Barry's Texts Are Deeper Than Yours
Filed under: Links From the Show
In the last 24 hours I have become a big Barry Yourgrau fan. If you didn't hear him on our show today, here's the deal: on a trip to Japan in 2002, the writer noticed tons of people walking around accessing the internet on mobile phones. Since he generally wrote pretty short pieces, he thought maybe he'd write some pieces to be read on cellys (cellies?). Barry didn't even really realize he was part of the burgeoning cell phone literature phenomenon: five of the 10 bestsellers in Japan last year started as cell phone novels, or keitai novels, as they're called.
Unlike many keitai novels, Barry wrote individual stories, and he didn't write them on cell phones, he wrote them for cell phones. His self-imposed constraints: 350 words or less, with no opening sentence longer than the 12 words that could be viewed without scrolling. Short as they are, we still only had time on the radio show to hear one of them. But Laura tells me there's plenty of room left on our internet, so Barry's letting us post one more here.
MEANT FOR EACH OTHER
You make a date through the Internet. You meet the girl for the first time at a sake bar. She gulps down a whole bottle of sake by herself. "Okay," you think. "I guess we know what sort of problem she has. But man, is she cute."
The rest after the jump...
After two more bottles, the girl falls asleep on her bar stool. "That's our sweetheart," grins the bartender, shaking his head at the girl's snores.
"You mean you know her?" you inquire, uneasily.
"Sure, she's here every night, with a different guy," says the bartender. "Whoopee, whoopee." He winks.
"Really," you reply. You eye the unconscious girl slumped headfirst on the bar counter. And you decide no matter how cute she is, this first date will also be the last, thank you very much.
And this is how you two meet, you and the love of your life. Four months later you get married and move into a lovely apartment together, where you start to raise a large and happy family.
How you get from point A to point B is a long, complicated, heart-warming, and in many ways wonderfully unbelievable story. But alas it requires someone with far greater narrative powers than mine to properly relate.
Barry told me that "Meant for Each Other" came from staring down the challenge of writing so many short short stories.
I'm fond of the story cause it uses (going for variety amid the 70-plus stories) a cheat (the author's inability to write the story) as a way of telling the story. Part of the little laboratory of story-telling that writing the book involved.
For more about Barry Yourgrau and his work, check out his blog, his website, and his old school print-on-paper work (that has since been adapted for cell phones).
8:30 AM ET | 01-23-2008 | permalink
