Afflicting hold: Peter Orner’s textual worlds

There is, I suppose, a kind of self-defeating mark to the task of praising a book about how affecting certain idiosyncratic short stories are to an idiosyncratic reader, who comes to the occasion entirely converted over to the cause of reading and obsessing over them. To a point where the experience of having read does not so much furnish the colors and textures of the world - the mental furniture and immense particulars of the minded creature that has to apprehend it - but is instead the lens through everything is filtered, the switch that determines in how wide an aperture it might be beholden.

I like Peter Orner. I like the fastidious way he champions what he likes, and how unfussy and uncomplicated he seems in the act of liking and championing and showing the underbelly and emotional timbre of his aesthetic commitments. I like watching him search for and activate the intellectual click that comes about in the midst of trying to sort why we merely like certain stories and why we are haunted and convicted by others.

Perhaps relatedly: i am unsure why I have been so reticent and lacked the courage to fly the flag of my own shadow. 2022 was like that, I guess.