Before I heard about the subject of this piece from the Guardian UK, I had already thought of it, for the first time that I especially remember in a bar in Buffalo: when a girl whom I was talking to refused my offer of a mix cd because she already had enough mix cds, I told her that that was ok because I don't pay enough attention to new music these days to offer what I feel like counts as an engaged mix cd anyway, and what (shifting here to the contemplative register) I would really like to do was offer people a Short Story Mixtape, a book of short stories that I had personally curated for someone's linear enjoyment. Zadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides had done it; why not bring their fun to the masses? The girl at the bar told me that she didn't like short stories, saying that if something was going to be short it should just be a poem and if it were going to be long it should just grow a pair and be a novel. But! The people who brought us the Kindle are now bringing us the download-alone short story, which means that my idea (and really, it's an obvious idea, I don't want to sound like those people in the Windows 7 commercials) could be a reality.
The people in that Guardian article don't actually think that a Short Story Mixtape is a "good idea", actually, because they don't, stricto sensu, seem to think that mix cds are a good idea, at least not as a courtship device, which is the most famous and time-honored use for the mix cd (they specifically mention putting in "some ruggedly attractive soul by including The Song of Solomon", which is like putting Let's Get it On in your mix cd). But not all mix cds need be amorous. I agree much more with the sentiment later in the article, the joy that one would feel in being one's own anthologist. They suggest putting the Death of Ivan Ilych in juxtaposition with At the Tolstoy Museum, which is I guess like putting Steal My Sunshine right after More More More. Or you could do mood themed ones, like "Rainy Day" or "Road Trip" or "Party Time", all of which I am pretty sure I have made mix cds themed to. I guess it would be tricky to do the last one as a Short Story Mixtape -- it would have to be kind of a quiet party, for one thing -- but the other two would work well.
Rainy Day Mixtape
Axolotl by Julio Cortazar
Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov
The Lady with the Little Dog by Anton Chekhov
Auggie Wren's Christmas Story by Paul Auster
Road Trip
A Choice of Accommodations by Jhumpa Lahiri
Nevada by John Updike
Under the Rose by Thomas Pynchon (only if it's a really far trip, though)
Tyrants Destroyed by Vladimir Nabokov
Yeah, I know, two Nabokovs. But every mix cd I ever made, road tripping, partying or rainy daying had a song on it by Spencer Krug, so somebody was bound to be on there a few times. But the Short Story Mixtape is fun! What kind of moods, and what kinds of stories, would you guys make?
Showing posts with label Short Stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Short Stories. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Friday, July 31, 2009
Nervous Summer
And but so. I have spent most of the last two months, in which I have not been blogging, being nervous. I have spent hours and hours in front of the ESPN network's Baseball Tonight program, not paying attention to them and instead focusing, with Great Mindfulness, on the pains in my stomach and wondering how much of them were psychic and how much somatic. It was, I began to notice, an almost wholly situation-independent case of nerves; no matter how pleasant or un- things would seem to be, I would become maximum level nervous, and dream up reasons to be so. It made me nervous that I hadn't gotten into any schools, for a while; then it made me really nervous that I had gotten into NYU. It made me nervous that the one of the dogs we live with developed a cough. It made me nervous that Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz were revealed to have taken steroids in 2003. Anything made me nervous. It was a nervous few months.
I started to notice that there were a few homey things that soothed my nerves to total satisfaction. One was going to the supermarket; one was listening to John Sterling call Yankees games. And a big, generic, booky thing, that I learned from the Summer of Nerves, was the incredible therapeutic power of the Fat Book of Short Stories. The particular Fat Book of Short Stories that I have been seeking solace in is the Early Stories of John Updike, but based on some dabbling in Nabokov and Flannery O'Connor, I think that others can work as well. Novels (most novels, anyway; not, say, Proust, on whom more soon) can be tempestuous relationships; they are capitalist little monsters, committed to dynamism. Things should have changed greatly from one chapter to the next in the novel. Take, say, Mansfield Park, a great book by Jane Austen, that makes enormous changes in both tone and pace. At the time in life in which I read Mansfield Park, I read a lot at a Starbucks while I waited for my brother Pete to finish his driving lessons. And it sort of jerks around: Fanny always seems at the point of being denied the life she wants, and the narrative takes some time off for class satire. Or, things are speeding along, and then we get the very long, very excellent, but very disruptive focus on the play that Fanny's cousins put on. Not quite a soothing element.
The Fat Books of Short Stories, however, are little pieces of stasis. Very little happens, and it happens beautifully, exquisitely. The well-formed short story tends to have one action, one Thing That This is the Story About; and the action is surrounded by a murmur of beautifully pitched observation, framing our action and delighting us. Especially in a writer like Updike, whose capaciousness allows for infinite gradations of tone, or one like O'Connor, whose singleness of purpose provides the same, we can return, story after story, to our Fat Book and find ourselves right where we were, and, provided that this is an author we like, we find ourselves just where we want to be. My nervous summer began with me reading 2666 on a beach, with its swooping plot and jagged contours; and hopefully, the nervous part of that summer will end here, with Updike and his fat book of beautifully considered, beautifully same moments.
Incidentally, I am only about a third of the way through my Updike book, which only goes about two fifths through Updike's career, but my favorite stories, for those of you wanting to get a toe (soothingly) wet, are: Pigeon Feathers, which has a magnificent final sentence; Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth; A Trillion Feet of Gas; and Twin Beds in Rome. So, for all of you who wondering what my favorite Updikes from about before 1960 were: there you are.
I started to notice that there were a few homey things that soothed my nerves to total satisfaction. One was going to the supermarket; one was listening to John Sterling call Yankees games. And a big, generic, booky thing, that I learned from the Summer of Nerves, was the incredible therapeutic power of the Fat Book of Short Stories. The particular Fat Book of Short Stories that I have been seeking solace in is the Early Stories of John Updike, but based on some dabbling in Nabokov and Flannery O'Connor, I think that others can work as well. Novels (most novels, anyway; not, say, Proust, on whom more soon) can be tempestuous relationships; they are capitalist little monsters, committed to dynamism. Things should have changed greatly from one chapter to the next in the novel. Take, say, Mansfield Park, a great book by Jane Austen, that makes enormous changes in both tone and pace. At the time in life in which I read Mansfield Park, I read a lot at a Starbucks while I waited for my brother Pete to finish his driving lessons. And it sort of jerks around: Fanny always seems at the point of being denied the life she wants, and the narrative takes some time off for class satire. Or, things are speeding along, and then we get the very long, very excellent, but very disruptive focus on the play that Fanny's cousins put on. Not quite a soothing element.
The Fat Books of Short Stories, however, are little pieces of stasis. Very little happens, and it happens beautifully, exquisitely. The well-formed short story tends to have one action, one Thing That This is the Story About; and the action is surrounded by a murmur of beautifully pitched observation, framing our action and delighting us. Especially in a writer like Updike, whose capaciousness allows for infinite gradations of tone, or one like O'Connor, whose singleness of purpose provides the same, we can return, story after story, to our Fat Book and find ourselves right where we were, and, provided that this is an author we like, we find ourselves just where we want to be. My nervous summer began with me reading 2666 on a beach, with its swooping plot and jagged contours; and hopefully, the nervous part of that summer will end here, with Updike and his fat book of beautifully considered, beautifully same moments.
Incidentally, I am only about a third of the way through my Updike book, which only goes about two fifths through Updike's career, but my favorite stories, for those of you wanting to get a toe (soothingly) wet, are: Pigeon Feathers, which has a magnificent final sentence; Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth; A Trillion Feet of Gas; and Twin Beds in Rome. So, for all of you who wondering what my favorite Updikes from about before 1960 were: there you are.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Short Story COUNTDOWN
So here's another list you all like so much, this time of my favorite short stories. I am not, I think, a short story expert, because I've only read one short story by Chekhov and that was in ninth grade. But whatever, I'm not a Judy Blume expert or a Robert Herrick expert either, and lord knows that didn't stop me from talking about them. Top five:
6. Josephine the Singer, or, the Mouse Folk, by Franz Kafka -- So I think there are basically three kinds of short stories: short stories that basically do what novels do, but shortly; short stories that have a plot culminating in some sort of gimmick, like stories by O. Henry; and then there are stories like the ones by Kafka and Borges and Steven Millhauser, that are all gimmick and almost no plot. Like the one by Millhauser all about the town that is a copy of the town that the narrator lives in, or Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which is all about an encyclopedia. There is not really a plot, as such, to my favorite Kafka story, Josephine the Singer, or, the Mouse Folk. It is all about the one mouse, in the mouse community who wants to sing songs, and the slow-building resentment of the rest of the mice. It is a great slow burn, of mouse resentment, and it's weird, and, for Kafka, it's surprisingly undepressing. Or rather, still pretty depressing, but more depressing about mice than about us, which kind of lets us off the hook.
5. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl --This story absolutely freaked me out when I read it as a kid, because at one point, the narrator interrupts his story about a guy who uses yoga to see through the backs of cards and win money to tell you what might happen next, and what the narrator tells you is that Henry -- a slightly unscrupulous but generally charming guy -- may just look at himself in the mirror and see, with his yogic powers, a blood clot, and then fall over dead. What actually happens is that Henry becomes a philanthropist, and founds orphanages all over the place. Imagine being twelve and having this author butt in to tell you that his characters survive only because of his caprices, that he could at any minute blood clot any one of them, even the titular hero of his "wonderful story". Yikes. This one gets on the list on sheer oomph.
3. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri -- This is a pretty good example of the short story as a mini-novel: it's got an interesting, metaphor-ready situation (the main guy is a tour guide whose other job is translating diseases for a doctor who doesn't know English) and then a few hours' worth of emotionally charged plot. Not a lot "happens" happens, but with Lahiri's quiet prose, not a lot happens very very strikingly.
2. Menelaiad by John Barth -- This thing, which is seven levels of story going in and then seven more exploding out, is a bravura retelling of some of the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey, told by Menelaus. Of the stories on this list, except for the creepy authorial interlude in Henry Sugar, this one has the most going for it in terms of short story gimmick, what with its nested stories and classical references and such. And in the middle of all of that is the most plangent thing I think I've ever read -- in the middle of yet another narrative three-ring-circus about his slightly embarrassing marital life, Menelaus breaks through half a dozen layers of story to ask the reader, "Why don't they call her Helen of Sparta?" It there were ever a claim on which to hang my nerdy hat, ladies and gentlemen, there it is.
1. Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov -- The season is cloudy and dull, but the story is wonderful. This is not a short story that's built like a novel, but a short story built like someone talking to you about a novel. It is also elegaic and full of delightful sentences and remorseless analysis, which is why I like it so much. I think that it strikes a mood of elegy, in fact, that is uniquely suited to a short story -- such a novel would get maudlin, such poems have too much the element of performance about them (see Dr. Johnson on Lycidas, e.g.) -- and makes it my favorite instance of what a short story can do.
6. Josephine the Singer, or, the Mouse Folk, by Franz Kafka -- So I think there are basically three kinds of short stories: short stories that basically do what novels do, but shortly; short stories that have a plot culminating in some sort of gimmick, like stories by O. Henry; and then there are stories like the ones by Kafka and Borges and Steven Millhauser, that are all gimmick and almost no plot. Like the one by Millhauser all about the town that is a copy of the town that the narrator lives in, or Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which is all about an encyclopedia. There is not really a plot, as such, to my favorite Kafka story, Josephine the Singer, or, the Mouse Folk. It is all about the one mouse, in the mouse community who wants to sing songs, and the slow-building resentment of the rest of the mice. It is a great slow burn, of mouse resentment, and it's weird, and, for Kafka, it's surprisingly undepressing. Or rather, still pretty depressing, but more depressing about mice than about us, which kind of lets us off the hook.
5. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl --This story absolutely freaked me out when I read it as a kid, because at one point, the narrator interrupts his story about a guy who uses yoga to see through the backs of cards and win money to tell you what might happen next, and what the narrator tells you is that Henry -- a slightly unscrupulous but generally charming guy -- may just look at himself in the mirror and see, with his yogic powers, a blood clot, and then fall over dead. What actually happens is that Henry becomes a philanthropist, and founds orphanages all over the place. Imagine being twelve and having this author butt in to tell you that his characters survive only because of his caprices, that he could at any minute blood clot any one of them, even the titular hero of his "wonderful story". Yikes. This one gets on the list on sheer oomph.
3. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri -- This is a pretty good example of the short story as a mini-novel: it's got an interesting, metaphor-ready situation (the main guy is a tour guide whose other job is translating diseases for a doctor who doesn't know English) and then a few hours' worth of emotionally charged plot. Not a lot "happens" happens, but with Lahiri's quiet prose, not a lot happens very very strikingly.
2. Menelaiad by John Barth -- This thing, which is seven levels of story going in and then seven more exploding out, is a bravura retelling of some of the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey, told by Menelaus. Of the stories on this list, except for the creepy authorial interlude in Henry Sugar, this one has the most going for it in terms of short story gimmick, what with its nested stories and classical references and such. And in the middle of all of that is the most plangent thing I think I've ever read -- in the middle of yet another narrative three-ring-circus about his slightly embarrassing marital life, Menelaus breaks through half a dozen layers of story to ask the reader, "Why don't they call her Helen of Sparta?" It there were ever a claim on which to hang my nerdy hat, ladies and gentlemen, there it is.
1. Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov -- The season is cloudy and dull, but the story is wonderful. This is not a short story that's built like a novel, but a short story built like someone talking to you about a novel. It is also elegaic and full of delightful sentences and remorseless analysis, which is why I like it so much. I think that it strikes a mood of elegy, in fact, that is uniquely suited to a short story -- such a novel would get maudlin, such poems have too much the element of performance about them (see Dr. Johnson on Lycidas, e.g.) -- and makes it my favorite instance of what a short story can do.
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