Just musing along

[ksmith]

For some reason, I have this dream of selling a story to The New Yorker. I nursed it along before I started writing short work, even though I felt that there was no way in hell that they would be interested in anything I wrote. Still, I bought a few issues of the magazine over the past couple of years. Read the fiction offerings. Some of it ranked with the worst stuff I had ever read, although I've read enough similar stuff to think that some literary style was passing me by and I simply didn't get it. Some of it was "eh." They didn't publish "Brokeback Mountain" every month.

So I was curious when I saw that one of their stories won the World Fantasy Award for Short Story, CommComm, by George Saunders. I read it. It falls into the section of the styleverse that I don't quite have a handle on, which may simply mean that I need to read more non-genre short stuff. I liked the ending. I don't think I could write a story like that, with that feel. I'm not sure my brain works like that.

I know. I'm supposed to write what I write, and let it find its own home.

Comments

[redheadedfemme]

Geez. I tried to read that story, and I couldn't finish it. It reminded me of eluki bes shahar's "Hellflower" series--incomprehensible jargon thick as mud, and just as hard to wade through--but at least bes shahar had an interesting enough central character to pull me in.

This story didn't. Bah. And it won a World Fantasy Award?? Good God.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Well, you make me feel a little better. I keep thinking that I must be missing something.

I read discussions of books and stories on other blogs, and I'll see comments like "I really had to work my way through it, but in the end, it was worth it--it wasn't an easy read" and I wonder how that's meant. Because I read stories that are complex because the plot is dense and there's a lot to keep straight, and then I read stories that are difficult because the setting isn't defined and I'm not sure where I am and I can't get my arms around the plot. I can't quite put my finger on anything, character or plot-wise, and that bothers me. I feel like I can't get my footing, like my feet are always in danger of going out from under.

I like dense reads. I like complexity. But there's a certain type of difficulty that loses me, but it seems to be what all the Cool Kids are oohing and ahing over.

I am slowly coming to grips with the fact that my inclinations are decidedly middle-brow.

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

There's complex and there's incomprehensible. I *love* complex. I *love* to have to think my way through a story (go see The Prestige if you haven't already). But I have to have something to hang onto. There has to be something I care about. I once mentioned to a highly literate coworker who shared some of my tastes in books that I wanted something to sink my teeth into. He recommended a Thomas Pynchon. Being the literary heathen that I am, I wasn't familiar with him but I was game.

Oh. My. God. I had never attempted to read such an incredibly dull and tedious work as that. I have no idea what the plot was, assuming there was one and for all I cared every single character could have fallen off the edge of a cliff and I wouldn't have bothered to see if they ever hit bottom.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Was it Gravity's Rainbow? I have that sitting in one of my bookcases. A former manager whose taste was like mine in some respects--found him carrying The Twelve Caesars in his briefcase once--recommended it highly. The warning bells should have gone off when he said that it took him a long time to read it and that it was difficult, but I went ahead and spent the money. After all, the thing is considered a classic.

Ten years or more have passed and I still haven't read it. To be honest, the synopsis turned me off. But it's another case of "hard, hard, hard, gotta work through it but it's worth it", and I really wonder whether it is, or whether a bunch of pseudointellectuals and gullible souls are just kidding themeselves.

There, I said it. Hell with it.

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

It was umm... The Crying of Lot 49. Supposedly a satire. Uh-huh.

And yes, I do think you've hit it. Pseudointellectuals and gullible souls. "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." Mencken knew whereof he spoke.