caleb walker

ten new classic short stories

I don't know who Elizabeth Gilbert is (well, she's an author, but I don't know her work), but her list, "My New Classics Top 10" (compiled for Entertainment Weekly), has been making the rounds. It's a list of her picks for the best (oxymoronically named) "new classic short stories." I've read three of them before:

• "Cathedral" is brilliant, and unarguably a classic, but it's 25 years old—er, "new."
• "Brokeback Mountain" is great too, as are Proulx's other more-recent stories, which I recently read in recent issues of The New Yorker.
• "Bullet in the Brain" is (I'll use this word in honor of George Carlin, who died last night) fucking brilliant. It changed the way I think about stories.It was published in The New Yorker, which has started making their stories available online, but "Bullet in the Brain" is not up yet. Here's an audio version of the story, read by TC Boyle.

Then there are the ones I've not read. I'll look for them and maybe, if I remember, report back.

• "Drown" by Junot Diaz. I've seen Diaz' name around a lot lately since his recent first novel (which I couldn't read more than 50 pages of) won the Pulitzer.
• "The Coincidence of the Arts" by Martin Amis.
• "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot" by Robert Olen Butler.
• "Teen Sniper" by Adam Johnson
• "Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister" by Edward P. Jones.
• "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" by Alice Munro
• "Pastoralia" by George Saunders

moving on

I've been working on this story called "Aysa Speaks" for a year now. I wrote it for a class then went to the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and learned that it was junk. I never showed it to anyone, but I applied the lessons I learned to that story and those lessons revealed what this story could be. Suddenly my standards were too high for my own abilities.

Since then I've been editing the story and thinking about it and ignoring it and measuring my aptitude against it, but not finishing it and not writing anything else.

I am now in a writing group. We are taking the summer off and our summer assignment is to read books that feed us in the particular ways we need to be fed. We originally thought we'd all read the same book, but our leader recognized our diverse needs and this is what we're doing.

He recommended for me a list of short-story authors including Aimee Bender. So I picked up one of her books at the university library, Willful Creatures. In it a man buys a little man at the pet store to keep him company. A woman steals the coats at a party. A woman sells fruits and words from a shack on the road outside Las Vegas. I love this stuff. I want to write like this.

So I poked around on the web for information on Aimee Bender and found a good interview at Powells Books. In it she says something I needed to hear:

I have a tendency to reread and reread, and there's a certain point where it's nice to remember that I want to put the work out there. ...When do I feel like I'm harming the story by going at it again?

I think I'm doing that with a story I'm working on now. I now hate it, whereas a month ago I was really liking it. Somewhere in there, it turned. Now what do I do? Do I go back to an earlier draft? Do I just wait? I think what I need to do with that one is wait a while, until I can return to it lovingly--and hopefully take it somewhere.

I hate "Aysa Speaks" now. And now I know what I need to do with it. I need to set it aside and do something new. This story is keeping me from writing.

PS: Here's her website.

another 100 books

The Daily Telegraph published the "best" 100 books written since 1982, according to the employees of Waterstones (that's the bookstore in the airports, isn't it?).

I have read 15 of them.

• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon (2004)
  An epic story told on a small scale. Our hero is a boy with Asperger Syndrome. The heroic acts include walking through a pedestrian tunnel. After reading it and falling in love with it, I bought it for my nephew.
• The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2003)
  Ugh. Tiresome and cliched. The scene where we first see the Taliban is striking, and I kept reading looking for more scenes like that. There were none.
• Life of Pi, Yann Martel (2001)
  Terrific story. Just get yourself past the first 50 pages. Once the boy is in the lifeboat the book becomes un-put-down-able.
• The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon (2000)
  Lots of cool people love this book. I did not. I don't know why I finished it, but I did so with great effort. I like comic books, super heroes, and magicians, but this particular combination bored me.
• A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)
  There is a beautiful passage in this book about Eggers' mother's funeral (or her funeral as he imagines it, I think) that made slogging through the story to that point worth the effort. But the rest, as I wrote elsewhere, is a tedious work of self-indulgence.
• Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)
  An epic story told on an epic scale. I never saw the movie, but I'm pretty sure that the book is better than that. I bought this book for someone - my father, maybe?
• Longitude, Dava Sobel (1995)
  Oh, that's right, I did read this one. I don't remember much of it. But I do remember liking Sobel's Galileo's Daughter much better.
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1994)
  I only remember reading this because I remember the man-in-the-well scene. I think there was a cat in the book too.
• The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx (1993)
  This I liked.
• Fatherland, Robert Harris (1992)
  I don't usually read this kind of thing. What's it called? Alternative history or something? But I sort of liked it while I was turning the pages, but it's certainly not one of the best books I've read.
• A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving (1989)
  This, however, is one of my favorite books. One of the top three, I'd say.
• Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood (1985)
  KR and I listened to this audio book on a trip. Does that count? It was good. Scary good.
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera (1984)
  We saw the terrific movie first. I liked it better than the book.
• Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984)
  Were there characters in this book? This is the book that introduced to us words like "cyberspace" and invented the internet or whatever. It was boring. I don't know why I finished it.
• The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco (1983)
  I read all of Umberto Eco's novels hoping they will be this good again. None have been. (The movie is good too.)

Others on the list I did not or could not read.

• Carter Beats The Devil, Glen David Gold (2001)
  I started this, but set it down after 50 pages and never picked it up again.
• Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden (1997)
  Never picked up the book, but I fell asleep listening to the audio book.
• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy (1997)
  I set the thing down after only 10 or so pages. I usually give a book 50 pages, but not this one.
• English Patient, Michael Ondaatje (1992)
  Good movie. I heard Ondaatje read from the book, and it was not an easy book to listen too. Very lyrical, very complex sentence structure.
• American Psycho, Bret Easton Elllis (1991)
  I read an excerpt from this online or someplace and was sickened by it. I've steered clear of the book and the movie since then.
• Possession, A.S. Byatt (1990)
  Here's another book I gave up on after 50 pages.
• Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follet (1989)
  This looked really interesting to me: the building of a 12th century cathedral. Sort of Umberto Eco-esque. So I borrowed it from my mother in law and never bothered to open it.
• Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1985)
  I haven't read this one, but I did read One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book I will read again someday.

And my favorites left off the list. (Oops. A commenter points out that some of these were published before 1982.)

• Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1985)
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller (1955)
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1960)
• Rabbit, Run, John Updike (1960)
• Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner (1987)
• Skinny Legs and All, Tom Robbins (1990)

r.i.p. kurt vonnegut

We lost another one of the good guys. I've got no time for a real post, so here are some links for the remembrance of Kurt Vonnegut.

• How to write with style.
• I posted about him before.
• NYT article on his death.
• NYT opinion piece.
• BuzzFeed has a lot more links.
• Boing Boing's tribute
• His Wikipedia entry.

"We are here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is."

recommendations

Yesterday I finished reading Gilead. It was recommended by my writing teacher this summer, who studied with and still worships the author, Marilynne Robinson.

It was such a gentle book, written as a letter from an elderly man with a bad heart to his seven-year-old son. It begins as the father, Reverend John Ames, writes about his "begats," his father and grandfather, both clergymen. Just as it seems the book will be nothing more than family stories—entertaining stories, yes—a plot creeps in. A stranger comes to town midway through his writing.

Tonight KR and I watched An Inconvenient Truth. Too much Al, I thought. It is, you must know by now, an expanded version of Al Gore's lecture on global warming. I found too many distractions from his main point. His presentation was very slick and I kept wondering what software he used (on his PowerBook!) to create the show. I also wanted a closer look at his graphs and charts. And there was too much Al. Too much footage of him walking around the old family farm, telling us about his family. Despite these weakeners, it remained a powerful film about what could be the thing that brings this whole party to an end.

The movie's website has on it a Carbon Calculator that figures out the amount of CO2 you generate (approximately, I guess). I scored 3.1, or "Much smaller than average." Mainly because I only drive my car about 1000 miles or so a year.

one and a half percent

This is something. I have read nearly two of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of the Year: The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel and I am currently well into High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories by Joyce Carol Oates.

And two others are on my wish list: Absurdistan, by Gary Shteyngart, and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.

I think that's a personal best.

happy birthday, tom

It's Tom Robbins' birthday today. He's the author of some mind-expandingly good books, including my favorite book, Skinny Legs and All. (It's the story of a painted stick, a dented can of beans, and a dirty sweatsock who travel to the Middle East to bring peace.) I've always been a reader (even on the sunny days of my childhood when my brother was out getting into trouble I stayed in my room reading), but it wasn't until I read Skinny Legs that I first thought, "Writing looks like fun."

Tom Robbins is at the top of my list of people I'd like to meet and for whom I'd like to buy a drink.

He says that when he starts a book, he has no idea of what the story will be. He never outlines and never revises. He just works on each sentence until he thinks it's perfect, sometimes for more than an hour, and then he moves on to the next one. He said, "I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life."

(My teacher in Iowa this summer warns, "All writers are liars.")

(Via The Writer's Almanac.)

some moore

One of my classmates from the Iowa Summer Writers Festival just wrote that she is in Portland Oregon for another writers conference where the short story writer Lorrie Moore recently read.

I think it was about a year ago that I first read something by Lorrie Moore. It was a class reading assignment, "You're Ugly, Too" and "How to Be An Other Woman," but I kept reading her stuff after that. I bought Self-Help, her first book. When I was in Iowa a month ago I picked up her second book of stories, Like Life. Over the weekend I ordered a first edition hardback copy of her latest, Birds of America. I just started rereading Self-Help as inspiration as I hammer away at my own work.

I want to write like Lorrie Moore—funny and tragic, witty and sad, even (ugh) "humorous and poignant," as one critic said. I've always liked that combination, I think. Even in music. Then my classmate sent me that email and it pushed me over the edge.

All morning I imagined myself asking well-crafted questions of her at that Portland reading, speaking into the microphone with a strong, clear voice that would make her remember me. I imagined handing her my first-edition hardback and asking her to sign it for me. I imagined her giving me her email address and asking to read something of mine, then her replying a day later that she loved it. But anyway.

Here are some interviews with Lorrie Moore: Salon, The Believer, New York Metro. And here are reviews of her work in the NYT Book Review. And here's a quote from one of her stories:

"That is what's wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls—we all have a bit of that—but that they insist their every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery."

adaptations

I see that Kottke marked the list of 50 best book-to-film adaptations to show which books he's read and which movies he's seen. Me too!

1. [BM] 1984
2. [M] Alice in Wonderland
3. American Psycho
4. [M] Breakfast at Tiffany's
5. Brighton Rock
6. [BM] Catch 22
7. [BM] Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
8. [BM] A Clockwork Orange
9. [B] Close Range (inc Brokeback Mountain)
10. The Day of the Triffids
11. Devil in a Blue Dress
12. [M] Different Seasons (inc The Shawshank Redemption)
13. [M] Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner)
14. [M] Doctor Zhivago
15. [M] Empire of the Sun
16. [M] The English Patient
17. [M] Fight Club
18. The French Lieutenant's Woman
19. [M] Get Shorty
20. [M] The Godfather
21. [M] Goldfinger
22. [M] Goodfellas
23. Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now)
24. The Hound of the Baskervilles
25. [M] Jaws
26. [M] The Jungle Book
27. A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes)
28. [M] LA Confidential
29. [M] Les Liaisons Dangereuses
30. [BM] Lolita
31. [B] Lord of the Flies
32. [M] The Maltese Falcon
33. Oliver Twist
34. [BM] One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
35. [M] Orlando
36. The Outsiders
37. [B] Pride and Prejudice
38. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
39. The Railway Children
40. Rebecca
41. [M] The Remains of the Day
42. [M] Schindler's Ark (aka Schindler's List)
43. Sin City
44. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
45. [M] The Talented Mr Ripley
46. Tess of the D'Urbervilles
47. Through a Glass Darkly
48. [BM] To Kill a Mockingbird
49. [M] Trainspotting
50. The Vanishing
51. [B] Watership Down

Update: Wholesome Goodness has a good idea, and I'm all for lifting good ideas. Here's my tally for you who are keeping score at home:

Books read: 11
Movies seen: 29
Neither: 18

pigs

KR loved these photos of farm animals and their owners. I liked the pig photos and told KR that I thought we should have a pig around the house. She reminded me that we already have Georgia, who, we have concluded, is part pig and part kitty. She plays like a kitten, batting her toys around with her hands, and she grunts like a pig. (She's even got me doing it.) Abi, on the other hand, is pure dog. KR, for one reason or another, wants a goat. And a duck. As for me, I'd like a duck.

That's not what I sat down to write about, though. There's a saying about the cobbler's children having no shoes. Well, I've been promising KR that I would create a website for her shop for years, but due to one thing and another, and blah blah and blah blah, the only thing I have done so far is make a page that says the site is "coming soon."

We decided that, if I am going to do anything about it, we need to treat this as a genuine business transaction with meetings and deadlines and payments and stuff. So we had the following email exchange the other day:

- - - - - - - -

Dear Caleb Walker,
Will you have your secretary contact my secretary to
set up a meeting regarding the shop's web site.
Thank you for your prompt attention.
KR

- - - - - - - -

Ms KR,
Mr Walker is available Friday at 530. If that is not a good time for
you, then please suggest something over the weekend or next week. He
can come to your home to meet if that is convenient for you.

Best regards,
Caleb Walker's secretary

- - - - - - - -

Dear Caleb,
Thank you for your prompt reply. I have written your
name in Ms. KR's apt. book for 5:30 Friday,
February 10th. Is there any place in particular you
would like to meet? She is open to suggestions
Sincerely,
KR's assistant

- - - - - - - -

Ms KR,
Mr Walker suggests The Squirrel Hill Cafe, but I suspect that will
be too noisy at 5:30 on a Friday. I suggest Pino's in Pt Breeze and I
bet I can convince him to change his mind.

Best regards,
Caleb Walker's secretary/sex slave

- - - - - - - -

Dear Mr. Walker,
Ms. KR appreciates your sensitivity to the noise
levels of local bars. Pino's is a lovely suggestion
since she enjoys the atmosphere. Her only concern is
centered around the care of her dog and pig. Perhaps
the time can be pushed back a half hour. Please
confirm this change.
Sincerely,
KR's perfect twin robot

- - - - - - - -

Ms KR,
Mr Walker is pleased to hear that you are an animal person. He has a
goat and a duck, himself.

He has agreed to meet you at Pino's at 6:00 on Friday, Feb 9 [sic].

Best regards,
The one who does all the work around here.

- - - - - - - -

"...the care of her dog and pig." That had me laughing. Anyway, we had our bidness meeting at Pino's, where we sat by the front door. So every time someone opened the door we were hit with a blast of freezing air. Then there were the little kids who were playing with the door, holding it open just for kicks. Then there was the slow service. But our meals were delicious, as always.