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Short Stories: a guest post by Tao Lin

I am going to blog about short stories today. These will be sentences I type to myself. I like the story "Wolf Dreams" by Ann Beattie (from "Distortions"). The story to me is similar in tone to the story "Graveyard Day" by Bobbie Ann Mason (from "Shiloh and Other Stories"). Both stories have narrators who are confused because their ex-boyfriend and husbands have all had the same first name. I have calm feelings right now thinking about these two stories. I feel friendly and patient and compassionate right now thinking about these two stories.

Before this I was clicking a lot of different things with no clear goal thinking things like "The caffeine has left me" and occasionally  typing emails with  sentences like "i keep covering face with hands in obviously fake display of exasperation."

I also like "Shifting" by Ann Beattie (from I think "Secrets and Surprises"). The story ends with a paragraph describing a woman lightly touching her body and looking at it in a mirror thinking something about statues. She thinks something about how if she was a statue she could enjoy  the sensation of touching  the gray, cold statue  lightly with her fingers. I'm doing this from memory so I might be wrong. Earlier in the story is a scene  that showed me that the woman was confused  and bored and maybe depressed and lonely and anxious, at this time in her life, and then it has the statue paragraph and then  it has a  paragraph break and the line, "This was in 1979, in Philadelphia." I think I quoted that wrong. I like that story.

I like short stories. I would like to create an anthology of them. I made a table of contents before on my blog.

I am censoring myself right  now from saying bad things about a lot of short stories and a lot of short-story writers.  I feel proud. The reward for censoring oneself is mostly within, it doesn't come in trophy form ever. There should be an award for a critic or writer who has abstained the most in a single year from saying bad things about things without rhetoric.

A lot of people right now probably want me to  stop censoring myself. Some people are trying to censor their urges of wanting me to not censor myself.   If you are reading this post you are probably bored. I don't know what to tell you. People are often bored because they do not have goals. I know that I will die one day. But that is not a goal, I don't have to do anything for that, it is going to happen.

Because of genetics human beings are born with goals. Not "goals" maybe but something. To avoid uncomfortable situations, to avoid hunger and thirst, to have sex, and to avoid pain. Those are goals that  maybe all  human beings have. But "uncomfortable" is an abstraction, it is different for every person. It is different for every person for  every moment in time. I am not hungry right now. I am not thirsty, I am not experiencing physical pain. I am not in an uncomfortable temperature or humidity level. I am not aroused. And I am not thinking about anything except this sentence I am currently typing. I have no goals right now.

Sometimes in gmail chat or in e-mail I type a sentence and it seems like a good novel title. I will paste some of those below.

how to funnel cash toward yourself

i pushed buttons on $1.25 cd player and it said 'Er'

self amusement success story: a novel of victory

a disappointing story with intense hitting

a wad of cash in 2010

$200,000: a novel of abundance

endless cash in giant windtunnel

They're almost all about cash.

My writing often has no insights anymore.  I thought about this walking around yesterday outside. I think it's because I don't expect anymore  to "learn" anything, to read any sentence  that will "change my life."  I expect that I might read something, a story or a line in a story (like "This was in 1979, in Philadelphia") or a poem,  that might make me feel some emotions,  maybe calmer or more accepting. Those are small things. I don't expect anymore to be "taught", like maybe how I felt in high school and some of college  when I read Kurt Vonnegut a lot and wanted  "answers."

I don't understand anymore the phrase "Life is meaningless." I do understand "The arbitrary nature of the universe."  Kurt  Vonnegut  didn't really give answers either, I think.

This is the end of Tao Lin guest post week. Emily Bobrow has asked me if I would like to blog more here in the future and I said yes. I will blog more here in the future. Thank you Emily Bobrow.