We're busy unpacking, even as we prep for our departure to Australia, New Zealand, Amsterdam, Paris and New York on the next leg of the Harry Conquers the Globe tour. So for today, we leave things in the hands of Zachary Amendt, 25, the author of "Casa de Serenidad," which originally appeared in Underground Voices Magazine and was later reissued in Best of the Web. He is one of several writers around the web today blogging in support of Dzanc's Best of the Web 2008 anthology. We'll see you in these parts tomorrow. Now, heeeeeere's Zachary:
Most of what I say is non-linear.
When people ask what I'm trying to push in my fiction, I want to say there's an urgent underlying philosophy that propels me – and I believe there is and that when I've matured to access that quadrant of my mind where these themes are housed, I'll be able to explain and flesh it out. But until then, anything I say on the subject is tantamount to bullshit.
I know this: I sometimes struggle to unplug myself from this age. And I think the secret to disconnectedness is using the most primitive of the available technologies – old cell phones, secondhand laptops – devices that still have a little magic left in them.
There is fine work, much finer than my own, being issued these days online. But from what I have read of my contemporaries, I think it's evident that young authors these days don't smoke enough cigars.
I write in the hopes that one day a practitioner of short fiction I deeply admire – James Salter, Jim Harrison – will contact me through one of my editors with a note that says, "Nicely done, Amendt." It would be like John Berryman lighting Yeats' cigarette. Immortality would be mine.
Wouldn't that be a little more like Yeats lighting John Berryman's cigarette?
Posted by: Sebastian Stockman | August 21, 2008 at 08:06 AM
You're boring.
Posted by: Tim | August 31, 2008 at 05:48 PM