Notsolinear: Tumbling the Small Stuff

May
23rd

Thu

“as sweet and stupid as life itself.” … Oldenburg exhibit at MoMA.

May
22nd

Wed

Rabbit Speed

You’re still doing groundhog speed.

You need to kick it up to rabbit speed.

Found four in the driveway this morning while doing yard work…

May
21st

Tue

Was supposed to be in NYC drinking with Diana, but PATH suspended service and so I wound up in a Short Hills dress store. Doncha know.

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Short Order Cook

He’s taking orders. Make up your mind. You wanna go in on a half-dozen squirrel with me?

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When I entered the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, I wouldn’t have called my work experimental. After ten years of painting, that is to say ten years of using an abstract, invented language, writing stories was the closest I had come to working in the realm of “realism.” It was the most direct I had ever been in my art. Perhaps the most direct I had ever been. But, as I learned from the comments of my peers in workshop (“this isn’t a story,” “this is poetry,” “what is this”), my writing was something other than what we referred to as literary realism. By which I mean, the writing many have come to believe most accurately represents life.

—

Susan Steinberg - What Happened to Experimental Writing?

This article makes me remember what I like about writing.

#Writing

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And then there’s the literal echo — Saunders’s language, the tricky rhythm of modern colloquialisms that’s often so beautifully awkward — in the words of that Times piece, it’s frequently “a kind of heightened bureaucratese” — can feel gimmicky in story after story, the sheen wearing off a bit. These criticisms — the pace, the shtick — are ones I and many, many others have leveled before all sorts of short story collections — and it’s there that we loop back around to the silly question of whether a writer who only produces short stories can really be considered the pinnacle of the profession. The question makes me cringe, for reasons I can’t quite articulate — maybe it’s because it does feel like a weird, insular, overly prescriptive bout of literary navel-gazing. Or maybe it’s because I’m beginning to suspect that it’s true.

—

Elizabeth Minkel, “George Saunders and the Question of Greatness.”

Here’s what makes me bananas about essays like this:

One of the reasons I walked away from fiction writing after I finished my MFA was because while I still cared about writing the best fiction that I could, I was SO fucking sick and tired of worrying about achievements, about pinnacles, about the Best American Whatever.

And I’m not going to lie: It felt really, really good to not care about all of that anymore.

Then, like many aspiring fictioneers of the early 21st, like the author of this piece, I read “Sea Oak.” I took note of voice, that aspect of craft that’s basically the Force, right?

And I thought: “Holy shit, this guy is having a GOOD TIME.”

Then I thought: “I WANT TO HAVE FUN, TOO.”

And I was back, for good. Thanks, George Saunders, the other writers you led me to, massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, and thousands of other little dumb things that conspired to pull it all back together.

So even though it’s not really fair, like, AT ALL? Even though I know that critical discussion of literary work and its context is important? Pieces like this, like that Gawker one, they just make me want to shout gibberish at my monitor…and then head down to Rite Aid to see if any of the cashiers look like Bernie. (I already know there’s one at CVS that does.)