shorts
My reading of late has been nothing but short stories. A recent sub. to the N'Yawker has insured I will get no long-term reading done. For a long time, I did not want to read short stories. I don't know why exactly. I get like that, moody about reading. So far about 4 NYers have arrived, and the most memorable story, and by far one of the weirdest has been "The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain" by Yoko Ogawa in the Sept. 6, 2004 issue. And that includes a pretty harrowing story by Joyce Carol Oates a week later. But the Ogawa is my preference by far. I've never heard of Ogawa, but in looking her up, and if I'm understanding this correctly, it appears her son, a journalist was killed this summer in Iraq. My sincere condolences if that is the case.
I don't know if its a translation issue, but certainly the few Japanese stories I've read, ones by Japanese authors that have been translated into English, are simply some of the best, yet weirdest writing I've ever encountered. Some of you will remember my long and immovable reading jag around Haruki Murakami. Jesus that was nearly irrecoverable. All I could read was Murakami. Every other book I picked up was so horribly not Murakami that I had not choice but to hurl it across the room. Luckily Haruki wrote five or six great books so it kept me busy for a while. But then I'd finished one of his later works, South of the Border..." and suddenly I didn't want to read any more about disappearing wives, making spaghetti while gangsters called on the phone, or parallel dimensions that seep sickly into our own. I wanted to break his spell but I could not. Every book I picked up sucked. So I just did crossword puzzles and waited him out. It was a long one, but was finally broken by of all things, The Corrections. That book from paragraph one jolted me back into American Fiction Reality. Thank you very much J.Franzen. Your book was a humanitarian effort.
Two story collections of note on the recent docket are: Inventing Victor by Jennifer Bannan, and Animal Crackers, by Hannah Tinti. I was lucky to have met Ms. Bannon and hear her read at the dubiously named Clean Well Lighted Place for Books (it was rather dim and not so freakin' clean to my eye. Just as well. We're not looking for antiseptic book stores are we? We like the Dirty, Dimly Lit Places a lot.) The reading was excellent. Jen hails from Pittsburgh and had somehow found time between working a full time job, and raising a toddler and a brand new baby to write a freakin' collection of short stories and get them published! So what's my excuse again? Holy crap.
This Hannah Tinti book is INSANE! Usually I get upset when I see the same stories that I've tried vainly to write, executed flawlessly and in print, but maybe I'm older, or maybe I can only tip the hat to a young woman who has pulled off some seriously good, surreal shit. There's a bunch of stories about weird goings on at the zoo, and yes, your truly has his own zoo story, one that even, like Tinti, features a giraffe. Tinti's giraffe story though is amazing, beautiful and fantastical. There's one story though in her collection, called "Preservation" that while very moving, complex and well done, also very much reminded me of an old, old story of mine called "Polar World, the Giant Bear," which attempted a smiliar setting and circumstance. "Polar World" was published (sort of) in a Pitt journal called Backspace back in 1984. Friends of mine were running the mag back at Pitt, and I was invited to come help them use up Pitt's money and ultimately crash and burn the journal. I hadn't thought about my Polar World story for years, but Tinti's story had me reaching back, digging through shit until I found on old copy, (scanned for your nostalgic pleasure here). 
A collectors item to be sure – many luminaries are included in it, including Mr. Armstrong, who I've mentioned before; the ubiquitous MC; Linda Cooper, an old friend and talented artist who I've woefully lost touch with; and even my first writing teacher from Pitt, the elusive and amazing Dennis Bartel, who once let me line-edit his novel, High'd Up, a work that should have immediately been published to rave reviews and longstanding cult status, but to my knowledge has never seen the light of day.
Anyway, I mention any of this only because until now, your humble narrator has gone unpublished in his literary life. Yes, there was Backspace , and who could forget my own xeroxed rag, Moon Spoon June? I also had some drawings and essays printed in an obscure magazine called Critical Mass, and no, it had nothing to do with bicycle traffic jams -- again all some 20 years ago.
But soft! The recent exciting news for me is indeed the impending publication of my article, "Money" (about a bartender who hears one Pink Floyd song too many coming from the jukeboxes in his life,) in the upcoming issue of Kitchen Sink, a beautifully produced culture mag outta Oakland. The good folks there have published my friend Mike Larkin ("your source for writing solutions... ") a few times, including his excellent piece on our beloved C.Kinder, who's book The Last Mountain Dancer is now OUT THERE for your bar-brawling pleasure. Kitchen Sink have been quite magnanimous with me, god bless 'em. They seem to be a talented and energetic group of fairly young folks who really know their writing, editing, music, and have gotten it together to put out a magazine that's getting a lot of attention and buzz in various circles. And now they're either kind enough, or misguided enough to have agreed to publish yet another of my articles in the issue after next, (KS9), this one about, what else? Death and Costco. Obscure collector's item from the future? Perhaps. But its something I've been after, being "in print," a somehow legitimizing and certainly exciting piece of news.
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