Self had lunch by herself in a quiet courtyard off Cubberley.
In front of her on a little table: two copies of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, one for niece, the other for self.
Then she walked back to the Oval, where she had parked (more…)
Tag: short story
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Monday night, self sat spellbound while Lydia Davis read a rather disturbing story about the death of a mother. The story was all in the details: the narrator visits her mother in the hospital. She enters the room and finds that her mother has died. Someone who doesn’t know the first thing about the narrator’s mother has (more…)
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Last night was the Lydia Davis reading at Stanford. It was great. Davis is hilarious, in a wonderfully deadpan way. Niece particularly liked a piece about cows. Self found a piece about the dying of a mother (Not her own, Ms. Davis was careful to emphasize. A friend’s. And she asked permission of her friend to use the subject) simply stunning.
This morning, self attended the Lydia Davis colloquium in the Terrace Room of Building 460. It was packed, but not to the degree that Davis’ reading, last night, had been. Self recognized Tobias Wolff (Another (more…)
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Self has been plagued by indecision. Her subscription expires this year. She thinks they always publish the same people. On the other hand, this was where she first read Roberto Bolaño, and Haruki Murakami, and Terese Svoboda. And Tea Obreht. And Yoko Ogawa. But does she really have enough bucks to extend her subscription? Her funds are running low, she needs to save up for future trips to Bacolod. She had to pay another vet bill for Gracie today: $230.
Self decides she’ll put off making a decision (again)
In the meantime, hubby has gone off to see Nic Cage in Drive Angry. Self did not feel like seeing a movie today. Instead, she curled up and started reading — yup, you guessed it; a back issue of The New Yorker. This issue was Feb. 7, 2011. The article that had caught her attention was in Personal History: the author was Francisco Goldman.
Self has read two novels by Francisco Goldman and loved them both.
There is something gripping about the way this article begins. The accompanying photographs are of a woman named Aura. She is attractive. In both pictures, she is relaxed. One is dated 2004, the other 2007.
Goldman writes that Aura was “a twenty-seven-year-old from Mexico City, a graduate student in Latin American literature on a Fulbright scholarship at Columbia,” while he was “forty-nine, born in Boston, the son of Guatemalan and Russian immigrants, working as a journalist and writing a novel.” They had been living together for “almost a year.”
And so self reads on, pulled by the inexorable force of wanting to know what happened. What happened to the woman named Aura? The feel of the article is so much like a mystery. Sentences here and there resonate with awful doom:
My first morning, I went swimming and then to breakfast at a café on the beach, where the waiter told me that the last time he’d gone into the ocean there he’d come out bleeding from both ears. That night, in my hotel room, I lay in bed listening to the waves, which now sounded to me as if they were grinding bones.
Goldman describes how he proposed to Aura. They were at a beach again.
I couldn’t go back to Mexico City, where we were spending the summer, without having proposed. I excused myself from the table and went to our room. A light rain was falling, one of those warm tropical drizzles which feel like the moisture-saturated air inside a cloud, as soft as silk against your face.
Oh, self would just love to know, know what happens to this couple. So, although she almost never reads an article straight through to the end, that’s what she finds herself doing now.
Here are Aura and Goldman on their first date. It turns out she has written a short story. She shows it to him:
The story was about a young man in an airport who couldn’t remember if he was there because he was arriving or because he was going somewhere.
And then, to further complicate the story, it turns out that Goldman works from home, but Aura has a killer commute, to Columbia from the apartment she shares with Goldman in Brooklyn. Goldman writes:
… she regularly got lost. She’d absent-mindedly miss her stop or take the train in the wrong direction and, engrossed in her book, her thoughts, or her iPod, not notice until she was deep into Brooklyn. Then she’d call from a pay phone in some subway station I’d never heard of.
He gave her a lot of attention (Of course! He was in love!) and then would worry:
How am I ever going to get another damn book written with this woman making me walk her to the subway every morning and cajoling me into coming up to Columbia to have lunch with her?
And then: they are traveling to their favorite beach in Mexico: Mazunte. There is a last-minute change of plans, they have to spend the night sleeping in separate dorm rooms in a hostel in Oaxaca. But his wife, Goldman remembers, was determined to get to Mazunte, as soon as possible:
Where, as we slept that night, was Aura’s wave in its long journey to Mazunte?
!!!!
OK, now self simply has to stop. Back to work, woman! You know this is the last free time of your weekend!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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Frederick Barthelme, self loves you for picking “The Hand” to win the Juked Fiction Prize in 2007.
Before “The Hand” (which Dean Alfar and Nikki Alfar included in Philippine Speculative Fiction, vol. III, and which Anvil published as part of self’s new collection, The Lost Language), there was “Lizard,” which was part of Ginseng and Other Tales From Manila, published by Calyx in 1991.
Here’s an excerpt:
She saw her mother leaning against a corner of the house, waving a palm-leaf fan slowly back and forth across her face. Her mother had not seen her. She was looking down at the ground and seemed to be thinking. Just at the moment when Wito would have called out to her, she caught sight of something reflected against the white wall of the house. An unexpected shadow had appeared in profile to her mother’s body. There was a head, or what Wito assumed was a head, though it looked nothing like her mother’s, and had long, pointed teeth. When her mother turned her head a little, the shadow moved, too. Only when Wito had come a little closer did she finally make out what it was — there, growing out of her mother’s back, was a huge, scaly lizard.
Self wrote this story when she was in the Stanford Creative Writing Program. Would you believe, the story was driven by homesickness?
A long time ago, self used to know someone named Wito. Now, no one she knows is called by that name. Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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Zack and self visited Liza E’s class at Skyline College today.
It was a beautiful day!
During the class (Students had drawn up a list of questions for self and Zack beforehand), self had occasion to recall that if it were not for Brian Roley, she would not have a book called Mayor of the Roses.
Self talked about the genesis of the title story. It was a nugget that remained in her consciousness for almost a decade before she sat down to write it. She originally hoped to turn it into a novel. But in the end, she hadn’t the nerve to live within the horror of its material for more than a couple of pages.
Brian just made an appearance at Pomona College. When self found out, she said: Why didn’t you tell me beforehand? Did you know son is at Claremont? He and his friends would have packed the reading!
Self delivered unto Liza (for The Bump) the incredible oinking pig. Self has to thank John Malkovich’s character in “Red” for giving her the idea.
Self feels so privileged: standing in Liza E’s office, Zack showed her the galleys for Leche. He told her a little about how the novel ends. Heads up, y’all: The book comes out in April.
Earlier, self had just stuffed her face with Lychee Shake, Lechon Kawali, Sinigang Bangus Belly and bibingka with ube ice cream at Tribu. Even though self kept protesting that she could not eat, she of course ended up eating. (She is definitely taking niece G here on Sunday, when she picks her up from the BART station! Before going to watch “Waiting for Superman” at Palo Alto Square!)
Liza E wore Giants wristbands on both wrists! Self found out that she and Jeremy are such fans they actually watch every single game! Compared to them, self is such a Johnny-come-lately! But self was happy to get into it with Liza on the time Brian Wilson had to color his orange fluorescent fabulous shoes with a black Sharpie because you are only allowed to have footwear that is half orange. Or some such ridiculous reason.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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It is raining today. Feels like it has been raining for hours. Time moved backwards, so that the clock says 6:53 even though she expected it to say 7:53. Out in the living room, she hears the beagles jumping and clattering all over the hardwood floor, trying their darndest (Beagles are so dumb) to wake her up. Well, she is up. But, unless they can hear her typing, she will pretend she is still asleep.
This morning, still reading Joshua Ferris, she comes to a section of his novel where a character named Lynn, recently diagnosed with breast cancer, thinks of the time she drove a lousy car around Lake Michigan.
Self too had a lousy car. Several of them, in fact. She wrote about one of them in a story called “The Lost Language,” one of those hybrid stories that are part essay and part fiction, that is told in segments. And it was published in Isotope, whose fabulous editor was Chris Cokinos, but now no one in America (or anywhere else in the world) will ever read it, because two years ago, Isotope ceased to be.
“The Lost Language” is the title story of the collection that was published last year in Manila by Anvil. Maybe people in Manila will read it. Maybe a dozen people?
And then this year she finished a novel called “Leaving.” It was about a Filipino maid. Then Mona Simpson came out with her big novel about a Filipino maid. Then self watches on YouTube as Mona Simpson reads from the section of her novel that has to do with a Filipino maid. The maid is called “Lola.” She is far more competent with children than Mona Simpson is. Oh. Wasn’t that Dear Departed Sister’s maid? The one self just encountered in New York, this last trip with Dearest Mum? Her sister’s maid was getting paid so much money, self wished she were a maid and not a writer. Seriously.
Self, where is this going?
Rainy thoughts, rainy thoughts.
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Giants won tonight! Self made it home in time (from tutoring at Notre Dame Writing Center) to catch the last two innings. Lincecum pitched all the way to the end! He threw 135 pitches! Self will never complain about neck or shoulder pain again. All she needs to do is think: 135 pitches in one night! How that young man’s arm managed to remain still attached to his shoulder at the end of the game is something that simply defies comprehension.
Driving home, self was glad she’d had her brakes fixed today. Because three deer suddenly materialized on Alameda, and if she’d still had the rotten brakes, she might have hit them. What were three deer doing, wandering across Alameda de las Pulgas this evening? There was one big deer and two little ones. After that, self’s heart was racing.
Tonight, barely a month into the Fall semester, self’s dance card was full. That is, she had student after student after student, one after the other, for over two hours. She had to help out with someone who wanted to know the difference between a compound and a complex sentence (Why? Self asked herself. Why is it important to know? Self went through her whole life not knowing the difference, and it hasn’t hindered her any! Until now!)
Then there were three students who needed help deciding whether to write a paper on Bernard Malamud’s story, “Angel Levine,” or Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral.” What a choice! Self loves Malamud, but in the end all the students decided to write about Carver (In retrospect, self shouldn’t have been so surprised. Malamud’s magical realism is altogether harder for students to comprehend than Carver’s seemingly straightforward — but actually deeply mysterious — story)
The last student was writing a paper on “The Marriage of Figaro,” an opera self knew absolutely nothing about. But now she knows a lot! For one thing, she now knows the opera dealt with the cultural and political relationships in a European country! In the 18th century! (Once again, self digresses) The student left after an hour, professing to feel quite confident in his paper-writing abilities.
Today, as well, self managed to garden. She watered, and did some light pruning of the apple and magnolia. October is a wonderful time to be in the garden. For one thing, it is cool, and self feels less manic about the watering. Today, in the late afternoon, when self looked at her garden, and saw everything so fecund, and new buds starting to open on her Fourth of July, and the Japanese anemones covered with pretty white flowers, she was happy.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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Here’s the beginning of self’s story, “Dumaguete,” published in issue 1.2 of The White Whale Review. This piece is part of self’s collection, The Lost Language, published in Manila in 2009 by Anvil Press of the Philippines:
DUMAGUETE
When Carlos’ mother decided to take him to Dumaguete, on the other side of the island, he didn’t question her. One day she said, we have to go, and they did, walking with their overnight bags to the bus station, whose uneven ground was pooled with muddy, brown water in which he could detect shapes darting, tiny black (more…)
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Two pieces just got accepted by a web-zine, for publication in 2011. Happy happy joy joy!
Hubby (hopeful to the last!) inquires how much self will get paid for the two.
To which self can only (more…)
Kanlaon 