YEARS OF BASS

Dreams of Distant Lives – Lee K. Abbott

2012-01-09T05:56:00.002-05:00

I don’t have the ability to articulate exactly what it is about an author’s writing style which causes me to be attracted to them.

I wonder if it is the subtle foundations they build their story upon. The length of their sentences, the breaths between thoughts - paragraph breaks. These three “things” come immediately to mind. Does that even make sense? Are they really “things”? I don’t even know the right word to describe what they are!

This story made my heart hurt.

It touched nerves in me…perhaps a few raw nerves that I didn’t even know were exposed. This frightens me.

I felt stillness and chaos. This frightened me.

I felt as if I was standing on the edge of my reality, just ready to slip into an altered state…which would become my new normal state…and this frightened me.

This story pulled me into my dreams – my awful dreams – not the dreams that appear at night as I sleep – those are actually very pleasant. The dreams I have during my waking hours are the dreams I am the most afraid of. They are rooted firmly in some aspects of my reality and because of this…they are they most scary. And this is why as I read Abbott’s words, I had a heart ache.

And to push me even further – the narrator of this little short is …39. Yup. How old am I again? Yup. 39.

“My inner life, the world constructed from what I’d been and done, was speaking to me, patiently and calmly. I would hear what it had to say, and I would understand. And so I came to myself, observed the man I am now walk forward to the man I was then and take him, as a father takes his children, into his arms. The one held the other – the future cradling the present- and the one who had been left, the one whose interior hooks and hasps and snaps had come undone, gave himself up utterly. They were both there, in dreamland, under heaven and over hell, two versions of the same man, clasped in an embrace that would end when the world came up again.”

That’s so beautiful…and perfect – for me.

Circle of Prayer – Alice Munro

2012-01-09T05:53:00.001-05:00

This was an unfortunate story to have to read over several sittings. I tried…I really did. I looked for assistance online – and I even made efforts to really slow down the pace of my reading in an attempt to digest this story a bit better. I found it difficult to follow and there was nothing that I could really pull from it.

There it is.

The Lie Detector – Madison Smartt Bell

2012-01-09T05:51:00.000-05:00

Standing in the shower on morning back in 2008, the idea came to me to start this blog/project. One of many the reasons why I decided to take on this project was that I felt through the stories contained within these anthologies a jumping point for reflection and problem solving might be presented. A sentence, a character a theme of a story could send me down paths of exploration that would help me understand my past…or help me with problems I may be going through. The stories could be tools to open my thoughts and feelings. As an added benefit, I’d get a bit of an education - along the way, I’d be exposed some really cool authors. It’s 2012 and in a few months I’ll be into my fourth year in this space. I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say about my progress at that anniversary date.

Now let’s push forward and see what this next batch of stories brings.

I wrote the above because this particular story triggered a memory of mine dealing with apartments, shady landlords, lack of money and a lack of direction in my life.

I think it was the spring of 1996…or was it early summer? Thankfully, my mind has done a pretty decent job of erasing some unpleasant memories from that time in my life. I quit my job as a chef in a pretty popular restaurant in New Jersey due to the drug habits of a fellow chef. I wasn’t comfortable being associated with his lifestyle. I was living on a futon mattress in the house that my father and step-mother had just moved out of. The place was empty…except for my toiletries and some food in the fridge. Things like kitchen appliances, sofas, all the usual domestic features had been taken out by the movers a few days earlier. It was like I was living in an upscale crack house. Really upscale. So there I was, having just quit my job, needing to find a place to live. For the life of me I can’t remember how I even conducted my apartment hunting.

“So you don’t have a job?”

“No sir.”

“How do you expect to pay rent?”

‘Well, I’m pretty sure I’ll find a job soon and I’ll be able to pay you.”

“Look kid – I don’t think I feel comfortable renting out my place to someone without a job.”

--yeah, no shit – I wouldn’t have rented a place to me either.

The last part of my memory of that period of my life is me on the phone with my sister crying. I was lost. I had no place to go. She begged me to move back to Virginia. I resisted…I couldn’t return home. She offered to come up the next day to get me and my crap. I declined her offer. I was too proud.

Memory cuts to me loading my belongings into a U-Haul.

Something happened. Something right, something good.

I kicked my pride aside and moved back to Virginia. My sister saved me from…I suppose I’ll never know.

I was on the edge, and she pulled me back.

Finally, a sentence at the end of the story really wraps things up for me. It draws the painful past into the present day and forces me to face once again my very uncomfortable situation. One that plagues my thoughts every day of my existence.

“So maybe the lie was out there too, I thought, even if I couldn’t see it. It was just there, floating around with the other particles of the atmosphere, and everybody got a little piece of it, and it didn’t belong to anyone.”

And so here I am today. With these memories – stirred by a short story in The Best American Short Stories 1987. Thanks Madison Smartt Bell. You’re keeping me on my toes.

The Lover of Women – Sue Miller

2011-12-27T17:23:00.001-05:00

Thinking about this blog over the past several weeks and theentries I have completed and those I have yet to write, I realized that Ihaven’t devoted much time to writing about my mother. Perhaps I am such that I needn't write abouther because there really is nothing to write about and I tend to focus on veryemotional subjects and she has not stirred the emotions in me that othersubjects I have written about have done.

Which is not to saythat this is a bad thing and I don’t think anything more should be read intoit.

Perhaps there hasn’tbeen a story that has triggered me to think of her during my writing – untilnow.

Funny how that works…isn’t it?

And so, this story comes along, and within it I find theperfect set of stairs to climb into a discussion with myself about my mother.

I really enjoyed this story and it’s one that will hangaround with me for some time. It wasn’tthe relationship that the brothers shared or the relationship(s) that thebrothers had with the family of sisters, but the relationship that the sons hadwith their mother. These sections causedme to think of my mother and the mother son relationship I am seeing M and theboy develop. A relationship so deep andintense, filled with such love and caring on a level that I will never havewith my son -no matter how hard I try.

And I am fine with that.

As a new parent, I think a lot about raising the boy and howmuch effort it requires to do a really good job at it. I also think that it is getting easier andwill get easier but also I realize that there will be new challenges that ariseat each new developmental stage, presenting a whole host of new challenges forM and I and hopefully, over the years we’ll develop the ability to adapt tothese changes quickly and deal with them without major disruptions.

I am completely clueless as to how my mother raised mysister and me. As a child, I wasn’taware of the “raising” that she was doing, or how her actions…or inactionswould play out in the years to follow. Iwonder if she realized what would or wouldn’t happen with everything she saidor did. Did she give it that intense ofa thought or was she flying by the seat of her pants? Will I look that deeply into what I say anddo as the years go by?

Does my mother look back on the years she spent raising usand have any regrets?

I can’t imagine that she could have expended so much – and Ishould say too that I can’t imagine me being able to expend the efforts andenergy.

But I want that tohappen!

I know that there was a period of time where all she wantedwas for me to open up to her. I simplycouldn’t do what she wanted because I was a moody-self-absorbed teen and youngadult. She wrote me letters pleadingwith me to share more of my life with her, she asked me repeatedly on our phoneconversations (from college or when I lived away from home) to offer herglimpses into my life…and I simply wouldn’t. As I moved into adulthood, I opened up…slightly, and it took severalyears of fully being an adult before I could open up – and speak to her as anadult should.

I now know how difficult this must have been for her. She gave me everything she ever had – triedher hardest and I shut down on her. Shewas concerned for my well-being as she said multiple times during thoseconversations and that concern just didn’t faze me.

I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t given her inreturn what she deserves over the years but it’s too late at this point and Ican only move forward on our current course (which is a good one) and let ourlives play out.

My mother is now a grandmother and she has assumed that rolewith much success. She spends too muchmoney on the boy and at times I am concerned that she needs to pull back alittle. She is in a tough space in lifebeing the caregiver for my step-father and she really doesn’t see us or hergrandson enough.

I wish her life wasn’t so hard. She deserves so much more. These past five years have been incrediblydifficult for her and her mental and physical states are suffering. There is hope that as time passes, that herworld will change for the better, after a period of severe sadness that I amsure will come after the passing of her husband.

She will be alone, and it will be the duty, I feel for thechildren to provide the comfort of a parent, to the parent, as she providedcomfort to us during our periods of loss.

I can only hope that we do a good job– she deserves it.

Kingdom Come - Mavis Gallant

2011-11-28T06:01:00.001-05:00

Bumping into Mavis once again. A stirring story. One that within the last couple of seconds, thinking about writing something for this story this story, has caused a flood of thoughts to pass and hopefully will result in a post that is more fitting to what this blog once was. Let’s be honest. I haven’t faithfully discharged my duties on this blog.

Taking stock of one’s life. Is one supposed to do this at my age?

It’s times like this, at 0426 in the morning when I am a little off due to the odd time and a story comes along like this one, where I get a little nervous about my place in this world, and what if anything I will ever amount to and finally, what sort of person will I be remembered as.

I pull back when I should be driving forward. I have the motivation – but then, I stop short. This can only serve to hurt me.

I should be, and it’s true, in some respects, happy with certain aspects of myself and what I have done with my life, but in others…I feel I am lacking.

I need to drive on and to find the motivation in myself to accomplish what it is that I am “here” for.

It’s stating the obvious that I need to be the one that makes this happen. I need to be the one sitting at a table writing. I need to be the one sitting at a table researching. I need to be the one exploring new avenues to enrich myself. I need to do this now.

We visited my father a couple weeks ago. He’s not doing well. His mind is getting worse. The disease is advancing and he is becoming less and less of who he was. We arrived just after dark on a Wednesday evening and as I carried the boy onto their back patio, I could see him through the window in his living room just sort of staring down at the floor. I don’t know if his wife was speaking to him and he was listening…or if he was lost in his head someplace. One evening, during our visit, I sat at a table and watched him struggle at the kitchen sink with the inability to figure out which handle protruding from the counter would cause water to flow from the faucet. I saw the frustration and confusion in his face for what felt to be the longest 8 seconds of my life as I silently coached him towards making the right selection. He walks from room to room not knowing why he walked into that room only to keep walking in hopes of quickly remembering why he walked into that room…so in the end, his journey becomes circular.

My father takes stock of his life often now, and this makes him very angry. He realizes that his mind is dying and that everything he spent his life working towards is vanishing. His friends never call him. His former co-workers never visit or call. It’s almost like he never existed, and he realizes this and it makes him sad.

I remember when he and his wife purchased their house. It was around 1996 and he was very excited that this new house had a room that would be his own office. The house is huge, and he was a little taken aback by the size. Showing me around the place back then, he talked of someday retiring, opening a private practice in the house and describing the set up in such detail as to mention the thought of creating a door that would allow his patients to enter his office directly. He wanted to write a book someday. He wanted me to help him write that book.

And now. All of that is gone. He sits in his office amongst his tall shelves of collected books and art moving one stack of magazines and papers onto the top of more magazines and papers only to move yet another stack of papers onto another stack of papers.

This last visit really caused me to pause and think about my mind and where it will be in 20 years. That’s about how long I have if the disease hits me when it struck him. I picture this giant clock ticking over my head and with each year, the hands move closer to a detonation point.

I feel that I am running out of time. And I am doing nothing to solve this problem.

Favor – Elizabeth Tallent

2011-11-28T03:09:00.001-05:00

I was rather happy when this little story popped up in the collection. I really enjoyed Tallent’s previous story “Ice” which appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1981 and which I wrote about back in February 2010.

Tallent has a nice way of carrying the reader through a story. Rich descriptions, twists of words within the dialogue that I really enjoy.

So much has changed in my life since February of 2010. It was that month that M and I decided that we were ready to take on the challenge of becoming parents. Our challenge was met, we are fortunate enough now to be the parents of a little one that has made us the happiest of people.

When M and I first arrived in America, I was returning as a man who was newly married.

It was my duty, I felt, to provide.

I felt that I had certain responsibilities as a husband. It took a little time for me to settle into my new role, and I felt that I had that time, as I had no idea as to what I really needed to do.

We lived in a crummy one bedroom apartment in a sketchy section of town and we were very happy when we made the move to a more stable location and a larger apartment. We plodded on through our daily grinds – M and I both working...and then M taking on the challenge of earning a degree while working. We each had our own lives within the life we shared together. A large part of the personal life that I created was within the time I spent reading. I also spent plenty of time alone out on the roads during my runs. M enjoyed watching her favorite movies and the “free time” we had before the boy now seems enormous.

Looking back over the ten years that we were married before the boy came along, I can’t say that I was placed into any position similar to that of the husband character in this story. I’m good at compromise and weighing out the time devoted to my responsibilities both at work and at home. Sure, as one would expect, there are minor things that M has to get on me about to complete but nothing that really gets under her skin. If marriage and fatherhood has taught me anything, it is that you must put others before yourself. The well-being of those you love the most should be your primary concern. We should endeavor to make those around us as comfortable and pleasant in this world as possible because really, it’s rough out there.

The Prince - Craig Nova

2011-11-28T01:19:00.002-05:00

I wish that throwing away secrets were as easy as the Prince was able to dispose of his uncle's dirty little book.

I have a secret that I wish I could just throw away into a trash bin. It's nothing too scandalous but one that has haunted me and sat heavily on my heart for 17 years. It deals with my education.

Sorry… it's not that juicy.

How often do I think of it?

Far too often I feel.

At least several times a week...for 17 years.

It is a matter of shame for me.

How can I unburden myself from it?

Perhaps what I am doing now is one way. Working through it.

The Prince lost everything in his life. I doubt my losses would be as massive. I honestly don't know what my losses would be but I am sure that once the secret is revealed, there will be a few people that could be hurt and they will be restricted to family members...which makes it even worse...which is probably why I am holding this secret.
As I put my feelings down about this secret, testing the waters of allowing it some freedom, I have chosen to place it on a medium that my family doesn't even know exists.

I have been writing here and working through some of my issues with my life since 2008. M knows that I collect these books, and she sees that I read them but she has no idea what I do with them after. I've often thought about the day when one of them discovers this little corner I've carved out.

So, a little shameful secret - does it feel like a black hood such as the Prince felt descend over him?

It does on occasion...and I'm so afraid that when the secret becomes too strong, the hood will not be able to be removed.

The Afterlife – John Updike

2011-11-14T02:15:00.002-05:00

A fine enough story by Updike I suppose. I go through phases with him. There are times when I can’t get enough of his writing and with this story; he isn’t driving me back to his work. I found it hard to relate – to any of the characters in this story and for it, I found myself pushing myself to read faster so that I could put another story under my belt.

As I sit and write these sentences, I am struggling to do just that – I can’t seem to write anything about this story.

I will say this about Updike. He forces me to look at my life, my marriage, my history with women and my future with my wife, and my son…with a much closer eye than perhaps I would have ever done had I never stumbled across his works. I enjoy his style, I find his writing very readable and I always feel comfortable reading him, and I feel certain gentleness about him.

Updike is all over these volumes and in my collections of short stories and I can’t possibly expect to enjoy every one of his works.

The Way We Live Now -Susan Sontag

2011-11-07T05:13:00.002-05:00

Susan Sontag.

What could I possibly say that hasn’t already been said about her? This is perhaps the second or third work I have read by her. The first short story from her for sure. I think the other two works were commentaries or essays and honestly, I think I remember having trouble reading them.

During my early years at the paper, I had a co-worker in the library who was also the editor of the Book Page section. I remember her preparing quite extensively for a phone interview that she was granted with Sontag. I hadn’t the slightest clue at this point in my life who Susan Sontag was and I really didn’t feel the need to discover her. From what I remember, the interview was nothing spectacular…meaning that my co-worker didn’t stumble over her questions and Sontag must have gone through the motions of giving answers.

It was perhaps a year later that my co-worker was invited to a local university dinner and Sontag was a guest of the university president. The dinner was held that the president’s house so the affair would be somewhat intimate. My co-worker was very excited about the chance to meet Susan in person and to remind her of the interview and to pick her brain on “who knows what”.

As it often happens, the anticipation and build up to an event or meeting is far greater than the actual event. This was the case with meeting Sontag. For some reason, Sontag wasn’t in the best of moods that evening and that mood also projected out into creating an atmosphere that made her almost unapproachable. My co-worker left the meeting feeling upset and let down at her brush with celebrity and with future mentions of Sontag’s name, a wrinkled nose and disgusted face always seemed to make their way into whatever conversation involved the author.

I actually enjoyed this story. Perhaps I can lay its subject (AIDS and those suffering from it as well as those surrounding the suffering individual) beside what my father is going through now and how we are all attempting to deal with his Alzheimer’s.

My father and his wife came for a visit a week ago to celebrate my son’s birthday. As I’ve written before, each meeting we have opens a new door of enlightenment for me in terms of our past relationship and the one that we will have as his disease progresses.

We will visit him in another couple of weeks…on his home turf and I’m sure all sorts of new feelings will emerge and some of the current ones I carry will be solidified or discounted. I told M the other night that I feel that because he wasn’t present in my life on a regular basis after the age of 8, that his slow degeneration now isn’t hitting me as hard as is possibly could.

Yesterday, as I watched my son crawl, tumble and stumble around the room, a thought that had never entered my head before, surface and caused me to hesitate and pause the normal stream of consciousness that flows at a steady clip though my brain. I thought about my son and his future in this world as a grown man. As a man, my age, as a man who will exist someday without me looking over him (as I will always do while I am alive), and I began to wonder what he will remember and think of me, just as I am having these thoughts about my own father. I thought about my father’s mental state, and the fear that a nasty little Alzheimer’s gene is lurking in my brain waiting to attack.

I look at my son, and wonder if that gene is swimming around in his little brain waiting to destroy it someday.

I’m afraid of that for me and for him. My son isn’t even two, and it doesn’t seem fair that he is growing up with this sword of Damocles hovering above him. And furthermore, as to my own mental makeup, I’m afraid, as to what sort of father I will be. I’m afraid of embarrassing him of not being strong enough for him, of letting him down, of disappointing him and I wonder if my father ever had those thoughts about me…did he ever wonder about my future as I was crawling around on the floor?

It’s a huge charge to be a father, and I am afraid. But, I also realize that I cannot let that fear cripple me or cause me not to even accept the challenge of fatherhood.

Contents – The Best American Short Stories 1987

2011-11-07T02:11:00.001-05:00

The Way We Live Now -Susan Sontag-The New Yorker, November 24 1986

The Afterlife - John Updike-The New Yorker, September 15 1986

The Prince - Craig Nova -Esquire, May 1986

Favor - Elizabeth Tallent -The New Yorker, April 21 1986

Kingdom Come -Mavis Gallant-The New Yorker September 8 1986

The Lover of Women -Sue Miller-Mademoiselle, March 1986

The Lie Detector -Madison Smartt Bell-The Crescent Review1986

Circle Of Prayer -Alice Munro-The Paris Review1986

Dreams of Distant Lives -Lee K. Abbott -Harper's November 1986

Men Under Water - Ralph Lombreglia-The Atlantic, January 1986

Boxes -Raymond Carver-The New Yorker, February 24 1986

The Tenant - Bharati Mukherjee-The Literary Review1986

The Blue Men - Joy Williams-Esquire, August 1986

Private Debts/Public Holdings- Kent Haruf-Grandstreet 1986

How I Found My Brother -Charles Baxter-Indiana Review 1986

The Other Miller - Tobias Wolff -The Atlantic, June 1986

Lady of Spain -Robert Taylor, Jr.-The Hudson Review, Spring 1986

The Interpretation Of Dreams by Sigmund Freud: A Story - Daniel Stern -The Ontario Review Spring/Summer 1986

Milk -Ron Carlson-North American Review1986

The Things They Carried -Tim O'Brien-Esquire, August 1986

The Best American Short Stories 1987 - Introduction

2011-11-07T02:07:00.003-05:00

I have yet to decide on a reason that would seem satisfactory even for me as to why it has been so long since I have updated. I will admit a certain level of intimidation when it comes to addressing this volume's guest editor Ann Beattie. In past postings I have spent a considerable amount of time devoted to an introduction the editor, but for some reason, I cannot wrap my head around laying out a piece that would be fair to her. Perhaps I should just skip over her as a person and author and just jump into her introduction to the volume. There is nothing that dictates that I have to follow form. I can make my own right?

I read the intro more than a month ago as well as the first two stories. I’ve just been sitting on my hands. It’s time to push through. I need to get over the thought that not spending much time on Ann Beattie is a disservice…I just think that once I get past this post, I can carry on.

One of the new features in this volume is addressed in the Publisher’s Note at the beginning of the volume. “Each of the authors of the twenty stories selected by the guest editor has been invited to describe briefly how his or her story came to be written. Most have accepted what is clearly a challenging assignment, and their short story essays appear at the back of the volume in the “Contributor’s Notes” section.”

Now rather than going into the life and writing life of Beattie, I’ll just pull a few sentences and paragraphs from her introduction…doing this will erase just a bit of the guilt I have for not giving her the same treatment as the other authors.

Beattie takes the route of choosing the story order rather than defaulting to the alphabetical author list of placement. Again, as with the other guest editors, I suppose she has done this to have the first stories in the collection read by the most eyes – assuming that some readers wouldn’t make it through the whole collection.

“It’s often been said that short stories are so popular now because they are an ideal for for our time. That is said in the same spirit, it seems to me, as announcing that finger food that can be eaten in one bite is preferable at cocktail parties. Similarly, a large group of people seem to believe Andy Warhol’s proclamation that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” My own feeling is that in the future, still only a chosen few will be noticed, and then-if they’re lucky – for fifteen minutes. I do believe that television has altered our ideas about concentration, yet at the same time we must have wanted that: the beast in the jungle has been replaced by the Betamax in the bedroom.”

“Much of the rest of the noise has to do with the current belief that everything and everyone needs discussion.”

“As I see it, writers are willing to take a chance; they like to tempt fate a little. Few writers- even those with outlines and copious notes-sit down to doggedly prove anything. Rather, they like to see if they can shake themselves up, if there are questions that can be raised, narrow roads that may widen.”

“To some extent, when we read fiction, we’re sleuthing to get the facts, and we have to have good instincts so that we don’t get thrown off. I think that with most stories-this group at least- we’re not meant to anticipate what we’re moving toward. The stories are mysteries to which we will be exposed.”

“One of the conclusions I have reached is that people want order, but some part of them craves anarchy, and writers are seen to embody both elements: in a sane, reasonable way, writers will present a situation, but the components of that situation, and the implications, can be dynamite.”

‘In the stories I selected, I found questions that disturbed me, implications I had not thought of, and observed living humans illuminated by art. I picked the stories, I suppose, for the same reason I have picked people and places (when I have been the one to choose). I picked them because they surprised me.

I enjoyed these little insights by Beattie. I hope to learn a little more about her through her choices.

Other truths be told as to why I haven’t been reading and writing. Simply, I’m adjusting to life as a father. At this time in my life, I am working at balancing what I once was with who I am now. Certain things must fall to the side, and reading and writing now will not win out over the boy. Work has really ramped up and I find myself pretty tired at the end of the day, and lunch breaks no longer are used for a quick posting of a pre written post. I will continue the project though at a much slower pace I’m afraid…but one that I am happy to accept.

New Yorker Fiction 1925-2011

2011-09-23T17:04:00.002-04:00

As previously posted, I discovered that a database listing all the fiction featured in the New Yorker since 1925 existed and I didn't have to create one of my own. It can be found here:

http://newyorkerfiction.com/Pieces.aspx

It's beautifully constructed but not in a format that allows different types of analysis. Yes, there are some amazing features and filtering options. I wish I knew the author of this database so that I could give them proper credit.

I have taken the data from their database and present it here in Google Docs in a simpler Excel type spreadsheet. It can be found here: New Yorker Database

Best American Stories 1986 – Completed!

2011-09-02T17:42:00.002-04:00

Goodbye to the Best American Stories 1986

Some numbers –

To read and report on these stories it took me 5 months and 1 day.

That also works out to:

22 weeks

154 days

110 weekdays.

While we are looking at numbers, I’ll dial it back a bit and see where we are with this little BASS project.

My first post dropped on:

May 29^th 2008.

That was –

3 years 3 months and 4 days ago. I can’t even begin to tell you how my life has changed since then.

1191 days. Pffffffff….long sigh.

How many of these volumes have I read and reported on in 3 years, 3 months and 4 days?

Nine.

Some more numbers? Well, it looks like I spent about 4.3 months per volume. To be more exact, 132.33 days per volume.

I think it goes without saying that I need to speed things up.

Let me now discuss my thoughts on this volume.

The introduction can be found here:

http://yearsofbass.blogspot.com/2011/04/introduction-raymond-carver.html

If you haven’t read the intro – please do, I’m actually proud of that post!

Here are a few words from that introduction.

I highlighted this from Carver’s intro:

“Stories from the New Yorker predominated, and that is as it should be. The New Yorker not only publishes good stories – on occasion wonderful stories – but, by virtue of the fact that they publish every week, fifty-two weeks a year, they bring out more fiction than any other magazine in the country.”

Well, I have discovered a new love for The New Yorker and that love has partially been the reason why I have failed to read stories from this volume. I’ve been too distracted by that magazine AND with working on a database that already existed AND attempting to buy, and eventually succeeding in buying a nice 3 volume set of collected short stories from that magazine.

There were 20 stories in this volume – 3 were from the New Yorker. See previous indexes from past BASS collections and you’ll see the NY’er dominating the collected stories!

Carver goes on to say

“One of the things I feel strongly about is that while short stories often tell us things we don’t know anything about – and this is good, of course – they should also, and maybe more importantly, tell us what everybody knows but what nobody is talking about. At least not publicly. Except for the short story writers.”

Yes – perfect. I’d say there were more than a couple of stories in this collection that did just that. They told us what everybody know but what nobody is /was talking about. The stories were wonderful – the majority of his selections.

Further-

“I deliberately tried to pick stories that rendered, in a more or less straightforward manner, what it’s like out there. I wanted the stories I selected to throw some light on what it is that makes us and keeps us, often against great odds, recognizably human.”

I mentioned in several of my posts the above quote. Carver succeeded.

So how do I feel about Carver’s collection?

Well, I feel that I did the volume a disservice. I took too long to read it and I didn’t fully commit my heart and mind to the project. I gave about 50%.

That, in short, is unsatisfactory.

Therefore, I do not feel I can faithfully pass judgment on this collection. The milk has been spilled, no need to cry. Let’s clean it up and pour another glass.

The Rich Brother – Tobias Wolff

2011-09-02T17:03:00.001-04:00

I was happy to finish this volume of The BASS with a story from Wolff. I really enjoy his writing.

Speaking of finishing…man…what a struggle to get through this volume.

I’ll break down that struggle through nimbers in the next post. I really need to get a handle on my reading.

As they say…”Too many books, too little time”.

I am fortunate in life not to have been faced with a decision such that the main character must face in this story. My family life has been pretty uneventful – even as I grouse on and on about the divorce and how I hold certain feelings against my father, all of which now I am reconsidering seeing that it ain’t quite fair to hold them against a sick man…and honestly, perhaps he was sick a lot longer than anyone of us realized. Not with what is eating his mind away now…but just sick with the inability to do the right thing.

I think the closest thing that we have in our family bordering on something similar to this story would come in the form of my step-brother’s son.

Good kid…this step-nephew of mine…just can’t get his shit together. Dropped out of Basic Training – yup, they actually let him do that…during a war! I figured they would look to keep as many trigger pullers as they could.

He had a job with the federal gov’t…man, think of that, a job with the feds! The benefits, the retirement! He quit because he didn’t like the attitudes of some of his co-workers!

What!

Of course, you ask him now, how he likes work, and he’d go on and on about his current place of employment.

He’s a bouncer.

Secure future there for sure!

Now I mentioned that I have never had to deal with a situation like the “Rich Brother”, but my step- brother has. He has really had a hard time dealing with his son. I think that every father that cares for their offspring wants to see them become successful and be happy with the life they live.

My step-brother has, as far as I know, cut off all communication with his son. He is very upset with his behavior and all of the mistakes he has made in life.

I can’t imagine the pain and the hurt that both of them must have gone through and could still be going through today.

I doubt that my step-brother feels any relief having rid himself of the “burden”.

I would think that the burden of the situation he is in now would be heavier.

Health – Joy Williams

2011-08-24T17:42:00.001-04:00

“Williams's fiction often portrays life as a downward spiral, and the failure of life in America, from a spiritual as well as economic perspective, as a virtual certainty. Her characters, generally from the Middle Class, frequently fall from it, at times in bizarre fashion, in a form of cultural dispossession. Characters are usually divorced, children are abandoned, and their lives are consumed with fear, often irrational…”

Yup – I say the above pretty much nails the overall feeling in Health.

It is a bit creepy to read about the pre-teen main character going into, and being briefly spied on during a tanning session.

Mid-80s teens tanning?

I can’t seem to remember any girls that were in the 8^th or 9^th grade with me going to tanning sessions. Sure, I think they spent time at the pool…or in their back yards working on a tan – but not at tanning salons.

Williams does a great job dropping hints of the future “youth-worship” society we live in today.

The kids are working too hard to look older and the adults are working too hard at looking like kids, and there is this weird mid-point where the two ages intersect.

The downward spiral of America…spiritually and economically and you might as well throw in culturally, academically and morally…yup I think we are well enough seeing that now.

Lawns – Mona Simpson

2011-08-22T16:34:00.002-04:00

This was a hell of a read.

First, researching the author and finding her connection to Steve Jobs (Apple) and one of the writers for the Simpsons was pretty interesting. Look her up if you’ve got a moment.

Carver picked a winner with this one. Once again he chooses an author that turns over a rock that has too often been left undisturbed and shows us, whether we want to see it or not, the nasty creepy crawly things that dwell in those places of our world/society.

Simpson writes a disturbing story, a story where you are pulled through the scenes and become quite comfortable living in that story only to find yourself really not wanting to be there. You feel pretty uncomfortable about what you are reading. Disturbed, and sad, sorry for the character and sorry for those who have been through what she has.

Then you place the book aside and think about the story, and realize that there’s a good chance that Simpson has written about something that you have thought to be pretty rare…like one in a million rare, but is actually more common than you realize.

You then start to think back to past friends, girlfriends and their behaviors. Could their behaviors have been attributed to something similar to what happens to the main character?

Abuse weather it be physical, sexual or psychological surely must shape the personality of the child/individual being abused. There can be no doubt that there has to be a pretty significant “rub off”.

Too often, I forget to look at the background of a person that I am dealing with. I need to remember to take into account their history. Professionally and if the relationship develops…personally.

That of course takes time and a great deal of communication – which is something that I have long been a huge proponent for many years.

Great story – tough to read, but a great read, one that I won’t soon forget.

Telling – Grace Paley

2011-08-22T16:29:00.004-04:00

Here we come across another story by Grace Paley. My first encounter with her can be found here.

This was a difficult story for me to get through. Not for the general story itself… but more for the style of writing.

The story forced me to slow down and read the dialogue…and honestly, it’s been difficult for me to read slowly these days.

Life has me catching up with these stories on a very infrequent schedule and…that sucks.

I miss the reading I was able to do.

And the next question from you should be…

“was…?” “well now Nokaj, that implies that there has been some sort of disruption that is preventing you from doing the reading you were doing.”

Yes, the birth of the boy really has thrown our lives into reconstruction.

We/I are discovering what is important in the world now and I just need to realign my priorities and blocks of time.

I was able to get running back into my schedule…now I just need to do the right thing and get this reading and writing there too.

“Problem…well, I’m pretty wiped out by the end of the day.”

Bullshit…reading one of these stories should take at the most 25 minutes.

Paley in her story gave me the speed bump that I needed to determine that I need a new pace, to slow down and focus on what is important. Reading these stories are important and something I need to spend more time on.

I’ve got a shitload of books in this series to get through and at the rate I’m going, I’ll never catch up.

It doesn’t help that I’ve added volumes to my collection on the back end of the series and that if I ever make it to the present year, I hope to include stories from those volumes.

Ahhh…Nokaj…dreaming again.

Invisible Life – Kent Nelson

2011-08-08T17:12:00.002-04:00

It’s funny – well, funny in a strange way.

This is just the type of story that M would use as an example if we had a little quarrel over the “type” of story I found pleasure in reading.

Yup – it’s depressing as hell, and as Carver promised, he included a story that shows us what it is like out there in real the world.

This was a great story, one that I could relate to on some levels. One that pissed me off, frightened me and generally aroused a whole set of deep emotions.

And that’s precisely what a good short story should do.

1986 – just past the midpoint of the decade. I was in high school by this time.

As I read the story, I thought back to what my life was like in ’85 and ’86.

A major turning point in my life. A point where I really started to pay attention to – my life.

Things mattered, friends mattered, girls mattered…life was new and fresh.

The story fits the period.

And interestingly enough, it seems to fit nicely into today’s world.

I think there are a great many of us out there attempting to find out where we belong. It’s not like years ago where you were 30 and pretty much knew where our lives were headed for the next 35 years. Today, young people are waiting to get married until they are older, waiting to have children or not have children at all, going back to school for a second or third degree, and changing jobs. Layoffs are happening and folks who are 55 are discovering that they have to transition into a whole new line of work to pay for their kids who are just entering college.

The young people who are waiting are perhaps smart in what they are doing. The big decisions, the big moves right or left are done without the burden of being in a “traditional family” situation. Maybe this is a good thing, a safe thing – at least for “the family”

Of course, when my father decided that he wanted to devote his life to work, and make family secondary, the calendar had just flipped over to 1980. He had a wife and a couple of kids, a house, car, decent career.

Dropped it all and moved into a one bedroom row house in a suburb of Philly.

It’s the selfishness in this story that pisses me off. It reminds me that it exists out there and the act of being selfish causes great ripples in the pond of life.

What frightens me in this story? I suppose it’s the instability and lack of the typical family structure is the most. It’s scary because the events in this story can happen, and they happen every day. What happens when a person’s mind just switches…as if their mind jumps the tracks but rather than tumbling over the cliff into a massive pile of crushed iron and steel, the train continues forward slowly causing damage while also almost unknowingly damaging itself.

Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux – Alice Munro

2011-07-25T18:27:00.004-04:00

In his introduction, Carver let the reader know that he intended to include stories in this anthology that reflected “what it was like out there.”

He does just that by placing this piece by Munro in the anthology.

I feel kinda bad. I just can’t get excited by a Munro story. It took me a couple of days to get through this one. It was longish, and there just wasn’t anything to pull me through. I know Munro’s reputation as an author…she just doesn’t do much for me.

And because I feel this way about the story, I cannot expend anymore energy on it.

NEXT!

Skin Angels – Jessica Neely

2011-07-25T18:27:00.003-04:00

As far as I know now, we were pretty lucky. I mean it could have turned out so much worse. We weren’t saddled with an abusive step-father or a wacked out step-mother, and neither of them brought step-siblings into the picture that harmed us in any way.

I hear horror stories about combined families.

Yup – my sister and I were pretty lucky.

My sister and I are both grown now and came out of the whole experience relatively unscathed.

I suppose I can’t knock either of my parents for getting remarried. They got lonely. They fell out of love with each other and they found love and stability on someone else.

Each parent is now dealing with problems that are too personal and too medical to really share here.

It is strange how things work out.

All My Relations – Christopher McIlroy

2011-07-19T18:20:00.002-04:00

Back in one of my other lives, I worked in a restaurant.

Before I began my work at the restaurant, I worked in a liquor store. I restocked the shelves, hauled cases of beer to cars, and from time to time, towards the end of my shift, I’d pound a couple of beers and do a couple quick shots of vodka from the airplane bottles we sold.

I wasn’t worried about getting caught because everything smelled like booze, and the work was mindless…so if I was a little buzzed…no one could tell.

We’d close the store around 11 and I’d peddle my bike home.

So, the restaurant.

I saw the help wanted sign hanging in the window one day as I was once again doing something mindless for the liquor store.

I wandered over during a break and inquired about the position.

Dishwasher.

Cool – another mindless job that could net me some extra cash. I applied and was hired.

A bit over qualified…but…well…whatever.

I worked out a schedule with the liquor store and the restaurant so I could have hours at both places.

I was tired at the end of the day, but I was working off some demons.

The dishes came back in bus-boy bins stacked high with slop. I’d scrape off the remaining food…at least the big chunks, and give the dishes a quick shot with the shower hose before loading them into the automatic dishwasher. I’d fall into a trance and became very efficient.

The owner of the restaurant saw that I had the potential of handling something a bit more challenging than dishwashing so he allowed me to train as a waiter.

His vision was flawed because I sucked as a waiter and I hated it.

Back to the dishwashing. My comfort zone.

An added bonus to being a dishwasher is that there was plenty of half empty bottles of wine that made their way back to my station. There was no way I was going to let some fine wine be poured down the drain! I developed quite the palate for grapes.

After working for several months, the restaurant changed ownership and with the new owners came a new chef and new ideas. The staff was pretty fortunate and a good percentage of us were asked to stay on as help. Once again, the owner/chef saw that there may be some potential in me and he moved me out of the dishwashing station and into the kitchen proper.

In my new position as a pastry chef/baker/cold app. Prep cook, I finally found success.

There was a new interest in the culinary world, and the whole “fusion cuisine” movement was hot. I was making homemade Burnt Sugar ice cream, Jagermeister ice cream, Ginger Thyme Crème-Brule, chocolate mousses, sugar cages, savory breads…it was quite the experience and I was very successful…as was the restaurant.

Moving me away from the dishwashing station left a hole. The chef hired a guy to fill my space. His name was Mike and because we already had a Mike (line chef), this second Mike became known as “Black Mike”.

Anything goes in the kitchen.

Black Mike has the cloudy bloodshot eyes of a crack smoker and hard-core drinker. He was small of frame and his body lacked any sort of muscle definition. He had a soft voice and wore a constant smile. He held a pack of Newport’s firmly in his hand.

I watched Black Mike as he worked, and I saw him develop a taste for the grape as I once did.

I respected that. In a demented sort of way.

I liked Black Mike. He was…what you saw. All he wanted to do was wash dishes and get buzzed. Again, I respected that. The honesty.

Friday and Saturday nights were long shifts in the restaurant.

Around 1030 as the last tables were being seated, I’d give $4 to Black Mike and tell him to head over to my old liquor store to buy some “two-fors”. For one dollar you could buy two 16 oz. cans of Natural Light Ice. So for $4 you could get 8 – 16 oz cans.

I’d give Black Mike 4 of those cans for his shipping and handling charges and because…well…he was a nice guy and just wanted to get a buzz.

I really enjoyed working at the restaurant and I learned so much there. I learned about life, and the thought that many people have, where they believe that everyone should spend part of their life working in a restaurant, is true.

It’s hard-core and will transform your so many of your thoughts on so many of your dearly held opinions.

I left the restaurant one afternoon after I caught the chef shooting heroin in the kitchen.

That was a bit much for me.

I left my stack of CD’s and my recipe book (one of the worst mistakes I ever made…leaving the recipe book).

I don’t know what ever happened to Black Mike. I can’t image anything good. The booze or crack probably caught up with him. He was just another shadow passing through my life.

I remember the last night I worked with Black Mike and it’s a nice image that I’ll hold onto of him.

He had just returned from the beer run. He dropped four beers off at my station, he then scampered over to his station, and we both cracked our beers at the same time, lifting them towards each other and nodding our heads, saluting the buzz we were about to mutually slip into.

Sportsmen – Thomas McGuane

2011-07-19T18:19:00.001-04:00

Blistering.

That’s about the best word that I can use to describe this tight little story.

I don’t think there’s a misplaced word or point of punctuation in this little work.

The most hurtful passage. The one that pains me to read – because I can see it – and wish I could turn away.

And then he didn’t come up. Not to begin with. When he did, the first thing that surfaced was the curve of his back, white and Ohio-looking in its oval of lake water. It was a back that was never to widen with muscle or stoop with worry because Jimmy had just then broken his neck. I remember getting him out on the gravel shore. He was wide awake and his eyes poured tears. His body shuddered continuously and I recall his fingers fluttered on the stones with a kind of purpose. I had never heard sounds like that from his mouth in the thousands of hours we talked.

I think it hurts me so because I see a young vibrant boy reduced to a state of utter helplessness.

Frightened.

Made into an infant.

Three Thousand Dollars – David Lipsky

2011-07-19T18:18:00.000-04:00

And now we hit a point in the BASS series where people of my generation start to see some names that are more familiar than say…James Lee Burke.

Nothing against Mr. Burke!

It’s just that I think David Lipsky is…known.

I find myself recollecting my college days again with this story.

During my junior, I dated a girl who went to school in the next state over.

New Hampshire.

Having a girlfriend 1.5 hours away wasn’t all that bad. Allowed me some space to get my studies done…and when the weekend rolled around, either she would spend the weekend on our campus – or I’d jump in the car and have a nice break from mine.

Side note - With all the shit I give my dad on this blog, at least the guy was there for me financially – when it came to school. He helped out with tuition and even paid child support monthly until I was 21. His child support money went into an account where I was able to tap into the funds for school books, supplies and uniform needs. Of course, a certain percentage of that money went towards beer and cigarettes. College right? (I was still buying cigs with pennies come the end of the month.)

Back to my Junior year. I can’t remember exactly when it was, but my dad gave me a calling card number that would allow me to call him or my mother down in Virginia from the hall phone across from my room in my dorm. It was cheaper than calling collect or me feeding quarters into the pay phone in the basement.

Well, having a girlfriend some distance away…and being a college male…I lost my right mind and used that card to call her.

Every night.

Well, the minutes added up, and one day my father called and wondered why he had received a bill from the phone company for several hundred dollars noting pages of call records from a phone in Vermont to another in New Hampshire.

That put an end to the calling card privileges.

It wasn’t $3,000 but it was the trust I violated.

It left a deep enough impression that I find myself writing about it here today years later.

Sorry Dad.

Doe Season - David Michael Kaplan

2011-07-19T18:17:00.002-04:00

As new parents, we obsess over every little developmental stage in “the boy’s” life.

Is he on track…ahead…man, maybe he’s behind?

We are hyperaware of every single miniscule change. M and I compare notes through the day double checking to see if something we observed was deliberate or just an action by chance.

I’m not sure when we’ll stop looking for changes. I’m sure that we’ll always recognize physical changes and the changes in his “person” can evolve over his entire life. So, thinking that way…It seems as the type of parents we are, we’ll never stop looking at W and the changes taking place.

When did I start paying attention to my person? When did I become aware of the changes taking place in and to my body?

It’s hard to really peg a date. Sure, there are the physical changes, and I can remember certain changes and how I felt about them (mostly uncomfortable, as I suppose most people are) but what I’d really like to remember is when I knew that I transitioned from boy to man. I’m not interested in the physical change…more the emotional.

If I were to assign an event or a transitory occurrence, I’d say it would have to be during my first year at Norwich.

I knew before I even entered that school, that I needed to be there in order to grow. I needed to be far from home in an environment that made me extremely uncomfortable.

Through that lack of comfort, I would grow. It’s not uncommon for people to find that the best lessons learned were those when they were placed in situations of duress and they were forced to act/behave in ways that they never thought possible.

I look back sometimes at my four years there and the memories are colored just as Kaplan opens his story.

“…early morning darkness – deep and immense, covered with yesterday’s snowfall, which had frozen overnight.”

“Her father smoked a cigarette and flicked ashes into his saucer…”

Cold, frozen, snowy, tobacco perfumed mornings.

Yup – it was during those years that I became a man.

It exists

2011-07-19T14:18:00.004-04:00

Well, there you have it.

Congratulations to the anonymous creator.

You did a better job than I'd ever be able to do.

http://newyorkerfiction.com/Pieces.aspx

The New Yorker Fiction Database Update

2011-06-06T17:50:00.003-04:00

So I have finished through January 2000, working backwards of course from the most recent issue. As you can see from the picture below, I am currently on row 590 with one row occupying headers. I added another column to include gender. I found another database that contained New Yorker Fiction and the author included the gender column, so I figured that it would be a pretty simple addition without compromising my speed on rate of entry. I will have to do a little back work to fill in some missing rows…but it shouldn’t be too much work.

I did discover that I will hit a huge bump in the road when I get to 1988. This is the year that The New Yorker decided to include a table of contents.

Finding the fiction in the years prior to 1988 will require me to rely on the producers of the digital edition to have properly tagged the issue with alerting me to the fiction within the issue. It will add another couple of steps to my entry process.

Another big time drag will come in the really early years of the magazine where they published a whole bunch of fiction in each issue and the fiction looks to be pretty short in length. Not what we are used to today.

Finally, I am happy to report that since I have completed over 11 years in this database, it is the largest (known or found by me) database of New Yorker Fiction created…outside of the database that I assume exists at The New Yorker. An of course there is always the possibility that someone is sitting on one or creating one now. I suppose it’ll be a race to the end.

Click on image for a slightly larger version

Today Will Be a Quiet Day – Amy Hempel

2011-05-31T17:17:00.002-04:00

It’s nearly impossible for me not to bring something of my own life into a story when the characters consist of a father, a son and a daughter. To draw me in deeper, when some of the action…or most of the story takes place in a car, I find myself drawing far too many parallels with my life as it was between the ages of 8 and 18.

My sister and I crammed alone time with our father into 5 or six hour blocks speeding up and down the east coast. I think we tried our hardest to make those five hours equal in quality the time that other children spent in the car with their father going to school, the store, the movies, the gas station…

I have a hard time remembering exactly what we discussed and what I thought about at that time. I’m sure though that whatever it was, any subject that my sister or I brought up, it would have to be of appropriate to discuss in front of the other sibling.

I wonder what my father thought of us. For his life, was interrupted when we re-entered it.

He had to plan events not just for himself in mind – but he had to make arrangements for us too.

And as I read these stories, my mind drifts once again to my father’s past behavior after the divorce.

Again, I’m trying now to imagine my father’s mind... as I am of the same age now, that he was when I was 10-11 years old.

Unfortunately, rather than having a nice pocket of memories to draw upon…yes there are a few…my most vivid memories are sad.

And most of these memories are related to my father an his inability to unplug from his work – and now I’ll relate a memory that for my sister and I was - “A Quiet Day”.

Even when we visited, my father still found it necessary to work…and work at a level that is/was unnecessary.

And these memories transition my thoughts towards summer weekends in center city Philadelphia.

My father couldn’t leave us at home when he pulled several all-nighters down in center city.

Our weekends would start early Friday mornings. We would ride into the city from Chestnut Hill with the novelty of a train ride cushioning our fall.

Walking through the dirty, dust hazy morning city streets from the train station to his office on the 7^th floor we took a quick last look at the outside world.

Painted high gloss white cinderblock walls, polished linoleum floors and harsh florescent lighting. This would be our home for the next ? number of hours.

No windows.

During the day on Friday, there would be the normal activity of people moving through the hallways of an office building and they all looked the same to us in their green scrubs and white coats.

It was generally a safe building where we could go to the vending machines and grab a coke without his supervision as long as we told him that we were leaving the hall.

There was also a game room on the first floor that we spent some time in as well, but because we weren’t that skilled in video games, and my father had a limited amount of quarters he wanted to part with, the attraction and access soon faded.

As the day wore on, people left early for the weekend and the halls became even quieter than they normally were. Lights hummed, water swooshed through hidden pipes, vents blew cool breezes and strange echoes bounced through the halls.

During the day, we slunk around the halls, past curious eyes and found comfort in a spare office. We listened to the radio, drew pictures, wrote letters and read magazines. We typed on a typewriter and played with clay.

Sometimes lunch and dinner would allow us off the floor or a quick trip out into the loud smoggy city with dad.

Upon returning to the office, we’d find that my father’s floor was close to empty. Shoes and socks came off and the halls became our private race tracks.

Our bare feet would slap down on the hard polished floors with such a noise as we raced up and down the hallways causing an occasional visit by a security guard baffled by the strange sounds.

Time faded and we had no concept of the external world…day or night.

My father would emerge from his office and his fatherly duties would suddenly reappear and he would inform us that it was time to sleep.

We found our beds to be an industrial sofa and office carpet. We’d fall asleep to the whisper of cold (not cool) air conditioning passing through the vents above us.

Sleep was difficult as carpets are hard. We’d wake early in the morning and stumble into the hall –not knowing if we had slept 8 minutes or 8 hours.

Dad would be at his desk, kicked back papers all around…working.

We’d use the bathrooms – and have breakfast in the cafeteria. The day would be a replica of the previous day with the only difference being that there wouldn’t be the traffic of fellow office workers.

Saturdays were quiet and we had the hallways to ourselves once again…but to a child, the cold stale halls were…just not right.

We found relief mid afternoon or early evening as our dad felt that HE could go home.

Relief from our polished linoleum and white cinder world.

We’d squint at the headlights or at the last remaining rays of sun as we headed towards the train station bound for his little one room apartment.

****And now a small scene from our polished linoleum and white cinder world …recently related to me by my sister.

Now before you entered my father’s office hall, there would be two service elevators. I don’t think it occurred to my father to steer us away from riding those elevators. It just never occurred to him.

One day, my sister was riding on one of the elevators and a worker pushed a cart onto the elevator that had a cage with a dog…a beagle. My sister, being a child was fascinated with the scene of a dog on an elevator in an office building, but because we were who we were, she quietly hid her excitement. I don’t even remember her telling me at the time that she saw a dog. And perhaps because of what later happened, she never felt the need.

A few hours later, my sister found herself on that same elevator…perhaps on her way to a vending machine.

The elevator stops a few floors down from the seventh, and the same worker from earlier in the day pushes his cart onto the elevator. This time, the cart has an empty cage on the top, and below it, a black plastic bag. It takes only a few seconds for my sister to do the math and realize what was in the black plastic bag because the texture of fur could easily be seen pressed against the walls of the bag.

I never knew my sister witnessed this.

Here we are decades later, and what does my sister remember of a summer visit to my father’s?

A beagle in a trash bag.

Bad Company - Tess Gallagher

2011-05-31T17:14:00.003-04:00

Gallagher and Carver

I suppose, sometime in the future, I will frequent cemeteries.

God – what an awful thought.

I don’t like to even imagine the scene.

Why would I be there? Not sure.

It seems that going there will bring plenty of heartache – the memories of the person that I will visit. Things I will say in my head to them, our conversations all taking place in my head.

Will I bring flowers? Momentos? Will there be a grave to tend to?

I’m too busy living to think about the dead…and I wish to be busy living for a long time.

I remember as a teenager thinking about my loved ones and how I would feel after they were dead.

In those days, I remember thinking that it would be so much better if I died before they did…so that I would not have to feel the pain of their death, and absence.

Pure selfishness.

Death is a difficult part of life. I’m not sure how I will react when death is a presence that becomes familiar to me.

Will I grow from death as I have often heard people do? Or will I shrink into a tight ball of black mass?

New Yorker Fiction Database update

2011-05-19T16:57:00.003-04:00

Not making as much progress as I would like.

Last entry – 7/7/2003 – John Updike - The Walk with Elizanne - Row 358. Of course, the entry will shift down as I add most recent to the top.

Roughly 8 years down, only 78 more years to enter.

Reading, writing, running and being a dad…are proving to be serious competition against getting work done on the project.

It’s O.K. though.

I’ll get there someday.

Communist – Richard Ford

2011-05-19T16:51:00.001-04:00

Even before my son was born I thought about how my parents behaved in their life when I was an infant, a baby, a child and young boy.

In what I am beginning to realize now as what was the last true/honest lucid discussion between my father and I in a motel room back in 2003, – before Alzheimer’s kicked into a degree that we could all clearly recognize, I was able to get the last few details I needed to complete the picture of what my father’s life was like as a new father and husband.

It was enough detail to solidify the pissed-off disposition I carried towards him several years before the discussion, and continue to carry today.

I’m able to keep those feelings neatly compartmentalized and draw upon the emotions they stir when I need to…but I don’t see the necessity to live daily with them in my life.

I suppose that I’ll wrestle with the damage of the divorce for the rest of my life. I’ve accepted that…soooo I’ll deal with it.

During several of our long evening walks as M and I discussed the timing and possibilities of starting a family, I’d drag out into the conversation the almost disbelief I had at my father’s behavior when he was 33-38. Now I know there are two parties involved in a divorce, and in the past I’ve said pretty much nothing about the role that my mother played in that whole affair. She factors into the decision that they made…but if I were to break it out and assign percentages of blame, I’d say it was 90% him 10% her. That measly 10% is also probably why I hardly mention her in these posts…she of course was a huge influence in my upbringing but at this time is my writing…I cannot bring her into this space – not yet.

I like to think that M and I are making better decisions and have established a better relationship than my parents had when my sister and I were young.

The relationships that the main character has in this short with the adult characters drove me to think about the future with my son and wonder about our relationship. It caused me to wonder about the relationship he will have with his mother.

It made me think about what my mother felt as she worked hard to raise my sister and I as my father spent hours and hours away from home…working.

It made me think about my mother and I after the divorce – our relationship.

The weight she carried the responsibility to care for two young children – alone.

Gossip – Frank Conroy

2011-05-19T16:03:00.001-04:00

Frank Conroy - January 15, 1936 – April 6, 2005

Another really good short.

As Carver promised…a story to show us what it was and is like out there.

This story covers several decades but there was a particular piece that I related to.

A section of this story deals with the main character as a professor. A female student of the character/professor is a victim of some gossip linking her romantically/sexually with the professor…and there we have the storyline that I can understand.

It was difficult during my time in Romania to keep the gossip about me under control. In fact, there was no controlling it. I was able to keep the gossip concerning my romantic affairs to a minimum. Just a minimum…not completely under control.

I worked hard to make sure that I was not seen in the company of girls or women. I was careful not to be alone in classrooms with female students. Lines would be drawn and assumptions made.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, there were ample opportunities early in my time at the school where I could have established myself as man of many women…but I knew of the negative consequences associated with such a label.

Plus, I think I have a pretty realistic view of the world, and I know my place in it, and the reality of it is, that the fact that I was an American in the village only polished to a pretty decent shine what is underneath…a pretty average guy.

It was difficult for M and I to completely hide our relationship once we took that step, and we knew that tongues were wagging, but we worked our hardest to make our relationship look professional. Honestly, in retrospect, I’m pretty sure everyone knew.

Mid-summer of 2000, when the notice of our marriage appeared outside of the mayor’s office, everyone’s assumptions were proven true and our daily walks around town caused eyes to settle on us just a bit longer and the whispers and smiles to increase just a bit more.

Just as the student in this story felt the weight of the gossip, I’m sure that M and her family felt the weight of our relationship and marriage much more than I did or will probably ever know.

Star Food – Ethan Canin

2011-05-09T12:55:00.001-04:00

Well, I suppose I should have expected that it would happen.

-Shit…I missed a story.

So here I am, plowing through 1986… coming across some really good stories, start to look up a little about the author and I’m getting pretty excited, because this is a great story and a great writer. I then read the short bio on the author in the back of The BASS and it mentions that the author had a story in the 1985 volume. Strange… I thought, I don’t remember the name, and I don’t remember looking him up several months ago when I would have written about him.

Shit…I missed one.

I skipped over a story in 1985. I’ll insert the story I missed as soon as I can find the time to red and think about it. I don’t suppose it’ll be the last time I miss a story.

One quick thing about Canin and Star Food.

I really enjoyed this story. It’s one that I am sure will kick around in my memory for a long time.

-----------------------------------------------

“It seemed you could never really know another person. I felt alone in the world, in the way that makes me aware of sound and temperature,…”

My son lies on his back, on our bed, furiously kicking his legs and I can feel his toes brushing across my chest as I lean over him with my ear pressed against his chest.

Between his sharp quick breaths I can make out the rapid beat of his heart and I swear that the swish I hear is the blood being pushed through that powerful little muscle.

He pauses for a moment, his feet pressed up against my chest, his breathing stopped, as I assign the thought to him, “Dad…what are you doing to me?”

The pause lasts about 2 seconds and the swift kicking and rapid breathing begins again and I support myself above him looking deep into his eyes…forcing him to look into my eyes.

I know the power I have to force him to return my stare will be over in a matter of months when he has the strength to flip onto his back and turn and twist away from me.

When he has the ability to crawl away from me, to walk away from me, to run away from me and finally to drive away from me.

M and I laugh at the swift almost constant kicking he does but we know that once he becomes vertical…

I look into my little sons eyes quite a bit. I know what I am doing. I am attempting to see into the future. I want to know what we will talk about in the future. Will we talk? Will he have questions? Will I have the answers to his questions?

When I read these stories in the BASS, stories of sons and fathers, stories of mothers and sons, stories of families…I can’t help but also think about how I would have received these stories two years ago when having a son wasn’t even on the table.

It’s stories like Star Food that really serve what this whole exercise is about for me.

Again…from Carver’s introduction:

I hope people will read these stories for pleasure and amusement, for solace, courage – for whatever reasons people turn to literature – and will find in them something that will not just show us how we live now (though a writer could do worse than set his sights on this goal), but something else as well: a sense of union maybe, an aesthetic feeling of correctness, nothing less, really, than beauty given form and made visible in the incomparable way only short stories can do. I hope readers will find themselves interested and maybe even moved from time to time by what they find herein. Because if short story writing, along with the reading of short stories, doesn’t have to do with any of these matters, then what is it we are all doing, what is it we are about, pray tell? And why are we gathered here?"

You see, here I find myself once again struggling to know it all…to know everything about my son…now and in the days that haven’t even arrived.

But Canin writes:

“It seemed you could never really know another person. I felt alone in the world, in the way that makes me aware of sound and temperature,…”

And I felt a bit of that as I pulled my ear away from my son’s chest. An act later analyzed by me as an attempt to learn and glimpse into his soul.

It's Official - I'm Crazy.

2011-05-09T11:46:00.005-04:00

I have a strange need to gather and organize data.

As you can see on my sidebar I have a few databases which list the contents of The Best American Short Stories and Glimmer Train magazine.

Now, I have now initiated my largest and possibly longest project yet.

I'm going to tackle the fiction published in The New Yorker. I've done the math and this could take well over a year IF I am able to make 30 entries into the sheet a day.

I had to recalculate my completion date after I discovered that in earlier issues there is no table of contents AND there are several pieces of fiction per issue.

I am working backwards from 2011 and I have completed through January 2008. I've only been at it a few days so I am satisfied with my progress so far.

Here is a screen shot of my sheet - I don't plan on making this public on Google Docs until it is complete...and then I will ask for help in pointing out errors and missed stories.

You can click on the image to see a slightly larger picture.

The Convict – James Lee Burke

2011-04-13T13:36:00.001-04:00

It’s tough sometime to do the right thing. Burke illustrates that point beautifully in this short and Carver sticks to his words from his introduction:

... I lean towards realistic, “life-like” characters – that is to say, people – in realistically detailed situations.”

Back in 2002, M and I were placed in a situation where we, as a couple, had to make a decision…the right decision and in doing so; we assume we caused a family to flee the country.

As I sit here and write this, it seems so long ago. I can clearly picture our old apartment, the smells, the light and the tension of that day.

I worked hard after returning to America to help M adjust to life in the States. I thought that she would enjoy meeting others from Romania. I encouraged her to seek out Romanians in the area and to set up meetings with them where she could…well… discuss life.

I didn’t fully realize that M was doing a fine job adjusting to life here, and that meeting other Romanians was probably the last thing she wanted to do. That was her old life. She was fully committed to embracing America…and doing it her way, and that way did not include involving others from her old homeland.

Sometime in mid- 2001 we met a couple of Romanian families. One family lived in our city and the other in the city across the water. The husbands of both families were in the Navy. Both families came to the States in the late 1990s. Soon after arrival, they joined the Navy as a way to – make money – to support their families, to have children and to have healthcare and housing for their wives and children.

Think long and hard back to the late 1990s. Life was VERY different then. The world was relatively peaceful. Life in the Navy wasn’t too taxing. Sure, you may be stationed aboard a ship – but it’s the Navy…what did you expect?

September of 2001 pretty much changed all that.

Our new Romanian friends shared all the worries that most of us had after the attacks.

The husband in one of the families was due to get out of the Navy in a few months. He had no intention of re-enlisting. He saw what was on the horizon and knew that his life would be severely altered if he remained in the service.

Now the other husband had a bit more time to serve. He also had a 1 year old American born daughter and a wife who during her husband’s previous routine 3 month deployment was pretty much housebound due to fear and depression. M and I assisted her in her shopping and errand running while her husband was gone. We even included her in some of our larger family celebrations.

The War in Afghanistan begins and this husband’s ship receives no orders to deploy. The family breathes a sigh of relief. The months in 2002 march along and we see that things start to get interesting in Iraq. I think it was pretty clear to everyone that we would soon be involved in a conflict in that country as well.

We meet the family one weekend evening and the husband and wife are looking pretty washed out. They sit in our apartment…on our futon/sofa and begin to tell us of a plan that they are hatching.

Quickly, it seems obvious to M and I that they are desperate. The husband has received orders that his ship is to deploy for an unspecified amount of time in several days. We can sense that there has been much tension in their house.

Our “friends” ask M and I to be accomplices in a plan to keep the husband from having to leave.

They were going to lie to the Navy and hide.

M and I are asked to hide and shelter the wife and daughter while the husband tells his superiors that his wife has run away and left him alone to care for his “sick” daughter.

Husband hoped that the Navy would see that there was no one to take care of the child and that the husband would have to remain in the States.

When we were presented with this plan, I think I was the first to pipe up and shoot them down…pretty much without hesitation.

My answer to them was followed with several minutes of them pleading and even a few tears from the wife.

We explained our reasons further…(as if we really needed to) and our meeting ended shortly thereafter.

As they were leaving, we asked what they were going to do. The husband couldn’t give us an answer but he said that there was no way he was going to deploy.

The following weekend, M and I drove into their neighborhood for a little drive-by of their apartment.

I suppose we weren’t too shocked to see that the window shades to their apartment were wide open, and that the apartment was bare. Absolutely empty. Just days after our last meeting.

We never found out what happened to that family. We could only assume that they ran to Romania. I’m sure that the husband’s name appears on some sort of watch-list as a deserter. Their baby…well, she was an American citizen. Perhaps she is now a Romanian citizen.

M and I did the right thing. We had to protect our future. It was tough to face that family, in an obvious state of need and panic and tell them that we could not help them.

So, Carver in picking this story by Burke in fact did offer the reader a true picture of what life is like. Burke had his convict…and I suppose we saw three sitting on our futon one evening back in 2002.

Janus – Ann Beattie

2011-04-13T13:35:00.002-04:00

I’d say over the past couple of years, I have done a pretty decent job of realizing that there are certain things in this world that I can live without.

I have desires for material objects and I have spent decent money acquiring those objects – and after those objects come into my possession - I realize that, the chase was better than the catch.

More often than not, those objects I chased after were books, and most recently, the books that would allow me to round out my collection of “The Best American Short Stories”.

I felt the books out in the world calling to me, begging me to add them to my collection.

When I started this reading project, the holes in my collection were large. I scoured ebay, Better World Books, Amazon and Thrift Books. I found volumes in every corner of the country. I waited patiently each paycheck to pull a little out to purchase the next volume on my target list.

I knew at some point that I would reach an end point to my collection…and when I did, when the last volume arrived in the mail, it stung.

My collection was beautiful yes…but it was complete.

Or was it?

There were years before 1978 that the BASS was published (under a different editor)…and those years began calling to me just as the books for my project did.

I work hard at not looking for these books.

They are out there, waiting to be purchased.

But as Beattie tells us – we can’t always have what we desire.

Knowing me – I’ll get those books – someday.

Gryphon – Charles Baxter

2011-04-11T17:31:00.001-04:00

“She was right,” I yelled. “She was always right! She told the truth!” Other kids were whooping. “You were just scared, that’s all!”

Just a great little story. With the bump of Barthelme out of the way, if this story is any indication of future selections from Carver, I’ll be very pleased with this collection.

Having a son, and thinking about his future, and placing him as a character in this story, I wondered if his little mind would turn and process experiences in his life as the boys in this story do.

As my son and I take our nightly walk up one side of the street and down the other, I find myself telling him my hopes and fears for his future. My son rides in a little front carrier strapped to my chest. His head is at the level where I can whisper and he can hear me quite clearly.

I wonder if my father ever did the same.

Most of the time, I know - rather than wonder -and I am confident that my father did not whisper into my ear as I do with my son.

My father was too busy whispering into his own ear.

I tell my son that I want to be the Miss Ferenczi of this story and that I want to tell him of Gryphons and meat eating plants.

I want to tell him of things that he won’t be taught in school. I want him to question math and science and everything that he is told…and to discover truths on his own.

Does 2+2=5?

I want him to seek out resources that will challenge conventional thought. To read and listen to books and people who do not look at the world through the eyes of …us all.

I want him to find the joy and fall in love with the written word.

I want him to step through he looking glass and not be afraid of what exists there…I want him to be comfortable there.

On our nightly walks, as the days grow longer and it stays lighter longer, and the birds chip louder and the light pulls back the shadows, I can see my son’s eyes catching and focusing on new objects of interest to him.

Trees beginning to develop leaves – nature he has never seen before. White Pear trees, pink blooming Cherry trees, white and pink Dogwoods, bright red Japanese Maples, red, white purple and yellow tulips, florescent green grass and fresh yellows on the bushes. I can see his eyes accepting these images and his mind attempting to digest these new forms.

I want to give him a life, and to teach him ways to be able to discover the world each day anew.

And so, with this story, Baxter has given me a real gift. He emphasized the importance of my future…and my son’s future. And in doing so, drew me even closer to him.

Basil from Her Garden - Donald Barthelme

2011-04-06T11:14:00.002-04:00

HE IS LAUGHING AT ME

Honestly, I wasn’t thrilled when Carver mentioned that he included a story by Barthelme in this collection. And dang…to make it even worse, he leads with him (I know…he did the fair thing and listed the stories alphabetically by their author…Gardner didn’t!)

I don’t know, I just haven’t been able to get into Barthelme.

Perhaps his writing is just above me. Which, if so, I’m fine with that.

Or am I?

I tell myself that I will let him exist up there, above me, and I’ll remain firmly rooted in my present location.

But, I can’t help, when standing in the shower…thinking about this story…wondering what he and his story is saying to me and wondering what I should write about it…thinking that perhaps I am not capable of “getting the message”.

I try to assuage my anxiety by reading reviews of his stories especially enjoying reviews that are critical of his writing.

But I see his writing as puzzle, a code…and, because of my nature, I need to figure his shit out!

So, morning after morning over this past week, having already read other stories in this collection, I stand in the shower obsessing over Barthelme and “Basil from Her Garden”.

Perhaps, as I have done with a few other stories, I think I need to lay this one aside and let it stew even LONGER and knowing that I’ll run into Barthelme again, this particular story will regain some life and its secrets may then become clear.

But…I know that is unlikely to happen.

I must crack this code.

Introduction - Raymond Carver

2011-04-01T16:42:00.004-04:00

May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988

So I’ve carried around BASS 1986 for several weeks now and read the introduction a few times, even highlighting the important passages and finally, read several interviews with Carver and listened to two podcasts of interviews with Carver (Don Swaim’s wired for books).

Finally, I am now ready to introduce The Best American Short Stories 1986, edited by Raymond Carver.

I mentioned in a previous post that I was looking forward to this collection just as about as much as the collection assembled by John Gardner. My intro on Gardner here and closing piece here.

I was greeted in the introduction by more than one passage that I feel needs to be highlighted and brought forth below. I believe the passages will give us a clear idea to what Carver was thinking as he chose the stories for this volume.

Additionally, I do not think that I need to go into the specifics of Carver’s life, his early career, his education, his failures, successes, his writing style and finally, his death. I am more interested in focusing on Carver’s thoughts concerning the short story and the writing of short stories…so, let’s go.

Carver opens with a pretty generic couple of sentences including his assurance that the short story landscape in America is solid (And honestly, it was quite strong in the mid 1980s).

“The next best thing to writing your own short story is to read someone else’s short story. And when you read and reread, as I did , 120 of them back to back in a fairly short span of time (January 25 to February 25), you come away able to draw a few conclusions. The most obvious is that clearly there are a great many stories being written these days, and generally, the quality is good – in some cases even exceptional.”

Later, he discusses the reason why stories from the New Yorker are well represented in the collection. In his wired for books interview he pretty much states the same as he wrote below.

If you take a look at the spreadsheet I created that is linked off this page (along the right sidebar), you can simply scroll through the sheet and see that the New Yorker has dominated the selections over the years.

Addressing his specific story selections:

“…under someone else’s editorship, this would be a different book with an entirely different feel and composition to it. But this is only as it should be. For no editor puts together a collection such as this without bringing to it his or her own biases and notions of what makes a good story a good story.”

And later -

“There were other biases at work. I lean towards realistic, “life-like” characters – that is to say, people – in realistically detailed situations.”

Further –

I love that above paragraph.

“Short stories, like houses – or cars, for that matter – should be built to last. They should also be pleasing, if not beautiful, to look at, and for everything inside them should work.”

“…looking back, I see it’s turned out that many, if not the majority, of my selections fell on younger, lesser known writers.”

Leading into the below:

“What do these writers have in common so far as the stories in this anthology are concerned?

For one thing they are, each of them, concerned with writing accurately, that is to say, thoughtfully and carefully about recognizable men and women and children going about the sometimes ordinary business of living, which is, as we all know, not always about an easy matter. And they are writing, in most cases, not just about living and getting by, but about going on, sometimes against the odds, sometimes even prevailing against the odds. They are writing, in short, about things that count. What counts? Love, death, dreams, ambition, growing up, coming to terms with your own and other people’s limitations. Dramas every one, and dramas played out against a larger canvas than might be apparent at first glance.”

---I can’t help but think that the passage above by Carver was directly shaped by his relationship both personally and as a student of John Gardner.

And with the above statement, I think Carver sums up exactly why I am so in love with the short story. It’s so right on.

And then finally, the last page of his intro - I feel it’s necessary to present in its entirety. -Note: purposely not italicized for purposes of ease of reading.

“Writers write, and they write, and they go on writing, in some cases long after wisdom and even common sense have told them to quit. There are always plenty of reasons – good, compelling reasons, too – for quitting, or for not writing very much or very seriously. (Writing is trouble, make no mistake, but for everyone involved, and who needs trouble?) But once in a great while lightning strikes, and occasionally, it strikes early in the writer’s life. Sometimes it comes later, after years of work. And sometimes, most often, of course, it never happens at all. Strangely it seems, it may hit people whose work you can’t abide, an event that, when it occurs, causes you to feel there’s no justice whatsoever in the world. (There isn’t more often than not) it may hit the man or woman who is or was your friend, the one who drank too much, or not at all, who went off with someone’s wife, or husband, or sister, after a party you attended together. The young writer who sat in the back of the class and never had anything to say about anything. The dunce, you thought. The writer who couldn’t, not in one’s wildest imaginings, make anyone’s list of top ten possibilities. It happens sometimes. The dark horse. It happens, lightening, or it doesn’t happen.(naturally, it’s more fun when it does happen.) but it will never, never happen to those who don’t work hard at it and who don’t consider the act of writing as very nearly the most important thing in their lives, right up there next to breath, and food, and shelter, and love, and God.

-Raymond Carver

-And there he lays out the wonderful frustrations of those of us afflicted with this wonderful disease.

Here’s a little from a 1983 Wired for Books interview.

Carver enrolled at Chico State college in CA, and that happened to coincide with the arrival of John Gardner there as a professor of creative writing. This was Gardner’s 2^nd teaching gig. His previous post had been at Oberlin College where he taught for one year.

Carver states that the meeting and class changed his life.

“I had always dreamed that I’d wanted to be a writer”. (Funny way of phrasing it.)

-Asked by Don Swaim to name some of the authors that Carver had his students read, Carver rattled off the following list.

Frank O’Conner, Kafka, Flannery O’Conner, John Gardner, Beattie, Chekhov, Tolstoy, John Cheever, Nabakov, Hemmingway, Schott and Joy Williams.

Further concerning Gardner, Carver mentions that after his time at Chico State, he and Gardner didn’t meet again until 18 years later. Their relationship quickly developed into a strong friendship. Swaim asked Carver if he thought that Gardner had a drinking problem, and Carver replied that he couldn’t speak of it…I suppose indicating that he really wasn’t comfortable passing judgment on Gardner.

In a 1986 interview, again with Don Swaim, John Gardner is discussed again and this time in relation to Gardner’s selection of stories for the BASS anthology.

Swaim makes the statement that Gardner admittedly refused to include any short stories from the New Yorker and that you (Carver) have done the opposite, in fact the New Yorker dominates the collection.

-Carver tells Swaim that Gardner for one reason or another had a bit of a bias against the New Yorker and that he (Gardner) had been turned down more than a couple of times by the magazine. Gardner didn’t care for the New York literary establishment or for the New York Times Book Review.

So there you have it.

I think I’ve said enough here now about Carver and I think that the introduction speaks for itself and my excitement towards what this collection holds.

Lets get started.

The Best American Short Stories 1986

2011-04-01T16:40:00.003-04:00

And the Contents

Basil from Her Garden - Donald Barthelme

Gryphon - Charles Baxter

Janus - Ann Beattie

The Convict - James Lee Burke

Star Food - Ethan Canin

Gossip - Frank Conroy

Communist - Richard Ford

Bad Company - Tess Gallagher

Today Will Be a Quiet Day - Amy Hempel

Doe Season - David Michael Kaplan

Three Thousand Dollars - David Lipsky

Sportsmen - Thomas McGuane

All My Relations -Christopher McIlroy

Monsieur Les Deux Chapeaux - Alice Munro

Skin Angels - Jessica Neely

Invisible Life - Kent Nelson

Telling - Grace Paley

Lawns - Mona Simpson

Health - Joy Williams

The Rich Brother - Tobias Wolff

Finished!!! – The Best American Stories 1985

2011-03-04T16:10:00.001-05:00

The Best American Stories 1985

Start date – Sept 10 2010

Finish date – March 4 2011

So, in closing, here is the breakdown for BASS 1985

It took -

5 months 22 days

25 weeks

175 days

125 week days

Which works out to:

One story every – 8.75 days

Gender profile of the anthology - 10 men and 10 women. (hummm – suspicious)

Stories from representing certain magazines more than once. – The Missouri Review – 2, The Paris Review – 2, Atlantic Monthly – 3, The Virginia Quarterly Review – 2, Esquire - 2.

Wow, almost 6 months to complete this anthology. Well, I suppose that “life” had a little bit to do with this. I will forever associate this volume of the series with the birth of my son. Even with this wonderful association, this volume was a hard read. I was so distracted by everything, and there really weren’t stories to pull me through.

There were standouts –

“The Sudden Trees”, “You’ve come a Long Way Mickey Mouse”, “Fellow Creatures” and “Angela”.

I couldn’t synch up my reading with my drive to write about a particular story. I finished several other novels as I struggled through this volume – most notably, Resurrection by Tolstoy.

Now that I’ve entered into a new phase of my life…a new chapter…a new segment, I’m ready to attack the next volume with vigor.

Bring on 1986...PLEASE!

The Skater - Jo Williams

2011-03-04T16:07:00.001-05:00

There is a huge difference between being told that you must somewhere and you making the decision to go someplace. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve lived a fortunate life in this regard.

Under the shelter of my parents, they were pretty liberal in allowing me to make my own decisions…and of course…allowing me to live with the repercussions.

It was my choosing to attend a university pretty far from home.

It was my choice to live in New Jersey after graduation.

It was my choice to move to Romania when I did and to return to America (with a wife) when I did.

And it is our choice to live the life we live under the circumstances we have created for ourselves.

The Johnstown Polka - Sharon Sheehe Stark

2011-03-04T16:06:00.001-05:00

It’s not too often that I appreciate a story that’s written in a dialect. This story is an exception though. Although I will say that that fact that it was written in a dialect that I enjoyed reading, I focused more on reading in that dialect than getting anything aout of the story.

If I came away with anything, I would have to say that it would be this.

Someone always has had it worse than you. Be thankful for what you have…no matter how profound you feel your loss is.

Lily – Jane Smiley

2011-03-04T16:05:00.003-05:00

Jane Smiley - September 26, 1949

One of the first things that I stressed to M when we started dating YEARS ago was the importance of clear and open communication within our relationship. When we had disagreements, I encouraged her to confront me, and I wanted us to discuss our problems or feelings as soon as they surfaced. I hope that I am remembering correctly, that when I proposed this free flow pathway of discussion that it caught her a bit off guard. I don’t think that she was ever in a relationship (a friendship or dating) similar to the one that she had just entered into.

No that we have been married for many years now, I never have to prompt her for any sort of dialogue…not do I feel any need to hold any of my feelings back. Sure, at the beginning of our marriage there were a couple of cases where we had to remind each other that we had to talk things through right away. We knew that it was never healthy to let things sit and fester.

Of course we’ve has some disagreements and arguments…but we’ve taken the time to work them out in a healthy manner.

As we’ve grown and as our family has grown, the need for communication has grown ever more important. Our feelings about growing our family – the decision when to have children all involved a great deal of open and honest discussion. Now, we are presented with all sorts of situations where we have certain anxieties that arise, whether it has to do with the baby, a job, lack of money…anything – the need to get it on the table in a speedy manner is paramount.

The Gittel - Marjorie Sandor

2011-02-28T13:35:00.005-05:00

I wondered if it would happen. I never thought that it would be so dramatic though.

I always thought that I had a decent sense of how to view the world through characters in a book. I thought I had a pretty solid sense of right and wrong. That I had a good solid level of compassion and love. I knew the suffering of women…of races other than my own. I thought that I could place myself into characters heads and really see where they were within a story. I thought I possessed that skill for years. At least the amount of time that I really considered myself to be a reader.

All that is over now.

The way I read a majority of my stories has forever been changed…and will continue to change.

You see, prior to the birth of my son, I read stories as a man. A man of a certain age, race and within a certain social structure…dictated by my finances and culture…you get what I’m saying.

Now, it’s as if all that has been thrown upon the rocks. Maybe I shouldn’t be that dramatic.

Maybe I should consider what has happened to be an enhancement.

Since the birth of my son, really, the way I approach these stories has changed. I think I can still draw a lot from my past and use the stories to discover who I am, but now, I am reading them as a father…not as the man that I described above.

As the man above, but enhanced as a father.

I think that it rounds me off rather nicely. And, as I grow into fatherhood, and as my son grows, and I learn from him, my perceptions and the messages the stories convey and the lessons they teach, and the pasts that they open up and explain… these stories will no doubt shift.

For example, this story. “The Gittel”.

Last summer, I really don’t know how I would have interpreted it. I would have read it as a soon-to-be father. I didn’t have the capacity to feel the emotions that I do now as I read it. Now as a father, I see it though different eyes. I feel the story with a different heart. I know the pains and joys of a father and a husband. And knowing that these feeling will evolve, I imagine that if I read this story 3 years from now, it would have a completely different impact.

Now, this causes me to wonder, will there be a perceptible shift in my thoughts as I write about these stories. Will my writings from a couple of years ago be something completely different than what I write now? Will this journal forever be changed?

Stories about children in the Holocaust, a war, or murdered. Parents fighting and how a child feels this. Families in crisis.

It will all be new to me.

An adjustment – realignment.

I suppose it’s an evolution.

I have grown into a new position in life. And I fully believe that when I began this exercise in reading and writing, that I was at the point in my life where I was ready to engage in such an “experiment”.

There has been a huge pause in my readings of these collections. I have been reading…just not The BASS.

I think that my writers shadow (the being that exists within me that is a reader and writer) has purposely taken a pause…allowing me to digest my new situation in life, and my ability to read and write about these stories will and I feel is returning.

For example, I have read a total of 7 stories from this edition since October. 7 stories in 4 months. That’s about the pace I had when I first started.

I think it’s time to get back to reading and writing. I have a purpose in this life, and these stories play a major role in discovering that purpose…allowing me to discover myself.

And now to discover myself as a father.

Secrets - Deborah Seabrooke

2011-02-01T16:03:00.002-05:00

It took a little while for me to get into this story, and as I type this I am conflicted as to whether or not I really enjoyed it. I mean, we have here another story where a character (main) is dealing with the infidelities of one of their parents.

Sure it’s the 1980s and we are still discovering that in the 80s, divorcing and having affairs “was the thing to do”.

It was really until the last 3 or 4 pages that the story presented itself to me differently…as a story of a girl discovering the reality that she is living in.

Why do I see this?

I suppose it has to do with the fish in the hatchery the girl references throughout the story.

The camouflaged brown bass swimming together in their tank, and their “reveal” when they break the surface looking for food from a visitor.

As I read this story, I thought about my own father and his secrets. I’m sure he holds many, but as Alzheimer’s erodes his memory, those secrets will fade away.

I suppose that could be a good thing. There are secrets that we should never know. I’m not sure what secrets he could hold that would really shock me though. I think there is enough separation between us now and I have confronted him on the issues that may have upset me…so I am secure in the knowledge that the secrets he is loosing are not all that important.

I imagine that someday there will be someone in my life that will be looking at the pool of water that is my life and at the swimming fish wondering what they hold…and what will be revealed if one of those fish surfaces for food.

I’m afraid that they will not be pleased with what lies below the surface. They will not see beautiful fish.

Instruments of Seduction - Norman Rush

2011-01-26T16:43:00.004-05:00

Norman Rush - October 24, 1933

Expectations---

I’ve sat on writing about this story for sometime now. I simply didn’t know what it was try to tell me.

Until this morning…

As the seductress in Rush’s story expected certain things from the men that she seduced I find myself all too often living my life expecting things from…well…life.

I feel that expecting things from life sets you up for disappointment.

We expect to find a job after college.

We expect to earn good money at that job because of our degree.

We expect that with our success, we will find a mate.

We expect that with that mate we will start a family.

We expect that family to run like a well oiled machine.

We expect that with a successful job, stable home life that our future can only be bright and rosy.

And sometimes, this causes us to never expect bad things to befall us.

But if we don’t expect certain things, does that force us to live a life of mediocrity or force us to not strive to greater heights? Do we just accept the ebb and flow of life and let the often rising waters of “bad things” drown us? Do we accept what happens to us as fate?

I think I need to find a happy medium between expectations and the unseen hand of “life”.

I knew that after my son was born that the majority of control that I like to have over my life would disappear. He would throw so many variables into the equations of events that it would be impossible for me to calculate how I could exert my control over events.

I am still learning to let go of some of that control and let go of expectations.

In the case of his birth, the expectations I envisioned of my life after his birth have been exceeded.

I never could have imagined the range of emotions that have saturated my life over these past three months.

So as I continue to live, and as I raise my son, I will learn, and he will in turn, unknowingly teach me how to flow within this world.

Why I read

2011-01-26T16:11:00.001-05:00

Again, I have been thinking a lot about why I read, and in particular why I read short stories and looking even deeper into that question, why I have chosen to read the “Best American Short Stories”.

I found the answer in an interview that I was reading this morning. A piece of reading that – surprise – is not what I should be reading. But please look forward to a post sometime in the future with me complaining that I am not making any headway in my efforts to plow through the BASS.

Tobias Wolff in The Paris Review Fall 2004 issue no. 171.

That’s the way we view our lives, by way of stories. Jesus taught mostly in stories—in parables: the good Samaritan, the woman at the well, the prodigal son. The teachings of that ancient Taoist text the Chuang Tzu are essentially a series of parables that force the mind into unexpected avenues of consideration and intuition. That’s what story can do that statement can’t do, axiom can’t do, rules and commandments can’t do. And that’s why Chekhov with his freedom from programs and vulgar designs continues to have this power over us.

Full interview can be found here.

So – there it is. Simply.

No let me go read something other than what I should be reading. – ugh -

Raven’s Wing – Joyce Carol Oates

2011-01-07T17:24:00.001-05:00

A strange, kind of “out of place” story for JCO. “Out of place” meaning…well…to me, this just didn’t slide into what my mind accepts as a JCO story. I certainly don’t expect every story that she writes to be about incest, murder, rape or cheating spouses…you know…the “type” that everyone expects JCO to write. I just really couldn’t get into it – probably because horse racing and gambling doesn’t do much for me. Sure, I cold look past that into the overall message she was trying to deliver…and blah…blah…blah…but I just couldn’t sum up the energy to really get into this story. And you know what, that’s a good thing. I haven’t fallen totally under her spell.

Yet.

City of Boys – Beth Nugent

2011-01-07T17:23:00.001-05:00

Beth Nugent - ??

Ahhh…yes, another story to remind me how lucky I am to be born male. Jeeze…the headaches you women have to deal with throughout your lives.

Godwin hits us with the victim/victimizer one-two punch giving us this selection right after Angela. Sure it’s placement is due just by luck of the author’s last names…but, you know…is there a theme to her selections?

A gritty little story which ends up lending its name to the title of a collection of short stories from Nugent in the early 1990s.

Stories like this cause me to think back to my teenage years. I wonder if any of the girls that I knew in those days we in situations similar to that found in this short. Chances are, they were – and probably worse. Was it of their own doing…or were they subjugated?

Then I think back to my days in the classroom. I think about the young girls at their desks intimidated of me as I walk past them…intimidated just because I am a man, and someone has put that fear of men into them.

And then I am once again reminded that we are humans, and this is how things are, and this doesn’t make me happy but it does fascinate me.