What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
by Joshua Minton
I just picked up the Criterion Edition of Short Cuts
by Robert Altman and based on the short stories of Raymond Carver.
The first time I watched this movie, when it came out in 1993, I thought it was absolute shit. But that was before I had been introduced to Raymond Carver's work. Now, the movie was pure genius. There was no serious driving plot but the characters were so interesting inside their situations that I found the movie irresistable and sat rapt through all three hours.
I know I get down on literary fiction a lot because I found most of it boring but there were two writers who really touched me during my formal education. One of them was my favorite teacher George Looney and the other was Raymond Carver.
George is a master poet but he's also a sad man. There was always a melancholy that hung around him. He taught me that good poetry consisted in establishing a strong metaphor and then letting it morph through ideas, emotions, and sensations until it comes to a closure and that often, the form builds itself from the inspiration. George's poetry always moves me, sometimes to tears depending on my mood.
And no one wrote stories like Raymond Carver. I had never laughed and cried reading the same short story before I read the story Cathedral and Where I'm Calling From. In Carver stories, the characters are built from the situations they are in instead of the other way around which the common method for American writing. What this led to were stories with people that sometimes had paper thin skin but bones as strong as steel. They are cut easily but their bones rarely break--or, sometimes they do.
I can't express to you how much this vision of writing short stories shook my writing style to its foundation--so much so that I rarely even write them anymore. My best Carver-esque story is definitely Pyrite (which I'm going to post to this blog here shortly, moving it from JoshuaMintonDotCom).
The movie is worth watching but won't be worth much if you haven't read anything by Carver. Start there and consider the movie dessert.
RIP Ray--you were the best of the best.
by Robert Altman and based on the short stories of Raymond Carver.The first time I watched this movie, when it came out in 1993, I thought it was absolute shit. But that was before I had been introduced to Raymond Carver's work. Now, the movie was pure genius. There was no serious driving plot but the characters were so interesting inside their situations that I found the movie irresistable and sat rapt through all three hours.
I know I get down on literary fiction a lot because I found most of it boring but there were two writers who really touched me during my formal education. One of them was my favorite teacher George Looney
and the other was Raymond Carver.George is a master poet but he's also a sad man. There was always a melancholy that hung around him. He taught me that good poetry consisted in establishing a strong metaphor and then letting it morph through ideas, emotions, and sensations until it comes to a closure and that often, the form builds itself from the inspiration. George's poetry always moves me, sometimes to tears depending on my mood.
And no one wrote stories like Raymond Carver. I had never laughed and cried reading the same short story before I read the story Cathedral and Where I'm Calling From. In Carver stories, the characters are built from the situations they are in instead of the other way around which the common method for American writing. What this led to were stories with people that sometimes had paper thin skin but bones as strong as steel. They are cut easily but their bones rarely break--or, sometimes they do.
I can't express to you how much this vision of writing short stories shook my writing style to its foundation--so much so that I rarely even write them anymore. My best Carver-esque story is definitely Pyrite (which I'm going to post to this blog here shortly, moving it from JoshuaMintonDotCom).
The movie is worth watching but won't be worth much if you haven't read anything by Carver. Start there and consider the movie dessert.
RIP Ray--you were the best of the best.
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I caught the last couple minutes of the Teen Choice Awards as I was flipping channels after Big Brother tonight and got the end of Adam Sandler's acceptance speech for some award. He ended it something like this:
