The week Owen left New York was one of sweltering humidity reaching down to enrapture us, swaddle us, leave us all reaching for insufficient comfort. We assumed Owen was alone in the task of loading a truck, of carting boxes and disassembled furniture down flights of stairs and into a double-parked van. It was a week of sweat-stained shirts, of dodging brownouts, of foregone conclusions about the city and about what constituted comfort demolished. Owen was leaving us, and few among us were sad to see him go.

Keen-eyed readers may notice that it shares a character with another story of mine, “Dulcimers Played, Strings Played.” That is not coincidence; essentially, this story originally began its life as a sort of prelude to something much longer I’d like to write. As part of it, I needed to explain how one particular character ended up in a particular place; from there, this story arose. The longer work is as yet unwritten (as a couple of my favorite novels from this year may have rendered the concept moot); we’ll see, I suppose.

(Also: immense thanks to Brian at Joyland for running the story.)

Except…it’s not really a proper horror story. It nurtures a particular image and setting that, by story’s end, eventually become horrific, but — this is more in the realm of things that unsettle me than things that will necessarily terrify audiences worldwide. It’s an image that I’ve had in my head for years now: seven or eight years ago, there was a particularly hot summer, and I’d walk to the subway after long nights at work and pass these clumps of trash bags that were just left there to fester, and I’d wonder; I’d start to see things emerging from them, and then I’d creep myself out and get onto the subway and try really hard to avoid thinking of the things now lurking around my subconscious.

(There’s an old story of mine somewhere with a similar payoff; a sinister buildup to an impossible image. Maybe I’ll post it somewhere; might make for interesting reading…)

I have a weird relationship with realism. A lot of the fiction I’ve done lately has been pretty straightforward. And yet: a lot of the writing that I first did when I was ushering myself into the process of writing fiction was much more surreal. Weird fiction or “slipstream” or something similar. Some of that’s just due to my reading habits: my bookshelves have a fair amount of realist fiction on them, but there’s a fair share of science fiction and horror and magic realism in there as well. But I also find it interesting that, after detouring around the weird for a while, I seem to find myself drawn back to it — the last story I finished opens in a fairly realistic vein and then takes a detour into the…if not the impossible, at least the unlikely.

Or maybe it’s just that I’m reminded that one can tweak things like realism on the page; that a story that opens in one mode doesn’t necessarily have to stay in that same mode for the duration. (Dennis Cooper’s The Marbled Swarm, which I just finished, is something of a master class in this — just when you think you know where it’s going, the narrator pulls things to a stop and resets the terms under which you hear his story.)

If nothing else, that renewed attraction to all things weird might help explain where parts of my head were when I wrote some of the dialogue in this story….

My current state: false starts and lyrics sitting half-written in notebooks. Seated at a table looking at fresh-made coffee. Watching steam ascend into late-morning light and thinking it looks like nothing more than smoke rising from a newly kindled fire. All I want to do is collapse around the phrase fake jazz, half-obsessed after a late-night remembrance of a long-ago late-night ramble about John Lurie. Thinking: I’m going to call this my fake fake jazz band, thinking that might blow minds, thinking that’ll leave holes in the world and realign things, wanting to see how people react, wanting to hear them run the combinations through their heads, wanting to see what their eyes do when they think. My fake fake jazz band.

You can read the rest here.

It’s called “Revolution Come and Gone.” (The title is a hat-tip to an early-90s compilation that I listened to more or less endlessly in my formative years.) It’s the opening of my novel-in-progress Reel, and it starts out something like this:

Timon met Marianne at a Black Halos show in Seattle. It wasn’t the colder season yet, but its arrival was obvious. Jackets and a few bold scarves could be seen on bodies on the streets surrounding the club. These were melancholy hours, a time to have impractical thoughts and ponder ways in and out on walks through the city.

You can read the whole thing here.

It’s something of an object lesson, really: word counts of the short novel and the novella are not dissimilar, but one feels like a novel; the other feels like something else, something abbreviated and much more focused. Not necessarily truncated, though — though it may also take the addition of a more bitter aftertaste for that to function correctly. And it may not function at all. Evidently, the novel-length version did not. Unsure now whether the belief that this section can function on its own is borne of realism or of a hesitation to let go. But hey, worth a shot.

Among the other contributors is, well, me. Writing at that length (the stories had a maximum length of 333 words) was one of the hardest things I’ve done; while the writing group of which I’m a member does a fair amount of flash-fiction work, it’s never been a style that I’ve been comfortable with. So getting a chance to take part in this was a challenge, and one I was glad to attempt — the result has a sort of density to it that surprised me.

Also, it was inspired by a fairly insane bit of industrial design that I see on occasion outside my preferred stop for coffee in Greenpoint. So, you know, there’s that.

Sharp-eyed and/or longtime readers may note that it shares a character with my earlier “Every Night is Bluegrass Night”.

(A tip of the hat to Shannon Garland for the North Carolinian weather advice.)

June 19th, 2009

Chris Leo (writer/musician in The Van Pelt)
Tom Shillue (comedian)
Tobias Carroll (writer)
Maggie Serota (freelance writer/A.V Club)
Justin Maurer (writer)
Isaac Ramon (Comedian)

Each give their best shot at telling a story about a vacation at Vol. 1 Brooklyn. There is a five dollar suggested donation to go to our friends at 826NYC, but you can donate more if you’d like.

@ Bar Matchless
557 Manhattan Ave.
Brooklyn, NY

Both Wray’s and Huston’s stories-in-progress are definitely worth a read, and there’s something deeply interesting about Twitter as, essentially, the logical endpoint of the serialized narrative; the point at which every sentence (or cluster of sentences) needs to be memorable enough to keep the reader interested. Twitter as a specific medium is a concept that’s been in my head a lot lately, for reasons that may be more clear in a few hours…