The Old Folks - William H. Gass

William Howard Gass born July 30, 1924

First - check out that photo of Gass - How cool is that?

It took several minutes of reading, only a few short passages and then a pause, to rewind in my mind, what I had just read, to fully comprehend what my eyes had just passed over, and to settle into the style of William H. Gass.

This was my first exposure to Gass and being exposed to a genius such as this is a nice side-benefit to this reading/life project.

I think that the word genius has been abused and personally, I tend not to use it often. Gass definitely deserves to have this label applied to his work. There is plenty of information on the net about Gass, and a wonderful personal website devoted to the author which offers assistance to a reader which wishes to fully understanding what Gass has to offer.

I don’t think that I have the ability to heap any more praise on this man, nor could I do it in the ways that others have done before me. Their studies of the man and his work surpass anything that I could endeavor to produce.

In short, I think what won me over about Gass was the hidden complexity of his writing. There is a simplicity which exists, but behind, and within the simplicity, exists a rich depth of expression. The sentence construction combined with a rhythm, created what I can only describe as a movable photo...the words and sentences actually moved across the page...within my mind of course.

I know I’m not doing justice, and my attempt to describe what I felt seem to me to be falling terribly short.

Reading about Gass, it is said that many of his life experiences, especially having to do with his family, find their way into his writing. Well, I don’t think he spared his folks in this short.

While reading “The Old Folks”, it was all to easy for me to draw a line to the relationship I have with my parents.

Now, the relationship the main character in this story has to his family is waaaayyyy different than the situation I have with my family.

I have encountered a couple of stories in the BASS series that have caused me to look within and consider how I am handling things with the aging of my parents and how I am dealing with this progression of life.

With my father, it’s pretty simple. He has Alzheimer’s...pretty early...only 64. It’s tough to talk with him on the phone and have him ask questions which I had answered only a few minutes before. Witnessing his general confusion with his existence in this world is even tougher when we visit him up in PA. To see a man who was so sharp, who was considered to be a leader within his profession, confused and lost within his own mind is tough. Naturally, I turn selfish and start to think about myself, and how, or when and if this will hit me. We are pretty sure his father had it so there is a nice chance that it could hit me. Believe me, I’m doing everything I can now to prevent what could fall on me later in life.

Looking at my mother, well, she is just getting old. Honestly, she’s really not that old – 64. The problem is, that it seems like she is allowing herself to become old. I have trouble erasing the permanent image of her as a 50 year old woman. I don’t know why I have stuck her at that age, but that seems to be where she’ll forever be in my minds eye. Now to see her moving slower, knowing the medicines she is on, adjusting her diet, becoming easily fatigued...it’s just tough to see her – well, them growing old.

Most Monday nights we have dinner over at my mother’s house. Not once have I walked into that house, and not thought of my old life there. We moved in when I was 5, and I moved out when I was 18. M and I lived there for a couple of months after we returned from RO and she too has memories that revisit her from time to time on Monday evenings. Happily, they are fond memories.

So, Gass forced me to look at my folks again, and at myself, and to consider once again how I have treated them over the years and what I need to do to prepare for the tough days ahead in our relationship.

I thank him for this.

Score 10 out of 10.

Speck’s Idea – Mavis Gallant

Another long short story.

Elkin really needs to work at changing my opinion of him. (And I’m sure this tops his list of things to do in the afterlife).

I am seeing a clear pattern emerging and I am starting to feel that his selection is more about him than the stories themselves. I feel that I am learning more about him and his problems than being exposed to a varied cross section of American Short Stories. If the pattern proves, then I think there was clearly an abuse of his editorship and he committed a disservice to readers spoiling a great anthology only a few years after the death of Martha Foley.

I touched on Mavis Gallant in my last post so I feel no need to think about her in this post.

Concerning the “Speck’s Idea”.

When you sit back, and look at say...the last 15 years of your life, as I did after reading this story, you really begin to question the existence of external forces shaping your future days.

I consider myself as someone who generally likes to have a firm set of controls over what happens in my life. I am beyond the days of tripping through my life and taking things as they come. I left all of that behind back in 1998. I believe I became the “grown up” person – the adult that I am today early in that year. I realized that I had finished sowing my oats and it was time to start taking control.

I look back at the years before 1998 and I see some interesting events that lead me to the actions I took in 1998.

I saw that my life needed to be conducted in a way that received a more “hands on” approach from me.

So, as I applied pressure in certain situations, I felt that there were forces that exerted pressure back, and at times, there were forces outside of my control that dictated directions that I would take. It was an interesting dance I learned from these forces, and the lessons continue through to this day. Again, as touched on earlier I feel that the importance of conducting a critical assessment of one’s life, and questioning everything about it on a regular basis is vitally important.

I have learned, and this story reinforces my beliefs that it is important to play an active role in shaping your future but when a situation arises, you need to learn how to bend without breaking. To let the water slide off your back without getting too wet.

But...there must be - flexibility with a rigid core.

Score 7 out of 10.

Booo!!! Blogger is screwing up my entires - so until it's fixed...no posts. Still reading.

Reading Mavis Gallant in a rainy car.

The Remission - Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant Born, August 11, 1922

I have found that with my research into the author of this short – Mavis Gallant, that I developed and appreciation of the story much more after dashing through her life bundled together for me on the net.

With my years of searching, finding, distilling out the most useful parts of a requested subject, and delivering clean material - my ability to absorb important and meaningful information happens pretty rapidly.

One of the reasons why I need to slow down when I am reading these stories – to ingest them as I would pre-Google. There is something to be said for quick absorption but a slow digestion has its merits.

Discovering Gallant has been pleasurable. Once again, Elkin presents a “longer” story and I initially found it difficult to push through this one.

I actually wrote a post concerning my difficulties with this BASS volume but I am holding onto it a bit longer so that I may continue to gauge my problems.

When I assemble these posts, my first step is usually to find a picture of the author. This allows me to get slightly closer. Look into their eyes, to imagine what they were thinking when they wrote the story. Who are they? What have they done? What will they do?

I found several shots of Gallant and included my favorite with this post and my second in the next post. Both are of her when she was a few years younger. She remarked in an online article for Slate that a more recent photo of her looked like a boiled potato. A bit harsh on herself.

I was quite taken by the above photo. Where is she? What is she looking at? And, let’s be honest - she is in short – very pretty.

After I find a photo of the author, I do some back grounding of the author. Birth date, awards, quotes.

I then write a little piece about what the story gave to me and will offer my opinion and usually end up writing a bunch of nonsense.

Again, this whole project is for me. Talking to myself.

I have found that putting it online is convenient and will give those who stumble across it a little surprise or two. (Especially a living author who Googles themselves and happens across their name associated with an old story). I often think that my children will discover it someday and know a little more about their father. Children I don’t even have.

Below are some quotes that really stood out as I looked into Gallant.

Timothy Foote called Gallant "one of the prose masters of the age," and added that no modern writer "casts a colder eye on life, on death and all the angst and eccentricity in between."

Dictionary of Literary Biography essayist Ronald B. Hatch observed that the subject of children, "alone, frightened, or unloved," recurs often in Gallant's work.

Gallant told the New York Times: "I think it's true that in many, many of the things I write, someone has vanished. And it's often the father.

Foote (again) "Gallant rarely leaves helpful signs and messages that readers tend to expect of 'literature':

And it is this last observation that really stood out to me in retrospect as I assessed what “The Remission” gave me.

Within “The Remission” I found a lesson that has been presented to me in other forms in previous stories.

As much as we like to think that we are the center of the universe, the world keeps spinning... or stops spinning regardless of the influence we think we have over it. People around us, our family and loved ones, live their lives, lives that are both known to us and those that are secret. Changes occur within them that we can measure by alterations in their physical shape as well as their mental standing...but the most significant are usually the changes that occur within them that are only known to them.

We die and the world does not crumble as we disintegrate into the earth...days, weeks and years pass and finally, someday, we fail to exist even as a memory.

We have a short time on this earth. And then- we are gone forever.

Mavis gave me a needed gut-check with this story.

Score - 8 out of 10.

The One-Star Jew - David Evanier

This story took some getting used to. 

I hate that phrase.

Getting used to. I thought at one time the word was “ust”.

As in “getting ust to.”

I was under the impression that the word ust had a meaning unto itself.

Anyway, I had to look deeper into this story to find what it was attempting to teach me.

Again, I felt that this selection was an instruction into one’s place in life, a transition, as well as a discovery, of where one is positioned in the universe.

Are you Jewish? A Buddhist? A transcendentalist? An Atheist?

Can you be everything and nothing? Must you be grounded, or do you project a sense of being grounded to those you love and who you interact with our are you one who is soaring above the earth in your head...looking at the universe and all that it can become for you?

Is there a danger of not being grounded and flying too high? What is the limit?

As I’ve mentioned. I’m in a position in life where I am asking questions of myself in relation to where I stand with myself.

A spiraling circle of questions. I usually ask these questions on my runs where I spend over an hour or two or three on the road. I have plenty of time to think out there and to have an internal Q&A session with myself.

Rather than sitting still in a room concentrating on my breathing, I choose to spend my meditative moments on the road.

I like to think all of us go through life thinking about where we fit into this reality we live in, but, after working where I do, exploring what I do, I’m afraid that I believe that there is a low, dull monotone ringing across the mental landscape of a majority of my countryman’s minds. I just don’t see them thinking about themselves in a way that is as introspective as I would consider healthy for them.

I don’t need to get into a whole digression of where we are as a society an how we are now paying the price of what we have failed to see within ourselves over the past several decades. These stories will show that for me.

I just felt that this story was telling me that it was OK to settle back and constantly question where I am and where I am going.

It was a difficult story but one that provided and nice assuring lesson.

Score – 6 out of 10.

Long Calls – Frederick Busch

Frederick Busch August 1, 1941 - February 23, 2006

I have a couple of interviews open in my browser as I write this. They are interviews with the author of this selection. I am choosing not to read them before I write my piece on this story because I don’t want anything he says to contaminate what I want to write.

I did sneak a peak into one of the interviews, and it revealed that some of the discussion was going to be on the state of fiction during the time of the interview. (2005 – one year before his death)

The state of fiction is something that interest me and something that I think I have mentioned a few times in the past. I think, if I am careful, and my memory continues tio serve me that I will be able to see the different forms fiction and in particular the short story will take over the years as I read through these collections.

“Long Calls”.

This story served as a reminder that we all are worlds unto ourselves. We are and I am too guilty of this self absorption. We forget that everything that could and is going on in our lives, is simultaneously happening in someone else’s life...with a chance that it is impacting them, and those around them, with a greater degree of force than what is happening in your life at the moment.

David Foster Wallace did a nice job of illustrating this in his famous commencement speech.

I think though over the past few years, I have become better at realizing that the situation I am in now is one of relative ease and comfort. Things could be so much worse. I forget how lucky I am at times...but I do recognize that I am lucky.

Again, “Long Calls”, is a simple story giving us insight to the inner workings of a life, and the intersections, traffic, speed bumps and crashes that happen daily to people in our world.

We attempt to reach out to others, connect – heck, just survive with each other, passing along through this world, and at times we are met with characters that just are not agreeable with the current time we are in.

We need to keep in mind though that we can learn so much from everything, everybody we encounter. We need to see the signs and appreciate what others are trying to tell us. Open your eyes, and ears...your mind will follow.

Score – 7 out of 10.