Stephen King’s Story in Esquire’s “Stories of Our Time” (July 2009) Issue

. . .  which self bought for her reading pleasure on the way home from New York at end of June.

She did not pick this magazine out of the magazine rack simply because she was so smart, but because she noticed a fellow traveler holding a copy and, after perusing the T of contents (Tyler Cabot’s “Stories My Father Told Me,” Charles P. Pierce’s “What If Obama’s Out of His Mind?” among others), decided that it looked like pretty good reading.

So, the featured story is by Stephen King.  And it is about a hapless writer (Stories about writers are the best kind of stories!) who has wrung eighty pages “out of his old and limping Dell laptop.” And he thinks he might screw up his courage and show the pages to an agent.  Which he does.  And the agent tells him, why

Finishing Greg Brillantes’ “Faith, Love, Time and Dr. Lazaro”

Self has finished reading Greg Brillantes’ “Faith, Love, Time and Dr. Lazaro.”

In the passage below, the doctor returns from a late night visit to a poor man’s hut, where he has been unable to save the man’s sick child:

Dr. Lazaro felt the oppression of the night begin to lift from him; an emotionless calm returned to his mind. The sparrow does not fall without the Father’s leave, he mused at the sky, but it falls just the same. But to what end are the sufferings of a child? The crickets chirped peacefully in the moon-pale darkness beneath the trees.

“You baptized the child, didn’t you, Ben?”

“Yes, Pa.” The boy kept in step beside him.

He used to believe in it too, the power of the Holy Spirit washing away original sin, the purified soul made heir of heaven. He could still remember fragments of his boyhood faith, as one might remember an improbable and long-discarded dream.

This story is so suffused with melancholy, dear blog readers. Which is perhaps why self loves it so much.

Stay tuned.

Paragraph 2 of the Story Begun Yesterday

I called to say I would be in the Bay Area for a few days; we met at a Starbucks at a mall near you: there was a

Beginning a New Story

Remember the time you were studying Chinese? I thought you’d end up in Beijing like the rest of your classmates. You didn’t go. Instead, you married someone in Electrical Engineering. The next time I met you, you had two kids, and you lived in a small white house. In Union City, of all places. Who knows anyone in Union City? The houses all look the same. It’s so boring.

Summer Thoughts: Café Irreal, Today’s “The View”, Mysterious Insomnia

Amazing: self has discovered that she can actually operate as a credible semblance of a human being, even with no sleep. At all. For that reason alone, today should be a very very very good day. (Just imagine, however, how much better and how much more productive self could be if she’d had at least four hours — !!! Gnashing of teeth)

Self has some very good news to share with dear blog readers: A short piece, “Appetites,” has just been accepted for Café Irreal’s Issue # 31 (Yaaay !!!) The site’s editors are currently visiting Prague, home of the greatest short story writer in the world, Franz Kafka.

And today, in contrast to yesterday, when the backyard was filled with men climbing our trees and conducting noisy conversations, self has the garden all to herself again: it is quiet,

How Self Writes When She Reads a Short Story From The New Yorker

The New Yorker story: “The Tiger’s Wife” by Tea Obreht

It begins:

I. The tiger

Having sifted through everything I have heard about the tiger and his wife, I can tell you that this much is fact: in April of 1941, without declaration or warning, the German bombs started falling over the city and did not stop for three days.

(Self pauses for thought: perhaps she can begin a story using timeline April 1941. But who of her acquaintance was alive at such a time? More important, who of her acquaintance can self interview so that her writing will have that necessary versimilitude? But, she digresses. Back to the story)

The tiger did not know that they were bombs.

(And neither does self know how she can write a story involving bombs. Whatever.

Summer Reading: “Faith, Love, Time, and Dr. Lazaro”

Last night, while The Man and self were having dinner in front of the TV, we heard on the news that a second Bay Area resident has died from the A(H1N1) virus, this one a middle-aged man who had no prior history of susceptibility.  And yet, here we are, still going about, still watching movies, still driving here and there, and the news makes no difference.

Only, it is difficult to sleep.

Dearest Mum is wherever she is, self doesn’t bother to call anymore.

On self’s lap is a big, heavy book, with the story “Faith, Love, Time and Dr. Lazaro.”  The author is Greg C. Brillantes.  He, like self, like self’s father, like her three brothers and husband, was an Atenista.

The story is about a doctor in some un-named provincial town (There is mention of a San Miguel Bridge —  where would that be?).  The doctor has to make a night call, so his teen-aged son offers to drive.  And while they are driving, the doctor thinks of “light-years, black space, infinite distances; in the unmeasured universe, man’s life flared briefly and was gone, traceless in the void.”

Self thinks these are extremely heavy thoughts.

And no wonder.  A few paragraphs on, an image comes to the doctor’s mind:  “slashed wrists, part of the future dead in a boarding house room,” the doctor’s other son.

Brillantes writes:  “Sorrow lay in ambush among the years.”

What. a. beautiful. sentence.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

Most Fan-TA-bulous Quote of the Day

Just back from heavenly San Luis Obispo, picked up dogs from Peninsula Pet Resort, (where they got treated to the likes of “home-made chicken-flavored frozen yogurt treats”), and discovered that the plants were still alive.

Also, there was a huge box from UPS in full view of the street, and no one had apparently disturbed it.

Also, there was this message in self’s “In” box, from the editors at White Whale Review:

We are very pleased to report, at long last, the second installment of our fair journal, featuring the likes of, well, you. For that reason, and for many others besides, we’re sure you’ll agree when we say things like “quality” and “two thumbs up” and, knowing us, probably something off-color but nautically appropriate.

So, check it out, dear blog readers. Pretty please. The setting is Dumaguete.

One Day at a Time . . .

Self finds it comforting that Obama is on the TV so often. He seems to make a public address almost every day! Every time he appears, no matter how tired hubby is, he drops everything to listen. Self has never, ever seen her husband respond this way to any President, Philippine or American.

When self was with Dearest Mum in San Luis Obispo last November, this is what happened in the breakfast room of their hotel when Obama came on the TV: All the people who were having breakfast put down their papers, lifted their heads, and stared fixedly at the TV. And these were people of all ages, from teen-agers to senior citizens. The room went completely silent. And self could see, behind the intent gazes, the hopes and wishes of all the millions of people who voted for this man.

Earlier today, self was watching CNN (she isn’t teaching at all this year, she thinks she might have mentioned that in an earlier post), and a young man from Denver appeared to give his assessment of Obama’s performance since assuming office. The young man gave Obama a C for some things, and an A (surprisingly) for his decisions on Iraq. Obama’s over-all grade was a B-.

Aside from watching CNN, self decided to watch the Netflix movie she had ordered before leaving from New York: “Away From Her.” Self had decided she needed to watch this movie because, aside from the fact that she was curious about Julie Christie’s performance, at the recent AWP conference she learned (from a panel with Xu Xi) that the movie was based on a short story by Alice Munro, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.”

After all the hectic activity of AWP Chicago and last weekend in New York, not to mention self’s almost despairing attempts of the last few weeks to jump-start a novel, self’s batteries were in need of serious re-charging. So she settled on the couch, in between the two beagles, with a huge bowl of popcorn balanced on her lap.

OK, movie began very austerely (good). Self was amazed at how beautiful Julie Christie still was. Her husband was played by Gordon Pinsent, an actor self doesn’t recall seeing from other movies, but he was suitably graven-faced. At the scene where the gorgeous Julie is entertaining some friends and stops to pour wine but looks down at her hand in complete puzzlement and doesn’t know what to call the thing she is holding, self’s heart almost stopped. It was such a riveting moment. And the scenes just kept getting better and better from there.

The ending of the movie left self hanging, she really wanted to know: Is Julie cured, or what? What about the “other man” who’s waiting in a wheelchair just behind the door, while Julie and her husband embrace?

Now self will have to go read the short story!

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

Reading for the Day: Gilda Cordero-Fernando’s “People in the War”

Posted this sometime back.  When self was in Manila last year, she stopped by the Ateneo Library of Women’s Writings and found they had a file on Cordero-Fernando.

(My God, now self knows where to donate her diaries.  She has about 50.  At first she thought she’d make of them a huge bonfire in her backyard.  But now she thinks she’ll take a few and offer them to the library)

Below is an excerpt from Cordero-Fernando’s short story “People in the War.” :

Our front door opened right onto the sidewalk, and the street sloped down to a lily-dappled river, in our house in the city.  Across the river a soap opera was always taking place:  a man with two wives lived in an unpainted house beside the lumber mill.  When the sun went down the wives began to quarrel, clouting each other with wooden clogs, and a bundle of clean wash came flying out of the window into the silt below.  We watched them chase each other down the stairs, clawing each other’s clothes off and rolling down the embankment, and the dogs of the neighborhood surrounded them, barking and snarling —  till from the lumber mill the husband emerged —  a shirtless apparition with a lumber saw in his hand.

At least once a month they held a wake on the river bank.  They rented a corpse, strung up colored lights and gambled till the wee hours of the morning.  Sometimes a policeman wandered in —  having heard some rumor, and poked around with his night stick.  But there would be the corpse, and it was truly dead, there would be the card games, but no suspicion of betting (the chips having been scooped away together with the basket of money) and the policeman would saunter away, wiping a tear, leaving the poor relatives to their grief and their gambling.

We must move to another neighborhood, my father said every day.  We planted trees to screen them from sight, we planted trees to preserve our respectability.  A truck unloaded two acacia trees on our doorstep, saplings no bigger than I.  The houseboy made a bamboo fence around their trunks and every afternoon the maids hauled out pails to water them.

Self is completely, completely entranced by the dream-like weave of this story.  She would like dear blog readers to know that Ms. Cordero Fernando is alive and well and still beautiful and still living in Manila, and those dear blog readers who reside in the Philippines should count themselves lucky because they can go to a bookstore or a library and begin to read everything this writer has written.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.