The light in the morning was strange.
I wrote a poem on the way to Amherst.
dead baby racoon
on the
side
of the
highway
It’s also a sentence.
Tuesday, today, I took my exercise bicycle apart and reset the resistance. So handy me.
Whenever I need to feed illiterate, I read stories from the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. I’d like to think that earlier writers just really liked their thesauri, or maybe in the past people just really liked those Improve Your Vocabulary quizzes, but still, my goodness are there a lot of words I don’t know.
The Monster and Other Stories, fitting into that last nineteenth/early twentieth century category has words I don’t know. It has the word dude used in a non-surfer way. It has some insidious racism that was probably actually considered as progressive non-racist at the time. It has three stories, one of which I completely forgot after reading it (The Blue Hotel) and I had to open up my kobo last night because I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was. It’s a somewhat odd choice for the sandwich filling of this trio of stories. The first (The Monster) and the last (His New Mittens) are set in the same town, are about family, are about children and adults and family and expectations, while The Blue Hotel is all men, all adults, in a hotel out on the plain (Nebraska I think. I suppose I could look it up.). All three stories are like whirlpools though, or tornadoes, or something that spins and spins: we start in close and expand out, more and more people entering the narrative, then spiral back in. It’s the natural way that Crane does this, this spiraling, that makes these stories. The initial and final simplicity of them is deceptive; there is a lot happening in each one (even the one I forgot).
But it is a bit dated. And it’s very American in that way that it can’t seem to envisage anything but what’s important here being important. And it took me forever to read the eighty-six pages. But then I got to say Mineola a bunch of times though, since that’s where Dover, the publisher, is located. Mineola. Min-eeeeeeeeeeeeeee-ola. Mini-OH-la. It seems like the name of a place where a Stephen Crane story should be located.
I will try to steal Stephen Crane’s spiraling out for my own stories. A good piece of writing to help me improve my own.
The Monster and Other Stories by Stephen Crane went on sale February 18, 2015.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
My new desktop background.
Last week I helped someone with their pre-calc homework. Just parabola problems, little tricks, but kind of fun, reminding me why I used to like math way back in high school. I’d like to think I explained things well enough — it being over facebook rather than in person. Maybe that’s telling me something.
So I thought a bit about mathematics this week. It seems strange that, at twenty-four through to thirty-two, I was at the edge of knowledge. I published papers and did stuff. Now, I meander about helping out high school math now and then and pretending things. I pretend things all the time. Remembering my dull dreams (actual zzzz sleep dreams not goals and wishes), expanding them, or just making shit up. I make a lot of shit up. I tell myself stories to go to sleep at night. Maybe that’s why my dreams are so dull, because my imagination is already overactive.
But I used to be at the edge of knowledge before I decided to just play around in pretend-land. For some reason, this past week, reconciling the two has been more difficult than I anticipated.
And so June begins – traditionally the month of Geoff attending conference after conference and me trying to parent in a way that isn’t me yelling and then turning on Netflix. So, instead of getting all stressed out about all the work I am not doing, I’m going to treat this month as a reading month: for work, I will read. I will read lots and lots of different types of books and then steal as much as I can from them. I also made secret pudding and put it in the back of the fridge where Tesfa can’t see it and I will eat all the secret pudding myself. I feel books and secret pudding (butterscotch!) might make this month less fraught.
Big A++++ to all actual single parents out there. All day everyday; I can’t imagine.
(I love getting to write the dotless ı in Turkish. When I’m done Irish on Duolingo, I might learn Turkish just because of that letter.)
Though his stories are often opaque, fragmentary and oddly plotted, they never fail to conjure up a mood that lingers in your mind for days.
Translators’ Afterword
Sometimes you don’t know what to say, and then the Translators’ Afterword says it for you. Most of what we have in this collection are odd little scenes with, from a plotting perspective, leave one saying So what? but from a mood perspective, give one a clear sense of Turkey from the 1930s to the 1950s. There are scenes of his neighbourhood, his island, fishermen, night watchmen, thieves, young boys in love (sometimes rather homo-erotically). There are a few stories just about fish, one from the fish’s perspective, one from a man watching a fish die. The stories skip lightly but at fairly earthy, concerned as they are with the minutiae of existence. If I were to pick a colour for this book, I’d pick a mundane sort of light brown, like soil a bit wet, but not drenched.
I don’t really mind reading no-plot little scenes, so I didn’t really mind reading A Useless Man, but a fair number of stories start with a few paragraphs that seem to have minimal consequence to the rest of the story. I guess they’re building the scene, but having to go back after a page or two because the transition to the actual story was so awkward, made me a sad and confused panda. Strangely, one needs focus for stories without traditional notions of plot, and I kept losing mine.
Line of awesome dotless ı’s: ıııııııııııııııııııııııııııııııııııııııııııııııııııııı.
A Useless Man: Selected Stories by Sait Faik Abasıyanık went on sale January 6, 2015.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Ivanov’s fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one’s efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.
The Part About Archimboldi, “2666“, Roberto Bolaño (translated by Natasha Wimmer)
Wish I was still there.