upstreet – 2007
Number 2
2007
Annual
Miles Newbold Clark
upstreet’s second effort champions the minimalist aesthetic: an all-black cover is graced only with the journal’s name and issue number. There are no pictures to be found anywhere.
upstreet’s second effort champions the minimalist aesthetic: an all-black cover is graced only with the journal’s name and issue number. There are no pictures to be found anywhere.
While I’m all for stark presentations of any sort, oftentimes I wished that this material had been allowed to “breathe” a little deeper. upstreet’s fiction is unfortunately rife with quotidian false starts like “’Let It Be’ was the first Beatles song I discovered I could actually relate to,” or “This is a story about how my girlfriend and I broke up, how our relationship ended after two years and how I moved on.” Word-by-word, many stories betray their potentially compelling plots with cloying prose. Moreover, they feel stiflingly similar at times; sitting down to write this review, it was difficult for me to recall any of the pieces with much clarity. Even the issue’s centerpiece – an interview with Lydia Davis – was frustratingly elusive. upstreet often has difficulties in getting to the point.
But no journal, especially a young journal, is flawless; and there are several stories that warrant merit. In H. Camp Gordinier’s Hidden Camera, the dry (almost dour) taste of the prose befits a stunted love relationship between a small-time Russian porn director and the mamushka-turned-sex-kitten who falls for him. And in Ed Anthony’s Heretics, a series of unpretentious images form the satisfyingly benign amalgam of simple man’s epiphany in a bakery:
It was the warmth of the room, the early May sunshine pouting in the big front windows, and the smell of windowsill geraniums, and the smell of the fresh white bread and coffee cakes, and the smile of the faintly bovine young woman who waited on him; it was all of it that seized him, not just any one thing.
Those who enjoy straightforward, essayish stories with sparse embellishments will join me in anticipating the next installment of upstreet.
