Thursday, November 5, 2009

Adventures with Literary Form:
Lydia Davis @ PAL 11.5.09


"A good piece of writing should surprise you each time you read it."--Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis writes short stories, sometimes very short ones. Her new collection, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis compiles over 700 pages of them. New Yorker writer James Wood aptly describes her work as being "crookedly personal." She read an essayPortalnd ARts and Lectures that covered a wide range of her influences that informed her experimentation with form of the story outside of the traditional conventions. She is intrigued by form outside the conventional one that was embraced by her parents, both of whom had stories published in The New Yorker. Her journey is one where she has explored the "line between poetry and prose." "I go the course I go." she explained during the Q&A when asked if there were other authors she wished were influences.

Davis' influences are folks like Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and Grace Paley and poets Russell Edson and Sparrow (who also runs for US President in every election since 1992.) Paley's work showed her she could take the material from her life and explore it in a literary way. Her lecture illustrated how she would be influenced by a form another writer would explore and make it her own. For instance, she used a Q and A format that David Foster Wallace used in his Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and transform it into an account of her jury duty experience only including answers and eliminating questions that were asked.

The most entertaining moments in the evenin was her take on on letters of complaint, a form she expanded on from the work poet Walter Bernstein. The first letter she wrote was a letter to a funeral director, which at first was a real letter, "then I got carried away with language, and then it was too literary to be sent. Her letter to a frozen pea manufacturer complained about the unappealing inaccurate depiction of a product. She left her text for a moment to mention how her letter about this Cascadia Farms product was received by parent company General Mills who did not reply directly, but sent her a bunch of coupons for Jolly Green Giant goods

There is a lot of paradox to Davis. She writes some of the shortest of short stories, yet is also known for her translation of Proust's Swan's Way. Proust, of course is known for long lyrical, and complex sentences, which sometimes can go on for pages. Her stories are often dark and strange, but she seems like a non-atypical teacher of writing. She is attracted to eccentrics like Glenn Gould and Flannery O'Connor, but loves the order and precision of Bach. She seemed surprised and maybe a little bit offended by the amount of editing that took place when one of her stories was accepted to the New Yorker, even though her parents had both been published by that magazine.

I decided to try to take on her collected stories volume chronologically as they are presented instead of the "dipping in" method that one can apply to such a anthology. I am only about a third the way through the collection but there is a distinct difference in the decade between her first collection Break it Down published in 1986 and the one that came out a decade later, Almost No Memory. Many of the works in the first volume feel more like exercises. The work I have read in Almost No Memory is still filled with strange characters with weird thoughts and settings, but they feel more like complete worlds. I look forward to continuing to explore Davis' universe.

I brought my volume of Collected Stories to be signed at the reception where I experienced am awkward moment with her. I always take off dust jackets when I read and travel with books. Pam has offered me Bo-Dart plastic covers, but that feels too much like carrying around a library book. I hastily put the jacket on in the morning for the volume's impending autograph not realizing I had it upside down and backwards. Lydia did not really know how to deal with this. She flipped the book over and gave me a look like I'm sure she gave to her children when their collars or layer of clothing were disordered. Still, she was quite gracious and signed and dated the book for Pam and myself.

This well-prepared evening with Davis, a practitioner in short form contrasted nicely with the more extemporaneous presentation by Wally Lamb , a modern master of very long fiction in the first lecture. I suppose one could say hat together one could say they represent a kind of spectrum of the current state of American letters.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:25 PM
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