#410 My Man Bovanne- Toni Cade Bambara

#410 My Man Bovanne- Toni Cade Bambara

This is from Bambara’s collection, Gorilla, My Love, originally printed in 1960. A woman, a single mother dances with a blind man, she enjoys herself. She is a city girl, through and through.

“And I ain’t never been souther than Brooklyn-Battery and no more country than the window box on my fire escape.”

All around her the community is changing, the “grass roots” and “black power” is growing, and suddenly thongs she is wearing and thongs she has been doing for years is being criticized. Her own sons are calling her horrible names for dancing with the blind man. Maybe she enjoyed the dance, because he was the only one in her life that wasn’t judging her superficially.

In the introduction to this collection, Bambara says she doesn’t write autobiographical fiction because she doesn’t want the hassle of friends and family getting upset at what she writes about.

“So I deal in straight up fiction myself, cause I value my family and friends, and mostly cause I lie a lot anyway.”

That’s a great quote!

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31

#409 Fun With Problems- Robert Stone

#409 Fun With Problems- Robert Stone

Hampton was a prison town, Mathews was a public defender. He used to be married but he is a drunk and messed all that up. Now he has settled into an existence of complacency and greyness.

“Matthew’s life had become so solitary he had almost stopped caring what he said, or to whom.”

“His ambitions had faded, and life could be various and perversely satisfying in Hampton.”

While conferring with a client at the prison, he meets a social worker and convinces her to meet him for drinks, although she herself a recovering alcoholic, only drinks juice. Mathews is like the devil on her shoulder and is extremely pushy about getting her to drink again. He is successful, she drinks, and they hook up.

“His life was lonely enough, but he was not shopping for a friend or a comrade in the service of the poor. His attraction to her was sensual, sexual, and mean, which was how he wanted it. Spite had taught his detachment. The trick was to carry indifferent to his own feelings without pity for things."

Her life goes back down the drain, and his stays in that middle purgatory. If he can’t be happy, the next best thing is to make others unhappy as well.

Rating: 7-8-7-7 Total= 29

#408 Riding the Doghouse- Randy DeVita

#408 Riding the Doghouse- Randy DeVita

Like father like son. A man lies awake, unable to sleep. It’s his son’s twelfth birthday.

“I am dozing trapped between midnight and dawn, and in my half sleep, I listen as rain sleets against our bedroom window; oak branches, stripped by autumn, scrape at the back of the house,”

He hears his son talking in his room, muffled, but when he looks in, his sin has closed his eyes pretending to sleep. He remembers when he was twelve, riding with his own father in his big rig. He too didn’t want to talk with his father, waiting for him to leave the rig, so he could talk to a stranger on the CB.

There is not enough time to miss good opportunities to talk to those most important to us. There are only so many miles an engine has before it dies.

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

#407 The Two Davises and the Rug- Lydia Davis

#407 The Two Davises and the Rug- Lydia Davis

This collection by Davis, can’t and won’t, is a different kind of short fiction collection than any of the others so far. Most of the “stories” are simple, one phrase, one sentence, one paragraph pieces, some listed as dreams. I probably wont use many of them here, unless I find one or two that are exceptional. Perhaps, I’ll use a few in one post.

This piece isn’t one of the dreams, but it is rather short. Two Davises, a man and a woman live in the same town, one a man, and one a woman. They are not related and do not know each other, until one day the female Davis decides to sell her rug. It’s a bold colored rug from he son’s room. They both have the same feelings for the rug, they are strongly ambivalent. They like it, then aren’t sure. Being very strong opinioned people, it is odd that they can be so unsure of they feelings about something so trivial.

I started stressing out over the indecision myself.

Rating: 7-7-7-6 Total= 27

#406 Report from the Trenches- Lucia Perillo

#406 Report from the Trenches- Lucia Perillo

We all have our demons, and our bad decisions. Some of us are lucky to see a sign, or get some help that gets us past them.

Jimmy has cheated on her again, and she flips out. She breaks her good set of dishes and drives Jimmy away with a curtain rod. Jill comes in to help calm her down. "Don’t clean this up", she advises, "sometimes you have to wallow in it to remind you how bad it can get."

She doesn’t need to be reminded, she wants to hear about Jill’s bad decisions which sound so much more romantic and wild than just having a philandering husband. Maybe Jill’s bad decisions are just the sign she needs to get past her own.

Rating: 8-6-7-7 Total= 28

#405 Ordinary Sins- Kirsten Valdez Quade

#405 Ordinary Sins- Kirsten Valdez Quade

Crystal works in the parish office. She took the job to pay some bills, and never intended to stay long. But now she is single, and pregnant, and her needs run further than money.

Father Paul is a beloved Priest, seemingly perfect and without sin, minus the former addiction with alcohol. But being sober for the last twenty-eight years, even that seems like a virtue. The New priest assigned to the Parish, Father Leon is traditional, cold, and judgmental.

The sins of the past, and present haunt each one in this story. Where there seems to be the strongest support, may lay the largest weakness.

Notable Passage: “Impressive how efficiently her subconscious tallied, dismantled, and blended together her sins, molding them all into a tidy and disturbing little narrative as persistent and irksome as pine sap.”

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total= 32

#404 The North London Book of the Dead- Will Self

#404 The North London Book of the Dead- Will Self

The first few pages feel like a sad, touching story about a son losing his mother to cancer, and perhaps that is what the whole story is, but then it takes a sharp left turn. It turns out that when you die in London you don’t really go anywhere.

“When you die, you move to another part of London.”

“The dead community are self-administering and there are dead people in most of the major enterprises, organizations and institutions. There are some autonomous services for dead people, but on the whole dead services operate alongside live ones. Most dead people have jobs, some work for live companies. Mother for example, was working for a live publishing company.”

Either a work of pure fantasy, or a man unwilling to let go of a loved one. Either way, this is a pretty typical style and quirkiness of Will Self.

Word of the Day: Eschatology- a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind

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