Onward and Downward

There's an interview with Margaret Atwood today in the New York Times Magazine which is perhaps the most boring interview with a writer I've ever seen. She discusses household debt and national debt. I'm not kidding. Idea: What wood hast thou shat today which one namest gold?

Reading: What Stories Are: Narrative Theory and Interpretation, just for the fun of it. Thomas M. Leitch. Best quote so far: "The Primary purpose of the work of art is to provide rules within which a given meaning can operate."

Reading: Decided to read Will Self's fabulous book My Idea of Fun for the third time. It's the sort of book that should be read once ever year or two. Get it and tell me how you liked it.

19 Knives

I've just finished 19 Knives, which this week is sort of a miracle since I've been working non stop with my editor the brilliant Andrew Steinmetz. He raises all sorts of questions and he and I seem to differ a good deal on how much we must offer the reader. Where I go gaga on Pynchon and Self I suspect Andrew would not. And that's good. It forces me to be real, real clear.

I want to review Jarman's book, but first I'm still shaking off the damp malaise caused by the suicide of David Foster Wallace. Tragic is all. Depression, chemical imbalance, it all must suck in the long term. Evidently he was on some very heavy medication and then had undergone electro-shock therapy. He was a spark of fun, observant, ballsy. The literary world has lost a diamond. McSweeneys is posting tributes, and a few of his articles are easily found on the net for those who want a taste.

Ok onto Mark Anthony Jarman. Preface, I picked up his newest recently, one of those books you see and your tongue falls out, and because you have no money you cut off your least favorite two fingers as collateral so you can take the book home that night. 19 Knives came out in 2000 and it blends slightly earier narrative form with the jumpier form he now embraces. It's fantastic stuff. The first in the book tells it all, "Guided by Voices" in which a man recounts stories about his friend, John Stark Lee. What is so wonderful about Jarman is how he throws in the universe when needed, and often when not needed and he cups his hands around the contradictions and like a potter forms them into a discursive form. Don't look for teleological plot advancement here -- and in this respect it's a huge antidote to formulaic/New Yorker types of stories.

What really sends me into a cheek chewing frenzy are his sentences. Try out these for size:
"Margaret Atwood says, Maybe my message is bleak because it needs to be bleak."
or
"Black payphone like a gun to my head I stand there, my feet disconnecting from the flat earth, getting air. The phone smells like vinegar and someone has said, I could falll for you in a big way."
or in Burn Man on a Texas Porch:
"Where are my lost eyebrows? Did they fly up, up, up, or drift down as delicate ash, floating like some unformed haiku on a winter lake? My eyebrows got the fuck out of Dodge. Flames went up and down me as they pleased; fire didn't have to obey pecking order or stop-work orders. Kids in pyjamas watched me burn like Guy Fawkes, watched me dwell in possibilities.

Yep. E pluribus unum. Almost every page, lines where rubber hits the tarmac, tears up the tarmac, rips the road asunder. There will be blood and guts and the spiked punch of freewriting.

If anything, Jarman makes a case for narration that does not conform. It's not idea driven, say as the work of Barthelme, nor is it as machine gun as Leonard Michaels, but it's there, spot on, tight in its looseness. He writes at one point, "You narrow the universe to one person, knowing you cannot, knowing there's a price for that." That, my dear readers, is a review of Jarman in a single sentence.

The Journey Prize Stories

The Journey Prize Stories selected by Adderson, Bezmozgis, and Brand leave something to be desired. We may be looking at the most prestigious Canadian short story award (I sure wouldn't mind getting one) but in a way you'd be hard put to understand why these and not others are included. Caroline Adderson said she wouldn't mind giving medals to every writer who's work was submitted, "for actually caring about literature." I like that statement and give her a medal in return for her promotion of the hard work it takes to craft a decent short story. David Bezmozgis says these are "truly among the best I'd read in recent memory." Maybe he's not been reading that many short stories lately? Yes I know, it's called hyperbole for publicity. Still, I tend to agree with his choices more than I do Dionne Brand who selects as best the one's I'd cut first. Nonetheless, I agree with Brand's short introduction in part. She writes that "A short story today...has to summon the unused and ignored capacities for thought and emotion which mass media finds insufficient. To use an idea from the French philosopher Baudrillard, the short story must disrupt the circuitry of the hyperreal." Yeah, we can discuss the violence of the narrative, there's a real point here that unfortunately the stories don't embrace.

I've been, as I mentioned in the Atlantic reviews earlier in my blog, trying to accurately describe the generic style that is infecting so many stories these days. They strike me as influenced by Joy Williams, but without her overabundance of detail. The writers add information for who knows what reason, probably to suggest place, which becomes filigree on plots that sort of ramble all over the place until finally there is a bit of emotional reflection at the end. This, evidently, is supposed to somehow give us that twinkle of insight so common to New Yorker Stories. After a while doesn't it all become generic redundancy? They can do it too, well so what. Every artist can draw perfectly from photographs, and the first question we ask them in college is, 'now what?'

Do you remember Barthes, and bp nichols, and Leonard Michaels, and Amy Hempel, and even some of Atwood, or Hemingway or Trevor or so many others whobegan to redefine what literature and the short story could be? Have we forgotten or ignored these writers? Have the lessons of Barthelme really been lost?

I think we have a duty to push the art of the short story ahead into new territory. We should be taking risks with form, plot, characterization, language, and everything else you can think of. Who says we need a twist at the end, what rule requires us to textually speed up the last couple paragraphs to signal an ending? I like artist Sol Lewitt's quote: Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.

Yeah, we could easily get stuck.

Certainly anthologies as are found in this book reflect this conservative taste, or worse all the works submitted were even safer and these are the best available.

Ok briefly noted: Swimming in Zanzibar, Krista Foss: Her first piece of published fiction. Example: "They passed men in white cotton shirts walking alongside the road who let the downpour soak through to their skin, splash their cheeks and eyes as if it was air, as if it was not tangible." See my point...details that don't mean much, predictable words and images let alone our debate on the present infinitive.
Twelve Versions of Lech, Andrew Borkowski: One of the better stories although it seems his idea of the anti-velocitarians is based on Bolano's Visceral Realists. A boy admires an artist who is of a different generation and era. Memorable sentence "When you get down to nothing, that's when you got something." OZY, Craig Boyko: The other good story here. Three letter winner initials on a video game prompt discussion into identity. The best in the book, I think.

When I say better or good in reference to this collection, I mean potential. There's nothing here I'd hand out to classes as examples.

How Eunice Got Her Baby, Nicholas Ruddock: straightshooting, straightforward. The plot is interesting here. Probably third in the ranking. Respite, Pasha Malla: Struggles with a lot, doesn't quite nail it. Trying very very hard to make us feel. The main character is a writer is named Womack who lives with his girlfriend/partner. Check out this sentence. "The writer Womak used to live with a woman named Adriane whom he had that autumn begun to introduce to people as his partner..." Ooch. Begins to sound like the writer Womak used to live with was a woman... So we back track and read again and again until we get the point (we already know he's a writer so why repeat?) Then we move on to the even more convoluted. Stardust, Jean Van Loon: Is this a joke? A play on Carver? Man, wife, kids fishing find foot in river. Man and wife fight. "So Much Water so Close to Home" and so close to our memory. Ok, Altman's movie wasn't brilliant, but it was pretty darn good. Worst twist in the story, man gets blown up and the way it's done is how he cannot see the tank and he doesn't know that he'll soon be blown up. Yep, all future. Chilly Girl, Rebecca Rosenblum: I really wanted to like this best of all. Angela Carter wannabe. It typifies the problem of not pushing the idea far enough. It's soooo safe it's depressing. I wanted to see the cold girl cry crystal tears to eat ice cubes to warm up. No nothing so daring, and even this isn't very daring. The start is good, but then it all melts. I don't think this is a knocker of an end line, "She sat down and waited to see what would happen next." My Hungarian Sister, Patricia Robertson: Another try real hard story. Girl makes up imaginary pal. I think there is an award in Canada for literature that focuses on Hungarian history or Ukrainian history. This, with the bits of information, seems like it's in fulfillment of a project, or the award. Alice Petersen, After Summer: writer still in school working with Birdsell, evidently. Less a story, more of a ramble. Some nice word crunches at times. Yep potential. Nicole Dixon, High-Water Mark: Grrr, I hate it when something really quite unnecessary to the story at the end takes on mamouth significance for no reason except the author feels something was supposed perform that function. Here, the hat came back, the hat came back. The writing is a struggle to meld the realistic with metaphorical. For example, "Lauren's there, instead of Mom. 'She went in a helicopter.' I am made of rain. I got to my room to change." I like the idea but when combined with what people wouldn't say 'helicopter??' then it becomes too much like the idea taking over. The Curve of theEarth, Grand Buday: I've read this before, didn't find it thrilling then, don't find it thrilling now. It's so tell us everything, especially how everyone felt. There's so much told, I felt I didn't have to really read it because there was nothing I could offer. If it's explained that much what's the purpose of the reader?