Chamblee54

The Soho Press Book of 80s Short Fiction turned up in the Dekalb Library system, and has provided some cheap thrills. One negative review catalogs a few of the charms.”Beware. Raw, graphic sexual content. I had intended this as a reading group choice. It was a pre-order so I had no forewarning or list of titles (“Sodomy” would have given me pause). Cover listed Raymond Carver, Mary Gaitskill, Amy Hempel, Jamaica Kincaid. Book arrived with cover detached.”
Weird Fucks Lynne Tillman is the first story. A young lady has an eventful summer. She takes up with a married man, whose wife dries her hair in the oven. Is this what happened to Sylvia Plath?
So Much Water So Close To Home Raymond Carver was a delight. I had listened to several of Mr. Carver’s stories read on youtube, but never read the text. SMWCTH is a tasteful story. Just-plain-folks go camping, and see too much.
Sodomy Gary Indiana jerks us off back into a New York state of mind. A man is talking about two of his late seventies boyfriends. One is a terrific fuck, but not much else. The other is a confused, off-and-on emotional connection. Mr. Indiana talks about 1978 as being “before the war.”
The Angel Patrick McGrath is the story of Harry Talboys, an eccentric old man who estivated in lower Manhattan. The old man lived his days in a gin fueled haze, while telling tales of his former glory. Eventually, the young man who wrote the story couldn’t take anymore of the old geezer.
River Of Names Dorothy Allison is tough to read. It’s about a lifestyle that I am blessedly unfamiliar with. A hyper productive South Carolina family gets through life, sometimes. RON opens up with one of the sisters taking a pail of soiled rags out to the fire. This scene involves the sense of smell.
Secretary Mary Gaitskill “A young woman, recently released from a mental hospital, gets a job as a secretary to a demanding lawyer, where their employer-employee relationship turns into a sexual, sadomasochistic one.” This is where the tales get funky. There is a connection to a movie and the description of the movie sounds different from the story … there’s no mental hospital discharge in the story. The young lady seems to be just a helpless young lady, who lives with her helpful parents. She gets a job in a law firm. The lawyer turns out to be a terrible person, who likes to beat her. She has a curious relationship with the whole thing … it’s a disturbing tale.
Wrong Dennis Cooper If Secretary wasn’t fucked up enough, the next story is by Dennis Cooper. Some guy lives in lower Manhattan during the seventies, and goes around killing people. Until he gets killed himself, and then goes on a deceased person monolog.
Debbie’s Barium Swallow Laurie Weeks makes william burroughs look like dick, jane, and sally. “There’s a guy named Benny lymphoma tracking … God or whatever Satan daddy lifts my skirt like he does at the slightest whim … what words can Debbie use for this secret procedure … she crawls and shakes with fever in the toxic dirt crawling one knee before the other … bitching from 34th Street to 35th a node shaped lip traveling from … your job in the … Hospital’s authoritative smoothing fekade” Pictures today are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library.”