something about our boss, Bill

Bill is a soft-spoken man, but his soothing tone and cadence fail to hide the bite of his mind. He is driven, and he’ll drive you. He has power, and his ideas, right or whimsy, come with an official stamp. He arrives early each day, a withdrawn soul always shooing validation farther down the path.

about living her life

The house was full of fucked-up people. The landlord lived seven minutes away. A girl moved in, wanting the excitement, a house with seven wild roommates. But it was bad. One tenant killed somebody in his room. She listened to the beaten-to-death guest choke on his own blood on the other side of the wall. Now she hears the noise he made all the time. She listened to the police interview a couple of other tenants outside, heard this through her window. She moved back in with dad. For old dad, she thought, what couldn’t be measured on a gauge—pounds per square inch, mileage, fluid ounces—could hardly be said to exist at all. So it was with all her trauma—she felt alone, and she hungers to make the sound of death herself.

(posts) Joe Walsh lyrics

"A Life of Illusion"
 - Joe Walsh ‧ 1981

Sometimes
I can't help the feeling
that I'm living a life of illusion
And oh, why can't we let it be
And see through the hole in this wall of confusion
I just can't help the feeling
I'm living a life of illusion

Pow! Right between the eyes
Oh, how nature loves her little surprises
Wow, it all seems so logical now
It's just one of her better disguises
And it comes with no warning, nature loves her little surprises
Continual crisis

Hey, don't you know it's a waste of your day
Caught up in endless solutions
That have no meaning
Just another hunch
Based upon jumping conclusions
Caught up in endless solutions
Backed up against a wall of confusion
Living a life of illusion

 

something about "Eyes Of A Stranger" by Payolas

"Eyes of a Stranger" came out in 1982. The lyrics describe the combination of attraction and fear. The song ends like how it started, with only drums—but minus the clave or whatever that is. That "pop" is gone.

The chorus:

    In your lips I sense a danger
    You've got the eyes of a stranger
    In your lips I see a danger
    You've got the eyes of a stranger

From "sense" to "see," he says twice. From a feeling to something more definite. And then he ends the song with the repetition:

    You've got the eyes of a stranger
    You've got the eyes of a stranger
    You've got the eyes of a stranger
    You've got the eyes of a stranger

The meaning of the line changes with the repetition. What was exotic becomes remote. He at one time sensed the danger, which drew him in; now he merely sees a stranger. The former moves your heartbeat; the latter, your feet.

something about Raymond Carver's short stories

In the Raymond Carver collection Fires (which I have not read), he supposedly says of his short story “Put Yourself in My Shoes” that he did not know when he started writing that the protagonist was going to be a writer. He had the sentence, “The telephone rang while he was running the vacuum cleaner,” and, from there, “I made the story just as I’d made a poem; one line and then the next, and the next. Pretty soon I could see a story, and I knew it was my story, the one I’d been wanting to write.”

 

Put Yourself in My Shoes touches on the themes of the writing process and perceptions of writers and writing.

The writer and protagonist in the story is Myers (last name), and the story begins when Myers’s wife (possibly his estranged wife) Paula calls from an office Christmas party to invite him. But Myers is reluctant; he quit his job at that office—a textbook publishing company—to become a writer. During this conversation, Paula says a former coworker, Carl, admires Myers’s “nerve” for quitting the job in order to be a writer. And Carl says, ribbingly, that Myers should come to the party—“Get him out of his ivory tower and back into the real world for a while.” Myers refuses to go to the party.

 

Instead, Myers and Paula visit a couple they barely know, Edgar and Hilda Morgan. The Morgans, upon remembering that Myers is a writer, feed him some story ideas, commenting on the possible perspectives and significance of each story, all the while making comments about writing, including

• “It would take a Tolstoy to tell it and tell it right," Edgar said. "No less than a Tolstoy."
  

• "We want you to hear about Mrs. Attenborough, poor Mrs. Attenborough. You might appreciate this story, too, Mrs. Myers. This is your chance to see how his mind goes to work on raw material."

• "You know writers," Hilda said to Paula. "They like to exaggerate."
  "The power of the pen and all that," Edgar said.
  "That's it," Hilda said. "Bend your pen into a plowshare, Mr. Myers."
  

• "If you were a real writer, as you say you are, Mr. Myers, you wouldn't laugh," Edgar said as he got to his feet. "You wouldn't dare laugh! You'd try to understand. You'd plumb the depths of that poor soul's heart and try to understand. But you're no writer, sir!"

But Myers appears not to want to hear them talk about writing and repeatedly gets up to leave, telling Paula to get her coat.
 

Earlier in the story, as Myers is driving to meet Paula, we learn Myers is “between stories”:

As he drove he looked at the people who hurried along the walks with shopping bags. He glanced at the gray sky, filled with flakes, and at the tall buildings with snow in the crevices and on the window ledges. He tried to see everything, save it for later. He was between stories, and he felt despicable.

Although he is not writing, he is not looking for story ideas; he seems instead to be paying attention to points of form. And as the story ends and Myers and Paula are driving away from the Morgans, and Paula comments on how crazy the Morgans are, we hear again about Myers's attention:

He didn't answer. Her voice seemed to come to him from a great distance. He kept driving. Snow rushed at the windshield. He was silent and watched the road. He was at the very end of a story.

So without hunting for plots, Myers finds himself at the end of a story that seemed to unfold one sentence at a time.

 

The other characters in the story seem to think of writing as highfalutin, which repels Myers. But I do not think this story is necessarily a comment on What people get wrong about writing or on What writing is. I think the character—and maybe Carver himself at the time—is not writing, feels bad about it, is frustrated by people talking about writing, and then finds himself inspired. Even after stumbling on the inspiration, he still will have to write, to get it on paper, and to revise and revise again.  

 

Put Yourself in My Shoes is one of the great stories in the 37 included in Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories. I know I read Cathedral in high school or college, and I remember liking it a lot. How could I have gone this long without reading his other stories? My favorite stories are "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," "Feathers," "Whoever Was Using This Bed," and "Blackbird Pie." I love the writing style and the mix of weight and ordinariness. I especially love the humor. “Put Yourself in My Shoes” is a great example. So is "Blackbird Pie," which is about a delusional guy's thoughts after his wife leaves him. He imagines that the Dear John letter she left him was actually written by someone else, and one of his rationalizations is a formatting choice in the handwritten letter:

Secondly, my wife never underlined her words for emphasis. Never. I don’t recall a single instance of her doing this—not once in our entire married life, not to mention the letters I received from her before we were married. It would be reasonable enough, I supposed, to point out that it could happen to anyone. That is, anyone could find himself in a situation that is completely atypical and, given the pressure of the moment, do something totally out of character and draw a line, the merest line, under a word, or maybe under an entire sentence.

Amazing. And where it goes from there:

I would go so far as to say that every word of this entire letter, so-called (though I haven't read it through in its entirety, and won't, since I can't find it now), is utterly false. I don't mean false in the sense of "untrue," necessarily. There is some truth, perhaps, to the charges. I don't want to quibble. I don't want to appear small in this matter; things are bad enough already in this department. No.

Note: I am so glad I have now read some Raymond Carver and most or all of Richard Yates. How did I go so long without really enjoying such writing happened?