Week in Seven Words #528

This covers the week of 3/1/20 - 3/7/20.

coughing

I'm starting to look at snifflers and coughers suspiciously. Like the young guy sitting at the other end of the room who keeps coughing wretchedly into his hand. To the person he's sharing a table with, he says he's fine. But he does admit later on, with a sigh, that he's tired.

dated

We use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to look at Apple's website from the 1990s. It had a blocky table-based layout. It looked so amazingly clunky and amateurish (by today's standards). 

horror

The students say they don't want to learn more about the Holocaust, because it's too horrible. At least they see the horror in what happened.

overlooked

"Does he ignore me because I'm not as smart as my brother? Is that why he barely talks to me?"

reminder
The dog flops onto my lap, face-up, to remind me that she hasn't gotten tired of belly rubs yet.

unpleasant

I cringe at the dynamics in that home, the disrespect that flows casually to the mom, the vulgar comments about women and girls.

viral

Two things people are talking about all the time: the virus and the presidential election. The presidential election and the virus.

Five Short Stories Set in Haiti

Title: The Blue Hill
Author: Rodney Saint-Éloi
Translator: Nicole Ball
Where I Read It: Haiti Noir
With the government's permission, toxic garbage gets dumped near a village. It renders the dirt an unnatural blue and covers people in blue pustules. The story is basically the ravings of a local detective. Sick from the toxins, he lies in bed gripped by visions. And what he shares is compelling: apocalyptic and poetic, with historic flavors and images of dragons and demons. It's a cry in the dark, at once futile and necessary. ("We will at least have the elegance to bear witness.") A story written as a prolonged fit may have dragged or come across as belabored. But it's powerful, and it pulls the reader along through hellish landscapes and images of a battle that the broken people, like the detective, don't have the health or power to engage in physically. It's their souls sending up a cry that no other person hears.

Title: Claire of the Sea Light
Author: Edwidge Danticat
Where I Read It: Haiti Noir
Claire is a young girl whose mother died giving birth to her. After she spends a few years with her mother's relatives, her father takes her back. She wants to stay with him, but he's more ambivalent. He cares for her but feels he can't properly raise her. As a fisherman, he knows he might die at sea or have to move elsewhere at a moment's notice for work. What will happen to her then?

The story is told from his point of view, but still shows some of what Claire experiences, not knowing where she belongs and whether or not her dad wants her. He's holding her at arm's length, because he doesn't know what to do. Along with the fear of being lost to her, I also got the sense that he fears becoming too attached to her, after having lost her mother. (The mother is very much present in her absence.) To Claire, her father's ambivalence may come across as rejection, especially when a wealthy fabric vendor who lost her own daughter expresses interest in taking her in.

There's a beautiful scene in the story, set before Claire's birth, where her mother is swimming among glowing fish in the ocean as Claire's father looks on with concern and wonder. Claire's strongest ties may be to her mother, who in being dead can be safely loved with the assurance that, in a way, she isn't going anywhere.

Six Short Stories About Children Dealing With Injustice

Title: The Balek Scales
Author: Heinrich Böll
Translator: Leila Vennewitz
Where I Read It: A Walk in My World
"The Balek Scales" reads like a folk tale. It's set in an area of European countryside ruled by the wealthy Balek family. By law, only the Baleks are allowed to own a set of scales. Local villagers bring produce and what they've found foraging, like mushrooms, to the Balek scales and receive payment based on weight.

A boy (the narrator's grandfather) discovers that the scales are rigged. The villagers' response feels like a scale tipping. They've accepted a certain amount of injustice in their lives, but this uncovered lie tips them over into outrage. What changes for the villagers after the lie gets exposed?

The villagers can apparently cope with little money for lots of hard work, as long as they enjoy some pride and some faith in the order of things. The Balek family didn't just injure them materially with the rigged scales. They wounded the villagers' dignity. They also degraded their own image. The discovery of their cheap, mean dishonesty broke their power over the villagers' minds. It also makes sense that a child discovers the rigged scales. A child who still plays and is still only learning how to do things the way things have always been done.

Two stories on art and ugly politics

Title: Portrait of the Avant-Garde
Author: Peter Høeg
Translator: Barbara Haveland
Where I Read It: The Art of the Story
In the years leading up to WWII, Simon is intoxicated with his power as an artist. He sees his paintings as a way to remake the world. In his mind, he is a mini-god, wielding fire and air. He throws himself behind vicious political movements in Europe, because they promote a new order, a vision that appeals to him. He thinks of the process more than the consequences. The costs don't occur to him, because as a powerful artist he isn't a common person; he imagines he can stand astride the world and comfortably watch it burn.

To balance out the insufferable Simon, there's Nina, his lover. She's earth and water to his fire and air. She takes him to visit a remote island where she grew up. People move slowly there; things change slowly or not at all. Simon hears a myth about a warrior's power expressed in a dream, with the power dissolving when the warrior awakes. And then there are the final scenes, where he finally experiences what it is to be small, to have others impervious to his gestures and to the ideas he constructs. In one sense, the world remains his stage, but the audience doesn't watch him with admiration or terror.

Title: The Twenty-seventh Man
Author: Nathan Englander
Where I Read It: The Art of the Story
Stalin's police have rounded up a bunch of Jewish writers, and the story focuses on four of them who share a cell. One is an author who sold out to the regime and wrote government propaganda. The second is an old revered Yiddish writer. The third is a great bear of a poet, both soulful and crude. And the fourth, the twenty-seventh man, isn't known to anyone and was most likely arrested because of a fluke, a clerical error. He's spent his life quietly writing stories in his parents' inn; while they are interesting stories, he has made no effort to publish them or otherwise make a name for himself.

This is a nonsensical, brutal situation, and Englander understands the absurdity of it. There's no compelling reason for these writers to get arrested. And they know they're facing death. As they share a cell, their conversation raises questions about why people write and who they write for (this is set after WWII, and the old Yiddish writer, for example, knows full well that most of his audience has been slaughtered). What meaning do words have when you're a few hours away from facing a firing squad? People with wisdom, talent, and regrets try to make sense of their impending death.

(Who is listening? At the very least, they're hearing each other out, and what is that worth? Depending on how you look at it, it could be worth very little or could mean everything in the world. Final flickers from creative minds about to be extinguished. Maybe they can still give each other a reason to live even when they're about to die.)

Salem, Massachusetts in October: 25 Photos

(From a half-day visit on Columbus Day.)

The Witch House

(It's the home of Jonathan Corwin, one of the judges involved in the Salem witch trials of the late 1600s.)

The Custom House

(At the Salem Maritime National Historic Park.)

Ropes Mansion Garden

(This garden is in back of a home dating to the early 1700s.)

Where is the boy going in Les quatre cents coups (1959)?

Title: The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups)
Director: François Truffaut
Language: French
Rating: Unrated

At the heart of this beautiful movie is a boy who's unloved. Antoine Doniel's mother tolerates him, or tries to. His father is friendly with him, but they don't have a close relationship. At school, Antoine repeatedly gets in trouble. The one bright spot in his life is his friend, René, who seems a light and friendly spirit, out for some adventure.

The movie isn't melodramatic. It isn't always sad. For a boy of Antoine's age, there are pleasures and fun pranks. He can try to strike out on his own. During one part of the movie, he's staying with René without his parents or René's parents knowing; he's just dropped off the grid. He's walking a fine line between the pleasurable part of running away from home, the childish fantasy of it, and the darker side of it. Who at home cares that he's gone?

In the movie, there's a funny scene where a group of boys jog through the streets of Paris behind their gym teacher, and then in twos and threes they peel away, until the man is basically jogging on this own. That's the playful side of escaping authority. The movie also shows the dark and more desperate side of it. Antoine's truancy eventually leads to petty crime and lands him in a juvenile correctional facility. At one point, during an outdoor sports game, he flees. He's heading for the sea, which he's never seen. But once he's there on the beach, where else is there to go? Once you've reached the limits of yourself, what comes next? The sea no longer represents escape; it's another barrier.

Antoine can't run away from himself. All of his problems are seeded in him. He's long taken into himself the knowledge that he's unloved and unwanted, and he carries it everywhere. What can he make of himself when he has all of this in him? He doesn't need to think about it or talk about it for it to be there. The authorities offer him nothing. Whether it's the police or a psychiatrist or a teacher, they set up pens to put people in. What Antoine carries in him doesn't change, and what he longs for doesn't materialize.

At different points, he tries to take from other people to make himself free and whole, to reinvent himself perhaps or start over. He plagiarizes a paper from a famous writer and steals a typewriter to pawn off for cash. His experiences blur the lines between childhood and adulthood. If only he were an adult, that would mean freedom, because for most of the movie he hangs onto his optimism about adulthood as a liberating force. But take a look at the adults around him. In what sense are they wise or self-sufficient or free? He's running from them too and what they represent.

The movie starts with the camera prowling the streets of Paris. In the shots, The Eiffel Tower is always obstructed or glimpsed from strange angles. There is, from the start, a feeling of hunger. The camera keeps going down one street after another, but where is there to go? After he reaches the sea, Antoine has an expression on his face that says, among other things, "Is this it?"

8 stories from around the world

Story Collection: World Literature: An Anthology of Great Short Stories, Drama, and Poetry
Editor: Donna Rosenberg

Title: The Black Cat
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
For as long as he can remember, the narrator in Poe's story has preferred the company of animals to men. He marries a woman whom he describes as having a compatible temperament, and she brings several pets into their home, including a black cat named Pluto who becomes his most cherished companion. However, being a Poe story, their harmonious home life isn't meant to last, and the peculiarities that had set the narrator apart from his peers at a young age now take a darker turn. He becomes a violent alcoholic, and though he lashes out at his wife, she remains for the most part in the shadows of this story, mentioned now and then but taking second place to Pluto, who bears the brunt of his cruelty.

What follows is torture, murder, and walled-up bodies. The story is told in a first-person, mentally unhinged narration, a Poe specialty (though this character is unique, not a repeat of other narrators). I love how The Black Cat conveys the perverse joy people take in damning themselves; they know that what they're doing is wrong, but do it for that very reason ("the unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself"). And it's also a tale of domestic violence. The wife, subtly erased, is only mentioned now and then (almost as soon as we've forgotten she exists - until we can't forget any more); in a strange way, as the narrator strikes out at his cat, I also sensed he was striking out at her, where she stood in the shadows.

Good Short Fiction: 3 Tales from 40 Short Stories

Collection: 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology (1st ed.)
Editor: Beverly Lawn

Title: Civil Peace
Author: Chinua Achebe
Soon after his country's civil war, a decent man counts his blessings and tries to make a life for himself and his family again. But the end of war doesn't guarantee stability, and everything that he and his family work for and try to save could easily be taken from them. Life is precarious in both war and peacetime, and sometimes the man wonders if there's any form of justice in the world that people can understand. He can't explain why good things or bad things happen; all he can do is make the best of what he has, try to survive, and leave the bigger questions unanswered. Achebe's story has a sweet, bewildered tone; even when robbers show up at the man's house, there's a sad sing-song quality to their words and the writing as a whole, like the voice of their child-selves in a world that makes little sense.

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Title: The Lottery
Author: Shirley Jackson
Even knowing what would happen at the end (this was my second reading), I was tense throughout. I was also able to pick up on more of the foreshadowing this time around.

The story is set in a small town, where people are pleasant to each other, very neighborly, and there's excitement and nervousness about an upcoming lottery. The lottery is a regularly held ritual calling for the participation of all citizens, young and old.

When this story was first published in the late 1940s, it struck a nerve. Jackson had set The Lottery in a location resembling an ordinary small American town. She made a good choice; small American towns with their neighborly people have been the sites of brutal group violence. No matter what its history, there isn't a single community that can allow itself to be complacent; setting a barbaric ritual in what appears to be a pleasant, ordinary place highlights this. The story also questions the foundation of people's lives. If an otherwise friendly bunch of people perpetrate a savage ritual, one that has no apparent purpose, what does this say about the rest of their lives or the way they think? On what principles does their society rest - on traditions upheld without question? Why do they need this ritual?

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Title: What We Talk About When We Talk about Love
Author: Raymond Carver
Four people sit around drinking and talking about love, or what they think love is. It's not as if they reach a consensus. One of them is a cardiologist, this time talking about the heart in another sense.

Throughout the story, some examples of "love" are offered up. One person defines the actions of an abusive ex-boyfriend as love. Another talks about an elderly couple who've landed in the ICU after a car accident.

I like the story for its quietness, its skilled use of dialogue, and the way it raises many questions about love and our perceptions of it. What are the narratives about love that we live by, for better or worse?

There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love?

The characters are in a quiet room, and they all seem detached from their lives, probably because they're drinking and reminiscing, and are also trying to step back and evaluate experiences they usually don't think about. (What, if anything, will they make of their thoughts? Will they change anything in their lives, or are these thoughts on love only left to quiet moments with a drink on hand?) There's minimal information about their surroundings, but sometimes a detail jumps out, like the presence of leaves at a window.

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Other recommended stories in this collection include The Cask of Amontillado (by Edgar Allan Poe), Paul's Case (by Willa Cather), A Good Man Is Hard to Find (by Flannery O'Connor), The Metamorphosis (by Franz Kafka), A White Heron (by Sarah Orne Jewett), and The Open Boat (by Stephen Crane).

[Updated 1/2015]

Week in Seven Words #121

constructive
They're given random scraps and told to build whatever they can imagine. Cars with plastic bottle cap wheels, a walkie-talkie with a straw antenna, a castle made out of cups and toilet paper rolls.

decibel
The music at the frozen yogurt shop is so loud, the place so packed and noisy, that you can't think or talk to the person next to you. You just stare into your cup and eat and eat before it all melts.

fathom
We've gone so deep into the park we can pretend we're no longer in the city. At the pond we find a bench. Though it looks a little wilted in the heat, the pond is a nice spot I think. He sees it as stagnant. I can understand why, but I can't agree. There's always something alive in there. A mix of fish, turtles, plants and microbes. It's a quiet place, and promises whatever you can find in it; the closer you look the more there is. After our conversation, which has kept returning to life's disappointments, to uninformed choices that can't be undone, I want to be in a place like this, out-of-the-way and quietly overflowing with life.

jib
The tiny sailboats have ventured onto the water again.

raw
The cookie dough has already been prepared; now it's only a matter of cutting it and flattening it into cookie-shaped pieces before it goes into the miniature oven. Of the four residents at the table, one can wield a knife quite well. Another tries but can barely manage. A third pops a piece of raw dough in his mouth then resumes staring silently at the rest of it. The fourth curses when you get too near her. "I wouldn't feed that to my cat," she mutters.

trail
Forget the subway and bus; I'll find a new way home. And I do, on land rising steeply over a lake, where the inlets are coated in a vivid green scum, and the path curves beneath low-hanging branches.

wretchedness
The howl of a dog that doesn't know what she did wrong.

Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah)

The song in the video, sung by Sophie Milman, is "Eli, Eli" - a poem written by Hannah Senesh and set to a melody composed by David Zahavi.

Senesh (1921-1944) was a Jewish parachutist who was captured by the Nazis and their collaborators in Hungary in 1944. After subjecting her to months of torture, through which they tried and failed to get information out of her about her mission, they executed her by firing squad.

Here's an English translation from the Hebrew of "Eli, Eli":

My God, my God,
May these things never end,
The sand and the sea,
The murmur of the water,
The lightning of the heavens,
The prayer of man.

אלי, אלי
שלא יגמר לעולם
החול והים
רשרוש של המים
ברק השמים
תפילת האדם

Good Short Fiction: The Cask of Amontillado (E.A. Poe)

Title: The Cask of Amontillado
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Where I read it: Great American Short Stories: from Hawthorne to Hemingway (edited by Corinne Demas)

Synopsis
Cruelty, catacombs, and revenge for unspecified slights. No amontillado in sight.

Some reasons to read it

• Poe is terrific at writing psychotic narrators. The one in this story is basically going to trap and kill a man while in effect inviting the reader to watch. The question isn't whether or not he'll do it; the story reads like an elaborate revenge fantasy where the outcome is assured. The question is how he'll do it. The narrator is dramatic and depraved, with a mix of elegant manners and some moments of howling insanity.
  

  It must be understood that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good will. I continued as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation.

  
  
• The story is all the more disturbing for the fact that the narrator seems to have a few stirrings of unease at what he's doing. He carries on regardless...
  
  
• Poe's use of details. Everything from the victim's name (Fortunato) to the description of the catacombs with the damp air and the niches in the stone walls. Such a crisp, cold and chilling atmosphere. The jingling of the bells in the last paragraph is a shivery moment. There's some dark humor as well.
  
  
• The delicious language: palazzo, roquelaire, flambeaux.
  

  We had passed through walls of piled bones, with casks and puncheons intermingling, into the inmost recesses of the catacombs.

  
  

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Other stories in this volume include The Birthmark (by Nathaniel Hawthorne), The Flight of Betsey Lane (by Sarah Orne Jewett), and Paul's Case (by Willa Cather).

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"The Cask of Amontillado" also appears in this anthology.

Week in Seven Words #59

badge
One afternoon I get an email. I read it with a slow smile that I feel in my chest. Over the next couple of days I think of that email as a badge pinned to me, that only I can see for now.

frizzy
She's a pink zig-zagging imp with a head of flaxen curls.

fuzzy
Language has logic, to an extent. To what extent, we wonder, staring at the spreadsheet in silence.

magnitude
The photos show things that have always seemed solid and sturdy, like houses, floating or flattened with everyone and everything in them.

mantilla
Rundown porches are veiled in pink blossoms.

pungent
From layers of fresh mulch and fertilizer, daffodils start to test the air in small isolated clumps.

snuffed
A candle burns next to the photos of five people who were murdered in their beds; one of them was an infant, her eyes in the photo scrunched up in sleep.

"I know they were singing those arias out of their own sorrow."

Says Cecilia Bartoli when interviewed about her new album, in which she sings pieces originally written for castrati. The interesting Slate article in which she's interviewed, Nature's Rejects, explores the lives of castrati, male singers forcibly castrated as young boys in the hopes that they would attain fortune and fame, illustrious singing careers. Most did not:

These nobodies sang for pennies in the streets, turned to prostitution for male customers, and sooner or later disappeared into the oblivion of the outcast. A great many ended up suicides.

And the famous ones, outside of their brief dazzling triumphs on stage, led lives full of distortion and depression:

Meanwhile, the years of superstardom were limited, because castrati tended to age badly: "Most of them become as big and fat as capons, with round and chubby hips, rumps, arms and throats." Even successful singers were shunned by many, their status as ambiguous as their bodies.

I recently became a fan of Andreas Scholl, a countertenor whose vocal range is said to be that of the alto castrato Senesino. Countertenors of course have not gone under the "little knife", a euphemism that only hints at the true horror of what the castrati went through when they were young boys:

... brought unsuspecting to a nameless place, screaming as he is held down for the operation, the wound cauterized with hot iron.

Countertenors did exist side by side historically with castrati, with the castrati apparently considered more illustrious and dominating opera especially. And it's reported that the castrati didn't quite sound like anyone else, including the female sopranos they replaced; there also would've been differences with countertenors (whose speaking voices tend to be low; testosterone, different type of vocal cord structure and development).

Countertenor Scholl and mezzo-soprano Bartoli render music with beauty, richness and power. Now after this article I wonder, what were the differences perceived in a castrato singing voice (of whatever range)? It seems the castrati in general were deemed to possess a prized vocal quality entirely their own, beyond individual differences in voice and musical ability; their listeners felt like they were hearing something not quite human.

They weren't viewed as human, not really. They were treated as instruments, cruelly shaped, forcibly carved. If the instrument cracked, you just threw it out; there were new ones to craft and maybe those would give you sounds you'd never heard before.

They were the products of a social, cultural and biological experiment, and a fascinating and disturbing example of how easy it is to adopt skewed and unhealthy cultural norms, and to excuse horrors in the name of (and for the sake of) beauty, art, or any number of other ideals.