#804 Exposition- Rebecca Makkai

#804 Exposition- Rebecca Makkai

Another stunning story about the undying power of music. This is written as a transcript of a recording. A spy is being interviewed by his superiors about his last mission. He attended the concert of an enemy pianist, Sophia Speri. It was an illegal concert where she was performing outlawed music.

“It was hypnotic. The Music. The very reason it has been banned, I’m sure. It hypnotized, it entranced, it gave the listener visions of worlds beyond the borders of…the human heart.”

The concert took place in secret hall entirely in the dark. It was supposed to be her last concert, she presumably knew she would be caught and executed. She was shot and killed on stage by the spy ten minutes into the show. She didn’t stop playing even when the gun was put to her head.

The spy is trying to convince the interrogator that he did not enjoy the music, couldn’t remember the music. He was clearly moved by the performance and can’t explain why he waited ten minutes to kill the pianist instead of immediately. The musician is dead, but the music and the defiance lived on.

Notable Passage: “Not to unhear music, but to forget it. Are they not the same?”

Rating: 9-10-10-9 Total= 38

#477 Oblivion- David Foster Wallace

#477 Oblivion- David Foster Wallace

Oblivion is a paradox about a dream, or it’s a dream about a paradox, or it’s a story about a dream about a paradox. It’s one of those things, or it’s none of them. What it is, is another brilliant example of the genius of DFW.

Imagine a fight you’ve been having with your significant other, a fight that has persisted for months, neither side making headway and no chance of a resolution. You both firmly believe you are in the right and that the other one is just oblivious. Now imagine, as we all do sometimes, are sitting somewhere having the argument play out in your mind, all the anger and vitriol spinning and overflowing until you are about to explode. That’s what this story is.

The paradox turns out to be a Bizarro-Gift-Of-The-Magi-esque circumstance that has kept both parties from a good night’s sleep for quite a while. Wife is kept awake by her husband’s apparent snoring, sits up and screams for him to turn over or sleep in the other room. The husband is flabbergasted because he apparently hasn’t fallen asleep yet so could not have been snoring. After months of fighting they agree to be observed at a sleep clinic. Their analysis astounds both of them.

Then again, none of this may have been real.

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40

#341 Ado- Connie Willis

#341 Ado- Connie Willis

It’s springtime and the English Lit teacher is about to begin her section on Shakespeare. However, in this period of time, due to oversensitivity, most literature has been banned or halted by injunction. Just by announcing the start of Shakespeare, protests sprung up.

“Delilah was outside the school when I got there, wearing a red Seniors Against Devil Worship in the Schools t-shirt and shorts. She was carrying a picket sign that said ‘Shakespeare is Satan’s spokesman.’ Shakespeare and Satan were both misspelled.”

Trying to figure out which works were still allowed, the teacher and principle sifted through the objections:

-The Royal Society for the Divine Rights of Kings objected to Richard III because there was no proof that he has killed the princess…they in fact objected to all the plays about Kings.

-Angry Woman’s Alliance objected to the Taming of the Shrew, Merry Wives of Windsor, Romeo & Juliet, and Love’s Labor Lost.

-The American Bar Associating objected to The Merchant of Venice…as did Morticians International due to defaming of the word casket.

-The Sierra Club objected to As You Like It because Orlando carves Rosalind’s name into a tree.

ETC.

They settle on Hamlet but now must go line-by-line taking out any and all objectionable lines. What they have left amounts to a few lines of nonsense.

“Hamlet…is that the one about the guy whose uncle murders the king and then the queen marries the uncle?”

“Not any more.”

Somewhere in here is a great idea for a satirical look at censorship in education, but this widely misses the mark. It follows a formulaic spiral down the slippery slope of the rabbit hole. The end, where another group gets a court order to make Delilah change her sign and she angrily asks: “What’s happening to our right to freedom of speech”—is so cliché it’s, almost a pun. I guess with such rich subject matter, I was hoping for a little more edge, a little more bite, more nuance. Maybe the editor cut those things out.

Rating: 7-8-5-5 Total= 25

#196 The Executor- Muriel Spark

#196 The Executor- Muriel Spark

Susan is a forty-ish proud Scottish woman, who has become the literary executor of her uncle’s will. He was a famous writer. He dies quietly while fishing alone on his property. “It was a mild heart attack. Everything my uncle did was mild, so different from everything he wrote.”

While she sorted through his affects, she allowed a foundation to take his notes, the entirety of his writing study, and his correspondence. She however, kept for herself his unfinished last novel, ten chapters of an eleven-chapter work already completed. She wanted to finish the work herself.

Upon sorting out this manuscript she notices a note from her uncle, newly written in his hand, prodding her about finishing his novel. For a month she kept getting notes from beyond the grave which she ignored or burned. Her uncle was playing with her—or her guilty mind was playing with her. It turns out that the Foundation that held the rights to his work already had in their possession the final chapter, but needed the first ten that had ben withheld.

This is the first time reading Spark. The writing is eloquent and flowing. I found the Notable Passage below particularly beautiful.

Notable Passage: “He once said that if you could imagine modern literature as a painting, perhaps by Brueghel the Elder, the people and the action were in the foreground, full of color, eating, stealing, copulating, laughing, courting each other, excreting, and stabbing each other, selling things, climbing trees. Then in the distance, at the far end of a vast plain, there he would be, a speck on the horizon, always receding and always there and never to be taken away, essential to the picture—a speck in the distance, which if you were to blow up the detail would simply be a vague figure, plodding on the other way.”

Rating: 9-9-8-8 Total=34

#130 The Welcome Table- Alice Walker

#130 The Welcome Table- Alice Walker

An old life-worn black woman at the end of her days tries to go to church for the last time, but it is a white church. After politely telling her to leave, and trying to shoo her out, they get forceful and carry her to the church steps and leave her suffering outside.

Inside the church they stand and prayed about: “the protection and promise of God’s impartial love.” Bewildered more than hurt, she sings and stares down the road, finally spotting Jesus who has come to lead her to salvation. She is found later dead by the side of the highway, she walked herself to death.

Among the many wonderful traits of Alice Walker is her poignant descriptive phrases. They paint a picture that sticks with you. These are just some of the great quotes about this woman:

“She was angular and lean and the color of poor grey Georgia earth, beaten by king cotton and the extreme weather.”

“Perhaps she had known suffering. There was a dazed and sleepy look in her aged blue-brown eyes. But for those who searched hastily for reasons in that old tight face, shut now like an ancient door, there was nothing to read.”

“On her face centuries were folded into the circles around on eye, while around the other, etched and mapped as if for print, ages more threatened again to live.”

Heartbreaking story, beautifully written. That pretty much sums up all of Alice Walker stories.

Rating: 8-8-9-8 Total= 33

#79 Tricks- Alice Munro

#79 Tricks- Alice Munro

This is a tragic Love Story. We haven’t had many of those in the past few months. This is at once familiar and completely fresh.

Robin is a single 26 year-old traveling to Stratford for her annual night of theatre. She likes to go alone and ride the train home afterwards. Due to a serendipitous string of events, she has the romantic night of her life. After losing her purse she meets a man walking his dog that offers his assistance:

“She had trusted him for faulty reasons. But she had not be mistaken to do so.”

They part, but not before agreeing to meet again next summer: “We will not write letters, letters are not a good idea. We will just remember each other, and next summer we will meet.”

But alas, it is not to be. The Shakespearian circumstances that lead to their failed re-meet is heartbreaking to ponder, but as a reader of short stories, completely satisfying. This is a fantastic read!

Notable Passage: “Move and inch this way or that…and you’re lost.”  Such is life.

Rating: 9-10-10-9 Total= 38

#67 Goodbye, Sweetwater- Henry Dumas

#67 Goodbye, Sweetwater- Henry Dumas

Sulfur Springs and Holly Springs, Arkansas…"The mineral richness below the surface has transformed the once cotton and tobacco lands into little pocket mining communities sticking like hardened sores beneath the white dust.”

As the Second Great Migration of black southerners to the north and western parts of the country was slowing down, the new industrialization left these communities dried up—literally and symbolically.

Families that survived slavery, war, and economic disasters were now being decimated by Jim Crow laws, and systematic upheaval.  Communities like the ones mentioned above were left with only the very old and the very young remaining to fend for themselves as best they could.

Layton is a teenager living with his grandmother. They are tight and cling to the only thing left to them, an intermittent sweet water spring. “The spring played a hide-and-seek pattern going underground and reappearing later.”

But like everything else in that part of the world, the spring will dry up eventually:

“Layton knew that staying was like dying. He could not die. He would go off and take his chances.”

His grandmother, being smart and practical agrees and encourages him to go, to do anything but stay and dry up with the sweetwater: “Go on and finish school. Go in army. Go to college. Get yourself some learnin’. Take care of your mama.”

Layton’s main source of strength and inspiration is his grandmother, it would be hard to leave her behind: “The only thing that gave Layton any real consolation was the fact that his grandmother was indestructible.”  “Somehow his grandmother was bigger and stronger than the land.”

Another beautiful story by Dumas filled with emotion, truth, and soul. There is strong commentary in here about the civil rights activism that is perfectly expressed, straight-forward, not heavy handed, and honest. As I say after each one of these: THIS SHOULD BE REQUIRED READING IN SCHOOL!

Notable Passage: “A mad dog will bite his own mother, son. So I’m sayin, son, be mad but not like a mad dog. Be right first. Be truthful first. And when you get mad at something, you got all that to back you up.”

Rating: 9-9-9-10 Total= 37

#64 People Like That are the Only People Here- Lorrie Moore

#64 People Like That are the Only People Here- Lorrie Moore

For the first two months of this project, I’ve used Friday’s as a showcase for O. Henry. Not wanting to get too repetitive or to use one author for such a high percentage of my reading, I’d like to change things up a bit.  For the next few months, O. Henry Friday’s will highlight winners and finalists of the O. Henry Awards, thus changing up gears a but, but keeping to the spirit of the original idea.

For starters, we have the 1^st prize story for the 1998 O. Henry awards, written by American Author, Lorrie Moore. Besides being one of the best titles for a story I’ve ever seen, this story is a beast.  It’s a tough topic, the worst topic actually—a child with cancer. “Baby and chemo, she thinks: they should never even appear in the same sentence together, let alone the same life.”

The Mother (Capitalized like you would God) is a writer and struggles with trying to take notes about this impossible experience to write pieces to raise money to pay for the treatment. But she’s having trouble

-“This is the Hieronymus Bosch of facts and figures and blood and graphs. This is a nightmare of narrative slop. This cannot be designed.”

-“I write fiction. This isn’t fiction.”

-“A Beginning, an end: there seems to be neither. The whole thing is like a cloud that just lands, and everywhere inside it is full of rain.”

The whole note-taking adds a Meta-level that increases the tension of the story. It’s emotional, frantic, ironic, humorous—in the way that jokes can relieve unbearable tension when things are awful, the kind of jokes that make you chuckle dryly but never actually laugh. The writing is real and not at all indulgent or derivative as such stories can often develop.

Notable Passage: “What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do.”

Rating: 9-8-9-8 Total= 34

#63 The Signal Man- Charles Dickens

#63 The Signal Man- Charles Dickens

Sorry for the brief hiatus, i was away for the weekend. I'll catch up over the next few days.

A haunted track worker tells the tale of a ghost appearing near his signal light:

“…the left arm is across the face, and the right arm is waved. Violently waved.”

“Halloa! Below there!” Each time the aberration shows itself, horrible deadly events take place.

Like many of Dicken’s works, this one uses real-world references.  The first warning to the signalman occurred as the Clayton Tunnel disaster of 1861 (tunnel seen below).

The narrator although sympathetic to the fear in the signalman’s eyes, believes his mind is playing tricks. He agrees to take him to a doctor the next day, but its too late, the ghost had already appeared and forewarned of the man’s own demise.  At the start, the signal man mistook the image of the narrator as another appearance of the ghost, perhaps he was right.

This is very much a Dickens story.

Notable Passage: “men of common sense did not allow for coincidences in making the ordinary calculations of life.”

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30