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Sonora Review Issue 55
Sonora Review Issue 55
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
Sonora Review Issue 55
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
...and I'd like to add that will teach all the classes, I will crave the eight o'clock I will teach whatever you want, Fuji Island Poetry, gator wrestling, Lamaze, all within my range. [...]
I'll go to every meeting I can find. I'll be perky and upbeat, bye-bye despair. I will not silently mouth the words I want to die. I will chortle when others chortle, stop when they stop, sick smile stuck on my face like the Joker. I will be a frisky Marxist, an ersatz Francophile [...]
kinda funny
The entire Chicago Voice Center staff is warm, sharp, and highly knowledgeable [...] As soon as he walks through the doors a calm washes over his entire person.
For this reason, Alex has considered increasing the frequency of his visits, but also doesn't want to put Dr. Gail D. Schonberg out anymore than he already does. [...]
For this reason, Alex has considered therapy. [...]
For this reason, Alex has considered becoming a weekly patient at another laryngology practice [...]
For this reason, Alex has considered outfitting himself with a Johnson Smith Mustache & Beard Kit in order to attempt registering himself as a new weekly patient of The Chicago Voice Center, giving him the benefit of two check-ups per week sans the betrayal and undercutting. This idea is so inherently flawed and misguided that it sometimes leads Alex to mentally chuckle and reflect on the humor of his larynx-related situation. [...]
For this reason, Alex has considered dropping by The Voice Center just to sit in the waiting room and read The Journal of Voice. [...] the even more uncomfortable uncomfortable aspect of feeling that his being there "just to sit and enjoy their extensive library and uncharacteristically comfortable waiting-room chairs" is the hot topic of staff conversation.
For this reason, Alex has considered dropping by The Voice Center just to sit in the waiting room and read The Journal of Voice while outfitted in a Johnson Smith Mustache & Beard Kit.
I like the mustache gag
[...] Calculus was realizing that something you had previously understood to be true in only a silly, facile way really had deep roots furled out underneath it that proved its worth and fireworks that shot up out of it too, newer and more complicated and more beautiful than what you had known before. And the roots and the fireworks talked to one another across the night air in a lyrical, sensible language. And assuming you did things as they were meant to be done, everything worked out perfectly. [...]
[...] I felt like people should do what they wanted to and not what other people would prefer. I've rethought this position over the years, though, and done an about-face. I realized that while every individual is basically forced into a relationship with himself (when you eat dinner in a restaurant by yourself, you're sort of going on a date with yourself), other people have the option to refuse. So it's other people you should be trying to impress. Being yourself can work if what you are happens to be something good, but if what you are is something lousy, then you should probably try to be something else.
very familiar
The thought of putting on a suit that had been moldering away in Dr. Rhodes's mothbally basement through Johnson's tumid utopianism, Nixon's grim Machiavellianism, Ford's linebackerish solidity, Carter's nutria-incensing malaise, Reagan's ultraviscus trickle-down nonsense, Bush's patrician scanner-amazement, and Clinton's philandering welfare 'reform' struck me as undignified. [...]
great and unexpected political commentary in the middle of this story about prom
[...] He thinks now, maybe it's because she picked it, maybe because she thought it was the one he wanted, and in doing so, made it the one he wanted, because he'd very much wanted her and always felt he'd have to keep wanting her in order to keep her. He tries to remember how, after such hard work, he managed to lose her. And he's not posing a rhetorical question, he's trying to recall the day she left, the argument that would, retrospectively, be called the catalyst (the last straw? there are probably other terms, too), but he can't remember, can't see her angry or hurt or walking away. He is almost certain it was his fault.
there's a weird ambient sameness among a lot of the male characters in this story collection but at the same time it's quite good inspiration for MC
--coming from upstairs. Does he want to change this? Does he want to change her leaving him? He needs to decide now. Does he want her to have been here the whole time? Does he want the creaking at the top of the stairs to be her? If she is here, and she is here long enough, will she replace her not-her? He thinks the wind is trying to trick him. The creaking turns to cracking, and the lines of light in the ceiling get wider, and thinks the wind, without knocking, has come inside.
Feels the wind on his face, and thinks it smells like water. Runs downstairs, and the creaking that had turned to a cracking, now becomes a tearing, and his ceiling disintegrates, breaks into hundreds of pieces and disappears. Runs downstairs, wants to go back for her ring, but it's upstairs, and there is no upstairs anymore. Falls against a wall by the front door, and closes his eyes. His home sounds like it is being sucked apart by a vacuum cleaner, or like everything is falling through a hole in the ceiling. The storm is a sink hole in the sky, and everything is disappearing.
I really like this
[...] how much literary fiction deals with the absolute power that the rest of the planet lives under? It's almost none. But if you read any science fiction or fantasy, there's always a dark lord or a dark side or an emperor. It's always wrestling with this incredible power. The anxieties of the rest of our lived experience are only expressed in the genres. It's the same way that our terror of abjection, our terror of our flimsy bodies, those only find real expression in horror. And yet all of these things are exiled from what we call literary tradition, and because of that, in literary fiction, we have a very attenuated sense of what we call the 'real'. [...]
[...] it's the difference between having an American passport and deciding you're going to live in Paraguay versus having a Paraguayan passport. If you're a high literary writer you can live there your whole life, but you have that fucking passport. Even if you never go home, the possibility of it determines all your choices, all your privilege, and that's a difficult thing for people to embrace and to think about.
on literary vs genre fiction
[...] One night, during a trip abroad, in the fall of 1903, I recall kneeling on my (flattish) pillow at the window of a sleeping car (probably on the long-extinct Mediterranean Train de Luxe, the one whose six cars had the lower part of their body painted in umber and the panels in cream) and seeing with an inexplicable pang, a handful of fabulous lights that beckoned to me from a distant hillside, and then slipped into a pocket of black velvet: diamonds that I later gave away to my characters to alleviate the burden of my wealth. [...]
god i love this