Week in Seven Words #564

This covers the week of 11/8/20 - 11/14/20.

boredom

He's under the impression that his boredom makes him unique. He believes it's a sign of superior intelligence.

eventful

Quarantined at home, she wears an evening gown to her microwaved dinner.

inevitability

Was it always going to happen this way? Could there have been another way? Another reminder to shift from what-ifs to what I have to do now.

innocence

There's enchantment in his voice when he points out the leaves whirling, settling on the sidewalk in a cascade of gold.

pasty-faced

We Skype again, our voices subdued. I don't even think it's something we enjoy doing anymore, seeing each other's faces through a screen. There's something tiring and unreal about it.

upcycled

As the sun sets, we stroll among dog sculptures made of plastic bags. They're cleverly done, colorful, a contrast to the loose bags and other bits of garbage along the street. Afterwards, we sit on a bench and talk for a while, until it gets too cold and dark.

walking

The day is made better by changing leaves and weather that's cool, not cold.

Week in Seven Words #523

This covers the week of 1/26/20 - 2/1/20.

apart

Who does he talk to when he needs to confide in someone? Who do I talk to?

groaning

I hear what sounds like a ghost moaning, but it's just a bus easing up to the curb late at night.

marcescence

What is the phenomenon of trees holding onto their brown, shriveled leaves in the winter?

plumpness

A narrow metal shelf bulging with cartons of chocolate milk. 

self-protective

Refusing to stay in the bitter overflow of another person's emotions.

stalled

They present us with a packet of forms and with a platter of purple grapes and potato chips that aren't really potato chips but are supposedly something healthier. The meeting is much like the one months ago. Similar concerns raised, the same pairs of hands tied, but at least we're venting a little.

vaguely

They remind me that they still know I exist. Now and then, I flicker into their awareness.

Week in Seven Words #371

bursts
Several adults are squashed together at a picnic table. They shout, sing, and jump up to make backstroke swimming motions. One of them pretends to ride a horse. They're playing Time's Up, round after round.

delicacy
The stationery store reminds me of a candy box. I buy a couple of gifts for someone and linger over the glossy, gold, silver, pink papery confections.

disjointed
Walking a couple of miles at night. The streets look like they were sloppily glued together. The sidewalks have ruptured. The buildings leak. On one street, the strongest light is from a supermarket window papered over with ads for detergent and ham.

entertainment
In one room, the kids make silly videos with their phones. In the other, the adults seethe at the cable company over service disruptions.

overlooking
I can remember details from conversations that took place months or years ago, but I'll step into a home I visit regularly and not notice new furniture arrangements or a large new shoe rack by the door where I'm just now placing my shoes.

screen
The high school students walking alone are stone-faced and wear earbuds. Some hold their phones a couple of inches from their eyes.

sprung
I stare at the screen for minutes without knowing how to finish the paragraph, but as soon as I get up to run errands, everything - the paragraph, the whole article - comes to me.

Three Short Stories Exploring Profound Loneliness

Title: Death of a Traveling Salesman
Author: Eudora Welty
Where I read it: The Oxford Book of the American South

R.J. Bowman, a traveling salesman, lives in a string of impersonal hotels with no one to help care for him when he's sick. His life hasn't made an impression on anyone. After almost driving his car off a cliff in a backwoods area, he finds himself, shaken and unwell, in the home of two people who live primitively. But even in that impoverished home, he discovers intimacy - an unspoken, simple closeness between people.

These people cherished something here that he could not see, they withheld some ancient promise of food and warmth and light.

Although they're hospitable to him, he remains outside the circle of domestic warmth. And he wonders why he doesn't have such warmth in his own life. It's a simple thing, found even in the most remote places, so why not in his life? What he's seeing is basic to life but absent from him; how is he still alive?

Title: The Museum
Author: Leila Aboulela
Where I read it: The Anchor Book of Modern African Stories

Shadia, a Sudanese woman, attends a graduate program in statistics in Aberdeen. Throughout the story, she suffers from a lack of connection to anyone. What she misses most about home aren't the people (including a fiancé who talks at her over the phone); it's the familiar places and experiences of day-to-day living she's homesick for.

It's not as if home is in all ways attractive to her. At home, there are people - like her mother and her fiancé – who try to pin her down, make sure her life fits a certain mold. (At one point, she mentions childhood visits with her father, who had left her mother years before, and how she enjoyed those visits because he kept mixing her up with her sisters; she could pretend to be different things with him, because he didn't have a fixed idea of who she was or should be.)

At the same time, Scotland is alien to her. In the course of the story, she develops a tentative friendship with a classmate, Bryan. Bryan's interest in her leads him to try to understand her culture and do some things that would make him more appealing to her. However, there's the possibility that Bryan, who hasn't traveled much but really wants to get out of Aberdeen, is attracted to her because she's exotic and represents an escape. How much about her can he understand?

At the end, he tries to shows his willingness to understand by inviting her to a local museum where there's an exhibit on Africa. But it's a jarring visit for Shadia, because the exhibit focuses on the exploits of European visitors and the kinds of animals one would see on the African continent. Where are the people? There's nothing of life at home that she recognizes.

Shadia's life is in a state of suspension between cultures, and no one seems to know who she is and what she really wants (and it's not as if she's clear on that herself). She misses home, but there are traps waiting for her there - stifling relationships. Could she make a home in Scotland and also open Bryan's eyes more? Or would that be too difficult, maybe even impossible for her?

Title: The Prospect from the Silver Hills
Author: Jim Crace
Where I read it: The Art of the Story

The main character struck me as already odd and alone when he starts his isolated job. He works as an agent for a company that's prospecting for precious stones and valuable metals in a remote region. His job is to examine samples of earth that have been dug out to see if there's anything promising in them.

But what does it mean that he's odd, and how does this oddness intensify? He imagines a wife and family for himself. He doesn't fit in with the work crew, who initially make some attempts to socialize with him. And how he experiences the land is increasingly at odds with how the company wants him to see it. He develops a sensual appreciation of what's dug out of the earth, and he restores it in unique, aesthetically pleasing ways.

A stone of apple-green he removed and walked with it into the valley where in a cave there were lichens of the same colour. A fistful of grit he scattered in the grass so that it fell amongst the leaf joints like sleet.

His sense of what is valuable no longer has anything to do with what other people find valuable. He's concerned with what looks good, what fits, and whether a place seems whole and restored.

He sees things in the land that no one else sees. He's cut himself off from other people and established his own world and his own system of values. That's his loneliness, his madness and vision. It highlights some of the arbitrariness in the values other people assign to things. Maybe this lonely man saw no way to find the things he valued within established society, so he made a world of his own - and, through isolation and sleeplessness and his own vision, he found a home permanently there. Until he's one with the hills, like a figure in folklore, not entirely human.

(As I was writing about this last story, it brought to mind Virginia Woolf's "Solid Objects," which I wrote about here. There's a similarity in the characters' obsessions about what they find in the earth, and the increased disconnect from society and its values.)

Three Short Stories That (In One Way or Another) Show the Strangeness of Day-to-Day Life

There are many things about day-to-day life that people take for granted - a stability and predictability that can be reassuring. But daily life isn't as stable, comfortable or rooted in common sense as it may appear when people coast along on it. The following are three stories that show an alien side to daily life and one's place in it.

Week in Seven Words #162

awakening
When I talk to him on the phone, he tells me that he's finally starting to treat himself fairly, see himself as someone who has a lot to offer. It's inspiring to hear him speak this way, especially in light of my own tendencies to undervalue myself and play down my abilities.

fandom
I love the unpredictability of people (as long as they don't turn out to be axe murderers). I never imagined I'd get into an in-depth conversation on fanfiction tropes with someone at a Shabbat lunch.

lonesome
Books, photos, a light behind a door that's mostly closed. She talks about all the things she'll do, some day, and casually mentions that she's afraid of dying.

potential
I'm reminded again of what an asset it is to have patience, as long as patience doesn't turn into inertia.

shamefaced
Two choices: implode with embarrassment, convinced that you've lost everyone's respect... or just keep going and realize that, contrary to what your melodramatic brain is telling you, things are actually ok, and no one cares as much as you think they do.

strop
The fierce sulking of a teenaged girl.

vowels
Wheel of Fortune is fun for young kids who are learning to spell.

Human After All

I've published a short story at Front Porch Review called "Human After All." It opens like this:

After the fire ruined her face and body, Aisling didn’t want to live among people.

You can read the story here.

Worth Watching: In the Heat of the Night (1967)

Title: In the Heat of the Night
Director: Norman Jewison
Language: English
Rating: PG/PG-13

An influential businessman in a small Southern town has been murdered, and the first suspect brought in for interrogation is Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier). Why Tibbs? He's a black man and was found sitting alone at the train depot with a wad of cash in his pocket; in the eyes of Sheriff Gillespie (Rod Steiger) and his ragtag crew of officers, he might as well be sentenced on the spot. When it turns out that Tibbs - Mr. Tibbs - is the best homicide detective in Philadelphia, makes more money a week than Gillespie does in a month, and was only passing through the area after visiting his mother, he's recruited to help solve the case. Reluctantly, after some pressure from his own police chief, he agrees.


It's not a happy situation for Tibbs, working in a hostile town where he could easily get arrested, beaten or shot. Tibbs can't just be good at what he does. To receive basic human consideration, he has to be the best; he has to meet the highest standards of professionalism if he even wants to be tolerated. I don't think we ever see Tibbs eat anything, wear anything other than a suit, or sleep. He has to be more than human.

Poiter delivers his lines a little too stiffly here, compared to his performances in a couple of older films. Maybe the extra stiffness reflects the strain of having to play - not for the first time - two roles in a movie: the role of his character (who's trying to stay alive, solve a crime, and show racist people that he's a person worthy of respect) and the role of Poitier the Emissary, put on the big screen to comfortably show white audiences in the late 1950s through the 1960s that black people can be good and kind and smart too.

Before Poitier, black actors didn't get prominent parts on-screen, with the exception of some musicals. From what I've seen they were mostly portrayed as slow, child-like, and/or servile. Poitier broke down some of those stereotypes by playing intelligent characters, people with nobility and courage and strong will. But to endear himself to white audiences, he wasn't allowed to be sexual, and he needed to be shown as helpful to white people. In the movies I've watched so far, his characters weren't boring or perfect, and he portrayed people who had backbone and wouldn't accept racist insults. He broke ground in cinematic scenes where he wrestled down racists (in the The Defiant Ones), called them 'boy' (in Lilies of the Field), and in this movie, slapped them. Those scenes still have power today, but they were much more shocking when the movies first came out. Still, Poitier was limited in his choice of roles, because he had to present a certain image to movie-goers.

In any case, I think in this movie the strengths of his performance lie not so much in the delivery of his lines but in his intense facial expressions, and his body language suggesting defensiveness and leashed strength; he has a compelling screen presence. His demeanor is a sharp contrast to Steiger's Sheriff Gillespie, a laconic bulldog of a man who slouches around, chews gum, puts his feet up on his desk, and hides a sharp mind behind an easygoing manner. Gillespie is racist, not so much with true conviction as with a need to feel superior to others in some way, given his nonexistent personal life and low-paying, high-pressure job in a backwater town. Tibbs's city manners, cleverness and sophisticated crime-solving techniques reluctantly impress him even as he's eaten up with jealousy and outrage.


Detective Tibbs and Sheriff Gillespie don't become friends, but Gillespie does come to see Tibbs as a man worth respecting and defending. In one great scene that captures their relationship and its uneasiness, Gillespie hosts Tibbs in his home where they talk over drinks. Letting Tibbs into his house is an unspoken sign of respect from Gillespie, who doesn't like having guests over. In the course of their conversation, they discover some things they have in common (two law enforcement officers, leading a lonely life with lots of hard, tiring work), and Tibbs starts to look a little relaxed for a change. But then the feeling of fellowship startles Gillespie - it's suddenly too much, sharing confidences with a man who should be inferior to him but isn't - and he retreats back into his racist mindset and shuts Tibbs out again, leaving Tibbs disillusioned and regretful. As long as he can see Tibbs as an officer, Gillespie is able to work with him, but he keeps retreating from the idea of Tibbs as a man.

That scene felt a lot more real to me than the ending, which hit a wrong note. Suffice it to say, Tibbs solves the murder, and he's about to leave this little town where maybe he's changed some people's perceptions. Gillespie arrives to see him off at the train station. At this point the filmmakers (and Poitier) make it seem like Tibbs really needs the recognition from the sheriff. He doesn't just want the victory of getting acknowledgement from a man who thought he was dirt at the start of the film, or the satisfaction of changing some people's minds; he seems to actually need Gillespie's approval. (Not like in Lilies of the Field, where the recognition he wants from Mother Maria feels more like the respect a person demands from a worthy contender.) Here it seems that Tibbs wants a pat on the head.


I haven't said much about the murder, because while there are some suspenseful moments and colorful (and yucky) minor characters the movie is worth watching mostly because of Poitier and Steiger and their dynamic.

I also love the feel of the movie in some of the scenes. There's the blur of lights in the beginning with Ray Charles singing In the Heat of the Night. Also the unexpected moments of humor or irony; for instance, the first character in the film who respectfully addresses Tibbs as "Mr. Tibbs" is one of the most racist characters, Endicott (Larry Gates), who lives like a plantation owner of yore. He regards his workers with paternalistic condescension and pines for the good old days where he could get away with shooting the uppity ones. These days he can't even deliver a slap without getting one back.

What I wanted more of was Tibbs's thoughts about the situation he's in. Not his need for acknowledgement or his need to stay alive and stay one step ahead of those trying to kill him, but his thoughts on being in alien territory. Usually he's in Philly, well-respected and in his element; in the South he's rejected and threatened by white society and doesn't fit in among the other black people who are still kept in "their place." His mother lives in these parts, and he understands some of the culture - seen especially in his conversation with Mama Caleba (Beah Richards), a character who plays a key role in the murder mystery. But what does Tibbs think? He's an emissary from another world (in this case, a big city in the northern U.S.), just as Poitier himself bridged two worlds in mainstream cinema, his films becoming part of an important transformation in American culture.

*All images link back to their source (Flixster Community).

Week in Seven Words #86

abruptly
It's a drab gray street with little to see except for a parking garage and the neon-lit windows of an XXX shop. Expecting to soon put it behind me, I hear someone call out, and there they are, people who haven't been around in months. They've materialized across the street at the bus stop with their child.

germination
Sometimes at the end of a sluggish day, all the inspiration and energy that had stirred quietly beneath the surface will burst out like vines flowering in a bog.

hermetic
There will always be someone sitting alone on the grass talking to himself in the midst of other people.

ineffectual
A thundercloud looms over the city, delivering empty threats all afternoon. We walk undisturbed.

mutual
We feed off each other's enthusiasm.

standoffish
The fountain at Fitler Square is fenced off. It plashes with an aloof complacency at people who try to send their arms through the bars to touch the water.

transmogrification
Old brick homes with fanlights above the doors give way to derelict shops and cold glassy skyscrapers.

Red Blues

Week in Seven Words #37

linger
Things that get put off and delayed do not go away. Why do I keep letting myself think they do? Though I turn my mind to other chores and tasks, the things I've tried to put off still sit there (I can see them out of the corner of my eye) siphoning away my concentration until at last I just have to deal with them.

neglected
I don't want a human life to go by unobserved. The people who seem invisible, unloved, and unwanted by others - I used to think they're ignored in large part out of a lack of time and willingness, also an indifference and callousness (life's busy, so much to do, can't stop to look, and are they worth it anyway?) but there's more to it than that. There's an underlying fear too, that anyone can slip through the cracks.

penne
Maybe it's the colder weather, because I get a craving for pasta this week; I like the way it bubbles in the pot, the billow of steam as I tip it into the colander, and the plentiful plate of it drenched in tomato sauce, garlic, basil and mozzarella.

phoenix
A new week, and new ideas rise out of the unceremonious ashes of old ones.

puddled
The world is overrun with cold water. Every step is a squelch, a splish, a spatter.

straining
I want them to understand. I point, repeat, stare at them with a desperate encouragement, ask questions, try to urge them out of a state of passive absorption. I wait for the light to flow into their faces, the glimmer of comprehension, that tells me they've learned - and that even if they don't grasp everything, that they want to at least struggle with the material, to lean forward in their chairs and puzzle things out, ask questions, throw suggestions out there without a fear of being wrong.

vaccine
The nurse administering the flu shot asks me if I'd like her to tell me when the needle is about to go in. I tell her it's not necessary, because I'm going to watch. Ever since I was a kid, I've never taken the suggestion to look away during a shot. Much as the sight is unappealing, if I don't look I'll tense up; maybe when I look, it feels less like something is happening to me that I have to just passively take.

One reading of "Travel Directions"

Earlier this week I came across a good poem. Travel Directions by Joan Siegel doesn't focus on the traveler's destination, which remains unspecified.

There ought to be a word
for the way you know how to get some place
but don't remember the names of streets

The poem speaks of a number of things. For one, the very real phenomenon of knowing how to get around a place or from one place to another without necessarily knowing street names, exact distances, or any other details you could readily use to direct other people. It's just a route you've taken so often it's embedded in your cognition, your senses and muscles. You don't have to think about it, and if you do, the details that emerge will probably be meaningful only to you.

That's another thing about this poem - how ultimately personal life and its travels are. We can share our perceptions with others, but at a fundamental level we experience the world alone; no two people will perceive, experience, think about something the same way. We can always do our best to share though, invite people into our minds (as far as they can go).

Another beautiful excerpt:

then the road turns sharply uphill past a red barn
where a black dog jumps out to race you for a quarter mile
and finally recedes in the mirror like a disappointment

The dog offers enthusiasm, joy, and simple companionship; these are kept at the roadside, never embraced, as the journey unfolds.

the road winds vaguely past
houses people road signs
while time hums in your ear and you remember
the dream you left behind that morning

There's a shift from the outward senses and the external world (which, even if experienced differently, can still be acknowledged and experienced together) to the writer's inner world, to a dream that only the writer knows about and no one else can guess at. The traveler's at a place where really no one can follow her.

Now I'm going to go off on a neurology-related tangent:

The poem reminds me of an article I read a few months back on episodic vs. semantic memory. Episodic memory is the term used to describe our memory for autobiographical events, our personal narrative; semantic memory is for general knowledge (knowing the state capitals, or what a watch is used for, or the multiplication tables). The two kinds of memories can certainly overlap and be enmeshed, but there are also distinctions between them; these distinctions can be seen, for example, in people with certain kinds of neurological damage that predominantly affect one type of memory but not the other.

In one neurological study, a person with episodic memory amnesia was asked to describe his old neighborhood. He could remember major landmarks and broad, general spatial relations between different places. But it was all a brittle, bare sort of mental map, very sparse. Minor landmarks and details were absent. Associations, memories, the whole personal feel was gone; I don't think he would have had the experience of the person in Travel Directions, being able to describe a journey based on such personal recollections/associations rather than the most abstract generalities.

(Though I'm not sure how he well he would navigate those places on foot, and I forget if they gave him such a test. Episodic memory can also be distinct from motor memory; for instance, a person with episodic memory amnesia would not necessarily lose his ability to play the piano, so maybe he could walk around his old neighborhood in habitual accustomed routes.)