Alex Kudera's Blog, page 158

good stories

I'm finding great stories everywhere I look, which currently happens to be the fall issue of Philadelphia Stories and the new edition of The Best American Short Stories (2010). From Philadelphia Stories, here is the full text of "The Sea Crest" by Jeff W. Bens. I'm just realizing that gambling is a theme in this one as well as my favorite so far from the Richard Russo edited 2010 Best of: "Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched" by Steve Almond. I just googled the latter and found a link to this cool short story blog (out of Philly no less). The Almond story is noted (and was presumably read) on October 25, 2010.

bug

I survived mortal combat with a huge bug by the door. It ticked me off when it slithered under my book bag, and so it's fate was to fail to survive the evening. Papa K defends the hearth! And then feels remorse, mixed in with the usual anxiety and fatigue. All good bugs must come to an end, but where's Hemingway when you need him to "Ca va" the situation and move on to the next scene. Yeah, I could never do for insects what old Hem did for fish. Or old men. So be it.

exley

My first installment of Exley discussion is available at http://whenfallsthecoliseum.com/2010/11/09/exley-clarke-and-eleanor-henderson/, and yes, you bet, Eleanor Henderson was kind enough to join in as a kind of guest host.

Is A Fan's Notes in your future?

Don Riggs: "What I Do"

Don Riggs is back in action at the transnational and trilingual Contemporary Literary Horizon with a poem called "What I Do." If memory serves, it's his answer to all the folks who can't do anything at all but enjoy the age-old saying, "Those Who Can't Do, Teach." Although I must confess I've enjoyed my own ironic interpretive spins on that adage of late, it is also always bizarre and annoying that teachers do all kinds of things in hopes that their lessons might go well and that their students, might, well, um, for example, learn--and then with five words, get dismissed as people who don't do anything.

I suppose that it's all old hat. Anyway, good poem, good journal.

Robert Anthony Watts

Teacher-writer uberbrother Robert Anthony Watts fought through the novel and then survived an interview with the author and posted some great comments on amazon (with a full disclosure of his being stuck knowing me for 15 years).

He didn't, however, get into the details of our first meeting, so I thought I would. In 1996, we were sitting at a small table in the coffee shop at the old Borders location of 1727 Walnut Street, and we were in the company of the famous elder gent, Isaac Starr, one of that location's daily visitors. Isaac interrupted his reading of the French and German dailies to ask Robert, "Do you have any idea of what this man does for a living?"

Rob looked a little nervous even though I probably looked about as regular as regular gets.

So then Isaac told him I was selling cars, or that I had been up until the very recent past. We then figured out I was just beginning Temple U.'s MA in Creative Writing, a program Robert had just finished. But he would be teaching at Temple as an adjunct in the fall; I think he did that without Drexel for at least one full year. If I'm not mistaken, the adjunct pay circa 1996 for a 15-week writing class at Temple was just about to move from $1400 to the lofty heights of $1500. Adjunct pay at Temple is quite good now (relatively speaking) although the health-coverage problem is unresolved. And I remember being thankful for that 9-month $8700 stipend, anything to get me away from the car lot and back into writing.

Well, leaving the lot ultimately did help me get a novel out although it's been quite a circuitous route to publication.

Thanks, Rob.

somber city?

We're in Chicago--with no periods, semicolons, or colons on this netbook--but we're here, at the Association for Business Communications Conference, hobnobbing with the B-School and Communications crowd, perhaps unlike creative writers, they can discern a career path in the near and far terms, so now I feel like a paragraph from Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Camera, stopping with commas, and then moving on, it's life in windy weather, indeed

but i wanted to drift back to the bit of Saul Bellow quoted by Fred Exley, the "somber city" of Augie's first paragraph if I'm not mistaken, and truth be told, I've read four or five Bellow novels but not that one and yet I think of it a lot, think of reading it, own it in fine trade paper, and have already named a central character in a future novel Auggie in recognition of Bellow's fellow and also the Harvey Keitel cigar-store photographer in Paul Auster and Wayne Wang's Smoke

But back to Chicago--is it a somber city? it certainly is a windy one, so much so that our flight was delayed three hours due to strong gusts and then receiving luggage straight from the plane, outside on the runway became an exercise in survival of the most sensibly dressed, and it helped if you hid behind the other passengers and let their bodies break the wind (so to speak)

Chicago hasn't seemed so somber, it's seemed cold, and we haven't really been very far from the hotel, just one trip to Chinatown, which seemed quite empty, and this could be due to the economy or the cold although there were people inside the restaurants, we were told by the concierge to take a taxi because they don't want guests walking by the government housing on the way to Chinatown, a "for your own safety" kind of thing, so we passed the projects in a taxi minivan (seeing more of those for whatever reason), and we saw some people but neither the buildings nor the citizens looked particularly somber although at the restaurant, Old Sze Chuan, it was more or less, "first to knock, first admitted"

OK, maybe we gather more data and report back later, we're hoping to see University of Chicago later and will report back on the ghosts of Bloom and Bellow if such are seen preparing for their Halloween spooking

PS--amazon recently notified me that bellow's letters are available there at discount

the writer's finances in America

Here's a feel-good piece from the recent past on the state of literature (and the writer) in the U.S. Or, I suppose, it could be called a money column by Keith Gessen.

Interview with Mark Safranko

My interview with novelist Mark Safranko has arrived at http://www.whenfallsthecoliseum.com/. Hating Olivia looks like strong stuff but could be worth it.

buried in The Ask

. . . and it does not disappoint. Sam Lipsyte is an unstoppable force of literature in a dim, darkening world.

Never surrender!

Hurricanes Anonymous

Matt Johnson's "Hurricanes Anonymous" (found in the 2009 Best American Short Stories) will not disappoint. I think it is the only short story I've read that takes place after Katrina and Rita, but I'm sure there must be many more. Any good ones come to mind?

The Joseph Epstein story in this collection is quite strong too although his story about a famous writer in another recent Best American Stories (sorry, no date) struck me as an amazing one. Epstein apparently writes about writers (and their widows) quite a bit. I'm the kind of writer who will gobble these down.

Eleanor Henderson next!