Misinspired by George Saunders’ “Ask the Optimist!”, “Ask The Pessimist” asks you to ask the pessimist…well, anything! Just don’t expect to like the answer you get…
8-Track (A Short Story)
Gerald (hungover and morose from the previous night’s compulsive overindulgence, what with, he told himself, the Leafs having fallen yet again to the Habs) was in no mood to be social. He, like his somehow still-unconscious siblings, had missed the 11:00 Mass, and was now unpardonably late for the habitual Sunday Brunch. He grabbed a coat on his way out the door, didn’t put it on, and threw it carelessly into the back seat of the car (mom and dad, obviously up to something, had gone to Church with Emma and her folks), while his other hand fumbled in his rugbypant pocket for the ignition key to his father’s brand-new “Silver Ghost Metallic” 1980 Olds Delta 98 Regency…
A Polyphonic Spree: Notes on Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel
I have always been obsessed with Milan Kundera, and wanted to figure out why, so I grabbed his book The Art of the Novel, and sat down to take notes. What follows is my account of his account of why he writes the kind of books that he does….
Football & the Death of the Hero in “56-0” by TC Boyle
Robert Downey Junior’s character Derek Lutz (in Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School (1986)) may well have been poaching, with tongue-in-cheek, from Don DeLillo’s End Zone when he quipped that “violent ground acquisition games such as football are in fact a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war,” but TC Boyle takes Lutz’s (or Delillo’s) conceit up a notch or two in “56-0”, which I jealously think is one of the most perfectly crafted stories that I have ever read. “56-0” can be found in Boyle’s Stories, but it was previously published in his 1992 collection Without a Hero, whose title is a perfectly apt controlling metaphor for the story as a whole, since, with seemingly effortless grace, Boyle has somehow managed not only to revivify one of American culture’s most clichéd of plotlines (an underdog team’s attempted, “against all odds” heroic “comeback”), but also to bring the ossified Aristotelian unities magically back to life, such that his story gains a remarkable, athletic equipoise, in which humour is locked into a dialectical deathgrip with existential gravitas. And—somehow—Boyle manages to make writing like this appear to be the most natural thing in the world….