A Gem of a Short Story

From the book I'm reading, Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davies.

"Enlightened"

I don't know if I can remain friends with her. I've thought and thought about it -- she'll never know how much. I gave it one last try. I called her, after a year. But I didn't like the way the conversation went. The problem is that she is not very enlightened. Or, I should say, she is not enlightened enough for me. She is nearly 50 years old and no more enlightened, as far as I can see, than when I first knew her twenty years ago, when we mainly talked about men. I did not mind how unenlightened she was then, maybe because I was not so enlightened myself. I believe I am more enlightened now, and certainly more enlightened than she is, although I know it's not very enlightened to say that. But I want to say it, so I am willing to postpone being more enlightened myself so that I can still say a thing like that about a friend.

And the cover is brilliant. It looks faded, but with a perfect photograph of a fly; it is so perfect that the clerk at the library was startled, and tried to brush it off.

Unfocused

"But life changes on a dial, in a garden, a clinking of beetle wings, a shrimp bush and dry pink petals of chinese lanterns dangling. Once I thought: I'll just plant things until there's no time to be afraid. But storms are furious in their own way, green lightning and bullets as big as hail in the desert, as frogs."
-- Taken from "Attempts At A Life" by Danielle Dutton.

I Can Leave My Attic Now

I have a photo of a group of friends, 12 minutes before a big final exam in December of my first semester in graduate school. There are 16 people in the picture, 11 of whom are no longer here. Only three left with their intended degree. The rest are "drop-outs."

Drop-out? Isn't that the kid who dropped out of high school, is living at home and working at Payless Shoe Source to pay his cell-phone bill? No. These drop-outs are all living fabulous lives: enoying fun jobs in big cities, getting married, making large sums of money, and having babies. They are making what my friend K. calls "Life Progress."

I'm not a drop-out; I just finished my fifth year of graduate school. Yet, I'm the loser. I have $607.40 in my checking account. I'm an unmarried homeowner with a greying dog, an empty refrigerator, and unfinished knitting projects. My front lawn hasn't been mowed in two weeks. I haven't called my mother today.

Still, things are looking up. The boyfriend mowed the backyard just before he left for his summer internship. I have a paper draft for a paper deadline that just got postponed one week. If I squint hard enough, I can kind-of-sort-of see a small light at the end of this tunnel.

So says Annie Proulx in "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World."

The main thing in life was staying power. That was it: stand around long enough, you'd get to sit down.

Learning to write

I'm currently working on three papers. On one, I'm second author. I'm mentoring the junior first-author on writing research papers. It's been a long process, but we've got a working draft, and I'm seeing the reward of mentoring.

I've noticed that my first author suffers from the "Cheever Fever" that Ethan Canin describes in his essay, "Smallness and Invention." He wants to make great, poetic conclusions, but does so without giving his reader any concrete details. Canin points out the following passage from Cheever's "The Pot of Gold,"

... Alice strode to the door, opened it, and went out. A woman came in, a stranger looking for the toilet. Laura lighted a cigarette and waited in the bedroom for about ten minutes before she went back to the party. The Holinsheads had gone. She got a drink and sat down and tried to talk, but she couldn't keep her mind on what she was saying.

The hunt, the search for money that had seemed to her natural, amiable, and fair when they first committed themselves to it, now seemed like a hazardous and piratical voyage. She had thought, earlier in the evening, of the missing. She thought now of the missing again. Adversity and failure accounted for more than half of them, as if beneath the amenities in the pretty room a keen race were in progress, in which the loser's forfeits were extreme. Laura felt cold. She picked the ice out of her drink with her fingers and put it in a flower vase, but the whiskey didn't warm her. She asked Ralph to take her home.

Of this passage, Canin gives insight,

I discovered two things: first, that Cheever's great, epiphanic leaps were almost invariably preceded (and followed, it turned out) by paragraphs that accumulated small, accurate detail.

I'll leave it to you to read the rest of the essay, which appears in The Eleventh Draft.

* * *

Mentoring my first author does not mean that I know how to write well. I realized I couldn't write when I was 16. I got a "C" grade on my first essay for my American History course. Devastation. Through the rest of the semester, the teacher tried to cure my own Cheever Fever. He fought against my long sentences; encouraged me to write like Hemmingway instead of Faulkner.

(True, good Faulkner is good. Badly imitated Faulkner is criminal.)


I'm editing my own article today. I see that I still have bouts of Cheever Fever. Take a look at these "Before and After" edits:

*

B: "The current media climate surrounding the issue of declining enrollment and lack of diversity in the sciences ought to peak the interest of today's scientists and educators."

(Pique. As Inigo would say, "I do not think that word means what you think it means")

A: "The faces of today's computer science community do not reflect those of the larger global community."

*

B: "we highlight the means by which participants were initially attracted..."
A: "we highlight how participants were initially attracted..."

* * *

To the delight of my friend Moira, I'm also learning how to use a semicolon. Trimble says, "If you can replace your semicolon with a period, your construction is OK, but if you can't, substitute a comma for it."