The great Mississippi writer Barry Hannah passed away yesterday at the age of 67. "Barry could somehow make the English sentence generous and unpredictable, yet still make wonderful sense, which for readers is thrilling. You never knew the source of the next word. But he seemed to command the short story form and the novel form and make those forms up newly for himself," said friend Richard Ford. Hannah's Airships is one of the last century's greatest collections of short stories, and was a prominent influence on many of today's writers, particularly George Saunders.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
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Airships is a body of work by itself. If he had never written anything else, that would be enough. Salinger, Hannah... Oates, Morrison, Pynchon and Roth better get a check-up.
Well this is a sad thing.
And why is the NY Times taking so long to get its official obit up? Barry Hannah is one you should have had on your shortlist of ready-to-go obits.
Another good writer that Lish made great. Let's see how many times his name gets mentioned in any of this. I'm betting zero.
R.I.P.
Hey, look: Gordon Lish is on the internet!
Thou shalt not feed the trolls, I know. But this from a Garden & Gun profile (per Maud Newton's blog today) may be of interest to Mr NYTY:
"[...] Hannah, however, did not suffer Lish's editorial wrecking balls as compliantly as Carver did.
"He'd mark things up, but if I didn't agree with it, I wouldn't take it," Hannah said. "But he did teach me a lot about writing short stories. The use of open space. The music of the empty white. Not to write so damn fucking much. Stop, sir! You're through!""
That they'd skip at this particular point in time is not a surprise. Undoubtedly, they are flying over it, to the far-away beaches, where my experience has been that every tourist has his or her own personal SEO consultants