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I can never use the term "in the gloaming" without thinking of my friend Alice Elliott Dark's perfect and classic short story by that same name. And so, last night, leaving the city at the gloaming hour, I thought of Alice. I thought of Joan Didion, too, and Rebecca Solnit, and all those writers who have captured this shade of sun-glinted blue with words.
The city was eager for spring, and full of its promise. Rittenhouse Square and its horn player, a little spontaneous drumming on the side. Restaurants and their outdoor seats. People reading on benches with their coat collars high.
My husband and I were there at the end of a long moving week—cleaning our son's now vacated city apartment at Spruce and 16th, and imagining him at the park in his new near-Manhattan 'hood. Sharing a meal at Serafina. Going home in the old Wrangler, two for-sure empty nesters now.
Meanwhile our son texts me this morning, his first day of his first full-time job. Up at 5:30, he confides. At Starbucks. Excited.
There's dusk. And then there's dawn.
6 Comments on Philadelphia in the gloaming; two empty nesters, last added: 4/17/2013
Sigh. Teary eyes. Kids at the same stage (thought I've never cleaned an apartment for them...your son got the nice parents!) It's good that they're off and employed and building that life we prepared them for...and it's a bit lonely too. This is lovely. Simple and lovely.
I was harder on Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking than many readers were. I thought it at times too self-consciously clinical, too reported, less felt. Many of my students at the University of Pennsylvania disagreed with me. I listened. Of course I did. I wanted to be convinced.
I do not feel disinclined about Blue Nights, which I have read this morning and which will break your heart. The jacket copy describes the book as "a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter." It is that; in part it is. But it is also, mostly, as the jacket also promises, Didion's "thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old."
A cry, on other words, in the almost dark. A mind doing what a mind does in the aftermath of grief and in the face of the cruelly ticking clock. Blue Nights is language stripped to its most bare. It is the seeding and tilling of images grasped, lines said, recurring tropes—not always gently recurring tropes. It is a mind tracking time. It is questions:
"How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen?"
"What if I can never again locate the words that work?"
"Who do I want to notify in case of emergency?"
Joan Didion, always physically small and intellectually giant, is, as she writes in this book, seventy-five years old. She is aware of light and how it brightens, then fades. She writes of blue—a color and a sound that has long obsessed me, and has obsessed writers like Rebecca Solnit. She writes of the gloaming, a word I will forever associate with the immensely talented Alice Elliott Dark.
Here is how she writes:
You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day "l'heure bleue." To the English it was "the gloaming." That very word "gloaming" reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows.
5 Comments on Blue Nights/Joan Didion: Reflections, last added: 11/14/2011
I love "the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour," which I assume is from Didion. My hesitation is from attributing the pronoun "she" to the closest noun:
...the immensely talented Alice Elliott Dark. Here is how she writes:
I tried to reserve this book online with my library, but it's "in process" and is the audiobook version. I prefer the book, especially when I want to quote from it.
(BTW, I owe you an email, which I'll send soon. Life keeps getting in the way.)
This coming Wednesday, I'll be at Rutgers-Camden for a reading, a talk about new trends in young adult literature...and a workshop. As I considered just what I wanted to convey during that workshop hour—something about precision and continuity, something about the speed of one sentence as flared against the long, quelling quietude of another—I began to think about the novelists and short story writers I am infinitely lucky to know.
(And I rush to say that I know so many talented people—humorists, memoirists, bloggers, poets. It is my hope, with this blog, to give voice to them all, one way or the other, in time.)
Today I share some of the lines I'll be discussing at Rutgers-Camden. We'll be talking about what makes these passages work, what we can learn from them. As I type them in, I catch my breath. These, my friends, are writers.
He was heading to the bathroom to brush his teeth. His starched shirt made crisp noises as he walked. He wore brown-and-blue suspenders and he'd tucked his tie in his shirt to save it from his three-minute egg. I said nothing, just smiled and lifted one eyebrow. And he looked at me oddly, the way he did more and more in those days, as if I'd spoken too quickly, overlapping my words and rendering them foreign. He said he had to go to work, and I dropped his fingers, and he went in and brushed his teeth. The sound of the bristles against his gums, doing their ugly work, was like an assault, as if he was scrubbing me away. — Kelly Simmons, The Bird House
Death, which used to seem so remote, now feels to Clara as though it is everywhere, like the universally disliked relative who arrives early to every gathering and shows no discernible sign of ever going home. She can sense it turning against her own work, lurking in the notion of permanence surrounding portraiture, skulking around the very idea of catching a person at one moment and documenting them, just then. This is what death does, she thinks, stony-faced, staring right into her own eyes. Catches us all. Stops time. — Robin Elizabeth Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This
Evelyn eyed Sarah's lunatic ensemble: hair blasted from its elastic band, bath-splashed T-shirt, teeth spackled with pulp from oranges she'd sucked hungrily at lunch because she didn't have the patience to peel. "I'd go nuts if I didn't work," she said. "I mean, what do those women do all day?" Elizabeth Mosier, The Playgroup
Even now, in middle age, she preserved the vital though self-deceptive hope that anything might change and nothing need be done meanwhile. She still had a kind of vision, she still could see, and she still was moved by perceptions as poignant as consciousness. But nothing came of it; nothing was expressed. She had fallen to a place where people worked at tolerable but not thrilling work, a lifetime of work whose chief reward and motivation was (never quite enough) money. If she died tomorrow, she would leave behind no aborted masterpiece. — Ivy Goodman, A Chapter from Her Upbringing
When the cinema went dark, the audience stirred to life. People leaned toward the shapes in the seats next to them. "What happened?" they asked. "Did you see?" �
5 Comments on Teaching (and knowing) the best of the best, last added: 10/24/2011
Lovely to read all these passages, Beth. Thank you for including me, and for reminding me of these lines written in another lifetime. You are always teaching me, and I am grateful, and envious of the students who will be sitting with you at Rutgers! xo
"You stand among giants," I could often be heard telling my students this semester, and there wasn't a speck of exaggeration in the claim. For I had a class—oh, I had a class—and they taught me and one another.
It is perhaps fitting, then, that this past Tuesday, Peregrine, the Creative Writing Program magazine of the University of Pennsylvania, began to make its way into mailboxes and classrooms. It's the fourth issue of this beautiful publication, and all credit goes to the great poet, teacher, and CWP director Gregory Djanikian, who quietly sifts and mingles the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry of faculty, students, and alumni to bring this book to life.
I am so honored to be included in this magazine, and I am so touched to find myself here among the likes of C.K. Williams and Charles Bernstein, Alicia Oltuski and Rick Nichols, and my dear friends Karen Rile, Alice Elliott Dark, and Kate Northrop. I've set this afternoon aside to read. It will be time extremely well spent.
1 Comments on Peregrine magazine: standing among giants (and friends), last added: 4/22/2011
The University of Pennsylvania has been extraordinarily good to me—inviting me to contribute to the pages of The Pennsylvania Gazette and Peregrine; trusting me to teach a small class of brilliant undergrads; putting me at the helm of an online book group; asking me to read with Alice Elliott Dark, or to sit on panels with Buzz Bissinger, or to join David Remnick for a Kelly Writers House dinner; and to come to know, even better, the likes of fellow teachers Jay Kirk and Karen Rile.
Earlier this summer, John Prendergast, the editor of The Pennsylvania Gazette, wrote to say that he'd read Dangerous Neighbors and that he looked forward to having a conversation. We had that conversation on a sunny day sitting on a row of skinny benches while a tennis match played out before us. I was my breathless, enthused, and sleep-starved self (as you'll read) and John was the thoughtful man he is. Several weeks later, the photographer Chris Crisman and his team met me at Memorial Hall and put up with me long enough to take my picture.
It is an extraordinarily generous story, accompanied by one of my favorite scenes from the book. It will always be cherished. And Chris, thanks for pulling your camera lens back. You know what that means to me.
6 Comments on The Pennsylvania Gazette Feature/Dangerous Neighbors Excerpt, last added: 10/30/2010
I love that your university is supporting you and your beautiful book so much. Fabulous picture of you. And it's great that they are offering up an excerpt to entice more readers.
I wish I could be half as productive (and witty) as you on little sleep. :)
Sometimes the Red & Blue simply knows talent and grace and generosity of spirit when it/they see it. We're all just pleased that you are connected to us in some many ways!
There are, it sometimes seems, not even six degrees of separation in the writing world. Today, during Alumni Day at Kelly Writers House (University of Pennsylvania), I shared this moment with the tremendous KWH deputy in charge Al Filreis (I would take one of his extraordinary classes, but I'm afraid I'm not quite smart enough), Alice Elliott Dark (whose short story, "In the Gloaming," was selected by John Updike as one of the best of the last century, and who read from it beautifully today), and Moira Moody, a writer and almost bride, who was Al's student before she was mine, and, after Al and I sent her on her way, a student of Alice's at the Rutgers-Newark Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program created by none other than our mutual friend, Jayne Anne Phillips.
But that's not at all. Dear Moira was also the inspiration for "Moira" (is inspiration too broad a word for such a flat-out stealing of a name and persona?)—the star of the zany corporate fable, Zenobia, that I penned with then-Shire CEO, Matt Emmens.
Altogether, then, on a gorgeous meander of a day.
2 Comments on Altogether now, last added: 5/15/2010
Beth, you are fast. I had a similar photo from this afternoon & a similar story to tell. You beat me to it and now I only needed to blog and make a link to your own beautiful blog.
Tomorrow I'll board the train and head down to my alma mater for Alumni Day. I'll take the twenty minute walk from 30th Street Station through the Drexel University campus toward the University of Pennsylvania campus, then head up Locust Walk toward Kelly Writers House, past all the tents and hoopla, where I'll join Alice Elliott Dark for a reading.
That much I know for sure.
What I don't know yet is what I'll be reading. Not precisely, not yet. Though I think I'll begin with these words from Good People, the novel for adults that I've been working on all these many months.
The baby is missing.The baby is not where I had left her—checked the rope and strapped her in, pulled my weight into the branch above, and said out loud, This is good and nice and sturdy.I had nudged her high and sung to her, True, true, the sky is blue, and she smelled like baby.There is not one single other thing that smells like baby, that cheeks against your cheek like the cheek of a baby.I had kissed her.I had promised, I am coming right back, Baby.
There was a pluming plane overhead.Two white trails of smoke, and a second plane—smaller, chasing.I had wanted a blanket so that I might lie nearby, so that all afternoon it would be Baby in her swing and me on the spine of the earth below, watching the ants in their jungled green, waiting for the red-tailed hawks to slice the plumes from the past of the planes.It is twenty-eight steps to the back door, which is red because I’d painted it red, and it is nine steps to the downstairs closet, but I’d forgotten:I’d left the blanket upstairs, in the trunk beneath the bed, beneath the hooked rug Mama was working when she passed, beneath Mama’s collection of hats.There are thirteen steps up, and there are thirteen steps down, and when I opened the red door where the brush strokes had dried rough around the brass plate, Baby was missing.
4 Comments on University of Pennsylvania Alumni Day (getting ready for), last added: 5/16/2010
"There is not one single other thing that smells like baby, that cheeks against your cheek like the cheek of a baby."
I love this line.
And I do want more! No pressure, but I'm jumping in my chair for this one. Your YA is wonderful, and so are your memoirs: but I think you just might rule the world with your adult novel.
Wow - That is the most scary line I have ever read. Yes, it is. A mother’s nightmare. Anyone’s nightmare. Nightmare above nightmare. I hope the ending is good.....
xoxo
Good luck to the boy and love to you, lovely Beth.
Thanks, Beth, for this lingering association. Best wishes to your son on his new venture.
What a great adventure for your son!
Exciting for everyone to look to the future.
Sigh. Teary eyes. Kids at the same stage (thought I've never cleaned an apartment for them...your son got the nice parents!) It's good that they're off and employed and building that life we prepared them for...and it's a bit lonely too. This is lovely. Simple and lovely.