Day 1: Annie Proulx, Ursula K Le Guin, Dorothy Parker
Today's texts:
Short story: Annie Proulx - On the Antler (1994)
I like Annie Proulx a lot. Broke Back Mountain is one of the most beautiful stories I have read, and I also enjoyed her rambling, depressing novel Postcards.
I'm not too sure what to think about this story. It reminds me of one of Faulkner's more comic stories about the devious Snopes family. It concerns the lifelong rivalry between two dim witted (?) hunters called Hawkheel and Stong. "Stong" is one of the best names for a shitkicker antagonist I have ever read, like Stradlater or Ackley.
I enjoyed the country dialect and (actually) beautiful descriptions that are simple and vivid:
At the head of a rough mountain pass a waterfall poured into a large trout pool like champagne into a wine glass.
I thought about that image a long time, trying to equate the two things, trying to make them match up. That to me is what a good simile should do.
Will wait to see if anything from the story sticks with me, but at least I have that simile.
Essay: Ursula K Le Guin - Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
I had heard about this essay many times, but finally read it and liked it a lot.
It is only six pages, I recommend a quick google for a pdf, but to simplify it, Le Guin basically argues that not all stories have to be variations of man vs ___; stories of conflict, conquering or heroes saving the world. It is easy to tell the stories of hunters, but what about gatherers?
Le Guin goes into a lot of fun caveman analogies, but basically states that a story doesn't have to consist of x vs y binaries, but can be a carrier bag that contains all the things from ones life, and that these things can be arranged to tell new, alternative stories.
One thing I love so much about Le Guin's sci-fi and fantasy books is they live up to the theories she speaks of in this essay. They avoid the tropey plots, space wars, and idea of good vs evil altogether. They also make you much more interested and appreciative of our world as it is.
I may be butchering it. Here is a great quote from the end:
Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel , how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things; there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn't over.
Poem: Dorothy Parker - Ballad of a Great Weariness
There’s little to have but the things I had,
There’s little to bear but the things I bore.
There’s nothing to carry and naught to add,
And glory to Heaven, I paid the score.
There’s little to do but I did before,
There’s little to learn but the things I know;
And this is the sum of a lasting lore:
Scratch a lover, and find a foe.
Faulkner (second mention, sorry) once said that the saddest word in the world is "was".
I love how Parker shifts the tenses of verbs to capture depressive thinking so accurately. Depression, according to Mark Fisher, is the slow cancellation of the future. The past is the present and the future will be past.
Myriam Gendron has a wonderful, beautiful album where she turns Dorothy Parker's saddest poems into songs. I really recommend it.
I havent read much of Parker's works, but I know I would really love them, but, I am scared to look into the utter despair of them- a despair always covered with humour, but still painful to comprehend.
Maybe tomorrow I will read one of her short stories.
Thats it for tonight! I wrote much longer than I had planned to, but ah well. Happy reading!