This month’s read is Miranda July’sRoy Spivey, first published in 2007 in The New Yorker.
In honour of David Sedaris’ 2023 Australian tour, which I attended and LOVED, David joins us for this month’s Raptorial Bites via the August 2022 episode of The Writer’s Voice in which he read and discussed the story with Deborah Treisman (a re-release of a 2012 episode of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast).
I look forward to what comes of this conversation between me and you and David and Deborah and everyone we know.
Thanks for sharing this one. I listened to the podcast (my access to the New Yorker exhausted for the month). It reminded me of the piece 'Big Boy' by David Sedaris in Me Talk Pretty One Day. Too funnny. There is a parallel kind of anxious humour in the two toilet scenes.
I enjoyed July's story. I found the celebrity a little unbelievable, but in a fun way. It felt like we had entered a wonderful fantasy world, and got to hang out there with the narrator and enjoy it. And it was nice that we could understand the cipher of the '4' later on because we were privy to the ?phantasmic experience it encoded.
I reckon it worked better that the narrator didn't make the phone call. It shifted the story in another direction. In my writing, I often find myself avoiding certain scenes I've set up in a narrative because I don't feel capable of handling them. In a way, the structure of this story did feel like a form of avoidance. But it worked. It was a nice strategy to move the story into a different level of narrative, maybe you'd call it a ?symbolic level, though... not sure. I thought July handled that transition delightfully! Kristen
Hi Mek!
Thanks for sharing this one. I listened to the podcast (my access to the New Yorker exhausted for the month). It reminded me of the piece 'Big Boy' by David Sedaris in Me Talk Pretty One Day. Too funnny. There is a parallel kind of anxious humour in the two toilet scenes.
I enjoyed July's story. I found the celebrity a little unbelievable, but in a fun way. It felt like we had entered a wonderful fantasy world, and got to hang out there with the narrator and enjoy it. And it was nice that we could understand the cipher of the '4' later on because we were privy to the ?phantasmic experience it encoded.
I reckon it worked better that the narrator didn't make the phone call. It shifted the story in another direction. In my writing, I often find myself avoiding certain scenes I've set up in a narrative because I don't feel capable of handling them. In a way, the structure of this story did feel like a form of avoidance. But it worked. It was a nice strategy to move the story into a different level of narrative, maybe you'd call it a ?symbolic level, though... not sure. I thought July handled that transition delightfully! Kristen