Shawn Huelle

almost no memory

Recently, I bought The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, and have been reading in it. This is what I did: I read the table of contents first, and marked interesting-looking titles, for instance: • Mr. Burdoff's Visit to Germany • How W. H. Auden Spends the Night in a Friend's House • The Sock • Five Signs of Disturbance • Foucault and Pencil • The Cats in the Prison Recreation Hall • What Was Interesting • Almost No Memory and on like that. There are well over 100 stories in the collection; I have marked 31. I am now reading the stories I marked, in order, and once I've read them, making another mark next to the title in the TOC.

Here are some not-fully-formed thoughts on my reading in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis thus far: • As with so many other wonderful things, I do not know why it has taken me so long to pick this book up. • I think the above is particularly odd because I'm getting the feeling, as I read, that Davis has been a huge influence on my own work, despite the fact that I've never read her before. • I expected these stories to be stranger. I expected, and I don't know why, for them to be like the stories of Gary Lutz, or Diane Williams, or Ben Marcus. I think Davis' name gets mentioned with theirs, but after doing a little research, I have found that Davis, unlike the other three authors I just mentioned, has never been associated with Gordon Lish. • I expected these stories to be stranger on the surface. What I am finding, however, is that, well (forgive me), still waters run deep. Davis' stories are almost perfectly benign until you close the book, put it down, and let what you have just read sift down through your mind and then suddenly! everything is deeply strange.

Here are some things I have marked in the book so far (completely out of context for my own nefarious reasons): • The undertaking is ill conceived and ill-fated, for he will waste much of his time in introspection and will learn very little German. • She thinks about how her smartness doesn't seem to count for much anymore, the way it used to. Her smartness has counted for less and less as she has grown older. • She is waiting for some sort of revelation, because she feels a revelation coming, but although various other thoughts have come, not one of them seems much like a revelation to her. • And so she knew by this that these notebooks truly had a great deal to do with her, though it was hard for her to understand, and troubled her to try to undersand, just how they had to do with her, how much they were of her and how much they were outside her and not of her, as they sat there on the shelf, being what she knew but did not know, being what she had read but did not remember reading, being what she had thought but did not now think, or remember thinking, or if she remembered, then did not know whether she was thinking it now or whether she had only once thought it, or understand why she had had a thought once and then years later the same thought, or a thought once and then never that same thought again.