As Dzanc Books has seen some success in reading Action Yes when looking for material for the Best of the Web, and Blake Butler's own SSM post today was of an Action Yes story, I headed over there and spent an hour or so reading past publishings of theirs. Man, they've published a lot of great stories and poems.
I settled on Derek White's "Aligned in the Ranks of Amoebic Ancestry" from a few years back. Derek often has a way of unsettling me while I read his work and I think it comes from frequently getting at least a little bit lost in his narratives. I usually seem to find out it was my own fault, in re-reading, I'll not things I should have caught the first time around, or I'll see I misunderstood the direction something was heading.
Before the Indians appeared on the horizon, I was a secret agent posing as one of them. I was so convinced of my role, that I forgot all my past lives. There was another real Indian with me whose name was Rank & File because the first thing he saw in this world were braves congregating for battle.
This is the start of the story, and that bit from "I was a secret agent," through "all my past lives" slipped right past me the first time I read this today. Missing this little tidbit caused quite a bit of confusion on my end as I neared the completion of the story the first time I read it. It wasn't until going back to the begining and seeing that in the first paragraph that some of the story made sense. Once I read that, and then continued to read the whole story that second time, everything pieced together quite nicely and I was able to realize what a really nice job White had done.
i love that derek white recoil, how things go down so easily even though they are such strange and cool ideas, i often find more and more pleasure on rereading. great post, dan!
Posted by: blake butler | May 21, 2009 at 11:24 PM