food at landscape stories

uma excelente notícia depois de 'Iran', a notícia do dia, para ler até à última linha.

Food is the mirror of society.


Food

What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why?
Georges Perec

The Infra-Ordinary
Extract first published 1973

- -

Food

We dug in. We ate everything there was to eat on the table. We ate like there was no tomorrow. We didn’t talk. We ate. We scarfed. We grazed that table. We were into serious eating. The blind man had right away located his foods, he knew just where everything was on his plate. I watched with admiration as he used his knife and fork on the meat. He’d cut two pieces of meat, fork the meat into his mouth, and then go all out for the scalloped potatoes, the beans next, and then he’d tear off a hunk of buttered bread and eat that. He’d follow this up with a big drink of milk. It didn’t seem to bother him to use his fingers once in a while, either. We finished everything, including half a strawberry pie. For a few moments, we sat as if stunned. Sweat beaded on our faces. Finally, we got up from the table and left the dirty places.
Raymond Carver

Cathedral, 1983
Knopf, 1983

quando

os dias são demasiado volumosos para o calendário e as esferas rolam. literariamente foi com surpresa (ou não) que andei para trás e para a frente com as cenas iniciais de The Big Sleep. Bogart, Bacall, Hawks e uma adaptação também de Faulkner, um clássico do cinema. e no entanto, tão enorme o filme e ainda o livro o ultrapassa. os detalhes de Chandler não chegam ao cinema, a concentração de sentido (Torga!) e os olhos de rapina. especialmente os olhos de rapina.

depois de Pamuk leio e imagino o autor a observar e o que vê em quem.

Carver é filho de Chandler: não conheço as ligações mas estava capaz de jurar. não segui os contos completamente por isto, por ver as mulheres de Carver  - finalmente, à luz da Califórnia que podia ter o som de Lana del Rey. dissolução, mas também acusação. Chandler passa voando por cima da dissolução familar, não lhe importa senão como uma curiosidade.

teimo em ver ambos em São Francisco e não noutras cidades da Califórnia. a baía, a ponte e o monte, velas, o Pier, gelados, pipocas e o Ghirardelli, as maiores sanduiches, o museu e o jardim das colunas, as fontes de água em frente ao museu, a livraria, a rua do cinema, as casas coloridas como as nossas da linha mas mais rosas e azúis, o antigo restaurante no 'cliff' sobre o mar, as gaivotas e o cheiro diferente do pacífico, the Big Sur. noutra vida, podia ter vivido em São Francisco.

(imagem daqui)

portrait of a woman

"The woman was attractive, with her long dark hair and her fair complexion(...)

"The young man was out in the yard behind the trailer and she was just coming out the front door with a cigarette in her mouth, wearing a tight pair of white jeans and a man's white undershirt."

Raymond Carver em "What do you do in San Francisco?" in Where I'm Calling From.

a sun drenched portrait.

the Great American Novel não era grande nem novel, mas são as curtas cortantes exactas histórias de Raymond Carver.

o carteiro da história lembra-me o homem das fotografias de One Hour Photo.

o modo oblíquo de caracterizar o carteiro lembra-me O rio da minha aldeia de Caeiro / Pessoa.

o carteiro lembra-me loucamente o narrador de A Rose for Emily e não duvido que Faulkner tenha sido uma poderosa influência em Carver (who cares about literary criticism tags).

existe uma relação de cores quase perfeita entre as histórias de Carter e as de Hopper (até na imagem do homem à janela e na descrição da luz).

"but standing behind the window and looking out at me through the curtain"

(eu digo-lhe: conseguir apanhar aquilo que se podia dizer ser a realidade mais verdadeira)

short cuts, bread

"Smell this," the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. "It's a heavy bread, but rich." They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light.", Raymond Carver quase no fim de "A Small, Good Thing", em Short Cuts.
ainda em euforia de ler o que foi escrito com total controlo, acabei pela terceira ou quarta vez Shortcuts que já comecei e retomei tantas vezes. o que gosto de Carver é o que não gosto de Pynchon, ou Roth. tão influente até hoje que alterou fisicamente o modo de ver as ruas e as casas e o interior destas. por isso se criaram escolas para que alunos dedicados pudessem aprender a copiar Carver, a tentar escrever pela sua caneta. poucos autores foram tão cobiçados. tantos copies feitos e nenhuns pastes conseguidos.


com algumas páginas em falta

Carver - Altman

"When I first spoke to the poet Tess Gallagher, Ray's widow, about wanting to make this film, I told her I wasn't going to be pristine in my approach to Carver and that the stories were going to be scrambled. She instinctively recognized and encouraged this, and said Ray was an admirer of Nashville, that he liked the helplessness of those characters and their ability to manage nevertheless. She also knew that artists in different fields must use their own skills and visions todo their work. Cinematic equivalents of literary material manifest themselves in unexpected ways."
(...)
"Writing and directing are both acts of discovery. In the end, the film is there and the stories are there and one hopes there is a fruitful interaction. Yet in directing Short Cuts, certain things come straight out of my own sensibility, which has its differences, and this is as it should be. I know Ray Carver would have understood that I had to go beyond just paying tribute. Something new happened in the film, and maybe that's the truest form of respect."
Robert Altman em "Collaborating with Carver", na introdução a Short Cuts.

e alguma crítica.

"Things rolled into the sink. "Where's the aspirin?" I said. I knocked down some more things. I didn't care. Things kept falling."
assim acaba Vitamins, de Carver.

"a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone"

os objectos de Carver.

On Writing
Raymond Carver
1981

Back in the mid-196Os, I found I was having trouble concentrating my attention on long narrative fiction. For a time I experienced difficulty in trying to read it as well as in attempting to write it. My attention span had gone out on me; I no longer had the patience to try to write novels. It’s an involved story, too tedious to talk about here. But I know it has much to do now with why I write poems and short stories. Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on. It could be that I lost any great ambitions at about the same time, in my late twenties. If I did, I think it was good it happened. Ambition and a little luck are good things for a writer to have going for him. Too much ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can be killing. There has to be talent.

Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don’t know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else. The
World Acconfing to Garp is, of course, the marvelous world according to John Irving. There is another world according to Flannery O’Connor, and others according to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway There are worlds according to Cheever, Updike, Singer, Stanley Elkin, Ann Beattie, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Mary Robison, William Kittredge, Barry Hannah, Ursula K. Le Guin. Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There’s plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day without hope and without despair. Someday I’ll put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk. I have some three-by-five cards on the wall now.
“Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.” Ezra Pound. It is not everything by ANY means, but if a writer has “fundamental accuracy of statement” going for him, he’s at least on the right track.

I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by Chekhov: “. . . and suddenly everything became clear to him.” I find these words filled with wonder and possibility I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that’s implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What’s happened? Most of all - what now? There are consequences as a result of such sudden awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief - and anticipation.

I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say “No cheap tricks” to a group of writing students. That should go on a three-by-five card. I’d amend it a little to “No tricks.” Period. I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or a
gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chi-chi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing - a sunset or an old shoe - in absolute and simple amazement.

Some months back, in the New York Times Book Review, John Barth said that ten years ago most of the students in his fiction writing seminar were interested in “formal innovation,” and this no longer seems to be the case. He’s a little worried that writers are going to start writing mom-and-pop novels in the 1980s. He worries that experimentation may be on the way out, along with liberalism. I get a little nervous if I find myself within earshot of somber discussions about “formal innovation” in fiction writing. Too often “experimentation” is a license to be careless, silly, or imitative in the writing. Even worse, a license to try to brutalize or alienate the reader. Too often such writing gives us no news of the world, or else describes a desert landscape and that’s all - a few dunes and lizards here and there, but no people; a place uninhabited by anything recognizably human, a place of interest only to a few scientific specialists.

It should be noted that real experiment in fiction is original, hard-earned and cause for rejoicing. But someone else’s way of looking at things - Barthelme’s, for instance - should not be chased after by other writers. It
won’t work. There is only one Barthelme, and for another writer to try to appropriate Barthelme’s peculiar sensibility or mise en scene under the rubric of innovation is for that writer to mess around with chaos and disaster and, worse, self-deception. The real experimenters have to Make It New, as Pound urged, and in the process have to find things out for themselves. But if writers haven’t taken leave of their senses, they also want to stay in touch with us, they want to carry news from their world to ours.

It’s possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring—with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine - the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me. I hate sloppy or haphazard writing whether it flies under the banner of experimentation or else is just clumsily rendered realism. In Isaac Babel's wonderful short story, ''Guy de Maupassant,'' the narrator has this to say about the writing of fiction: ''No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.'' This too ought to go on a three-by-five.

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places.
I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say If the words are heavy with the writer’s own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason - if the words are in any way blurred - the reader’s eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. The reader’s own artistic sense will simply not be engaged. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing “weak specification.”

I have friends who’ve told me they had to hurry a book because they needed the money, their editor or their wife was leaning on them or leaving them - something, some apology for the writing not being very good. “It
would have been better if I’d taken the time.” I was dumbfounded when I heard a novelist friend say this. I still am, if I think about it, which I don’t. It’s none of my business. But if the writing can’t be made as good as it is within us to make it, then why do it? In the end, the satisfaction of having done our best, and the proof of that labor, is the one thing we can take into the grave. I wanted to say to my friend, for heaven’s sake go do something else. There have to be easier and maybe more honest ways to try and earn a living. Or else just do it to the best of your abilities, your talents, and then don’t justify or make excuses. Don’t complain, don’t explain.

In an essay called, simply enough, “Writing Short Stories,” Flannery O’Connor talks about writing as an act of discovery. O’Connor says she most often did not know where she was going when she sat down to work on a short story She says she doubts that many writers know where they are going when they begin something. She uses “Good Country People” as an example of how she put together a short story whose ending she could not even guess at until she was nearly there:

When I started writing that story, I didn’t know there was going to be a Ph.D. with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women I knew something about, and before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. I brought in the Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn’t know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized it was inevitable.

When I read this some years ago it came as a shock that she, or anyone for that matter, wrote stories in this fashion. I thought this was my uncomfortable secret, and I was a little uneasy with it. For sure I thought this way of working on a short story somehow revealed my own shortcomings. I remember being tremendously heartened by reading what she had to say on the subject.

I once sat down to write what turned out to be a pretty good story, though only the first sentence of the story had offered itself to me when I began it. For several days I’d been going around with this sentence in my
head: “He was running the vacuum cleaner when the telephone rang.” I knew a story was there and that it wanted telling. I felt it in my bones, that a story belonged with that beginning, if I could just have the time to write it. I found the time, an entire day - twelve, fifteen hours even - if I wanted to make use of it. I did, and I sat down in the morning and wrote the first sentence, and other sentences promptly began to attach hemselves. I made the story just as I’d make a poem; one line and then the next, and the next. Pretty soon I could see a story, and I knew it was my story, the one I’d been wanting to write.

I like it when there is some feeling of threat or sense of menace in short stories. I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation. There has to be tension, a sense that something is imminent, that certain things are in relentless motion, or else, most often, there simply won't be a story. What creates tension in a piece of fiction is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it's also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things. [meu sublinhado]

V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is ''something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.'' Notice the ''glimpse'' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse given life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky -that word again - have even further-ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer's task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He'll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things; of how things out there really are and how he sees those things - like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right, they can hit all the notes.

- - -
daqui, with a different name.

“Do you see what I’m saying?”

What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, Raymond Carver, aqui. e aqui.
a nova-velha versão, Beginners, está no kindle.
e a enorme edição de Gordon Lish, no New Yorker, aqui.
duas entrevistas, aqui.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Love
Raymond Carver (1981)

My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and some­times that gives him the right.
The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and me and his second wife, Teresa-Terri, we called her--and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque then. But we were all from somewhere else.
There was an ice bucket on the table. The gin and the tonic water kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love. Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years in his life.
Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her. Then Terri said, "He beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying, `I love you, I love you, you bitch.' He went on dragging me around the living room. My head kept knocking on things." Terri looked around the table. "What do you do with love like that?"
She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair that hung down her back. She liked necklaces made of turquoise, and long, pendant earrings.
"My God, don't be silly. That's not love, and you know it, Mel said. "I don't know what you'd call it, but I sure know you wouldn't call it love."
"Say what you want to, but I know it was," Terri said, "It may sound crazy to you, but it's true just the same. People are different, Mel. Sure, sometimes he may have acted crazy. Okay. But he loved me. In his own way maybe, but he loved me. There was love there, Mel. Don't say there wasn't.”
Mel let out his breath. He held his glass and turned to Laura and me. "The man threatened to kill me," Mel said. He finished his drink and reached for the gin bottle. “Terri's a romantic. Terri's of the kick-me-so-I'll-know-you-love-me school. Terri, hon, don't look that way." Mel reached across the table and touched Terri's cheek with his fingers. He grinned at her.
“Now he wants to make up," Terri said.
"Make up what?" Mel said. "What is there to make up? I know what I know. That's all,'
"How'd we get started on this subject, anyway?" Terri said. She raised her glass and drank from it. "Mel always has love on his mind." she said, "Don't you, honey?" She smiled, and I thought that was the last of it.
"I just wouldn't call Ed's behavior love. That's all I'm saying, honey," Mel said. “What about you guys?" Mel said to Laura and me. "Does that sound like love to you?"
“I’m the wrong person to ask," I said. "I didn't even know the man. I've only heard his name mentioned in passing. I wouldn't know. You'd have to know the particulars. But I think what you're saying is that love is an absolute."
Mel said, 'The kind of love I'm talking about is. The kind of love I'm talking about, you don't try to kill people."
Laura said, "I don't know anything about Ed, or anything about the situation. But who can judge anyone else's situation?"
I touched the back of Laura's hand. She gave me a quick smile. I picked up Laura's hand. It was warm, the nails polished, perfectly manicured. I encircled the broad wrist with my fingers, and I held her.
"When I left, he drank rat poison." Terri said. She clasped her arms with her hands. “They took him to the hospital in Same Fe. That's where we lived then, about ten miles out. They saved his life. But his gums went crazy from it. I mean they pulled away from his teeth. After that, his teeth stood out like fangs. My God,” Terri said. She waited a minute, then let go of her arms and picked up her glass.
“What people won't do!" Laura said.
"He’s out of the action now,” Mel said. 'He's dead."
Mel handed me the saucer of limes. I took a section, squeezed it over my drink, and stirred the ice cubes with my finger.
"It gets worse," Terri said. "He shot himself in the mouth. But he bungled that too. Poor Ed,” she said. Terri shook her head.
"Poor Ed nothing," Mel said. "He was dangerous."
Mel was forty-five years old. He was tall and curly soft hair. His face and arms were brown from the tennis he played. When he was sober, his gestures, all his movements, were precise, very careful.
“He did love me though, Mel. Grant me that," Terri said. "That's all I'm asking. He didn’t love me the way you love me. I'm not saying that. But he loved me. You can grant me that, can't you?"
"What do you mean, he bungled it?" I said.
Laura leaned forward with her glass. She put her elbows on the table and held her glass in both hands. She glanced from Mel to Terri and waited with a look of bewilderment on her open face, as if amazed that such things happened to people you were friendly with.
"How'd he bungle it when he killed himself?" I said.
“I'll tell you what happened," Mel said. "He took this twenty-two pistol he'd bought to threaten Terri and me with. Oh, I'm serious. The man was always threat­ening. You should have seen the way we lived in those days. Like fugitives. I even bought a gun myself. Can you believe it? A guy like me? But I did, I bought one for self-defense and carried it in the glove compartment. Sometimes I'd have to leave the apartment in the middle of the night. To go to the hospital, you know? Terri and l weren't married then, and my first wife had the house and kids, the dog, every­thing, and Terri and I were living in this apartment here. Sometimes, as I say, I'd get a call in the middle of the night and have to go in to the hospital at two or three in the morning. It'd be dark out there in the parking lot, and I'd break into a sweat be fore I could even get to my car. I never knew if he was going to come up out of the shrubbery or from behind a car and start shooting. I mean, the man was crazy. He was capable of wiring a bomb, anything. He used to call my service at all hours and say he needed to talk to the doctor, and when I'd return the call, he'd say, 'Son of a bitch, your days are numbered.' Little things like that. It was scary, I'm telling you."
"I still feel sorry for him," Terri said.
"It sounds like a nightmare" Laura said. "But what exactly happened after he shot himself?"
Laura is a legal secretary. We'd met in a professional capacity. Before we knew it, it was a courtship. She's thirty-five, three years younger than I am. In ad­dition to being in love, we like each other and enjoy one another's company. She's easy to be with.
"What happened?" Laura said.
Mel said, "He shot himself in the mouth in his room. Someone heard the shot and told the manager. They came in with a passkey, saw what had happened, and called an ambulance. I happened to be there when they brought him in, alive but past recall. The man lived for three days. His head swelled up to twice the size of a normal head. I’d never seen anything like it, and I hope I never do again. Terri wanted to go in and sit with him when she found out about it. We had a fight over it. I didn't think she should see him like that. I didn't think she should see him, and I still don’t.”
“Who won the fight?" Laura said.
I was in the room with him when he died". Terri said "He never came up out of it. But I sat with him. He didn't have anyone else."
"He was dangerous," Mel said. "If you call that love, you can have it."
It was love," Terri said. “Sure, it's abnormal 0 most people's eyes. But he was `willing to die for it. He did die for it."
“I sure as hell wouldn't call it love," Mel said. "I mean, no one knows what he did it for. I've seen a lot of suicides, and l couldn't say anyone ever knew what they did it for."
Mel put his hands behind his neck and tilted his chair back. "I'm not inter­ested in that kind of love," he said. “If that's love, you can have it."
Terri said, "We were afraid Mel even made a will out and wrote to his brother in California who used to be a Green Beret. Mel told him who to look for if some­thing happened to him."
Terri drank from her glass. She said, "But Mel's right--we lived like fugitives. We were afraid. Mel was, weren't you, honey? I even called the police at one point, but they were no help. They said they couldn't do anything until Ed actu­ally did something. Isn't that a laugh?" Terry said.
She poured the last of the gin into her glass and waggled the bottle. Mel got up from the table and went to the cupboard. He took down another bottle.
"Well, Nick and I know what hove is," Laura said. "For us, I mean," Laura said. She bumped my knee with her knee. "You're supposed to say something now," Laura said, and turned her smile on me.
For an answer, I took Laura's hand and raised it to my lips. I made a big pro­duction out of kissing her hand. Everyone was amused.
"We're lucky," I said.
"You guys," Terri said. "Stop that now. You're making me sick. You're still on the honeymoon, for God's sake. You're still gaga, for crying out loud. Just wait. How long have you been together now? How long has it been? A year? Longer than a year?"
"Going on a year and a half," Laura said, flushed and smiling. Oh, now," Terri said. "Wait a while."
She held her drink and gazed at Laura.
"I'm only kidding," Terri said.
Mel opened the gin and went around the table with the bottle.
"Here, you guys," he said. "Let's have a toast. I want to propose a toast. A toast to love. To true love," Mel said.
We touched glasses
"To love." we said.

Outside in the backyard, one of the dogs began to bark. The leaves of the as­pen that leaned past the window ticked against the glass. The afternoon sun was like a presence in this room, the spacious light of ease and generosity. We could have been anywhere, somewhere enchanted. We raised our glasses again and grinned at each other like children who had agreed on something forbidden.
"I'll tell you what real love is," Mel said. "I mean, I'll give you a good exam­ple. And then you can draw your own conclusions." He poured more gin into his glass. He added an ice cube and a sliver of lime. We waited and sipped our drinks. Laura and I touched knees again. I put a hand on her warm thigh and left it there.
"What do any of us really know about love?'' Mel said. "It seems to me we're just beginners at love. We say we love each other and we do, I don't doubt it. I love Terri and Terri loves me, and you guys love each other too. You know the kind of love I’m talking about now. Physical love, that impulse that drives you to someone special, as well as love of the other person's being, his or her essence, as it were. Carnal love and, well, call it sentimental love, the day-to-day caring about the other person. But sometimes I have a hard time accounting for the fact that I must have loved my first wife too. But I did. I know I did. So I suppose I am like Terri in that regard. Terri and Ed." He thought about it and then he went on. "There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me. Then there's Ed. Okay, we're back to Ed. He loves Terri so much he tries to kill her and he winds up killing himself." Mel stopped talking and swallowed from his glass. "You guys have been together eighteen months and you love each other. It shows all over you. You glow with it. But you both loved other people before you met each other. You've both been married before, just like us. And you probably loved other people before that too, even. Terri and I have been together five years, been married for four. And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, you might say, is that if something happened to one of us--excuse me for saying this-but if something happened to one of us to­morrow I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I'm wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don't know anything, and I'm the first one to admit it."
"Mel, for God's sake,” Terri said. She reached out and took hold of his wrist. "Are you getting drunk? Honey? Are you drunk?"
"Honey, I'm just talking." Mel said. "All right? I don't have to be drunk to say what I think. I mean, we're all just talking, right?" Mel said. He fixed his eyes on her.
"Sweetie, I'm not criticizing," Terri said.
She picked up her glass.
"I'm not on call today," Mel said. "Let me remind you of that. I am not on call,” he said.
"Mel, we love you," Laura said.
Mel looked at Laura. He looked at her as if he could not place her, as if she was not the woman she was.
"Love you too, Laura," Mel said. "And you, Nick, love you too. You know something?" Mel said, "You guys are our pals," Mel said. He picked up his glass.
Mel said, "I was going to tell you about something. I mean, I was going to prove a point. You see, this happened a few months ago, but it's still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk above love."
"Come on now," Terri said. "Don't talk like you're drunk if you're not drunk.”­
"Just shut up for once in your life," Mel said very quietly, "Well you do me a favor and do that for a minute? So as I was saying, there's this old couple who had this car wreck out on the interstate. A kid hit them and they were all torn to shit and nobody was giving them much chance to pull through,"
Terri looked at us and then back at Mel. She seemed anxious, or maybe that's too strong a word.
Mel was handing the bottle around the table.
"I was on call that night," Mel said. "It was May or maybe it was June. Terri and I had just sat down to dinner when the hospital called. There'd been this thing out on the interstate. Drunk kid, teenager, plowed his dad’s pickup into this camper with this old couple in it. They were in their mid-seventies, that couple. The kid—eighteen, nineteen, something—he was DOA. Taken the steering wheel through his sternum. The old couple, they were alive, you understand. I mean, just barely. But they had everything. Multiple fractures, internal injuries, he­morrhaging, contusions, lacerations, the works, and they each of them had them­selves concussions. They were in a bad way, believe me. And, of course, their age was two strikes against them. I'd say she was worse off than he was. Ruptured spleen along with everything else. Both kneecaps broken. But they'd been wear­ing their seatbelts and, God knows, that's what saved them for the time being."
"Folks, this is an advertisement for the National Safety Council," Terri said. "This is your spokesman, Dr. Melvin R. McGinnis, talking." Terri laughed. “Mel,” she said, "sometimes you're just too much. But I love you, hon," she said.
“Honey, I love you,” Mel said.
He leaned across the table. Terri met him halfway. They kissed.
“Terri’s right, Mel said as he settle himself again. “Get those seatbelts on. But seriously, they were in some shape, those oldsters. By the time I got down there, the kid was dead, as I said. He was off in a corner, laid out on a gurney. I took one look at the old couple and told the ER nurse to get me a neurologist and an orthopedic man and a couple of surgeons down there right away.”
He drank from his glass. “I’ll try to keep this short,” he said. “So we took the two of them up to the OR and worked like fuck on them most of the night. They had these incredible reserves, those two. You see that once in a while. So we did everything that could be done, and toward morning we’re giving them a fifty-fifty chance, maybe less than that for her. So here they are, still alive the next morning. So, okay, we move them into the ICU, which is where they both kept plugging away at it for two weeks, hitting it better and better on all the scopes. So we transfer them out to their own room.”
Mel stopped talking. “Here,” he said, “let’s drink this cheapo gin the hell up. Then we’re going to dinner, right? Terri and I know a new place. That’s where we’ll go, to this new place we know about. But we’re not going until we finish up this cut-rate, lousy gin.”
Terri said, “We haven’t actually eaten there yet. But it looks good. From the outside, you know.”
“I like food,” Mel said. “If I had it to do all over again, I’d be a chef, you know? Right, Terri?” Mel said.
He laughed. He fingered the ice in his glass.
“Terri knows,” he said. “Terri can tell you. But let me say this. If I could come back again in a different life, a different time and all, you know what? I’d like to come back as a knight. You were pretty safe wearing all that armor. It was all right being a knight until gunpowder and muskets and pistols came along.”
“Mel would like to ride a horse and carry a lance,” Terri said.
“Or just a woman,” Mel said.
“Shame on you,” Laura said.
“The serfs never had it good,” Mel said. “But I guess even the knight were vessels to someone. Isn’t that the way it worked? But then everyone is always a vessel to someone. Isn’t that right? Terri? But what I like about knights, besides their ladies, was that they had that suit of armor, you know, and they couldn’t get hurt very easy. No cars in those days, you know? No drunk teenagers to tear into your ass.”

“Vassals,” Terri said.
“What?” Mel said.
“Vassals,” Terri said. “They were called vassals, not vessels.”
“Vassals, vessels,” Mel said, “what the fuck’s the difference? You knew what I meant anyway. All right,” Mel said. “So I’m not educated. I learned my stuff, I’m a heart surgeon, sure, but I’m just a mechanic. I go in and fuck around and fix things. Shit,” Mel said.
“Modesty doesn’t become you,” Terri said.
“He’s just a humble sawbones,” I said. “But sometimes they suffocated in all that armor, Mel. They’d even have heart attacks if it got too hot and they were too tired and worn out. I read somewhere that they’d fall off their horses and not be able to get up because they were too tired to stand with all that armor on them. They got trampled by their own horses sometimes.”
“That’s terrible,” Mel said. “Some vassal would come along and spear the bastard in the name of love. Or whatever the fuck it was they fought over in those days.”
“Same things we fight over these days,” Terri said.
Laura said, “Nothing’s changed.”
The color was still high in Laura’s cheeks. Her eyes were bright. She brought her glass to her lips.
Mel poured himself another drink. He looked at the label closely as if studying a long row of numbers. Then he slowly put the bottle down on the table and slowly reached for the tonic water.
“What about the old couple?” Laura asked. “You didn’t finish that story you started.”
Laura was having a hard time lighting her cigarette. Her matches kept going out.
The sunshine inside the room was different now, changing, getting thinner. But the leaves outside the window were still shimmering, and I stared at the pattern they made on the panes and on the Formica counter. They weren’t the same patterns, of course.
“What about the old couple?” I asked.
“Older but wiser,” Terri said.
Mel stared at her.
Terri said, “Go on with your story, hon. I was only kidding. Then what happened?”
“Terri, sometimes,” Mel said.
“Please, Mel,” Terri said. “Don’t always be so serious, sweetie. Can’t you take a joke?”
He held his glass and gazed steadily at his wife.
“What happened?” Laura said.
Mel fastened his eyes on Laura. He said, “Laura, if I didn’t have Terri and if I didn’t love her so much, and if Nick wasn’t my best friend, I’d fall in love with you. I’d carry you off, honey,” he said.
“Tell your story,” Terri said. “Then we’ll go to that new place, okay?”
“Okay,” Mel said. “Where was I?” he said. He stared at the table and then he began again.
“I dropped in to see each of them every day, sometimes twice a day if I was up doing other calls anyway. Casts and bandages, head to foot, the both of them. You know, you’ve seen it in the movies. That’s just the way they looked, just like in the movies. Little eye-holes and nose-holes and mouth-holes. And she had to have her legs slung up on top of it. Well, the husband was very depressed for the longest while. Even after he found out that his wife was going to pull through, he was still very depressed. Not about the accident, though. I mean, the accident was one thing, but it wasn’t everything. I’d get up to his mouth-hole, you know, and he’d say no, it wasn’t the accident exactly but it was because he couldn’t see her through his eye-holes. He said that was what was making him feel so bad. Can you imagine? I’m telling you, the man’s heart was breaking because he couldn’t turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife.”
Mel looked around the table and shook his head at what he was going to say. "I mean, it was killing the old fart just because he couldn't look at the fucking woman."
We all look at Mel.
"Do you see what I'm saying?" he said.
Maybe we were a little drunk by then. I know it was hard keeping things in focus. The light was draining out of the room, going back through the window where it had come from. Yet nobody made a move to get up from the table to turn on the overhead light.
"Listen," Mel said. "Let's finish this fucking gin. There's about enough left here for one shooter all around. Then let's go eat. Let's go to the new place."
"He's depressed," Terri said. "Mel, why don't you take a pill?"
Mel shook his head, "I've taken everything there is."
"We all need a pill now and then." I said.
“Some people are born needing them," Terri said.
She was using her finger to rub at something on the table. Then she stopped rubbing,
"I think I want to call my kids," Mel said. "Is that all right with everybody? I'll call my kids," he said.
Terri said, "What if Marjorie answers the phone? You guys, you've heard us on the subject of Marjorie? Honey, you know you don't want to talk to Marjorie. It'll make you feel even worse."
"I don't want to talk to Marjorie," Mel said, "But I want to talk to my kids."
"There isn't a day goes by that Mel doesn't say he wishes she'd get married again. Or else die," 'Terri said. "For one thing," Terri said, she's bankrupting us. Mel says it’s just to spite him that she won't get married again. She has a boyfriend who lives with her and the kids, so Mel is supporting the boyfriend too."
"She's allergic to bees," Mel said. "If I'm not praying she'll get married again, I'm praying she'll get herself stung to death by a swarm of fucking bees."
"Shame on you," Laura said.
"Bzzzzzzz," Mel said, turning his fingers into bees and buzzing them at Terri's throat. Then he let his hands drop all the way to his sides.
"She's vicious," Mel said "Sometimes I think I'll go up there dressed like a beekeeper. You know, that hat that’s like a helmet with the plate that comes down over your face, the big gloves, and the padded coat? I'll knock on the door and let loose a hive of bees in the house. But first I’d make sure the kids were out, of course."
He crossed one leg over the other. It seemed to take him a lot of time to do it. Then he put both feet on the floor and leaned forward, elbows on the table, his chin cupped in his hands.
Maybe I won't call the kids, after all. Maybe it isn't such a hot idea. Maybe well just go eat. How does that sound?"
"Sounds fine to me," I said "Eat or not eat. Or keep drinking. I could head right on out into the sunset."
“What does that mean, honey?” Laura said.
"It just means what I said," I said. "It means I could just keep going. That's all it means."
A could eat something myself," Laura said. "I don't think I've ever been so hungry in my life. Is there something to nibble on?"
"I'll put out some cheese and crackers,” Terri said.
But Terri just sat there. She did not get up to get anything.
Mel turned his glass over. He spilled it out on the table.
“Gin’s gone," Mel said.
Terri said, “Now what?"
I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

figura de estilo

Da excelente Five Dials, aqui o último número em .pdf.
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Similes, including comparisons, from a page in Raymond Chandler’s notebooks.

1. As cold as Finnegan’s feet
2. As cute as a washtub
3. As much sex appeal as a turtle
4. As cold as a nun’s breeches
5. As French as a doughnut (i.e. not French at all)
6. As clean as an angel’s neck
7. As shiny as a clubwoman’s nose
8. High enough to have snow on him
9. So tight his head squeaks when he takes his hat off
10. Lower than a badger’s balls
11. Longer than a round trip to Siam
12. Smart as a hole through nothing
13. A face like a collapsed lung
14. A mouth like a wilted lettuce
15. A nose like a straphanger’s elbow
16. His face was long enough to wrap twice around his neck
17. He sipped like a hummingbird drinking dew from a curled leaf

depois de

ter lido "Tell the Women We're Going", parte de Beginners de Raymond Carver, esquecido por um tempo nos meandros do Kindle.

---

In three early stories written during the 1960s, there are accounts of violence rendered in three distinct literary modes that Carver was imitating on the road to finding his own style. “Furious Seasons” is a Faulknerian tale narrated by using the device of repeating the scene leading up to a murder four times.

With the exception of Hemingway, Carver quickly left early influences behind. And Carver’s realism is a much closer rendering of the lives of everyday Americans than Hemingway’s ever was. While Hemingway was preoccupied with war in Europe, Carver portrays the everyday battles that take place on the real home front: in domestic realms of America. Carver’s stories are more often than not about family relationships, especially marriage. The existence of marital violence has become so pervasive in American society that it risks becoming commonplace4, and it is a pervasive presence in Carver’s stories as well.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) is considered a seminal book in what came to be known as literary minimalism, a pared-down style Carver developed as a sort of extreme form of Hemingway’s telegraphic realism. Though Carver moved quickly beyond the minimalist aesthetic of this volume in his next works, the treatment of women and violence bears the characteristic traits of this movement. Carver made massive cuts to the stories in this volume while preparing it for publication5, replacing some violent episodes with ellipsis, and leaving much to suggestion. Some of the stories take domestic situations similar to those in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? to absurd ends, providing compressed, dark humor in the place of narrative exposition. In the title story of What We Talk About When We talk About Love, two couples get drunk while discussing the nature of love, and debate, among things, whether a husband who beats his wife then kills himself can really feel love for her. The fusing of the themes of sex, love and violence reaches no conclusive resolution, as the gin runs out and the lights dim on the characters. This story sets the tone for a collection in which people commit sudden acts of violence that are more extreme than in the previous volume, yet less contextualized and sometimes seemingly random.

The story “Tell the Women We’re Going” contains the volume’s most horrific account of violence; in it the male perpetrator moves outside the family sphere and into the world at large. The protagonist Bill and his friend Jerry decide to take a Sunday afternoon off from their families. On their way driving home, the men encounter two women biking, and later follow the women onto a hiking trail. Jerry presumably kills them both, though the concluding scene is elliptic: “Jerry used the same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon, then on the one that was supposed to be Bill’s” (66)

--
parágrafos fora de ordem e não sequenciais de um ensaio interessante sobre Carver, as mulheres e violência. se bem que a versão acima seja diferente da que li, um ponto para críticos. reavaliando o que gosto e porquê.

coisa com coisa

" It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy's pack, and my three-legged table, from which I did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories. They seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if unwilling to be brought in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning over them and take my seat there. It was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house." no capítulo 4 do Walden.

a mesma ideia que encontrei no Why Don't you Dance? de Raymond Carver.

" The chiffonier stood a few feet from the foot of the bed. He had emptied the drawers into cartons that morning, and the cartons were in the living room. A portable heater was next to the chiffonier. A rattan chair with a decorator pillow stood at the foot of the bed. The buffed aluminum kitchen set took up a part of the driveway. A yellow muslin cloth, much too large, a gift, covered the table and hung down over the sides. A potted fern was on the table, and a few feet away from this stood a sofa and chair and a floor lamp. The desk was pushed against the garage door. A few utensils were on the desk, along with a wall clock and two framed prints. There was also in the driveway a carton with cups, glasses, and plates, each object wrapped in newspaper. That morning he had cleared out the closets, and except for the three cartons in the living room, all the stuff was out of the home. He had run an extension cord on out there and everything was connected. Things worked, no different from how it was when they were inside."

e afinal a mesma ideia que já me tinha atraído aqui. and the fun part: "How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life... you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV..." do filme Up in the Air, claro.

white chocolate, pineapple & coconut bark

prometeu que amanhã as coisas teriam sentido, mesmo com a chuva e mesmo depois do choque de ter lido sobre um homem que pôs todo o conteúdo da sua casa no relvado da frente, à vista da estrada e dos vizinhos, tudo ligado, até a televisão. fosse em Portugal ou em outro canto mais ou menos obscuro do mundo estaria a dar um concurso para descobrir uma estrela da pop no local mais inesperado. e descoberto esse macaco de saltar, seria outro no sistema, que alguns julgavam fantasticamente sofisticado, o sistema das estrelas pop e a sua falsa complexidade marrona.

se te visse na rua não te conhecia com certeza, nem sequer desconfiava que durante um longo período estiveste quase ao meu lado todos os dias. a seguir as mesmas regras e as mesmas horas, a pensar em quase o mesmo e a vestir quase a mesma roupa. aquela ideia antiga de comunhão e de todos os seres se amarem sem fim no caldeirão biológico da vida esmagava-se no teu retrato de óculos escuros a passear no mesmo sítio onde passei há tão pouco tempo, a pôr ainda os pés nos mesmos degraus e a olhar para as mesmas coisas.

era a fingir, era tudo a fingir. nem eu estava ali, nem tu, nem ninguém.

..

totalmente unrelated, mas muito interessante, via Last-Tapes. que me lembra sempre a terceira pessoa ("Who is the third who walks always beside you?")

está na wiki

que Raymond Carver foi despedido da Science Research Associates "for his inappropriate writing style". queria ver esse estilo, fiquei mesmo com curiosidade.

tanto tempo em espera

- - -

e não há palavras que cheguem para dizer o que eu gosto disto. na altura devo ter lido a Catedral e este Amor, em tradução, duas vezes adulterado. agora um pleno original. não há palavras mas há imagens. (edição kindle de 2009)