Up: Who Cares?

[Related]   «^»

Introduction

By Ford, Frank Bernard

I'm writing a short story. Fine, written a hundred or so, but having just read a critical work on deconstructionism, I need to change something, although my feeling is that I've always deconstructed - smashed up the calcified bourgeois everything, or tried to. And must continue. 1997 and never more necessary.

Is what kind of short story valid? Question sounds academic, icy breezes through a skeleton. Hear 'em? - how can you not? Old people wheeze, and young people craving A's.

New Yorker type, long on soft-pedal suggestion? Let's say a guy stares at his crotch while things happen peripherally for thirty pages or years - like neon reflections in rainy blacktop being processed by a drunk. Hero's future, as they used to pronounce, is assured. Determined. Character is farts.

Something modeled on TV or movies? Perhaps a clownish dude who ultimately charms an independent lass with her independent ass. The touting of the screw as they fight, fuck, fight, fuck, and marry. Marry!

  

Staying with the inspiration of film, something happens at the end of the black 'n white archetype akin to the crescendo termination of a pop singer's most depraved single, elevating the banal to the insufferable. There's a corollary in fiction of course. The O'Henry ending had a certain flapdoodle charm, but this modern dodge resembles a literate grope towards your privates.

And ending a more recent pastel-color movie-y version: steam a-gurgle and carrying acceptable flotsam - no rubbers - as indeed we are all artily carried etc on the etc of LIFE etc. (Or willows wave as they are wont to do...rustling-sound up BIG. Oh wouldn't Adolph gravely nod assent?)

Not relevant, either one, unless we want PHILOSOPHY in our story.

So accept a tale most acutely modern wherein a woman, don't call her girl, gets the crap kicked out of her by abusers she has prudently chosen to do the job right, then snaps to, sick of being a “cunt!” - whereafter a sweet hello from accountant Clarence will provoke a reply threatening to cut his balls off.

In another version of this horseradish, a gross macho-mouth actually beCOMES Clarence! after INsights burn through the insanely driven everyday brute-fantasy of Capitalism.

Of course you can't sustain any of this stuff, even to the modest lengths of the form. Well I can't. Actually, can't stand it.

  

The strength of the greatest practitioners of most art in our time is that they can keep performing their schtick without puking. They deserve everything they get.

(When you know your work is truly vomit-inducing, then I guess you keep heaping it up. What else, in our time, can you do?)

There is padding, telling detail to stab some cretin's heart; there is repetition in every mode - somewhat cloaked if one pretends to craft. Also, most writers hint around, except Jack London and religious types.

(Well...must be SOMEthing here, reader puzzles.)

  

Let's see. Other types of stories? Of course, but why survey? We're both lazy enough.

If the short story were a turkey and it is, and is full of shit, however drizzly-inclined upon occasion, then it surely has been raised for Christmas.

How many times was Eugene O'Neill's father the Count of Monte Crisco? THE COUNT OF FUCKIN MONTE CRISCO!

And yet the most abjectly disgusting ploy is: I'm writing a short story. Oh if only I could kiss my own selfconscious ass! Mount-fuckin-Olympus. Well, then, I'm a crud? You? Both? Why do we have to ruin everything? And why not?