Hint Fiction

W. W. Norton is planning to publish an anthology of Hint Fiction in the fall of 2010, and they’re inviting submissions.

Hint Fiction is a story of twenty-five words or less that conveys the entirety of a story in a way that makes readers want to read them again and again. The stories should inspire ideas, evoke emotions, create untold scenarios. If your story is selected, they’ll pay you $25 for World and Audio rights. You can’t submit until August 1, so you have time to write a good twenty-five word story. It has to be titled, which will help explain the story’s greater meaning, and you must send it in an email between August 1 and August 31, 2009. You may send two stories in your email. Submission guidelines are at Hint Fiction Anthology.

The Not-So-Natural Cat

A letter  from a reader reminded me of a time when I was such a fanatic about my cat’s nutrition that I tried cooking her food myself. I got the idea from The Natural Cat, a book about the holistic way to feed and care for felines.

Ms. Kitty, my cat, was addicted to Tender Vittles, but the book said I should not feed her any dry or semi-dry cat food. When I told Ms. Kitty what the book said, she looked at me with slit eyes and ran to her bowl to eat some Tender Vittles.

Undaunted, I went to the health-food store and bought wheat germ, yeast, bran, lecithin granules, kelp, and bone meal. The book said to toast the wheat germ, which is how I learned that wheat germ burns very quickly in the oven. I wasted a good bit of it before I got it right, and mixed it with the other healthy stuff. Then, feeling extremely domestic and earthy, I put half a cup of lentils and half a cup of millet, a little Wheatena, a carrot, and a few spinach leaves into a pan. I covered it and put it on to boil and drifted into an imaginary scene in which Ms. Kitty and I sat in the vet’s waiting room, she looking incredibly sleek and contented while the other cat-owners looked enviously at us.

“What do you feed her?” they would ask, and I would wave my hand modestly and say, “I cook her food myself.”

That’s when I learned that a mixture of lentils and millet and Wheatena will boil over in an eye-blink and stick like hardened glue to a stovetop. I scrubbed the stove and mixed another batch, which also boiled over. That’s when I learned you can’t put a lid on lentils and millet and Wheatena. If you do, it will boil over. It took a long time to cook without a lid, but when it was finally done I dumped the whole mess into the food processor and whirred it into oatmeal consistency. Then I added some bran flakes and a couple of crumbled rice cakes and stirred in a can of chicken chunks. I spooned serving portions into small baggies and put them in the freezer. The whole procedure had taken much longer than I expected, but I felt extremely virtuous.

Next morning, I defrosted one of the servings, stirred in some of the vitamin-mineral mix, and set it down for Ms. Kitty. I was so proud. Ms. Kitty nosed it, gave me a rude look, and walked away. She stayed outside all day sulking, and in the middle of the morning I threw away her untouched breakfast.

At dinnertime, I gave her another packet with a few pieces of lamb from my dinner added to it. She picked out the lamb and left the rest. I threw it away, but I was a little annoyed. “I worked hard to cook this for you,” I said.

She lifted her upper lip and gave me a hard look.

Next morning she seemed suspicious even before we went in the kitchen. I gave her another serving of the lentil-millet-chicken mixture, and she sent me a hostile message.

“Look here,” I said sternly, “we don’t talk like that in this house!”

She glowered at me and stalked into the living room and pouted while I ate my yogurt and fruit. I sprinkled some of her vitamin-mineral mix on it.

While I was rinsing my dishes, she came back and sniffed at her bowl and made a plaintive cry.

“Oh, all right,” I said. “I’ll give you some Tender Vittles!”

I put some Tender Vittles into the healthy food and stirred it up. When I put it in front of her, she ate just a few bites and then asked to go outside. Just after I shut the door behind her, she made a horrible yowling sound as if she were in terrible pain. I jerked the door open and she deftly threw up her breakfast at my feet.

“Okay,” I said, “you win. You don’t have to eat it again.”

I didn’t think it was a good idea for her to eat for a while, so I didn’t offer her anything else. Besides, I was really annoyed at her. I went to my office to work and after a while she jumped on my desk and looked hard at me.

“I won’t give it to you again,” I said. “But I went to a lot of trouble and expense for you. It’s sort of ungrateful of you not to eat it.”

She leaned over my hand and for the first time in her life bit me. On the wrist. Broke the skin and brought blood. And then she looked at me and blinked her eyes, twice.

I knew what Ms. Kitty was saying. She was saying, “I forgive you, but don’t ever do anything like that to me again!”

It took a while for us to make up. I didn’t give in right away because my feelings were hurt, but for her dinner I opened a can of sliced beef in gravy and gave it to her without stirring in any of the vitamin-mineral mix. Next morning, I let her have her beloved Tender Vittles.

I need to add that since that benighted time, I’ve learned that cats are basically carnivores, and that I was trying to make her eat something that nature didn’t intend. As usual, the cat was smarter than the human.

Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout has already won a Pulitzer Prize and accolades from every critic who has read Olive Kitteridge, but I’d still like to add my appreciation to the list. Reading the linked stories reminded me of looking at stacked transparencies of the human body, one layer giving the skeletal structure, then the circulatory system, the nervous system, layers of different organs, until finally you turn the last layer over and there’s the human form in its entirety, from the bones to the skin. Olive Kitteridge, the woman who has some link to every story, is revealed in the same way. She’s wise and stupid, amusing and dull, loving and bitchy, loyal and treacherous. She sees some things in life more clearly than anybody else, and she’s totally blind to the ways she hurts other people. I recognized a lot of people I knew in Olive, and caught a few glimpses of myself. If you haven’t read Olive Kitteridge yet, you’re in for a rare treat.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

When I think about all the daily miracles in the world, one of the most amazing is the infinite creativity that streams at us every day. Musicians continue to take a few basic notes and turn them into new rhythms and sounds, artists dip their paintbrushes into the same pigments that have been around for centuries and create new combinations of colors and shapes. And writers create new characters, new plots, new poems, new ideas from the same old words that have been around since the first story-tellers entertained their friends around a campfire. We’re all dipping into the same limitless pool of inspiration, and filtering it through our own experience and personality. The results are sometimes clumsy, sometimes brilliant, and sometimes awe-inspiring.

Muriel Barbery put her hand into that pool and pulled up The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a story that shimmers with intelligence and insight. Alternately erudite, earthy, funny and touching, the tale is told from two points of view: that of a lonely, precociously intelligent young girl and that of the self-educated concierge of the posh Parisian condo in which the girl lives with her clueless family. The girl’s family believe she is surly, slow, and perhaps psychotic, and she allows them to think it. The concierge, knowing her position is one generally assumed to be held by persons of low intelligence, goes to great lengths to hide her knowledge of music, art, good food, and literature from the world. But a new tenant moves into the building who recognizes the superior minds of both the girl and the concierge, and their covers are blown.

Translated from the French by Alison Anderson, The Elegance of the Hedgehog was a literary sensation in France in 2007, and has been read by millions in Europe. It’s a gem of a book, told with elegance and wit. I loved it.

Philandering Politicians

Another holier-than-thou “family values” politician has made a tearful public confession of infidelity. And as usual, his wife says she will forgive him if he properly repents. This familiar scenario has been played out so many times that we could all direct it. Cue the husband’s tears and apologies to his family, his state, his staff. Cue the somber wife by his side. No tears for her. Cue a long shot of the family in former times, all the children cute and smiling at their dad. Then the interviews with old friends and political allies, all of them male, who say they were shocked — shocked! — to learn their good moral friend has strayed from his high moral values. They hope his wife and his constituents can all put it behind them and move forward.

Just once, I’d like to see the stoic wife suddenly turn into a wolverine on camera. I’d like to see her sucker-punch the philandering husband. I’d like to hear her tell him what a dirt-bag he is for exposing their children to the humiliation of making their family fodder for talk shows and jokes for comedians. Elizabeth Edwards has been criticized for writing about how hurtful her husband’s affair was, as if she broke some rule about how wives are supposed to behave. The fact that she’s chosen to stay with him must mean there’s more to the relationship than the public has any right to know. The fact that she hasn’t played long-suffering victim means she’s not a long-suffering victim. Good for her.

Deep Throat and the FBI

The AP has obtained FBI files that detail the agency’s feverish efforts in the 70s to suppress showings of the porn movie “Deep Throat.” Reading about it took me back to a day when Houston’s marriage and family therapists were asked to review the film as a public service. We were asked to give our opinion as to whether the movie was dangerous to normal men and women, or if it had some redeeming value.

Marriage counselors, as a group, are unflappable when it comes to hearing about other people’s perverse habits, but in our own lives we’re fairly conservative. I doubt that any of us would have gone to a theater to see “Deep Throat,” but since we’d been asked to see it as a public service to the community, we pretended it was a scientific inquiry and turned out en masse. The film was shown in an auditorium on the University of Houston campus, and we had to present our special invitations AND proof of identity to get in. Los Alamos probably didn’t have tighter security.

First we filled out a survey detailing how many porn films we’d ever seen and how we felt about porn films in general. Then the film ran, and we were given another form to fill out for our reactions. Most of us were mildly amused by the film. We looked at one another with the smiles of sophisticates who had stooped to watch something beneath us for science. But we weren’t done. There was a second film in addition to “Deep Throat.” We had to watch it too, with more forms to fill out before and after.

The second film was “The Devil in Miss Jones,” which, unlike “Deep Throat,” actually had a plot and a dark message of sorts. The premise was that Miss Jones, a chaste, very religious woman whose life had been unremittingly dull, had committed suicide. In spite of her goodness in life, she had been sent to hell for the suicide. Bitter at all her good life going for naught, Miss Jones said that if she’d known she was going to hell anyway, she wouldn’t have lived such an exemplary life.

She got to go back and redo it, and she pretty much engaged in every low, vulgar, disgusting sex act anybody could imagine. At first it was sad, because the actress was good enough to make us think how disappointing it would be to live a holy life and still end up in hell. We sort of sympathized with her. Then it got too sordid to watch. Some of us actually covered our eyes at some scenes. Then it got boring. We began having whispered conversations about other things. Images of sexual depravity that had at first been shocking had become banal. We zipped through the final form we were given, checking emphatically that we would probably never see another porn film as long as we lived, and that we hadn’t found a single socially redeeming quality in “The Devil in Miss Jones.” It didn’t matter. Both movies went on to movie screens all over the world.

One of the FBI agents trying to stop distribution of “Deep Throat” was Mark Felt. He would later be a Watergate informant to Bob Woodward, giving inside secrets about Nixon’s dark corruption. Felt’s alias was “Deep Throat,” but “Miss Jones” would have been more appropriate.

Pimiento Cheese Redux

Remember pimiento cheese? I’ll bet I ate a ton of the stuff when I was young. But then my taste got a little more sophisticated, not to mention that I started thinking about calories, and so pimiento cheese became a part of my gastronomical past. Lately, though, with all the doom and gloom in the air, I’ve been wanting the comfort food I used to eat. Macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, pot roasts, that kind of thing.

Yesterday while I stood looking into my refrigerator hoping for inspiration, I noticed a jar of sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil, the finely minced kind that I usually stir into hot pasta. Right beside it was a plastic bag of grated cheddar cheese. A little bell rang in my head. Why not combine them, add a little mayo, a smidgen of Dijon mustard, and call it tomato-cheese? So I did, and spread it on stone-ground wheat crackers for a snack. It wasn’t bad. Not as soul-satisfying as the old gloppy pimiento cheese on gummy Wonder Bread used to be, but not half bad. I think next time I’ll put it on top of grilled burgers.

Fathers Day

On this Father’s Day weekend, we salute all the hard-working, dedicated, loving fathers around the world.

Here’s a statistic that may surprise a lot of people: for both sons and daughters, when it comes to a child’s future self-esteem and self-confidence, fathers are more influential than mothers. Mothers may not like that, especially mothers who have to raise their children alone, but that’s the fact. In almost every study on the impact fathers have on their children, fathers seem to have a greater effect than mothers in a child’s self-confidence or lack of it.

Fathers who are positive sources of self-confidence give their children a sense of safety. They support them, both financially and emotionally. They respect their children’s ideas and dreams. They encourage their children’s talents. In every possible way, they show their children that they are important, that they matter.

Being a good father may be the most challenging job any man ever has. Those who do it well deserve all the accolades we can give them. They not only provide a solid foundation for their own children, they make the entire world safer and saner. So to every good father out there, I send a big THANK YOU!

Juneteenth and Slavery by Another Name

Today is Juneteenth, a commemoration of the day that word finally reached slaves in Galveston, Texas, that they were free. The announcement was made on June 19, 1865. The Emancipation Act had actually been signed on September 22, 1862, but slavery was so vital to the American economy — all American economy, not just the south — that the news was kept from slaves as long as possible. For that same reason of economics, federal and state laws were quickly enacted that continued legalized slavery until World War II.

SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME (Jan, 2008 Doubleday/Jan 2009 Anchor paperback) by Wall Street Jounal bureau chief Douglas A. Blackmon lays out the story so cogently that I had to read it in small sections to spare myself the tears, fury, and shame of knowing that my own state and nation conspired to arrest black men for things like walking along a railroad track, speaking loudly in a white person’s presence, not being able to produce proof of employment when stopped on the street, or changing employers without permission. Once arrested and found guilty by a kangaroo court, they were sentenced to hard labor in steel mills, mines, or to labor camps owned by states or the federal government. The awful truth that Blackmon asks us to look at is that until World War II, our country treated black citizens with the same terrible cruelty that Nazi Germany treated Jews.

On this day of celebrating the day when slaves learned they had been free for two years, I highly recommend Blackmon’s book for every American. We will never get past the poison of slavery in our society until we look squarely at it and acknowledge that it hurt every one of us. And still does.

Newspaper Love

Picking up my newspaper at the end of the driveway early one morning, I realized that I might be the last person in my block who still had a newspaper delivered. I know I’m the only one who has two delivered on Sunday. For about thirty seconds, I told myself all the reasons that sensible people get their news from the internet. Then I reminded myself that I don’t read newspapers for the news.

Newspapers have never existed solely to provide top-breaking news coverage. That’s the role of radio, TV, and the internet. Newspapers are for other things. They’re for unfolding clean and crisp and reading local letters to the editor with the second cup of coffee at breakfast. They’re for in-depth coverage of public figures, scientific discoveries and social issues. They’re for thoughtful and intelligent reviews of books and movies and plays. They’re for Dear Abby, crossword puzzles, comics, and the horoscopes that nobody believes but everybody reads. They’re to pass back and forth to somebody you love on lazy Sunday mornings on a sun-dappled terrace with a pitcher of bloody Marys. They’re for lining bird cages, paper training puppies, catching paint drips, and wrapping breakables when you move.

Newspapers are a way of life. At least they’re my way of life, and I will continue to subscribe as long as publishers print them.