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Relationship Flash
So…this is a day late, but yesterday was technically a holiday and I slept quite a lot. Sorry for that and back to the regular schedule.
__________________________________________________________________Lisbeth spun her tea cup in slow circles on the table, her eyes fixed on the book in front of her, but she wasn’t really reading. As she was waiting for the next in the long line of potential boyfriends from that new online dating site, she was mentally reviewing her selection criteria.
These coffee dates (tea for her, but tea dates just sounded weird) were her version on an interview. The men’s profiles were basically a resume and the conversations online were a cover letter. If they made it past her rigorous screening, then they got to meet for non-alcoholic beverages. About 1 in 10 made it to the Diesel Cafe for drinks, and only 1 in 5 made it to a real date. Even still, most flunked out.
It wasn’t really their faults, they were nice guys (most of them) it’s just they threw too many red-flags or just didn’t quite meet her requirements. Cute enough that there wasn’t something she wanted to fix. Teeth and feet were two big ones. If either were hideous, it was really hard to feel romantic. At least her height (a lot lied) were witty and intelligent enough that the conversation never lagged. Genuinely interested in what she had to say, not just waiting for their turn to talk. And then the specifics. Not a Boy Scout Eagle Scout, not interested in politics except for maybe a few specific topics but still clued in enough to vote intelligently, not a character ripped from Ayn Rand, not a drummer, not broken, not too much older (three years max), and humbly self-confident.
She was nearing 25 and she sometimes cringed to think of the men she’d dated in the past. That’s why she made damn sure they didn’t have any of those red flags. Okay, maybe she could be lenient if he was cute enough, but no, she had to stop thinking like that. That is what continuously got her into trouble.
Glancing up at the next person coming in, she saw it was a guy who looked remarkably like the photos of her date (some lied) and glanced at her phone before tucking it away in her purse. He was on-time. Amazingly hard to find in some people. He also looked around and found her before heading to order and came over.
Lisbeth stood to be polite and shook his hand, this was an interview after all. He was exactly the same height as her, with one of those smiles that promised lots of mischief (the best kind). After brief introductions to assure themselves that they had indeed found the right person, he dropped his stuff and made his way to the counter to order.
His walk was confident and assured, no hesitation at the counter, even though she knew this place was new to him. He also had a great ass. Definitely a bonus. She tucked her bookmark into the book and slid into her bag and smiled a little to herself. Definite potential, but you never knew for sure until all the laundry fell out of the closet on your head.
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Writing Prompt #7
We all have those people in our lives who leaving lasting impressions for good or for bad. Write a story where a character’s past just won’t leave them alone. For good, for ill, in reality or only in their mind.
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Origin of “To Talk Turkey”
The phrase To talk turkey came into usage about a century and a half ago. At that point in time it referred to a pleasant conversation, possibly due to the fact that a young man would get tongue tied when speaking with a pretty woman and would sound like gibberish. Over the years it has developed a sterner quality and a small parable or sorts may be to blame. The story went that a pilgrim and a Native American went hunting and brought down a bunch of game. The white man, thinking to outsmart his hunting partner, tried to manuever his hunting companion into giving him all the turkeys, but the brave’s only response was, “All the time you talk turkey, now I talk turkey to you.” At which point he divided things equally and went on his way.
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A Tree of Heaven
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith was another fabulous blast from the past. I saw an early printing of it sitting on my boyfriend’s shelf, got curious, and stole it for a couple weeks until I finally got around to reading it. This is a complex coming of age story of a young girl named Francie growing up below the poverty line in Brooklyn just prior to World War I. A lot of it is most likely autobiographical from Smith’s own experiences growing up as the daughter of immigrants in Brooklyn during that time, but not all.
The book gets its title from a particular species of invasive plant that has taken root in Brooklyn, called a Tree of Heaven. There is one tree in particular that has grown up and around the fire escape that Francie will escape to and read on for hours at a time.
Split into five books, this novel starts with a set of scenes from early in the girl’s life, then jumps back even further to focus on her parents and how they met. It then progresses through her early childhood, school years, graduating from the lower grades and skipping high school to help her family out by working in the city, finagling her way into college courses and we finally end the story as she is getting ready to leave for college out of state and is contemplating a possible marriage.
Smith’s writing is simple and poignant. It’s stripped-down nature is at times its most powerful tool, making scenes that could be overwrought and sentimental instead brutally efficient. If you want an example, read it through until you get to the scene where they have to buy her father’s funeral plot. There is a simple small section about the star bank they have to empty to buy the plot that literally felt like a blow. If this section had been gussied up, it would have been saccharine and terrible, but it’s simplicity is what gives it its incredible power.
I can see why this novel has become a standard of literary fiction. It draws you in and makes you cheer on the protagonist. Rarely do you feel pity or guilt or any of those other somewhat negative emotions, regardless of the circumstances of this family. Instead, they are so strong and so beautiful that you as a reader are left feeling warm and empowered. They accomplish so much with so little that it is a truly inspiring tale.
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Hardly a Romantic Romance
Core: A Romance by Kassten Alonso is a self-titled romance. And, in a sense, it does deal with relationships and love, but it may be more accurate to say that the subtitle of this book places it squarely into the Romantic period of literary influence, alongside authors such as Edgar Allen Poe.
This is a very disturbing tale of a man’s descent into madness and violence due to his obsession over a woman. Now, granted, as you flash backwards and forwards in his life, you come to feel that he is not entirely responsible for his actions due to circumstances beyond his control and traumas he has suffered, but still. This is one disturbed gentleman. I’d give you his name, but you don’t get to know that as a reader. Instead, you sit in his psyche and bite your nails as you watch his sanity degrade farther and farther until he is lost.
Now a book like this could easily fall prey to the imitative fallacy and at first I was worried that it would do so. But it settled out nicely within the first chapter and was fairly easy to follow. The writing is very stream-of-consciousness, as you are inside the main character’s head, and you are jumping back and forth between a single present moment, his early childhood, late adolescences and mid 20’s. It was an interesting and well transitioned frame for the story. Overall, I think Alonso managed the mechanics of a challenging form quite well.
Core did bring to mind another novel I read a couple years ago, Lux by Maria Flook. I had the privilege of working with Flook my first term at Emerson and so I read her novel before the workshop so I had a sense of her style. Lux is another novel about a deeply disturbed love affair, handled quite differently, but I am fairly confident that a person who enjoys one of these books will enjoy the other.
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Singer Flash
Irene took the stage to tepid applause. Most of the people in the bar were not paying any attention to the mousy haired singer behind the microphone, and that was just fine, so far as she was concerned. Not that she was nervous at all, at least not about the singing. She knew she had a great voice. No, it was the other things she was there for that made her nervous.
She’d gotten the idea a week ago. She’d been sitting in the typing pool at the police station and overheard some of the guys in the major crime squad talking about how the latest singer at Johnny’s club had left. They never seemed to last long, but then again, they were never very good. And no one was there for the singing anyway, seeing as the booze and bar were just a front for his less legitimate business concerns.
But Irene knew just what she was going to do. No hesitation. Maybe if she pulled this one off, they’d stop saying women couldn’t be police officers. She knew she was good at this stuff, she just had to prove herself. So she went home, got so dolled up even the other girls from the pool wouldn’t recognize her, then had shimmied down to the club to audition for Johnny. She was almost disappointed when he asked her to sing a few bars then told her she was hired–she had wanted intrigue, the need to shake her ass or tits at him to get his approval.
And now here she was, opening up the joint on a Friday night. Half-empty and entirely un-enthused. The piano player launched into a half-hearted rendition of “You Call Everbody Darlin’” and Irene sang as lustily as she could manage into the mic. It was her goal to come across as an empty-headed and lusty woman, make sure no one thought to turn her way except when they wanted a tune.
She made it through a set and wandered off the stage to grab a drink. She had no head for alcohol, so she was going to try and stick to Shirley Temples. At least look like she was boozing. She sputtered on the first sip when rum exploded on her tongue and she turned accusingly on the bar tender.
“I wanted a Shirley Temple, this has rum in it!”
“Doll, you could use a little loosening up, so sit your rump down and drink your Naughty Shirley.”
Irene almost protested again, but she didn’t want to make any kind of scene that would draw attention to her. So she sat at the bar and sipped at the drink. Maybe the bartender was right, this didn’t seem so hard and it might help her to let her hair down a bit. After all, she had to get into character, didn’t she?
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Writing Prompt #6
Here’s another pictoral writing prompt for you…
I know she’s hard to see, but I think that’s part of what is great about this picture. Here’s a lady performing in a spotlight (most likely singing) sometime in the 40’s or 50’s. Who is she, why is she there, who is she performing for?
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Origin of “Scot Free”
So, we know that Scot Free means to get away without consequences. But where did it come from? In Old English, a scot was a payment, and later a tax. So, to go scot free means to go without tax or payment–not as I earlier thought a really racist way to say they were getting away with not having to deal with a Scotsman…
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“It was probably my fault…”
Wrack & Ruin by Don Lee was quite the ride. You start with the fairly innocent scene of an organic Brussels sprouts farmer having a string of bad luck. But as the story progresses and you find out he was once a famous sculptor, things just keep getting worse and worse. Between a developer trying to get his farm for the 18th hole on a new gold course cum resort and his brother’s failing movie project starlet seducing his best friend, he barely has time to deal with his ex girlfriend putting nails in his tires and the local pot dealer taking offense at his personal plants.
This book was a fun and poignant view into the life of an artist who found fame and didn’t like it and tried instead to retreat into the calm obscurity of a Brussels sprout farmer. The writing is absolutely phenomenal and the characters are fresh and complex.
One aspect I found very interesting is the reason that the main character left the art world was not only that he found the constant creative pressure and critiquing painful, but that he was slotted into the label of Asian American artist and everyone tried to keep forcing his work into an interpretation based upon that. As a reader, you definitely draw parallels at this point between Lee and his character. It makes you think twice about whether pigeon-holing artists and authors with a race label is helpful or harmful. Are all those classes based around African-American or Asian-American literature doing justice to those authors? Or is it forcing their work to fit an archetype and we get disappointed when they don’t deal explicitly with issues of race or even gender? And can any author cross the line and write about another race? Or is that going to be a problem? All questions that I think the educational hegemony are going to have to start asking themselves in the near future.
But the whole book is not about this. It’s about man struggling to find his place in the world and get along with everyone else. The race issue is simply one aspect of that. Wrack & Ruin is a fabulous book that I definitely recommend reading. It also left me craving Brussels Sprouts, so I made a batch sauteed in garlic, oil, salt, and pepper and smothered them in Hollandaise sauce. Yum…
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You can’t write something this good…
So, last week, my friends and I sat around questioning the sanity of whoever was holding onto a winning lotto ticket worth roughly $17,000,000 and wasn’t turning it in. The deadline was fast approaching and the state was eagerly licking it’s chops to absorb the prize itself. Then I saw this article.
Apparently, a trust has stepped forward with the ticket and claimed the money. But for who? They refuse to say. They claimed it on the last day of the deadline for someone, but no one knows who or why they waited until the very last day to do so. I am now eagerly awaiting the results of the investigation because I don’t think I could write anything as good as the real story is going to be.
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Rebecca A. Demarest 