I have five crazy stories for you
World’s on fire. Again. Crap. Surely we’ll have to figure out what to do about that. But in the meantime, we also need to unwind. Be in the moment. Before we figure out what to do next, we need to figure out how to handle now. How to escape.
Here’s what I say: When the world starts feeling stranger than fiction, we just need stranger fiction. Here are five of the wildest, most mind-bending short stories I’ve ever read, featuring characters and circumstances so absurd that they make our real world situation seem normal by comparison.
Plus some photos from my life.
You can’t point a 35mm camera at a dark sky and expect anything to develop except black, even if the moon is full. But on this one night, the moon was low in the sky, humongous, and the light from the sun hadn’t cleared out.
Awesomely, I caught a crescent:
“The Daughters of the Moon” by Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino is a GOAT writer and this is a GOAT story - it has stayed with me for over a decade. The premise is a fantastical, geological one: the moon, the literal rock, comes down to Earth. And the language is so vivid and beautiful that the words steal the show. Which is impressive, because it’s a really good show: naked women running around all over the place.
"Elliott Spencer" by George Saunders
Saunders is a nutso writer. Take the first several lines in a giant gulp, and then just keep going and going and going. It took me some time to “get” the premise, but the juice is worth the squeeze; this is fascinating stuff.
Here’s a picture of a tree. The film broke, but I still like it:
It looks like a tree half-lost to time. Or memory.
“Shakespeare’s Memory” by Jorge Luis Borges
Borges is another GOAT. The gist of “Shakespeare’s Memory” is that this guy inherits all of Shakespeare’s memories. It happens quite suddenly, in one magical occurrence, and then he’s one human with two full sets of human memories. Yeah.
“Chaunt” by Joy Williams
Reading “Chaunt” feels like stepping in and out of consciousness, because the world isn’t a real world. Or at least it doesn’t feel like it.
So the reading experience is more like a meditation, a lesson in letting go of the need to make sense of every detail.
Also, everything, always, comes back to death.
”Poetry” by Greg Jackson
We are alive. The planet is alive.
Everything in nature has the power to kill us. Nothing in nature has the power to kill us.
Wild Saturday night, lol,
-Bill
PS I need more reader friends! Read with me!
PPS Please forward this to anyone you know who enjoys reading. Thx! ✌️