The Essence of a Scary Story by Three-Year Old Kevin Lee Schmidt

Kevin White EyedOnce upon a time, there was a group of kids . . .

and they DIED!

(Read what Kevin’s story means in terms of the structure of a story, which is something that we must learn as children, in my book Narrative Madness,  available at narrativemadness.com or on Amazon.)

The Danger of Meta: Centre George Pompidou and David Foster Wallace’s “Octet”

Centre Georges Pompidou demonstrates the danger of meta:

pompidou-center

(Image from fun-en-bulle-castbd.blogspot.com)

The Parisian art museum built in 1977 is meta-architecture because it exposes elements of a building that are usually hidden, placing them on the exterior. It teaches us to see a building as a material object made up of structure, support, pipes, wires. In the picture below some pipes are painted different colors, suggesting different systems, thus “exposing the device,” showing us how the building works. Very interesting, no doubt. So what’s the problem?
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A Not Not-True Introduction to Donald Barthelme and “The School”

Sixty StoriesThis introduction to Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School” is non-fiction. Non-fiction means “not fiction.” Fiction, as you have learned, is a story that is “not true.” In other words non-fiction, on a linguistic level, is “not not-true.” This means, logically, when you cancel out the negatives, that the non-fictional information I am about to give you, is — I am very pleased to say — true.

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Who is the Monster at the End of The Book? It’s Not Grover, Dear Reader.

On the cover of The Monster at the End of This Book Starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover, Grover breaks the narrative fourth wall and smiles and waves at the readers, a bit shyly, saying “Hello, everybodeee!” No mistaking that voice! Then the title page, which readers always turn past quickly, like Grover, who is already peeling back one corner of the illustrated page (drawn on the real paper), saying, “This is a very dull page. What is on the next page?”

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The Limits of Language: Seuss Beyond Zebra

In On Beyond Zebra by Dr. Seuss, Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell, who is just learning to spell, writes out the alphabet on a chalkboard and says, “The A is for Ape. And the B is for Bear. / The C is for Camel. The H is for Hare.” He knows all the letters through to Z for Zebra. “So now I know everything anyone knows / From beginning to end. From the start to the close. Because Z is as far as the alphabet goes.” In other words, the alphabet allows him to learn about the known animals of the world, the implication being that without the alphabet he may never have known about hares or zebras.

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A Simple Metapoem for an Oxymoron: You

Paradoxes and Oxymorons

by John Ashbery

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What’s a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem.
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

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Ronosaurus and I Present “Borges and I”

HacedorBorges’ “Borges and I” is such a wonderful piece of metafiction that I will just reproduce it whole for you here, with just enough of a comment to suggest that writing writes the writer, as I discussed in Who is Writing This? and It’s All Fiction, in which I discuss how every piece of writing requires the invention of a speaker, even a dictionary entry (the “nobody” speaker), so the requirements of the piece determines the voice and therefore the speaker. In the short fiction below, Borges is talking about how his fame has taken over his life (or, as Foucault would put it, his author function, his reputation as a great writer, has erased the real person).

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The World’s Shortest Novel?: Snoopy’s “It was a Dark and Stormy Night”

Is a novel defined by its length or by a certain approach? Can we consider a story that is not long a novel if it is epic in scope, representing a range of experiences and emotions? If so, isn’t Snoopy’s It Was a Dark and Stormy Night a novel?

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The Burden of Life: Tim O’Brien’s Metafictional Classic “The Things They Carried”

Things They Carried“The Things They Carried” is a short work of fiction. The Things They Carried is also the name of what could be called a short-story collection or perhaps a meta-fictional novel. It’s a pastiche of fiction, nonfiction, fantasy, memoir, author’s notations, and literary commentary.

Although the opening story stands alone as a work of fiction, it also functions as an introduction to the larger book. It establishes the major characters that recur throughout the “novel” and introduces many of the topics the book explores, themes as concrete as the Vietnam War and as abstract as how someone tells the truth about a historical event. O’Brien felt that straight facts could not convey an experience as ambiguous and disturbing as the Vietnam war. Yet O’Brien does not wholly rely on fiction either. He interweaves fact and fiction in the story (and throughout the book) to give the reader a more comprehensive sense of what it was really like to fight in Vietnam, to live in the face of death, and to carry on a purposeless existence.

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