at the emerging writers network they’re doing this thing, short story month, where they talk about short stories they like. they have a logo and everything, and guest contributors, and then other people are doing it on their own soapboxes, so i figured i would do one on mine.
i choose linh dinh, particularly his story “what’s showing” from his collection blood and soap.
it’s a mystery to me why linh dinh isn’t better known than he is. maybe he is better known than i know he is, among poets, for example, for his poetry. maybe he isn’t as well known for his fiction because his reputation as a poet colors readings of his fiction, makes poems of his stories in his readers’ minds. his stories could be accused of being prose poems.
like “what’s showing,” from his collection blood and soap. it’s a series of short descriptions of movies that i don’t think are showing or ever actually shown. here is one:
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1996) 1 hr. 10 min. This Chinese flick has nothing to do with the noir classic by James M. Cain or the two American movies of the same name. Instead, it features a genial mailman who always rings twice at the six hundred-plus houses in his daily round for nearly forty years before he retires. (PG) ****
the reviews i saw of this book compared dinh to borges and calvino, and i think those comparisons are apt (i might add daniil kharms as well), but there’s something else to these stories, a very particular kind of “outsider-ness,” for lack of a better term. in context, linh dinh isn’t just trying to be funny here, it isn’t weirdness for weirdness’ sake. the cumulative effect of “what’s showing,” and really the entire collection, leaves me with the impression that in dinh’s world, his own version of the postman always rings twice is just as likely to exist as cain’s.
same as it ever was
i’ve had this sense since the first time i read his book back in 2004, but last month i had it confirmed for me when i went to a reading he was doing and found out that he actually lives in philadelphia. at the reading i found out he kept a blog called detainees. detainees is full of pictures of philadelphia, of places in philadelphia that i go all the time. i know i go to the places in his photographs all the time, but in the photographs i don’t recognize them. he makes the familiar unfamiliar. if that sounds cliche then probably no one has made the familiar unfamiliar to you lately or ever.