You got to love Richard Ford. I just finished his book The Lay of the Land and highly recommend it, and the trilogy, of which it is the 3rd part. He punches you in the gullet all the time.

 (You got to love Richard Ford. I just finished his book and highly recommend the trilogy, of which it is the 3rd part. [1-The Sportswriter; 2-Independence Day] He punches you in the gullet all the time. The following are excerpts from The Lay  of the Land, this first one is from toward the end of the book.  It is November 2000, after the Gore vs. Bush presidential election.)



"When I'm turned loose from this current challenge, I am going to sit down and write another letter to the President, which will be a response to his yearly Thanksgiving proclamation--generally full of platitudes and horseshit, and no better than poems written for ceremonial occasions by the Poet Laureate.  This will be the first such letter I've actually sent, and though I know he will not have long to read it and gets letters from lots of people who feel they need to get their views aired, still, by some chance, he might read it and pass along its basic points to his successor, whoever that is (though of course I know--we all do). 

 It will not be a letter about the need for more gun control or the need for supporting the family unit so fourteen-year-olds don't steal cars, own machine pistols and shoot people, or about ending pregnancies, or the need to shore up our borders and tighten immigration laws, or the institution of English as a national language (which I support), but will simply say that I am a citizen of New Jersey, in middle age, with wives and children to my credit, a non-drug user, a non-jogger, without cell-phone service or called ID, a vertically integrated non-Christian who has sponsored the hopes and contexts and dreams of others with no with for credit or personal gain or transcendence, a citizen with a niche, who has his own context, who does not fear permanence and is not in despair, who is in fact a realtor and a pilgrim as much as any.
      


...I'll write that these demographics confer on me not one shred of wisdom but still a strong personal sense of having both less to lose and curiously more at stake.  I will say to the President that it's one thing for me to give up the Forever Concept and take on myself the responsibilities of the Next Level--that life can't be escaped and must be faced entire.  But it's quite another thing for him to do, or his successor.  For them, in fact, it is very unwise and even dangerous.  Indeed, it seems to me that these very positions, positions of public trust they've worked hard to get, require that insofar as they have our interests at heart, they must graduate to the Next Level but never give up the Forever Concept.  ...there is an important difference worth considering between the life span of an individual and the life span of a whole republic."



[p. 466.]

Richard Ford

"Chances are, with the year I've had, I was headed there anyway....When I asked what it was I had to do before I was sixty, maybe it's just to accept my whole life and my whole self in it--to have that chance before it's too late: to try again to achieve what athletes achieve when their minds are clear, their parts in concert, when they're "feeling it," when the ball's as big as the moon and they hit it a mile because that's all they can do. When nothing else is left. The Next Level."

"More tears are falling.  I could laugh through them if I didn't have a potentially self-erasing pain in my chest.  What is it I'm supposed to accept?  That I'm an asshole?  (I confess.)  That I have no heart?  (I don't confess.)  But what would be the hardest thing to say and mean it?  What would be the hardest for others? 

"...and of course, the answer's plain, unless we're actors or bad-check artists or spies, when it's still probably plain but more tolerable: that your life is founded on a lie, and you know what the lie is and won't admit it, maybe can't.  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

"...deep in my heart space a breaking is.  And as in our private moments of sexual longing, when the touch we want is far away, a groan comes out of me.  'Oh-uhhh.'  The sour tidal whoosh the dead man exhales.  'Oh-uhhh.  Oh-uhhh. '  so long have I not accepted, by practicing the quaintness of acceptance by....'Oh-uhhh.  Oh-uhhh.'  Breath-loss clenches my belly into a rope knot, clenching, clenching in.  'Oh, oh, ohhhhhpp.'  Yes, yes and yes. No more no's.  No more no's.  No more no's."

"As I said, acceptance is goddamned scary. I feel its very fearsomeness here in my bed, in my empty house with the storm past and Thanksgiving waiting with the dawn in the east. Be careful what you accept, is my warning--to me. I will if I can."

[All excerpts above from Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land]



Orhan Pamuk Says #6 Can't you sleep? Isn't it too soon to confess the truth? You are not allowed to think about what you did today or what you're going to do tomorrow.

 

 "You've just gone to bed. You're in familiar surroundings, nestling inside sheets and blankets that are steeped in your own smells and memories; your head has found that pocket of softness in the middle of your pillow; you're lying on your side, and as you curl your legs up against your stomach, your forehead tilts forward, and the cold side of the pillow cools your face: soon, very soon, you'll fall asleep and, in the darkness that engulfs you, you'll forget everything--everything.




Photo courtesy of Amanda Ruggeri

 

    

      "You'll forget the...unfinished work...those who've blamed you, those who will blame you, your financial troubles, the rush of time, your loneliness, your shame, your defeats, your wretchedness, your pain, and the catastrophes--in just a few minutes you'll forget them all.

 

     "...Waiting with  you in the darkness, or the half-light, are all those ordinary and oh-so-familiar wardrobes, chests of drawers, radiators, tables, trays, chairs, tightly shut curtains, discarded clothes, and cigarette packs--the matches are in the pocket of that jacket, and next to it is your handbag and your watch--all waiting, waiting.  ...You are ready.

     "You are ready.

     "But still you can't sleep."

 

 

     "If my memory, my powers of imagination, and my bedraggled dreams do not cave in from exhaustion in the course of my long travels, I'll keep on drifting through that gray land between wakefulness and sleep until my eyes light on a place I know...whatever it is, I'll go inside, and after opening every door and searching every room as if the house itself were the lost recesses of my own memory, I'll go into the last room, blow out the candle, stretch out on the bed, and, surrounded by strange and alien objects, fall asleep."

 

 

[Text excerpted from Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book. New York: Vintage International Books, 2006, pp.246-250]

[Photo credits: (1) Siena at Night, Amanda Ruggeri; (2) Orhan Pamuk, Innocence of Objects.]

 



"A great writer reveals himself in his ideas of good and evil as much as in anything." He was the "Master of human smiles and human moan, Passions that ask for bread and find a stone, Hopes hungered into madness..." (John Powys on Thomas Hardy) --John Cowper Powys Championship Page #8

(Having been a fan of Thomas Hardy's novels during and after college, I was doubly delighted when I read this particular chapter, sometime during the 1980s, of Powys' wonderful book Enjoyment of Literature.)

John Cowper Powys

John Cowper Powys on Thomas Hardy...

 

Thomas Hardy in his garden

      "...in the midst of those who aim at creating a glow of sensuous well-being in their readers and of those who aim at distrubring their readers with frightfulness and disgust, the figure of Thomas Hardy stands out clear and distinct as one whose purpose was to capture the simple truth; and to present it, whatever the effect on his readers might be, with the patient taciturnity of the monotones of nature as they refuse to change one note of their grey neutrality under the prayers and imprecations of our troubled race."   

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

   

  "A great writer reveals himself in his ideas of good and evil as much as in anything; ...Hardy's good men are...a mixture of simplicity and sagacity, and they seldom, if ever, surprise us by explosions of morbid nerves or of imaginative weakness.  ....Loyalty, fidelity, simplicity, sagacity, disinterestedness, are the marks of a "good" Hardy character.  And it is the same with Hardy's good women.  Tess is certainly "a good woman," if ever there was one; and what a comfort to feel how the moral sense of the age has advanced since such a "wounded name" as Tess's needed the bosom of a great and daring genius to house it!"



     "What makes Hardy--with Shakespeare--the greatest of our pessimists is that his pessimism isn't a matter of personal nerves or personal misfortune but a matter of indignant sympathy with a suffering world..., the kind of suffering on which he concentrates, is not, though the physical enters also, the misery of hardship and destitution, so much as the emotional tragedies of the heart."

views of Thomas Hardy country in England

[Text from above excerpted from Powys, John Cowper.  Enjoyment of Literature, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1938, pp. 435-450.]

A very good review from Derosaworld.typepad.com on General Mouse

 

A Good Short Story and A Great Short Story: The Professor vs General Mouse

Our college literature professors teach us that a good short story has a strong descriptive narrative about one event or moment in time. There are plenty of Hemingway short stories that can prove that theory.
But occasionally a writer can break that mold and you get Dorothy Parker’s The Big Blonde which seems to capture a novel-sized life in a few pages.
I read two short stories last week that also go for the ‘Hail Mary’ pass in terms of story arc. Roberto Bolano has a story in Harper’s Magazine this month The Ruin of Amalfitano (log-in required) which manages to track the downfall of a writing professor (Amalfitano) once he has met a young writing student named Padillo, as they share a demolition derby ride through life.
The other story is General Mouse, a tour de force written by Mark Zipoli. This story sets out to cover the life of a man who we meet bemoaning the super-sized dietary habits of Americans as he works keeping a Los Angeles Farmers' Market clean of garbage and trash.
The story unravels General Mouse’s amazing personal history overlaid with remembrances of things past from our shared history of Vietnam.
Bolano’s story is the ‘good’ story here, and is as wild as we would except from the author of The Savage Detectives. The highs, lows, sex and drugs of a Bolano story are on display as the trajectory of the professor's life changes after meeting the student who changes everything. It is a richly drawn character study that captures the fallout as the men's passions collide and mix to create a toxic nectar of which both men drink.
It is the scope of the story that is impressive. The reverberations of the friendship of these two men’s lives require Bolano to write of the aftermath of the final parting of Amalfitano and Padillo on the other minor characters in the story. We too, as readers are left changed after sharing the experience of their lives, and we are left wanting to know more.
The ‘great’ story here, is General Mouse, a story different in every way possible from Bolano’s except for the impact and the scope of what it attempts to achieve, a man's life story.
Mr. Zipoli manages to create a complete biography of a very complex, secretive and important person in the short story form, and we are lacking nothing at the end. We have experienced an epic novel.
General Mouse, whose real name is Anh Dung Tran, a 70 year old worker at the Los Angeles Farmers’ Market, empties the overflow of trash and garbage throughout the day passing judgment on the customers as he slips in and out of memories from his past; memories intertwined with the history of his home country.
...Nobody knew that he’d read history in Hanoi and studied at the Sorbonne; that he’d taken courses at Moscow University and learned Russian, English, French, and Chinese; that he read maps and had built bridges and swing traps, and dug tunnels; and launched spiked tree trunks into the air against the French and the Americans.

Nobody knew that he’d helped to make a French regiment disappear without a trace in the forests of Cao Bang province. The French colonialists, they never put their backs into it, he thought; we were just savages to those heirs of Voltaire and Danton...

All the revolutionary promises, betrayals and failures experienced by the East vs West satellite nations of the Cold War are played out in the mind, minefields and on the back of Anh Dung Tran.

The writing is truly mesmerizing as we are swept through a biographical, psychological and historical journey of General Mouse.

Tran's present and past, haunt the Farmers’ Market. This is truly a great American short Story.

Mark Zipoli is the author the novel The Long Habit of Living as well as other short stories. Please look him up, he may not be as easy to find as the ghost of Roberto Bolano, but his work is rich in texture and nuance of character. Mr. Zipoli is an author who lets you into the minds of his characters and what they share with the reader is worth volumes.

Review courtesy of http://derosaworld.typepad.com

 

Orhan Pamuk says #5 "The museums I visited in my childhood were joyless places infused with the atmosphere of a government office."

"The museums I visited in my childhood were joyless places infused with the atmosphere of a government office."

[So says Orhan Pamuk in the latest issue of Newsweek Magazine]

"Nevertheless, we still knew exactly what we were supposed to feel: respect for that thing known as “national history”; fear of the power of the state; and a humility that overshadowed our own individualities."

[Check out the full article at Newsweek Magazine here.

All photographs are courtesy of and copyrighted by Newsweek Magazine.]

Page 171 - At the corner of Seventh Avenue, ...I found myself approaching the stands of an all-night vegetable store, ...and spotted Sarah.

From the novel, page 171.

Chapter IX

At the corner of Seventh Avenue, above the entrance to the train station, a path I’d taken repeatedly so as to accomplish it blind-folded, I found myself approaching the stands of an all-night vegetable store, which I hadn’t noticed repeatedly, and spotted Sarah.

She was touching and handling various pieces of fruit before placing them into a basket, which she held close to her side.  She'd looked to me to be quite serene, pleased to be by herself, which she often was but wasn't often pleased by it.  She wore her day clothes, a bicolor dress of rose and gray, a continuum of her thirst for muted shades.

Photo courtesy of Mesut Ilgim
http://www.trekearth.com/members/mesutilgim/

I'd walked past the apples and the out-of-season melons and pushed through the hanging strips of plastic that kept the store's temperature moderately warm and which eliminated the need for formal portals and doors.  I'd walked up to her and stood at her side.

    "Playing the West Side homemaker?" I asked her.  I was happy to discover Sarah when she least expected me.
    "Don't step on that melon.  It's mine," she said.  "Where are you coming from?  Or will I be sorry for asking?"

(later on...as Walter and Sarah are walking home...)

We'd veered off the sidewalk. Sarah went into a small grocery store which was ready to close for the night. I'd inched my way closer to the store's front window, in order to see what Sarah was up to. A woman within came over to the window, untied a thin, nylon rope and let down a set of venetian blinds that cut off my visibility. She'd left me standing there, looking at nothing. I'd turned and stepped back onto the sidewalk and waited for Sarah. She'd emerged into the night with an open package of chocolate cookies.
   "These cookies are exactly like the kind my mother used to make," she cried, almost the epitome of cliché.
   "Are you hungry?" I asked her, resuming our journey homeward.
   "No," she replied. "I just wanted them. I love these cookies. But don't tell anybody about this; I'm not supposed to eat these anymore. I've become allergic to chocolate. Don't tell anyone I bought them." By which she meant don't tell Owen.
   "It's the memory, Walt," she cupped the package against her. "It's just the memory."

[My friend Theresa has an almost Upanishadic reverence for cookies, although cake is a wonderful thing, too...  Her love for her mother and the kinds of things her mother used to do, like cook and bake and play the piano, that brought great waves of comfort to Theresa, not only as a little girl but as a young woman as well, was/is inspiring to me.  I wanted to make Walter and Sarah secret sharers in their own right, and of course incorporate the value of memory as the glue which binds them:  And so I took something from Theresa's and my past, a simple visit to a Korean greengrocer and a stop at a small market.  Memory is oftentimes, in my household, one of the prized glories of the garden, the charm that holds friendships together, holds personalities together, even when the memory is "as heavy as a mountain."]

Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night - one of many excellent short stories by Barry Hannah.

There was a family in St. Louis I lived with, sleeping with their divorced mother.  ...The daughter, every day on the backseat of the car as she was taken to school, said, demanding: “Turn on the radio, please.”  The please just an irony in her mouth, in a flat, mean voice.  The mother obliged as if hypnotized, never pausing to find that rock-and-roll button for the brat.  One day I couldn’t bear it any longer, but when she was out of the car to school I did not attack.  Rather I started weeping because of the sadness of being around this hugely indulged vixen, and I knew love would die soon because I couldn’t stand the home life that made her possible.*

*[Excerpted from "Through Sunset into the Raccoon Night," in High Lonesome, by Barry Hannah.]

I finished the book yesterday and thought I should put it out "there" because Hannah is such a good writer, and he can make you laugh as well as push your head through a wall.  Sometimes we need that.

Here's another...

She came out into the driveway wailing as I’ve never heard a white person wail.  But you see a whole tree go over like that, and your grip on the universe goes.  A small mob of slackers came down the block and stood around the big tree over the Mercedes.  They grinned, sort of worshipping the event.  But the woods running down a hill to the east went into an exploding mutual collapse too much like the end of the world, and everyone fled back inside.

           All these old trees were like family in the act of dying; their agony was more terrible than the storm itself.  We had been confident, even arrogant, with them around us, I realized.  They’d been comforting brothers and sisters.  Now the town was suddenly half as tall.**

**["The Ice Storm," from High Lonesome, by Barry Hannah.]