The JRLMSSC Is Born

Yesterday’s post on short stories was part love song, part lamentation. Today we tell you what we’re going to do about the lamentation part of things.

But first, appropriately, a very short story:

The other day I was included on an email chain between the participants of a once-great book club. As often happens in life, this half dozen men in their early thirties had been spread far and wide by the grad-school/professional diaspora, and now meets only once a year during the holidays. From what I could tell, a few half-hearted emails are occasionally traded to spur or check on progress, and at least one daunting title had been jettisoned midway through the year to stave off a mutiny of the disinterested.

But then something interesting happened. One of them circulated a short story he thought just might intrigue the group. What followed was a flurry of emails and informal reviews that ranged from high praise to “not-that-great,” and from profound and eloquent to downright hilarious. In fact, I’d never seen a group of non-writer thirty-somethings mobilize themselves to a literary discussion quite so quickly before. It spawned an epiphany of sorts:

Short stories are short. People will actually read them. The point of the story can usually be smoked out of its hiding place in very little time, and you can say about it what you want to in the space of a short email or blog comment. They are infinitely better suited to comprehensive club-type discussions than the long works of fiction that three-quarters of the group never likes, and half the group never reads.

And that is why we’re establishing the John R. Lyman Memorial Short Story Club. Every month we’ll post the link to a fantastic short story for you to read, and on the appointed day you’ll return to hear some of our thoughts, and to share some more of your own. It will be spectacular.

Now, are we the first short story club in existence? Certainly not. Are we the best short story club in existence? It’s likely. But we know we’re the only one that enjoys the ongoing patronage of Mr. John R. Lyman. So who is this great man, you ask? That’s a great question, and we look forward to all your great questions, comments, complaints and criticisms as we launch the short story club that bears his name.

First up for the JRLMSSC in January? We might as well start with a doozy: “Walter John Harmon” by E.L. Doctorow, published in the New Yorker in 2003, and collected in his 2004 book Sweet Land Stories. Here's the opening:

When Betty told me she would go that night to Walter John Harmon I didn’t think I reacted. But she looked into my eyes and must have seen something—some slight loss of vitality, a moment’s dullness of expression. And she understood that for all my study and hard work the Seventh Attainment was still not mine. [Read More]

It is Fascinating. You won't want to miss it. Click the link, read it, mull it over, and come back here to hash it out on Thursday January 19^th.

And don't forget, the first rule of Short Story Club is: you do not talk about Short Story Cl– wait a minute, no… that’s another club. The first rule of Short Story Club is tell everyone about short story club. It’s gonna be off the chain!

An Ode to the Short Form

I’m a short story nut. And I sometimes fail to understand why other people aren’t.

I mean, people used to read them. There used to be a huge market for short fiction back in the day. As a point of reference, consider the following:

F. Scott Fitzgerald sold 11 stories in 1919. For these he received $3,975. That’s $361 a pop. You might not think that’s all that impressive, but in today’s dollars it works out to be about $4,500 per story.

Between November 1923 and April 1924 he produced 11 more short stories, this time earning $17,000- or $215,000 in today’s money. That’s almost twenty grand per story! But sit tight, there’s more.

When he sold “Babylon Revisited” to the Saturday Evening Post in 1931 he pulled in an astounding $4,000, or the equivalent of almost $57,000 in our day. Again, for a single story. How did he do it? Readers galore. But sell a short story to a literary magazine nowadays and you’re lucky if you get two free copies of the publication as a reward.

So, what happened to the market? Why aren’t people reading short stories anymore? Is it the decline of mass market magazines? The advent of TV? The publishing industry’s focus on easy-to-market novels and series? Probably a little bit of all-of-the-above. But there’s got to be something else at play. After all, people still read. Not only that, our attention spans grow shorter and shorter every year. You would think short stories would thrive in an age where people consume content on smart phones while in line at the grocery store. So what else is going on here?

I think short stories have a branding problem. Stories. Aren’t those the things we tell our kids? And short. Doesn’t that mean it’s light? Easy? Mere fluff? Why would bright, serious adults spend their time with such things?

“Books,” “novels,” and “series” on the other hand, all possess a kind of weight and cachet that imbues their readers with erudition,  and culture and saavy.

Pretend for a moment that you’re sitting in a waiting room somewhere. A complete stranger walks in and asks you what you’re reading. Would you rather tell them you were reading a novel? Or that you were engrossed in “a short story?” …Exactly. You see my point.

But I don’t see why it has to be that way. When it comes right down to it, what’s not to love about short stories? You want great first lines? I give you Poe’s “The Cask of Amantillado:”

“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”

You want smack-you-in-the-face last lines? How about Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”

"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

You want fantastic dialogue? Foreshadowing? A mysterious backstory to unravel? And wide shifts in tone? You don’t need a novel! You can find all of that and more in a great little yarn like Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Banafish.”


Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disparaging novels. I’ve read some great ones. Some I’d even call life-changing. But when I find myself contemplating something I’ve recently read, more often than not, it’s something I’ve read in a short story. Maybe it’s because short stories give you quick glimpses and relatable scenes. Maybe they engage you better by leaving more to the imagination. Maybe it’s easier to hold their bite-sized messages in our brains. Or, maybe it’s just easier for a writer to hold our focus for 15 pages than it is to do so for 300. I’m still trying to put my finger on the exact appeal.

But I think we can agree that both long and short forms serve their purpose. If a novel is a cross-country road trip, a short story is a weekend jaunt- or an overnight stay, or a night out on the town. It’s anything you want it to be, except a long slog. But that’s the other key advantage it holds. You can easily plow through just about any short story, good or bad. If it’s no good, you move on and forget it. No harm, no foul. If it’s great, it sticks with you just like a novel. But because of its length (or lack thereof) you’re never committing yourself to a literary Death March that will leave you hating a bad novel when you finish it, and feeling guilty or unfulfilled when you don’t.

To make a long story short (HA!!), the short form appears to have lost its grasp on us, despite its obvious charms. It’s a shame and a vexation. Come back tomorrow, and we’ll tell you what we’re going to do about it.

In the meantime, what are your favorite short stories?

Title Chase: The Grapes of Wrath

Yesterday we sniffed out the title of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country. Today we do the same for John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Why did the one book make me think of the other? Well, despite their vastly different subject matter the two books are very similar stylistically. Paton came across Steinbeck's masterpiece on the same international tour of penal institutions during which he wrote his own novel. You can trace the American writer's influence in Paton's use of a preliminary dash to offset dialogue and, as we discussed yesterday, his use of intercalary chapters to make one family's tragedy a symbolic statement about the world at large.

Steinbeck's intercalaries are some of the most interesting parts of Grapes in my view. They range from abstract descriptions of banks as insatiable monsters, to bits of dialogue set on used car lots and roadside shanty towns. They allow Steinbeck to turn the Joad familiy's plight into a broad condemnation of the Depression Era powers that be.

So where do we get the title, The Grapes of Wrath? From the heartrending descriptions of agricultural waste that have left Oakies and migrant workers like the Joads hungry and destitute:

"The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. 

"And the smell of rot fills the country... 

"The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

-Page 477 in my 1972 Viking Compass paperback

Title Chase: Cry, the Beloved Country

There are a few things I always pay attention to when reading any book. If it happens to have an interesting title, one of the things I keep an eye out for is the passage where the title originates.

Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country was a book that had spent a few years on my bookshelf before I finally cracked it open. And I'd always wondered where that particular title could have come from. Certainly not in dialogue- people just don't talk that way. And it didn't sound like any sort of standard narrative description, so what then? Maybe a song? A Poem? I just didn't know.

Turns out it comes from Paton's use of intercalary chapters to tell his story. Intercalary chapters are simply passages that are inserted in between various sections of the narrative to expand the scope or provide context for the central characters and their story. Rather than disturb the flow, they're meant to create a mood, or show flashes of what's happening in the larger world. In Cry, the Beloved Country, intercalaries are used to cast Stephen Kumalo's story against the backdrop of percolating racial tensions in South Africa, and against the ruthless gravitational pull that large cities seem to exert on the rural poor.

The effect is pure awesomeness. Here's the intercalary passage that gave the book its title:

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

But I'm not alone in thinking it's a great title. There's an interesting story about how this exact passage was chosen. Paton was staying with two acquaintances in California, on the condition that they read his manuscript. When they finished it they asked him what he would call it. He suggested that they have a little competition. Each of them would write their own proposed title, and then they would compare notes. When they showed each other their suggestions, all three of them had written "Cry, the Beloved Country."

First Line Friday!

Today's first line is from a novel I have never read, which was written by a writer that I once happened upon on a shockingly sunny evening in a Colorado library while I was supposed to be studying for the Colorado Bar Exam. I read the first line that evening, and oh how I wished I could have thrown down my legal books and read the damn Beckett novel. But no, my discipline got the best of me, and I stopped reading with this first and immortal line.

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

Ten words that convey a boat-load of tone! Just by reading this line, I can assume that the feeling of the novel will be bleak, monotonous, and somewhat cynical. Further, there are two images / phrases that I love in this brief line. First, the idea of the sun shining because it has no alternative? It's wonderfully jaded. Second, the sun shines on the "nothing new," a beautiful alternative to saying the "same old." I suppose that's why Beckett was a genius.

Perhaps someday I'll read something other than this first line.

Two men walk into a Bar(d)...

Well, yesterday I intimated that Hemingway was a simpleton. A pox upon me. To make amends, I thought we’d stack him up against his flowery old nemesis, Faulkner, and measure them both against the greatest wordsmith of them all: William Shakespeare.

To do this, I’m pulling two passages from Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, both describing "languor," - one by Faulkner, the other by Hemingway- and plugging them into the Oxford Dictionaries’ “How Shakespearean Are You?” tool. You may be surprised, as I was, by the results:

"He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in his well state the body is slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body’s pleasure instead of the body thrall to time’s headlong course."        The tool's verdict: Your English is 84 percent Shakespearean. The waters of the Avon almost lap at your feet.

"Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited."        The tool's verdict: Your English is 92 percent Shakespearean. Do you live at the Rose Theatre?

Who'd have thunk it? My own first paragraph up above grades out at an 80. Type your own text into the tool and tell us how Shakespearean you are.

The Writer's Voice

Sometimes we become so immersed in the distinctive literary voice of an author, that when we hear that same author's actual speaking voice, it can be a little jolting. 

Because of his use of short, declarative sentences, Hemingway is often praised as a pioneer of economical and understated prose. But one listen to his slow, halting speech in this recording, and you may be convinced that that simple style was all he was capable of.

A little digging seems to reveal that this is Hemingway’s own parody of his widely-panned novel Across the River and Into the Trees, which we’ve talked about before. Whether he was inebriated when he recorded this is left to question. But it’s worth a listen in either case.

The Lending Library

Most of the books that line my shelves can jog some memory of the place where I originally acquired them: Used Book Stores, Museum gift shops, online retailers and so forth. But there are a handful of books that conjure up not only a place, but a corresponding twinge of guilt whenever I catch a glimpse of their spines. These are the books I am indefinitely “borrowing” from lending libraries on three different continents.

I could have titled this post “Books I’ve Stolen In My Travels,” but that wouldn’t exactly be accurate. Not, that is, if you believe like I do, that lodging-based lending libraries are more akin to the “leave a penny, take a penny” cups at your local convenience store than they are to your nearest municipal library. I have always tried to leave a book when taking one, but in the grand reckoning of my lending library balance, I suppose I have withdrawn more than I have deposited. So it’s with some remorse (and zero intent to make restitution) that I publish a list of my permanently borrowed books:

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad:

This book was picked up this past summer in a small penzion off of Campo San Polo in Venice, Italy. It was the third day of an unexpectedly long stopover while we waited for a standby flight back to Atlanta. I snatched it from the common bookcase and laid it on the nightstand with all the best intentions. But I’m sad to admit I didn’t even try to start this one. Three mornings of standby hell followed by three afternoons of lugging little kids through the tourist-packed streets of Venice will crush the desire to read anything out of just about anybody.

The Red Dancer, by Richard Skinner and Why We Want You To Be Rich, by Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki:

Both of these were picked up in a Buenos Aires youth hostel in 2009. It was admittedly very slim pickings. I was in Argentina for a business school Colloquium and didn’t think I’d have time for any reading outside of the assigned business cases I brought with me from the states. Turns out I was right, but I took them anyway. The first book, historical fiction about the life of Mata Hari, wasn’t read until this past year, and the other has not been cracked open as of this writing.

Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes:

Nestled beneath the Air Traffic Control Tower at the Salt Lake City airport, there is a squat, beige building that houses a Delta Reservations call center. It’s where I worked for the last two and a half years of my undergraduate program. Inside that building is a fairly robust lending library filled with all kinds of the regular crap you’d expect people to take on a weekend trip to Paris and promptly dump in the break room upon their return. Still, I’d scour the shelves for anything remotely decent, and was surprised one evening to find something that actually struck my interest: The above named Nebula Award-winning novel by Daniel Keyes. Unfortunately, I must have been engrossed in another read, because seven years later it still sits unread on my shelf. (By now you’re noticing a pattern…)

Stop-Time by Frank Conroy:

In June of 2003, the woes of stand-by travel once again reared their ugly head. Instead of luxuriating in a business class seat on an overnight flight to meet some friends in Eastern Europe, I spent a very long night folded across two benches at Gate 12 of JFK’s Terminal 3. As a consequence, I burned through my reading material much faster than expected, and had nothing to read by the time we left Budapest for Prague. Luckily, future Shelf Actualization co-blogger Tucker McCann reached into his ‘already read’ pile and tossed me what is still quite possibly the best memoir I have ever read. (He’d picked it up for a dollar out of a clearance basket at the University Bookstore). I never returned the book, and now that we live in separate cities, I imagine I never will. Sorry Tucker.

What about you? What have you taken, and where? Spill it.

In which we discuss resolutions for the new year

Whether we write them down or not, we all make New Years Resolutions. So let's have'em. Out with your 2012 reading resolutions! Mine are relatively simple, because I'll foul up anything even remotely complex. Here they are:

#1) Read more women:

Some of my all-time favorite books have been written by authors like Harper Lee, Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, but anybody who's read my 2011 reading recap will see that I've been swirling in an eddy of literary testosterone for the better part of a year: One female author, out of twenty-eight read last year. Yikes.

In fact, let's just look at eminent American authoresses for a moment: if you were to ask me right now to tell you the difference between Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers, the best I could come up with is that Flannery O'Connor raised peacocks in Milledgeville, Georgia- and that's because I live in Georgia. I hope to remedy that in 2012 (the cluelessness about women authors, that is- not the living in Georgia.)

#2) Read an Agatha Christie Poirot novel:

This second goal supports goal number one, but it also gives me one last chance to actually read a Poirot mystery before David Suchet acts out the final handful of stories on my TV. Not high literature, but hey, I've got to switch things up from time to time.

#3) Read a foreign language novel in the original:

Little-known fact about me: I speak Slovene, along with about two million other people on earth. But the only adult book that I have actually completed in the language is a cheap translation of a Barbara Cartland romance that I bummed off my wife when I had run through my own reading material at the beach one year.

I did read Camus' L'Etranger in college French, but that was more a linguistic adventure than a literary one. So, this year I vow to finally get over the hump and tackle a great work of Slovene literature, probably Boris Pahor's Trg Oberdan.

What are you're reading resolutions for 2012?

Happy New Year!

Most of us are waking up this morning after a very late, if not altogether crazy, night of celebration. And before long we'll turn our thoughts to the New Year and the many new beginnings it promises. Given those two prompts (the morning-after funk, and the appeal of a clean slate), there's no better story to share with you today than the Jay McInerney tale "It's 6 a.m., Do You Know Where You Are?"

Originally published by the Paris Review, this story later became the opening chapter to McInerney's classic novel Bright Lights, Big City. Since the story is written in the second person, the narrator is, well... the reader. It's the story of a man who 'comes to' out of a drug-addled haze, and continues his cocaine-fueled romp until he is brought to the realization that his life is in tatters. 

In the closing lines he is so desperate for real nourishment that he trades his designer silk jacket for a bag of warm rolls. It is a glimmer of hope that suggests things are about to turn around for this sorry addict:

"You tear the bag open and the smell of warm dough rushes over you. The first bites sticks in your throat and you almost gag. You will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything over again."

It's a nice message for New Year's Day. Give it a listen. The 20 minute recording was made for a recent Selected Shorts podcast. Start at 3:00 minutes in if you want to hear Jay McInerney talk about the genesis of the story, or jump to 7:00 minutes in to start listening to the story itself (you can click ahead just above the green line in the player.)

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Happy New Year.