He sighed. Sighing is the worst form of breathing and I try not to do it myself but I admit it's hard. Sighing is something we struggle to unlearn. (from "The Air as Air")
The stories in An Oral History of Atlantis are funny and weird. I laughed and nodded along. I was so looking forward to a new book from Ed Park; the only disappointment is that it's not a novel.
The star of the collection, in my view, is "Well-Moistened With Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts." (And I would love for this story to be a full novel.) An archeological dig, funded by a mysterious foundation, consisting of 18 women all named Tina, on a nameless and drifting island, with a mission to collect samples and translate "oracle bone script" — they wanted never to leave.
We contemplated sending him some saucy photos, the Syllabic sybarites draped languorously over pottery shards and lexicons, feeding one another thumb-sized grapes, but that plan could backfire: it wouldn't do to waste a resource as precious as film. So we pecked out letters on the rusty old Remington, asking the Foundation to consider the value of establishing permanent scholars on the island. A final draft was produced. Then we realized there was no mail service. I volunteered to type out five more copies. These were sealed and tied to the legs of birds we'd befriended. We showed them a picture of our benefactor and hoped for the best, releasing them into the giant Rothko painting that was the sky at twilight, salmon over slate.
As for the language of symbols they were intent on deciphering, "everything could mean anything, as well as its opposite. You had to pick which side of the contradiction to embrace, or else record the whole unholy snarl itself." One day a Tina falls ill and leaves, and a replacement is sent, the Anti-Tina. "All poetry is accuracy," she said.
In "Eat Pray Click," a writer of "pure Sensibilism, with a shot of Mood Writing," devises a Kindle hack (or virus) whereby a book is revised on every reading.
Basically, he longed for a text that wasn't set in stone, something more akin to a living organism — a story with free will. He didn't like that books started on the first page and ended on the last.
"Where's the freedom in that?" he'd say, in letter after letter.
"The Gift" describes a charismatic prof's Fundamentals of Aphorism lectures at a community college and recounts the occasion on which the now heavily overused tautology "It is — what it is" was uttered for the first time in recorded history.
Not a weak story among them.
The Stories
A Note to My Translator (at 0:56 of audiobook preview)
The Wife on Ambien (in The New Yorker)
Machine City
Seven Women
Two Laptops (more or less)
Thought and Memory
Eat Pray Click (or Easter Promenade)
Slide to Unlock
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