Rebecca Brown read a never-before-read short story at the Frye Art Museum last Friday night. During the introduction, the Frye's public programs manager Mary Jane Knecht described the museum's new program of "asking writers to write original work in response to the art on the walls around you," which, as far as new programs at small art museums go, is pretty brilliant, extending the museum's reach beyond visual art, into literature; encouraging far-flung interpretations of works; and bringing visual-art people and literature people into the same room. Plus, it's just cool. Brown wrote the story after staring at Robyn O'Neil's large, chilly landscapes scattered with winter-wrecked trees, creepy owls, and little identical men, and the finished product was just as violent, sad, and death obsessed as you might hope for.
Brown prefaced her reading with some don't-ask-me-I'm-not-the-expert comments about O'Neil's art ("She works in pencil—what's the technical word for that, graphite?—she works in graphite and, uh, white, I mean, paper") and said a few things about the conventions of fairy tales. As she talked there was a technical problem at the podium. Someone in the audience got up to help her, and Brown, riffing, said, "The hero is often a hapless person who doesn't know what she's doing, and she's helped by strangers who come from near and far." The audience loved it. The number of people who'd shown up was larger than the number of folding chairs that had been set out, and lots of people were sitting on the floor, including Lyall Bush, the current director of Hugo House, his bright red socks bared, and (across the room) Frances McCue, the previous director of Hugo House, in a black baseball cap.
The fairy tale itself, titled "The Brothers," had many of Brown's trademarks. Abrupt sentences. Syntactical disorientation. Psychosexual ambiguity and pain. Humor. Brevity. The psychosexual ambiguity was accomplished with sentences like: "The brothers did these things, though they were brothers." The syntactical disorientation was best exemplified by a "not thing" Brown referred to, something along the lines of a fluctuation in the air, sort of a whisper, sort of a notion. The violence involved garroting, flailing, and disemboweling, and the humor was subtle: "It's not exactly quiet when a gang of people is beating someone to death." Even the beating had a subject-object vagueness to it, "like no one was doing it, like it was just happening." Brown mentioned "the sound of being dead," and "pity and forgiveness," and then the story was over. A friend leaned over to whisper her assessment, which hadn't occurred to me: "Pretty Jesus-y."
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After all my haranguing about Seattle literary magazines in recent columns, I'm compelled to report that the new McSweeney's is out. The cover is gorgeous, the art inside makes me want to rip up the binding and frame the pages, and the story by Tony D'Souza, a fairy tale of sorts called "The Man Who Fell in Love with a Tree," is awesome. Read it and weep, Seattle literary magazine editors.
