To me, George's words here sum up the purpose of both writing and reading: "As I increase the specificity in a piece, I’ll find that a character becomes not necessarily morally better or more forgivable but just somehow more complete. His sins become higher-order sins, so to speak. (And his virtues become higher-order virtues.) My judgment of him gets tempered." Deborah Treisman calls this thing George does a form of "mind melding" (which, as a Star Trek fan, I love). I like to picture all of us across the planet, reading "Thursday" together, our minds melding with George's, David's, Gerard's, and each other's--and our judgments of one another becoming increasingly tempered. George Saunders, you are a man of Love. (And as I said in previous post, this is just a great story. Thank you for writing it.)
Love the post, and it;s underpinning sentiment, for sure Mary.
Having said which, have to flag an at least transient sense of discomfiture with "I like to picture all of us across the planet, reading "Thursday" together, our minds melding with George's, David's, Gerard's, and each other's--and our judgments of one another becoming increasingly tempered."
Don't all the best made cases, always, allow for divergence as well as congruence?
If you, beyond merely 'liking', are a fan of Star Trek don't you sincerely fear The Borg Ending?
Leonard Nimoy came into a restaurant my father was managing and cooking for in Oxnard. He sat at the counter and had breakfast. I was at school, so I didn't meet him!
Shatner, McCoy and... what of Ohuru, for another iconic, resurrected, passing example?
Wow Mary! Who, being but youngsters among us, could have anticipated travelling to boldly to new figments of the universal literary imagination in such richly dipped and sharp etched 'Star Trek Originalists' as we?
This Star Trek discussion reminds me that I always ate spaghetti drenched with red clam sauce from the little can of Progresso sauce when watching the original Star Trek episodes in the 70s. Fond memories of watching and eating.
Amid so many delights: "On clotheslines strung between them danced the garments of our fellow-poor, flailing about in the wind, as if to say, Yes, though we are the clothes of the poor, we dance, and what of it? A shirt threw an arm up merrily. A pair of boxers inverted itself in joy, leg holes briefly opening upward."
I loved this passage too. Reminded me immediately of the clothes fluttering on a line in Tolstoy's "Master and Man" which is of course in "A swim..." Made me wonder if GS was paying homage to the Tolstoy story in this passage!
That passage stood out to me too; though as ever I was reading too fast; yet at the end of this I did pause and think - wonderful.
But... because I had been reading too fast I missed the 'as if to say', and I thought George had gone for...
"On clotheslines strung between them danced the garments of our fellow-poor, flailing about in the wind. Yes though we are the clothes of the poor, we dance, and what of it?"
My brain loved this version, loved that I had been trusted to know it was just the narrative voice doing the voice of the clothes of the poor.
But, I was ever so ever so disappointed to see that the 'as if to say' was in there after all.
As it happens so I have learnt - having been being born and brought up in the City of Coventry, not so much close by as in the Heart of Shakespeare's erstwhile Arden , that I suffer from the occasionally passing 'torture'of hearing myself speak, in long, slow, basically boring Brummie vowels.
Except, of course, that I happen to know - thanks to the erudition and performative talents of David (Dad) and Ben (Son) Crystal - that Billy the Grand Bard Literary Vizier of Stratford spoke long and slow, like I do, too! And, back in that distant day I'm recollecting, he couldn't have been speaking 'Brummie' as was spoken being as how, "Brummie" was yet to be invented on the back of that thingy-ma-gig that nowadays gets labelled, like it or loathe it, as 'The Industrial Revolution'...
If George reads aloud 'at just the right speed' what do you think you might need to tweak, so to speak, to get your reading off the page speed past your 'excitement', 'gulping' and 'forgetting to chew' tendencies?
Here's a question you might care to ponder: is George's reading of "Thursday" likely to be, for you, the 'definitive' one or might others offer 'listens to love'?
“On the bright side, it was Thursday.” It’s the first line of George’s new story in the New Yorker, June 5, 2023. I first listen to George reading it. When I listen to someone reading a work, I notice accent, inflections, cadence of speech and the moments where I make a mental note to focus later on the printed text, of what’s being said, maybe inferred and what is missing.
The second sentence of the story begins, “Gerard, yes, hi, hello,” said Mrs. Dwyer, the nurse’s assistant sanctioned to hand over the Perlman headpiece and the big green pill and the smaller red one that activates the green one.” As a reader, I’m introduced to Gerard and then Mrs. Dwyer who is sanctioned to do something medically, officially in her capacity. Is this a hint, does it suggest something later, will she do something that is not sanctioned?
In the New Yorker interview with Deborah Treisman about the work, George mentions a much earlier story, his first published in the New Yorker, titled “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz,” September 27, 1992 and later in his short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, published in 1996. The narrator accidentally downloads into his brain the memories of a burglar who’s broken into his shop (a virtual-reality parlor). After he overcomes the intruder by coldcocking him with the FedEx tape gun, he says, “I strap him down and set my console to Scan.”
After reading these two stories, they seem to be a particular type of brethren. There’s a throughline coursing over a thirty year span of writing. There are others, but it’s hard not to think of George’s short story, Escape from Spiderhead published in the New Yorker, December 12, 2010 and then his 2013 collection, Tenth of December. “Drip on?” Abnesti said over the P.A.” begins the first line.
Each of these stories stand individually but collectively ask related questions like what is the value of our memories, who has the right to control them, conjure them, how far or should someone go in search of a memory for themselves or someone else. Are there ethical considerations if or when employing human memory, one’s consciousness for benign purposes or otherwise?
The best storytelling has a kind of staying power after reading. George’s new story, Thursday asks, “To what end? Had it all been just a pointless, random, meaningless disposition of energy?”
“No, not pointless, not at all: we were the point. All that had occurred before had been necessary to bring us about, to produce the young and healthy perfection that was us, our generation, so that we could finally, on behalf of all who had come before, render meaningful that brutal thing called life on earth.”
And here we are dear readers, halfway along the story but we’re all in.
"When I listen to someone reading a work, I notice accent, inflections, cadence of speech and the moments where I make a mental note to focus later on the printed text, of what’s being said, maybe inferred and what is missing."
Fascinating Nan.
Has being unable to listen to an author reading one of their works - say because, for example, being writers like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen or Dickens they couldn't do other, tops, than live, unrecordable, readings of their fictions - lessened your enjoyment / appreciation / insight being ignited by reading, naturally in published print format(s) of 'first encounter'?
If you, let's imagine. you hadn't listened to George reading "Thursday" prior to eyeballing the text - word by word; sentence by sentence; paragraph by paragraph, etcetera - what, if any difference(s) might there, possibly, be between your 'present' understanding and what your 'present' understanding might, perhaps, have been?
Just asking, in reflecting upon my own, latest and current, 'wonderings' about this extraordinary human - as far as we, yet, know - phenomenon that we collectively opt to label 'STORY'... your passing thoughts along with those of any passing others are the limit of the literary grail I'm probing.
Thanks Rob, this was an unusual first read of a short story as it was via the New Yorker podcast I received so it was less of a choice and more of an opportunity to listen then read on my own. Yes, it's hard to imagine what Chaucer or Shakespeare, Austen or Dickens might have sounded like but have heard their work read or acted. When this happens, it can sometimes be terrible but more often than not, it can be quite a memorable, incredible experience. I had a class with a professor of Classics teaching Homer's Odyssey and it was just a wee bit overwhelming reading two translations and long analysis papers but he broke the tension in each class meeting by having us all stand up and read or rather sing out a passage as it was meant to be performed.
These things we label 'stories' are increasingly coming to seem, to me, more closely akin to the gem stones we label 'diamonds'. For example stories like diamonds 'are forever'. What's more they are multi-faceted and many splendoured things. It's not just that the more closely you look the more you come to see but that you can cut the same story in different ways and accordingly see new, sometimes very unexpected, things.
For me a great benefit of these Comments Threads is having the opportunity to externalise, and in so doing 'fix' and 'hold', passing thoughts and so often to have the joy of reading other's comebacks on them. In this instance you've given me image of a sports arena, filled to capacity, in which one strand of the pre-match entertainment is having the crowd in a sequenced recital of sections of Homer's Odyssey to create, literally, a literary powered 'Mexican Wave'!
Or, alternatively, what about same treatment of Byron's stirring 'The Destruction of Sennacherib'? Six four line stanzas comprised of rhymed couplets, each of 24 crowd segments invited / allowed to deliver just one line aloud at the gallop...
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
Love that, "gem stones we label 'diamonds...multifaceted...the more closely you look the more you come to see...new, sometimes very unexpected things." Yes, that's what I gleam from the Comment Threads as we, a global community, across time zones, study together a short story.
Thank you for the Byron excerpt. That poem is beautiful and haunting all the same. Makes me think later in time, the poets of World War I. Also, a good recommendation to spend more time with his poetry as I know so little.
Hey ho, even with no need for Shakespeare's non-io, Nan.
However sublime - and this afternoon, in a passing afternoon of sublime sun-blessed tranquillity I've happened to have read the first short fictions salvos sequenced as a threesome under "i" - George and other exemplary contemporaries write no chance, on this Earth under our cosmological night sky Heaven, of surpassing let's say Wilfrid Owen's 'The Send-Off'.
And here's the thing, the ground that Owen writes of, and makes his own is - though it took me years to realise - ground that I have trod, often, and with the lifting heart that is such profound accompaniment to the arrival of that id our each owned 'Ode to the Arrival of Boundless Joy'.
Great playing this passing round of literate 'table tennis' with you Nan!
I appreciated the description of hard scrabble life––dysfunctional family life, the cars, the surroundings (strip malls, apartments with no furnishings, etc) but without demeaning or looking down on. The story describes that world well.
In a word? Our world is dysfunctional? "Oh woe that I was born to set it right!"
Or, has there, long been a mis-transliteration in play?
Was Bardic Bill, born and bred upon the Avon in the town of Stratford and later migrated South of the River to Southwark, actually - screaming, if I make so bold as to dare say loudly and quite possibly lewdly - trying to get his coterie of somewhat slow, dim, so literary acolytes to grasp the salient point that he was "born to write" not "put things right"?
From the interview: “If we met David from this story, circa age fifty, on the street (drunk, loud, aggressive), we’d swerve away. But, after reading the story (I hope), we’re able to connect the dots between that guy and the kid lying on his back in that yard with his beloved sister.”
When I read the story, this was one of the things that made me pause. That I felt compassion for David and feared the worst for his sister because we got that first glimpse of them as kids.
What a different world it might be if we could see people so thoroughly. It would be much harder to judge. Or maybe not, if we are unable to see ourselves thoroughly and honestly as well.
I followed along the story wanting to dig deeper like Mrs. Dwyer and Horace. Each new revelation made me want to know more. As an outside observer, I could judge the “sorry, not sorry” attitude of Mrs. Dwyer and Horace while taking on the same attitude of wanting to see and know more too - albeit with a different end-result motivation.
In a more pedestrian example - I have always been curious to read other people’s journals. Like my mom’s or my best friend (because I knew she writes exactly what she is feeling with zero self-censure). But it ties to wanting to know those intimate thoughts and how they might view something or see the world. It’s such a mystery - that we can’t truly get into another person’s mind.
So, yeah, those are my first thoughts. I enjoyed the story very much.
Congratulations and thanks! It's a beautiful story. I love the ending, it was surprising (I was telling myself that there was no way it could end well) and yet seemingly inevitable. From your stories that I have read, you are always able to pull out that string of light from your characters that makes the ending of the story so amazing.
I love listening to you read George. I love the Chicago accent that's still there. And everybody after listening to 'Thursday', listen to 'The Mom of Bold Action' (in The New Yorker archives). I listened to it one day on the way to town laughing and smiling the whole way. Thank you George for your talent and yourself.
Thank you, Jane. I can't seem to shake my Chi accent, or that slight lisp, no matter how hard I try - and, of course, when recording, I am made newly aware of both. Ah, well, I try to say myself, Here's to self-acceptance!
I read the story this morning, when I got my copy of the NYer. My first thought was sheesh, wow. A lot of unexpected satisfying twists there. Congratulations. Great story.
Also: mayhemic. Nice word. I'm putting that in the bank.
Am finding a theme running through what I have read of you. Something terrible becomes clear but the characters come to realize it’s all just life and get on with it. They are released from internal imprisonment to walk into a cloud.
You found a way to make backstory front story by having it as memory recall (even if it was a false memory/someone else’s)!!! As a bs resistant person I am delighted. Thursday may be the most perfect example of this I have ever read. Like someone else mentioned the story kept tugging us forward at places in another writer’s hand would lag.
Favorite line “Now the red. Then the agua.” And I loved how you defined the word in the next sentence for those who don’t know.
I also realized over the last year what a short story should be by reading the stories here. I get story in flash and feel I can master flash but my long stories are atmospheric character studies except for one longer story that has two characters at odds with rising tension & I believe is fully realized.
I learned nothing about fiction in grad school. In their defense, I focused on completing a memoir & couldn’t focus on much else.
Here I feel and see windows & doors opening to possibilities I never dreamed of because I’d never been introduced to the short story the way Story Club (and You Oh Master) introduced it.
And I was moved by the post on Gogol the possible periodic madman. I have just started trying to read Wild Palms by Faulkner. I say trying because I’ve only read Light in August, which funny enough I attempted to read as a teenager & my southern grandmother didn’t want me to read it. She never said why except hinted it was too much, which it is. LIA is one of the most moral books I have ever read so I was startled to read that Faulkner in life is considered a racist. Not in his fiction though.
Oh, how fallible are we.
Thursday has some lovely heartfelt descriptions: No, not pointless, not at all: we were the point. All that had occurred before had been necessary to bring us about, to produce the young and healthy perfection that was us, our generation, so that we could finally, on behalf of all who had come before, render meaningful that brutal thing called life on earth.
Your stories are love letters to us/we, the readers.
I am glad to be a recipient.
Ps: I couldn’t access the D. Tremaine article. I used to subscribe so TNY cut me off.
Though very different, this reminded me of “Puppy” from “Tenth of December.” Two people from very different classes coming together. I wondered if you picked the name Gerard because it begins with G, like George, and that character is based on you and your exploration of guilt about feeling judgmental toward others.
Also, loved the Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips reference. Though I have no memory of eating there--don’t imagine I would have liked fish and chips then; I ordered the Filet o’Fish exactly once--we drove by one every week on our way to terrifying swim lessons at the Y, and the sign has a warm place in my child heart. I had a Perlman headpiece? I’d be headed right there.
There are so many things to love and comment on. I don’t know about others but I find myself hoping that your stories could just go on and on so I could stay hypnotized. I tried to see the skaz mechanics you described last week, of first seeing Gerard being medicated and fitted with equipment, then what happens next (we see the therapists may be up to something or questionable in motives when Mrs. Dwyer and Horace either interrupt or Gerard is coming out of it). Then we experience more dissonance in Gerard’s (David’s) experience, followed by further discovery that Horace and Dwyer have another agenda than to let Gerard experience moments of childhood in his old age. And we also learn that Gerard hasn’t been the best human being either. In a period of near unification of Gerard (David) Gerard perhaps does one truly generous thing which is to intentionally honor Clara’s wishes of not telling Dwyer, her granddaughter, how to find her (Clara).
Other images and stuff I loved and/or laughed at or was moved by (sometimes I can find myself laughing at sad things too)
“distant lawnmowers cross-bellowing like enraged crewcut men in dispute;” Why can I see/hear this?
“We were trying this attitude on for size, one might say.
And, alas, I saw now, we were in the process of being molded. Pummelling would, ever after, be one of the choices available to us. Pummelling had been put on the menu, so to speak. To some, pummelling was unthinkable. To Clara and me, henceforth? Quite thinkable.”
“Because this was such a signal family event—a moment of peak emotional intensity—I would often, in the years to come, find myself waiting, as it were, for an excuse or opportunity to pummel someone, in much the same way that, I would imagine, a young person raised by virtuoso musicians might, on first finding an instrument in his hand, feel that the moment had arrived for him to begin pursuing the family business.”
“the subtle but specific smell of the marbles from the Chinese-checker set, the feel of my pinkie in one of the holes of the game board,”
“We both knew, with absolute certainty, that we would never drink.”
David (Gerard’s) conversation with Petey the old rocking horse
The further sense that there is something off and slightly cruel when his mother calls David (Gerard) DAVID and also chastises him at this tender moment as “a goof.” This continues to give the heads up that something is amiss.
The Alice in Wonderland-ish way Dwyer, Horace, and Gerard grow larger.
And gosh, I loved this:
“For all their dreamy yapping, they were brats, entitled brats, with the mindless vigor of youth, who wanted what they wanted so strongly and with such a presumption of eternal innocence that it would never occur to them that a thing they strongly felt like doing might be better left undone.”
To me, George's words here sum up the purpose of both writing and reading: "As I increase the specificity in a piece, I’ll find that a character becomes not necessarily morally better or more forgivable but just somehow more complete. His sins become higher-order sins, so to speak. (And his virtues become higher-order virtues.) My judgment of him gets tempered." Deborah Treisman calls this thing George does a form of "mind melding" (which, as a Star Trek fan, I love). I like to picture all of us across the planet, reading "Thursday" together, our minds melding with George's, David's, Gerard's, and each other's--and our judgments of one another becoming increasingly tempered. George Saunders, you are a man of Love. (And as I said in previous post, this is just a great story. Thank you for writing it.)
Love the post, and it;s underpinning sentiment, for sure Mary.
Having said which, have to flag an at least transient sense of discomfiture with "I like to picture all of us across the planet, reading "Thursday" together, our minds melding with George's, David's, Gerard's, and each other's--and our judgments of one another becoming increasingly tempered."
Don't all the best made cases, always, allow for divergence as well as congruence?
If you, beyond merely 'liking', are a fan of Star Trek don't you sincerely fear The Borg Ending?
I'm on originalist--I only watch the original Star Trek with Shatner and Nimoy.
Leonard Nimoy came into a restaurant my father was managing and cooking for in Oxnard. He sat at the counter and had breakfast. I was at school, so I didn't meet him!
My first love was William Shatner’s Captain Kirk ... Rob I’m not sure that makes me a youngster
"Dem Bones, dem Bones, dem real dry McCoy Bones"?
Shatner, McCoy and... what of Ohuru, for another iconic, resurrected, passing example?
Wow Mary! Who, being but youngsters among us, could have anticipated travelling to boldly to new figments of the universal literary imagination in such richly dipped and sharp etched 'Star Trek Originalists' as we?
What a blast-off 🚀
This Star Trek discussion reminds me that I always ate spaghetti drenched with red clam sauce from the little can of Progresso sauce when watching the original Star Trek episodes in the 70s. Fond memories of watching and eating.
Amid so many delights: "On clotheslines strung between them danced the garments of our fellow-poor, flailing about in the wind, as if to say, Yes, though we are the clothes of the poor, we dance, and what of it? A shirt threw an arm up merrily. A pair of boxers inverted itself in joy, leg holes briefly opening upward."
I loved this passage too. Reminded me immediately of the clothes fluttering on a line in Tolstoy's "Master and Man" which is of course in "A swim..." Made me wonder if GS was paying homage to the Tolstoy story in this passage!
That passage stood out to me too; though as ever I was reading too fast; yet at the end of this I did pause and think - wonderful.
But... because I had been reading too fast I missed the 'as if to say', and I thought George had gone for...
"On clotheslines strung between them danced the garments of our fellow-poor, flailing about in the wind. Yes though we are the clothes of the poor, we dance, and what of it?"
My brain loved this version, loved that I had been trusted to know it was just the narrative voice doing the voice of the clothes of the poor.
But, I was ever so ever so disappointed to see that the 'as if to say' was in there after all.
I loved listening to George Saunders read aloud a new story by George Saunders. You read it at just the right speed, George.
If I had been reading it in the magazine, I'm sure I would have been so excited I would have gulped it down and forgotten to chew.
I always have to work hard to slow myself down. My natural talking speed is something like....well, remember "Alvin and the Chipmunks?" :)
"Slow down, you move to fast
Gotta' let the moment last..."
As it happens so I have learnt - having been being born and brought up in the City of Coventry, not so much close by as in the Heart of Shakespeare's erstwhile Arden , that I suffer from the occasionally passing 'torture'of hearing myself speak, in long, slow, basically boring Brummie vowels.
Except, of course, that I happen to know - thanks to the erudition and performative talents of David (Dad) and Ben (Son) Crystal - that Billy the Grand Bard Literary Vizier of Stratford spoke long and slow, like I do, too! And, back in that distant day I'm recollecting, he couldn't have been speaking 'Brummie' as was spoken being as how, "Brummie" was yet to be invented on the back of that thingy-ma-gig that nowadays gets labelled, like it or loathe it, as 'The Industrial Revolution'...
🤣
Haha!
Lovely comment Annie Bee
If George reads aloud 'at just the right speed' what do you think you might need to tweak, so to speak, to get your reading off the page speed past your 'excitement', 'gulping' and 'forgetting to chew' tendencies?
Here's a question you might care to ponder: is George's reading of "Thursday" likely to be, for you, the 'definitive' one or might others offer 'listens to love'?
“On the bright side, it was Thursday.” It’s the first line of George’s new story in the New Yorker, June 5, 2023. I first listen to George reading it. When I listen to someone reading a work, I notice accent, inflections, cadence of speech and the moments where I make a mental note to focus later on the printed text, of what’s being said, maybe inferred and what is missing.
The second sentence of the story begins, “Gerard, yes, hi, hello,” said Mrs. Dwyer, the nurse’s assistant sanctioned to hand over the Perlman headpiece and the big green pill and the smaller red one that activates the green one.” As a reader, I’m introduced to Gerard and then Mrs. Dwyer who is sanctioned to do something medically, officially in her capacity. Is this a hint, does it suggest something later, will she do something that is not sanctioned?
In the New Yorker interview with Deborah Treisman about the work, George mentions a much earlier story, his first published in the New Yorker, titled “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz,” September 27, 1992 and later in his short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, published in 1996. The narrator accidentally downloads into his brain the memories of a burglar who’s broken into his shop (a virtual-reality parlor). After he overcomes the intruder by coldcocking him with the FedEx tape gun, he says, “I strap him down and set my console to Scan.”
After reading these two stories, they seem to be a particular type of brethren. There’s a throughline coursing over a thirty year span of writing. There are others, but it’s hard not to think of George’s short story, Escape from Spiderhead published in the New Yorker, December 12, 2010 and then his 2013 collection, Tenth of December. “Drip on?” Abnesti said over the P.A.” begins the first line.
Each of these stories stand individually but collectively ask related questions like what is the value of our memories, who has the right to control them, conjure them, how far or should someone go in search of a memory for themselves or someone else. Are there ethical considerations if or when employing human memory, one’s consciousness for benign purposes or otherwise?
The best storytelling has a kind of staying power after reading. George’s new story, Thursday asks, “To what end? Had it all been just a pointless, random, meaningless disposition of energy?”
“No, not pointless, not at all: we were the point. All that had occurred before had been necessary to bring us about, to produce the young and healthy perfection that was us, our generation, so that we could finally, on behalf of all who had come before, render meaningful that brutal thing called life on earth.”
And here we are dear readers, halfway along the story but we’re all in.
"When I listen to someone reading a work, I notice accent, inflections, cadence of speech and the moments where I make a mental note to focus later on the printed text, of what’s being said, maybe inferred and what is missing."
Fascinating Nan.
Has being unable to listen to an author reading one of their works - say because, for example, being writers like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen or Dickens they couldn't do other, tops, than live, unrecordable, readings of their fictions - lessened your enjoyment / appreciation / insight being ignited by reading, naturally in published print format(s) of 'first encounter'?
If you, let's imagine. you hadn't listened to George reading "Thursday" prior to eyeballing the text - word by word; sentence by sentence; paragraph by paragraph, etcetera - what, if any difference(s) might there, possibly, be between your 'present' understanding and what your 'present' understanding might, perhaps, have been?
Just asking, in reflecting upon my own, latest and current, 'wonderings' about this extraordinary human - as far as we, yet, know - phenomenon that we collectively opt to label 'STORY'... your passing thoughts along with those of any passing others are the limit of the literary grail I'm probing.
Thanks Rob, this was an unusual first read of a short story as it was via the New Yorker podcast I received so it was less of a choice and more of an opportunity to listen then read on my own. Yes, it's hard to imagine what Chaucer or Shakespeare, Austen or Dickens might have sounded like but have heard their work read or acted. When this happens, it can sometimes be terrible but more often than not, it can be quite a memorable, incredible experience. I had a class with a professor of Classics teaching Homer's Odyssey and it was just a wee bit overwhelming reading two translations and long analysis papers but he broke the tension in each class meeting by having us all stand up and read or rather sing out a passage as it was meant to be performed.
Beautiful, will always remember that :)
These things we label 'stories' are increasingly coming to seem, to me, more closely akin to the gem stones we label 'diamonds'. For example stories like diamonds 'are forever'. What's more they are multi-faceted and many splendoured things. It's not just that the more closely you look the more you come to see but that you can cut the same story in different ways and accordingly see new, sometimes very unexpected, things.
For me a great benefit of these Comments Threads is having the opportunity to externalise, and in so doing 'fix' and 'hold', passing thoughts and so often to have the joy of reading other's comebacks on them. In this instance you've given me image of a sports arena, filled to capacity, in which one strand of the pre-match entertainment is having the crowd in a sequenced recital of sections of Homer's Odyssey to create, literally, a literary powered 'Mexican Wave'!
Or, alternatively, what about same treatment of Byron's stirring 'The Destruction of Sennacherib'? Six four line stanzas comprised of rhymed couplets, each of 24 crowd segments invited / allowed to deliver just one line aloud at the gallop...
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
... 😂
Love that, "gem stones we label 'diamonds...multifaceted...the more closely you look the more you come to see...new, sometimes very unexpected things." Yes, that's what I gleam from the Comment Threads as we, a global community, across time zones, study together a short story.
Thank you for the Byron excerpt. That poem is beautiful and haunting all the same. Makes me think later in time, the poets of World War I. Also, a good recommendation to spend more time with his poetry as I know so little.
Hey ho, even with no need for Shakespeare's non-io, Nan.
However sublime - and this afternoon, in a passing afternoon of sublime sun-blessed tranquillity I've happened to have read the first short fictions salvos sequenced as a threesome under "i" - George and other exemplary contemporaries write no chance, on this Earth under our cosmological night sky Heaven, of surpassing let's say Wilfrid Owen's 'The Send-Off'.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57369/the-send-off
And here's the thing, the ground that Owen writes of, and makes his own is - though it took me years to realise - ground that I have trod, often, and with the lifting heart that is such profound accompaniment to the arrival of that id our each owned 'Ode to the Arrival of Boundless Joy'.
Great playing this passing round of literate 'table tennis' with you Nan!
Rob
I appreciated the description of hard scrabble life––dysfunctional family life, the cars, the surroundings (strip malls, apartments with no furnishings, etc) but without demeaning or looking down on. The story describes that world well.
I agree, Sea. May be difficult but not without its dignity.
In a word? Our world is dysfunctional? "Oh woe that I was born to set it right!"
Or, has there, long been a mis-transliteration in play?
Was Bardic Bill, born and bred upon the Avon in the town of Stratford and later migrated South of the River to Southwark, actually - screaming, if I make so bold as to dare say loudly and quite possibly lewdly - trying to get his coterie of somewhat slow, dim, so literary acolytes to grasp the salient point that he was "born to write" not "put things right"?
"Baby we were born to ride.."
From the interview: “If we met David from this story, circa age fifty, on the street (drunk, loud, aggressive), we’d swerve away. But, after reading the story (I hope), we’re able to connect the dots between that guy and the kid lying on his back in that yard with his beloved sister.”
When I read the story, this was one of the things that made me pause. That I felt compassion for David and feared the worst for his sister because we got that first glimpse of them as kids.
What a different world it might be if we could see people so thoroughly. It would be much harder to judge. Or maybe not, if we are unable to see ourselves thoroughly and honestly as well.
I followed along the story wanting to dig deeper like Mrs. Dwyer and Horace. Each new revelation made me want to know more. As an outside observer, I could judge the “sorry, not sorry” attitude of Mrs. Dwyer and Horace while taking on the same attitude of wanting to see and know more too - albeit with a different end-result motivation.
In a more pedestrian example - I have always been curious to read other people’s journals. Like my mom’s or my best friend (because I knew she writes exactly what she is feeling with zero self-censure). But it ties to wanting to know those intimate thoughts and how they might view something or see the world. It’s such a mystery - that we can’t truly get into another person’s mind.
So, yeah, those are my first thoughts. I enjoyed the story very much.
"Something in the quality of the light seemed to be making promises regarding our future"
Wow.
Congratulations and thanks! It's a beautiful story. I love the ending, it was surprising (I was telling myself that there was no way it could end well) and yet seemingly inevitable. From your stories that I have read, you are always able to pull out that string of light from your characters that makes the ending of the story so amazing.
I love listening to you read George. I love the Chicago accent that's still there. And everybody after listening to 'Thursday', listen to 'The Mom of Bold Action' (in The New Yorker archives). I listened to it one day on the way to town laughing and smiling the whole way. Thank you George for your talent and yourself.
Thank you, Jane. I can't seem to shake my Chi accent, or that slight lisp, no matter how hard I try - and, of course, when recording, I am made newly aware of both. Ah, well, I try to say myself, Here's to self-acceptance!
I read the story this morning, when I got my copy of the NYer. My first thought was sheesh, wow. A lot of unexpected satisfying twists there. Congratulations. Great story.
Also: mayhemic. Nice word. I'm putting that in the bank.
Am finding a theme running through what I have read of you. Something terrible becomes clear but the characters come to realize it’s all just life and get on with it. They are released from internal imprisonment to walk into a cloud.
Thursday on a Friday
You found a way to make backstory front story by having it as memory recall (even if it was a false memory/someone else’s)!!! As a bs resistant person I am delighted. Thursday may be the most perfect example of this I have ever read. Like someone else mentioned the story kept tugging us forward at places in another writer’s hand would lag.
Favorite line “Now the red. Then the agua.” And I loved how you defined the word in the next sentence for those who don’t know.
I also realized over the last year what a short story should be by reading the stories here. I get story in flash and feel I can master flash but my long stories are atmospheric character studies except for one longer story that has two characters at odds with rising tension & I believe is fully realized.
I learned nothing about fiction in grad school. In their defense, I focused on completing a memoir & couldn’t focus on much else.
Here I feel and see windows & doors opening to possibilities I never dreamed of because I’d never been introduced to the short story the way Story Club (and You Oh Master) introduced it.
And I was moved by the post on Gogol the possible periodic madman. I have just started trying to read Wild Palms by Faulkner. I say trying because I’ve only read Light in August, which funny enough I attempted to read as a teenager & my southern grandmother didn’t want me to read it. She never said why except hinted it was too much, which it is. LIA is one of the most moral books I have ever read so I was startled to read that Faulkner in life is considered a racist. Not in his fiction though.
Oh, how fallible are we.
Thursday has some lovely heartfelt descriptions: No, not pointless, not at all: we were the point. All that had occurred before had been necessary to bring us about, to produce the young and healthy perfection that was us, our generation, so that we could finally, on behalf of all who had come before, render meaningful that brutal thing called life on earth.
Your stories are love letters to us/we, the readers.
I am glad to be a recipient.
Ps: I couldn’t access the D. Tremaine article. I used to subscribe so TNY cut me off.
Though very different, this reminded me of “Puppy” from “Tenth of December.” Two people from very different classes coming together. I wondered if you picked the name Gerard because it begins with G, like George, and that character is based on you and your exploration of guilt about feeling judgmental toward others.
Hi Pam, and honestly, no - I just grabbed that name out of thin air. That's how I do it. I think you're right about the relation of "Puppy," btw.
Also, loved the Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips reference. Though I have no memory of eating there--don’t imagine I would have liked fish and chips then; I ordered the Filet o’Fish exactly once--we drove by one every week on our way to terrifying swim lessons at the Y, and the sign has a warm place in my child heart. I had a Perlman headpiece? I’d be headed right there.
There are so many things to love and comment on. I don’t know about others but I find myself hoping that your stories could just go on and on so I could stay hypnotized. I tried to see the skaz mechanics you described last week, of first seeing Gerard being medicated and fitted with equipment, then what happens next (we see the therapists may be up to something or questionable in motives when Mrs. Dwyer and Horace either interrupt or Gerard is coming out of it). Then we experience more dissonance in Gerard’s (David’s) experience, followed by further discovery that Horace and Dwyer have another agenda than to let Gerard experience moments of childhood in his old age. And we also learn that Gerard hasn’t been the best human being either. In a period of near unification of Gerard (David) Gerard perhaps does one truly generous thing which is to intentionally honor Clara’s wishes of not telling Dwyer, her granddaughter, how to find her (Clara).
Other images and stuff I loved and/or laughed at or was moved by (sometimes I can find myself laughing at sad things too)
“distant lawnmowers cross-bellowing like enraged crewcut men in dispute;” Why can I see/hear this?
“We were trying this attitude on for size, one might say.
And, alas, I saw now, we were in the process of being molded. Pummelling would, ever after, be one of the choices available to us. Pummelling had been put on the menu, so to speak. To some, pummelling was unthinkable. To Clara and me, henceforth? Quite thinkable.”
“Because this was such a signal family event—a moment of peak emotional intensity—I would often, in the years to come, find myself waiting, as it were, for an excuse or opportunity to pummel someone, in much the same way that, I would imagine, a young person raised by virtuoso musicians might, on first finding an instrument in his hand, feel that the moment had arrived for him to begin pursuing the family business.”
“the subtle but specific smell of the marbles from the Chinese-checker set, the feel of my pinkie in one of the holes of the game board,”
“We both knew, with absolute certainty, that we would never drink.”
David (Gerard’s) conversation with Petey the old rocking horse
The further sense that there is something off and slightly cruel when his mother calls David (Gerard) DAVID and also chastises him at this tender moment as “a goof.” This continues to give the heads up that something is amiss.
The Alice in Wonderland-ish way Dwyer, Horace, and Gerard grow larger.
And gosh, I loved this:
“For all their dreamy yapping, they were brats, entitled brats, with the mindless vigor of youth, who wanted what they wanted so strongly and with such a presumption of eternal innocence that it would never occur to them that a thing they strongly felt like doing might be better left undone.”
Thank you for writing stories I love to reread.
You can have Thursdays, I'll take the weekend without beatings^^