i’m still reading the bolano, but as i’ve mentioned before, when the weather gets warm my thoughts turn to short stories. actually, what i said before was that when the weather gets warm my thoughts turn to barry hannah, but i think we can all agree that the name barry hannah is synonymous with short stories, meaning, even if he’s only my second place spirit animal, he’s definitely the spirit animal of short fiction. my priorities are fucked.
this time when my thoughts turned to short stories they turned to a very specific collection that i’ve been waiting for for six years now on the basis of a single story. i mean, i read that one story and i decided not to read anything else by the author until he put out a book, because i knew it would be so much fun to read the book when it finally came out, and now it has, and i bought it the day it did, but i’ve been putting it off, ostensibly because of the bolano, but also because, even though i successfully managed to avoid reading any other stories by the author, i made the mistake of reading a number of reviews and interviews, and now i’m a little nervous.
let me type about something different but related for a minute.
did anyone see adam kirsch’s review of antonya nelson’s most recent collection in the new york times a couple months back? i’ve never read anything by antonya nelson, and now probably never will. no offense, antonya nelson, but i can’t when somebody (i mean adam kirsch) said this about your work:
The simplest way to summarize the story is to say it describes a man and a woman having a fight in a bar — the kind of banal but psychologically intricate transaction that is a short story writer’s natural terrain.
i could go on about this forever, but what it would all amount to is i don’t want to ever hang out in a short story writer’s natural terrain. also, i don’t want to read anybody who hangs out in a short story writer’s natural terrain. and i don’t think anybody else does either, which may be at the root of all those claims you hear (if you’re listening) about the short story being dead.
speaking of which, this left me cold. does it seem like the new york times is making a bunch of grand claims this year that are ultimately pretty empty? review me, new york times. i’m writing short stories that strive for greatness a long way from the short story writer’s natural terrain.
and i don’t see the appeal of adam kirsch. i just ignored him when he mostly stuck to poetry criticism (not that i don’t care about poetry criticism; i actually read quite a bit of it, just not the stuff kirsch writes), but when he thinks he’s stepping on my natural terrain he better watch it. and that thing he wrote about keith gessen was bullshit. what was that even supposed to be? maybe if it had been about tao lin it would have made some sense.
you think i’ve gotten off track but you’re wrong i’m just off terrain.
here’s the thing.
who needs nabokov?
i made the mistake of reading reviews and interviews with the writer whose collection i’ve been so excited about, and one of the interviews ended with this:
“The ugly things we tend to deal with… they’re just too gruesome for fiction.”
i’m going to give this book the benefit of the doubt as soon as i’m done with the savage detectives. but shit.
finally, once someone reviewed a journal i had a story in. here is what the reviewer had to say about my contribution:
Christian TeBordo’s lyrically titled “Sweet William, Don’t Even Bother Denying It” has bursts of disjunctive humor but suffers from a first-person narrator hell-bent on bullying both Sweet William and the reader.
that story will be in my collection, by the way. the whole book is on my natural terrain.
my brother and i will discuss bolano again shortly.