Short Cuts by Raymond Carver, Stories and Poem Selected and with an Introduction by Robert Altman

First of all, I include the part about film director Robert Altman because the whole reason for the existence of this collection is to gather the stories that inspired the film Short Cuts. I didn't actually read most of the pieces in the Short Cuts book itself, but looked up the list of them and read them in other Carver collections, as I couldn't find a copy of this collection in the library. But I did finally come across the book yesterday, and I read the last story I had left, Tell the Women We're Going, and Altman's introduction.
That whole first paragraph is fairly irrelevant I suppose. No matter. Two of these stories (Vitamins and A Small, Good Thing) I read in Cathedral, about which I have already posted on this blog. If you remember, I was particularly enamored of A Small, Good Thing. I have an admission to make: I didn't actually re-read either of those two stories. I kind of wanted to get all the stories read so I could watch the movie, about which I am very excited. Admittedly, this is not a very healthy attitude with which to read fiction. Oh, well. It is what it is.
I don't know why I keep giving all this personal back story. It's probably pretty boring, but I've already typed it so it's staying. Anyway, all the stories here are very good. And I'm not at all familiar with Carver's poetry, but Lemonade, the only poem in here, is absolutely amazing. I was shocked. Apparently, during his lifetime he was pretty respected as a poet, although that's fallen by the wayside as he has come to be considered one of the best American short story writers ever. Anyway, this book is a great, slim introduction to Carver's work and it provides context if you want to see the film like I want to so much.
It should be mentioned that the film is supposed to be amazing. It's already in the Criterion Collection, 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Altman is supposed to be a consistently brilliant director. Of course, none of this really guarantees anything, but it surely makes it likely that the film is good (perhaps some logical cause and effect errors in there, but you know what I mean). I really enjoyed Altman's introduction essay as well. He talked about how he spoke with Tess Gallagher, a poet who was married to Carver (and if I'm not mistaken was his editor at some point), every step of the way through the movie to make sure it would be consistent with Carver's vision.
However, the film, according to Altman and critics, is very much it's own piece of art. That is to say, the film as it is would be great even if the Carver stories didn't exist. You don't have to be a Carver fan or even have read his stories to like the film. Apparently. As I've said, I haven't actually seen it yet. According to Altman, the stories that inspired the film are just that: inspiration. Many liberties are taken with the story lines and characters, names are changed, new characters and story lines invented, and many characters originally from one story find their way into other ones. The cast is huge and amazing. So many great actors. Even Tom Waits is in it! Altman says that each actor brings their own thing and changes the stories in wonderful ways. It sounds like a truly collaborative effort. But Altman, and ultimately Carver, are the forces behind this thing. Supposedly. I haven't seen it.

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney

"You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not. A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already."

Let me say this first - Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City was not what I was expecting. That's not to say it was bad. It turned out that my initial understanding was wrong and the result was a better novel than I went in thinking it would be.

Critics label McInerney as a member of the 1980's "Literary Brat Pack," but he is so much more versatile than that. Bright Lights, Big City is noted for its use of the second person to describe the New York City cocaine culture of the electric eighties. Strikingly, this gimmick does not detract from the humanity found within the protagonist. Unlike fellow "Brat Packer" Bret Easton Ellis, McInerney doesn't write post-modern from a nihilistic perspective. His characters have flaws, but they also have regrets and desires to become a better people.

Bright Lights, Big City follows the narrator through his job as a fact-checker for a literary magazine. The story borrows heavily from McInerney's own time as a fact-checker at the New Yorker. At night, he goes out to clubs and does cocaine with his best friend. He has his dreams as a writer, but the rejection of his submissions to the magazine's fiction department coupled with the recent separation from his model wife, Amanda, drives him further into his hedonistic lifestyle. At first, the country girl Amanda did not take New York City's nightlife or the modeling career seriously, but the face of the city slowly creeps over and changes both.

Bright Lights, Big City is a quick read. At 180 pages, you can race through it. Over the course of the book, you are going to actually feel for the protagonist or at least acknowledge his inadequacies. While the novel is not what I was initially expecting, I do want to read more by Raymond Carver's understudy, particularly, Brightness Falls and Story of My Life, which is based on the life of Rielle Hunter, with whom Jay McInerney had a brief relationship and would later go on to have an affair with 2008 presidential candidate John Edwards.

Oddly enough, this book is getting remade into a film in 2010 according to IMDB. The novel was inspiration for the film of the same name in 1988 that starred Michael J. Fox, Keifer Sutherland, and Pheobe Cates. It was crazy enough to attempt to make Bret Easton Ellis' short story vignette collection, The Outsiders, earlier this year. I'll hold my opinion, but I don't have huge expectations.

The Music School by John Updike

Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold and lie heavy as the perfume of a flower shop on the dark slope of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city.

First of all, that's the smallest clear image of the cover I could find (though it's not the cover of my edition), so keep your comments to yourself. (Zach edit: Cover image has been corrected and author has been warned.)

Up top in italics are the first two sentences of this collection (and currently comprise the entirety of my Favorite Quotes section on Facebook...whatever). Yes, two sentences. Go back and see for yourself. They come from the story In Football Season. The recently departed Updike has always been famous for this type of high-style prose, and he is a master of it. In fact, he has been often criticized for focusing so much on style that it sometimes takes away from plot. Harold Bloom, whom I respect immensely (the man is clearly a genius) but with whom I sometimes disagree, went so far as to call him "a minor novelist with a major style." While I can't speak to his novels, as I've never read any of them, I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, one of his lesser known. I had been wanting to read an Updike book for a long time, and came upon this one at an amazing book sale. That's why I chose this one as opposed to Trust Me, The Same Door, Pigeon Feathers, or the recently released My Father's Tears and Other Stories.
Let's remember that to be called a major stylist by one of the world's foremost literary critics and theorists is nothing to sneeze at, even being called a minor novelist in the same breath. One thing is for sure: Updike can write a sentence. And in my opinion the man can write a story. I can certainly understand why people say his plots are pretty lightweight. There basically isn't one in In Football Season, as well as The Morning or Leaves. However, I absolutely loved the first and the last of those, and the other wasn't bad. The only story that I truly didn't like was The Indian. It just seemed sort of pointless. But I did read it in the dark in a bed in a dorm room when I was exhausted, so I may have missed a lot.
I read the first three stories of the book while still in school and just recently picked it up and read the rest. Some of my favorites, other than the ones mentioned, are Giving Blood, The Bulgarian Poetess, Harv is Plowing Now, Twin Beds in Rome, and The Christian Roommates. Mr. Updike claims that he never thought of how he wrote as style. Rather, he just wanted to make things perfectly precise. My friends, he does just that. There are so many moments when you'll know exactly what he means and think that you were the only one who saw it that way. Lightweight plots sometimes (but by no means always), but complex characters (Frank Bascombe is sometimes thought of as the new Rabbit Angstrom (who is not a character in any of these stories, but I just thought I'd mention that as it is an Updike character)) and wonderfully rich and precise sentences.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.

Wow. Isn’t that beautiful? Great stuff, right? I could feel genius pouring out of my fingertips as I typed that. That passage seems really Nabokovian. (Or maybe Nabokov is Joycian since Joyce came first, but I read Nabokov first, so…) Anyway, I was unfortunately only able to comprehend little of the supposed brilliance in this book but liked it anyway. It is the story of Stephen Dedalus, whom we get to see brief moments in his life from when he was three to when he is in university. The plot gets really interesting when he decides to go to a brothel but then instantly wants to repent after hearing a passionate sermon, one that the reader gets the entire 15 pages of. But it is really good. I didn’t instantly recognize that this was intensely good writing because the text became more like a vortex that just sucked me in and I didn’t even realize how drawn in I actually was until the preacher’s fervor stopped overflowing and the monologue ended. It was really cool, moving stuff that could only be rivaled by the very similar church scene in Moby Dick, albeit that one was much more centered, no doubt, on whales. Though I will add that this block of the book could go either way with its readers—I could just as easily see somebody getting distracted during it. For me, though, I was able to follow it as closely as a shadow.

I was reading this book to gear up for Ulysses but after reading Portrait I don’t really feel more prepared; rather I feel pretty despondent so I’m not sure if I’m ready to undergo that great literary endeavor. I want it to be more enjoyment than torture so I don’t think I’m ready, not yet.

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

Mid-Marchish, this year: I go into a bookstore with Jon and ask him to pick me out a book to read. He selects about a dozen, narrows it down to three, and lets me decide. The Sportswriter by Richard Ford, an author I had not heard of before, is one of the finalists and looks compelling but I ultimately choose American Pastoral—a decision I would soon not regret. 1.
Maybe a couple days later, possibly a few weeks, I’m in a used bookshop in Winston-Salem with Hunter. As if it is calling me, I randomly come across The Sportswriter. Six bucks? Why not. 2.
I pack for New Zealand and throw in The Sportswriter along with other books. 3.
One month later, Hunter, while amidst Cheever and his “big red book” of short stories, says via e-mail that the story, Reunion, by Cheever, is one of the most beautiful things he’s ever read… Or something to that effect. OK, I decide, I’ll check it out. 4.
I search Reunion and very luckily find a New Yorker fiction podcast where the story is read and discussed by none other than Richard Ford. Hey, I think, that name sounds quite familiar! Was he our 37th or 38th President? 5.
I agree, Reunion is absolute bliss. In the podcast, Ford mentions that the story inspired one of his own stories also called Reunion. I decide to search that as well to see if it’s anything like the other. 6.
Awesome. Ford’s Reunion is completely awesome. One of the best I’d read in a while. I decide to check out more of this Ford guy. 7.
I find another of his stories published in The New Yorker circa 2005. Another fine piece of work. 8.
I rediscover, sitting on my table, The Sportswriter by Ford whom I’ve come to love through the back way despite Jon holding open the front door for me the whole time. I’m massively pumped to read this book. 9.
I READ THE SPORTSWRITER! 10!

That was just a long way of saying that I couldn’t tell you how excited I was to read this book because of how much I liked Ford’s short stories and also because I had this book sitting on my table while I didn’t even know how much I liked the author. I didn’t mean for that list to be 10 points long but it conveniently worked out that way—like it was intentional. Anyway, enough of that.

The book follows a middle-aged, divorced sportswriter, Frank, over the course of a very busy Easter weekend. Briefly, Frank is lost in the world. He used to be a writer, as in a fiction writer, and actually published a well-acclaimed collection of short stories before deciding to jump to sportswriting, although it is clear that he is simply running away from expectations. He had a good life with his ex-wife, who is named only as X, but it still wasn’t complete in some way. It was missing some piece that didn’t make Frank whole and this is evident in the reason why X left him. It is actually no use in trying to describe the plot because it is so inconsequential to how deep and multidimensional the character of Frank is. That is the book—trying to figure Frank out. He is a habitual liar in trivial matters, looking more to please or avoid awkwardness more than anything. Yet what I think is so great is that I can’t feel sorry for Frank. Although I wish he was still with his ex-wife and writing novels and he seems to secretly want that too, Richard Ford always shut the door on sympathy by putting him in a situation where he isn’t very likable. Even though I have some strong opinions on Frank, I can’t do him a quality character analysis (spent way too much time on that introduction list) but what I can do is highly recommend this book. He is a character that, I think, will stay in your mind a while because he is so human and everything that comes with that.

The writing is also top-notch stuff. It’s highly readable in the sense that it flows effortlessly from one line to the next and does so with a very easy vocabulary. I’m quite interested in the sequel, Independence Day, which won the Pulitzer in… 1995?
If you read this book, look out for all the times that Ford describes a woman as having big breasts. I believe every woman’s body he describes (at least 4) is well-chested.

The King of Madison Avenue by Kenneth Roman

“In writing ads, act as you would if you met the individual buyer face to face. Don’t show off. Don’t try to be funny. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t behave eccentrically. Measure ads by salesmen’s standards, not by amusement standards.”

Who is David Ogilvy? Many, including this reader, proclaim him as their main inspiration for entering the advertising field. Why? There are three reasons: 1) Ogilvy’s working philosophy was not the 1960s smoke-filled business pitch as seen in AMC’s Mad Men. He always professed to “sell” the product through detailed feature descriptions and speaking directly to his audience. 2) He interacted and had meaningful relationships with so many assorted major thinkers of the twentieth century that these experiences could be distilled into a damn good film on their own right. 3) The subject of this biography lived nearly 30 years of his life in one of the oldest châteaux in France, Touffou.

David Ogilvy was larger than life and his mixed heritage only accounts for part of his eccentricities. Born on June 23, 1911 in England to a Scottish father and an Irish mother, Ogilvy would eventually attend Oxford on scholarship before eventually dropping out to work numerous jobs in Paris. Finally settling down as a waiter at the elusive Hotel Majestic, Ogilvy learned the art of presentation and preparation. When his successful brother ordered him back to England to help him sell Aga Cooker Stoves. Ogilvy offered free cooking lessons to all housewives who allowed him to demonstrate the stove’s features at their home. He was an instant hit and turned the product into an exclusive status symbol almost overnight in England. Even the Queen wanted one.

Widely considered the most famous automotive ad of all time and Ogilvy's best. The ad was so successful for Rolls-Royce "they don't dare run the ad again for fear of running completely out of stock."

Throughout his career, Ogilvy became known as the odd man out in the world of American advertising when he moved to New York City and opened a small shop. Before Ogilvy, British advertising borrowed heavily from whatever sold in America. Ogilvy’s work consistently proved that the consumer was smart and should be treated as such. He was also one of the first to hire a multi-racial staff. He was also one of the first to decry advertising awards as “distracting” and offered monetary awards to his staff for sales generated over “creativity.”

The man in the Hathaway shirt. His famous eye patch helped to sell more shirts in the ad's initial run than were available.

Kenneth Roman, the former chair and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather (pronounced May-ther), Ogilvy’s ad firm, has created a startling case for his former boss. Ogilvy was a dynamic creature that never held back in expressing his colorful opinions. Ogilvy would tell that you he is only remembered because he “outlived his betters.” Ogilvy is remembered because he was so productive even until his death. He never quite left the public eye or stopped writing.

Early ad for the Aga Cooker featuring Edouard Manet's Luncheon on the Grass. Both were considered controversial when they were first released.

Ogilvy wrote two autobiographies during his lifetime but it is Roman’s that offers the Ogilvy we cherish. There are many parts of Ogilvy’s philosophy that I disagree with, but it is hard to criticize a person that placed as much value on research as he did. Almost nobody bested Ogilvy in any argument and he was self-aware of his genius. Perhaps that is his most admirable quality.

One of Ogilvy's most famous quotes with the Russian dolls that inspired it.

If you are going to read any book on advertising, it should be Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man. If you want to read a biography on the man who helped to form much of our contemporary view of core principals of brand image this is your book. Roman was in the best position as a friend and co-worker for so many years to write Ogilvy’s “second opinion” biography. The book is worth a read if only to check out his teen years and the section detailing Ogilvy’s involvement with the OSS during WWII.

Hiroshima by John Hersey

“In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt. At least ten thousand of the wounded made their way to the best hospital in town, which was altogether unequal to such a trampling, since it had only six hundred beds, and they had all been occupied. The people in the suffocating crowd inside the hospital wept and cried, for Dr. Sasaki to hear, “Sensei, Doctor!,” and the less seriously wounded came and pulled at his sleeve and begged him to go to the aid of the worse wounded. Tugged here and there in his stockinged feet, bewildered by the numbers, staggered by so much raw flesh, Dr. Sasaki lost all sense of profession and stopped working as a skillful surgeon and a sympathetic man; he became an automaton, mechanically wiping, daubing, winding, wiping, daubing, winding.”

John Hersey may be remembered as one of the forerunners to the New Journalism movement that swept America during the 1960s and 1970s with magazines such as Esquire, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Fusing elements of storytelling with cold, hard fact created more compelling works in stories that demanded an element of warmth and elaboration. The cover of my 1989 edition of Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946) boldly states, “Everyone able to read should read it – Saturday Review of Literature.” Frankly, I was sold at the word Hiroshima. It was when I brought the book home and my dad told me how it was required reading at his high school that fully sold me. This book should still be required reading alongside Esther Hautzig’s The Endless Steppe.

The book follows the day the atomic age began on August 6, 1945 through the personal accounts of six different citizens of Hiroshima that survived the blast. These six accounts included (as recounted from the book’s inner jacket):

Miss Toshinki Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just turned her head to chat with the girl at the next desk.

Dr. Masakazu Fujii, a physician, had just sat down to read the paper on the porch of his private hospital.

Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, was watching a neighbor from her kitchen window.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest, lay on a cot in the mission house reading a Jesuit magazine.

Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young surgeon, walked along a hospital corridor with a blood specimen for a Wasserman test.

The Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, was about to unload a cart of clothes at a rich man’s home in the suburbs.

Hersey went to great pains to paint an accurate picture of the horrific events leading directly up to and the days following the explosion over Hiroshima. The Japanese are reclusive when it comes to documenting horrible memories and we should commend the author for getting honest accounts that do not seem doctored or censored. There is no shortage of passages that caused me to grimace or make exclamations aloud.

I read the updated version from the 1980s that includes an extra chapter that details each of the six respondents’ lives in the years following Japan’s recovery. Hersey’s exhausting quest for the truth is not lost in time and the new section fits well with the original text. There are some books in life we are instructed to read no matter what your preference for books is. They might be Huckleberry Finn or Night or even All Quiet on the Western Front. Hiroshima certainly fits into this category. Whether you are knowledgeable about the aftermath of the only atomic weapons used in war or you want to know a bit more from the Japanese perspective this book is for you.

The Breast by Philip Roth

I am a breast. A phenomenon . . . took place within my body . . . and converted me into a mammary gland disconnected from my human form.

Yes, it is true, the main character in this book transforms overnight from a healthy middle-aged man into a 155-pound breast, complete with a 6-inch nipple and all. I picked this up at a secondhand bookshop for a few bucks and it was well worth it. It’s only about 100 pages and can be read entirely on a Sunday afternoon, but in that time Roth, à la Gogol (The Nose) and Kafka (The Metamorphosis) describes what life would be like as a very popular part of the female body. I shouldn’t say much on this book because it is so short and should simply be read instead of any review on it, but I will say that Roth does not hold anything back in his prose. After reading this and American Pastoral and about Portnoy’s Complaint (in which the main character, at one point, masturbates into the core of an apple), I can safely say that there seems to be no subject that embarrasses him as an author. And though at times it seems he may be going out-of-bounds, I don’t think he would put it in unless it was important and part of the story. He has an uncensored mind, but for those who can stand it, the rewards are vast.

The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

I was a bit more excited coming into this book than I should have been; this probably due to finally watching The Fellowship of the Ring movie and really liking it. So I was pretty engrossed in the story at that point. But then I started reading The Two Towers. And it’s no secret that I wasn’t much for Tolkien’s very descriptive way of writing. Personally, it’s a problem of idea and execution. Not to say that Tolkien did not execute the story of the ring well—certainly history speaks volumes that he did—but that I just don’t really get into orcs and wizardry when it comes to reading 300 (and eventually 1000) pages on them. I think it all sounds fascinating, especially considering the fact that Tolkien was so meticulous in his creation of Middle-earth, but I caught myself constantly losing myself in the text. So as much as I want to like these books, I cannot bring myself to; while Jon, on the other hand, stands just two feet away from me, yet on the other side of the fence, saying that though he wasn’t enthused by LOTR, he cannot bring himself to say that he didn’t like them.

But for me, I think it’s the classic breakup excuse of, “It’s not you, it’s me.” Though when most people say this they are usually lying, I think it may be true in my case. I read in an article recently that fantasy, right behind romance, is the second-best selling genre these days. And that fact is hard to ignore in this age when a love-seeking vampire (Twilight), convertible machinery (Transformers), and fledgling wizard (Harry Potter) are main characters in very popular books and box office rockers. But what book has done more for its genre than LOTR has done for fantasy? I may not be qualified to make that claim but it seems that the answer would be no other book. Naturally, LOTR is the best place to crack that genre and I have found that it is not for me. I think I have found my niche in literary fiction.

But what is there to say specifically about The Two Towers? For starters, I missed the not so polite banter between Gimli and Legolas that was in The Fellowship. In this book they are much closer and more like brothers then enemies. Also, Gandalf confirmed himself as the biggest A-hole wizard in both Middle-earth and our own earth (though no wizards I know). His quick temper actually kinda pissed me off in some parts, I’m not gonna lie.

I watched the movie a few days ago for the first time and really liked it. I think it smartly condensed the history to simply the bare necessities and was easier to follow. It omitted some parts but on the whole was a fairly faithful adaptation. One very noteworthy omission, though (and I’m curious if anybody else caught this), was the end because in the book, Frodo and Sam are lead by Gollum into the spider’s cave where stuff happens and Sam falsely thinks Frodo is dead. Frodo’s body is picked up by orcs and Sam uses the ring to escape them. This, I thought was a good cliffhanger to lure the reader into the third part but it was left out of the movie so I guess it will be shown in the next. Anyway, I thought the dialogue in the movie was absolutely brilliant. All in all, the movies so far have really pulled me in while the books have loosed me.

In conclusion, I am content to deduce my problem with this book simply as one of a lack of interest on my part, but, to be sure, the minute details Tolkien insists the reader know don’t help much. Though his imagination, I can’t help but admire.