Week in Seven Words #568

This covers the week of 12/6/20 - 12/12/20.

anemic

It's a major shopping avenue, and on normal years it would be teeming with people and sparkling with lights and sensational window displays. Now, only one store looks festive. The rest are subdued. It's a pallid celebration.

colder

There are no more turtles in the pond. Only dark, frosty water with ducks.

insights

Increasingly, we talk about interesting lectures he's heard on different Jewish topics. Familiar texts still have a great deal in them that we haven't explored and considered.

riverbank

A walk by the river: joggers, people with strollers and dogs, and, yet again, dead fish glistening belly-up in the water. Later in the week, a milky fog swallows up the river, and the fish are gone.

roly-poly

This is the season of fattening. Of cold and carbs and holiday treats.

seethes

She doesn't realize that the venom of her jealousy keeps them at a distance.

utilize

Minding the gaps: I want to make better use of gaps in my schedule, like the hour between two meetings. What "better use" means would vary from one day to another: answering emails, doing some research, closing my eyes for a short while.

Four Very Different Short Stories Focusing on a Female Character

Title: Comforter of the Afflicted
Author: F.H. Batacan (Maria Felisa H. Batacan)
Where I Read It: Manila Noir
This story is set in Manila and centers on the investigation into the murder of Olivia Delgado ("Libby"), who was helping abused women escape from their violent partners. Although she is dead, Delgado remains a living presence, solitary and tenacious. She had channeled her anger into a lifelong struggle within a system where abusers usually have significant advantages, not least because victims are often conditioned (both by the abuse and by wider social mores) to bear the abuse without complaint.

The story becomes an unsentimental tribute to her and her life spent putting up a mighty fight, starting when she was young and attempting to protect her mother from her father. Delgado died fighting also. In spite of how it all ends, the struggle was worth it.

Title: Edie: A Life
Author: Harriet Doerr
Where I Read It: American Voices
A story about a nanny, and it isn't twee or in the least romantic. The writing has a wryness steeped in melancholy. The nanny works for a family where the father was only really in love with his first wife, who died. His subsequent wives aren't suitable. It's not that they're "evil stepmothers;" they just don't really fit into the household.

The nanny, meanwhile, can't serve as a replacement mother. However, she gives some kind of stability to the children and space on her wall for their eerie pictures. What happens when the children grow up? Is she forgotten, having never been a part of the family in a way they recognize? She has worked at the heart of the family but remains at its margins.

Title: Ruminations in an Alien Tongue
Author: Vandana Singh
Where I Read It: Other Worlds Than These

"To understand the aliens I became a mathematician and a musician. After that, those three things are one thing in my mind: the aliens, the mathematics, the music."

I found this story enthralling. It's lovely to see a story that combines math, music, and language, instead of rigidly dividing up the disciplines. The main character, Birha, is a professor on another world who has unlocked an alien outpost and studied the alien tongue (acoustical scripts and poeticas, a kind of instrument). There's also an alien artifact that changes the probabilities of events.

The story comes in waves and spirals. There are meditations on love and self and time. I think of this story as a journey that I went through wide-eyed and bewildered.

"I am myself and yet not so. I contain multitudes and am a part of something larger; I am a cell the size of a planet, swimming in the void of the night."

Title: Tits-Up in a Ditch
Author: Annie Proulx
Where I Read It: Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3
Raised by her grandparents, a girl grows up unloved and unvalued in Wyoming ranch country, in a story that deftly renders an entire society, the way it's changing, and everyone's status in it. Proulx shows the girl's life unfold from childhood to an early marriage and a stint in the military during the 2003 Iraq War.

I like when an author shows the ways an individual life is enmeshed in a particular culture and shaped by family dynamics. There's a degree of inevitability in this story's depressing ending. Not that people are utterly powerless or are merely a passive product of their environment. I've seen a tendency, however, to greatly underestimate the effects of upbringing and culture on the choices people make and the possibilities in their lives. The imagery of cattle in this story is tied to how the main character is pushed along certain paths.

Three Short Stories Featuring Gardens

Title: Broken Glass
Author: Sabina Murray
Where I Read It: Manila Noir

"Now you go play, and when you think you know what happened to that man, the one that flew straight down, you come and tell us, okay?"

In "Broken Glass," a huge backyard, some of it laid out in neat gardens, other parts of it wilder, reflects the characters' social terrain. A young girl named Angela lives in a walled-off wealthy neighborhood in Manila. On a visit to her aunt's home, she hears her mom and aunts discussing an attempted break-in the night before. A security guard apparently shot the intruder as he was scaling a perimeter wall, but it isn't clear where the body is.

Angela goes out to play on her aunt's property. Along with clear paths she can easily follow, there are also sections - especially farther from the house - that remain overgrown and untended. She encounters different domestic employees who, like the gardens, give her safe assurances mixed with hints of danger. They're obliged to treat Angela well, but they also refer to dark things that Angela is too young and sheltered to understand. By the end of the story, she's a little less sheltered, and her safety feels more precarious. I like how the author shows the subtle destabilizing shift in the girl's life.

Title: The Flower Garden
Author: David Guterson
Where I Read It: The Garden of Reading
A teenaged boy is torn between two dreams: continuing to be with a girl he loves, and playing baseball. He feels the intense promise of both. He helps the girl with her garden, and when he's with her there, he believes their love will last forever. But then he heads to baseball practice, and the girl feels less real to him than the dream of trying out for a professional team.

The story starts in a golden haze of summer, when he's 17-years-old and eyed with wistfulness and nostalgia by the old people in his neighborhood. He's a world apart from these older people, though by the story's end he's taken a significant step towards them, with his young dreams crumbling. At one point, in winter this time, he revisits the garden. The story seems to ask whether a relationship (or someone's dreams) can survive that killing blast of winter, whether there's enough faith in spring and renewal.

Title: The Garden of Time
Author: J.G. Ballard (James Graham Ballard)
Where I Read It: The Garden of Reading
A husband and wife live in an elegant estate with beautiful gardens. On the horizon, a horde of people approach. The husband slips into the garden and plucks a blossom off a special kind of flower. The horde falls back. Every time they get closer, he picks another blossom. Each blossom stops time, for a short while. The horde can't overrun the estate, tearing it apart, as long as there are enough of these special flowers in the garden. There's a sense that the aristocratic couple live in a magic bubble of time, and that the horde outside inhabits a different time altogether. Soon, the aristocrats will run out of flowers, their bubble will burst, and the life they've cultivated in it will end once and for all.

This husband and wife face each day with resolution, going about their lovely routines, even when they know their efforts are futile. The story's poignancy comes from the desire to see that beautiful bubble stretch out for longer. But they can't stop time and forever live as if threats to their way of life don't exist. The most they can enjoy is a temporary reprieve. No new flowers are growing in their garden. It isn't a fruitful place. As beautiful as it is, it may also be stagnant. There is no permanence compatible with mortal life, and any change, whether it's considered good or not, goes hand-in-hand with destruction of some kind. The husband and wife can see no way to either directly confront the horde or adapt to any of the changes coming. The state of permanence they achieve in the end is a frozenness without possibility of growth; they're still beyond reach from the horde, but their time is past. They can only exist as reminders for people who care to look closely.

Week in Seven Words #238

bordered
The conversation is largely a repetition of other ones we've had. Because his point isn't to tell me something new; it's to map out the current limits of his life, at least how he sees it. He can do this, but not that. Go there, but no farther, not for now. His words make the boundaries firmer.

bowl
Sand pounded flat by feet but not by waves. It's a sheltered harbor. The water is flat and calm and waits for people to disturb it.

featureless
The sun's glare turns everyone into silhouettes.

mistrustful
A preschooler balances on a fence with his father's help. He tests his father by tipping forward suddenly; will the large hands around his waist tighten and hold him steady? They do. He tells his father, "You'll drop me!" He insists on it, against all conflicting evidence; his father will drop him - it's just a matter of time.

numbing
The idea of time healing wounds - not sure about it. At least, it's not as simple as that. Because time can bring with it numbing, which isn't necessarily the same as healing.

thrust
Roots that have punched through rock and cement.

tinny
I wonder if I'm little more than a nerdy sideshow in his life. And in her life, a project that went haywire, much to her chagrin and bitter delight.

Groundhog Day (1993): Egotist learns to love himself and others via a time loop

Title: Groundhog Day
Director: Harold Ramis
Language: English
Rating: PG

Hell is being stuck with yourself when you're full of self-loathing.

Phil Connors (Bill Murray) strikes people as having a high opinion of himself. He's a Pittsburgh weatherman full of contempt for his colleagues; he's convinced he's headed for a more prominent spot on national TV. An assignment to cover the Groundhog Day festivities at Punxsutawney is a personal affront to him; he hates the yokels in small towns and their silly traditions. When a snowstorm forces him to stay overnight in Punxsutawney with his producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell), and cameraman, Larry (Chris Elliott), he's gone through what he probably considers the most pointless, boring day of his life.

Until the gets up the next morning, and finds out it's Groundhog Day all over again.

Time is stuck in a loop, forcing Phil to relive the same day over and over. At first, he thinks he's going nuts. How can it be that he's waking up every morning at 6:00 am in the same bed and breakfast, with the same song playing from the alarm radio? As he realizes that this is real, and he's actually trapped in Punxsutawney in a 24-hour loop, he begins to indulge his hedonistic side: speeding, thieving, seducing women, eating junk food the way a man would when he doesn't have to care about cholesterol and cavities.

From Wikipedia, Fair use

Week in Seven Words #184 and #185

#184
ambition
He struggles with reading and math but maybe he'll get the life he wants anyway, his photo in Sports Illustrated and a mansion with many sports cars.

embalmed
Old cakes topped with sugared roses wilt in the dull white light.

faultfinding
It doesn't need to be perfect; it just needs to get done. It doesn't need to be perfect; it just needs to get done.

nasal
A drippy optician, sniffling while squinting at a computer that doesn't work.

resurrection
She pulls back the moth-eaten curtains and discovers a world that's forgotten she exists.

promotion
They've recruited an unfunny comedian to hand out flyers for their comedy club. People will be sure to come.

whitecaps
Light breaks in waves against my brain.

Week in Seven Words #135

gynecologist
The awkwardness when the doctor attempts polite chit-chat during an annual check-up. How do you like the city so far? Uh, it's great. Super. Lots to do here, yep.

insouciant
Among the harried people rushing from block to block there's one person sailing along half-nude on a bicycle and wearing a glittery silver wig.

passing
Old men on a bench outside a cafe looking around at a neighborhood that's changed.

refreshing
Evergreens and harbor air.

scarce
Health insurance options.

solemnity
A grove of trees, a copper bell, and geese.

spectral
There are many stories to be found in the silent houses.

Week in Seven Words #127

filament
A friend I haven't seen or spoken to in years, speaks to me in a gift I find while cleaning out a drawer: a little jewelry box and in it a small scrolling paper bearing a message about dreams, beauty, and light. Her name signed at the bottom.

impassioned
Ray Charles sang the best rendition of "America the Beautiful" I've heard so far.

larded
A paper made indigestible by jargon.

nonpartisan
Napping on a hot afternoon is the best way to stay clear of trouble.

panicled
Purple hydrangea blossoms and books neatly stacked on my newly tidied desk.

retrogress
Without knowing it, they push me towards making the same unsuitable choices as before.

sobering
The rumble of fireworks and the sigh and shout of the crowds are pierced from time to time by an ambulance or firetruck wailing in the distance.

Week in Seven Words #108

banality
Online dating has been mostly a bore so far. When you meet people in person you experience them as the complex 3D creatures they are, and not as small photos supplemented with the same descriptions over and over - "intelligent, fun-loving, one-of-a-kind" - like personal ads in a Lake Wobegon newspaper.

fulcrum
Time has to be balanced in your mind so that you don't tip too much into the future or sink too frequently into the past.

indurated
In the night my thoughts are cold black diamonds.

reaching
I talk into the phone, knowing that he's there at the other end even though I can't hear him.

second-rate
Sometimes you look back on your week to find that one of your prominent memories involves a pitched battle with a backed-up toilet. Oh well.

slipping
When I'm feeling low about my writing I think of the words as weak magnets sliding down the front of a fridge.

sussing
At the library I spot a DVD Whisperer. He caresses their spines and speaks to each one - "Should I watch you tonight? Or you?" - then cocks his head and listens for the answer.

Week in Seven Words #98

antique
It's an older part of the city, and it's nearly empty. I like it that way - quiet with cobblestone paths, grass, old bridges over dried-up streams, old brick homes topped with ornate weathervanes, gardens abandoned in winter, their fountains dry.

burger
It comes on a soft bun with dark green lettuce, raw onion, salsa, guacamole, and spicy chipotle sauce. They call it the El Mariachi burger. It's a good burger.

distinctive
80s teen movie: stale classrooms, social misfits, angst, puffy hair, and Molly Ringwald.

harmonic
Different authors writing on completely different topics can have a beautiful resonance in one's mind. While picking over a creative problem, I come across an essay on Aldous Huxley by the departed Christopher Hitchens and some wonderful passages from May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, and they sound an intriguing chord in my thoughts.

jitterbug
At the park I follow a faint thread of music and find two pairs of swing dancers by the fountain.

now
I'm starting to really understand what a precious gift this time is. So much is up in the air, but it's a beautiful opportunity nonetheless. I'll kick myself if I miss out on it and don't do what I'm called to do at the moment.

unsuited
At the supermarket it's non-stop holiday jingles. And I want to know why so many of the recent recordings are sung in a breathy melodramatic quaver. It's a holiday jingle. Sleigh bells ring-ting-tingling should hopefully not evoke emotional torment.

Good Short Fiction: 4 tales from The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories

Collection: The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories
Editor: Roberto González Echevarría

Title: Journey Back to the Source
Author: Alejo Carpentier
Translator: Harriet de Onís

Journey Back to the Source tells the story of Don Marcial's life from end to beginning. Time flows backwards.

Crow's-feet, frowns, and double chins vanished, and flesh grew firm again. One day the smell of fresh paint filled the house.

Sometimes the story seems like a video being rewound, but often there's a forward-moving feeling to the backwards flow of time. Don Marcial is escaping from what he's become, retracing a path towards innocence. There is no other way to reclaim this innocence, except to go forward into the past.

And a splendid evening party was given in the music room on the day he achieved minority. He was delighted to know that his signature was no longer legally valid, and that worm-eaten registers and documents would now vanish from his world. He had reached the point at which courts of justice were no longer to be feared, because his bodily existence was ignored by the law.

However, even in his comparatively innocent childhood, there's death and darkness (beliefs that he might have taken into himself unquestioned as a child and then with adulthood fully embraced or allowed to flourish, without bothering to understand them).

The story is full of rich language and psychological insight, as in the following observation of Don Marcial on his death bed:

What had begun as a candid, detailed confession of his many sins grew gradually more reticent, painful, and full of evasions.

The final lines of the story blend beginnings with endings.

Then he shut his eyes - they saw nothing but nebulous giants - and entered a warm, damp body full of shadows... Clothed in this body's substance, he slipped toward life.

-------------

Title: Midnight Mass
Author: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Translators: William L. Grossman and Helen Caldwell
A seventeen-year-old student is visiting an older male relative, a man who openly cheats on his wife. One evening before midnight mass, when the rest of the household is asleep, the student and the wife have a long conversation.

The two are intimate. They don't have sex. They're intensely aware of each other. She speaks more freely and has a more open expression than he's ever seen. He observes her closely, noting minute changes in her appearance: her posture, the expression in her eyes, the way she moves her hands and arms.

Usually her gestures were slow, her attitude calm. Now, however, she rose suddenly, moved to the other side of the room, and, in her chaste disarray, walked about between the window and the door of her husband's study. Although thin, she always walked with a certain rocking gait as if she carried her weight with difficulty.

On that one evening time is suspended. There's an atmosphere of possibility and revelation. The neglected wife is seen for who she is and for what she could be, and that's part of the intensity of her conversation with the student. They are alone together, removed from other people and from the conventions of daily life.

-------------

Title: The Switchman
Author: Juan José Arreola
Translator: George D. Schade
A traveler arrives at an empty train station and wonders when his train will come. He speaks to an an elderly switchman who finds it funny that the traveler expects any train to show up. At length the switchman describes the irregularities and inefficiencies of the country's rail system.

The elaborate description of train troubles is what first drew me into the story; the switchman talks about inaccurate railway maps and about trains that stop where they shouldn't, don't move for days on end or just appear at random hours.

"This country is famous for its railroads, as you know. Up to now it's been impossible to organize them properly, but great progress has been made in publishing timetables and issuing tickets. Railroad guides include and link all the towns in the country; they sell tickets for even the smallest and most remote villages. Now all that is needed is for the trains to follow what the guides indicate and really pass by the stations. The inhabitants of this country hope this will happen; meanwhile, they accept the service's irregularities and their patriotism keeps them from showing any displeasure."

I could see the trains as a metaphor not only for life and its unpredictability but also for people's tendency to passively give themselves over to a governing power:

"The hope is that one day the passengers will capitulate to fate, give themselves into the hands of an omnipotent management, and no longer care to know where they are going or where they have come from."

Does the right train ever come? And by the end, does the traveler still care about its destination? What he might content himself with is just the feeling of being on a train, of going somewhere (anywhere) or at least having the illusion of motion.

-------------

Title: The Third Bank of the River
Author: João Guimarães Rosa
Translator: William L. Grossman

This story makes sense to me on a gut level (I think).

When the narrator is a child his father decides one day to get into a rowboat and live out on the river.

Father did not come back. Nor did he go anywhere, really. He just rowed and floated across and around, out there in the river. Everyone was appalled. What had never happened, what could not possibly happen, was happening. Our relatives, neighbors, and friends came over to discuss the phenomenon.

The father's strongest connection is with his son, the narrator, who leaves provisions for him on the river bank; they don't interact in any other way. The father remains on the water in all kinds of weather, in all seasons, staying mostly out of sight and not speaking to anyone. Years pass, and the narrator is the only family member who doesn't move away from the river. Then one day he figures out what he needs to do to get his father back on land.

It's an eerie and absurd story. There's never a clear explanation for why the father chooses this course in life and what it even represents. It's as if he's pursuing an obscure path or calling that his son, the narrator, might be drawn to one day. Or maybe the narrator will escape from his duties and from the burden of his father's legacy and leave the old man behind on the river, completely cut off from everyone.

[Edited: 1/2015]

Week in Seven Words #89

coiling
They're sitting in the kitchen making long colorful paper chains to loop around the walls of their sukkah. The decorative chains spill over the kitchen table and pool and heap on the floor.

decumbent
Hit by an illness first thing in the morning, I find that the world is shaky when I'm out of bed. I stay under the covers, reading by the light that slides in through the blinds.

furtherance
I learn again that it's best not to put off doing something good and worthwhile with the complacent thought that there will be another opportunity for it soon.

illustrative
As I'm reading them picture books about a spiffy giant and a Gruffalo and a snail that travels the world on a whale's tail, she asks me why the pictures show some things but not others; for instance, if the story tells you that a fox ran off and hid, the picture only shows you the hiding part but not the running part. After I tell her that everything can't be shown, and that the people who write and illustrate the books have to pick and choose, her older brother starts to talk about how in movies you can't see what's going on with all of the characters either; when one character's story is on screen, other characters are off-screen, with things happening to them that we can't even see but maybe will only hear about later.

lucent
On my walk home, bright globes of light burn on either side of the path. It's nighttime and a fresh new day has begun.

precipitation
The tables and chairs are beaded with rain water.

unawares
Scrabble Junior can be as challenging as regular Scrabble, simply because Scrabble Junior lulls you into a false sense of security.

A good sweet year to you

It looks like I'm behind schedule with the Week in Seven Words post for this week, so I plan to post two of them at a time early next week. What with holiday preparations and other things, I haven't had time for proper blog fun these past few days (overdue blog visits are also on the schedule for this weekend!)

Rosh Hashanah is starting really soon... I wish you all a happy, sweet, and successful year. Be well.

Week in Seven Words #74

cartographical
To solve the game I sketch out maps on lined paper with squiggly tunnels and shaky rooms, roads that leap too far right or left. I love it when I haven't yet explored everything, and there are blank spaces, terra incognita.

changeable
For the exact same task, twenty minutes isn't nearly enough time on one day but a decent amount of time on another.

inflation
The quality of a mediocre film improves when you watch it in good company.

interplanetary
When talking to different friends it can feel as if I'm bouncing around from one planet to another - some are brilliant and turbulent, others are spare and rocky, a few aren't planets at all but friendly moons with valleys, caves, and silver mountains. But they're all inviting, one way or another.

meandering
I like his free associative style of speaking. He says what comes to mind, but it's never anything malicious - at worst it's irrelevant, but mostly in an amusing way.

puffy
Pizza dough slowly swelling in a bowl.

terpsichorean
At half past midnight, while walking past the brightly lit windows of a bank, I see a janitor inside mopping the floor. Several feet away his young daughter twirls around with a broom.

You won't read everything out there that's worth reading...

... or watch everything worth watching, or go to every place you've dreamed of visiting.

An interesting article on how people choose what to do with their limited time, and their attitudes towards the books, movies, and general experiences they'll need to leave untouched.

If "well-read" means "not missing anything," then nobody has a chance. If "well-read" means "making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully," then yes, we can all be well-read. But what we've seen is always going to be a very small cup dipped out of a very big ocean, and turning your back on the ocean to stare into the cup can't change that.

* Found via Arts & Letters Daily.

"Is hung with bloom along the bough"

Photos from 4/1/10.


The pinks disappeared in a blink.


And the whites reminded me of winter.

Week in Seven Words #11

brighten
After a night of little sleep and a few days in a slump, I don't think I can be inspired that afternoon. I'm mistaken. Her lecture thrums with intelligence and possibility.

countdown
These are days spent counting different things. I don't want to think about how many more afternoons like this I'll have in their company, these people with whom I've found such a shared language. Of course I plan to see them in the future, but it won't be quite the same.

discarded
Walking home I spot a lovely white carnation in a garbage can. It remains upright among discarded newspapers and food cartons. A few blocks later, while crossing a courtyard, I see a squirrel sitting in a large shrubbery pot and tearing through a bun. He probably snatched it up from the garbage can three feet away, where someone had tossed it away nearly whole.

inexpectation
Expect to be continually surprised. What I say may cause a young man to snort wine from his nose. A young woman who pops in and out of my life will stand with me in the entranceway of an apartment building for close to an hour pouring out her doubts and feelings and hopes about some of life's most personal matters. Other people will sometimes be there and sometimes won't be there; every moment they're present is to be savored, for however long it may last.

sealed
While quickly translating text, the sensation of running up against gates tightly shut. We send out our hands and fumble for keyholes or crevices; hopefully the means will occur to us - the root, the context, the sensation of I saw that word ten verses ago, didn't I?

torpid
The urn beneath the drainpipe is flooded. In the froth of rain drops and run-off, long green leaves churn listlessly.

vantage
From ground level it looks like the tree has shed all its blossoms. But from the second floor window, I spy some flowers peeping from the uppermost branches; pink and white, they're surrounded by blowzy brilliant green.

Video poetry - one year in 120 seconds

One year in 120 seconds from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

That was 2009 right there.

It starts and ends in snow; the trees swell and recede. I love the beauty of the seasons and their patterns.

But it goes by so quickly, that one year; feels like one slow complete breath, just one.