Hypocritic Days & Other Tales

by Woolf, Douglas; Braman, Sandra

• ISBN13: 9780876859117
• ISBN10: 0876859112
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-02-01
• Publisher: Black Sparrow Pr

Summary

Douglas Woolf was a writer's writer: his tales of serene down-and-outers, belated frontiersmen, and cross-country spiritual seekers were much admired by fellow-artists Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, and Paul Mazursky. "He was so gentle," wrote Creeley shortly after Woolf's death in 1992, "so particular to the ways people live together. It is in his intimate focus, in the unobtrusive detailing of gesture, conversation, place, that his genius is clear."Woolf's quiet genius is on display in each of the twenty-seven short stories in Hypocritic Days, a career-spanning collection edited by his literary executor, Sandra Braman. Take the title story, for instance: it's a kind of improvised, Laurel-and-Hardy dance between a washed-up Saratoga horse jockey and his large, slow, uncommunicative son, both characters stepping lightly, in tandem, as they negotiate the boy's awkward passage from teenager to young man. Or "Bank Day," in which Woolf tenderly depicts an impoverished young couple expecting their first child, full of hopeful, high-minded plans for the future even though they subsist on a diet of cat food and cold coffee. None of his characters ever lose hope, despite the horrors and despairs surrounding them, and not because they are fools but because, in the words of Robert Creeley, "they have the talent, and the pleasure, of making in this world a place of their own."

Table of Contents

Preface	p. 7
Hypocritic Days	p. 13
The Pilgrimage	p. 85
You Can't Get Another One	p. 91
Note for an Autobituary	p. 99
Company	p. 103
Just the Three of Us	p. 109
The Kind of Life We've Planned	p. 117
The Cure	p. 125
Quadrangle	p. 131
The Imaginative Present	p. 133
Mr. Weatherwax and Psyche	p. 143
Mr. Weatherwax Takes the Cure	p. 149
The Contest	p. 155
The Third Doorman	p. 159
The Ice Cream Man	p. 173
Stand Still	p. 179
Fair-Weather-Wise	p. 189
Bank Day	p. 197
The Flyman	p. 211
The Love Letter	p. 223
Juncos and Jokers Wild	p. 235
Slayer of the Alien Gods	p. 241
The Spring of the Lamb	p. 253
HAD	p. 273
Market Research	p. 281
"A Story I Wasn't Supposed to Tell"	p. 283
The Timing Chain	p. 285
After Words	p. 393
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