Raise your hand if you wish you didn't drop French after high school...(My hand is raised)

I should be putting the final touches on my "Lost in the Funhouse" lecture, and I am, but a break from the slog has reminded me that I wish I had never dropped French in high school as soon as I was able.

In the Beginning...

Maybe today’s the day to start this thing. Yesterday was amazing on all accounts – spent the morning at a pumpkin patch and apple orchard with my wife and our son, a great afternoon walk to the park, followed by an evening filled with homemade spicy shrimp pizzas, beer (Steam Whistle: nothing better), and a funny movie (Tina Fey knows funny). Today stands no chance in living up to the fun I had yesterday, but it’s another kind of good. This Friday I’m lecturing before 100+ undergrads on John Barth’s short story “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968). And this is my thing. The short story. Short stories, that is. Specifically, the American short story. It’s what I study. Now, should anyone other than myself ever stumble across this blog and take the time to read it, I should point out a few things about myself.

I’m a PhD student in English Literature at a pretty okay university in Canada. The “Doctor” in my blog’s title refers to the position toward which I’m currently striving, however clumsily. Okay, very clumsily. The “Impostor” gestures toward the anxiety felt by a lot of grad students (“Impostor’s Syndrome”), felt by me as a result of my ongoing academic clumsiness (Every day presents itself as the one when I might receive that email telling me a mistake was made in accepting me to the program). Thus, my pseudonym. Also, it sounds, to me anyway, like the name of some bygone comic book super villain (for example: Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange (not a villain), Dr. Fate, Dr. Impossible, et cetera).  And I like comic books, so that suits me just fine.

As I prepare my lecture on Barth’s story, I’m quickly realizing how complex a narrative it is, and I’m a little worried I may have jumped at too complex a story too quickly; perhaps it would have been better to start with something a little more user-friendly. But I’m clumsy (see above). And I’m an impostor (again, see above). So I’m proceeding on the hope that within the next week I can pull together something sounding enough like knowledge to get me through 50 minutes before 100+ people. Wish me luck.

If I ever post again, I’ll let “you” know how it goes (whoever you are – this exercise feels so self-serving. I’m probably the only person who will ever read these posts). In the meantime, read more short stories. Here are a few good collections:

Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son

Leonard Michaels’ The Collected Stories (especially “Murderers,” “The Girl with a Monkey,” and anything from the brilliantly titled cluster, “I Would have Saved Them if I Could”)

Tobias Wolff’s story “Firelight” from The Night in Question: Stories

Daniil Karms’ Today I Wrote Nothing

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Collected Stories

Isaac Babel’s The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (Listen to George Saunders read “You Must Know Everything” on the New Yorker podcasts)

And read the poetry of Joseph Brodsky.

Enough procrastinating (as if such a thing exists). I gotta go. Be well.