Coover: "the convention" and "The Brother"

Robert Coover was born in 1932 and teaches at Brown University.  You do the math.  This past February, I saw him at AWP give a reading of his stunning story, "Going for a Beer," which you can read in its entirety online.  It's as fresh and experimental as anything T. C. Boyle shares in his anthology.

To supplement your reading, I ask you to read this recent article published in the Guardian in which author Hari Kunzru discusses, among other things, Coover and his interest in "the possibility of non-linear narrative architecture."  Characterization is important to Coover, but it works in the service of epistemological and ontological goals.

O'Connor: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "Good Country People"

Goodness!  O'Connor obsesses over it, teases it and twists it.  In the end of these two stories she leaves us with a murderer and a seducer teaching hard-won lessons to women who'd believed they had it all figured out.

All writers have obsessions.  O'Connor bring her characters to life through their appearance, action, dialogue, and thought; and every bit of direct characterization is in service to her obsessions with morality.  One of my favorite passages from "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" sneaks in under the radar as one of the Grandmother's bits of unwanted advice.  Think about this: she "cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour and that the patrolmen hid themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after you before you had a chance to slow down."  Oh, sneaky rulekeepers!  How dare they hide in order to catch you misbehaving.  Watch out for the judges who hide among you!  If you're sure you can get away with it, speed on!

When the Misfit is there to catch Grandmother misbehaving, she reforms.  O'Connor seems to be asking whether threat is the only way to salvation.

In "Good Country People," nasty Hulga maintains her position of intellectual superiority up until she is brought to mortification.  Will this moment ironically save her from herself?  Why does the story start and end with Mrs. Freeman?  Maybe it shows the unreliability of the narrator....  This will lead us to a discussion of direct characterization versus authorial interpretation, as explored in the next chapter of Burroway.  At the beginning the narrator tells us: "Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings."  By the end, the narrator has faded and we get Mrs. Freeman herself: "Some can't be that simple," she said.  "I know I never could."  Whom do we believe?

If all writers have obsessions, what are yours?

Cheever: "Goodbye, My Brother" and "The Five-Forty-Eight"

These two stories by Cheever pull me into deep waters. It's not the purification experience of swimming that the "Goodbye, My Brother" narrator believes in. Rather, these waters are like the ocean that long ago drowned the father of that story, the waters that always drown our fathers because they are the whole of our backstory--they are where the past exists.

In "Goodbye, My Brother," we find Cheever referencing old myths and old bloodlines, traditions and the way our readings and reinventions of traditions might help or harm us--on this point, I find find the story to be steadfast in its ambivalence.

In "The Five-Forty-Eight," the crazy victimizer, Miss Dent, is also the victimized. She too draws on the past, quoting Job from the bible, a man who suffered greatly and was not perfect. In the end perhaps Miss Dent succeeds in getting through to the blind and somewhat cruel Blake. Cheever leaves this up to interpretation.

The title had me curious, so I searched for "5:48" on the internet. The result: Matthew 5:48 is part of the Sermon on the Mount and is "the final verse of the final antithesis, and a summary of Jesus' earlier teachings." (This is from wikipedia; go look up more about it if you wish; it involves the conundrum of perfection.)

Miss Dent quotes Job to Blake: 'Where shall wisdom be found?' it says. 'Where is the place of understanding? The depth saith it is not in me: the sea saith it its not with me. Destruction and death say we have heard the force with our ears.'

Keep this idea in mind when reading Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

P.S. This posting is a mini-lecture, not an model for the comments I'd like from you. For that, stick to the syllabus's instructions of writing about technique/elements and how Cheever might influence your writing.

Flowers Grow Out of My Head

My brother George and I used to sing this funky Pointer Sisters song in the seventies. The counting grounds you while the melody magics you up. Throw in a pinball machine and you've got a vision of life itself. Stability, art, and chance.

This is how I feel about origin and originality. My answer is twelve.

Animator Abbey Luck has remade the video with music by Perrin Cloutier of the band Beirut. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Letters to Alison Dubai

Last night, my son Emerson and I both had great dreams. In Emerson’s dream, he and his uncle were walking through a forest picking crayons off the trees.

In my dream, I sat in the back of a red pickup truck with a dozen or more people who were younger than me, maybe college students. We were watching an empty train track. It was early summer and the air was filled with anticipation, like we were getting ready for a Kill the Cat Press chapbook launch. (Or the end of classes, or even graduation.) In the distance we heard the noise of something approaching, and then there it was, a train, a long and loud train pulling into view and finally slowing to a halt. We jumped up to see what was inside, and on the backs of the train cars we saw large bright objects the train was delivering. Odd containers like kayaks and red and yellow dog houses and big suitcases and giant turtle shells that looked as light as balloons. Young people started to appear everywhere, climbing the train to unpack the shells and the boats and the houses. Everyone was excited about the train’s arrival. Everyone looked for her or his own container to take home.

I relate these two dreams because I wish to ask the author of the new chapbook Letters to Alison Dubai:did you dream these dreams last night too?

Elizabeth Deanna Morris is a dreamweaver. She is a dreamcatcher. In her poetry-prose, she storytells and creates a real and unreal fabric, warping language over our heads and woofing it into our eyes and ears. In Liz's gorgeous and innovative compilation, she picks the crayons off the trees and puts them to good use, drawing in our minds and our hearts. In an alternate reality, you and I are sitting together in the bed of a red pickup truck. We’re watching a train come toward us on the tracks. In a moment, it will arrive, full of containers ready for us to grab and fill…

(Modified from Kill the Cat Press Launch, May 2, 2011

The Exquisite Failure of the Jack Bank

Last night, Glen Retief read from his excellent debut memoir, The Jack Bank. The title derives from the author's experience of physical abuse at a white South African boarding school. G.R.'s performance for the university crowd struck a chord. This beautiful man, somehow real while standing high on a stage--impossible, yet!--he was simultaneously thoughtful, earnest, and artistically deliberate. The audience roared as he read a coming-of-age story set in a metaphoric castle not unlike college castles all across America. He described how he found community as a white man living in a primarily black dormitory hall; how his friend Aubrey accepted him and found him "...interesting, man"; how the author continued to hide his homosexuality in this new context and friendship; and how the two friends set out on a drunken knights' mission that ended in failure.

My colleague's performance leads to this It's Dark in There Tenet #1: Failure is the only path toward creating something worthwhile.

Pink Pig

Just reread Selah Saterstrom's book The Pink Institution, thanks to the Susquehanna University Lit Club.

When I was little, I delighted in the short i, in its two different sounds. There's the short i of Pit and Pin and Pill. Then there's the short i in Pink and Pig. The difference is so slight that I would slip into it, saying pig and pink over and over again, wondering at that slight upturn of my lips.

Now S.S. finds a way to play with the beauty and the horror of this slippage. In a cover she designed, she presents a southern life, minus the Peculiar Institution, as the Pink Institution. Hanging upside down. Bleeding out. Catching breath.