Week in Seven Words #577

This covers the week of 2/7/21 - 2/13/21.

dork

The role she's been asked to audition for is an improbable one: the effortlessly gorgeous, socially awkward female nerd who's such a dork but never really says or does anything unattractive, she's just, you know, a dork with glasses and fashionable heels.

icy

The pond is clinking with ice, the shores crusty with slush and mud.

knotty

I meet him for the first time beside a tree with a heart-shaped knot.

lacework

Low branches turned to lacework by the snow.

mafia

The head and torso of the snowman are propped up on a bench, like a grim warning from the snowman mafia. ("Double-cross us, and you too will be disassembled before you melt.")

timeworn

It's cute how the author thinks that pairing a character in his 60s with a woman in her 20s is edgy.

unhelpful

"My problems," she says, "are about not asking for help when I need it, and getting the kind of help that holds me back."

Book Rec: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Betrayal is one of the themes in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. Set in Edinburgh during the 1930s, the novel centers on a bold, unusual schoolteacher (Miss Brodie) and a small group of girls she takes under her wing. From about the time they're 10 to when they leave school at 17, they're called the "Brodie set," as if they're part of an exclusive club.

Miss Brodie's mission is ostensibly to give the girls a much broader education than they'd receive through the school's ordinary curriculum. But over time it seems that she's trying to mold them to her own liking or fix them in place with her own labels or judgments. I think that's one of the betrayals in the book – when students begin to seem less like students and more like acolytes, or like attendants in the court of a queen. To what extent can Miss Brodie fix their path in life, given her influence over them?

And how empty is her own life, that she needs such a degree of influence over her students? In what ways has she betrayed herself?

At different points in the book, the narrative flashes forward to show the girls as adults. It's revealed that one of them betrays Miss Brodie to the headmistress of the school by revealing the teacher's fascist sympathies. Miss Brodie's admiration of fascism seems like it's based on puffed-up fantasies (also, it's interesting how the nonconformity of Miss Brodie, who refuses to be like other teachers, co-exists with her fondness for the Blackshirts and with her own desire to mold her students and their paths in life).

When the student informs on her, to what extent is it an act of betrayal? You're left to wonder at all of the motives at play. If Miss Brodie violated the trust and responsibility of her position as teacher, informing on her may be seen as a necessary act, even if her misdeeds have less to do with her misguided admiration of Mussolini and more to do with how she attempts to influence the girls. The student in question may also have been trying to gain some control over Miss Brodie; she may have been struggling with the profound influence Miss Brodie has had on her life. It may be that the student Miss Brodie influences most – the one who becomes most psychologically enmeshed with the errant teacher – is also the one who turns on her.

Recommending Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz

Tel Ilan, a pioneer village, already a century old, was surrounded by fields and orchards. Vineyards sprawled down the east-facing slopes. Almond trees lined the approach road. Tile roofs bathed in the thick greenery of ancient trees.

In Scenes from Village Life, Amos Oz opens windows into the lives of different characters living in a village in Israel. Many of the residents continue to operate farms, but the face of the village is changing. People have opened up restaurants and galleries and have leased out land. They're making a living from tenants or from visitors who come by each weekend to search for art, furniture, and other items of interest. Along with the external changes in the village, there are private transformations, unsettling and destabilizing occurrences experienced quietly.

These are some of the qualities of the book that stood out most:

- So many of the descriptions enfold you, the sensory details chosen with sensitivity, hitting the right notes ("A deep, wide silence lay on the garden...")

- In many of the episodes in the book, an absence is what brings people new insights or forces them to confront what they've been avoiding. A nephew who doesn't show up, a wife who disappears after leaving an ambiguous note... during each incident, the characters who remain behind discover something important about their lives, such as a truth they've ignored or denied.

- Characters probe at the limits of what they can understand about themselves, other people, or life. For instance, in one part of the novel, a man shines a flashlight under a bed. In this dark space, a teenager had previously killed himself. What does the flashlight illuminate? ("I had no further reason to turn my back on despair." Does despair still linger in that empty space in tangible form?)

- The novel captures the village's instability, not just in the way that personal relationships become unstable and unpredictable, but also in how the village has changed. Its connections to its farming days are weakening. The future is uncertain. Long-standing residents aren't sure what comes next in their own lives and for the community as a whole. At the same time, there's much that remains familiar. The things that haven't changed may accentuate everything that's different.

Week in Seven Words #419

bleariness
Sleeplessness chases me throughout the week, catching and dragging at each day and leaving the nights unsettled.

electrify
She's shuffle-dancing with sparkling sneakers on a dark street.

enervating
The book club meets in a mildewy room that's washed of color by fluorescent lights.

ricotta
A large, shimmering, melting moon glimpsed in the early morning at the end of the street, over the slate gray river.

subterrene
When he suffers anxiety over a trivial issue, he needs to remind himself to consider the true source of his fears. It isn't the triviality. That's only a mask for the larger, deeper thing that gnaws at him.

unrelenting
Her story is a dead horse flogged with angst. Tens of thousands of words of angst: fire, deaths, abuse, amnesia, comas. She's dragging her characters by the heels through hot coals across a continent.

watering
Each time she plucks a string on her guitar, there's a sensation of a raindrop landing in my mind.

Some thoughts on Home by Toni Morrison

In this Toni Morrison novel, two siblings leave their backwoods Georgia home, get even more scarred out in the world, and come back to find that home is a more complicated place than they’d ever thought. Not as stifling as in their childhood, and offering possibilities for rebuilding their lives.

The novel is set in the 1950s, and one of the siblings, Frank, has returned to the U.S. from the Korean War. He brings with him post-traumatic stress and memories that make it difficult for him to live with himself. He’s also black, and needs to transition from a recently desegregated army back to a society where segregation is still the norm, through official enforcement in some places and unofficial enforcement in others.

Meanwhile, his younger sister, Cee (nickname for Ycidra), flees her hateful grandmother by running off to Atlanta with a man who dumps her. Her search for better paying work brings her to the home of an unscrupulous doctor who hires her as his assistant and conducts unethical medical experiments on her and others.

It’s relatively rare to see novels featuring Korean War vets (and black vets, more generally). During the war, Frank has seen and done things that he can’t come back from. (“Back was the free-floating rage, the self-loathing disguised as somebody else’s fault.”) He has discovered things about himself that he would never have guessed at and that he doesn’t know how to confront.

The novel explores the question of what a home truly is. The characters lead precarious lives, and they could be driven out of their homes all too easily. So how does someone create a home when violence, destruction, illness, and complete destitution are nipping at the borders and can spill in at any moment?

Home is not simply a place, it’s a set of relationships and connections, and deep impressions on the mind and heart. The characters have perpetrated or witnessed profound violations in the world. Home is a place where you’re not degraded and where you ought to be free of those violations. At home, you can confront the demons and have people stand beside you.

Cee gains new strength with the help of women who stand in for the lack of a mother figure in her life. Chief among them is Ethel Fordham, who tells her, “Somewhere inside you is that free person I’m talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world.”

So home is where you can heal, among people who find worth in you, and it’s where you can do worthy things, even in the face of harsh odds. Of Ethel’s garden:

Her garden was not Eden; it was so much more than that. For her the whole predatory world threatened her garden, competing with its nourishment, its beauty, its benefits, and its demands. And she loved it.

Morrison doesn’t sentimentalize home or make the folks of this backwoods town charming and endearingly simple. Other authors might have gone down that path and trivialized the story and the struggle of these scarred characters.

Blog's Name in Books

I found this fun little activity here: match a book from your to-read list to each of the letters in your blog's name.

Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu)
History (Elsa Morante)
Excellent Women (Barbara Pym)

Shirley (Charlotte Bronte)
I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)
Love and the Platypus (Nicholas Drayson)
Leaving Atlanta (Tayari Jones)

Only Yesterday (S.Y. Agnon)
Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Timeline (Michael Crichton)
Home (Toni Morrison)
Ella Minnow Pea (Mark Dunn)

Winter's Bone (Daniel Woodrell)
Ormond (Maria Edgeworth)
Rhinoceros (Eugène Ionesco)
Little Dorrit (Charles Dickens)
Dombey and Son (Charles Dickens)

Old Goriot - what genuine feelings survive when everything's a transaction?

Honoré de Balzac sets much of his novel, Old Goriot, in a dingy Parisian boardinghouse during the period of the Bourbon Restoration. Madame Vauquer runs the place and might call herself the "mother" of all the tenants - mostly young people who are struggling to make their way in the world (like the law student, Eugène de Rastignac), old people who are probably stuck there for good (like the titular character, Goriot), and maybe one or two others whose finances are a mystery.

The boardinghouse occupants, if one squints, could be seen as a kind of family, dining together and getting in each other's business, but Madame Vauquer isn't a real mother. Her relationship with the boarders is transactional, and the ones who can't afford to pay her much get the worse rooms. It's business.

The Age of Innocence: Newland Archer as an Opera Singer

Both at the beginning and towards the end of The Age of Innocence, the same aria from the same opera gets performed for the same group of people, the upper crust of New York City in the 1870s. The same soprano, Christine Nilsson, sings it both times. No doubt her voice is beautiful, but because the novel highlights the words of the aria in little outbursts, the effect is a plaintive bleat ("M'ama!").

The fine music and the aria's tribute to love plays in the background. What's in the foreground are the social rituals of the upper class, who examine each other with their opera glasses. One of the mistakes Newland Archer makes is assuming that love and fine art reign central and supreme, while less worthy social machinations can unfold in the background.

Newland is a young man from an old family. Even if he isn't outrageously wealthy, he embodies class and respectability. His mother and sister dote on him, and his life is leisurely. His position at a law firm exists mostly for form's sake. Cultured and at ease with himself, he has every reason to believe he's in command of his world.

At the start of the book he becomes engaged to May Welland, in all outward appearances an excellent match. But soon after, he falls in love with her cousin, Ellen Olenska, who has fled to New York from her husband. In the drama that plays out, Newland hangs on for much of the time to the belief that he's master of himself, and that fine thoughts and passionate feelings, truth and beauty, are central in his life. He's pulled between personal inclinations and powerful social demands, but even as he struggles, he believes that it's his choice that matters. His and Ellen's.

Cleo and the Black Boston Elite in The Living Is Easy by Dorothy West

… she would cut off her arm for these sisters of hers with the same knife she held at the tenderest spot in their hearts.

That's Cleo, the main character of a book that brings to life the world of Boston's black elite shortly before and during the First World War.

Cleo is originally from the South, but after making her way north learns the social refinements of northern cities and marries a down-to-earth businessman, Bart Judson, whose money helps her maintain her social airs. She doesn't see herself as black so much as Bostonian, and wants to raise her daughter, Judy, to also be a little Bostonian lady.

Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy, which I read for the Classics Club Challenge, is fascinating for two main reasons.

Two different books unfolding in Little Women

Somehow my American girlhood went by without a single reading of Little Women. So for the Classics Club Challenge, I read it. I can't react to it anymore the way I probably would have as a teen, though I know I would have strongly identified with Jo and enjoyed the book as a whole.

What struck me, reading it now, is how throughout the book there's a tension between two authorial voices. It's almost as if there are two different books in Little Women, one of them brighter, more picturesque and calling more attention to itself, and the other one a subtle, shadowy book that adds disquiet to the story.

The vignettes in the lives of the four sisters - Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth - often get wrapped up neatly. Though Alcott's characters come across as real and not like cut-out figures serving as moral examples, there's a tidy lesson from many of these episodes. It's what you'd expect in a 19th-century book geared towards a younger audience; the girls need to become proper little women. On the other hand, throughout these vignettes there are some darker currents and some sources of tension that persist even after the tidier resolutions. Sometimes the text is sentimental, even verging on treacly; other times there's a surprising wry humor and unease.

Let's look at Jo, for instance. While capable of great devotion and care towards others, she's also the most spirited and unladylike of the girls and wishes she could have enjoyed a boy's greater freedom. Like Alcott, she's a writer. Jo settles into a more conventional role at the end (mothering boys, when she can't travel much or go to school like one) - though at the same time she keeps her ambitions to write. The resolution to her story is complicated; she has made major concessions to what's expected of her as a proper little woman, but her old restlessness and dreams are by no means entirely tamed (what will become of her dreams is left open-ended).

Death, poverty, the conflict between what you want or need for yourself and what's expected of you - all of these the novel touches on, in a more tidy way front and center, but with the rawness at the edges, unexplored territory on the margins. Alcott was deeply familiar with all of these themes and with the messiness of life. And the fact that she lets this untidiness into her book to varying degrees, and gives her own strong personality some room to play throughout the text, keeps it from being only charming or sentimentally affecting in a simple way.

Art and Life in The Picture of Dorian Gray

At the start of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian is a dazzlingly handsome young man who's sitting for a portrait in the studio of Basil Hallward, an artist. Observing both of them is Lord Henry Wotton, who preaches a philosophy of life where sensory pleasures are paramount to everything else. (How much Wotton actually believes in this, or in anything else, isn't clear.)


When the portrait is finished and Dorian looks at it, he realizes that it won't be long before he'll lose his radiant looks; like everyone else, he'll age and die. He wishes he could remain young, and that only his portrait would age.

His wish comes true, though he doesn't realize it at first.

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.

Good Short Fiction: The Immortal Story by Isak Dinesen

Title: The Immortal Story
Author: Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
Where I read it: Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard

Reading this story was like lying in the surf having waves pour over me; I knew I should get up and breathe from time to time, but I wanted to stay where I was until the tide receded.

Who are the characters set in motion in The Immortal Story?

There's Mr. Clay, a miserly English nabob in Canton, who lives in a house full of mirrors that once belonged to his business partner whom he bankrupted (and who then committed suicide). He knows only figures, facts and transactional relationships; money is the defining element and purpose of his existence. After he falls sick, he has a clerk, Elishama, stay up all night reading old account books to him. But one day when they run out of accounts to read, he asks on impulse for a different kind of story.

Elishama is also a man cut off from human relationships, though unlike Mr. Clay he doesn't covet wealth. When Elishama was a young boy his family was murdered in the 1848 pogroms in Poland, and he was passed around from one place to another, taught book-keeping, and finally sent east until he wound up in China. What he wants more than anything else is solitary peace:

One passion he had, if passion it may be called - a fanatical craving for security and for being left alone... His soul was concentrated upon this one request: that he might enter his closet and shut his door, with the certainty that here no one could possibly follow or disturb him.

Elishama has sympathy for women, and for birds, but he doesn't get emotionally involved with anyone; he sees things keenly, but in the spirit of an outsider and not a true participant in life.

In response to his employer's request for another kind of story, Elishama reads aloud from a page once given to him by an old man who left Poland with him when he was six. It's an excerpt from the Book of Isaiah. Listening to it, Mr. Clay asks if any of these prophecies were ever fulfilled, and then wonders why people tell stories about things that never came about. He's determined then to will a story into existence. He decides on one of the few he's ever heard - a sailors' tale - and orders Elishama to help him set it in motion, not as a play but as a real life event.

Who will they enlist as the participants? There's Virginie, a mistress of one of Mr. Clay's employees, who turns out to be a surprising, complex figure. And then there's the sailor they pluck from the harbor, the one willing to trust Mr. Clay and his promises.

Even as Dinesen lays her characters bare, she handles them with gentleness, a kind of sympathy for their shortcomings and pain. I like how each character is jaded and old in some ways, and young and fragile in others. Mr. Clay, for all that he owns the district and feels that everyone is a toy in his hands, is with those same feelings rendered an overreaching child. Elishama seems to understand the price of everything (even if he doesn't always agree with it) and makes some wise observations about what he's seen of life, but he's forever a traumatized child who doesn't want to be hurt again. Virginie still has one foot in her childhood, the happiest time of her life with an affectionate father who used to tell her grand stories; now her view of the world is as a place to get by, to try and feel good and make others feel good. Lastly the sailor mixes boyishness with hard experience.

What happens when Mr. Clay attempts to enact a fictitious tale? Does he have the power to truly bring anything to life? He measures his success by bare dry facts and doesn't seem to realize that while people and relationships can be reduced to transactions they also rise above them. Virginie and the sailor have their own stories to tell behind closed doors, to deepen their encounter, and Mr. Clay knows nothing of it. He might like to think of people as puppets that he twitches along fixed paths, but there's much that goes on beneath the surface - worlds of beauty and sympathy that he can't perceive. Stories take on a life of their own, and miracles can manifest in small ways.

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This post has been linked to at Short Stories on Wednesdays at Simple Clockwork.

Guest Post at Simple Clockwork

As part of Short Stories on Wednesday, which started at Breadcrumb Reads and is now at Simple Clockwork, I wrote a flash fiction piece, "Emptied."

If you follow the link to the post be sure to check out Simple Clockwork, which is an excellent blog with reviews of books and short stories, guest posts by authors, and pieces of original fiction written by Nancy Cudis. Thanks, Nancy, for posting my little story.

Spotlight on Pancake

Over at the bookworm blog there's an "author fun facts" post, encouraging bloggers to share some interesting facts about an author they've come across. It's a great idea and will hopefully introduce people to authors they haven't heard about.

This week I checked out the collection of short stories by Breece D'J Pancake (unfortunately I forgot the book at a friend's place, and I'll have to wait for a break in the wild sleet and snowstorm to head out and retrieve it). I found out about Pancake through the Omnivoracious blog's wonderful post, "The Books of the States", which recommended good books and authors from each state in the US. I also read about Pancake in this NPR piece.

Some facts about Breece D'J Pancake:

- He died in 1979, a couple of months before his 27th birthday. Suicide, most people say (a handful think it was an accident).

- He was born in West Virginia, and his stories are rooted in his home state.

- He published 6 stories in his lifetime, which were compiled posthumously with 6 unpublished stories into one volume: The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake.

- According to wikipedia, the 'D' stands for Dexter, the 'J' for John, and that D'J was a misprint of the initials D.J. in The Atlantic (the wikipedia article also mentions his conversion to Catholicism)

- He's an acclaimed writer who's been compared to Hemingway (including in a non-literary sense; in addition to the way both authors died, they also both loved and spent a lot of time outdoors). Pancake's skill, craft, substance, and clarity, however, are considered uniquely his own.

- From his biographer:

"He'd stay up real late at night, maybe four or six hours later, he'd wake in the wee hours of the morning and maybe write some more. His work ethic was incredible. His fiction is very tight and very well-phrased. And that comes from writing over and over and over again. And some of these stories, he wrote maybe twenty times, maybe ten handwritten drafts, then typewritten drafts..."