Angel's Laundromat, by Lucia Berlin

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Guide to Berlin's stories

A video about her life and works

Written by Pere Vila

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Juneau, Alaska in 1936, Lucia Berlin led a largely rootless childhood because her father, Wendell Theodore Brown, was a mining engineer and the family moved nearly every year, from one mining town to the next, throughout North America. It was not until World War II, when Brown served overseas as a naval officer, that Berlin’s mother, Mary Emma Magruder, was able to settle temporarily with her two daughters in her native Texas. They spent the war years in El Paso, the town where Berlin’s parents first met when her father was a student at the Texas School of Mines and her mother was studying drama.

When Brown returned from naval service after the war, the family moved to Santiago, Chile, where Berlin spent her adolescence. She suffered from a variety of health problems throughout her life and was particularly plagued by a curvature of the spine, which eventually destroyed one of her lungs. The frequent displacements of Berlin’s early life, combined with the double scoliosis that prevented her from indulging in many of the pastimes of youth contributed to her cultivation of a rich interior life.

Berlin returned to the United States to earn a B.A. in Spanish and in English, and a M.A. from the University of New Mexico. It was during this time that she met her first husband, but he abandoned her when she was pregnant with their second child. She married and divorced two more times, and had two more sons with her third husband. She eventually raised all four boys on her own. A Manual for Cleaning Women, her first chapbook, was published during the late 1970’s, when Berlin supported her family by cleaning houses.

In the 1980’s Berlin lived in Oakland, California, and continued to publish stories in magazines. She collected many of these works in full-length volumes. The best of the tales from the first half of her writing career appeared in her 1990 collection entitled Homesick: New and Selected Stories, published by Black Sparrow Press. This landmark volume won an American Book Award, and Berlin was also the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Jack London Short Story Award.

In 1994, Berlin moved to Boulder to teach creative writing at the University of Colorado, and she soon established a reputation there as an effective teacher. Health problems forced her relocation to California in 2000, and she died on her birthday, November 12, 2004, in Marina del Rey.

 

SUMMARY

Angel’s Laundromat is the opening story in Lucia Berlin’s posthumous short story collection A Manual for Cleaning Women.

The story contrasts the working-class atmosphere of a run-down laundromat in Albuquerque with the narrator’s glamorous past, exploring themes of alcoholism, class, and shared human connection. Similar to other Berlin’s stories, the narrator jumps from one vignette to the next in rapid succession while sprinkling in some background history during the process.

The story opens by comparing Angel’s Laundromat to The Campus, a sterile, air-conditioned laundromat across town favoured by middle-class graduate wives who listen to soft rock. The narrator avoids this polished place. Instead, she travels across town to Angel’s, a gritty spot filled with Pueblo and Apache Indians, travelling people, and struggling individuals. This contrast highlights her affinity for the marginalized and the raw reality of working-class life. In the laundromat there is an Indian named Tony, an elderly alcoholic Apache who struggles to put dimes into the machine due to his shakes. He usually sits next to Lucia, the narrator, staring at her hands, so she too looks and sees “Horrid age spots, two scars. Un-Indian, nervous, lonely hands. I could see children and men and gardens in my hands”. There is so much psychological truth packed into just these sentences: discomforting self-awareness, recognition of the effects of time and aging, an insight about race, and lastly, the sense of being used up with work done. Like many of her stories, it is about lives that brush one another in passing. She and the Indian eventually joke and chat together, but one day he’s gone and Lucia can’t remember when it was that she realized she never saw that old Indian again.

But Angel’s Laundromat is also disjunctive, as disorganized and random as memories in places of washing and waiting, muggy places, tiny places that serve an underclass of people, students and bedsit dwellers, the poor, the old, the indigent, and she, “Lu-chee-a”, as the Indian calls her, is among them. It is in this sense that the story is both aimless and easy; it does not strain to be more than itself and in this way, it evokes the looseness of a certain sort of life, a life lived bumping around on the bottom no matter where you began. It doesn’t matter what you are, either a woman who once mixed with Prince Aly Khan, or a man who has been dispossessed of his status as an Apache chief, now you are there and that’s all there is.

QUESTIONS

-Try to find information about: Zuni belt, Lady Bird Johnson, AA, Good Hygiene, Hamm’s can, Muzak, Zero bar, Okies, Vina del Mar, Prince Aly Khan.

-Try to get the meaning of these jokes: "A guy is bending down tying his shoe and another guy comes along and beats him up and says: ’You're always tying your shoe!’" And "A waiter is serving ans he spills beans on somebody's lap and says: ’Oh, oh, I spilled the beans.’"

-Why do you think that group therapies (like Alcoholics Anonymous) are effcient? Or aren’t they?

-Do you think suicide has to be penalized? Give reasons.

-Have you ever been in a laundromat and used its services? Can you tell us any anecdote?

-In your view, what is the best way to retort clichés?

VOCABULARY

Suds, super, DUZ, leaf, dimes, passed out, pressing room, cots, cross my eyes, dog tag, busted

The Silence, by Murray Bail

 

By Núria Lecina

BIOGRAPHY

Murray Bail (born the 22^nd of September 1941) is an Australian writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction.

He was born in Adelaide, South Australia, a second son of Cyril Lindsay Bail (1914-1966) and Hazel Bail (née Ward). His father worked in the tramways and his mother was a housewife and a milliner. He has two brothers.

He has been married twice. His first wife was Margaret Bail (née Wordsworth). They got married in 1965 and divorced in 1988.

His second wife was ​Helen Garner; they got married in 1992, and they divorced in 2000. She also was a well-known Australian writer.

He has lived most of his life in Australia, except for sojourns in India (1968-70), England and other parts of Europe (1970-74). After working for advertising agencies in Adelaide and Melbourne, he moved with his first wife to India in 1968, where he worked for an agency in Bombay. During his travels, he became ill of amoebic dysentery and went to London for treatment. Once there, he decided that the novel he had written in India was worthless and threw it in the trash.

For recovering, he remained in London for five years (1970-1975), spending the first year on unemployment benefits. He then wrote for many newspapers, which encouraged him to publish his first novels once he returned to Australia. This travel’s experience influenced him. Many of his works reflect which he, an Australian, thinks when observing his country from outside, its culture, and the way people live.

Now he lives in Sydney.

Before dedicating himself to literature, Bail worked in galleries and as an art critic. He was trustee of the National Gallery of Australia from 1976 to 1981, and wrote a book on Australian artist Ian Fairweather.

 

Bail is considered one of the most innovative Australian writers in short fiction, classified as very interesting, unique and an intellectual of the 20th century.

He is known for his dry humour and for challenging the traditional narrative. Bail used to say that novels should not be stories with a beginning and an end, but that they should be instruments for thinking. That inspiration comes from mistakes. When nothing goes as you expected, imagination begins, he says.

He did not believe in sudden inspiration, he believes in thought and patience. He could spend years revising a work. He is an admirer of Kafka, Borges, Nabokov and Calvino —all writers who play with language and with the way people tell stories.

He had often said that Australians were too practical, and that the local culture did not value invention or fantasy.

He says it with irony, but it is a real criticism: he wanted Australian literature to stop being just stories of the outback and survival, and become a more philosophical and universal literature. He doesn’t have a very extensive body of work, but he does have a lot of work to do. He says that writing is like making furniture with words: few pieces, but well-made and useful. This is in line with his passion for cabinetmaking and object design.

 

HIS WORK

 

-Novel

Homesickness (1980)

Holden’s Performance (1987)

Eucalyptus (1998). He has been awarded several times for this work. This is the story of a botanical fairy tale. It is his most famous novel, where realism and fairy tale are mixed. A father promises that only he who knows the name of all the eucalyptus trees of his property will be able to marry his daughter. Curiously, Eucalyptus was to be made into a film starring Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe, but the production was cancelled at the last minute due to artistic disagreements between Bail and the director.

Camouflage (2000)

The Pages (2008)

The Voyage (2012)

 

-Non-fiction

Ian Fairweather (1981). This work was written when Murray was working on the National Gallery of Australia; it’s a biography of this artist, an Australian painter who was also eccentric and solitary, who lived in a cabin made of drums and scrap wood.

Longhand (1989)

 

-Notebooks 1970-2003 (2005)

He (2021). The last book, only 164 pages to explain his autobiography. He writes it in the third person; he doesn’t like to use the first. It’s curious that he describes why he started writing his memoirs: it was dissatisfaction of his way of working, sitting at a table writing every morning and at weekends. And he admits that the inspiration for his fiction is found in his childhood memories and travels. He says that he has lost interest in art, and that music occupies more of his free time than looking at paintings.

 

-Short fiction

Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories (1975), republished in 1986 as The Drover's Wife and Other Stories. Here is where we can find our short story, The Silence.

 

 

SUMMARY

 

Let’s set the scene:

Australia is a continent of seven and half millions square kilometres. It’s the largest world island. In spite of this extension, there are only 28 million inhabitants and the population density is of 3,4 residents for square kilometre.

The first residents arrived there 42,000 years ago. They were nomads, hunters and collectors. Their spirituals values were revering the earth and believing in the dream time. Nowadays, Aboriginal people keep this culture even though the political changes. It’s the country less world populated, where the ninety per cent lives in the urban areas. The big portion inside is arid and desert.

It would be in one of these deserts, some years ago, that we could imagine at our character, Joe Tapp.

The Silence seems a simple history. Joe Tapp lives in the desert, in an enormous landscape, alone, in a campsite where he has a tent, a freeze, a petrol drum, firewood that obtain from some cut trees and a lot of rubbish. All of it scattered.

It’s not clear if Joe is an Aboriginal Australian, but his habits and his behaviour make us think that he is very close to this culture.

His life is very repetitive, the story explains his daily routines. For over a year he has been there, in the desert, hunting rabbits that live hidden in the dunes. He sets traps so that they are stuck in the rabbit’s neck. His activity is in the morning, he goes with sacks on his back to collect the corpses. Once in the camp, he skins and cleans them, removes the pelts and puts them in the freezer. He rests, and at sunset, he returns to the trap area to prepare them again. He sleeps and starts the new day again.

Joe is an introverted person, rooted in the environment where peace and silence reign; tranquillity is only broken by some animal noise. It’s the silence of nature.

All this activity, which aims at his survival, is altered every two weeks when Norm Treloar arrives with his noisy red truck, to buy and pick up the dead frozen rabbits. This is the only relation with another human. Joe doesn’t feel well at all when Norman arrives. Norman is a communicative man, and always, like a social routine, greets him, asks him how everything is going. Then, they load the meat on the truck, they have a tea, and finally Norman leaves, raising the desert’s dust. All return to natural state, the silence!

Joe feels worse and worse each time. He is overwhelmed, often thinks about the meeting with Norman, and suffers waiting for the next time. Every time he feels the meeting more intrusive. Breaking the silence bothers him, disturbs him. Norman’s words and noise offend him. He doesn’t want this relationship, he even throws to the fire the newspaper that Norman lefts. He wants silence, but also humanity disconnection. But he needs to go on with the business.

Joe thinks about his work, enjoys his peace, he loves to be there, surrounded by nature, he spends hours squatting. Like an Aboriginal.

And when suddenly he heard the truck’s far noise, Joe knows what he would do. He runs to the sand dune and hides behind the bushes. From there, he can see the campsite, and he lets Norman do the work. The truck driver looks around, searches for Joe, honks the horn, smokes a cigarette, and finally goes to the freezer, fills the truck with the meat, and leaves.

The silence returns, and Joe comes back to the campsite ready to carry on his work. Now he can go and setting rabbit’s traps, happy to have had a resolution.

 

My opinion

Silence is the absence of all sound or noise. In this story, it is the fact of stopping talking little by little. Joe is becoming more and more silent. For what reason?

Joe decided to be there more than a year ago, in the desert. We don’t know where he came from or what he did before, or why he came there. He chose to live in a place where it was easier to find himself, to be in contact with a silent world, to live at his own pace.

I think that the environment has been absorbing and integrating him in the nature, and he has finally found an inner peace and a meaning to his life. Possibly we, who live in a completely different place, don’t understand this. We live in a continuous communication, sometimes very crazy.

Silence can also be a kind of non-verbal communication, and maybe Joe’s story wants to transmit this other lifestyle to us. Maybe it’s not necessary to speak a lot and think more.

 

QUESTIONS

-Hunting with traps today here is forbidden: What can be the rules for an "ethical" hunt?

-Now and then there is a rabbit pest, or a locust pest, or any kind of pests. If they are natural phenomena, must we fight them?

-What are the benefits of being alone? And the damages? Do we need moments to be alone? Why are we nowadays more individualistic?

VOCABULARY

singlet, drums, burrowed, gears, whine, melt, sport, juice, grub, saltbush, billy, rowdy, strain, stunted, revved

 

Manhood, by John Wain

 

Prezi presentation

Audiobook

BIOGRAPHY

John Wain was born in the Midlands in 1925. He studied at St Jonh’s College, Oxford, and later he taught at Reading University and also at Oxford. But he was essentially a man of letters: he wrote poetry, novels, short stories, plays, essays and biographies. Nevertheless, nowadays, his works are less read.
As a poet, he belonged to a group of writers called “The Movement”, active in the 1950s. They wanted to give a sense of Englishness in their poems and go back to traditional literature, a reaction to the exuberance and exoticism of the modernists, such as Dylan Thomas. Other members were Kingsley Amis (Martin Amis’s father), Philip Larking and Ted Hughes (Sylvia Plath’s partner).
As a narrator, he was associated with the “Angry Young Men”, a group of writers highly critical of the political system and the social order; so, their literature would be more realistic, and their topic the lives of the working class. Here we find Allan Sillitoe and John Osborne, whose play Looking Back in Anger was the seed of this tendency. We also can say that Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch shared some of their ideas.
Perhaps Wain’s most interesting work was Hurry on Down, a comical novel that follows the adventures of a young man after finishing his university studies.

He died in at the age of 69.

SUMMARY

Mr Willison is somebody who wasn’t very happy with his youth and childhood. He wasn’t satisfied with his physical education. He would have exercised more, played more sports. He had studied hard to get a good job and so all the time was working on books and exams.

Now he has a teenage son, Rob, and he wants to give him another kind of education. Not so much school academic subjects and a little bit more of sport. So, he takes his boy for long bike rides and prompts him to inscribe in the school rugby team. But Rob isn’t very fond of physical activities; nevertheless, he loves his father and wants to make him happy.

One day, after several miles of cycling, Mr Willison gives his son a boxing punch-ball and a pair of boxing mittens. Rob isn’t really interested in boxing, but he doesn’t reject his father’s present, and he even tries to hit the ball with all his strength.

Then, at school, we suppose because of his father’s insistence, tries, or says he tries, to join the rugby team. But, as in the end he isn’t selected, he makes up for saying he was chosen for the boxing team; this way he doesn’t disappoint his father. Mr Willison is very excited with this piece of news, and he takes on himself to train him. However, his wife says boxing is a dangerous sport for the brain, and there is a heated discussion about the topic between husband and wife. Mr Willison is overjoyed, and Mrs Willison is furious.

So everyday Rob trains very hard with his father, but, when the day of the tournament arrives, he says he doesn’t feel very well and that he cannot fight in the contest. His mother is very worried and blames his husband for the situation and tells him to call the doctor. Mr Willison is so bewildered that his suspects his son of faking his illness out of fear. In the end, he decides to call the manager of the boxing team.

 

QUESTIONS

-What do you think is going to happen after the father discovers the truth?

-Mrs Willison mentions “her big night” referring to the night her son was born. What was your “big night / day”?

-What do you know about Baroness Summerskill, Ingemar Johansson and Marquess of Queensberry?

-There is a lack of communication between father and son. According to you, should there always be complete frankness between parents and children?

-In general, is “suffering” something profitable in order to shape a person’s character?

-Is it essential for a teenager to come through a rite of passage?

-When, in your opinion, does pushing our children to study, or play sports become necessary, and when does it become harmful?

 

VOCABULARY

short cut, dale, beamed, mittens, scrum, cramming, trunks, catches, parried, bullet-headed, louts, take a grip, fit as a fiddle, bout, M.A.

 

free-wheeling, haunches, fatigue, endurance, sullen, clambered, doggedly, physique, prone, rebellion, simultaneously, mittens, landmark, tournament, trials, acutest, satchel, to, limber, up, keened, louts, compel, appendicitis, jabbering, defensive, queries