Feedback Friday

I don’t know much about fiction on the internet. I know there is a lot of it, and that the second-person is very popular, and that I click through most of it quickly in a way that makes me sort of sad because for most of my life I’ve been told what is good to read and it’s possible I don’t know how to recognize what is good on my own. But I like this, and here is why, and maybe someone can tell me how to find more like it.

This story is made up of a lot of things—Cortázar’s short story and a lot of memories and some breaks of poetry—things that are held together by bunny and baby. Stories like this make sense to me because this is the easiest way to remember your own life, by picking one thing and making every association with it you can. This could be lazy, just listing every thing you remember that relates to one thing, but it’s not here because she makes language do things in the story, making it come loose like it usually does in memories but in ways I think are interesting (“that I can have will held hold my own.”)

You have to think about the word “baby” in this story, and that it is used by mothers and fathers to sons and daughters, and by men and women to men and women. I think it’s good to have to think about what a word means, and that’s why I like this story, and because of these two sentences:

 to touch my place where the words come out

   this name, a shaped space that fits

Feedback Friday #3:

2002 was a confused time for me. My college course was proving… spiritually unfulfilling. I had just discovered the doing of webdesign and thought it might afford me the opportunity to escape the corporate representatives arriving to our open days to try and win us over. I had sickening visions of grey carpets and fluorescent lighting and cubicle culture. My fears were superficial fears. My wants were superficial wants.

Some time around then I watched an awful film called 40 Days and 40 Nights. I recognised its awfulness straight off, but that didn’t stop me absorbing something from it. An image of a twenty-something guy, living in San Francisco, working in a bright, beautiful office, dating extraordinary women. Being a webdesigner.

What can I say? I have a history of making life choices based, at least in part, on very bad films (see also: Hackers). Since then I’ve always felt a connection to this awful movie. Because it made me make my life as cool as Josh Harnett’s (which it is).

So it was one of the first entries I opened when I found Titular. And after reading a bunch of the entries there it’s still the one I most respond to. Titular publishes fiction named after titles of well-know novels, films and television shows. It’s a great idea, and what’s interesting about it is that you choose stories from the list based on your  connection with that title, but the story you read is barely, if at all, connected to your notion of it.

So, the story itself: It is wonderfully opaque (to me at any rate). I am going out on a limb to say that it is about a western woman marrying a Chinese man. But I could be missing something. It almost fits. It’s possible the husband isn’t Chinese, but then why are they in China? She feels “too big, a giantess in a foreign land.” The strangeness of living in a foreign culture is cut through this whole thing.

We get the difficulties of her marriage tied to the stormy night. There’s a suggestion of emotional distance. “She waited for him to say something.”  “…all the terms of endearment she’d never said to anyone.”

The kid is great. “a comma.” Diffusing anger and tension. “She crossed her eyes and poked her eyebrows. ‘Daddy,’ she said, “this is how you do angry. You do this. You do angry.’” The bit about loving grown-ups is just beautiful.

Overall a really nice short piece. Details plucked from a larger story, provided without comment. Compact, mysterious, resonant.

Feedback Friday:

I have a five-year-old son. He likes video games where you have to find the objects that will help you escape from a room. He likes books that explain how Japanese castles were organized. He loves sleeping but hates going to bed.

One day when he was in pre-school, while the other kids were napping, his teacher found him sobbing, holding a book about turtles. When she finally got him calmed down enough to explain what was wrong, he said: “We have to take care of the earth.”

When he draws a picture of a person, he draws the bones inside their body.

I can’t imagine the author of this story doesn’t have children. This is exactly what it’s like. We send them out into this world, and we’re fearful for what it might do to them. But they have this curiousity. And even though it can terrify us, we have to feed it, because in the end it’s going to be what saves them.

When my son’s pre-school teacher told us about Raimi sobbing during naptime, she said “I just know that a five-year-old who cries for the Earth and the loss of turtle habitats is going to grow up to be a special person.”

Yes. But they all will.

Unpreparing, by Lindsay Hunter

This really just hits a bunch of sweet spots for me. First of all, that first paragraph is not only completely insane, it’s so not what you think. And in fact the juxtaposition of the first two paragraphs is basically what tied me up immediately. It creates this real sort of edgy surprisey sense, like, this is a story that is going to knock you down before you even know you’ve been set up. In fact it is so that way that I almost don’t want to say too many specific things about it. I will ruin your experience, I’m thinking! I don’t want to do that.

I mean, you really do think at first, this guy is psychotic, and while that feeling doesn’t end entirely, don’t you even feel yourself feeling sympathetic? Like, of course he’s wondering that—I wonder that all the time.

Constructing a story like this where you just have the narrator and “my boyfriend” and no real outside world except as pertains to the subject at hand, that’s a great way to really drive at your subject—your story. In this one we really get a chance to worry around the idea of violence, and is it violence if it’s expected, and how prepared can you be, and what if you go too far the other way, and oh my god aren’t we all kind of complicit in this fear-driven thinking, and so on. I think the only limit comes when you start thinking things like, “well why the hell is she with him, then?” because the fact is that the relationship between these two characters might be crazy multifaceted but we’re just looking at this sliver, this weird behavior relevant to the task at hand. This is not entirely a criticism, this is just, I think, the type of story this is—and in fact I feel like short fiction like this is the perfect place for it. Trying to expand this kind of thing novel-wide is a big bad idea, but people try it! But if you want to see it done right, you have to limit your word count. You just do.

Also prose dialogue is just a technique I love, and it’s really used just right here. Particularly the swearing, particularly the paramedic. And oh my god, the nurse! I loved her line at the end. Overall, really just horrifying and lovely.

I Googled Lindsay Hunter for more, and although she doesn’t appear to have a site of her own, she’s got fiction all ‘round the Internet. Here’s my search, with a little filter to remove pages pertaining to the Pistons player. Also Ms. Hunter apparently started this reading series, so there you go! Credits!

Okay, guys, I missed last week, the official FBF day (second Friday of the month) but I’ve been busy as Croesus and anyway. You can do it whenever you like. So:

I know that Joey Comeau is not exactly unknown on the Internet. I am not plucking a dull pebble from the muddy riverbed, polishing it on my sleeve and revealing its iridescent layers to the crowd gathered round the bank. They have all read A Softer World. “Look, Joey Comeau has iridescent layers!” I say. They nod. One of them pats me on the shoulder.

But there is also Overqualified. And I don’t know how big a deal it ever was, but the Internet forgets quickly.

Overqualified is a simple premise, probably done before, except instead of writing silly-funny letters about maybe dog-food or having experience training camels, he goes with the darkest, creepiest shit you could possibly put in an application. I think my favourite letters are those that could be possibly true, where the applicant is not obviously joking.

I tried to pick one to talk about and found it almost impossible, but I’m going to do the application to The Chronicle Herald for Inventory Clerk. I’m picking this one because it builds, on every reading, to an involuntary laugh on the last line. I am reading it here for the umpteenth time in work, and I know where it’s going and what’s coming and I still have to suppress giggles when I get to that last paragraph. I do not want to have to explain what I’m reading to the people sitting next to me.

So I’m not going to break it down or try to comment on its form, because it’s a complete unit, opens wonderfully, and it’s funny, and nothing kills humour like its analysis.

Also worth mentioning is his best of a number of letters to the RIAA. Kind of worried that I picked one with an essentially similar theme, but still and all. Enjoy.

Sean Lovelace: ‘A Sigh Is Just a Sigh’

This hooked into me initially because of how disorienting it was on the first read, and yet, how I smiled my way through that. It was a good sort of disorientation, a druggy sort of montage, like we all went to sleep with Casablanca on, and even that’s not fair because who likes it when their writing is referred to as “filmic”? Unless they are a filmmaker? Or maybe that’s just my issue.

But I love these sections, and I love how they are little snaps of a movie that has invaded a life, and how that just doesn’t work at all and all parties involved are getting desperate about it. I think I like the Bogart bit the best, because of the part about the industry standard, and the broken kneecap. I also like all of the cigarettes. People smoke more in fiction than they do anywhere else. We don’t talk about it but we should.

I wonder a bit about the ending. It’s neat, and also neat, and it begins well with all of these beautiful and apparently unnecessary details—Bisquick, croutons, Zinfandel. But it almost becomes too real in its unreal? Almost becomes a pilot episode. I could stand to be cut off at the knees here, to escape with a little less dialogue so I’m not able to ground myself in the circumstances quite as well. Like I said, I liked the disorientation. I like feeling bewildered in this story, I like feeling like oh—here are the things I recognize, this is Bogart’s voice I’m channeling, but why’s he in the house? Oh I don’t need to know, in fact. No one needs to explain that to me. Bogart’s in everyone’s house, once you invite him.

Although it’s very possible I’ve got my read on this wrong and I’m not as oriented as I think. HMM.

Anyway it’s very good, and Sean has other things you can read, which you should do. So.

(Follow Feedback Friday here.)

This is one my most favorite short stories ever. This is what I want, when I say there’s not enough really good fiction on the internet. This is a master class on how to write fiction that succeeds online.

It’s very short, so there’s not a lot of scrolling. It grabs you right from the first sentence, and each paragraph afterwards contains a really compact yet wondrous little detail that propels you like a maglev train to the end. And then the last sentence turns the whole thing on its head and spins it suddenly away from you.

Every time I read this I just sit there, stunned, staring at my monitor. This is flash fiction: there’s no story arc in the traditional sense, no business about the journey the protagonist takes, it’s just a flurry of relatable human experiences, broken down into their most intense emotional components. My only complaint is that this story isn’t tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.

You can find other stories by Myfanwy Collins at her website.

Another Feedback Friday. Catch the fever.

Did I listen when kfan and distorte said how brilliant Fiction Volante was? Yeah, but I thought, “Oh, I’ll get to that when I have some time” and when I did, it wasn’t there any more. But thanks to the good people at the Google cache, I was about to read maybe 30 percent of the stories, including “Substitutions.”

The thing I like best about this story is the way the title engages with the story. The first time you read it, there seems to be a clear correspondence between the story and the protagonist’s actions, and then at the end suddenly the title refers to a different substitution entirely.

Another way to get at this is to note that the story balances two main topics: a relationship and the actions of the protagonist. The first two (short) paragraphs are about the relationship, the third paragraph is about the actions (with one reference to the relationship), the fourth is about both, and the fifth is entirely about the actions. Both are interesting and there’s a fairly even balance there. But then the last paragraph comes and the title smacks you upside the head again and suddenly that balance between the relationship and the actions has changed profoundly.

I’m overanalyzing, maybe, but to see something structured this precisely and feel the way that it works on you emotionally is a nice thing.

It’s Feedback Friday, kids.

The thing I like best about Munro’s piece is the way that telling the reader the conclusion at the outset of the story (twice, if you count the title and the first sentence) actually heightens, rather than diminishes, the suspense in the story.* Even though—or really, because—you know what’s coming, you’re filled with dread as you read. And even if you weren’t, the final simile is devastating enough that there’s plenty of surprise to be found at the end.

The description of the task the narrator is doing while her son speaks with her is also pretty remarkable. It’s connected both to her relationship to him as well as to what the son is describing, which is further reinforced by the concluding simile.

* Cf. J. Robert Parks’ comments about the film Man on Wire in the latest edition of the Daily Plastic podcast.