmpTbJrlHM/s320/46+-+Scott+-+The+Most+Beautiful+Apartment+in+NY+pic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">STORY: </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">“The Most Beautiful Apartment in New York” by Justin Scott</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">FROM: </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">MANHATTAN NOIR, ed. Lawrence Block (Akashic Books, 2006)</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">BASICALLY: </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Bob has finally found the New York apartment of his dreams, complete with unparalleled view of the Empire State Building. He’s ready to buy, but the owner’s playing hardball with an exorbitant price. Bob’s friend the real estate broker is helping as much as possible--but the friend’s newfound obsession with exacting revenge on his supposedly evil ex-wife is starting to get creepy. A suspenseful tale with a deadly climax and a surprising final twist.</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">This is a story that fairly cries out to be broken down, like so many Lego castles, into its component parts. I’m kind of obsessed with structure you guys! Not because it’s my favorite thing about literature though—quite the opposite. The reason I’m always wanting to know how stories are put together is that my instinctual understanding of the mechanism is precisely nada.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Now, lovely prose, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that </i>I get. I’m making no claims to an immortal style of my own, you understand, but I do think I have a good strong gut feeling about what works and what has quality and how words sound nice together. Sometimes I can even coax these qualities into my own sentences! But large-scale narrative structure—like plotting, pacing, and overall balance—doesn’t come naturally to me in the slightest.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">That’s why a story like “The Most Beautiful Apartment in New York” is such a boon to a writer like me. It’s entertaining and interesting, and yet simple and formulaic enough that I can study it to understand why writer Justin Scott chose to include the elements that he did and how he knew where to put them.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I feel like I’ve got to insert a caveat, here—I definitely don’t see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">learning to write to a formula</i> as one of my writerly goals. (Noooooo! I am lofty and high-falutin’!) It’s not that I think formula fiction has no value, but it wouldn’t make sense for me to start penning popular thrillers; that’s not what I read and it’s not where my passion lies. However, I do want to learn how literary formulas function. Why are they so pleasing to readers? What effect do certain narrative choices have? It’s that whole “you have to learn the rules before you can break them” thing—not that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you</i> have to do anything at all, or do it in the way that I do it. I’m just groping along in the dark, here.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I’ve run across a couple of links lately that have given me a lot to mull over in terms of formula and structure. First, it was </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="http://www.wetasphalt.com/?q=content/how-write-book-three-days-lessons-michael-moorcock"><span style="color: blue;"><u>this breakdown by Michael Moorcock</u></span></a>, a respected science fiction writer who’s written many a non-formulaic novel in addition to his bald-faced moneymakers. In it, he explains his approach to churning out a 60,000-word potboiler in a mere three days. That discovery led me to <a href="http://www.multiverse.org/fora/showthread.php?t=2510"><span style="color: blue;"><u>this method by Lester Dent</u></span></a></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">, successful pulp writer of yore, for writing a 6,000-word short story. Let’s take a look at some of the ways “The Most Beautiful Apartment in New York” (or “TMBAINY,” as I shall henceforth call it) accords with their principles. By the way, some serious spoilers ahead.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">So, if you look at Lester Dent’s method, you’ll see he starts right in with some good specifics about what your unique formula-driven story will need: </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">1. A DIFFERENT MURDER METHOD FOR VILLAIN TO USE<br />
2. A DIFFERENT THING FOR VILLAIN TO BE SEEKING<br />
3. A DIFFERENT LOCALE<br />
4. A MENACE WHICH IS TO HANG LIKE A CLOUD OVER HERO<br />
<br />
One of these DIFFERENT things would be nice, two better, three swell. It may help if they are fully in mind before tackling the rest.<br />
</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I wasn’t sure what Dent meant by “different” in this context, but it seems to make sense once I apply the concepts to “TMBAINY.” The murderer, unhinged real estate broker Tommy King, uses in this instance a scalpel. As murder weapons go, it’s not especially shocking and in no way over the top, but neither is it the kind of thing you hear about every day. It’s, y’know, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">different.</i> And author Justin Scott amps up the interest level by having Tommy talk about his fascination beforehand:</span></div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">“I’m going to buy a surgeon’s scalpel. What she did to me. I just have to figure out how not to get caught— What’s the matter? You’ve never been mad enough to kill anybody?”</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">At the time, this is fairly casual. Of course, once you know that Tommy does try to cut his ex-wife’s heart out, it’s a bit more grim.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I wouldn’t say that Tommy is seeking anything especially different in this story, but he’s not clearly a villain until most of the way through. As Bob the protagonist’s friend and real estate broker, Tommy’s goal (revenge against his ex-wife) is meaningful because it remains hidden until the climax.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Next, Dent calls for “a different locale.” (And check out his tricks to convince editors you’re familiar with any random faraway place.) (I could spend forever musing about the ways such shenanigans have become both easier and harder in the Internet Age. But I’ll spare you.) This story takes place in New York. New York! Pretty-well-known slash not-so-different. There must be a million and one other stories that take place in that city. Yet I think Scott’s New York serves the same function that an exotic and thrilling locale would for Dent. The main thing is that it’s absolutely integral to the story. New York itself is intertwined with the protagonist’s goal—everyone everywhere wants to live in a nice place, but in a gargantuan city where real estate is scarce, apartment buying achieves epic importance. The other main thing is the specificity, how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">place</i> permeates this story in its smallest details. The intractable owner, for example, insists that his apartment’s a great investment because</span></div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">“Nothing will bring it down. It didn’t go when the Towers went down. I was watching on CNN thinking, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oh, God, the Empire State Building’s next, I’ll never get my price without the view.</i> Then I realized the terrorists don’t know from shit about the Empire State Building. You gotta be a New Yorker to love the Empire State Building—sure enough, they went for the Pentagon.”</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Now, this is an excellent passage for several reasons, but most fundamentally it melds the story’s What to its Where. Plot and setting are about as elementary as narrative components come—but when they’re well-united, as they are here, they add a powerful dimension to the storytelling. (And I don’t see how the truth of this is limited to pulp or formulaic writing.)</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Last of all, Dent says a menace has to hang like a cloud over the hero. This mystified me at first, but then I looked at “TMBAINY” and realized that a certain feeling—yea, one might even say a menace—does hang over the whole story. Bob, as protagonist, is intently focused on his own goal: he wants that apartment something fierce. The importance of his desire is increased by the New York setting, an external impetus, and also by his growing sense that in his life, he’s always accepted second-best—the lesser apartment, the lesser wife, the lesser life. And then even the guy selling the apartment suggests that maybe he’d be better off buying an apartment in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brooklyn</i>. Infuriating! So Bob’s got forces within and forces without pushing him to do whatever it takes to get this apartment. He’s even willing to spend time with Tommy King, sleazeball extraordinaire.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Bob and Tommy are presented as friends, but it seems fairly clear that it’s a friendship based on, to put it nicely, practicality. Bob is unnerved by Tommy’s ex-wife fixation and this feeling only grows throughout the story as Tommy’s fixation seems to balloon out into a real desire to do harm. Bob also finds himself seriously doubting Tommy’s loyalty—is he showing the apartment to someone else who’ll buy it out from under him? The story’s focus is the acquisition of the apartment, but the thing with Tommy is like a gadfly that won’t let up. As a reader, I felt a mounting anxiety about it—I didn’t know how Tommy’s violent impulses would end up affecting Bob’s goal, but I could sense that something was going to have to give. Of course, this only works if the two separate strands end up crashing into one another. If that had never happened, if it had turned out that Tommy King’s ex didn’t actually figure in the story at all, it would have been baffling. In a short story, what’s there needs to get used.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">That’s something Michael Moorcock says in his advice on writing sword-and-sorcery action to formula. I haven’t talked much about Moorcock’s approach, mainly because it’s designed to apply to a short novel rather than a short story (and even Dent’s method is meant for a much longer story than “TMBAINY”). But one bit from Moorcock stands out because it happens to be the main way in which “TMBAINY” fails.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Moorcock says,</span></div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">You need a list of images that are purely fantastic: deliberate paradoxes, say: the City of Screaming Statues, things like that. You just write a list of them so you've got them there when you need them. Again, they have to cohere, have the right resonances, one with the other.</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">It’s the thing about cohering that matters. In “TMBAINY,” the conflict comes to a head with Bob humiliating himself by borrowing money from his working-class parents, who have painstakingly saved it to retire on, but then it doesn’t even matter because the owner’s already sold to a woman who wants a “pied-a-terre for her boyfriend.” The woman just happens to be Tommy King’s ex-wife. She has no idea that Tommy’s even involved, she just loved the place at first sight—but he is literally lying in wait for her. As she tours her new piece of real estate, he attacks and kills her. Bob has guessed Tommy’s plan, but he hesitates just a moment too long—fully aware that her murder would mean that “the price of that apartment was going to plummet.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">She dies. And Bob does get the apartment, which brings us to the problem with the story’s cohesion. Bob finds that he can’t enjoy his wonderful new apartment because everywhere he looks, he sees this woman’s ghost. Literally.</span></div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Samantha was waiting in the window, her heart-shaped face super-imposed on the Empire State Building. Her ghost? Or just my guilty imagination reflected in the glass? Didn’t matter which, I saw her clear as I saw the sunlit spire by day and the white iceberg at night. I tried moving around the room, shifting perspective. At angles, the nineteenth-century glass distorted the light, but she kept moving with me…“Why didn’t you stop him?” she asked one morning. And that night, “You knew he wanted to hurt me.”</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">My big problem with this part of the ending is that it just doesn’t fit. There’s been no indication that we’re in anything but the mundane world—now, suddenly, I’m supposed to accept a supernatural judgment? Irascible apartment owners cohere with sleazy real estate brokers, and big-city apartment hunters cohere with ex-wives, and excellent views of the Empire State Building cohere with human motivation—but none of that coheres with the sudden appearance of a mournful, guilt-inducing ghost.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">When I re-read “TMBAINY,” I realized that the author had actually mentioned ghosts numerous times before the ending. The guy selling the apartment, for example, mentions that the only thing that brings down prices on apartments like his are hauntings. And the word gets used metaphorically more than once. So Scott clearly made an effort for the ghost thing to cohere. But it fell flat; the departure was too great. I think he would have had to include some early hint that supernatural events actually could occur in the universe of the story—lacking that, protagonist punished by his own guilt in the form of a ghost just feels like a cop-out.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Luckily, that’s not quite where the story ends. The true ending has a much better twist, and I think I’ll leave it unspoiled for you.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Even for this major flaw, though, “TMBAINY” is a really fun little story. To me, that’s the big power of formulaic approaches—even when other elements aren’t as strong as they could be, the formula points to the pieces that make a reader want to keep reading. Most people, I believe, would vastly prefer an exciting and interesting tale with some slightly wooden characters and a few weird plot turns to a beautifully-composed, carefully-rendered story in which nothing seems to happen. And to me, it’s not an either-or proposition—the very best fiction serves up pleasure right alongside art.</span></div>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-529847784549148452011-08-12T18:42:00.001-06:002011-08-12T20:57:57.132-06:00The Calculation of Other Meanings - #44 and #45<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuukWbXqC5hMBZ0KNYYcdW98pA4dx1EWYpS_12FYEP289UQhoLj_rhMYRkFpEWvI67o8i_6pWm6MKS7ToiW0OoRCGcow00UNAoxndN9CShPKS-YN6bH7czKFD4CIdjUTy3xJjISfMblg8/s1600/44+45+-+Drabble+-+Les+Liaisons+Dangereuses+-+A+Day+in+the+Life+of+a+Smiling+Woman+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="204" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuukWbXqC5hMBZ0KNYYcdW98pA4dx1EWYpS_12FYEP289UQhoLj_rhMYRkFpEWvI67o8i_6pWm6MKS7ToiW0OoRCGcow00UNAoxndN9CShPKS-YN6bH7czKFD4CIdjUTy3xJjISfMblg8/s320/44+45+-+Drabble+-+Les+Liaisons+Dangereuses+-+A+Day+in+the+Life+of+a+Smiling+Woman+pic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">STORIES: </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">“Les Liaisons Dangereuses” (1964) and “A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman” (1973) by Margaret Drabble</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">FROM: </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A SMILING WOMAN: COMPLETE SHORT STORIES (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">BASICALLY: </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Both are stories of a repressed character who finds their self-control suddenly slipping.</span></b></div><ul style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"><li> <div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">In “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” a young man named Humphrey feels uncomfortable at a party where he doesn’t know anyone. In one corner, an attractive redhead is holding court with her many admirers. He makes his way to her but of course she ignores him--until he improvises a startling method for catching her attention.</span></b></div></li>
<li> <div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">“A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman” follows television personality Jenny Jamieson as she cooks, cleans, and manages her household, attends a committee meeting, and has lunch with a clergyman whom she’ll be interviewing on her program. But it’s her afternoon appointment that throws her whole day off-kilter and makes every interaction, except those with her children, seem meaningless. For months, she’s been ignoring an alarming, unexplained feminine bleeding, and now the doctor confirms that she needs to return for surgery as soon as possible. Though her condition is never explained in detail, we know it’s bad, and Jenny starts bleeding again from all the digging around the doctor did during her appointment. She begins to reflect on death, believing her own to be imminent. But she still shows up to her final task of the day, a speaking engagement at a girls’ school. There, as Jenny lectures winningly about new opportunities for girls, her clothes slowly soak with blood.</span></b></div></li>
</ul><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">And with that giant gob of Courier font washing across your monitor, you may have picked up on just how it is I plan to catch up on my Year of One Hundred Stories …(HINT: It’s <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i></b> by continuing the recent trend of not posting for large chunks of time. Sigh.) Actually, I declare unto you, henceforth I shall be doubling up on stories as the mood strikes me. I am blogger, hear me roar. My goal this year is first and foremost about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">reading</i> a hundred stories and, to be honest, penning a hundred separate write-ups seems a little unnecessary. I mean, the write-up is important (if for no other reason than that my brain is a sieve and retains nothing if I don’t write it down), but synthesizing multiple stories into a single cohesive essay is its own intriguing challenge. Let’s see if I’m up to it, shall we?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I picked today’s stories, as usual, without much of a plan. I happened to like their titles, and because the pieces in this collection are organized chronologically, I wanted to make sure I didn’t get two that were right next to each another. That’s why I was so weirded out by how much each reminded me of the other. If I’d been looking for two stories to compare and contrast, I couldn’t have chosen more aptly. Although you can see from the outlines above that their plots are quite different, and “A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman” is much longer (and therefore more multifaceted) than “Les Liaison Dangereuses,” these two stories have a curious sameness to them. In fact, to my eyes, they represent a single basic technique, or maybe I should say an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">approach</i>, as initially applied by a less-developed writer and, later, by one more developed. They just happen to be the same writer, which is marvelously instructive.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">“Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” published in 1964, is very short and encompasses a single action in a brief space of time. Humphrey, a young man at a party, hovers unseen behind a beautiful and popular stranger, finally turning her attention to himself by—I’m about to spoil this for you, so hang onto your hat—by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">setting her hair on fire</i> with a candle. Totally spontaneously, but totally on purpose. Yikes, dude. The bulk of the story leading up to this startling ending is taken up with Humphrey’s self-involved reflections on the rudeness of the other guests who ignore him, and trying to decide whether he should leave, and bitter judgments about the various attractive females who don’t so much as look at him.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">What comes across about this young man is how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">uptight</i> he is. He follows the conversations around him closely, but he’s sort of shocked that no one’s polite enough to invite him into their conversations and resents that the other partygoers “seemed to be getting on quite nicely without him” and his “unoriginal views on Harold Pinter. On the other hand, he did not really want to leave.” Humphrey begins as a person who is emotionally frozen by an unfamiliar setting filled with intimidating strangers. But, ultimately, he surprises even himself with his ability to take action. And here’s the zinger—Humphrey is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">socially rewarded</i> for his entirely senseless (if mild) violence. Self-assurance itself is enough to win the day, and apparently also the heart of the redhead:</span></div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">“What did you do it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">for?</i>” she cried, in a positive blaze of admiration, the kind of excitement kindled by duels or the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rape of the Sabine Women</i> or indeed any violent and decisive action taken in the cause of passion.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">“Oh, well,” he said, with nonchalant pride, as though such inspirations came to him every day of the week, “I just wanted to attract your attention, that’s all.”</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Although 1973’s “A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman” is far more complex—the time span is longer and augmented by flashback, the topic more serious, and Jenny Jamieson considerably more fleshed out—it likewise features a protagonist who is discovering cracks in the system of social norms she has always adhered to. Jenny has navigated society’s demands with ease; she’s always been able do exactly what was required of her, and do it in a way that others found pleasing.</span></div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">She always managed to say the right things to everyone; she never offended and yet never made people dull. She was intelligent and quick, she had sympathy for everyone she talked to, and all the time she looked so splendid, sitting there shining and twinkling…She told everybody that she loved her job, that she was so lucky, that it fitted on so well with the children and her husband…She didn’t take herself very seriously—it’s just an entertainment, she would say. I’ve been lucky, she would say. All I do is have the chats I’d love to have at home, and I get paid to do it. Lovely!</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I can just imagine Humphrey, in the other story, gazing from afar at Jenny Jamieson, telling himself how stuck up she must be and simultaneously longing to be near her. His story has him on the outside, socially, but through a sudden flash of illumination (essentially, that style counts far more than substance), he blazes his way in. Jenny’s story, on the other hand, is one of a woman who, by dint of her own skill, talent, and effort, has mastered being on the inside, but the intrusion of her own mortality has brought to the surface the emptiness of that success.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">What is our role, and how do we fulfill that role? How do we defy it? How much of oneself is authentic, and how much a construction? These questions clearly interest author Margaret Drabble. Her method of exploring them seems to be one of setting up a reflective individual to have their assumptions overturned. Successful television interviewer Jenny Jamieson can’t seem to escape an awareness of how her own success seems to be destroying her husband, even though he’s the reason she got the job in the first place. Jenny’s strength has served in the past, one gets a sense, to cover up his weaknesses. She has always done everything exactly right, and yet everything is falling apart—especially herself. The most positive thing she can think of is that she was smart enough to take out a life insurance policy on herself years before.</span></div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">It had seemed a good idea at the time, and she had never regretted it. Her husband, though competent in some ways, was feckless: he was also much hated, as editors often are, and if ever he lost his power to control others, others would not waste time in trying to ruin him. She had thought to herself, some years ago, as soon as she began to earn good money, I should insure myself, for the children’s sake. Well, she had done it, she had not merely thought about it, she had done it. That was the kind of woman she was. So she need not worry about their material future.</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">And yet, even feeling the rightness of that decision, Jenny can’t escape the sense of having wasted her life.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Drabble engages in one technique of which I’m not especially fond. Both Humphrey and Jenny, in their respective stories, reflect on an experience similar to their own that happened to one of their friends. Humphrey recalls a “chap he had once known who had put a cigarette out on the back of his hand because some girl said he was a physical coward.” The girl, he notes, “had been most impressed: indeed she had screamed loudly and burst into tears.” Jenny reflects on a friend of hers who had committed suicide, while she, Jenny,</span></div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">had comforted husband and mistress and child, in so much as it was in her to do so…So much sympathy had been lavished upon the survivors. But the woman, Jenny’s friend, was dead forever. She was beyond sympathy and love and fear. She was no more. What rage must have possessed her, at the moment of extinction, to know what tenderness would accrue to others from her death, while she lay rotting.</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">In both cases, I think Drabble is trying to find a way to have her protagonist reflect on the meaning of their own actions without doing so directly. She doesn’t want to explain the moral or the point of the story directly, so she couches it in a memory suddenly coming to her protagonist’s mind. But the sudden remembrance, occurring both times not far from the story’s end, feels to me like an intrusion. It’s just too convenient that the guy struggling with getting a girl’s attention remembers a friend who once tried to get a girl’s attention, and that the woman who’s struggling with her own possible death remembers a friend’s death. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Well, the second one is maybe more plausible, but, because I had already read the first story, I was probably sensitive to the repetition of it. When people complain that a collection of short stories can seem redundant, this is what they’re talking about—so I think it’s worth bringing up as something to possibly avoid. Or at least, to be aware of. As different as these two stories are in terms of their plots, they feel like they’re solving similar questions in similar ways.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Still, though, they’re worth reading. If you’re interested in tackling big social questions in your writing, Drabble is a worthwhile model. One other point, in that vein, before I go—Drabble works outright symbolism into the ends of both of these stories in a very interesting way. Though it’s outside of the scope of this blog to analyze what she really <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">means</i> by having a guy enjoy social success when he dares to do violence to a beautiful woman, and having a beautiful woman give an inspirational speech while her clothes soak with the blood of her diseased body, I want to draw attention to how well she makes both of these symbolic endings work within the universe she has set up inside her work. It would be entirely possible to read both of these stories and not notice the symbolism at all and yet still get the stories’ import. That is to say, the symbolic images mesh entirely with the plot and characters of the story. (In “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” this is maybe a little less seamless—my first instinct was to be annoyed by the redhead’s giddy response—but that could well be because I’ve benefited from the intervening half a century of women’s cultural advances.) </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Though I’m no expert, it certainly seems that the success of symbolism sometimes depends on its superfluity. What I mean is, the story would still be the story without the symbolism. It’s just that the symbolism reinforces what the story is trying to say and makes it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feel</i> true in an indirect and non-logic-based manner. Using symbolism well is still a pretty big mystery to me, but Drabble’s given me something to think about.</span></div>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-44093335476064123492011-07-28T16:12:00.000-06:002011-07-28T16:12:16.604-06:00The Story of the Whole World - #43<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipyUJNJTqOasA3IKdEwCQH7NmeS-aZQUfUbsE12bxnsebkriDdPWvkruIQ4l606gaHSQuMb_z0Ulsv28VgptHL_pvr_wdqB8AFNkp0ShOkdJsU1vloNCtgf2RUdB55NpqOImvjEUimKuA/s1600/43+-+Pohl+-+Fermi+and+Frost+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipyUJNJTqOasA3IKdEwCQH7NmeS-aZQUfUbsE12bxnsebkriDdPWvkruIQ4l606gaHSQuMb_z0Ulsv28VgptHL_pvr_wdqB8AFNkp0ShOkdJsU1vloNCtgf2RUdB55NpqOImvjEUimKuA/s320/43+-+Pohl+-+Fermi+and+Frost+pic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div> <br />
<div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">STORY: <b>“Fermi and Frost” by Frederik Pohl </b>– Winner of the 1986 Hugo Award.</div><div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"> </div><div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"><b></b> </div><div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">FROM: <b><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780312875275">PLATINUM POHL: THE COLLECTED BEST STORIES</a> (Tor, 2005)</b> </div><div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">BASICALLY: <b>What the whole world long feared has finally come to pass--the USSR has launched a full nuclear offensive against the US. Amid the massive casualties and ensuing nuclear winter, one American man and the boy he happens to rescue are lucky enough to escape to Iceland. There, protected from the very worst of the global extinction by geothermal warmth and a society accustomed to long bouts of cold, they try to hang on to human civilization amidst the tragedy.</b> </div><br />
<div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">One thing is clear: Frederik Pohl knows what he’s doing. I, who am young and green (in writerly, if not necessarily chronological, terms), might have been tempted to begin this story post-collapse, unfolding my characters’ story in a devastated post-apocalyptic world. Then I guess I would’ve worked backstory into their conversation or something. </div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">But what Pohl does is so much better. He begins the moment <i>before</i> everything changed. He begins with the recognizable: </div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">On Timothy Clary’s ninth birthday he got no cake.</blockquote><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The reason for this is explained in a roundabout fashion. Timothy’s in the TWA terminal of New York’s JFK Airport, apparently alone, with nothing but some stale pastries to eat all day, and we learn that he’s wet his pants because </div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Getting to the toilets over the packed refugee bodies was just about impossible. There were twenty-eight hundred people in a space designed for a fraction that many, and all of them with the same idea. Get away!</blockquote><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This all happens in the space of a paragraph. Notice how quickly Pohl widens the scope of the narration. The story’s “camera” is focused tightly on this little boy, but it almost immediately pans out and lets us see that the story isn’t about just the little boy, but about many people—an entire nation, at least. And what’s wrong with them? The camera keeps pulling out for a wider and wider shot, until we learn, </div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Because there had been no launch order yet, or none that the public had heard about anyway, there might still be time for escape. A little time. Time enough for the TWA terminal, and every other airport terminal everywhere, to jam up with terrified lemmings. There was no doubt that the missiles were poised to fly. The attempted Cuban coup had escalated wildly, and one nuclear sub had attacked another with a nuclear charge. That, everyone agreed, was the signal. The next event would be the final one.</blockquote><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Why is beginning in this way such a masterful maneuver on Pohl’s part? I think it has to do with creating stakes. By beginning his story just before all of human civilization nearly comes to a grinding halt, Pohl grounds his story in a horrible event that feels all too plausible. The particular plight of a little boy, poor Timothy Clary, is what draws us into the story, but it’s immediately apparent that what happens to him is incidental in comparison to what seems imminent for the whole earth. </div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">However, if Pohl had begun <i>after</i> the devastation, the story could be read as pure fantasy. Whether you’re looking at Jonathan Lethem’s <a href="http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2007/10/review-amnesia-moon-by-jonathan-lethem/">AMNESIA MOON</a> or the movie <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Max">MAD MAX</a>, the dystopian and/or post-apocalyptic landscape is <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AfterTheEnd">a trope frequently employed</a> to have a little fun, asking important questions like, <i>What if society completely broke down and there were no laws, but we still had cars?</i> Such stories can be highly enjoyable, but Pohl clearly wanted to go in a different direction. “Fermi and Frost” asks a different kind of <i>What if…?</i> question, one that has real relevance in a world still plagued by a nuclear threat (even if an “attempted Cuban coup” is unlikely to be the triggering event anymore). This is science fiction firmly attached to knowable and known reality. </div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Pohl takes some interesting risks in his narration. The camera-panning-out style of narration I mentioned above could easily lapse into telling rather than showing, or it could come to seem distanced from the story it’s telling. But Pohl appears to avoid these difficulties by returning again and again to his particular characters and the realistic actions they’re taking. One moment, we’re getting omniscient narration, like this: </div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">If the terror had passed and the frantic negotiations had succeeded, Timothy might have found his parents again in time to grow up and marry and give them grandchildren. If one side or the other had been able to preempt, and destroy the other, and save itself, Timothy forty years later might have been a graying, cynical colonel in the American military government of Leningrad. (Or body servant to a Russian one in Detroit.)</blockquote><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">But the next moment, we’re seeing the overcrowded airport through the eyes of Dr. Harry Malibert, <a href="http://www.seti.org/page.aspx?pid=234">SETI researcher</a>. The great scientist gets tasked with helping a sick little boy who’s wet himself, bringing the story right back to individual humans in a unique situation. It’s a brave maneuver, to let the narration swing out so far from the characters, but Pohl manages to be quite smooth about it. Ultimately, I’d say that Pohl’s combination of <i>micro</i> character-focused events with <i>macro</i> omniscient narration is what allows him to tell a fundamentally didactic moral (i.e., that nuclear weapons are a real threat) in a way that feels like a genuine piece of honest storytelling. </div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">* * * </div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">As you can see from the picture on today’s write-up, LIBRARY MONTH continues! (Not that I checked Cleo out from the library--but you can see the library barcode just behind her ear.) In fact, I’ve recently gone spelunking amidst the stacks of a new-to-me library branch and have selected some collections that appear highly promising. I know I’ve been neglecting my bloggerly duties of late, as well as my many dedicated fans (sorry, Mom!), but I have a Nefarious Plan for catching back up. Mainly, it involves <b>totally cheating. </b>Am I clever or what? Stay tuned!</div>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-21817461786543521092011-07-16T14:01:00.001-06:002011-07-16T15:28:46.222-06:00Linked Just By This - #42<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2VczTfkokhjqrHL3hGDKguvNAY8AZFAhfCDGzffBN2eG7u4eUHygqs6Pq0aJXH4y9R10xaTu77U6zINQ5oyKEE_iy5dc_m6d9IPe5u09ul21Okoxp8Xoi2eswkfU55ZH3XeQcsmDJ0XY/s1600/42+-+Hadley+-+The+Eggy+Stone+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2VczTfkokhjqrHL3hGDKguvNAY8AZFAhfCDGzffBN2eG7u4eUHygqs6Pq0aJXH4y9R10xaTu77U6zINQ5oyKEE_iy5dc_m6d9IPe5u09ul21Okoxp8Xoi2eswkfU55ZH3XeQcsmDJ0XY/s320/42+-+Hadley+-+The+Eggy+Stone+pic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">STORY: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">“The Eggy Stone” by Tessa Hadley – </b>Once again, when I selected this story, I had no idea it was available to read </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/dec/30/featuresreviews.guardianreview16"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">HERE</span></a><span style="font-family: "Courier New";"> for free! Yay!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">FROM: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">SUNSTROKE AND OTHER STORIES (Picador, 2007)</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">BASICALLY: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">At a week-long school trip to camp, two girls’ hands touch the same beach pebble--the Eggy Stone--at the same moment. Over the holiday, like best friends, they pass the stone between them by elaborate rituals--but how will they share when the trip comes to an end?</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">Here’s another gorgeous story you can go read for yourself. Out loud, if you’re up for it. Some of the lines seem to long to be spoken.</span></div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">We crunched in socks and sandals across a rim of crisped black seaweed and bone and sea-washed plastic: the tide was in, the long gray line of the waves curled and sucked at the cramped remainder of the beach, a narrow strip of pebbles…Under our sandals the big pale pebbles rattled and shifted awkwardly. The boys began throwing them in the sea; we felt between them for treasures, the creamy spirals from old shells, bits of washed-soft glass.</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">The prose is musical; it lilts from hard to soft and, when said aloud, makes the throat open and close through a revolving progression of vowels. Word-shape is a part of musicality—but what’s here is more than merely pretty. This passage lays the nature scene with specific sensory details and a certain breezy-but-invigorated tone. It mimics the movement of water with its sibilants (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">SockS and SandalS acroSS a rim of criSped black Seaweed</i>) and its repetition (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sea-washed plastic…in the sea…washed-soft glass</i>)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.</i> Thanks to the mention of “the boys” followed up with “we,” as in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">we the girls,</i> it also manages to indicate in a masterfully understated manner that the narrator is female. It’s pretty impressive—information like this, while crucial, isn’t always easy to slip in without being really heavy-handed about it. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">Actually, I’d like to stagger off-course for just a moment on that topic. In my own writing, I used to think a certain amount of androgyny in my narrators was kind of clever. I was writing about humanity and human beings, after all, not simply one gender or the other; if I had hit upon a voice, a point of view that could be interpreted in either direction, so much the better. However, after enjoying many heaping mounds of manuscript workshopping and critique-grouping, I’ve come to learn that a character whose sex could genuinely go either way actually happens to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">annoy the shit out of readers.</i> Really. They don’t read it as groundbreaking or delightfully playful or an interesting commentary on their own internalized gender norms. Nope. It just bugs the ever-loving crap out of them. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">But hey. That’s not to say that you should never, ever do it. Absolute rules do not exist, no matter what you might hear. But when we take risks in our writing, we should understand what it is we’re risking.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">And one other thing. You might still fall into this trap if you try to make the sex of your narrator clear through action and voice, but you never explicitly say what it is. My teacher Jack Trujillo at UNM once told us that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">if you don’t tell your reader what sex your narrator or main character is, they’ll always assume it’s the same sex as you the writer</b>. While a narrator that seems at one moment male and another female will frustrate your readers, the narrator that’s left undefined is assumed—without comment or much conscious thought—to be the writer’s gender. (If something later in the story contradicts what the reader had assumed, they will move on to the annoyance I mentioned above.) I never noticed this tendency until it was pointed out to me. In fact, when I actually caught myself flipping to the beginning of a story to see if the writer was a man or a woman so I could figure out what POV I was reading—I realized exactly how true this observation is. So I pass it unto you, dear readers, with my compliments. Do with it what you will.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">But back to the story at hand. “The Eggy Stone” strongly calls to mind Margaret Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” (a.k.a. </span><a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/05/your-story-is-place-31.html"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">story #31</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">). Besides being beautifully written, both deal with girls who become close friends for only the duration of camp, and both approach the relationship from the POV of the girl who has less social standing (“The Eggy Stone” in first person and Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” in close third). But where Atwood’s story takes a long view and uses a remembered tragedy to link a past event to the emotional present, Hadley’s story is quieter, almost completely contained in the childhood moment it seeks to describe.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">Through the course of the narrative, the Eggy Stone becomes imbued with a kind of power that links two girls who have little else in common. It’s a bridge between two distant nations. Speaking different languages, they've got to invent their own form of communication:</span></div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">We took turns holding the Eggy Stone, and the turns were decided by various ritualized competitions, including folded-paper fortune-tellers, knocking the heads off plantains, and a kind of wrestling we invented, kneeling opposite each other with the stone placed between us and swaying in each other's arms, trying to force our opponent to touch ground on one side or another. Before each competition there was a form of words: something like "Eggy Stone / On your own / All alone / Inaccessible light."</span></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">What I love about this is how it externalizes the very real kinds of tacit competition that can occur between girls (and also not-girls, I presume), even ones who are best friends at camp. A rumination on the ways in which one jockeys for position even with the people one loves would not be nearly so effective as this glimpse into the competitive heart of these girls’ connection.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">If you can get ahold of the Atwood story (HINT: try your local library!), I recommend reading it in conjunction with this one. There’s no such thing as a scientific approach to the study of fiction (what would the control group be—a blank page?), but the subject matter of “The Eggy Stone” is so similar to that of “Death by Landscape” that their differences are truly instructive. However, even if you’re not trying to dissect the hows and whys of short stories, Tessa Hadley’s writing is lovely and I can wholeheartedly recommend popping over to read this very short story. Thanks <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Library Month</b>—you’ve given me another introduction to yet another fabulous author!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDN4CGkLCEyxdZGumT5UITDL4GM6tubyvBOT58WzggrPQUXX6hcA80wfwcBm7cczANm0FYxk1PhxkJORbpK2iEcOA-T0o9WnQNAKh-qsPFxkDr08M72VZtt6RfB9E4V30MacjgStpDUKo/s1600/42+-+Hadley+-+The+Eggy+Stone+pic+with+cat.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDN4CGkLCEyxdZGumT5UITDL4GM6tubyvBOT58WzggrPQUXX6hcA80wfwcBm7cczANm0FYxk1PhxkJORbpK2iEcOA-T0o9WnQNAKh-qsPFxkDr08M72VZtt6RfB9E4V30MacjgStpDUKo/s320/42+-+Hadley+-+The+Eggy+Stone+pic+with+cat.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">P.S. I couldn't decide which cute bonus pic with neighborhood kitty to include, so here's another:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUR0cGAWN_2XNTjPdnpNOGL_R-khhckmMWmeLmCVkKM_PjlZJcTCP242OFuIfRj55SJL2_I-c87i0BMI9orpCISMbe5PIxJY5RhiwkJNbaCEgRCUIzJowbXrhBkIgIueJ5ns8KYqQXBVo/s1600/42+-+Hadley+-+The+Eggy+Stone+pic+with+cat2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUR0cGAWN_2XNTjPdnpNOGL_R-khhckmMWmeLmCVkKM_PjlZJcTCP242OFuIfRj55SJL2_I-c87i0BMI9orpCISMbe5PIxJY5RhiwkJNbaCEgRCUIzJowbXrhBkIgIueJ5ns8KYqQXBVo/s320/42+-+Hadley+-+The+Eggy+Stone+pic+with+cat2.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";"> </span></div>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-33979259144110256372011-07-09T17:38:00.000-06:002011-07-10T14:53:17.867-06:00And Now I Die - #41<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA6raKwHB4Ac4qHe7-wiPUAcc2ocDQLjYvuYG6FaDHO17LbsE9v0kmXXsl5lQLCBY9nTLoVu5PIYRtUHl60I1CdFuq8e4FJkq-jlOvvj3ETKeqJwgdwRBkhvKuwj8TrtXRvCXQ_TVa-0k/s1600/41+-+Norris+-+A+Memorandum+of+Sudden+Death+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA6raKwHB4Ac4qHe7-wiPUAcc2ocDQLjYvuYG6FaDHO17LbsE9v0kmXXsl5lQLCBY9nTLoVu5PIYRtUHl60I1CdFuq8e4FJkq-jlOvvj3ETKeqJwgdwRBkhvKuwj8TrtXRvCXQ_TVa-0k/s320/41+-+Norris+-+A+Memorandum+of+Sudden+Death+pic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"><span style="font-size: small;">STORY: <b>“A Memorandum of Sudden Death” by Frank Norris</b> - <b>Take a gander for yourself <a href="http://www.classicreader.com/book/2524/1/">here</a>.</b></span></div><div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> </b></span> </div><div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"><span style="font-size: small;">FROM: <b>THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF FRANK NORRIS (Ironweed Press, 1998) –</b> Originally published in 1902. </span></div><div style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">BASICALLY: </span><b style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">Framed as a journalist’s publication of pages found by chance in the desert, an accomplished young writer’s hastily-scribbled diary of his final days traveling across the barren desert southwest as his group is first followed and then attacked by a band of Indians.</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"> </b> </span> <br />
<div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">As a blogger, I am contractually obligated to whine about this sooner or later, so I might as well do it now. I’m having trouble staying up to date with my (admittedly rather untaxing) posting schedule here on the YoOHS blog. Here it’s already July, but <i>ack</i> I’m not even halfway to the finish line. I’ve been trying to catch up, and I very nearly got three entries posted last week (instead of just the minimal two), but then I stumbled on this curious little number from Frank Norris. (...Since this entry took me forever and a half to write, however, AND I've been beset with a bunch of really boring technical difficulties, I'm even more behind. Yeesh.)</span></div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">That I picked it up at all, of course, is sheer chance. That’s one of the great glories of the public library—all the rampant serendipity, the accidental finds. At the risk of pestering you with the obvious, I’d like to point out: libraries—they are places! with stuff! to discover through actual physical contact! (Discovery can happen in a bookstore, too, but then you have to <i>pay</i> for it, and that throws a wrench into the proceedings.)</span></div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">As you can see from the photo above, THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF FRANK NORRIS is unassuming at best. But I liked the cover photo, and the description on the back seemed intriguing, considering I’d never heard of the man: “Frank Norris (1870-1902), in the course of his tragically brief career, distinguished himself as one of the most influential and innovative writers of his era, leaving an indelible imprint on American literature.”</span></div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So I checked it out and brought it home. Then, when I was trying to decide which piece to read, the book fell open to a story that begins, “The manuscript of the account that follows belongs to a harness-maker in Albuquerque, Juan Tejada by name, and he is welcome to whatever of advertisement this notice may bring him.” A charming opening line that touches on local history and promises some rich historical detail? Yes please.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But…there are issues. Okay, I know I just said that the opening line is charming, but the story starts out with this whole journalistic background thing which drones on for almost three pages. The journalist details how he got ahold of the manuscript, and the history of the writer, named Karslake, and why this particular account should be of interest to the reader, and what the manuscript looks like, and why Karslake had enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry and… yeah. A tidal wave of piddly details.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My assumption is that Norris meant this introduction to serve in place of backstory so that the story itself, in the form of hastily-written log entries, might focus on action and not get bogged down with the kind of background necessary to make a reader care about that action. Also, of course, a journalist’s fact-based introduction, even if fictional, lends an air of truth to the piece. Norris takes great pains to provide the kind of quotidian detail that grounds this in real life:</span> </div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Though I did not know young Karslake, I knew his stuff—as everybody still does, when you come to that…the mere mention of his pen name, “Anson Qualtraugh,” recalls at once to thousands of the readers of a certain world-famous monthly magazine of New York articles and stories he wrote for it while he was alive; as, for instance, his admirable descriptive work called “Traces of the Aztexs on the Mogolon Mesa,” in the October number of 1890. Also, in the January issue of 1892 there are two specimens of his work, one signed Anson Qualtraugh and the other Justin Blisset. Why he should have used the Blisset signature I do not know. It occurs only this once in all his writings. In this case it is signed to a very indifferent New Year's story. The Qualtraugh "stuff" of the same number is, so the editor writes to me, a much shortened transcript of a monograph on "Primitive Methods of Moki Irrigation," which are now in the archives of the Smithsonian. The admirable novel, "The Peculiar Treasure of Kings," is of course well known. Karslake wrote it in 1888-89, and the controversy that arose about the incident of the third chapter is still--sporadically and intermittently--continued.</span></blockquote><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">None of this bears any direct relation to the rest of the story (or if it does, the connection is far too subtle for me to tease out). From a historical perspective, this mountain of details is kind of interesting. But as a reader—gah.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Once the action of the “manuscript” gets going, things ramp up a little. (Fun tidbit: the <i>entire reported text </i>of the manuscript is actually enclosed in quotation marks. It’s so quaint and fussy I could squeeze its widdow cheeks!) Karslake begins in an interested, but nonchalant, tone:</span> </div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“They came in sight early this morning just after we had had breakfast and had broken camp. The four of us--'Bunt,' 'Idaho,' Estorijo and myself--were jogging on to the southward and had just come up out of the dry bed of some water-hole--the alkali was white as snow in the crevices--when Idaho pointed them out to us…We took them in through my field-glasses and Bunt made sure they were an outlying band of Hunt-in-the-Morning's Bucks…They seem to be well mounted.</span> <br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> "We held a council of war from the saddle without halting, but there seemed very little to be done--but to go right along and wait for developments. At about eleven we found water--just a pocket in the bed of a dried stream--and stopped to water the ponies. I am writing this during the halt.</span> <br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> "We have one hundred and sixteen rifle cartridges.</span></blockquote><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Karslake is sure, almost from the outset, that an attack is imminent. Yet the attack doesn’t come. This wavering certainty does create some tension—because of the introduction, the reader knows that an attack <i>will</i> come, so Karslake’s anticipation within his narrative combines with what we know will take place.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But it’s not enough. Certain stories to which we already know the ending still manage to hold our interest, even fill us with a delicious readerly anxiety as we hope against hope that there’s some loophole and things will not end as we know they must. (The only example jumping to my mind at the moment is a novel, </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Sargasso_Sea"><span style="font-size: small;">WIDE SARGASSO SEA</span></a><span style="font-size: small;"> by Jean Rhys, which reimagines the history of JANE EYRE’s madwoman in the attic. The whole time I was reading, I kept wanting to believe that I had simply misunderstood some fundamental point and that it would all end happily…) In “A Memorandum of Sudden Death,” however, there’s no mounting sense of tragedy. </span></div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Perhaps it’s a question of length? Or maybe Norris provides the wrong kinds of details about Karslake in that journalistic introduction—for all that the reader ultimately knows in the way of facts, we get very little sense of who the man actually was or why we should especially care about what happened to him. His tragic end is no more than a curiosity.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This piece does contain some good writing and historical detail that’ll probably make me recommend it to certain friends who have an enthusiasm for literature about the desert and the west. I especially like several bits about the landscape and the way the story ends in the middle of a sentence (as though the writer really were killed in the middle of the action). I also like a passage in which Karslake recounts his surprise that the death of one of his companions should feel so insignificant:</span> </div><blockquote style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This is the first violent death I have ever seen…If I had been told of his death—the details of it, in a story or in the form of fiction—it is easily conceivable that it would have impressed me more with its importance than the actual scene has done. Possibly my mental vision is scaled to a larger field since Friday, and as the greater issues loom up one man more or less seems to be but a unit—more or less—in an eternal series.</span></blockquote><div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Naturally, I can’t help but connect this to Norris’ own desire in writing this short story (and feel a little haunted by the fact that his own life would end so soon after writing this). It’s conceivable, even, that Norris wanted to make this thrilling scene of death by shootout in the desert into what Karslake experiences—just “a unit...in an eternal series.” (But if so, it would mean that it’s gone out of his way to make his story <i>less</i> interesting than it otherwise could be.) In the end, I’d say that “Memorandum of Sudden Death” is an example of a fine piece of writing that, because of its structure, doesn’t reach its true potential.</span> </div><span style="font-size: small;"></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-25355768721958257132011-06-30T20:23:00.000-06:002011-06-30T20:23:03.739-06:00Speaking of Speaking - #40 – ALSO, LIBRARY MONTH CONTINUES!<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:RelyOnVML/> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/> <w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/> <w:OverrideTableStyleHps/> <w:UseFELayout/> </w:Compatibility> <w:DoNotOptimizeForBrowser/> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCyAuB2Fozrikj7fmSMEIoEn-0MgTmNx2WfVnIcRuDFKhoA8BploEKpn9epOHspKdyWtx7II1NudekEjG_2G93X6Wqwnoamka1eVT2SdxorDZrX6LJr3V6akEUUHSKRScDblqHil6omww/s1600/40+-+July+-+I+Kiss+a+Door+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCyAuB2Fozrikj7fmSMEIoEn-0MgTmNx2WfVnIcRuDFKhoA8BploEKpn9epOHspKdyWtx7II1NudekEjG_2G93X6Wqwnoamka1eVT2SdxorDZrX6LJr3V6akEUUHSKRScDblqHil6omww/s320/40+-+July+-+I+Kiss+a+Door+pic.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">STORY:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">“I Kiss a Door” by Miranda July</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">FROM:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><a href="http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com/"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU</span></b></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";"> (Scribner, 2007)</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">BASICALLY:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Looking back on the details of her interactions with a former friend, a woman realizes that the signs of the friend’s big secret were there all along.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">So, I sort of want to hate Miranda July.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s one of those wunderkinder too bright to look at—writer, filmmaker, actor, etc. etc. etc., plus exceptionally pretty, plus my age, plus recipient of all kinds of awards and critical accolades and jury prizes and so yes, sometimes I just want to throw up my hands, toss down a vodka tonic, and crawl under a rock.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oh sure, oh sure,</i> I’ll drunkenly mutter to myself, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">it’s *easy* to be published in The Paris Review when you’re already perfect in every way</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then I’ll belch and fall into fitful dreams of losing the Tuscaloosa County Pie Eating Contest to a members-only club of pygmy chimpanzees.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">They’re called coping strategies, people.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">Unfortunately for my planned slide into bitterness, alcoholism, and night terrors at the hands of these damned injustices, Miranda July is, by all appearances, actually a very nice person who has actually done a lot to earn all the praise that's been heaped upon her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I heard her talking on a podcast about her writing, I found her intelligent and likeable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Click on her book link above or head over to </span><a href="http://mirandajuly.com/"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">her personal site</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";"> and notice how casual and quirky and charming she manages to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, I suppose that, instead of despising her and making up nasty rumors to insert into her Wikipedia page and feeling generally venomous and petty, I should just sit back and try to learn something useful from her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Argh, maturity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I haz it!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">“I Kiss a Door” is short and on first glance, feels slight, almost underdeveloped.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn’t branch out from its center.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By “center,” I mean in this case the mind of its narrator, a somewhat self-involved woman who is essentially relating her shock at a piece of gossip she just heard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But on reflection, I think the story instead branches inward, becoming deeper and more layered precisely because it doesn’t move around much and have a bunch of plot pushing things forward.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The narrator’s thoughts and judgments about her friend Eleanor, by remaining enclosed in her own mind, become as much about herself as about that other person.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eleanor’s particular relationship with her father, especially, but also her troubled views on creation and art and freedom, become a prism through which the narrator sees her own views on these things—though she can’t acknowledge it even to herself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, in her own mind, it’s just a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Well I’ll be damned</i> kind of moment as she grasps something about Eleanor she never before realized.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">In terms of technique, it’s notable that a large percentage of this story takes place through dialogue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Interestingly, July chooses, in this story as elsewhere, not to mark her dialogue with quotation marks.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">I don’t know what it’s like for you, but when I read dialogue that doesn’t use quotes, it feels completely different in my mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such a little thing, but it makes so much difference.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For me, the effect is what I’d call <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">flattening</i>, though if you ask me to explain that I’ll just stammer and try to change the subject.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Without quotation marks to set them off, the words feel pushed into the page—even though they’re structured much like normal dialogue, like the specific things that people actually said, they feel less certain.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">I have my suspicions that to never, ever use quotation marks is something of an affectation, but I do think it’s an effective technique in this particular story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re learning about the past (and by extension, the present) through the memories of the narrator, and the fact that all of the dialogue occurs in this flat and unmarked manner only seems to underscore that it’s not a completely reliable record of events.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not that it’s an unreliable narrator in the strict literary sense of the term, but that any first person account is by its natured skewed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Plus, all the dialogue in the story occurs between the narrator and another person—there aren’t any group conversations, or reports of others’ conversations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here’s how “I Kiss a Door” opens:</span></div><blockquote><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Now that I know, it seems so obvious. Suddenly, there is nothing I remember that doesn’t contain a clue. I remember a beautiful blue wool coat with flat silver buttons. It fit her perfectly, it even gripped her. </span><br style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Where did you find that coat? </span><br style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">My father bought it for me. </span><br style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Really? It’s so cool. </span><br style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">It just arrived this morning. </span><br style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">He picked it out? How did he know how to pick something so cool? </span><br style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I don’t know.</span></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">Notice that, lacking quotation marks or dialogue tags to clarify things, July sticks to back-and-forth dialogue that’s both simple and brief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No speeches, no ambiguous attributions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her narrative paragraphs are set off partly because they are longer—i.e., visually—and partly because of the cue words July uses to begin them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The example above doesn’t make it obvious, but other non-dialogue paragraphs begin with things like “It seemed unfair that…” and “When Shy Panther played at…” and “By the time <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thunderheart</i> came out…”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would be difficult to mistake these phrases for the narrator’s dialogue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Quietly and carefully, July works hard to make sure that these shifts don’t annoy or confuse her readers.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">And now.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">I have absolutely no transition <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">(Miranda July would have thought of a transition…)</i>, but hey everyone, it’s <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Library Month!</b> My father suggests I call “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Library Month </b></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">±”</span></b><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";"> since, as </span><a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/06/lets-start-gumshoe-revival-39-plus.html"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">I have explained</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">, NO ONE has any idea how long it’ll actually last.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Feel free to think of it in mathematical terms!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meanwhile, I’d like to point your mouse-clicks to some library-related coolness:</span></div><ul><li><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">The literary blog </span><a href="http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/?p=33681"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">MobyLives</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";"> recently drew my attention to what census figures can tell us about the personal and professional lives of librarians over the past century or so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And good news, because the librarian profession is no longer in decline, having apparently found its cultural niche.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">Except maybe not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/06/the-end-of-librarians.html"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">The Daily Dish</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";"> highlights the ongoing debate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fie!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Librarians are cool.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">In fact, take a look at some photographic evidence of their coolness in a series of gleeful posts over on writer/artist </span><a href="http://lainitaylor.blogspot.com/2011/06/skulls-and-dancing-or-my-first-ala.html"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">Laini Taylor’s blog</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s just returned from </span><a href="http://lainitaylor.blogspot.com/2011/06/skulls-and-dancing-or-my-first-ala.html"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";">her first ALA annual conference</span></a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";"> and has posted tons of great on-the-town photos and book porn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Enjoy!</span></li>
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</style> <![endif]-->Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-85313562662066382822011-06-28T21:33:00.003-06:002011-07-16T15:46:32.602-06:00Let’s Start a Gumshoe Revival - #39 – PLUS, LIBRARY MONTH BEGINS!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwf-o19SiVYH6av09FfKBUBNHSJDtRFGMy9KTR5ziu8ngGtp4wlKnc94WdUZc0LhP9MXyG2SEek7SgqCbPspqFP5USuOXzd7og8d-wRfOZIpGE72SYNY-x8P6kRsILRWZBaqvLI2z0GKA/s1600/39+-+Hammett+-+Zigzags+of+Treachery+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwf-o19SiVYH6av09FfKBUBNHSJDtRFGMy9KTR5ziu8ngGtp4wlKnc94WdUZc0LhP9MXyG2SEek7SgqCbPspqFP5USuOXzd7og8d-wRfOZIpGE72SYNY-x8P6kRsILRWZBaqvLI2z0GKA/s320/39+-+Hammett+-+Zigzags+of+Treachery+pic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">STORY: <b>"Zigzags of Treachery" by Dashiell Hammett<br />
</b></span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">FROM: <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1139915819"> </a><b><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=174">DASHIELL HAMMETT: CRIME STORIES & OTHER WRITINGS </a>(The Library of America, 2001)<br />
</b></span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">BASICALLY: <b>Classic detective fiction. The narrator, an unnamed Continental Op, uses a combination of diligence, smarts, and guts to get proof of a doctor's suicide before his sickly widow--falsely accused of murdering him--dies in police custody.<br />
</b></span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The other day, with the indoor summer air warm and unmoving, and the late afternoon sunlight streaming in through the high windows, and the few fragments of conversation muted by the walls of dusty books, I wandered the Fiction shelves of <a href="https://albuq.cabq.gov/screens/libinfo.html">my local public library</a>. I was searching for something, though I couldn't have said exactly what. Listlessly, I picked up this novel and that one, finding titles I've always meant to read sooner or later, but nothing struck my fancy. One book had always been fascinating when it wasn't in front of me, but exceedingly dull whenever, like now, I held it in my hands. Another reminded me of someone I'm doggedly <i>not </i>thinking about for the time being. What I really wanted was a book that would thwap me upside the soul in absolutely delicious irresistibility—something light, but still solid and meaningful. Something that would make me feel better about life, but without resorting to treacle. I've read a couple of really great novels recently, and I'm almost through another round of the Alice books, and I've actually started what promises to be another very good read, but something still was wanting. <br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Alas for me, I was unable to locate this mythical high-flown ineffable idea of a novel. Instead, what I kept finding were <i>short story collections</i>.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Winding my way through the rows, I piled volume after volume of stories into the crook of my arm, wondering what the hell I was going to do with them all. I do already have an entire groaning shelf-ful of books of short stories, you know. Plus, the blog is my best excuse yet for acquiring more books. But it seemed like such a pity—here were stories of all sorts, many of which I knew zilch about, let alone whether I wanted to go to the trouble of owning the books they were in. And that is how, then and there, YoOHS's celebration of <b>Library Month</b> was born!<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But waitaminute, a disclaimer first: <b>I actually have no idea how long Library Month will last.</b> Might be two weeks, might be six. Let this fill you with a proper sense of carefree adventure rather than, say, annoyance. The duration depends on what I find to read and how long I want to keep going without breaking back into the books I already own and pretty much that means it's anyone's guess. I'm a Ouija-style reader—I can try and plan out my reading all I want, but it's fruitless; wherever the spirit/psychotic break takes me next is where I am compelled to go. <i>I don't control this stuff, people. </i> Truthfully, I don't know how others manage those impressive TBR piles and organized reading goals. But anyway, I couldn't very well name this the <b>Library Event To Last An Arbitrary and Unpredictable Period of Time</b>, could I?<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">So, I hereby dedicate a month-ish to singing the praises of public libraries in general and my library in particular and we'll get to more of that with the Next! Episode! Of! Year Of One Hundred Stories!<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">And oh yeah, did you want to actually hear about story #39? <br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Okay then. I happily oblige. This story's so much fun—though, with a name like "Zigzags of Treachery," I think it's contractually required to be cool. Over the years, I've read a decent number of novels and stories containing Raymond Chandler's version of the hard-boiled detective, but Dashiell Hammett <i>(whose name is rather harder to spell than you'd think)</i> is very different. With Chandler, everything is steeped in nostalgia and gin and passion and sorrow. Cynicism wars with romantic illusion in a baroque world of decay. It's heady and poetic stuff. While I wouldn't want to draw <i>too</i> many conclusions from reading just one story, Hammett clearly goes in another direction. His unnamed narrator is dispassionate, clinical, logical. The crime is a puzzle to be solved, a knot to unravel. Emotional reactions are consciously rejected. In that sense, maybe there's more of a kinship with that Victorian favorite, Sherlock Holmes.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But one of the things I really liked about "Zigzags of Treachery" is how Hammett uses his first-person narrator. In Sherlock Holmes, mysteries are solved supposedly through the application of logic, but really through inscrutable, almost otherworldly calculations that take place in a the mind of a singular genius, and <span style="color: red;">are</span> revealed to the audience only as they become understood by the narrator, Dr. Watson. Hammett's story, on the other hand, lets us see directly into the mind of the detective. The emphasis is not on genius, but on method: "[S]uch results as I get are usually the fruits of patience, industry, and unimaginative plugging, helped out now and then, maybe, by a little luck." We see the Continental Op narrator spend hours waiting for a suspect to leave her apartment, and we see him choose a suit that's just shabby enough but not too shabby to blend in to a particular set of people, and we even get the benefit of his own guesses about the case's outcome—though, as he says, "I don't gamble too much on my guesses." Even though there are still plenty of unrealistic/impossible elements in "Zigzags," as there are in pretty much every mystery I've ever read, the narrator's voice helps carry the whole thing off as plausible.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I could talk about a lot of other aspects of this story, but, yikes—this entry might go on forever. An analysis of the <a href="http://letthewordsflow.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/narrative-tension-and-the-ticking-clock/">ticking clock</a> aspect, in particular, could reveal some juicy writerly secrets. I will say that Hammett's use of a time limit is good though imperfect (even if I love how he ties it into characterization)—but I really want to make the argument that you, my fellow aspiring writer-friends, should read stories like this one even if you're not remotely into detective fiction. They are useful as all get-out, and here's why: a detective story is something that can be understood right off the bat. Its purpose is always clear because its purpose is always the same—to create a sense of mystery that pulls the reader along until the secrets are revealed at the very last minute. As such, it's a wonderful tool for thinking about how to use particular techniques. <br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">"Zigzags of Treachery" is a veritable textbook of ideas for distracting a reader's attention, inserting a ticking clock, upping the stakes for the protagonist, including details that lend a powerful sense of realism, and grounding a piece of fiction in a particular place. And it's got its flaws—particularly, the long-ass ludicrously detailed criminal confession that takes place near the end, but also the artificiality of the ticking clock and most especially the whirlwind trampling of the basic civil rights of every single suspect the narrator comes into contact with. But that's fine. Like many works of this genre, "Zigzags" is an entertaining story that's still simple and imperfect enough to break down into its component parts and learn from.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Of course, you could also just read it for the fun of it.</span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-17420588153116091272011-06-25T16:49:00.001-06:002012-01-17T21:19:01.633-07:00The Cudgel of Funny Ha-ha - #38<span xmlns=""></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4ZOz6LAqOcAltyG-JvYFHSP2Ntrc5D18OXK3lo00vgbUjafKhiMXeyMTKRwSAzDsOUwEo4us3y85-qbGgZfspbt4uJCHC89knRRAgL_oyykV8FknBw-j7Cs7RlZARTu1JvNt_USoLQys/s1600/38+-+Evenson+-+Promisekeepers+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4ZOz6LAqOcAltyG-JvYFHSP2Ntrc5D18OXK3lo00vgbUjafKhiMXeyMTKRwSAzDsOUwEo4us3y85-qbGgZfspbt4uJCHC89knRRAgL_oyykV8FknBw-j7Cs7RlZARTu1JvNt_USoLQys/s320/38+-+Evenson+-+Promisekeepers+pic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">STORY: <b>"Promisekeepers" by Brian Evenson<br />
</b></span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">FROM: <a href="http://www.brianevenson.com/knife.html"><b>THE WAVERING KNIFE</b></a><b> (FC2, 2004)<br />
</b></span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">BASICALLY: <b>None of the promisekeeping literature they've had Xeroxed specifically prohibits beer, so a bunch of religious good ol' boys meet in a bar at happy hour and get just plastered enough to unburden themselves manfully to one another. And then a little more plastered, and a little more. Certain secrets emerge. A story that starts out with laughter, moves quickly toward mockery, and then plunges suddenly into a tasteless (if still darkly humorous) ending.<br />
</b></span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Here's another story <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/06/miscalculations-36.html">we can blame on Christa</a> and her <a href="http://ask.metafilter.com/163487/What-was-the-best-short-story-you-read-in-the-last-10-years">Metafilter thread</a> of awesomeness. I had never heard of Brian Evenson before, but I can't wait to read more of him. "Promisekeepers" is the kind of story you can imagine playing well at a reading—the characters are earnest and ridiculous, there are lots of lines fairly seething with irony, and the ending marches up and smacks you across the face with one part menace and two parts over-the-top stereotype. Any audience would fairly be falling off their chairs with all the hilarity.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Evenson makes an interesting choice, though. The humor of "Promisekeepers" keeps chugging along, right up to the very end—but then it cuts out suddenly, like the sound in a movie, leaving the reader wrestling with the unfunny import of the final lines. For me, it was like I was still kind of laughing, but then as I finished the story, I thought, <i>That wasn't really funny at all, was it? And I'm probably a bad person for laughing at it.</i><br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It's disconcerting, a resolution like that. I call it an interesting choice because it sort of makes the reader complicit in what the story's criticizing—I mean, here I was, following along and being entertained and snickering at these screwed-up people, so suppressed and uneducated, and then the way it ends suddenly reveals how deep their dysfunction actually runs and how darkly it will explode in everyone's faces. Evenson's use of humor, in effect, turns on the reader and judges him.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I can't help but compare "Promisekeepers" with <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/04/lowlife-shuffle-25.html">story #25</a>, Denis Johnson's "Two Men." Both contain a first-person narrator who moves in and out of participating in the story, and both are centered around groups of uncertain and desperate-to-compensate men who careen through the night and commit acts that cannot be undone. <br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But while Johnson eschews outright humor and attempts to make us understand and identify with his protagonist, even if we can't excuse what he does, Evenson invites us to laugh at these hicks. At first the humor is relatively gentle--the character names Verl and Laverl, the admission that "it takes a few beers before honesty kicks in." And I really laughed at the line, </span></span><br />
<blockquote>
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It does not say in the promises we have to pray aloud, and like hell are we going to in a bar, but I move my lips so that if any of the others open their eyes they will see me praying in my heart. </span></span></blockquote>
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But things take a slightly darker turn when the narrator explains that the group took on Ray Junior in order to fulfill the obligation to meet with "a racial man or some sort of heathen once a month." Still, though, the bigotry's played for laughs--Ray Junior's credentials turn out to be that he's "one-sixth Italian (and thus dark-complected)" and "Episcopalian instead of Southern Baptist. He is going to hell, but we believe in promise number six so for now he is our brother."<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">And then that finish, about which I'm being very cagey so as not to give anything away. In a way, Evenson's ending isn't really any different from Johnson's. It's just that Johnson cuts his story off with the horrible (and deadly serious) suggestion of the violence that's about to take place, while Evenson follows the laughs right up until "the police arrive." As a reader, I suppose I'm ultimately more impressed by earnest, melancholy Johnson, but I'm certainly not immune to Evenson and the way that he mixes grimness into his humor (or is that humor into his grimness?). Evenson's story can be enjoyed and appreciated right off the bat, without multiple reads or deep intellectual analysis, and though maybe this is sounding like something of a backhanded compliment, I'm trying to say that it's no mere lighthearted piece of fluff, though it quite cleverly draws you in as if it were.</span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-74942067969324052552011-06-23T13:21:00.001-06:002011-06-30T23:44:03.913-06:00What It’s Like Is What It Is - #37<span xmlns=""></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpCIQJNftautnZb3beBejXivFOwRkRXradHF2RK1cvLcu-qU9kWm6qD5yR-1NUgBn_QN8k4ngQPmsDo3c-oxj7r70FjPKfIw8ee_cgzujn_h8m7FGH7h9_5Xw8YI04iGnXszhjnC7WjFc/s1600/37+-+Lin+-+Suburban+Teenage+Wasteland+Blues+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpCIQJNftautnZb3beBejXivFOwRkRXradHF2RK1cvLcu-qU9kWm6qD5yR-1NUgBn_QN8k4ngQPmsDo3c-oxj7r70FjPKfIw8ee_cgzujn_h8m7FGH7h9_5Xw8YI04iGnXszhjnC7WjFc/s320/37+-+Lin+-+Suburban+Teenage+Wasteland+Blues+pic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">STORY: <b>"Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues" by Tao Lin<br />
</b></span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">FROM: <a href="http://www.mhpbooks.com/book.php?id=45"><b>BED</b></a><b> (Melville House Publishing, 2007)<br />
</b></span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">BASICALLY: <b>A self-conscious 23-year-old tries desperately to take on the appearance of a normal, functional life. Though he can barely talk to a teenage girl who works at the library with him, she seems oblivious to his awkwardness. When she invites him to toilet paper some guy's house with her and her friends, he goes along, but the experience only seems to fill him with more doubt.<br />
</b></span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><a href="http://heheheheheheheeheheheehehe.com/"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Tao Lin</span></a><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> is apparently some kind of hipster literary darling. (It's good work if you can get it. I imagine.) After reading "Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues," I can see the appeal. It's not exactly tightly-plotted, and the ending doesn't so much resolve as cut off, leaving the last lines hovering there in the darkness, but he orchestrates a towering moodiness and links it inextricably to a particular time of life. Youth is foremost, with all its attendant miseries, anxieties, and personal failures as it flowers painfully into adulthood. Sometimes Lin reminds me of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Generation-X-Tales-Accelerated-Culture/dp/031205436X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1308638546&sr=8-1">Douglas Coupland</a> back before everything Douglas Coupland wrote began to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Miss-Wyoming-Douglas-Coupland/dp/0375707239/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_9">disappoint me</a>.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The fact that Coupland, who really can be great, had such a hard time sustaining the Voice of Disaffected Youth makes me curious to know whether Lin can write in only this one voice, or whether he's got any range, because I think it's got to be very hard to be able to Speak For a Generation and still come up with other meaningful works that don't try to Be That Same Thing. I'm using a lot of Capitalized Phrases right now, but what I'm trying to point out is the way some authors' writing can be become <i>kinds</i> of writing, <i>types</i> of writing, and probably in a future entry I'll have to figure out whether Tao Lin succumbs to that or is able to break free of it. Even if he does succumb, of course, it doesn't negate the fact that, in "Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues" at least, he does something pretty cool.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">What kept occurring to me as I was reading was that it would be so easy for a story like this to be completely boring. The protagonist, Greg, is weak. He's frequently passive, always self-incriminating, and his story opens on and returns to long passages of expository summation. </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">That kind of gnawing <i>offness</i> that Greg always felt, that constant knowledge that he was doomed in small but myriad ways, intensified in the presence of people, became immediate and insufferable, like a rat in the stomach. So after his parents sold the house and retired to California, Greg moved alone into an apartment behind a rundown 24-hour supermarket. </span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It goes on in that vein for quite a while—for three and a half pages, in fact, everything we learn about Greg comes through the narrator's explanations and not through any action on his part.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">As anyone who's ever taken a workshop class knows, this is Not How It's Done. Start with action! Into the pot boiling! The last thing in the world you want to do is give your character's whole history right up front—that shit's gotta work its way in through dialogue and flashback and other Artfully Applied Techniques! …And usually, that's great advice. But, in spite of All the Clever Things I Know, I enjoyed Lin's approach. He has a way of mucking around in the dullest, most quotidian details of experience and finding the warped little gems.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I suspect that Lin's ability to tell a story this way relates to what author/teacher John Dufresne says in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lie-That-Tells-Truth-Writing/dp/0393325814%3FSubscriptionId%3D15HRV3AZSMPK0GXTY102%26tag%3Damznf-us-tbsearch-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0393325814">THE LIE THAT TELLS A TRUTH</a>: "The only reason to ever describe a tree is to show how it is different from any other tree." Well, Lin describes boredom, listlessness, uncertainty, and shyness in terms that are anything but customary. After Greg moves out on his own at the beginning of the story, </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">His meals became larger and less often, like a crocodile's. He'd eat an entire package of bacon or a box of frosty muffins, sleep for 20 hours, and then masturbate, languishingly, to all his crushes from middle and high school. </span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I love how this has the ring of universal truth, but is so specific to the nature of this character. Lin could have told us that Greg was lonely and angst-ridden and thought a lot about his past, but it wouldn't have had the power of these details. Equally, he could have given us a scene of Greg being bored, of doing nothing—but who wants to see boredom dramatized? We all know what boredom is. This story unfolds the unique crevasses of Greg's particular ennui, but it also keeps blazing forward.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Lin's also great with the similes—the word <i>crocodile</i> was my first hint of the kind of voice we're dealing with. In fact, Lin frequently uses similes to buffer his exposition. Greg "became nocturnal and strange," he tells us outright, but continues, "taking on all the impatience and bipolarity of a young child , without any of the charm or smooth complexion." As Greg struggles to fit more easily into society, he reads self-help books and tries to start calling people by their names because </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It would be interpreted as friendly. And though his voice still sounded small and weepy to him, like gerbils let into a swamp, Greg felt good to be saying people's names. To be making some kind of progress.<br />
</span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">For some readers, I suppose the constant similes could get grating. If I read more Lin and find that this is <i>always</i> his technique, that he <i>always</i> describes people in the same way and uses similes to couch his explanations, then I'll be less impressed. But for this story, about a suburban guy trying to find some meaning and some forward momentum in his unremarkable life, I think Tao Lin's technique works beautifully to find the beating heart at the center of one person's nothingness.</span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-20586815738090607832011-06-21T12:36:00.001-06:002011-06-30T23:45:12.333-06:00GUEST POST: How Now, Mister Chow?<span xmlns=""></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">STORY: <b>"The Evil B.B. Chow" by Steve Almond<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">FROM: <a href="http://www.stevenalmond.com/the-evil-bb-chow.html"><b>THE EVIL B.B. CHOW AND OTHER STORIES</b></a><b> (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005)<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">BASICALLY: <b>A woman goes on a blind date. She gets involved with the guy much too quickly, all to find out that he is a total chump. It sounds very normal and mundane, but the story is well told and amazing. AMAZING.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12pt;"><b>Hi! I'm Audrey! This is a copy of The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories!<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">While you could argue that there are better and brighter pieces in this collection of short stories, I chose the title work because I know a B.B. Chow. His real name might not roll off the tongue with such poise, but as I flipped the pages of this story, I found myself more and more engaged and more and more frantic to get to the end to see if things ended better for the narrator. (They did not.) This means if you pick up this collection, "The Evil B.B. Chow" may not be the same experience for you. In that case, I suggest you read "The Soul Molecule" or "A Happy Dream," both good stories. But the remembrances of my own B.B. Chow tied me to Almond's work immediately.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">From early on, it is clear that the narrator is probably doomed. A few pages in, she says, "It's a relief, frankly, to hang out with someone [B.B. Chow] who plunges through life without the almighty force field of irony." (Cue the irony.) With dark, sinister music playing in the background, you can see Almond as Puppetmaster, manipulating this woman into a position that has no good exit. Almond sends her down a slippery slope so gradual that the narrator—not to mention, the reader—aren't aware that she is inching closer to impending ruin. I continued to hope that everything would work out—a hope strengthened when the story briefly looks up. Then everything crashes around the narrator and the truth emerges: B.B. is still in love with his ex. The transition is masterful, and possibly more important, believable.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Besides his artful story progression, Almond is excellent at dropping hints for the reader without making them obvious. It looks easy, but only because he is so good at it. When I read the story a second time, I was amazed at how early Almond starts dropping clues. On the first page, one of the secondary characters compares Chow to the villain from a Bruce Lee flick, but the narrator ignores the suggestion of evil. The allegation seems silly, and it is easy to be persuaded that it shouldn't be taken seriously. The story, unfortunately, does not feature any kung fu, but Chow does emerge in the end as a real nogoodnik.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But a review cannot be completely glowing, right? I labored under the impression that the narrator was male for a good two pages. There was nothing frankly to detour me from thinking that, and yes, it was a poor assumption on my part—a male author can write female narrators. However, it looked to be a much different story when I thought the male narrator was receiving roses in a terra cotta bowl. The attributes that we normally consider "requirements" for a narrator (name, age, life story, etc.) are not present in this tale. While it is somewhat refreshing that this piece works without those details, if the narrator was introduced as "Sandra" in the first sentence, it would have cleared up some confusion. <br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Also, the set-up for the narrator's showdown with Chow's ex felt a little off to me. I love the actual showdown, so I'm willing to forgive, but the next time I'm angry with someone, I hope I can walk to their approximate neighborhood and find them walking their dog at the exact moment I'd like to bust some chops. <br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Overall, I enjoyed this work by Steve Almond. I hope you do too!<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">- - -<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><b>AUDREY</b> reads, writes, blogs, and creates culinary masterpieces for her small family which is located for now in the midwest. Her hair is a lovely shade of pink, even when it's not. Check out more of her insights at <a href="http://pinkaudrey.blogspot.com/">http://pinkaudrey.blogspot.com/</a>.</span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-29428484862139879522011-06-11T02:12:00.002-06:002011-06-30T21:02:34.711-06:00Miscalculations - #36<span xmlns=""></span><br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">STORY: <b>"Division by Zero" by Ted Chiang – </b>Well, the internets continue to amaze and delight with their bounty. Looks like you can go read this story, too, all legal-like. Go <a href="http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/division/full/">HERE</a> and enjoy, or just buy the book/ebook because Small Beer Press is super-duper.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">FROM: <a href="http://smallbeerpress.com/books/2010/10/19/stories-of-your-life-and-others/"><b>STORIES OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS</b></a><b> (Small Beer Press, 2002)<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">BASICALLY: <b>When she discovers a mathematical proof that any two numbers can be shown to be equal to one another, a mathematician's entire world collapses and she tries to kill herself. Her husband, who once attempted suicide many years ago, experiences both déjà vu and numbness as he attempts to help her. Parallel points of view converge on an emotional truth about their relationship and the nature of love.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Recently, my friend Christa pointed me toward a <a href="http://ask.metafilter.com/163487/What-was-the-best-short-story-you-read-in-the-last-10-years">Metafilter thread</a> in which people were talking about the best short story they'd read in the last ten years. One writer whose name comes up again and again in the thread is Ted Chiang. Wait, who? Despite a gazillion awards and the fact that I <i>have</i> actually heard of his new novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lifecycle-Software-Objects-Ted-Chiang/dp/1596063173/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1307742026&sr=8-2">THE LIFECYCLE OF SOFTWARE OBJECTS</a>, he was completely off my radar as an author. So, being the dedicated blogger I am, I ordered me up a copy of his book. Oh, the sacrifices I make for you, my public. (Hi, Mom!)<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">So, anyway, following my usual method, I picked a story because I liked the title and read it. And let me tell you, I am not sorry I did. Ted Chiang is a great writer and I can't wait to read the other stories in this book. In "Division by Zero," he does this thing that I've loved ever since I read the second half of Italo Calvino's classic <a href="http://www.amazon.com/t-zero-Harvest-HBJ-BookH/dp/0156924005/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1307742161&sr=1-1">T ZERO</a>—he combines mathematical principles with human desires to create a form of fiction that feels at once connected to the architecture of the universe and divorced from mere subjectivity (even though, of course, it's not—fiction is <i>by definition</i> subjective).<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">In terms of technique, there's a lot for me to write about. The most obvious subject would probably be the story's overall structure. Numbered sections first present a mathematical concept, then advance the story through the POV of Renee the mathematician, and finally switch to her husband Carl's POV. In <b>1</b>, for example, we're told what it means that division by zero is "undefined." In <b>1A</b>, we see Renee in <a href="http://writingonthewallblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/close-vs-distant-pov.html">close third person</a>, post-suicide-attempt, just about to leave the psych ward. In <b>1B</b>, it's Carl in close third, in the office signing forms for her release, and he's remembering back to the questions he answered during Renee's intake. Then it's on to another mathematical concept in <b>2.</b> It's a really interesting structure, and what's most impressive is how Chiang, at the story's conclusion, manages to tie the structure directly to the mathematical concepts he refers to in the story. That is, the numbered sections aren't just arbitrary or cleverly postmodern; they're actually integral to the story's meaning.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Another strong aspect of this story was Chiang's handling of time. Though the numbered sections progress in an orderly fashion—1, 1A, 1B, 2, 2A, 2B, etc.—the story unfolds in a decidedly nonlinear manner. This allows him to move around, showing Renee falling in love with mathematics as a child, how Carl's life changed after his suicide attempt two decades before, and the recent events leading up to Renee's own attempt, while still keeping it clear for the reader that the <i>now</i> of the story is occurring after Renee's release from the psych ward. The significant part of the story is foregrounded, while the narrative's still free to include any relevant scenes from the past.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But instead of talking further about either of these well-handled aspects of "Division by Zero," I'd like to focus on one tiny little detail that occurs early in the story. It's in <b>1B</b>, when Carl is signing release papers and thinking about those questions he answered when Renee entered the hospital. Here's how he remembers the conversation: </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">"Yes, she's a professor of mathematics. You can find her in <i>Who's Who</i>." </span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">"No, I'm in biology." </span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">And: </span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">"I had left behind a box of slides that I needed." </span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">"No, she couldn't have known." </span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">And, just as expected: </span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">"Yes, I have. It was about twenty years ago, when I was a grad student." </span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">"No, I tried jumping." </span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">"No, Renee and I didn't know each other then." </span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">And on and on.<br />
</span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">What Chiang is really doing here is finding a unique way to work exposition into his story. In one fell swoop, the reader learns about Carl's profession versus Renee's, how he discovered her suicide attempt, and his own history. To be sure, these are only introductions—Chiang returns to both attempts and gives the reader more information and context for them—but the broad strokes are laid out early.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Using the one-sided conversation consisting in Carl's answers (from which the doctors' questions can be easily inferred), is another brilliant stroke. Doing it this way avoids having to include the doctors or ward staff as characters. If Chiang had wanted his story to comment on psychiatry and psychiatric hospitals, he would have wanted to introduce such characters, but instead he directs the narrative entirely on the effect that Renee's suicide attempt has on her and Carl's relationship. Rather than having an unwieldy scene taking up space and shifting the focus too much onto the hospital, Chiang simply shows Carl's responses. We get exposition, we get Carl's POV, and it feels natural and appropriate because hey, hospitals can be impersonal places. It's so simple and elegant and effective a solution that I'm filing it away for future use.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">So there you have it. A strong story from a gifted writer. Lots to ponder and maybe something to read. Seriously, hooray internets. </span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-66053097351343577702011-06-07T18:43:00.002-06:002011-06-30T23:46:44.668-06:00Keep an Eye on the Little Guy - #35<span xmlns=""></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2r-Zc4nmj_EMOGQkFKOfZMIf0V4cIiRQmfMNzxMbQkJZMunzphajOqO89QgyStsgq4kBk7hCUpTCG4rPaZCXI0Q5JOdvMkB2y6F-sE2S3CeZ36mlU7oMAIOqWMCtGW3a44F5WTew84Zc/s1600/35+-+Tan+-+Eric+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2r-Zc4nmj_EMOGQkFKOfZMIf0V4cIiRQmfMNzxMbQkJZMunzphajOqO89QgyStsgq4kBk7hCUpTCG4rPaZCXI0Q5JOdvMkB2y6F-sE2S3CeZ36mlU7oMAIOqWMCtGW3a44F5WTew84Zc/s320/35+-+Tan+-+Eric+pic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">STORY: <b>"Eric" by Shaun Tan – </b>And oh-em-gee I did NOT know this when I picked this story, but it's available online! Legitimately! Go <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2009/may/13/shaun-tan-eric-story-pictures?picture=347429230">HERE</a> to read.<b><br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">FROM: <b>TALES FROM OUTER SUBURBIA (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2009)<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">BASICALLY: <b>Illustrated story in which a family tries to be good hosts to a "foreign exchange student" named Eric. If he seems unaccountably interested in the strangest things, like serial numbers and stray buttons, they kindly to chalk it up to cultural differences. Then Eric leaves! They're puzzled--did they do something wrong?--but it turns out he's left behind a one-of-a-kind message for them.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">In general, all stories do the same things. They interest the reader by invoking curiosity/wonder/fear/sadness/identification. They create desires and they create tension by not fulfilling those desires but then they fulfill them and it's such a relief. Like in that quote by James Wood I mentioned in <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/04/undrinking-butlers-unflirting.html">story #26</a>, literature must "manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level." [Edited to add: I also mentioned the quote in <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/03/girls-is-crazy-17.html">story #17</a>, so apparently it's time for me to dig up a new quote to mention. Hrmph.]<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">And that's why it doesn't matter that this is a story in a book for kids, nor that part of the storytelling occurs by means of the illustrations. Personally, I love children's literature and I love art, and the fact that at this late stage in the game it's highly unlikely that I'll suddenly blossom with unsuspected artistic talents of my own, does not deter me one bit from wanting to know how a story like this works.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Eric, the so-called foreign exchange student, is shown in the story's illustrations to be a cute little poky-headed leaf-like guy, small enough to fit in a teacup. An alien, maybe? An elf of some kind? He's carrying luggage made of nutshells, for cripes sake. But the black-and-white pencil drawings are realistic, and the text never refers to the strangeness of Eric's looks, so immediately this unlooked-for irony creates tension—like, what's THAT dichotomy all about, huh?<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Leaving that question hanging, the narrator's character gets developed. "But sometimes I wondered if Eric <i>was</i> happy," says this pensive child. And, </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Secretly I had been looking forward to having a foreign visitor – I had so many things to show him. For once I could be a local expert, a fountain of interesting facts and opinions. Fortunately, Eric was very curious and always had plenty of questions.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">However, they weren't the kinds of questions I had been expecting. </span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">So, now we have the question of what this foreigner really is AND we have the narrator's desire to seem useful and knowledgeable. But the illustration serves to deepen the first's mystery and to block the second—Eric appears to be asking about the tail on the capital letter Q on a box, he peers under the stamp on an envelope. He's not at all interested in the things the narrator might know about. </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Most of the time I could only say, "I'm not really sure, " or, "That's just how it is." I didn't feel very helpful at all. </span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">(By the way, this is a beautifully-designed book, which you can't appreciate while reading the story on the web. The text layout makes a little more sense, too—each page works the illustration organically into the narrative; it's not just a big block of text underneath a picture like it is in the Guardian slideshow. I just thought I'd mention that.)</span></span><br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Now, it's all well and good to notice how brilliantly Tan uses a wordless picture of Eric pointing questioningly to the serial number on some sort of computer cord and quite another to apply the lesson for those of us who aren't so talented with the visuals.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But I'd argue that while Tan's technique is particular to him, he's making the same kinds of decisions about storytelling that any other writer would be. For example, these particular illustrations are so charming partly because they're so specific. It's not just any old run of the mill power cord that Eric's peering at. It's probably for a monitor or something else that I should know but don't—notice how I find that I'd be just as helpless as the narrator in the story. <br />
</span></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS_YcMrFZxHiomvxcmu8HFV3J3cYFwOgzgy7q_7zXcyF8Yu9BKJyfNgoAIEBKOt_LigGIIOeE6TEFtj3OKSC7LoSvJ_npwiMtExrLKlRdmfHgjMTVVW_VSFMe7uulxi8uaHeOUb4EtxoM/s1600/35+-+Tan+-+Eric+pic2+%2528533x800%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS_YcMrFZxHiomvxcmu8HFV3J3cYFwOgzgy7q_7zXcyF8Yu9BKJyfNgoAIEBKOt_LigGIIOeE6TEFtj3OKSC7LoSvJ_npwiMtExrLKlRdmfHgjMTVVW_VSFMe7uulxi8uaHeOUb4EtxoM/s320/35+-+Tan+-+Eric+pic2+%2528533x800%2529.jpg" width="213" /></a><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Tan also uses compression in his pictures. Take a look at that image of Eric holding up a piece of paper with a picture of a flower and a question mark on it while he points inquiringly to the flower-shape of the drain. An entire conversation is summed up in that picture and conveyed to the reader without the reader having to actually sit through it. Now, obviously, you can't do that same exact literal thing in words, but you certainly can understand that <i>less is more</i>. If it doesn't need to be spelled out, that's a good argument for not spelling it out.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Point of view is also crucial to Tan's telling of this story. Although Eric is present in every illustration (except the final two, after he leaves), the narrator and his or her family are in exactly none. As readers, we stay inside the mind of the child telling the story, looking out through their eyes. Because their gaze remains centered on Eric (and, after he's gone, on the places where he used to be) the story is about Eric—<i>and how this child sees him.</i><br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">In what I've read so far of TALES FROM OUTER SUBURBIA, Tan likes to keep his endings loose. The finale of "Eric" really raises more questions than it answers. I happen to like that quality about Tan's book; it's part of what gives a sense of wonder and expansiveness to the stories because there's always something left to be told. Nonetheless, this ending <i>does</i> confirm for the reader that Eric is some sort of otherworldly being, not governed by human rules, and it does give the narrator something satisfying to be a tour guide about. So Tan walks a fine line between satisfying the desires he's raised in the reader and defying their expectations in a way that will hopefully entertain. I think it's pretty great. What do you think?</span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-31946326293676058592011-06-04T22:46:00.002-06:002011-07-01T01:40:44.020-06:00A Life in the Day of - #34<span xmlns=""></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO0bM1LrlKwS97UmytfAPP9uFLvTYHeipZSt5cTLaWHbuTPFNxQaaxJCXAXNpQkz3E6oaizSDHDKMnMHba0NwwZs9OR5gPHcK5fIOAn-qUEwjEyGSHtrw9Eq8DV_z2bV0YA0gxm3u-u7c/s1600/34+-+Silber+-+My+Shape+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO0bM1LrlKwS97UmytfAPP9uFLvTYHeipZSt5cTLaWHbuTPFNxQaaxJCXAXNpQkz3E6oaizSDHDKMnMHba0NwwZs9OR5gPHcK5fIOAn-qUEwjEyGSHtrw9Eq8DV_z2bV0YA0gxm3u-u7c/s320/34+-+Silber+-+My+Shape+pic.jpg" width="274" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">STORY: <b>"My Shape" by Joan Silber<br />
</b></span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">FROM: <b>IDEAS OF HEAVEN: A RING OF STORIES (Norton, 2005)<br />
</b></span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">BASICALLY: <b>Spanning many years of a woman's life, this story begins with her childhood curiosity about religion. That impulse gives way in adolescence to a reliance on her blossoming physical charms--a shallow and unfulfilling "advantage" that eventually helps bring her minor success as a dancer on cruise ships. Ultimately, her marriage to a Frenchman fails and she moves to New York, determined to make it as a real dancer. Weeks of demanding dance lessons culminate in a humiliating display for her cruel teacher and she realizes finally that she'll never succeed as a professional dancer--and, surprisingly, she doesn't even want it that much. The story ends both on a note of happiness--describing her happy long-term relationship with another man--and one of ambivalence, as she finds herself unable to forget the dance instructor whom she allowed to treat her so strangely.</b></span><br />
</span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">GEEZ. My description is practically longer than the freaking story. Can you blame me? This story crams most of a lifetime into just twenty-two pages. And yet <i>cram</i> seems like the least appropriate of words, since the story is loose and light and flows very easily across the decades.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It's worth looking at Joan Silber's transitions for a moment—they're so simple they seem easy, though I know that must be an illusion. For example, the story opens with the narrator's fascination with attending religious services, then recounts how she eventually abandons the practice. </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">After a while, I heard myself making fun of it with the others, and I stopped going. All at once, suddenly, cold turkey. I turned my back on the whole thing.<br />
</span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">And then she advances into a new period. </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">So. Then I grew the mounded body that was to be my adult shape. I came from a family of women with large breasts, and by fourteen I had my own set, which I sheathed in satin brassieres that made them point forward in military cones. Torpedo tits they were called (by us girls too).<br />
</span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Notably, Silber chooses to make the seam of her story's time-shift quite visible—her "So." is a distinct break that prepares the reader for a big change (and also mimics speech, making the narrator's voice feel naturally conversational). On top of this, Silber's juxtaposition of these two events—abandoning religion and developing physically—avoids making the narrative drone on with <i>this happened and then this happened and then this happened</i>. That's where stories that try to span a lifetime can get bogged down, I think—the feeling that they're just rattling off a collection of events. It works here because Silber's narrator remains very specific, but these events take place over a span of time.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">…As opposed to what? You'd be right to wonder. It's common to see stories that use a single event—a big fight with a boyfriend, say, or a particular Sunday morning making pancakes with Grandma—to stand in for a whole series of similar experiences. We don't hear about <i>every</i> Sunday morning with Grandma; just seeing the one gives us a good idea of their relationship. There's not a thing wrong with this approach, but Silber doesn't use it much here. <br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Instead, she finds a lovely balance between specificity and generalities. With certain important events, such as the scene of total humiliation with the dance instructor, the speaker does focus on moment-by-moment narration, but the rest of the time she covers huge swathes of history by talking about specific events that happened over long periods. "And I worked on cruise ships for years," she mentions casually; </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I went to Nassau and Jamaica and Venezuela and through the Greek islands. I worked in clubs in Miami too, walking around with a big feathered headdress on and the edges of my buns hanging out the back of my satin outfit. I lived with a bartender who was irresistible when he wasn't a repetitious, unintelligent drunk, and with an older man I never liked. </span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">And just like that, the narrator's summed up the passage of nearly a decade. But she's done it in such a way that my understanding of the character has grown, as well as my sense that something more significant must be coming for this protagonist.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Summary has its place in short fiction, just like every other technique of storytelling. Joan Silber shows not only how to do it correctly, but how to place it at the center of a vividly unfolding life.</span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-15561916846281361962011-06-01T00:37:00.003-06:002011-07-01T01:41:46.462-06:00What a Dainty Spider’s Web - #33<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS-iJRuTuezUEc9fgRWcd-fvu27hD8eqpOxNIsF49YEetUymEFIBEZTCnQGnNa__Alyb_bMJo0WvM166YIjHHJBhuA8P2ppd08MUfsRPIEhk9ua-iUMTChs3h026hce0B-CJHw32aqcGA/s1600/33+-+Dahl+-+The+Landlady+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS-iJRuTuezUEc9fgRWcd-fvu27hD8eqpOxNIsF49YEetUymEFIBEZTCnQGnNa__Alyb_bMJo0WvM166YIjHHJBhuA8P2ppd08MUfsRPIEhk9ua-iUMTChs3h026hce0B-CJHw32aqcGA/s320/33+-+Dahl+-+The+Landlady+pic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: -0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">STORY: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">“The Landlady” by Roald Dahl</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: -0.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">FROM: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">KISS KISS (Dell, 1961)</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 11pt;">BASICALLY: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fresh off the train from London, a young man about to start work at his first job is seeking lodgings, but becomes ensnared by the motherly owner of a too-good-to-be-true bed and breakfast.</b></span><br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I guess I'd classify this as a <i>mild suspense story</i>. I might also throw the word <i>murder </i>in there even if it <i>is</i> kind of a spoiler, but here's the thing. I don't read much mystery/suspense, and I'm no expert at guessing endings—but even to me, early on, it was clear that the fresh-faced protagonist of this story was headed for his doom. The book's packaging probably helped create some assumptions going in, some sense of dark doings, but most of the feeling comes from Dahl's own setup. You have seventeen-year-old Billy Weaver, whose youth and gee-whiz inexperience are emphasized. The night's "air was deadly cold and the wind was like a flat blade of ice on his cheeks." The streets are empty, and then Billy notices this bed and breakfast so abruptly it's almost magical. And everything about it, from the dachshund curled up before the fire to the extremely low rent mentioned by the toothache-sweet landlady, conspires to make it irresistible to Billy.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">At this point in the story, it's clear that something is off. It's just all too <i>too</i>. So twee and delightful you could just puke! It's clear to the reader, even if Billy just blunders his way past it. There's even an explicit moment of almost-supernatural inveigling as Billy decides he's going to check out the pub before settling on this cozy little bed and breakfast, but then finds himself "compelled" by mysterious forces to turn back.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">If the story had been written more recently, I would expect this blatant setup to be undermined somehow. Sure, it's a bit of an inversion of classical tropes to put a little old lady up to villainous acts, but within the story's own logic, it doesn't come as a surprise. She's too perfect, a fact that Dahl emphasizes rather than obscures. In this postmodern age of literature, the reader's expectations become part of a narrative—for many writers (Italo Calvino, for example, or Donald Barthelme, or Lydia Davis) the fun lies in turning those expectations on their heads. But Dahl, at least in this story, isn't operating on that level. He sets out to tell a straightforward, suspenseful story about a young man who never suspects that he's been ensnared by an evil being. And that's exactly what he delivers.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Strangely enough, this is yet another story that was first published in <i>The New Yorker</i>. (See <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/02/please-applaud-my-lack-of-dick-jokes-it.html">here</a> and <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/04/lowlife-shuffle-25.html">here</a> for my ever-evolving opinion of that magazine.) It doesn't feel like a <i>New Yorker</i> story in the least, but maybe things were different in the fifties. I wonder if, in its day, "The Landlady" would have seemed edgier to the common reader. Maybe to those for whom zombies, vampires, and CSI weren't a part of mainstream pop culture, Dahl's spooky tale would have come across as grim and macabre and dark. I mean, for me, it still does all those things, but in the same way that <a href="http://www.lemonysnicket.com/"><i>A Series of Unfortunate Events</i></a> does—its darkness doesn't really scare, but still kind satisfies the desire for something creepy. Just, in a really, really mild way.<br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">So mild, in fact, that the story might almost fail—were it not for the fact that every single sentence is basically as faultless as sentences can be. And not only are the sentences themselves perfectly simple and perfectly phrased, but they are placed in such an order and with such a rhythm that they unspool the story with a perfect pace. (If you're curious, you should google the story and take a look for yourself. I'd love to know what you think.) The thing that's great about this story is that even though you know what's in store for poor Billy, Dahl still raises a powerful curiosity about how everything's going to go down. If the place is so preternaturally nicenice, how <i>is</i> Billy going to die?<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">That's the carrot that Dahl dangles before his reader every step of the way. From the moment the reader ascertains what naïve Billy cannot—that this bed and breakfast is not what it seems—they become invested in the story's outcome. So Dahl draws this out by showing Billy's gradually dawning suspicions. Not suspicions, even; Billy doesn't ever quite catch on to what's happening to him. But he starts asking questions about the previous tenants who've signed the guest book, and even if he won't live long enough to figure out what it all means, the reader hangs onto every word, waiting for the grisly fate that's sure to come.</span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinIcGTcAWyoPFBzXS4ij5QsHZQmFfzh8Lu5elRFIS8GVP5yotCtT-aA9VvLJ6hwYvgZGhEVxGT_BBbqlz-GLIwfpDhowHP4l8JEhGokja4mKgf6kT7p3lQAxHc7QKB0jLT5ngUcKk5z9U/s1600/33+-+Dahl+-+The+Landlady+pic2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinIcGTcAWyoPFBzXS4ij5QsHZQmFfzh8Lu5elRFIS8GVP5yotCtT-aA9VvLJ6hwYvgZGhEVxGT_BBbqlz-GLIwfpDhowHP4l8JEhGokja4mKgf6kT7p3lQAxHc7QKB0jLT5ngUcKk5z9U/s320/33+-+Dahl+-+The+Landlady+pic2.jpg" width="204" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-42201289331436753922011-05-25T11:26:00.004-06:002011-07-01T01:43:11.111-06:00These Milk Glands Were Made for Walking - #32<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><span xmlns=""></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirO_58t9z8Q1ixgxw9Fs6DyIPURD4tK4ho4RghGOg_r4LnGIV_p4FkpCnTvAMOKpav48ds1njGS2RS3235P1tsvrbhRkkStk5b1pdY1ovtiUDN68eqlJTUns-F18z3yvlLVjzKAfOF7-Q/s1600/32+-+Leiber+-+The+Night+He+Cried+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirO_58t9z8Q1ixgxw9Fs6DyIPURD4tK4ho4RghGOg_r4LnGIV_p4FkpCnTvAMOKpav48ds1njGS2RS3235P1tsvrbhRkkStk5b1pdY1ovtiUDN68eqlJTUns-F18z3yvlLVjzKAfOF7-Q/s320/32+-+Leiber+-+The+Night+He+Cried+pic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">STORY: <b>"The Night He Cried" by Fritz Leiber</b></span></span><br />
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<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">FROM: <b>THE BEST OF FRITZ LEIBER (Nelson Doubleday, 1974)</b></span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">BASICALLY: <b>Over-the-top sci-fi parody of the hard-boiled detective story "perfected" by author Mickey Spillane. In Leiber's story, a heptapus (think <i>octopus</i>, but with only seven appendages) from Galaxy Center has come to Earth disguised as a sexy broad to correct author Slickie Millane's misconceptions about the purpose of sex. Ever prone to violence and misogyny, Slickie alternately tries to seduce and kill her. Good-naturedly reconstituting itself after each attempt on its life, the heptapus drinks too much scotch and bungles the mission to hilarious results.</b></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">This may be my new favorite story. I'm fickle, so that'll probably change, but for now, I'm in lurve lurve lurve. "The Night He Cried" is utterly silly and beyond funny. Even if you're unfamiliar with the literature being parodied, as I was, Leiber's vision of a bumbling but well-intentioned alien trying to reason with a completely insane tough guy is pure gold. </span></span><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I also love what Leiber has to say about this story in his Afterword. </span></span></div><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"></span></span><br />
<blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I wrote "The Night He Cried" because I was distantly angry at Mickey Spillane for the self-satisfied violence and loveless sex and anti-feminism he was introducing into detective fiction <i>and</i> because he had the temerity to publish a couple of stories in the fantasy field, about which I have a parental concern. My rage seems remote, now, yet the point was valid. </span></span></div></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Writing a story to make a point is a tricky thing. Obviously, no one likes to be preached to. Nor are readers likely to care about some writer's personal vendetta. And specificity can be dangerous—Slickie Millane as author of the Spike Mallet novels is really only funny if you know that Mickey Spillane wrote the Mike Hammer novels.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But I don't think Leiber's story suffers from any of these problems. First off, preachiness is absent. Though Leiber explains in his Afterword that he was reacting to Spillane's anti-feminist themes, he didn't respond by writing A Very Impassioned Story About Feminism. I'm a feminist—it's by no means a dirty word—but even I wouldn't want to read that story. Nor Stories About the Evils of War, the Wrongs of Colonialism, or the Decline of America's Educational System. What I <i>do</i> want to read is a <i>story</i>—something that involves me in its world, makes me care about its characters, and entertains me. Leiber's piece works because the story takes priority over the message.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Secondly, even though it references an "enemy" more or less by name, Leiber's story is saved from seeming petty by virtue of its sheer ludicrousness. The most grotesque elements (the hyper-sexuality, the misogynistic violence) are part of what's being parodied and come from the source material. Leiber doesn't go after Spillane <i>personally</i>—there's nothing in the story that might be read as a commentary on Spillane's religion, for example, which was Jehovah's Witness. Instead, it's very clear that what's being mocked is the tough guy propaganda machine. Leiber destroys the idea that anyone, including some pulp writer, could resemble the one-dimensional, morally-unconflicted hero of Spillane's trashy novels. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">All this might make it sound like Leiber's lampooning is only funny if you know something about Mickey Spillane, but I don't think that's the case. The hard-boiled detective is a well-known type, even if many modern readers won't recognize its specific roots in Spillane. And the story never takes itself seriously. A sense of zany fun keeps the focus firmly planted on the action, not on some other story you're not reading. After Slickie Millane has shot in the gut what he thinks is a mouthy dame, she has reconstituted herself and awaits him in his convertible. </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">There was a burst of juke-box jazz. Footsteps tracked from the bar toward the convertible. I leaned back comfortably with my silver-filmed milk glands dramatically highlighted. </span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"></span></span></blockquote><blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">"Hi, Slickie," I called, making my voice sweet and soft to cushion the shock. </span></span> <br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"></span></span></blockquote><blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Nevertheless it was a considerable one….Then with a naive ingenuity that rather touched me, he asked huskily, "Hey, have you got a twin sister?"</span></span></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFaxY8BnfgEWCCkuYcVzkOFky7BR0r1h8jWHtiFYhqpi04b2qGoxvoalsyZgWA8ZwQ3YH4dBqEiSf2VWXiqjy7sm89pgLVybrAocc5Q1ERxy7lifg6WXsa3847IyHEAnPZJB9czJXs-lM/s1600/32+-+Leiber+-+The+Night+He+Cried+pic2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFaxY8BnfgEWCCkuYcVzkOFky7BR0r1h8jWHtiFYhqpi04b2qGoxvoalsyZgWA8ZwQ3YH4dBqEiSf2VWXiqjy7sm89pgLVybrAocc5Q1ERxy7lifg6WXsa3847IyHEAnPZJB9czJXs-lM/s200/32+-+Leiber+-+The+Night+He+Cried+pic2.jpg" width="155" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"></span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">What it all comes down to is that, whatever else he might be doing during the course of his story, Leiber never forgets his audience. This story sets out to entertain and that's what it does. The fact that it's making cultural commentary or trying to drive home a point is just an added bonus—the story makes sure to succeed on its own terms. Leiber shows writers that they don't have to avoid putting a direct message in their fiction, but that they'd better make it worth the reader's while. Go find yourself a copy of this gem and read it, because it's superfun. </span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-56188812937352485032011-05-21T17:41:00.002-06:002011-07-01T01:44:15.716-06:00Your Story Is a Place - #31<span xmlns=""></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3giKqp05ddXMqlXRcCt-EuQLLhb7DzkL2L1i6yo-f7GWGjerjp1uXz_xLEwibTh1IPICL1pvQhFZEGqqzVgSKGTOHrOPj8bNpLZ5nVYQEkLU1XGefskb2areOR_96rU5OjqC68VP957s/s1600/31-+Atwood+-+Death+By+Landscape.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3giKqp05ddXMqlXRcCt-EuQLLhb7DzkL2L1i6yo-f7GWGjerjp1uXz_xLEwibTh1IPICL1pvQhFZEGqqzVgSKGTOHrOPj8bNpLZ5nVYQEkLU1XGefskb2areOR_96rU5OjqC68VP957s/s320/31-+Atwood+-+Death+By+Landscape.jpg" width="308" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">STORY: <b>"Death by Landscape" by Margaret Atwood<br />
</b></span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">FROM: <b>WILDERNESS TIPS (Doubleday, 1991)<br />
</b></span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Courier New;">BASICALLY: <b>Reflecting on her valuable collection of landscape paintings, displayed in a new apartment now that she's widowed, a woman remembers the fateful summer of her thirteenth year, when a friend mysteriously disappeared while the two of them were alone during a camp expedition.<br />
</b></span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">This is a story with lots to teach, if only I could figure out what. Seriously, it's seamless—my description above of the story's plot doesn't even begin to do it justice. Atwood presents a childhood incident in such a way that she's able to evoke the entire course of a woman's life and the emotional reality the woman has never been able to deal with. I came away from "Death by Landscape" feeling as though I had read a Greek tragedy or watched a heartbreaking documentary, even though the story only portrays this woman—Lois—in youth and (briefly) in old age. Two stops along a whole lifetime, and yet it's enough. We feel as though we understand. While the story isn't crushingly sad, there's an emotional impact, a sense of years collapsed into a few paragraphs.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">You might remember that in <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/05/oh-god-not-dog-28.html">story #28</a>, I was all like, <i>Realism? Meh—whatevs.</i> And yet here is a profoundly real-seeming story that totally enthralls me. I mean, that's not to take anything away from Bezmozgis—I was serious when I said "Tapka" is well-written, and absolutely the right kind of story for the right kind of audience—but I do think it's interesting that I had such different reactions to what is pretty much the same genre; these are both pieces of literary fiction that deal with a Significant Childhood Incident. Obviously, the writer whose techniques I'd like to emulate is the one whose work resonates for me when I read it. And Atwood…I can see that I need to read a lot more of her. <br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Just another indication, friends, that we should cast our nets widely. We never know what's going to strike a chord. I, for example, am not a reader of realistic fiction! Until I am.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">So, what was so effective about Atwood's story for me?<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Margaret Atwood seems to have a lot of tricks up her sleeve when it comes to making her small story seem huge. Like the author of <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/05/no-really-grammar-is-exciting-29.html">story #29</a>, she plays around with present tense and past tense—except that she actually does it well and not quite like you'd expect. Instead of just using present tense for Lois-as-an-old-woman and past tense for Lois-as-a-girl, Atwood complicates the relationship of these two versions of Lois by putting part of the childhood experience—maybe the most important part, the part that revolves around the disappearance of Lois' friend—in present tense. This connects it to the present tense used at the story's beginning and end to show old-woman-Lois, and (like I talked about with story #29) it moves the story's camera into a greater intimacy with the character.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Atwood also just writes really beautifully. A monumentally unhelpful observation, I know. <i>Oh,</i> I can hear you exclaiming, <i>if you'd just told me I was supposed to write <span style="text-decoration: underline;">beautifully</span>, I would've tried that.</i> But how to quantify style? It's not that Atwood's writing is especially lush or poetic (though she is also a poet, and a good one); it's more that she writes fluidly. All those mechanics everyone harps on, from sentence variation to strong verbs, turn out to recede into the background when they're employed well. Atwood's sentences are so consistently well-constructed that you don't even really notice them. Instead, you keep tumbling forward into the story.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> And I think that's a key to the power of "Death by Landscape." Because those beautiful sentences that flow so nicely and naturally aren't just telling the surface story of the events leading up to and away from the disappearance of Lois' friend; they're also telling another story about Lois and what the events mean to her. Not directly, though. If Atwood had come right out and said, "Lucy's disappearance bothered Lois for the rest of her life," no one would care. But look at this paragraph: </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">However, there were things Lois knew that Lucy did not. Lucy scratched the tops off all her mosquito bites and had to be taken to the infirmary to be daubed with Ozonol. She took her T-shirt off while sailing, and although the counselor spotted her after a while and made her put it back on, she burnt spectacularly, bright red, with the X of her bathing-suit straps standing out in alarming white; she let Lois peel the sheets of whispery-thin burned skin off her shoulders. When they sang "Alouette" around the campfire, she did not know any of the French words. The difference was that Lucy did not care about the things she didn't know, whereas Lois did. </span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Not only do we get a fantastic image of the kind of friendship that existed between these two girls (Lucy <i>lets</i> Lois peel the dead skin from her sunburn, ew), but check out that last sentence. In the context of the paragraph, it makes complete sense, and we understand exactly what we need to about the difference between these two personalities. But the wonderful trick here is that this sentence also means something significant about Lucy's eventual disappearance and how it will affect Lois. Although Atwood never explains directly, sentences like this one help us to understand the reason why Lois is haunted her whole life by this childhood event, beyond even what might be expected.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The story's full of such sentences. Not so many that they're annoying, of course—that would just distract from the storytelling. These sentences do double duty. Meaningful in the context of the narrative's forward movement, they're also directly applicable to the story's larger <i>meaning</i>. Atwood uses them as a tool to bring her readers to a realization about the kind of person Lois is. We come to understand why this woman—not just <i>a </i>woman, but <i>this </i>woman—would possess a collection of landscapes that "fills her with a wordless unease." And we understand not because we're told directly, but because everything is there, all at once, woven into the landscape of the story itself.</span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-85841244771198395362011-05-14T19:29:00.001-06:002011-07-01T01:46:14.053-06:00On Childish Things - #30<span xmlns=""></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMW6tJesmD28VZmDhIXn8rlSyKeiQUm-MTihFWQlE9v0BnfJskkYhbdc1FjVNW-5eVQOlgMbsHZKSvm2tg1Xu7zq1HPj5pNgUW-MVCPEAzgNOQcamC1DEYbaUlssrUCRvOqjGNB-l-MeE/s1600/30+-+Duprau+-+The+Aces+Phone+pic1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMW6tJesmD28VZmDhIXn8rlSyKeiQUm-MTihFWQlE9v0BnfJskkYhbdc1FjVNW-5eVQOlgMbsHZKSvm2tg1Xu7zq1HPj5pNgUW-MVCPEAzgNOQcamC1DEYbaUlssrUCRvOqjGNB-l-MeE/s320/30+-+Duprau+-+The+Aces+Phone+pic1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span xmlns=""></span></div><span xmlns=""><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Courier New;">You've gotta love the design of a McSweeney's book.<br />
</span></div><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">STORY: <b>"The Aces Phone" by Jeanne DuPrau, illus. Rachell Sumpter<br />
</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">FROM: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Noisy-Outlaws-Unfriendly-Blobs-Things/dp/B002HOQ9FM/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top"><b>NOISY OUTLAWS, UNFRIENDLY BLOBS, AND SOME OTHER THINGS THAT AREN'T AS SCARY, MAYBE, DEPENDING ON HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT LOST LANDS, STRAY CELLPHONES, CREATURES FROM THE SKY, PARENTS WHO DISAPPEAR IN PERU, A MAN NAMED LARS FARF, AND ONE OTHER STORY WE COULDN'T QUITE FINISH, SO MAYBE YOU COULD HELP US OUT</b></a><b> (McSweeney's, 2006) – eds. Ted Thompson with Eli Horowitz<br />
</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">BASICALLY: <b>A young loner finds a cell phone in a park and discovers that it has a very strange number on speed dial--what comes through the phone isn't a voice, but a wallop of noise and overwhelming emotion. This sound/feeling is composed of individual strands that can be followed to their sources, good or bad. Soon he meets the phone's owner and learns the secret: that the phone's connected to all of the dogs in a 20-block radius of the park, and it's the job of the phone's owner to find the wounded, abused, and hurting dogs and make sure they get help.<br />
</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">When I was in second grade, we used to split up into groups for reading a story and then answering discussion questions. One time we read only part of a story and then were asked, based on what we knew, how the story was going to end. I seem to remember elephants. A baby and its mother? Maybe it was hippos. Anyway, I remember that my answer, while true, didn't exactly please my teacher:<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I said that the story was going to end happily (with the baby finding its mom or whatever) because the stories we read <i>always</i> ended happily.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I admit, I still feel a little smug about that response all these years later. I had picked up on a simple cultural truth: that stories for children aren't out for blood. (My rampant cynicism at age seven is a little harder to explain.) Stories for kids aren't trying to undermine trust in the world. They don't try to invoke despair. (Notice I'm saying <i>children</i> here and not <i>young adults</i>—that's a different genre with its own conventions, and this McSweeney's collection is aimed at 4<sup>th</sup> to 7<sup>th</sup>-graders.) The danger present in most literature for children is highly stylized and eminently capable of being resolved, for the very good reason that we don't want our kiddos to live in abject fear of the world.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">So I think it's kind of honest and unusual of Jeanne DuPrau (author of bestseller intermediate novels like THE CITY OF EMBER) to dispense with any sense of calamity in her story. At no point do we feel that the boy, Martin Alonzo, really has anything to worry about. He's intrigued by the sound/feeling that comes through the found cellphone and he has pretty much no trouble talking to the phone's owner, an older lady (prickly but not at all threatening) who he recognizes from the neighborhood. The story mostly consists of Martin learning how to use the phone and what it's for. It's a story about an <i>idea</i>—an idea that, as a sensitive and worried child, I feel sure I would have been interested in. <br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I, too, knew about animals suffering—unloved stray dogs, mangy neighborhood cats—and I too felt basically helpless about the situation. This story bridges that feeling of helplessness and makes it manageable. It's a fantasy, but one that attempts to resolve an emotion that might already be present in the reader, rather than one that it has raised in the reader. An adventure story, for example, might put the hero in a volcano about to erupt, just so it could have lots of fun explaining how he gets out.<br />
</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ5eP6h26cHSzmu_1FvZ6boZueKGT6aumVp8RsSj-DDOcRIfjjXKS6yq0ec95pojEhWJVhmHrC3eegvnxSOXyPEdrO_6kYC37IRyxoNQXkRFFIdavGJINBOhHDheKXWvW6npdVWF1o8Zw/s1600/30+-+Duprau+-+The+Aces+Phone+pic2+%2528800x533%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ5eP6h26cHSzmu_1FvZ6boZueKGT6aumVp8RsSj-DDOcRIfjjXKS6yq0ec95pojEhWJVhmHrC3eegvnxSOXyPEdrO_6kYC37IRyxoNQXkRFFIdavGJINBOhHDheKXWvW6npdVWF1o8Zw/s320/30+-+Duprau+-+The+Aces+Phone+pic2+%2528800x533%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But Martin's tale isn't about unrealistic physical danger. Instead, it deals with psychological transformation, an inward change that's shown through outward action. At the beginning, Martin suffers from a sense of not belonging. </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Martin himself was only passing through [the park] on his way home to get his skates. Skating was what he did after school. He didn't like hanging around at home, in the apartment that was way too small for his big family. It was crowded and noisy, with his four little sisters and brothers always yelling and crying, and crawling all over the place, and his mother always getting after them. He didn't like hanging out with the kids from school, either, because all they wanted to do was play video games at the arcade. Video games made Martin feel like he was trapped in a box. </span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">On the one hand, I want to mock Martin. Martin, you are so emo! Nobody understands you! …But on the other, it's a pretty authentic emotion. Martin, like many a reader, is trying to figure out his place in society. Just like helplessness against the world's problems, this concern—one of self-realization—must already be present in the reader to have much meaning when the story deals with it.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Ultimately, I'm afraid "The Aces Phone" does suffer a bit from its lack of tension. A little something to make the reader worry about Martin, and therefore feel more involved in the goings-on, would have taken the interest level up a notch. I really have no idea what a ten-year-old would think; I can only tell you how it strikes me as a reader and as a writer. But I do imagine that this is just the right kind of story for a certain kind of person. And I admire a piece of fiction for children that isn't just about embroiling a character in wacky hijinks. DuPrau's story demonstrates the power of a resonant, emotional idea (creatively explored) and she proves that literature for children doesn't have to be insipid or sentimental to be meaningful.</span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-31004946829304785792011-05-10T14:39:00.002-06:002011-07-01T15:27:05.346-06:00No, Really, Grammar Is Exciting - #29<span xmlns=""></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijfN-MnK05UhlzrMxJijzOljPLooyYJWdprTvyczkTS1S6qqSqoEwgwRMGs2a2NUtZIA84psXxL4OUKn-2QIt-VNmrRg0eb5IJ1Joq6T6v7JxaDE1uQJYOurqvj9eSCvRBTLjRN4m9BLc/s1600/29+-+Manning-Sanders+-+The+Fairy+Helena+pic1+%25281024x681%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijfN-MnK05UhlzrMxJijzOljPLooyYJWdprTvyczkTS1S6qqSqoEwgwRMGs2a2NUtZIA84psXxL4OUKn-2QIt-VNmrRg0eb5IJ1Joq6T6v7JxaDE1uQJYOurqvj9eSCvRBTLjRN4m9BLc/s320/29+-+Manning-Sanders+-+The+Fairy+Helena+pic1+%25281024x681%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span xmlns=""></span></div><span xmlns=""><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">STORY: <b>"The Fairy Helena" by Ruth Manning-Sanders<br />
</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">FROM: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Man-Golden-Bird-Hungarian/dp/0192712829/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1304995880&sr=8-1"><b>THE GLASS MAN AND THE GOLDEN BIRD: Hungarian Folk and Fairy Tales</b></a><b> (Roy Publishers, Inc., 1968) – illus. Victor G. Ambrus<br />
</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">BASICALLY: <b>A zany, if unfocused, folktale starring a guy who accidentally lets a demon out of jail, runs away because he's afraid he'll get in trouble, almost starves, gets rescued by the (kindly?) demon and given a life of ease. He enjoys the company of the demon's ten daughters, but discovers that each night they turn into birds and visit a fairy. In secret, he tags along, falls in love with the fairy, gets in trouble with her and almost killed, but is helped out again by the demon. He wins her in the end and of course yaddas yaddaly ever yadda.<br />
</b></span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">There was a lad called John, who went to be a soldier. And one night they put him to stand guard outside a prison.</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> So there is our John, standing in the moonlight with his gun over his shoulder, and the keys of the prison in his pocket. Not a sound did he hear until midnight; and then there came such a moaning and a groaning from inside the prison as made John's hair stand on end.</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Did you see it? The strange thing that just happened in those two little opening paragraphs? We started out in a distant past tense—<i>there was</i>, <i>who went, they put</i>. We switched to present—<i>there is</i>. Then we flopped back to past, but not so distant—<i>did he hear, there came, made</i>.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">It's dizzying. And the story just keeps on in that vein. </span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">"Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!" moaned a voice. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"></span></span></blockquote><blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">"I can't do that!" shouts John.</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></span></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjEvm5ed8q8wEJUtQkcSVOLgfnYPwv3P0lwRfhCbCX_1-6hl-Ji_r2e4F231hxVncuZdqzhkxQcoI7V_OI8ezckGy_ltk5p_f4MkeOhckLqNSe1am04kWfxhN1OvhkrW6nVHpY2HOWcSw/s1600/29+-+Manning-Sanders+-+The+Fairy+Helena+pic2+%25281024x683%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjEvm5ed8q8wEJUtQkcSVOLgfnYPwv3P0lwRfhCbCX_1-6hl-Ji_r2e4F231hxVncuZdqzhkxQcoI7V_OI8ezckGy_ltk5p_f4MkeOhckLqNSe1am04kWfxhN1OvhkrW6nVHpY2HOWcSw/s320/29+-+Manning-Sanders+-+The+Fairy+Helena+pic2+%25281024x683%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Accidental tense-switching is an all-too-common affliction at early stages in the writing process. Maybe we haven't yet settled on the voice for a piece, the particular vista from which our POV character is taking it all in, and we slip back and forth between happening-in-the-now present tense and the-perspective-of-time past as we drum up the action. Once we figure out what's what, we go back and marshal our verbs into formation.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I don't think that's what's happening here. There is no apparent attempt at marshaling. Instead, the tense-switching runs headlong through the whole story, but for me, it irritates from the get-go. The story's trying to sound like an oral tale—there's casual diction ("by that time he had put a goodish bit of distance between him and the town") and idiomatic syntax ("'What's fretting me indeed!' cries John. 'It's yourself is doing that!'")—and so maybe the heedless flip-flopping between past and present tenses is meant in that vein. As if the tale's more authentic because it's not the sort of thing you see <i>written down</i> very often. Which is kind of true.</span></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcsUtz8xz_xKe72xJaRgNgl9d-JBoXRia-cw6gHUOrhOBJJuz-QXgS2nkWgoBVG5IbtSJZ7tVjAUIj2pZB0iJS9_8DFXKewIPdsKcIJ_lNbogZ9q0-uEjuI-h3NvONx7ALoSotID8owX0/s1600/29+-+Manning-Sanders+-+The+Fairy+Helena+pic3+%25281024x683%2529.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcsUtz8xz_xKe72xJaRgNgl9d-JBoXRia-cw6gHUOrhOBJJuz-QXgS2nkWgoBVG5IbtSJZ7tVjAUIj2pZB0iJS9_8DFXKewIPdsKcIJ_lNbogZ9q0-uEjuI-h3NvONx7ALoSotID8owX0/s320/29+-+Manning-Sanders+-+The+Fairy+Helena+pic3+%25281024x683%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a><span xmlns=""></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">And so, even though I think the tense-switching in this story doesn't quite succeed, I find</span></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcsUtz8xz_xKe72xJaRgNgl9d-JBoXRia-cw6gHUOrhOBJJuz-QXgS2nkWgoBVG5IbtSJZ7tVjAUIj2pZB0iJS9_8DFXKewIPdsKcIJ_lNbogZ9q0-uEjuI-h3NvONx7ALoSotID8owX0/s1600/29+-+Manning-Sanders+-+The+Fairy+Helena+pic3+%25281024x683%2529.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> myself intrigued by it. When I look at what it does to the action in the tale, I can see that it actually controls time in a really weird way. That's because past tense and present tense aren't just opposites of one another. When you read, </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But every evening at supper time those girls would suddenly go from the table and run upstairs; and John didn't get another sight of them till next morning, </span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">you're looking backwards as though through a telescope. You're seeing all the action, but you're not next to it. There's a certain amount of distance. But with, </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">So what does he do but tiptoe upstairs and put his eye to the keyhole of the girls' room, </span></span></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">you're not only seeing events unfold in the now, you're actually right next to the events, your nose right up against the keyhole with John's. You don't have that telescoping distance, but you also can't see the bigger picture. See what I mean? Whether you use past tense or present tense isn't just about time; it's also about tightness and specificity of focus.</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMB1uNL-8T2ekhb9rBNzobCGbSlxI3o_Cmb45N0w-cswpS6Zt4hMykAYEtdx8u_f6YXgmdh3HAZSP8IbUdZ5fJnKBkRKlllECK0tB3sKEaHwXPhRBBZ5mdLf9BN-iklxUsVSeKqKE8eRU/s1600/29+-+Manning-Sanders+-+The+Fairy+Helena+pic4+%25281024x481%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMB1uNL-8T2ekhb9rBNzobCGbSlxI3o_Cmb45N0w-cswpS6Zt4hMykAYEtdx8u_f6YXgmdh3HAZSP8IbUdZ5fJnKBkRKlllECK0tB3sKEaHwXPhRBBZ5mdLf9BN-iklxUsVSeKqKE8eRU/s320/29+-+Manning-Sanders+-+The+Fairy+Helena+pic4+%25281024x481%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span xmlns=""></span></div><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">There has <i>got </i>to be a way to play with tense more smoothly than it's managed in "The Fairy Helena." After all, we're actually very accustomed to these movements back and forth—the majority of stories and novels are narrated in the past tense, while characters are always going around speaking in the present. And it's not that uncommon to see tense shifts used to articulate different sections of a piece—like maybe switching to present tense to indicate that we're in a dream. So it's just a tiny step more to imagine how one might try to shift tenses between sentences to show different realities for different characters, or to distinguish a supernatural being from a human, or to make someone seem magical and strange in a way that other characters are not.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">This is a fun fairy tale with a bizarrely passive protagonist and a bafflingly helpful demon, but what I like best about it is how it's got me thinking and makes me want to try things. Inspiration comes from the oddest corners, sometimes.</span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-86869761223694975292011-05-09T10:09:00.001-06:002011-07-01T01:54:03.776-06:00Oh God, Not the Dog - #28<span xmlns=""></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCt-PWAsA7mxlZAeAdQOPalCuJgXvGn1Q4q_smXzps7pKzR6zoQEXkUxmZKTpFGQnOEoHaEOqXAPrKyZ_JkZ4yanqGVyf1cviXlfP93jP8H-WDGA4Xw1CFj_xsj7Ms0Lbr7xFBTI8tGyU/s1600/28+-+Bezmozgis+-+Tapka+pic+%2528683x1024%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCt-PWAsA7mxlZAeAdQOPalCuJgXvGn1Q4q_smXzps7pKzR6zoQEXkUxmZKTpFGQnOEoHaEOqXAPrKyZ_JkZ4yanqGVyf1cviXlfP93jP8H-WDGA4Xw1CFj_xsj7Ms0Lbr7xFBTI8tGyU/s320/28+-+Bezmozgis+-+Tapka+pic+%2528683x1024%2529.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span xmlns=""></span></div><span xmlns=""><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">STORY: <b>"Tapka" by David Bezmozgis<br />
</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">FROM: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Natasha-Other-Stories-David-Bezmozgis/dp/0374281416/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1304956021&sr=8-1"><b>NATASHA AND OTHER STORIES</b></a><b> (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004)<br />
</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">BASICALLY: <b>The sins of childhood are mined in this account of what goes awry one day for two young children entrusted with a neighbor's beloved Lhasa-apso. More broadly, though, a story about the immigrant experience.<br />
</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">You may have noticed that I've written about a lot of stories with quirky or fantastical elements—<a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/01/past-we-havent-met-yet-is-coming-1.html">devils and cheerleaders</a>, <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/02/robot-mystery-hour-11.html">robots</a>, <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/02/phantoms-of-your-own-fragmentation-9.html">ghostly apparitions</a>, and <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/02/between-two-places-10.html">fairy tales of the afterlife</a>. My tastes, I admit, do favor of the weird. Realism, on the other hand—well, it can leave me cold. It's not you, Realism, it's me! I get <i>why</i> people want to be smacked in the face with the relentless suffering of humanity, sure I do, but sometimes it just feels like a chore to read—like I'm enduring something just to get my character built.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">"Tapka" is a good story. I'm probably not its audience. I found myself just wanting to get through it, but it's not the story's fault. It's just…these little kids, and they're Russian immigrants who're trying so hard, and this precious little dog, and he's the only thing this older immigrant couple has, and you just know the whole time that something awful's in store for him and you kind of want it to be over with already.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">And it doesn't even turn out that bad, but we end on a note of sadness wrapped around a painful life lesson and while I admire how we got there, I didn't enjoy myself much.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But if you like this sort of thing—the people that may very well be real, the personal tragedies that could be happening next door—then Bezmozgis is right up your alley. He tackles the perspective of childhood with elegance and compassion, but the really interesting thing he does in "Tapka" is unite the state of childhood with the experience of being an immigrant. One context informs the other—they run so easily and obviously parallel, in fact, that I know Bezmozgis has to be making the connection look easier than it is.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">In the crucial scene, we see six-year-old Mark with his seven-year-old cousin Jana, playing with the dog in the ravine where they take him for walks. They throw his toy again and again, each time having only to say "Tapka, get Clonchik," and the dog will fetch. But on this particular day, the children are also playing with their newfound tongue. Jana discovers that you can say "Shithead, get Clonchik" and the dog doesn't know the difference and keeps playing the game in happy obliviousness. But Mark is bothered and doesn't want to call the dog he loves "Shithead." </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">I couldn't help thinking, "Poor Tapka," and looked around for some sign of recrimination. The day, however, persisted in unimpeachable brilliance…I was amazed at the absence of consequences.</span></span><br />
<span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Bezmozgis uses this conflict over a word in such an interesting way. He paints a convincing picture of a quarrel between two children, those little power plays and acts of one-upmanship they engage in. At the same time, he's keeping their strangeness in their surroundings front and center, as they struggle to express themselves rightly in English. And then he's marrying the bewildered state of an uncertain child with the equally bewildering experience of being in an unfamiliar country. When disaster strikes, the stakes feel extremely high because they are flailing, both as immigrants who can't speak the language and children who can't articulate what terrifies them.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">And if it turns out to be a little bit (though not too) depressing, then Bezmozgis has most likely accomplished what he was aiming for: a story that feels true, an empathy that becomes real.</span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-43709275336209029672011-04-30T23:17:00.001-06:002011-07-01T02:26:50.753-06:00Poetry Its Own Logic - #27<span xmlns=""></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1HWe0NbJmUv3twvstutus8i8IN-Aufb-O6-HQA6vtqafxWsI9sbEBp5tBY37E6GaTiFtOBGl8BOIWz-_rgN2ezFLYjj_S8i_2bJW2EzOBUGW01iP0Nf1thH5rX1GbtvMWk4YMW6L6l0E/s1600/27+-+Zumas+-+Dragons+May+Be+the+Way+Forward+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1HWe0NbJmUv3twvstutus8i8IN-Aufb-O6-HQA6vtqafxWsI9sbEBp5tBY37E6GaTiFtOBGl8BOIWz-_rgN2ezFLYjj_S8i_2bJW2EzOBUGW01iP0Nf1thH5rX1GbtvMWk4YMW6L6l0E/s320/27+-+Zumas+-+Dragons+May+Be+the+Way+Forward+pic.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span xmlns=""></span></div><span xmlns=""><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">STORY: <b>"Leopard Arms" by Leni Zumas<br />
</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">FROM: <a href="http://opencity.org/books/farewell-navigator"><b>FAREWELL NAVIGATOR</b></a><b> (Open City Books, 2008)<br />
</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">BASICALLY: <b>A dreamy and unsettling account, as told by a gargoyle, of the occupants of the Leopard Arms apartments in Brooklyn. To save a neglected child with tonsillitis, he'll have to break the rules he learned in gargoyle school.</b><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: small;">"Leopard Arms" isn't like any of the other stories so far twiddled apart here on YoOHS. Much stranger and harder to categorize than, say, <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/01/normal-bunnies-are-normal-8.html">"The Last Rabbit"</a>, its experimental elements mean we're dealing with a new species of short fiction. It's far more of an actual story than Lydia Davis' experimental <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/01/1-2-3-what-are-we-writing-for-7.html">"The Family"</a>, but it's not even <i>trying</i> to do what <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/04/well-say-past-was-now-24.html">"Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian"</a> was going for—and so I find myself less sure than normal what to make of it.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: small;">I either liked "Leopard Arms" or I didn't. One of those two things. The jury's still out. Could go either way. But since it's trying something that feels fresh and weird, I lean toward giving it the benefit of the doubt.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: small;">I liked how it's episodic—a simpler structure that doesn't require such a tight control on continuity between scenes. To open, for example, the gargoyle narrator introduces the "new family" that "is taking the place of the woman who choked on a peanut." Then, following a section break, the gargoyle gives his backstory and outlook—</span></span><br />
<blockquote><blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: small;">The word you know me by is from <i>gargouille</i>, the French for throat. A throat can sing a tune, swallow milk, be sliced wide open. Down throats go slender needles aimed at human hearts. </span></span></blockquote></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: small;">Another section break, and now for a moment we see the new family, the young daughter "pacing along each new wall to listen," but then the camera swings outside to show a passing bus full of tourists and swoops back in to show the reactions of building residents like Mrs. Megrim and "the watcher."<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: small;">So Zumas builds up her story stroke by stroke. It's how a lot of TV shows work—a whole tangle of subplots get advanced at once by moving an inch on one, then switching to another. And of course they all interact. Part of the appeal of a show or a story with a large cast is our involvement and interest in their individual lives. When they inevitably conflict, fall in love, form friendships, and make enemies of one other, we have a sense of complexity because we are intimately familiar with all the separate points of view. (I love shows like <i>The Good Wife</i> or <i>True Blood</i> or <i>Boardwalk Empire</i> for this, but look for it in your favorite ensemble dramas. You'll probably start seeing it everywhere.)<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: small;">While I think Zumas creates a narrator that's just perfect for giving voice to this episodic structure—a gargoyle is the ultimate watcher of all and sundry—something's missing. She either doesn't try to or isn't successful at binding all her strands together. The threads that follow the collector and the watcher and the flautist, while stuffed full of lovely poetic non sequiturs, don't do much that I found satisfying. They're connected, but the connections don't bear fruit. The scenes are well-larded with striking imagery, yes—the shame collector's senile grandmother phoning him, the watcher's bittersweet longing for a shark—but in the end, are used only as elaborate set pieces. I felt like the peripheral episodes on which the story spent so much time didn't signify much to the main story about a neglected little girl finding a mother-substitute in her curmudgeonly neighbor.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: small;">So I don't like that. Except that I can appreciate how this story eschews narrative structure for its own kind of poetic logic. Maybe it's because I've been reading a lot of poetry for school, lately, and so I feel sympathetic or attuned to the lushness of strange words arranged <i>just</i> to be fascinating…Even though the scenes didn't satisfy me in terms of story, there's still something about their eccentricity, their sense of being assembled of odds and ends, that, surprisingly, ties them together enough to make them feel like more than they individually are.</span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-45167987300385026052011-04-18T23:48:00.001-06:002011-07-01T02:27:54.726-06:00“Undrinking Butlers & Unflirting Housemaids of Metal” - #26<span xmlns=""></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjie8iddFGdCKtzAcQ1EdavWx1ibvye53AVS5_txPMutMiuk-XwZ81sA7XXeBQpw55ANNVrWX9yiJNiz-2uHqjvdhYDnx33CI9MISRu3U2tt4dVa4YrC0t-_EeEZD5_XZme7qEetnwmlIk/s1600/26+-+Chesterton+-+The+Invisible+Man+pic+%2528683x1024%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjie8iddFGdCKtzAcQ1EdavWx1ibvye53AVS5_txPMutMiuk-XwZ81sA7XXeBQpw55ANNVrWX9yiJNiz-2uHqjvdhYDnx33CI9MISRu3U2tt4dVa4YrC0t-_EeEZD5_XZme7qEetnwmlIk/s320/26+-+Chesterton+-+The+Invisible+Man+pic+%2528683x1024%2529.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span xmlns=""></span></div><span xmlns=""><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">STORY: <b>"The Invisible Man" by G.K. Chesterton – </b>Another short story you can find online easily. Maybe I should be reading more stories published this century?<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">FROM: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486298590/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&seller="><b>THE ANNOTATED INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN</b></a><b>, edited by Martin Gardner (Dover, 1998) – </b>Story originally appeared in 1911.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">BASICALLY: <b>A far-fetched mystery in which a young man (named Angus) tries to help his romantic rival catch <i>another</i> romantic rival (this one EVIL) in the act of leaving threatening messages all over the place. Angus enlists the help of a reformed-criminal-turned-private-investigator (named Flambeau) who is being visited by the unimpressive-but-observant Father Brown. They do solve the mystery--too bad the first romantic rival still gets butchered. Oh well!<br />
</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Leave it to me to unknowingly seek out the one "metaphysical detective story" that contains robots. Of course, Chesterton's Edwardian robot is a vaguely imagined "clockwork invention for doing all the housework by machinery," and inspired, as annotator Martin Gardner notes, by "L. Frank Baum's Tik-Tok of Oz except it was headless." These so-called robots turn out to be only minimally important to the story, merely the successful invention with which Angus' first romantic rival—a diminutive man named Isidore Smythe—recently gained his independent fortune. (I suppose they're a possible red herring, too—part of me, I must admit, hoped the Robot Butler Had Dunnit. But it was not to be.) Honestly, robots seem completely out of place and fairly ridiculous in this otherwise plain Edwardian setting. Of course, because I am me, they still kind of made me like the story more. (I mean, if nothing else, I appreciate that once upon a time <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre_fiction">Genre Conventions</a> were not quite so rigidly defined and enforced as they are now.)<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">In his fascinating and helpful Introduction (which you can read <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=1fZRZv-WVyoC&lpg=PP1&dq=0486298590&pg=PA1">here</a>, yay Google Books), Martin Gardner explains that </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Father Brown stories obviously belong to the classical tradition of mysteries in which the reader is challenged to solve a puzzle. The story is a game between reader and writer. The author tries to play fair, yet at the same time surprise readers with a simple solution that they could have guessed but did not. Like so many Sherlockian plots, and those of Agatha Christie and other great masters of the puzzle genre, the plots of Father Brown tend to be enormously improbable. Indeed, improbable is an understatement. </span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">He then goes on to detail the ways in which current detective shows and movies (current as of 1985, anyway), with their car chases, bare-knuckles boxing, and bimbos, are just as fantastical in their own right. And he's got a point. What seems realistic to one generation is the cheesiest claptrap artifice to the next… isn't it kind of strange that it ever seemed realistic? <br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But that's the sleight-of-hand of entertainment in whatever medium—it succeeds based on a verisimilitude that is entirely manufactured. For the writer of fiction, that's both enormously freeing (since you can, in theory, make anyone believe anything) and burdensome (since it means there's no objective measure—the slightest irregularity can inadvertently puncture the fictional dream).<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">This quote by James Wood (spotted on the Tin House Books Blog) seems to apply here: </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><b>I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level.</b> </span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Let that sink in. Genre, literary, whatever kind of fiction—and heck, nonfiction too—it all comes down to the degree to which the writer has <i>managed</i> a <i>hunger</i> in the reader for itself and its characters.<br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">In "The Invisible Man," Chesterton's management is clunky at best. I'm baffled by Gardner's note that "This is perhaps the best known, most anthologized of all Father Brown stories." Father Brown doesn't even show up until twelve pages in. Before that, we get Angus (who, as I far as I know, is not a recurring or otherwise significant Chesterton character) peering in at a sweets-shop window, entering and proposing to a pretty shopgirl he barely knows, then her long tale of the two men (ugly! and loafers!) who already spontaneously asked her to marry them, and how they went away to seek their fortunes which they already had but she ;lajksdfa;ljwhocares… It really goes on for quite awhile.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Should I excuse this as some kind of generational thing? If I expect a mystery story to dash out of the starting gate like a hopped-up greyhound, it's got to be because of genre conventions, right? In 1911, maybe a guy was free to write his romance-slash-mystery with a little bit of AWESOMEROBOTS thrown in for color. Maybe he didn't have to plunge right into murder, but could take his time and weave a little story about some people inveigled in curious circumstances.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Except that Chesterton's own subplots, which dominate the first two-thirds of the story, don't appear to interest even him. After the first of Angus' romantic rivals is killed, and then the second is caught and shown to be the killer (how he got away with it—not who he is—is supposed to be the story's clever reveal, so that's not really a spoiler), Chesterton dispenses with the love story he spent pages and pages setting up with this unevocative sentence: </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">John Turnbull Angus went back to the lady at the shop, with whom that imprudent young man contrives to be extremely comfortable. </span></span></blockquote><span xmlns=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">---. Uh, great.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">So it's not that Chesterton was mixing different elements in some unorthodox way. It's more that he doesn't seem to have gone back once he reached the end to make sure that it still had something to do with his beginning. I cannot hunger for the <i>reality level</i> of "The Invisible Man" because it isn't sure, itself, of its level. Some wise editing could have made this a much stronger story. Gardner mentions several times that Chesterton wrote the Father Brown stories for money and that they do not represent his finest writing and I get that. It's probably even truer today that most people making a living off their writing can't afford to be too fussy about it when deadlines and cashmoney are involved. I'm also not immune to being charmed by the quaint weirdness of these stories, in spite of their flaws. So it is with everything we read as writers—we are always taking stock on what to steal, what to love, what to discard, and what to improve upon.</span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-931444960886715701.post-11639725638809176662011-04-16T15:05:00.001-06:002011-07-01T11:10:48.398-06:00A Lowlife Shuffle - #25<span xmlns=""></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5iyxmKcTXDv3w39hs_s287QLIAYsMlEixPJeTQVxTP5DN1MHbSbcrAqqrG52i60a0Ylym2LPQMv3Kc4N-dlZQUe9IhlpBopOb_RKupQuaqMXIQ2ZgN0qs1ur034mV4iqWikCEDJRlUqA/s1600/25+-+Johnson+-+Two+Men+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5iyxmKcTXDv3w39hs_s287QLIAYsMlEixPJeTQVxTP5DN1MHbSbcrAqqrG52i60a0Ylym2LPQMv3Kc4N-dlZQUe9IhlpBopOb_RKupQuaqMXIQ2ZgN0qs1ur034mV4iqWikCEDJRlUqA/s320/25+-+Johnson+-+Two+Men+pic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span xmlns=""><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New;">STORY: <b>"Two Men" by Denis Johnson<br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New;">FROM: <b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Son-Stories-Denis-Johnson/dp/031242874X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1302987833&sr=8-1">JESUS' SON</a> (Picador, 1992)<br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New;">ALSO FROM: <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/services/rss/feeds/fiction_podcast.xml"><b>THE NEW YORKER FICTION PODCAST</b></a><b> – Scroll down to "Salvatore Scibona reads Denis Johnson"<br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New;">BASICALLY: <b>A cowardly man careens from place to place through the night with his friends. The "first man" is a drunk who won't get out of their car. The "second man" burned the narrator on a drug deal awhile back. Unsympathetic people doing the incomprehensible - made electric by Johnson's prose and structure.</b><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: small;">As any faithful reader of my blog (Hi Mom!) will no doubt remember, it's taken me a while to become someone who can honestly say <a href="http://yearofonehundredstories.blogspot.com/2011/02/please-applaud-my-lack-of-dick-jokes-it.html">they like <i>The New Yorker</i></a>. And yet my former position as scoffer and dismisser is looking more and more untenable, because here is this dark, beautiful short story by Denis Johnson that was published there in 1988. Since I was still in my denim-skirts-LipSmackers-pewter-dragons phase at that point, I don't think I can somehow imagine that <i>The New Yorker</i> has only begun to accommodate my tastes in the last few years... no, I must accept the fact that they publish some iconic fiction that I was, at a certain point, too green and short-attention-spanned to appreciate, and that I have carried that prejudice with me for far too long.<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: small;">Not that I'll be giving up my robot stories and fairy tales any time soon. Variety, people! Have we learned nothing here?<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: small;">Yet another reason to love <i>The New Yorker</i> is their Fiction Podcast. Authors pick a story published by someone else in the magazine, and then they read it and discuss it with the Fiction Editor. Simple concept, profoundly interesting results.<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: small;">Hearing a story can change it. Can open it up in a new way. The same words are processed by the same language mechanism in the brain, yet are altered just by entering through a separate portal. I have to admit that when I first read "Two Men," it didn't strike me as anything special. I completely love Johnson's story from the same book called "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" (it haunted me so strongly I had to pick it up and read it again the very next day, just to cope), but "Two Men" kind of slid right by. Yet to hear author Salvatore Scibona read it was a completely different experience. The voice of this unstable man at the story's center comes alive in Scibona's voice, and I am there, in that night, trying to make sense of a series of unconnected events that are somehow unspeakably connected in the mind of the narrator. I've listened three times, now, and I have to say that my appreciation of "Two Men" gets deeper every time. (And the discussion that takes place after the story is not to be missed.)<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: small;">There's something so impossible about trying to write from a truly unhinged point of view. Someone sane enough to get by in the regular world and not get locked up (much), but still totally crazy, capable of an awfulness and disconnection not <i>normal</i>. Johnson's narrator is neither quirky nor wholly, relentlessly bad. Instead, he just seems like a <i>really fucked-up guy</i>. The kind of guy everyone's run into at a party, or known through friends, or dated. This guy is out there, living his miserable life; I can completely believe that.<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: small;">The narrative of this guy is full of telling sentences whose impact seem to escape him. At the beginning, for example, he tells us </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span style="font-size: small;" xmlns=""><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica;">I had forgotten my friends had come with me, but there they were. Once again I hated the two of them. The three of us had formed a group based on something erroneous, some basic misunderstanding that hadn't yet come to light, and so we kept on in one another's company, going to bars and having conversations. Generally one of these false coalitions died after a day or a day and a half, but this one had lasted more than a year.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><span style="font-size: small;" xmlns=""><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></span></blockquote><span style="font-size: small;" xmlns=""><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica;">Later, when the three friends are trying to dump the drunk guy off at his house, but a woman inside won't open the door, this: </span></span><br />
<blockquote><span style="font-size: small;" xmlns=""><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica;">All of her was invisible except the shadow of her hand on the curtain's border. "If you don't take him off our street I'm calling the police." I was so flooded with yearning I thought it would drown me. Her voice broke off and floated down.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><span style="font-size: small;" xmlns=""><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></span></blockquote><span style="font-size: small;" xmlns=""><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica;">It's as though this person has some kind of deep understanding, an insight into his own condition and into beauty and into suffering—and yet his whole night, and not just the night, but his whole existence, is an utter waste. Pointless errands, meaningless diversions, unconcern for others, a profound resistance to facing the reality of the wife and young son waiting at home for him, needing him—Johnson juxtaposes the narrator's flashes of insight about his cowardly life against the bullheaded reality of his own feckless actions.<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica;">In doing so, he changes his readers' relationship to him. This individual, worthy of disdain at best, becomes someone with whom we have shared an experience—albeit one that disturbs us. It's a little confusing, when examined, which is exactly the point; in the right circumstances, with the right series of wrong choices, any of us could <i>almost</i> be this guy. Even if we're not him, we're implicated in what he does. It's a fantastic psychological trick that Johnson pulls off, to bring us so close to someone so fundamentally repellant. </span></span>Lisa Barrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00826680022810833438noreply@blogger.com0