Sarah Wrote That

Enormous Exuberance At The Last Minute

Reading Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes At The Last Minute this weekend, I was amused in light of recent discussions by her willingness to use exclamation points.  Some of them seem ironic and Internet-y (which I think she would appreciate—a medium military in origin, propagating OMGs and long cats), others as exuberant as Whitman.  She’s as exuberant about sentences as about people; she knows how to twist context and jumble us up along with her.  What is one to do, at last, with sentences packed this tightly semi non-sequiturs but marvel:

I wanted to stop and admire the long beach.  I wanted to stop in order to think admiringly about New York.  There aren’t many rotting cities so tan and sandy and speckled with citizens at their salty edges.  But I had already spent a lot of life lying down or standing and staring.  I had decided to run.

Which she does, until she gets to her childhood neighborhood, where people trump her plan and she stays for a couple of weeks. 

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Thoughts On Grace Paley

This week in my independent study we started Paley’s Collected Stories, and alongside my reactions I wanted to post the cover of the edition I am using, which though it doesn’t seem to me that I bought it so many years ago is already browning inwards from the corners.

Why scan a book cover when you can Google it, right?  My laziness yielded a Google bonus: a copy with a Philip Roth endorsement that my copy lacks (did the publishers add it in a later edition, or decide it was better to do without it?). “Splendidly comic and unladylike,” Philip says.  Which would never have occurred to me!  In fact with most people I would wonder why anyone after 1903 or so would use “unladylike” as praise or at all, but this is Philip Roth so we know what he’s referring to.

But: let’s get crafty, shall we?

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