Foreign Shores – James Salter

James Salter - June 10, 1925

Salter’s inclusion by Updike should come as no surprise to those familiar with the works of both authors.

I felt that this was a very masculine story even though it was soaked with two strong female characters. Surprising to me, I felt that the young boy in the story was the strongest of the characters – his presence - his limited lines - they carried a power.

I like the way Salter writes. If you are familiar with my writings here on this journal, you should have a general idea of the sort of writing that I am attracted to. I do enjoy the beautiful turn of phrase and a classical style…but at the same time, I like the brute force of a nice string of sentences that startle the reader. I don’t disapprove the use of a startling scene or a situation that makes the reader uncomfortable (sexually…or morally) because I think that this technique employed correctly by a writer is what makes literature so…well…damn good ( see the works of Joyce Carol Oates). Salter is another writer where I can say “if I were a writer…I’d like to write like him”.

Letters and their contents.

It’s unfortunate that letter writing has fallen out of our culture. Rather than finding a drawer full of letters hiding secrets (as in this story), we find unlocked email accounts and steamy text messages on cell phones.

Electronic characters rather than ink scratched into paper.

Messages that can disappear in old electronic archive folders hidden behind passwords never to be seen by a son or daughter searching for the origins of her parent’s relationship.

We have become so good at hiding who we are – who we choose to present to the world. It’s nearly impossible to really know another person.

Husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, parents and best friends – all remain a mystery to each other for entire lifetimes.

It can be what makes relationships so wonderful – the exploration…or so tragic – the discovery.

Bruns – Norman Rush

Norman Rush - October 24, 1933

Interesting author. Rush and his wife served as Co-Peace Corps Country Directors in Botswana from 1978-1983. His experiences there colored his stories – this one not excluded.

Tough story to get through. Honestly, I have trouble reading stories in dialects. They turn me off from the beginning, and I can’t seem to manage them enough to dive deeper into the story.

With this story, I can only guess that it draws on an incident that Rush may have witnessed during his time in Botswana.

His closing two sentences actually wrap the story up for me perfectly.

“There is ruin. It’s perfect.”

Very seldom does a week go by that I don’t think about my time in the Peace Corps. This constant reflection is of course only stimulated more by having M as a wife…but I reflect often on my time there and my memory is still good enough to pick out small details of days and moments that had a great impact on my life.

On our past trips back to Negresti, one of the first things I try to do is to walk the streets. This is a pretty funny desire because when I lived there, I made efforts not to be seen on the streets.

When I walk the streets, I want people to recognize me. I want to see if they have changed – I want to see if they see any change in me.

Negresti is a strange town. It hasn’t changed much in the 10 years since we left. There are far more stores and the selection of merchandise is much greater for the consumer (as opposed to the times when I couldn’t even buy bread or salami).

I walk the streets and I go into the stores and I see the selection and I see that people are buying and I am happy that these products are available to them – but then, there is a slight twinge of sadness deep in me.

I want to hold onto the suffering that I had when I lived there. I want the walks and the stores to be the same. I want the small bars and cafes to only have 3 selections of beer and 2 choices of coffee and 3 brands of cigarettes – rather than the 10 choices of beer, 10 coffees and 10 brands of cigarettes.

I want the cafes to be cold and dark…I want the bars to be cold, dark and filled with the smoke of a days worth of smokers. I want the streets to be broken and cracked – I want to hear people calling out to me and whispering as I pass…

I take comfort in the memories – am I afraid of the progress because it is unknown?

Things to Be Thrown Away – Jonathan Penner

Jonathan Penner - born 1941

My father has a huge basement. This basement has the square footage of the apartment that M and I live in now.

This basement is filled to about 99.35% of its capacity. It is FULL.

Tools, old board games, CDs, old framed pictures, books, kitchen appliances. Rolls of tape, scotch, collectable watches and general crap that he has found and collected over the past 40 years.

I say 40 because he has stuff down there from his college days – stuff that he has carted from his home town in Iowa to PA to VA back to PA to NJ and then back to PA.

Honestly, there really is a lot of stuff in this basement.

Now, what makes me write about his basement in relation to this story, is that I too must make a decision – sometime pretty soon I would imagine – concerning things to be thrown away from his basement.

I’ve written in the past about how he has already started to “give” me things. This process of “giving” is interesting.

He’ll state that if I see something, and I want it, ask him, and he’ll give it to me.

Well, on one of our last visits, I did just that, and the “giving” didn’t actually take place.

I asked him for something and he would look at it and ponder its signifiganice in his life and the say “…well…I don’t know…I’d like to hold on to this.”

He would then ask if I wanted 5 rolls of duct tape or an old rusty rake ( I took one roll of tape and politely refused the rake).

There is this unspoken knowledge that exists within the entire family where we realize that someone is going to have to take or to dispose of most of my fathers “stuff”.

Over the past several months, in preparation for the baby, I have done a fine job of clearing out the apartment of my life of “stuff”.

I can’t imagine nor would I want to bring into my life all of his stuff.

So, I too must consider what to keep and what to discard.

And, in this process, I must decide what to keep about my father and what I shall let slide down my memory hole.

The Cold Room – Lowry Pei

Lowry Pei – Birthday?? – Grew up in the 50s.

I venture into my own cold room quite a bit.

Sometimes I think that I spend too much time there.

My cold room isn’t necessarily filled with the corpses of memories. I think that they are just in hibernation and each time I visit them, they return to life and I am able to spend some time with them again.

Then again, I’m happy to have the ability to still pull those memories from the recesses of my mind. Who knows how long they will remain. I know as I age, I’ll loose the ability to find them in their normal resting places.

When I crack the door of the cold room and step inside, I think about my days in high school. Friendships…girlfriends.

I think about my college years. Again, all the good friends I had …the couple of girlfriends I had.

I think about my time after college.

My years adrift before my time in Romania.

I think about the “friends” I had in Romania. I think about M and how we met. I think about out time together in RO. I think about our first years in this country together. I think about the innocent first couple of years we spent together…as we really grew to know each other.

I’m happy when I revisit these corpses.

But, deep in the back corner of the cold room, on a shelf, in a box are the really “dead” memories.

I know they are there, and from time to time I will lift the lid to that box and look inside and see them there. Naturally, I don’t spend too much time with them….but I respect the space they occupy on their shelf.

Rosa – Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick born April 17, 1928

If I had not read ‘The Shawl” in the BASS 1981, I don’t think that I would have had the connection to this story that the story enabled.

Having that story in my head through the time I read this really added some depth and body to the story.

Rosa is a rather long story…but worth it.

I always seem to enjoy stories that have a character who is…touched in the head.

I think if written with skill, the effect is wonderful.

Ozick certainly knows how to pull it off.

I think that part of my fascination with this particular trait in a character is my own fear or thought that I may suffer this fate someday.

I already question little mannerisms that I have and wonder how others perceive me. Little gestures, statements, behaviors and quirks. I think looking at myself from the outside, parts of who I am are a bit – well – weird…if not a little odd already. I ask myself – “why did I make that weird noise?” or “why did I screw my face up like that?”.

I have told M about these thoughts I have and she assures me that these are just traits that make us who we are. They are part of our personality.

I suppose she is correct, but I can’t seem to shake that I’m already a bit off center.

My father (in his “normal” days- Pre Alz), had an odd personality. You don’t have to stretch your thoughts too far to draw a connection between the two of us.

I just wish I wouldn’t look back on a scene in my life and be so critical of my behavior in these particular scenes.

I’m too into my own head sometimes. If the normal biological processes of my brain chemicals altering my everyday behavior as I grow older don’t push me into the looney bin – then me fretting over those brain chemicals is going to push me there quicker.

-Screwed huh?

Nairobi – Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates - born June 16, 1938

I haven’t yet narrowed down my inability to finish this volume of the BASS. Sure I’ve been distracted by the pregnancy but I’ve had plenty of time to read and write.

It’s not like I don’t have more years of the anthology to plow through…

Perhaps it’s my lack of disciple showing again.

I don’t understand what is so difficult about spending ½ an hour with a story and then writing something about it the next day.

So…Nairobi.

Oates.

A pleasant enough story. Nothing spectacular – standard fare from Oates (which means that the writing is superior to other authors).

What did it give me?

Well, this was a tough one.

One that caused me to stare hopelessly at the computer screen for awhile.

The first word that popped into my head was illusions.

I feel that the story had to do with the perception of those illusions. Is it even possible to perceive illusions or are illusions something that are stable and cannot be subjected to a certain perception? They either are something or they are not.

Hummmm…

This story caused me to think about the world around me and my existence in it.

How much of the time that I spend in this world is an honest existence?

Reality vs. fantasy.

I’ve written in the past quite a bit about perception and how I am working at how I deal with my own.

It seems, and this may be just because I am hyper aware of it, that there is an awful lot of discussion out there in the world now about the “reality” that we are living in. Was the life we lead before this economic crisis a “real” world or was it a world based on a fantasy?

Was it this illusion that got us into the trouble that we are in now?

Was what happened after 9/11, America’s reaction, based on a realistic plan to fight our enemies? Afghanistan? Iraq?

The internet, TV, the movies, the entertainment and information industries…infotainment…are they reality?

Do we see Nairobi on the other side of the screen and believe that we are there because we have been conditioned to believe that we are there because we are told that we are there?

Illusions and reality – something to be explored and considered.

Glimpse into Another Country – Wright Morris

Wright Morris - January 6, 1910 – April 25, 1998

It’s not that often that we sit back in our little world(s) and attempt to grasp how big the world really is.

We go through our day and focus on our frustrations and convince ourselves that the problems and pains we are suffering are to be our own to bear and that there can’t possibly be anyone out there suffering as much as we are.

I think DFW in his famous commencement speech brought our self-centeredness right to us and helped us realize what silly creatures we are.

Only recently, well, within the past 8 years or so, have I really attempted to grasp the enormity of the world. Even after my trips, life and time abroad, I still failed to realize the scale of this place – planet - until recently.

I think it has only been through the education I have gained over these past years both through my day to day work and in my reading that has allowed my mind to open and to see what is really going on in this world...taking a Glimpse into Another Country.

I think that it’s the mental filters kicking in once again that only allow so much information to pass through into our minds preventing an overload of sorts.

The filters prevent the weight of the world from crushing us. Sometimes those filters malfunction...and well, you can guess what happens when the weight of the world lands on you.

How many times do you glimpse into another country?

Step off that cliff?

Run that extra mile?

Cheat death?

Walk around naked?

I thought that doing so would be difficult given my line of work. I have found this not to be the case.

It all has to do with a shift in your mental state. Knock it off a couple of degrees – (you can choose how to do that) and your everyday can become glimpses into other countries.

I have to remind myself to skew my angle of thought. Not daily...but hourly.

I have to think about how others think.

Think about what others see.

Think about what others feel.

Think about what others do.

Then – I think about what I think and see and feel and do.

And I think about other ways of thinking and seeing and feeling and doing until I know that my next step may or may not be the right one...but it will definitely be interesting.

It’s a big world.

Let your mind take you out there. It’s easier than you think.