Bring on the Quirk!

I don’t necessarily believe in love in at first sight, but sometimes a literary magazine arrives in the mail and I just know—I just know.

I mean, just look at the cover of this Summer/Fall 2011 issue of Gulf Coast:   It’s by artist Dario Robleto, and it reminds me of this, which makes me happy. Nearly everything about this issue Gulf Coast makes me happy.

For instance, this is Gulf Coast’s twenty-fifth anniversary issue, and as such it has one eye on the past. One of the co-founders of the journal, Philip Lopate, contributes an essay, “Hazlitt on Hating,” a dissection of William Hazlitt’s piece “On the Pleasure of Hating.” It’s rare for a contemporary literary journal to expend space on a nineteenth-century author, so such a find is, for this Nineteenth Century Nerd, exciting (1). Lopate’s involvement is also a nice nod to the journal’s past; the issue also has the results of the annual Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose—Barthelme being another notable Gulf Coast founder.

As the outgoing editor notes in his introduction, “A journal such as ours lives necessarily in the present. The editor and managing editor positions, as well as the genre editor positions, change hands every two years.” (This, I feel compelled to point out, is actually a great deal more stable than the many literary journals run out of universities, where the editor positions change every year). However, the retrospective issue offers, “a rare chance to look back further, to think about the longer story.” And that “longer story”—the twenty-five-year history of the journal—helps give this issue charming variety and the heft of some seriously awesome contributors.

The other featured essay is by Michael Parker, and it’s about my favorite piece of punctuation: the semi-colon. (The colon is a strong second). Parker notes the disdain that many well-known writers (including Donald Barthelme) have had for the semi-colon; it’s associated with ostentation (look at me, I can use the most often-misused piece of punctuation correctly!) and there’s also a long history of strangely gendered anxiety surrounding it.

Parker deftly takes down Kurt Vonnegut’s objection to the semi thusly:

        “Do not use semi-colons,” advised Kurt Vonnegut. “They are transvestite     hermaphrodites (2) representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”
        Though I do understand there are situations in which it might be     advantageous to pretend you have not been to college—I confess having done so just a few weeks ago while exploring a subterranean tavern in Terlingua, Texas—writing prose is not to my mind one of them.

Yeah! You tell ‘em, Michael Parker.

He goes on to discuss the “metaphorical possibilities” of the semi-colon and analyzes its use from several passages of writing. He references Proust's Swann’s Way and gives an example from Lydia Davis’ recent translation of Madame Bovary—more references to the nineteenth century and compelling evidence that someone may have put this issue of Gulf Coast together expressly for me.

Further proof of this comes in the book reviews at the back of the issue. There are five reviews and they are all exceptionally well written. A review of Benjamin Percy’s The Wilding by David Duhr notes Percy’s “vivid, grotesque imagination and…writing chops” while suggesting that this man-versus-nature story might drag a bit because “In a successful man versus nature narrative, we truly believe that nature has a shot at winning. In Deliverance, some men go in, fewer men come out, and we’re actually surprised that any of them emerge…Not so for The Wilding. Men go in and men come out, but we never really worry for their safety.” It’s an astute criticism that’s still very respectful; I’m so used to reviews in literary journals being more-or-less positive (and often bland) that this thoughtful, mixed critique feels almost shocking.

There’s also a review of Amelia Gray’s collection of short stories Museum of the Weird (3). Dane A. Wisher’s review begins by outlining the emerging genre of “Literature of the Quirky”: “Despite Quirk’s departure from realism proper due to Quirk’s surreal juxtapositions, improbable plots, and occasional violence and grotesquerie, it is still very much invested in the contemporary realist short story project of the quotidian, the small moments of freedom won in the mundanity of modern life. In this sense, Quirk does not depart from what both Charles Baxter and Michael Chabon have more or less termed the epiphany genre.”

I felt the need to quote this in full, because it’s an interesting assessment of what Wisher calls “the genre of quirk,” and because it references two of the best essays on short stories ever written: Charles Baxter’s (4) “Against Epiphanies,” in Burning Down the House and Michael Chabon’s “Trickster in a Suit of Lights” which can be found in Maps and Legends. If you don’t have these two books, buy them immediately. I just provided links for you! No, seriously. Go do it now. I’ll wait.

…You back? Good. Let’s continue. Back to Gulf Coast’s review of Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird. While I appreciated Dane A. Wisher’s analysis of “Literature of Quirk”, I worried that this description of the “Quirk Genre” can’t really be accurately applied to Amelia Gray’s writing. But, as if anticipating my response (because this issue of Gulf Coast was designed expressly for me), Wisher goes on to note the differences between Gray’s writing and other practitioners of Quirk such as Aimee Bender:

Gray invites, because of her subdued, mater-of-fact tone and offbeat plots, a comparison to Aimee Bender, though the overall comparison is less apt than it would seem at first. While both write humorously about oddities… Bender’s are ultimately more explicitly rooted in the subjects of gender, sexuality, desire; her images are more apparently symbolic of an argument being made.…The stores in Museum of the Weird are more concerned with offsetting the quotidian, using foreign objects as catalysts for contemplation of a situation, though the contemplation and analysis her characters engage in do not themselves restore the situation to a state of order. The characters consider these disturbances with a surprising combination of objectivity and obtuseness, like people in a museum attempting to comprehend some ancient artifact …Unlike Bender, in whose fiction the signs and symbols point to an underlying thematic order, a fairly clear intellectual structure beneath the chaos, Museum leaves the reader thinking, “Well, this must be a metaphor for something.”

Yes! What makes Gray’s writing so interesting, in my view, is that it is not necessarily concerned with Quirkiness and Weirdness as an approach to writing a short story, but that it is just genuinely weird. The weirdness is organic, not a decoration or a writer-ly tic. And true weirdness, real quirkiness, is a rarer thing to find than one might think.

And it’s even harder to find Real Weirdness that hits your sensibilities in just the right way. Luckily, the editors (outgoing as they might be) have provided an issue of Gulf Coast that hits all my particular Weirdness preferences: the issue is colorful, enthusiastic, wide-ranging, occasionally a little bit mean, and chockfull of discussion about books and writers and punctuation that I happen to love. Weirdly perfect for me.
   
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1. I mean that I am a Nerd about the Nineteenth Century, not that I actually come from the Nineteenth Century or that I am some kind of Nineteenth Century variant of the Nerd.

2. See what I mean about the gendered anxiety?

3. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I knew Amelia in high school; we went to Prom in the same group and had dinner beforehand at the Olive Garden. (I’m sorry to reveal all this so publicly, Amelia, but facts are facts, and one can never outrun one’s past).

4. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that Charles Baxter was my professor in graduate school. I moan a lot about my anxieties about reviewing people I know here. The fact that I’m referencing people I know in this review is proof that I’m growing as a person! I think.