The Golden Darters - Elizabeth Winthrop

 

Before I dive into this wonderful little story, I’ll do what I always seem to do in these entries and wander down a path that has absolutely nothing to do with the intended (I don’t think I ever actually outright concretely stated) purpose of this multi-year long exercise in reading and writing.

I spend much too much time online – in front of a screen. Today, as I was writing a post to share on a particular social media platform, I noticed that in the space where I was to paste my written content, a prompt offered to assist me in writing the “content” with the help of AI. For some reason, today, that hit hard. I have been reading and listening to people who are smarter than me discuss how AI and generative AI can stunt/damage a human’s ability to write – and possibly, as a result, to think. I need to do more reading on this validity, but I am leaning toward understanding and believing that this is true. As I sit and write this, the ideas flow from my brain onto the screen in a Word document. I am also fully aware that these words will probably be sucked into a LLM for training purposes. Perhaps it’ll be used to develop a personalized AI assistant for me that will be marketed to me someday, and they will take this chunk of content and use it to “sell” it to me.

Perhaps I am lucky that I experienced the written word and the ability to write without the taint of AI invading my thoughts. Will my children, though? Will they have the opportunity to suffer over written sheets of paper, struggling for the right combination of words to effectively communicate their feelings, such as I am doing now? Or will they select from a library of prompts that will generate a set of sentences allowing the reader to attempt to understand what they are feeling?  The in-person meeting, free of digital devices, might one day…or perhaps, it’s even now, the only authentic form of transmitting thoughts and ideas to one another. It’s not hard to find reports of the damage that these digital words have inflicted on the humanness of humans.

Looking back on our lives, perhaps we can remember that coming-of-age moment or a rebellion against control.

Perhaps the moment or act was something subtle and peaceful beneath the surface of everyday life over an extended period.

Perhaps the moment or act came crashing all at once, forever altering our lives, violent, hurtful.

Perhaps we had more than one moment that occurred during different stages of our lives.

Perhaps that coming-of-age moment hit at 40…or 50…buying that shiny red Corvette or finally getting that tattoo.

These moments can be quite impactful not only for us but also for those that we surround ourselves with.

They can change how others view us, perhaps for a moment…or forever moving forward.

 These transformations, these moments, these acts of rebellion are special – they make us human; they allow us to evolve, grow, and mature.

They bring forth the crazy electrical connections inside our squishy grey brains struggling to help us function in this shared reality.  

 

 

 

Under the Roof – Kate Wheeler

 

It happens, of course – After realizing, through reading hundreds of these stories over the past sixteen years, that not every story will deliver…something…anything. It took some time to realize this – but then again, how would I have known?

I sat with his story for some time and contemplated its message, just as the monk in the story considered his position in the space he occupied. It concerns me to some extent that perhaps there is part of me that would have quickly picked up on the message at one time, but now, after having my brain soaked in the digital waters, I have forgotten how to breathe oxygen. I struggled with the length of the selection, something that may not have been an issue a few years ago, but then again, Wheeler confesses that she too felt that “I’d come to believe that it was too slow, too long and serious.”

The time stamp on this post accurately reflects when I gave the story its most serious consideration, and even though I did first read it several months ago, I took the time to skim it over once again…giving it a mild second chance.

I approached my considerations from a few angles – as an expat, someone who has always found Buddhism interesting, the male/female relationship, and family relations (extending into step-family members).

I finally had to resign from a post stating that “Under the Roof,” and I couldn’t find common ground.

Forever Overhead - David Foster Wallace

 

I remember February 20, 2020, picking up the BASS 1992 anthology, flipping it over to read the list of authors collected, and seeing DFW's name listed. As I slowly worked my way through this collection, each story arriving before me through a very interesting period of my family's life (nothing scandalous…just a move and the growth of children), each story, of course, was colored by what I was going through at that moment. It's taken me 1610 days to reach the story and finally write about it.

I was excited to read it but intimidated to write about it. 

I mean, it's DFW – so much has been written about this guy, and he continues to draw love and hate from the lit world. My encounters with him have been mostly positive. I bring him up in conversations at least a couple of times a year, and his famous commencement speech/book has caused me to become more empathetic in traffic and grocery lines.

This story hit at the right time. Getting here has been a long slog, but it aligned perfectly, as far as I can tell. The story was enjoyable, and some passages hit home. It's a fast read that pulls you in.

I've mentioned before that I find the contributor's notes of this anthology so rewarding, and this is another that I feel delivers.

As the months drifted past between my first thoughts about this story and my thoughts about commenting on his Contributor’s notes, I decided to place them below and leave them – without spoiling them with my amateur musings.

His reflections are fun and very different from most BASS anthologies' notes. If they weren’t…I suppose I’d have more to say about it.

I was happy to have this insight into the story and again grateful that these little windows into the writers exist.  

 

 

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE is the author of a novel, The Broom of the System; a story collection, Girl with Curious Hair; and, with Mark Costello, a book-length essay on race and music called Signifying Rappers. He lives in Boston and is at this very moment restructuring his whole c.v. around inclusion in this anthology.

 

• This is a bit embarrassing, and I'd rather not discuss it, but will, since certain authorities have been polite but firm about these little post-story discussions being strongly encouraged, and I'd probably submit with cheer to way more embarrassing requirements if it meant getting the old snout into the B.A.S.S. trough.

 

The embarrassing issue here is I'm not all that crazy about this story. It's one of very few autobiographically implicated things I've ever tried. I did, like probably lots of kids, have a high-dive trauma. My real trauma was much more plain-old-sphincter-loosening-fear-based than the existential conundra this story's kid encounters. I basically got to the top, with a long line of jaded souls behind me, and changed my mind about going off. It was excruciatingly shaming, but in no way deeply or exceptionally shaming. I think it wasn't the memory of the shame so much as current shame that allowed so pedestrian a shame still to haunt my esteem-centers, prompting me to make the story so heavy, meditative, image-laden, swinging for the fence on just about every pitch. The thing seems to me a performative index of every weakness I have as a writer and as a person. And God knows why I let my desire for an Alienated Narrative Persona lead me to use the second-person point of view; now I'm scared people will read this and think I'm just a McInerney imitator in a black turtleneck, a copy of Kierkegaard under my arm.

The thing went through dozens of drafts, the first of which still sits in the pages of my undergraduate "Stories That'll Prove I'm a Genius" notebook. I went to grad school in Tucson, which is where I guess the thing picked up its setting: you can't spit in Tucson without hitting a pool, though darn few are public like this one is public.

I completely deny ever once kissing any part of my sister's feet at any time whatsoever.

I'm noticing that, with respect to any piece of fiction, my dissatisfaction with the final draft is directly proportional to the excitement that precedes the first draft. I remember doing the tortured artist thing back in school, all ego and caffeine, and thinking I had a genuine Big Idea for this story here, and seeing it finished, Big, published, lauded as Important by bearded titans. This was before I even bothered to start to try writing the thing. I preconceived it as deeply moving and imposingly cerebral at the same time, at once tender-psyche'd and tough-minded, just the sort of thing Eminences would pluck out of the glabrous herd by choosing for a prestigious anthology. By the second draft, my head was more or less permanently attached to the wall I'd been pounding it on. In black-lit contrast to the timelessly Big thing I'd preconceived, the actual ink-on-paper story seemed pretentious and trendy and jejune and any number of bad things: it seemed like the product of a young writer who was ashamed of a personal trauma and who was straining with every fast-twitch fiber to make that trauma sound way deeper and prettier and Big than anything true could ever really be. And here I mean "true" both artistically and historically.

I don't know why I kept putting the thing through drafts. I kept getting late-night twinges of that original preconceptual excitement. I kept seeing the thing as maybe just one image or two epiphanies away from blossoming, from honoring its entelechy of Bigness. Six years and many other completed projects later, I sent this story out in the old brown envelope. I sent it out for the same reason most young writers I know send stuff out: to have an excuse to quit thinking about it. My surprise when Fiction International took the thing was nothing compared to my feelings about the august endorsement that occasions this wordy little confession. Do not get me wrong: qualms about the story's failure to be anything more than a lumpy ghost of what I remain convinced was its initial promise of Bigness have not inhibited me from calling pretty much everybody I know and casually working in the B.A.S.S.-selection news. I'm extremely and yet of course also humbly grateful and moved and etc. I'm just coming to realize that I have very little personal clue about whether the stuff I do is good or bad or successful or not successful* which like most bits of self-knowledge is both mortifying and kind of a relief. It makes me glad I have opinionated critical friends and politely firm editors, not necessarily in that order.

 *Is "successful" the same as "good," here? Does inclusion in B.A.S.S. render a story de facto "good" the way a human reverend's pronouncement effects a legally binding union?

 

The Way People Run – Christopher Tilghman

 

When I was reading and writing here more frequently, I remember the feeling when the story delivered a surprise. I’m not talking about something within the story…but usually some odd connection that comes through something in the story or, in the case of this story, information about the author.

Pulling up his Wikipedia page, I learned that Christopher Tilghman served three years in the Navy. The page also provides a link to a story that appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review in the Spring of 1986. The story titled Norfolk, 1969, describes Norfolk in such a way that he had to have spent some time in my old city. What a pleasant surprise to read about neighborhoods, streets, and places I knew so well. Pulled a little at my heartstrings. We’ve been out of Norfolk for more than a couple of years, and this time has allowed memories to reappear – good and bad. Of course, the digital world brings images and friends from Norfolk to me daily, but I’ve found that more personal feelings and emotions are being stirred. I miss Norfolk – not enough to return permanently, but the city where I spent most of my life is still part of me.   

 

The Way People Run was first published in the New Yorker on September 9, 1991. In September 1991, I was just beginning my sophomore year at Norwich. I think the strongest memory from that time was hearing Nirvana for the first time on our college radio station and blasting the Pearl Jam CD from my roommate's stereo system. My sophomore year was a huge difference from my freshman year, and we had a great time.

I’ve always felt that stories published in The New Yorker had a certain “feel” to them, and this, too, has that “feel.”

My introduction to BASS 1981 where Hortense Calisher describes the typical New Yorker story – and I believe, that 10 years later, in 1991, her assessment holds up.

“Perhaps this is a good place to talk about the “typical” New Yorker short story, since the proportion of my inclusions from that magazine will give pain to some. There is no typical one, really, but I can describe what people think it is: a story of suburbia or other middle-class to “upper” milieu, which exists to record the delicate observation of the small fauna, terrors, and fatuities of a domestic existence, sometimes leveled in with a larger terror—a death, say, or a mortal disease—so that we may respond to the seamlessness of life, and of the recorder’s style. To move on casually from these stories, as we often do, is a guilt, since they are as often, if subduedly, about the guilt of moving on. Muted response is the virtue. Never break out.”

I’m excited though to see how her assessment holds up in 2001, 2011 and 2021!

Down a little side path here – I haven’t read New Yorker fiction in quite some time…I also feel that there has been a shift in the New Yorker where what they publish isn’t of interest to me anymore. I think I’m still part of their targeted readership?!

Back in the main path – in the Contributor’s Notes at the back of the volume, Tilghman states that he “composed “The Way People Run” as a collage of visual images I have collected on the northern Plains.”

I immediately felt this composition when first reading this story, before turning to the back of the book and him laying it out in his notes.

I can’t stress enough how much I appreciate these anthologies' Contributor’s Notes section. They provide such insight into the author, and like their short stories, I feel that they work hard to really provide a rich, detailed look into the author’s mind around the time of inclusion in the anthology and perhaps a reflection of where they were (in their heads) when they wrote the story,

I found this last passage of his notes interesting.

“About a year later I was driving through the boarded-up towns of rural Virginia (it could have been anywhere in the U.S.A., of course), and my character Barry came back to me as a simple image of economic decline and moral exhaustion. I realized my story was not about the West, where it is set, but about the coasts, from which Barry has run. The fact of decay seemed to offer its own sufficient reason, so I polished up the first draft and sent it off. I don't like describing things that are falling apart — it's the shape of the story that bothers me more than the pessimism - but I'm afraid we'd all better get used to it.”

 

“…but I'm afraid we'd all better get used to it.” And here we are over 30 years later.