What are short stories good for?

I was driving home yesterday and listening to NPR when a little segment about Rick Bass came on. Bass is a fiction writer who I seem to recall dominated the contemporary literature scene when I was taking MFA courses in fiction writing (in the late 80s, in other words).

Here's the bit, if you want to read it or listen to it:  Rick Bass on the art of the short story

Bass says that "The short story is a beautiful reservoir that you enter. You learn something, and you get out. It fits our brain. It's a unique package, a lozenge, a lens that helps us process all kinds of information. The classic short story form with that elegant, tapered shape - it's not formulaic. It's organic, and it fits who we are as a species."

I'm not sure what he means by this, frankly, but it sounds pretty beautiful and hits me in the poetry center of my brain, a part of it that doesn't really need to make complete sense of a stimulus but instead experiences it physically. All I know is that, driving down Ashland past the thawing parks by the train tracks toward downtown Green Bay, I liked (in the pit of my stomach) the idea that short stories fit our brains like lozenges.

A lovely sentiment, like the BOOM epiphany of a poem about spring arriving at last.  But is it true?

Are short stories "organic" or are they in fact artificial?  Really, how many of us crave short stories?  How many of us read them?  How many of us write them when they're not assigned by circumstances?

I'll be the first to admit that I crave, instead, serial narratives -- family sagas, soap-operatic works in the tradition of Downtown Abbey (but on the page, of course), series of novels devoted to the same detectives, TV shows that follow the same characters through 8+ seasons of personal life.  Short stories, even if they're "linked," don't give me the same thrill.

I just finished reading and listening to all of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series. He started this cycle of novels as a serial entry in a newspaper and then branched out into the sphere of novels. All 8 of these books had me gripped in a set of characters living and working and making their strange ways in San Fransisco, beginning in the 70s and moving slowly into the first decade of this new century. His characters are richly drawn and intricately connected to each other -- gay and transgender and "straight" in a time of social upheaval that's still going on. I lived with those characters for weeks. They became part of me, their worlds overlaid on mine as I walked the dog around the frozen block, as I drove from home to school to home in the routine of an ordinary life.  And their presence made that ordinary life take on a kind of wonder and richness that I needed.

I think I'd like to argue, then, that the serial narrative is more organic to the species.  The epic poem, the series of novels, the long family history, then, are all more organic than the short story, which seems (frankly) like an amputation.

But, hell, I'll take a short story over silence any day.