Lorrie Moore

It made me get a bit wistful for auld ILE.

By Heart

it freaks me out when people link old threads, for some reason. & i reckon it would creep moore out; she'd have something to say about it.

i was (mistakenly) saying to a mate last night that given the united states' recent behaviour we should attempt to kill the love of US pop/art/etc culture in NZ and we were listing great canadian authors (a kind of methadone for US culture) - and we included moore. why'd i think she was canadian? who cares.

Isn't it about time you gave it back to him? Edna knows where he is. Somewhere between Putney Bridge and the Finland Station.

It recently occurred to me that the books I know (and perhaps like) best are the ones I did for 'O' and 'A' Level. So let's hear it for months on end of rote learning. The best of these books is, I think, 'La Porte Etroite' by André Gide. I don't know it off by heart though. This is an answer to the other thread.

I like Lorrie Moore very much - what I've read of hers, I mean, which isn't everything. There's a sort of acuteness in her writing which really appeals, and it's done in a way which has niceness (in a good way, a kind of polite atmosphere) stabbed through with fear ot disgust or whatever as necessary. I think I'm trying to say there's often something very humane about the way she creates her characters out of little details.

I'm reading "Heligoland" at the moment and it occurs to me that Shena Mackay - I love Shena Mackay too, perhaps more - is like Lorrie Moore's English auntie.

I get it. I wish not everyone did. Oh - they don't.

Yes, it is.

Here is my favorite joke that I've made, umm, ever.

PERSON: "You know, the title of Birds of America, she didn't even have that until it was done -- what happened was this person read the stories, and he couldn't tell if this one theme was intentional, and he asked her, 'Hey, did you know that there's a bird in every one of these stories?"

ME: "Was this person English?"

(& oh man, why'd you have to say that re: LM & workshops! it's obvious when you spell it out, but . . . oh, man!)
(& is it really barthelme, STILL? I thought everyone would want to be, I dunno, DFW or something. is there a website for the literary stockmarket yet? is wannabarthelme as bad as subcarver? ("Results 1 - 1 of 1 for "walt whittling". (0.83 seconds)"))

Also: didn't LM study in a class DB taught? And didn't DB choose an LM story for some best American Short Stories collection. I always think of Moore as some ideal compromise between the postmodernes and the "realistes", the Ann Tylers... ironic formalism meets "raw feeling". Especially in BoA - in the 'Canonical babbling' baby story (journalism or fabulism?) and the story about the gay couple touring the south (originally titled "Lucky Ducks"!) - which I think is her masterpiece.

She is touring right now - for the New Yorker... Isn't it time she had a new book out?

moore for this boy. my three biggest inspirations -living- are moore, munro, and spark.

"Recently I received a letter from an acquaintance in which he said, 'By the way, I've been following and enjoying your work. It's getting better: deeper and sicker.'
Because the letter was handwritten, I convinced myself, for a portion of the day, that perhaps the last word was richer. But then I picked up the letter and looked at the word again: there was the s, there was the k. There was no denying it. Even though denial has been my tendency of late. I had recently convinced myself that a note I'd received from an ex-beau (in what was a response to my announcement that I'd gotten married) had read 'Best Wishes for Oz'. I considered this an expression of bitterness on my ex-beau's part, a snide lapse, a doomed man's view of marriage, and it gave me great satisfaction. Best Wishes for Oz. Eat your heart out, I thought. You had your chance. Cry me a river. Later a friend, looking at the note, pointed out that, Look: this isn't an O. This is a nine - see the tail? And this isn't a Z. This is a 2. This says 92. 'Best Wishes for 92.' It hadn't been cryptic bitterness at all - only an indifferent little New Year's greeting. How unsatisfying!"

She's published one or two new stories so far, but that's it. It's such a mystery -- most of the BoA stories appeared around a decade or so ago -- I remember my own excitment when each new one appeared in the New Yorker, with excitement of a writer hitting her stride -- but not much since.

Urgh, I just remembered the coffin scene :(

i have not been able to finish anagrams

too bleak for me, i just don't want to read about that stuff, sorry

i know i can just skip to the next story, but it turned me off from the book for a while.

i love anagrams i know it's slighter than birds of america but i love it and it makes me sad for days

no--i totally dig it, the story was wrenching xpost

there was only one story in birds of america i didn't like, it was from a male POV, maybe the second or third one?

there's one i skipped in the first collection. partly though it was a fear that maybe something of what it was going for was ... unearned somehow? striving for significance etc

i think a lot of the Bad Things that happen in anagrams suffer from this: though in a way that made me feel disengaged rather than ill, which is how the first collection made me feel. which is a shame, i think the first 80 pages or so of that are great.

xposts i guess? the thread seems a bit fractal at this point.

i still haven't read the new one! i will. i was excited about it, but then it occurred to me that it would probably be another five years before she wrote another book so what's the hurry? plus, selling books for a living has left me no time to read or browse in bookshops.

the reaction to the book from some people reminds me of when my fave joy williams FINALLY came out with a new novel and it was strange and bewildering and too much and gothic and crazy and i didn't actually know what to make of it at first. and i will probably have to read it a few more times just to get everything that is in it. plus, joy has become a harcore conservationist or whatever, so it was kind of like reading a book written by both flannery o'connor and edward abbey. or something. (this happened to my fave scott bradfield too. think he became a huge animal rights guy and his stuff changed mightily. like a cross between patricia highsmith fairy tales and, um, angela carter fairy tales.

i highly recommend the quick & the dead by joy williams though. and all her other earlier short story collections and novels. she's a real hero of mine.

she's probably most famous these days for her essay The Case Against Babies. don't know how i feel about that though.

http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/e-sermons/babies.html

i will check this joy williams out; thank you!

quick and the dead is wonderful but super rambly

she's all
hey here's a quirky new character
for a bunch of pages
but I'm cool with that

haven't read any lorrie moore but she lives here and one of my good friends is in her fiction workshop, so i keep thinking i should start.

I ate dinner w/ her but didn't really know who she was

this passage is kind of long, i now realize; i will edit:

"Reminds me of dating," I said, and Sarah spun her head, to size me up again...Heat flew to my face. Dating? What did I know of it?"...I had once actually gone out on a date--last year--and I had prepared for it by falling into a trance in a lingerie store and buying a forty-five-dollar black Taiwanese bra padded with oil and water pouches, articulated with wire, lifelike to the touch, a complete bosom entirely on its own, independent of any wearer, and which when fastened to my chest looked like a dark animal strapped there to nurse.

amazing! i read that on a plane and immediately started making choked laugh-cry noises. embarrassing.

well, the first half of 'who will run the frog hospital' was pretty good

although i could sort of imagine it as a movie with a script by diablo cody without too much effort

haven't read this yet but uh:

http://firmuhment.tumblr.com/post/397658485

ugh.

there's also a rejection letter from the U. Of Wyoming MFA program

needs to learn about image resizing maybe then hell get into an MFA program or two

OK I didn't look at this very closely before posting, yeah it sucks, sorry.

eh, it's sorta interesting. some scanned lydia davis, aimee bender stories, some gertrude stein mixed with cut outs from magazines, i like the idea of a handwritten blog, but yeah, can't read the thing and the lorrie moore thing is wtf

this reminds me, i need to read Gate at The Stairs

i dont mind fanfic-as-serious-fiction but it needs to be at a size i can read

max try holding down control and manipulating the scroll wheel on ur mouse ~

now is there some way to make the story less terrible

ctrl + W

now is there some way to make the story less terrible

a+

for balance

Is this where the main discussions of A Gate at the Stairs took place?

what did you think? my first reading -- there are enough beautiful, poetic sentences to make it worthwhile, but the narrative is really weak. she piles on the melodramatic coincidences like nobody's business. and for someone who's taught at the university of wisconsin for twenty plus years, her feel for madison and UW students is pretty shaky. it's the #1 party school in the country, and yet tassie never goes out, and doesn't seem to have many friends at all. it's hard to imagine too a wisconsin kid who'd go home for the holidays and never once hang out with her high school friends. regardless, lorrie can write a killer sentence, and i'd pick up anything she put out

I agree with much of what you say, and have posted my verdict here:
Lorrie Moore

I don't so much follow your point about WI though. The novel is not set in Madison but in Troy. Perhaps there is no such place as Troy, and it is a parallel-universe version of Madison? I don't know. But even if that's what it is, then it surely has a licence to be different from the real Madison.

I can very much identify with the idea of someone who, in a world full of other people who are into 'partying' and 'hanging out', never gets to do these things. That sounds a lot like real life to me.

Like you, I would still want to read anything she wrote, despite the waywardness of this book.

but that's not madison. sure she can do whatever she wants with her setting. say though a novelist were writing about london and ignored everything that made london unique -- i bet you'd be a bit nonplussed about that. there are too many signifiers suggesting that "troy" is madison -- the scooters for one; and more telling, tassie's apartment by the huge football stadium: there's only one huge college football stadium in the whole state -- for any reader familiar with wisconsin and its capital not to conflate troy and madison. notice too that she's careful about getting green bay right. why not deliver a little madison flavor as well? also, lorrie made a deliberate choice to depict tassie not as some alienated arty loner but as more of a typical bright, confused, hard-working undergrad, a pretty mainstream kid. one of the primary qualities of madison, and of the entire state, arguably, is that there is a fun loving culture there that's incredibly inclusive. a lot of big 10 students throughout the midwest may feel alienated by their ostentatiously (monied) hard-partying peers, but madison doesn't really suffer from that. even the art majors and kids in punk rock bands get dressed up on halloween and tear up state street

It is interesting in hearing about WI and Madison. I'd like to see it! I had a book published in Madison once.

I don't know what 'big 10 student' means. We don't have that term in England.

She does talk about Green Bay, as I recall. So she calls that place by its real name, and Madison by another name? If that's the case, maybe one thing it means is that she is not necessarily going to describe Madison as it really is? Why do you think she did not call it Madison?

re London: how many London writers actually describe a London I recognize? Probably not many. Geoff Dyer's *The Colour of Memory* was a bit closer than most. But then people have different views of London. If someone said that London was a fun, sociable place and a novel should reflect that, then I think I would be inclined to say that London is not always a fun, sociable place at all.

identifying 'everything that made london unique': an interesting task maybe!

but I don't think that people would reach agreement on it!

Incidentally the character does hang out with a lot of unnamed other people near the very end of the book, when she works at Starbucks.

I didn't find her relative solitude unreal at all, because she spends much less time alone than I do. Come to think of it, I think that what you are identifying as a negative - student life as solitary and uneventful - now strikes me as one of the most real things about the book.

But of course it's not really uneventful cos daft and disastrous things happen too! Within the story, the Brazilian bf geezer is surely one reason that she doesn't spend her time with other groups of people.

the big 10 is a consortium not of ten but twelve more or less midwestern american schools -- the universities of wisconsin, illinois, indiana, iowa, michigan, minnesota, and, academically, chicago (which dropped out of all athletic competition decades ago); penn state, ohio state, and michigan state; purdue; and northwestern. the university of nebraska's joining next year to make 10 thirteen

i don't mean to define tassie's solitude as negative, but unrealistic. i am very painfully aware of how campuses can encourage students to seek solitude and even isolate them against their wills. again though something characteristic of madison, the school where lorrie teaches, is that such students are remarkably unusual. to create such a character, with no explanation, and for no apparent narrative gain, sacrifices a lot of what makes madison such an interesting experience for its students. i'm still surprised she'd portray a wisconsin campus as so generic, whether it's madison or not. in fact i put off reading the novel for a while somewhat intimidated by how her perspicuity might slash apart one of my alma maters

an example of an author who did get one of these big 10 campuses right is denis johnson. the stories in jesus' son set in iowa city (university of iowa) nail the midwestern desolation that creeps around the edge of that campus. there's nothing comparable atmospherically in a gate at the stairs, except maybe the snow? and it's much more artistically daring of johnson to try to render iowa city, since it's the home of the iowa writers workshop, the top writing program in the US, than it would have been of lorrie to try to give us a little of madison, not exactly, aside from her residence there, a node of american literary activity. why she didn't really try, i have no idea

I really liked the ridiculous gothic excesses of Gate At The Stairs, in fact I wanted it to be more excessive, the storyline with the parents wasn't as sinister as I'd hoped.

yeah, between the revelations about the boyfriend and the couple tassie works for, and then her brother, she really piled it on. maybe she could have turned tassie into some stem cell experiment frankenstein who lives on cheese and beer and packers games

It does have some spectacular cringe moments though, she's fantastic at making you feel really embarassed for her characters.

Coffin scene and the boyfriend plot were poor though, and kind of unnecessary.

I've only read the latest one and Frog Hospital. Should get Anagrams at some point. Birds of America I've avoided because I have enough half-read short story collections as it is.

i couldn't finish birds of america. the smugness put me off. self-help is pretty good, though. the last story, "to fill," is lorrie being fantastic at making you feel embarrassed for her characters

Only read The Collected Stories...god, what a book. Picked up A Gate at the Stairs for £2 the other day, will have to wait till I finish my degree before I start it really.

£2!

It's definitely worth £2.

But if you want something dark, shit, read People Like That Are the Only People Here.
― the pr00de abides (pr00de), Thursday, October 13, 2005 10:55 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

just got to this in birds of america...fuck it's so good

yeah that storys p much a modern classic now

moore on memoirs:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/may/12/what-if/?page=1

on friday night lights http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/very-deep-america-friday-night-lights/?page=1

Bill believes in free speech. He believes in expensive speech. He doesn't believe in showing "Fire" in a crowded movie theater, but he does believe in shouting "Fie!" and has done it twice himself--both times at Forrest Gump

Certainly 'safe' is what I am now - or am supposed to be. Safety is in me, holds me straight, like a spine. My blood travels no new routes, simply knows its way, lingers, grows drowsy and fond. Though there are times, even recently, in the small city where we live, when I've left my husband for a late walk, the moon out hanging upside down like some garish, show-offy bird, like some fantastical mistake - what life of offices and dull tasks could have a moon in it, flooding the sky and streets, without its seeming preposterous? - and in my walks, toward the silent corners, the cold mulchy smells, the treetops suddenly waving in a wind, I've felt an old wildness again. Revenant and drunken. It isn't sexual, not really. It has more to do with adventure and escape, like a boy's desire to run away, revving thwartedly like a wish, twisting in me like a bolt, some shadow fastened at the feet and gunning for the rest, though, finally, it has always stayed to one side, as if it were some other impossible life and knew it, like a good dog, good dog, good dog. It has always stayed.

knew right away that was from who will run the frog hospital

will be carrying paragraphs of that book with me forever