too much happiness & lines for the fortune cookies

Favourite thing yesterday (and over the last few days): rereading Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness. Before our book group, Joel and I often find ourselves speed reading the required book, looking at each other in stunned amazement--what? book group again? already?--not because we don't enjoy it but just because, despite the fact that we chastise our students for hurrying through material, it seems we can never be organized about such things ourselves. But in the case of Munro's book the speed reading shifted from obligation to pleasure to utter absorption. She is such a spell-binding writer. I'd read most of the stories before when they were first published in The New Yorker and was surprised to find the reading experience pretty much undiminished the second time round. But the story I enjoyed most, nevertheless, was one that I had not read before: "Fiction." I love the subtlety and yet seeringness of the shocks Munro delivers in her writing. When I finish a story it is as if Munro has carved out a little pause in my world, and I stop and think, and the entire world shifts just slightly and everything then continues to carry on.

No one mentioned Munro on the favourite-things list BUT I do have another connection (that is, admittedly, a stretch). Bill A notes Frank O'Hare's poem "Lines for the Fortune Cookies" and one of the lines in the poem is "Who do you think you are?" which is itself the title of a collection of Alice Munro's stories (a collection that, I think, had a different title when it was published in the States because it was believed that Americans would not be pleased by the provocation of the Canadian title.) Here's the poem:

Lines For The Fortune Cookies

Frank O’Hara

I think you're wonderful and so does everyone else.

Just as Jackie Kennedy has a baby boy, so will you—even bigger.

You will meet a tall beautiful blonde stranger, and you will not say hello.

You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone.

You will marry the first person who tells you your eyes are like scrambled eggs.

In the beginning there was YOU—there will always be YOU, I guess.

You will write a great play and it will run for three performances.

Please phone The Village Voice immediately: they want to interview you.

Roger L. Stevens and Kermit Bloomgarden have their eyes on you.

Relax a little; one of your most celebrated nervous tics will be your undoing.

Your first volume of poetry will be published as soon as you finish it.

You may be a hit uptown, but downtown you're legendary!

Your walk has a musical quality which will bring you fame and fortune.

You will eat cake.

Who do you think you are, anyway? Jo Van Fleet?

You think your life is like Pirandello, but it's really like O'Neill.

A few dance lessons with James Waring and who knows? Maybe something will happen.

That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.

I realize you've lived in France, but that doesn't mean you know EVERYTHING!

You should wear white more often—it becomes you.

The next person to speak to you will have a very intriquing proposal to make.

A lot of people in this room wish they were you.

Have you been to Mike Goldberg's show? Al Leslie's? Lee Krasner's?

At times, your disinterestedness may seem insincere, to strangers.

Now that the election's over, what are you going to do with yourself?

You are a prisoner in a croissant factory and you love it.

You eat meat. Why do you eat meat?

Beyond the horizon there is a vale of gloom.

You too could be Premier of France, if only… if only…