Most Fascinating Typo of the Week

See Deborah Bauer's otherwise-unremarkable "Flying Angels" in the July 2005 issue of Carve for this gem:

"Hard-edged dewy lawns and rows of begonias border the miniature tutors and Spanish-style bungalows."

One wonders if the tutors are small-minded as well as tiny, and if they favor begonias --?

The 920-Word One-Liner

Don't we read fiction for robust pleasures like character, gorgeous language, and tragedy so pungent it slashes the hands? Damn right we do. Then why do writers (and editors) think they can get away with hanging a story on a gimmick?

Case in point: Theodore Ross' 920-word one-liner, "The Somalian Smokes It Up," in the July 2005 issue of Pindeldyboz. In such a short story, you wouldn't think it would take Ross three paragraphs (285 words, if you must know) to explain how the main character got nicknamed "The Somalian," but it does; and just when it appears that something's about to happen, the story flames out in a joke: having seen a beggar defecating in the open street, the Somalian concludes (in a tortured point-of-view shift), "Isn't that just the way of things in Cambodia, his home: someone always shitting on the Promised Land." Sheesh. This from an editor at Harper's. Read it yourself and tell me you're not disappointed.

Another case in point: Debra Broughton's "Colour of Friendship," appearing in the January 2005 issue of Word Riot. This time, it's a different kind of punchline, the sort used in detective fiction and spooky movies all the time: the main character is the one who committed the murder, though in this case you only realize there was a murder at the very end. --Oops, I think I gave away the ending again.

The problem, see, is that these stories aren't genre stories, where gimmicks and guessing games are part of the deal. Both of the stories I've mentioned so far are both presented as literature, and guess what, kids? A higher standard applies. A good rule of thumb is that literature is worth reading more than once. If it can only stand up to one reading (because the second time through, for example, you already know that Bruce Willis' character in Sixth Sense is actually dead), you're probably not writing literature. If your entire story relies on not telling the reader something critical -- not just the minor misdirections of any storyteller, choosing her pace and order of events; no, I mean, for example, when you showed your main character walking out on her boyfriend and you deliberately didn't tell your readers that she'd just stabbed him to death -- if your story rests on that sort of dishonesty, you should realize that your story's not going to be worth reading twice.

One last example: "Self Defense," by Michael Hartford, also in Pindeldyboz' July issue. Again, this is a different kind of one-liner, old as time: the main character, a normal, suburban dad, is provoked beyond endurance by his wife, who keeps shooting him with a squirt gun at their son's birthday party. In the story, much is made of attempts by the politically-correct to separate squirt guns from real guns (the ones in the story are made in the shape of animals, and the manufacturer calls them "squirters"). But scratch the surface, it seems, and we find humanity's primal impulses locked, loaded, and staring us in the face. Never mind that we know nothing, really, about the relationship between the husband and wife in this story - to understand the hostility they unleash, it's supposed to be enough, apparently, that she keeps criticizing his choices for the party (what food to serve, how to cook it, whether or not to give out the squirt guns) and that he keeps ignoring her.

Even if these stories were better than they are (when was the last time you read a story like "Self Defense," where a calm, ordinary day in the suburbs turns violent?), they'd still be weak, because they're designed only to shock the reader with the punch, if not the punchline. Are their characters presented with real conflicts that will, no matter the choice they make, cost them something they love? No. Are the stories distinguished by blazing language or formally challenging? No. These are easy stories to write, simple in concept and simple to execute. It's the curse of the short story form -- it's hell to write a great one, but it's easy to write one O. Henry would've been proud of. Try extending any of these for 20 pages, and they'd fall flat. Don't we all write and publish stories that fall flat? Absolutely. But let's not set our sights so dadgum low.

--Benjamin Chambers, Founding Editor

Lonesome Lonesome

Roderick Leyland’s, “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” (Eclectica, April/May 2005) starts off with a bang:

It’s a bugger when you bungle your first brain transplant. Isn’t it? Yeah, he knows what I mean. Blood, grey matter, bone fragments… Blimey! Was I on a learning curve! That’s what they say, these days, isn’t it? Not, I’ve got it wrong; but, I’m on a curve. I know the kind of curve I prefer. Don’t you, dear? Cor, look at her blushing under the pancake. I wear pancake too, love, but I’m not one of them. No, it prevents the lights burning me out, sweetheart, and stops me looking like a corpse. Who said, That wouldn’t make any difference? You wanna come up here, son, and try yourself? Yeah, you’re very brave, down there in the dark. Big gob, small dick.

This paragraph packs an awful lot into a few short sentences: it announces that the piece is going to be formally challenging, establishes the speaker as a stand-up comic, and gives him a particular sort of persona—he is vulgar and sexually aggressive, the sort of man who uses humiliation as a tool for seduction, who is able (or, more importantly, wants his audience to believe he is able) to shame a woman into bed and her boyfriend or husband into a sort of grinning acquiescence. (As for brain surgery and corpses, well—we’ll get to those later.) The stage seems set for turnabout—at some point, the reader suspects, our crude comic will get his comeuppance but good.

We are not disappointed. The voice, it turns out, belongs to one Ronnie Lonesome, the emcee of what appears to be a second-rate variety show. (Indeed, considering the allusions to blonde dancers, it appears to be vaudeville or even burlesque, which seems a bit strange, given the obvious contemporaneity of the piece.) And Ronnie Lonesome, of course, is only a stage name—and a clever one at that, invoking as it does not only the character’s loneliness but also, since it is taken from an Elvis Presley song, the sexual magnetism of The King. Our protagonist’s real name is Desmond Robinson, and over the course of the next seven or so pages he will indeed get what’s coming to him.

It is a clever stroke to make Lonesome a comic, because it naturally allows the piece to take the form of a modified dramatic monologue, typically the provenance of poetry, or, well, drama. The trick with dramatic monologues is to have their speakers unintentionally reveal something about themselves that they won’t or can’t state outright. (Robert Browning was a particular master of this—see, for example, his poem “My Last Duchess.”) And a performer with a shtick like Ronnie’s seems particularly ripe for this sort of treatment; we look forward to watching him hang himself with a rope woven entirely of his own words.

Does this actually happen? Not exactly. “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” defies our expectations in a number of ways, some satisfying, others not. The good news is very good indeed: Mr. Leyland is a gifted plotter; there are clues as to what is actually going on with Ronnie Lonesome scattered throughout the piece, but not until three-quarters of the way through does the bigger picture come into focus. Once we know the whole story, it is a pleasure to go back, find all the hints the author has dropped, and see how cleverly and seamlessly they have been fitted into the larger context of the work. For as it turns out, Ronnie Lonesome has bigger problems than mere boorishness—there is a tumor in his brain, which, we are led to believe, will likely kill him. Hence his opening joke about brain surgery, and the subsequent (better) joke about the make-up preventing him from looking like he’s dead. Ronnie also seems to suffer from olfactory hallucinations—he perceives odors that aren’t really there. Thus we get an early riff about odd smells and pretentious celebrity chefs.

Of course, the precarious state of Ronnie’s health transforms his bluster into something sympathetic—we see it not as the ranting of a cranky misogynist but instead as a dying man’s sad attempt to hold on to his self-respect. He is struggling to convince himself that he is virile, entertaining, popular; most of all he is struggling to convince himself that he is brave. One of the strongest bits in the piece stems from this struggle—here, Ronnie is talking to himself in the privacy of his dressing room, ostensibly preparing new material:

…she [Ronnie’s doctor] says [of the tumor], It’s the size of a pea.

I say, Get your specs on, girl. Listen: when I walk in the showers, heads turn.

Desmond, she says, it needs treating.

I say, Then give it a night on the town. What d’you reckon: limo, dinner at the Ritz, a box at the theatre and a suite in a Park Lane hotel?

It’s all swagger and desperation—but it’s funny swagger and desperation. Denial is certainly at work here, but it’s of an interesting variety: chosen, as opposed to reflexive. You can’t joke about something you don’t acknowledge in the first place; Ronnie’s brand of self-defense is more subtle (and, one could argue, more admirable) than the ordinary sort.

The problem is that many of Ronnie’s jokes aren’t this good. Here’s a sampling from his actual act:

…Oh yeah, that paper: New Pop Weekly. Now then, every week they print a list of the Top Sixty. Have you heard some of these?

Wanna Grapple with your Tackle, by Vicky Virago and the Vixens.

Want that Hunk in My Bunk, by Kathie Klutch and the Crampons.

You’re in my Flat, by Mick Manse and the Maisonettes.

On and on they go, these cryptic little puns, for eight more entries—three-quarters of a page out of seven pages total. Now compare this to the act of another comic, overheard in fragments by Ronnie when he is off-stage—a comic whom the story sets up as genuinely unfunny:

“No, she says, I don’t want to stroke your cat. I asked for a Marmite sandwich!”

Yes, Ronnie’s act makes more sense, but only a little more. For the piece to be completely effective Ronnie would have to be consistently, crudely funny—or he would at least have to be crudely funny when the author wanted him to be. The problem is one of control. It’s not that the voice gets away from Leyland, exactly; Ronnie never lapses from character. Rather, the words he actually says aren’t enough to carry the full weight of the piece, and so Leyland is forced to invoke other devices to bring his message home. The most distracting of these are what we might think of as stage directions, italicized bits of business which supply context, sometimes unnecessarily. Early on, they seem harmless enough:

Ronnie approaches the front of the stage, almost falling into the orchestra pit, and becomes conspiratorial.

There’s a minor problem with this—Ronnie’s voice might sink to a conspiratorial whisper, or his tone might turn conspiratorial, but for he himself to turn conspiratorial is jarring, as if we’ve become suddenly and inappropriately privy to his state of mind—but it doesn’t do much damage. By the end of the piece, however, the situation has grown more dire. Here is one of the last of these stage directions:

Ronnie continues to stand on the stage looking into the auditorium, waiting. The audience is attentive. People have gathered in the wings.

And another:

Silence has invaded the theatre and occupied everyone.

Something has shifted here—not Ronnie himself, but his story’s setting. The theatre has taken on the quality of a nightmare; the audience has come to resemble supernatural judges. Certainly, facing the prospect of death at the hand of one’s own brain is both absurd and menacing, but it still doesn’t make sense, given the rest of the piece, for the circumstances to suddenly become surreal. But Leyland needs to bring his story to a climax, and since Ronnie’s words alone won’t suffice, this is the method he falls back on. Indeed, by this point in the story, Ronnie is at a loss for words: he is having an episode of some sort, and his speech is comprised of disjointed snippets, memories and garbled fragments of other comics’ acts and appeals to the audience. It is undeniably moving, but it is also something of a cop-out. Since Ronnie’s brain is failing him at the story’s end, Leyland has the opportunity to stuff Ronnie’s speech full of things the comic, in his right mind, would never say—and he uses the opportunity in ways that ultimately diminish the piece. Ronnie, it seems, has never gotten over the death of his mother, and what surfaces here at the very end of his act appears to be a memory of her death as seen through the eyes of a young child.

It went quiet, my mum was still, and I couldn’t wake her. I shook her but she just lay there, warm. They said leave her, she needs rest now, but she never woke. And that’s God’s truth.

Now, this is certainly a heartbreaking bit of prose. The problem is that there has only been a single, fleeting mention of Ronnie’s mother up to this point, a mention so brief and devoid of detail that the reader has no sense of Ronnie’s emotional connection to her. The effect of this deathbed memory therefore ends up seeming rather contrived—it is as if the author did not quite trust the work he had already done and therefore felt he needed to play the "dead mother" card in order to drive home the point that Ronnie is scared, sad, and lonely.

This is a shame, since Ronnie’s fear, sadness, and solitude would have been manifest without bringing up his mother. After all, the spectacle of a man dying so publicly, and yet so terribly alone, is about as sad as you can get. Given the over-the-top nature of Ronnie’s voice, it might have been wiser to exercise restraint in constructing the piece’s actual events—it might have been wiser to trust us to find the pathos in the story for ourselves, rather than hanging it before our eyes in neon letters.

Still, there is great deal to admire in “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” not the least of which is Mr. Leyland’s psychological penetration—Ronnie Lonesome himself is a wonderful creation, simultaneously so self-deceiving and so very self-aware. It’s quite a balancing act Mr. Leyland attempts, and, if he does not fully carry it off, we still have a great time watching him try.

--Bill Bukovsan, Associate Editor

Top Ten Online Stories of 2004 - Update

Check out Terry Bisson's spooky little entertainment, "Super 8." Fun ride.

Million Writers Award for The King's English & Best Online Fiction of 2004

The best news, first: The King's English won the Million Writers Award for Best Publisher of Novella-Length Fiction, 2005. Not bad for a one-year anniversary present, eh?

Hey, but there's a heck of a lot of good fiction out there on the web, and I'd like to urge you to check some of it out. Jason Sanford of storySouth, who runs and hosts the Million Writers Award, has chosen the top ten online stories of 2004. I'm sorry to say he didn't choose the three nominees from The King's English for his finalists, but his top ten should be worth reading. (Sorry, I haven't read them, either. Can't quite convince the folks at my day job that you need me more than they do.) Read the stories and vote for your favorite.

The King's English top three novellas for 2004, in alpha order, by author:

"Wednesday," by A'Dora Phillips

"Wonder" by S. M.R. Saia

"Escape Velocities" by Jim Snowden

Be sure to check 'em out!

If Paris Hilton Wrote Poetry

Check out Janis Butler Holm's hilarious send-up of Paris Hilton at Maisonneuve. It's a cheap shot, but sometimes those are the best. On a more serious note, see Britton Gildersleeve's savvy essay on making literature relevant for college students: "How Reading Poetry Will Help You Get a Six-Figure Job," in the National Writing Project's quarterly from 2001.

Ready, Stet, Go!

The Crowd, by James Chapman
Facets: a Literary Magazine

Chapman's piece is an excerpt from his novel, Stet. The eponymous main character (if one can call a character who barely shows up in a story a "main" anything) -- Stet, we mean, is a Soviet filmmaker. We gather that much, anyhow, from this excerpt, in which he manages to be born. This excerpt, however, is not concerned with anything so boring as a mere birth, and cannot be tied down so prosaically. Instead, we are treated to brief introductions to (among other things) Leningrad, Russian snow, the destruction of two complaining statues by German artillery, and the impact of film on how Russians perceived the world and their place in it -- all this in a dense, imagistic style reminscent of Michael Ondaatje or Gyórgy Konrad.

Take, for example, the wayward narrative strategy on display here:

…perhaps the Comedy Theatre is an unsuitable example, and we should move down the street to the Komissarzhevskaya Drama Theatre, opposite the bank-like department store Gostiny Dvor, where after rehearsals you may buy everything from a House of Friendship and Peace bath towel to the kind of wooden chair that suicides use to kick out of the way as they hang, and wives use to stand on as they hide their husbands' bottles of drink, everybody owns a chair like this, what is a chair compared to the art of the theatre? A play may reveal your whole life to you, while the chair you sit on is merely reality, a chair has no soul, it is despicable.

Chock full of such pronouncements, "The Crowd" is fascinating, gorgeous, and disappointing. Is it just us, or does its first sentence have an agreement problem?

... and the people of his city that morning put their feet onto the cobblework carefully, like a defendant who accidentally sees the judge smooth his robes, alone, before emerging to announce his decision.

Either way, the switch from plural "people" and their many feet to "a defendant" is a jarring way to begin. Combine that with "The Crowd's" determined avoidance of anything like profluence, and you have a piece that will frustrate the common reader. But for the uncommon reader -- that's you, by the way -- it's definitely worth checking out. We might even buy the book.

Tweeners

"Interstitials," by Kate Schatz
Blithe House Quarterly

Here's one for you language freaks out there. The narrator of "Interstitials" (spell that five times fast) has a profession that explains the story's speed and gloss: "I make - design - interstitials. Short graphic works: pre-commercial lead-ins, post-show showcases." In other words, she does graphics for TV, filler for the empty spaces between content. She speaks in streams of disconnected words and phrases, each one shorthand for a visual effect, a mood, a time period -- the jargon of visual design. For example:

He goes: "It all reminds me of last month, but OK."

Last month was pinstripes, ineffective love, security concerns, code orange, the same old dill sauce, a brief heart stop, the helicopter over the bridge, a missile pointed, everyone I love in a metropolis, another doctor, the only not-sham.

Schatz, of course, uses this shorthand ironically: the lists are meaningless, not just because all jargon is meaningless to outsiders, but because the words are so divorced from reality. The emptiness at the core of her work has infected the narrator's life, and though she denies it, she does suspect it:

Sometimes the thought comes: what if I leave? What would happen? To me, the world, my stuff? To just go, be one of those people with no money but nice simple foods, in a place with a great deal of green, and space, and animals. I go with this for a moment, then remember: that is unappealing. My life is amazing. There are 17 new messages in my inbox.

Fittingly, "Interstitials" is formless -- it's a snapshot of the narrator on an airplane and in an airport (both places where people are in between their point of origin and their destination). It falters occasionally, particularly toward the end. The narrator stops to explain her profession (fortunately for me, so I could quote it here) to an intrusive, unwanted companion in the airport bar; it's clear that Schatz felt she had to explain what interstitials were. I'd argue that this is untrue -- it's clear from the text that the narrator creates TV advertising. We don't really have to have it spelled out for us, and if we do, Schatz is good enough to do so less obtrusively. As it is, the passage reads not as if we're eavesdropping on the conversation between two characters, but as if Schatz is talking to the reader -- a temporary failure of point of view that pulls the reader out of the fictive dream.

It's almost as though Schatz couldn't quite figure a way to finish after a great start. As the real world intrudes on the narrator, her linguistic pyrotechnics fade away, and the story's energy goes with them. One can argue that this is part of the narrator's growing disillusionment with her work, but this is ultimately unconvincing. The reality around her -- represented largely by the conversation of her companion at the airport bar -- is unpleasant and unattractive. No, I think Schatz understands that for her story to be more than a glossy portrait of a profession and its attendant worldview, she needs the everday world, with its low production values, to intrude upon her narrator's bubble. But once it does, Schatz seems to find it as enervating as her narrator.

As if to revive the story's flagging spirit, Schatz conjures up a violent event on the runway, which the narrator, watching, instantly begins to mentally translate into a graphic sequence. As an ending, it's serviceable enough, but here's the final line:

We grip our stools and sit glued to the scene, and the acrid airport begins to violate my nose.

"Glued to the scene?" Schatz, like Homer, is nodding here. She displays a sensitivity to language that's far above average, so it's hard to believe she'd finish her story on such a cliche unless she was distracted or rushed. The same is true of "the airport violates my nose."

But don't let my grouchiness dissuade you from reading "Interstitials." It reminds me at once of Donald Barthelme, with his elfin humor and preference for surrealist juxtapositions, and of Joan Didion -- whose best essays unfailingly record the way language is used to misrepresent uncomfortable facts -- and that's no mean feat. I'll be looking for more of Kate Schatz' work, and so should you.

Pocket Full of Posies

The Lies of Handsome Men, by Rob Nixon, appears in the current issue of Blithe House Quarterly. The story is moody, atmospheric and sulphurous as a torch song. Here's a breathless passage that sweeps the reader along with it:

And this boy wants to know where you've been and what you've been doing. He believes you have something to teach him and he wants to know how it feels in your world, so he listens to words you've said a million times and stories that should have grown stale in the telling but it's as if you've never spoken them before, as if you truly had something to pass on. He takes you in with his eyes and his fingers and lets you wrap yourself around him breathing in the unfamiliar scent of his soft skin. There's passion again and you feel what keeps you alive, and this boy, this darling boy who wants so much, he walks beside you out into the streets with endless possibility and you realize what you came here for is still calling to you. It charges you, it puts a dance in your step, it clears the fog from your senses and plugs you in to a glowing, blaring night that can be yours again. And together you're in Boys Town, an endless city of tenement youths and nightclub dancers and sailors and immigrants newly arrived on shore.

Set in New York in 1939-1942, it's the story of a young man, Kenny Donahue, who comes to the big city with big-city dreams, just a kid who hustles his beauty to older men for a chance at glamor, at his dreams -- dreams that turn sour and end in violence. (Sorry - Nixon's tone has infected mine.) Non-linear, the story is told in sections, each one headed by lyrics from music of the period (or, anyhow, music that would sound like it was of the period, presumably slow, big-band numbers about lost love and broken dreams). It's fun sorting out the narrator of each passage, and anticipating Kenny's untimely death, which is foreshadowed early on, but Nixon counts too much on atmosphere and misses a chance at evoking true feeling.

To begin with, let me tell you what's wrong with quoting lyrics in fiction: they don't work. They're a cheap way to achieve a mood, but songs are personal -- even if your readers are familiar with a given song, there's no guarantee it has the same associations for them. I always cringe when I read essays about the 1960s, written by former flower children who were there; they always always always want to quote from the Rolling Stones, or Dylan, or the Doors, and even though I know the music, the lyrics just lie there on the page, pale with consumption, not nearly strong enough to do the work the author is asking of them. If you want a mood, an atmosphere, you need to create it with specific detail, sharp dialogue, and excellent scene-setting. Tone's the clincher, and so powerful a tool that it can carry the show on its own, just so long as you don't rely on it for too long. Nixon tries to make it do the work of the rest-- and he nearly succeeds.

But he flubs it in the first paragraph, just as he's delivering his first serve, his foot over the white line at the edge of the tennis court:

He was looking to get work at the World's Fair, but that's just temporary, he thought, that wasn't what he came for.

That hurts, coming as it does from a playwright. Nixon's syntax leads the reader to expect the phrase, "it wasn't what he came for," to be part of the sentence that forms Kenny's thought. Put into standard prose, it would read, "'But that's just temporary,' he thought. 'That's not what I came for.'" A cleaner way to solve this problem -- and one truer to the voice -- would be to eliminate the quotation from Kenny's thoughts, like so: "He was looking to get work at the World's Fair, but that was just temporary, it wasn't what he'd come for."

But never mind this cavil. Nixon really gets rolling in his second paragraph -- it's so strong it should have been his lead-in.

He came to town thinking he'd be Kenneth, or just Ken, but it never stuck. Kenny, they called him, always Kenny, that's how he was known. Kenny Donahue came to town fresh, the kind of kid you see from a speeding car, passing him almost unnoticed in the middle of a farmer's field, staring off. Kenny Donahue standing in a field, aching, pants on fire, hearing music in the air, and he got on a bus and came to town. He came to town on a bus and three years later left in an unmarked box that nobody would ever guess held someone who'd been in limousines and private party boats and opening-night taxis.

That's a tone with a heckuva sheen on it, so slick you want to keep reading forever. Still, tone isn't enough to sustain the piece. At the end of the story, the narrator relates a scene from a movie, and then realizes that he's in exactly the same situation as the actress he remembers. It's a good moment, but the movie isn't named, and for a reason: its specifics are so generic, so stereotypical, that you recognize the plot instantly -- and you know Nixon is counting on this, that he's smart enough to know that his own story is at best nostalgic and at worst unoriginal, relying as it does on its readers' familiarity with a certain style of story, noirish and seamy, its characters flatly accomplishing only the expected.

In the end, "The Lies of Handsome Men" puts me in mind of nothing so much as Broadway is My Beat, a radio show I first learned about a few years ago, which first aired in the 1940 and 50s. Broadway is straighter than "Lies," of course -- the lives of gay men would never be directly acknowledged in shows of its kind, though the stereotypes are present in the lisping voices of walk-ons -- but the deceptive glitter of New York City and its tawdry underside, recapitulated in "Lies," is a constant theme. Broadway's writers knew the theme was old, even then, and indulged in parody at least twice every show, when the main character, Detective Danny Clover, would wax purple about life on Broadway. One of my favorite examples:

The long winter is dead on Broadway, and the street mourns its dying without a tear. What's to weep, kid? The dawn banging on the radiators, tearing sleep into pieces on a cold morning? The standing on a street corner in the night wind trying to read the racing form with 100% wool mittens? And the girls so bundled up you can only see their faces -- that's to weep? Give me the springtime, kid. In the springtime, things bud and blossom. The girls, the neon flowers, the field of golden daisies on the Trans-Lux. Look at it now, kid:

ARTIST DEAD IN FIFTH AVENUE GUEST HOUSE
Police Sift Murder Clues, Searching Link with Death of Philip Hunt, Millionaire

Ever smell posies like that, kid? Spring's come to Broadway ... give up to it!

Try this, from Nixon's story, in comparison. The prosody isn't the same, but the lurid details are:

The clothes you're wearing are the clothes you wore, the smile you are smiling you were smiling then, but who knows? Who remembers? Who saw anything? Everyone suspected Berkeley or Morgan. But they never proved it. They didn't have to. The papers had a field day with the dirt they dug up. "Millionaires and rent boy in sick triangle. Cafè society's dirty secrets. Lush life ends in tragedy." It had all the elements of a juicy murder story. Young. Rich. Nude. Twisted. They said Kenny was blackmailing one or the other, maybe both. They never proved it. Speculation in the air - maybe they hired some down-and-outer to do the deed and make it look like a random robbery. But they never found him. They never tried. The police were satisfied to chalk it up to another pervert dead at the hands of a hustler. Love for sale, appetizing young love for sale. Who knew if it was true? Who cares? There's no one to tell, nothing left to do with the truth about what was done, no one wants to hear it now. Certainly not from someone walking this world like a ghost, haunting this dive, dead to hope and longing, a name connected to nothing, an image that doesn't linger, glimpsed at the end of a long corridor, the far corner of a city block, peripheral, noiseless, if glimpsed at all. A guy afraid to be what he couldn't shake, never got what he came for. A guy who never was, who looked to the papers and magazines, to the Georges, the Waynes he saw there, the men who could make it happen, someone to watch over me. A guy who gazed from afar at the Kennys of this city, the golden boys, the boy on the shiny chrome stool, the face in the misty light, the breathless touch of springtime, such a hungry yearning burning inside of me - in the roaring traffic boom, in the silence of his lonely room, no no - not for me. A lucky star's above, but not for me. The way you changed my life, the way you haunt my dreams, the way I held the knife, no no no no, they can't take that away from me.

It's nice enough work, Mr. Nixon, but the trouble is, I have smelled posies like that before.

Cannonball Express

Reading is always a gamble; this time, nosing around in the nonfiction section of Dislocate, a journal out of the University of Minnesota, I came up aces. See for yourself. Check out the blazing language and fierce economy of Joni Tevis' "Second String," about the glory days of an old carnie who, in a pinch, once had to take over as the human cannonball. Get past that first colon, and you'll feel a little blown away yourself.

Ennui, Already!

In Christopher Orlet's "Portrait of the Artist as an Old Drunk," which appears in the Fall 2004 issue of storySouth, there's one superlative joke. The narrator is selling sandpaper to the Amish when he hears that the Berlin Wall has fallen.

At length I went inside the office grinning ear to ear and asked the owner, a severe man with a long dusty beard, if he'd heard the news. He said he hadn't. I said, "No? The Berlin Wall has fallen." He looked at me with that deep, mistrustful look the Amish have of outsiders. "That's it for [C]ommunism," I said. "It's all over, the end of history." "Did you bring the samples?" he said brusquely.

The deadpan delivery of this joke works best when there is no explanation, but Orlet feels the need to explain it, and then kill it altogether with a metaphor:

I felt stupid for a moment. The Iron Curtain, I mean, what was that compared to the latest abrasive sample? The Amish had their own walls, you see, and they weren't made out of cement and razor wire.

What's ironic about this is that Orlet's intent is the very opposite of explanation. "Portrait" is a pastiche of fragments, told in a deadpan, dead-eyed style reminiscent of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. As these snapshots show, the narrator is largely disconnected from life, depressed and looking for meaning. It's an easy way to construct a story, leaving the writer unburdened by profluence, character, or scene-building. (The story could also use a good proofing.) Which is too bad. Orlet has verve and panache; I hate to see him slight his own gifts.

Superior Interiority

I'll admit that reading online lit doesn't inspire patience. Much of it is written too quickly, and doesn't suffer from being read the same way. So it's a pleasant surprise indeed when one comes across a story with imagery as gorgeous as that of Christiana Langenberg's Tumble Dry Low Heat, another selection from Carve. As with Bruce Taylor's story from the same issue, profluence isn't the order of the day -- in this case, a divorced woman mentally relives her anxiety over her young son's recent heart surgery while sitting alone in her house during a snow storm. In this sense, it is, like Taylor's story, another think-piece, because we never really leave the woman's head; but the intensity of its imagery carries the story. A single example, when the heart surgeon speaks with the woman after the surgery is over:

Your son's blood, in red stars, constellates on his instep, an irregular galaxy wraps around his ankle.

The fraction of a light year it takes for this to happen. The arc of a droplet in flight. The angle of impact. The way it looks to the mother.

Not Gormless, Just Formless

Here's a good place to start a story: imagine you're a guy who's having an affair with some other guy's wife. You and she are both on the faculty of a local college, and you're kind of smug about the affair whenever you meet her husband, because you have secrets. You know all about how he disappoints her, and you know when you see him in his "bad plaid car coat" that she hates it, always has, while you, you're wearing a scarf she gave you, and the stupid schmuck doesn't know it. This state of affairs (if you'll pardon the phrase) has been going on a long time. Then she leaves him, and you run into him afterward in the parking lot at the college. You know she's left him because she's told you, but he doesn't know that, and so he tells you his side of it while you stand beside your car, its engine still running.

Thing is, writing fiction is full of pitfalls, as is demonstrated by Bruce Taylor's able and interesting piece, One of the Guys, which you can find in the latest issue of Carve magazine. True, Taylor can't resist some cute irony -- ZZ Top's Sharp Dressed Man is on the radio as the narrator and the cuckold meet in the aforementioned scarf and coat -- but overall, the piece is entertainingly written and smoothly executed. No, Taylor's real issue is that he isn't writing fiction. There's no dialogue, no dramatic situation that is developed over the course of the piece: all that exists is one encounter in the parking lot, followed by explication about how the dramatis personae arrived there, a brief meditation on their roles, and then a very nice image to wrap things up.

I know all about fiction's infinite variety of form and subject, and am a fan of many a departure from the standard, sometimes-hidebound ideas of what constitutes a short story -- so hush your mouth, child. But just because something doesn't display the profluence of a classically-defined short story doesn't necessarily mean it's breaking the rules of fiction; it can mean that the piece has been mis-classified.

"One of the Guys" is actually an intelligent pensée, a mini-essay on the similarity between the Don Juan and the cuckold: the narrator's own wife has left him, just as the cuckold's has; neither will ever know the real self of the woman they both love; and, we learn, Don Juans and cuckolds in general are, despite the women they have in common, apparently doomed to drink alone. Seen from that angle, it's well done. From the angle of fiction, though, it's unconvincing and unsatisfying: it's exactly the sort of self-indulgent introspection a Don Juan would go in for. One suspects that the cuckold wouldn't see the parallel.

Buddy System

Meanwhile, over at Facets literary mag., Katherine Holmes, a poet and fiction writer published in the Fall 2004 issue of The King's English, has a story called "Buddy System" that's worth checking out. The narrator is a graduate student marooned in Duluth, Minnesota with a neighbor named Dana who can do everything -- including get out of snow drifts -- better than our heroine. Yet even Dana is vulnerable to crimes of passion slash violations of the municipal code, and briefly becomes in her own mind the object of a police manhunt. (Sorry -- "personhunt" just doesn't cut it.) The most interesting aspect of the piece is the narrator's distance from the subjects of her story, and her surprising narrative lurches. Holmes should probably have dropped the unnecessary narrative frame, and the piece could have used another editorial pass, but I found it nonetheless an intriguing piece.

Tch Tch Tch, 'Boz

What's up with Pindeldyboz? Keep in mind that the Boz is a power to be reckoned with in online writing. After all, it was named "Best Online Publication of 2003" in the storySouth Million Writers competition. Not to mention the fact that it also publishes a print edition -- and bully for it, I say.

But in the submission guidelines for its print edition, you'll find this:

"[W]hile we do print longer work in the print volume, we actively discourage submissions of longer than 10,000 words, simply because, dude, that's LONG. "

Yeah. And ---?

Great Title, Iffy Execution

"An Interpretation of, and Pronunciation Guide for, REO Speedwagon's 1980 Hit, 'Keep on Lovin'' You" , by Jamie Allen, in Eyeshot. (If you follow the link be sure to scroll down.)

You gotta love this title, since the song it refers to is not exactly notable for its layers of hidden meaning - how much interpretation can it possibly support? The conceit isn't bad either: the interpretation turns out to be a direct-address cry of anguish from the narrator to his first love, a girlfriend he had in 7th grade. The song, of course, was their song, and the sentiment of the song title is his and not hers. Seems she betrayed him back in 7th grade -- presumably some time around 1980 -- and though he grew up and moved on, he never got over it. What's great about the story is its obssessiveness, the way in which the narrator's pain, so easily dismissed by adult readers, has never dulled:

But even so, sometimes I'll be driving down the highway and I'll come across the song, our song, on the radio, and I'll be in the car with someone and they'll somehow sing it the wrong way.

That passage is a perfect evocation of the emotional detritus we all carry with us from other relationships -- song fragments, articles of clothing, jokes -- artifacts which are, for us, invested with powerful emotion, but which others regard as inconsequential.

Unfortunately, the story is weak -- build thy church on rock, not on REO Speedwagon lyrics -- because it outlasts the charm of its conceit. The narrator's one-note insistence on his seventh-grade betrayal wears on the nerves; poor line editing doesn't help. Advice the author didn't ask us for: cut it in half, tighten it up. It'll pack a bigger punch.