Morris Collins
@MorrisACollins
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2024 O. Henry Prize. Author of Horse Latitudes @dzancbooks. New novel: The Tavern at the End of History @dzancbooks (2026). Bon vivant, abed by nine.
Boston
Joined February 2014
Meanwhile: Art, sanitoria, the angels of history in a state of decline, Kabbalah and bad sex, fake memoirs, Yiddish poets, a dybbuk, diasporic longing, inherited trauma & the dangers of commemoration—I’m looking forward to sharing this with you all. w/@dzancbooks
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if the internet becomes primarily AI-generated content, it no longer has any function in the world or in the affairs of mankind, and can be simply dismissed as a medium to interact with.
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"Whatever happened to monocles? We used to wear them when we aviated. If your hats aren't beaver felt, don't wear them to travel. Ladies, I see some of you going uncorseted. Say it with me: scrimshaw, ermine, overskirt, lace. Mother says I'm a grown boy now."
Duffy on his demand that air travelers not wear slippers or pajamas: "It honors our country ... don't take your shoes off and put your feet on the chair ahead of you"
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Ah, yes. The "3-women-per-day" school of narratology: "The scenes in Balzac or in Dostoyevsky (the last great Balzacian of the novel form) reflects...a beauty that is very rare...that everyone has known (or at least glimpsed) in the course of his own life." -Kundera, The Curtain
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Big mistake. No good mornings, here:
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Ambivalence is a both/and.
Going to my grave muttering "The paragraph is a syntactic not a visual unit"
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"Like a poor profligate who sucks and bites/ the withered breast of some well-seasoned trull/ we snatch in passing at clandestine joys/and squeeze the oldest orange harder yet." Baudelaire wishes you a happy Monday!
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Actually can't remember a single recent prize-winning novel featuring a professor...
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contemporary literary fiction 25% I love dolphins 25% what if dolphins can read my thoughts 25% I tell the dolphins what to do 25% it's not so illegal 25% don't flip out 25% that was on porpoise 25% the ocean is colder than you know 25% to a hammer everything looks like tuna
contemporary literary fiction: 33% "i am a grad student from oberlin and this is my situationship with a professor" 33% "i am a novelist getting a divorce from another novelist" 33% "i am a member of [insert marginalized group] and this is my trauma dump" 1% actually good stuff
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From the forthcoming book. A professor! Here we go prizes!
@SEPlibrary if you only read novels with literary prizes you'd think 75% of the population worked as a writer, a professor, or both
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Have you noticed—a—few—too—many—thoroughly misplaced—em-dashes in exhibition press releases lately? I resurrected my Drag Them to Filth series on @Filthy_Dreams to mock bad AI exhibition press releases, including the worst I've ever read (so far):
filthydreams.org
Have you noticed—a—few—too—many—thoroughly misplaced—em-dashes in exhibition press releases lately? A few extra oddball, “not…but…” styled phrases? A hefty dash of strung-together artspeak descript…
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Caveat: I (also) want reviews of my books to be laudatory, rapturous, awestruck.
@xlorentzen I don't care if the reviewer likes the book; I usually disagree w/ critics. Also, my own opinions are pretty ridiculous. I want to read an interesting engagement with the book from a good writer. They don't need to sound like Hardwick as long as they sound like Amis or Davenport
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Guzzling wine, making beef bourguignon, reading the Harrison bio while it simmers.
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My favorite read of the last five years.
Absolutely stunning. Wonderfully sparse, elegantly narrated and packing a visceral emotional punch, Kristof’s spellbinding story of intrepid twins Claus and Lucas explores identity, art and familial bonds amidst the horrors of war. HIGHLY recommend.
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Sure? I love Faulkner. For yrs Absalom, Absalom was my favorite novel. But you're expressing the fundamental problem here: it's not an either/or, right? The OP was upset because somehow he felt he was living in a 0-sum where claiming Beloved as great diminished others...
@MorrisACollins Fine. Now read Faulkner and Steinbeck.
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Well it's the last point people seem to be missing. We can love what we love and learn to love more. We have world enough and time (one hopes!) for this kind of promiscuity.
@MorrisACollins Those are all great novelists but none of them uniquely experienced, felt, thought, and wrote as Morrison. Just as Borges, Kafka, Joyce, etc… are all unique. If only we could read them all.
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I disagree that Beloved is just 'OK' & as a writer I'm not sure that the first words of a novel are its dedication and the 'truths' I go to literature for aren't facts, but anyway I think a pretty good sign of a great novel is that it makes you 'uneasy.'
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Actually you do need to read Beloved. I'm not sure what it means to 'know literature' but we just finished reading Beloved in my class on Love & Death in the American novel. So my students now know literature.
@nadienadianadie Borges, Kafka, Joyce, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Ovid, Homer, Li Bai, Tu Fu, Stendhal, Dostoevski, Pushkin, Lezama Lima, Pessoa, Maupassant, Victor Hugo, Poe...I could continue for 10 hours...but oh no, you need to read Beloved otherwise you dont know literature
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Teen daughter couldn't sleep, so I started to read to her. First book to hand was The Secret Garden. We go through first chapter, and I pause, and remark: well, in my day, kid's books started with the protagonist orphaned in a isolated house where everyone's died of cholera.
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I read Hebrew, Mid. Welsh, Old English, Mid. English (incl. northern dialects), Latin. A lit. education should go from Gilgamesh to my novel, The Tavern at the End of History. I just don't see why this can't incl. the world in all its genders & genres, theories & methodologies.
Ah, yes, narrative theory: ruining the study of narrative everywhere. These panics seem so antithetical to how I felt as I student. I wanted it all. Every beautiful thing. Poetry, prose, 3 millennia of dreams, theory. The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.
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