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Title: Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz ISBN: 0-9709428-0-X Publisher: 3rd Bed Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.38 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Art demands an open mind.
Comment: Man, oh man.. many people recurrently never quite get it ... . Art is not a concern of telling easily digestable stories, and writing is not about "getting the job done".
But enough bickering. Gary Lutz is among my favorite living writers because his language is so daring, creative, and skillful, and his ideas are interesting. Anyone who reads this work and thinks that it's bad writing just isn't paying attention. It's excellent writing- a kind of writing that's not easy to accomplish, and it's rather risky. People have engrained word relationships into their heads, not to mention 'reality scenarios', so when those relationships and scenarios are broken dramatically, people tend to respond dramatically. What Gary Lutz does is twist these things violently so that we're forced into different modes of perception.
In short: these stories fascinate me.
But some people don't wish to challenge their perceptions, ... and so be it. They can have what they wish. But if they wish to criticize what they haven't bothered to try to understand, then they're somewhat out of line, and would be better advised to keep quiet.
The filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky said that those filmmakers who are great artists are great because rather than working on the audience's terms and giving the audience what the artists think they want, the artists work on their own terms and force the audience to work on the artists' terms.
Samples are always helpful (this one from "Positions") :
The trouble with coming was that I actually did arrive somewhere. I arrived at the place my body had already left. I got there just in time to get a good look at what had happened where things were. I looked at the person on whom I had been a passenger--in every case, my sister. I looked at this woman, who was a form of transportation, a mode of shipment.
Then what?
I think I stopped looking.
For months it was like that in exactly one room. It was a room in which everything was first on the one hand and then on the other hand, and before long the hands went back into the pockets and were out of view.
Rating: 2
Summary: pretentious doggerel
Comment: I guess this is the type of writing you would expect from a writer more focused on language games than actual story telling. Since he doesn't have the talent to engage the reader in a narrative, he instead resorts to abstract high falutin syntax to try and get the job done, trying to mask over his mediocrity with (sometimes witty, most times awful) aphoristic nonsense. This kind of intellectual masturbation is the last refuge for writers with little talent but tons of ego. The people who believe that Lutz tells the "dark truths about our lives" are people who haven't read more than five books in the last ten years; they are people weaned on television, DVDs, and Charles Bukowski, the people who wear their ignorant nihilism as a badge of honor; they are those young people you've probably overheard in a bar saying things like "yeah man, life is so disgusting." Yes, life is disgusting, but no need to employ an even more disgusting prose style that symbolizes nothing but your own mental vacuity. And for those who believe that Lutz is not embraced by the establishment because he's too truthful, well that's just idiotic. He's not accepted by the so-called evil establishment because his writing is awful, plain and simple. He can tell his dark, cliched, postmodern truths all he wants, but as long as he continues to write with one hand on the keyboard and the other on his wang then his words will never be worth more than the paper they're printed on. Five stars for this guy? Yeah right.
Rating: 3
Summary: I just didn't "get" his style of writing
Comment: There's really not alot for me to say here, except that clearly some people relate differently to different styles of writing. I didn't like this book at all. It didn't make me "feel" anything as I read the stories. Most often, I was like "huh"? Please know that I am not one who needs a "point" to a story in order to appreciate it. I can find alot of pleasure in one or two sentences, depending on how they are written. I very much prefer the styles of writing found in "Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories" and "In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction".
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Title: I Looked Alive: Stories by Gary Lutz ISBN: 0971248575 Publisher: Black Square Editions Pub. Date: 01 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Age of Wire and String: Stories (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) by Ben Marcus ISBN: 1564781968 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1998 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Super Flat Times: Stories by Matthew Derby ISBN: 0316738573 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Notable American Women: A Novel by Ben Marcus ISBN: 0375713786 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 15 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.50 |
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Title: Altmann's Tongue: Stories and a Novella by Brian Evenson ISBN: 0803267444 Publisher: University of Nebraska Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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