Some Words

So Gizmodo posted this. I’m not interested in the gadget personally, but the title made me wonder. Do other people hurt themselves while brewing tea a lot? Is it really that hard?

Naguib Mahfouz died. As usual I am late the game on both noting it and reading him. It has gotten to the point that authors dying makes me feel guilty. I start to realize how many good books I haven’t given time to.

Maybe if I hadn’t brewed all of that tea myself I would have had time to read him already. But loose leaf tea is just so much more delicious.

And much earlier in the week The Valve talked about short stories. The idea that the short story is dead, much like the novel, comes up a fair amount. I think at least one of the reasons for this is the fact that short story markets can segregate very easily. It’s possible to have a collection of just… oh… we’ll say detective fiction set in the 40s. Reading that is bound to make you feel like the genre, and maybe the form, is tapped. But that is because you didn’t read everything that was available. Now, the short story is a tough one, you don’t have a long form to play with. Novels let you mess with things in ways that short stories often can’t. There are things you can do in the short story of course, but if you bend the form too far you run the risk that the reader won’t acclimate to the trick or twist. On top of that there seems to be a heavy tilt toward personal memoir styles these days. I’ve bitched before that I feel like I read a lot of stories about climactic moments in childhood. But I have to believe that the other stories are out there and I’m just not seeing the others.

There is a collection linked in the Valve article with a lot of authors I respect, but I don’t know how many of them I’d end up seeing in places I read.