Ropes of Sand

Not Everyone Can Relate

Thoughts & Thinkings from Over There, Ohio:

Ohio heat's like Iowa heat. Only there are hills here in the way of the mirages. If it can be said we live where our belongings reside, I'm now a resident of Beechmont Storage, where I'll get a month free because the owner's son slept on my couch one night in 2002. And it is from nearby unit 611 that I write: As I U-hauled, I was thinking around on stories that seem to me fashioned to feel quickly ended even if they aren't - we're headed out before we knew we were in there. Almost all of the stories in Ann Beattie's collection, Where You'll Find Me, are fast like this. And a number of Mary Robison's too. (Tell Me, for example, which is a collection of 30 fast-ass stories.) The Junot Diaz collection, Drown, reminded me that not all fast-ass stories are fast-ass in quite the same way. "Drown," for example, is paced slowly. It's a bit of a meanderer. But I leave that story with the same feeling: that I could have stayed, I would have stayed, I'd have liked to have stayed. And then there is Lydia Davis, the quickest of the guns. Almost No Memory is a book for which I've imagined a series of other titles, all of them including the words Almost and No and Idea. It strikes me that this approach (the quickie) is one that would not fly in workshop, but that isn't my concern. I'm stuck wondering why it flies with me. These four books are four of my favorites, though I don't feel satisfied by any of them. Maybe that is what I am like. Or maybe it's about the grace involved in the compression of a story's anxiety. Or, a fear of commitment. Not something, apparently, you get to the bottom of in a ten hour haul.

There's this Devendra Banhart lyric, "Not everyone can relate to what you and I appreciate." That's something else I've been thinking about. As in, what to think about anonymous's and the growing frequency of their angry visits to the blog. A real pack of charmers.

posted by SAS @ Monday, July 25, 2005