# Short Stories; Manual

Received a fun phone call from Beijing yesterday: “When the phone rings,
who would you most like it to be? And who would you hate it to be? Who
is the first person that comes into your mind, Roy liked to ask people,
at that moment?” Have I mentioned how much I like Hanif Kureishi? His
“In a Blue Time” opens with that paragraph.

All his opening lines are good actually. The others in Love in a Blue
Time are:

> Azhar’s mother led him to the front of the lower deck, sat him down
> with his satchel, hurried back to retrieve her shopping, and took her
> place beside him. (“We’re Not Jews”)
>
> All week Bill had been looking forward to this moment. He was about to
> fuck the daughter of the man who had fucked his wife. (“D’accord,
> Baby”)
>
> I tell you, I feel tired and dirty, but I was told no baths allowed
> for a few days, so I’ll stay dirty. Yesterday morning I was crying a
> lot and the woman asked me to give an address in case of emergencies
> and I made one up. (“With Your Tongue down My Throat”)
>
> I used to like talking about sex. All of life, I imagined—from
> politics to aesthetics—merged in passionate human conjunctions.
> (“Blue, Blue Pictures of You”)
>
> Surreptitiously the father began going into his son’s bedroom. (“My
> Son the Fanatic”)
>
> I’m at this dinner. She’s eighteen. After knowing her six months I’ve
> been invited to meet her parents. I am, to my surprise, forty-four,
> same age as her dad, a professor—a man of some achievement, but not
> that much. (“The Tale of the Turd”)
>
> She comes to him late on Wednesdays, only for sex, the cab waiting
> outside. (“Nightlight”)
>
> At eight, those who’d stayed up all night, and those who’d just risen,
> would gather on the beach for a swim. (“Lately”)
>
> One morning after a disturbed night, a year after they moved into the
> flat, and with their son only a few months old, Baxter goes into the
> box-room where he and his wife have put the wardrobes, opens the door
> to his, and picks up a pile of sweaters. (“The Flies”)

(Midnight All Day is a better book, but Love is what I’m reading at the
moment.)

I got through most of Dean Allen’s
([textism.com](http://web.archive.org/web/20020626/http://www.textism.com/))
[Manual](http://web.archive.org/web/20020626/http://www.textism.com/article/515/)
recently. This is a collection of short stories written by what might be
regarded as members of the A-list of web authors: the contributors
include [Heather B. Hamilton](http://web.archive.org/web/20020626/http://dooce.com/),
[Alexis Massie](http://web.archive.org/web/20020626/http://www.alexismassie.com/), [Paul
Ford](http://web.archive.org/web/20020626/http://ftrain.com/), [Leslie
Harpold](http://web.archive.org/web/20020626/http://leslie.harpold.com/) and [Joshua
Allen](http://web.archive.org/web/20020626/http://fireland.com/).

Each of these authors has a pretty decent web following: they are all
good, funny, perceptive writers. Manual, though, is a completely
different matter. The stories contained within are, almost without
exception, pitiable things. They’re _indulgent_. They’re
_ungrammatical_. They’re _unengaging_.

A terrific example is Gail Armstrong’s “How to Skin a Cat.” It starts
like this:

> > _Dear Mom…_
>
> That’s as far as you ever get. Thoughts veer toward you like a swarm
> of bees then scatter shattered like a storefront window. Swat, flee,
> toe the shard or…. the mosaic is becoming unruly. Words abdicate like
> never before. You’re tired of what they say and, besides, you’ve had
> to start thinking in French again—a fancy excuse for can’t cut through
> this muddle on a dare, not even in your native tongue.

What happened here? Editors everywhere are _weeping_. (Compare this to
the Kureishis.) Did someone dare Armstrong to produce a sentence in
which the verb _abdicate_ was applied to the noun _words_? To personify
a _mosaic_? To employ, in the same sentence, _two_ difficult-to-imagine
and opposing similies for _thoughts_?

Chekhov wrote: “Fledgling authors frequently should do the following;
bend the notebook in half and tear off the first half … you’ll only have
to change the beginning of the second half a little bit and the story
with be utterly comprehensible. Everything that has no direct relation
to the story must be ruthlessly thrown out.” This otherwise good advice
unfortunately improves almost none of the stories in this
collection—their problem is not that they combine a good heart with a
superfluous beginning: their problem is that they don’t contain much
worth salvaging at all.

I don’t think I’m the only person to come to these conclusions. There
has been remarkably little buzz about the book, which is especially
strange when you consider the profiles of the authors involved. (I’ve
not seen any criticism, but I haven’t seen favourable comments (or even
links) either.) Dean Allen’s [VeriSign
agitation](http://web.archive.org/web/20020626/http://www.textism.com/article/494/) has
been linked to from just about everywhere, but Manual seems to have only
been mentioned on the authors’ own sites—has it even appeared on
[Metafilter](http://web.archive.org/web/20020626/http://www.metafilter.com/)?

There are some good things about the book. It was a nice idea, and to
connect the stories via the theme of instructional documents was a
clever way to cater to everyone. Heather B. Hamilton’s “How to
Unsuccessfully Woo Your Roommate’s Future Husband” was good (to this
story most of my criticisms don’t apply). Kevin Guilfoile’s “How to
Explain the Rules of Cricket” is particularly clever, though the
execution could’ve been better.

Why didn’t Manual work out? The stories aren’t good enough, yes—but how
to explain the authors’ web success? The answer, I think, is that their
websites are popular because their content is _personal_. Pepys’ diary
is popular even though it isn’t high literature: it’s popular because
it’s personal—and it’s the truth. Anne Frank was a real, live person—a
fictional account of a similar life would not have the same impact.

Writing situated within the context of a personal website does not need
to be as high in quality as writing that has to stand without this
“support.” A piece of fiction is good if these things are irrelevant:
(1) when and where it was written; (2) whether or not it’s true; (3) who
the author was (such that you have no hope of interacting with them).
These criteria apply to short stories. Happily, they don’t apply to the
personal writing of the web.