I’m doing procedural things at eleven p.m. in the dim yellow light of the forward galley. It’s not sound-proofed. No carpets. Lots of kitchenware, metal and plastic. In the old days the gals wore heels in here. Clacked around. No longer. Elegance was lost in a world of foam rubber soles.
Tired, getting schitzy and ready to get back to base. It was crazy. My suicidal sister came to mind. Andrea. Annie. Turns out the all-Amerikan girl was a sweet con. A real shrewd homecoming queen. Had her babies before 21 and by forty was hell on wheels, super-pretty super-bitch looking out for numero uno. The new Andrea became Andréa. She put her legs in the air, earning her way up to status and money and then took a guy twenty years younger, someone like a builder, but with the reliable big equipment she craved. Married him. Got a place by the lake, a boat, extra places to live. Conspired profits. Laundered money from bad sources. Escalating fucked-up-ness.
It was all muy extravagante and a bit mafioso. The law came eventually.
Coke became a larger part of it. The lingerie got wilder. She went first-name basis with the handsome local cosmetic surgeon. Then the DA called one evening via detectives at the door. Then a grand jury. She battled until her money and luck ran out, then fled to Ireland and one foggy day said fuck extradition immunity anyway and jumped off a cliff.
I am her younger sis Janey, easy on the eyes as well. You may have run into me at the best places in New York. Or in a cantina in Mexico City. A cafe in Zurich or on the dance floor in Ibiza. Hey, I never hang out in Nowheresville.
OCUPADO sign goes on and off to my left. With the throw of a bolt. My agenda and my heart opens and shuts.
A shiny pot of burned Melita Colombian coarse-grind clicks off, still aromatic. The red light replacing the green. Below there are the usual rattles and flight-noises from the array of warming lockers, a comforting harmonic. The tray ovens are strac and lined up hup-two. They have been empty since the bankruptcy.
A bilingual dictionary is on the small formica counter, wrinkled from use and page-stained.
Lance found a bug in an oven earlier during the first-class cookie bake. He squealed. He does that. It’s funny to see a uniformed man freak out. We have pills and free mini-bottles to help all types.
Our engines changed pitch. We’re in the pattern. I notice the view changes in the Emer door porthole. I can see buildings, grids and blocks, and vast plains of lights. The view extends farther when the pilot banks, showing off this sentimental sight of Amerika after dark.
The smell of our cabin air changes from pressurized to real. The permeated odors of coffee and first-class chocolate chip cookies go away, and I begin to imagine I can smell the people. Sort of like canvas sneakers and overworked talc.
I grab the mike for a routine announcement, hesitant to step even two paces outside the warm galley, my Somewheresville.
Author: WPM
CIRCA 1956 IN SOUTH CAROLINA
Late summer. Bluejays squawked in bellicose tones distinctively bluejay, ganging up in trees in the median parkway of Florence Street.
Out back, chickens wandered in a pen, wheezy and trepidatious. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote in his perfect way that chickens sound asthmatic)
A eucalyptus tree a century-old stood by a tall lawn spigot with brick splashguards. In the grass were faded sticks from an old croquet set. An antique gun workshop hid behind a bamboo grove. A homemade motor boat slept in a back shed. Broken-down polo mallets tacked up to bare studs. Farther away a defunct camper trailer, a wrecked rowboat, on flats of sandy dirt loaded with red ants.
After lunch Neapolitan ice cream out of the carton. The strawberry section had bits of fruit, tart to balance the sweet. Lots of infants and grade school cousins occupied the house. Among the adults, concerns about baby formula and potty training ran below their everyday kitchen conversations.
The uncles were comics. Midday meal, the big one, had prayer, ha ha.
Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat.
An afternoon car ride in gramma’s Buick if you were nice. The heat pounding down on the way back. 8oz Coke bottles from the icebox. Rules required you read aloud the city of origin imprinted on the bottom. A sack of boiled peanuts, chilled, always on the top rack.
Nighttime we ate again but ate light, like leftover bread, biscuits, doctored-up casseroles. Sliced tomatoes from the yard.
Retiring to the family room, we saw the golden clocks that moved silently inside inverted glass jars. A floor fan hummed.
The night heat was heavy and still.
From the cabinet TV, Adlai Stevenson’s summer convention speech played loud. Mixed support. An ancient magnolia tree loomed outside like a giant.
Windows were opened cautiously. Everyone was afraid of black people.
Fresh-Squeezed Fiction
originally posted April 2013
In his recent interview on PBS, Philip Roth made a passing comment about Saul Bellows’ late-in-life shift to writing short novels. He described the form as a novel in which the author chooses to condense a storyline rather than expand it. For an aging writer who is being efficient with the energies he has left, the short form is logical, Roth admitted. But something in his tone seemed to indicate he was less than convinced about the short form’s artistic merits, or if it was his vehicle of choice.
My mixed bag of reactions:
If the online literary journals are to be believed , writing compressed fictional pieces (flash fiction) is revolutionary and the future. Most posted flash vignettes are often less than 1000 words; some less than 500; and in some cases they are limited to three or six sentences. I recently saw a micro-fiction contest with ten words max. It’s like a Battle of Cleverness.
Flash fiction is an internet product, a celebration of economy of scope, style and narration. And I may as well throw in poetic devices, too. It’s fast reading, read fast by rapid-decision editors for fast webzines for digestion by fast-moving users with fast iPads in our fast and compressed modern times, etcetera.
But at the core of the product itself, the modus operandi of flash fiction is not really new nor revolutionary. It’s not that far removed from, say, what Hemingway was doing in “Hills Like White Elephants.” Or Brautigan was doing almost fifty years ago in “Trout Fishing in America.”
Flash fiction strives for pure, lean impact. To be evocative and as far from exhaustive as possible. Unfortunately many flash fiction pieces tend to sound strained, over-manipulated, ambiguous, or fall into the “way too precious” trap. The ones in present tense (and/or second person You) are especially cloying, like someone boring us with a breathless dream account. Yet some are real gems that carry a sparkle no matter how many re-reads, and these rise above those done by magic tricks with words that wow momentarily then are forgotten.
What the proponents of flash fiction don’t show or even broach on their sites, and for expedience sake can’t, is how this new direction of less is better affects the novel form.
What is a short novel? There are the usual suspects as examples, masterpieces like Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” Pynchon’s “Crying of Lot 49,” Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Or some will include “The Great Gatsby” or “Catcher in the Rye.” The difference is, if we go with the generally accepted figure of 50,000 words plus equals a novel, those last two don’t count as short novels. But they do achieve an end by the same means: streamlining the story and its delivery in a highly artful and stylized way. Another that comes to mind, a personal favorite, is Rick Barthelme’s “Tracer,” a masterfully written short novel that is seamless and presented without a sense of author’s effort.
Within this venture of writing by contraction, there are many toolsets available at a writer’s disposal.
Kurt Vonnegut could present a novel with expansive action and concepts via his genius of writing pithy sentences and employing white space. His thing was stylistic compression, an economy of words and syntax more than an abbreviation of storyline. “So it goes.”
Dave Eggers does it the other way, at the highest level, with a compressed storyline in “Hologram for a King.” The scope of actual drama of time and place are limited (similar to Camus’ “The Stranger”). The payoff comes in character portrayal and mood that feels more like theatre than a bound book.
I love to read Roberto Bolaño because so many of his sentences are crafted to be interesting and filled with story. It is their density, their PSI that draws me in. I can read one of his short stories (and sometimes even just a page of one) and feel as if I’ve read a novel (cf. “The Insufferable Gaucho”). He transmits an enormous amount of information in a sentence. There are enough particularities to keep things visual and us the readers engaged. But there is no fluff, none of the vast amount of description (“the twittering birds”) and development we run across in a 500-page novel.
Each has its merits, the expansive and the brief. Was Roth hinting at something else? What defines a short novel? Is it tailored to today’s impatient and jaded reader? Will flash fiction influence its presentation and what this new breed of insta-readers want? Is there something new going on with short novels? A new sub-genre yet to evolve?
(to be revisited)
Corporate…..Literary
(originally posted May 2018)
Paradigm……….Slant
Legacy Systems…………Old Material that’s Hard to Convert and Harder to Delete
Synergize……….Commiserate
Take Offline……….Cooling period
It is What It Is……….Crap
Robust……….Hemingwayesque
Drill Down……….Add detail
Leverage……….Contrivance
Scalable……….Not much ripple effect
Get Buy-In……….Land an Agent
Core Competence……….Syntax
Stakeholders……….Characters
Kudos……….Your piece has been accepted
Hats Off……….Honorable Mention
Stay the Course……….Keep writing where you left off
Core Values……….(too preposterous a phrase even for writers)
Lots of Moving Parts……….Too many stories in one
Bleeding Edge……….Experimental fiction
Move the Needle……….Surprise Twist
Define Target Audience…………Know your Reader
Discipline…………Genre
Appendices…………Flashbacks
Roles & Responsibilities…………Character traits & motives
Value-Add…………Meaningful or Resonant Content
Measurable Objectives…………Intent
Post Test…………Critics
Task Analysis…………Synopsis
Process Engineering…………Structure
Flowchart…………Plot
Example Scenarios…………What-If?
Quality Control…………Proofread
Levels 1, 2 and 3…………Dramatic Arcs, Action Scenes, Detailed Imagery
Reset…………Stop and Fix
Roughly Right…………Second Draft
NOTE: …………Author Intrusion
Clarice Lispector – “Crónicas”
In one of her skillfully composed articles, Lispector describes the moments we experience when unconsciously emulating the behavior of someone else. She is traveling and in close proximity to a missionary woman, or nun we suppose, whose movements and demeanor she can’t help but study. The effect is one of contagion. She herself begins to assume a holy countenance and step about in a sort of controlled glide, feet moving above the earth. Later she encounters a prostitute and wittingly decides to experiment and imitate. She puts on a sultry stare and flirtatious cigarette, with some perfume as well. But her experiment is a failure, not because she cannot be that way, we are to assume, but because she consciously chooses to make an attempt. Whereas with the missionary, she would rather avoid taking on her habits, if you will, even not think about it, and by so avoiding the attempt, she succeeds at it. Zen.
Accordingly, a writer finds it impossible to not try and mimic some of Lispector’s language of contemplation and appraisal. The rhythm of her prose and rhetoric of certainty and persuasion gets into one’s writing machinery.
The crónicas are selected daily news articles Lispector wrote for a newspaper in Río de Janeiro. Her topics come forward one after another. Relentless observation and insight. Honesty. Although she said journalism was not her speed, her readers must have certainly enjoyed what she offered each day. Topics offering a buffet of soul food for thought and rumination: the animal within us; assumptions we make; gifts; belonging or not; laziness and reliance on others; uncertain inquiries; odd habits; chickens and eggs; an ordinary married couple…and on the subjects go, often intersecting and chemically working with other themes throughout the book. Some say her writing has the power of witchcraft.
Clarice Lispector, born into a Jewish family in the Ukraine in 1920, moved with her family at an early age to Brazil. Her writing has been largely off the radar in America. New Directions Books has brought her back to circulation and renewed popularity by republishing all of her works, as translated from the Portuguese. If, as they say, Portuguese is the most beautiful language of them all, I wish I knew it well so I could read her original prose.
She died in 1977.
About WPM
I’m a retired corporate writer of instructional media and now a paperback writer.
For a listing of my books, see my Amazon author page.
I’m the former owner and managing editor of 3711Atlantic, a popular online literary journal and proving ground of many new writers in the late 90s and early aughts.
I graduated from University of South Carolina with a BA in English Lit. I’ve taken contemporary fiction courses at Rice, UNC, and completed the Advanced Short Story course offered by University of Iowa Workshop, via distance learning.
email me at: wpmfla at gmail
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“City of the Dead” by Sara Gran
Gran’s highly unusual protagonist, the private eye Claire DeWitt, knows an awful lot. She is wise beyond her years and more daring than most of fiction’s male detectives, often to the point of being reckless. She is confident that no case will remain open under her watch, with the exception of the disappearance of her teenage best friend Tracy, a tragic theme that repeats within the DeWitt series of novels.
Also reiterated in the series is Claire’s history as apprentice to the late detective Constance Darling (they lived and worked together in New Orleans, a fact that prompted Claire to return there and take on a case). We are also treated, as in Gran’s other “Claire” novels, to excerpts and examples from French author Jaques Sillete’s counter-intuitive Zen-like book on the art of solving a crime.
Using his teaching points, Claire shows how she can find clues in unexpected ways. She has an uncanny ability to relate to the people of New Orleans, from the Garden District privileged to the deep-ward street level. She has a tough outlaw side of her own. Knowing what pain and bad luck can be, she is able to meet anyone down and out on equal grounds and interact via exchanges of frankness and respect. There’s some remarkable writing depicting these interactions. She has an edge in how to get information, a desirable trait for any private detective.
Her rapport is especially rare when she engages with some pistol-toting black youths with whom the ravages and injustices of hurricane Katrina are still fresh and raw. In the world of forty-ounce malt-liquor beers, uppers, lies, and violence, she seeks and manages to find accomplices and allies, not enemies.
More importantly, she has heart. Lots of it, and we feel it.
“Infinite Blacktop” by Sara Gran
The book consists of three narratives, each at a different place and time, each with their own line of action. There are common elements defining the background, life and career of Claire DeWitt, the private eye who by her own cocky admission no one ever defeats. Having read one of the other DeWitt novels, I already knew about her mentorship under Constance Darling and her deep study in the cult book Detection written by Jacques Sillete. The Sillete book is fictitious, but she makes it so intriguing we wish it was out there on Amazon.
I like how Gran writes. Informally, brash, yet with skill and measure. Her character’s search in these stories is not so much for the whodunnit aspects, but to find retribution and meaning in, or confirmation of, what is right. This is not a superficial exploration she makes. It is heart-rendering, totally committed, down to the blood and bones level. We all miss Tracy and feel Claire’s pain for her. When Claire suffers, we do. When she makes mistakes and still brags, we cringe. When she gets cornered and in trouble (repeatedly) we root for her to get away. When she wins and finds respite and understanding, we do too.
If I go back for a second read one day, I would thumb through the pages and read each part separately. My hat’s off to Sara Gran, who has shown the bigshot book guys what she can do, and has now carved a way to run her own publishing company.
“Generation Loss” by Elizabeth Hand
I went shopping earlier this year for mystery novels narrated from the perspective of a modern, female character. I read in the NYT about this Elizabeth Hand book, which won a notable award, and seemed a likely starter for what I was looking for. I have been long accustomed to the hardboiled accounts from male-centric crime and detective novels by old craftsmen like Chandler, Hammett, MacDonald; and newer ones like Lindsey, Markson, and James Lee Burke, etc. In the aughts, I read two of those amazingly engaging “Girl With ___” novels by Stieg Larsson. When he died, I quit reading mysteries altogether and went back to my usual fare of snobby supposedly literary novels, of which half were remarkable and the other half mostly NYC publisher hype. No wonder I retreated to older tried and true novels.
In this novel, Hand’s heroine is Cass Neary. Cass is not a detective but is reckless and ends up being one. Like Larsson’s first “Tattoo” novel, we follow Neary and root for her. The pages fly by. The rugged coastal Maine setting and cast of characters are intriguing. We are there and feel it. It’s, as they say in CW 101, atmospheric. Of course it doesn’t last, this lyrical writing, because the sellers of mystery/crime books demand storylines explode with ghastly appeal to the most jaded of book readers.
Cass wanders off with the curiosity of a typical Gothic heroine and finds out more than she bargained for, reaching shore on the bad guy’s property on an even more remote island than the bleak, subsistance-level one she had been staying on. Oddly, in a bit of dubious editing, the bad guy’s place is somehow like a self-sufficient Four Seasons Resort, complete with a Chamber of Horrors. It reminded me that Larsson’s first book went off the tracks in a similar way, with a far-fetched B&D dungeon and torture basement making us erase all our nicer memories of fast-lane life in cool Sweden.
Cass Neary is much like Claire DeWitt in Sara Gran’s series (to be posted soon) that also features a lovable punk, down & out, beer-swilling, pill-taking tough-ass grrrl renunciant who gets knocked around to hell and back but still keeps going in order to find the truth and prove a point.
The ghost and soul of the crime/detective genre’s most unforgettable woman character — Lisbeth Salander — remains as Influencer.
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Five Stars: “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner
In Kushner’s latest novel are some of the most captivating passages you will ever read in today’s fiction. But, you have to work your way mindfully through Sadie’s story to encounter and appreciate them. In the story she’s an infiltrator, a provocateur, and independent 34-year old. In the novel delivery itself, she is an intelligent and delightful narrator who can be quite personal. She lets us in on all she’s doing.
Sadie breaks into the account of a protest movement’s grand poobah and mentor, a man named Bruno. She spies on his email-delivered anthropological truths, profound ones, which she gladly shares with us the reader. Her gritty details of espionage and public relations entrapments often give way to Bruno Reports. These delve into the importance of man’s progress on earth, from mindless ape to thinker.
The plot may be confusing at first. Under an assumed identity, Sadie is being paid to compromise herself in order to disrupt an event. She even takes her role into a romantic relationship. The main incidents occur in rural redneck France, which is well-depicted. Sadie, in her dry wit, informs us that Tractor Pull culture is international and often where we’d least expect it.
Things boil over at a farm protest festival where a visiting government minister is set up as a target. When the minister is dashed and the event is over, Sadie the independent contractor agent is highly rewarded. She collects her money, and retreats to solitude. Free and unattached, she has time to reflect on Bruno’s weightier observations.
One in particular is about the location of Earth among the movement of galaxies, and how the Dipper constellations have long been used as points of navigation. She contemplates Bruno’s description of how ancient Polynesian boaters learned to sail vast distances in the Pacific and even to America by following Polaris, the North Star. As Sadie, flat on her back, studies the night sky in her remote hideaway in Spain, she begins to understand the “continuum,” the eternal movement of our planet in time, the value of natural versus artificial.
She observes that many of the noticeable twinkling lights in the blackness above are in fact man-made satellites, hundreds of them, which she compares to lice.
A great novel has unique revelations of everyday life plus an over-reaching theme, a wise spin on current affairs, science, art, or philosophy. The views encompass and at the same time transcend the novel’s plot and characters’ mundane lives. Kushner can do this, and with Sadie’s dry piercing wit, make us laugh as well.
Sadie’s journey may have begun when she was a fearlessly sexy and brash agent on assignment, but it concludes when, having learned more about mankind than she bargained for, she seems a humble soul approaching enlightenment. It’s time for her to head for the hills back where she calls home.
Rachel K always writes a good book. I love “Telex from Cuba” and consider it the most consistently interesting. IMO, “Creation Lake” is her most literary novel so far. And Sadie Smith, who in the South we might call “a caution,” is a narrator I’d gladly read again.
Advisable International Travel Wear
Steinbeck’s “East of Eden”
Published in 1952, this is Steinbeck’s virtuoso performance. Nearly 600 pages of clean, direct prose colored with history, lyrical geographic description, fully rounded characters, and a story that marches ahead toward the fate of two families in California’s Salinas Valley, the Hamiltons and the Trasks.
I came to it looking for an American saga, expecting a novel of broad range over people and time. There is that, but far more. There is a wealth of great reading, along the lines of Tolstoy, DIckens, Hemingway. By Steinbeck’s own admission, the novel is his magnum opus, collecting and utilizing all that he has learned as a writer and applying it to “the big one.”
Of course, with the title and the Cain v. Abel / brother v. brother motiff, paradise lost, etc. There is considerable documentation out there that draws the book’s biblical parallels, especially with the book of Genesis.
Our recent grim and fearful post-election period has been an appropriate time to read about Evil. I reached the end of my read soon after the Inauguration, a queasy time when false pretenders are assuming the reins of power, truth is moving to the shadows again, and actual demons are literally being released.
You’ll spend a lot of time in this book. Sort of like being inside the world of McMurtry’s novel Lonesome Dove, being a close witness type of reader, involved emotionally, staying up late turning pages. Steinbeck relates and spins the story but does not try to razzle-dazzle us with literary pyrotechnics. There are academic debates about who the scarcely-mentioned “I” voice could be. I go with the one that says it’s Steinbeck himself, posing as one of Hamilton’s grandchildren. He extends the fun a little and has the Steinbeck house and family appear in a late chapter. Cameo stuff, based on fact. No matter. Just read, knowing that essentially the story is presented in third person POV all the way through.
Adam Trask is the good-hearted character who cannot quite attain a successful place in life. He is demoralized and cursed by his past affection for Cathy Ames, possibly the most vicious and nasty woman to ever appear in a modern classic American novel. Their offspring (or, as we later learn, from she and Adam’s brother) are the young twins Aron and Cal, who will carry the saga forward into the century.
The wise Chinaman Lee is almost too good a character, and for my money steals the show. He exceeds Sam Hamilton in his ability to shoot the shit, i.e. talk to any topic, and he does so with eloquence. He shows even more intelligence, compassion, and duty than Sam or his wife Liza combined. He is the saving grace of the twins. His major role however is philosophic. His deep studies and knowledge of the bible and beliefs both Oriental and Occidental, allow him to give us the novel’s key message: timshel, Hebrew for “thou mayest,” which moves us out from under the imperative of “thou shalt.” So, we have a choice about Evil.
And somehow that choice about Evil brings us back to election-time again.
williampelotmoore.com 