Starting The New Year Reading

I’ve started out the year by reading about boys and men in trouble. First I read Mark Twain’s “The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer”, a classic I haven’t touched in over a decade. I was surprised at just how much I had forgotten or had thought was Tom Sawyer when it was in fact Huckleberry Finn (on my long list of planned Twain for 2010). It’s such a universal story of being young that even though I grew up in the north over a century after Twain’s characters I recognize many of the strange mannerisms and speech of youth that I hope Facebook and cell phones don’t destroy.

After Tom Sawyer I picked up “David Copperfield”, and am well into it. I debated the merits of either reading it straight through or breaking it up (it is rather long book) with another novel every few days. “Copperfield” was published over the course of nineteen months, from May 1849 to November 1850, so I justified taking my time reading. After sixteen chapters I put it aside for two days and picked up John Cheever’s “Falconer”.

Throughout my life I’ve found myself in trouble for various reasons, nothing too serious, and I’ve only seen the inside of a police station once, as a Cub Scout. We were shown around the booking area and had our mug shots and fingerprints taken. “Falconer” is a short novel about a man that has killed his brother and is sent to prison, where he falls in a deeper love than the one he seems to have ever shared with his wife, explores his memories in the long stretches of time he has, and finds freedom not only from the physical prison, it would seem, but from his own emotional captivity. It was fascinating seeing your typical upper-middle-class Cheever character transported into a place where everyone is equally (mostly) powerless.

I’m going to be reading a chapter or two of “Copperfield” a day, and for my other book (I like to juggle, keeps the reading fresh) I’ve picked up “Then We Came To The End” by Joshua Ferris. I’ve read a few of his short stories and liked them and I look forward to seeing how he works in long form.

A Little Bit On Size

I’m concerned with size. No, not that kind. Eyes above the shoulders, please. Size of me writings, that is. Among all the other things I’m working on, I’m reading through a book of Aesop’s Fables I had as a kid, with an introduction by Isaac Bashevis Singer. It’s a printing from the late sixties, with wonderful little drawings every page or so. In reading these little paragraphs that hold so much, I’m reminded of Hemingway in a way (ho-ho), mostly the way he wrote when he was at his best: paring down his words to just the bare necessities, and sometimes even less. The iceberg method of writing, where only a fraction of the story is exposed, fascinates me and frustrates me, as I’m always tempted to wax on and off about some little detail in a Dickensian manner (“the Sofa…”). I’ve recently written a short story that came out around 4,000 words. I think it’d be a damn good piece if I could get it down another five hundred or thousand words. Like Wash says in Knocked Up, TIGHTEN.

A bit breezy in here, ain’t it?

And now, the first fable from the book. I’d like to dedicate this to politicians, past, present, and probably future:

THE WOLF AND THE LAMB
A wolf, meeting with a lamb astray from the fold, resolved not to lay violent hands on him, but to find some plea to justify to the lamb the wolf’s right to eat him. He thus addressed him” “Sirrah, last year you grossly insulted me.” “Indeed,” bleated the lamb in a mournful tone of voice, “I was not then born.” Then said the wolf, “You feed in my pasture.” “No, good sir,” replied the lamb, “I have not yet tasted grass.” Again said the wolf, “You drink of my well.” “No,” exclaimed the lamb, “I never yet drank water, for as yet my mother’s milk is both food and drink to me.” Upon which the wolf seized him and ate him up, saying, “Well! I won’t remain supperless, even though you refute every one of my imputations.” The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.

Short, simple, to the point. Well played, Aesop.