sleight-of-hand, taciturn tales full of bogus “moments.”
“Huh, I don’t get it,” people think. “Must be me.” And they drop the book, and pick up the channel converter. For every reader that dies, a viewer is born.
Thinking about all this made me mad, it got me steamed. In the end, I was
steamed
out of bed.
“This is the type of thing that’s killing literature,” I muttered to myself, whipping off the covers. I jumped out of bed,sat in front of the typewriter, and, with my hangover anchoring my ass to the seat, started typing my review.
Over the next four days, I worked hard on my review, meanwhile living on only two sandwiches a day, trying to make my mother’s cash last. Every morning, and every afternoon, I walked down to The Cheese Counter on Bloor, bought 100 grams of casalingo salami, a two-finger wedge of Brie, and a hard “panetti” roll. Then I took all these ingredients to the park and made myself a sandwich, using my knife. By means of this stratagem, I cut my food costs in half, because if the guy behind the counter made the sandwich for me, it cost $3.99. If I bought the ingredients and made it myself, it was only about two bucks (have I mentioned I’m one-sixteenth Scotsman?). Of course, I lost out on the condiments — lettuce, tomato, mustard — but I never had much use for any of that stuff anyway.
I don’t think the guy behind the counter at the Cheese Counter was crazy about me. He had to go through the charade of wrapping each of my puny purchases in wax paper, writing the price on the outside. I felt bad making him go through all this, but what could I do? Food is life, and I needed four more days of it to finish my article (in effect, I reversed the 20th-century North American formula: I consumed in order to produce).
I worked hard on my review, as I say. I even felt I’d pioneered a bold new journalistic hybrid: the “autobiographical book review.” I didn’t want to shove my opinions down the reader’s throat, so I wrote the review in the form of a story, the story of the fat, lazy fool I lived with in a shack on Long Island, the summer I was a reporter. A bloated, TV-addicted brute, he sped around in a Lexus, ate junk food, spent every free hour in front of His Lord and Master, the television. Once every fewweeks he squeezed his buttery bulk into a sausage-tight lycra outfit, donned special booties, and tooled around the block. “Exercise.” Ignorant, selfish, addicted to consumption, too lazy to work, he was fired from his job on a fishing boat halfway through the summer, and split in the middle of the day, leaving me with a stack of bills.
This was more my image of the typical American, I said, than the lean, taciturn cowboys of the Minimalist short stories. He didn’t say nothing because he was “a man of few words,” he said nothing because he had nothing to say. He wasn’t haunted by ‘Nam — he probably couldn’t even point to Vietnam on a map. “If Art is a mirror to Life,” I wrote, “then the Minimalists are holding up a fun-house mirror to contemporary Americans, a mirror that makes Americans look leaner, tougher, and more attractive than they really are.”
In the end, as I say, I was proud of my work. But nervous, too. After all, how would you like to commission a youngish writer with a publication track-record of a
letter
, only to receive in return a far-reaching autobiographical “think piece” on the true nature of America, the death of the novel, the decline of Western civilization, and all the woes of society? You’d probably have to axe his piece, kick him down the stairs with his kill fee, and fail to return all his calls henceforward.
Definitely a scenario that loomed large in my mind as I pedalled off to the
Monocle
to hand it in.
I needn’t have worried, though. Jonathan Griffin loved it. Nan, too.
“Excellent work, my boy, excellent,” Jonathan Griffin said. “You have a unique gift.”
We’re downstairs at the Monocle.
“Huh, I don’t get it,” people think. “Must be me.” And they drop the book, and pick up the channel converter. For every reader that dies, a viewer is born.
Thinking about all this made me mad, it got me steamed. In the end, I was
steamed
out of bed.
“This is the type of thing that’s killing literature,” I muttered to myself, whipping off the covers. I jumped out of bed,sat in front of the typewriter, and, with my hangover anchoring my ass to the seat, started typing my review.
Over the next four days, I worked hard on my review, meanwhile living on only two sandwiches a day, trying to make my mother’s cash last. Every morning, and every afternoon, I walked down to The Cheese Counter on Bloor, bought 100 grams of casalingo salami, a two-finger wedge of Brie, and a hard “panetti” roll. Then I took all these ingredients to the park and made myself a sandwich, using my knife. By means of this stratagem, I cut my food costs in half, because if the guy behind the counter made the sandwich for me, it cost $3.99. If I bought the ingredients and made it myself, it was only about two bucks (have I mentioned I’m one-sixteenth Scotsman?). Of course, I lost out on the condiments — lettuce, tomato, mustard — but I never had much use for any of that stuff anyway.
I don’t think the guy behind the counter at the Cheese Counter was crazy about me. He had to go through the charade of wrapping each of my puny purchases in wax paper, writing the price on the outside. I felt bad making him go through all this, but what could I do? Food is life, and I needed four more days of it to finish my article (in effect, I reversed the 20th-century North American formula: I consumed in order to produce).
I worked hard on my review, as I say. I even felt I’d pioneered a bold new journalistic hybrid: the “autobiographical book review.” I didn’t want to shove my opinions down the reader’s throat, so I wrote the review in the form of a story, the story of the fat, lazy fool I lived with in a shack on Long Island, the summer I was a reporter. A bloated, TV-addicted brute, he sped around in a Lexus, ate junk food, spent every free hour in front of His Lord and Master, the television. Once every fewweeks he squeezed his buttery bulk into a sausage-tight lycra outfit, donned special booties, and tooled around the block. “Exercise.” Ignorant, selfish, addicted to consumption, too lazy to work, he was fired from his job on a fishing boat halfway through the summer, and split in the middle of the day, leaving me with a stack of bills.
This was more my image of the typical American, I said, than the lean, taciturn cowboys of the Minimalist short stories. He didn’t say nothing because he was “a man of few words,” he said nothing because he had nothing to say. He wasn’t haunted by ‘Nam — he probably couldn’t even point to Vietnam on a map. “If Art is a mirror to Life,” I wrote, “then the Minimalists are holding up a fun-house mirror to contemporary Americans, a mirror that makes Americans look leaner, tougher, and more attractive than they really are.”
In the end, as I say, I was proud of my work. But nervous, too. After all, how would you like to commission a youngish writer with a publication track-record of a
letter
, only to receive in return a far-reaching autobiographical “think piece” on the true nature of America, the death of the novel, the decline of Western civilization, and all the woes of society? You’d probably have to axe his piece, kick him down the stairs with his kill fee, and fail to return all his calls henceforward.
Definitely a scenario that loomed large in my mind as I pedalled off to the
Monocle
to hand it in.
I needn’t have worried, though. Jonathan Griffin loved it. Nan, too.
“Excellent work, my boy, excellent,” Jonathan Griffin said. “You have a unique gift.”
We’re downstairs at the Monocle.
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