JCO Miscellany: Two

Fact vs. Fiction

Dan P. Lee of Philadelphia Magazine has published a long article on the death of John Fiocco, Jr. Selected details from initial reports on the tragedy were the starting point for a JCO story, “Landfill,” which publication in the New Yorker caused a brief local storm of indignation when its source material was identified.

Philadelphia Magazine:

What Oates couldn’t — or didn’t — realize was that in the absence of any formal conclusion by the authorities, the scenario posited in her fiction had transmogrified into a sort of perceived fact. In the wake of the rampant, frequently erroneous speculation offered first by Nancy Grace and her ilk, it became impossible for anyone to approach Oates’s story as anything less than an explanation.

An interesting argument, but at most I would say it is “possible” (certainly not “impossible”) that some people looked at JCO’s story as an explanation.

Journalists make a living writing stories about such tragedies, and fiction writers do the same. What many people didn’t — or wouldn’t — realize then was that the journalists’ versions of events, though ostensibly “true,” are usually of interest only locally, and for a limited time; whereas the artists’ versions, though fictionalized, may well elevate random “facts” into truths of universal and timeless interest. JCO’s early story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, also inspired by part of a journalistic account (of a minor serial killer), has become a short story classic. The original journalism, however, has been forgotten, as have the original crimes (excepting of course by those few directly involved, and selected true-crime aficionados).

JCO’s forthcoming novel, My Sister, My Love, is inspired by the Jon Benet Ramsey case. “Landfill” was eventually inclulded in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2007, and called “a small masterpiece” by a Booklist reviewer.

Speaking of My Sister, My Love …

The Wall Street Journal has published an excerpt from JCO’s forthcoming novel.

Exotic Gothic

JCO has contributed several sections of her novella Beasts to Exotic Gothic, an anthology of “forbidden tales from our gothic world” edited by Danel Olson.

New York Review X 2

Joyce Carol Oates has been a regular reviewer for the New York Review of Books, contributing nearly fifty review-essays since the early nineties.

JCO’s latest are reviews of Boxing: A Cultural History in the May 29 NYRB: “As Kasia Boddy’s masterwork of bricolage sweeps on, there comes to be something wonderfully Joycean—oceanic, indefatigable, slightly deranged—in the very quantity of data she has amassed.”

And for the June 12 issue, reviewing Salman Rushdie’s newest novel: “Though The Enchantress of Florence … is being described as a ‘historical’ novel, readers in expectation of a conventional ‘historical novel’ should be forewarned: this is ‘history’ jubilantly mixed with postmodernist magic realism. The veteran performer-author is too playful and too much the exuberant stylist to incorporate much of deadpan ‘reality’ into his ever-shifting, ever-teasing narrative of the power of enchantment of cultural opposites….”

Of Seas Crimson and Tranquil

The current banner image for this blog and for Celestial Timepiece is taken from HubbleSite, run for NASA by the Space Telescope Science Institute. STScI titles the image “Cone Nebula (NGC 2264): Star-Forming Pillar of Gas and Dust,” and further describes it as “a nightmarish beast rearing its head from a crimson sea”—as if this were not obvious to anyone familiar with nightmarish beasts. Or crimson seas.

Though some have deemed Joyce Carol Oates’s writing to be astronomical in scope, they may not have realized that some of her work is astronomical in theme as well:

Corky’s fascination with cosmology in the Pulitzer-finalist What I lived For; the story “The Radio Astronomer” from Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque; the poem “The Triumph of Gravity” from Tenderness; and of course Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, with chapter titles such as “A Short History of the Heavens” and “Ocean Of Storms. Sea Of Tranquility. Lake Of Dreams. Lake Of Death.”

JCO notes that “Looking into the depths of the sky, we are looking into Time: the stars of distant galaxies that seem to us so beautiful, so fraught with meaning beyond our human ability to comprehend, are in fact not there, but, long extinct; even our own sun is eight minutes into what astronomers call look-back time. Maddy Wirtz, the chronicler of the Foxfire Confessions, in adulthood an astronomer’s assistant, is only able to tell her story through the prism of look-back time—’Undertaken now because I have the proper telescopic instrument.’ Which is to say, the perspective of Time.”