Speaking of Speaking - #40 – ALSO, LIBRARY MONTH CONTINUES!

STORY:  “I Kiss a Door” by Miranda July

FROM:  NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU (Scribner, 2007)

BASICALLY:  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.

So, I sort of want to hate Miranda July.  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.  Oh sure, oh sure, I’ll drunkenly mutter to myself, it’s *easy* to be published in The Paris Review when you’re already perfect in every way.  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.

They’re called coping strategies, people.

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.  When I heard her talking on a podcast about her writing, I found her intelligent and likeable.  Click on her book link above or head over to her personal site and notice how casual and quirky and charming she manages to be.  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.  Argh, maturity.  I haz it!

“I Kiss a Door” is short and on first glance, feels slight, almost underdeveloped.  It doesn’t branch out from its center.  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.  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.  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.  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.  No, in her own mind, it’s just a Well I’ll be damned kind of moment as she grasps something about Eleanor she never before realized.

In terms of technique, it’s notable that a large percentage of this story takes place through dialogue.  Interestingly, July chooses, in this story as elsewhere, not to mark her dialogue with quotation marks.

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.  Such a little thing, but it makes so much difference.  For me, the effect is what I’d call flattening, though if you ask me to explain that I’ll just stammer and try to change the subject.  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.

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.  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.  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.  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.  Here’s how “I Kiss a Door” opens:

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.

Where did you find that coat?

My father bought it for me.

Really? It’s so cool.

It just arrived this morning.

He picked it out? How did he know how to pick something so cool?

I don’t know.

Notice that, lacking quotation marks or dialogue tags to clarify things, July sticks to back-and-forth dialogue that’s both simple and brief.  No speeches, no ambiguous attributions.  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.  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 Thunderheart came out…”  It would be difficult to mistake these phrases for the narrator’s dialogue.  Quietly and carefully, July works hard to make sure that these shifts don’t annoy or confuse her readers.

And now.

I have absolutely no transition (Miranda July would have thought of a transition…), but hey everyone, it’s Library Month! My father suggests I call “Library Month ±” since, as I have explained, NO ONE has any idea how long it’ll actually last.  Feel free to think of it in mathematical terms!  Meanwhile, I’d like to point your mouse-clicks to some library-related coolness:

• The literary blog MobyLives 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.  And good news, because the librarian profession is no longer in decline, having apparently found its cultural niche.
• Except maybe not.  The Daily Dish highlights the ongoing debate.  Fie!  Librarians are cool.
• In fact, take a look at some photographic evidence of their coolness in a series of gleeful posts over on writer/artist Laini Taylor’s blog.  She’s just returned from her first ALA annual conference and has posted tons of great on-the-town photos and book porn.  Enjoy!

What Isn’t There - #23

STORY: "Who Knows What's Up in the Attic?" by Jean Rhys

FROM: THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES (Norton, 1987)

BASICALLY: An older English woman receives an unexpected visit from a handsome Dutch acquaintance and for a little while, feels something like hope. Then the relationship breaks apart--or she sees it for what it really is--and the world closes in on her again. Like most Rhys stories, the whole thing is subtle, despairing, and at least partially autobiographical.

If you are the kind of person who wants her characters described and their motivations explained and the action to be grandiose, then Jean Rhys is not for you. As for me, I think she's marvelous. (And if you're a writer, you should read her anyway, just to see how she does what she does.)

Subtlety is Rhys's game. She wields spare dialogue to create emotional flux, but she never spells anything out. In this exchange, for example, the unnamed female protagonist is getting to know a slight acquaintance, a Dutchman named Jan, who has come for an unexpected visit. 

"You know," he said, "I admire my uncle. When I was quite a little boy and my mother died he really brought me up. That was in Indonesia. My father is an artist. I have some pictures of his that I like very much and I like him. But he is too – too soft. That is not a good thing."

"I suppose not."

"My uncle is not so." He took a case from his pocket and handed her a small photograph. "That is my uncle."

The uncle looked a bit on the sly side to her.

"I see what you mean," she said.

"And this is my father."

"You are like him."

"Yes I know. And I am fond of him. I feel affection for him but he is not – how do you say – forcible enough."

What actually happens during this dialogue? Not much. On the surface, we learn a little bit about the man from Holland, and that's about it. But there's still a tautness between the short lines that creates tension. The woman tells him he's like his father (or looks like him) just after Jan disparages his father as "soft." She thinks of the uncle as looking "sly," a highly specific term that nonetheless has a certain ambiguity—but she doesn't say anything about her thoughts to Jan. Ideas are being presented, displayed, admired; Jan and the protagonist are engaged in some kind of dance. And then a little later, this: 

At the door he turned. "We recognized each other, didn't we?"

She didn't answer. She thought: yes, I recognized you almost at once. But I never imagined that you recognized me.

The consciousness Rhys creates is composed almost entirely of incompletion, of things asserted only in thought or only in speech but never in both—always there's a silent gulf between the two. It is only natural, then, that the characters in Rhys's story should also break apart as they become aware of the divide that looms between them.

A Surge of Something Fine - #22

STORY: "'A Death in The Desert'" - If you want to read this story, friends, google it …Also, I don't know what the deal is with the quotes. In my book, this story has quotation marks around it, as though the title is an allusion or quotation. I like to be accurate about these things.

FROM: THE TROLL GARDEN (Signet, 1961, originally pub. 1905)

BASICALLY: A man who is continually mistaken for his famous composer brother chances upon one of the brother's former students, dying of tuberculosis in the Wyoming desert. He'd been in love with her himself when he was young--though like everyone else, she sees in him only his resemblance to his brother. But she needs him, precisely for this resemblance, and so he stays.

I'm having a little trouble getting started on this Willa Cather story. A part of me doesn't seem to want to analyze it. Don't know why, exactly. Maybe because while it's odd and flawed, there's also something thrilling and great running around inside of it. Maybe something fragile. Cather herself didn't care for "'Death in the Desert'"—in a letter, she referred to it as "such a weak story!". Which is true. But it's not bad in the same way it would be in the hands of a lesser author. If I poke at it too much, will I still be able to like it?

The story is built around a simple coincidence: Everett Hilgarde alights from a four-hours-late train in Cheyenne and happens to be spotted by a woman in a phaeton at the crossing of the tracks. That woman happens to be Katharine Gaylord, a former student of Everett's brother Adriance and, before her devastating illness, successful in her own right as a singer (mainly thanks to her sheer determination). So, that's a thing—random coincidence is kind of a weak foundation. But it only bothered me a little.

Adriance, the renowned composer brother, possesses a magnetic, charismatic, mercurial personality that draws admiration and love to him everywhere he goes. A pretty believable characteristic, maybe a bit dramatic. In a piece of fantastically overwrought dialogue (which I kind of like anyway), Everett explains to Katharine that 

People were naturally always fonder of Ad than of me, and I used to feel the chill of reflected light pretty often. It came into even my relations with my mother…She did her whole duty by each of us, but it was sort of generally understood among us that she'd have made burnt offerings of us all for Ad any day. I was a little fellow then, and when she sat alone on the porch in the summer dusk she used sometimes to call me to her and turn my face up in the light that streamed out through the shutters and kiss me, and then I always knew she was thinking of Adriance. 

 "I used to feel the chill of reflected light pretty often"? Come on. Even the most wonderful, gifted, sensitive person doesn't utter sentences like that. Not even in 1905.

In this vein, there are lots of speeches that go on forever and convey huge chunks of backstory. Katharine's brother, for example, appears only to ask for a visit from Everett on her behalf and to explain her psychology and history and prognosis in succinct and eloquent detail.

Okay. Yes. But. Despite the clunky placement and clunkier emotions, several of those speeches did actually make me interested in the characters Cather was trying to interest me in. (That is a Pretty Big Deal, authorial abilities-wise. Think about it. Even though elements of the story grated, the story itself drew me in and kept me hooked, so I kept reading. And we're not talking about a story with lots of distracting action.) I was glad that Katharine's brother explains so much about her character, because it happens to be interesting. Later, Katharine reminisces about her time with Adriance with the same thoroughness, but it's actually very lovely in parts, and heartfelt, and the whole thing is so dramatic but I just sort of floated along, enjoying the heightened-yet-authentic triangulation of emotions between Katharine and Everett and the absent Adriance.

And Cather, even in this early story, puts her sentences together in such a measured but energetic way. You feel them as you follow them. At first, I thought the sentences themselves were gorgeous, but actually they're not always anything special on their own. It's the flow, the way the sentences surge and move even as they're describing emotional states or physical traits. Here's an example, and it's what I'll leave you with. It's such passionate writing that maybe it almost borders on purple prose occasionally (though in other places it's restrained), but I like it a lot.  It's a great reminder, I think, that even with all the dismantling of texts that goes on around here at the Year of One Hundred Stories blog, the thing that really matters is the writer's ability to evoke feeling in a reader.

The question which most perplexed him was, "How much shall I know? How much does she wish me to know?" A few days after his first meeting with Katharine Gaylord, he had cabled his brother to write her. He had merely said that she was mortally ill; he could depend on Adriance to say the right thing--that was a part of his gift. Adriance always said not only the right thing, but the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing. His phrases took the color of the moment and the then-present condition, so that they never savored of perfunctory compliment or frequent usage. He always caught the lyric essence of the moment, the poetic suggestion of every situation. Moreover, he usually did the right thing, the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing--except, when he did very cruel things--bent upon making people happy when their existence touched his, just as he insisted that his material environment should be beautiful; lavishing upon those near him all the warmth and radiance of his rich nature, all the homage of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were no longer near, forgetting--for that also was a part of Adriance's gift.

The Robot Mystery Hour! - #11

STORY: "Catch That Rabbit" by Isaac Asimov

FROM: THE COMPLETE ROBOT (Granada, 1982)

BASICALLY: From their outpost on an ore-rich asteroid, two guys working for US Robots had better figure out why the team of mining robots they're testing keeps returning empty-handed. JOBS are at STAKE.

I would now quite delightedly like to present you, dear Reader, with a story about ROBOTS. Cool, right? (YES. The answer is YES. Robots are cool.) I've never read an Asimov novel, but his short stories, with their rules and their scientists and their "Dammit, Jim!"-style ejaculations just delight me. But the whys and wherefores of this phenomenon are elusive. Everyone knows Asimov is basically a hack. I read real literature, you know. I know what's good, and, spoiler, it's not Asimov. So what on earth explains this affinity?

It's not the characterization or the dialogue. One of the guys in "Catch That Rabbit" is named Mike Donovan and the other is Gregory Powell. (Ho-hum.) The narrator (limited third-person) refers to each one by his last name, while the characters refer to each other by their first names. Combine this with the fact that, although one is apparently the disdainful supervisor of the other, they talk and act and think in almost identical ways, and then add a distinct paucity of dialogue tags—and basically I had very little idea of who was actually talking at any given point. But Asimov doesn't use conversation to tell you anything about the characters, silly goose. Characters serve to verbalize the competing sides of a given conflict. A problem is volleyed back and forth in a series of exchanges, thus communicating the precise nature of the issue to the reader and hashing out the rules which happen to govern it.

Aloud he said, "You're as lucid as Euclid with everything except the facts. You've watched that robot group for three shifts, you redhead, and they did their work perfectly. You said so yourself. What else can we do?"

"Find out what's wrong, that's what we can do. So they did work perfectly when I watched them. But on three different occasions when I didn't watch them, they didn't bring in any ore. They didn't even come back on schedule. I had to go after them.

"And was anything wrong?"

"Not a thing. Not a thing. Everything was perfect. Smooth and perfect as the luminiferous ether. Only one little insignificant detail disturbed me – there was no ore."

Oh, and check out the pointless sarcasm! It's a classic, really. A reliable go-to. If you want your characters to seem clever, but you wouldn't know clever if it hit you over the head, just have them exchange sarcastic barbs. Now, obviously, I'm a big fan of sarcasm (helloooo, are you reading this?), but when it's coming out of a character's mouth, it really ought to give you a better idea of who that character is, and it especially ought to distinguish one character from another. In Asimov's fumbly mitts, it does neither.

It's not the plot, either. I mean, there are Asimov plots that are more interesting than this one, which has the emotional resonance of an accountant being unable to get her copy of Quickbooks to load, but the main issue is that for Asimov, plot construction seems to involve going down a checklist. Problem – new-model ore-mining robots won't mine ore – check. Stakes/Motivation/Ticking Clock – if engineers can't get the robots to pass performance tests, they'll lose their jobs – check. Complication – problem only happens when no one is watching, and the robots themselves have no helpful information – check. Asimov sets them up and knocks them down with a completely transparent consistency. This story was written pretty early in Asimov's career, and he got better with age, but I can still never get away from the feeling that Asimov approached writing a story like constructing an electric circuit—as a fundamentally mechanical undertaking that allows for some creativity and reshuffling within a very strict set of known parameters.

It all sounds like a big mess, right? So why do I even like this crap? (But come on, I'm being coy. I don't just like Asimov's robot short stories, I adore them.) The reasons aren't always logical or widely-applicable, but hey, they are my reasons:

1. Technical gobbledygook YUM!
Asimov often populates his stories with people who not only interact with robots, but who actually understand how they work. Here it's engineers, elsewhere it's roboticists, and sometimes it's just suspiciously tech-savvy plebians. These people always have a mouthful to say about how robots are designed and constructed and why they do what they do. Either Mike or Greg, for example, it really doesn't matter which, says,

"Don't rush me. Let me work this out. There's still the possibility of a mechanical breakdown in the body. That leaves about fifteen hundred condensers, twenty thousand individual electric circuits, five hundred vacuum cells, a thousand relays, and upty-ump thousand other individual pieces of complexity that can be wrong. And these mysterious positronic fields no one knows anything about."

This story was first published in 1944. Lots of Asimov's jargon has an absolutely delicious retro-futuristic vibe to it, combining vacuum tubes with "the Multivac-complex" with a "definite mathematical relationship that governs such things and failure to conform would indicate marked abnormality in the positronic brain" across all his stories. And what's so interesting to me is that it doesn't matter when the vocabulary becomes outdated, because language like this functions essentially as a magical incantation. What's important is not what the words themselves say, but the power they have to invoke the particularly non-human mindset of manmade non-men.

2. Delirious, irrational confidence. This is harder to pin down to any one thing. Asimov just seems so sure of himself. His stories are replete with mediocre technique and uninspiring prose, but they have a relentless forward momentum. You always know that he's going somewhere with all of this, and so you overlook the imperfections. I'll take Asimov's verve and nerve over artful, poetic prose that fails to tell me something worth knowing, any day.

3. ROBOTS. Hells yeah! Robots are just the best. Doesn't everybody feel this way about them? If not, they should. Robots are the great, mysterious Other onto which we project our own fears and dreams. They are the technology that seemed right around the corner, about to change everything, on the very cusp of bringing humanity into the glittering future, and yet somehow they remain out of our grasp. Even with all the really cool advances being made in robotics, they remain at their heart a fantasy. Isaac Asimov's robot stories are all about humanity's ragged edges, our trembling grasp on what it means to live in a disheveled clockwork universe.



And now, enjoy some robots dancing.

T4 idents from double g studios on Vimeo.