The Conclusion of the short story "Bluebird" has finally been posted at www.ulapoetryandfiction.blogspot.com.
I wrote the story merely to prove a point but it turned into more than I bargained for.
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9 comments:
Chilly Charlie
go to my blog and click some of the comment areas, there's a character named Chief there that has the same M.O. has Tim Hall.
The person is a crazy narcissist to the point he thinks everyone one of my posts is somehow directed at him.
And my statcounter says that someone from Chicago keeps clicking on my blog.
And the guy says that his wife takes care of him because he is fat and lazy.
Why is this on my blog?
Btw, Noah, any comment on my story? If I recall, you're one of those who said I wasn't a writer-- because I abandoned serious writing for seven years-- stupidly?-- to try to help other underground writers.
Anyway, I'm back in the industrial heartland; for how long I can't say.
Have a good day.
(People please read my response to "Michael" on the "Open Sesame" thread below.)
wenclas
i like your story
and have read both parts
and do actually check everyday to see if the third part is up.
wenclas
to add more.
the people who hate would bitch and say the characters are "generic."
they would say they weren't real people.
The problem is; is that to have totally real people you can't leave the room, you have to placate the notions of the character.
Like if the character believes some silly thing, like true love or that ambition and success and working for The Man but never recognizing The Man as The Man but as a destination of success. The author must go with it.
Putting a character in the macro nowadays will not get this to Random House or Harper Collins Wenclas.
You need to try to give the characters a connection to something horrible, like a great great aunt that died in Siberia in the Gulag so the characters remain innocent of all charges of stupidity.
A good author nowadays knows that leaving the room of self-deception the characters exist in will not create cash flow.
That the God, Jimmy Stewart, beauty and truth are ambition and success and the American way.
To create a 'real person' describe how they urinate a lot, or tie their shoes with one hand, or have a strange collection of tea cuips from England, how they listen to certain bands and their father died in a myserious car wreck they must solve because of a book they found under his bed eight years after his death, and during all this be in a really great band that has a lot of silly names for their songs, and some sex and the lead who is 9 can recite shakespeare without pausing to remember a word.
It's embarrassing for the "Michael"s out there that they keep chiming in with "there's room for everyone" in light of stories like King's. (Both "Michael"s posted to an old thread AFTER all 3 Bluebird parts were up, ahem.)
They're flip about the very point that the story makes and which the ULA shows has no basis.
It would be more sane of them if they showed an example, or a work of art that contended that their presumption had a shred of merit. Has ANY artwork, or even serious economic theory, ever been created to support such an idea? Even their ironist heroes scoff at it. So why the two faces? Is it too shameful for them to actually live in the wretched system, and benefit from it, without speaking up against its closed doors as decency would naturally have it? C'mon some critique HAS to be tolerated, right? Your favorite art is lite but it's brave enough to include at least a little critique, right? What are you afraid of? Take some of what you read to heart: is there really room for everyone?
Efforts have to be made to create room. There isn't passively or naturally room. A system and its beneficiaries has to go out of its way. For there to be room, ULA work would be getting reviewed and ULA challenges would be accepted and debated in public and reported on. We might get trashed but so what. The "Michael"s should have the decency to see that it's far better than being ignored. They also have to admit that ignoring is a pop strategy among apparachiks. Otherwise, it's just embarrassing.
I don't quite get Noah's post, which is showy but doesn't seem to have much to do with the characters.
He's waiting for the last part, but the last part is up.
Maybe he's confused the three parts. It sounds like he hasn't read Part I. (The hazard of posting a long story on the Internet. The story is actually of one piece, but was too long not to break up.)
The two characters may be archetypes but they're hardly generic.
Alex is well described when introduced at the end of Part I.
MOST of Part I is involved with the background and early life of Melissa: "Bluebird." When the author spends this much time outlining a character. . . .
(My strategy was to gradually reveal the adult Bluebird the rest of the way, through others opinions toward, or devices like the magazine interview. Melissa IS the story, and if there's ultimately nothing there at the last encounter in the hotel room, then, maybe that's the point!)
******************
I probably should've stayed in the field I was in back in 1999, which at least was filled with fairly intelligent people. The literary world is a Bizarro Universe where everyone is deluded.
The writers themselves have lost all sense of literature-- REAL literature. One just needs to pull down any of the classics to see the stark difference in voice, intelligence, and conscience when contrasted with what's being offered today by the literati.
***********************
In the discussion below, someone brought up Denis Johnson. Okay, I looked up some of his stories.
What did I find?
The same-old voice of the New Yorker! It's easy to see how he made it. He plays by the rules.
Worth an essay: Today there's a dominant style of writing. Call it mono-style. (Or monopoly style.) It's not only reflected in most literary short stories, but even in entire novels, like the recent one by Jonathan Lethem I referred to.
It consists of endless consciousness. Absorption in the moment, which is
1.) Really absorption in the Self;
2.) Absorption in the bourgeois lifestyle; the things and consumption of things of the world.
Lethem can't mention breakfast in a restaurant as a step to telling the story itself. (The idea of the tale has pretty much been lost.)
Instead Lethem uses the opportunity to luxuriate in a description of eating breakfast. Don't those eggs at that restaurant taste good? Yum! Yes, we can taste the eggs with him, insterspersed with listening to some inane dialogue-- but what's the point? The breakfast itself?
There's no narrative momentum maintained because there's no narrative momentum to start with. There's only the writing-- endless pages of creative writing.
Lethem luxuriates in his prose; in the luxuries of the world.
I'm convinced the style is the result of the bourgeois mentality of all these writers.
But what a contrast to the great writers of other eras!
Read the openings of two stories:
A.) "Lost Face" by Jack London.
B.) "May Day" by Scott Fitzgerald,
to see the amazing difference in point of view; in the whole way the story is attacked.
Not incidentally, both stories were written when the short story was wildly popular as an art form-- as it definitely is NOT today.
Not everyone wants to absorb themselves in the solipsism of today's literary forms. . . .
For truly different voices, buy some ULA books.
No one would ever confuse the voices of Wred Fright, Crazy Carl, James Nowlan, or Jack Saunders.
No workshop crap among them anywhere to be found.
Read them and you're reading the new-- part of the excitement.
wenclas
i was talking about what a professional agent would say.
I like it.
I have gotten emails from agents and sent things not major presses but slightly big indie presses and they have told me things like that.
I was just telling you what they would say.
You are a fine person wenclas, keep writing, it flows well.
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