Thursday, July 13, 2023

Lucia Berlin


The title story from A Manual For Cleaning Women is "A Manual For Cleaning Women". Not the same since stories are presented in quotation marks and books in italics. Some of you already know this. It's not important if you don't. All writing will be said to you soon enough. 

Lucia Berlin lived in many places (born in Alaska, raised in Chile, etc.) and had a variety of jobs over her adult life, from house cleaner (or cleaning woman, but not cleaning lady) to university professor. Her story "A Manual For ..." is not a traditional manual so much as a diary, with details on bus routes that include"42--PIEDMONT" and "43--SHATTUCK--BERKELEY."

Here's the entry for the "33--BERKELEY EXPRESS":

The 33 got lost! The driver overshot the turn at SEARS for the freeway. Everyone was ringing the bells as, blushing, he made a left on Twenty-seventh. We ended up stuck in a dead end. People came to their windows to see the bus. Four men got out to help him back out between the parked cars on the narrow street. Once on the freeway he drove about eighty. It was scary. We all talked together, pleased by the event.

For those aware that Cate Blanchett has signed on to play Berlin in a film version of A Manual For ... (and director Pedro Almadóvar, listed on IMDB as a co-writer with Blanchett, has signed off of), it's coming on three years since the deal was announced and yes, the titular story would provide a nice ground through which other stories could be threaded. This is the advantage of adapting stories to film, one of the better examples being Robert Altman's adaptation of Raymond Carver's selected Short Cuts (1993).

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