lorrie moore

i like thinking about lorrie moore's career

i will type about each of her books

self-help

some of these stories are very crude, but the tone and voice and whatever are very idiosyncratic, and so it is still engaging because there's the feeling that a real and interesting person is trying hard to be new and interesting and not boring

'how to become a writer,' the one published in the new york times, is the least crude, probably due to it being published in the new york times

anagrams

very depressing and funny, not as crude

i like the stories in here a lot (before the long novel part)

in the novel part the main character has an imaginary friend and an imaginary daughter

like life

my favorite book by her

'joy' and 'like life; are the two stories in here that were not previously published in literary magazines

who will run the frog hospital?

her novel about teenage girls

the grown-up sections are funny and depressing

the teenage girl sections are sort of television-y

the fat sister commits suicide by hanging herself

birds of america

the stories about feeling depressed i enjoyed

i lost interest a little when she wrote about gay midgets who go on a roadtrip to a vietnam memorial or something and one midget is blind i think

the story that everyone, rick moody and the o'henry people and best american short stories people and everyone, likes a lot is the one about cancer, which i like as much as her other stories, but not any more i don't think, but it is acceptable and respectable to like, and view as 'important,' because of it is about cancer, a real problem

conclusion

people generally like it (deem it acceptable and 'important') when problems are concrete, like cancer or immigration, but do not like it (call it self-indulgent, unimportant, and selfish) when problems are complex, like feeling sad or strange or doomed for no easily explainable reason

but why do people feel depressed?

not because of one single thing like cancer or immigration and not because of being self-indulgent or weak-minded, but because of the cumulative effect of the following, all of which are real things

that we will all die one day, that time moves in one direction and we only get one chance to get things right, that we are conscious things and so are conscious that other people are thinking things that we will never truly understand, that we do not choose to be born and that that first event of birth is the cause to every effect of our lives, so that we probably do not have free-will, that in a world of electrons and protons and neutrons, each particle the same, we are required to arbitrarily differientiate, that... about a million more things

which is more universal, less simplified and maybe 'more important,' (i'm writing now from the point-of-view of people who go around saying that 'stories matter' and that 'tea-towel' fiction, stories where 'nothing happens,' is not as 'important' as 'immigration' stories or 'political' stories) than for example cancer stories or stories about being confused of your identity, if you are 'hispanic' or 'white' or 'asian' or 'asian-american'

so one argument could say that writing about feeling depressed, about 'nothing,' is writing about life itself while writing about cancer (or race-issues or whatever) is writing about the distraction that is sitting there, in front of life itself, distracting people, people like editors of literary magazines, people like award-givers, who forget about that list of things i listed above

because after cancer and after you resolve your cultural identity issues then there are still the other problems i listed above

(though maybe writing about cancer is being more specific, picking one thing to use to talk about it all, yes i am aware of this argument, i'm just thinking things through in this post, not saying that i'm right, not even making a point either, but probably just defending 'tea-towel' fiction)