Life Is Short – Art Is Shorter by David Shields

Author:David Shields [Shields, David; Cooperman, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780990437048
Publisher: Hawthorne Books

Elizabeth Cooperman

Creation

8.Trick Story

The world is no longer speaking to you. It’s high time you got tricky, wily, clever–in order to deal with life.

Rick Moody: Primary Sources

Barry Lopez: Class Notes

Gregory Burnham: Subtotals

David Shields: Life Story

Paul Theroux: Acknowledgments

Trick Story

IN THE EXTREMELY BUREAUCRATIZED CULTURE IN which almost all of us now live, we’re inundated by documents: itineraries, instruction manuals, lectures, permit forms, advertisements, primers, catalogues, comment cards, letters of complaint, end-of-year reports, accidentally forwarded email, traffic updates, alumni-magazine class notes, etc., etc. The five fraudulent artifacts collected here exact/enact giddy, witty, imaginative revenge on the received forms that dominate and define our lives. These counterfeit texts capture the barely suppressed frustration and feeling and yearning that percolate about 1/16th of an inch below most official documents.

These elegant forgeries appeal to those of us bored by the conventions of traditional fiction. Or those of us who, out of similar boredom with the conventions, turn to genre-bending and genre-defying work to reanimate their literary passions. Such stories are a detour around the dead ends of traditional realism, modernism, and postmodernism; for every soul trapped in bureaucratic hell who would give his or her eyeteeth to take that latest interoffice memo and turn it into a whoopee cushion – ditto, here is your form or anti-form. In 1,000 words, create a fraudulent artifact; choose a documentary gesture you’re interested in, build in a theme and/or plot, and work to pull the thematic and/or narrative line through the story. Just as in a traditional story, the narrative and thematic threads need to get pulled forward under the surface of the pseudo-document.

This section’s five examples of the form/anti-form manage – in their different ways, but all within a very small space – to tell the story of someone’s life.

Rick Moody, “Primary Sources”: ostensibly a list of Moody’s favorite works of art while growing up, but really a devastating meditation on how, in the absence of his father, “I was looking elsewhere for the secrets of ethics and home.” Moody’s booklist establishes the upper-middle-class milieu in which he grew up and subtly suggests a coming-of-age narrative: prep school, college career, alcoholism, first office job, mental hospital stint. As Dinty W. Moore does in “Son of Mr. Green Jeans,” Moody holds his trump card until the end, revealing his father as the most primary of sources; the whole story/works cited page explodes as metaphor.

Barry Lopez, “Class Notes”: on one level an Onion-style parody of alumni-magazine class notes; on another level, an anthropology of Reagan-era unfettered capitalism; and on still a deeper level a chart of the transition over the course of a man’s life from hyper-aggression to inevitable loss to the bliss that comes from the knowledge that “what thou lovest well remains; the rest is dross.” The final sentence enacts the entirety of the story – from testosterone to loss to salvation: “ROGER BOLTON, who played professional baseball for nine years, lost his family in flooding outside New Orleans and has entered a Benedictine monastery.”

Gregory Burnham, “Subtotals”: seemingly a

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