The Short Story and Its Writer (anthology edited by Ann Charters, 2003)

I was reading some short fiction in the above anthology put out by Bedford/St. Martin's and trying to get a feel for what the anthology valorized/foregrounded, and it felt pretty desultory. Obviously, it's aiming to be comprehensive, a survey collection (1800 pages) so it's going to be all over the place. It seems pretty mainstream though, with writers' bios tending to focus on what mags they made it into and at what age...such as "at 24, she had her first story accepted in the New Yorker" yadda yadda.

Experimental literature is rather poorly represented. Charters does include "Miss Fur and Miss Skeene"....but why won't someone anthologize that great little Hemingway mockery from the Yale Gertrude Stein...I believe it's called "Men Drinking?" Or is it just called "Men?" I never fail to fall under that one's spell and I would classify that as short fiction. I guess in the seventies it was hip to include something by Russell Edson...no Edson here. But I could list 100 writers who write experimental short fiction off the top of my zine-y head, any of whom could be in here and would add a different slant altogether. But this is clearly the monolithic culture thing. The thing that doesn't really exist but does because it holds the purse strings. I don't know much about Ms. Charters...was she or is she married to the rather cool Samuel Charters who wrote a great little black book of criticism on a handful of poets that included Larry Eigner and Robert Creeley? I loved that book. And wasn't Samuel somehow invested in the rock world back in the days when it came out on vinyl? I could have Googled all these things but it's a cool grey day and I'm too relaxed. Maybe someone will tell me. Magic 8-Ball?

The inner organization is alphabetical. I think it was Kostelanetz who said when you see that form of organization it means someone was lazy. I have to agree totally with that...and you end up getting a flow of stories that goes like this..."Grace Paley....Octavio Paz...Edgar Allan Poe...Katherine Anne Porter..." UGH! This is not organization or any sort of interesting flow.

I read this HORRIBLE award-winning story by Woody Allen (did he really need to be in here...do you think of Woody Allen when you think great short fiction writers??) titled "The Kugelmass Episode." It was cutesy and horrible...clearly an idea that would have been better realized as a short 30 min. sci-fi script for a revival of the Twilight Zone or something. It was gimmicky, but not the good kind of gimmicky. It almost ruined watching the U.S. Open while I read it, but didn't quite manage it.

Then I read a short story by Ann Beattie, "Find and Replace," and it was more of the self-conscious bourgeoise writer sticks pins in herself-type story. It was readable but that's about all I can say for it. I've read emails from non-writer relatives about family traumas that were as engaging and had as many memorable lines as this. So no great shakes.

I read Sherman Alexie's "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" and it was the least objectionable of the three but still was another of these stories wearing its identity politics on its sleeve. His eye for detail was more engaging, but I don't read short fiction for an eye towards detail. I can look at details myself. I have eyes. I don't necessarily need an epiphany (would be great if it happened anyway) but I usually need some form of novel perception or restructuring of the perceptual schemata. Anyone can show us in how many ways (and how often) life sucks. I can turn on the news.

Paging through here, I was happy to see dozens of short stories I've enjoyed for almost two decades now...Ray Carver, Poe, Cheever (I don't read Cheever the way everyone seems to, as yet another in THAT lineage), Flaubert, Hawthorne (why are these all men?), Zora Neale Hurston, Shirley Jackson (o.k. twilight zone-y but it holds up), Henry James (daedalian sentences turn me on), Joyce, Kafka, Jean Toomer, Vonnegut, Edith Wharton, Woolf and others.

So this is definitely a collection where the editor just relies on the canonized....gets out a vacuum cleaner and sucks up the requisite number of pages. I would suggest she could have found at least two or three (or thirty five) writers just by pulling out a Burning Deck catalogue and ferreting out world-class writers of short fiction from that. What has it been? Forty years of publishing great literature? Probably many more than that?

Oh well, it is what it is. The military may be wrong about a lot of things, but they got that one right.

And hey, I'm still looking for poetry (and let's add short fiction to cheer me up) to post on here, so if you're a young'un or a young gun or an old'un or old gun, send me summat and maybe you will see your name in bloggy lil lights.

Salut.