Sarah Wrote That

I’m really enjoying Rachel Sherman’s The Living Room, and her use of third-person to juggle three women’s perspectives.  The teenage and elderly voices come through particularly distinctively, and Sherman’s pacing is like listening to good improv; you know a lot of skill goes into hitting notes that fall so right, but it never feels arduous.

• Faster Times interview with Sherman 
• “Two Stories; Single Family; Scenic View” from Sherman’s story collection The First Hurt

Piano Lesson

You wouldn’t remember, said the teacher, but that entire block was a Steinway showroom. The student does not remember.  She grew up in Teaneck.  Her playing is cleaner this week.  Everything sounds better on her teacher’s baby grand.  On her walk to the subway, the street smells of old books.  A father in a Yankee sweatshirt wipes hot dog cart mustard from his chin and looks at her.  He has missed a spot of mustard, and she bets he has no idea about the block they’re on, everything you should know to stand there.

Ripton, Vermont. 15 August 2008.

Dinner at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference is served at six in the dining room of the main building of the old Inn.  In 2008, on our third night, a grey afternoon cleared while we were eating, and after dessert it seemed the entire conference walked out across the road to the stone wall along the meadow or stood in the road—there was no traffic—new acquaintances and old friends from previous summers snapping pictures, as if we were all thinking not just how lovely it was but what the likelihood was of such light again while we were there.

Ships That Pass:

You looked about 37 and wore your jeans too tight, which I am prepared to forgive because maybe you’re just not ready to concede the extra pounds—maybe denial is your métier—in which case: okay, we can diet together. We’ll be that couple that jogs.

via Fiona Maazel

via Blake Butler

The Weight of Words

I’m so excited about Elizabeth Hardwick’s New York Stories.  From the Barnes and Noble review:

the later stories, in addition to “the absence of the lumber in the usual prose” and “the relief from spelling everything out, plank by plank,” as she put it, almost exclusively use an unusual, highly attenuated first person.

Reading late Hardwick—Sleepless Nights and American Fictions—you realize, that’s what a sentence in English can do.  As Hilton Als writes:

her influence can still be felt in any writer who knows that a story or essay’s tone is based as much on a word’s weight, and the rhythm of a paragraph, as it is on thesis and intention

The furniture of realist scene-building seems dutiful and perfunctory by comparison, the confessionals of language-oriented fiction floaty and solipsistic.  Hardwick knew too much of the world to only look inward:

Antwerp and Ghent: what wonderful names, hard as the heavy cobbles in the square. Amsterdam, a city of readers. All night long, you seemed to hear the turning of pages: pages of French, Italian, English, and the despised German. Those fair heads remembered Ovid, Yeats, Baudelaire — and remembered suffering, hiding, freezing. The weight of books and wars. 

Jessica’s Honey Scones

1 cup whole-wheat pastry flour
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon double-acting baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick (1/2 cup) cold unsalted butter, cut into bits
a generous 1/4 cup dried currents
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons honey
1/4 – 1/2 cup half-and-half (1% or whole milk are fine)
egg wash made by beating 1 large egg with one tsp. water
(or reserve a tablespoon of the 2 eggs)

Into a bowl sift together the pastry flour, the all-purpose flour, the baking powder, and the salt, blend in the butter until the mixture resembles coarse meal, and stir in the currants.

In a small bowl beat together the eggs, the honey, and 1/4 cup of the half-and-half (or milk) until the mixture is combined. Add to the flour mixture, and stir the mixture with a fork, adding more of the half-and-half (or milk) if necessary, until it just forms a sticky but manageable dough.

Knead the dough lightly on a floured surface for 30 seconds and pat it gently into a round 1 inch thick. Cut the round into 10 wedges with a sharp knife dipped in flour and arrange the wedges on a buttered baking sheet. Brush the tops of the scones with the egg wash and bake the scones in a preheated 450 F oven for 11-13 minutes, or until they are golden.

Gourmet, May 1984