as whoever is reading this knows, i have a collection of short stories coming out this autumn and only this autumn. i’ve figured out how to talk about it since mentioning i hadn’t figured out how to talk about it, but i don’t feel like talking about it right now.
as pretty much no one knows, i’ve spent the last month reading an extremely long manuscript, almost war and peace long. the reason no one knows is because the author won’t let me talk about it. i figure i can get away with this much.
last night i talked about the completed manuscript for the first time with the author of the really long novel, and i opened with two things:
- this is hands down one of my top ten books of all time, and
- reading this makes me realize i will never do anything like it.
that first will be self-justifying once the book is published, but the second is the kind of thing that’s gotten me in trouble before, because people (i mean writers) tend to take a statement like that one of two ways:
- i don’t want money for my writing, or
- i’m minor league.
with regard to the former, i had this conversation at my first party in grad school. the general consensus was that no one should take less than thirty grand for a book. i said i’d trade mine for a case of beer. one close friend said he’d sell his for twenty bux. (he’s sober.) i’ve now published three and have yet to get that case of beer. my close friend has published one and got paid so much he could afford to use that twenty dollars to buy me a case of beer every night for the rest of my life.
which reminds me of a story. also set in grad school. i was peeing in a public restroom, as were several of my other classmates, when george saunders, who was our professor, walked into the restroom.
“can you imagine the future of literature if a bomb went off in here right now?” he said.
i’m sure i’m not the only one of the rest of us who was flattered.
“it’d be set back, like, fifteen minutes,” george said.
which brings me to the latter of the reactions to my statement above, the one about being “minor league.” i’m not the first to point out that minor and major are not the same in literature as in baseball. think of it more like music. my books are short and they let me do whatever i want style-wise, as opposed to the big (as in size and issues), where you owe the reader something else. i don’t want to get into it, just trust me.
everybody has a posse
so, to sum up: minor is like radiohead; major is like hannah montana. except in the case of the friend of mine who wrote the big book. and anybody else who’s good, major or minor.
okay, this reminds me of one last story. i got invited to read at a small conference, so i went, and i invited my friends to watch me read. i read and it was fine but not spectacular, but in the q and a afterwards, the people who read with me said things about how “experimental writing” is neglected. but fuck that.
that was a joke about radiohead and hannah montana. my sister loves hannah montana.
let’s do it like this: major is thomas pynchon; minor is flannery o’connor. we’ll sort the rest out later.
i really wish i could talk about this major novel i read. so good.
and i was lying about no one knowing. my wife knows i read it. and my brother. but they haven’t read it. i can’t wait ’til they do. and everyone.
speaking of my wife, here’s some minor literature i sent to her:
The saddest man in the world signs stacks and stacks of greeting cards, and distributes them one by one around the city, leaving them in inconspicuous places where people still might find them, in hopes of brightening someone’s day. It’s fucking pathetic.
sappy, i know. i do it all for love.