We’re not going at this systematically, just passionately. Natalie says that examining Away is like standing on a tapestry, stunned by jewel tones, so it’s hard to know which threads to scrutinize first. I think this will become the Away blog for awhile. Not systematic. Just passionate. Pulling one thread at a time.

Here’s the official Random House summary, which is no substitute for the book.

Here is the first paragraph in its entirety (page 1 happens to be a page we looked at last night):

It is always like this: The best parties are made by people in trouble.

I love what she dangles before us in that first line: people in trouble. If there’s one thing I want to read about—

And here are the first two sentences of a second paragraph that could almost fill a page:

There are one hundred and fifty girls lining the sidewalk outside the Goldfadn Theatre. They spill into the street and down to the corners and Lillian Leyb, who has spent her first thirty-five days in this country ripping stitches out of navy silk flowers until her hands were dyed blue, thinks that it is like an all-girl Ellis Island: American-looking girls chewing gum, kicking their high heels against the broken pavement, and girls so green they’re still wearing fringed brown shawls over their braided hair.

Such urgency, right up front. Spill, spent, rip, dye, chew, kick. Girls, crowded together, hungry for work. But here’s the part Natalie and I are trying to understand: How, in two sentences, does Bloom sweep across so much time and space?

Here’s what she packs into Sentences 2 & 3 of the book. It’s like fitting a taxicab into a suitcase:

Lillian is a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe or Russia (her name, and the theatre’s, tell me this). In five weeks she’s been working hard not just at sewing but also at keenly marking the differences between girls with the shtetl in their clothes and hair, and girls who’ve shed it. Bloom shows me that Lillian has sharp eyes, because of how she notices detail. She shows that Lillian’s mind works as fast as her seamstress-hands, because of how data from the Bloom/Lillian POV comes flying obliquely at me.

Which is to say that Natalie and I have opened the suitcase and examined the taxicab but we can’t quite figure how Amy Bloom got it in there, or how to pack such a bag ourselves.

Here is another example of sweep, this time from the brief POV of Frieda, the cousin with whom Lillian lives (p. 13).

She would not ask to bargain with Italians every month for the privilege of doing piecework in her apartment, but she sees it all as part of the great ladder upward. She feels the smooth, pale wood under her hands, she sees her feet settled firmly beneath her; she dreams almost every night of her spiritual home, Fifth Avenue, and she is strolling with her friends, well-dressed women flashing silk ankles and strapped shoes, accepting compliments from handsome, prosperous, cigar-smoking men (clean-shaven, well-spoken men), climbing the polished marble steps to her brownstone, in which Frieda waltzes from room to room, skirt flaring as she catches a glimpse of the gleaming porcelain fixtures in her modern bathroom…

This sent me to my beloved first printing (not first edition) of Mystery and Manners, in which Flannery O’Connor analyzes that now-famous sentence about Emma Bovary playing the piano. Flaubert wrote:

Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.

Flannery, describing what Flaubert pulled off, might have been speaking of Bloom and Frieda:

The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it. At one end of it, we are with Emma and this very solid instrument “whose strings buzzed,” and at the other end of it we are across the village with this very concrete clerk and his list slippers.

Critical, says Flannery, because “Flaubert had to create a believable village to put Emma in.”

Just so with Frieda: At at one end we are bargaining with the Italians for piecework, and at the other we are on Fifth Avenue with “silk ankles” and a porcelain sink, and the result is the believable city of poverty, striving, and wealth in which Lillian Leyb has landed.

Don’t worry; there will not be a quiz. I write this stuff because I’m obsessed.

L

Label, labia, labile, labored, laconic, lair, lambent, lame, language, lapel, lapels, largely, largess, lash, lashed, latter, laud…

Oh, stop nodding off. Could it be that the list is true, that it’s hard to use lapels without resorting to grabbing by and boutonnieres and other clichés (“resorting to cliché” being itself unforgiveable; forgive me), that lambent works too hard, that lashes are predictably long and dark unless you sear them off in an explosion?

These 17 pages open a book that may remain fantastically obscure—Words, by Andy Devine—and not just because the cover has about as much visual presence as a cloud.

Devine is to writer Michael Kimball what de Selby was to Flann O’Brien in The Third Policeman: an invented genius, exceedingly bizarre. (My mentor, Jim Krusoe, said of The Third Policeman: “This book is so good it’ll make you want to pee in your pants,” a line I stole for a story. And he was right.) Devine, a “conceptual fictional writer” and alphabetical essayist, writes novels and stories, then implodes them into lists of words and punctuation marks. Rigorous about revision, he whittles a couple down to their titles. His life’s work is the subject of much study. (Surprised?) Accordingly, Kimball, as editor, adds to this collection a scholarly afterword, quoting from rare Devine interviews; and I am amazed to find myself joyful over the whole thing.

Here is a snatch of commentary on two lists that launch the book, the second, of course, being “Words That Should Be Used In Fiction, a Selection.”

Of course, these were not essays in a traditional sense. They were both simply lists of words, but it was clear that the lists of words collected into an argument that was an implicit critique of fiction. Devine confirms this in the Maday interview (2009): “I’m talking about these words in relation to fiction. Nonfiction is another matter.”

This feels like getting my brain rubbed right through the dura mater.

Okay, so this is really not you. You are not vastly amused by Devine’s theory that “word choice was one of  the intial points of failure for so much fiction and that by avoiding certain words that failure could be avoided, or at least delayed.”

May I then recommend nine pages in the middle titled “A Grammar For Fiction Writers,” which is not a grammar at all; it is the author speaking truth to writers, with periodic rants about punctuation. It’s in list form, of course. The first line got me out of the apartment this morning to do my pages in a coffee shop, and may become one of my mantras, which is more than worth the $8 cost of the book.

Herewith, a Selection.

Fiction writers are only fiction writers when they are writing fiction.

Fiction must be rendered. Revision creates art.

Every work of fiction can be improved.

It is important for the fiction writer to have a sense of purpose even if that sense of purpose cannot save the fiction writer.

The reader should never know what the next sentence is going to be.

And just to keep you off balance:

Words with prepositions in them—downstairs, downtown, inside, outside, upstairs—are good words. Write fiction about people going inside, outside, upstairs, etc.

I don’t really get that, I don’t even agree with it, but the book made me bizarrely happy. Revision creates art—oh yes. Back to work.

This is what I know about myself: the safest thing I can do is take a risk, while the riskiest thing for me is to play it safe.

–from Poet Mom, the blog of poet January Gill O’Neil, author of Underlife

Perversely, when I am several months into writing a story, or several years into a book, I stall. And not just stall. I flee. This happens just as the thing starts to seem like a genuine piece of narrative—albeit still a rambling piece of crud, but one that might soon start to crystalize.

It would be lovely to think that my subconscious is saying, Honey, just let the manuscript percolate for a few months. But I’m suspicious. I think dread of some kind is involved. Dread of failure? Fear of success? Whatever’s going on down there in the writer’s basement, I’m playing it safe, taking no risks: not writing. And the manuscript, far from percolating, becomes a distant object.

I have marvelous excuses. An intensive book tour. Can’t write in hotel rooms; bad ergonomics kill my hands. A friend’s chemo, necessitating a two-week trip. Another friend’s novel, which I line-edited with much pleasure for two weeks. My mom’s fourth hospitalization (involving more dog therapy, of course—that’s Pippin in dreamy splendor at the foot of the bed) and my six-week relocation to L.A.: Who could work? I’m never home; it’s a theme. My shiny new blog. There’s more; shall I keep going?

In Santa Monica’s Diesel bookstore this evening I was amazed to see, as if for the first time, that some writers come out with books on a regular basis and some do not, and that I really have only two choices for my sparse free hours and bad hands: blog-email-Facebook (which has brought many new writers into my world), or work on the terrifying half-done novel. In Diesel, finally, I saw it as a choice—for now, at least, after five months of book-travel and caregiving. And so I hope to unplug, though not to a Luddite extent, and get back in near-daily touch with the novel. I feel almost Seussian about this vow: I will write it on a train, I will write it in the rain, I will write it in my bed, I will write it in my head.  Most important, I promise to take the risk of writing it on the bad days.

(Dog therapists trained and provided by the nonprofit Love on 4 Paws.)

Enslaved is not a word I lightly use; it’s up there on the shelf with holocaust. Yet the entwining of brutality and beauty to create an intangible bond was so heady, and so closely tied to fiction in some way, that the clause has stayed with me for decades.

It came back to me several times recently. This week I discovered In the Library, a perfume from the company CB, whose credo includes: “I hate perfume.” The fragrance In the Library is redolent of

English Novel taken from a Signed First Edition of one of my very favorite novels, Russian & Moroccan leather bindings, worn cloth and a hint of wood polish.

It costs $65. O, I am dying to try this one; so far I’ve only admired the typography on the label, online.

And then there is the far more narcotic odor that rises straight from the page.

I’m still rereading—with exquisite slowness while my mom marvelously recovers—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. From chapter 4 (trust me, I am far beyond chapter 4 by now):

He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.

At this my wrists start throbbing, and I type “last paragraph of The Dead” into Google and find:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Don’t you love the resonance? Can you smell the ink and yellowed paper yet? (Will you and I both order In the Library and recognize each other in the supermarket by scent?) I’m going to guess, in my ignorance, that Joyce wrote the Portrait paragraph first—but for an earlier manuscript that he called Stephen Hero. Set the record straight if you know.

By now, I’m scrolling down this blog called Falling Faintly to read other marvelous last paragraphs, including some Denis Johnson, for which many thanks, and also another example of repetition that seems to stream from Joyce through Faulkner to McCarthy, genetically speaking; Mendel with his peas would have been entranced.

The Last Paragraph of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling all at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

Warning: Page perfume can cause delusional behavior at the keyboard.

Last summer, for a six-week spell, I was reading part of Ulysses (with a group, and a study guide) simultaneously with The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying (with a class at Politics & Prose). Between Benjy, Bloom and the maddened Darl, the scents rising from those three sets of pages so infected my brain that I wrote two new chapters for my novel-in-progress in a kind of stream-of-consciousness. Then (insert head-smack here) I sent them to my agent. Yes, I did. Go ahead and feel smug. Two months went by. Being deaf to subtlety, I phoned.

“I didn’t understand them,” she said. “You weren’t telling a story anymore.”

Joyce tells stories. Faulkner tells stories. Landis, apparently, was blethering.

I still believe in trying anything, but also in sleeping on it, and being rigorous about clarity and story. I trashed the chapters, began groping my way back to Story and my own voice.

It’s all hard, isn’t it?

Don’t be put off that the piece starts with Elmore Leonard, whose ten rules you read nine years ago in The New York Times. (Does he sound more sonorous in The Guardian? I didn’t spot the word hooptedoodle this time.)

Anyway, the UK reporter kept working the proverbial phones, reaching Annie Proulx and many others. A few favorites:

Roddy Doyle

Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.

Geoff Dyer

Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary.

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

Anne Enright

Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.

Jonathan Franzen

The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than “The Metamorphosis.”

You see more sitting still than chasing after.

Zadie Smith

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

And two resources from my own stash:

Janet Fitch keeps a weather journal, and says why on her blog:

It’s hard to remember February when you’re sweltering in the firepit of August.  I couldn’t invent the dinnerplate sized rosettes of sempervium swollen with rain in a rock wall, or the slow purposeful bees visiting the white lantana, this liquid warbling of songbirds–mockingbirds, robins!

She goes on:

I do the weather to stay tuned to the phenomenon of the real world.  Reality is not virtual.  The weather is everything–-time of day, light and shadow, scent, textures and patterns, sound, the three dimensions, distance, what’s blooming, what’s bare…and how I feel this morning, after rain…

And here are links to four (written) fiction lectures by Michael Kimball on HTML Giant. I love that Michael quotes writers like Gary Lutz and  Sam Lipsyte. Here’s the beginning of Story & Plot:

“Fuck the plot.” Edna O’Brien says that in a Paris Review interview. She then goes on to say this: “What matters is the imaginative truth.” I don’t know what she means, exactly, by “imaginative truth,” but I can imagine what she means.

It reminds me of something that somebody told me Rick Whitaker said: “Plot tells you how their life turns out. What the fuck do I care about how their life turns out? I want to know their heart.”

And that reminds me of this quote from Andy Devine: “We all know how the story ends. If you have the baby, then the baby will die. If you fall in love, then the love will end.”

I care deeply about story. But I love these quotes, and pre-ordered Andy Devine’s book, Words. No, I was not remotely influenced by the fact that Andy Devine and Michael Kimball are the same smart, generous and enviably productive person.

I have a bunch of readings coming up fast—in in LA, SF, DC, Charlottesville, and AWP in Denver. It would be lovely to see friends.

We also had a poetry therapist. My friend Heather Hartley, whose debut collection, Knock Knock, just came out, emailed a poem every other day for me to read aloud. Dear Heather, I could not wrap my tongue around e. e. cummings’s “I was sitting in mcsorley’s.” (Sample verse: he’s a palping wreaths of badly Yep cigars who jim him why gluey grins topple together eyes pout gestures stickily point made glints squinting who’s a wink bum-nothing and money fuzzily mouths take big wobbly foot)

But the next day’s poem delightfully fit the dog party that took place in Room 2292: two therapy dogs in the room at once. Turns out the dog therapists visit schools, too, where children with reading difficulties–kids who can barely read aloud in class–will happily struggle with a book if Moe or Jasmine is listening to their efforts in a quiet corner. Stammer all you want, you will never get a harsh word from a golden Lab.

Get Drunk!

by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters; that’s our one imperative need.  So as not to feel Time’s horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you down, you must get drunk without ceasing.

But what with? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.

And if, at some time, on the steps of a palace, in the green grass of a ditch, in the bleak solitude of your room, you are waking up when drunkenness has already abated, ask the wind, the wave, a star, the clock, all that which flees, all that which groans, all that which rolls, all that which sings, all that which speaks, ask them what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will reply: “It is time to get drunk! So that you may not be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk, and never pause for rest! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose!”

(Translation by Michael Hamburger, cited in more depth in comment below.)

Heather also emailed Cecilia Woloch‘s “Be Always Late.” It resonates deeply and wildly with the Baudelaire; I can’t find it online but intend to track it down in print.

Dean used to read aloud to me a John Updike short story called “Wife-wooing” from the collection Pigeon Feathers, and somewhere is a sentence about the two-year-old baby that goes, “Language is to him thick vague handles swirling by; he grabs what he can.” Joyce opens Portrait with Stephen at (I’m guessing) a slightly older two than Updike’s toddler, caring intensely what words mean, and remembering them.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

I love how that first paragraph is singsong, like a parent’s voice. The second has a marvelous lurching quality, like a toddler’s gait or attention span. And it’s so much more interesting to guess Stephen’s age from concrete details than to be told it outright. Joyce gives us a song fragment followed by Stephen’s phonetic (mis)pronunciation, and also this:

When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother puts on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

Quickly the memories lengthen from clauses to paragraphs, from memory fragments into complex scenes. Sentences begin to take poetic flight. Language deepens. That stuttering-lurching quality, in which Stephen’s baby-brain stumbles from one impression to the next, falls away. By the end of a 43-page chapter we have a 10-page scene packed with political allusions and adult complexities (observed and reported by a child, or from a POV that is part Stephen-child, part Joyce) that takes place during a single Christmas dinner.

Back to the beginning, however. Just one page in, Joyce leaps from the moocow to this:

The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were shouting and the prefects urged them on with strong cries. The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of the footballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light. He kept on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his prefect, out of the reach of the rude feet, feigning to run now and then. He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of the players and his eyes were weak and watery…

Joyce doles out adjectives conscientiously, to give a flash of color, or a shot of movement, or discomfiture. (And note that lovely repetition of “weak,” no accident.)

But no amount of rereading or parsing can help me understand exactly how Joyce takes Stephen from toddlerhood to Clongowes, his boarding school—a period of maybe three years, I’m guessing—in less than a page and a half. And it’s not just the three years. In that short space he tells us rhymes and a song of Stephen’s childhood and his Ireland, shows us Stephen’s mother playing a hornpipe on the piano so the little boy can dance; introduces Uncle Charles and Dante (Stephen’s aunt), makes it clear that Irish Republican politics were fiercely felt and discussed, and that the neighbors had a little girl whom Stephen planned to marry (a statement his mother and Dante make him apologize for)—we’re immersed in that house and its music and talk.

And every line conveys not only concrete sensory information but has abstract implications. If Mrs. Dedalus simply changes the bed when Stephen wets it, she must be kind; if he is made to apologize for the marriage statement, perhaps the neighbors are Protestant; if the family can afford a piano, they aren’t poor yet. (Their furniture will soon be carted off, and in Ulysses, Stephen’s younger siblings sell his books in order to eat.)

One and a half pages.

Talk about not needing to move people in and out of rooms!

♥

Much gratitude to friends who sent good wishes and fabulous poems for my mom. We are back in hospital (I like it the British way) and managing to laugh a lot.

Yesterday Dr. Burrows came to do a bronchoscopy, explaining directly to my mother, bless him, what would happen: first consent, then anesthesia, then the unpleasantness. “Okay, Mom?” I said. (She can’t talk with a tube down her throat so I took the consent part seriously.) She nodded. I signed.

“Any questions, Mom?”

My mother typed with one finger on the yellow Ouija—slowly, because it’s not Qwerty—as the nurse and respiratory therapist filled syringes, adjusted dials.

T. H. E.

“The,” I said.

N. E. W.

“New,” I said.

Y. O. R. K.

“York?” I looked at her with wonder. All day she’d refused to let me read to her. I kept telling her about this Amy Gerstler poem, “Interview with a Dog,” that would make her day.

T. I. M. E. S.

“Mom? You’re about to go to sleep—you want The New York Times?”

She looked at me with intense read my mind eyes. I stroked her forehead till they closed.

In the morning I reminded her: “You asked about The New York Times, right before anesthesia. You want me to read you the paper?”

My mother, her face still tentacled with tubes, typing hand swollen with edema, pointed carefully at the Ouija board:

J.O.K.E.

And then gestured for a pen so she could write, laboriously, on the floppy newsprint pad: Read me dog poem.

I showed her the enchanting cover first. I told her, “No one tells Amy Gerstler what a poem is, or isn’t.” And it seems I’d packed the right book after all. Love dog poem, my mother wrote, and touched her heart.

Read “Interview with a Dog” at coconutpoetry, where it’s the second poem down; better yet, buy the marvelous collection Dearest Creature. Herewith, a mid-poem excerpt, but please don’t settle for just this.

Q: OK. I just gave you a bath. Then you went and rolled in manure.

A: Will you barbeque soon? Will you let me lick the grill when it cools?

Q: No, really. How come I get you all nice and clean and you immediately roll in something stinky?

A: Humans don’t get true grooming, which only takes place using the tongue. Toothpaste, mouthwash, and deodorant are what’s “stinky.” Soap’s revolting. Terrible invention. Why have it in your lamplit, carpeted, doorlocked lair? Dung is informative, complex—full of news flashes from the body’s interior. Shit’s an encyclopedia, volumes of urgent correspondence your organs wrote if only you knew how to read. What’s learnt from smelling shampoo? It just causes sneezing, erases articulate fumes. Bulldozes olfactory signposts. Washing is book burning.

“You mean heavily sedated?” I asked from DC.

“I’m staying in the room with her,” my father says, “and she doesn’t know I’m here.” Comatose, sedated, what’s the damn difference? He loathes the machine that “breathes her” and he loathes the machine that delivers liquid Nutren Replete. Each snakes a tentacle down her nose or throat.

I flew in this morning to be with my father, and, I thought, to read to my mother. Even people under anesthesia supposedly hear their surgeon’s comments, so why not nourish my mother’s delicious and crystalline mind? She is taking (is taking, is taking) a class on Pushkin at UCLA; she has all the books by and on Pushkin a girl could want. So: Chekhov? But often someone is going to die in Chekhov. Or is living in privation. Is that right? Packing under duress, I suddenly can’t remember a word of Chekhov (below), despite three translations on our shelves. Packing, I’m frantic for engaging books that won’t make my mom laugh—what if she chokes on a tube?—and in which no one lives in privation, or dies.

Because privation might make her sad. Privation runs back generations in our family. When my mom’s mother was a girl in Cominets Podalsk,  Russia, she and my great-grandmother carried other people’s laundry on their back to a lake, scrubbed it in cold water, wrung it out, and carried it home on their backs, heavy and wet. This went on until my grandmother was old enough to quit school (about the equivalent of third grade, I think) and walk to work in early darkness, alone, past a church graveyard to a cigarette factory. It was freezing; the children in the factory needed gloves. But with gloves one can’t roll cigarettes.  So no gloves.

So no privation.

I consider Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband. It is the story, in what Carson calls “tangos,” of a marriage seen through to its end. What if my father turns the book over and reads this, and wonders if his own marriage is being breathed up by a machine? So no Anne Carson. I love the verbal delicacies in two recently reread story collections: Maile Meloy’s Half in Love, and Pia Ehrhardt’s Famous Fathers, but both write about adultery, and my parents will be 55 years intertwined in July.

The perfect choice would be Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which we both love, endlessly. I’ve read it twelve times. But my mother so connected with certain scenes, and re-tells them with such raw emotion, that I would not get through them. Pilate, at her daughter Hagar’s funeral, saying and singing the words: My baby girl. My baby girl. My baby girl. My baby girl. Looking into each person’s eyes in that church, saying it differently each time, asking it, praying it—my baby girl, my baby girl—and then calling out: And she was loved!

Mom, forgive me, I would break down.

Impossible to go wrong with the exquisite Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But Stephen is beaten at Clongowes, I think, for losing his glasses. I think. Even if I misremember, could his unhappiness carry some resonance from my mother’s childhood?

After some internal debate over which of three editions to pack (vintage, fragile, or tattered), I pack Portrait from sheer love of both Joyce and Stephen. But wait—if Ulysses opens with Stephen newly motherless, does his mother die at the end of Portrait?

Surely we won’t get there. Surely by then my mother will be demanding coffee and Pushkin and Dr. Dog, the therapy dog from her last hospitalization.

Which was only a week ago.

I add two poetry collections by Amy Gerstler: Medicine and the new (signed!)  Dearest Creature. I will get to say “skeleton tea” out loud, with envious enunciation. And my father will get to voice his disappointment with modern poetry and hark back to his hard-drinking days in Scotland with Hugh MacDiarmid and that crowd.

In lieu of the Ferragamo pumps, I slot in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, because Smith is funny and smart and spirited and so much better-read than I am—she and my mother might commune across the beeping machines. (My mother once commented that I could not call myself educated if I had not read Don Quixote; mortified, I dove for Don Quixote and found it so sad I couldn’t finish it. Zadie Smith has undoubtedly delivered entire lectures on Don Quixote.)

“Be careful,” my husband warned when he spotted Zadie in my suitcase. “An old woman dies in that book.” I’d forgotten.

And then I understood that it was hopeless.

Because an old woman dies in every book worth reading. Or a young man is punished for losing his glasses, or a marriage tangoes off a cliff, or a dying man drags himself out on deck one last time to look at the fathomless ocean—which Chekov story is that? Is it “Gusev?” Why can I remember nothing I’ve read at this moment, just titles and vague images, just a snapshot from 23 years ago in which my mother, with the sun full on her yellow hair and her apricot-colored skin and her maroon silk suit, reaches out to touch her daughter’s face as if all that brilliance and all the secrets of long marriage could actually stream from her fingertips to my flesh?

Perhaps it did. It was my wedding day and I am still married. My mother would know if that story was “Gusev.” All I can do is pack the wrong books Saturday night, and show up Sunday in the I.C.U., where I discover that I have no voice for reading at all, no will to do anything but smooth her sunstruck hair and tell her I am here.

Explanations don’t help a bit. What good does it do to comment on it? All those things are imperfect, imprecise things. We talk as we do because it’s amusing, like drinking a good bottle of wine.

From Conversations with Cezanne.

And here is Deborah Eisenberg, more than 100 years later, talking to Anna Kesey in Tin House (no. 34*):

…I’m always perplexed when a reader is perplexed, when a reader says to, or of, one of my stories, “What was that?” I think, Well, it’s what I said it was. It’s the thing I said.

Can explaining a story degrade a reader’s experience of that story, even if you’re not remotely a Cezanne or an Eisenberg? I promise not to go on about my own work much, but people often ask about “Jazz,” which opens my collection with the sentence “It is not true that if a girl squeezes her legs together she cannot be raped.” Rainey Royal’s legs have been parted by the knee of Richard, who is 39 and her father’s best friend—but she’s confused by her own sexual powers, and she isn’t sure it’s rape.

And readers want to be sure. Most think it’s rape: Rainey is 13, and Richard is 39. She says no, and he ignores her.

But she doesn’t scream. She’s been seductive with him. She accompanied him to the park, though her father sent them there at night for a concert. “She knows exactly what she’s doing,” one woman said.

Thus the question: rape, or seduction? And that’s consummation at the end, right?

I never answer directly, though after reading Cezanne and Eisenberg last week, I’ll work harder to tell readers why. It’s not that they’re missing something (unless the writing is flawed). It’s that a story and the question it poses cannot be teased apart, and also that once written, a story belongs to its readers.

It’s what I said it was. It’s the thing I said.

Sometimes I quote Michael Silverblatt, who does the legendary author-interview show The Bookworm on KCRW public radio, Los Angeles:

A short story is like a flower. It should keep opening in your mind long after you finish reading it.

♥

*The extraordinary painting on the Tin House cover, “Jazzy,” is by New York artist Marilyn Greenberg.

♥

EVENTS, DC AREA & BALTIMORE (self-promotion alert; two of my own are here–a new literary collaboration with Eileen Fisher, a designer I adore.)

Thursday, January 28,  4 p.m. — reading, signing, & shopping! A literary salon at the Eileen Fisher clothing store, with “sips & treats.” I’ll be reading from my collection, Normal People Don’t Live Like This. Tysons Galleria, McLean, VA. RSVP if possible: 703.288.1802    $25 off clothing purchase.

Saturday, January 30,  1 p.m. — reading, signing, & shopping! The second DC-area literary salon for Eileen Fisher, with “brunch bites” served. The Shops at Wisconsin Place, Chevy Chase, MD. I’ll be reading from Normal People Don’t Live Like This. RSVP if possible: 301.654.9811    $25 off clothing purchase.

Saturday, January 30, 8:05 p.m. (doors open at 7) – Literary Death Match, Baltimore Edition. The Windup Space, 12 West North Avenue, Baltimore: map Appearing: Michael Kimball, Jessica Henkin, Rafael Alvarez. Competing: Michael Hughes, Mike Young, Jen Michalski and Dave Housley. Hosting: Todd Zuniga. Or read it all here.

JOHN ASHBERY teaching & reading Tuesday, February 2, at Georgetown University, 5:30 p.m. seminar in ICC 462; 8 p.m. reading in Copley Formal Lounge; free; details.