Leap | Chapbook | Vol XLVI, Fantasy Girls by Kyle Hemmings

CLICK HERE TO READ

Vol XLVI, Fantasy Girls

Kyle Hemmings (4.3.11)

Four short stories from our New Jersey regular Kyle Hemmings. In his third chapbook us we meet in sequence four mysterious women. Fantasy Girls.

Biography | Chapbook | Vol XLII, 'In Memoriam to a Marionette' by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

CLICK HERE TO READ

Vol XLII, In Memoriam to a Marionette

 Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé 

To make up for missing last week's chapbook we have got something very special indeed. If you know him, he needs no introduction - Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé. A chapbook of vignettes that together form a caudate sonnet of 24 pieces of postcard fiction.

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé has edited more than ten books and co-produced three audio books, two of which were anthologies. The other titles span the genres of ethnography, journalism and creative nonfiction, some edited pro bono for non-profit organizations including Sok Sabay Cambodia, Riding for the Disabled Association, and the National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre. A former entertainment journalist, Desmond has traveled to Australia, France, Hong Kong and Spain for his stories, which have included features on Madonna, Björk and Morgan Freeman, culminating in the authorship of the limited edition Top Ten TCS Stars for Caldecott Publishing. Trained in book publishing at Stanford University, Desmond studied sociology and mass communication at the National University of Singapore, and later received his theology masters (world religions) from Harvard University and fine arts masters (creative writing) from the University of Notre Dame. His poetry and prose have appeared in more than a hundred literary journals. An interdisciplinary artist, Desmond also works in clay. He has designed and sculpted ceramic works to commemorate Albert Camus’ 50th Anniversary, the Dalai Lama’s 50th Year of Exile, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ 120th Anniversary, Edgar Allan Poe’s Bicentennial, and Grolier Poetry Bookshop’s 80 Years of Service as the Oldest Continuous Poetry Bookstore in the US, among other commemorative pieces. His ceramic works are housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.

Snow | Chapbook | Vol XLI, The Gingerbread Gang by Michael Frissore

CLICK HERE TO READ

 

Vol XLI, The Gingerbread Gang

Michael Frissore (24.12.10)

 

Merry Christmas! To celebrate here is 'The Gingerbread Gang'. A festive chapbook...well kind of, it features gingerbread. Go on, nibble.

Bitch | Fiction | Jay-Z Needs To Do His Adding-Up Again.

When I was in primary school, I invented the worst word ever.


I’d run up to other kids and say,

“You know what you are? You’re a garbbblelecyuhdar.”

“A what?” they’d reply.

I’d say,

“It’s a Swahili word. It’s actually the worst swear-word you can ever say. Far worse than shit or fuck or any of those other ones.”

And I’d insinuate, with hand gestures, what it actually meant – a suitably vague description of complex sexual acts that I’d half-picked up from Limp Bizkit lyrics.

And, if I was successful, the victim would say,

“How do you pronounce that?”

“Garbbblelecyuhdar.”

“Garbbblelecyuhdar.”

And they’d run on to someone else, and spread the word.

“You’re a garbbblelecyuhdar.”


Surprisingly enough, the actual word may not have been garbbblelecyuhdar. But that wasn’t the point. Swearwords are awesome, particularly if you’re a child only just coming to terms with the transgressive power of moving your tongue, lips and teeth to make a certain set of syllables, and break the world around you. Every child should remember the first

Bitch is ancient. And it still has bite, astonishingly – in part, presumably, to its misogynistic connotations, and in part due to that resonant ‘tch’ sound. Its brothers and sisters have fallen to the wayside in their thousands, like bugger, which now sounds so quaint you could easily imagine American tourists coming to visit a Little Teashop of Buggery in Stratford. Hell, that gives me a great idea for my next business venture.

A bit like this, only with more buggery.

The verb ‘bitch’ is even more misogynistic, because it’s so much more insidious. To complain behind someone’s back, it implies, is an essentially feminine trait. And it is interesting that “son of a bitch” or “biche sone” has been around for just as long as the word itself – you could even stretch the argument to suggest that women were partly only designated as bitches so that men could insult other men.


Now, I know Jay-Z doesn’t have 99 problems. I know this, because he lists them. Critics, radio shows, and rap magazines. Racist policemen who jump to the conclusion that he’s up to something illegal (according to the video, they’re on the money), which takes up a whole verse so that Jay-Z can make repeated James Bond-esque quips at their expense. The unsubstantiated case of a pussy who “tried to push me”, resulting in increased paparazzi attention and the D.A. asking for a half-a-million bail fee. So we’re talking seven problems at most. Really, not very many problems in the larger scheme of things.

He actually has a new book out, in which I very much hope he discusses this obvious error of mathematics. It’s called ‘Decoded’ and it purports to be about the poetry of rap. It won’t be. Because Jay-Z’s not a poet. Nas is a poet. Jay-Z’s a businessman (and I don’t think he’d mind that description too much.)


Jay-Z, for example, has never coined the word Schweppervesence, as Nas does in Life’s a Bitch. But more importantly, Nas can still pull off that peculiar combination-persona of street poet/ultra-violent criminal/materialistic businessman/drug-user/reflective parent and benefactor to the young that’s so popular amongst a certain breed of rapper. But come on, Jay-Z; you’re best mates with the President of the United States. Do you expect us to believe that you personally drive around with drugs in the back of your car? Much as I’d love to think that Obama just turns up at one of your parties and sits quietly in the corner, wincing at the constant gunshots and politely refusing the cocaine (his wife would kill him), I don’t believe in it.



Take, for example, the “bitch” of 99 Problems. Apparently this is a woman who Jay-Z is seeing, and who he believes he has under his thumb. Now, we all know who Jay-Z’s seeing. It’s Beyonce. Beyonce who in the single Single Ladies sings about being a single lady taunting her ex-boyfriend in a nightclub by being promiscuous, who clearly has a one night stand in One Night Only, and who picks up an unnamed man in Naughty Girl and inviting all of her female friends over for a mass orgy with him. Beyonce, look out! Jay-Z is a psychopathic criminal. Didn’t you listen to any of his songs?

A woman clearly physically and emotionally cowed by a short man who looks a bit like a potato.

Which, I wonder, is the reality? How does Beyonce feel when she sees Jay-Z singing 99 Problems? Proud? Sad? Resentful?


In fact, the only rapper who is actually qualified and morally justified to sing about bitches is Snoop Doggy Dogg, as he is, self-affirmedly, a dog himself. So let’s end with the Dogg’s poetic wisdom, mobbing with the dog pound, just feeling the breeze, smoking indo, sipping on gin and juice.

Biiiiiatch.


Jon Ware
Fiction Editor

FINKPOINT | CHAPBOOK | VOL XXXVII, Fractures & Religious Affairs by Ken Champion

CLICK HERE TO READ

 Vol XXXVII, Fractures & Religious Affairs by Ken Champion

YET AGAIN, READERS OF THE WEBSITE ONCE KNOWN AS SILKWORMS INK, FINKPOINT  (YOUR NEW LITERARY DJ) HAS PULLED ANOTHER GLORIOUS RABBIT OUT OF HIS ELECTRONIC HAT. HERE, FOR YOU, TODAY, A COUPLE OF SHORT STORIES FROM THE BRILLIANT KEN CHAMPION.

FNKPNT

Generation | Film | For No Reason, Let's Compile Some Lists

What an interesting article from Totalfilm. ‘Horror Icons on their Favourite Horror Movies!’ Admittedly towards the final third, the top ten lists are no longer by horror icons so much as by journalists who make a living out of things like compiling lists of their top ten horror movies. But still.


The list delighted me specifically because the icons’ stated preferences confirmed ingrained snobberies I already hold. Smart and ironic filmmakers like Joe Dante and Edgar Wright enjoy smart and ironic films like Don’t Look Now and Night of the Demon. Eli Roth plumps for dim-witted gorefests that are cool because nobody’s heard of them except him, Quentin Tarantino, and losers who actually ask themselves, “Hey, I wonder what’s on the Horror Channel tonight,” like me. Kane Hodder picks an upcoming movie of his as his second favourite, and consequently comes across as a self-publicising boor, whereas Robert Englund speaks passionately about the sound and cinematography of Turn of the Screw adaptation The Innocents. In terms of overall votes, John Carpenter goes all-out with a two-by-four on the craven Wes Craven. Nobody voted for Saw. (Oh, hang on – oh, no. They did. And for Hostel. Damn you, Kane Hodder!)

I probably couldn’t have predicted that the writer of Slumber Party Massacre 2 would admire the cinema veritie style of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. In fact, in spite of their names, I might not have considered that the two films had a great deal in common. But still.

                                                               Pictured: horror.

What was more interesting was the preponderance of films from the late Seventies up to 1980 – I guessed the final punch-up must have been between Turner Classic Movies Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Alien and The Exorcist. A golden age for the genre, certainly, but so very dominant? Note the lack of love for films that were only, relatively speaking, very slightly earlier – 1963’s The Haunting is only mentioned once or twice. And films that came later – Blair Witch Project, for example. And, thinking about it, I don’t think this is simply a question of the era these film-makers and film-stars were informed by. It’s also an issue of generational cool in a genre that prides itself on being outsider-ish. Blair Witch/The Descent/Let The Right One In are too new to be considered classics, and certainly too new and too mainstream to be considered cool for real horror connoisseurs. The Exorcist, in its own way, was an exceptionally mainstream movie, but it gets far, far more votes than Poltergeist, which is still tainted with the mark of the mainstream period of Steven Spielberg. Jaws gets a pass because it was his breakthrough film. Freaks is old enough and cultish enough to be cool. Carnival of Souls is maybe too cultish for its own good. The Thing, to my surprise, gets more votes than Halloween – because it’s still an outsider’s movie, perhaps? Because it remains under-acknowledged by that mainstream, passed aside, un-remade? At least until that prequel comes out, that is. But still.

So I decided to generate an enormous, utterly meaningless flow-chart, to document the various peaks-and-troughs of horror opinion, making use of this vast new repository of information.

As with all statistics, I made some fairly arbitrary distinctions; I would only include the lists that were being made by someone chosen for actually working in the business, rather than commenting on it, no matter how knowledgeable they may be. So the guy who did make-up on Scream is in. Nigel Floyd is out. If someone didn’t bother to put their votes in order, only their first vote counts (sorry, John Landis. But for God’s sake, play the game! I don’t care how restricting and pointless it is!). And, to make the generated chart even more meaningless, all of Rob Zombie’s votes count as minuses. Not really. But to add a further note of randomness to the equation, I’m not particularly good at maths.
Each film gets a score out of ten depending on where it stood in the top ten list. First place gets ten points, tenth place gets one point. Bon? Bon.


Most Popular Horror Movie

1) The Exorcist; 182. The run-away victor. 22 appearances on the lists, almost always in the uppermost regions.

2) Alien; 119. Less-often picked than TCM – fifteen times - but more highly-rated.

3) Texas Chainsaw Massacre; 110. Sixteen votes.

4) A tricky tie at 101 between Jaws and The Thing. Thing gets more votes (eighteen), but Jaws is more highly rated amongst those who’ve picked it.

Lone Defender: Highest Rated Horror Movie picked by only one participant who wasn’t being hipsterish and ironic, or trying to promote his forthcoming sequel Hatchet 2

With a 10 from George Romero, the original Thing From Another World clinches it, beating Wes Craven’s lone 10 for Nosferatu because I don’t care for the films of Wes Craven. Soon after come the Twin Peaks movie, with a 9, and Inferno, also with a 9 (curiously, Steven Shiel, who voted for it, didn’t include Suspiria on his list; I’d like to hear his argument.)


Best Overall Average

Peeping Tom; two nines.


Least Favourite Most Favourite: Lowest Rated Horror Movie Overall

Cult of the Cobra (Romero again), Who Can Kill A Child?, The Other, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Seventh Victim, Duel, Braindead, Fright Night, Son of Frankenstein, Martyrs, 10 Rillington Place, Friday 13th Part VII (HODDER!), and Day of the Beast all manage a lowly one.

Most Questionably An Actual Member of the Genre

Scanners, at one vote of four. Exploding heads don’t make it a horror film. Points go to those who correctly identified Picnic at Hanging Rock as a horror film.


Most Likely to Get Bullied By The Other Participants

Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, score of two? Not Dracula, not Nosferatu?Get out of here, Larry Fessenden, director of Wendigo, you prissy Twilight lover.


Most Intriguingly Overlooked

Silence of the Lambs and Blair Witch scrape a couple of votes each, but Hellraiser and Les Diaboliques are the winners here, managing only four and three respectively, with a single vote. Hm. Intriguing.

Pictured: horror.

My point is, we’re obsessed with this sort of thing. On the Internet in particular. You could actually speculate about how the mechanical processes of the online world are turning us into obsessive-compulsive automatons, forever making lists and comparing statistics and telling ourselves that this stuff actually means something objective. I’d do it myself, but I’m far too busy. As an addendum to this article I’m planning to make a new flowchart that only compares the preferences of the people whose opinions I happen to personally agree with. Kane Hodder will be nowhere in sight.

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor Strolling Briefly And Recklessly Out Of His Remit

p.s. The full 121-film flowchart is available to anyone who wishes to see it, providing they first put their signature to some documents I happen to have lying around.



Wider Reading | Fiction | The Unbearable Meaningfulness of Being Overweight (In Fiction)

I mentioned to one of my fellow editors over the weekend that London is a city full of intimidatingly beautiful people. Well, in the summer, it gets worse. All of the models who pass for female inhabitants start wearing astounding dress-things for walks in the park; all of the men slip into white T-shirts that are too small for them, solely for the purpose of oppressing me with the size of their biceps. In London, I feel so ugly I keep thinking a policeman’s going to come up to me and ask me if I have a licence for that face.

Joyce's Bloom.

It was always my plan, this week, to write about ‘wider reading’ by discussing the role of the overweight hero or heroine in fiction. (Phil Brown’s splendid Wikipedia piece has managed to make this interpretation of the theme seem not only flippant and tasteless, but also bland.) But there is, I think, something there. Beth Carswell’s written an interesting piece about how a character can never simply be overweight; there will always be significance in that, usually the implication that the character is greedy or idle. And I think there’s a lot of truth in that, even if it’s used sympathetically. Leopold Bloom’s stoutness, at least in part, represents that he is a man driven by his desires and his appetites, setting him up for his famous day in which he is consistently led astray. Many female readers identified with Bridget Jones’ eternal drive to get her life together, as exemplified by her attempts to lose weight. Even Rumpole of the Bailey’s girth spoke to his jolly sense of mischief and his Falstaffian ebullience. Carswell argues, too, that fat children in fiction are almost always divided into two specific groups; bullies, and victims of bullies, to be hated for their size, or to be pitied for it, which is a good point - the Piggies and the Dursleys, for example.



We discussed this for a while, and couldn’t really come up with any characters in fiction who are overweight without their weight being used in any way to typify them. In TV, however, and in film, there’s quite a few – Charlie Kane being the most famous of all. And that’s got to be partly because of the immense talent of actors like Orson Welles, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and James Gandolfini, to name a few, who have never been willing to play ‘the fat guy’ (as many lazy comedians do). So the visual arts do win out over prose there, I’m afraid, though it isn’t an absolute victory – could an overweight actress really get serious dramatic roles, or would she be more likely to end up in these sorts of films?

But there’s another reason, too, for this sort of thing. In the movies, a cigar can just be a cigar, because there are a great many people working on them, and some of those people are employed to fill in the little set details that don’t actually matter. Prose, the vast majority of the time, isn’t like that. There’s just one person, all by themselves, trying to create a world out of syllables – and, whether they know it/like it or not, every syllable is significant, because you’re using it to show your reader a little more (even if all you’re showing them is that you’re a bland, unimaginative douche). Every detail is a prop in the theatrical sense, not the cinematic – it’s there as a tool to give a sense of a world where there shouldn’t be a world at all.



So I’m issuing a challenge myself, though this is less a call to arms than a tentative cry of,

“Shall we just have a quiet night in, then?” Writers; come up with a story featuring a character with unusual physical qualities. They might be overweight, or have a hunchback, or be very short, or even be entirely disabled. But this characteristic must have no bearing on their personality or the themes of the story whatsoever. Neither may the story be an earnest and signposted attempt to show that obese/disabled/in-any-way-different people are just like ‘us’ ‘normal’ types; that, in my opinion, is cheating (not to mention patronising).



Or, if you prefer, I’ll even widen the field; the challenge is to write a story, a sentence, a word, that has no significance, no meaning to it, no intent behind it, whatsoever. Harder than you think, I think.

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor

Hollywood | Chapbook | 'You Could Pass for Lana Turner' by Kyle Hemmings

 CLICK HERE TO READ

Vol XVIII: You Could Pass for Lana Turner

Kyle Hemmings (2.7.10)



Kyle Hemmings returns with a dose of fiction this time around. Fitting in with our Hollywood theme we proudly bring you 'You Could Pass for Lana Turner'. Enjoy.

Prizes | Fiction | The Inkies

    Filling in for Jon Ware, I was planning to expound upon my rather considerable knowledge of 19th Scottish servants’ ‘found poetry’, disguised as shopping lists. 
But then I took a look (as one does) at today’s literary prize scene, and what I saw there filled me with loathing and righteous bile.  Take the renowned ‘Silkies’, or, as they’ve become known under Phil Brown’s dubious leadership, ‘The London-and-Kent Haberdashers/International Imitation Cider Distillery Silkie Awards’.  Let me give you some examples of the ways in which this potentially fantastic poetry award has sunk into cynical, mainstream self-congratulation.

*

Best Title of a Collection

I won’t even attempt to go into the obvious self-contradiction of such a category’s existence.

Best Title of a Poem

The cynical, mainstream disregard for other forms and other media is sickening.  Apologists for Brown will probably whine that the ‘Silkies’ are supposed to be a ‘poetry’ award.  I spit back in their faces,
    “What about Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall- is there not audacious poetry in giving that title to a book which spends much of its length in halls more relevant to the plot and with more metaphorical power than Wolf Hall itself?  And how about the poetic juxtapositions of Die Hard 4: Live Free or Die Hard?  What,” I add, poking them in their tobacco-weakened, possibly cravat-wearing chests, “about Ugandan artist Abraham Karungi’s utterly poetic series of pottery David Beckhams?”


Best Cover Illustration

    Sickening.


Best Press Photo

    Sickening favouritism.  Why wasn’t I, I wonder, entered into the running?


Best Name of Poet

Sickening gimmickry to attract the nouveau-intellectuals.


Best Use of Box Brackets

    This category is actually pretty good.  Still, Brown’s obvious pandering to the so-called ‘Rape Poet’ movement (see also the winner of Best Cover Illustration) is inappropriate and sickening.  I wonder he didn’t award Best Title of a Collection to his crony James Harringman’s cynical, mainstream collection ‘A Rapist’s Handbook: Japes and Rapes of an Englishman in the Brecon Beacons’.

*
   
Enough is enough, I say.  And so it is (with great reluctance) that I’ve taken it upon myself to single-handedly rescue the literary prize scene from the abyss into which it has sunk.
My theory is this; when, say, authors claim that prizes are killing literary fiction, they really mean that they themselves are too feckless, impressionable and stupid to be able to accept a large sum of money and a couple of newspaper interviews without instantly sinking into a mountain of cocaine, dubbing themselves ‘The Second Coming of Colonial Fiction’ and not writing a single word for the next eighteen months.  Then, perhaps, they’ll write a mawkish second novel about the appalling pressures of being an author with money and fame.

My point is this; that prizes are only dangerous (like heroin) when they cease to be a tool of the author’s, and the author becomes a tool of the prize.  A great deal of this comes from this sense of an inner circle; the utter lack of self-reflection of those who run the awards.

So it is with this in mind that I am proud to announce the inaugural Inkies, a prize awarded to the finest (and the foulest) of literary prizes.  The winners may not alter a great deal over the years.  Each prize-winning prize will win the opportunity of a lifetime- I offer myself to you, to add my expertise and cutting insight to the drab C-list celebrities and Michael Portillos that usually make up your judging panels.  I also may not punch you in the face when next we meet.

*

Most Worrying Dagger Fixation:

Goes to the Crime Writers’ Association, for their Dagger in the Library, Debut Dagger, Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, Gold Dagger, Cartier Diamond Dagger, Dagger in the Library, Duncan Lawrie International Dagger, John Creasey Memorial New Blood Dagger, Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award, and their most sinisterly-titled Short Story Award.

Apparently, this year Chuck Swain’s The Blood Doth Stream Over The Prawn Cocktails, a detective novel set at the awards, in which the year’s most exciting crime novelists are killed off one by one, is predicted to win all ten.

 
Most Likely To Be Barked Out By A Drill-Sergeant With Little Ear For The Subtleties Of Rhythm:

Goes to the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Fiction.


Most Likely To Have Been Won By Henning Mankell Or Stieg Larsson:

Goes to the Best Swedish Crime Novel Award.


Prize For Under-35s Dedicated To The Memory of An Author With A Name That Could Surely Never Have Belonged To Anyone Under 35:

Goes to the Betty Trask Award.


‘Hilarious, Affectionate’ Prize Nickname Most Likely To Induce Nausea, Psychosis:

Goes to the British Book Awards, aka ‘The Nibbies’.  As it will every year.


Most Tenuous Link Between Prize Name and Prize Subject:

A hard decision, this one.  But in the end we settled on The Macavity Award, named after T.S. Eliot’s Mack the Knife- inspired ‘mystery cat’ and master criminal.  The prize itself is awarded to writers of mystery fiction, rather than, say, fiction about master criminals or talking animals.


 
Most Exciting New Prize

Goes to the Warwick Prize for Writing.  It really was very good last year.


Children’s Book Prize Title Least Likely To Have Been Chosen By An Actual Child:

Many worthy applicants this year; the Amelia Frances Howard Gibbon Illustrator’s Award was disqualified, although we’re still uncertain how many children could have pronounced the late Canadian children’s author’s name in one breath.  Which means that the award goes to the Cool Awards, a title so cringe-inducing in its attempt to reflect its young readership that I was almost moved to pity.  The fact that Cool is an acronym only, to my mind, exacerbates the prize’s crimes against actual coolness.
*

I’m afraid that’s all we have time for- this year, at least.  But do come back next time around for another session of the Inkies; the one literary prize that will never compromise its integrity by selling out into the mainstream.

Signing off,
Donald ‘Voice of the’ Everyman

Jon Ware is away

Second Person | Fiction | Choose-Your-Own-Article

You’re in the second person.  It’s quite a startling situation for you- as a reader, you’re not used to it.  It’s a little intrusive.  You’re accustomed to doing the intruding.

1)      Try to explore your surroundings. (TURN TO PAGE 17.)
2)      Assume you’re in a cheap rip-off of an Italo Calvino novel.  March outside to confront the author of this article in a fit of pique. (TURN TO PAGE 6.)
3)      Try to remember back to the days of choose-your-own-adventure books.  (TURN TO PAGE 8.)
4)      Dismiss the use of second-person narrative as a cheap affectation, without real value to fiction.  (TURN TO PAGE 243.)


PAGE 8:

Yes, they were good, weren’t they?  You think back to Give Yourself Goosebumps.

1)      Consider the matter of interactive fiction.  Wonder a little sadly at its loss of popularity due to the rise of a more straightforwardly immersive form, in the video game.  Imagine the largely untapped, terrifying possibilities of a novel told like a puzzle, in which the reader is trapped inside the head of a protagonist, forced to act out the events of the story, rather than being allowed to remain an untouchable observer.   (TURN TO PAGE 81.)
2)      Worry about the problems of ‘personas’, and the dangers of a second-person reader/protagonist becoming immersed in the fantastic world around him, to the detriment of ‘reality’.  (TURN TO PAGE 34.)


PAGE 69:

You find yourself imagining yourself as part of the threesome.  For a short time you find yourself animal, mindless, invincible- inhabiting the sleaziest, most deviant acts without the slightest concern.

Then you wake, and you feel bad about it.  But not too bad- the person who did those things already feels far away, like someone with no connection to you whatsoever.  You call your mother, and you’re a good son, a good daughter once again; a good person, you tell yourself.

END.


PAGE 81:

No wonder, you think, that the form has largely died out, when it was hiding something genuinely revolutionary beneath stock situations and standard genre worlds.   Alternating between giving the reader a potentially empowering control over their actions, and telling them what they think?  It’s a genuinely disturbing experience, you tell yourself.  Then you scratch your nose, which is feeling extremely itchy.  Next you yawn, and consider the importance of empathy- or impressionability- in the reader’s reactions to such stories.

You go on your way, a little enlightened, vowing to tell all of your friends about the literary site called Silkworms Ink.

END.


PAGE 243:

The article doesn’t trouble to inform of you of the surprisingly large number of respected, experimental authors who’ve utilised the second-person, Faulkner and Gunter Grass.  Instead, it asks you gently whether there isn’t some interesting game possible using this ‘affectation’- the creation of a multiplicity of narratives, echoing and complementing one another, as if across parallel timelines, often turning in on themselves, for instance.  Like The French Lieutenant’s Woman, only not a cop-out.

But you aren’t listening.  You tear down the article from the four walls surrounding you, and storm away to read something else.  This artificial reality collapses, apologetically.

END.


PAGE 6:

You head outside.  Unfortunately, it’s pitch black, and you’re eaten by a meta-narrative.

END.


PAGE 17:

Streams of words.  Opinion masquerading as authority.  You’re inside an article, all right- and judging from the threesome outside the window, it’s an Internet article.

1)      Assume you’re in an Italo Calvino novel.  March outside to confront the author of this article in a fit of pique. (TURN TO PAGE 6.)
2)      Try to remember back to the days of choose-your-own-adventure books.  (TURN TO PAGE 8.)
3)      Dismiss the use of second-person narrative as a cheap affectation, without real value to fiction.  (TURN TO PAGE 243.)
4)      Watch the threesome.  (TURN TO PAGE 69.)


PAGE 34:

This one is a genuine worry, you think.  Readers are only the most indirect sort of participators- and it may be that level of detachment that gives us room to make up our own minds about the themes, argument, characters of a book.  It’s entirely possible that you’ll spend the length of the entire fiction playing the author’s game, rather than hunting him like the Minotaur through the maze he’s constructed.

Or is that an insult towards the reader’s intelligence and independence of mind?  Is it, in fact, perfectly possible to immerse yourself fully and utterly, then rise again, refreshed and stimulated?

You think about it, and you make your mind up, one way or another.

By the time you’ve decided, however, someone’s switched off your computer, and you’re forced to spend all eternity in a nearly-state, trapped inside the article; a single, virtual incarnation, lost beneath a billion reproducing brothers and sisters.

END.

-
Jon Ware
Fiction Editor

Issue 1 | Fiction | First Lines

 Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Graham Greene begins with, A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.  How handy it is, then, that one should so often ‘choose arbitrarily’ a moment of experience that can be summed up by a pithy, aphoristic opening sentence.  And, occasionally, one that also touches on the nature of beginnings itself.

A morning’s trawling through my bookshelves has led me to a very strange conclusion on this subject; that no talented author, no matter how serious-minded they are, or how interested they claim to be in breaking down the form of a novel, is able to resist the allure of a flashy opening sentence.  Even Beckett, to my disappointment, starts Murphy with The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.  More obvious show-offs- Rushdie, Nabokov, Heller and Joyce- show off, still more obviously.   Donna Tartt gets several minus points for trying too hard with,
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
Sometimes, of course, a perfectly ordinary opening sentence can seem like a mannered, polished one because it’s so well-known.  But the vast majority- James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and though about life and death, or Iain Bank’s exploding grandmother, or the near-completely unnecessary clocks striking thirteen of 1984?  These are very much pre-meditated.

I can understand why we, the reading public, like snappy first sentences.  Novels are great sprawling, messy things; opening lines are easier to pin down, especially if we believe we can then use them as some sort of key to the infinitely more complicated stuff that follows.  But, for these very same reasons, the aphoristic opening sentence, the self-reflexive opening sentence, the surprising juxtaposition that the rest of the book often fails to live up to- these should, logically speaking, be anathema to the fiction writer, who has the space and the words to push beyond the self-contained nonsense of, say, Every happy family is exactly alike, or that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Naturally, a writer wants to engage his or her readers from the very start.  But I don’t believe the publisher who claimed she was gripped from the moment she read that most exceptionally mannered first sentence, of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone-
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
It would have been the opening scenes that gripped her; the opening line just stuck in her head and claimed the credit.  Very few readers, I imagine, have tossed a book aside because they didn’t like the first sentence, or praised the entirety of a bad novel because they did.   So why do writers feel the need, consistently, to come up with something so flashy and demonstrative?  Is it so difficult to write a truly unobtrusive opening sentence- one that simply starts the novel, nothing more, but which is put together expertly nonetheless?

*

My irritation over this problem carried me here to the Internet, where I spent some time at the website of the Bulwer-Lytton prize, and its spin-off, the ‘Lyttle Lytton’, both of which claim to award a “pittance” every year to the writer who can come up with the most “atrocious” opening sentence to a novel.  It doesn’t, of course; most years, the prize goes to an excellent comedic opening sentence to a novel that would probably run out of steam fast.  Jon Tando’s A lone testicle lay in a barren field, for instance, verges on genius; I liked Peter Berman’s Gordon strove to be a nice pimp as well.  It takes real effort to find one that actually lacks a basic sense of rhythm, such as Graham Swanson’s 2008 winning entry,
Because they had not repented, the angel stabbed the unrepentant couple thirteen times, with its sword.
Simply wonderful.  Less intentionally bizarre is the first line of Paul Clifford, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, after whom the prize is named;
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
The nature of the prize suggests we’re supposed to sneer at Bulwer-Lytton’s overwrought prose, his decision to break up the imagery with an off-putting parenthesis, and the probably unnecessary clarification that the night was dark.  But I quite like it.  It’s guileless, completely sincere in its desire to build atmosphere, and it fails in its attempt to show off.  I imagine Graham Greene’s narrator would have hated it

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor