non-fictionalism-blog

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Everything you know about America—all the history, all the politics, all the lessons from all the economic indicators, all the arguments from the red states and the blue—is irrelevant when you are sitting in a coal mine, or staring at a radar screen showing thousands of airplanes flying at once, or wrangling five hundred pregnant Red Angus cows beneath a blazing hot desert sunrise.

Hidden America, Jeanne Marie Laskas

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Joan was fascinated by Whitman, especially by his marvelous, magpie mind cluttered with all sorts of useless information—he could recite the list of Popes backward and forward ; knew the names of every king’s mistress and his date of reign ; knew that the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648, that Niagara Falls is 167 feet high, that snakes do not blink ; that cats attach themselves to places, not people, and dogs to people, not places; he was a regular subscriber to the New Statesman, Le Nouvel Observateur, to nearly every journal in the Out-of-Town Newsstand in Times Square, he read two books a day, he had seen Bogart in Casablanca three-dozen times. Joan knew she had to see him again, even though she was sixteen years his junior and a minister’s daughter, and he was an atheist. They were married on November 13, 1960.

Mr. Bad News, by Gay Talese

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Today’s Reading | UNDERWORLD: OUR UNDERGROUND COAL ECONOMY by Jeanne Marie Laskas | Non-fiction Story

wagged them, like puppets, move rapidly from side to side, or to and fro

he was a truck of a man, a wide load in both girth and spirit, big in size, a big man, 像卡车一样的男人 

just beyond the panhandle of West Virginia, 平底锅柄, 狭长地带 

rolling farmland dotted with tall oaks, white church steeples, geranium pots hanging on front porches, rolling land has gentle slopes continuing for a long distance, 和缓而绵延的耕地；geranium 天竺葵 

buggies, 专用的小车 (buggies that zoomed like lunatic cockroaches through the darkness) 

a crackle like a fireplace, 发出的噼啪声 

squawking, 嘎嘎叫 

part of the allure for you guys, temptation, 诱惑 (not to be confused with "allude to”, which means 暗指, … allude to the fact that he is the mole in the CIA agency.) 

medium-sulfur bituminous coal, 中等硫烟煤 

I was slightly ahead of the learning curve, 我还算知道得多的，我学得还算比较快   

I knew coal mine existed. And not just in pockets of some America that never caught up. 

… to be vaguely cognisant of boxcars full of coal snaking in between the hills. 隐隐知道，大概明白 

disappear from the nation’s consciousness, 从全国的视野中彻底消失 

gorge on sth, to eat enthusiastically and in great amount, 狼吞虎咽 

fodder for a cable-news frenzy, 题材 

I followed them underground, home, to church, to the strip club where they drink and gossip and taunt and jab and worry about one another. taunt, 奚落、嘲讽, jab, 揶揄、推搡 

a disarmingly cheerful guy, 令人释然的，令人放下防备的，令人放心的 

bust your ear off, （声音大到）震聋、震掉 

five days at a stretch, 一口气，连续 

talking in circles, 绕着圈儿说话 

care package to take home, care package, 聚会之后大家会让参会者带回家的礼物 

Family was the assumption. Family-to-family interaction was the natural order of communication. 

unwittingly dependent on, 毫不知情地依赖 

flip on a light switch 

whopping, 巨大的 

twitch, 抽搐、痉挛 

a life dependent on brawn, brawn, muscular strength, 靠体力吃饭 

Leaving it only proved how much he loved it. 

rhododendron, 杜鹃花 

The whir of the massive fan sucking bad air out of the mine is loud, obnoxious, and constant. 

coveralls, steel-reinforced boots, hard hat, light, and on his belt a battery pack. coverall, 连体工作服, steel-reinforced boots, 灌了铁的加强型工装靴 

peg board, 打洞板 

conserving battery power 

watch the underworld whiz by, 呼啸而过 

endless crawl of abandonment and prayer 

roll off the mantrip, 翻出矿车 

hands clasped behind their backs, 紧紧攥在背后 

lean over and waddle, 摇晃地走

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Today’s Reading | EAST WIND by Julian Barnes | Short Story

 paintwork lifted and flaked by the hard east wind, paintwork 油漆, flake 使……剥落

shingle, 木瓦、盖板

catch the accent, 听出口音

not doing any waitressy number in hope of a bigger tip, doing number = 做……事

lived in rabbit warrens, 兔子洞（有许多狭小通道的建筑）

front crawl, breaststroke, swimming strokes 

the market had bottomed out here long ago, 触底，降到最低点

acting the little snob

brickies, plasterers, electricians, 砖瓦工

the sun slants low across the sea, 倾斜，slant something 

hampered, 阻碍

was bingo for 

gabby, chattery, talkative

for that matter, 就此而言

reacquainted himself with the lubricated struggle of the condom, simply interesting way of saying things

nightie, 长袍睡衣、小睡衣

trotting up the concrete path

pebbledash 泥灰卵石涂层

professional eye took in the 

whirry old hand-drier never quite does the trick

strolled around for a bit

smooths out the dent in the bed, 抹平床单上留下的坑

went down on his haunches, 四肢着地

tight perm, perm 电烫发、大波浪

eased open the top drawer, 省着力打开

jumpy, 胆战心惊的

circular plate

tendon, 腱

show for it

Something about Henry the Eighth wanting to get married again. The king’s knob. All sorts of things came down to sex if you looked at them closely enough.

Old people died, you sold their flats and houses to people who in their turn would get old in them and then die.

Read Julian Barnes because 曾嘉慧 mentioned him to me this morning. I could only vaguely recall this name. My speculation was correct, he was the author of a short story collection I purchased through the e-book vendor, Pulse. And this story is the first, which later I found, was also published in New Yorker. 

It starts with a seemingly irrelevant accident. A row of houses was burnt down. Then, like a long take that Theo Angelopoulos most famous for, the focus of the story zooms in on a divorced real-estate agent overlooking at the ruin and the flat sea beyond the shoreline. Later, as the story pans out, the agent is involved in a romantic relationship with a woman with an eastern European accent, for which he continues to mistake her for Polish, while, as the story later reveals, she is from East Germany. 

The charm of the story lies in that it could be anyone. We all know someone who is divorced recently in our lives. Try to put them into the story. Voila, you will find how easy it is to establish such a connection between these two characters. The boundary between reality and fiction is blurred by the author’s clear, serviceable and unadorned plotting and language. No particular literary techniques are extensively applied to the story. Other stories, especially best-sellers, tend to excite readers by the unusualness, by the extraordinary, by what-the-fuck-is-this effects. Branded a post-modernist writer — whatever that means — however, Barnes hails the ordinariness and, to a certain degree, boredom as the cornerstone of the construction of the lives of the characters, as with the zillion real people in this bland, slow-paced, continuous world. An existentialist perspective is self-evident between the lines.

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Today's Reading | THE LAND OF PLENTY by Jeanne Marie Laskas | Non-fiction Story

chunky, 偏胖的

pregnant with sb., the sb. here is the baby in the womb

the number of fat people here has ballooned to one-third of all adults. 急速增长

a mushrooming diet industry and public awareness about fiber and cholesterol and health clubs and home exercise equipment and exercise videos featuring every conceivable celebrity. 迅速增长

takes a lot of odd jobs at nights. 零工

gone berserk, go crazy, erupt in rage, “The coach went berserk upon the announcement.”

whip out a can of Jenny Craig tuna, 快速地拿出，抽出（鞭子）

The brakes are officially off

laughing harder than laughter can possibly contain them, 开怀大笑，笑容都不够用了

a guy on a forklift is hauling in the Doritos. forklift 叉车, haul in 拉进

Tonight’s craft is bird feeders. You smear a thick layer of peanut butter over a Styrofoam cup, then roll it in birdseed. Pretty soon the peanut butter is being smeared on bodies as well as on Styrofoam cups. Pretty soon Nichole and her best friend, Amanda, are dumping birdseed onto each other’s heads, becoming human bird feeders! Pretty soon Amanda is crying. -- The “pretty”s are genius at work.

Published in Allure

http://www.maryellenmark.com/text/magazines/allure/911D-000-012.html

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Today's Reading | COUNTY ROAD G by Peter Orner | Short Story

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Today's Reading | THURSDAY NIGHT AT THE GOPHER HOLE, APRIL 1992 by Peter Orner | Short Story

pisser

furrows

and his cheeks were now twin percolating spasms. 

... he is a methodical man who trolled around for answers. 形容人做事有条不紊

pan out, things turn out well / suceed

a posse of mothers and aunts. a group of people who share some commonality. 

on this he truly walks alone, （在这件事上他确实）特立独行

stand in awe of 

... came home morphed into Louis Armstrong, 变形，整个人看起来就像路易·阿姆斯特朗

Then she'd inexplicably about-faced into another merciless attack... 态度突然发生转变

patter, 喋喋不休

thudding fact, （确凿）震耳欲聋的事实

... who squirtted his mother's hair jizz in both his ears. 喷出摩丝

fungus toes, here probably nail fungus = 灰指甲 

jiggled the door handle, 轻轻摇晃、转动

rut, 沟壑

his cheeks were still blimping, swollen, pumped up, 浮肿、鼓胀

rattle, 咔啦咔啦响

skimpy eyebrows, scanty, lacking in size and fullness, 稀疏的眉毛

bucked teeth, 龅牙

soap dispenser, 皂液器

He foamed up his face and rinsed, 在脸上搓起泡沫然后冲掉

squeal like a pig, 高声叫嚷、尖叫

in this stink of a bathroom

... with T. L. holding his legs together outside the door, trying to read his face for a message from on high. from someone in a position of authority

hazy brown

dam up the purple fluid, 字面上是筑起围栏兜住这股紫色的液体，结合上下文可推断是他的胡子兜住鼻血

scoop him up, 铲起，文中是指司机从地上抱起了伤员

whacking away at boxes, 不断地重击, struck a series of heavy blows

Frank pinched the bulb of his oozing nose and tried to hold his breath. 捏住肿成球且渗着血的鼻子

Chu Lai, 越南的地名，美军曾在此驻扎，曾有过惨烈的战斗

racket, 喧嚣、吵闹

Ramond had once told him that there's no real difference between faith and endurance. 

Nancy filled the often unendurable silences of his life. He didn't exist in silence literally. S and F Packaging waas as loud a place as any. It was just that there were times in the day -- even when he was working side by side with people -- when he'd feel the silence build to a low whine, as if a mosquito were trapped and slowly dying in his ear. An odd, sometimes nagging, sometimes blissful silence that cut him off from everybody, even his closest friends, guys he'd grown up with and now worked beside. Guys whose kids called him the Other Uncle Frank on the Fourth of July. For the most part he hid the problem well. Noboday except Nancy even knew about it. Whenever it was obvious to others that Frank was trying to read their lips rather than listen to them, most just thought, That's Frank Waverly, thinking so hard about other things that he can't keep up. 

---

This is in every way a stunning piece. 

  The grim scene set in the gents’ of a local pub. The “purple fluid” comes out of Frank’s nostrils. The blurry mirror and the jiggling door knob and the racket outside of a posse of faceless, worried people. All the aforementioned render the story Gothically mysterious and horrific. It could easily remind an English reader of the classic Woman-in-Black-style Victorian horror story or, speaking of toilets, or pissers as Peter Orner prefers, of bathroom in which Moaning Mrytle haunts for centuries. 

  The story is simple. Frank with his swollen nose oozing of blood — from a fight or as a result of two unnoticeable descending stairs in the bathroom, we don’t know — sees hallucinations in the mirror over the sink. Ruts, grooves, furrows, whatever you want to call it, creeps and deepens around his eye sockets. He remembers his aunt who could patter non-stop and somehow becomes a filler of his life. There is his brother, whose abnormal behaviours raise question after question. What’s the matter with him? Is he mentally ill? (When readers learn that he “squirtted his mother’s hair jizz in both his ears.”) Was he close to Frank? And there is a little flashback at his recent past (as suggest in the title 1992) when he worked as a computer engineer on USS Saratoga in the first Gulf War. The author  choreographs his life so effortlessly and so delicately through a few minutes in which a man with a bleeding nose locked inside a urinal. 

  Every word of this story ties back to the sentence Paul Beatty wrote on the book The Sellout.

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Today's Reading | THURSDAY NIGHT AT THE GOPHER HOLE, APRIL 1992 by Peter Orner | Short Story

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I talk to people I disagree with politically more often than anybody I know, and I’ve discovered that sometimes we find the same things funny.

New Yorker, Talk of Town, Patricia Limerick, Historian

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People claim to root for the hero, but it's the villains they remember.

The Music Room, Stephen King

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Today’s Reading | THE GENERAL’S DAY by William Trevor | Short Story

A story of an old man. 

collected in The Collected Stories of William Trevor

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The minute you finish writing a story you'll be convinced that there is no more story left in the world.

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Today’s Reading | SUMMER VOICES by John Banville | Short Story

“This story fascinated me, not least because Banville so beautifully invokes a sense of the summer, and of the countryside. He colours it black though, bringing a darker element to his story using death and decay, and this takes the story in an altogether different direction, which left this reader at least genuinely uncomfortable and somewhat creeped out. What a delightful storyteller John Banville is.”

collected in The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story

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Today’s Reading | JIMMY FALLON: THE NEW KING OF LATE NIGHT TV by Jeanne Marie Laskas | Profile

Sometimes after reading too much fictional literary writing over the weekend, I would inevitably be thirsty for some reflection on reality. Who can better quench that kind of thirst of mine than Ms Laskas’s witty but surgically shrewd observation and profiling? Well there sure are many. But For now I’d settle for her. 

This piece is about Jimmy Fallon. Everyone loves Jimmy Fallon, but not everyone understands him. Upon catching me watching that show, X would satirically grin at the screen, seemingly trying very hard to conceal her contempt. “Such silly stuff,” I can be sure that she is laughing out loud in her mind. 

“It’s okay to be silly,” as Ms. Laskas writes about the mission of Jimmy Fallon’s show. 

"Fun. ’Have fun’ is my message. Be silly. You’re allowed to be silly. There’s nothing wrong with it." 

http://www.gq.com/story/jimmy-fallon-interview-gq-april-2013

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Today’s Reading | PAST LIVES by Gay Talese | Non-fiction Story

Gay Talese documented the mostly culinary past lives and its somehow Buddhist rebirth of a building in New York. Though short, one can tell from the details of the building’s previous tenants that Mr Talese must have had invested much efforts in digging up the obscure and largely forgotten past of the place. Solemnly written, the story bestowed much significance on the otherwise banal locale, as if it is a carefully and tactfully designed place in which an unfolding story is situated. 

Similar style can be applied on stories like 84 Charing Cross Road and others. 

published in The New Yorker, July 18th, 2011

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Today’s Reading | THE GYPSY WOMEN by Joseph Mitchell | Non-fiction Story

collected in Up in the Old Hotel

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Today’s Reading | WALKING AWAY by Philip O Ceallaigh | Short Story