The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.
Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.
Today’s story, for day twenty three – Expelled, by John Cheever
John Cheever is, of course, one of the Titans of short story writing and chronicler of the American Condition. He’s often called “the Chekhov of the suburbs.” His eponymous collection of short stories won the Pulitzer Prize.
I know him best for his most-anthologized story The Swimmer. I read it in college in my short story class (we read a hundred stories in a semester) and it affected me enough to remember sitting in my dorm room reading it after all these years.
Today’s story is Cheever’s first published story, Expelled. It’s the thinly-disguised tale of his own experiences being shitcanned from a prestigious prep school – The Thayer Academy. In real life he left, was invited back on probation after winning a short story contest, then flunked out again.
Expelled reminds me of other works that mark a young (usually idealistic) person’s realization that the world isn’t going to be able to stand up to their expectations – and that will make for a difficult life. The Catcher in the Rye is probably the most iconic tale of the type. My favorite is A&P, by John Updike – a seductively simple yet subtly horrific story.
Today’s story has an interesting structure – a series of vignettes each featuring a character involved in the expulsion. That helps keep the thing from becoming too self-indulgent, and makes the school and its denizens more likable and less blameful. It’s a story written by a young person – not quite fully developed – but you can read the potential here.
And now it is August. The orchards are stinking ripe. The tea-colored brooks run beneath the rocks. There is sediment on the stone and no wind in the willows. Everyone is preparing to go back to school. I have no school to go back to.
I am not sorry. I am not at all glad.
It is strange to be so very young and to have no place to report to at nine o’clock. That is what education has always been. It has been laced curtseys and perfumed punctualities.
But now it is nothing. It is symmetric with my life. I am lost in it. That is why I am not standing in a place where I can talk
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.
Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.
Today’s story, for day twenty two – The Other Wife, by Colette
Today, in this modern age, in this best of all possible worlds, it isn’t unusual to be out with someone and run into an ex – either yours or theirs (or both’s). But in the time of Colette – not so long ago, really – it was probably a rare and uncomfortable occurrence.
Perhaps that’s the reason that seeing her new husband’s recently divorced wife at a seaside restaurant table leaves so big of an impression on a wife. I guess it starts with her slight vexation at finding he never mentioned that they both had blue eyes – though I bet she would have been more angry had he brought it up. I can assure you that his ex-wife is the last person in the entire world he wanted to see that day.
And for good reason.
There are subtleties of the heart that are beyond my ability to understand and convey. Luckily for us all, there is Colette.
She knows. She knows.
“She’s just difficult!”
Alice fanned herself irritably, and cast brief glances at the woman in white, who was smoking, her head resting against the back of the cane chair, her eyes closed with an air of satisfied lassitude.
Marc shrugged his shoulders modestly.
“That’s the right word,” he admitted. “What can you do? You have to feel sorry for people who are never satisfied. But we’re satisfied . . . Aren’t we, darling?”
She did not answer. She was looking furtively, and closely, at her husband’s face, ruddy and regular; at his thick hair, threaded here and there with white silk; at his short, well-cared-for hands; and doubtful for the first time, she asked herself, “What more did she want from him?”
And as they were leaving, while Marc was paying the bill and asking for the chauffeur and about the route, she kept looking, with envy and curiosity, at the woman in white, this dissatisfied, this difficult, this superior . . .
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.
Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.
Today’s story, for day twenty one – The Library of Babel, by xxxxx
Imagine, if you will, an infinite library. Well, not exactly infinite – because there is a finite number of letters in each book and the library has been demonstrated to not contain duplicates – therefore there is a finite (though very large) possible number of books. Instead of infinite then, it is endless… you will never reach the edge.
Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.
The galleries are hexagonal, with five shelves each along four walls. There are hallways leading away, these halls contain tiny restrooms and closets where the visitor can sleep standing up. There are vast ventilation shafts that give a good idea of the infinite… I mean endless nature of the library.
Well, you don’t really have to imagine this place, this library, this world, because it is described in detail in today’s plotless story – The Library of Babel. Borges’ works are intellectual and fantastic – yet somehow I find them mysteriously emotional and affecting. It’s a lot of work for a short short story – but it’s worth the effort.
At least I think so.
The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men. The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.
Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.
Today’s story, for day twenty – Odour of Chrysanthemums, by D.H. Lawrence
Odour of Chrysanthemums is a famous story – with a well-established position in the pantheon of great and famous short literature. But, somehow, I had never read it – or at least I didn’t remember reading it. And a story of this skill and emotional impact – I would have remembered it.
The first thing that struck me about this story is the language. The paragraphs are chock-a-block with unusual (at least for modern eyes), esoteric, and completely appropriate (even perfect) word choices.
gorse, footplate, coppice, spinney, whimsey, colliery, imperious mien, trundle, metals, winding-engine, steel fender, hob, crozzled… and so on.
I plowed through the first time (reading the story on my tablet in a coffee shop a short bicycle-ride from my house, drinking an iced Thai Milk Tea with boba) and only later, worked my way through with a dictionary website, learning the exact meaning of the words.
The second thing that fascinated me with the story is the description and sense of place. An English coal-mining town in all its filthy glory. What a difficult life. The wife with two children (and another on the way) waiting for her husband to come home from the mine – assuming he had bypassed dinner to go out drinking.
I assumed I was reading a piece of social commentary on the unfairness of life around the coal mines – and I suppose the story is. There is nothing in the text to dilute the clarity or sadness of the woman’s life and the impossible future her family faces.
One aspect of the story that I haven’t read about is the point that her husband suffocated. It was a slow death. If his wife hadn’t assumed he was out drinking and had alerted the other miners about his absence sooner, the end result might have been very different.
But, for all that, at the end, the story reveals its true heart, and its something else entirely. The title gives the first hint. Then there at the end, the wife is faced with her husband’s beautiful body and she realizes she never even knew him.
That is where the story really comes alive and where it has its strongest, unforgettable impact.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.
Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.
Today’s story, for day nineteen – Ex Oblivione, by H.P. Lovecraft
Read it online here:
Even though it was a long time ago, I vividly remember when I first read H.P. Lovecraft. It was in college, Lawrence, Kansas, sometime in the mid 1970’s. Though I was, as these things go, well read for my age, I had never heard of H.P. Lovecraft. For entertainment as much as anything else, killing time between classes I would often stop by the bookstore. I noticed a series of paperbacks that appeared on the shelves all adorned in a similar style – black covers decorated with a series of horrible, distorted monster heads. It immediately caught my eye. Looking at them I saw they were all collections of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft.
I asked around about this Lovecraft guy and was told that he wrote very scary stories. Then I remembered I had read a novel by Colin Wilson – The Mind Parasites – that was written as an homage to Lovecraft. It seemed pretty important at the time. So I bought a handful of titles.
H.P. Lovecraft
H.P. Lovecraft
H.P. Lovecraft
H.P. Lovecraft
So it was with some excitement I carried my little bag of books back to my dorm room, stretched out, and started to read. I read a half-dozen or so and remember thinking, “What is the big deal?” They were creepy, sure, and imaginative in s pulp sort of way, but written in a sort-of archaic style. And they didn’t seem that scary to me.
Then, I tried to go to sleep. There, stretched out in the dark, I couldn’t get the stories I had read out of my mind. Lovecraft has an ability to get under more than your skin – his writing goes right to the subconscious. The unease and fear I felt is with me to this day.
I was a fan. Not the first and not the last.
I later realized that a very strange movie I had seen as a kid – The Dunwich Horror – was another Lovecraft work.
Today’s story is a short little introduction to Lovecraft’s style and themes. His most well-known works are set in a world known as The Cthulhu Mythos – which a lot of other writers have added to over the years. Some of these are very good – but nobody is able to quite duplicate Lovecraft’s ability to frighten.
After a while, as the days of waking became less and less bearable from their greyness and sameness, I would often drift in opiate peace through the valley and the shadowy groves, and wonder how I might seize them for my eternal dwelling-place, so that I need no more crawl back to a dull world stript of interest and new colours. And as I looked upon the little gate in the mighty wall, I felt that beyond it lay a dream-country from which, once it was entered, there would be no return.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.
Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.
Today’s story, for day eighteen – In the Penal Colony, by Franz Kafka
Read it online here:
Today we have another story that I have read before – I’ve read everything by Kafka I can get my grimy paws on – long ago. It is worth a re-visit, the story is more subtle and complex than it seems at first.
Kafka is considered one of the literary giants – though he barely published anything while he was alive. On his deathbed he made his best friend promise to destroy all his unpublished work. Thank goodness he didn’t. So Kafka’s fame is directly due to the betrayal of the person he trusted most.
I could not be any other way.
In the Penal Colony is about as horrific a tale as you are going to come across. Some backwater third-world tropical colony has a megalomaniacal tinpot ruler (the Old Commandant) that devises a complex and gruesome means of torture and execution. With the aid of his faithful lackey (The Officer) he goes ahead and, with great fanfare, orchestrates a reign of terror across the land.
Now, we don’t get to visit this horror in its heyday – it’s years later and the Old Commandant is long gone. However, aided by The Officer, still faithful to the abominable vision, the plague of pain and fear continues to stumble along of its own accord. None of the characters is even given a name. The central character is offended by the torture and system of rude justice – but he is so numbed it’s hard for him to do anything concrete about it. Even the intended victim doesn’t seem to care much about what is going to happen to him.
The Officer recognized that he was in danger of having his explanation of the apparatus held up for a long time. So he went to the Traveler, took him by the arm, pointed with his hand at the Condemned Man, who stood there stiffly now that the attention was so clearly directed at him—the Soldier was also pulling on his chain—and said, “The matter stands like this. Here in the penal colony I have been appointed judge. In spite of my youth. For I stood at the side of our previous Commandant in all matters of punishment, and I also know the most about the apparatus. The basic principle I use for my decisions is this: Guilt is always beyond a doubt. Other courts could not follow this principle, for they are made up of many heads and, in addition, have even higher courts above them. But that is not the case here, or at least it was not that way with the previous Commandant.
On reading the story again, despite the detailed description of the ghastly apparatus, the most horrible impression is of the bureaucratic, inhuman, machinery of abuse careening forward on its own floundering momentum. Only the degeneration of time can stop it, like it stops everything.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.
Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.
Today’s story, for day seventeen – The Veldt, by Ray Bradbury
Read it online here:
Today’s is a story I have read before – but it was so long ago I don’t remember it – so it counts as fresh. “The Veldt” was first published as “The World the Children Made” in 1950 – but it was later included in the anthology “The Illustrated Man” in 1951. I read that book as a child (and saw the movie – which “The Veldt” is in also) – so I know I’ve read it before. I do have a memory of the movie version – maybe that wiped out the written word.
At any rate, even though the story is almost seventy years old (wow!) it could be written today. The only thing that dates it are the prices – a state of the art luxury automated home cost thirty thousand dollars – the author obviously intended that to seem like a lot of money.
The story is about the evils that can befall you if you buy into luxury too much and lose sight of the real world. For these parents, the real world gets in through the artificial luxury and bites them on the ass (literally). Oh, and it’s no coincidence that the kid’s names are Peter and Wendy (as in Pan and Darling).
“Everything. Where before they had a Santa Claus now they have a Scrooge. Children prefer Santas. You’ve let this room and this house replace you and your wife in your children’s affections. This room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents. And now you come along and want to shut it off. No wonder there’s hatred here. You can feel it coming out of the sky. Feel that sun. George, you’ll have to change your life. Like too many others, you’ve built it around creature comforts. Why, you’d starve tomorrow if something went wrong in your kitchen. You wouldn’t know how to tap an egg. Nevertheless, turn everything off. Start new. It’ll take time. But we’ll make good children out of bad in a year, wait and see.”
It’s interesting to compare and contrast this story to the one from day six, The Semplica-Girl Diaries. Both are the stories of parents trying to give their children the best the world has to offer, and failing terribly. Both are brought down by their children (one set on purpose, the other as an unintended consequence) as a result of an extravagant purchase – a present – done with the best of intentions.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.
Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.
Today’s story, for day sixteen – Cinnamon, by Neil Gaiman
Cinnamon was a princess, a long time ago, in a small hot country, where everything was very old. Her eyes were pearls, which gave her great beauty, but meant she was blind. Her world was the colour of pearls: pale white and pink, and softly glowing.
After yesterday’s story, a tale ancient and local, we come to today’s – written by Neil Gaiman – another writer of local color… but his locality is the postmodern world of the internet and the graphic novel.
Cinnamon is a short work in the form of a fable. The parents of a blind and apparently mute princess offer a great reward to anyone that can find a way to get her to talk. After a few failures the challenge is taken up by the most unlikely of suitors.
It’s a well-written and entertaining read. Gaiman can’t resist an inside or sly joke when one presents itself (the reason for the princess’s quietude can be guessed before even reading the story) and that sometimes hurts the prose and obscures the point. But it does add some extra entertainment to the proceedings.
And in this day and age, nobody can afford to turn down a little extra entertainment.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.
Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.
Today’s story, for day fifteen – A White Heron, by Sarah Orne Jewett
Read it online here:
Day fifteen, halfway through. So much to read, so little time.
Today we go back into the past – A White Heron was written in 1886. Its themes, however, of city and country life, of man and nature, and of being faithful to one’s own instincts are as valid today as ever.
Sarah Orne Jewett was best known as a regional writer who produced works of “local color” describing the rural coast of Maine. The finely tuned descriptions of nature and the people of the area are the primary focus of her stories – the plot is secondary.
That’s the best way to read A White Heron – let the language take you to a specific time and place and don’t worry too much about what’s happening there.
Isn’t that among the best that a book can do?
Sylvia’s face was like a pale star, if one had seen it from the ground, when the last thorny bough was past, and she stood trembling and tired but wholly triumphant, high in the tree-top. Yes, there was the sea with the dawning sun making a golden dazzle over it, and toward that glorious east flew two hawks with slow-moving pinions. How low they looked in the air from that height when one had only seen them before far up, and dark against the blue sky. Their gray feathers were as soft as moths; they seemed only a little way from the tree, and Sylvia felt as if she too could go flying away among the clouds. Westward, the woodlands and farms reached miles and miles into the distance; here and there were church steeples, and white villages, truly it was a vast and awesome world.
The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.
Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.
Today’s story, for day fourteen – The Embassy Of Cambodia, by Zadie Smith
I played badminton a lot, for some reason, when I was a kid. When summer came along, the cheap filmy net with its too-delicate poles and always-tangled stays would come out and be pinned into the yard somewhere. We would each get a delicate racket and then the shuttlecock would fly. I never met anyone, among the hundreds that I know I played badminton with, that actually had any idea of what the rules of the game were. It didn’t matter anyway – I always seemed to live in windy climes and the motion of the shuttlecock in the air was always more random than not – no fair game was possible.
I don’t see badminton played in people’s yards anymore – they play washers or cornhole or pool volleyball. Maybe it’s a Texas thing. Sometimes, though, when I’m randomly punching channels into the remote, I see a game taking place in a professional badminton league. Professional badminton players. Professionals.
This is a strange world.
Zadie Smith is a writer, possibly the premier writer, of the immigrant experience. I know her, as you probably do, as the author of White Teeth – a touchstone novel.
Today’s story The Embassy Of Cambodia is a long short story – or a very short novel (complete with numbered chapters) that was actually published in book form after appearing in the New Yorker. It’s the harrowing story of a semi-legal immigrant housekeeper in London. She is doing the best she can to maintain a life of her own.
In a discarded Metro found on the floor of the Derawal kitchen, Fatou read with interest a story about a Sudanese “slave” living in a rich man’s house in London. It was not the first time that Fatou had wondered if she herself was a slave, but this story, brief as it was, confirmed in her own mind that she was not. After all, it was her father, and not a kidnapper, who had taken her from Ivory Coast to Ghana, and when they reached Accra they had both found employment in the same hotel. Two years later, when she was eighteen, it was her father again who had organized her difficult passage to Libya and then on to Italy—a not insignificant financial sacrifice on his part. Also, Fatou could read English—and speak a little Italian—and this girl in the paper could not read or speak anything except the language of her tribe. And nobody beat Fatou, although Mrs. Derawal had twice slapped her in the face, and the two older children spoke to her with no respect at all and thanked her for nothing. (Sometimes she heard her name used as a term of abuse between them. “You’re as black as Fatou.” Or “You’re as stupid as Fatou.”) On the other hand, just like the girl in the newspaper, she had not seen her passport with her own eyes since she arrived at the Derawals’, and she had been told from the start that her wages were to be retained by the Derawals to pay for the food and water and heat she would require during her stay, as well as to cover the rent for the room she slept in. In the final analysis, however, Fatou was not confined to the house. She had an Oyster Card, given to her by the Derawals, and was trusted to do the food shopping and other outside tasks for which she was given cash and told to return with change and receipts for everything. If she did not go out in the evenings that was only because she had no money with which to go out, and anyway knew very few people in London. Whereas the girl in the paper was not allowed to leave her employers’ premises, not ever—she was a prisoner.
On Sunday mornings, for example, Fatou regularly left the house to meet her church friend Andrew Okonkwo at the 98 bus stop and go with him to worship at the Sacred Heart of Jesus, just off the Kilburn High Road. Afterward Andrew always took her to a Tunisian café, where they had coffee and cake, which Andrew, who worked as a night guard in the City, always paid for. And on Mondays Fatou swam. In very warm water, and thankful for the semi-darkness in which the health club, for some reason, kept its clientele, as if the place were a night club, or a midnight Mass. The darkness helped disguise the fact that her swimming costume was in fact a sturdy black bra and a pair of plain black cotton knickers. No, on balance she did not think she was a slave.
On the way to her illicit swim every Monday she passes the Cambodian Embassy where she notices two people playing badminton beyond the high brick walls. They are unseen – only the shuttlecock is visible as it arcs above the barrier. In one direction it is smashed – in the other it is returned in a high, graceful arc.
And then Fatou does something terrible – she saves the life of one of her employer’s children. That upsets the whole thing – the power doesn’t work anymore. Fatou is sent packing – though somehow we feel that she will make it through OK, depending, of course, on what your definition of OK is. Yours is probably different that Fatou’s.
Bill Chance 