My First Goose
April 13, 2011
This morning, I heard a flock of geese flying north, and it made me think of the first short story that truly got me thinking about what a story truly should be in terms of plot arc: Isaac Babel‘s “My First Goose.”
I read it first in Dave Kajganich’s Intermediate Fiction class at Miami University, and we broke down the plot into a graph. The push and pull of Isaac Babel’s narrator created a jagged line up to the point where he skewers the goose on his sabre and orders an old woman to cook it for him.
But that’s when translated literature began to suffer. The stories of Red Cavalry amazed me, and I read a collection I got from the library. When Babel’s narrator walks up to the old woman and tells him he needs to eat, she said, “Comrade, I want to hang myself.” I remember it being horrendously out of place, bumping me out of the story.
When I presented Red Cavalry for a Critical Reading and Writing: Novel-in-Stories class taught by Antonia Logue, I went out and bought The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, which is edited by his daughter and translated by Peter Constantine. The woman’s reaction to Babel’s narrator demanding food—and trying to impress the soldiers with whom he was embedded—was completely different.
“Mistress,” I said, “I need some grub.”
The old woman raised the dripping whites of her half-blind eyes and lowered them again.
“Comrade,” she said after a short silence. “All of this makes me want to hang myself.”
And there it is. Character motivation. An old Polish woman, imposed upon by the Sixth Division of the Red Army, has a reason for her utterance of suicide. Of course, Babel the character—let’s not confuse the writer with the storyteller—must, above all, become one of the men to whom he was assigned. “‘Goddammit!’ I muttered in frustration, shoving her back with my hand. ‘I’m in no mood to start debating with you!’”
I thought of this story much over the past few months. Last fall, while in Ohio for the holidays, I took a couple short trips out to public land to hunt geese. I had no idea what I was doing, and I didn’t bag any, probably because I had no calls, no blind, no decoys, and, well, the water was already frozen—they’d already moved south. I fired one shot at some flying over, but they were plenty out of range. And so is Babel’s storytelling ability. He’s a true master; when the Soviet Union disappears you, you’re doing something right with your writing.
Story Week Reader 2011 put to bed
March 10, 2011
Cover by Ann Prazer
For the past three years, my wife Ann and I have designed the Story Week Reader for the Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing Department, where I got my M.F.A.
This year, like every year, it feels like a marathon to design—even with the templates Ann created in InDesign—because, unlike other literary journals, the writers go through several rounds of revisions with an editor. This year, that included sending each writer a galley of their story for their approval. It was easy from a technical standpoint, and really fulfilling to see the stories of emerging writers go from raw submissions to layout.
Kudos to all the writers, and especially to editors Jotham Burrello, Dan Duffy, Leah Tallon, and Maggie Ritchie. You’ll be able to read the entire book online at the above link later today.
Amazing debut by an amazing writer
February 1, 2011
I first met Patty McNair in my first graduate-level fiction course in 2003, and though her teaching has stayed with me ever since, her writing is magnificently inspiring. She’s got a new website up for her debut collection of stories, The Temple of Air, which I had the pleasure of copy editing. Usually, reading manuscripts feels like work on some level, but not this one. It’s amazing and touching and painful and everything a good book should be.
So take a minute, check out her page at http://patriciaannmcnair.com and, if you’re feeling adventurous, take a look at the interview I did with her for the reader’s guide. That one’s at http://bit.ly/errgTK.
The code of a gentleman
January 27, 2011
I’ve got a fancy-pants wedding coming up that I’ll be attending at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia—black-tie optional, wearing a tux (I’m a groomsman) that I just bought and had altered. So I’ve been reading up on etiquette and manners; I don’t want to make a fool out of myself. And maybe the best book on this that I’ve read has been The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide: Recovering the Lost Art of Manhood by Frank Miniter. Besides how to break up a fight and how to pack a first aid kit, the chapter on being a gentleman has a few lists of great gentlemanly codes—think King Arthur’s knights, the U.S. Marines, etc. My favorite, though, is the following list of A Gentleman’s 20 Rules of Conduct, with Miniter’s explanations omitted unless they require some clarification:
1. Always be polite.
2. Don’t curse around ladies.
3. Don’t shout.
4. Don’t lose your temper.
5. Don’t stare: ogling a woman is poor form.
6. Don’t cheat: a relationship is a pact a man doesn’t break; if it isn’t working and can’t work, end it; if you do that before accepting other companionship, you’ll be an honorable man.
7. Don’t spit.
8. Respect your elders: use sir and ma’am when speaking to an elder you’re not on familiar terms with.
9. Don’t laugh at others: if someone spills a drink or trips, help them. Don’t chuckle unless they do.
10. Take off your hat indoors.
11. Wait for everyone when sitting down for a meal.
12. Always open doors for ladies.
13. Always help a lady with her coat.
14. Help her with her seat.
15. Give up your seat: that goes for tables, buses, trains, etc., for ladies or, I would add, the elderly.
16. Stand up for a lady: during formal occasions, stand when a lady exits a room or table.
17. Give her your arm when escorting a lady to and from a social event.
18. Ask if she needs anything at social events—a seat, a drink, etc.
19. Dress better than the occasion.
20. Have impeccable hygiene: You can have dirty nails when splitting wood, but not when you take a lady’s hand.
I can’t argue with any of these, and neither would my wife. Since reading this, she’s said I’ve been “much more sweet” to her, but the truth is that I’ve only been doing what I ought to have been doing all along. These are simple guidelines that I wish more men would follow.
A huge loss for the Chicago lit community
January 21, 2011
Ric Hess, one of the owners of Sheffield’s, passed away Monday. I’d only met Ric a few times, mostly during literary events he hosted at his bar like Reading Under the Influence or Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing Department grad student readings during Story Week or other times, but this one’s shaken me a bit. Ric was only 48 when he died, and an alumnus of the Fiction Writing Department. It’s just way, way too young; his Facebook page is covered with gorgeous and touching memories friends have written. At times, it’s hard to turn away from it.
The Chicago Tribune wrote up a featured obit, which played second only to that of Sarget Shriver. But to Chicago’s literary community, losing Ric is a serious blow. Let’s all keep his family in our thoughts.
A noble New Year endeavor
January 14, 2011
A good friend, and former coworker, Janelle Rucker, started off the 2011 with the goal of reading a book a week, and in typical Rucker fashion, she’s kicking this resolution’s ass. First up, Arranged Marriages by Chitra Divakaruni, an amazing writer and wonderful person I had the pleasure of meeting during one of Columbia College Chicago’s Story Week Festival of Writers.
Janelle’s a great reporter for The Roanoke Times, so it comes as no surprise that she’s writing about the adventure into fiction. Check out her site at http://myjournie.com. It’s well worth the read.
As for my resolution, I’m going to be better about updating this site.
With the holidays coming up…
November 18, 2010
As far as I can tell, I’ve seen nothing but father-son relationships for the past year and a half.
They appear in books, movies — even television shows, and I’m not much of a TV watcher.
And I know why. My relationship with my own father, from the time I turned twelve, went downhill. That’s the age he was when he watched his own dad keel over from a heart attack at the breakfast table while he got ready for his day. My grandfather, as my dad told it, was dead before he hit the floor.
He only told me this because, around that time, he was yelling at my brother for not picking up a candy wrapper, and I stepped in between them. He told me to mind my own business. I grabbed him by the shirt and slammed him into the wall and said, “Why should I listen to you? You’re nothing but a fucking drunk.” He had a few inches on me, the body of an All American football player and wrestler softened by middle age, but in that moment, I stood eye-to-eye with him; I had him back on his heels for once. He called me a loser, though he apologized the next day.
The next day he tearfully apologized to me and admitted he was a drunk. He never uttered the word alcoholic, as far as I know.
I’ll skip a few years, a divorce, a few arrests for drunken driving, a distancing in our relationship to the point where we didn’t talk for a few years. But the truth of the matter is that he was a raging alcoholic, and nobody knew extent of it — he started seriously drinking when he took a job sweeping up at a bar when he was fifteen.
Of course, I didn’t know about this until after he shot himself in the side of the head on June 2, 2009.
That’s when I started noticing fathers in nearly everything, and in hindsight, everything I’d ever read. The image of Quoyle’s fatherhood in Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News breaks my heart now, where it once inspired me. The distance between Frank Wheeler and his sons in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road seems eerily prescient now. I ache for Ballinger, the father who learns his pregnant daughter will marry one of her college professors in Richard Bausch’s amazing short story “Aren’t You Happy For Me?” I could go through my bookshelves and list you example after example, and do the same with my DVD collection.
In that one moment of despair that followed infinite others, when Dad squeezed the trigger of that .32, my view of life began to change. I truly believe fiction is a mirror of life, but I know — not just understand on an intellectual level, but know it in my core now — that that compact between reader and writer, director and viewer, is a two-way street, though not one that the writer or director has any control over.
I’ll be the last person to urge restraint upon writers; self-censorship makes for crap fiction on the page or on the screen, and stories of happy families don’t make good stories. Neither, though, do laziness or easy exits from plots. Every single example I mentioned does the hard thing and puts the audience through the wringer.
And as someone who’s been through the wringer of life lately, I’m damn glad they did.
Happy Halloween. Chekhov as Lohan, Colbert
October 31, 2010
It’s not exactly new news that Ben Greenman, an editor at the New Yorker, has a new “book of fiction” out, where he inserts pop culture figures into classic Chekhov stories. In his interview on The Daily Beast, he says it’s a project he directed, more than he wrote.
That said, Nerve.com has an alternate story, and if this taste of how the father of the modern short story dresses up for Halloween under Greenman’s direction, I have to say, I love it. The first paragraph:
Before setting off for her audition, Lindsay Lohan kissed all the movie posters. Her stomach felt as though it were upside down; there was a chill at her heart, while the heart itself throbbed and stood still with terror before the unknown. What would she get that day? An offer? A callback? Six times she went to her mother for her blessing, and, as she went out, asked her sister to pray for her. On the way to the audition she gave a homeless man five dollars, in the hope that that five dollars would atone for her ignorance, and that she would not forget her lines or what her character was feeling.
Chekhov is brilliant and required reading for anyone who wants to call himself or herself a writer. But his stories are also just a damn good read. Let’s hope this literary mashup gets younger readers to give Chekhov a chance.
Better than a drunk dial
October 27, 2010
Or even a text from last night (language not safe for work). Turns out, according to the Guardian UK, that drunken book-buying is so much easier with an e-reader.
The number of books I buy while sober is, I have noticed, inversely proportional to the number I buy while drunk. It’s a zero-sum game, as Proust once observed of wet dreams: when all the resources are consumed in the night, none are left for waking life.
Counting free samples and e-books from the pre-1923 copyrightless domain, the total number of books I “purchase” per month has actually gone up by about 200%, while the number of books I purchase while sober has dwindled to about 5% of the total. You used to be able to say that someone’s library looked like it had been assembled by a drunk person. Now, for me, the metaphor has become a reality.
It’s an absolutely brilliant piece, if not for the content, for the writing. Turns out if I ever end up with an e-reader (or an iPad), I may be drunkenly downloading some Elif Bautman.
To avoid carrying books
October 24, 2010
I’ve seen a three people on the train in the last two weeks reading Kindles. Which is fine, if you’re just into consuming words instead of truly diving into them, turning pages with a pencil in your hand, marking passages that move you. You know, trying to make yourself a better reader or writer.
Well, now you can put your e-reader inside a case that makes your e-reader look like a book.
Based on my experience, the Pad and Quill cases are the toughest of all the gadget cases which imitate Moleskine notebooks. And now there are finally Kindle 3 and Nook versions.
Really? Really?
