M Sarki

I made it more than half way through this basic retread of some short stories Lydia Davis has previously written and published. Seems she writes a bit here and there about a boy and her relationship and perhaps a bit more about a girl and her relationship and sometimes about both of them and her relationship with them all and by the time I get to where I am I am so tired and too tired of reading this boring tale of nothing. Ray Johnson, the artist, whose last act was a performance piece in which he leaves a trail of friends who all know a piece of him but no one knows his all, goes and kills himself by drowning in a river. Ray used to do performance pieces in the city and called them "plays about nothing". He had a loyal following and somebody made a movie about his life that was very interesting. It was called "How to Draw a Bunny". Let me give you an example of how Ray operated. If a buyer of his hard art only could afford to pay say three quarters of what Ray's asking price was then after a bit of haggling back and forth Ray would graciously accept the deal, collect the money, and send the buyer three quarters of the piece. Whatever became of the leftover pieces of Ray's art remain a mystery, at least to me. In this novel by Lydia Davis I often noticed a short story of hers that I had already seen elsewhere in other of her collections. For example, "Story", from her first collection of short stories titled BREAK IT DOWN, tells how the narrator's boyfriend couldn't see her before she was to embark on a trip very early the next morning so she stays up all night in her obsessive search to find out why. She makes several trips back and forth to his apartment, several phone calls, and she meets him or talks to him but never quite believes his story and she shouldn't. The names in this story were changed in the novel, but the story is the same story as the text entered into her novel. This happens often in here. Too often for me. It is lame and is a poor way to garner loyalty from me. I had already purchased from amazon.com the Collected Stories of Lydia Davis based on the one superb story I read in the collection FAKES edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer in which I do more than mention the piece here:

http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/hub/My-Full-Disclosure

The Lydia Davis Funeral Parlor story was about a letter she wrote to a funeral home about the attendant naming what was left of her father after his cremation his "cremains". I thought the letter so clever and brilliant and so well written that I bought the entire Lydia Davis collected short story work and now I almost wish I hadn't. The book arrived in the mail today and it matched the description online so I can't send it back. I guess I will see more of what is in it when I have more time and space to do so this coming mid winter. But the few stories I have already read in my perusal of it, as I have had the book on loan to me from the library and I have decided to return it to the library tomorrow in addition to returning the novel which I also borrowed from the library, is that Davis is at the very least a retreader and not at all an original novelist. Or she is senile. Or she has dementia? In the meantime I have to abandon her novel today because it is driving me crazy trying to read it. It is even a more daunting prospect to pick the book up to read when I have EXTINCTION now taking a back seat. In fact, just a few moments ago I did try to pick the book up to continue on with my reading and the feeling of dread was killing me. My eyes floated down below that novel to see EXTINCTION resting there so elegantly and noble at the bottom of my pile of now four books I am currently reading that sit on my end table by my chair in my personal reading library. To think I had temporarily set down the novel EXTINCTION by Thomas Bernhard in order to read this drivel ahead of finishing this great one. I am so sorry, Thomas. I got excited. Forgive me. I thought I had discovered another living genius in our midst. But it is possible she is the real deal of short story writers. Just don't tell me I should have stayed with her and the novel until the end because the novel gets so much better later. If that is the case, and I really do not doubt that this may be true, then she should have started there.