Cracks in pavements,cobbles,gutters,weeds In the little street we children played While nature fought back, spreading out wild seeds
Old women reached for grace with rosary beads When I call.I don’t know what to say Cracks in pavements,cobbles,gutters,weeds
Neighbours borrowed eggs and helped in need What was my entire world has shrunk, decayed Still nature fights back, flinging out wild seeds
The cobbles have been tarmacked till aggrieved Here we once enjoyed school holidays Cracks for insects,cobbles,gutters,weeds
Girls played with doll’s prams,boys disagreed All the world was here, where’s left today? While nature blackened, blasting out her seeds
Where are mother,father,oh dismay I am old and they lie in the clay Cracks in pavements,cobbles,gutters,weeds Nature acts still, spreads out flying seeds
While the priest annointed him with oils I played in the gutter all alone I hoped to find the marbles we had lost Or from the melted tar to pluck a stone
The summer was so hot the cobbles baked Looking like a row of fresh made loaves There were no fishes in the millstream’s rush Nor a place where bread and Saviour rose
I found a florin in the cobbled street I found two marbles lying near a grid I found a daisy squashed in a wide crack I saw a spider hanged in its own web
To summarise ,my father went away The Queen was crowned and we just had to play
I remember you boys rolling marbles down the gutter
And how you prized them, have beautiful they where when you rolled them on your hands in the sunshine
I remember you climbing fences and falling off walls while I stood by to admire you
We found a well in someone’s allotment covered over mr by tin.
You frightened me with tales of boys vtorturing frogs.
Maybe you were frightened of the prospect of national service.
Sometimes you talked about the Nazis
But you could never have said to anyone that you were afraid.
Before that I remember you climbing up the piano trying to get to the Christmas tree on the top.
You seem so full of energy alive so happy and yet it was not true
Later you developed panic syndrome I could hardly believe it
And then you died with Parkinson’s disease
You were lonely in the nursing home. I hoped when you drowsed that you remembered the marbles and playing rounders in the street
You taught me how to bowl over arm. I wanted to play cricket but it never happened How full of possibility the world seemed, the energy, the joy, the lust for life.
Avocado pear with prophecy
Melon and cake salad [ iced]
Carrot and weak soup
Battered beans all aching
Casserole of jam with funny bones
Salmon and duck eggs in dream sauce on white mice.
Fishcakes and celery tarts
Vegetarian man with pearl barley.
Hot spiced reef with pasta
Chilli beef and barmaid
Seven pear trees with roasted roots
Icecream and sausage jelly on custard tarts
Shoulder,breast and sweet lady
Toothless spies, wholemeal bred
On a whim I went to Downing Street They charged me fifty pounds for both my feet Then no-one anwered when I rang the bell I looked in through a hole, the penny fell
I claim I saw the tide was coming in Riding high with whales, oh they were thin What next , a golden galaxy implodes Stars shoot out like sparks from other worlds
Jonah rode a whale to London Town Still in shock, he did not hear a sound All tongues will dry until we see the flames The burning bush, the prophecy, the Name
For Sophocles I spent a million pounds My credit card’s still bouncing underground
Oh,light bulb foreseen by our God Save us all from darkness’ rod You are our Saviour as foretold In prophecy by ancients bold. We will worship you at night When sunken is the sun so bright. We’ll watch TV and Kindle fire No more to play shall we aspire. We’ll wear ourselves out watching screens, As from a can we eat baked beans We’ll send for pizzas with our phones With which we never feel alone. We might talk to our partner dear Though to text is easier. We see the neon street lights gleam Where once we saw the moon’s cold beams And in bed we read our books With a kindle or a nook We put beneath out pillows fair I phones which we long to hear Can one have too much new light? From technology some take flight For gone are seasons, and their fruit As our computer we reboot. New potatoes all year round Avocados once quite rare Now are seem ‘most everywhere. Melons,grapes and fresh green peas As the birds sing,life’s a breeze. Oh light bulbs,fluorescent tubes Electric candle, light is cubed. We thank you for extended days Maybe we’ll find time for prayers. God is great in mystery No light bulb can help us see. In silence,darkness, meditate Wonder what will be our fate. As retribution for our wrong Satan stabs us with his prongs He needs no more light in hell The fiery furnace cooks as well.
A word that’s spoken by a friend can reach Can touch, can move, can embrace in its sounds The inner soul where its vibrations teach.
When cut off, silent,after sad defeat Such gentle words can break our sullen bonds A word that’s spoken by a friend can reach.
We must not torture nor torment in speech Our heart, the centre of our morbid wounds The inner soul with its vibrations speaks..
From our eye, a tear springs with relief From imprisoned sulking, jump with a great bound! A word that’s spoken by a friend can reach.
Muscles weaken,but the mind stays fleet Humour and its cousins are our clowns The inner soul by its athletics speaks.
I smile and smile yet rarely do I frown For I will rise up, even when low down A word that by a friend can reach,provoke In our souls ,deep memories will evoks
In my despair I felt that I was stuck Paralysed by grief and guilt I failed By the end I had tried every trick
From prayer unthought to deeps of logic black My life, my engine ,juddered off the rails I hated God and of “his” Church was sick
Starving and alone I was in shock The death of one I loved had made me frail By the end I had tried every trick
I felt Love’s arms around me, death was blocked I knew this goodness, why else would I wail? I thought I hated God but Love had struck
Warm and golden light that did me hold Where are you now when Evil has grown bold? Kind despair that made me long time sit By the end I learned Love needs no trick
The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed.
Discharge status: Alive but without permission.
Healthy appearing decrepit 69 year-old male, mentally alert but forgetful.
The patient refused an autopsy.
The patient has no past history of suicides.
Patient has left his white blood cells at another hospital.
The patient’s past medical history has been remarkably insignificant with only a 40 pound weight gain in the past three days.
She slipped on the ice and apparently her legs went in separate directions in early December.
The patient experienced sudden onset of severe shortness of breath with a picture of acute pulmonary oedema at home while having sex, which gradually disappeared
Yet our tendency to forget the haunting brilliance displayed in the short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” in the novel “Them,” the novella “Black Water,” the Marilyn Monroe novel “Blonde,” and to focus instead on her tweets or the sheer volume of her catalog seems fitting, because her latest novel, “The Man Without a Shadow” (Ecco: 384 pp., $27.99), is preoccupied with the act of forgetting. It tells the story of a charismatic amnesiac, Elihu Hoopes, whose short-term memory has been destroyed by encephalitis. Though Eli, his ailment and an image he can’t seem to shake — the disturbing anamnesis of a girl’s body floating just below the surface of a stream — are at its center, the book is as much the story of Margot Sharpe, a neuroscientist who enters Eli’s life as a graduate student but over time becomes much more entangled with her patient’s world. The novel wrestles with our complicated acts of remembrance and the various ways memory constructs and colors our emotions and ethics — our entire identity. After all, it’s memory that allows you to discern where you are going, where you have been.
Oates will appear at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Saturday, April 9. This phone interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What carries you from one book to the next? Does an image come to you or a character or an idea you want to explore?
In a long work like a novel, a number of elements have to come together. It’s like a river into which many tributaries are flowing. The river builds with different smaller streams. You have one idea and then another and then another. I always start with characters about whom I care. I like to work with characters who are representational. I am interested in the personal, but I also want to write something that has a larger significance in terms of society.
“The Man Without a Shadow” is not only a fascinating portrait of its two main characters, Margot and Eli, but an examination of memory as the very bedrock of the edifices of our identities, our personalities.
I’m interested in how we fashion our personalities out of somewhat selective memory. We forget much. It is both very natural and very normal to forget a good deal. Things that we remember may have a certain cast. As in a movie, there’s a certain tone, of lighting, of music, of sound, so with our memories some people have a natural tone of melancholy and others have a more optimistic or cheerful tone. We all know people who are determined to be upbeat and other people who seem to be looking over their shoulders all the time, wounded and complaining. Personality to me is the ultimate fascination — how we’re all so different, and yet we’re very much alike in many ways.
How did the function of memory determine the book’s structural and aesthetic choices?
The novel is constructed as if it were notes on an amnesiac. A neuroscientist is keeping a personal journal and part of that is the novel, but then we’re also in Eli’s memory and imagination too. We see what he’s remembering of his past. He’s haunted by his past. That’s true of many people. There are seminal incidents in people’s lives that they keep returning to and thinking about. He’s tormented by something that happened when he was very small and didn’t have any ability to comprehend. He’s trying to comprehend it with his art.
Author Joyce Carol Oates talks with Michael Silverblatt during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC on April 19, 2015.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Are there similarities between comprehension through art and science? You write of Margot, “She has always asked questions for which there are not ready answers. To be a scientist, Margot thinks, is to know which questions to ask.” Is that also in some way the definition of a writer?
A scientist is someone who is really looking at the causality of things. If you were a political scientist, let’s say, you would look at the current political situation with Donald Trump and the others in a very analytical way, seeing it maybe as part of a cycle of American politics. A scientist is always looking at the context, whereas most people just read the newspaper and throw it out. “Does this thing have consequences?” “What does it mean?” “Is there a precedent in history?” These are questions that a scientist would ask, and a novelist asks these questions as well.
When Mary went to bed she wanted to put her phone on the charger but she could not find it
First she thought shall I ring 999 and she asked Emile for his opinion but he didn’t know what to say
She ran the number and she could hear it ringing but it was downstairs and she was feeling tired so she thought to herself I will get it in the morning mlll
MotherI want an i-mssk Emile whispered into her ear she lay on the bed
So she said her night’s prayers and got into bed wearing a long cotton night dress with blue flowers all over it and the silk eye mask that she liked very much
Mother I want an eye mask cried Emile
Well you can’t have mine because it will be too big for you and it will drop off ot it might even strangle yo will surely in a world as large as this one must be somewhere someplace where they make eye masks for cats to wear at night.
We’ll have to look on Google he thought to himself it will give Mary something to do tomorrow apart from trying to find her phone.
The next day Mary went downstairs and she rankg the landline with the number of her mobile and it began to ring but it wasn’t in the living room and then before she could walk across the room it stopped ringing
Oh what a bloody nuisance she thought to herself she tried again
I’ve heard of lies done lies and statistics she said to herself but that is a decent sort of lie m I am the owner of the phone and I am not turned it off it must have run out of batter don’t worry mother Emile cried
It must be here somewhere but not the bedroom or the living room
Do you remember fractal geometry she asked the cat nervously
I don’t believe I ever heard of that
Well what a PS2 was in ordinary geometry is a short distance like between thrill and Colin bay if you follow all the internets of the coastline an infinite distance. Oh god sort the cat I hope she’s not going to go on to infinity and different levels of infinity and so on because to be honest cats are not interested in infinity we are interested in living creatures people mice routes dogs horses Beatles frogs but definitely not infinity which is an abstract concept far beyond the reach of the mind of a cat like me.
Cup of tea and sat down thinking it’s going to take me infinitely long to find this phone so I will die while I’m looking for it
She stared down at the blue roof and taught there’s no point loosing at the blue rub it’s not in this room it must be in the hall or the kitchen
Suddenly an idea came to her, it’s in the hall darling.
Stan is that you? I can’t manage very well without you because you’ve got better eyesight than me or at least you did but how do you know it’s in the hall where are you? Can people in heaven loop down and look at lost objects for their relatives?
So she went into the hall and she walked towards different door and there on the floor underneath the tablet a Catholic weekly periodical load a phone
well that’s very peculiar Mary thought because she had come so her subscription 18 months before and she had not been receiving it and now by some miracle someone to put it through the door and said London right on top of the phone except there was a tiny bit peaking out and she must have noticed that previously without making it concerts. She picked up the phone and almost kissed it for joy
I must be more systematic because unlike the infinite length of the coastline the life of a battery in a phone is only a few hours
So that means you need a plan
the phone rang as soon as she put it on the charger and it was a neighbor Annie.
What are you doing today question mark do you fancy taking Emile out for a walk?
He is a cat not a dog
I think you have some ulterior motive for asking me that.
Well I’m feeling very shy today but I need to get some exercise so I thought if you iand came with me it would give strangers something to talk about
Yes will you proposing to put Emile on a lead because he will not like that
Well you can sit on your shoulder I have seen nothing the tone there is a man with a white coat on Sunday mornings he takes it into Marks and Spencer’s.
I wonder if he is enquiring about winter clothing forecast because it’s somewhere they could expand into although since cats are very small it might not make a lot of profit and yet at the same time because they are so small the tailoring and the fit will be very difficult and who’s prepared to pay millions for a coat for their cat when they could simply keep the caf at home by the fire
Next thing that we’re doing makeup for cats she said to Annie as he told her about Emile wanting a silk I mask.
Well at least he won’t be asking for lipstick and I shado
Stan was in the new black and cream kitchen cooking the Sunday dinner.As usual in the North it was roast beef and Yorkshire puddings.Stan was very good with Yorkshire puddings.They ate them with gravy before the main course just to maintain tradition.Even Emile,their talking cat, loved a pudding soaked in thick meaty gravy.. Suddenly the kitchen door burst open and in rushed their neighbor Annie… covered in blue paint. What’s happened to you,Stan enquired cautiously.Surely you are not house painting on Sunday? No,I never paint myself,she responded.I was in the old shed and a stray cat was up on the top shelf.It leaped off knocking over this tin of paint.I’m wondering how to get ot out of my hair? What type of paint is it? It’s emulsion paint. Well,I’m afraid you can’t get it out! I can’t go around town with blue hair,she cried loudly,even a touch hysterically. Well,all I can think is that I could cut off a little of your hair. OK, if that’s the only way to get rid of that damned paint.Can I stay and eat with you,babe? Of course,sweetheart.Now here are some pinking shears. Have you no ordinary scissors? she cried fractiously.Oh,bleedin’ ‘ell!! No,we lost them.But pinking shears will give a layered effect. Stan began cutting the lefthand side of Annie’s hair.Then he went around to the right….his left or her right? She looked in the mirror,The left is a bit longer,she murmured vampishly.She falt like cussing and swearing but she didn’t know enough bad words so far in her life. OK I’ll cut off a bit more.Stan whispered into her neck. Oh,my God.The shears slipped,it’s gone really short,he shouted. All Stan could do was cut the remainder of Annie’s lovely hair so it was only 2 cm long all over. Suddenly Mary came in, I didn’t know you were a hair dresser, she said sardonically to her errant husband. Well,Annie got paint in her hair so I’ve trimmed it off. Trimmed it..it looks like she won’t need a cut for about two years. Annie began to sob noisily ,terrifying Emile who was hiding behind the flour bin watching some ants. Well,Stan answered, it will be easier to wash and dry and she’ll have no need for rollers etc.Why,I could do it for a living. I think it looks charming. Why pinking shears?Mary whispered.You could have used my dressmaking ones. Well,too late now mioawed Emile sarcastically from the bookcase filled with the entire Penguin cookery book collection over thirty years.What a pity it took up so much space in the tiny kitchen. I think her hair looks sweet,said Stan bravely. Meantime,you have burned the puddings again.Just like King Alfred and the cakes.Men are only good at savory and meat dishes. It takes a woman to cook puddings and cakes.But Yorkshire puddings are savories. I wonder how Wittgenstein would have classified them ? cried Mary enthusiastically. Not Wittgenstein again,moaned Stan in mental torment,can’t you move onto some other philosopher? Whom do you suggest? she said grammatically. Try Carnap or take up gardening. Oh,Carnap’s more of a logician,Mary said defiantly, You see I love Wittgenstein as a human being. Are you committing adultery with him ?Stan demanded thoughtfully his eyes bright like lasers. That’s a wild exaggeration,He’s dead,Mary muttered.And he was,er,gay! How do you know? That’s what they all say,shouted Stan angrily. But what about you and Annie? Mary said venomously. Well,I get lonely with you lecturing all day and studying Wittgenstein and mathematics all night Surely you could wait till I come home? Mary said sharply I suppose so,though a harem has always been my dream! I think you are a bit past it now at 99,said Mary. That’s not what I think, said Emile quietly.Cats and men…how do they do it? Meanwhile Annie had washed her hair an it dried in tiny uneven curls all over her head. It looks quite fetching,they decided as they sat down to eat the charred Yorkshire puddings. What an exciting Sunday especially for Stan who enjoyed touching and playing with women’s hair. I wonder if it’s a mental illness?I’ll have to look on the internet.Still, better than panic attacks, he thought consolingly as he carried the roast beef onto the dining room where the women were discussing religious topics including a curiosity about why Christians were so anti Semitic despite Jesus’ wish for people to love each other.and besides being God,He was also a Jewish person too. That’s interesting,Stan thought,here people think he’s English!What a weird world it is,to be sure.God was not a white Eton educated man.He may have been brown with a long black beard and a moustache.Did he smoke? Only when he thought nobody was looking!Then he had flames coming out of his ears,Well,it made him laugh,you see.It’s Sunday soon so get ready.The Lord is nigh and he has a new hat on too
Traditionally, envy is linked with the eyes,” Dr. Smith said, noting that the word comes from the Latin “invidere,” which mean to look at with malice, or cast an “evil eye.” Just as an invidious comparison is by definition bad, so is envy defined by some psychological researchers to be inherently malign.
“As much as we might admire what is fresh and innovative, we all learn by imitating patterns,” writes Irina Dumitrescu in The Times Literary Supplement. “To be called ‘formulaic’ is no compliment, but whenever people express themselves or take action in the world, they rely on familiar formulas.” It’s true. For her review-essay, Dumitrescu reads 5 books about writing and explores how writing advice is caught in a paradox: to get people to communicate clearly, logically, and find their own voices, instruction must first teach them rules and provide enough room to learn by copying. This is why most of us writers begin by imitating established writers. We find someone whose style or subject reflects our own – someone in whom we hear our ideal selves, someone who sounds like we want to sound one day – and we mimic them. This could start with a parent, move to a cool friend, then end with a famous novelist or memoirst, before we emerge from the pupae of literary infancy. In other words, to facilitate originality, we must teach formula, encourage imitation, and push for eventual independence. She explores the value of craft, structure, exploration, and formula, and the way sticking to rules erodes a writer’s style, their character, even the essence of the art. She contrasts John Warner’s book Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities with the book Writing to Persuade, by The New York Times‘ previous op-ed editor, Trish Hall.
Every French schoolchild learns the date: February 28, 1571, the day a well-regarded and uncommonly educated nobleman named Michel de Montaigne retired from “the slavery of the court and of public duties,” moved a chair, a table, and a thousand books into the tower of his family castle, near Bordeaux, shut the door, and began to write. It was his thirty-eighth birthday, and, by way of commemoration, he had the first two sentences he wrote that morning painted on the wall of a study opening onto his new library—announcing, if mainly to himself, that having been “long weary” of those public duties (and, presumably, of his wife, at home in the castle, a few steps across the courtyard) Michel de Montaigne had taken up residence in “the bosom of the learned Virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, already more than half expired.” His plan, he said, was to use the second half looking at himself, or, as he put it, drawing his portrait with a pen. He had his books for company, his Muses for inspiration, his past for seasoning, and, to support it all, the income from a large estate, not to mention a fortune built on the salt-herring and wine trades, which, in the last century, had turned his family into landed gentry. (His full name, as most oenophiles can tell you, was Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.)
Montaigne’s pursuit of the character he called Myself—“bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal”—lasted for twenty years and produced more than a thousand pages of observation and revision that he called “essais,” taking that ordinary word and turning it into a literary occupation. When he died, at fifty-nine, he was still …m….
Stan was feeling a l ittle annoyed as since the days were getting brighter and longer the dust on the furniture was becoming more evident..Not that Mary was a tyrant in any way but she was out at work ,whereas he was free from his purgatory working with gamblers and homeless drug users.
Of course he had been pleased to be working to improve society but enough was enough.He already was helping two people on a voluntary basis at his local church.Still Mary was labouring in the lecture hall explaing how linear algebra might help folk to lead better and more virtuous lives especially if they were going into Parliament or the higher reaches of the Civil Service which aided government ministers dealing with strange confusions in th Economy and the entire world
He picked up his microfibre dusting rag cut from an old towel and started to dust the TV set.After that he sprayed Dettox onto the keyboards of all their laptops ,ipads, phones and remote controls.Then he dried them with an old tea towel made of cotton and linen.
Suddenly he heard the back door opening.In ran his beauteous mistress Annie wearing a green and red tracksuit and purple trainers with pink spots on.
Shall I make some lovely coffee,she asked impertinently.
I have not done much housework yet,Stan cried tearfully, with a smile
Let me see,she responded with the genuine interest of the retired and bored,
My, this remote control is very,very clean,I am stunned
She put it in front of her eyes and glared myopically at it.
All her mindpower was concentrated on this one object which was now her whole world.
You have done brilliantly with this but you do need a break from this tedious and arduous work,she enthused to her aged lover.
Oh, OK then,Stan answered laconically.
She poured coffee and Jersey milk into two Portmeirion pottery mugs and took them into the conservatory where she admired his potted plants and his herbs.
What ‘s this funny plant here, she called.It wasn’t here last week,
It’s cannabis,he informed her wilfully.
Are you a user now she enquired tactlessly.
No,I am keeping it for a friend.. he is a scientist,Stan claimed
That’s what they all say,she riposted jocosely.
Well,I don’t know how to use it.I believe you smoke it so does it have to be dried?
I guess so , she said like a cowboy from Alabama on a diet of coke and french fries.
Well,I am not going test it,he said pensively.I don’t even smoke a pipe any more.I suck my thumb instead.It’s free.
Would you like to suck my toes ,she asked him lovingly. After all, the Duchess of York had hers sucked and I am her equal in some ways she told him truthfully
Sucking women’s toes has so far not been part of my repertoire and neither
has whipping and smacking them either.I prefer to suck their lips and caress their cheeks. Stan informed her politely as if they had never met before.
Which cheeks? she asked suspiciously yet humorously
Sorry, dear,I am happy to caress any part of your warm voluptuous flesh later but I need to get on with the housework.
Just ignore it, she ordered him.I’ll help you after we have been to bed
I didn’t know we were going to bed, he said in a puzzled tone
Well,you do now, she giggled deliciously.
And so does Emil e who is already on the landing from where he can see the mirror opposite the bed.What a naughty boy he is, but what would you do in his position?
I thought so.
How my heart sings 