There was an apple at the far end of the sofa. It had a bite on one side and was sitting on a Vanity Fair magazine that seemed to have been left abruptly, barely a minute past the flipping of the cover. As I came closer, the bite began to look more like a crater carved up by a knife, as if it was the only gratifying portion of the forsaken fruit. But there weren’t any knives beside the magazine. The bite was the only trace of someone who was no longer there.

I went up the bedroom and found no one there. She would soon be back. No worries, she always said. I felt a quick, passing craving for the apple as I sat on the bed. With a sigh, I laid down the bed like an old worker retiring from a busy shift. The golden spray of light fixed on the ceiling was what I stared at before everything around me was lost from sight. In my dream, we were dancing again at my friend’s wedding.

“Tell me your plan,” she said.

“My plan?”

“Yes,” she smiled. “What’s your plan?”

“I don’t know,” I said, looking at the few other couples on the floor. “Do you have something in mind?”

“I want to go someplace far, somewhere we haven’t been to. A beach.”

“Now when it’s always raining?”

“I like it when it’s raining. Don’t you like the rain? I thought you did.”

“I do. I love it when it rains.”

We both looked into the distance and saw faint stars above the outline of darkened hills. I turned to her again and locked my eyes so I could see nothing but her face. She was serious, and beautiful. Stella by Starlight.

“Tomorrow,” I whispered to her ears.

When I woke up, the place still felt motionless like there wasn’t even air. I had left the CD playing and the trumpet’s sweet, flirtering notes was the only sound that greeted me when I came down. The living room looked just as it was except for an issue of Esquire spread out where I half-expected to find a different magazine. The open page had a poem about James Franco with a black and white photo on the side. He looked like a jazz musician with his sunglasses. I went over to the player and put Miles Davis to rest.

The knife that carved the apple was still missing from the scene. And now the apple was also gone. I found Stella at the back of the CD case.

I picked up the phone to call Grace. The rapid pulse coming from the other the end felt alarming to my muted heartbeat. There was still that hollow, carved-up feeling when I heard her say hello.

This is a work of fiction.

I’d like to thank my friends Harvee and ds for introducing me to this wonderful, weekly activity. The Magpie Tales blog features a new picture every week and invites writers to post poems or vignettes inspired by the photo. This is my first time joining in and so I was so excited when, upon remembering to check the blog and seeing the picture this weekend, a dreamy scene flashed in my head and urged me to write my first piece. That Sunday I knew I had a story, and so I spent most of my free time these past two days trying to form the words.

When I first had the scene in mind, there were two things I instantly thought would have to be in the story: the name Stella and a jazz theme. Why the name Stella crossed my mind is still a mystery to me—I don’t know anyone with that name (which, depending on your interpretation of the story, is kind of like the protagonist himself). And I also don’t know much about jazz. So it was pretty surprising for me to find out that Miles Davis played a jazz standard called Stella by Starlight, and that is where the dream sequence came from. Serendipity. I’m still listening to the song right this very moment. If anyone would like to help expand my jazz education beyond Miles Davis, please be kind enough to do so.

Below is the full picture posted for Magpie #30. Credits belong to willow:

Please check out the other entries at the following link:

http://magpietales.blogspot.com/2010/09/mag-30.html

I was reading about Hemingway writing at a good café in Place Saint-Michel. He had just pulled a notebook and a pencil off his coat pocket and was scribbling, drinking rum, watching a very pretty girl sitting at a table near the window. I was also in a good café but there they had no rum. My notebook, pencil and coat were left upstairs in my office. So I typed hastened notes on an iPod that played poetry readings of George Oppen some half hour earlier. I wrote down all that I could before I must return to the banal reality of work. Memory is fiction—so I’ve heard—and reading that “restored edition” of the writer’s original Paris sketches inspired me to preserve a faithful account of my morning. But again unlike in Hemingway’s scene, no pretty girl had stepped into my sight.

I saw a very pretty girl the night before—different from Hemingway’s descriptions, but still very pretty. She was sitting next to me, close to me, the entire ride home. Her brown hair smelled nice. There was warmth coming off her bare thigh pressed to my jeans and that ensured my constant awareness of her presence. I didn’t turn to give a smile, not even a stoic glance, which I’ve learned works with women better than any wrinkling of the lips. Her lips looked sweet and appetizing, and when her phone had rang as I took my seat it sounded like she had a sweetheart.

Hemingway wanted to write the very pretty girl into his story. She had a fresh face and jet black hair styled in what probably looked ultramodern at the time. I probably would have liked her too. But the girl appeared to be waiting for someone and when she vanished the writer thought she must have gone with her man. He wished it was a good man. I wished the girl with the smooth, warm thighs also had a good man.

At the café, I took a sip of my espresso and it was bitter and sweet. It left a sharp, earthy aftertaste which made me think I should have ordered my regular cup. Across me, a thick woman stood up to grab her Cafe Verona from the counter. She was wearing black as if also in mourning and was quick to answer the barista’s call. Her soles clattered like castanets on the marble floor. The window by her seat showed more people strolling their way to their corporate cages. A job interview was going on behind me, apparent from the calculated pleasantries and replies crossing back and forth the small, round table. It disrupted my reading.

Ernest Hemingway wrote something that reminded me of the feeling I get when finding a book to be so satisfying to the inner senses. He said that after writing a story, he always felt as though he had made love. I believe him and I think I know what he was saying. It’s that bliss of realization that what you’re holding in your hands is something beautiful, that what you’ve just experienced with it—whether by creating or consuming it—is beautiful. A mental climax. My reading of A Moveable Feast was not without such moments of joy, moments that’ll always belong to me in this fiction of memory.

I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

—Ernest Hemingway

Inspired by my reading of:

A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

by Ernest Hemingway

Edited with an Introduction by Sean Hemingway

Scribner (2009)

This piece from The New Yorker is about Gordon Lish and “the cutting of Raymond Carver.” Perhaps unknown to many, a good deal of Carver’s celebrated minimalism is the result of Lish’s editing. At the prime of his career, Carver gained enough prestige to escape another “surgical amputation” from his beloved friend—cuts which Carver found to be both insightful and unsettling.

Comparing his story “The Bath” (which appeared in the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, edited by Lish) to its longer version “A Small, Good Thing” (included in Cathedral, when he was already in “power”), I must say that I prefer the first story. Now I love Carver (he’s my hero) and I understand his frustration. I’m sure it sucks to have your piece published not in the exact form you crafted it. But as for this particular story, it may sound a little ironic but the more-edited version feels more representative of a style that’s uniquely Carver.

Now, here’s the original article that every enthusiast of Carver, or writing, must read:

• Rough Crossings
  The cutting of Raymond Carver.

For additional reading, you might find these related New Yorker articles worth your time:

• Letters to an Editor
  Excerpts from Carver’s correspondences with Lish, from 1969 to 1983.
• “Beginners,” Edited
  The transformation of a Raymond Carver classic.

*   *   *

The sopranos’ clear, crystalline vocals is surely a more spine-tingling vessel for the famous tune. But Greenday’s frontman sings his part because the rockstar brings in something a Broadway singer could not replace: the song’s original voice.

Voice embodies character and carries with it a richness that adds to the fidelity of the experience. And this is true for prose as it is for song. But whereas in music it is the vocalist who breathes a piece to life, in writing it is the composer who gives his vocalists their every breath. And when stories require characters not like the artist’s own, the writer becomes the actor.

We do not assume that because Nabokov created Humbert Humbert he was a murderous pedophile himself, nor do we think that Melville was in fact consumed with hate for a huge, white whale. Some stories demand heroes, others disgraceful souls. Yet we hardly ever blame these artists who desired nothing but perfection. We celebrate these works because they are compelling portraits of humanity, whether of the endearing kind or the most repulsive. Writing is performance art, and the greatest writers are the greatest of actors.

*   *   *

Back at the Grammys stage, a mob of young actors lift their hands and belt out lyrics with the enraptured band. “Something inside this heart has died.” They are a generation who’ve learned the song before it was even written. A generation of lost faiths, a generation of conflict, of oppression, of teenage tragedies and depression. “You’re in ruins.” A generation with a voice hoping for hope.

Now I don’t have dreams of ever writing a novel, but when 826 National contacted me about their new collection of personal insights from successful novelists, I knew I had to buy myself a copy. The book’s webpage provides this blurb:

For every genius whose ideas are prone to bouncing away before they can be caged with a word processor, The Secret Miracle: The Novelist’s Handbook is here to prove you’re not alone. Edited by Daniel Alarcon, the collection of interviews document a star-studded discussion on the craft of writing by a slew of notable figures from all walks of the literary community including Michael Chabon, Paul Auster, Amy Tan, Haruki Murakami, Roddy Doyle, and Stephen King. Get an inside look at the alchemy of writing fiction, answering everything from nuts-and-bolts queries—“Do you outline?”—to perennial questions posed by writers and readers alike: “What makes a character compelling?”

And what’s also great about the book is that all proceeds go to 826 National’s nonprofit writing centers. So it’s entertainment with a little charity.

Here I leave you with some memorable quotes:

Reading widely is what is immediately useful to my work.

—Chris Abani on useful reading

It comes after rhythm, and then after character and it is an aspect of plot. In my books, nothing just happens. If that started, I would go to law school.

—Colm Tóibín on structure

The music of it.

—Aleksandar Hemon on what makes a good dialogue

Heavily and consistently but in oblique and stealthy ways.

—Michael Chabon on drawing characters from his own life

Novels are longer and have more shit in them.

—Stephen King on the difference between novels and short stories

The Secret Miracle:
The Novelist’s Handbook

Edited by Daniel Alarcon

826 National (2010)

Two hours, zero minutes. The lousy draft from yesterday’s already in the bin. “Why did you throw those pages out?” Mary Karr was asked in an interview. “It wasn’t true”, she answered to Alec Baldwin. It’s not that the lines were lies. But, as Karr puts it, it’s tedious. She didn’t want to write another “drunk-alogue”. I didn’t want to write another Cupid-struck review describing how the writer’s prose is so poetic. Karr being the kid who spouted Cummings back in gym class and recited Frost before her pothead surfer dudes braced the waves, you easily get the notion that she was meant to be a poet. Now a Guggenheim Fellow and a published author of verse, it should be no surprise that her writing—despite the strong colloquial flavor—tastes so darn beautiful. I knew the lines would form like lovely little verses. And it’s that very expectation that made me sign up to host in this digital book tour. But while it’s the lyricism that kept me in a mesmerized state of reading, it’s the narrative that kept me turning pages. If with the sensational success of her books The Liar’s Club and Cherry, Karr is said to have defined the memoir, in Lit she has perfected it.

“I’m trying to do what a novelist does,” she told Baldwin. “I’m not just setting down the events. I’m trying to create an experience for a reader so that they go into that experience.” And it is perhaps this faithfulness to the experience that makes the book as hypnotic as her old narcotics. Riding with a nutcase, drinking to oblivion, marrying Superman, meeting the parents, raising a blonde-ringleted angel, and finding her old first poem tucked in her sick father’s wallet—Karr’s narratives drive the reader’s senses across heartfelt recreations of her experienced truths, whether it’s life’s many miseries or the little, faith-building moments of pure deliverance. Lit is what a memoir should be like.

Six minutes. What else have I to say? Plenty, but my head is lost in a haze. I’ve a list of memorable quotes long enough to get me sued for copyright. I’ll have to settle for just one . . .

Humming through me like a third rail was poetry, the myth that if I could shuffle the right words into the right order, I could get my story straight, write myself into an existence

Lit

by Mary Karr

Harper Perennial (2010)

I’d like to say special thanks to Trish Collins of TLC Book Tours for letting me be part of this event. You can learn more about Lit and Marry Karr at the tour’s web page. Please check it out and see the reviews of other tour hosts.

I would open a book—a book that I’m particularly craving for at the moment. And I would pick up where I left off and continue to the following page, and to the page that follows it. And I would struggle to get past a fourth. But no matter what book it is, I couldn’t finish five pages at a time. It was frustrating. I would keep going to the store, and keep rejoicing at my wonderful finds: books I’ve always wanted to get, and books I didn’t know about. More books to be read, much less reading done.

That’s pretty much how it was until last Wednesday, when I was again at a bookstore, trying to fill in the bliss of reading with the joy of having bought something. I decided I could afford one more purchase before the month closes. By the time I breezed through the row of classics—not two minutes after I passed the guard, the big detectors, and a pretty woman in a short-skirted suit browsing across the Romance section (opposite the shelf where I expected to find Pamuk and not just Pynchon)—I was already holding a hardbound copy of Alice Munro’s latest collection. Too Much Happiness, it says in large type, right through a thin plastic wrap with a little discount sticker at the bottom. An abundance of happiness on sale for 20% off—it sounded like a great deal to me. But there, along with Cheever and Chekhov (both of which I refused to buy only because the paper was of the poor, powdery kind), I saw the name CARVER printed in bright-white capitals against a slim, black spine. Black and white has a kind of seduction that makes the act of extending an arm and grabbing a volume feel almost instinctive. And when the cover says What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, seduction starts to make sense.

Quarter of an hour later, I found myself sitting at a dim-lit restaurant, tearing the plastic off of Carver’s book as I wait for my triple-decker tropical pancakes to arrive. Why I chose pancakes over steak for dinner, I’m not entirely sure. But I later thought that all the sweetness of the fruits and coconut and clear vanilla syrup dripping off the cake made a fine companion to Raymond Carver’s fiction. Before I was to lay my eyes on that saccharine delight, I decided to indulge myself with the story on page 17—the perfect choice, I thought, for it was only four pages long. It was finished sooner than I thought personally possible, leaving me with a strange feeling—partly for the revived sensation of having finished a reading, and partly for the unfamiliar atmosphere I had just read through. When I was done with the second (and slightly-longer) story, I was already entranced by the unmelodic tone of Carver’s prose. He reminded me of what I love about Hemingway: smooth, casual sentences whose periods create uneasy silences—a kind of seething static that extends in the background like low white noise. And as with Hemingway, it is in what he hides from speech that resonates like echoes of these stressed emotions.

When my dubious dinner was finally served, I had already consumed three short stories of some twenty pages in total. I looked up to catch a few heads glancing in my direction, and I wondered if they were bothered to see someone reading at a dinner table. Outside, a parade of taxis and SUV’s were dropping off families and school buddies and briefcase-carrying solitaries right along the arched driveway. Something about the mall’s glittering presence requires faces to grace its doors with posh, polished smiles. There was only one other table in the restaurant that held a single guest. Heaven N’ Eggs is what the place is called. And while I’ve yet to try their eggs, the place brings back memories of a heavenly smile I once shared pancakes with.

The next morning, I woke up with my right eye feeling like it’s being poked with each little movement. The ophthalmologist later removed a tiny speck of plastic lodged up near the socket, and surmised that it was either from the book’s plastic wrap or the water bottle cap I twisted open the previous night. Tearing and breaking plastic, I’ve learned, can be a dangerous thing. And when the soothing power of anesthetics faded, my eyes were once again cut off from my literary cravings. But it didn’t matter. I was already cured. I would soon face a book again. Mr. Carver saved my reading life.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

by Raymond Carver

Vintage Books (1989)

Oh, by the way, I missed all of you in the blogosphere. It’s great to be back.

Because of life’s innumerable distractions, I’ve been increasingly inactive around the blogosphere lately. And now I’m afraid I have to put blogging on hold. But I hope to be back in a month or two, hopefully with fresh content and a better format.

Enjoy the summer!

But the maid knows it’s just appearances. She knows that beneath the amiable guise is a bitterness as acrid as the stench she had painfully scrubbed off their dwelling. They resent her. She is an outsider who had entered their lives and discovered all the dirt they had to hide. She made them see their filthy existence and now they curse her with vile contempt. The eldest son thinks of violating the virgin just to make her feel unclean.

And the maid knows it all, for she hears their every thought.

Nanase holed herself up in her room. This could turn into a nightly routine, she thought. The family seems to have been carrying on this way every night for years. Could you call this dinner? Weren’t they just feasting in hatred and anger?

In this intriguing novel, Yasutaka Tsutsui imagines the workings of the troubled mind through the invasive consciousness of an innocent girl. As the young psychic Nanase moves from one family to another—working at their homes only long enough to avoid discovery—she explores the limits of her disquieting ability and comes to learn the darker realms of telepathy. With creeping eeriness and striking language, The Maid presents a perturbing atmosphere unlikely to escape the reader’s senses.

The Maid

by Yasutaka Tsutsui

Translated by Adam Kabat

Alma Books (2010)

Thanks to Elisabetta Minervini of Alma Books for sending me a copy of this book. More works by award-winning author Yasutaka Tsutsui can be found at their website.

The Japanese Literature Challenge 4 is coming soon, so please stay tuned at Dolce Bellezza. For this year’s event, I plan to review Tsutsui’s more popular novel Paprika, of which a copy was generously given to me by the lovely Tanabata of In Spring it is the Dawn.

No one else has written so beautifully about human remains hanging from tree branches.

—Esquire

And so as I lay on the couch with my eyes closed, listening to that 20th anniversary lecture from Cambridge, it struck me that the talk O’Brien delivered was much like the book itself. I was brought back to the memory of reading. The book, of course, is hand-crafted prose and the lecture just casual oratory. But there again was O’Brien, still a writer like the book’s narrator from two decades before, also reading a letter and telling random stories, talking about home and about Nam, recalling moments of grief and laughter and terror and anger; talking of love and loss, of guilt, of his family and children, of his little lad who just a short time ago took a pee at a wire-mesh wastebasket on top of their brand-new carpet because the boy had “two heads”—one that thought his daddy would be mad, and another that thought it would be fun. He also had two heads once, O’Brien confessed to his boy. But despite being against the war even before he was drafted, the book he wrote didn’t come out to be a mere criticism of that bloody affair that snatched him away from a promising year at Harvard.

Though labeled as “a work of fiction,” The Things They Carried has the depth and texture of a real-life story. And much of it probably is, except for some quirky twists that give the stories a tinge of magic realism, a blur between sensation and imagination that may possibly bring to mind the works of Borges as much as Hemingway’s. It reads like a memoir and progresses in the way an old soldier might go about sharing his stories with his grandkids, telling them in fragments, cycling through events and repeating some of them a few times over, offering in each retelling a new spin, a new angle, a new conclusion to a story that never really ends. All wars reach an end, but their stories find no ending.

It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story.

But you can’t say that. All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth . . . You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it.

I thought I’d explain why that quote from Esquire is less about the magazine’s dark, clever humor and more about O’Brien’s brilliance as a writer. I thought I’d describe how the title chapter plays out like a set of slides from an old projector, a stream of war-time and peace-time photographs that share a collective tale filled not with cold facts of conflict but with feelings of a familiar humanity. I thought I’d talk about why it’s really more about style and form than about the chaos of warfare, and why the New York Times called it “a book that matters not only to the reader interested in Vietnam but to anyone interested in the craft of writing as well.” I thought about my favorite lines, favorite scenes, stories and sentences that by their sheer, effective beauty make me dream of becoming a writer. I planned to talk about all of them, or one of them. But I’ve realized long before that no word I write here could give this book the honor it merits—not because it’s far better than any other book I’ve reviewed, but because it’s something you just have to read in order to let the beauty touch your heart.

Man’s romantic fascination with war lies not in the hostility of combat, but in our own capacity to express so gracefully the very absence of beauty. Perhaps it’s why we even listened to our grandpa’s changing recollections, why in our tender years of innocence have we had the mind to pay those altered tales some eager attention.

No, war is not beautiful. War is ugly, especially when you’re made to witness your friend’s dismembered corpse hanging from tree branches. But as the lonely soldier sits there in his foxhole, holding a little pencil and little piece of paper, pondering at that little moment that may very well be his last, he sees life for what it is and what it can be—for what it should be. He imagines something beautiful, writes something beautiful. He’s a soldier and he has little time. He has to make beauty fit.

They carried their own lives. The pressures were enormous. In the heat of early afternoon, they would remove their helmets and flak jackets, walking bare, which was dangerous but which helped ease the strain. They would often discard things along the route of march. Purely for comfort, they would throw away rations, blow their Claymores and grenades, no matter, because by nightfall the resupply choppers would arrive with more of the same, then a day or two later still more, fresh watermelons and crates of ammunition and sunglasses and woolen sweaters—the resources were stunning—sparklers for the Fourth of July, colored eggs for Easter—it was the great American war chest—the fruits of science, the smokestacks, the canneries, the arsenals at Hartford, the Minnesota forests, the machine shops, the vast fields of corn and wheat—they carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and shoulders—and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at lost for things to carry.

The Things They Carried

by Tim O’Brien

Broadway Books (1998)

To watch a video of Tim O’Brien’s March 25, 2010 lecture, please follow this link to the Forum Network. You may also choose to subscribe to the Forum Network’s Book Tour Podcast and get a weekly dose of authors discussing their works.

Thanks to my lovely young cousin Leona for giving me a copy of this book. I know you didn’t like it all that much (maybe because you were required to read it) but for me it has been a really unforgettable read. And in case you didn’t get to the last page, I must tell you that it’s one of the most touching finales I’ve ever read (which is not even about war at all).