Little Things

While I was in London this weekend (and I swear I have photos from this trip, along with everything I shot in Sevilla, Granada, and Malta, and I will post them when I have a spare moment!), I found myself in a little shop called The Book Warehouse. Because nothing makes me feel quite as complete as a new book, I decided to buy a small, lightweight, travel-friendly copy of the short story collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver.

Although I'm still wrapping up Absalom! Absalom! right now, this collection has entirely stolen my attention. Raymond Carver can write like nobody's business. I'm not exaggerating when I say that these are probably the best short stories I've read in six months. Which isn't really saying a whole lot; I haven't read a ton of short stories in the last six months. But I digress.

This story initially appeared under the title "Popular Mechanics" when it was published in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in 1981.

"Little Things"

Early that day the weather turned and the snow was melting into dirty water. Streaks of it ran down from the little shoulder-high window that faced the backyard. Cars slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside too.

He was in the bedroom pushing clothes into a suitcase when she came to the door.

I'm glad you're leaving! I'm glad you're leaving! she said. Do you hear?

He kept on putting his things into the suitcase.

Son of a bitch! I'm so glad you're leaving! She began to cry. You can't even look me in the face, can you?

Then she noticed the baby's picture on the bed and picked it up.

He looked at her and she wiped her eyes and stared at him before turning and going back to the living room.

Bring that back, he said.

Just get your things and get out, she said.

He did not answer. He fastened the suitcase, put on his coat, looked around the bedroom before turning off the light. Then he went out to the living room.

She stood in the doorway of the little kitchen, holding the baby.

I want the baby, he said.

Are you crazy?

No, but I want the baby. I'll get someone to come by for his things.

You're not touching this baby, she said.

The baby had begun to cry and she uncovered the blanket from around his head.

Oh, oh, she said, looking at the baby.

He moved toward her.

For God's sake! she said. She took a step back into the kitchen.

I want the baby.

Get out of here!

She turned and tried to hold the baby over in a corner behind the stove.

But he came up. He reached across the stove and tightened his hands on the baby.

Let go of him, he said.

Get away, get away! she cried.

The baby was red-faced and screaming. In the scuffle they knocked down a flowerpot that hung behind the stove.

He crowded her into the wall then, trying to break her grip. He held on to the baby and pushed with all his weight.

Let go of him, he said.

Don't, she said. You're hurting the baby, she said.

I'm not hurting the baby, he said.

The kitchen window gave no light. In the near-dark he worked on her fisted fingers with one hand and with the other hand he gripped the screaming baby up under an arm near the shoulder.

She felt her fingers being forced open. She felt the baby going from her.

No! she screamed just as her hands came loose.

She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby's other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back.

But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard.

In this manner, the issue was decided.

 - "Little Things," from Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From: New and Collected Stories (1988)

The Dirty Fork

After a delightful weekend in London, I'm home again in Córdoba, too tired to post anything more than a Monty Python sketch I watched with my good pal Diksha yesterday.

- "The Dirty Fork," from Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969)

Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung

Antonia's feeling lazy, so she's decided to revert to the effortless and share another song.

- "Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung" by The Flaming Lips, from At War with the Mystics (2006)

Eclipse

Once again, the blog ghost Antonia has returned. This time, she's sharing photos from the morning of March 20, when there was a partial solar eclipse visible here in Andalucia. Though Andalucia isn't far enough north to be able to see the total eclipse, it was still pretty neat. Antonia, like me, is of the belief, however, that most photos of an eclipse taken with a mid-quality SLR camera are the same, so here is one, because one is enough.

P.S. This post was written at 2:00 a.m. in the midst of preparing to travel, so sincerest apologies if it seems a bit lackadaisical.

Lovefool

Antonia the blog ghost is back. She's like my inner Tyler Durden, the person I would be if I had more moxie and confidence. Antonia has decided to share some more songs while I go visit my friend Sweet Deeks in London this weekend and worry about my impending departure from Europe.

To quell these anxieties, Antonia has summoned the ghost of 1996 for you. Like me, she has an unabashed love of bad pop music and easily gets songs stuck in her head.

- "Lovefool" by The Cardigans, from First Band on the Moon (1996)

Weird Medieval Art

It's exactly what it says.

Codependence at its finest

Late fifteenth-century

Taken from the ever-fascinating Beachcombing's History Blog.

Semana Santa, pt. I

This is far overdue, but here are some photos I took during Semana Santa in Córdoba.

Fillmore Jive

1. Malta was complicated and full of sense and the most clear blue water I've seen in my life and fairly friendly people and very bitter people and cheap food and crumbling buildings and the most disgusting tap water I've ever tasted, which I was told was "not fit for drinking" but I drank anyway because I'm hardcore.
2. I feel completely detached from my brain right now, moreso than usual, I think because I haven't had a good night's sleep in quite a while and need to take a day for myself to sleep and rest and housekeep and worry less about everything, which I'm beginning to do again as a result of the sleeplessness.

This song was all I could think of to post, because it's all I ever think of when I'm tired. It's also probably one of my favorite final songs on any album so far.

- "Fillmore Jive" by Pavement, from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994)

Canadian Logging

The blog ghost Antonia returns once again to keep house while I explore Malta. Today she's decided to share this short clip, produced by the National Film Board of Canada and released in 1978. It's a minute long movie explaining the history of logging in Western Canada...it sounds dry and esoteric, but rest assured that it's a winsome little bit of education.

-Directed by Al Sens, 1978

Maurice Sendak Believes

Antonia, the friendly blog ghost, is still doing her job well. As such, she's decided that today will be a day for conversation with Maurice Sendak. The Believer, which is a wonderful magazine that's interviewed people like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Harold Ramis, and Nora Ephron, published this interview with the late writer in 2012, several months after his death. The full piece can be found here, but Antonia has also included an excerpt below, in which Sendak talks about the influence of his family and the effects of losing family members during the Holocaust:

III. WE ARE INSEPARABLE

BLVR: What did your grandmother say about the old country?

MS: She told me about how the Jew-haters would come into her little grocery store and she would push her children down into the cellar. They had a door that closed and they ransacked the whole store. That was pre-Nazi. That was the Cossacks. She came from a little Polish town. My love of Poland is very bleak to this day. I can hear her stories in my head. It was very hard for her. Her husband died when he was forty, which drove my mother crazy. She blamed his death on my grandmother, which is why my grandmother sent her to America—shut up, get outta here. So she came to America. A sixteen-year-old girl, alone. She was told that there would be a pushcart dealer and his wife who would rent her a room and she would have someone to talk to. But shortly after she arrived, he was killed in an automobile accident. I don’t know how she survived. I mean, of course she went nuts. They were all nuts. I knew they were crazy when they came to the house. Crazy faces and wild eyes.

BLVR: Did you have a sense of being American-plus?

MS: Yes. I was very happy to be an American. I loved being here. I loved not being dead when I was a kid. And whenever a kid died, when I was a kid, it was a very big thing; it reflected back on the fact that my being here was arbitrary. My father coming here was arbitrary. He didn’t have to come here. He came because he was chasing a girl who had committed herself to every living human male in the village. And he was the rabbi’s son! He had prestige and was extremely handsome and devil-may-care. He came here and became a drudge. His family was sitting shiva for him back in the old country because he had done this terrible thing: chasing a girl, when your father is a rabbi, and schlepping all the way to New York.

I remember reading that Anne Frank had a friend in America, in Idaho or somewhere, and they exchanged letters. The girl wanted to know why Anne couldn’t come and visit her. The idea that it would have taken only a simple plane trip to save Anne’s life… and the little girl from Idaho didn’t understand that. Why should she? It was very touching to me that it was the plane trip that was the answer to everything. Anne’s death was very hard. All the little-girl playmates that I had in Brooklyn became little Anne Frank girls. And one of them actually became sick and died. I was very confused. I saw that you could die, even in America. That was hard.

So the childhoods of me and my brother and sister were complex. We didn’t know who we were, and whatever we chose to be was seemingly in opposition to what our parents wanted us to be. They wanted us to be wealthy Americans. A doctor, a professor. My sister could be a rich wife. Not much was expected from her, except that she marry well. My sister was so intelligent, and she wanted so much to go to college, but my mother and father said no, she was only a woman, it was a waste of money. I hated the idea of college, and my father was furious because I was the youngest and he could actually pay for me. I was in total revolt. I hated school. I hated forcibly learning something. I had a few understanding teachers who didn’t see me as an evil creature.

BLVR: So where did your curiosity and imagination manifest?

MS: My brother, who was five years my senior. A wonderful, wonderful brother. And my sister. They stood guard over me. They were like the parents I wanted, and behind them, the parents I really had. I mistreated my parents because I didn’t understand their troubles, and then it gets too late.

BLVR: Were they very anxious around you?

MS: Yes. Too anxious. Everything was hard, everything was a problem, everything was a scolding. Everything was you-did-something-wrong. You went around the block, you did something wrong. You spoke to a strange person, you did something wrong. My mother calling me to dinner, “You didn’t go to your brother today, and he’s reading by himself in his room, what kind of brother are you?” He was my savior. He was gentle and wonderful. We wrote stories and I illustrated them on shirt cardboard. And when my relatives—these goofballs—came, he would read the stories and I would hold up the pictures. He wrote a wonderful story called “We Are Inseparable.” About a brother who falls in love with his sister, which my brother did—Freud didn’t know from Brooklyn, he never flew over Brooklyn—and they’re going to get married. My parents didn’t think anything of it.

I remember that story, and I hated drawing the scene where they had to kiss, because I couldn’t fit their faces together. And then at the end—because in the back of his mind he knew something was wrong—the boy is in an accident, with bandages like a mummy, and lying in a hospital bed, and the parents are blocking the bed because she’s a banshee and is going to come, and she rushes in and pushes them aside and jumps on him, and they both hurl themselves out of the forty-second-floor window of the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital screaming, “We are inseparable.” Ha! I had such a good time drawing the bodies falling and smashing. Total wreckage. It was his masterpiece.

BLVR: Did your family know they were crazy?

MS: No. But they led desperate lives. I remember when my brother was dying, he looked at me, and his eyes were all teary. And he said, “Why were we so unkind to Mama?” And I said, “Don’t do that. We were kids, we didn’t understand. We didn’t know she was crazy.” When I asked my best friend, Martin, to have lunch at my house, and my mother walked through the room furiously—she was always furious—he said, “Who’s that?” And I said, “We had to hire somebody.” I would not admit it was my mother. And that shame has lasted all my life. That I didn’t have the nerve to say, “That’s my mother; that’s how she is.”

IV. FOR HE’S A JOLLY GOOD FELLOW

BLVR: Who told you you were talented?

MS: We had a cousin. We were not supposed to like her, because she was a communist. She was very plain. I adored her, and me and my sister would steal off and go to her house. She sat and talked to me and told me that I knew how to draw and that I could be an artist, or anything, and I thought if she was in the world, then good was in the world. Nobody had spoken to me like that. She died when she was young. She married a terrible non-Jew, a really ghastly person. She was the only person who tried to tell me there was more to life than this cuckoo family.

I don’t want to exaggerate to you how bad it was. They were good to me. They tried. They had no education, no experience of life. They came from little shtetls and they were living in America, which was the oddest thing of all. How do you get along with people? You don’t speak En-glish, you haven’t been to school. Your kids are being drawn away from you by society. Their lives were unspeakable. And our lives were between unspeakable and the movies. We had America from the movies and books. In the end, I guess it was OK. I’m totally crazy, I know that. I don’t say that to be a smartass, but I know that—whatever that means—it’s the very essence of what makes my work good. And I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that’s fine. I don’t do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can’t not do it.

BLVR: You were safe in America, but the war in some ways came closer to you and your family than to many of those still in Europe.

MS: Yes. This is true: the day of my bar mitzvah—my father belonged to a Jewish social club—he got word on that day that he had, no longer, a family. Everyone was gone. And he lay down in bed. I remember this so vividly. My mother said to me, “Papa can’t come.” I was going to have the big party at the colonial club, the old mansion in Brooklyn. And I said, “How can Papa not come to my bar mitzvah?” And I screamed at him, “You gotta get up, you gotta get up!” And of course he did. The only thing I remember is looking at him when they broke into “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”… And my father’s face was vivid, livid, and I knew I had done something very bad; that I had made him suffer more than he had to. What did I know? This thirteen-year-old ersatz man. Trying to handle fifteen cheap Parker pens.

BLVR: What an inheritance.

MS: Yes. And then you grow up, and you do books for children.

The Swimming Song

So the ghost who occasionally maintains my blog is back to share tidbits while I relax in Malta, away from the Internet. This ghost, who goes by the name of Antonia, always takes the bookmarks out of my books and happens to really dig banjos.

- "The Swimming Song" by Loudon Wainwright III, from the album Attempted Mustache (1973)

The Window

This is a poem by Diane di Prima. By no means do I have a hugely discerning taste, and I'm not very familiar at all with di Prima's poetry. I need to read more of her work before saying whether I generally like her or not, but this poem caught my eye for several reasons. Usually I'm not into poetry that's so abstract and sparse that it could be interpreted in a million-and-one different ways, but this has some good things going for it, and perhaps you will think so too.

"The Window"

you are my bread

and the hairline

noise

of my bones

you are almost

the sea

you are not stone

or molten sound

I think

you have no hands

this kind of bird flies backward

and this love

breaks on a windowpane

where no light talks

this is not time

for crossing tongues

(the sand here

never shifts)

I think

tomorrow

turned you with his toe

and you will

shine

and shine

unspent and underground

 -From This Kind of Bird Flies Backward (1958)

The End of the World

During my last day in Galicia, my new friend Richi and I went around the coast and looked at cool stuff near the ocean. I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't the best day I've had in a long time; seeing the Atlantic was the perfect end to my Camino and to my week of adventure. I was delighted to be able to explore such a beautiful place with a local; Richi had immense pride in being able to share his native Galicia with me. (If you're reading this, Richi, thank you for being such a knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide!)

We went to Castro de Baroña, which is this incredible two-thousand year-old fortress originally built by the Celts. It's fairly well-preserved, but there are no restrictions on walking through it, so we could just sit and eat empanadas on these ancient old houses. Afterward, we went to Ézaro and saw the cascades where the River Xallas (pronounced like "shy-us") empties into the sea. Apparently it's the only river in Europe to empty into the ocean in a waterfall, but now there's a hydroelectric power plant right next to it, so it's probably way less picturesque now than it was before. Also, Wikipedia says that there are other waterfalls that empty into oceans in Europe, so maybe that thing I said before about it being the only one isn't actually true.

Finally, we bummed around la Costa da Morte ("the coast of death"), so named because of the numerous shipwrecks and barnacle-fishing-related deaths that have occurred there. In what was perhaps one of the most memorable points of the trip, we ended up at Finisterre (or Fisterra in Galego). Finisterre was so named because it is one of the westernmost points in continental Europe, and so for centuries it was the end of known land. Many people considered to be the end of the world, hence the name: Finis terrae.

Sitting on the promontory and watching the sun go down over the ocean was unbelievable. It was the most open view I think I've ever seen, and I couldn't help but look out to the southwest and think of everyone I've known in the U.S., and how far away all of it was and how big the world is. I'll wrap this up before I get too faux-philosophical, but if there's one part of Spain I can recommend to you, it's Finisterre.

Castro de Baroña

The view from above the Ézaro Waterfall

And the Ézaro Waterfall itself

Cape Finisterre

El Camino, pt. IV

These are photos from the last day of the Camino, as well as from Easter Sunday in Santiago. It was a wonderfully relaxed conclusion (if you can call it that). I arrived in Santiago on what would have been my grandmother's hundredth birthday, so to my sentimental perspective, it was even more special than it would have been otherwise. The feeling of walking down the hill and seeing the edges of Santiago made me more excited than anything has in a while, and I'm a fairly excitable person. I felt an overwhelming combination of accomplishment and contentment.

Santiago itself was very cool, though I think I was content to have only spent two days there. It's a small city, but there was enough to do. I ended up making some friends and going to a jazz concert, which was extremely impressive. The drummer, who was my favorite musician in the group, was licking his drumset and throwing around metal mixing bowls and wind-up toys. It was swell.

Fifteen kilometers to go!

 

Almost there...

We made it!

 

 

La Xunta de Galicia

The monastery where I slept

 

Easter Sunday Pilgrim's Mass

 

These doors were everywhere

Santiago, as seen from Parque Belvis

El Camino, pt. III

My apologies for not sharing more sooner; yesterday I was in Granada and today I went to a little pueblo called Villaharta with a friend of my host family. It's obvious that things here have been very occupied in the most wonderful way possible. I'm traveling to Malta on Wednesday, and later this month I'm going to London as well. Budget airlines are really a beautiful thing.

Here are some photos from the third day of my Camino. I walked through Arzúa and stopped for the night in a town called Pedrouzo, which was not my favorite place at all, maybe in part because it was a very long day and I was exhausted upon my arrival. There were also a ton of cows along this stretch, which is saying something considering that I'm from the Midwest and have seen my share of cows.

As always, I walked with several friendly people, among them a very kind Galician couple named Pablo and Paola, both of whom are university professors. They humored my bad Spanish, and Paola practiced her English with me too. Later I met two middle-aged Valencian couples who took photos with me and asked me lots of questions about why I was walking alone and whether it felt unsafe. Mariteresa, who was very maternal and caring, told me that I had to return to Spain to work when I graduate, because she said she was sure that I could find work with my English skills. It's very likely she was just being friendly, but it's a nice thought.

When I got to Pedrouzo, I also discovered some crazy bloodstains in my shoes and felt really cool. But you probably didn't need to know that.

Fifty kilometers to go

There was a missionary here giving out wax stamps

"It's easy!"

I really liked these colors

One of hundreds of cows along the way

Twenty-five kilometers to go

A plague of eucalyptus trees