The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is hard to ignore with its bright orange cover, and it was particularly hard for me to ignore since I had never even heard of her before while her stories had already been collected and bound for sale. I took the chance on Lydia Davis after reading a New York Times Book Review on The Collected Stories:

Years before National Public Radio elevated flash fiction into contest fodder for the terminally distracted, Lydia Davis was batting out stories the length of an earthworm. But size matters less to Davis than timbre: these 198 stories, brought together from four previously published volumes, present 198 divergent voices to taunt the complacent reader. Davis nervily inhabits obsessive and haunted personas, her intonation shifting with unsettling precision from the sly to the sinister. She nabs the chilling poise of a pedant whose dispassionate analysis chokes the life out of schoolchildren’s get-well notes to a classmate; the ennui of a stay-at-home mom startled to learn that Glenn Gould shared her ardor for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”; the angst of Franz Kafka as he dithers over whether to fix his date beet or potato salad. Davis approaches the short-story form with jazzy experimentation, tinkering with lists, circumlocutions, even interviews where the questions have been creepily edited out. You don’t work your way across this mesa-sized collection so much as pogo-stick about, plunging in wherever the springs meet the page. Amid such an abundance, it would be folly to play favorites. In the absence of better sense, special pleas go out for the persnickety nattering of “Old Mother and the Grouch,” the hate-thy-neighbor paranoia of “The House Behind” and the rueful introspection of the woman who stink-bombs a family outing in “Our Trip.”

What do I have to say about the stories of Lydia Davis? I don’t think I quite know yet. I do know that once I started reading them I could not stop. It’s the best bed-time reading ever because I can make it through a short story of a few sentences before I fall asleep. Take the two sentences of “Odd Behavior” as an example:

You see how circumstances are to blame. I am not really an odd person if I put more and more small pieces of shredded Kleenex in my ears and tie a scarf around my head: when I lived alone I had all the silence I needed.

(We might all feel like stuffing our own ears with Kleenex and tying scarves around our heads after the holidays.)

As I have given up on describing Lydia Davis, I appreciate the good work of Zach Baron of The Village Voice:

Collected Stories has a lot of this type of philosophical churning, much of it revelatory and even more of it, probably, inconclusive. You do not read Lydia Davis in the hopes of finding someone like, say, Mrs. D, the writer-protagonist of Davis’s caustic “Mrs. D and Her Maids,” whose “approach to writing is practical” and in whose stories a change inevitably takes place, usually followed closely by an epiphany. You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity.

Style is character, Joan Didion once observed. And over eight austere books—including the story collections compiled here, Break It Down (1986), Almost No Memory (1997), Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001), Varieties of Disturbance (2007), and one novel, The End of the Story (1995)—Davis’s prose has been unmatched in mirroring the workings of the mind. Few are better than this writer at representing thought on the page; she captures not just the peculiar rhythm of internal speech but also its cycling, digressive mechanics. Here’s one character, waiting for a phone call from a lover: “When he calls me either he will then come to me, or he will not and I will be angry, and so I will have either him or my own anger, and this might be all right, since anger is always a great comfort, as I found with my husband.”

As an Art History major I took all the classes that I could on Ancient and Medieval Art and Architecture.  The most interesting classes to me were the ones that began in 3200 BC.  For me the older the subject the better.  Needless to say, though I was and still am interested in Contemporary art, I didn’t understand the fascination.  What’s the appeal of a canvas painted solid blue, when there are Boticellis and Michelangelos?

The $12 Million Stuffed Shark by Don Thompson explains the process as well as the high demand of contemporary art.  Most works done by these artists are meant to be conceptual and controversial.  Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol are two contemporary artists whose art is known for being unique yet criticized.  Warhol’s whole purpose was that by making silk screens anyone was able to copy them.  Many conservators now can’t tell between an authentic or a replica, which was the idea.  Damien Hirst didn’t catch, stuff or install the shark that he sold for $12 million, he just had the idea.

The business for these artists  is all  fueled by the wealthy collectors.  People who are looking for huge investments buy art.  Someone purchases a Francis Bacon and ten years later it’s worth ten times the amount.  The reason that contemporary art is so popular is because of branding.  Anyone can have a nice car or a sea side Villa, but not everyone can own an original Jasper Johns.  It’s like carrying a Prada purse.  The label or logo on the bag automatically shows your wealth.

Thompson touches on all of the angles of contemporary art and what makes it so interesting in our world today. Some of the most interesting points covered are the mixed media used, which  ranges from paint, elephant dung, the artist’s own blood, and stuffed sharks.  Other fun facts cover the most expensive paintings sold privately and at auctions as well as the most expensive painting sold per square inch:  Madonna of the Pinks, an 11in x 14in Raphael, sold for £35 million to the Getty Museum.

-Sarah Clinton

365 Tao: Daily Meditations

by Deng Ming-Dao

Harper Collins (1992)

As a calendar ends and another starts, I’m thinking about which daily reading book I will take with me through 2010. I enjoy living with a book each day. A small portion of reading from a thought provoking book on an inspiring subject. I’ve been doing this for years, and it is something I look forward to when I begin my nightly reading after my work day. If you haven’t tried this as a part of your reading routine, think about it. I’ve found that this habit helps me to get into a frame of mind to read and absorb more. It helps me to relax within my reading, enhancing this pleasurable time of day.

In 2009, I enjoyed 365 Tao. On each page is a daily reflective commentary on subjects like growth, swimmer, moderation, spine, and nonending are turned down pages to return to in the future.

As I was sitting in front of my fireplace this morning, I was struck by the fact that Christmas is incredibly universal. Not many things can pull off involving the entire world; much less involving it in a spirit of goodwill and peace for all. I think that’s pretty amazing and I wondered what some of this “world” had to say about it…

“I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.”

Shirley Temple

“Do give books – religious or otherwise – for Christmas. They’re never fattening, seldom sinful, and permanently personal.”
~ Lenore Hershey

”My first copies of Treasure Island and Huckleberry Finn still have some blue-spruce needles scattered in the pages. They smell of Christmas still.”
~ Charlton Heston

*     *    *

“Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall.  We traditionally do this in my family by driving around the parking lot until we see a shopper emerge from the mall, then we follow her, in very much the same spirit as the Three Wise Men, who 2,000 years ago followed a star, week after week, until it led them to a parking space.”

~Dave Barry

*     *     *

“To your enemy, forgiveness.

To an opponent, tolerance.

To a friend, your heart.

To a customer, service.

To all, charity.

To every child, a good example.

To yourself, respect.”

~ Oren Arnold

*    *     *

”I sometimes think we expect too much of Christmas Day. We try to crowd into it the long arrears of kindliness and humanity of the whole year. As for me, I like to take my Christmas a little at a time, all through the year. And thus I drift along into the holidays–let them overtake me unexpectedly–waking up some fine morning and suddenly saying to myself: ‘Why this is Christmas Day!”
~ Ray Baker

*     *     *

“One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the living room on Christmas day. Don’t clean it up too quickly.”

~ Andy Rooney

*     *     *

“And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so?  It came without ribbons.  It came without tags.  It came without packages, boxes or bags.  And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore.  Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before.  What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store.  What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”

Dr. Seuss

*     *    *

Happy holidays to you and yours!

“. . . Family represents the reality of which Christmas is the dream. It is, of course, Family (messy, complex, miserable, happy, so many gradations of those last two words) that is the real gift, beneath the wrapping. Family is the daily miracle, and Christmas is the enforcement of ideals that, in truth, do not matter. It would be tempting therefore to say, “Well, then ditch Christmas!” the same way people say “Ditch God” or “Ditch marriage,” but people find it hard to do these things because they feel that there is more than a ghost in these machines; there is an animating spirit.”

“Santa help me, but I believe this, too. You know you believe it when you start your own little family with some person you met four years ago in a bar, and then he tried to open the presents on Christmas Eve because that’s what he did in his family and you have the strong urge to run screaming from the building holding your banner about the end and how it is nigh. It is a moving and comic thing–a Murdochian scuffle between the Real and the Dream–to watch a young couple as they teeter around the Idea of Christmas, trying to avoid internecine festive warfare . . .”

“. . . Christmas, childhood, the past, families, fathers, regret of all kinds–no one wants to be the grinch who steals these things, but you leave the door open with the hope he might come in and relieve you of your heavy stuff. Christmas is heavy.”