A Change of Season – James Bond

James Bond-???

Try finding any information about this author!

There have been countless times in my life where I have found myself in a situation where I think I could have accomplished a task better than the individual I am paired with. I’m sure too, that the individual who is dealing with me at that moment could be feeling that he/she is doing just fine and actually is doing better than I could be doing. They could also be feeling some hints of uncertainty and self doubt which would cause them to lean into the wind and work harder a the task in order to save face and prove me wrong.

I don’t have a specific example that I can summon right now, but the larger lesson that I came away from in this short story was the need for me to constantly or at least make a more concerted effort to look at situations from my counterpart’s point of view.

In my life, I have been working hard to see things in my environment not only through my eyes. In our culture/society, we have become very “me” centric.

With Facebook (which I participate in) and other forms of “look at me” media/networking, we need to remember that it’s not all about us – we aren’t always ‘right”.

One sort of decision making practice that I do follow is something that my parents raised me with and some thing that I too hope to use in my own parenting. It’s also something that was stressed to me in my (military) training and something that I do today.

When it comes to someone making a decision about their immediate future – or even their long term future, I hesitate to offer them direction. I’ll only step in or object if I feel that a shitstorm could ensue. I would prefer that they would, if one is to be made, make a mistake and learn a lesson from it. Of course, if they are successful, then they are the one to receive all the credit – and learn again from what they did. I don’t think that I am avoiding any sort of obligation or responsibility, rather I think that I am allowing growth within the person. They may not see this as the event is unfolding...but I the span of life, perhaps the lessons learned will surface and help.

A little break –

I seem to have fallen into one of my spells where I have a difficult time reading and writing for this project. I feel good enough to say now though that I seem to be coming out of it and I should be able to read more and regularly post here.

Here is my first major distraction. It’s a distraction that is more than welcome.

And here is my second. this distraction too...is wonderful.

I’d like to bring out a sentence from the conversation between David Foster Wallace and David Lipsky.

I think that at times this is why I have trouble with the stories – I have to transition between styles of writing and looking for the lessons in each story (if there are any to be found).

Wallace:

... “Because a book has to teach a reader how to read it. so the structure stuff starts right at the beginning.”

- From Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself – A Road Trip with David foster Wallace” – David Lipsky

- So, that is my latest set of excuses. Am I satisfied with them? Sure.

The Dignity of Life – Carol Bly

Carol Bly - April 16 1930 – December 21 2007

Researching Carol Bly, I discovered what a remarkable woman/writer she was. She was a powerful literary force and an overall wonderful person. It was said that she caused readers and writers to open their eyes to the realities of the situation.

Turning this story into the lesson that I am seeking from the BASS series wasn’t too hard. I am in the stage of my life now, where happily, a new life is beginning and will make a major impact on my life, but sadly, there are a couple of family members whose lives are winding down...at a speed that is very unsettling.

I’ve written in several posts about my fathers Alzheimer’s disease. I don’t think I need to tread over that ground again. I think I have also mentioned my step-fathers more recent health issues.

But, Bly has done a wonderful job at doing what she does best.

Pat (step-dad) is 88. He is old, and he’s not doing well. He has reached point in his life where things just aren’t working for him anymore. He is partially deaf, and blind in one eye. He has limited mobility, and his mental state is...well...deteriorating. Life is hard for my mother now who must wait on him 24 hours a day. Simply, she has a newborn on her hands once again.

My father is 64 - early onset Alzheimer’s. He called me yesterday on 3 separate occasions. Each call was for the same thing. Call one, I spoke to him and had a conversation about his books. Call two, I missed. Call three was a five minute voice mail from him again about his books. The voice mail was him simply asking me the same question he had asked about 4 hours earlier – just rambling on and on.

With my father and with Pat, we are working at making sure that there is still some dignity of life.

We all attempt to treat both of them the same that we always have but it can be quite stressful and sad at times.

We hold those that we love sometimes in our minds at an age that we love them the most in...or wish to remember them the best way in.

I don’t know if I phrased that correctly, but what I mean to say, is that I have trouble seeing my father as he is now. I choose to see him when he was 55. When he was able to remember what he was doing as he walked from one room to another. When he came to visit me in Romania and we took off to Italy for a week – no cares in the world.

And I remember Pat, making sauce in the kitchen, watching the fights on T.V., listening to Jazz in his Buick Regal – left arm out the window holding a cigar.

These life changes for the two of them have come on so quickly that it has caused all of us in the family to work hard at making the adjustments.

It is important for us to honor these two men and to respect them. To hold their memories and to always remember what they did for us.

Introduction – Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler - October 25, 1941

On my first pass of the Introduction, I found it rather...well...bland. So, what I’ll do now is sit the book beside me, and re-read it and pull out some lines which should be reconsidered as they can’t be called “bland”.

...”Why is it, then, that so many short stories lose their bloom in the time it takes me to store a magazine on my closet shelf? Why is it that some few do not? What makes those few any different?

Well, this is the year I found out, more or less.”

About Shannon Ravenel and her reading for The Best American Short Stories 1983 –

(Ravenel)...”read 1379 stories published in 502 issues of 154 different magazines.”

On her own selection of some of the stories to fill BASS 1983

“For one whole afternoon, I sat in the middle of a rug and rearranged tear sheets around me like so many parts of a jigsaw puzzle. Then I went off and left them. Some stories I noticed, hung on in my mind while I was busy with other tasks. Some evaporated. Some I returned to the following day and found, when I picked them up, that they sprang back whole into my memory, all of a piece, as if carved from a single block. Those were the real successes.”

And then this important line –

“Well, in the long run, this much emerged:

It seems to me that almost every really lasting story – almost, you notice- contains at least one moment of stillness that serves as a kind of pivot.”

and

“All really satisfying stories, I believe, can generally be described as spendthrift.”

...

“A spendthrift story has a strange way of seeming bigger than the sum of its part; it is stuffed full; it gives a sense of possessing further information that could be divulged if called for. Even the sparest in style implies a torrent of additional details barely suppressed, bursting through the seams.”

On the magazines the stories came from –

“I would have preferred for these twenty stories to represent twenty different magazines. It didn’t happen that way. The fact is that more good writers seem to be sending The New Yorker more good work than they send to other periodicals, and it would be unfair to all of us if I pretend otherwise. It does please me to see that without trying to, I have arrived at a fairly even balance between the sexes – nine selections by men, eleven by women – and at least half of the writers are relatively unknown.”

Are writers sending the New Yorker “more good work”, or are the writers sending the New Yorker the New Yorker style of writing...in an attempt to “be published”

Ahhh yes, that old question again.

So we go from Gardner in the previous collection, who pulled from obscure publications, to Tyler picking 8 stories from the New Yorker.

Finally –

“I like to imagine that if you set this book on a table, it would almost bounce; it would almost shout.”

About the stories –

“I am proud of them, and I am grateful to the writers who created them.”

-Anne Tyler won the Pulitzer Prize, 1989, for Breathing Lessons. Here is another case where Ravenel picks a great editor.

The relationship between the two seemed to have lasted.

WHILE ALGONQUIN Books' recently issued New Stories from the South marks the 10th anniversary of the series edited by Shannon Ravenel, the house is holding off its celebration until next April. That's when it publishes The Best of a Decade of Shannon Ravenel's New Stories from the South. And this time around, the editor is not editorial director Ravenel but Baltimore-based author Anne Tyler. And therein lies a tale.

The duo developed a close working relationship when Tyler was guest editor for the 1983 Best American Short Stories;, Ravenel edited the series, published by Houghton Mifflin, for 12 years. "I used to entertain myself by making a straw vote of the stories I would select if I were guest editor," Ravenel recalls. "Usually I was far off their selections. But with Anne Tyler I missed by only one story, so I just fell in love with her. And we really did enjoy working together, although I don't think we ever spoke by phone. Neither have we ever met in person. She's a very private person."

Summer, Bob. "Algonquin's short stories: guess." Publishers Weekly 2 Oct. 1995

And in closing a little bit about the personal qualities of Tyler that might give us an insight into the stories she picked.

Despite her status as a best-selling novelist, Anne Tyler remains a private person who rarely lets public demands interfere with her family life. She shuns most interviews, avoids talk show appearances, and prefers her home in Baltimore, Maryland, to New York City. As the author explained in an e-mail correspondence with Alden Mudge for BookPage online: "I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward." In a body of work that spans over four decades, Tyler has earned what former Detroit News reporter Bruce Cook called "a solid literary reputation ... that is based solely on the quality of her books."

"Anne Tyler." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 Apr. 2010.

I am really looking forward to these stories. Once again, the wonderful thing about these collections is that every year, the reader is treated to a new guiding hand. Someone to lead you down the paths created by the best writers our country has to offer.

The Best American Short Stories 1983 Anne Tyler & Shannon Ravenel

There really isn’t too much to say about the physical make-up of this book so I’ll just combine the Contents post with the Description post.

I can’t recall where exactly this edition of the BASS came from. I could very well be from Better World Books but I’m not 100% sure.

This was not a former library book but there are some small clues as to who the previous own was. I’m almost certain that this book belonged to an individual.

A short story writer.

If you look at this photo, you will see some marks next to some addresses of literary magazines.

I can only suppose that the previous owner of this book intended to contact these magazines.

Of course, there are many other possibilities, but this seems to me to be the most obvious.

The book physically:

The book spent a good amount of time on a bookshelf. The cover is pink, but the spine is gray – obvious sun bleaching.

This is the first paperback BASS that I will be reading in this project. I have some more further down the road.

The glue has failed in some areas, and a few pages are coming loose. I suspect that I I read, and flip through the pages, more will come unglued making for a mess book in the end.

I think that covers everything. Onto the reading!

Contents -

xi Introduction - Anne Tyler

1 Hard to Be Good - Bill Barich - New Yorker Dec 20 ’82
25 The Dignity of Life - Carol Bly - Ploughshares, 1982
48 A Change of Season - James Bond - Epoch, 1982
68 Where I’m Calling From - Raymond Carver - New Yorker Mar 15 ’82
84 “Ollie, Oh...” - Carolyn Chute - Ploughshares, 1982
99 My Mistress - Laurie Colwin - Playboy Mar ’82
117 The Count and the Princess - Joseph Epstein - The Hudson Review Spr ’82
141 Scales - Louise Erdrich - North American Review, 1982
155 The Professor’s Houses - Ursula K. Le Guin - New Yorker Nov 1 ’82
161 Sur - Ursula K. Le Guin - New Yorker Feb 1 ’82
178 Graveyard Day - Bobbie Ann Mason - Ascent, 1982
191 Victrola - Wright Morris - New Yorker Apr 12 ’82
201 Reunion - Julie Schumacher - California Quarterly, 1982
210 Best Quality Glass Company, New York - Sharon Sheehe Stark Prairie Schooner, 1982
222 Colorado - Robert Taylor, Jr. - The Ohio Review, 1982
236 Starlight - Marian Thurm - New Yorker May 10 ’82
249 Deaths of Distant Friends - John Updike - New Yorker Jun 7 ’82
255 Reunion - Guy Vanderhaeghe - Saturday Night, 1982
269 Beebee - Diane Vreuls - Shenandoah, 1982
285 Firstborn - Larry Woiwode - New Yorker Nov 22 ’82

The Best American Short Stories 1982 - Completed!

I've been waiting a long time to write this.

I have had a real strange relationship with “The Best American Short Stories” 1982.

First, I should start of and admit that I had more than just a casual interest in John Gardner.

Before I even picked up 1982, Gardner interested me.

His introduction pulled me in. The fact that he was going to exclude “New Yorker” type of stories and give me some real meat – excited me.

What caused me some worry was his admission that the selection was made by several people – not just him, and that he had done it in haste. I was worried because sometimes when people are on a deadline, they get sloppy...or lazy.

Well, I think there was some sloppiness here. There were 20 stories in this anthology. Five of those stories were “Gardner People” – and I think that Oates could be considered number 6 because of their friendship.

Here is where he stacked them – and if you are interested in seeing the relationship the author and Gardner shared, I invite you to read the posts I made on each.

Raymond Carver – First position

Joanna Higgins – Third position

Charles Johnson – Sixth position

Joyce Renwick – Eighth position

Roberta Gupta – Tenth position

Oates??? – Twentith position

So, we see that the first half of the book – ½ of the ten stories – have a pretty clear connection to Gardner. Not one of the authors (excluding Oates) after Gupta had any relationship with Gardner that I could discover.

I’d also like to point out again that the order of the stories is not alphabetical. I would assume that Gardner “requested” that the stories be placed in this order. Perhaps he felt that readers would at least make it through the first half of the book before abandoning it therefore guaranteeing that his people would be read.

So – is there something “wrong” with a literary heavyweight like Gardner stacking his “people” towards the front of the book?

The casual reader in 1982 would have no idea of the relationship that Gardner had with these 6 authors. It is only now, today, that I was able to draw the connections that I did.

I wouldn’t doubt that there were others in the American/New York literary community that knew of the relationships. I’m sure Ravenel knew of the relationships.

Did Ravenel abandon any sort of conflict with Gardner due to deadline? Did she not fight him because she knew that engaging him would be a bloody battle?

I do wish to find out the answer to this...someday.

Personally, I get a dirty feeling knowing that Gardner put his people up front.

If I were an author and I had a relationship with another author who had the reputation and influence as Gardner had, would I want him to place my work just as he did for these authors?

-Yes.

-Simple enough.

So, why do I feel bad about what he did?

Well, I fall back again on that feeling of sloppiness and laziness that I mentioned above.

I just wish that he invested the time and energy that he put into his other efforts – into this book.

Gardner was always looking to help out his friends.

It looks like he did just that before he died.

I have no doubt the authors that were “Gardner People” included in this anthology would have been successful without being included here.

At least that what I tell myself. At least that’s what I hope.

It would be giving Gardner a bit too much power.

Gardener died in September of 1982. He laid his Harley down on a familiar road in Pennsylvania.

The first reviews of “The Best American Short Stories” 1982 were published in November and October of that same year. It was said that the selections he made was one of the last literary works he “produced”.

I like Gardner – but I don’t like what he did in BASS 1982. I do like the stories he picked...but I don’t like knowing the back story behind the authors.

Overall, I really enjoyed this anthology. If you look at the time I have spent with it, it is clear that I don’t want to part with him.

I won’t have the same relationship I’ve had with him over these weeks.

Here are some numbers.

I posted my first entry about the collection on February 25.

I am post my last on April 16.

That works out to the following:

1 month 22 days

or

7 weeks 1 day

or

50 days

or

1,200 hours.

There were 20 stories and that works out to one story every 2.5 days.

Gender split was 10 male and 10 female – hummm...suspicious.

Magazine representation – completely opposite from the last BASS – Only one story from The New Yorker - Two selections from MSS (Gardner’s Magazine) and the rest of the stories are from a nice wide variety of little magazines.

My favorite – “Dancing Ducks”

Least Favorite – tough because I really liked them all - but if forced to choose, “Exchange Value”.

I’ll hold on to John Gardner a little longer.

I borrowed the book “The Art of Fiction” and am currently reading “Conversations with John Gardner” (yea!!! Inter-library loan).

Well- so long – I'll miss you.