Sunday, March 17, 2024

The Bird’s Nest by Shirley Jackson

 Gradual alphabetical list of my Jackson reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/15/my-reviews-of-stories-by-shirley-jackson/

One thought on “The Bird’s Nest — Shirley Jackson

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    ELIZABETH 

    “; Elizabeth’s office allowed of no concealment, and so she came to work of a Monday morning to find that directly to the left of her desk, and within reaching distance of her left elbow as she typed, the wall had been taken away and the innermost skeleton of the building exposed.”

    The truly amazing scenes that open this novel — where has it been all my life? — contain the above ‘elbow’ trigger supreme, amidst a description of the listing or subsiding  Museum building where 23 year old Elizabeth Richmond works as a clerk, with expressions such as ‘banking curve’ with regard to the tilted or canted exhibits, to which description I can do no justice here! But is this architectural difficulty connected with later references to E’s  backache and migraine, after having dinner, a dinner considered important by her mannish aunt with whom E stays after her mother died, so important it is only the dinner’s subsequent brandy that loosens the aunt’s tongue in conversation after which she calls E  KIDDO!

    If one ‘elbow’ moment was not enough, there was yet another…

    “Now, let’s see, this shaft down the building ought to pass somewhere close to Miss Richmond’s left elbow; will it, I wonder, trouble Miss Richmond to find one wall gone?”

    Seriously, this material is a staggering example of Shirley Jackson fiction.  Whether it is evaluated ultimately to be good or bad fiction, remains to be seen.

     I have read so far up to…

    “She did not hear Aunt Morgen pass down the hall, nor perceive Aunt Morgen’s belated conscientious glance in through her doorway; she did not hear Aunt Morgen whisper, ‘You all right, kiddo?’”

Monday, March 11, 2024

Stories by Shirley Jackson (4)

 


Stories by Shirley Jackson (4)

Continued from here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/shirley-jackson/

Gradual alphabetical list of my Jackson reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/15/my-reviews-of-stories-by-shirley-jackson/

Previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/

When I read these stories, my thoughts will appear in comment stream below…

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5 responses to “*

  1. GOT A LETTER FROM JIMMY

    ”Oh God, she thought, I said silly. I said silly twice. That finishes it.”

    I wonder if the wife is more insanely furious about something than her husband, when they both pussy-foot around opening the eponymous letter. You better finish it yourself, and not depend on me telling you about it, even though I may have left it unread, except for that short passage above that was reported to me by someone else equally as mad about it as me.

  2.  PARANOIA

    A story of a small man, like many dapper men, going home with a candy box under his ARM for his wife’s birthday. But one ELBOW trigger follows another ELBOW trigger, that accompanies a stalking or blatant pursuance by a man in a light hat, from taxi to bus to subway to souvenir shop, with several examples of the dapper man’s ARM, one being tugged half in half out, and on one occasion he is upon his KNEE, where all these hinges as to what identity he himself is when reaching his wife makes a disarmingly disturbing story. His head’s electric bulb moment?

  3. LIKE MOTHER USED TO MAKE

    This is possibly the saddest story I have ever read. About a single man in his own apartment, who is meticulous with civilised cutlery he has built up for dinner parties, although it seems it is only Marcia in the next door apartment (an apartment far more scruffy than his) who comes, now and again, to eat a meal cooked by him, including, this evening, with only his third ever cooked fruit pie, a cherry one that seems too sour for him but optimally sour for her. There is also much to relish about the Jacksonish multi-coloured accoutrements in his living quarters. Why is it all so sad? Visit the scene via this story and see for yourself. You may be induced to stay there forever. SOUR: so you are?

  4. Jack The Ripper

    It seems as if the title is the supremest spoiler ever. And if it indeed turns out to be such, it is all a bit ‘meh’. But what of all those men in the bar to whom our protagonist appeals about the 17 year old girl he had just witnessed drunk and comatose upon the pavement outside, ‘unattractive’ but ‘thin and lovely’ when laid out? Is this the first trigger for him to adopt the career already implanted as the title, a sudden brain surge he was not even expecting to possess him, none of which would explain the knife he carried with him so un-omnisciently? I blame the freehold author. The man was not even a narrator, reliable or not.

  5. THE MAN IN THE WOODS

    This is a remarkable deadpan story, with shades of Laura Carrington stories, or vice versa, a dead pan of onions and meat with an appetising smell, trees that crowd in upon a stone house, and the eponymous man called Christopher arriving through dark and endless trees from a random endless walk with an adopted cat, to be sort of welcomed by two ladies in green robes, and their cat Grimalkin that almost fights with Christopher’s cat. Is he going to be allowed to shelter overnight? — a suspenseful theme, while the man, who is the real host called Mr Oakes, sharpens a knife as if threatening Christopher, when the ladies prepare a deadpan feast. But is it more a question of Christopher being the man now duly in line to deal with the house and the garden’s roses and whatever else? The whole purpose of his trek through the woods, a purpose until now hidden in plain sight? Is there an inadvertent clue vaguely for what purpose Mr Oakes is going to use the knife at the river, when the two ladies’ names are joined up — Cissy (aka Circe) and Phyllis to CissyPhyllis? But what of the measurements on the white-washed wall? The story thankfully defeats the reader in the end.

    1. SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY

      I recall studying this book by William Empson when I was a student of Stylistics under Anne Cluysenaar in the 1960s. This story with its title is probably the most plainly inscrutable one you will ever read, so one naturally seeks for ambiguities to help it have a pay-off. The story of a student boy who picks up the Empson book every time he visits a certain bookshop, a shop having several individual overhead lights with on-off switches at each shelf, a sort of basement which is otherwise cold and gloomy, and stairs leading down to it where, seemingly, there is always one extra step you don’t expect when reaching the bottom. The shopkeeper is also attending to other customers, a man and woman, and the man evidently wants fine books with fine covers and fine authors to read or as, I suspect, simply to furnish his front room. The probably penniless student, to the knowledge of the shopkeeper, always replaces the Empson on the shelf having acted as if he is inspecting it to buy it, yet certain that nobody will buy it and he can continue reading it next time he visits, and thus he leaves. And there we have it, as the inevitable ending follows the student’s departure from the bookshop. I switch off the light above the story, minding my step thereafter in the darkness.

    2. THE HONEYMOON OF MRS SMITH

      “She had worn her best dark-blue dress to be married in, and Mr Smith had worn a dark-blue suit so that they looked unnervingly alike….”

      Blue is the darkest colour of all in Jackson. Helen Bertram has become Mrs Smith, a spear carrier by dint of name, like many of Jackson’s well-named spear carriers, and visited by another called Mrs Jones, after  Mrs S had been out shopping fending off innuendo and so-called assistance for having married a potentially notorious Mr S, so who is Mr S? The complex Henry James prose loosens a bit as we realise what Mr S may be. It is a chilling and attritional task to read to the end where the word ‘rest’ takes on a multitude of meanings.

    3. TRIAL BY COMBAT

      I simply love this story, a perfect gem. Where has it been all my life? Elizabeth Bowen plus Shirley Jackson, a simple tale of tension between ladies living in near identical rooms in an apartment block with understated compelling suspense regarding kleptomania of knickknacks and politeness with undercurrents, and the devastating ending that is even more understated. It was the aspirin that finally killed me! Not forgetting the blue housecoat hung up.

    4. HOME

      “the disgusting wet cold”

      A run of the mill ghost story of a feudal-acting woman having taken over a large house in a small village community, with a bridge near the creek which she is warned nobody ever travelled when it was raining. So of course she ignored them and ended up immersed in wet cold bathos. To tell you more could not possibly spoil this story because, in my book, it is hardly worth reading in the first place. Be warned.

    5. THE VILLAGER

      An extremely subtle story, in danger of becoming too subtle to mean anything, that ends with aching shoulders. One woman had found herself disguising herself as another woman (the latter who is currently absent) while exploring the latter’s apartment  for furniture to buy, a story all about missed opportunities of a dancing career and broken marriages, and the fact you can’t escape yourself by becoming someone else. Or vice versa. But who, in the process, over-stretched their whole body en pointe?

    6. COME DANCE WITH ME IN IRELAND

      Three ladies on the ground floor of an apartment, one with a baby, the other two visiting her from elsewhere in the block. The outside buzzer goes that rings the ground floor apartment when strangers or salesmen call, and this is a poor hungry old man selling shoelaces. Echoless, even though after they feel sorry for him and feed increasing amounts of an eggy fry-up to him, he echoes aspects of the poet Yeats (whom he once knew, he claims) before he rudely leaves. I loved the deadpan pointlessness. I blame the sherry they gave him. Or the fact that soon I will be too old to do up my own review shoelaces. Or accidentally knot them one to the other.

    7. PILLAR OF SALT

      Stories as often oblique and dark palliators now reach their end. I seem, by random chance, to have left the best until last. An almost direct experience  of the holiday of a seasoned husband and wife, Brad and Margaret., visiting New York from New Hampshire, innocents abroad, but their ideals of a city break gradually takes various turns of alarms, confusions and even the imposing city buildings are in entropy as well as the panic and meltdown of Margaret, conveyed by dense attritional paragraphing that effectively plunges the reader into her various emotions, towards an ‘elbow’ moment that helps bring matters to a frighteningly open-ended close. And this final story makes even my reviewing methods crazily credible….

      “We’ve been playing anagrams.”

      END

Saturday, March 09, 2024

Mooncalves

 NO Press 2023

Edited by John WM Thompson

When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

Stories written by Briar Ripley Page, Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí, Janalyn Guo, Brian Evenson, Jaime Corbacho, Lisa Tuttle, L. Marie Wood, Adam Golaski, Chelsea Sutton, Meghan Lamb, Christi Nogle, Glen Hirshberg, J.A.W. McCarthy, Sasha Geffen, Mark G. Meyer, Thomas Mavroudis, Daniel M. Lavery, Nathan Breakenridge, Steve Rasnic Tem, Jeff Wood, Elwin Cotman, Sofia Samatar, and Jaime Corbacho.

3 thoughts on “MOONCALVES

  1. I have been attracted to this book, not only because it has a few of my favourite writers included, but also because of its title. Since first coming across, as a young student, the word in Shakespeare’s Tempest, I have teased friends and family with the accusation of their opinions currently being like those of mooncalves and, so, I didn’t want to waste more time until they improved their intellects! Thankfully, nobody, I believe, took me seriously as they could see the glint in my eye.

  2. December Story by Briar Ripley Page

    “It’s just edges. Celestial blankness, corpse fingers, frozen lake. I search a long time for the final piece that will finish the border and close it off, but nothing ever quite fits. None of the shapes fall into place.”

    Well, anyone who knows me, will know I would most certainly like any sort of blankness, let alone a celestial version of it. And thus the story around this jigsaw stays with me powerfully, a jigsaw, above, that describes my gestalt real-time reviewing to such a Kafkaesque perfection of imperfection, that it is almost worth dying for, let alone trying and possibly failing to scry its tale of epistles, some sent, some unsent, and attempted meetings between two boyfriends, one K, the other Gene, with hints of trans-surgery for one of them in a sort of Evenson Warren, and one of them sleep-walking into a version of Golaski’s Refrigerator-Drome, and a woman with too many teeth. And all of us screaming through a ‘flesh radio’. And much more, from Snow Queen to Looking-Glass.

    “Even wild animals can become attached to their cages,…”

  3. The Tomato by Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí

    “What if the tomato started bleeding?”

    Having just yesterday finished reading and reviewing the stories of Leonora Carrington (HERE), I think I can safely say that this story competes with such classics and in most cases wins out.  The story of a woman’s young son being turned into a tomato by the recriminatory magic of another woman, and her efforts to regain him by all manner of means and her own potential self-abasement, travelling all the byways of her own backstory and of her feminine body, eventually reaching a shocking but inspiring climax that one can hardly forget.

    “Why is the past tense of broadcast broadcast and not broadcasted?”

    Why is a tomato sometimes called a love apple, I ask, as I cutted it.

    1. Night Fragrance by Janalyn Guo

      This is an engaging story of a young girl with metal back brace and a troubled mother (estranged from the girl’s father) moving to a house and community circumscribed by tall trees and fragrances, some of the latter meaty, some of her school friends involving her in games like Hungry Woods, in swimming wild and more, with mushrooms, orchids and meat-eating flowers, and, as an inspiringly inadvertent theme and variations, 18 variations in total perhaps, upon the tomato immediately preceding this story, we learn more about the metabolism of femininity  in interface with the mines, if not minds, of earth and a transformative growth  towards where life is more fulfilling.

    2. It Does Not Do What You Think It Does 

      Brian Evenson

      “And then I waited, elbows balanced on the countertop, fingers laced gently together, for my food to arrive.”

      An elbow trigger that does what the title says, time and time again, as if you cannot believe in such a literal refrain. A trigger that immediately preceded one man travelling all night meeting by chance another such man in a motel eatery, the latter tugging at the former’s sleeve, more than once.  With mention in their ensuing conversation of sounds detached from objects stalking a travelling person and smells migrated from places to a travelling person, too. As if white noise is a medium for such processes. The ending is important but maybe it is not important, but what is truly important was the journey there, a journey that transcended omniscience itself. Important only, though, in the sense of things being imported or fostered out. This story does do what you initially thought it did.

      My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/brian-evenson/

    3. Butterfly Kisses 

      Jaime Corbacho

      This is an amazing flutter-peridot of a story, the prose textured and deep yet pellucid and limpid, not that I understood the plot consciously, but part of me certainly did by osmosis, as the journey into death is deployed more tantalisingly real  than ever before in literature with coffin-sharing bifurcated by ocean burial. Each word tickled my cheek before entering my eyes. 

    4. The First Wife 

      Lisa Tuttle

      “…his online footprint was nearly as faint as my own.”

      This story seemed at first merely plainly workmanlike with Halloween themes for mooncalf readers involving an old lady’s backstory of husbands, a backstory shared with another old lady and the former’s erstwhile yearning to own the nearby mansion, but it becomes staggeringly surprising at the chutzpah of its quite unexpected mask and painting theme of one of her ex-husband’s wives, including herself, and how we are left eventually in a limbo of frighteningly bottomless bathos. 

      1. Beyond the Chain

         L. Marie Wood

        A nicely oblique vignette about  what happened beyond the chain and the perpetrator of an abominable crime sheltering in their own shadow while beckoning for their ghostly victims so as to reenact the crime. Or that is not what is about at all!

         Even I (or especially me) could not see clearly beyond the chain. Perhaps Shirley Jackson could.

      2. Edge of the Forest 

        Jeff Wood

        “No one peered curiously from behind the shades.”

        Sometimes in dreams one can get an added letter here, or even a missing one.  A story of man’s fight against the coyotes using his own urine, towards the end directly peeing at them, rather than peer at a distant circle of their keening rituals. He has just moved to the edge of the city where the coyotes roam, gradually subsumed by their danger and of who he actually was in the eyes of wife and daughter as well as his neighbour, maybe just a few coyotes pretending to be more than they were or making beautiful gestures in fabricating their own dead as  eruptions from the pattern of the pack.  But are they this book’s mooncalves as diminished volcanoes, if you add the missing letter M as representative of the essential me? Or as representative of a moondog lynchpin in the fabrication of such coyotes not now in dream but the reality of nightmare? Are we more than we ever were?