safety in the cinema

A little while ago, we had David Thomson visit the bookstore to talk about his new book, The Moment of Psycho (complete with unsettling subtitle: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder). I didn't actually hear very much of his talk because I was busy with various bookstore things, but I heard him begin by presenting the idea of "safety in the cinema."

Are we safe when we go to the cinema? Are we safe when we settle down into those plush folding seats and lean back in climate-controlled darkness? Are we safe when the screen lights up and the music begins and we are transported to somewhere definitively not where we started out?

No, David Thomson says.

No! I say.

And then several days went by and several things happened and I was very sad. I kept thinking, am I safe? And then I thought about it some more, and I had to ask myself, would I want to be? When I am sad, do I want to see things, hear things, read things, think things that only comfort me? Will having my world flattened out, simplified, and filtered make me feel any better? No, it won't. I tried it recently. It makes me feel like I'm playing with paper dolls, or a garden made out of spun sugar. None of it lasts, and if it rains, everything is going to collapse into mush and melt away, leaving you with nothing but pale and dirty water.

The thing about art (and when I say art, I mean it as a clumsy stand in for telling stories, listening to music, dancing in the rain, looking at a painting in a museum, taking photographs, going to the cinema... all of that, on both sides) is that it puts extra folds into my life. When I was very young, I read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. There's an illustration in there that tries to explain how you could fold together space and time to travel long distances through both in a moment. An ant crawls along a length of fabric stretched between two hands. The hands fold the fabric together and the ant steps from one finger to the next, skipping all the fabric in between.

Art does the opposite. It makes folds and pleats in my life, but they aren't shortcuts. They're richly textured, absurdly embroidered, swags of knotted and tangled and snarled and dirty things. They give me the luxury of time outside of my mundane routine to examine things I don't quite understand. They rip off the confines of all those silly excuses I make up for myself to stay inside where everything is safe.

I don't want everything to be safe, not in art at least. Otherwise there's no point to it. Otherwise it's just stuff, this comforting, safe stuff that says nothing, that gives nothing, that has absolutely nothing in it at all.

bruising powers of brevity, or, why you should read short stories

One of the most frustrating things about working at a bookstore is when you are telling someone about a book you love, one of those that you adore either madly and immoderately or sensibly and intelligently, and they listen to you politely before saying:

"Well, that sounds interesting. But it's really not my kind of thing."

And you're a little bit crushed, convinced that if only they tasted it, they would fall for it too; but it's perfectly fine for them to decline. They know themselves better than I do. They've been reading for years, and by now they know the general flavor of what works. I should leave them alone.

But.

There is something that I wish I could insist on. Everyone should read short stories! Look! I'll read you one myself, if you just stand here long enough. So many people tell me that they don't read short stories. They don't like them. They only want to read novels, the kind you can press your face into for several hours and emerge, glutted on the visions of someone else's life. Short stories seem pretty, they say, but what's the point of them?

The point of them is their shortness. They work with compression and omission, by leaving things out and taking shortcuts to the inside of your head where, once they get there, they unfold themselves, like a giant piece of origami undone. They bruise you with their hard edges, explode, amuse, devastate, and baffle. You can do things in a short story that would be exhausting if sustained for a novel. There's more space on the inside than you would suspect, more room for guessing, a looseness left for the reader to explore.

(Mr. Steven Millhauser has something to say on the subject, an interesting--and maybe faintly grumpy?--essay in the NY Times.)

I think the trick is that you have to figure out what kind of short stories you want to read. I used to avoid them because I thought they were all brief bits of ordinary people doing ordinary things, and that bored me (schools should use more imagination when selecting short fiction). What was the point of reading about something that I could see better by walking outside?

And then I discovered genre stories (I say "genre" and I mean mystery, fantasy, science fiction, anything where the strange and not quite possible actually happens). Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Kelly Link and Italo Calvino... Steven Millhauser, Neil Gaiman, Angela Carter, Etgar Keret, Jorge Luis Borges, Ray Bradbury, Raold Dahl (have you ever read his short stories? brilliant!), Ted Chiang, M. R. James, Kurt Vonnegut ("Harrison Bergeron" is the first short story that I couldn't stop thinking about for days and days after I read it), Avram Davidson... These stories smacked me in the head. They got up my nose and under my skin. They haunted, excited, and thrilled me; and I loved them.

And because I'm so in love with them, I want everyone else to love them to. Or, at least to give them the chance to introduce themselves.

Read short stories. Bruise your head.