Just returned from a really great day in San Francisco. Saw some real estate, met some new people, ate lunch with an old friend. The weather was perfect.
In a recent post, T mentions the venerable writer Joyce Carol Oates. Funny how coincidences and timing work - I've recently started "High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966-2006." It's divided into five sections - New Stories, The 1960s, The 1970s, The 1980s, The 1990s; with an afterward by Oates herself. So I'm skipping around, and loving her prose so far.
The content's depressing, yes; yet she has an acute way of describing these inner struggles that we've all felt before, so helpless, so human - even if the protagonist is a pill-popping, unfaithful middle-aged English professors or a troubled, famed writer with an identity complex ("The Dead", "My Warszawa", respectively). She also leaves things open-ended, hopeful, almost. Here are two excerpts:
"Gordon kissed her face, her body, she clasped her hands around him and gave herself up to him musically, dreamily, like a rose of rot with only a short while left to bloom, carrying the rot neatly hidden, deeply hidden."
"When he laughed you want to laugh with him in the way that fallen leaves are drawn in the wake of a speeding vehicle."
Beautiful. Just like California sunshine.
C
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