bits and

There are no post office boxes available in my area. What a drag. So, my promise to mini comics makers everywhere remains unfulfilled. Maybe next month.

One excellent thing about going into the office, besides the companionship and free pens, is that sometimes ARCs of books that you wanted make their way into your hands. Yesterday I got a copy of The Rules of Inheritance by Claire Bidwell Smith, which I wrote about here. Can I read this book about dead parents? Not right now, probably, but I am glad to have it for when I am feeling stronger.

I want this book: Stone Animals by Kelly Link, published by Madras Press. It is illustrated by Lilli Carré, Lisa Brown and Ursula K. Le Guin and more. Whoa.

Some school in Florida has assigned 'Finances' by Lydia Davis and now students are searching for answers with google queries like "what are the man and woman trying to do in "finances" by lydia davis about?." Seriously? Do your own homework. Be happy you have a time in your life that you can sit around and think about what stories mean. This will end faster than you think.

I really detest the winter. My everything is cold.

The End of the Story by Lydia Davis

Since a bunch of her books arrived at once on the hold shelf at my library, I’ve been on a bit of a Lydia Davis tear. This book is her only novel and it was published in 1995, though the book feels like it could be set in the 1970s.

Like her short stories, The End of the Story is feels very much like an internal monologue happening in an unidentifiable time, cold and fluid. The main character is trying to write a novel about a love affair she had with a man 12 years her junior, a student at the college where she worked. She tells the story in bits, interspersed with ruminations on the relationship and on writing the relationship. It’s difficult to get a firm grip on the narrator, but passages like this one give you some idea, and also make you (me) laugh with recognition: “At first I thought this novel should be like the sort of novel I admire… In that novel, the characters only walk in and out of rooms, look through doorways, arrive at apartments, go up and down stairs, look out windows from inside, look in windows from outside, and make brief remarks to each other that are hard to understand.” At least if you think what kind of books a person likes tells you something about them, as does the narrator.

In fact, she wonders if what and how her former lover read was what drew her him, one of the many possibilities she ponders. The fact that she has to wonder should tell you something about this book. In fact, the relationship seems quite trivial, and the man quite lame, despite all the thinking about it—since this book is really about writing and memory, it almost doesn’t matter. When the narrator reflects on the larger trajectory of her life, it all seems to follow from the obsession with the story she is trying to get out. Davis has a certain cutting way with these passages and they feel very real: “There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or learn how to love a person while continuing to be selfish. I do not think I could mange the first two, but I thought I could learn how to be just unselfish enough to love someone at least part of the time.”

Despite the distance I felt from the characters, I really liked this book. I wanted to slog through the thoughts and be immersed in a struggle I find really intriguing. The end was really well done and effectively pulls you out of the head of the narrator while confirming that that is where you’ve been all along. Cool.

Samuel Johnson is Indignant by Lydia Davis

Even as I feel the hot breath of the New York Public Library puffing down my collar, I don’t particularly want to give up the books I have of theirs in my possession. Among these is SJII, a collection of short stories that was first published by McSweeney’s, though I have flimsy Picador edition.

A ton of these stories are short shorts--the titular “Samuel Johnson is Indignant” is one sentence--which makes quoting them hard. I like that many of them are filled with a kind of tired fun, which mirrors my mod these last few months. In “Finances,” a story about worth in love, a man and a woman argue: “If I give all I have and you give all you have, isn’t that a kind of equality? No, he says.” Of course, on paper, a relationship is never worth it; you can almost feel the sigh of the author. Most of these shorties are the thoughts of cold narrators, or statements that feel like they’ve dropped from the lips of slightly nasty characters that seem so bland on the surface, such a as a woman who calls her sister down the stairs because she finds it amusing to watch the sister struggle to move her weight down them. Maybe they have names and genders, perhaps a profession (writers and teachers, mostly), but no features that poke out and stay stuck in the mind.

The two stories that I enjoyed the most, “In A Northern Country” and “The Furnace,” were both longer works with characters that throbbed. When I say I enjoyed them, I guess that I should also say that they were not enjoyable topics and in fact made me feel a little sad. But it is that absorption into a story is what I crave, and both delivered. “In A Northern Country” is about an old man in search of his brother, who sets off to a strange country with a dying language, only to become lost himself. I could feel the cold seeping in through the drafty lodgings the man found and the struggle to keep his memories in line with this unwanted, nightmarish present. “Furnace” is about an adult woman who keeps an unusual correspondence with her increasingly out-of-it father. As he looses his detailed stories of life to his daughter, she struggles to record them and not forget, as he is doing, a task that seems really out of place in her everyday life. I loved the descriptions of the notations he made on newspaper articles sent to his daughter. Without a ton of words, Davis is able to give us a feeling of this man, a really warm touch in a chilly book.