Cannery Row

I read this book many months ago. I loved this book. I loved the way it meandered around in it's setting, got lost in anecdotes on characters, anecdotes that went off on tangents, before the story eventually settled on something resembling a plot, dropped it for a while and picked it back up in the end. That plot? Mack and the boys throwing a party for Doc, such a nice guy.



Are stories allowed to do that anymore? Some novels, maybe, but what about short stories? Stewart Dybek comes close in his collection I Sailed with Magellen. Look at "Blue Boy". It's the kind of fiction that punches out a large space for itself, a space larger than needed for the plot that drops in. Or he makes it seem that way. The story is roomy, yet every word counts. I guess the opposite of this, the more commonly accepted story, is one we describe as "tight". Granted, a novel has more room to be loose than a story does, but couldn't there be more loose stories? And what makes them loose? Their focus on setting? Is it that no one cares to read them that much, journals have no room for them, or editors have no patience for them? Or all three? Or any combination of the above?

I suppose the purpose of this post is to ask whether any of you robots could suggest stories similar to those described above, or authors who write such stories. Much appreciated.

From Baxter

I know all of you who took Nancy's workshop still have Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House. I dusted off my copy to revisit a few of his gems. Here's one of 'em from On Defamiliarization that addresses emotion in fiction:

"The fallacy of much fiction is that in any particular moment we are feeling one emotion, when in fact we are feeling many emotions at once, many of them contradictory, such as lust and gloom. But of course lust and gloom often go together, as do depression and cheerfulness. What is a bored ecstasy like? What does one feel in the midst of pessemistic hope? Is there such a thing as furious tenderness? Why are so many psychopaths lovable? The monsters we have all known in our lives are monsters almost by definition because they are often not monsters, and we expect them to be one way, and they turn out to be another. That's why we admitted them into our lives in the first place.

"Psychopaths, afterall, are great charmers. Bad people are good people who have gone on a sort of lifelong spiritual vacation, and who remember to be decent from time to time.

"....Instead of making our narrative events and our characters more colorful, we might make them thicker, more undecidable, more contradictory and unrecognizable."

Congratulations for Peter

I'm doing my part to revive this damn thing because I miss all of you folks, and I wish we conversed more. I read over at the blog-that-shall-not-be-named (because several of us lurk there) that Peter Ho Davies is on the long list for the Booker Prize. Congratulations to Peter!

And here are pieces of a poem (I know that's probably sacrilege to cut a poem into pieces and post it, but I can't help it) by Michael Ondaatje called Burning Hills that I'm posting in the hope it will jump-start this place.

So he came to write again
in the burnt hill region
north of Kingston. A cabin
with mildew spreading down the walls.
Bullfrogs on either side of him.

...

What he brought: a typewriter
tins of ginger ale, cigarettes. A copy of Strangelove
of The Intervals, a postcard of Rousseau's The Dream.
His friends' words were strict as lightning
unclothing the bark of a tree, a shaved hook.
The postcard was a test pattern by the window
through which he saw growing scenery.

...

There is one picture that fuses the five summers.
Eight of them are leaning against a wall
arms around each other
looking into the camera and the sun
trying to smile at the unseen adult photographer
trying against the glare to look 21 and confident.
The summer and friendship will last forever.
Except one who was eating an apple. That was him
oblivious to the significance of the moment.
Now he hungers to have that arm around the next shoulder.
The wretched apple is fresh and white.

Since he began burning hills
the Shell strip has taken effect.
A wasp is crawling on the floor
tumbling over, its motor fanatic.
He has smoked five cigarettes.
He has written slowly and carefully
with great love and great coldness.
When he finishes he will go back
hunting for the lies that are obvious.

The older of the two Karens told me that when I moved from Ann Arbor, I would miss that community of writers, my friends, that I had become a part of. And she was right. I do. So post, damnit!