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This week's "From the Archives" selection, "Truth and Beauty", is a short story I wrote in the spring of 1990, when I was mainlining modernist English fiction like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, about a literature student who decides that he wants his life to be just like that of the characters he’s reading about, but soon discovers that real life is just not amenable to aesthetic logic.

This story is one of a series I wrote with a main character named Mike or Michael, an over-logical young man, obsessed with philosophy and literature. He can, of course, be seen as an ancestor of Michael in Notes For a Future Novel/The Deep & Savage Way/Volume III. The Mike in “Truth and Beauty”, though, is more of a regular guy than the Santa Zita Trilogy Michael, which helps make the story a bit more satirical-like what if someone adopted modernist fiction as a lifestyle choice.

“Truth and Beauty” was included in my Christmas 1990 collection, Andy Warhol’s Sisters and Other Stories.

Here's the beginning of the story; click the link to read the rest:

One day Mike decided to instill values of truth and beauty into his life.

He was inspired by the books he had been reading in his literature courses. The order and structure of such novels as James Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse were immensely appealing to him.

In comparison to these great works, Mike's own life seemed mundane and ordinary. Unlike Leopold Bloom or Lily Briscoe, he didn't have any philosophical or symbolic motifs running through his own life. He decided to do something about it.

Read the rest of “Truth and Beauty”

Today I found my folder of earliest Notes For a Future Novel drafts. The earliest print-out I have is dated March 14, 1991 and contains only four pages. It contains the following scenes:

• Michael working on his novel for Helen late at night.
• Helen arriving him after hanging out with Roxy, falling asleep on her couch since room-mate Jennifer is having sex in their room (Jennifer is hand-corrected to Gretchen.)
• Michael in Helen’s section, discussing Bartleby the Scrivener and getting criticized by an ultra-liberal classmate.
• Helen meeting Roxy at the coffee shop and discussing their love lives.

On the back are some hand-written notes, including this, which sums up one of the important themes that was there from the beginning:

UCSC is the deluded Eden-the City On the Hill, the new Jerusalem.

 As I recall, this is what I typed from memory after coming home from the real-life Claimstake. I had originally written the first few pages on my friend Matt’s Mac Plus while hanging out with my friends, almost transcribing directly what they were doing, but sadly that file has long since been lost.