Friday, January 29, 2010

And Auchincloss and Zinn, too.



I'm not sure why writers come and go in groups, but they do. Bloomsbury and the Left Bank and New Journalism brought the world great groups of writers, and this week, Salinger and Auchincloss and Zinn leave together. Maybe it has something to do with apartments in Heaven and the need to find amicable roommates, in which case, god speed, God, good luck with J.D., but as intrigued as I am by Salinger's Pynchon complex, and the possibility of 14 (!!!) or more unseen manuscripts in that safe, Zinn and Auchincloss may be lesser known, but it seems hard to say lesser writers, so let's not forget to crack the spine on an old copy of A People's History of the United States or one of Auchincloss' presidential bios (at least for me, that's how I came to know his writing) as well as that underlined, annotated Catcher in the Rye.

As Thompson once wrote, "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."

Selah.

So it goes.


J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010, "Who Wants Flowers When You're Dead?"


J.D. Salinger died yesterday at the age of 91. In many ways, as R. remarked, it seemed as if he had already been gone for many years: his reclusive life included locking out the world from any new writing. I wonder what we would have gotten to read had he continued to publish, had he written for his readers rather than for himself (as he reportedly claimed). It will be interesting to see if any of his later writing becomes public. The New York Times had an informative piece about him here.

When I read The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, it was, not surprisingly, the titular passage that stuck with me most:

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.


As R. said, take Catcher or Nine Stories or Franny and Zooey off the shelf, and read Salinger at his best.

—C.

Image courtesy of boston.com

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

The Book Thing

I am staying in a room filled with books. In my own bedroom, the books lining the shelves are ones that I have already read. It's comforting to wake up to them and see the familiar titles, remember the tales in each, feel safe in the knowledge that almost all of those books have been read. Here, though, are many books I have not read. It's a bit daunting. As I do in a bookstore or library lately, I stare at the titles unable to decide on one that feels right, that will get through to my psyche in a way that means something, is affecting. Not a dystopian tale, not one with an estranged husband or an already-dead character, not one about unrequited love or love gone sour with no redemption. Anything too peppy or too trite or too philosophical without enough in-scene narrative seems dull as well. Nothing feels right. I stare at the books and think about starting one. It isn't just that I've been lacking in reading time. There's some story I want to read, but I can't quite put my finger on it, can't quite articulate what I'm seeking.

Another case in point. R. and I went to The Book Thing—not a bookstore but a warehouse in Baltimore packed with books. Free books. Hundreds of volumes filled the concrete rooms, and I could not choose. Maybe it was because the building had no heat, and the temperature was in the 20s. The winter air derailed any slow, thoughtful opening of covers and flipping of pages. I could think only about getting warm, which led to frustration about losing the opportunity to take any and as many books as I wanted. (Base needs triumph over intellectual desires every time; the intellect cannot function when the body is too cold.) A sense of being overwhelmed by unlimited choices also plagued me; usually I select only what I really want, for lack of money, for not wanting to waste, to avoid the guilt of an unread stack of reading; too many unopened books waiting in a pile can be unnerving.

Shelves and shelves of books—something I love. It’s just that lately, none seems to get at the right thing. And I realize this: I'm waiting to write the story I want to read. It's hard when life gets in the way and so many other things need taking care of before I can sit down to write. The perfect writing time and writing space is elusive—I must once again learn to create in the in between spaces. This usually works when something is going well, when my mind is fluid and in shape and focused on a project. But now I must restart. It’s like I've been sick for a long time and my body has forgotten how to run with a sense of freedom and strength. It's back to short, flat runs that are slow and cumbersome. Again I must build and build before I will be able to re-cross the pain threshold and remember why I do this at all.

So maybe it’s not a dissatisfaction with the books I have yet to read but a dissatisfaction with the shape of the book I want to write. The stories of others are irritating because none tells it just like I want it to, as I would tell it or see it. Perhaps this awareness will help me to write. Perhaps it is just another quirk in the constantly changing process that is fiction writing, that is living and working and creating. Either way, I keep thinking of something Toni Morrison said: “If there is a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

—C.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Baba's House

My Baba’s kitchen smells of baking bread. The scent hints of vanilla, rum, and orange peel. The loaves are braided and filled with poppy seeds or shaped like large muffins topped by a cross formed in the dough. The breads line the counter, cooling on wire racks.

"Baba" is Ukrainian for grandmother. My Baba has recently stopped dying her hair blond and lets it curl gray around her head. She looks like her mother now, when she got older, she says. The cane she uses she calls “Schmirko,” or little rascal, and since the surgery on her leg she is getting stronger and relying on Schmirko less.

“Don’t tell anyone I baked; I wasn’t supposed to,” she says. She blesses each loaf by making the sign of the cross with a knife.

Dried mushrooms tied together hang on the wall by the door. She brought them back from her last visit to the old country, where her cousins took her and my mother hiking in the Carpathian Mountains. Pictures of my own cousins and their babies decorate the refrigerator, kept in place by flower magnets. In the window, between two lace curtains, a prism bounces refracted light across the room onto a reproduction of da Vinci’s Last Supper. A ceramic frog sits by the sink, holding a wet sponge in its open mouth. The frog and a set of ceramic jars were made by my aunt who died the year before I was born; some fluke of the flu stopped her heart. If she were still here, she would be a Baba, too.

Next to the ceramic jars is a porcelain cottage; the roof comes off, and inside is a flask of vodka.

When I discover this, Baba pours us each a “jigger” and tells me to toss it back. The liquor burns as it goes down my throat. She decides we need two. It’s only three in the afternoon.

The clock on the wall ticks the seconds, and the wind rustles through the neighbor’s trees, rattling the slightly open windows. Outside by the shed is a round grill. Baba burns any trash related to religion in it. Withered palms and old pussy willows from Palm Sunday, papers with icons, old church bulletins, and flowers from last week’s service all go into the grill. They can’t be thrown away like regular trash; they might be desecrated, Baba tells me. She keeps a book of matches in her raincoat pocket for when she has enough trash to set a fire.

The inside of the shed smells of gasoline for the lawn mower and moist soil and also of plastic—the beach ball and kiddie pool my cousins and I used to play with are still there. Garlic bulbs, braided together by their leaves, hang in a bunch above the shelves of tools. The garden outside is filled with marigolds, and in the center sits a statue of the Virgin Mary. Once on a late summer evening, I saw my grandfather pray by it on his knees. It was when his kidneys were failing him, and my grandmother pleaded with him to go on dialysis.

The trees we used to climb are gone and so is the vegetable and herb garden where I used to pick dill for potato salad. Only a row of evergreens lining one side of the yard remains. Now I sometimes rake up the sap-sticky pinecones so the grass can be mown.

In the kitchen, I put a kettle on for tea.

“The train is arriving,” Baba says when it whistles.

I pour the steaming water over tea bags in two large mugs and take them into the sitting room. In the closet are afghans and pillows and old hat boxes that no longer contain hats but hold whatever trinkets and clothing my grandmother has decided to save. She still has my mother’s Girl Scout uniform and prom dress. There’s also the Styrofoam mannequin head with a wig. My cousins and I colored in her eyes and lips and used to stuff clothing with pillows to make her a body.

Once, we set her in a chair and my great-grandmother covered the life-size figure with a blanket.

“Your friend is cold,” she told us.

We decide to put on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I lean back in the armchair rocker where my grandfather used to sit when he rested in the afternoons and watched Bonanza reruns. Next to the chair, on a long chest with a record player inside, is a picture of him. In it, he is twenty-two. It is just after the end of World War II, and he is at the displaced-persons camp in Germany where he met my grandmother. He is leaning against a tree, wearing a white scarf over a dark sweater. He holds a cigarette between two fingers as his arm hangs down alongside his leg.

“That’s my favorite picture of him,” Baba says.

—C.

Sunday, January 3, 2010