The Moon and Sixpence

I picked up Maugham' s "The Moon and Sixpence" at Chop Suey Books in Carytown. I was in the mood for a first person narrative unlike a few recent contemporary novels that have left me confused about the form. Why do so many narrators today remember what they cooked and ate and watched and said? Accountability seems to be the strongest asset of any good storyteller. Save paper; state what matters.

I recently read "The Dentist", a story by Roberto Bolano, where two men come upon a brilliant writer living in a run-down section of Irapuarto, a city where I was once stranded after fighting with a woman on a trip to Guanajuato. I was attracted to the story immediately because of its location, but then, even more, because of the idea that there were still writers unfound in the world that either would never be found and didn't care, or wrote solely for their own pleasure, or were unable to get their work in the right hands to the right people to the right, who knows? I have to believe that writers need to write and need to be read, its connecting one's mind with another's through an object that was once a dream or a thought or a voice real or imagined. I remember Arthur Flowers saying there was no greater joy than to hold in his hands the book that was once inside his head.

Maugham does this well. His narrator follows, much like the narrators of Bolano's best stories. They tell the story of another, through their own voice, and hold themselves accountable for the accuracy and omissions and editing necessary in the retelling of past events. This allows the narrator to depart from the actual telling of the story at times in order to set forth his or her own thoughts. He does not have to 'remember thinking'. He is thinking as he is telling, and so the narrative is true to the form. No one can remember thinking. But in some writing the narrator remembers thinking better than he remembers his own story.

The narrator in "Sixpence" follows the not-so-tragic character of Charles Strickland, while defining for himself and the reader what art is and can be:

"The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration, sublime or beautiful, satisfies the aesthetic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself."

Throughout the novel, Maugham reminds the reader that he is detached from Strickland's life and so gives himself the privilege to write about it without mercy. The weakest moments come when the two interact, as it only serves to move the story along. But, what is most fascinating is his clear and concise ability to be astounded by a work of art while at the same time understanding that all good art is a sublime and unknowable force.

He writes: "The writer is more concerned to know than to judge." And one understands that in the end it is impossible to really know anything.

Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather

The short story. Not sure where it is or where it's going. I read them, take from them what I can, and if they're good, if every word is as it should be, and there is no denying a world as the one read, then I am left in awe, turning backwards toward the beginning to see how I was taken and ultimately stranded. Few authors have not only the ability, but the heart, to focus their talents on the detail and structure a short story demands, and who's to blame them? Hundreds of unread literary magazines are put to good use in starting a fire during these cold months. A fair number of my own stories are among the ashes. The move to online-only literary magazines is clearly coming, and I actually tend to read individual short stories online more so than I do in print, mainly for their instant availability. On the other hand, I have a deep appreciation for a collection as a whole. They are still being published in fine hardcover and paperback editions, and some great authors are lending themselves generously to the form.

I think of the collection as I do an album, knowing that Open Secrets by Alice Munro is not the same without the story "Vandals", nor is Neil Young's After the Goldrush the same album without "I Believe in You" or his cover of "Oh, Lonesome Me". There's a rhythym, from beginning to end, in a collection of short stories.

However, it is rare that a collection will stay with me, become part of me, in a way, long after I've read them. A few that have include: Jesus' Son, Rock Springs, The Burning Plain, Blow-Up and Other Stories, Cathedral. I may remember a story or two from the recently published collection The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards by Robert Boswell, but, as a whole, I could not say the collection was well connected and the stories flowed from one to another with any real meaning or purpose.

The same can be said for Lydia Peelle's Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, which contains two awesomely rendered pieces, "Kidding Season" and "Shadow on a Weary Land", but I don't get the sense that these two stories, the last in the collection, are connected to the rest of the book, as they are without question the most imaginative and original of the group.

(Side Note: Why does every young writer have a carnival story of some kind?)

Strangely enough, though, there is a collection I read recently by Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian, Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, that, even though distilled from seventeen stories down to six for the English language version (by Gao himself), work to represent the chaos of thought and memory and its influence on how the past is remembered and the present experienced. Gao is a masterful writer, often playing with tense shifts and narrative in a way that I have never seen before. I sometimes believe he is speaking to his own spirit. The title story, and, yes, I agree, a terrible title, is one of the best I've read in years, and the collection is pieced together in the same way that we live, remembering varied fragments of time from the recent past to childhood, even playing with our projections of the future. It was a joy to read, and, along with Soul Mountain, shows why Gao was such a worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize.

Turning Back at Elk City

New Story in JMWW Jounal.

Man. Woman. Fear. Violence. Love.

Quotes from writers in new Opium Magazine. I submitted a line from George Saunders and he replied with a line from Pushkin. They're both in Opium 9, along with some great writing and an interview with Jonathon Keats. Worth checking out.

The Obscene Bird of Night

There are few novels that one senses more than they read, and "The Obscene Bird of Night", by Jose Donoso, is one of them. Mr. Donoso, who passed away in 1996, was a novelist, journalist, and professor, and his style reflects all three vocations. He writes from the perspective of a deformed mute who does not so much tell a story as let the story be told by those who surround him. In long, scattered paragraphs, sometimes four, five voices will speak, and we know that the mute is in the room as he will sometimes interject with his thoughts. I have seen this before in Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano", but Donoso is challenging the reader even more by asking us to listen as the other characters--nuns, priests, inmates, old women, lovers, doctors--speak to the boy, and to each other, and as the boy speaks to them (though they cannot hear him), and narrates the action of the scene. We sense the entire scene that Mr. Donoso has imagined, and in this case, the word creates the frenetic feeling of being stuck in a crowd.

The boy comes from a wealthy family, however, because he is born deformed, the Don of the family manages to surround his son with other freaks in a Casa run by nuns, so as not to expose himself and his aristocratic family to ridicule. The boy, Mudito, is not allowed to leave the Casa and so has no knowledge of the outside world. The story moves through history and time the way our memory sometimes recalls a moment from yesterday and then another from twenty years ago while walking a single city block. The boy has created a character who assists the father in these plans, and through a short novel within this novel, we learn about the development of the Casa. Characters in Mudito's novel and Donoso's reflect each other, and sometimes become each other in the nightmarish world that develops in the boy's mind once he has his first glimpse of the city streets outside the Casa.

Ideas of hoarding objects play a significant role in the novel, and both religious and personal artifacts--a Eucharist light, the finger of Saint Gabriel, a button, a board game--are treasured equally by the "inmates", who have, since Mudito's birth, become accustomed to the Casa, which, as the novel progresses, is rumored to be torn down so that developers can build and profit off the land.

Sex, Dogs, Pumpkins and Giant Paper Mache Heads, also permeate this novel that, in my reading of it, asks whether it is ever possible to erase the now proven corruption of our past, and if those who were responsible for its creation can ever be punished.

Last Days in America

Dear Readers,

Thank you for continuing to check in with this website and for your support. My hope is to post frequently about those books which might go unnoticed, or worse, be forgotten.

I also hope to share my own work with you, especially any work that appears in literary journals I have often wished to be a part of over the years. One of those journals is KNOCK Magazine, published out of Antioch University Seattle and edited by Bryan Tomasovich.

My story: "Last Days in America" appears in the magazine's new issue.

You can buy individual issues or subscribe here

The magazine is also available in bookstores across the country

The Boat, Gallatin Canyon, Bear and His Daughter

A few weeks of fighting the short story, made it possible to explore it once again through the eyes of three very different authors--one young, two old.

The sentimental is stripped from the work of Robert Stone's "Bear and His Daughter", while McGuane still puzzles in a way that at times aggravates me as a reader, but then, in no less than a short sentence, illuminates the power of the short story: heart, humor, mystic observance. "No longer the country crossroads of recent memory, Four Corners was filled with dentists' offices, fast food and espresso shops, and large and somehow foreboding filling stations that looked, at night, like colonies in space..." (From the story Gallatin Canyon). McGuane propels the narrative forward with a rare language that is true as a woodcut, yet understands the need to lighten moments with non-sequiter dialogue and exposition that often traces the cruel, strange, and funny line of a man's life:

"The seas were ever less violent, and within an hour the skies had cleared entirely and the Gulf had regained its characteristic dusty green placidity under towering white clouds. It occurred to Errol that his drinking days were behind him. Oh, joy! Not another shit-faced, snockered, plastered, oiled, loaded, bombed, wasted minute ever again! No more guilt, remorse, rehab, or jail! Free at last!

"Calming down, he remembered that his hope lay in his visit to Florence Ewing, the good witch." (From the story The Refugee).

I often look back to the two stories that have always stayed with me: Ishiguro's "A Family Supper" and Richard Ford's "Rock Springs". Both speak with such honesty and clarity, they are sometimes too difficult to finish for how masterfully written they are.

I wonder then after finishing a book of stories like "The Boat", will I ever remember the plot, the characters, a line even, from that work. It is with me now, so I'll say that the risks Nam Le takes are wonderful, and the ability to enter the worlds unknown, such as in "Cartagena", where a drug lord's pawn is forced to make a crucial decision concerning his life and the life of a friend, inspire to let go of the fear of writing about something you don't know, and embracing the idea that strikes us in dreams or in early morning silence, the calling, the source. I enjoyed five of the seven stories, though the one that seems to have propelled his book toward its lauded reviews, "Love and Honor and Pity, etc.", a narrative one knows is true yet stripped and sculpted into an arc, felt very out of place once I had finished the book, which is strange considering it's clearly used to establish unity in the collection.

It would not be fair to match Le's work with the work of McGuane and Stone, nor to match McGuane and Stone, though both do embrace the chaos of chance. While I can see the conflict, climax, reverse expectations, and resolution of Le's work very clearly, Stone fires out like a shotgun spray, as if a journalist just picked up along a dirt road and entered into a world he had no idea he was about to record. Stories like: "Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta" begin in the scene, offer only the most minimal exposition, and reveal the characters through one of the strongest forces of fiction, dialogue. There is always the possibility of each story collapsing under its grandiose conditions, but the thrill of reading Stone is that the characters work themselves up to such a state that if they didn't snap, we may as well for them. So, I'm invested.

All three I recommend. Beautiful books unconcerned with anything other than the line, the beat, the voice.