There are days when I'm convinced everyone's crazy--I'm sure you've experienced this sensation--when in reality I'm just paying attention to the wrong things. Probably I'm a little bit crazy.
I was at a Halloween party and overheard somebody, drunk, say, "Literature just ain't what it used to be!" which is a truly awesome thing to say. I'm assuming they meant that literature is no good now, compared to...who knows when. But part of me wants to believe they were making a literal comment on the fact that 'literature' (whatever that all encompassing word even means) is constantly evolving. In which case, yes, people alive and writing now are certainly different people than those who wrote before. Well said!
But without booze in the veins, thinking less cynically/sarcastically, I'm now choosing to focus on the fact that at a Halloween party, with sobriety compromised, somebody was talking about books. Neat!
Anyway, should you ever find yourself of the opinion that today's writing isn't on par with the great writers of the past, just know that you are crazy and have probably completely given up searching, which is sad. I try to read and write every day; while I don't think everybody really needs to do that, if you are going to have bold, all encompassing opinions (that party was not nearly the first time I've heard the "ain't what it used to be!" argument), you really ought to go out and read a ton first.
So I figure I should share some of the billion wonderful stories I've stumbled on over the years--here's a start with something from The Kenyon Review from 2003. This story is about two Turks running a struggling pizza and kebab shop in Dresden fifty years after Allied planes pretty much erased the city. They encounter neo-Nazi skinheads and drunks who defile their restaurant on a nightly basis. Then they meet one otherworldly young woman.
As far as I'm concerned these are real characters, written ferociously one minute, then intensely compassionate the next. Check out some of these sentences:
"When one of the skins came into the shop, Amar felt the hummingbird in his ribs trying to fly its way out. The skinhead’s vomit-brown pants were ripped from knee to foot, he smelled of kerosene, and he had tiny beads of dark blue in the piss-yellow whites of his eyes."
"Dresden, parts of it with a new veneer of cobble and mortar, except everyone knew about the cracks underneath and, more important, about how the stones had not been sturdy enough before. Dresden, with its streets snaking through his veins, from the days when he pushed the lunch cart, which had become the restaurant, which threatened to become a bankruptcy of empty bricks. Dresden, and Amar never even went to the church, which the Germans refused to refurbish, where the angels still kept their broken faces, but he knew all about it. After Amar put Benji to bed, those angels wrinkled up their concrete half-noses at him as if they were about to whisper. Amar was not sure if it were he or their rubbled tongues that never allowed them to speak."
"How at night Amar took Benji home and made him dinner and cleaned his corduroys and played imaginary games with a child’s rules, flexible and fantastic, as if every event would turn out OK as long as Benji had a little more time to think."
Anyway, swim on over and READ: Daniel A. Hoyt's 'Amar' in The Kenyon Review.
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