Forthright and penetrating (Books - Something is Out There by Richard Bausch)

Richard Bausch's new collection of stories, Something is out there. observes the strong passions of everyday life. I think his greatest skill is making what is internal - what is going on in the heart or the mind of his characters - external without our being precisely aware at the moment of the arrogance of the invasion. In the title story, the action is a kind of surreal malaise experienced by two sisters resulting from the shooting, earlier that day, of one of their husbands. As a blizzard envelops them, the two sons tend to the practical business of shoveling snow as they await the arrival of their cousin, the son of the other sister. One sister is forward-focused and a doer, the other ruminative and hysterical.

Dora wandered back into the kitchen and then on, to her room. The boys talked about shovbeling the walk again. Paula said to go ahead; it was something for them to do. She couldn't quite voice the thought - it was too ordinary, really, almost childlike - but it seemed impossible that the trauma of the afternoon's trouble and anxiety could be added to by anything serious where Christopher was concerned. The world she knew did not act that way. She wanted to say something to the boys - to tell them that the day's misfortune was sufficient, plenty enough for anyone, and surely the world would not add to all that. But then she understood the irrational nature of this line of thinking; there was not going to be anything sensible or logical about this day. She felt a little freezing current of air under her heart, and tried to concentrate on watching the boys shovel the walk again. They barely made any headway.

How subtly and exactly he captures that wandery, threatening, other-wordly atmosphere of a confrontation with mortality - the aftermath of the storm of adrenalin, the sense-making exercises the mind engages in. Bausch doesn't write what Paula thought but rather what she doesn't think, but what sits at the edge of her mind behind her actions. Nor does he litter his prose with the predictable 'she thought to herself.' Instead he observes what people do, what they say, the idiosyncratic content of a sensory detail that comes to their awareness, and the understandings they then possess out of these experiences. That "freezing current of air under her heart," how perfect and precise a physical detail. A winter storm inside to match the winter storm outside.

Bausch catches the odd moment, the kind that we become aware of in the moment that we will never forget all our lives.

I found "One Hour in The History of Love" the most unusualof the stories. Written in the present tense, it observes the commerce of relationships of 3 groups of people - 1 newly wed (and newly pregnant) couple sitting at a cafe table with their friends, also a couple, but at a more jaded stage in their relationship. At an adjacent table sits another couple, a writer, his fiancee, and a self-absorbed photographer she used to assist. An elderly couple sits in a coffee shop on the corner of the same block as the cafe. Beginnings, middles, and ends of the life cycle eddy around this block, interacting with the chief creative acts of life - art-making (in the writer and photographer), life making (in the grown children of the elderly couple and the nascent child in the newly wed's womb), and loving. These three forces exist in three adjoining dramas which affect each other but never intentionally interact.

"Give me a call before you leave town," Benjamin says to them both. "We could sit out on my balcony and share a bottle of wine." He realizes, as he speaks, how lonely this makes him sound, and as he tries to find something else to say, some words indicating with the proper amount of casualness that others would also be there, Jesse cuts him off. "We'll do that, you bet," he says in the tone of someone already forgetting the invitation, and walking away with his lovely woman on his arm, and his obvious pride in being happy, in love. Benjamin walks down the sidewalk, past an old man - the same old man, he realizes, that he had seen earlier - who comes storming by him with that rickety walk, hands shoved down in his pockets. The whole world is bright sun, and the man's eyes are narrow, furious, the mouth deeply frowning.

What a masterful conflagration of detail, like an episodic stage play in which the summing of unrelated scenes creates a complex drama that the participants aren't event aware of.

I think my favorite of the stories was "Overcast," in which Elaine, a waitress at a diner, lives in the aftermath of her divorce. The business of the story is her taking refuge in writing and listening to opera, her brewing and serving of coffee, her visiting her mother, but its action is her dawning realization of her own loneliness. The story has a quiet arc, a penetrating insight, and forthright diction. Those are the qualities I have come most to admire in this, the first Bausch volume I have read. I am tempted to try a novel by him next - any suggestions?
Here are my other posts on Something is out there 1, 2.

Information storage and replication - adaptive and maladaptive (Books - The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing & Something is Out There)

I wrote in my last post on Richard Dawkin's fine collection of science writing of hypothesis testing - a part of the scientific method which helps us to build our body of knowledge about the world through disciplined comparison. This is how it works. Scientists pit a hypothesis that says that what they think is not true (the null hypothesis) against an alternate hypothesis (their own). For example, if the scientist is testing the effect of a drug to cure the common cold, he might take two groups of people with nasty colds, give one the drug and the other a sugar pill. His claim might be that those who took his drug will sneeze fewer times a day than those who took the sugar pill. His 'null hypothesis' would state that there will be no difference between the two groups - that both will sneeze the same number of times after taking the pill. This is the result he does not want. If his experiment is successful, he cannot prove his hypothesis per se, because no one can test every instance of something, but what the scientist can do is reject the null hypothesis to some degree of certainty. It is up to not just this probability,but also to the experimental design to say that the reason the sneezing decreased was the drug and not something else.  Our experimental design would have to account for other explanations, such as the fact that the cold ended naturally on its own - something science calls controlling the experiment.

Why would scientists work so hard to try to address an explanation other that the one we want? There are two reasons: one protects against our influencing the outcome in subtle ways in our experiment because we want success so badly (scientists fall prey to the same psychological pitfalls as any other human). The second is is one of logic and safety. Say you wanted to reach some books on a very high shelf and you had no ladder, but there was some wood, a hammer, and a few nails. You build a 4-step step-stool but you have no aluminum braces and only a single nail for each join. Would you a) proudly throw your finished stool down in front of the right spot on the shelf and jump on up to the top step, standing on your toes to reach that book as soon as it was finished or would you b) put some weight on it with your hands first, testing the stool before climbing on it? If you are like a scientist, you will opt for the second choice, preferring to break the stool you made with your hands than to impulsively leap to the top step and risk breaking your neck .  It is more logical to attempt to break the stool safely than it is to assume that it is functional because you would like that book on the top shelf so badly. It is not that we want the stool to break, it is that we want to know with a great deal of certainty that it will not. So we try to break it by putting at least as much pressure on it as it would likely withstand under typical us.

That long explanation of hypothesis testing was a preamble to a point I wanted to make inspired by another couple of excerpts Dawkins chose in The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, these by biologist Francis Crick and zoologist Matt Ridley. That is: scientists are good at doing other things too. One strength of a great creative-scientific mind is the way it can use its body of accumulated knowledge together with its unique perspective to see patterns in the world that others have not seen. This begins with a sentence from Watson and Crick's 1953 paper on DNA:

'It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.'

The quality of mind that enabled Watson and Crick to race ahead of their laboratory-based rival Rosalind Franklin is well demonstrated by that sentence, and it is shown again in the extract I have chosen from Crick's book Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (1981). Watson and Crick were not only concerned with finding out how things actually are - although that was of course their ultimate goal. They also kept in mind the way DNA ought to be if it was to do its job as the genetic molecule, and this gave them a short cut, which was ignored by the painstaking Rosalind Franklin...it is in general true that deep cogitation on the way nature ought to be constitutes a good prelude to the eventual investigation of the way it actually is. Only a prelude, however: the ultimate test of an idea is not its elegance but how will it explains reality.

So creative scientists are also good at something that might be called informed musing. In fact most creative people of all kind are. I might add to Dawkins cautionary concluding sentence that a responsible reporter of science will always let you know which they are doing - testing a hypothesis or musing.

I have not read Matt Ridley's 1999 book Genome, but Dawkins describes its creative structure - 23 chapters, one for each of our chromosomes, each chapter extrapolating upon a theme inspired by what is known about the functions of that chromosome. If the excerpt is any indication, this makes for some rich cross-fertilization among genres. In the case of this chapter it is biology, physics, and information processing. The short chapter careens from Erasmus Darwin's 1794 prediction that living filaments may be shared precursor to all organic lifeforms - an amazing notion for its day! To the idea that lifeforms, unlike closed systems which proceed from states of order (requiring more energy) to states of chaos (requiring less),

...build packets of order and complexity called bodies but at the cost of expending large amounts of energy. In Erwin Schrodinger's phrase, living creature 'drink orderliness' from the environment.

Isn't that fantastic? He goes on to connect the building of a body with the need for information. That information must be storable (the DNA of our genome) and must be both readable and replicable. Less than two pages later, Ridley speaks of the year 1943 as the time when diverse ingredients began to coalesce in a way that would eventually transform how we know our world. Here is what I mean by a unique mind being able, through its own peculiar fund of knowledge and its uniquely creative disposition, to see what no one else can. Ridley writes of what Watson and Crick were up to, the tortures Josef Mengele was enacting at Auschwitz, the work of Oswald Avery that prefigured the connection of DNA to heredity, and the brilliant Alan Turing, who was creating a computation machine that also could store information, modify it, read it to enact functions, and replicate it. What Ridley sees and writes of with panache is the excitement in disparate disciplines that prefigured the connecting of biological code to heredity. It's a visionary discourse that exemplifies what I wrote of in the last post inspired by Dawkins's collection, that strong feeling precedes scientific inquiry.

I have also continued my travels with another unique mind - that of Richard Bausch - in his latest story collection, Something is Out There. "Son and Heir" is a devastating portrait of dissolution of the aimless son of a college president. Lyndhurst, the son, is a pitiable character whose combination of pride and inherent mistrust leads him to make a series poor judgments. This mistrust is predicated on his having witnessed his respected father's infidelity toward his mother alongside the public continuance of their marriage - a hypocritical facade - to which Lyndhurst has developed over time his own facade of not caring. Here too we see information stored and replicated, this time in a maladaptive pattern, no doubt initially developed to protect Lyndhurst from hurt but, in the long run he is never able to modify his mistrustful picture of the world so that he might experience it as a place where effect can predictably follow cause. Bausch's portrait of Lyndhurst's anxiety and hurt are set in the context of the great power failure during the intense heatwave the Eastern half of the U.S. experienced several summers ago. He cooks them to the boil.

Particulars in ordinary worlds versus ordinariness in extremis - (Books: Something is out There by Richard Bausch & Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay)

I dipped into two fiction books this weekend, one Richard Bausch's new collection of short stories Something is out there. and the former bestseller by Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah's Key. They couldn't be more different.

Bausch's narrative voice is patient, gentle, clearly of the South. His subject matter quotidian heartbreak - the strain in a marriage between an older and a younger artist, the selfless gesture of a son towards his dying mother, the adulterous adventure of a reverends wife.

Keeping strictly to the early-morning ritual, Diana prepared coffee, boiled one egg and lightly buttered two slices of toast for him, then put cereal on for the girls, and went and dressed for the day, while they ate. When they were finished, she rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. In the usual rush, she saw the twins off to school, brushing Lauren's hair for her, nagging Kelly about brushing her teeth thoroughly to get the food particles that had lodged in her braces. All as usual. So much the exact pattern of her mornings. The ordinariness of it made her happy, and it surprised her. It also increased her sense of unreality.

The economy of this opening paragraph is a pleasure. We know Diana's day is structured, regular, but not a burden. That Diana's husband is a creature of habit, a reserved man - one egg, the toast lightly buttered - I call up the picture of an English parson. We also know that this will not be a typical day, but we don't know why, and so Bausch has created suspense in a scene of the most familiar ordinariness. Bausch fashions a world that is familiar almost to the point of cliche, but rescued from that fate by its being particular to individual lives. He accomplishes this through the use of detail. Each of the three worlds of his I have entered so far envelops me in its totality. We get to know its key citizens, usually just two or three people, very intimately. We go deep, not broad. The kind of encounter I leave feeling it has been of value.

Contrast this with the bestseller, Sarah's Key. Two alternating narratives, one set in 1942 as Paris's Jews are rounded up by their own police, one of many episodes in France's embarrassing Vichy past that had been swept under the carpet for many years. The other set in 2002 Paris, as an American journalist, who is married to a Parisian, takes ownership of an apartment originally inhabited by one of those Parisians who were shipped off to Auschwitz in 1942. De Rosnay tries for distinct voices - there is a third-person narrator in 1942, but one focused on the character of a young girl. This makes for a combination of omniscience and innocence that sounds awkward to the ear in a way that has yet to resolve itself sixty pages in. In 2002, we read the first-person voice of the American journalist, Julia. This tries for a relaxed, contemporary tone peppered with confessional detail about her marriage to Bertrand and her friendship with two cool gay fellows that I care nothing about, having not the slightest idea who she is, as well as awkward dialogue from her 11-year-old daughter.

Bertrand waved to us, then pointed to the phone, lowering his eyebrows and scowling.

"Like he can't get that person off the phone," scoffed Zoe. "Sure."

Zoe was only eleven, but it sometimes felt like she was already a teenager. First, her height, which dwarfed all her girlfriends - as well as her feet, she would add grimly...

Was this written for the Disney channel? "Like he can't get that person off the phone?" Like I can believe this sentence is being spoken by a Parisian 11-year-old who is continually 'scoffing' and 'adding grimly' - can she never simply 'say' anything? "First, her height, which dwarfed all her girlfriends - as well as her feet" Second, which comes after first, this is not a sentence. And, if I read this correctly, did her feet dwarf all her girlfriends?

Ms. de Rosnay also makes the unfortunate choice to use Zoe to give less cultured readers the basics in French everyday life:

"I have to go," I said. "Meeting with Joshua."

"What do we do with Zoe?" asked Bertrand.

Zoe rolled her eyes.

"I can, like, take a bus back to Montparnasse."

"What about school?" said Bertrand.

Roll of eyes again.

"Papa! It's Wednesday. No school on Wednesday afternoons, remember?

Bertrand scratched his head.

"In my days it - "

"It was on Thursday, no school on Thursdays," Chanted Zoe.

"Ridiculous french education system," I sighed. "And school on Saturday mornings to boot!"

School on Wednesday not on Thursday. Got it. Glad we got that exposition out of the way. I keep waiting for Mickey Rooney to run on from behind a curtain and sing a number.

The chapters are of Disneyfied length, I guess that is so that the Americans can trot off to the kitchen between them to get popcorn and sugared soft drinks and maintain their status as the leader of stupidity and obesity in the Western world, while not forgetting who anyone is. So far the structure is predictable and the prose is the most ungainly I have read in a good long while. I am interested by the Vichy occupation and I have heard that the plot is a killer, so I will try to stay with this book a bit longer. I can only guess that its popularity has to do with the fact that no one could tell a well written book from a poorly written one when the subject was the holocaust. Or maybe it was Oprahed?

Short stories, short dresses (Opera - Salome with Karita Mattila)

The short story seems to be poking its head up everywhere these days. First C.B.'s challenge this past month. Then Kate's post on Friday, featured an essay by Steven Millhauser that I assumed was in some book of his essays.

The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the universe.

It turns out it is in today's New York Times Book Review and is a clever appreciation. Kate links to the entire essay.

Mark Thwaite posted on Friday from an address by the late David Foster Wallace about the humor of Kafka, but much of what I took away was about the story form in general.

...great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication theorists sometimes call "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve....

Mark links to the entire piece. The way Wallace puts together words is fierce and incisive, I love the high standards he has for readers as well as writers.

Yesterday The Ragazzo and I saw the Met's fairly recent production of Richard Strauss's Salome. I always appreciate the Met's orchestra's playing of early 20th century music. Conductor Patrick Summers and the orchestra made gorgeously lush dissonnance. The contemporary production by Jurgen Flimms thankfully spared us from the awful quasi-1950s-bad bibilical-hollywood-epic aesthetic that usually graces more "traditional" productions of this opera. This production is the first I have ever seen that gets that the famous Dance of the Seven Veils is not a balletic interlude in which good dance and choreography are necessary to entertain us until we can get back to the singing, it is part of the drama in which Salome baldly mocks Herod's lust for her by doing a striptease. But this production belongs to Karita Mattila, the Finnish-born soprano and consummate stage-creature whose impressive feat is not the literal stripping of her clothes but the emotional full monty she is willing to do. Most of the rest of the cast are simply not at her level and either Flimm or the Met's staff directors remounting the production are unable or unwilling to see when the cast members are not even pretending to do what the text and the drama say they are doing. That or they don't have enough time to find good solutions. For example, Herod sings about the coldness and heat he feels and the sounds he hears when he begins to panic after Salome asks for the prophet Johanaan's head. But Kim Begley merely sings the words. Nothing happens to him as it would to any human being being frightened by the fact that he is having an unfamiliar experience and no one else around him seems to be also be having it. Even the simplest stage-craft types problems seem to be ignored. When Salome climbs down from a scaffold (in a white satin dress and heels) a couple of members of the court stand by the ladder to assist her in her descent (sensibly). However, they appear to know that she needs help only by telepathy, nothing was communicated to them by Salome or anyone else on stage. It is this sheer laziness of stage craft that I see time and again at the Met, that peppers their fanciest and even most astute productions with needless moments of amateurness. This pulls any audience member attentive to story or to the logical progression of human behavior right out of the action. Opera does not have to be unbelievable, but lack of attentiveness to detail will assure you that it will be.

Back to the highlight of this production - Karita Mattila, she plays Salome as an entitled brat, a sort-of 1930s Hollywood babydoll who, when she gets into her head that she wants Johanaan simply will not have it any other way. She is simpering, she is willful, but most of all she is bereft of love and is deeply sick because she can never have enough. Never mind the bare necessities of this role from a sheer vocal standpoint - octave plus intervals to jump, lush orchestrations to soar above on high sustained notes - Matilla has the technical chops, but a good performance asks for way more than that. She climbs that scaffolding like a gymnast, does a full split, she bumps and grinds, she stamps her feet like a child throwing a tantrum, she yells her head off in frustration, she lies on her back with her head hanging off the edge of the stage singing parts of the last scene and she does it all looking and sounding like a goddess and making her music sound inevitable. It is interesting to me that so much emphasis is placed on Salome being attractive. I suppose superficial beauty is desirable to make Herod's lust for her believable, but really Salome is alone and her desperation over that makes her horrific and unattractive. Mattila is willing to go there and it is that kind of nakedness on stage that I prize and that makes this performance such an intense and memorable one. This production is going to be simulcast HD to many movie theatres across the country next Saturday. If you are a little wary of twentieth century opera, Salome is a good introduction because it is short - under two hours, here is a link to the Met's website with information about the simulcast.

Now on from necrophilia to an unbelievable amount of reading on protein synthesis and, if I get the time, I'm going to make some middle eastern tomato soup with cumin, lemon and cilantro.

Bukowskian revelry (Books - The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'Ambrosio)

I continue to be impressed by the battered little worlds Charles D'Ambroiso conjures up in his short story collection The Dead Fish Museum.

We angled our heads back and opened our mouths like fledgling birds. Smoke gave the cool air a faintly burned flavor, an aftertaste of ash. A single flake lit on my wife's eyelash, a stellar crystal, cold and intricate. I blew a warm breath over her face, melting the snow.

I felt like I knew so much about the relationship between these two people at the end of this, the opening paragraph of Up North, and yet D'Ambrosio had written nothing explicit. In it the odd balance of this relationship between a husband and wife unfolds as we learn of the woman's rape, and see her husband try to function in the machismo-driven world of the womans' father, brother and cronies. It is a grotesque meeting of bravado, of promiscuity, and of a wish for intimacy.

The Scheme of Things is the story of two down-and-out scam artists and is an oddly tender and even sweet little tale. The title story is in a bleak, Bukowskian vein. A man gets out of prison and finds project carpentry work on a pornographic film. The stunning writing and the grimy, disturbed mileu make for an odd marriage.

Behind a thick sheet of acrylic, the desk clerk's face rushed up at him; it spread and blurred, white and without features, but never seemed to reach the surface. Ramage leaned forward and looked through a circle in the slab of glass, cut like a hole in ice. On the counter was a dinner plate with chicken bones and a few grains of rice hardening in brown gravy, and next to the plate was the splayed and broken spine of a romance. The clerk had been working over the chicken, cracking the bones and sucking the marrow. Her hair was tin and her teeth were leaning gray ruins in her lipless mouth. Her blue eyes were milky and vague, the pupils tiny beads of black. Ramage could not imagine a youth for her - it was as if she'd been born fully ruined...

God that's good.

The penultimate tale, Blessing, is like many in this book, one of a person finding themselves in a duo of some kind - a marriage, a friendship, a father-son relationship - but I mean in this case - really finding themselves. These stories seem to be acts of discovery that come upon the characters in the midst of the mess of daily living. I guess one could say they are insights. And in that way they are, I suppose, moments of brightness, or at least of clarity, though that doesn't mean that they necessarily look very 'nice.' But that is, I feel, the value of the experience of reading them - that and the sheer beauty of D'Ambrosio's language - it is revelry.

Story of the day

Sheila posts some of her own writing today...well she's always posting her own writing, but this is her WRITING... a story called Enter Sandman. It is a relentless tumble down the page (screen), head on over and read it.