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| Check out this short story from Lydia Davis: |
“We sit in the airplane so long, on the ground, waiting to take off, that one woman declares she will now write her novel, and another in a neighboring seat says she will be happy to edit it. Food is being sold in the aisle, and the passengers, either hungry from waiting or worried that they will not see food again for some time, are eagerly buying it, even food they would not normally eat. For instance, there are candy bars long enough to use as weapons. The steward who is selling the food says he was once attacked by a passenger, though not with a candy bar. Because the plane had been delayed so long, he said, the passenger threw a drink in his face, damaging one eyeball with a piece of ice.”
I love the Urbandale Public Library. I requested the library order Lydia Davis’s story collection, can’t and won’t, after reading Peter Orner’s review in the New York Times Book Review.
Orner described the author as the patron saint of befuddled reality.
He said if you read enough of her stories, they start happening to you; her stories express the wild divergence of human experience. Disappointment figures in several of the stories.
Bonus: Here’s one of my favorite stories from the collection:
“Under all this dirt
the floor is really very clean.”
Let me know what you are discovering about disappointment. Is your floor disappointingly dirty?
Thanks for exploring the mystery – Nicky Mendenhall