“Is That You, John Wayne?” by Scott Garson
Following in the steps of such modern day masters of this intricate form, including Lydia Davis and Kim Chinquee, Scott Garson has embraced it, bringing his own brand of American disharmony often seen in those forbears. The majority of stories in his second collection Is That You, John Wayne? run from a page long to three and they are the crux of this collection bent on exploring the sadness of life, the missed or missing opportunities, and the stasis our collective cultures seemed to have emotionally entered while we fly and speed about with technology that probably has not made us treat each other any better.
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Micheline Aharonian Marcom lives in Northern California and teaches at Mills College. She is the author of four novels: Three Apples Fell from Heaven, The Daydreaming Boy, Draining the Sea, and The Mirror in the Well, and has been honored with a Lannan Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Writer’s Award.
What is emotionally naked art and why do I think I have to describe the films of John Cassavetes, particularly A Woman Under the Influence, and Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, particularly ”Melanctha,” that way?
Lydia Davis is the author of four short story collections, as well as The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis and the novel The End of the Story. A MacArthur Fellow, she has been a finalist for many major book awards and this September will release her translation of Madame Bovary.
Magic in movies is a beautiful thing. I’ve inundated myself with film for years, since the age of nineteen, but only recently experienced the pleasure of being put under a spell by two directors I had known of, but whose images I was not ready for.