The Reverse Bug – Lore Segal

This was a difficult story for me. I know when I am not capable of justly writing about a story – a story that is too complex for me to truly understand and appreciate. So many others have paid the proper respect this story deserves and I encourage you to seek out their opinion of the story.

I enjoyed reading Lore’s notes at the end of the BASS concerning the creation of the story and how various bits and pieces of the story were in her head for decades. In one online interview Lore states that the idea for the “Reverse Bug” was something she carried around with her for fifty years.

Fifty years.

I think that’s wonderful. A writer that was finally able to get that idea down on paper – and communicate it through such a deep and fascinating story.

It gives one hope that there are conclusions to quests – sometimes weeks, months or years later. 

Typical - Padgett Powell

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 16^th 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.