From the Archives: August 2007 Archives

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”