Picking up BASS again and attempting to inject some life
into this project and doing so with encountering Padgett Powell for the first
time almost killed the desire in the first several minutes of reading Typical.
You see, I think my mind has lost a great deal of tolerance
for literature.
I started my entries on the BASS 1990 on
September 11, 2013 and
read my first story from that collection and posted my thoughts on the 16th of that month.
Here it is now November 22, 2016 and I’m still carrying
around this book and still writing about how I’m struggling to get through it.
3 years 2 months 11 days later.
I had a pretty good run with the BASS series up until now
but my lack of reading…these stories…has caused damage to my lit-mind.
I’ve read plenty over these past three years – but these short
stories kept me flexible – nimble. That’s all gone now and was doubly
reinforced when reading Typical.
You see, I think I would have consumed and digested the
story differently with my old mind. But – we read the stories when we read them
– and that too lends to their interpretation.
I enjoyed this story.
Today.
I’m glad I pushed forward past my desire to toss the book aside
once again.
This story was the right story to pull me back in and to (at
least I feel it has) reignite this project. I wrote a couple of entries ago
back in May that I thought the story I had just read would be the one to pull
me back in – obviously it wasn’t.
One last thing – I really enjoyed reading Powell’s Contributors’
Notes. He wrote at length on the Molecular Theory of Fiction – basically his
thoughts of how a story comes is created and he used Typical as the example detailing
12 origins of certain parts of his short story Typical. A quick Google search failed to turn a discussion of the "Theory" in any subsequent interviews or writings or its application on any other pieces of his work.
