Bedtime Story Conservatory 19 14/04/2020

Hey,

It was snowing heavily for about 2 minutes earlier, and the builders outside my window erected a 60ft or so yellow scaffold with a little white booth on top. Today my friend told me that she knew someone who knew someone who climbed up a tower like this in the middle of the night, the police were called in large numbers, and when they brought her down, she said she said that she 'just wanted to see what the view was like'.

Today's readings is/are 3 short stories from Jayne Anne Phillips Black Tickets 1979. Phillips was born in West-Virginia, and published this collection of short stories when she was 26, which garnered her national fame. She is considered to be under the umbrella of 'Dirty Realism', a North American literary movement by various names, which also included Raymond Carver, who I have sent to you twice before. 

Brief reflections on 'Dirty Realism'- 

"It is instead a fiction of a different scope – devoted to the local details, the nuances, the little disturbances in language and gesture – and it is entirely appropriate that its primary form is the short story and that it is so conspicuously part of the American short story revival. But these are strange stories: unadorned, unfurnished, low-rent tragedies about people who watch day-time television, read cheap romances or listen to country and western music. They are waitresses in roadside cafés, cashiers in supermarkets, construction workers, secretaries and unemployed cowboys. They play bingo, eat cheeseburgers, hunt deer and stay in cheap hotels. They drink a lot and are often in trouble: for stealing a car, breaking a window, pickpocketing a wallet. They are from Kentucky or Alabama or Oregon, but, mainly, they could just about be from anywhere: drifters in a world cluttered with junk food and the oppressive details of modern consumerism." - Bill Buford, Granta Magazine

Phillips says her own work and the movements style as describing "how things fall apart and what is left when they do".

Also, the song attached to the beginning and the end of this recording is Van Morrison's Streets of Arklow 1974, which Phillips quotes at the beginning of the book.

The link to today's reading:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1E8m8gNxasL8bCE48eb5_3R_-rbz1LFNe

The link to all previous readings:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1t4v042zpGgwI7KN6_ST_tAthqm63J22V

Warm wishes and love,

Sam