Writers’ Corner

Reflections of Janey the Flight Attendant

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.

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

“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.

Reading Tom Gold Weathers, Jr.

Most likely, Tom would not believe it: my recent reading binge of his indie-published books.

I’ve read them now, but for a while I had yet to finish a journey through several of his paperbacks. Some I read were were small storybooks or collections of verse (those items he called “poem things”). There were also essay-like ruminations, and engaging articles observing people around him. I read all of these and for good measure re-visited a favored older book or two.

Many of us called him “Stob” back in the 1970s because he once worked part-time staking out house foundations, literally hammering stobs into the ground. He compared it to structuring written pieces.

Tom Weathers has an author persona that straddles the line between a Southern gentleman writer of intelligence and refinement and a Waffle House good ole boy scribbler. He can pull the mix off. His writing is congenial and well-constructed, wide in its readability appeal.

Tom’s published ventures are in sum his crónicas. His reports of life as he sees it, come from vantage points often located in Shelby, NC or Gastonia, NC. Most accounts are humble and honest, almost none are showy. He also produced a wealth of travelog writing and photos based on his roadtrips throughout America and Canada in his pal Conservative Bob’s BMW Roadster.

With Weathers in general, here are a few things you get:  inside accounts of close family events, astute profiles of friends and work peers, clever cosmic realizations, tales of his uphill veneration and loss of certain women very dear to him, the odd twists of fate and Vonnegut-like moments of karass, or as we called it, intertwingle, where lives magically cross other lives. e.g., Who among us but Tom would have someone like a tanned post-pubescent George Hamilton drift in and out of his personal history chapters?

I stumble over the riffs about physics and engineering that are beyond my grasp. It’s in Tom’s DNA. Once when we traveled together on an Amtrak to NYC, he talked about the theory of relativity as our train ran next to another train going in the opposite direction.

He is an admirer of Faulkner as well as Castaneda and Hemingway. His writing is often understated, and he withholds content that could be considered “unseemly.” Part of doing so is brought by the caution of being un viejo wary of being too brash.

Tom’s writing has always put me in the spirit to write a little bit myself. After all, he was my editor and supervisor in my first writing job out of college. His stuff has always influenced the way I write.

I’d tell him that. It’s praise. In previous times, hearing it would please him. But for now he’s conspicuous in his absence. O Lost, and by the wind grieved…Stob.

Books, Photos, Etc: Spring in FL 2019


“The Book of Unknown Americans” by Cristina Henriquez

A simple, well-written, and passionate story about Central and South American immigrants adjusting to a new life in the USA. The family characters are vivid and likeable, and the conditions and human dramas in their new less-than-desirable home in Wilmington, Delaware make it a page-turner.  There is fiery romance and pending tragedy between Maribel and Mayor, which is the heart of the book. There is a lot to be learned here by gringo readers.

th   “Waveland” by Frederick Barthelme

Down and out, a book of three or four people still hanging in there in coastal Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. Being mean, being sweet, being survivors.  It’s Vaughn the architect’s story, simple yet complex (owing to his constant soulful introspection). Once again, like in his classic novel “Tracer,” we see a man who is separated and dashing proceed in his everyday life with a new girlfriend, who somehow/someway is tolerant of Vaughn’s getting back together with his ex-wife. All three end up in one house at one time, in a Tennessee Williams sort of crucible, making for a survival of a different kind. I didn’t like the three characters that much to fall in love with the book, and the dynamics came across like something I’d already read  before.  Still, I remain a big Rick Barthelme fan. Not many out there are writing from their heart and soul about everyday American men. He does it with truth, fairness, and guts.

“The Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison

I’ve been trying to read this book for years and in March made it farther than I have before, which is still less than 25% in. Ellison’s writing is true to the times, in the sense that it’s wordy, strident with complaint, indulgent in artsy be-bop, and filled with tangents, a style largely unagreeable to today’s more impatient “give it to me stoic and straight” readers. I wondered early about the influence of marijuana in the author’s self-edits.  Who can contest decades of critics and readers who have proclaimed this a great novel? It assuredly is, but it’s one I cant seem to settle into and press relentlessly ahead in the pages. I wish I could appreciate it for all its worth, and eventually will try again.

PHOTO SECTION

Pensive, decades after College Spring-Breaks of Yore.

Seasonal Poem Selection

Thanks

  by W. S. Merwin, 1927

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Homage to Sam Shepard

I recall going to Houston’s Alley Theatre in the early 1980s to see their production of “True West,” a Sam Shepard play.  There was free champagne served before the show in the foyer. The slinky girl who I took to the show liked that part.

The low rectangular stage was surrounded by ascending rows of seats. Between acts, the room went pitch dark while the crew changed the set. The slinky girl let loose a small coyote howl, and I firmly elbowed her in the ribs.

The story was about sibling rivalry in suburbia. The bad boy son was perpetrating some neighborhood robberies. He stole everyone’s toaster, it seems.

During one set change in the dark, a dozen or more toasters were fired up. In the audience we could smell toast cooking before the lights came up and action resumed.

The brothers fought and things came to a climax. That’s about all I remember.  I liked the uniqueness of the play and admire its author for his many talents and the free-spirited way he lived.

Screen Shot 2017-08-01 at 5.35.10 PM

Sam Shepard 1943-2017