Week in Seven Words #456

culinary
The kitchen is dingy, and the cook keeps her phone and keys on the counter among spatters of sauce and grease. But the soup is pretty good, and so is the chicken sandwich.

hardware
Framed by the window, the cluster of buildings and lights resembles a computer motherboard.

lockup
As with other high schools, the architecture for this one evokes a prison. It's a slab of gray with the windows barred.

processed
He doesn't read the book, just looks for answers on Quizlet, which his indifferent teacher will accept with an automatic checkmark.

rove
His mind is roaming an elsewhere. He's shifting in his seat, and soon he'll hurry out the door to walk off his restlessness.

sluggish
Buses slide out like tired slugs from the tunnel.

truth
"The truth will set you free" is how the expression goes, but this freedom, whatever it happens to be, generally isn't quick or guaranteed. What the truth does is show you some of the ways in which you're chained. From there, you need to figure out how to unchain yourself, if you even want to, and if you even can.

Week in Seven Words #256

I'm sorry for the nearly month-long absence on this blog. The reason was a combination of lots of work and a needed blog break.

anticipant
She peers into the audience, her face nervous and expectant, knowing her family will be there but needing to see them.

crestfallen
"I stink at this," is what one child says every time she doesn't get something right the first time. Who is she echoing?

easy-going
She sits on the floor in her power suit, at ease when kids tumble around her legs.

huddled
They're the same type of people - same background, same lifestyle - so it doesn't matter what they say to each other; they're happy with the knowledge that they're the same and that their conversation will be safe.

pathetically
Out of pity I buy a small stuffed animal with lumpy ears. A dog, I think. An aspiring dog.

restorative
The clean scent of linens in a drawer.

true
While the others are match sparks and unsteady flames, she's a lamp, steady and gentle in the dark.

A Room with a View: "the real and the pretended"

The characters have a strange quality in E.M. Forster's A Room with a View. Sometimes they come across as real and deep; other times they seem to be made of colorful tissue paper.

The world of the book is also divided in two. On the one hand there's passion, nature, and honest conversation: rare moments when people speak their mind or know themselves (or realize what they could be). On the other there are petty social conventions, which get in the way of truth and beauty. The book opens with two Englishwomen - Lucy Honeychurch and her older, poorer relation, Charlotte Bartlett - traveling in Italy. Instead of experiencing Italy with all of their heart and mind, they're wearing culturally approved blinkers. They're saddled with guidebooks that tell them what's beautiful and worth seeing and what isn't. They're burdened with the company of narrow-minded pedants and opinionated bores who need to make sure everyone thinks and talks and acts in the correct way. Charlotte herself seems to be one of those bores, but by the end of the book you'll get a long sad glimpse into her that shows you what she might have been.


In the course of the book Lucy will choose between two men that represent the division running through the book: George Emerson and Cecil Vyse (just by their names, guess which one is a prig). George is poetry and passion and troubled moods; Cecil has no concept of real intimacy but cuts a good-looking smart figure.

Lucy has grown up in a society where she's often had to deny or excuse her thoughts and feelings, to the point where her own voice is lost in her mind among others. Playing piano - not in the conventional accomplished way of women her age, but with real soul and understanding - is one consistent way she expresses herself where her words fail her. Conversations communicate very little that's genuine or clear.

On the whole I felt detached from the characters. I wasn't walking among them; they were on a stage, and I was watching them from different places in the audience (sometimes needing binoculars). Where the book really leapt out and grabbed me were in isolated passages, here and there, beautifully written and sharing some insight into human nature and society.

The contest lay not between love and duty. Perhaps there never is such a contest. It lay between the real and the pretended, and Lucy's first aim was to defeat herself... The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.

(I'm adding this post to the list of Classics Club Challenge books.)

Good Short Fiction: A Wilderness Station (by Alice Munro)

Title: A Wilderness Station
Author: Alice Munro
Collection: Selected Stories

All my life I found this a good rule to follow - to get as much pleasure as you could out of things even when you weren't likely to be happy.

A Wilderness Station is an epistolary story that makes you feel like a bird flying over a forest, getting glimpses of people below and what they're doing, while knowing that parts of them will stay concealed. You'll never know the whole story.

Simon Herron, the man who dies (murdered?), is the only major character who doesn't get a voice. We see him through other characters, and we see them through letters and secondhand accounts. At the start of the story you're flying over Canadian wilderness, a frontier just being broken into by settlers. There's Simon and his brother, George, trying to make a life in the woods. They're joined by Simon's wife, Annie McKillop, who was betrothed to Simon via mail.

You might be thinking there's a love triangle, but there isn't. There's death, cruelty, mystery, guilt, and what appears to be insanity. Munro has a gift of letting multiple lives unfold across generations within a single short story. She leaves us to make sense of what we see; like historians armed with some primary documents and with our own imagination and preconceptions we try to understand what happened to these characters, before and after and during a fateful day in the woods.

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Other stories in this collection include: Dance of the Happy Shades and Lichen.