It's now bratwurst week in my apartment, thanks to a dubious "manager's special" at the co-op. I mean, ten cents apiece for delicious bratwurst! For a minute I thought the sign was some kind of street theater.

You know, one of those fake grocery store sales? You see them all the time. It's those crazy kids.

Food poisoning threat level: yellow.

My short fiction class was gun-to-the-head painful today. In addition to the usual nonsense from the expatriate Canadian otherwise known as Eating Girl — I would normally hesitate to criticize a student for being overenthusiastic, of all things, but she kept giving speeches that only gradually metamorphosed into questions, completely unrelated questions — we also had a guest speaker, up-and-coming author Daniel Alarcón.

I had a problem going into class because, well, I hadn't liked his stories. Maybe I just got a rotten batch, but "The Visitor" especially seemed to be nothing special, however clean and confident the writing. He said he didn't believe in "write what you know," but when you go beyond writing what you know, you have to rely on universal observations, increasing the risk that your insights will be banal or cliched.

Or maybe the problem is exactly the opposite? That when you're writing in a niche (stories about Peru, in this case), the banal seems new.

I really don't know what I wanted from this visit. What is he supposed to tell a class on "short fiction"? What is any author supposed to tell a class about his work?

Jay Rubin's hagiography Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words has a great story about a writer talking to students, which I dimly remember. Some of you have heard this from me before.

Murakami is guest lecturing at an American college, big lecture hall, for a crowd of students and professors, and finally he opens up floor for questions. A student stands up and asks him about the underground volcano in Hard-boiled Wonderland. Where did he come up with this incredible metaphor? What does it mean?

So Murakami tells the student "Actually, there are no metaphors in my work."

And this professor of Japanese literature who was sitting in the back of the room suddenly stands up and shouts: "Don't listen to that man! He doesn't know what he's talking about!"

We heard all about the history and biography behind Alarcón's writing: don't care, don't care. Most of it smelled a bit too much like justification. I prefer my short stories without little authorial notecards about where they came from and what they're supposed to mean.

Alarcon did have some moderately interesting comments about the writing process — "imagination plus empathy" is something or other — more useful for a comp class but certainly welcome here. Of course, after a little while I realized that, if I don't like his writing, then any advice he had about the process was probably of limited utility.

Also, and I'm pretty sure this isn't just because I'm a libertarian, some of the statements of this self-proclaimed "leftist" (those aren't scare quotes, for the record, but look sharp) were completely alien to me. At one point he referred to "the capitalist beginning-to-end order" of some stories, which he said he tried to avoid.

I took the lack of a collective gasp as another sign that I was in grad school.

I agree that this way of telling stories is sometimes too simple. But you heard it here: chronological order is capitalist.

Try to guess the economic systems that go with these narrative ordering techniques:

1. "Reverse-chronological" order
2. In medias res
3. Flashbacks

Eventually my invisible gun ran out of bullets. To my credit, I stayed for the entire class period, and most of the wounds were self-inflicted.