First Line Friday!

“At five o’clock that morning reveille was sounded, as usual, by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters.”

This is, in my opinion, a great first line. Let’s dissect this bad boy.

We’ve got staff quarters and reveille being sounded. Right off the bat we know this tale will unfold in the confines of some well-ordered, regimented existence.

It’s sounded at five o’clock, so we know we’re not at summer camp. And it’s not being trumpeted from a bugle, so we know we’re not in the army. Where then?

Well, it’s happening as usual- just like it always does- and it’s being banged out by a hammer on a length of rail. Sounds cruel.  Sounds heartless. And efficient and brutal and any number of other things. Sounds like a Soviet gulag.

This is how Alexander Solzhenitsyn welcomes us to the Siberian prison camp where his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich  is set. As you can gather from the title, the book only covers the events of a single day, but the reader feels the monotony and tedium of an entire prison sentence in the space of a very few pages. He pulls it off with that great opening, and by closing with the same image he led with:

“There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail.

“Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days.

“The three extra days were for leap years.”

 

Short Story Club: "Walter John Harmon" by E.L. Doctorow

Welcome to Short Story Club. Come on in, have a seat, and let’s get down to business. Tucker and Orlando are in the kitchen preparing watercress sandwiches. As we announced before, the focus of this month’s discussion is the rather lengthy short story “Walter John Harmon” by E.L Doctorow. It’s a fascinating yarn about life in a religious cult- as told by a believer, who also happens to be the group’s in-house counsel attorney.

In what we hope becomes a tradition, we’ve asked for guest posters to kick off our discussion. And who better to inaugurate the John R. Lyman Memorial Short Story Club, than Mr. John R. Lyman himself. (And no, that’s not him pictured above. That would be Doctorow.) What did you think, Lyman?:

I hadn't thought much about cults lately, which isn't all that easy to do when you share a home state with the Lafferty brothers and Warren Jeffs.  Half the time you're trying to just read an article about last week's football game in the local paper you get smacked in the face with horror stories about child brides and tales of end times. At a certain point you tune them out. After reading "Walter John Harmon" I had a better sense of why: most cult stories are invariably told somewhat uninterestingly by outsiders, because in the most interesting cults members don't do much talking to rest of the world. That type of reporting often leads to a list of weird acts and crimes, but never seems to get to the crux of the cult itself. It's a bit like reading a Woodward and Bernstein article on Watergate without any input from Deepthroat.  

In my mind Doctorow's story, although of course fictional, offers as plausible an account as any "true" story of life in a cult. The feeling of complete inadequacy ("I knew the failing within me when Betty was this night summoned for Purification") mixed with the supreme arrogance of knowing you're right about something while the rest of the world is completely wrong ("In the end, no one could withstand the warmth and friendliness of our Embrace."). And, of course, the utter fear of cognitive dissonance, which drives so much of what anyone does but seems to especially affect those in a cult. "Hmm, the prophet ran off with my money and wife -- either I've been a total tool for the last five years of my life or this is all part of the master plan. Let me go talk to a few of the other elders who might have been fooled, too. . . yep, it was all part of the master plan!"

At times the story shows its age. For whatever reason cults were a bigger deal in the late 90s and early 2000s than they are now. Perhaps there was less going on then, or maybe the American public has just come to accept religious wackos now and isn't as interested as reading about them. The passages on the Internet are borderline funny. I had forgotten there was a time -- 2003, apparently -- when people actually used the term "Web log" instead of blog. And if Doctorow wrote the story today he'd either cut the entire descriptive paragraph after "Betty and I learned about Walter John Harmon from the Internet" (really, where else would you learn about a cult?) or replace it with, "Initially we friended Walter on Facebook, which is where all his followers must first declare their loyalty. Then we watched some really funny YouTube videos of him playing with his cats." But the essence is timeless. Life is pretty damn scary for some people and it's nice to have a place to fit in, even at the expense of your wife, livelihood, and rationality.

Thanks, John. What about the rest of you? Do you agree? Disagree? Like the story? Dislike the story? What did you think about the world Doctorow created here? Have at it in the comments!

From the Pen of Wallace Stegner

I’ve talked about what makes a line of prose jump off the page at me here. I don’t necessarily make highlights as I read, but I’ll dog-ear a page for future reference if something catches my eye. Below is a smattering of such lines from Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. All emphasis is mine:

"Noiseless as a flower opening, a rocket burst above the hills. She sat up, watching the white stars curve and fall. Then BOOM! All the night air between her and the town, two and a half miles of it, trembled with the delayed report...

"Another rocket seared across the sky at an angle and bloomed with hanging green balls. Another went up through the green shower and burst into an umbrella of red. Then three together, all white. Then one that winked hotly but did not flower. BOOM! went the cushioning air. BOOM!  BOOM BOOM BOOM!BOOM!"

"She watched me with something like horror. I could feel her eyes on my back, and hear her breathing, and whenever I wheeled around in my chair and caught her eyes, they skittered away in desperate search for something they might have been looking at."

"A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone."

"Standing by the gateway he moved the sweating servants with an eyebrow, directed them with half-inch movements of his head."

"He hung from her breast like a ripe fruit ready to fall. His eyes were closed, then open, then closed again... She hated the thought that he must become a separate, uncomfortable metabolism cursed with effort and choice."

What about you? What’s the best line you’ve come across in your recent reading?

Literature podcasts

I’m sure you’re all as giddy as we are for Thursday’s Short Story Club kick-off. As we continue to build momentum for the short form, we thought we’d share some more great short story resources to help you mark the time.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m currently cursed with an hour-long commute. That’s one hour each way. This means I’m always looking for good commute-listening fodder. The last refuge of the sane commuter is variety, so in addition to radio, my own music and any number of audio books, I have a few trusty podcasts standing by to get me through the tedium. Here they are in order of preference:

The gold standard: The New Yorker Fiction Podcast.

Fiction Editor Deborah Triesman invites recent or regular contributors to the New Yorker to pull their favorite stories from the magazine’s archives and read them aloud for the podcast. The readings are sandwhiched between excellent and interesting commentary, and I have very rarely come away from an episode disappointed (though it has happened on occasion.) New podcasts once a month. Run-time is typically right around 40 minutes or so. Check it out.

A close second: PRI’s Selected Shorts Podcast.

Host Isaiah Sheffer introduces a wide variety of short stories which are performed in front of a live audience by actors of the stage and screen. The episodes usually feature two different stories, generally given a loose theme that binds them together. They have recently added some commentary to spice things up a bit and I think it’s done the trick. The ratio of stories I don’t like is slightly higher than those I listen to in the New Yorker podcast, but what it lacks in quality, it more than makes up for in quantity. New podcasts every week. Run-time is right at 1 hour per show.

There are also a few “amateur hour” honorable mentions:

The Writing Show. Host Paula B. reads incoming submissions of short stories or first chapters (usually 4 per hour-long show) and gives her impressions freely. There’s a lot of genre stuff to wade through, but there are also some real gems to be found. Our own Tucker McCann has been featured, but since the submissions are anonymous, I won’t tell you which episode.

The Lit Show. In addition to interviews and roundtables, students and alumni of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop regularly share their work on this podcast. It’s interesting to see what kind of work comes out of a top-flight MFA program.

The Moth. From iTunes: “The Moth features people telling true, engaging, funny, touching and eye-opening stories from their lives.” Because they are performed live, and without notes, the stories don’t often have the structure of written stories. But they can be entertaining.

Any other podcast aficionados out there? Keeping in mind that I try to stay in the lit-fic vein, what are some other short fiction podcasts I shouldn’t live without?

Poet's Corner

Poetry for the rest of us:

-Image by James Henkel

Design

BY BILLY COLLINS

I pour a coating of salt on the table

and make a circle in it with my finger.

This is the cycle of life

I say to no one.

This is the wheel of fortune,

the Arctic Circle.

This is the ring of Kerry

and the white rose of Tralee

I say to the ghosts of my family,

the dead fathers,

the aunt who drowned,

my unborn brothers and sisters,

my unborn children.

This is the sun with its glittering spokes

and the bitter moon.

This is the absolute circle of geometry

I say to the crack in the wall,

to the birds who cross the window.

This is the wheel I just invented

to roll through the rest of my life

I say

touching my finger to my tongue.

What's In A Name?

MacEvoy has been rolling around in the elk miscarriage of literature titles as of late . . . which has caused me to do a lot of thinking. Of my favorite 25 (or so) novels, I have strong feelings when it comes to the titles. I hate them (i.e. "The Catcher in The Rye"). Or I love them (i.e. "The Angle of Repose") and wish that I had a book with just such a title.

It often befuddles me that a writer can produce a novel of such sustained prominence and genius, while completely striking out on a workable title (i.e. "All The Pretty Horses"). The tile should be the easy part, in theory, I mean it's ten words or less. But yet these "misses" do occur, as I will point out below. Keep in mind, every book on these lists is, in my mind, important and ground breaking and wonderful, in spite of its great or terrible title.

Best Books I've Ever Read with GREAT (I'm jealous) Titles:

• The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway)
• The Angle of Repose (Stegner)
• The Great Gatsby (Joyce)
• For Whom The Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
• To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
• East of Eden (Steinbeck)
• Dharma Bums (Kerouac)
• The Autumn of the Patriarch (Garcia Marquez)
• My Name is Asher Lev (Potok)
• Ask the Dust (Fante)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Garcia Marquez)
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera)
• Blood Meridian (McCarthy)

Best Books I've Ever Read with TERRIBLE (how could such a good novel have such a shitty title) Titles:

• Dancing At The Rascal Fair (Doig) (sounds like grocery store romance lit)
• All The Pretty Horses (McCarthy) (sounds like lesbian cowgirl lit)
• Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man (Joyce) (Note: I actually don't like the novel either)
• Travels With Charlie (Steinbeck) (John thought this one up in 10 seconds, surely)
• The House of Spirits (Allende) (sounds like a "universe" book you'd see featured on Oprah)
• Love In The Time of Cholera (Garcia Marquez) (Can't have "love" in a title, sorry Gab).
• Cry, The Beloved Country (Patton) (sorry MacEvoy, but this one misses the mark for me)
• A Good Man is Hard to Find (Flannery O'Connor) (sounds like my Jewish mother-in-law)
• The Stranger (Camus) (too bland)
• Out Stealing Horses (Petterson) (sounds like a 12 year old wrote the title)
• The Savage Detectives (Bolano) (After reading it, I am still unsure what the title means, so I hate it)
• A Moveable Feast (Hemingway) (Makes me think of Thanksgiving?!)
• Freedom (Franzen) (sounds like a George Bush speech title)

Now, keep in mind that aside from Joyce, I've LOVED each of these novels and count them as important to my development as a person and thinker. And these titles represent opposite ends of the spectrum with plenty of titles that fall in between the Great v. Terrible debate ("Don Quixote de la Mancha" and "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "The Old Man & The Sea").

What I've gleaned from my self-made lists are that most writers find themselves on both ends of the spectrum depending on the novel. They write a stellar title for one novel, and a pitiful title for the next.

Can anyone disagree with my list(s)?

Learn a life skill: Read a novel

Sometimes a passage will do nothing for the plot, zip for the growth of the characters, and zilch for conveying a lasting message of any kind- but you still love it because it provides a killer description of something you'll probably never experience first-hand. In that spirit, let's let Tom Joad show us how to skin a rabbit:

Tom took up the rabbit in his hand. "One of you go get some bale wire outa the barn. We'll make a fire with some of this broken plank from the house." He looked at the dead rabbit. "There ain't nothing so easy to get ready as a rabbit," he said. He lifted the skin of the back, slit it, put his fingers in the hole, and tore the skin off. It slipped off like a stocking, slipped off the body to the neck, and off the legs to the paws. Joad picked up the knife again and cut off the head and the feet. He laid the skin down, slit the rabbit along the ribs, shook out the intestines onto the skin, and then threw the mess off into the cotton field. And the clean-muscled little body was ready.

-John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

First Line Friday

Today's first line is one that I've loved since the first day I read it, years ago, on my balcony in Los Angeles below the tapestry of a mild winter afternoon.

"I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists."

This novel then goes on to tell the story of a 17 year old aspiring poet named Juan Garcia Madero in Mexico City and his interactions with a group of rogue poets known as, of course, the "visceral realists." This first line is very abrupt, not flowery, not overly burdensome, but concise, and then the real kicker: The Visceral Realists. The reader is 7 words into the novel and already wondering who the hell the visceral realists are. To my eyes, it's a very effective first line.

So who wrote this first line? And in what novel? Without further ado, it is Roberto Bolano's critically acclaimed "The Savage Detectives." This novel really frustrated me at times, while completely melting my face with its turns and prose at other times. I guess I'd suggest that you read it, but be advised that it's work. But it's work that's well worth it.

"Not that there's anything wrong with that."

Like most men my age, I’ve probably seen every episode of Seinfeld at least twenty-three times. But the fourteen-year-old MacEvoy certainly wouldn’t have known who John Cheever was when the episode entitled “The Cheever Letters” aired in 1992. Twenty years later I can say his short stories rank among my very favorites.

Anyway, here is a clip from that episode that riffs off of the then-fairly recent publication of the author’s very private, very forthright letters and journals. “The letters” make their appearance at about the one-minute mark...

Two months down!

Hard to believe we've been at this for two months already. We've got truckloads of great content stored neatly away in the archives and you can see the authors we've touched upon in just the past 30 days above. Below, you'll find the five most popular posts from the same time period.

Thanks for reading, and as always, leave us a comment and tell us how we can improve, what you'd like to see more of, what you wish we'd stop, etc.!

1. The Art of the Pseudonym
2. On Plot Twists
3. My Shelf Life: 2011
4. Poet's Corner
5. Hello, my name is Rose of Sharon