May 31, 2023

SHORT STORY REX May 2023

Joe Koch, Ivy Grimes, Mary Thorson and more

1. “Given”, Joe Koch

I quite enjoyed this quick little story from the great Joe Koch. It’s cryptic in approach without being coy about its themes: identity, liminality, evolving selfhood(s) and reckoning with one’s past and one’s future. Also there’s a fucked-up puppet

I first encountered Koch's work via the exquisitely titled “Eating Bees from the Ass of God” (written with Joseph Bouthiette Jr.) and while these two stories are very different they share a sort of tautness and verve that makes me want to read more, more

2. “Glass Piano”, Ivy Grimes

Ive been on the Ivy Grimes train for a little while now, pulling on the string that makes the train whistle go toot toot (of the 5 posts I’ve made here, her name has appeared in 3 now, so like 60% lol), but please trust me when I say: good lord this story is good.

"I used to think I was the only one who had swallowed a glass piano." One of those opening lines that one reads and immediately goes: that's it, im sunk, do what you will with me.

All throughout, the glass piano speaks, it tells us we are not alone, and thats a beautiful thing to hear

3. Tower Vol. 1: “END”

Enjoying the inaugural issue of this new publication, self-described as “a digital anthology full of art and writing grappling with endings, death, dissolution and finality." I especially enjoyed "Online Dating" by Mary Thorson, a quiet family drama with some rather scabrous details. It's a story about a widow finding a new love, told from the perspective of the bereaved daughter who I guess is looking for an old love?

Also, I know next to nothing about poetry except what I like (this newsletter isn’t called Poetry Rex, after all), but I have to mention "Jackass Forever" by Tudor Sykes which is a wild ride and does not require being a fan of the eponymous show starring johnny knoxville

The first issue is available for download now on their itch.io page.

Not-short story rec: Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo

Given my background, Pedro Páramo is a book that feels like I should have read by now. (To be fair, I’m a slow, less-than-prolific reader, so that’s most books for me.) Rulfo’s a case of “your favorite writer’s favorite writer”, and having read him now it’s no surprise to me that Borges would find so much to love in its recursive ghost-story-within-a-ghost-story structure and its romantically bleak depiction of the wasteland. Nor is it any wonder that in 1961, upon reading this story about several generations of family in a small town dogged by the unshakeable curse of their family history, Gabriel García Márquez reportedly had a life-changing discovery which broke him out of a creative funk and allowed him to inspire One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I am not ashamed to say I had to read the first 30 pages of this book not once, not twice, but three times. And not because I’d lost somewhat the habit of reading in Spanish (admittedly, I had gone a few months without reading Spanish-language fiction in earnest), and not because the slang and diction of early-20th century Mexico was impenetrable to me (on the contrary, I found it fairly easy to follow, «a pesar de la fidelidad de Rulfo al lenguaje de los Altos de Jalisco»1). Nor was it Rulfo’s writing style—laconic and austere and not at all prone to complicated squalls of clauses and subordinating derring-do.

Rather, it was the inherent strangeness of the work itself I found so confounding. It begins simple enough, a “stranger comes to town” tale about a man who, after his mother’s death, goes to meet his father for the first time. Very soon, though, the tale becomes slippery. Everyone he meets in his mother’s ancestral home town is dead, or at least seems to be. Or nearly. Scenes begin and end abruptly. The point of view shifts from first to third, then back. Spectral voices bubble upward, overlapping flows of reminiscence and lamentations2, with Rulfo’s generally staid prose erupting in occasional outbursts of weirdness as the book slowly mutates, until about halfway through the book, spoiler alert, the narrator dies. Of what? No one’s really sure. In the book’s second half, war and the revolution (or rather, the revolutionaries) wander onstage and off again, but the outside world is forever elsewhere. Here, we are in limbo.

There so many reasons one might become a ghost. Unfinished business, regret, loneliness. Nostalgia. A guily conscience, an outstanding debt that can never be paid. Pedro Páramo is about all that and more. It’s a book which, now that I’ve finally read it, I know I’ll read again.