Collection: 44 Irish Short Stories
Editor: Devin A. Garrity
It was difficult to get into 44 Irish Short Stories, and I put it aside for a while, but eventually I came across the following five stories, which I thought were all good. I love their wry humor - it doesn't matter how dark the subject matter is, you can see the authors writing about it with a hint of a smile. Reminds me of Jewish humor - can't escape life's misfortunes so you might as well laugh.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Friday, August 24, 2012
Week in Seven Words #133
floating
I love summer nights, after it's rained earlier and the air is soft and balmy. I could walk for miles on nights like these.
floristic
Blotchy red roses and delicate purple flowers on display along Amsterdam Avenue.
marver
A spell of cathartic writing, where I pour out all the simmering anger and shape it into something useful.
savored
Lunch hour: Shakshouka with haloumi cheese, a corner table, and a good book.
unfathomable
Struck by the number of strangers around me - people I'll never know, who brush up against my life as I brush against theirs when we dodge past each other on a crowded sidewalk.
unresolved
An unspoken "let's pretend it never happened" instead of a spoken "I'm sorry."
zwischenzug
I haven't played chess since childhood but all it takes is a few games and I start to see the connections again between the pieces. Instead of sending them out in disjointed short-sighted moves, I start to get how one can protect another, how they can operate in tandem to pose a threat to and capture opponent pieces. I have fun rediscovering all of this.
I love summer nights, after it's rained earlier and the air is soft and balmy. I could walk for miles on nights like these.
floristic
Blotchy red roses and delicate purple flowers on display along Amsterdam Avenue.
marver
A spell of cathartic writing, where I pour out all the simmering anger and shape it into something useful.
savored
Lunch hour: Shakshouka with haloumi cheese, a corner table, and a good book.
unfathomable
Struck by the number of strangers around me - people I'll never know, who brush up against my life as I brush against theirs when we dodge past each other on a crowded sidewalk.
unresolved
An unspoken "let's pretend it never happened" instead of a spoken "I'm sorry."
zwischenzug
I haven't played chess since childhood but all it takes is a few games and I start to see the connections again between the pieces. Instead of sending them out in disjointed short-sighted moves, I start to get how one can protect another, how they can operate in tandem to pose a threat to and capture opponent pieces. I have fun rediscovering all of this.
Monday, August 20, 2012
10 great places for reading outdoors in downtown Philly
When I lived in Philly my apartment wasn't in Center City (downtown) but I did walk around a lot there and I can vouch for each of these places as excellent reading spots along with being good outdoor hang-outs; some of them are crowded and lively, while others are quiet and out of the way.
People often raise safety concerns about Philly, but I never felt unsafe in any of the places listed below (mostly because I visited them in the daytime, usually on Sunday afternoons); in any case, use your common sense and listen to your instincts if you feel uncomfortable anywhere.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Undine Spragg: All That Glitters Is Not Gold
Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country was one of my selections for the Classics Club Challenge. It's a masterpiece of social commentary and psychological insight, and at times I wanted to throw it across the room (or rather, throw its heroine and her associates across the room).
The heroine of the novel is Undine Spragg, a superficially beautiful woman who glitters and consumes and believes herself to be entitled to everything she takes from others (because it's not really taking, in her view, it's more like receiving what she deserves for simply existing).
Undine regards everyone and everything as a means to her personal gratification. Other people can go about their lives and do whatever it is they want to do, as long as they're satisfying her wants. If they aren't, it means they're wrong and perverse and the whole planet has gone off course, and Undine will do everything in her power to right it. If people's lives get destroyed in the process, it's hardly her fault for asserting her rights. (She's very big on "rights" while having no empathy or sense of what's right.)
This character so disgusted me that I had to put the book down for a while. But ultimately I kept reading for two reasons: 1) Wharton is a masterful writer, who uses sharp, beautiful prose to peel back the layers of her characters and expose them to their very veins 2) I started to read it as a dark comedy - at times a very dark comedy, with lots of painful irony, and a heroine who gets away with everything because through her Wharton is exposing the wider culture where a monstrous human being like Undine Spragg can be be nurtured, indulged, and helped towards social triumph, even though the majority of women in her position would have faced more severe consequences.
At the start of the novel, which is set in the early 20th century, she's arrived in New York City with her parents in the hopes of marrying into high society. Her father made some money in the Midwest, which is why they can try to attach themselves to the well-monied New York crowd. In NYC they find two main kinds of wealthy families. There are the nouveau riche - people whose backgrounds might be quite similar to Undine's: the men made it big in business, they're ostentatious, caught up with what's trendy and showy, don't have a drop of aristocratic blood or much in the way of education and culture. Then there are the older families who've been the elites for a while; they aren't necessarily rolling in money (in fact they see business as something distasteful), but they do have fine homes and an appreciation for tradition, family, fine culture and education.
Wharton's sympathies seem to lie with those older families; at the same time she's merciless towards them, exposing their ineffectuality in the face of a more brazen, unprincipled and acquisitive culture. Undine's first husband, Ralph Marvell, is from one of the older families and is the most sympathetic major character of the book, but he's passive when he shouldn't be and makes blindly foolish decisions that class him with the rest of Undine's enablers. These constitute a diverse group including her parents and assorted society notables, who act towards Undine out of various motives or weaknesses of character, but have the unified effect of letting her get away with whatever she wants.
Undine isn't an independent woman, not by a long shot. Willful, yes, but she needs other people to admire her, amuse her, and supply her with money for everything she wants. She wilts when she's away from other people; she has few mental or emotional resources of her own and isn't expected to make money on her own. When she slips from one husband to another, she's exchanging one dependency for another, and is conscious of how she can lose everything if she makes one wrong move. Her power comes from learning how to read other people and draw the desired response from them. She relies on her beauty, and on an ability to adapt herself to situations and become to a limited extent what others want her to be. To intelligent, sensitive and poetic types (like Ralph) she may seem like a pool of water whose glittering surface conceals unexplored depths, until they dive in and injure themselves on the hard, shallow bottom.
(Ralph also had the conceit of becoming Undine's teacher - she was meant to be his fresh, innocent Midwestern muse that he would guide through a new world of art and literature - another variation of the woman dependent on the man while inspiring him as an object of beauty, though softened by Ralph's hope that they truly would become companions.)
Part of Undine's artful use of her beauty is how she suggests qualities she doesn't have (or understand) by knowing what they should look like on the surface; she's great at striking a meditative pose, or looking fresh and innocent or sweetly somber. Her ability is a wider comment on the culture she belongs to - an imitative American culture short on real feeling or a sustained attention span, where people mimic Old World, European-style mannerisms while having little appreciation for anything lasting and deep. The model of marriage among the wealthy business class in this culture (and promoted as the cultural ideal) is one where money is substituted for intimacy. The husband works at Wall Street to keep his wife as a creature of luxury and feed her bottomless demands for more stuff; it's not as if she's expected to occupy her mind with anything else. When they do spend time together, it's mostly in the company of other people, at grand dinners, opera, theater, and other outings. Everything is prized for its surface appearance.
As someone who lacks depth of feeling and empathy, places a price tag on everything and everyone, and has no clue about how money is made, Undine is the model woman of her culture, the best reflection of its ideals: ignorant, ruthless, and demanding, a monstrously spoiled child. She has some male counterparts in the book - Peter Van Degen, for one, a beast of a man whose money is a means of satisfying every appetite... but even more than Peter there's Undine's real match: Elmer Moffatt, a somewhat mysterious figure who keeps popping up in the book like a jocular devil - stout, red-faced and full of grand schemes. Had she been a man, Undine might have been a lot like Moffatt; she has that business-like mind and eye for opportunity. But because she was raised to be a kept creature, she must use her business acumen to secure people she can depend on for a steady cash flow and social cachet.
There are many gems in the writing: artistic ("... night after night the skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars"), humorous ("Mrs. Shallum, though in command of but a few verbs, all of which, on her lips, became irregular...") and insightful about human nature ("Everybody wanted him to write – everybody had decided that he ought to, that he would, that he must be persuaded to; and the incessant imperceptible pressure of encouragement... acted on his restive nerves as a stronger deterrent than disapproval"). It's a cutting, amusing, and absorbing novel, a great book.
The heroine of the novel is Undine Spragg, a superficially beautiful woman who glitters and consumes and believes herself to be entitled to everything she takes from others (because it's not really taking, in her view, it's more like receiving what she deserves for simply existing).
Undine regards everyone and everything as a means to her personal gratification. Other people can go about their lives and do whatever it is they want to do, as long as they're satisfying her wants. If they aren't, it means they're wrong and perverse and the whole planet has gone off course, and Undine will do everything in her power to right it. If people's lives get destroyed in the process, it's hardly her fault for asserting her rights. (She's very big on "rights" while having no empathy or sense of what's right.)
This character so disgusted me that I had to put the book down for a while. But ultimately I kept reading for two reasons: 1) Wharton is a masterful writer, who uses sharp, beautiful prose to peel back the layers of her characters and expose them to their very veins 2) I started to read it as a dark comedy - at times a very dark comedy, with lots of painful irony, and a heroine who gets away with everything because through her Wharton is exposing the wider culture where a monstrous human being like Undine Spragg can be be nurtured, indulged, and helped towards social triumph, even though the majority of women in her position would have faced more severe consequences.
At the start of the novel, which is set in the early 20th century, she's arrived in New York City with her parents in the hopes of marrying into high society. Her father made some money in the Midwest, which is why they can try to attach themselves to the well-monied New York crowd. In NYC they find two main kinds of wealthy families. There are the nouveau riche - people whose backgrounds might be quite similar to Undine's: the men made it big in business, they're ostentatious, caught up with what's trendy and showy, don't have a drop of aristocratic blood or much in the way of education and culture. Then there are the older families who've been the elites for a while; they aren't necessarily rolling in money (in fact they see business as something distasteful), but they do have fine homes and an appreciation for tradition, family, fine culture and education.
Wharton's sympathies seem to lie with those older families; at the same time she's merciless towards them, exposing their ineffectuality in the face of a more brazen, unprincipled and acquisitive culture. Undine's first husband, Ralph Marvell, is from one of the older families and is the most sympathetic major character of the book, but he's passive when he shouldn't be and makes blindly foolish decisions that class him with the rest of Undine's enablers. These constitute a diverse group including her parents and assorted society notables, who act towards Undine out of various motives or weaknesses of character, but have the unified effect of letting her get away with whatever she wants.
Undine isn't an independent woman, not by a long shot. Willful, yes, but she needs other people to admire her, amuse her, and supply her with money for everything she wants. She wilts when she's away from other people; she has few mental or emotional resources of her own and isn't expected to make money on her own. When she slips from one husband to another, she's exchanging one dependency for another, and is conscious of how she can lose everything if she makes one wrong move. Her power comes from learning how to read other people and draw the desired response from them. She relies on her beauty, and on an ability to adapt herself to situations and become to a limited extent what others want her to be. To intelligent, sensitive and poetic types (like Ralph) she may seem like a pool of water whose glittering surface conceals unexplored depths, until they dive in and injure themselves on the hard, shallow bottom.
(Ralph also had the conceit of becoming Undine's teacher - she was meant to be his fresh, innocent Midwestern muse that he would guide through a new world of art and literature - another variation of the woman dependent on the man while inspiring him as an object of beauty, though softened by Ralph's hope that they truly would become companions.)
Part of Undine's artful use of her beauty is how she suggests qualities she doesn't have (or understand) by knowing what they should look like on the surface; she's great at striking a meditative pose, or looking fresh and innocent or sweetly somber. Her ability is a wider comment on the culture she belongs to - an imitative American culture short on real feeling or a sustained attention span, where people mimic Old World, European-style mannerisms while having little appreciation for anything lasting and deep. The model of marriage among the wealthy business class in this culture (and promoted as the cultural ideal) is one where money is substituted for intimacy. The husband works at Wall Street to keep his wife as a creature of luxury and feed her bottomless demands for more stuff; it's not as if she's expected to occupy her mind with anything else. When they do spend time together, it's mostly in the company of other people, at grand dinners, opera, theater, and other outings. Everything is prized for its surface appearance.
As someone who lacks depth of feeling and empathy, places a price tag on everything and everyone, and has no clue about how money is made, Undine is the model woman of her culture, the best reflection of its ideals: ignorant, ruthless, and demanding, a monstrously spoiled child. She has some male counterparts in the book - Peter Van Degen, for one, a beast of a man whose money is a means of satisfying every appetite... but even more than Peter there's Undine's real match: Elmer Moffatt, a somewhat mysterious figure who keeps popping up in the book like a jocular devil - stout, red-faced and full of grand schemes. Had she been a man, Undine might have been a lot like Moffatt; she has that business-like mind and eye for opportunity. But because she was raised to be a kept creature, she must use her business acumen to secure people she can depend on for a steady cash flow and social cachet.
There are many gems in the writing: artistic ("... night after night the skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars"), humorous ("Mrs. Shallum, though in command of but a few verbs, all of which, on her lips, became irregular...") and insightful about human nature ("Everybody wanted him to write – everybody had decided that he ought to, that he would, that he must be persuaded to; and the incessant imperceptible pressure of encouragement... acted on his restive nerves as a stronger deterrent than disapproval"). It's a cutting, amusing, and absorbing novel, a great book.
Friday, August 17, 2012
Week in Seven Words #132
acquainted
He's too young to read the Lord of the Rings, but he's been permitted to watch the Peter Jackson movies with an adult present and collect some of the Legos (including a Lego Shelob with a length of web-like rope coming out her rear end). To me it's an odd way of discovering that universe, when you first know the characters as movie stars and collectible toys.
amazing
I haven't been following the Olympics much, except for hearing about Michael Phelps, watching a few women's gymnastics videos, and occasionally checking in on weightlifter Sarah Robles. One thing I do watch is the match where Misty May and Kerri Walsh win their third Olympic gold in a row. It's awesome to see how close they are as friends in addition to being an unbeatable team on the court.
exploratory
I introduce one of them to the world of blogs. The other is making her own world, a poster of an imaginary country with a list of stats: language, currency, major rivers, a capital with a strange name.
quaggy
Between the trees I see a beautifully green and scummy pond.
unobserved
Unproductive hours trickle by followed by a burst of activity and inspiration. I always worry about those hours when I don't seem to get as much done as I want, but maybe they're necessary for whatever it is the brain needs to do.
unshod
He greets me with a high heel in each hand.
untranslatable
After I leave a friend's apartment building in NYC, a man approaches me as I stand alongside a small family of tourists at a crosswalk, waiting for the light to change. He's bald and somewhere between the age of 35 and 50. "The way you stepped out of that building," he says in a heavy Russian accent, "it was as if you were stepping onto water. It was amazing." What he means by that, I can't say, so I say nothing. "Do you speak Russian?" he asks. "No," I say. "Maybe one day you'll learn," he says. "Maybe," I agree. "You know what I say when people ask me if I play the violin?" he asks, laughing a little. "I tell them, 'Maybe one day I'll learn.'" He laughs again. Then he asks, "Where are you from?" I'm tempted to say 'Earth' but instead say, "The U.S." He nods thoughtfully. "You don't look as if you belong here..." He looks at me expectantly, but when I make no reply, he shrugs and says, "Ah well, you have the right to be alone," and walks off quickly. The light changes, and I cross the street, looking back a couple of times to make sure he isn't following me. He isn't. Whatever his intentions were, something was definitely lost in translation.
He's too young to read the Lord of the Rings, but he's been permitted to watch the Peter Jackson movies with an adult present and collect some of the Legos (including a Lego Shelob with a length of web-like rope coming out her rear end). To me it's an odd way of discovering that universe, when you first know the characters as movie stars and collectible toys.
amazing
I haven't been following the Olympics much, except for hearing about Michael Phelps, watching a few women's gymnastics videos, and occasionally checking in on weightlifter Sarah Robles. One thing I do watch is the match where Misty May and Kerri Walsh win their third Olympic gold in a row. It's awesome to see how close they are as friends in addition to being an unbeatable team on the court.
exploratory
I introduce one of them to the world of blogs. The other is making her own world, a poster of an imaginary country with a list of stats: language, currency, major rivers, a capital with a strange name.
quaggy
Between the trees I see a beautifully green and scummy pond.
unobserved
Unproductive hours trickle by followed by a burst of activity and inspiration. I always worry about those hours when I don't seem to get as much done as I want, but maybe they're necessary for whatever it is the brain needs to do.
unshod
He greets me with a high heel in each hand.
untranslatable
After I leave a friend's apartment building in NYC, a man approaches me as I stand alongside a small family of tourists at a crosswalk, waiting for the light to change. He's bald and somewhere between the age of 35 and 50. "The way you stepped out of that building," he says in a heavy Russian accent, "it was as if you were stepping onto water. It was amazing." What he means by that, I can't say, so I say nothing. "Do you speak Russian?" he asks. "No," I say. "Maybe one day you'll learn," he says. "Maybe," I agree. "You know what I say when people ask me if I play the violin?" he asks, laughing a little. "I tell them, 'Maybe one day I'll learn.'" He laughs again. Then he asks, "Where are you from?" I'm tempted to say 'Earth' but instead say, "The U.S." He nods thoughtfully. "You don't look as if you belong here..." He looks at me expectantly, but when I make no reply, he shrugs and says, "Ah well, you have the right to be alone," and walks off quickly. The light changes, and I cross the street, looking back a couple of times to make sure he isn't following me. He isn't. Whatever his intentions were, something was definitely lost in translation.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Worth Watching: The Triplets of Belleville (2003)
Title: The Triplets of Belleville
Director: Sylvain Chomet
Language: French and English (though there's hardly any speech)
Rating: PG-13
Fred Astaire gets eaten by his shoes. That's (in part) what happens in the fun and creepy musical number that opens The Triplets of Belleville. The movie drags at times, but I'm glad I stuck with it. It brought me into a world where an old woman can paddleboat across an ocean and team up with three other old women to take down the French mafia. An inventive world, where household objects can become musical instruments and dogs can serve as spare automobile parts without getting hurt.
The story unfolds as follows: a woman raises her orphaned grandson, who has a passion for bikes. She becomes his trainer when as a young man he competes in the Tour de France. From the Tour de France he's kidnapped by French gangsters and taken across the ocean to the city of Belleville, a place where people love to live large and consume things. His grandmother, and her dog, Bruno, who's just as loyal to his stomach as he is to his owners, follows them. In the city she meets the Belleville Triplets - three sisters who sang in music halls during the 1930s. They still eke out a living performing music (I won't tell you what kind, because I was laughing in surprise) and live in a seedy apartment building. Together they take on the mafia.
The quality of the animations is one reason I kept watching the movie. They're rich and varied and full of caricatures. The competitive bikers have bulging thigh muscles and noodle-like arms. The mafia henchmen are like giant menacing boxes that merge together. In one funny scene a maitre d' at a nightclub flops around obsequiously at the arrival of an important gangster. Typical cinematic events are also caricatured, namely a car chase where the villains repeatedly shoot at but keep missing the slow-moving heroes, who hit back successfully every time.
Some of the caricatures are disturbing, others show a wry cynical humor, while others are full of child-like joy. The Belleville triplets look like happy musical crones. They're lovable fringe-dwellers, materially poor but leading a bizarre and cheerful life in a society that revels in excess; although they're one of the musical spectacles in this movie, they love what they do beyond the attention it gets them. The scene under the bridge where they make music with the stranded grandmother is beautiful; it's the music of people who aren't noticed but don't care, because they're alive and happy and able to sing and dance, and what else matters?
Music really is used to great effect in this movie. For instance during the short scene where the grandma is paddleboating across the ocean, through a stunningly beautiful storm that's stirring up giant waves and making the clouds and water gleam with lightning, the Kyrie from Mozart's Great Mass in C Minor comes on, and I got goosebumps.
The movie doesn't have dialogue. With a couple of exceptions the only spoken words are in songs or in radio or television (a similar device to what you see in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times). The music and the visuals are eloquent enough and make the world of the movie what it is: a place where the tragedies are absurd, the triumphs are joyful and silly, and beauty and perversity sometimes seem indistinguishable.
Director: Sylvain Chomet
Language: French and English (though there's hardly any speech)
Rating: PG-13
Fred Astaire gets eaten by his shoes. That's (in part) what happens in the fun and creepy musical number that opens The Triplets of Belleville. The movie drags at times, but I'm glad I stuck with it. It brought me into a world where an old woman can paddleboat across an ocean and team up with three other old women to take down the French mafia. An inventive world, where household objects can become musical instruments and dogs can serve as spare automobile parts without getting hurt.
From Wikipedia, Fair use
The story unfolds as follows: a woman raises her orphaned grandson, who has a passion for bikes. She becomes his trainer when as a young man he competes in the Tour de France. From the Tour de France he's kidnapped by French gangsters and taken across the ocean to the city of Belleville, a place where people love to live large and consume things. His grandmother, and her dog, Bruno, who's just as loyal to his stomach as he is to his owners, follows them. In the city she meets the Belleville Triplets - three sisters who sang in music halls during the 1930s. They still eke out a living performing music (I won't tell you what kind, because I was laughing in surprise) and live in a seedy apartment building. Together they take on the mafia.
The quality of the animations is one reason I kept watching the movie. They're rich and varied and full of caricatures. The competitive bikers have bulging thigh muscles and noodle-like arms. The mafia henchmen are like giant menacing boxes that merge together. In one funny scene a maitre d' at a nightclub flops around obsequiously at the arrival of an important gangster. Typical cinematic events are also caricatured, namely a car chase where the villains repeatedly shoot at but keep missing the slow-moving heroes, who hit back successfully every time.
Some of the caricatures are disturbing, others show a wry cynical humor, while others are full of child-like joy. The Belleville triplets look like happy musical crones. They're lovable fringe-dwellers, materially poor but leading a bizarre and cheerful life in a society that revels in excess; although they're one of the musical spectacles in this movie, they love what they do beyond the attention it gets them. The scene under the bridge where they make music with the stranded grandmother is beautiful; it's the music of people who aren't noticed but don't care, because they're alive and happy and able to sing and dance, and what else matters?
Music really is used to great effect in this movie. For instance during the short scene where the grandma is paddleboating across the ocean, through a stunningly beautiful storm that's stirring up giant waves and making the clouds and water gleam with lightning, the Kyrie from Mozart's Great Mass in C Minor comes on, and I got goosebumps.
The movie doesn't have dialogue. With a couple of exceptions the only spoken words are in songs or in radio or television (a similar device to what you see in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times). The music and the visuals are eloquent enough and make the world of the movie what it is: a place where the tragedies are absurd, the triumphs are joyful and silly, and beauty and perversity sometimes seem indistinguishable.
Friday, August 10, 2012
Week in Seven Words #131
appreciated
As welcoming gifts they present me with a chocolate-frosted cupcake, a card with a blue cave troll on it, and a paper bracelet with a pink shiny heart.
bladed
At the moment there's only anger, a razor sharp focus that admits no sense or compassion.
enough
"Never enough" are the words I use to bludgeon all my efforts.
multipurpose
The dog, when she isn't curled up on my lap, makes for a good armrest.
renitency
When I sense that I'm being pressured to conform I resist on instinct, even before I'm able to articulate why.
resound
Music blooms out of the dusty speakers.
well-met
Four branches bearing different leaves (star shaped yellow, oval green) meet across a light blue sky.
As welcoming gifts they present me with a chocolate-frosted cupcake, a card with a blue cave troll on it, and a paper bracelet with a pink shiny heart.
bladed
At the moment there's only anger, a razor sharp focus that admits no sense or compassion.
enough
"Never enough" are the words I use to bludgeon all my efforts.
multipurpose
The dog, when she isn't curled up on my lap, makes for a good armrest.
renitency
When I sense that I'm being pressured to conform I resist on instinct, even before I'm able to articulate why.
resound
Music blooms out of the dusty speakers.
well-met
Four branches bearing different leaves (star shaped yellow, oval green) meet across a light blue sky.
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