Short and Curlies

by
John McFetridge

We’ve been talking a lot about short fiction on DSD lately.

There’s also been a lot of talk online about e-books and e-readers – and I think there’s a connection here.

With music changes in technology moved us from singles to albums and that changed content. Longer songs, concept albums (oh the pretentious horror of Journey to the Center of the Earth but I liked In the Court of the Crimson King and even Frank Sinatra put out a concept album, In the Wee Small Hours), rock operas and entire live concerts in boxed sets (I had the four-record Chicago Live at Carnegie Hall and I inherited the three-record Concert for Bangladesh when my sister moved out).

(and probably a bunch of changes in classical and jazz, and who knows, maybe even country music, too, I have no idea)

Then music went digital and everything changed again. Now we’re back to buying singles on iTunes and everything is playlists now. An old fogie like me struggles to get my iPod to “shuffle” albums. What I really want is an app that will divide the albums on my iPod into the original two sides they were on the LP and play them one side at a time – so I can recreate stacking four albums on the old turntable and listening to all side ones and then flipping them all over and listening to all side twos. The way rock music was meant to be listened to. But I digress.

So, now we’re seeing changes in reading technology that I think may change the content.

Sure, there have always been novels written in many, many short chapters. And there have always been very, very short stories even before the term ‘flash fiction’ was coined.

But the addition of the internet is a big change. Look at flash fiction challenges. Dozens of writers from all over the world post short stories on the same day and hundreds of people from all over the world can read them instantly. And this is really only the beginning. (someday I want to try a flash fiction challenge that’s also a kind of scavenger hunt around the internet – I haven’t worked out the details yet)

There are services now that will email a new short story to your cell phone every day. Will this mean a return to the serialized novel? Or maybe more people than just Alice Munro will be able to make a living writing only short stories (but don't stop working on that novel just yet, Patti).

Sometimes I joke that my novels now are really just 70 flash fiction pieces strung together, but it isn’t that far off. Short sections, each one with its own beginning, middle and end (I hope. Or at least I try for, some have sections have that).

I know a lot of people don’t like this style and complain about it being the dumbing-down of literature or pandering to short attention spans or... something, where was I? I also get the complaint that there are too many characters to keep track of and now I'm thinking with e-books there could be links to quick character-refresher notes. I'm sure there will be new complaints about that, too, but some people will like the feature.

And now there is the Vook, that weird combination of book and video which we’ll probably see a lot more of when the iPad really gets going - nice big screen, great graphics, it could be really good.

What else do you think we’re going to see? What other changes besides short chapters?

Long Walk Home

By Jay Stringer

Time to check off another of Dave’s list of blog cliché’s. I’m going to write about tone of my favourite musicians.

Our relationships with art change over time; our states evolve and expand. Sometimes they narrow. Something that you liked ten years ago might be something that you hate as an adult. In another ten years you may like it again.

That said I couldn’t imagine any point in that timelines when I’ll accept Hootie and/Or The Blowfish.

But something that fascinates me is those artists who stay with you, the touchstones. Sometimes it’s out of nostalgia. I can always put on Heartbreaker and be transported back to the early hours of the morning when I was 20/21 and heard it for the first time. I sat up until sunrise playing it over and over again. It doesn’t really matter that I have little time or taste for what Ryan Adams became after that point, I still have that album to act as a transporter. Likewise anytime I listen to The Clash there’s always going to be a part of me that’s back in my in bedroom at my patents house, getting ready for a night out.

Bands, too. My friends may get sick of my obsessive love for Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, and the pilgrimages to their annual gigs, but it taps into something from another time. It’s reminding me of where I’ve come from, not where I’m going.

But there are some artists whose places in my heart have evolved as I have. They’re still just as important to me; their songs still resonate as strongly within me, but sometimes for different reasons. I can barely imagine what it must be like for these guys, to still be singing songs they wrote when they were 24. The meaning surely must shift for them, too?

Interestingly, for me at least, is the way I’ve been looking at them recently. As I shift more and more into being a writer, I’ve found that I analyse a different aspect of these songs and artists. You guys came very close today to an epic essay that also talked about Waits and Westerberg, but I thought I’d give you an edited version.

Bruce Springsteen.

Growing up smack in the middle of England, and coming of age during brit-pop, it was never cool to like Bruce Springsteen. I’ve treated the return of the ‘Boss’ persona to pop culture these last few years with a degree of mistrust, simply because it feels so different to what I knew. The rockers in the midlands were too busy wearing black and learning riffs, the brit-pop guys were too busy wanting to be Lads or art students, and everyone else was just too straight faced. Bruce was just some strange sweaty guy, who was only half remembered for a few pop hits that nobody understood, and he was way to open and sincere for my friends British souls to cope with. What I saw as a teenager was the fun, and the spontenanety. I saw cool lyrics, and, nice sounding guitar. It was just so different to everything else around me. And it was the anti-cool. That was probably very important to me at the time. And, okay, he sang about strange places in New Jersey, and some thing called a ‘highway’, but growing up in a region that had been decimated by the death of engineering, industry and coal mines, I didn’t have a hard time transplanting his world into mine.

Later on, as a budding (re: pathetic) musician, it was his craft that I grew to like. The way he owned the stage and the work that he put into it. And the Telecaster. Man, it never seems okay to say this, but that guy can play. Listening to that guitar on Darkness On The Edge Of Town, and the live bootlegs from that era, was a whole new guitar sound for me. He never showed it off. He never manufactured an image of being a ‘guitar god’, but it was clear that in the few moments he chose to let rip, there were few who could live with him. And that restraint was something I liked, that ability to choose which approach best serves the message. That’s something that’s become far more important as I’ve grown.

Lately what it is that resonates with me? Well, it’s still his craft in many ways, but from different point of view. Looking at my relationship with his music is in many ways like looking at the history of rock’n’roll. It was escapism and rebellion. There were other forms of music for telling stories or spreading messages. Bur rock’n’roll grew out of lust, and dreams, and youth, and all of those things that bundle up tight in your belly when you’re 16. It was about a lie, and escapism. Springsteen was one of the people who brought it down to earth and connected it again with reality. There was a disconnect between what went on in pop and rock songs, and what people actually encountered in real life, and he was one of the songwriters who realised that and bridged the gap.

His first two albums had been free-wheeling affairs, jangling guitars and freestyle music, beat poets, circus acrobats and kids standing under street corners waiting for that one perfect kiss. But as he gained more focus, and found something new in his voice as a writer, things changed. Born To Run as an album started to bridge the gap between everything that rock had promised, and the things it had failed to deliver. It was an album about making choices. There was an acceptance of compromise and a need for simple survival in lines like; “show a little faith, there’s magic in the night, you aint a beauty but hey, you’re all right”

Then with Darkness On The Edge Of Town the darkness of the title seemed to come in the form of Bruce’s dwindling twenties. He reached that point and wrote about it. Suddenly he was singing about trying “to get away without getting hurt” and about reliving the same trap day after day and night after night. Through it all though, and this is where he differs from the many imitators, he found a defiance, and some lingering hope. It was music about living with the choices that you’ve made. He sang about there being a meanness in the world, and having "debts that no honest man can pay," but through it all, the words and the songs found some reason to believe. And it felt –and feels- real. Over the years he’s expanded. He’s researched about immigrants and poverty and given us character studies, he’s been through divorce and sung about the dark side of love, and he resurrected ‘The Boss’ in a decade that needed some large music about redemption.

He put out an album about 9/11. And while everyone else who had tried fell into the ‘worthy trap’, with tub-thumping our heart-on-sleeves rock, he did what a writer should do; he looked at people. He wrote about people surviving after something awful has happened.

And his drive to be the best he can doesn’t always lead him down a popular path. He was nearly jeered off stage in the early 2000's for performing American Skin, a song about an immigrant who was shot 41 times by plain clothes police. It was a song that tried to chart the tension minority communities and the police, and it was a bold move for an artist who would have stopped making such moves a long time ago. Add a few extra word and characters, and you have the basis of a George Pelecanos book.

“Lena gets her son ready for school

She says "on these streets, Charles

You've got to understand the rules

If an officer stops you

Promise me you'll always be polite,

That you'll never ever run away

Promise Mama you'll keep your hands in sight”

I realised much later on, that part of the image problem he had when I was young was because of his imitators. Out of his particular and unique voice grew a genre. There have been stadium arena’s packed out for over thirty years now with musicians singing about being half way there, or living on prayers. Their fists thump the air with their worthiness. On a smaller scale, there are any countless number of musicians who plod a particular path, that has become somewhere near to the middle of the road while they sing about important issues. Hell, I’ve not been shy in my opinion that the album Bruce put out last year was nothing but a tribute to this kind of music, even down to it’s title Working On A Dream. The ‘worthy trap’ is a tiresome one.

But none of this takes away from what he’s done, and the body of work he can look back on. The Cryuff turn could only really be carried off by Cryuff. Marlowe could only be done by Chandler. Stew could only be done by my Nan. Anybody else trying it is like a writer who is aping someone else’s voice.

Where am I going with this? Well, a phrase thrown about often here on DSD is social fiction. We quite like to drop that into conversation, and with good cause. Writers like Pelecanos get the props that they do because of the life they can capture on the page. It’s not the fantasy of Chandler, nor the despair of Goodis. It’s something that bridges the gap, and lends weight to the stories and life to the characters.

And this is what I get from Springsteen. It’s social fiction with guitar.

The Dan O'Shea Flash Challenge

By Steve Weddle

Dan O'Shea put the flash smackdown on us recently and has some great talent signed up for today's challenge. To find out more and track down some excellent entries, head over to Dan's site. While you're there, you'll wanna listen to Dan chat up DSD's own Joelle Charbonneau.

So here's my entry in Dan's latest challenge. The only requirements were no more than 1,000 words and the setting had to be a church.

_________

“Will the bad guys be here, Uncle Oscar?”

I picked him up under his arms and set him on the bench outside the priest’s office. At three or four, however old the boy was, he still understood that his father was missing and his mother was in the hospital. He didn’t understand everything it meant, of course. Neither did I.

I kneeled down in front him, thin light from the ceiling, and pushed his hair out of his eyes. “Zach, I just have to talk to this priest for a few minutes.”

“Can I come with you?”

“You just lie here for a few minutes.” I took off my jacket, rolled it up and made the kid the world’s most expensive pillow. “Lie down here. I’ll be right back.”

“But I’m not tired.”

“OK. You don’t have to sleep. Just lie down and close your eyes for two minutes. Then I’ll be right back.”

He looked at me without saying anything for a second, then rubbed his eyes. “Promise?”

Yeah, kid. After I keep another promise.

***

The priest was sitting in a leather arm chair, reading some papers. “Can I help you?” I closed the door. He stood up. Maybe 40 years old. Head of dark hair slicked back. This late at night, he wasn’t expecting company.

I told him I wanted to talk to him about my sister-in-law.

“Yes,” he said. “I read about that in the papers. Tragic. If there is anything we can do to help the family.”

“The men who did it, you talked to them. I want to know what they said.”

He moved behind his desk, but was still standing. “I can’t discuss that, my son. Perhaps you should speak with the police. I’ll call them for you.” He picked a cordless up from his desk. I reached across the desk with one hand and into my back pocket with the other, grabbed the phone and smashed it with a small sledgehammer from the garage.

“Jesus Joseph and Mary,” he said, taking a step back into bookshelves. I stepped up onto the desk, then kicked him in the face as he tried to run past. I was on top of him as he hit the floor, grabbed him by the shoulders and dropped him into the chair he’d been sitting in.

“They told you who they were working for,” I said. “One of them. He said things got out of hand. He asked you for your help. I want to know who he was working for.”

“I can’t tell you that. I won’t. That’s just not going to happen.”

I looked around the office. Books. Files. Paintings. Crosses. Tapestries. I couldn’t tell whether he’d break. Or, more accurately, whether he’d break before I broke him.

I spun the hammer around in my hand. “We got off on the wrong foot,” I said, looking at my scuffed boot. “You know what they did to my sister-in-law? What they would have done.”

“I am aware of the incident,” he said, getting himself back together, straightening his collar and pushing his wet hair back down. “What those men did was a sin, but I am not here to judge them. I am here to counsel, to bring the wayward sheep back to the Father.”

“Sheep,” I said. “That in the lemming family?”

“Son,” he said, even though he was clearly a decade younger than I was, “what do you know of sin?”

Little Zach was just outside the door. He hadn’t come in at the earlier crash. I needed to get back, make sure he was ok.

“I know I’ve got enough piled against me that plucking the eyes out of a priest’s head probably wouldn’t make a difference.”

He leaned forward. “A sin is an action that takes you away from the Father. Something that the Devil puts up between you and the Holy Spirit.”

“Father, I’m asking you nicely.” I stood up. “You can tell me what that piece of shit said right now. Or we can spend a little more time and you can Morse Code it to me with whatever is left of you.”

The priest wasn’t going to break easy. “Their sin was no greater than the sin of your brother that brought them to the house.”

Half-brother, I nearly said. My half-brother. But that told me what I needed to know. Confirmed what I’d thought. He’d gotten involved in more than he could handle. Again. “Any chance you tell this to the police? To the prosecutor? Give them the information they need.”

“This was sinful behavior,” he said. “But all sins are equal. All sins take you away from the Father. That is what sin is, separation from the Creator. No sin is any greater than any other sin in the view of the Father.”

“Padre?”

“Yes, my son?”

I pulled the mallet around to one side and stepped towards the priest. “You might want to tell the Father to close his eyes right about now.”

***

After about a half-hour I closed the door behind me, stepped into the hallway and picked up Zach and my jacket. He woke up as I was putting him into my car. “Is mess over, Uncle Oscar?”

“Mess?”

“Yeah. Mommy says we have to come to church for mess.”

I buckled him in, handed him a stuffed tiger.

“Yeah, Zach. It’s going to be over soon.”