B) Something I don’t have time for now, so…

C) I’ll get to it later.

I’m not killing it. I’m not even taking it private.  I’m just letting you know that nothing more will happen here… until it does.

To my 27 readers…thanks for visiting.

That’s what Sam Shepard is, isn’t he?  He’s not known primarly as a short story writer, although Amazon lists several collections.  He’s the playwright who gave us “Buried Child,” “True West” and “A Lie of the Mind,” along with many others written when he was theater’s scenemaker, first in the East Village and later San Francisco. Even more people recognize him as an actor — a good-looking, lean, rugged kind of guy, Clint Eastwood but even more tight-lipped.  In “The Right Stuff,” he portrayed test-pilot Chuck Yeager and Levon Helm played his crewman. Before each flight, they had the same ritual dialogue:

Sam Shepard

Chuck Yeager: Hey, Ridley, ya got any Beeman’s?
Jack Ridley: Yeah, I think I got me a stick.
Chuck Yeager: Loan me some, will ya? I’ll pay ya back later.
Jack Ridley: Fair enough.

So, it’s hard to read “Indianapolis (Highway 74)” as anything but the musings of this well-known writer and actor, who seems a lot like the main character, Stuart.  The memory that triggers the encounter with Becky in the lobby of a hotel outside Indianapolis, is of a time when the two of them lived like bohemians together near St. Mark’s Church in the East Village, sharing a bowl of wheat germ in bed.   St. Mark’s Church is where Shepard’s theater career got its start.

The story plays out as a dramatization of Robin Williams’ one-liner, “If you remember the 60s, you weren’t there.”  When Becky, “a tall skinny woman in a cloth Pat Nixon-type coat” sees Stuart, he doesn’t remember her at all, until she frees her mane of red hair from a bandanna.  “Now it all comes back,” he tells us, but he still can’t remember her name.  Humiliatingly, she makes him guess, seemingly to prove that although she was “so in love” with Stuart, Stuart couldn’t be bothered with the chore of keeping her in his memory.  Once again, a reader thinks, “Right, because he was Sam Shepard, the handsome genius of the East Village who turned into a movie star. He must have laid hundreds of hippie chicks back then. Plus he probably took a lot of drugs. How could she expect him to remember her?”

Their decades-later, supremely awkward encounter takes place because Stuart is waiting to see if a room opens up at the Holiday Inn.  He’s “been crisscrossing the country again, without much reason,” he explains in the story’s first sentence.  On this particular night, it’s late and snowing hard, so he’s willing to wait in the lobby, under constant assault from a violent reality TV show.

The assault on Becky is equally disturbing.  Her entire being is negated in this story, immediately by Stuart’s cruel memory lapse, and more deeply by her unnamed husband, who has “disappeared” with their two teenage daughters.  She is “in limbo” at the Holiday Inn, an allusion to death that Shepard brings to his final image of her, “standing there shivering, without her coat, and the snow catches hold of her red hari and it glows in the backlight, like a halo.  Am I now having a religious experience?”

Becky is a spirit stripped of form and identity who tries to be an angel — offering Stuart the sofa in her hotel room.  Clearly afraid of her, he declines politely but firmly.  He drives on, but the snow is falling so heavily he can’t see anything, which prompts an epiphany from the depths of memory:

Maybe there’s a correlation between external blindness and internal picturing. I can see the edge of the mattress now, and our gray bowls side by side, our knees touching. These are some of the other things that go sailing through my head as I strain to keep the car between the lines: Leaving the desert on a clear day. Boarding the Greyhound. Getting off in Times Square. Huge poster of a pop group from England with Three Stooges haircuts. Blood bank with a sign in the window offering five dollars a pint. Black whores with red hair. Chet Baker standing in a doorway on Avenue C. Tompkins Square Park, with its giant dripping American elms. Cabbage-and-barley soup. Hearing Polish for the first time. Old World women in bandannas and overcoats. Cubans playing chess. Rumors of acid and TCP. Crowds gathered around a black limo, listening to a radio report of Kennedy’s killing. Jungles burning with napalm. Caskets covered in American flags. Mules hauling Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s coffin. Stanley Turrentine carrying his axe in a paper sack.

I’m turning around. I’m in the middle of a blizzard and I’m turning around.

Stuart has decided to take Becky up on her offer after all.  The snow is only the proximate cause.  He wants to, what, honor the memory she offered him? To find comfort in her, or to give her comfort?  He swims upstream through the channels of hotel policies designed to ensure guest privacy until he gets Becky on the phone.  All she has to say is “Hello,” and “the simple innocence of her voice starts me weeping and I can’t stop….”  As desperate as Becky is, she is an angel to Stuart.

That’s where the story stops.  It is a surprisingly sentimental ending, but I wasn’t especially moved by it. The way the story is written, Becky is a compelling character, but Stuart is not. He’s driving around the Midwest “without much reason.” His choice of the hotel is “random.”  We’re supposed to see him as lost, but he doesn’t clarify much about what set him on this journey. What we learn about him isn’t much more than that he’s tired and annoyed by loud TVs, women who make him guess their names and dogs that take too long to finish peeing.  Thus, it’s ambiguous whether, at the end, he’s just giving in to his need for sleep and safety, or if this woman has really changed him.  His epiphany has little to do with her and much to do with his earliest memories of New York — his youth.

The story finally seems more like a chapter from a memoir.  You fill in the blanks of what you don’t know about Stuart with details you might recall about Sam Shepard. He does nothing to undo such an impression. His New York recollections underscore it.  I think we’re seeing in this story an example of a literary hybrid that might be a signal of our age — a mix of fiction and memoir, where it’s understood that the central character, the narrator, is the writer but the incidents might or might not have happened.

Perhaps Sam Shepard actually does drive around the interstates in the middle of winter, and perhaps there was a night when, to his surprise, a woman presented herself to him as an old flame. Or maybe the woman never appeared, but he fantasized about her while sitting in that Holiday Inn lobby waiting to see if a room opened up.   Though you wonder:  If Sam Shepard was sitting in the lobby of a busy hotel, wouldn’t somebody want his autograph?

P.S. This story has a curious correspondence with the Stephen King story I mentioned in the first post.  In both stories, the main characters have dogs. And, in both stories, the main characters are weeping uncontrollably at the end.  I wonder if the editor noticed this.  If she did, I wonder if she considered pulling one of the stories, or at least spacing them farther apart.  Probably couldn’t do it.  King has a novel out just now, and Shepard’s new collection of stories will be published in January.

I wondered how I could ever decide a story was a) interesting enough and b) ready to offer to the world for publication.

“I know.  I’ll start making a regular habit of reading the short stories in The New Yorker. If a story is published there, it must meet some minimum criteria for interestingness. It must be a story that an agent liked, that an editor liked, and I have to assume that readers liked enough to allow the magazine’s fiction editor to keep her job.  Perhaps making a habit of reading the short story they publish every week (which I haven’t previously been doing) will give me confidence that a story I’ve written, or might write, is good enough to send out — if not to The New Yorker, to some publication.”

That’s what I thought while I was lumbering through the blue water.

Then it hit me.  What The New Yorker decides to publish each week is a good deal more important than a mere lesson it could have for me as a writer.  The New Yorker might be the only nationally circulated magazine left in America that still publishes fiction on a regular basis. 

The Atlantic Monthly gave fiction up perhaps a decade ago, and now only publishes an annual “summer reading” special issue.  I don’t know what Harper’s or Esquire do anymore, but even if they publish a story in every issue, they’re monthlies.

There are still literary magazines out there that publish lots of fiction, but they publish quarterly and, unless you already know about them, you’re unlikely to come across them.  Maybe in Borders, or in one of the dwindling number of independent bookstores, but certainly not at an airport.

The New Yorker is sold at airports.

For short fiction in America, The New Yorker is the primary remaining showcase.  It’s the last picture show. Thousands of people read these stories every week.  It might not be the first thing in the magazine they read.  The New Yorker’s reputation nowadays rests on its journalism, commentary and cartoons. But I have to think there are some buyers of The New Yorker who get to the fiction occasionally.  And from those stories, they get an idea of authors they might like, so it influences the nation’s literary culture.

It also happens to be the case that authors with big novels coming out often get a short story placed in The New Yorker around the time the book is launched. The other week, Stephen King popped in with a little kitchen-sink tale, “Premium Harmony” about an unhappy blue-collar couple going shopping.  I’m not surprised that King has a review of some Raymond Carver material coming up in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.  His story is Carver down to the cigarettes, the shabby car and the dog, but without the poetry.

The bigger context is the publication of King’s enormous new novel, “Under The Dome,” which sounds more typical of the work he’s famous for, with its mix of fantasy and allegory and its small-town New England setting. I assume the short story was placed to remind readers of The New Yorker that King was back in business.

Whatever. I’m not likely to read “Under the Dome” anytime soon, but I read “Premium Harmony.”  It’s worth discussing on its own terms. Why? Because it ran in The New Yorker.  When new movies come out, don’t you talk about them with your friends?  If  new series starts on TV, something big like “Mad Men” or anything on HBO or Showtime, doesn’t that lead to conversations?

A new story in The New Yorker is a comparable cultural event.  It’s about now,  just as much as a high-profile movie, book, TV show or album is about now.  The monetary stakes might be lower, the audience might be smaller relative to a TV show, but relative to the universe of fiction readers, it’s a red-carpet moment.  We get one, usually just one, almost every week.  Somebody out there must want to talk about it.

If that somebody is you, I hope you’ll read my posts about these stories and then comment on them with your own critiques. Starting with the most recent issue in my house, I’ll read the story each week as soon as I can, and write something about it so the discussion can start.

My idea of literary criticism is mostly stuck in the 1950s. I used to enjoy writers like Cleanth Brooks, Northrop Frye and Malcolm Cowley, and up through my college years, they were dominant in their influence on English professors.

The idea was, you looked at the work, what was on the page.  The story, novel or poem under examination (and Frye at least looked at himself as a scientist) should be read not for its relationship with the author’s biography, or any other external factors.  It shouldn’t be necessary to know the writer was divorced, or a drunk, or a Communist.

However, the story does not exist in a total vacuum, per these critics.  It is part of the larger context of myths and archetypes drawn from a critic’s reading of other literature — all other literature.

This is how I like to read, but I’m not going to be strict about it with myself, and if you choose to participate, I’m especially not going to be strict about it with you.  If you see the story as a political artifact, an embodiment of class struggle or a metaphor for environmental degradation, go ahead and talk about it.  If you know something about the author’s life that you think plays into your response to the story, that’s great.  I might slip off the old mask and try on some of the others.

If it isn’t clear already: I’m not a qualified literary critic.  I graduated with a degree in English, but I’ve never written a graduate thesis about literature nor taught a class. This blog has no pretensions to anything other than my ability to keep up with the traffic and to have something of interest to say.

So, expect posts about once a week, corresponding to recent stories.  I’m going to write something about each one.  If a relevant piece of news comes over the transom, I might post about that.  I also might see a slightly older story (from the stack that used to be by my bedside) and write a post about it in between the regular posts.  But the focus will be on the newest stories. If you want to join this online story club, the only requirement is that you read the story you’re commenting on.

However, if you’re one of those people who reads the stories months later, right before you recycle your copies of the magazine, I’ll try to use tagging and categories to make it easy to find the post about that story and you can comment on that thread.  It would make me very happy to look back a year from now and see 50 discussions still going on.

If you want to communicate with me privately, use this e-mail:  stodder dot john at gmail dot com.

Let the journey begin!