~ Naoko Matsubara (via)
My story “Crock” is in the Celebrity Issue of Northville Review. It is another — the first written, actually — from the series of tall tale stories I’ve been working on. Hopefully, they’ll all be available together in book form sooner or later.
~ Bob de Graaf, “Wings”
(via)
~ Bryan Nash Gill, Hemlock 82
(via plsj)
Brian Kiteley’s earlier novel Still Life With Insects has been a favorite of mine for years, but in some ways I think I liked The River Gods even more. The novel develops in fragments, traversing about 1000 years of history in a variety of voices. At first it seems to be offering a portrait of a town, but as it goes on that pictures becomes much broader until it’s a complex image of an entire country seen through a local lens — as recognizable historical figures alternate with the author’s own family and, presumably, more fully fictional narrators, Northampton, Mass. becomes embedded in national and global politics, philosophy and literature, the broader American story of destruction and violence in the name success, and cultural changes from witchcraft trials to the sexual revolution and AIDS. What the voices share is a sense of a loss — some of them are, in fact, ghosts — and a connection to Northampton whether lifelong or fleeting, whether they are in town at the time of narration or at war in Africa or traveling in France. The River Gods reminded me a great deal of Angus Peter Campbell’s Invisible Islands, another story of place told in fragments that also makes what seems at first look an out of the way, irrelevant place and establishes it at the center of a much bigger world.
The unnamed narrator of Lee Rourke’s novel The Canal sets out to embrace boredom, saying, “It is the power of everyday boredom that compells people to do things — even if that something is nothing.” That tension between boredom as drive to action and boredom as stasis was the core of the novel for me, because as the narrator tries to repeat his (in)actions each day — sitting on the same bench by the same stretch of canal, with the same woman and watching the same swans and office workers — he struggles against changes internal and external alike. There’s a recurring focus on transportation, from the airplanes he is a knowledgeable enthusiast of, to the canal itself, to cars and buses and even walking. And all of those, in one way or another, become destructive — whether on the large scale like 9/11, or more localized acts of violence. The narrator embraces boredom and aims for stasis, but he also says, “ And as our world becomes increasingly boring, as the future progresses into a quagmire of nothingness, our world will becoming increasingly more violent. It is an impulse that controls us. It is an impulse we cannot ignore.” Violence is the inevitable outcome of ANY action, even the action of inaction, and all progress and change are creeping toward destruction in time. On the other hand, DENYING boredom leads one to “superfluous activity,” eventually violent, so we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. The best hope is an infinite recursion of inactivity and self-extraction, such as the narrator tries to create by sitting at the canal, but unlike the static loop he manages to create in a game of Pong (probably my favorite passage of the novel), actual stasis isn’t easy to come by.
I wondered, while reading, what a truly “static” novel would feel like, how dull it might be, and what kind of action it might lead me to as a reader. Because The Canal itself ISN’T boring, ratcheting up its sparse plot and raising the stakes as the story proceeds. Maybe a story arisen from boredom cannot succeed if it is actually the enactment of boredom. Yet I was always aware that by the novel’s logic some destruction is necessitated by the actions of writing and reading — a violence against the “real” world, perhaps, committed by stripping away its trappings to create something so tidy and constrained as a novel. It never let me forget that it was constructed, not something natural, because of its nameless, mostly veiled characters (eventually represented by empty, underlined spaces where names are conspicuously absent). As readers, we demand forward momentum and the familiar trappings of drama even from a novel about avoiding them, and the tension of being suspended in such a contradiction pushes us to ask new questions and reach new ideas. Like an infinite recursion of Pong which isn’t quite a “game” any longer, and is waiting for us to find a new word.
A bear got into an empty car, honked the horn and then sent it rolling 125 feet into a thicket, with the bear still inside, a Colorado family said. Seventeen-year-old Ben Story said he and his family were asleep in their Larkspur home, 30 miles south of Denver, when the bear managed to open the unlocked door of his 2008 Toyota Corolla early Friday and climbed inside.
A peanut butter sandwich left on the back seat is probably what attracted the bear, Story said.
@ NPR
It was, of course, only a matter of time.
As others have said, the pieces collected in American Gymnopédies aren’t “stories” so much as moments, perhaps the germs of stories or even the longing for stories. I liked how each moment is grounded bodily and materially, because for such short fragments most of them offer a real sense of physicality and presence and that prevents the collection from becoming too ethereal even while it is otherwise ambiguous. At the same time, most of the stories feel like moments en route to somewhere else – characters look over fences to long for what’s in the distance, they stop at hotels before reaching their real destination, and they daydream through the dark tunnel of a cereal box. So each story ends up feeling both grounded and untethered at the same time, an alluring and sometimes jarring sensation, and one that is increased by the book’s lack of geographic detail. Although each story is named for a city, there’s rarely any detail of those cities offered so I found myself wondering what about a moment was specifically “Duluth” or “Atlanta” or “Boston.” There’s an occasional street name but that’s about it, so rather than the cultural details of place we’re offered a purely experiential landscape, one in which cities only exist as our private, minute memories of and encounters with them and in which one place is more or less the same as another except for what might happen to us there (if anything does). At first that lack of clear geography felt like a missed opportunity to me, and I wished Scott Garson had made these places more particularly themselves, and though it stopped bothering me as I fell into the daydream state of the collection, that’s what I mean by a “longing” for stories. These moments almost seem to wish they meant more, or were clearer, and I felt like I was trying to make sense of a larger landscape by focusing intensely a whole bunch of individual points that may or may not be connected. My impulse as a reader was to project my own knowledge of these cities onto the stories, trying to fill in the gaps, but they resist that so firmly that I never stopped feeling adrift, and got used to the feeling instead.