Mentioned herein:
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
The End, Salvatore Scibona
The Fake Nazi, Aimee Bender
Ploughshares Magazine
It's no secret I've been reading a lot of short stories lately. Partly, my attention span has been stunted by work, and soon, school. More on that later. It also seems like every novel I've picked up lately has been awful. I tried Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but the prose was horrid, and the pacing terrible, and the political posturing shallow. I'd heard you have to get through the first 50 pages for it to pick up, so I remained patient. After 75 pages people kept telling me you had to get through the first 100. I read to page 110, and when someone told me it didn't really pick up till page 150, I gave up. I didn't want to get to the end before deciding I was enjoying the book.
I've since picked up Salvatore Scibona's The End, based on the promise of his short story in a recent New Yorker. And it's okay, but it's a very fractured thing. It follows the lives of Italian immigrants in Ohio in the first half of the 20th century. The first section was about a baker who one day oversleeps, then drives out to New York to bring back his estranged family. He gets sidetracked to Niagra Falls, where he has an ice cream, then the narrative leaves him there while it switches to a different woman in the same neighborhood with no immediately obvious connection to the baker. The book flap copy indicates they're all linked by some terrible secret, but 100 pages in, I still have no idea what it is. I like the book and hope to finish it, but like Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I'm not sure I'm invested in the story, or even why I should be. There's no urgency for me to discover what happens next.
So I've turned back to the short story, where the investment is smaller and the pay-offs just as satisfying. I picked up the recent issue of Ploughshares, the literary journal of Emerson University. For those of you who don't know, much of American short fiction is published by University sponsored small journals. It's a measure of American literature's health, really, that artsitic fiction has become subsided by the education industry, in effect they're publishing the art and writers they'll be writing critical essays on in the future. Sounds like narcissistic inbreeding, but there you have it.
In this issue of Ploughshares is Aimee Bender's new story, The Fake Nazi. I cringed at the title, but dove in, and was pleasantly surprised. It's about a man in Germany who walks into the police station and confesses to holocaust atrocities. But he's wrong - he's too young, for one thing. They find his apartment filled with Nazi movies and novels and newspaper articles - he's apparently been living with guilt for crimes he never committed. Eventually, his life and death haunt a secretary in the legal system where he had periodically tried to surrender himself. She investigates his life, and discovers a past lover, then his brother, and all the secrets to who he was, and how he fit in society.
Here's the kicker: She does all in 13 pages. It's a testament to the power of the short story, and of Aimee Bender's skill, that she can do this, while Stieg Larson had to fumble through 100 pages before I gave up on him, and Salvatore Scibona hid all the meat of his book in dark, intellectual wrappings and Faulknerian posturing. I think it's sad that writers these days are ashamed of just telling stories. You know, something happened, so I did this, and then this happened. It's hard, Lord don't I know it. It's easier to be a stylist than a storyteller, maybe, or it's too hard to resist the urge to be clever and intellectual.
So anyway. I'm not sure where I'm going with this blog, or my reading, and may take a break. Then again I may not. Other things are coming at me, or rather, I'm going towards other things. So, keep checking in and stay in touch.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Feet at the State Fair
Heading north on Nelson Street
kneecap to kneecap with strangers.
Bathed in their corndog breath
your eyes glazed and twitching
seeking something stationary and calm -
look up to the sky ride. Pods of glass
in primary colors glide like geese
going south for winter.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Best American Short Stories 1982
Why BASS 1982? Well, it's the oldest one in my collection. And also because it was edited by John Gardner, on whom I had a young writer's crush many years ago. I finished his novel Mickelsson's Ghosts in my basement bedroom and said to myself, I want to be a writer. Or, rather, need to be a writer. Something in its urgent, dense philosophy I barely understood, and its world-spanning ambition sparked a desire to create novels and worlds, to describe characters and their personal moral dilemmas. So I set to work. I thought he was that good. Twenty years later, I'm still scribbling in my spare time, and a bit ashamed of this adoration - Gardner, it turns out, in both his work and his life, was preachy, didactic, melodramatic, and had a patchy personal life that included adultery, bullying, and debt.
So he is for many reasons, some good, some not, little remembered now. He's best known as the author of Grendel, a short re-telling of Beowulf from the perspective of the monster. But back in the early eighties, Gardner had built a solid reputation as a dense, earnest novelist and amazingly dedicated teacher whose proteges included Ron Hansen and Raymond Carver, whom he had taught at Chico State College.
Gardner was almost as famous for the stir he caused with his book On Moral Fiction, which argued that novels should serve a higher purpose than mere entertainment. This was back before the only questions facing American literary fiction were 'Is it dead yet?' and its corollary 'can the eBook save publishing?' John Gardner was one reason no one asked that question. His faith in genuine art was what kept him going, his endless revisions and questioning of his own work and the work of others fueling a fierce determination that there was a higher truth out there, and that one more revision would make it all come clear.
And so he got his shot at Best American Short Stories. The stories he collected in 1982 are good, but uneven, and the inclusion of several of his proteges smacks of cronyism. Two of the stories he selected were from his own magazine, MSS, which he edited for some twenty years. One of them, The Courtship of the Widow Sobcek, by Joanna Higgins, is a good story, but one so closely hewing to Gardner's vision of fiction he could have written it himself. It's about an old man, first generation Pole, a cantankerous character not unlike the old man of Gardner's novel October Light. In Higgins's story, he brings his curtains to the Widow Sobcek for cleaning, and becomes enamored of her, taking his curtains to her once a month, to the amusement of the small town where they live. The other story from MSS, The Cafe de Paris, I found gimmicky and mostly unreadable.
On the other hand, the inclusion of Carver's magnificent story Cathedral in 1982's BASS would never be considered an act of nepotism. In fact, to have left it out would be a criminal act. But reading it with Gardner's editorial presence in mind, you can definitely see the influence, or, if you will, a convergence of attitude.
Cathedral is on the surface a bizarre and thin conceit for a story. It's narrated by a gruff, middle-class man whose wife's blind friend comes for a visit. And that's all that happens. They end up watching a special on tv about cathedrals of Europe, and the narrator tries to describe them to the blind man, but he ends up tongue-tied, and essentially blind himself. The story ends with them trying to draw cathedrals together on paper bag, the narrator with his eyes closed.
The wife wakes up and sees them and doesn't know what's going on, but she can't know, she wasn't there for the journey, which is the point of the story, how religious ecstasy is a blind path, and connections between people are inexplicable and mysterious. It's a classic Gardner theme, but also a classic Carver obsession.
There are other good stories here, such as Mary Robison's quiet, uneventful Coach, and some more experimental pieces such as Alvin Greenberg's "The Power of Language is such that a even single word truly taken to heart can change everything," which is about a floating island whose sole inhabitant is convinced the wild pigs are becoming sentient. So, overall, this a good artifact of a time when American fiction was in a transition from the anarchic experimentation of the seventies to the stoic minimalism that would define the eighties.
It's clear Gardner had some conflicting emotions about editing this collection. He concedes in the first sentence of his introduction that people will disagree with him about whether these are the best stories, and he goes on and on about how his wife and Shannon Ravenel, then the series editor, hounded him into certain selections. There's also the back-story of him rejecting every single selection Ravenel sent his way, and insisting she FedEx him every periodical she'd selected from, overnight, two days before the reading deadline. He had a perhaps irrational distaste for New Yorker stories - all knife-flash and no blood, he says of them, a statement I generally agree with. Also, he willfully dismisses the best-known writers of the day - Updike, Beattie, Barthelme, etc., by saying all of them - every single one - had on 'off year.'
I think the truth is, Gardner loved the underdog. He loved to find good stories by unknowns, stories by people the world might never hear from again. Like James Ferry, whose story "Dancing Ducks and Talking Anus" deals with complex issues like Vietnam vets (still a burning issue in 1982), Native American spirituality, domestic abuse, and love. It also keeps a strong, narrative, knowing and mystic voice; all this despite a horrific central act - a self-administered sulfuric acid douche by an abused woman - that would cause most readers, editors, and writers to dismiss this story with barely a notice, if not downright revulsion. You can hate this story for that reason alone, and I wouldn't blame you, but beyond that there is beauty here, and Gardner saw it, and his selection of it is what makes others, years later, give it the chance he almost didn't himself.
Gardner, whatever difficulties he caused, knew what he was doing. He knew Updike, Roth, Beattie, and all the other heavy hitters would get their due anyway - they were the lions, and weren't going anywhere, with or without one year of BASS. In fact, for the rest of the decade you couldn't swing a cat without hitting something by Updike, or some kind of minimalist Carver clone, but James Ferry, whose story was as serious and moving as anyone else's despite its pedigree, would possibly never get a chance like this again. And it's true: he vanished into the weeds, this story the only evidence of his literary existence I can find. But it's enough. People - mostly Gardner fans and BASS collectors - still find this story and respond to it, and that's all any writer can hope for.
As for Gardner. In the fall of 1982, not long after this collection (and Mickelsson's Ghosts) was published, days before he would be married, John Gardner died in a motorcycle accident in northern Pennsylvania. There's a small cultish following with its own web ring, and his books go in and out of print depending on mood. There's a lot more to say, and I don't have time right now; maybe I'll get to it later...
So he is for many reasons, some good, some not, little remembered now. He's best known as the author of Grendel, a short re-telling of Beowulf from the perspective of the monster. But back in the early eighties, Gardner had built a solid reputation as a dense, earnest novelist and amazingly dedicated teacher whose proteges included Ron Hansen and Raymond Carver, whom he had taught at Chico State College.
Gardner was almost as famous for the stir he caused with his book On Moral Fiction, which argued that novels should serve a higher purpose than mere entertainment. This was back before the only questions facing American literary fiction were 'Is it dead yet?' and its corollary 'can the eBook save publishing?' John Gardner was one reason no one asked that question. His faith in genuine art was what kept him going, his endless revisions and questioning of his own work and the work of others fueling a fierce determination that there was a higher truth out there, and that one more revision would make it all come clear.
And so he got his shot at Best American Short Stories. The stories he collected in 1982 are good, but uneven, and the inclusion of several of his proteges smacks of cronyism. Two of the stories he selected were from his own magazine, MSS, which he edited for some twenty years. One of them, The Courtship of the Widow Sobcek, by Joanna Higgins, is a good story, but one so closely hewing to Gardner's vision of fiction he could have written it himself. It's about an old man, first generation Pole, a cantankerous character not unlike the old man of Gardner's novel October Light. In Higgins's story, he brings his curtains to the Widow Sobcek for cleaning, and becomes enamored of her, taking his curtains to her once a month, to the amusement of the small town where they live. The other story from MSS, The Cafe de Paris, I found gimmicky and mostly unreadable.
On the other hand, the inclusion of Carver's magnificent story Cathedral in 1982's BASS would never be considered an act of nepotism. In fact, to have left it out would be a criminal act. But reading it with Gardner's editorial presence in mind, you can definitely see the influence, or, if you will, a convergence of attitude.
Cathedral is on the surface a bizarre and thin conceit for a story. It's narrated by a gruff, middle-class man whose wife's blind friend comes for a visit. And that's all that happens. They end up watching a special on tv about cathedrals of Europe, and the narrator tries to describe them to the blind man, but he ends up tongue-tied, and essentially blind himself. The story ends with them trying to draw cathedrals together on paper bag, the narrator with his eyes closed.
The wife wakes up and sees them and doesn't know what's going on, but she can't know, she wasn't there for the journey, which is the point of the story, how religious ecstasy is a blind path, and connections between people are inexplicable and mysterious. It's a classic Gardner theme, but also a classic Carver obsession.
There are other good stories here, such as Mary Robison's quiet, uneventful Coach, and some more experimental pieces such as Alvin Greenberg's "The Power of Language is such that a even single word truly taken to heart can change everything," which is about a floating island whose sole inhabitant is convinced the wild pigs are becoming sentient. So, overall, this a good artifact of a time when American fiction was in a transition from the anarchic experimentation of the seventies to the stoic minimalism that would define the eighties.
It's clear Gardner had some conflicting emotions about editing this collection. He concedes in the first sentence of his introduction that people will disagree with him about whether these are the best stories, and he goes on and on about how his wife and Shannon Ravenel, then the series editor, hounded him into certain selections. There's also the back-story of him rejecting every single selection Ravenel sent his way, and insisting she FedEx him every periodical she'd selected from, overnight, two days before the reading deadline. He had a perhaps irrational distaste for New Yorker stories - all knife-flash and no blood, he says of them, a statement I generally agree with. Also, he willfully dismisses the best-known writers of the day - Updike, Beattie, Barthelme, etc., by saying all of them - every single one - had on 'off year.'
I think the truth is, Gardner loved the underdog. He loved to find good stories by unknowns, stories by people the world might never hear from again. Like James Ferry, whose story "Dancing Ducks and Talking Anus" deals with complex issues like Vietnam vets (still a burning issue in 1982), Native American spirituality, domestic abuse, and love. It also keeps a strong, narrative, knowing and mystic voice; all this despite a horrific central act - a self-administered sulfuric acid douche by an abused woman - that would cause most readers, editors, and writers to dismiss this story with barely a notice, if not downright revulsion. You can hate this story for that reason alone, and I wouldn't blame you, but beyond that there is beauty here, and Gardner saw it, and his selection of it is what makes others, years later, give it the chance he almost didn't himself.
Gardner, whatever difficulties he caused, knew what he was doing. He knew Updike, Roth, Beattie, and all the other heavy hitters would get their due anyway - they were the lions, and weren't going anywhere, with or without one year of BASS. In fact, for the rest of the decade you couldn't swing a cat without hitting something by Updike, or some kind of minimalist Carver clone, but James Ferry, whose story was as serious and moving as anyone else's despite its pedigree, would possibly never get a chance like this again. And it's true: he vanished into the weeds, this story the only evidence of his literary existence I can find. But it's enough. People - mostly Gardner fans and BASS collectors - still find this story and respond to it, and that's all any writer can hope for.
As for Gardner. In the fall of 1982, not long after this collection (and Mickelsson's Ghosts) was published, days before he would be married, John Gardner died in a motorcycle accident in northern Pennsylvania. There's a small cultish following with its own web ring, and his books go in and out of print depending on mood. There's a lot more to say, and I don't have time right now; maybe I'll get to it later...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)