Cosmopoetica

A Thanksgiving Story

There was this kid in high school named Carlos, a year younger than me, a little pudgy and a little foul-mouthed sometimes, and not really a close friend except the way everyone of approximately the same age becomes close in a tiny town like Podunk, capital of the state of Nowhere, unless they are actual and actively enemies.

We were in mixed gym class, 9th and 10th graders together playing softball, one of a half-dozen necessary “liiiiiiiiife-tiiiiiiiime spoooooorts” as our ex-national wrestling champion turned gym teacher, coach and remedial math teacher liked to call them, when Deanna– the only remaining African American (or half African-American, I never asked and didn’t really care) in town (down from a peak of five, a number buttressed by the family of four that appeared suddenly one year and disappeared just as quickly) and one hell of an athlete (and I’m in no way saying these things are related)– clobbered the ball in what might not only have been a home run but might have, everyone now agrees, gone further than even my record home run from earlier in the year, the one that smashed the Wallis’s window across the street from the field, were it not for Carlos’s head getting in the way.

The iron crack of the bat was followed so quickly by the literally skull-cracking, comic-book like “pop” of the ball hitting Carlos’s head that I can only describe it as the sound an Asimovian android, all real-skin and carbon fiber bones, would make needlessly cracking his knuckles.

And Carlos fell from standing to sitting, feet to ass but upright the whole time, like he’d seen God and God had blown him down with his hot ketonic breath and ordered Carlos to sit down and think hard about what had just happened. And Carlos sat there, eyes closed, for a few seconds, while all of us just watched, and didn’t start to slumpfall until Coach– in an unlikely burst of speed that proved to even the skeptics that he really must have been an incredible athlete back in a time we could barely comprehend– reached Carlos and scooped him up in his arms.

It might make a better story to say that Carlos was never the same after that, like little Elizabeth, who wandered between a cow moose and her calf on the way to school, receiving a brutal kick in the head for head, and disappeared to wander India in search of enlightenment, but when Carlos came back from the hospital he was the same Carlos. And it might be more dramatic to say that poor Carlos gasped once, opened his eyes wide in recognition of some fantastic universal truth bestowed upon him in a single moment of cosmic awareness, and then died right there on the late Spring grass… but obviously he didn’t. No, the Carlos that returned triumphantly to school, high-fiving his friends and enjoying the mostly temporary adulation of the girls in his class (and a few in ours) was the same Carlos we’d always known: a little bit cruel in the way young men can be when they have fearsome older brothers to protect them, but basically a good kid, and not– as far as we could tell– any more enlightened than the rest of us.

And Carlos went on to do all the things you’d expect and a few things you might not, like dating Deanna “The Bat” for a while, indistinguishable from the rest of us in any important way until most of us left town and never went back, leaving the rest to say and never leave.

And that’s the end of the story until Thanksgiving a decade later, when Carlos returned home to visit his mom, his big brother, his big brother’s wife, and a bunch of friends whose identity doesn’t matter. Bloated with turkey and stuffing and pumpkin pie and all the food that each Thanksgiving we anticipate, wondering why we’ve confined it to one day each year and then a day later don’t even want to think about, Carlos and company were playing cards when someone– no one remembers who, but it was probably Carlos himself– cracked a particularly good joke (no one remembers the joke either) that set Carlos to laughing. And then laughing too loud. And then abruptly Carlos stopped laughing, as if someone had clapped a hand over his mouth, closed his eyes just, I’m sure, as he did back on the softball field, and died. The result, it turns out, of an undiagnosed and untreatable brain defect– likely from the impact of the fat and not-so-soft softball all those years ago– that lead to an aneurysm, an important vessel in Augie’s head choosing that particular moment to swell slightly and burst its impossible seam.

Sure, there’s the obvious irony of the whole thing: lifetime sports robbing poor Carlos of his reality and rendering him forever just a character in our memory of the odd events and the stories and anecdotes that spring from them. Which might be worse than not being remembered at all but for the example of our old Coach, deep in dementia, who doesn’t remember anything about the incident, and there’s nothing better about that. Deanna still blames herself and I doubt she’ll ever forget even the tiniest detail, as much as she might want to. And me… what I really remember– I mean in vivid detail– is how I’d closed an inning earlier in that same game with a cross-body snatch of a line-drive from the fat of Deanna’s bat, the ball stinging through my glove, a play so instinctive it made me realize there was something living inside me I barely knew at all and at the same time so natural even the coach had to literally doff his cap and so beautiful I sometimes wonder if it ever really happened at all.

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[cc image by Caro’s Lines]

Slightly modified from a meme I was “tagged” for:

take 15 minutes (no more!) to list, in no particular order, 15 books (in this case novels) that have most intensely “stuck with you.” No Googling, etc.

I was a bit surprised by what I came up with—definitely not the same list I’d create given more time. I’ve added a few brief notes after the fact:

The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner) – a tale of an idiot that’s no idiot and that ends up signifying everything. Say “stream of consciousness” and this is the work I think of first. Time- and mind-bending.

Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) – Alas, poor Yorick. Alas, DFW. In my own way I knew him well. Did you know you can laugh and cry at the same time (and I don’t mean happy tears)? Needless to say, David Foster Wallace has come up here many times.

Ulysses (James Joyce) – 18 mini-books in one, each with an individual style. Relentlessly allusive; at once stylistically sprawling and a picture taken with a macro lens that hadn’t been invented yet. I documented much of my re-reading of Ulysses a while back.

Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson) – could have put Diamond Age or Snow Crash here, but this is the one that popped into my head.

Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) – sneaking in a trilogy is probably cheating, but I consider this one big book. I think Tolkien did too. I’m well aware of what some consider flaws, but LoTR wormed its way into my heart early. I cry at the end—the very end—every time.

Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov) – I’ve written about Lolita before. It’s not the book too many think it is… it’s so much more.

Crime & Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky) – Raskolnikov is an indelible, horrifying, tragic, pathetic and disgusting character. And yet I have great sympathy for the deepest driving forces in his life and how they break us on their terrible racks.

Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) – I liked this more the second-time around than I did the first. I’d like to think it’s because I’ve retained my sense of wonder. The alternative is bleak.

Time’s Arrow (Martin Amis) – The imagery of time literally running in reverse, the homunculus narrator, and finally an original—even brilliant—evocation of the Holocaust. Time’s Arrow is criminally underrated.

Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) – A reasonable argument could be made for Huckleberry Finn as the greatest (if not The Great) American novel. It’s just hard to see through the layers of popularization and the book rendered constantly as a cartoonish work for juveniles.

Affliction (Russell Banks) – Wade Whitehouse is another unforgettable character: out of control, the abused become an abuser, unable to find his way. And the col Northeastern winter. And the utter absence of Whitehouse in this story, told after his disappearance… uncovered piece-by-piece by a scholar who is discovering an obsession of his own.

The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) – Another solid contender for the Great American Novel (and the “American” part is exceedingly important).

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll) – A novel even more shrunken in the popular imagination than Huckleberry Finn.

A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) – Sappy? Whatever. I’m not ashamed of it.

A Deepness in the Sky (Vernor Vinge) – I could list any number of sci-fi novels that shifted my perception, but Vinge’s novel both took off the top of my head and intersected with a lifelong interest in physics, relativity and time-dilation. I could have easily substituted Rainbows End, but that might be because I read it more recently.

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The stories in Flash Fiction Forward can generally be divided into a few basic categories:

1. miniaturized conventional stories

2. absurdist stories along the lines of James Tate or Russell Edson’s prose poems (the former is represented here)

3. extended prose poems

4. clever plays on type: stories in the form of quizzes, questionnaires, one-sided interviews

5. experimental and unclassifiable pieces that are usually some blend of 2 & 3

Of these I prefer the prose poems and experimental pieces (when they remain intelligible). The clever, gimmicky stories barely reward a single reading… they leave nothing to come back to in my mind. The absurdist thing’s been done– and is still being done well– but not by most of those who try it here.

Category #1, conventional "flash fiction," makes up the bulk of the volume, and is at times a thin gruel indeed. Unless adjusted for the form, the conventional stories suffer the most and most obviously, becoming anecdotes or story seedling harvested too early, neither allowed to grow into full-fledged works nor pruned and worked into bonsai.

There are good examples here of every type, most by names readers of short fiction of any length probably already know– Robert Coover, Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, Jack Handey, Rick Moody– and those alone make this collection of 80 stories a worthwhile investment of time and a few dollars. But while Flash Fiction Forward makes clear the dangers of the form, the benefits are less obvious. In my ears most of the offerings here fall flat with the same kind of disappointment one feels upon hearing three dominoes fall and then nothing… the rest of the chain squelched and squibbed. Rather than being short, flash, sudden fictions they are merely unfinished or simply too small.

I’ve blogged a few of the better stories:

I’ve blogged a few of the best pieces:

• "The Fallguy’s Faith" (Robert Coover)

• "The Hardest Questions" (Bruce Holland Rogers)

• "Bill" (Dan Kaplan)

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I can’t say enough about this collection. Borges was a master at weaving compelling, Escher-like verbal tapestries with threads of obsessions I’ve grown to share in: time, memory, eternity, infinity, fiction and evocation and vocation… the least of these stories is Very Good… a few of them should be considered among the best short fictions ever written:

"The Library of Babel"

Among other things, this story both poses a fascinating philosophical and logical question/conundrum regarding existence, creation and eternity, but it also unknowingly provides the single-most compelling explanation of what I understand to be one of the central projects of much experimental writing, including language and post-avant poetry.

"Pierre Menard: Author of Don Quixote"

A rightly famous tale in which Pierre Menard undertakes to immerse himself so thoroughly in Don Quixote that he will be able to re-create the work (not merely rewrite it), which will be much more interesting than the first– despite being identical to it– by virtue of being composed in the 20th century. Talk about raising serious issues surrounding our conception of originality, authorship, creativity and criticism…

And it’s impossible not to enjoy Borges’ humor recognizing the absurdity of the truth:

The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say; but ambiguity is a richness.) It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Menard with that of Cervantes. The latter, for instance, wrote (Don Quixote, Part One, Chapter Nine):

… la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, deposito de las accciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lopor venir.

[... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.]

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "religious layman" Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical eulogy of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

… la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, deposito de las accciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lopor venir.

[... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.]

History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what took place; it is what we think took place. The final clauses–example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future–are shamelessly pragmatic.

"The Babylon Lottery"

The story of a lottery system that has grown to encompass (and dictate) every aspect of a civilization– despite the fact that no one knows who runs it, if anyone does, beyond the shadowy and possibly non-existent group known only as the Company, or what the rules are, if there are any– is obviously an allegory for the role of fate, chance and determinism in life. But, like every Borges story, it is much more than that because he always manages to keep the focus on people even if the import is about something abstract. As Borges wryly notes in the prologue, after mentioning that one story is a detective story of a kind :

The other pieces are fantasies. One of them, "The Babylon Lottery," is not entirely innocent of symbolism.

And, again, Borges’ humor is both pointed and charming. Note Kafka’s apropos appearance:

… it must be recalled that the individuals of the Company were (and are) all-powerful and astute as well. In many cases, the knowledge that certain joys were the simple doing of chance might have detracted from their excellence; to avoid this inconvenience the Company’s agents made us of suggestion and magic. Their moves, their management, were secret. In the investigation of people’s intimate hopes and intimate terrors, they made use of astrologers and spies. There were certain stone lions, there was a sacred privy called Qaphqa, there were fissures in a dusty aqueduct which, according to general opinion, lead to the Company; malign or benevolent people deposited accusations in these cracks. These denunciations were incorporated into an alphabetical archive of variable veracity.

"The Garden of Forking Paths"

As mentioned earlier, "The Garden of Forking Paths" is a detective fiction, but of a very different kind. Dr. Yu Tsun, Chinese national, German spy, and great-grandson of famous intellectual Ts’ui Pen, seeks out Dr. Albert. But why? And how does what he discovers about Ts’ui Pen and his fabled labyrinth change (or not) what he must do? This brief story is a nesting doll of the mysterious.

I could prattle on about many more stories, but I’ll just end here and implore: read this book!

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It turns out Charles McCarry was one of the best spy novelists I’d never heard of. After too many recommendations from those in the know, I finally picked up the earliest locally available example of his work– The Tears of Autumn. I wasn’t disappointed. In this novel– first published in1974 and clearly written while the Vietnam War was a constant concern and the loss of John F. Kennedy still a painful wound– McCarry has established a claim to the heights of Le Carre in my personal pantheon. Tears of Autumn tells a complicated tale of conspiracy and the assassination of JFK… an oft-rehashed idea now, but McCarry’s book withstands the test of time due to the plausibility of the story and his clear, sometimes beautiful prose. The only false note in the book is that the main character is a bit too much of a super hero. Paul Christopher– a patriotic former poet turned CIA spy– is a bit too good at everything. Christopher’s not outlandish ala James Bond, but he touches on the unbelievable. A small weakness in a fine, fine book.

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The difficulty of it [writing] cannot be overstated. But at its best, it involves a state of concentration that is a satisfying experience, no matter how difficult or frustrating. The sense of being focused like that is a marvelous feeling. It’s one of the reasons I’m so willing to seclude myself and am a little bit grouchy when I have to deal with the reasonable expectations of the real world.

–Marilynne Robinson
from “The Art of Fiction #198″
(Paris Review, Fall 2008)

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Pangloss was professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology. He proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses.

“It is demonstrable,” said he, “that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for all being created for an end, all is necessarily for the best end. Observe, that the nose has been formed to bear spectacles—thus we have spectacles. Legs are visibly designed for stockings[Pg 3]—and we have stockings. Stones were made to be hewn, and to construct castles—therefore my lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged. Pigs were made to be eaten—therefore we eat pork all the year round. Consequently they who assert that all is well have said a foolish thing, they should have said all is for the best.”

–Voltaire
from Candide

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[isbn: 0375425306]

Referring to stories as ‘clever’ is often shorthand for "interesting but ultimately shallow," while ‘inventive’ often means "very creative, but not a great piece of art." In both cases the admirable qualities are undercut by a lack of dimension and richness when considering the work as a whole and alongside others like it. But sometimes a book comes along that isn’t just clever and inventive but also vital and fully realized. Kevin Brockmeier’s The View From the Seventh Layer is a good example.

A few of Brockmeier’s stories are formally inventive– "The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device" is presented in a "choose your adventure" format, which isn’t unheard of, but it also tells a complete, moving, beautiful story, which I’ve never experienced in that format before– but almost all are thematically inventive and clever in the best, non-reductive sense of the terms. Despite their undeniable freshness, Brockmeier’s stories involve the classic stuff of fiction: characters ranging from a preacher who discovers a compromising muse to a philosophy student who discovers through unexpected means why some great philosophers gave up on philosophy and an Afghani tribal woman immortalized by a western photographer, each wrestling with their constantly changing lives, their vocations (and avocations), the things they try to love, and the things they hope love them back.

Four of the stories are explicitly called fables. One of the most lyrical, "A Fable Ending in the Sound of a Thousand Parakeets," is also one of the best, telling the Steven Millhauser-ish story of a mute man living in a city where everyone communicates through song raises a flock of parakeets that gradually learn to sing the sounds of his life, even after his life is over. In another ("A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets") a man chances to buy "God’s overcoat" only to discover that the pockets are continually filled with peoples’ plaintive prayers.

There’s a deep power propelling each story forwards, but Brockmeier doesn’t sound just the same single serious note. "The Lady with the Pet Tribble" cleverly fuses Chekhov’s famous story "The Lady with the Pet Dog" with the milieu of that other famous Chekhov… the Star Trek universe while "Home Videos" takes place behind the scenes of a funniest home videos television show.

The View from the Seventh Layer is one of the best contemporary collections of short fiction I’ve ever read. It’s compellingly modern without  posturing, fragile without being pretentious, delightful without pandering. I’ve already ordered Brockmeier’s earlier collection and his novel. If they’re half as interesting as this latest collection they will be well worth it.

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David Foster Wallace has a new story in the New Yorker…

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A week or so ago I signed up as a member of a small group of bloggers reading Proust. Since then I have been making my very slow way through Swann’s Way (yep, the $8.95 cheap-ass bastard edition– after spot-comparing it with the Lydia Davis translation, I saw no compelling reason to buy the latter).

I don’t have nearly as much time to read as I would like, and the first thing I quickly discovered about Swann’s Way is that it demands that even rarer commodity: quality reading time. This is not the kind of writing that can be effectively done while listening to music or the radio… or even while significantly mentally distracted.

Of course, as everyone knows including those who have never read a word of his work, Proust is all about memory. As the blog alludes to, he distinguishes between volunatary memory, where you consciously seek to recall events from the past, and involuntary memory, which is triggered unexpectedly by objects. In Proust’s conception, the latter is the more genuine. It is all the richer and more complex for being uninvited, and it engages our senses in ways that deliberate, intentional recall cannot.

Proust’s writing demands– and so far rewards– close attention. His sentences are long, elegant, and tricky. But he doesn’t waste words; it’s not all lengthy frills and frippery but Proust’s fundamental unwillingness to let the smallest observation or feeling go by unnoticed or unexamined. It’s ironic to me that he puts so much value in the construction of our selves as seen through the eyes of others in the context of a work which is so intensely inward-gazing that it reaches an almost Zen-like state of absolute command.

At this moment I am poised for the dunking of the famous madeleine and the head-trips that follow. If I disappear for more than a few days, I’ve probably fallen into the book and am unable to get out…

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Eric Rosenfield thinks the short story is dead and then points to a dissection of the Best American Short Stories as proof!? BAS hasn’t been representative of the most vital aspects of the short story for decades (if ever). It, like the Best American Poetry series, is representative of a very narrow, exceedingly mainstream slice of its chosen genre. They are both comprised largely of stories from the biggest magazines and presses byt the Usual Suspects of the moment. If you want to make a judgment, at least open your eyes to the whole range of what is available, not the narrowest, staidest of anthologies. The only thing shown so far is that Best American Short Stories is predictable.
Judging only from Best American Poetry, one would think poetry completely moribund as well… and yet it couldn’t be further from the truth. For better or for worse, we are in the midst of a poetry renaissance. Poetry, like short fiction, has grand days ahead of it, not only because there are remarkable talents, but because everything technological is in their favor: the market shift to the long tail, podcasting, alternative reading devices, microformats and usable small-payment and independent subscription and production systems…

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