Monthly Archives: October 2008

the last day of October

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“The weather was unusually warm for the last day of October.  We didn’t even need jackets.  The wind was growing stronger, and Jem said it might be raining before we got home.  There was no moon.”  To Kill A Mockingbird  by Harper Lee

I read it in school.  I read it again in June of 2006.  I just finished listening to it on CD read by Sissy Spacek.  I think Sissy Spacek is Scout.  I cannot recommend it highly enough.  I listened to it in my car, and on more than one occasion, I would sit there listening even after arriving at my destination.  It is that good.  Listening to it made me want to read it again.

family history

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Dani Shapiro is one of my all-time favorite writers.  She knows how to tell a story–how to slowly release details in order to build tension and lure the reader forward. The first book of hers I read was Family History, published in 2003, but which I did not discover until October of 2005.

How does a writer know what to start with?  When to reveal a detail?  What is just enough to keep a reader interested but not so much that the reader has no place in the process?

It begins:

“I lie in bed these days and watch home movies–a useless exercise, to be sure, but I can’t stop myself.  Ned’s an amateur filmmaker, and ever since we got our first video camera when Kate was born, he has documented our family’s life, not just birthday parties and anniversaries but smaller, more telling moments.

I recommend all her books.

  • Playing With Fire, 1989
  • Fugitive Blue, 1993
  • Picturing the Wreck, 1996
  • Slow Motion, 1998
  • Family History, 2003
  • Black & White, 2007

circularity

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The Lucky Ones is Rachel Cusk’s fifth book. 

In it, there is a Contents page, which announces five sections.  Each section stands by itself.  There is a passing reference in each section to at least one character in another section.  With a lovely circularity, the last section ends with, I believe, the only reference to the main character in the first section.

A wonderful collection of linked stories.  But the book, on its cover, calls itself a novel.   Again, I don’t think so. 

Still, the author’s writing throughout is even better in this book than her last.  The final section of The Lucky Ones is my favorite.  In it, she goes into that depth of truthfulness that characterizes a work of substance.

“You’re doing well for yourself,” said Vanessa sourly.

“And all that happened,” mused Serena, “was that I finally worked out that people prefer what’s true to what’s right. 

She writes about shaping a day:  “It seemed to Vanessa that she should do something to please Colin on his return from work, and this ambition immediately rose like a great spire from the humble structure of the day.”

Finally, perhaps my favorite paragraph:

“It was in the mornings that Vanessa most often suspected the existence of a problem.  In the rumpled dawn camouflage of her bed she would open her eyes and think of the coming day and sometimes, just as when sometimes she turned the key in the ignition of her old Honda, nothing would happen.  She lay there, paralyzed by the image of what she had both to construct and then to dismantle before being returned to this same bed, like a book being returned to its shelf, intact and yet somehow depleted of her information.”

a day in the woods

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Today, Sunday, October 26th, I’m walking.  It’s a day in the woods.  An autumn ritual (because of spring snakes).  A 23-mile hike, which last year took 11 hours.  We choose the date by trying to maximize the chance of cool weather with enough daylight hours.  This is tricky.  Already we’re down to less than 12 hours.  Sunrise in Georgia these days is around 7:45 and sunset, 7:00.  And we’re a year older.  We’re taking flashlights.

We do it to prove we can.  We do it to get away from it all.  We do it to work on staying in the moment–to try to make it about the journey and not about being finished.  As you might imagine, around mile 18, this becomes very difficult.

So think of us as you go about your day…

I was walking again

in the woods,

a yellow light

was sifting all I saw.

 

from Changing Everything by Jane Hirshfield

The Lives of the Heart

 

out of her head

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Pam Houston is one of my all-time favorite writers.  She is a master at getting it out of her head and onto the page.  Take for example this bit of dialogue from her novel, Sight Hound:

“You know,” she said, “I’m not going to be one of those girls who plays hard to get, because first, I’m too old for it, and second, I am hard to get, if simply by virtue of my schedule.  I don’t have time for the peek-a-boo part of a relationship, and if you could see how empty my expectation bucket is at present you would be truly amazed.”

She is also the master of the real.  This paragraph is from her story, “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had,” one of The Best American Short Stories of the Century.

“Leo grew up like I did on the East Coast, eating Birds Eye frozen vegetables and Swanson’s deep-dish meat pies on TV trays next to our parents and their third martinis, watching What’s My Line and To Tell the Truth on television and talking about anything on earth except what was wrong.”

She is the also the master of the metaphor.  This paragraph, from the same story.

“There was a man there named Josh who didn’t want nearly enough from me, and a woman called Thea who wanted way too much, and I was sandwiched between them, one of those weaker rock layers like limestone that disappears under pressure or turns into something shapeles like oil.”

Running through these excerpts and all her writing is the truth.

word-smitten

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Charles Frazier‘s second book,Thirteen Moons, is narrated by Will Cooper, who has a friend named Bear, a Cherokee Indian chief. 

“I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form.  Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath.  Smothered it.  Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected.  Everything that happens is fluid, changeable.  After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time.  Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall.  Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing….Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final.”

Bear is objecting to the loss Mark Doty was writing about that occurs when we leave the physical world for the world of words. 

Bear would be against catching days, would say that we remember only what we remember for a reason.  And that we should let memory and time play with the facts.  Bear would say, let it go.

I agree that the way memory works is fascinating, but the fascination comes from the variance with the truth.  To be able to see the variance, we must know the truth.  So I tend to side with Will over Bear. 

He says, “…I was always word-smitten.  Always reading in a book or writing in a journal.”

the kitten

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marry tale #2:  the kitten

 

Once upon a time there was a man and a woman, who decided to become the husband and the wife.  They were very new at being the husband and the wife and had no skills at it.  And so they had a problem.  They weren’t quite sure how to handle it, but they didn’t want to resort to the so-called wisdom of their elders.  Clearly it had not served them well. 

When they had the same problem again, the wife said, “let’s call it the kitten.”

The next time they had the problem, the husband said, “We’re having the kitten again.”

“Okay,” the wife said.  “If we don’t change something, we’re going to keep having the kitten.”

“We should have a plan about what we’re going to do when we have the kitten.”

“That’s two different things.”

“I see your point.”

“Actually,” the wife said, “it’s two different ways to handle the problem of the kitten.  One is to try to prevent the kitten; the other is what to do if we fail to prevent the kitten.”

“We work so well together.”

“As to point number one, it seems like we have the kitten when we are tired.”

“I agree.”

“So, I suggest that if one of us is tired, he or she hangs a tired card on the door between as soon as he or she gets home from work.”

“If a card is up, we won’t talk to each other.  We can just wave hello.”

“It’s brilliant,” the husband said.

“As to point number two, which would occur if the aforementioned plan fails, whoever sees the kitten first, stops talking and goes to hang a kitten card on the door between.”

“Brilliant,” the husband said again.

And so they lived together ever after.

 

what’s in a novel

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"...by any other name would smell as sweet"

"...by any other name would smell as sweet"

In a 1921 New York Times article entitled, “What is a Novel, Anyhow?”, Henry Kitchell Webster, writes “A novel is defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as a fictitious prose narrative of sufficient length to fill one or more volumes.  Well, do you know, that is just about what I thought it was.”

Michael Ondaatje calls Divisadero, published in 2007, a novel.  The book is divided into three narratives.  The writing is beautiful.  As a novel, though, I found it unsatisfying.  I wonder if this dissatisfaction goes to my expectation (founded or unfounded) of what a novel is.  But I’m not the only one who had issues with the form.

Erica Wagner, the literary editor of The Times of London, wrote in a New York Times article, “’Divisadero’ is a series of narratives that calls itself, perhaps for convenience’ sake, a novel. I’m not sure that it is, in fact, a novel; but then I wouldn’t be happy calling it a book of linked stories, either. Ondaatje is a writer who likes to blur form….He is a poet as much as (or even more than) he is a novelist, and the crosscurrents of his writing flow and ripple against each other as poems might. Sequences of images set themselves out in their individual beauty and lucidity; sometimes how they fit into the whole is almost beside the point.

I have to disagree with her last sentence.  I’m not sure that if a book is going to call itself a novel, that how the parts fit together can be beside the point.  For an excellent and succinct review of Divisadero that puts the form issue in perspective, take a look at “‘Divisadero’: Where narrative splinters.

In an audio NPR interview on June 2, 2007 (worth listening to just to hear the author’s voice), the first question to Michael Ondaatje  was “What makes this a novel?”  His answer was that each section by itself was unfinished, that the only way he knew to finish the first story was by another story.  He does admit that it is an “odd structure.”

A better approach would, perhaps, have been the one recently taken by Elizabeth Strout.  The cover of her book Olive Kitteridge merely says fiction, leaving it to the reader to ascertain the form of the work.

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collaboration and commitment

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The Oxford American Dictionary defines collaboration as

“working jointly, especially in a literary or artistic production.”

It defines commitment as

“the process or an instance of committing oneself.”

And committing as

“pledging or binding oneself to a certain course”

Something different for today–a movie. 

This summer one of my sons, Bobby Martin, was in Paris taking a film class.  I had the opportunity to collaborate with him on a short film.  I had the easy part–throwing out ideas.  He had the hard part–doing all the work.  He selected the music and mapped the scenes.  He did the filming and the editing.  Nevertheless, he graciously added my name to the credits.   The film is two minutes and forty seconds.  Turn up the volume and enjoy.

 

wordable awareness

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In his memoir, Dog Years, the poet Mark Doty writes, “only part of our reality is representable in words.  I feel immersed in things I can’t name most of the time.”

Still, he is a poet and a writer.  He spends his life fighting against the unnameable.  Despite our efforts, he says “something is always escaping.”

We search for the right word.  We know it’s there.  We attribute its lack to ourselves, not to its inexistence.   Most of the time we are right.

“We suffer a loss,” he writes, “leaving the physical world for the world of words….”

Think of the sensation of a rough surface on the tip of a finger –the goal is to feel it again reading those words.  The words by their nature come second–a step removed.

Despite the loss, he says our attempt to exist in the world of words gives us “our personhood.”

Don DeLillo, in Falling Man writes, “She knew there was something she’d wanted to say all along and it finally seeped into wordable awareness.”

 

September 30, 2008 Columbus, Georgia

This is what we want–wordable awareness.

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all one thing

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Tim O’Brien, in The Things They Carried:

“It’s now 1990.  I’m forty-three years old, which would’ve seemed impossible to a fourth grader, and yet when I look at photographs of myself as I was in 1956, I realize that in the important ways I haven’t changed at all.  I was Timmy then; now I’m Tim.  But the essence remains the same.  I’m not fooled by the baggy pants or the crew cut or the happy smile–I know my own eyes–and there is no doubt that the Timmy smiling at the camera is the Tim I am now.  Inside the body, or beyond the body, there is something absolute and unchanging.  The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice:  a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow.”

The line made by a blade on ice is the wick Mary Gordon was writing about.  Small loops, large loops, off-centered loops–it’s all the same line.  All the same life.  Looking back at pictures, sometimes we can see the same eyes or the same smile.  My grandmother in her eighties said she still felt like she was sixteen–until she tried to do something. 

What was there in fourth grade or at sixteen that’s still there now? 

Sometimes we have to look at the pictures, spread them out in a line, to prove it to ourselves. 

That was me.  That is me.

 

 

one story

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My favorite journal is One Story.  That’s what it is.  One story.  At a time.  Brilliant.  Every three weeks, one story arrives in my mailbox.  I always keep a story in my purse.  Or my pocket.  I’m never without something to read.  One Story is the brainchild of Hannah Tiniti and Maribeth Batcha.  The first story was published April 1, 2002.  I just received Story #109.  They publish each author only one time.  They also post an interview with each author on their website.

Some other great short stories I’ve read this year (all available online!): 

a place for storing years

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On my list of top ten all-time favorite books is a book I read in 2000, The Half-Life of Happiness by John Casey.  It’s a novel about a marriage and a family, but I haven’t read it since then and can no longer remember any specifics.  My yellow highlights, which I’ve since given up in favor of whatever pen or pencil I can find at the moment, have faded, almost to the color of the yellowed pages of the novel.  2000 doesn’t seem that long ago, and yet if you think of yourself as being eight years older….

I’ve never read anything else by John Casey, and I’m not sure why.  Checking the internet, it doesn’t appear that he’s had any other books published since 1998, when The Half-Life of Happiness came out.  Spartina, published in 1989, won the National Book Award for that year.  Testimony and Demeanor was originally published in 1979 and reissued in 2005.

“Garden tools, canoe paddles and fishing gear, their daughters’ toys and sports equipment, Joss’ movie gear…the girls’ wardrobes….All these things spilled from closets and racks and chests so that the whole house was a series of partly assembled kits for family happiness.  The house, like their marriage, was a place for storing years that weren’t ever quite what was planned but which he believed might still be made whole by someone turning up with the missing piece.”

The Half-Life of Happiness is going to the top of my reread pile.

time going round in circles

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Rachel Cusk‘s fourth book is a memoir, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother.  My favorite line, because of the unwritten premise, comes in the Introduction, where she writes, “…so it would be a contradiction to write a book about motherhood without explaining to some degree how I found the time to write it.” 

The answer is that her partner quit his job to take care of the children “while Rachel writes her book about looking after the children.”

In the author’s words, this book “describes a period in which time seemed to go round in circles rather than in any chronological order.”  Very quickly, the baby develops colic.  Surely, Cusk writes, there is a better word for this, some sort of German word meaning lifegrief. 

At the end of three months:  “I see that she has become somebody.  I realize, too, that the crying has stopped, that she has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself.  And she has wrought me, too, because although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence.”

My only quarrel with the memoir is that perhaps a better title would have been simply On Becoming a Mother, as these pages are limited to the initial weeks and months after the baby is born, to this transition time of becoming a mother, which the author so clearly does. 

A book to read before you get pregnant, as well as afterwards (if you can stay awake long enough to read.)  And don’t forget Anne Lamott‘s, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year.  Two books that speak the truth.

If anyone is waiting for the house-building analogy, she’s painting and carpeting….Next up, The Lucky Ones.

a gathering place

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On NPR, on September 20th, I heard David Sedaris say that he was no different than anyone else except that he kept a notebook in his pocket.  He noticed and he recorded.  In the May 8, 2006 issue of the New Yorker, he wrote:  “For the past ten years or so, I’ve made it a habit to carry a small notebook in my front pocket. The model I favor is called the Europa, and I pull it out an average of ten times a day, jotting down grocery lists, observations, and little thoughts on how to make money, or torment people.”

In Writing Toward Home, Georgia Heard writes, “A notebook is a gathering place, a portfolio of thoughts and fragments…What moves me to write one thing and not another is the point…My notebook is a constant weight in my already-too-heavy black bag…Its presence always reminds me I’m a writer, and it helps me live a considered life that doesn’t spin by focused only on groceries, dinner, and car repairs.”

This is a gathering place.  Where reading and writing and life come together.  Words from the notebook I keep in my purse linked to a favorite passage or book…Looking up from a passage and attaching it to a moment… Writing here makes me more aware of all three.  Why is it we write one thing and not another?

Is a day full of breakfasts and pants left on the floor and haircuts so thin that it slips through the net, impossible to catch?  One way to find meaning is to notice.  Another to record.  I should let the groceries and the haircuts fall through but take the time to fatten up at least one moment so that it has enough meaning to catch.  I can swell an hour with the thoughts of someone who lived a lifetime ago.  Take a minute to see the red leaf that wasn’t there yesterday.  Pause a second with the white tail of a deer as he jumps the hedge.

Dillard writes that we should “labor with both hands at sections of time.”  Some days it takes both hands.

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light years

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“Life is weather.  Life is meals. Lunches on a blue checked cloth on which salt has spilled.

The smell of tobacco.  Brie, yellow apples, wood-handled knives.”

James Salter, in one of my all-time favorite books, Light Years.

I met James Salter in Portland in July of 2004, and I asked him why he didn’t write another book on marriage.  Referring to Light Years, he said, “Doesn’t this say it all?”

It is one of my favorite books.  I’ve read it three times.  What he says he says brilliantly and poetically.  But I believe there’s more to say.

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the doors between

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marry tale #1:  the doors between

 

Once upon a time there was a man and a woman, who decided to become the husband and the wife.  They wanted to be sensible.  They wanted to continue to respect each other.  Each wanted to preserve his and her privacy. They weren’t quite sure how to do this, and they didn’t want to resort to the so-called wisdom of their elders.  Clearly it had not served the elders well.  The husband and the wife wanted to reinvent the world of marriage. 

“What would really be nice,” she said, “would be to have adjoining rooms, like in a hotel, where we each have a door between us.  If we want to see each other, we can just open our door.”

“Sometimes I might have my door shut, but yours would be open.  Sometimes you might have your door shut, but mine would be open.”

“Sometimes they might both be shut.”

“And when they’re both open, we want to be together,” he said.

“It’s brilliant.”

“We should buy a duplex and set it up that way.”

“Brilliant,” she said.

And so they did.

 

One night the husband was missing the wife.  He went to open his door, but hers was shut.  He left his door open until he went to sleep.

The next morning the wife was missing the husband.  She went to open her door, but his was shut.  She left her door open until she left for work.

And so it went.

Each one was feeling shut out by the other. 

 

After a while, the wife went to knock on the husband’s front door.  “It’s odd, but I don’t think this is working.”

“I agree,” the husband said.

“I have a new plan.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Why don’t we keep the doors between open all the time, unless we really, really need to be by ourselves.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

It turned out that each only needed to shut his or her door between four or five times a year.  They were proud of their creative arrangement. 

And so they lived together ever after.