Sarah Manguso's Short Days, at first glance is a collection of unrelated anecdotal ideas jotted down by the author. My first read through reminded me of comedian Demitri Martin, a personal favorite of mine. To further illustrate their similarity, here are excerpts from Short Days and Martin's "This is a Book" respectively.
"The trouble with comparing oneself to others is that there are too many others. By using all others as your control group, all your worst fears and all your fondest hopes are at once true. You are good; you are bad; you are abnormal; you are just like everyone else."
"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. And keep your acquaintances somewhere between your friends and your enemies in terms of closeness. With strangers, approach it on a case-by-case basis-but if you want a general rule of thumb, I would say keep strangers slightly less close than your enemies or your friends. (P.S. I guess now you can see why this fortune was in such a big cookie.)
Martin takes an especially satirical tone to his writing, which is similar to some of Manguso's other stanzas in tone. Yet both utilize one liners to separate other ideas from one another while still following the form of the work as a whole. The section in Martin's work is titled Fortune Cookies, where the content follows the theme the title suggests. This satirizes the messages commonly found on fortune cookies and forces a chuckle from the reader at the end. Manguso's stanzas read like ideas jotted in a journal or notebook as the author comes up with them. Since they're short and contextually separate, the reader associates short, abrupt days with these stanzas.
What makes Manguso and Martin unique is the power and meaning held in a concise packet of writing, both possessing the potential for thought or laughter independent of the whole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N2CKeMoayg
Hi Matt:
ReplyDeleteThis is a great response. I like that you have pointed out the pithiness of Manguso's text. I think you're the first student to recognize that there is some humor here too:
"In real life, my healthy boyfriend said he envied y paralytic disease--that I'd earned the right to a legitimate nervous breakdown. A few years later he was in a an accident and became paralyzed from the neck down. That's just bad writing."
That is hilarious. Sad, but hilarious.
I'm not that familiar w/ Martin, but I am Jack Handey. Check out his Deep Thoughts:
https://www.deepthoughtsbyjackhandey.com/category/deepthoughts/