Now I am reading THE ENDING WRITES ITSELF by Evelyn Clarke.
A rainy day here, what do people that don't read to on days like this?
Watching THE HOUSE OF SPIRITS (Prime) PARADISE (Hulu)
Rewatched BODY HEAT. Movies are not this sexy any more.
How about you?
At any rate, I think I mostly read O'Hara short stories He published hundreds of them. But I did read a lot of novels by three other Johns as a teen: Steinbeck, Marquand and Dos Passos. As well as Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe, Willa Cather, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen and Theodore Dreiser. No mysteries at all. I don't think I knew they existed then. My mother had a few in our one tiny bookcase, but I was more attracted to the romances there.
Anyway this story is collected in the Library of America collection of a few years ago. It is a nine-page story. O'Hara wrote both very short and very long stories. It begins with a young man (Jamie) noticing a young woman crying in the street. He recognizes her and has a immediate desire to cover her up because her deep distress is like nakedness to him. People didn't often cry in the streets.
He
looks for her at a swimming party that night (this is probably set in
Gibbsville- a stand in for O'Hara's own hometown in PA) Nancy has begged
off coming; she was supposed to bring 12 ears of corn, someone
complains. A discussion takes place over how girls mature earlier than
boys. How he shouldn't fall for her since although the same age, he was
too immature for Nancy. "She needs someone who can take care of her,"
someone says.
But he looks for her again the next day at the club swimming pool and finds her. He is very attracted to her and watches as she climbs out of the pool to see where the swimsuit sticks to her body. (I had never thought of this as a "thing" before). The dialog between them is snappy.
She has been crying because her father has been charged with misappropriation of funds and she asks him if he assumed she was crying because she was pregnant.
Again there are references as to how he is not mature enough for her. He offers to marry her and she says he isn't even finished with college. The story ends with the lines.
"I don't want to have to wait that long," he said.
"We don't have to wait, for everything," she said.
Although only nine pages, you come away from the story feeling you know a lot about these two twenty-one year olds. They come from the privileged class and I think that was the typical group O'Hara wrote about. He came from that class (father was a doctor) although he always felt like an outsider apparently because he was Irish and Catholic. There are lots of phrases in the story that date it, but the story isn't dated at all. Something very like it is in The New Yorker most weeks.
Supposed to be 100 degrees here on Tuesday. It must have reached that before but I don't remember it.
Saw TOY STORY 5 and enjoyed but did not love it. Seems like the are using story lines from earlier films in the series and it is also a lot like INSIDE OUT.
Reading YESTERYEAR by Caro Claire Burke, which is very funny and original.
Watching, MY FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS, THE BEAR, PORTRAIT ARTIST OF THE YEAR, SUGAR.
Megan is in Hollywood, serving as the consulting producer for a new Netflix show called NEXT DOOR. She will be back and forth from LA To New York for five months. She just finished her next book so it came up at the right time.
What's new in your backyard?
A ten -year old walks a five- year old to school every day. The way there is calm but on the way back, the ten-year old tell the kindergartner scary stories. The younger one screams and cries when the story is told. It's a game, but it isn't. One day, she isn't there in the morning and the ten-year old is told the younger one is now going to public school. She is grief stricken. Translated from the French. Perhaps that's why I didn't get it. Or maybe it's a religious thing (they are Catholic). But why did the kindergartner go along with it? Why did the older child derive satisfaction from the game? Just not enough information for me.
Watching STAR CITY (very good) on APPLE. Finished WIDOW'S BAY (Apple) which was great and the first episode of the second season of SUGAR (Apple) .
Went to a concert with a harpist and cello player from the DSO. We do have a great Senior Center.
Started THE IVY TREE by Mary Stewart (as recommended by Tracy). Seemed like a nice palate cleanser after THE GRIFTERS.
Great weather mostly sunny and in the seventies.
What's up with you
I've been told for years if I like Charles Willeford, I would like Jim Thompson. Well, I liked this book a lot, but there is not an ounce of humor in it unlike the Hoke Mosley books. The writing is terrific and what a trio inhabits these pages. It begins with Roy Dillon getting clubbed in the stomach. He is a grifter, a man of mostly small cons. His mother and girlfriend form the trio and it's hard to say whose the most noirish but I am betting on Lilly, his mother. This has so much atmosphere, and good settings and great dialog, you can hardly turn the pages fast enough. La Jolla never seemed so dark to me. Like a play almost, each of these characters has their own little story and the other back away and let them tell it.
A mother has traveled from Korea to visit her daughter who lives in the US. now. She works in a zoo and takes her mother along with her one day. They are especially interested in Zelzah, the last California Condor who lives in the zoo. The animals are now arranged by how endangered their species is. She encourages her mother to walk the length of the zoo while she does her job in security. Later they have dinner and the mother combs the daughter's hair. She then tells her daughter that she has come to tell her daughter she's been diagnosed with dementia. The daughter tells her that she will care for her but the mother refuses it. "Understand that your human mother has gone away. Don't try to find her in what I've become. Only then is there a chance you will love me still.
Is there any of us who doesn't have a relative or friend suffering from this?
I am binging LANDSCAPE ARTIST OF THE YEAR (On Prime). Love seeing the amazing British countrysides.
Reading THE GRIFTERS by Jim Thompson. Excellent writing, not sure if it will get too violent for me but the signs are there. So many writers I have never read-David Goodis among them.
Weather is up and down, sunny and then not.
What about you?
A Great Deliverance is the debut novel by Elizabeth George, published in 1988, and the first in the Inspector Lynley series, introducing the aristocratic Thomas Lynley and his working-class partner, Sergeant Barbara Havers, as they investigate a brutal murder in the Yorkshire Moors where a woman confesses to beheading her father. The book won multiple awards, including the Agatha and Anthony Awards for Best First Novel, and explores the complex relationship between the two detectives as they uncover dark secrets in a seemingly peaceful village. I read much of this series and enjoyed the dynamics between the very much have Lynley and the have-not Havers. It also was a wonderful TV series, perfectly cast. At some point, I fell out of reading it. Perhaps because the books were very long. Anyway, this first one was great.
A couple, who are both straying for the first time, go to the beach. As the man is trying to tell a joke, the woman notices someone in distress in the ocean. The man, a strong swimmer, joins the drowning man's friend, in trying to save him. They both fail. As the couple is leaving the beach he notices his purple flipflops are gone. Then he notices a woman stumbling away, wearing them. He demands she return them and then figures out she is the wife of the drowned man. The couple is unable to consummate their afternoon and go home. This was a successful short story for me. Well- written and had a point.
We also saw THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, which was about as good as that play can be. So many of the Stratford actors have been in plays for thirty or more years there so you watch them age from playing Juliet to the elderly women in EARNEST. Lots of good food too. So nice to spend time with Kevin especially. He has to decide on a major by December and still hasn't decided. Between plays we played a game called SPLENDOR which was really difficult to understand. Board games have gotten more difficult since even my kids' times.
Great weather on the whole. Reading a Japanese novel that takes place on a subway line. I haven't unpacked yet so I can't tell you the title. Perhaps Tracy knows. I am betting she recommended it.
What about you?
My First Job
In 1966, I returned home to Philadelphia after a botched attempt at elopement during my second semester of college. My parents, learning that I had withdrawn, alerted the state police, and I was eventually tracked down in Virginia after a long Greyhound bus trip from the college in Massachusetts. As I have reported the full story of this escapade elsewhere, I will just say it was a full-scale debacle, expensive for my parents and humiliating for me. Later my children would ask to hear it at family gatherings and find it very amusing. Their misdeeds were minor when compared to this.
The morning after I came home in February 1966, I found the Want Ads (a newspaper section I didn’t know existed till then) of the Philadelphia Inquirer on the kitchen table. Several ads were circled in angry red. Lots of exclamations points decorated it. Most of the ads were for jobs at diners and pizza places or as store clerks in pet stores or Kresge’s, but one was for a job at Curtis Publishing Company in downtown Philadelphia, a bus and a subway ride from my house. I had no idea what the job entailed, but the skills listed seemed basic enough for a high school graduate with one semester of college under her belt. So newspaper in hand, I made my way on public transportation to 6th and Walnut Street. I was hired on the spot. Apparently my one semester in college and decent high school grades has won me the position—a job I soon realized I was ill-equipped to do. I had no idea if the salary listed was reasonable, having never had a full-time job before. ($55.00 a week). My parents had given me no advice on what I could expect and whether I should try to barter them up. So I said nothing, just filled out the paperwork and was shown my desk. Most of the other employees in the large office were forty years my senior.
Curtis Publishing Company was unknown to me although it was a famous Philadelphia landmark. The only downtown buildings I was familiar with were the four major department stores (John C. Wanamakers, Lit Brothers, Gimbels, and Strawbridges) and the handful of elegant movie houses. Center City Philadelphia was ground zero to dozens of well-known movie theatres (today there are just a handful). Clustered in districts on Market, Chestnut, South, and North 8th Streets, these entertainment venues (such as the Boyd, the Fox, the Stanley and the Goldman) lined the sidewalks with blinking lights and glistening facades, drawing thousands of visitors downtown. Many Saturdays, my girlfriends and I traveled down to see first-run movies at these palaces. We would dress up (heels and gloves included) for the occasion as was the custom in the early to mid-sixties. The movies playing there would not make their way to our shabby neighborhood theaters for weeks. They didn’t seem like the same movie at all viewed in the Renel Theater that carried a smell that was not just popcorn.
Curtis Publishing Company, my future place of employment, was founded in 1891, and was a major publisher and home to Ladies Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, Country Gentleman, Jack and Jill Magazine and several other notable publications. It was an historic building right across the street from Independence Hall and had features such as the Tiffany-designed “Dream Garden” mosaic, atriums, a lot of bronze fixtures and chandeliers, and other notable architectural elements. It occupied an entire city block and still sits there today. From the floors to the ceilings and everywhere in between, there were exquisite details inspired by the French Beaux-Arts architectural movement. The Dream Garden mosaic, designed by Philadelphia-born artist Maxfield Parrish, is composed of 100,000 pieces of iridescent Favrile glass. The building was 12 stories high.
By the time I arrived at its door in 1966, it was in decline as a first-tier publisher, and various departments had been combined to save money. Many attempts had been made to rescue it with bank loans and money from a multitude of investors, and all of them had failed. Its failure was mostly blamed on a lack of diversification in its publications and the aging population who subscribed to them. Its publications were no competition for magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Playboy and Glamour, which had many more subscribers. They looked to be from different centuries. Today, the building still stands it all its glory, but it largely offers services to self-publishing authors.
During my six months in this building, I didn’t notice a single one of the architectural glories it featured. I walked to the bank of elevators that day and took one to Personnel. I was hired in purchasing. None of the departments that had a hope of interesting me had jobs. I had left college thoughtlessly with no idea of what I might do instead. I had hitched my wagon to a cartoon aficionado with no ability to draw. Much like I had given no thought of what I would major in when I traveled off to Massachusetts, I gave no thought on how I would support myself once I left. That would be the concern of my intended husband whose greatest skill was shooting a basketball into my wastepaper basket.
Curtis Publishing Company seemed to think I was someone who could have a fairly responsible job. Or they weren’t exactly flooded with applicants. So within a week or so, after mastering the antiquated adding machine, my job seemed somewhat above my pay grade. When things were delivered to various departments in the building, I marched down to that department and checked that the order was complete and signed for by the department head. Then I went back to purchasing and checked to make certain the bill was correct, and then authorized payment. I expected someone senior to me would check on the process (or at least on my math), but Curtis was so short of personnel by then that no one did. My high school math skills were apparently expected to keep the place afloat. Most of the offices on my floor of the building were either empty or occupied by jocular men who seemed to do little more than banter and flirt. Clearly they could see which was the wind was blowing.
But I soldiered on, spending an hour or more to get to the office each day. My parents decided to ask me to pay room and board since I had cost them a semester’s non-refundable tuition with my stunt. By the time I paid them and my taxes, I could probably have made more money babysitting. As summer drew near, I noticed there was no air-conditioning in my office. Just a couple of lazy ceiling fans that moved Philadelphia’s humid air around. One day a woman in my office had a stroke and died on the gurney.
Around then, I started looking for a new job. My search was sped up when I was accosted by a man in a convertible who blocked by way in crossing a street with his huge car coming home from work. In the sixties in Philly, many screen doors were still open so I swiveled and ran up a walk and into a house. The woman, who was ironing, called the police once I told her what had happened. The police escorted me home and my parents and I decided I would look for a job with an easier trip home.
My next -door neighbor was a lineman for Bell of Pa and suggested I apply for work as a service representative. So that is what I did. My mother worked near the Bell office and would give me a ride. And my pay would be $75 a week. I’d start my three month’s training in two-weeks time.
Unfortunately when I told some of my colleagues at Curtis about my new job and new salary, it created dissent in the office and the next thing I knew two burly men were escorting me out of the building after I bundled my few personal items. We exited via the main door and I finally saw the attractive mural I hadn’t laid eyes on in the six months I worked there.
Saw the movie TUNER, which I thought was pretty good. It had action but it still managed to show you the lives of its characters and had lovely music. Watching MAXIMUM PLEASURE GUARANTEED on APPLE. Also WIDOW'S BAY. Finished HACKS and THE BURROUGH. Didn't get much out of the BURROUGH but HACKS ended well.
Reading a collection of short stories by Ha Jin. Friday I go to Stratford to see THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST and GUYS AND DOLLS with my son, his wife and my grandson. I will put a posting up for next Monday and respond later.
So what are you up to?
Richard
Yates wrote two of my favorite novels, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD and THE
EASTER PARADE, but he also wrote this fabulous collection of ten short
stories (among others). Written in the fifties "The Best of Everything"
almost seems like a story written earlier. Were people in their twenties
this naive? This innocent? I have to assume some were.
It is the story of a couple on the day before their marriage is to take place in Atlantic City. The point of view switches between the two of them and you can't help but notice how drastically different they are from each other once you are in their heads. You also realize they don't know each other at all and that their marriage will probably fail quickly.
The woman is a typical middle class young woman working as a secretary. She speaks well and is respected in her office. The man is a step or two down the socioeconomic ladder and has a poor grasp of English, which the woman's roommate makes her constantly aware of, calling he and his friends, "Ratty little clerks."
But for whatever reason, Grace
goes forward with the marriage plans although we sense her worry. Her
roommate, feeling badly about the things she has said about Eddie,
leaves her alone the night before the wedding and Grace plans an early
consummation, feeling this will set things right.
But Eddie has been the man of the hour with his friends at a bachelor party and he is stunned by their good will. You get the feeling he has never been the center of attention before this night. He hurries to Grace's apartment to tell her he is going back to the party and her attempt to seduce him goes to naught.
We understand now that Eddie will
always choose his friends over his wife and that will destroy their
marriage quickly. She goes so far to put his hand on her naked breast.
Nothing.
There is a lot of discussion online about this
story. One teacher said it was the cause of a female student in his
class dumping her boyfriend. Yates' real gift here is capturing the mind
and language of both characters so clearly and with sympathy. Eddie is
not a bad man and Grace is not a snob, but they certainly don't belong
together. They seem to have reached an age when they believe it is time
to marry no matter to whom.
Here is a nice piece by Stewart O'Nan pondering the fate of the writing of Richard Yates. He had an unhappy life and an undeserved disappearance from the shelves. His resurgence in the early nineties quickly died out. A real shame.
I have always admired writers who can describe nature well: the sounds, the smells, the look of it, even the feeling. This is so well done. This is about a man going fishing. Sometimes his fishing is an excuse for meeting up with his lover. His lover is giving him an ultimatum. This day he is just fishing. First he gets tangled in his fishing lines and nearly drowns. Then he gets in a battle with a fish. Beautifully written.
Three good movies this week. An Icelandic film, THE LOVE THAT REMAINS
Chang Rae Lee has always been one of my favorite writers, especially A GESTURE LIFE and NATIVE SPEAKER. This is a piece from his forthcoming novel. It takes place almost exclusively in a school yard atmosphere. Rather like LORD OF THE FLIES. Our hero is Korean and he gets into a ongoing fight with a Jewish boy and some sorry names get thrown around. I don't know why it works so well because it is a familiar theme. But Lee is a terrific writer who makes it come alive. I remember fights like this so well from my schoolyard days.
(from Matt Paust)
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| Joe Kapitan |
