Outside Providence (continued)

3RD BED CAN VARIOUSLY be described as absurdist, experimental, and surrealist/dadaist. The problem with these labels, however, is that they arrive with so much baggage they end up obscuring the very thing they are meant to define. "Absurdism" is useful, but suggests frivolity and ridiculousness — something not to be taken seriously. "Surrealism" and "dadaism" properly evoke the collision of the unconscious and the dream state with "reality," yet seem locked as terms in the early part of the last century. Even "experimentalism," while conveying the idea of the new and untried, can seem strained, particularly since many literary "experiments" have been going on for almost a century. Fiction editor Anderson suggests another drawback to the term "experiment" — it has a manufactured laboratory quality to it, whereas literature is unpredictable and always evolving.

"It’s not like a perfume where you perfect the scent through titration and then bottle it," he says. Therefore, all these terms, and none of them, quite describe 3rd bed’s soup of fiction, verse, prose-poetry, drawings, comix, translations, and found and reclaimed scraps of literature and ephemera. The publication’s content tends toward the eclectic, although certain predilections of the editors, including an interest in natural history and a soft spot for East Europeans, jut forth to a greater or lesser degree depending on the issue.

3rd bed was started, says Standley, as a reaction to realism, at least of the sort that was becoming dominant in the 1980s and early 1990s. Following a 1960s and 1970s wave of experimental and post-modern writers, including Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme, the 1980s, he suggests, saw a reassertion of realism and the ascendancy of minimalists such as Raymond Carver. Standley, Anderson, and 3rd bed’s other founding editors, despairing of what they found to be a creeping conservatism in the small presses, decided to create a new journal in the tradition of Grand Street (www.grandstreet.com) and Conjunctions (www.conjunctions.com), two established publications open to non-traditional forms. While 3rd bed was developed in opposition to the realistic aesthetic, Standley now says, "I see the journal now in a more positive way, as expanding the modes of realism." Anderson similarly backs off from declaring 3rd bed as "anti-realism," suggesting instead, "[The magazine]" exists to provide a venue for writing that is doing something else."

One of the paradoxes of realism is that there is nothing more artificial than trying to capture "real life" on the page. Huge amounts of reality (a word, Vladimir Nabokov suggested, that should always appear in quotation marks) must be left out, and all kind of devices employed, so that events appear to follow logically from one another, and characters behave in what appear to be typical and consistent ways. 3rd bed eschews this approach, essentially arguing that literature cannot and should not mirror slippery and subjective "reality." Anderson suggests that in realistic fiction, "There is the assumption that the world we live in makes sense. In the writing we are going for, you feel that none of this makes sense." As opposed to minimalist writing, 3rd bed favors what might be termed intense, saturated prose, or, "Writing that takes nothing for granted" says Anderson. Poetry editor Meinhard also argues in favor of exploring experience in a non-realistic way, as well as verse that "Pushes language to some sort of extreme."

An issue of 3rd bed starts, even before the table of contents and masthead, with a series of unexplained found pieces. These are cultural artifacts that Standley has dug up, the literary equivalent of discarded soda cans, cigarette packs or hubcaps being taken by a visual artist and converted into an assemblage or installation.

Issue 9, for example, presents reproductions of two letters (with postmarked envelopes from 1962) that, given their sloppy scrawl, appear to have been written by a seven-year-old. There’s an e-mail exchange between a Japanese and an American professor, debating the naming of a biochemical computer program "ASH" or "CASH," and the associations of these words with death and greed. Also included is a 1755 letter from Samuel Johnson to the fourth Earl of Chesterfield; and finally, e-mail from a Web site devoted to guns, suggesting an exchange of links with 3rd bed. These pieces provide a suitably off-kilter opening to the journal, offering what Standley suggests is a trace or a whisper of a possible orientation or direction for the issue. The rest of the magazine is composed of prose, poetry, mixes thereof, and various other unclassifiable elements.

The fiction in 3rd bed is unlike the predominantly realist prose that appears in publications like the New Yorker. Those looking for a story in which a character (a teacher, say), exists in a recognizable and defined setting (a classroom, a suburban house, a motel room), faces a conflict (with himself, a spouse, a student), and then comes to, if not a resolution, at least an epiphany or moment of change, will be put off. As Standley puts it, "A completely disappointing ending is really appealing to us." And so, too, it appears, is a confusing and unclear opening, and a middle that takes a strange turn and appears to erase the promise of the story’s beginning, if such a thing could have been divined in the first place. Characters in 3rd bed stories are sometimes unidentifiable, and a voice, an interior monologue, or set of elliptical observations may constitute the entire piece. 3rd bed’s poetry, like its fiction (assuming these two can be separated), is rarely referential and is equally challenging. Poetry editor Meinhard suggests that the journal’s poems tend to be language-based and lyrical, "More like music than reading a newspaper."

The following excerpts from issue 9 provide an indication of the 3rd bed aesthetic. "Junk Stuff" by Marceline Crawley begins,

All of them were swarthy-chop busy in the bumble, then at once:

"Ouch" they say,

"I am not the social bee."

So they live in the swamp for a month, and that takes care of it.

David Rossmann’s story, "The Parkers," opening paragraph is,

Dappled shadows move over us and then the sun glares again. The streets are named for trees. It’s a Sunday in September. There’s a gleaming minivan, a red subcompact something, a light truck, a silver import, and a wide rusty wagon. There’s a sport utility vehicle, a sport utility vehicle, and another sport utility vehicle.