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

[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.