Subject: Re: Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile
From: Paul Kennedy (kennedyp@toronto.cbc.ca)
Date: Thu Sep 28 2000 - 17:04:27 GMT
>
>
>So yes, I like finding the unpublished stories in
>magazine archives,
>
Subversive snicker from north of the old 49th (...well, actually south--but
I've never been one to allow geographical fact to spoil a salty historical
expression....)
...or also like it if they just happen miraculously to appear on a deeply
carved wooden table top, in a classy/brassy pizza joint, on the south side
of Chicago.... Why, the lady's been known to smuggle sensitive software
over international borders (which we all know is MUCH WORSE than sneaking
virgins over state lines for sex, or whatever else it is they do during
those long winter nights in Wisconsin!)
And in return I get the coffee mug of a perennial non-contender....
...Other than that, Cecilia, I'd like to thank you for a brilliant
description of the way that a beloved writer's works fall in and out of a
reader's favour. Given the mountain of masterpieces that I've yet to read,
there are certain books that more than repay the temporal investment of
re-reading. What does it say about a person when he/she confesses that the
Russians seem to have written a statistically disproportionate number of
those books? Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekov....
Jerry, for all his all-too-obvious day to day failings, wrote one persistent
little piece of prose that somehow broadcasts directly into the genetic code
of adolescents everywhere--and to that important part of all people that
remains perpetually adolescent.
I'm frankly not as enamoured of Jerry's stories. I sprinted to the
bookstore the morning after I'd read TCitR from cover-to-cover for the first
time. I devoured F&Z, the urine-coloured RHtRC&S:AI, and finally--because I
then believed that stories were less significant indicators of a writer's
genius (having not yet encountered Chekov)--Nine Stories. I loved them when
I first read them. But they haven't aged well.
Cheers,
Paul
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