A Tale of Two Sidneys

For those who write, there are two sandboxes in which to play, and a third, alternate site reserved for those who take themselves too seriously to enjoy the play of writing. I address here the sandboxes of playfulness, which are the places in which craft of story and self gain entrance into muscle memory.

There are two basic formats for story, long and short.

The long story is a series of wrappings of event about the armature of an individual who ultimately undergoes some form of change. Something happens, somebody changes. My esteemed dramatist colleague from USC, Lee Wochner, reminds me that the three-act play has now changed to two-act. Digby Wolf, inventor of and head writer for Laugh-In, now emeritus from the theater department at UNM, bound now for a gig at the University of Canberra, says nevertheless, Nevertheless, the three-act format is a good template for the longform story. Long story is a stage play, the combined sixty episodes of The Wire, or a novel, say George Pelecanos' remarkable The Turnaround. Long story is also Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which is to say a series of novels in which a character, Lyra Belacqua, has a number of things happening to her, during the course of which she changes considerably.

The short story is a series of events, usually related in scenes, in which a character is drawn farther into a self-fulfilling encounter, one in which the reader is left to actually see or guess at the outcome. The character may or may not be able to see the outcome. The principal in Tobias Wolff's remarkable Bullet in the Brain, for instance, may not be able to see what we see. It is instructive to note how far the short story has progressed from Ambrose Bierce's Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge to the Tobias Wolff.

The literary landscape is like the Earth during the azimuth of evolution of the dinosaur when Earth was struck by a huge meteorite which obliterated for most practical purposes the evolution if not the very existence of the dinosaur. Who knows what the dinosaur might have become had that collision not got in the way? Story has an azimuth, discerned by looking at its structure from the time it began creeping into the petty pace of day-to-day events, altering them, imparting a sense of connectedness and causality which has led many of us to believe in such things as Fate or the will of the gods, or the will of God (as in His Perfect Plan, and don't blame me for that gender stuff; so far as gods go, I'm pretty happy with Kali). We seem now in 2008 to be nipping at the heels of causality much in the manner of an Australia Cattle Dog, rendering it more a vignette or in some cases a string of events, episodes if you will.

The rousing question is What do you bring to it? What have you done for story lately? To paraphrase William Wordsworth, Story is too much with us, late and soon. Which is to say the evolution of story can progress only if those of us working on it can fold into its ingredients a quality I will call inevitability. This quality is present in all evolution. biological or literary. It represents the individual writer's sense of what is most needed to give the process we call story a nudge forward regardless if I as reader or critic or teacher or writer like it or not. I'm pretty impressed by the presence and beauty of the giraffe, and it makes some sense to me that the giraffe evolved to score the leaves off the topmost branches the dinosaurs couldn't reach and that its neck acts like a siphon for water, but I have no stake in the giraffe. Were it to go extinct as a species, I would, having grown up with a sense of wonderment and admiration for the creature, feel a profound regret, but not the ache of grief at the loss of more personalized things. Truth to tell, my fondness for the short story comes from years of painful practice at the so-called pulp and slick and commercial story enhanced by the realization that what I considered a story outside those confines was something a respected editor agreed with and subsequently took on. I have a visual image of hat I want a short story to be. Every time I open a closet door, that image occurs to me.

True enough, if I deconstruct that series of events many persons agree upon as being story, and do so in terms of my vision, I will find a number of elements that go back to Aristotle's Poetics. I also have come to hold similar views on what a person, a single individual among the many billions who have walked and are still abroad on the Earth, represents as an individual. I also believe that the two are the Scylla and Charybdis of storytelling, my goal being to put events between those two poles

The Combination Plate, por favor

1. The book sat there for some time, seemingly too much book to read in a week and, thus, impossible for this week's review--maybe next week and Spring break.

2. The lure of the book, its title, and a reminder that a great loss was forthcoming, set connection receptors to twitching.

3. The book is Lush Life, which in the right context could be a nod to Billy Strayhorn, the incredibly gifted collaborator of Edward Kennedy Ellington, The Duke.

4. The author is Richard Price of Clockers fame. More to the point, Price is a sometimes writer on The Wire.

5. The Wire, as of tomorrow, is toast.

6. So okay, I'll have a look, then pick up a sensible, shorter book which can be read and commented on and filed by tomorrow night, which has become the default due time for the weekly review.

7. So I'm screwed because Lush Life is nothing less than magnetic, its title indeed an ironic riff on Billy Strayhorn's stunning lyric. You know:

I used to visit all the very gay places,
Those come-what-may places,
Where one relaxes
On the axis
Of the Wheel of Life,
To get the feel of life,
And jazz and cocktail.
The girls I knew had sad and sullen gray faces,
With distingue traces,
That used to be there,
You could see where
They'd been washed away
By too many through the day
Twelve o'clock-tails.
The you came along
With your siren's song
To tempt me to madness.
I thought for a while
That your poignant smile
Was tinged with the sadness
Of a great love for me.
I guess I was wrong.
Again I was wrong....

Yeah, that one. I think Strayhorn was seventeen or eighteen when he wrote it.

8. Just before we turn on the dry cycle, throw in this enhancement: In addition to Richard Price, many episodes of The Wire were written by Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos.

9. Here's the spin cycle. Just as The Wire and indeed Lush Life are bursting at the seams with an ensemble cast of characters and are related in an intricate patchwork quilt of a format, so are the works of Lehane and Pelecanos, so indeed are the novels of Denise Mina, so are many other of the novels appearing after 2000. What we are seeing is a shift in the DNA of the novel from the single point of view to the ensemble point of view, with shorter scenes, a finger-popping tempo, an edge, and a growing method of authorial observation in which it is clear that although the author may have favorites, he or she does not produce political stereotypes with whom to take opposition. All the characters believe in their individual rightness. Take a look at The History of Live by Nicole Kraus if you don't agree with this vision I present here of the novel's trip ticket Take a look at Richard Powers; The Echo Maker.

10. Individuals will continue to read and to write the "old" novel, the more linear story arc, but for those of us who cannot plot or who will not plot, this ensemble melange is a lovely switch in the depth, texture, and reach of story.

11. Many such modern novels, such as The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Urrea or The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, not only fit this ensemble description, they are wedging in another important event, which is language. Each of these two is inserting Spanish without defensiveness or self-consciousness. Some countries try to keep illegal immigrants from sneaking in across the border; America is doing its best to keep Spanish from sneaking in, but forget it, Spanish is here. Get over it. Read it

Stuff about Writers and Tuna Salad Sandwiches

1. The goal in longform fiction is change. Something happens and someone (ones) change.

2. The goal in shortform fiction is some kind of awareness. Something happens and the narrator realizes a choice must be made, and may, indeed, make the choice. But be careful: since 2000, more or less, take care not to make the choice acted upon seem too mechanical.

3. Writers have multiple personalities. There are probably as many archetypes living inside the writer as there are verb tenses in the English language.

4. The difference between a writer and a lunatic is that the writer knows he has these archetypes living within.

5. A writer at work on a story is like the leader of an Italian parliament.

6. A modern novel is a negotiated settlement.

7. Persons who embark on a writing career because friends or family tell them they ought to put their stories down on paper are buying the literary equivalent of the Minneapolis Bridge.

8. A first draft is like throwing dirt clods at the side of a building.

9. Nothing bad ever happens to a writer.

10. It is all right not to like famous writers.

11. Many of today's most successful writers have not read Middlemarch.

12. Most writers in the early period of their career begin their stories too soon and end them too late.

13. It is not wrong not to have read Jim Harrison, but it is too bad.

14. Ditto Annie Proulx.

15. Readers become quickly bored with mysteries associated with significant things and conversely fascinated with mysteries associated with funny-sounding places. The mysteries of New York does not hold a candle to the Mysteries of Pismo Beach or Pasadena.

16. A peanut butter sandwich is not funny. A tuna salad sandwich is.

17. A writer who has writers' block is not funny. A surgeon who has surgery block is.

Short Story vs Novel: Literary Detente

Much of my life is as tied up with the short story and the novel as the profligate spender is with credit cards. As a consequence, a good deal of energy goes into deciding where to put the short stories and novels I have read, where to store the ones I have not yet read, which convenient place to store the ones loaned to me, and how to record the ones I have out on loan and to whom they are thus loaned.

Equally time consuming is the fork in the road about my absolute favorite medium, the novel or the short story, which of the two I most enjoy writing, and which of the two I enjoy teaching. On any given day, I can be of either mind since both are glorious mediums, intimate splashes of life tossed at a freshly painted wall or a not-so-fresh surface.

The contest didn't used to be so close; as much as I loved short stories, I did not think I could write them because of my belief that in order to do so, one had to know how to plot. From time to time my interests left the equivalent of early autumn zucchini on my doorstep, which is to say what I considered short stories then--mostly concept- or gimmick-driven narratives--landed in my psyche like paramilitary parachutists dropped behind enemy lines. Novels were more my medium because in the novel format I could hide the fact that plot lines were a mystery to me.

Somewhere within the tortured and hallucinatory landscape of my immune system having played a year-long practical joke on me, leaving me more or less allergic to myself, I forged a sense of what the short story was and how I related to it. Well on the road to recovery, I was invited to dinner by Dennis and Gail Lynds and seated propitiously next to John Milton, the editor of The South Dakota Review. John and I liked the same kind of wine, had second helpings of the roast, and seemed to forge a sense of literary respect over the cheese-and-fruit platter. "Send me something," John said.

Three relatively sleepless weeks later, I did, naming the story after my then splendid dog companion, Molly, using the philosophy I'd forged in my illness, and crafting a narrative in which one of my favorite characters contrives to steal his best friend's dog, disguise her, and raise her as his own. A week later I received one of those small envelopes from The South Dakota Review I had come to associate with acceptance notes. In short order, using the same philosophy--as opposed to formula--I had crafted a story about an academic--a Hawthorne scholar-- who receives anonymous threats from an enemy in his faculty mail box. Another small envelope from John Milton. And yet another story, about a man in a senior citizen's writing group who is wildly attracted to a middle-aged woman in his class, doing his best to impress her.

This time, the note in the small envelope from John Milton said, "I guess you're one of my regulars now." To me that meant I could count on placing a story a year in SDR, one of the bright lights in the world of the literary journal world.

My short story output flourished and I was convinced this was the most delicious medium of all, a landscape I'd never thought it possible to inhabit. Life was officially splendid. Until.

John Milton died suddenly, unexpectedly, and with the exception of one seemingly outrageous story about a discovery I'd made about the university where I teach--in a tribute-to-John issue--I've not managed to crack the SDR again, and had to seek my fortunes elsewhere.

Those years have brought me to long-term reading and submission relationships with dozens of literary journals as well as the editorship of one. From time to time I discover a poet or essayist whose work moves me, but the driving force behind my reading is the short story. When the latest issue of The Georgia Review arrived, I fell on it because the cover promised a feature, written by a poet I much admire, that takes me back to the paperback original science fiction adventure stories.

What I realized only last night, just at bed time, was the presence among the short stories of "A Great Piece of Elephant" by Lee K. Abbott, a remarkable stylist who writes as though using a hot-wired computer, his insights, characters, and locales charged with mystical inevitability and glandular honesty. Abbott's characters careen about with the guilt of The Scarlet Letter, the driven inquisitiveness of Saul Bellow, and the humanity of Walker Percy, all these qualities leavened by the humor or--well, of Lee K. Abbott. In addition to it being gorgeously funny and ironic, of a piece with Jim Harrison's "Republican Wives,""A Great Piece of Elephant" is told from three differing points of view, a no-no in short story for anyone but Lee K. Abbott.

The Georgia Review also contains "Next Stop Abbottland: The Stories of Lee K. Abbott," which pays some loving regard to All Things, All at Once, his most recent collection. Herewith, my review of ATAaO.

Abbott teaches writing at the Ohio State University then reverts to the wilder, woolier parts of New Mexico, where everything seems to require the kinds of development--social and economical--that try men's souls and womens' patience. Like all fine humorists, he is a great moralist; like all fine stylists, he hears a cadence of language, of the human heart struggling to find a place, any place, with a wi-fi connection.

Lowenkopf's Uncertainty Principle

A quantum is an invisible entity of energy, say a poem, or short story, or novel. Quantum physics defines the position and momentum of an entity, say a poem, short story or novel. A vector is an arrow drawn to scale, representing the magnitude and direction of an entity, say a poem, short story, novel, or photograph as it moves from its source somewhere in its creator to its impact point with a section of the viewers kishke.

Conjugate variables is another term from physics that seeks to define such observable dualities as magnitude and direction, time and space, or possibly even time and energy.

Werner Heisenberg, arguably one of the more insightful interpreters of quantum mechanics, noted the increased difficulty in measuring such conjugate variables. Thus the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, reduced to simplistic image with the observation: A watched pot never boils. The more accuracy with which we measure one of the variables, the greater the uncertainty attending our ability to measure, much less define the variables. Indeed, Heisenberg's spectral self seems to be hovering over those physicists who are trying to define the initial state of our universe, thinking this would allow them to be able to predict behavior in the universe infinitely into the future.

Asking what makes a poem, short story, or novel linger in my sensitivities and, accordingly, in any one's sensitivities, brings Heisenberg to mind as a conjugate variable with the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. In the admittedly alternate universe in which I live, I find it necessary to have the quanta defined by poets and scientists. Yeats, one of my great favorites, was nuttier than the proverbial fruitcake. Indeed:

The Ballad of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
I cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream,
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name;
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded in the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands.
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and hold her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Heisenberg was able to walk among the long dappled grass of mathematics and the relationship of concepts. I am happy to think of him as My Man in Science.

You have only to know me to recognize that I dote on modern short story writers and novelists, even though I have spoken with affection in these entries of Hawthorne. I also add herewith D. H. Lawrence, whose splendid and diverse stories, "The Blacksmith's Daughter," and "The Rocking-Horse Winner," represent some lovely alpha and omega, respectively a gem from a rural landscape and another from an urban one. For me, these two have clearly lasted, withstood the test of time in the linear accelerator that passes for my mind. I can and will revisit them, speak of them with enthusiasm. Today, on Ben Huff's post, I saw two photos that gave me the most agreeable chills, a decidedly good sign.

As a writer, a reader, a reviewer, and a teacher, I bring four conjugate variables to the dinner table. Poems, short stories, novels, and photographs, since I began by mentioning these separate arts, are quanta, sometimes wave, sometimes particle, sometimes--amazingly--both. Attempting to apply a scientific judgment to them somehow deflects or undercuts the brilliance of the light they emit and my ability to bathe in that light.


This week is Oldie Week for my book review column. I have chosen Glendon Swarthout's remarkable, Bless the Beasts and Children, first published in 1970. You can read the review here.