In Another Country

Food in this story: chestnuts. In Milan. In the fall. The war is just over (Which war? Self had to google: World War I)

Also, the Café Cova, “next door to the Scala” which “was rich and warm and not too brightly lighted, and noisy and smoky at certain hours” (a tourist trap now, according to Yelp)

We were all at the hospital every afternoon, and there were different ways of walking across the town through the dusk to the hospital. Two of the ways were alongside canals, but they were long. Always, though, you crossed a bridge across a canal to enter the hospital. There was a choice of three bridges. On one of them, a woman sold roasted chestnuts. It was warm, standing in front of her charcoal fire, and the chestnuts were warm afterward in your pocket.

 

The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber

It starts off the collection, and it’s pretty long (for a Hemingway short story). All about a safari in Africa. Interesting, told from the safari guide’s point of view, who OF COURSE finds the wife attractive. The husband, Macomber (only in his mid-30s, but intimidated by the safari guide), is portrayed as a wimp. Despite these clichés of manhood and/or lack thereof, self finds herself empathizing much with Macomber. His reluctance to shoot the lion, for instance.

In this short story, the meal in question is breakfast.

Robert Wilson, the guide, has kippers and coffee.

“Finish your breakfast and we’ll be starting.”

Also, the lion’s point of view is part of this story. Pretty cool, that part. And you will feel, in your bones, how disgusting it is to hunt lions. Feeling and knowing are two different things.

Wife rewards Big Lion-Hunter with a kiss on the mouth, right in front of her husband. Guess Hemingway thinks that’s what all real men deserve, when they’ve finished off a lion. They deserve to be rewarded with a kiss from a beautiful woman. Because — hey! Hunter-killers are rad! Self can’t think of any story she’s ever read that infuriated her so much.

Story becomes very noir-ish towards the end, characters speak very “posh,” in a version of British stiff-upper-lip.

Her sympathies to Macomber.

Stay tuned.

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The First Forty-Nine

Not reading in the order in which they appear in the book. Rather, starting with the stories Hemingway wrote while he was marching with The Fifth Column.

There’s a date in self’s handwriting on the flyleaf: February 1984

Story # 1:  The Killers, p. 279

This story is about dinner.

“Everything we want’s the dinner, eh?”

“I can give you ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, liver — “

“I’ll take ham and eggs,” the man called.

“Give me bacon and eggs,” said the other man.

Which so does not sound like dinner to self, but anyhoo.

Stay tuned.

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge # 91: SIMPLICITY

Love this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge!

P. A. Moed:

This week . . . we’re getting back to basics.  Show us what simplicity means to you. 

Is it stepping back to a time when luxuries were scarce and people were content with less?

In these times of self-isolation, self turns back to the comforting presence of her old books:

There’s a date in self’s handwriting on the flyleaf: February 1984

And she’s planting tomatoes:

And she vows that as soon as she can travel to London again, she will visit Chez Mamie on Hanway Place, the place where she’s spent so many hours, enjoying Julie’s fabulous cooking:

Chez Nous (Formerly Chez Mamie), 22 Hanway Place, London: Self has been eating here since 2014.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

For Women’s History Month

March is Women’s History Month. These are the women (prose) authors on self’s 2020 Reading List:

• Liane Moriarty
• Diane Gabaldon
• Edwidge Danticat
• Mathangi Subramanian
• Jacqueline Woodson
• Jung Chang
• Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Sally Rooney
• Peg Alford Pursell
• Oyinkan Braithwaite
• Dacia Maraini
• Shahrnush Parsipoor
• E. R. Ramzipoor
• Elizabeth Tallent
• Sadie Jones

Also: Caroline Kim-Brown’s short story collection, which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, coming this fall: The Prince of Mournful Thoughts. You can read the title story now, in Ms.Aligned Vol. 3.

Women self has read so far 2020:

• Dodie Smith
• Katherine Addison
• Jia Tolentino
• Kathryn Ferguson

Movement on the 2020 Reading List

Just finished Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory, by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, and it was glorious.

Now reading The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison.

Self’s next two books are I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith, and Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh. She found a review in The Economist about great houses in fiction, and those two books came up in the course of. She thinks she read Brideshead Revisited, but so  long ago that all she remembers is a British mini-series of the same name, with an actor with the improbable name of Anthony Andrews playing Sebastian.

Monday is off to an excellent start.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Last Short Story in Someone Who Will Love You In All Your Damaged Glory

More of the You that You Already Are

The Situation: The narrator works in a theme park called (self thinks) PresidentLand, and his job is to pretend to be Chester A. Arthur, which as we all know is not as fun as pretending to be FDR or even Jimmy Carter. Anyhoo, the narrator’s sister is also dying of cancer. And he needs to work because that is how he pays for her medical insurance. One day, his mother calls:

Your sister is going into surgery and she is very scared.

And I’m like, You want to get a job? Cause if not, who is going to pay for this surgery?

And she’s like, You know I can’t work on account of my shaky hands.

And I go, I know, Mom. Could you put Ramona on, please?

I wander into the midway and linger by the McKinley Shooting Gallery.

Ramona takes the phone and goes, I wish you were here. Mom is being so crazy.

And I go, I wish I was there too. How are you doing? Mom says you’re scared?

---

And right there is when self’s heart breaks into a million little pieces.

Self’s Dear Departed Dad said, before he died, I’m scared.

And self’s Dear Departed sister looked at self with such fear, and then she died (She was 34, she got streptococcal pneumonia)

And then self’s DEAREST Sister-in-Law Ying, who was more like self’s sister, got leukemia Stage IV and told self, I’m scared. And then SHE died.

SPOILER ALERT    SPOILER ALERT     SPOILER ALERT

The narrator manages to sneak out of the theme park (first stashing the head of his President, Chester A. Arthur, behind some bushes) and rushes to the hospital and he’s really upset and asks a doctor if his sister’s dead. The doctor says, “No, not dead, no! She’s just comatose.”

Self really feels for this story because when she was a lowly adjunct professor in Foothill Community College, her Dear Departed Sister-in-Law, Ying, was dying in Tel Aviv. And out of a feeling of terrible desperation, self took one week off and gave her class make-up assignments and flew to Tel Aviv. And when she returned to her class, the Dean was extremely extremely irate. And self never did recover her footing after that. Because Ying died. She died a few days after self had returned to teaching. So that was a really bad time. The worst. Also because the Dean cut her no slack. That was so long ago now that self hardly feels any anger at the Dean when she writes this.

Stay tuned.

 

Raphael Bob-Waksberg: Your Pain Is My Pain

The short story self is reading today is Lunch With the Person Who Dumped You.

At the rate self is going, she’ll never finish Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s collection, never! Which is a pity, as she’s got two meaty fantasy reads lined up to read next: Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth, and Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor (which was recommended to her by her seatmate on a recent flight to London: a Stanford grad on his way to deliver a paper at a conference in Glasgow)

An excerpt from Bob-Waksberg’s story:

Remember, the one who laughs last laughs longest, so make sure you laugh last and when you do you laugh heartily but with a detached air of none-of-this-really-matters-I-haven’t-been-lying-awake-at-night-staring-at-the-ceiling-regurgitating-all-this-pain coolness.

Which is an attitude that really helps, especially today. Given what’s just gone down in the Senate.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

“We Men of Science” by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

We Men of Science, from the collection Someone Who Will Love You In all Your Damaged Glory:

She said: Yoni, it’s Carl . . . he’s dead.

and I said: Oh my God, is he okay?

and she said: Yeah, well, he’s dead, so . . .

After:

We went to the funeral and the shiva call. I said some very nice and accurate things.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Short Story of the Day: “We Men of Science” by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

Story # 6 in Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory (which, Holy Cow, self is loving SO. MUCH):

Science will survive with or without our attempts to understand it; science doesn’t care.

Like a callous ex-lover, science won’t miss you, and sure, maybe that’s a little scary, but isn’t it also a little exciting?