A Young Writer’s Diary Entries From Early November, 1984 | Thought Catalog

A Young Writer’s Diary Entries From Early November, 1984 | Thought Catalog

How Brooklyn Alt-Lit Saved Literary Culture, Conclusion: 1982-1985 | Medium

How Brooklyn Alt-Lit Saved Literary Culture, Conclusion: 1982-1985 | Medium

SALUGI AT STARBUCKS by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle Store

Richard Grayson's Salugi at Starbucks is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 124-page $7.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

In this quartet of stories about late 20th century gay relationships gone awry, Richard Grayson's young male characters are always looking in all the wrong places. As The American Book Review wrote:

"They are young gay men trying to survive in a hostile or marginally accepting world. They conduct themselves with manic cheer. They possess a grace and courage that have to substitute for the acceptance and love that most people look for. Their successes in this sphere are meager; their disappointments, many.

Yet, despite a seeming similarity in their drives – and palpable coincidences of character and action – Grayson rarely palls. His young men are imbued with a sweet, endearing nuttiness that serves both to energize and individualize. He depicts our cyberspace and e-mail age, so convenient for rapidly dissolving and re-forming associations, invariably against a backdrop of the search for sincere love and the deaths that ravage gay men and their partners."

"Bending Gender": Richard Grayson reviews Jonathan Ames’s "Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs" in American Book Review

Richard Grayson reviews Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs, edited by Jonathan Ames, in the January/February 2006 issue of American Book Review:

Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs
Edited and with an introduction by Jonathan Ames
Vintage Books, paper, $13.95, 314 pages

By Richard Grayson

Most Americans are intrigued by transsexuals but don’t know what to make of them. I can recall the dopey reaction of one teenager to the sentimental 1970 film The Christine Jorgensen Story: “She was such a cute guy! Why did she become a girl?”

Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs, doesn’t answer my adolescent question. Jonathan Ames, the book’s editor, is after something more profound than that. In his introduction, Ames calls the etiology of gender dysphoria “probably unanswerable…a mystery of the human condition.” (xv) The testimony of the fifteen transsexuals compiled here serves as a celebration of that mystery and of the infinity capacity of human beings to reinvent themselves.

At first blush, Ames – a talented novelist, performance artist, and newspaper columnist and perhaps the wittiest writer of his generation – might seem an odd guiding force behind this kind of anthology. But Ames’s comic novels – I Pass Like the Night, The Extra Man, and Wake Up, Sir! – are, at their heart, stories of quirky characters choosing to profoundly transform their lives.

While changing one’s sex may seem like a drastic step, the overarching theme of the entries in Sexual Metamorphosis is restoring the natural order of things. The first excerpt, Case 129 from Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, sets the tone for the volume. A nineteenth-century Hungarian physician describes how, despite marriage and children, he has felt “like a woman in a man’s form” his entire life.

Although the second memoirist, the Danish painter Lili Elbe, born Einar Wegener, died in the 1930s following surgical implantation of ovaries, later medical advances made true sex change possible and fairly safe. At this point, Ames notes, transsexuals’ memoirs take on the same basic narrative structure: First, a child feels terribly uncomfortable in his or her gender role; next, an adolescent or adult, after much torment, undergoes a transformation into his or her “true” sex; finally, after more suffering – now physical as well as psychological – the individual finds peace, if not total happiness, in the aftermath of the sex change.

The excerpts from Jan Morris’s Conundrum – the book that made transsexuals respectable if still a bit outré – exhibit all the stylistic gifts of her best travel writing. Morris’s earliest memory, exquisitely rendered, is of three-year-old James, sitting beneath his mother’s piano as she plays Sibelius, suddenly realizing that he “had been born in the wrong body, and should really be a girl.”

Despite that, Morris relates a happy, nearly idyllic childhood, and seems so well-adjusted that it makes James’s transformation from husband and father into plucky, Mrs. Miniver-like Jan almost anticlimactic.

Some of these selections deal with public reaction to the writer’s metamorphosis. Jorgensen, the former Army private from the Bronx whose Danish sex change operation in 1952 caused a national sensation, is represented here with an account that goes a long way to explain how her unpretentious charm and ladylike demeanor made her something of a beloved figure, the first celebrity transsexual.

In contrast, Christine Cossey, a fashion model and James Bond girl cruelly outed by British tabloids, wanted to keep her gender reassignment a secret, not only to the general public but also to her overbearing mother-in-law. When, to her horror, Cossey’s sex change is revealed, her career and fairy-tale marriage appear to come apart.

Most of these memoirs deal not with public coming out, but with private people struggling with their own feelings and relationships. The excerpt from Deirde McCloskey’s Crossing relates how a distinguished economics professor named Donald, who has long enjoyed dressing as a woman, finally decides to become Deirdre.

McCloskey concentrates on the struggles with Donald’s wife and adult children, who react to his crossing the gender barrier with horror and cruelty. No wonder McCloskey tells her story in the third person.

On the other hand, the excerpt from tennis player and physician Renée Richards’s Second Serve concentrates on the physical aspects of the metamorphosis, recounting in somewhat gruesome detail the bodily pain and suffering she undergoes in her surgical transformation from Richard Raskin, as well as the practical clinical details of maintaining her new sex organs.

A recurring motif is that both rejection and acceptance can come unexpectedly. Donna Rose and Deirdre McCloskey tell of wives who ridicule and demean their husbands’ desires and take extreme measures to avoid them post-surgery and post-divorce. However, the wife of Jennifer Finney Boylan, a novelist and English professor, stays in the relationship after her husband has become a woman.

Generally, transsexuals’ parents and grandparents, even those from the working class, rally around them surprisingly quickly, perhaps because they’ve known something was up since childhood. Children have more trouble getting used to their parents’ transformations, though the younger they are, the more they take the sex change in stride. The funniest moment in the book is when, on his first outing with his newly-female father, Donna Rose’s son Matt, wanting to get her attention in a crowded store, shouts out, “Hey, Dad!” – and immediately covers his mouth as if trying to recapture the words.

As Ames points out, the public is particularly ignorant of female-to-male transsexuals (F-to-M’s). However, the excerpts of the memoirs of Mario Martino, Loren Cameron, and Mark Rees – as well as the account of “Joe” from a book written by Dr. Harry Benjamin, who coined the term transsexual and whose Benjamin Standards are guiding principles that still form the basis for treatment today – show that their struggles are quite similar to their M-to-F counterparts.

One point the anthology makes crystal clear is that sex and gender, sexual orientation and sexual identity, are distinct categories. About the only thing gay and lesbian people have in common with transsexuals, Boylan tells her psychologist, is that the same people beat up both groups.

Uncharacteristically, Jonathan Ames stays in the background too much here. Beyond his thoughtful introduction to the volume, he gives us only a few sentences setting up each entry. A reader unfamiliar with the tragic story of the homophobic murder of Army Sgt. Donald Watkins may be somewhat confused reading the moving excerpts from the memoir of Calpernia Sarah Addams, Watkins’s transsexual beauty-queen girlfriend.

All of the memoirists here are white Americans or western Europeans, leaving readers to wonder how cultural differences might affect transsexuals in other parts of the world. Unfortunately, few Asian transsexuals – the best known are the Beijing Modern Dance Company's artistic director Jin Xing and the Thai boxer-turned-actress Parinya Charoenphol – have written memoirs available in English translation, and as Ames points out, no anthology can be a perfect selection.

However, given their prominence in the transsexual community, the apparent omission of African-Americans is unfortunate. Did Ames deliberately pass on the recent autobiography Hiding My Candy by The Lady Chablis of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil fame? Perhaps he felt that her decision to keep her penis – the “candy” of her book’s title – made her different from his other memoirists.

The Lady Chablis may actually be closer in spirit to today’s new trans generation, educated in gender deconstruction and not so interested in becoming a “real” man or women. Forgoing the surgery or even hormone treatments that make the transformation definitive for the writers in Sexual Metamorphosis, young genderqueers can be perfectly comfortable having both breasts and a penis. Loren Cameron, a San Francisco F-to-M photographer, notes in his memoir that younger people have less static gender identification than his generation of transsexuals. Ames, acutely attuned to the cultural scene, is aware of the changes in transsexual culture, but the production of memoirs by the coming generation will have to wait.

Although Ames’s anthology should find a place on the syllabi of college courses in human sexuality, its compelling narratives make Sexual Metamorphosis a work of literature.

American Book Review reviews Richard Grayson's THE SILICON VALLEY DIET

The March-April 2001 issue of American Book Review has a review of Richard Grayson's The Silicon Valley Diet:


American Book Review
March-April 2001

Defiant on Thin Ice
Henry Grinberg

The Silicon Valley Diet. Richard Grayson.
Red Hen Press, PO Box 902582, Palmdale, CA 93590.
182 pages; paper, $14.95.

Richard Grayson’s ninth collection of short stories achieves many goals, and he is clearly a master of the genre. It it equally clear throughout the twelve tales that, although the characters have different names, they are essentially the same – without strenuous attempts at disguise. They are young gay men trying to survive in a hostile or marginally accepting world. They conduct themselves with manic cheer. They possess a grace and courage that have to substitute for the acceptance and love that most people look for. Their successes in this sphere are meager; their disappointments, many.

Yet, despite a seeming similarity in their drives – and palpable coincidences of character and action – Grayson rarely palls. His young men are imbued with a sweet, endearing nuttiness that serves both to energize and individualize. He depicts our cyberspace and e-mail age, so convenient for rapidly dissolving and re-forming associations, invariably against a backdrop of the search for sincere love and the deaths that ravage gay men and their partners.

There’s more. Wherever Grayson casts his gaze, he manages to isolate panoramas of city and small town life in America from the 60s to the present, detailing not only the particular rebelliousness of these “outsiders,” but also the general collapse in the national fiber, of which they are part. These are connected to public events, such as the uncertain outcome in Korea and defeat in Vietnam, and are reflected in a spate of fragmented families, step-siblings galore, and a never-ending specter of impending divorces and split-ups. You get a picture of a psychologically maimed, dysfunctional society, some of whose members don’t give up trying for happiness.

Four of the stories employ a similar, interesting technique, that of alternating narrative with what at first seem like droningly dull passages from textbooks – a political-economic history of part of the former Soviet Union; a treatise on how to write; another on the invasion of ruinous, alien vegetation onto prairie land; and an excruciatingly obsessional description of a diet. These particular stories, “Boniatos Are Not Boring,” “Moon Over Moldova,” “Mysteries of Range Management,” and “The Silicon Valley Diet” (the title story of the collection, perversely presented last), are unusually effective.

But the effect is quite different from story to story, despite the shared technique. “Boniatos” achieves a wonderful sense of humanity, hovering brilliantly between the tragic and the wildly funny, by wickedly employing a deadpan, soulless mock-treatise on how to write that manages to crush the life out of the ostensibly creative act. “Moldova” is a little masterpiece, told by indirection. It tells of young gay man attracted to both partners of a homosexual relationship. Interspersed by chunks of a history of the former Soviet republic, the action is magically reinforced by what appears to be nothing other than a tedious narration. But that history manages to reflect, by means of the author’s plays of subtle implication, the pathos of a man absurdly drawn to both members of a couple, neither one of whom he may claim.

“Mysteries of Range Management” takes place in the wide open spaces of Wyoming, where we learn a gay life is possible too – not only in big cities. As with “Moldova,” we have another story together with interpolated extracts from a textbook. This time it is one describing the relentless spoliation of the cattle ranges by a non-native vegetation called “leafy spurge.” Again, the text interacts with the human story in richly ironic and half-crazy ways. More somberly than he did in “Moldova,” Grayson makes leafy spurge – the pest-plant, an insidious encroacher – symbolic of the workings of both anti-gay social contagion and the action of AIDS itself. He makes specific references to the recent murder in Wyoming of Matthew Shepard. This provides tangible menace in an outwardly tranquil tale.

“The Silicon Valley Diet” is yet another story that builds its effects by means of interspersed tutelaries – this time instructions for a weight-loss diet, so humorless and condescending in presentation as to be maddening if the effects were not so – I say again – wildly funny and compelling. And, again, it is another tale of the kinds of startling partners that gay relationships can involve. At times, it seems there’s nothing too grungy when one’s in love or in lust, as in many a straight relationship.

The remaining stories here are accomplished and make their points with enviable skill. They don’t come off with quite the same impact, in my judgment, as those I have described. They present similar explorations into the bittersweet frustrations of life, missed chances for meaningful connection, and the perceived necessity for choking off one’s real feelings. But they are very good, nevertheless.

In these and the other stories in the collection, Grayson makes one aware of how vulnerable his characters are. Beset by mortality, even as they seek affirmation, they truly remind us of those flying summer insects that extinguish themselves in a brief act of love. Everything is poignant. Much hurt is to be sensed beneath the wise-guy, tough-cookie exteriors. It’s Grayson’s way, moreover, that many of the pieces in the book are preceded by what you may think are charmingly bizarre preludes that anticipate the main action, but which turn out, slyly, to be the main show itself.

There are many layers to this detailing of the techno-ridden superficialities of our contemporary life, with its bar codes, microwave ovens, and cyberspeak. These are truly sagas of man versus machine. The fact that these are gay men serves to render them even more poignant because one senses that these characters may have hoped for some protection from the brutalities of modern life, through technology. Perhaps, even redemption.

Richard Grayson reviews SHADE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF FICTION BY GAY MEN OF AFRICAN DESCENT in American Book Review

In the current issue (Volume 18, Number 5, July-August 1997) of the American Book Review, Richard Grayson reviews Shade: An Anthology of Fiction by Gay Men of African Descent, edited by Bruce Morrow and Charles H. Rowell.

American Book Review reviews Richard Grayson's I SURVIVED CARACAS TRAFFIC

The American Book Review has a joint review of Richard Grayson's I Survived Caracas Traffic and Jonis Agee's A .38 Special and a Broken Heart in its April/May 1996 issue:

_________________________________
Irony and/or Authenticity
_________________________________


A .38 Special and a Broken Heart
Jonis Agee
Coffee House Press, 27 N. 4th St., Minneapolis, MN 55401; 130 pages; paper, $10.95
__________________________________
I Survived Caracas Traffic: Stories from the Me Decade
Richard Grayson
Avisson Press, 3007 Taliaferro Rd., Greensboro, NC 27408; 144 pages; cloth, $21.00
__________________________________

Tyrus Miller


FOR today’s storyteller, irony is less a chosen mode, a figure of speech, than an atmosphere which one breathes of necessity, whether or not the surrounding air smells sweet. Starting from this recognition of irony as a kind of fated climate, the best Anglo-American short fiction writers of this century, from Joyce, West, and Barnes to Carter, Creeley, Davenport, and Abish, have explored ways to understand and inhabit an ironic literary cosmos, without either denying its existence or being consumed by it. It is fitting, then, that in reading new works of short fiction one measures them against the standards set by the masters of the genre in coming to grips with the problem of irony.

. . . .

Richard Grayson's collection I Survived Caracas Traffic is nearly the antipode of Agee's collection: cynical, comic-satiric, resolutely urban "East Coast." Grayson's book assembles twelve previously published pieces of magazine fiction. The topical references in the stories suggest, in fact, that the collection includes work from some time along, along with more polished recent work. For example, one story mentions "People's [sic] Express," the now-defunct Newark-based cut-rate open-seating airline: I pick up a strong aroma of 1984 or 1985 in this story. The risk of such immediate incorporation of topical detail is, of course, that it may lose its charge or even its meaning as time goes by. I can remember a lot of joking about People's [sic] Express about ten years ago, but now one would be lucky to find an audience who even remembers what it was.

Grayson's talents show themselves most fully with his swiftly drawn characters, rendering them in sharp paradoxical sentences. These character appear like walking non sequiturs. In fact, one of the most successful pieces in the book, "Mini-People," is a concatenation of these character sketches:

Dr. Bender has two daughters by his first wife. They call him up during his sessions with his patients and ask for help with their homework. When Dr. Bender cannot help them, he sometimes asks the patient who is with him to do so. Gail helped Dr. Bender's daughter do a report on off-track betting.

Dr. Bender is very much a male chauvinist. He says he is a phallic imperialist. He thinks this is very funny. ("Mini-People")

Grayson's limitations reveal themselves just as quickly, however, whenever he has to narrate anything. Exposition, the communication of background information in order to set up the story, seems to give him particular trouble. In other cases, he lets significant details fall from the narrator's mouth like a bolus of partly-chewed meat: "Some things I couldn't bring myself to talk about with Sean. Like his father ("I Survived Caracas Traffic"). The reader sits in suspense wondering just what the author is about to reveal about Sean's father! Obligingly, the author fills us in with his next paragraph: "At first I figured his parents were divorced, but when he talked about getting social security, I realized Sean's father had died, and from other things he said -- though he never mentioned his father -- I realized it was a hurt so deep I didn't dare explore it." That pretty much covers all we need to know about Sean's father, so we can move on to other things.

One story, entitled "A Clumsy Story," lays bare the mechanisms of short story writing. The "clumsy story" which is the internal object of the framing author's "Preface" and "Apology" bears an uncanny resemblance of style and character of other stories in the book. In a preemptive gesture of meta-fictional irony, thus, Grayson takes up criticisms of his work (such as the one I made above) and incorporates them as the premise of a new story. The question arises within the reader's head: Is Grayson a more proficient writer than I had thought? Maybe all those awkward passages were a sign of true sophistication! Yet it is not just the framed story that is clumsy; it is also the meta-fictional handling. There is none of the comic inventiveness of Barth or Sorrentino; nor is there the poetic play with narrative time that one finds in Calvino or Cortazar.

Yet still one last lingering doubt remains: perhaps this clumsy meta-fictionalizing is an even more subtl ironic criticism of the pretense of meta-fiction to refresh the text, to save it from its fall into conventionality. Perhaps Grayson is telling us that meta-fiction itself has become convention, that this war-horse of "post-modern fiction" is as flyblown as the conventions of Victorian realism. Perhaps. But may I be forgiven if I express my doubt that this is the case. The problem with irony, of course, as Schlegel had already noted nearly two hundred years ago, is that there is no sure way of telling where it begins and ends Irony tends to spread over everything it touches, whether by design or by unwanted extension. But as another man wisely said, just because I can't prove that an abyss won't gape before me when I open my door, doesn't mean I need to act as if it will. Accordingly, then, I draw this review to its meeted close with a timid profession of faith: sometimes "a clumsy story" is just that, and meta-fictional irony -- or is it meta-meta-fictional irony? -- can do nothing to persuade me that it is more

Tyrus Miller teaches Comparative Literature, English and Film Studies at Yale University, where he is working on a critical study of late modernist fiction. His most recent publications include articles on Beckett, Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams, C. Day Lewis, John Cage, and Massimo Cacciari.

American Book Review (Nov./Dec. 1984) Reviews Three Books of Short Stories by Richard Grayson

The American Book Review reviews I BRAKE FOR DELMORE SCHWARTZ, DISJOINTED FICTIONS,EATING AT ARBY'S on pages 21-22 of its November/December 1984 issue:

From Our House to Bathos

* * *

I BRAKE FOR DELMORE SCHWARTZ
Richard Grayson
Zephyr Press
13 Robinson Street
Somerville, MA 02145
1983, 95 pages
Cloth, $9.95; Paper, $4.95

EATING AT ARBY'S: The South Florida Stories
Richard Grayson
Grinning Idiot Press
P.O. Box 1577
Brooklyn, NY 11202
1982, 24 pages
Paper, $3.00

DISJOINTED FICTIONS
Richard Grayson
Cumberland Journal
P.O. Box 2648
Harrisburg, PA 17105
1981, 64 pages
Paper, $3.00

Reviewed by Jaimy Gordon
_________________________

Eating at Arby's and Disjointed Fictions clamor for laughs before one even opens the covers. True, I Brake for Delmore Schwartz is a dignified volume, except for the title and the enclosed red bumper sticker that spells it out in large letters. But the flamingo-pink cover of Eating at Arby's announces that Richard Grayson ran for Town Council lately in Davie, Florida, with a campaign promise to give horses the vote; and the back of Disjointed Fictions reports that he was once a candidate for the Democratic Vice-Presidential nomination. Both books offer columns of testimonials on Grayson's work, some from trade organs like Publishers Weekly, others from Florida community rags like the Delray Beach News Journal and the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. These critics are, on the whole, somewhat puzzled by Grayson—a woman from the New York Post hopes that "his literary career may be blessedly brief"—but most know a joke when they see it. They invoke Steve Martin, Saturday Night Live and the muse of stand-up comedy to explain Grayson, though a certain uneasiness lingers between the blurbs: If this is Saturday Night Live, can it be literature?

And now a second clipping from the Miami Herald slips out of Eating at Arby's, hinting at yet another South Florida story. In October, 1982, an alert reporter sniffed out a small scandal behind the chapbook: Richard Grayson employed a $3000 grant from the Florida Arts Council to chronicle the banal adventures of Manny and Zelda among mall shoppers, Marielitos, and drug murderers, in flat, repetitive, Dick and Jane-style prose. The reporter finds Grayson in his English Department cubicle at Broward Community College, and he does not allow her to go away disappointed. He elaborates on his municipal campaign platform: besides enfranchising horses, he was in favor of giving tactical nuclear weapons to the Davie police force. He threatens to sell the book on the street and says of the Florida Arts Council: "I'm sure they'll be delighted to see such a great piece of literature came from their money." But he adds a typical disclaimer: he is grading well over a hundred "illiterate papers" a week. "As you can see from the book," he tells her, "it doesn't do much for your writing style."


The willingness to be a public clown—or, more accurately, to present the appearance of a wistful nobody scribbling away in private who occasionally bursts out as a farcical publicist, exposing himself before the world—continues unabated inside Grayson's prolific but never prolix fictions. The several strains of his humor occur in more or less varied combinations according to the story, and I much prefer those loosely segmented chains of association in the first person (happily, two thirds of the stories in both Disjointed Fictions and I Brake for Delmore Schwartz fall into this category), where all his mannerisms exist side by side, to his more symmetrical and abstract pieces; for, in the absence of the first person, Grayson's prose loses much of its charm and is shown to be a rather blunt and inelastic tool. Grayson is not a graceful stylist, and as soon as the expression of a personality (or the illusion of this) disappears, his inventions and satires move on leaden feet. This is particularly true of Eating at Arby's, whose conceptual plan may sound comic, but which, as a literary experience—that is, as something to read—is all but insufferable. Manny and Zelda speak the same stiff, uncontracted idiom with which Dick and Jane stupefied us in second grade; the tiny vocabulary of their dialogues expands primer-style from a base of I like/nice/fun/friends/important/good/glad/ happy/man, to include "gay," "I-95" and "accidents"; "Century Village" and "Arby's"; "trip to Colombia"; "sore back" and "chiropractor"; "hurricane," "cocaine," "gun," and "murder." Besides offering a draught of gall to the Arts Council, the little book has two virtues, of a sort; it does not take a subtle intellect to feel the point of its satire, so that Grayson's contempt, which almost any dolt can share, is ultimately reassuring; and it is all over in twenty-four pages.

The variegated texture of the first-person narratives that most engage his admirers and baffle his critics is challenging to describe, since it is through juxtaposition that these deliberately unshapely tales achieve their effects. There is a strain of soap-opera exhibitionism in Grayson; sown through I Brake for Delmore Schwartz are revelations of an embarrassingly personal nature, often maudlin, often clearly untrue: "At this time I was suffering from schizophrenia," he says in passing, in "Is This Useful? Is This Boring?." "No matter how hard I tried, I never could take the whole bottle of sleeping pills," he says in "Oh Khrushchev, My Khrushchev." "But maybe for Khrushchev I could do it." A commonplace East Coast Jewish extended family, divided between New York and Miami and subject to cancer and bar mitzvahs, is put to use in many of Grayson's stories, variously as the basis of anecdotes that would not go over badly on the borscht circuit ("little antidotes," the grandfather in "Nice Weather, Aren't We?" calls them) or for highly suspect pathos. In one story in I Brake for Delmore Schwartz, the narrator's sister has drowned; in another, leukemia has snatched her away; in Disjointed Fictions ("Escape from the Planet of the Humanoids"), a sister is still tirelessly dying; the reader is instructed to "Feel this:"

The pain of frustration that a man feels when he is trying to write a sentence about how a character feels at his sister's funeral and can only come up with this fragment: Better her than me.

But in another tale the sister's phone number ("FOR A GOOD LAY CALL 969-9970") appears on a subway map in the IRT; and in yet another, she's alive and prospering as Roslyn, "now a Long Island dermatologist and mother of twins," who says, "Yes, I remember Saulie's bar mitzvah. . ."

The thread of the pathetic family saga intertwines with another characteristic one that I will call the lament of the schlemiel in the creative writing workshop. He is no longer in it, of course, but it has left its mark. The narrator worries about the quality of his fictions, checking them against mumble-mouthed platitudes of the craft; and these are travestied evenhandedly whether they arise from the post-modernist school or the Famous Writers' School. Grayson has an MFA from Brooklyn College, so he knows the rhetoric. In "Is This Useful? Is It Boring?," the narrator boasts, "For two years I studied Fiction Writing in one of the best universities in the country. . . .We were supposed to write new kinds of fiction. One writer called himself a 'post-contemporary' writer. That says it all." But from this self-congratulatory beginning, the voice disintegrates into a muddle of pomposity and self-pity: as a writer who misrepresents people as characters and otherwise can "get away with murder," the narrator is "a pretty powerful person"; well, no, he says, actually he writes out of a neurotic need for attention; in fact, he writes to get revenge on some Italian kids who once called him "Irving"; then the narrator changes his mind — "I can't even find the right words" — maybe he didn't learn anything in college after all. So much for the tenets of the experimentalists.

But then there are the traditionalists to contend with. Halfway through "Nice Weather, Aren't We?," the narrator's girlfriend Rosalie sneaks in "while I was out getting a Fresca" and writes "NO FOCUS" on the middle of the page. "Criticism like that I don't feel useful," he says huffily. But he admits it's all a strain. In "The Four Faces of Freud":

Listen, there is no point in finishing this story... I can't understand why some editor would print this, except as a cry for help. I am mentally ill.

This is the Grayson manner in endless variations: alternate strains of impudent posturing that breaks down in self-parody, equally disingenuous confessions of the writer's ineptitude; and, withal, punchlines and puns that he will labor for many paragraphs to set up, like, "I never promised you a prose artist," and, "Fiction's no stranger than Ruth." All these parts are suffused with the appealing professional anxiety of a small-time writer scrabbling against odds and without much concern for his dignity to get a little renown for himself. Grayson once said in an interview (Gargoyle 17/18) that he keeps his fiction short because "fragmented, self-conscious novels might very well be boring. Some people say that fragmented, self-conscious stories are also boring, but at least they're short."

It seems worth noting that Grayson perceives his readership, so far, more clearly than his readership perceives him. There is a sound precedent for that loose-jointedness of his fictions that so confounds his critics, a venerable one that reaches back far beyond the mimetic and novelistic bias that is in fact a middle-class parvenu in the world of letters. It is the satiric tradition of Erasmus and Rabelais, of Diderot, of Swift and Sterne and Peacock, and one may find this tradition, as in Grayson, the shape of a miscellany founded on a loose association of ideas, frequently with humble apologies from the author; idiosyncratic asides, digressions, and non sequiturs; catalogues and inventories; structures of information borrowed from extra-literary domains of the language; dialogues, patterns of query and response, and other instances of the unexpected, the undignified, the fitful, the intellectually pretentious breaking down into parody. But the brevity of Grayson's fictions is his own design, based on a just though severe estimate of the attention span of a literary peer group he understands all too well. In the same interview, Grayson told his questioner, "Actually, if you look at my work, it's probably more influenced by TV than by literature." Grayson writes for (because he is one of) a literati that watches TV, that is hounded by the neologisms "writers' workshop," "Citibank," and "co-op apartment." The narrator of "I Brake for Delmore Schwartz" walks the streets of New York, Citicard in hand—the same streets trod by Isaac Bashevis Singer and by the shade of the departed Schwartz—asking himself if it wouldn't be smarter to take a course in computers for a guaranteed fourteen grand a year, than to persist in this thankless manner of living.

Perhaps the most confusion about whether to place Grayson in the contemporary literary scheme is owing to the imperfect self-knowledge of that public of which Richard Grayson is the jester. We — and I mean you and I — live in a strange literary economy where most writers between the ages of twenty-five and forty accept the lot of the sort-of-published, the semi-solvent, the great unread, against the backdrop of an age of media super-celebrities; so that we are unable to escape the evidence of our under-appreciation though fully aware of the ludicrousness of the contrary. Richard Grayson constructs a literary persona out of just this predicament. He is a satirist and parodist so timely that his brothers and sisters may not yet discern themselves in his mirror. Certainly our hapless group that writes and studies writing and cogitates about writing but cannot know its audience deserves its own comedian, if it can learn — as Richard Grayson has — to laugh at itself.
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Jaimy Gordon is the author of Shamp of the City-Solo (Treacle Press) and Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue (Burning Deck), among other works. She presently teaches at Western Michigan University.