But at my back I always hear/ Time’s winged chariot hurrying near–Andrew Marvell (To His Coy Mistress)

January 3, 2009

I’m starting teaching again in just about a week and a half. A shorter winter break this time because I just got another teaching gig at one of our local colleges. Only one class but it’ll help. That makes three classes so far, not counting this great class i’m teaching at San Diego Writers, Ink– a small writing school downtown. The class is called Crafting Short Pieces and runs for only 5 weeks. So teaching four classes at three different schools, and it starts in about twelve days.

Sigh.

In the meantime, when i’m not planning/ working on my classes or going to my office a few days a week to work on my book i’m trying to read as much as I can.

I just finished Disquiet, by Julia Leigh, which is getting praised left and right. It’s a novella, only about 121 pages, that’s creepy and beautiful. I loved it.

I also really enjoyed Alice Munro’s short story, “Some Women,” which was in the recent NewYorker Winter Fiction Issue. Unfortunately it’s not online! Drat. I don’t know why the NY’er publishes some but not others online. So stingy. In any case, I often get frustrated at how much Munro, and others, are published in the NewYorker, but then I read Munro’s stories and each time I do I realize, yes, yes, she is a damn good writer. This story is about a young girl who is a caregiver for a dying man and finds herself in the middle of a female power struggle with the man’s wife, mother, and a neighbor.

Here’s a description of an elderly woman’s body:

There I saw Old Mrs. Crozier stretched out on a daybed, on her stomach, her face turned away from me, absolutely naked. A skinny streak of pale flesh. The usually covered length of her body didn’t look as old as the parts of her that were daily exposed–her freckled, dark-veined hands and forearms, her brown-blotched cheeks. The skin of her back and legs was yellow-white, like wood freshly stripped of it’s bark.

I really like how Munro fuses two words together often–  dark-veined, brown-blotched, yellow-white.

There is, however, a cool recent interview with Munro from the October 2008 NYer Festival Blog that has some interesting information including:

• “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories” was the headline that appeared in a local paper when Munro first began publishing.

and

• When she’s at the beginning stages of writing a story, she might sit and look out the window for a week, not doing a word of writing, “just letting things get settled in my head.”

I can certainly relate to that.

So what’s up next on my book queue?

Well, I just read a short story, “Homecoming,” by William Maxwell published in the Jan. 1, 1938 NewYorker– and available here! I read it, though, in the book, William Maxwell: Early Novels and Stories, part of a handsome hardcover, two-book set (the kind with the silk ribbon inside) re-releasing Maxwell’s works, from the Library of America , that Ted’s mother gave me for Christmas. Check out the story, it’s short and very moving.

Besides that i’m reading the essay “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” by David Foster Wallace from a 1994 Harpers. It’s long, brilliant, scathing, funny.

And what are YOU reading?