Lead Igloo | Stories, Philosophy, Opinion
He sits on the edge of his bed, chilled by the morning air, mind filled with the fractured thoughts of the morning dream, something about a dog and the sense of something sexual. A dog barking and a sexual act, so far apart that they could be separate dreams.
He walks stiffly into the bathroom, lifts the toilet lid and urinates direct and hard into the deepest part of the bowl. He looks up, around, nowhere, as the feeling of relief, bordering on pleasure, sinks deeper.
In the shower, he stands there. It occurrs to him that he is not yet awake, not fully.
He gives himself a white, Santa-like beard. The razor pulls across his skin. The memories of sleep intermingle with thoughts of work, shifting at some level below awareness, below, even, caring. He tries to think of a word. It sounds like ‘clarify’ and has a similar meaning. He swishes the razor in the sink, taps it and keeps shaving.
In the bedroom, he dresses while his wife sleeps. He tucks his singlet into his trousers and gets his shirt out of the cupboard. He won’t put it on yet, it will be one of the last things he does before he leaves. He notices the collar is crinkled.
In the kitchen, where he is ironing his shirt, he His wife appears, puts her hand on his shoulder, passes.
“How did you sleep?” he asks as the iron exhales steam. He is aware she responds, but he doesn’t listen. The word he is after definitely starts with a C and has a similar meaning to clarify. It means to support or back up. Or clarify. But it isn’t clarify.
He switches the iron off and his wife asks him if she can get something for him for breakfast.
“Um,” he says, and folds up the ironing board. “No.”
He eats a bowl of cereal in front of the television. He lets the images and the sounds, the speaking at him, the disaster and the quagmires and the consternation, wash over him, on, over and off him.
He puts his shirt on in front of the mirror, holding his wrists out before him as he buttons the cuffs.
At the station, he stands in the morning sun. The handle of his briefcase feels like it has molded to the shape of his grip, though it is probably the other way around. He holds onto it like if he took a tumble it will keep him from falling over. The word like clarify hovers into view – it’s there, so near that another breath and he will have it. Then it recedes again.
All the window seats are taken. He sits next to a heavily-made up young lady consciencious enough to keep her handbag on her lap thereby leaving the two seats next to her clear and open. From where he sits he can see a man, an old man, with a brown paper bag. He twists the neck, so that it resembles the shape of the object it contains. As if it isn’t obvious that it’s a bottle. The man puts it down, next to his leg. His hands shake, as if it isn’t obvious the man is an alcoholic.
His eyes are dry and feel mildly swollen. He’s tired.
A well-spoken businesswoman boards the train, yelling into her phone, impossible to ignore. It quickly becomes clear she is talking to a boyfriend or a husband. He says something she takes exception to and she proclaims, “Who do you think you are,” again and again, each time with increasing incredulousness until finally she says each word as its own sentence: “Who. Do. You. Think. You. Are.”
He cringes. He’s heard that before, some time ago. The question was directed at him. Without hearing it, he knows what the man on the other end is saying. The man is defending, writhing.
Looking back and forth for cars, he hurries across the street. Before entering the building where he works, he orders a coffee from the coffee stand on the footpath. He orders a flat white with one sugar every day, at the same time, everyday. The baristas’ smug, knowing expressions annoy him. They know what he has but don’t guess it, instead smiling smugly as if they secretly know him. While he waits, he tries to think of his word again, trying to think of any word beginning with a hard c sound. It is becoming infuriating.
He and a group of others congregate around the steel doors of the elevator shaft, all looking up at the line of numbers indicating where the elevator is up to.
Qualify. To qualify something. Quantify? Qualify.
LI
To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings – the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward – I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me; but the work as it stands has had, in a very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision; some of the most important portions having been reserved for a more careful re-examination, which they are now never destined to receive. Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it, than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom.
From On Liberty by John Stuart Mill.
Carved up, or kindly cut? James Ley on Raymond Carver and the writer-editor relationship. Via The Australian.
Publishing: The revolutionary future. Jason Epstein on the revolution that is here. Via New York Review of Books
Thinkwriting about Don DeLillo. On DeLillo, writer and lover of language. By Darragh McManus and via The Guardian
The Acre. Great nonfiction by Brian Calvert. Via Guernica.
Advice to novelists, from a reader. A reader tells writers how to write better books. The nerve! Via Salon
Tags: darragh mcmanus, don delillo, edit, guernica mag, james ley, nyrb, publishing, readers, salon, the australian, the guardian
Writing and publishing short stories is a part of the writer’s apprenticeship – but publishers don’t believe short stories sell. This is a problem.
If publishers say short story collections don’t sell, I would argue it’s not, for the most part, conspiratorial. They’re talking about sales figures, and you can bet if they did sell, short story collections would be as common as the novel.
Even if it is influenced by external forces, sales figures are dictated by one thing – sales figures are the number of books bought by real people.
So, let’s summarise: writers write short stories but publishers don’t publish them because readers don’t read them. As a result, there’s a surplus of short fiction, veritable rainforests of the things that writers of all skill levels have spent days and sleepless nights and precious work hours thinking about, writing and editing.
“When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant,” said Truman Capote.
I haven’t personally met an aspiring writer who hasn’t, in some way, written the shorter form – in fact, it seems mad to begin one’s writing career with a novel. And, apart from short story competitions, the obvious ‘official’ outlet for short stories are literary journals. Apart from poetry – a whole other form so popular among one group, so unpopular beyond them – and the essay, the short story is the literary journal’s bread and butter.
But… who reads literary journals?
I take an interest in lit journals because I am an aspiring writer. I want to see what is being written or, more to the point, what is being published and, ultimately, I want to be published in them because, perhaps naively, I still view it as one of the steps in getting a novel published (the editorial to the 70th anniversay issue of Southerly basically said as much).
I suspect 95 per cent of readers of Australian literary journals are the same as me (while I love the beach and will happily spend an evening cheering on two teams hitting or kicking an orb of some sort back and forth, I don’t drink, smoke or do drugs and I am quite at ease spending my weekends in a library, reading, studying and writing – that probably further separates me from 99 per cent of my generation, so I may not be the best case study). Which is a problem.
The short story paradox is symptomatic of the modern reader-writer relationship.
If writing for writers is all one is doing, something is wrong. Literature, in that case, is not working. It’s like car manufacturers making cars for other car manufacturers. Like comedians telling jokes to a room full of comedians. There’ll be some laughs, some back-slapping of familiarity and an innate understanding of the entire process. But there’ll be significant deconstructing, some bloviating, lots of comparing. There will be deep appreciation – but the jokes in this setting won’t simply be jokes.
Before you get too mad with me for comparing short stories to jokes, there is an analogue. Like jokes, short stories must follow a formula – we can at least agree that they follow the formula of being freakin’ short – in order to work. They’re also written for an audience. I could probably quote Aristotle’s Poetics here.
The internet is an extreme example of this niche writing. I’m under no illusions that very few non-writers will read this, or much of anything I post. If they do, I don’t expect them to get much from it. My hope is that most of the stuff on Lead Igloo is the equivalent of a watchmaker showing off a handful of tiny cogs.
Solutions
I’m scared. The artform that I have chosen to invest a large portion of money and, more importantly, LIFE to is something I increasingly think of being on a push-bike to obsolescence - the need to digitalise books and revitalise the industry would be unnecessary or less of an issue of contention if people were READING BOOKS. However, I still have hope.
Literary journals and, more importantly, writers need to play a bigger role in the public debate. The more writers, and the forums they use, matter, the more their work matters. Of course, a writer can make as much noise as he wants and it still won’t garner anywhere near the same amount of attention as a quasi-celebrity will. What can I say, we’re just a vapid, vacuous society and it’s time we started getting offended into action.
T.S. Eliot, in his introduction to Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, wrote, “One of the lessons to be learnt from [Pound's] critical prose and from his correspondence is the lesson to care unselfishly for the art one serves.”
I also think literature’s problems would be less of an issue if people were not looking solely to make money from the writing. Self promotion is (almost) perceived as being more important than the work itself – but it’s not. If writers spent more time forming true, lasting connections than the socialficial networks they form online, a decent portion of the self promotion would take care of itself.
The ebb and flow of fashion says that it’s likely literature will have another golden era and, again, a proportion of the population who have no intention of writing anything, ever, will scramble to read that new short story. Until then, I’ll keep writing and I hope you will too, because hope is all we have.
I wish you way more than luck.
LI
Lee Daniels’ critically lauded film Precious is, in an Aristotelian framework, a comedy.
It is about the rise in fortune of a lower class individual who the audience finds sympathetic – and it has a happy ending [had Aristotle's commentary on Comedy survived we'd no doubt have more to work with, but that's about the best we've got].
Of course, it is not a comedy in the definition of the genre today. For instance, on more than one occasion Precious’s mother stares just left of camera and delivers relentless callous abuse. It is difficult viewing. Nor is there much to laugh at in the rest of the film.
Without ‘spoiling’ the story, Precious, played by Gabourey Sidibe, is an obese, pregnant, illiterate 16-year old who is sexually abused and assaulted by both parents with horrendous regularity – all of which I am understating. Her mother’s raison d’être is to claim welfare. The only relief Precious, and in turn the audience, gets from the hardships of her life comes in the form of fantasy sequences. Their usefulness to the story is questionable but they are NECESSARY – they allow viewers a moment to breathe.
I ultimately left the cinema wondering if, and why, these kinds of stories must be told. Do they need to be told? Something inside me kept answering with a resounding yes. But this response was coming from the same side of me that returns lost wallets and obeys road rules.
I wasn’t convinced. Precious is a brutal film. The end, while positive – as it could only have been – is if cathartic then only mildly so. Later, the side of me that seemed so sure of these stories needing an audience, joined the rest of me in not wanting to think about it, let alone write about it.
Part of me was unconvinced because I already know these stories. I’m aware of them because I see and read stories just like them – thanks to global media – daily. Having grown up in an era where a large portion of pop culture is hip-hop culture, an era which, it could be argued, has culminated in the election of a black American President, I am in fact hyper-aware of the black American’s struggle.
Just because I am hyper-aware of life for black men and women in America does not mean everybody is. And that Precious is black does not make it a ‘black’ problem. Indeed, her classmates are a range of ethnicities and, indeed, incest and teen pregnancy are not restricted to any group. Race, while an element of the story, is not THE story. But I am very aware of her experiences from a racial perspective as well as a social perspective.
Obviously the story told in Precious does not need to be completely unique. The way a story is told is more important that what is told. Precious is based on Push, a novel by American writer, Sapphire. It was a work of fiction based on Sapphire’s experiences working as a literacy teacher. The real feeds fiction.
However, I am sure I was not the only person to leave the cinema, or any cinema in which it has played, feeling thoroughly depressed – feeling the emotions one would sooner associate with tragedy. Which is another way of saying that, from the film’s perspective, the world is free of hope and life is unflinchingly cruel.
Art need not only be beautiful. But apart from several startling performances, a film – or anything that has artistic pretensions – needs to do more than give its audience an unsubtle slap.
So, why tell this particular story? At the centre of Precious is the will to survive, to overcome. An individual is presented with certain situations and circumstances which appear insurmountable – the audience watches, curious to see if our hero can rise. It is the story of the Aristotelian underdog filled with less than the usual dose of Hollywood sentimentality. That in itself makes Precious’s story worth telling.
LI
Earphones dangling, blank-staring, cuticle-cleaning, heal-tapping. Phone button-depressing.
All with a life of their own.
LI
He did not find a moment of rest as he sniffed round about to find the hidden enemy who had armed the bogus leper, for he felt there was someone within reach of his hand, someone that close to his life who knew the hiding place of his honey, who had his eye at the keyholes and his ears at the walls every minute and everywhere just like my pictures, a voluble presence who whistled in the January trade wins and he recognised him in the jasmine embers on hot nights, one who had pursued him months on end in the fright of his insomnia dragging his fearful ghostly feet through the most hidden rooms of the darkened building, until one night at dominoes he saw the omen materialise in a pensive hand that finished the game with a double five, and it was as if an inner voice had revealed that that hand was the hand of treason, God damn it, it’s him, he said to himself perplexed, and then he raised his eyes through the flow of light from the lamp hanging over the centre of the table and met the handsome artilleryman’s eyes of my soulless comrade General Rodrigo de Aguilar, what a mess, his strong right arm, his sacred accomplice, it wasn’t impossible, he thought, all the more pained as he deciphered more deeply the weave of the false truths with which they had diverted his attention for so many years in order to hide the brutal truth that my lifetime comrade was in the service of politicians of fortune whom for convenience’ sake he had taken from the darkest corners of the federalist war and had made them rich and had heaped fabulous privileges upon them, he had let himself be used by them, he had tolerated the fact that they were using him to rise up to a point that the old aristocracy swept away by the irresistible breath of the liberal whirlwind had never dreamed of and they still wanted more, God damn it, they wanted the place of the elect of God that he had reserved for himself, they wanted to be me, motherfuckers, with the way lighted by the glacial lucidity and the infinite prudence of the man who had managed to accumulate the most confidence and authority in his regime by taking advantage of the privileges of being the only person from whom he accepted papers to sign, he had read aloud the executive orders and ministerial laws that only I could put through, he pointed out the amendments, he signed with his thumbprint and he stamped it with the ring which he then put away in a strongbox whose combination only he knew, to your health comrade, he always said when he handed him the signed papers, here’s something to wipe yourself with, he told him laughing, and that was how General Rodrigo de Aguilar had succeeded in establishing another system of power within the power as widespread and as fruitful as mine, and not content with that in the shadows he had set up the mutiny of the Conde barracks with the complicity and the unreserved assistance of Ambassador Norton, his buddy in matters of Dutch whores, his fencing master, the one who had smuggled in the ammunition in barrels of Norwegian cod under the protection of diplomatic immunity while he would use balm on me at the domino table with the incense candles saying there was no government more friendly, or just and exemplary than mine, and they were also the ones who had put the revolver in the hand of the false leper along with fifty thousand pesos in bills cut in half which we found buried in the attacker’s home, and the other half of which was to be turned over after the crime by my own lifetime comrade, mother, what a bitter mess…
Extract from The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa.
The Chess Master and the Computer. Garry Kasparov on the history of the chess player’s nemesis, the chess computer. Via New York Review of Books.
Pound’s Collected Poetry Recordings. PennSound’s complete collection of Ezra Pound recordings. Includes a good interview with Richard Sieburth, the page’s editor.
A nation of racist dwarfs. “Kim Jong-il’s regime is even weirder and more despicable than you thought,” so writes Christopher Hitchens. Via Slate.
Talibans à la française? Malise Ruthven examines the debate over the burqa in France. Via NYRblog.
It looked like she was still staring at him, but he couldn’t tell; the pub was dark, the art deco lamps emitting a dull, sickly glow that seemed to hang in the air like a fog.
The manager had probably made the place like this, he thought, to attract the kind of crowd that was here tonight. To attract the kind of people who were always here and therefore probably didn’t need attracting. But it was obvious, and thus a failure, not in the least because he couldn’t tell if this girl, the lounge chair about to engulf her, was giving him her attention, trying to communicate non-verbally with him, or not. He wanted to know, because he was already beginning to fall in love.
Rodney, the friend that had brought him here, the friend that was always here, was deep in conversation with a mysterious girl of his own. He tapped Rodney on the shoulder. He was going to ask if he too falls in love with every girl who gives him the slightest amount of attention, irrespective of whether he is actually attracted to her. When Rodney turned around, he gestured not to worry, sorry he’d interrupted him. But then he worried that this girl across the room who may or may not have been checking him out had seen him rudely interrupt his friend.
The clack of the pool balls punctuated the loud murmur and the folk music. He hated this place. It was weird. He hated to think what nightmarish tricks it would play on him if he was drunk. The tiles were on the inside of the wall instead of the outside and there wasn’t enough lighting to tell if you were being sized up or even communicated to or not. Plus, all the furniture was stacked on the one side, put there as though the place had just reopened after being closed for 40 years and they hadn’t bothered to rearrange the furniture, or update it.
And all the chairs were upholstered in ugly faded orange or brown vinyl or some itchy, flannel-like material. Or both. They looked comfortable, but in the way well-worn clothes look comfortable. Then there was the
The girl still appeared to be staring at him. When he glanced over he saw her nodding at what her friend was saying, but her eyes were definitely, definitely directed at him.
He turned around, up, to see if maybe she was gazing at a television, but there wasn’t one. The only TV in the room, playing some music video stylicatically unrelated to the music coming from the speakers, was above the bar. He started to get restless. It was impossible to see what she was looking at, absolutely impossible. He’d need something more from her if she was serious. But he didn’t want
Lead Igloo
For reasons that will become clearer (to myself) at a later date, I am reading Ezra Pound & Japan, a collection edited by Sanehide Kodama.
Ezra Pound & Japan collects over fifty years of correspondence between Pound and various Japanese poets and editors. The latter parts of the book also contains Ezra’s actual contributions to Japanese literary journals and newspapers.
But what I want to write – briefly – about are the letters. Ezra never went to Japan, stating that he’d either have to be earning far more than he was if he was to afford a trip there, or he’d have to be offered a professorship at a Japanese university. So the thing that makes the letters contained in Ezra Pound & Japan remarkable is that they document the forming, then the life of friendships - in full. This differs from other collections of letters that I’ve (tried to) read because these records are the extent of the relationship, all the words and the only words spoken between friends.
The Pound to Katue Kitasono correspondence is especially illuminating as it begins with a letter from Kitasono, a young Japanese poet and leader of an avant-garde collective called VOU Club. This first letter is, in essence, one from an admirer, written in the hope Pound will take some time to read his work. Soon, through his connections, Pound has VOU Club’s work translated and published in English.
However, in the middle years of their friendship, which also happen to be the years of WWII, Pound’s letters outweigh Kitasono’s four to one, with Pound expounding (!) on economic and political issues, and his financial situation – all matters literary receive less and less attention. Kitasono has by now gotten Pound a job as an international correspondent for Japan Times and it is clear from the letters spent discussing the types of articles he is writing and JT’s payments for them - he tells KK that a ‘Reporters Card’ would be useful to him as “poets have no civic status among other mere men” – how reliant he is on Kitasono, and on the job.
Or maybe it was just chatter between friends separated by land, brought together by poetry.
Lead Igloo
