Corey Pung's Blog
March 6, 2013
Recommended Reading: The Scriptological Review by Tania James
One of the most common storylines in all of fiction is that of the son trying to reconnect with a lost father. Classical examples include Telemachus’ journey to find Odysseus and Perseus’ quest to reunite with his father and resume his place as rightful heir. Sometimes the father is already beyond reaching, as is the case with contemporary classics like Thomas Pynchon’s V., Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Incedibly Loud and Extremely Close. Tania James’ short story The Scriptological Review fits well into the Son-Father tradition but carries with it two distinctions: 1) it’s written by a woman, and 2) in this case, the object the son obsesses over isn’t his father’s writings, but his father’s handwriting itself.
The main character Vijay, on the outset of The Scriptological Review, seems like a pathetic figure. It’s first explained that he is the editor of a magazine devoted to the study of handwriting, only to subvert his achievement a few paragraphs later by explaining his magazine’s HQ is his mom’s basement, and that he publishes his work with her money. Then, in a few short pages, Tania James craftily makes us feel for her protagonist, as it’s suggested that his whole infatuation with handwriting is his way of trying to understand the life of his late father.
What attracted me most to The Scriptorium Review was the specificity of it. The story is peppered throughout with terminology artfully plucked from a scriptology textbook. I had to laugh when I read the line “Do certain types of t’s, like certain disorders, run in the family?”
Apart from the tragic undertone and the bittersweet resolution of The Scriptology Review, the story is worth reading for the delightfully clever way that Tania James reminds us that sometimes you don’t have to read between the lines: what’s on the page is important enough.
The Scriptological Review: A Last Letter from the Editor, can be found in Aerogrammes by Tania James.
--Reviewed by Corey Pung, author of A Rapturous Occasion
The main character Vijay, on the outset of The Scriptological Review, seems like a pathetic figure. It’s first explained that he is the editor of a magazine devoted to the study of handwriting, only to subvert his achievement a few paragraphs later by explaining his magazine’s HQ is his mom’s basement, and that he publishes his work with her money. Then, in a few short pages, Tania James craftily makes us feel for her protagonist, as it’s suggested that his whole infatuation with handwriting is his way of trying to understand the life of his late father.
What attracted me most to The Scriptorium Review was the specificity of it. The story is peppered throughout with terminology artfully plucked from a scriptology textbook. I had to laugh when I read the line “Do certain types of t’s, like certain disorders, run in the family?”
Apart from the tragic undertone and the bittersweet resolution of The Scriptology Review, the story is worth reading for the delightfully clever way that Tania James reminds us that sometimes you don’t have to read between the lines: what’s on the page is important enough.
The Scriptological Review: A Last Letter from the Editor, can be found in Aerogrammes by Tania James.
--Reviewed by Corey Pung, author of A Rapturous Occasion
January 28, 2013
Recommended Reading: Not One of Us by Patricia Highsmith
Not One Of Us, by Patricia Highsmith, is a short story I first remember finding while perusing through an anthology of suspenseful fiction when I was a preteen. My thoughts upon finishing it were “What an incredibly dark story!” and “I’m probably too young to be reading this…” Now, as more than ten years have passed, I have reread Not One Of Us and my thoughts are exactly the same.
Not One of Us concerns a stuffy and elitist circle of “friends” who meet regularly to gossip and deftly critique one another. I use the term friends in quotations because it’s revealed right away that the line between love and hate within this clique has become hopelessly blurred.
The brunt of the group’s collected malice is shifted onto Edmund Quasthoff, a man who has committed the most venal sin they can think of: he has become dull. I can’t help but think his unlikely name “Quasthoff” is a clever pun on ‘castoff,’ which is what poor Edward essentially is. The friends then decide its up to them to make Edmund interesting again, although it’s more for their benefit than his, which is made all too clear as their efforts become increasingly more insidious.
In Not One Of Us, Patricia Highsmith satirizes bourgeous pretensions in a surgically lacerating way that is rarely matched in American fiction. It’s a powerful story, and a brutal one.
Not One of Us can be found in The Selected Novels and Stories of Patricia Highsmith or in the collection titled The Black House.
--If you're looking for something else to read, check out my books A Rapturous Occasion and The Madness of Art: Short Stories
Not One of Us concerns a stuffy and elitist circle of “friends” who meet regularly to gossip and deftly critique one another. I use the term friends in quotations because it’s revealed right away that the line between love and hate within this clique has become hopelessly blurred.
The brunt of the group’s collected malice is shifted onto Edmund Quasthoff, a man who has committed the most venal sin they can think of: he has become dull. I can’t help but think his unlikely name “Quasthoff” is a clever pun on ‘castoff,’ which is what poor Edward essentially is. The friends then decide its up to them to make Edmund interesting again, although it’s more for their benefit than his, which is made all too clear as their efforts become increasingly more insidious.
In Not One Of Us, Patricia Highsmith satirizes bourgeous pretensions in a surgically lacerating way that is rarely matched in American fiction. It’s a powerful story, and a brutal one.
Not One of Us can be found in The Selected Novels and Stories of Patricia Highsmith or in the collection titled The Black House.
--If you're looking for something else to read, check out my books A Rapturous Occasion and The Madness of Art: Short Stories
November 28, 2012
Colette and the Taboo Subject of Love
When reading supposedly “scandalous” and “controversial” novels from the past, the reaction of the contemporary reader is nearly universal: it’s hard to find so much as the blemish of a taboo in comparison to what we are now accustomed to. One of the most famous banned books, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and the adultery that happens within its pages, now seems formulaic and even quaint: you can find a saucier novel in just about any supermarket these days. Even the stifled pederasty of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice seems almost innocuous in our Post-Sandusky world. Cheri, Colette’s masterpiece, remains one of the few 20th century classics that will still raise an eyebrow, and not because its protagonists–a woman in her forties and a boy in his late teens–make love, but because they are in love.
Cheri was published in France around 1920 and went on to receive acclaim from two of France’s most well-known taboo breaking authors, Andre Gide and Marcel Proust. Cheri’s author was Colette, a talented writer whose scandalous indiscretions were second only to Oscar Wilde’s in terms of fallout. She would have many affairs in her lifetime with partners male and female, the most infamous of which involved her own stepson (no blood ties at least). Despite all of this, her novel Cheri can hardly be called lewd or pornographic. If her books were deemed unfit for public consumption, it was only in the same sense that Mae West’s hysterical comedic style was watered down in the Code years.
The novel follows the last months of the relationship between Lea and Cheri. They had met when Lea was approaching forty and Cheri was a mere 18, and their ensuing romance lasted six years. To clear up some of the confusion you may have at this point, let me point out that Lea is female, and Cheri is male. It took me a few pages to determine the genders of the protagonists, since not only is Cheri’s name (or nickname) feminine, but his attitude is as well. I’m reminded of Marcel Proust’s response to the question ‘what are your favorite qualities in a man?’ To which he answered “Feminine charms.”
It’s suggested at the onset that both Cheri and Lea regard their relationship as strictly sexual, and they share very little romantic attachment to one another. A few chapters in, as Cheri announces his engagement to a woman closer to his own age, Lea takes the news affably, and the two even share a few laughs about it. As they amicably split up, they slowly realize what they’ve done is at best a trial separation, and it proves to be very trying indeed.
It’s only when apart that Lea and Cheri realize they must be together. It’s only when their feelings are revealed as love that the novel takes on a scandalous aspect. Earlier, their romance seemed questionable, but it’s not all that uncommon in today’s society for men to take up with older women–we even have a number of crassly comical terms for it. One thing we don’t expect to form from such bonds–apart from children–is love.
Love, even amongst secularists like myself, has a heft to it, a solemn side. Sex though can be written off, chocked up to youthful recklessness, or called a dalliance on life’s way. When love and taboo collide, the first reaction is to think that something very powerful and important is being besmirched. In the spirit of compassion, while taking baby steps, we can gradually accept that love absolves taboo. Colette, very gracefully while maintaining a wry smile, holds our hands while we make this transition.
--By Corey Pung, author of The Madness of Art: Short Stories and A Rapturous Occasion
Cheri was published in France around 1920 and went on to receive acclaim from two of France’s most well-known taboo breaking authors, Andre Gide and Marcel Proust. Cheri’s author was Colette, a talented writer whose scandalous indiscretions were second only to Oscar Wilde’s in terms of fallout. She would have many affairs in her lifetime with partners male and female, the most infamous of which involved her own stepson (no blood ties at least). Despite all of this, her novel Cheri can hardly be called lewd or pornographic. If her books were deemed unfit for public consumption, it was only in the same sense that Mae West’s hysterical comedic style was watered down in the Code years.
The novel follows the last months of the relationship between Lea and Cheri. They had met when Lea was approaching forty and Cheri was a mere 18, and their ensuing romance lasted six years. To clear up some of the confusion you may have at this point, let me point out that Lea is female, and Cheri is male. It took me a few pages to determine the genders of the protagonists, since not only is Cheri’s name (or nickname) feminine, but his attitude is as well. I’m reminded of Marcel Proust’s response to the question ‘what are your favorite qualities in a man?’ To which he answered “Feminine charms.”
It’s suggested at the onset that both Cheri and Lea regard their relationship as strictly sexual, and they share very little romantic attachment to one another. A few chapters in, as Cheri announces his engagement to a woman closer to his own age, Lea takes the news affably, and the two even share a few laughs about it. As they amicably split up, they slowly realize what they’ve done is at best a trial separation, and it proves to be very trying indeed.
It’s only when apart that Lea and Cheri realize they must be together. It’s only when their feelings are revealed as love that the novel takes on a scandalous aspect. Earlier, their romance seemed questionable, but it’s not all that uncommon in today’s society for men to take up with older women–we even have a number of crassly comical terms for it. One thing we don’t expect to form from such bonds–apart from children–is love.
Love, even amongst secularists like myself, has a heft to it, a solemn side. Sex though can be written off, chocked up to youthful recklessness, or called a dalliance on life’s way. When love and taboo collide, the first reaction is to think that something very powerful and important is being besmirched. In the spirit of compassion, while taking baby steps, we can gradually accept that love absolves taboo. Colette, very gracefully while maintaining a wry smile, holds our hands while we make this transition.
--By Corey Pung, author of The Madness of Art: Short Stories and A Rapturous Occasion
September 24, 2012
My Favorite Short Story Collections
Readers of my book The Madness of Art: Short Stories express mild embarassment when they meet me. They then admit they haven't yet read the whole book, but have been busy. I'm hoping this is the only reason for their embarassment.
In reality, this embarassment is completely baseless. Short story collections, in most cases, are not meant to be read cover to cover over a short time. Most authors write stories so infequently it takes years to have enough material for a book. Why then should the reader be expected to read the books more hastily than they were written?
Short stories are simply meant to collect dust on shelves. I might read one story today then not return to the book for a full year, and in some cases it's taken a decade for me to actually finish a collection. Other books on my shelves I'll probably never read every portion of--I own an awful lot of Chekov, for example. Every once in a while though I'll find a collection so captivating I end up reading every story in less than a year, and in some cases return to the stories again and again. Listed below are the collections that have collected the least dust on my shelves.
Dubliners, By James Joyce
I don't know if I'd be a writer today if not for Dubliners, specifically the story Araby, which I read at just the right time in my life--I was old enough to appreciate it, and young enough to be moved by it. It wasn't until five years after I discovered the book that I realized the stories followed an arc. The first story begins with childhood, then goes through every step in the average lifespan until concluding, appropriately, with a novella titled The Dead. In high school I wrote a dozen knock-offs of Dubliners-style stories, only to lose them somewhere in my attic. Let's hope I never find them again. Just about every writer of literary fiction has tried to imitate Dubliners and failed. Luckily, my failures never saw the light of day (although I must apologize to the friends and teachers I forced my work on!).
Sixty Stories, By Donald Barthelme
The title Sixty Stories sounds more daunting than the book itself really is. Instead, Sixty Stories is one of the breeziest collections out there. Nearly every story is five pages or less, and each contain a good laugh or two. These are often puzzling, baffling stories. If James Joyce had tried writing Dubliners later in his career, I'll bet some of his work would resemble what's collected here. Donald Barthelme freely plays with language, throws out highly illogical stories, and manages to upend whatever expectations the reader may have about what literature is supposed to be. Every year I re-read huge swatches of this book. If you're looking for something lighter in tone and actual weight, check out Donald Barthelme's earlier collection 40 Stories.
The Girl With Curious Hair, By David Foster Wallace
The Girl With Curious Hair is the book that first introduced me to the work of the late great David Foster Wallace, or DFW as he's known to his fans. Not only that, but it remains my favorite of his works. It's not nearly as depressing as his later collection Oblivion, nor is it as unsparingly bleak as Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Instead, The Girl With Curious Hair seems to be DFW's way of telling the world he can, and will, do everything. One story involves a love affair between Jeopardy contestants while another takes place entirely during a long journey to McDonald's.
Collected Fictions, By Jorge Luis Borges
This isn't just a collection of Jorge Luis Borges' short stories... it's a collection of his story collections. Again, like Sixty Stories, this sounds a lot more daunting than it really is. Collected Fictions includes every collection the much revered writer published in his long career, but once you accustom yourself to his dense prose style, you'll find these tales are actually quite thrilling and compulsively readable. I read every story in less than 6 months, and to this day I'm constantly compelled to go back and read my favorites such as "Funes the Memorious" and "The House of Asterion."
Check out my book
The Madness of Art: Short Stories
In reality, this embarassment is completely baseless. Short story collections, in most cases, are not meant to be read cover to cover over a short time. Most authors write stories so infequently it takes years to have enough material for a book. Why then should the reader be expected to read the books more hastily than they were written?
Short stories are simply meant to collect dust on shelves. I might read one story today then not return to the book for a full year, and in some cases it's taken a decade for me to actually finish a collection. Other books on my shelves I'll probably never read every portion of--I own an awful lot of Chekov, for example. Every once in a while though I'll find a collection so captivating I end up reading every story in less than a year, and in some cases return to the stories again and again. Listed below are the collections that have collected the least dust on my shelves.
Dubliners, By James Joyce
I don't know if I'd be a writer today if not for Dubliners, specifically the story Araby, which I read at just the right time in my life--I was old enough to appreciate it, and young enough to be moved by it. It wasn't until five years after I discovered the book that I realized the stories followed an arc. The first story begins with childhood, then goes through every step in the average lifespan until concluding, appropriately, with a novella titled The Dead. In high school I wrote a dozen knock-offs of Dubliners-style stories, only to lose them somewhere in my attic. Let's hope I never find them again. Just about every writer of literary fiction has tried to imitate Dubliners and failed. Luckily, my failures never saw the light of day (although I must apologize to the friends and teachers I forced my work on!).
Sixty Stories, By Donald Barthelme
The title Sixty Stories sounds more daunting than the book itself really is. Instead, Sixty Stories is one of the breeziest collections out there. Nearly every story is five pages or less, and each contain a good laugh or two. These are often puzzling, baffling stories. If James Joyce had tried writing Dubliners later in his career, I'll bet some of his work would resemble what's collected here. Donald Barthelme freely plays with language, throws out highly illogical stories, and manages to upend whatever expectations the reader may have about what literature is supposed to be. Every year I re-read huge swatches of this book. If you're looking for something lighter in tone and actual weight, check out Donald Barthelme's earlier collection 40 Stories.
The Girl With Curious Hair, By David Foster Wallace
The Girl With Curious Hair is the book that first introduced me to the work of the late great David Foster Wallace, or DFW as he's known to his fans. Not only that, but it remains my favorite of his works. It's not nearly as depressing as his later collection Oblivion, nor is it as unsparingly bleak as Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Instead, The Girl With Curious Hair seems to be DFW's way of telling the world he can, and will, do everything. One story involves a love affair between Jeopardy contestants while another takes place entirely during a long journey to McDonald's.
Collected Fictions, By Jorge Luis Borges
This isn't just a collection of Jorge Luis Borges' short stories... it's a collection of his story collections. Again, like Sixty Stories, this sounds a lot more daunting than it really is. Collected Fictions includes every collection the much revered writer published in his long career, but once you accustom yourself to his dense prose style, you'll find these tales are actually quite thrilling and compulsively readable. I read every story in less than 6 months, and to this day I'm constantly compelled to go back and read my favorites such as "Funes the Memorious" and "The House of Asterion."
Check out my book
The Madness of Art: Short Stories
September 19, 2012
Funny Flash Fiction: The Lust Generation
Here's a very short short story I wrote titled The Lust Generation. This story will be included in a collection I hope to publish later this year. For more fiction by me, please check out my books The Madness of Art: Short Stories and A Rapturous Occasion.
The Lust Generation
After a long day of prepping, primping, beautifying, finessing, and dressing, Constance was ready for a night of clubbing. She was dressed to the nines in the season’s finest fashion. Light and airy was in right now, clunky and layered was out. Effervescence was the new ideal. “There should be a certain effortlessness to a woman’s beauty,” this month’s issue of Couture Shock told her.
For the better part of two hours, she sifted through her closet for just the right combination of sex appeal and elegance. The trick was to include certain small elements that seemed out of place–a bracelet in a clashing color, for example, or a pair of jeans intended for fall. That way, people think, “Oh wow, look how pretty she is, despite how she obviously cares so little for fashion!” Her roommate watched on imperiously, quick to say yay or nay in the wittiest way possible.
Finally, she’d settled on a pair of heels from a Manhattan boutique, skinny jeans ordered from a Paris company called Jouissance, a limestone bracelet hand-made in Nepal, a jacket from Tehran, a dark purple scarf from Mumbai, kinky underwear from Maid in America, and lip gloss she found in a vegan co-op.
She was ready for the club, but dancing was only the first part of her projected night. According to last month’s edition of Charmed Life Quarterly, women were finding liberation in the world of casual encounters. The hook-up was the perfect way for a woman to meet her romantic needs while pursuing a career. Constance was wondering what exactly would get her career going.
Her roommate balked at the idea of the one-night stand, and took it one step further by saying the idea of responsibility-free sex being liberating for women sounded awfully misogynistic to begin with. But then, she was engaged to a real dead-ender, and was poor.
Things worked out swimmingly for Constance. At the second club she went to, she met someone. His personality was blah, his conversation blase, but his fashion? Tres chic! Plus, he was forward. The moment they stepped out of the club into the humid, neon blear of the night, he bluntly said to her, “Your clothes look good. I bet they’d look better on my floor.”
The taxi ride to his studio apartment was over in a heartbeat. As she stepped into his apartment, she thought with excitement, “This is it! I’m actually going through with it!”
Before he turned the light on, she began taking off her clothes, strewing them on the floor, trying as hard as possible to resist the urge to fold them up nicely. Soon, she was standing completely nude, near his bed, waiting.
And waiting.
Confusedly, Constance fumbled around and found a lamp on his nightstand and clicked it on. Then she saw him, completely dressed, on his knees pawing at her clothes.
“Wow,” he said, holding the hem of her jeans, “These are Jouissance?”
The End.
The Lust Generation
After a long day of prepping, primping, beautifying, finessing, and dressing, Constance was ready for a night of clubbing. She was dressed to the nines in the season’s finest fashion. Light and airy was in right now, clunky and layered was out. Effervescence was the new ideal. “There should be a certain effortlessness to a woman’s beauty,” this month’s issue of Couture Shock told her.
For the better part of two hours, she sifted through her closet for just the right combination of sex appeal and elegance. The trick was to include certain small elements that seemed out of place–a bracelet in a clashing color, for example, or a pair of jeans intended for fall. That way, people think, “Oh wow, look how pretty she is, despite how she obviously cares so little for fashion!” Her roommate watched on imperiously, quick to say yay or nay in the wittiest way possible.
Finally, she’d settled on a pair of heels from a Manhattan boutique, skinny jeans ordered from a Paris company called Jouissance, a limestone bracelet hand-made in Nepal, a jacket from Tehran, a dark purple scarf from Mumbai, kinky underwear from Maid in America, and lip gloss she found in a vegan co-op.
She was ready for the club, but dancing was only the first part of her projected night. According to last month’s edition of Charmed Life Quarterly, women were finding liberation in the world of casual encounters. The hook-up was the perfect way for a woman to meet her romantic needs while pursuing a career. Constance was wondering what exactly would get her career going.
Her roommate balked at the idea of the one-night stand, and took it one step further by saying the idea of responsibility-free sex being liberating for women sounded awfully misogynistic to begin with. But then, she was engaged to a real dead-ender, and was poor.
Things worked out swimmingly for Constance. At the second club she went to, she met someone. His personality was blah, his conversation blase, but his fashion? Tres chic! Plus, he was forward. The moment they stepped out of the club into the humid, neon blear of the night, he bluntly said to her, “Your clothes look good. I bet they’d look better on my floor.”
The taxi ride to his studio apartment was over in a heartbeat. As she stepped into his apartment, she thought with excitement, “This is it! I’m actually going through with it!”
Before he turned the light on, she began taking off her clothes, strewing them on the floor, trying as hard as possible to resist the urge to fold them up nicely. Soon, she was standing completely nude, near his bed, waiting.
And waiting.
Confusedly, Constance fumbled around and found a lamp on his nightstand and clicked it on. Then she saw him, completely dressed, on his knees pawing at her clothes.
“Wow,” he said, holding the hem of her jeans, “These are Jouissance?”
The End.
April 1, 2012
Read it for Free! Part 5 of The Shopper Awakes, A Short Story by Corey Pung
Here's the conclusion to my short story The Shopper Awakes. If you haven't already, read the other parts of the story first.
For Part 1:
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
Part 2
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
Part 3
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
Part 4
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
Part 5
Rita stood in the ruins of the coliseum where once upon a distant time she watched basketball and rock concerts. The skyboxes where she once noshed on cocktail shrimp and sipped martinis were now day-cares, and the dance floor and court were swelling with cheaply dressed people holding books where they should hold cell-phones, and had paunches where they should have had tight abs. The present was a whirligig version of the status quo she knew and loved and there was nothing she could do about it except await some manner of elucidation from today’s symposium, which at the very least was executed in the Greek fashion with wine passed around unreservedly, but it was as common and cheap and sanguine as everything else here.
Martha had brought her here to join the other wards of the state and lost youths in need of proper educations. She would be housed and catered to and respectfully mothered to some degree (countless degrees removed from what she was used to), until she either completed her education, found an occupation, or started a family, all of which weren’t by any estimation part of her five-year plan, or ten year for that matter. Education seemed the least strenuous of the three, but she wondered just how many hours she’d have to go through the motions. She asked Martha, “But when does education end?”
Martha laughed in an unintentionally deprecating way, “Never thought of that, really. Until true genius or death comes I suppose.”
With that, Martha smartly left, kindly vowing to visit on occasion. Rita meanwhile sulked and sunk into abject self-pity as the day’s lectures began.
The lectures were largely mandarin to her, full of references she couldn’t register, names she couldn’t place, and events that had no historical significance to her. There were a fair share of factoids from her time in the lecture that flew by like strange birds--remarks about the ghastliness of 20th century health-care plans, the pope and the Vietnam War. Overall, the idea was impressed upon her that she was a stranger in a strange land, or more precisely, a stranger in a strange time, a quite prominent symptom in the post-millennial period, even to those who weren’t time travelers. I myself was at the academy that day as a student, and took brief notice of her due to the gawkiness of her narrow hips and prominent bust and the unusualness of her dress. Bright and silky attire in this day and age? I was too absorbed in the day’s lecture to do anything more than stare for a moment and turn away.
It must’ve been only a few moments after I dismissed her as some Crazy Jane-type character that Rita did something truly remarkable for someone with her upbringing. Shorn of her 21st century gadgetry and gizmos, Rita had to take it upon herself to be resourceful. No longer could she simply resort to the internet for bits and pieces of information, she would have to invest time in saving her life. The academy was well stocked with books, more precious than gold and silk.
To give her some credit, books in her time were taboo, just as intellectuals were of the untouchable caste, so we shouldn’t be too hasty in mocking her when I point out here that she didn’t know what the Dewey decimal system was, and that she searched alphabetically by title. It was an exhausting process at first, considering she had to learn first hand the lay of the land without a guide or mentor, but our heroine was nothing if not tenacious, and was able, through chance or by grace, to locate a book detailing the events of the last century, i.e. what should have been her time.
As she sat down at a creaky desk in a poorly furnished study hall, Rita heaved a fitful sigh of resignation, gazing out at the shabby people in this shabby city, thinking, with some residual anger misdirected at her father, long dead, ‘this is what happens when you date smart people.’
Sarcastic or otherwise, there was some truth in her statement. After all, the world as we knew it was the product of people seeking intelligence in bedmates. Smart people eventually produce smart children, and smart children produce a smart society. If prettiness and vanity fall by the wayside, so be it. Excuse me for overlooking cultural relativity.
Perhaps for the first time, Rita read a book without being told to do so, without an enquiring eye hovering over her shoulder, without a reward in mind, and without the threat of flunking looming in her thoughts. It was through her own efforts that she learned why books had become so important. She read of how so many were burned or discarded after the war, and how the few that remained, the ones that were discovered in abandoned buildings or awaiting destruction at landfills, were cherished by the succeeding generations who had so presciently realized that some level of intelligence and talent were necessary for human life even in the most luxurious or decadent of times. That the world didn’t turn on entertainment and self-absorption alone was a lesson learned too late by many of her generation, but time’s caprice at this instance offered her a second chance, and I’d like to say our heroine seized it.
There are two schools of thought amongst my contemporaries who are intrigued by Rita’s curious life. Some will take an ironic and pessimistic approach, owing especially to the story circulating that Rita, on that day, in that study hall, was seen burying her head in her hands and exclaiming in a tone of disgust “What a terrible, terrible future this is.” The statement’s sheer oddness ensured it stuck out in the witnesses’ memories.
I though prefer to take a different approach, because later that day, in that selfsame study hall, I remember noticing in the dustbin a pair of strange shoes; bright and colorful things with pronged heels. Of course, I knew it was customary to reuse old clothes and materials as efficiently as possible, but I thought they looked too uncomfortable for anyone to wear and left them where they’d been abandoned. Sometimes I look back and think that maybe I should have extracted them and preserved them; they must have had some historical significance. At sentimental times though, I find myself dreamily imagining Rita walking out into the new world, steadfastly and barefoot.
Thanks for reading, everyone. If you'd like to own The Shopper Awakes and read 7 other short stories by me, please purchase my book The Madness of Art: Short Stories!
The Madness of Art: Short Stories
Also, check out my new public facebook page!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Corey-P...
For Part 1:
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
Part 2
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
Part 3
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
Part 4
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
Part 5
Rita stood in the ruins of the coliseum where once upon a distant time she watched basketball and rock concerts. The skyboxes where she once noshed on cocktail shrimp and sipped martinis were now day-cares, and the dance floor and court were swelling with cheaply dressed people holding books where they should hold cell-phones, and had paunches where they should have had tight abs. The present was a whirligig version of the status quo she knew and loved and there was nothing she could do about it except await some manner of elucidation from today’s symposium, which at the very least was executed in the Greek fashion with wine passed around unreservedly, but it was as common and cheap and sanguine as everything else here.
Martha had brought her here to join the other wards of the state and lost youths in need of proper educations. She would be housed and catered to and respectfully mothered to some degree (countless degrees removed from what she was used to), until she either completed her education, found an occupation, or started a family, all of which weren’t by any estimation part of her five-year plan, or ten year for that matter. Education seemed the least strenuous of the three, but she wondered just how many hours she’d have to go through the motions. She asked Martha, “But when does education end?”
Martha laughed in an unintentionally deprecating way, “Never thought of that, really. Until true genius or death comes I suppose.”
With that, Martha smartly left, kindly vowing to visit on occasion. Rita meanwhile sulked and sunk into abject self-pity as the day’s lectures began.
The lectures were largely mandarin to her, full of references she couldn’t register, names she couldn’t place, and events that had no historical significance to her. There were a fair share of factoids from her time in the lecture that flew by like strange birds--remarks about the ghastliness of 20th century health-care plans, the pope and the Vietnam War. Overall, the idea was impressed upon her that she was a stranger in a strange land, or more precisely, a stranger in a strange time, a quite prominent symptom in the post-millennial period, even to those who weren’t time travelers. I myself was at the academy that day as a student, and took brief notice of her due to the gawkiness of her narrow hips and prominent bust and the unusualness of her dress. Bright and silky attire in this day and age? I was too absorbed in the day’s lecture to do anything more than stare for a moment and turn away.
It must’ve been only a few moments after I dismissed her as some Crazy Jane-type character that Rita did something truly remarkable for someone with her upbringing. Shorn of her 21st century gadgetry and gizmos, Rita had to take it upon herself to be resourceful. No longer could she simply resort to the internet for bits and pieces of information, she would have to invest time in saving her life. The academy was well stocked with books, more precious than gold and silk.
To give her some credit, books in her time were taboo, just as intellectuals were of the untouchable caste, so we shouldn’t be too hasty in mocking her when I point out here that she didn’t know what the Dewey decimal system was, and that she searched alphabetically by title. It was an exhausting process at first, considering she had to learn first hand the lay of the land without a guide or mentor, but our heroine was nothing if not tenacious, and was able, through chance or by grace, to locate a book detailing the events of the last century, i.e. what should have been her time.
As she sat down at a creaky desk in a poorly furnished study hall, Rita heaved a fitful sigh of resignation, gazing out at the shabby people in this shabby city, thinking, with some residual anger misdirected at her father, long dead, ‘this is what happens when you date smart people.’
Sarcastic or otherwise, there was some truth in her statement. After all, the world as we knew it was the product of people seeking intelligence in bedmates. Smart people eventually produce smart children, and smart children produce a smart society. If prettiness and vanity fall by the wayside, so be it. Excuse me for overlooking cultural relativity.
Perhaps for the first time, Rita read a book without being told to do so, without an enquiring eye hovering over her shoulder, without a reward in mind, and without the threat of flunking looming in her thoughts. It was through her own efforts that she learned why books had become so important. She read of how so many were burned or discarded after the war, and how the few that remained, the ones that were discovered in abandoned buildings or awaiting destruction at landfills, were cherished by the succeeding generations who had so presciently realized that some level of intelligence and talent were necessary for human life even in the most luxurious or decadent of times. That the world didn’t turn on entertainment and self-absorption alone was a lesson learned too late by many of her generation, but time’s caprice at this instance offered her a second chance, and I’d like to say our heroine seized it.
There are two schools of thought amongst my contemporaries who are intrigued by Rita’s curious life. Some will take an ironic and pessimistic approach, owing especially to the story circulating that Rita, on that day, in that study hall, was seen burying her head in her hands and exclaiming in a tone of disgust “What a terrible, terrible future this is.” The statement’s sheer oddness ensured it stuck out in the witnesses’ memories.
I though prefer to take a different approach, because later that day, in that selfsame study hall, I remember noticing in the dustbin a pair of strange shoes; bright and colorful things with pronged heels. Of course, I knew it was customary to reuse old clothes and materials as efficiently as possible, but I thought they looked too uncomfortable for anyone to wear and left them where they’d been abandoned. Sometimes I look back and think that maybe I should have extracted them and preserved them; they must have had some historical significance. At sentimental times though, I find myself dreamily imagining Rita walking out into the new world, steadfastly and barefoot.
Thanks for reading, everyone. If you'd like to own The Shopper Awakes and read 7 other short stories by me, please purchase my book The Madness of Art: Short Stories!
The Madness of Art: Short Stories
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March 29, 2012
Read For Free My Short Story The Shopper Awakes, Part 4
Here's part 4 of my short story The Shopper Awakes. Only one more part left.
If you haven't read part 1, go to
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
For part 2
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
For Part 3
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
Part 4
What was beauty amidst decay? Rita thought of herself as dejected and alone, an outcast amongst ugliness. Hers was a feeling akin to culture shock, but not the wide-eyed wonder of the honeymooning tourist, but more like the creeping unease and paroxysms of pity prominent (she presumed) in those bleeding-heart philanthropists and kooky relief workers who braved out into third world countries on the nightly news, pleading for pledges. What did her father call them? Scam artists. But those were countries of the beleaguered and oppressed! This is America. Was America? Under the refuse and rubble, beyond the lushly overgrown plants, beside the milling pedestrians, she could see the skeleton of the old city, once vibrant and full of life. What happened? Did the democrats finally get their way?
Her stream of consciousness brooked into the River Styx when a voice, vaguely familiar, called her back into the present. She turned abruptly to see the thin woman from before, now with her pajamas tied tight and a ski jacket on. She definitely had a touch of the kindly matron about her, but Rita decided a little makeup wouldn’t hurt, and her red hair, faded to auburn in some places, could use some strawberry highlights, but otherwise she was approachable.
Winded from tracking Rita, the woman said, “I am surprised by how hard it was to follow you, what with those awful shoes you have on. I thought foot-binding was no longer practiced in your time. Barbaric, really, the shapes a woman had to contort herself to.”
Rita was surprised to be spoken to in this desolate place, rather than be mauled or panhandled. Was that pity she heard in the woman’s voice? “My time? You mean, you understand my situation?”
“Yes. Well, I pieced it together when I saw you in that neolithic outfit. I’ve been trailing you all morning.”
With the harum-scarum morning behind her, it took Rita a moment to place the face of this woman she had met just a short time before. It was Martha, the woman who had the smart-aleck wunderkind yapping at her ankles, whose house she had crashed at for a century. Why had she followed her? To attain some dusty curio, an attic antique? Rita was alive, opinionated, and would be resilient to the last; the woman would just have to contend with that.
The woman eyed her more judiciously and said, “Funny, my husband and I never did get why your generation wore such ridiculous get ups. I mean, those clothes exhibit neither form nor function. Really, I’d think even bloomers and petticoats had more practical advantages.”
Martha’s nasty vitriol was met with base boldness from Rita. “You can’t talk to me like that. I’m the daughter of Charles Jonquil.” She paused, waiting for the fact to register. “The millionaire. I’m beautiful and my clothes are beautiful. It seems to me your entire awful culture has forgotten that beauty is an art.”
Martha took offense to her whole life being so roundly dismissed, “Then you’re not much of an artist.”
“What?”
“From heaven or hell, beauty, come you hence?” Martha waited for her deft quotation to register.
“Charles Baudelaire. To oversimplify the works of Kant, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if you would just open yours a bit wider, you might see this isn’t the hellish and ugly place you take it for.”
“But these are the ruins of the city I loved, the trash heap of a scene I was very much a part of. I guess I’m not in Kansas anymore.”
Martha hadn’t got the reference; apparently The Wizard of Oz wasn’t the timeless classic Rita hoped it to be. As a side note, I have since researched the film in question, and it’s rumored a few copies may exist, but are highly prized and coveted, screened once in a blue moon for ardent fans.
Relishing the opportunity, Martha went on to fill in the immense blank in Rita’s mind that was the preceding century with information, pared to the essentials for her benefit. The third world war, with all its blood and glory, was sized down to just a few raw chunks of facts. It was, and still is, a touchy subject. The post-war period, not to be confused with the postmodern period that had ended with the treaty, occupied a greater place in their minds for its relevance to Rita’s predicament.
It was the cultural purge after the war that made Rita such an outsider in the present, that time when humanity, what dregs were left of it, decided to rid themselves of what they assumed to have triggered the crises: the intellectual clutter that was shelved in the storerooms of history. Books, as many of you know, were largely destroyed or discarded for espousing ideals and morals contrary to the peacekeeping forces known as bureaucracy and blithe ignorance. Those which survived were those with no ideas beyond the status quo and no morals unconnected with commerce. Films not content to be empty entertainment were liquidated, including Things to come of course, and even Rita’s beloved The Wizard of Oz. It was a shopper’s paradise following the war, and many of my more agnostic readers must think that would have been the proper time for fate to snap our heroine awake. Our time had something else in store for her. Rita was both enthralled and mortified to hear what followed the post-war consumer bubble, but the biggest surprise was yet to come.
With loving reverence, Martha then mentioned the man who roused the world from its somnolence, Richard King. The name struck Rita as familiar, but again, her life was such a blur at the moment that all those who figured into it were just streaks of light shooting away from her, leaving her in the lonely dark. She explained how Richard had championed self-development in the face of crushing materialism and utter exhaustion with a number of books, essays, and films, distributed like contraband amongst remaining intellectuals. With those gestures, he thoroughly debased society as Rita knew it, leaving in its place destitution and desuetude. Poor Rita didn’t yet see the beauty in this.
Martha then went into greater detail about the malcontented messiah, explaining how he began putting reforms in place after losing the great love of his life at a movie theater. As legend has it, she rejected him wholesale by storming out of the theater, never to return his calls or reply to his emails. Heartache, as historians like myself know all too well, can cause man to go to great lengths just to pacify the afflictions in his heart. As he saw it, it was the superficial aspect of society that induced such cruelty in his lover and he aimed to change that. So flows history, and so on, and so on. I’m not here to give a history lesson, but I bring this up to point out one crucial fact. The spirited woman in the legend and our heroine were one and the same. Rita nearly had a nervous collapse when she realized this connection.
The depressing cityscape around her took on a morbid dreamlike quality as it slowly set on her that she herself had an integral part to play in its current outcome. If she had only watched the film contemplatively instead of dashing out to make calls! The revelation caused in her such dizziness she could do nothing to alleviate it but blurt it out. “I was her! I was the lost girl!”
“You were she!” Martha was ecstatic. “You know, you’re quite a mystery to most of us, like the Dark Lady of the Sonnets... Or Empress Josephine. We must consult the scholars with this discovery. Did you know him?”
“Only for about an hour or so. I don’t get how he could feel so much for me in such short time. I only really talked to him during the previews.”
“True love doesn’t need to mull things over.”
“Jeez, maybe I underestimated him.”
“Maybe!”
That's it for now. If you want to read all of this story plus seven more, check out my book The Madness of Art: Short Stories available on Amazon in paperback and as an ebook.
The Madness of Art: Short Stories
Check back soon for the conclusion.
If you haven't read part 1, go to
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
For part 2
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
For Part 3
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
Part 4
What was beauty amidst decay? Rita thought of herself as dejected and alone, an outcast amongst ugliness. Hers was a feeling akin to culture shock, but not the wide-eyed wonder of the honeymooning tourist, but more like the creeping unease and paroxysms of pity prominent (she presumed) in those bleeding-heart philanthropists and kooky relief workers who braved out into third world countries on the nightly news, pleading for pledges. What did her father call them? Scam artists. But those were countries of the beleaguered and oppressed! This is America. Was America? Under the refuse and rubble, beyond the lushly overgrown plants, beside the milling pedestrians, she could see the skeleton of the old city, once vibrant and full of life. What happened? Did the democrats finally get their way?
Her stream of consciousness brooked into the River Styx when a voice, vaguely familiar, called her back into the present. She turned abruptly to see the thin woman from before, now with her pajamas tied tight and a ski jacket on. She definitely had a touch of the kindly matron about her, but Rita decided a little makeup wouldn’t hurt, and her red hair, faded to auburn in some places, could use some strawberry highlights, but otherwise she was approachable.
Winded from tracking Rita, the woman said, “I am surprised by how hard it was to follow you, what with those awful shoes you have on. I thought foot-binding was no longer practiced in your time. Barbaric, really, the shapes a woman had to contort herself to.”
Rita was surprised to be spoken to in this desolate place, rather than be mauled or panhandled. Was that pity she heard in the woman’s voice? “My time? You mean, you understand my situation?”
“Yes. Well, I pieced it together when I saw you in that neolithic outfit. I’ve been trailing you all morning.”
With the harum-scarum morning behind her, it took Rita a moment to place the face of this woman she had met just a short time before. It was Martha, the woman who had the smart-aleck wunderkind yapping at her ankles, whose house she had crashed at for a century. Why had she followed her? To attain some dusty curio, an attic antique? Rita was alive, opinionated, and would be resilient to the last; the woman would just have to contend with that.
The woman eyed her more judiciously and said, “Funny, my husband and I never did get why your generation wore such ridiculous get ups. I mean, those clothes exhibit neither form nor function. Really, I’d think even bloomers and petticoats had more practical advantages.”
Martha’s nasty vitriol was met with base boldness from Rita. “You can’t talk to me like that. I’m the daughter of Charles Jonquil.” She paused, waiting for the fact to register. “The millionaire. I’m beautiful and my clothes are beautiful. It seems to me your entire awful culture has forgotten that beauty is an art.”
Martha took offense to her whole life being so roundly dismissed, “Then you’re not much of an artist.”
“What?”
“From heaven or hell, beauty, come you hence?” Martha waited for her deft quotation to register.
“Charles Baudelaire. To oversimplify the works of Kant, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if you would just open yours a bit wider, you might see this isn’t the hellish and ugly place you take it for.”
“But these are the ruins of the city I loved, the trash heap of a scene I was very much a part of. I guess I’m not in Kansas anymore.”
Martha hadn’t got the reference; apparently The Wizard of Oz wasn’t the timeless classic Rita hoped it to be. As a side note, I have since researched the film in question, and it’s rumored a few copies may exist, but are highly prized and coveted, screened once in a blue moon for ardent fans.
Relishing the opportunity, Martha went on to fill in the immense blank in Rita’s mind that was the preceding century with information, pared to the essentials for her benefit. The third world war, with all its blood and glory, was sized down to just a few raw chunks of facts. It was, and still is, a touchy subject. The post-war period, not to be confused with the postmodern period that had ended with the treaty, occupied a greater place in their minds for its relevance to Rita’s predicament.
It was the cultural purge after the war that made Rita such an outsider in the present, that time when humanity, what dregs were left of it, decided to rid themselves of what they assumed to have triggered the crises: the intellectual clutter that was shelved in the storerooms of history. Books, as many of you know, were largely destroyed or discarded for espousing ideals and morals contrary to the peacekeeping forces known as bureaucracy and blithe ignorance. Those which survived were those with no ideas beyond the status quo and no morals unconnected with commerce. Films not content to be empty entertainment were liquidated, including Things to come of course, and even Rita’s beloved The Wizard of Oz. It was a shopper’s paradise following the war, and many of my more agnostic readers must think that would have been the proper time for fate to snap our heroine awake. Our time had something else in store for her. Rita was both enthralled and mortified to hear what followed the post-war consumer bubble, but the biggest surprise was yet to come.
With loving reverence, Martha then mentioned the man who roused the world from its somnolence, Richard King. The name struck Rita as familiar, but again, her life was such a blur at the moment that all those who figured into it were just streaks of light shooting away from her, leaving her in the lonely dark. She explained how Richard had championed self-development in the face of crushing materialism and utter exhaustion with a number of books, essays, and films, distributed like contraband amongst remaining intellectuals. With those gestures, he thoroughly debased society as Rita knew it, leaving in its place destitution and desuetude. Poor Rita didn’t yet see the beauty in this.
Martha then went into greater detail about the malcontented messiah, explaining how he began putting reforms in place after losing the great love of his life at a movie theater. As legend has it, she rejected him wholesale by storming out of the theater, never to return his calls or reply to his emails. Heartache, as historians like myself know all too well, can cause man to go to great lengths just to pacify the afflictions in his heart. As he saw it, it was the superficial aspect of society that induced such cruelty in his lover and he aimed to change that. So flows history, and so on, and so on. I’m not here to give a history lesson, but I bring this up to point out one crucial fact. The spirited woman in the legend and our heroine were one and the same. Rita nearly had a nervous collapse when she realized this connection.
The depressing cityscape around her took on a morbid dreamlike quality as it slowly set on her that she herself had an integral part to play in its current outcome. If she had only watched the film contemplatively instead of dashing out to make calls! The revelation caused in her such dizziness she could do nothing to alleviate it but blurt it out. “I was her! I was the lost girl!”
“You were she!” Martha was ecstatic. “You know, you’re quite a mystery to most of us, like the Dark Lady of the Sonnets... Or Empress Josephine. We must consult the scholars with this discovery. Did you know him?”
“Only for about an hour or so. I don’t get how he could feel so much for me in such short time. I only really talked to him during the previews.”
“True love doesn’t need to mull things over.”
“Jeez, maybe I underestimated him.”
“Maybe!”
That's it for now. If you want to read all of this story plus seven more, check out my book The Madness of Art: Short Stories available on Amazon in paperback and as an ebook.
The Madness of Art: Short Stories
Check back soon for the conclusion.
March 27, 2012
Read The Short Story The Shopper Awakes For Free, Part 3
I've decided to let people read my short story The Shopper Awakes for free. Here's part 3. If you haven't read part 1, go to
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
If you want to read part 2, go to
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
Part 3
She thought she understood it at once: the street signs read Hawthorne, a place unremarkable except for a few vintage clothes stores and was known to be hostile to people of her dignity and background. She knew she would be infinitely better off if she could make it to the heart of the commercial district or at least to the trendier areas of the Pearl. The battery of her cell was dead, having dwindled into nothingness a century ago, but as far as she knew, it was busted, since she distinctly remembered charging it on the way to the theater. Desperate, she tried to hail a cab but none appeared. She tried to hitch a ride but drivers glared at her like she escaped from the funny farm. She felt like she was the worst thing imaginable to her: provincial. A townie. Someone with a trade. Someone with a trade, but she had no trade—that would at least be a consolation. Finally, she settled for a bus.
To her surprise, none of her fellow passengers stared at her with thinly veiled envy or awkwardly muted lust, both of which could be pleasant in their own way. Instead, they looked at her as if there was something off, not quite right, amiss, and she knew very well everything was in its right place with her, in the right proportion, in the finest fashion. Was it, she wondered, the plunging neckline of her dress, or the highness of her hem? These people were too conservative, she thought, or not conservative enough.
The bus divested itself of her at the entrance to Clackamas Town Center as she’d demanded it to. As she got out, she was given a vision of something uncompromisingly post-apocalyptic, like something out of a movie... Like the town in the movie she had just watched half of. She foggily recalled the squalid setting of the film, a place simply called Every Town, full of bitter maids and horrid men and no glamour whatsoever. For our heroine, based upon her slightly prejudiced perception, every town in our world had become Every Town.
The shambles of the towering mall were the clearest example of the frightfulness of the new world. Gone were the monolithic giant advertisements of mostly nude and anorexic European models. Gone were the humble shop clerks who followed her like wide-eyed puppies. Gone were the pretzels, the smoothies, the manicure parlors, the sensory deprivation tanks, the redundant theaters, and the twenty-minute colonoscopy clinics. In their place? Inspired portraits of Edith Wharton, Nat King Cole, Carl Jung, H.G. Wells, Eugene Delacroix, Nina Simone, Lord Byron, Susan Sontag, Ray Bradbury and other people she didn’t know of or recognize. The stores each looked more like living rooms than high-end boutiques, and lower-class living rooms at that. Overall, it looked the same as the department store she woke in. There were children bathing and singing in the koi pond, and Beethoven played over the PA system. She wondered bleakly, what fount of grubbiness was this?
Hoping to find some dim sign of sanity amidst this vast cultural dereliction, Rita honed in on miasmal photons illuminating a darkened corner of a nearby store, knowing there to be either a TV--the twentieth century’s mainspring of information--or a computer--the twenty-first’s. Poor Rita had to settle on a product out of the past; it was a UHF TV haunting the lonely end of the store, and a shabby one at that, with rabbit ears and about eight stations on the dial. For her generation, keep in mind, there was never enough. A commercial played on the set. The narrator had the perfected bland-but-comforting voice, wonderful for hawking wares, and the footage was lighted with indulgent phosphorus, redolent of cleanliness and sterility. He spoke in a sort of mock-whine, “Are you tired of having hard to place existential angst? Tired of dry, irritating platitudes from men who claim to be latter-day philosopher kings? Then try our new three volume set for a change! Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, all for three easy payments of $8.99. But wait, there’s more. Order at your leisure and receive this complimentary volume of Camus for free.”
Rita was puzzled; she’d never heard of those bands. She changed the station to another ad featuring a voice similar to the last, sophisticated-yet-androgynous, who said, “Hi there. If you’re like me, you’re sick of writing embarrassing invitations and RSVPs that reveal gaps in your cultural understanding. That is why we are happy to offer the new and updated universal calendar, now featuring chronology respectful to many different beliefs and cosmologies, including Christian, Orthodox Judaism, Gregorian, Mayan, Traditional Chinese, and many more. For you film buffs out there, we’re presenting a timeline where 1967 becomes Cinema Year Zero.”
The camera panned to the calendar, devastating Rita. The year was 2110--or year 143 for cineastes.
How completely horrible, her phone plan must’ve expired long ago! How could she call anyone? Wait! Who could she call? Things were worse than she could possibly imagine--a life of happiness had that problem.
Fate hadn’t allotted her the time to consider the full breadth of her misfortune. A slouching bedraggled middle-aged man in a raggedy housecoat and cut-off jean shorts pointed at her while exclaiming, “What are you doing in my house...”
She turned as if to run.
“Without a drink or something to snack on?”
Even as his hostility was cordially unmasked as hospitality, she ran from the ruins of the department store, thoroughly at a loss--weirded out. The department store was his house? She scooted along yellowing tiles in heels.
If you'd like to read all of The Shopper Awakes plus seven more short stories by me, check out my book The Madness of Art: Short Stories!
Check back tomorrow to see Part 4!
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
If you want to read part 2, go to
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
Part 3
She thought she understood it at once: the street signs read Hawthorne, a place unremarkable except for a few vintage clothes stores and was known to be hostile to people of her dignity and background. She knew she would be infinitely better off if she could make it to the heart of the commercial district or at least to the trendier areas of the Pearl. The battery of her cell was dead, having dwindled into nothingness a century ago, but as far as she knew, it was busted, since she distinctly remembered charging it on the way to the theater. Desperate, she tried to hail a cab but none appeared. She tried to hitch a ride but drivers glared at her like she escaped from the funny farm. She felt like she was the worst thing imaginable to her: provincial. A townie. Someone with a trade. Someone with a trade, but she had no trade—that would at least be a consolation. Finally, she settled for a bus.
To her surprise, none of her fellow passengers stared at her with thinly veiled envy or awkwardly muted lust, both of which could be pleasant in their own way. Instead, they looked at her as if there was something off, not quite right, amiss, and she knew very well everything was in its right place with her, in the right proportion, in the finest fashion. Was it, she wondered, the plunging neckline of her dress, or the highness of her hem? These people were too conservative, she thought, or not conservative enough.
The bus divested itself of her at the entrance to Clackamas Town Center as she’d demanded it to. As she got out, she was given a vision of something uncompromisingly post-apocalyptic, like something out of a movie... Like the town in the movie she had just watched half of. She foggily recalled the squalid setting of the film, a place simply called Every Town, full of bitter maids and horrid men and no glamour whatsoever. For our heroine, based upon her slightly prejudiced perception, every town in our world had become Every Town.
The shambles of the towering mall were the clearest example of the frightfulness of the new world. Gone were the monolithic giant advertisements of mostly nude and anorexic European models. Gone were the humble shop clerks who followed her like wide-eyed puppies. Gone were the pretzels, the smoothies, the manicure parlors, the sensory deprivation tanks, the redundant theaters, and the twenty-minute colonoscopy clinics. In their place? Inspired portraits of Edith Wharton, Nat King Cole, Carl Jung, H.G. Wells, Eugene Delacroix, Nina Simone, Lord Byron, Susan Sontag, Ray Bradbury and other people she didn’t know of or recognize. The stores each looked more like living rooms than high-end boutiques, and lower-class living rooms at that. Overall, it looked the same as the department store she woke in. There were children bathing and singing in the koi pond, and Beethoven played over the PA system. She wondered bleakly, what fount of grubbiness was this?
Hoping to find some dim sign of sanity amidst this vast cultural dereliction, Rita honed in on miasmal photons illuminating a darkened corner of a nearby store, knowing there to be either a TV--the twentieth century’s mainspring of information--or a computer--the twenty-first’s. Poor Rita had to settle on a product out of the past; it was a UHF TV haunting the lonely end of the store, and a shabby one at that, with rabbit ears and about eight stations on the dial. For her generation, keep in mind, there was never enough. A commercial played on the set. The narrator had the perfected bland-but-comforting voice, wonderful for hawking wares, and the footage was lighted with indulgent phosphorus, redolent of cleanliness and sterility. He spoke in a sort of mock-whine, “Are you tired of having hard to place existential angst? Tired of dry, irritating platitudes from men who claim to be latter-day philosopher kings? Then try our new three volume set for a change! Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, all for three easy payments of $8.99. But wait, there’s more. Order at your leisure and receive this complimentary volume of Camus for free.”
Rita was puzzled; she’d never heard of those bands. She changed the station to another ad featuring a voice similar to the last, sophisticated-yet-androgynous, who said, “Hi there. If you’re like me, you’re sick of writing embarrassing invitations and RSVPs that reveal gaps in your cultural understanding. That is why we are happy to offer the new and updated universal calendar, now featuring chronology respectful to many different beliefs and cosmologies, including Christian, Orthodox Judaism, Gregorian, Mayan, Traditional Chinese, and many more. For you film buffs out there, we’re presenting a timeline where 1967 becomes Cinema Year Zero.”
The camera panned to the calendar, devastating Rita. The year was 2110--or year 143 for cineastes.
How completely horrible, her phone plan must’ve expired long ago! How could she call anyone? Wait! Who could she call? Things were worse than she could possibly imagine--a life of happiness had that problem.
Fate hadn’t allotted her the time to consider the full breadth of her misfortune. A slouching bedraggled middle-aged man in a raggedy housecoat and cut-off jean shorts pointed at her while exclaiming, “What are you doing in my house...”
She turned as if to run.
“Without a drink or something to snack on?”
Even as his hostility was cordially unmasked as hospitality, she ran from the ruins of the department store, thoroughly at a loss--weirded out. The department store was his house? She scooted along yellowing tiles in heels.
If you'd like to read all of The Shopper Awakes plus seven more short stories by me, check out my book The Madness of Art: Short Stories!
Check back tomorrow to see Part 4!
March 26, 2012
Read My Short Story The Shopper Awakes For Free Online, Part 2
If you haven't read part one of The Shopper Awakes, click on the following link. http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
Part 2
The Third World War... The subject is rather dear to me, and has been exhaustively and astutely chronicled by others, so let’s just say the Third World War came and went and is mostly incidental to our tale, only mentioned here because of its role in Rita’s gradual reawakening after she was presumed dead or on vacation for many years. It was shortly after the war that the bereaved and grieving public, looking for someone or something to blame, turned their firebrands and tossed their bricks on museums, art-house theaters, and libraries. It was the biggest bonfire since Alexandria smoldered, except this purge was perpetrated with a wonderful sense of cheery benevolence, and it’s said the ashes of books and paintings and so on were properly mulched, the earth being a popular cause at the time. Purportedly, camp fire songs were sung.
It was in the heaps of rubble that Rita was found, but she looked so comfortable in her coma that she earned the crowd’s sympathy and was left in a state of sublime slumber, and when, in short time, a mini-mall was constructed over the ruins of the former culture, the foremen were kind enough to build around her and pave over her. The mini-mall was built complete with a multiplex, but mankind learned from its apparent mistake, and made certain the films were of the most derivative and shallow quality, certain not to place an idea in the viewer’s mind that was not already there. Authors were prescribed the same aesthetic, and so began the era of Innocuous Realism.
Luckily for our heroine, the mini-mall was as well composed as the chintzy and flashy goods it hawked, and wasn’t built to last or even sustain human life for more than a few seasons, but was surprisingly accommodating to the comatose. The floor collapsed like the end of an empire and history was put into a rare state of flux. In the gathering dust and confusion, as a dozen broken bottles of perfume wafted into the air, Rita was stirred awake from her hundred-year catnap feeling nothing worse than an ice-cream headache.
“I don’t think I’ve been in this store before,” she said as she stood up on wobbly pins and dusted herself off. Surveying the absurd scene, she caught sight of a group of people milling about the store in different stages of undress, and not the sexy or marketable stages either. They wore tattered and stained jeans that weren’t fashionably tattered or stained by the factory. They wore crummy flannel and not the chic variety of crummy flannel. Worse, their shoes didn’t match the outfits, but then, steel toed hiking boots didn’t match much of anything. One man was in a shaggy bath robe standing beside an infant in nothing but a diaper held together by painter’s tape and safety pins, waddling about, blissfully ignorant of his own fashion faux pas. The shelves and glass display cases were cluttered with bric-a-brac, aged appliances, dusty books, and the clothes on the racks were as offensive to her senses as what the customers had on. “What is this,” she gasped in fright, “an outlet store?”
A thin woman in oversized maternity pajamas stared at Rita a moment before hollering to her husband in the robe, “Dear, if you are going to invite company over, at least exercise discretion in mentioning it to me so I may prepare appetizers and aperitifs. I swear, my love, you sometimes exhibit the mental acuity of a child first introduced to Hegel’s phenomenological musings.”
Rita stared, alternating between states of awe and blankness, as if she were hearing another language for the first time. The future, for her, was byzantine.
“Oh come now, Martha,” he replied, shrugging. “You and I both know I caused such a controversy by dismissing Hegel on the grounds that he overlooked the central tenets of cultural relativity in his critique of history. I objected to how he contrived an idea of progress appealing to men of his social set, but not applying to the heterogeneous forms of mankind.”
“Dada,” the infant gurgled in a cute high voice as it tried to stand up, “I thought we satisfactorily concluded your refusal of Hegel part and parcel was, how shall I put this? Passé, rooted inextricably in your salad days as a glossy-eyed secular humanist.”
“Junior!” His mother scolded him.
“Besides,” the father said, “I didn’t invite her. The floor gave in and out popped this waifish girl, sleep in her eyes, like a regular Rip Van Winkle.”
The woman replied in Rita’s defense, “Just because she’s dressed so old-fashioned doesn’t mean you must compare her to Rip. Women don’t like being compared to grizzled and bearded men in trousers. Call her, umm, Sleeping Beauty.”
“My name,” she blurted, “is Rita.”
“Or Rita Van Winkle.”
“Junior!”
Before they had the chance to sauté the salmon they set aside for special occasions, Rita bolted out the automatic sliding doors, barefoot in stockings, holding her pastel heels behind her like dim children.
If you would like to own The Shopper Awakes and read 7 other tales by me, please purchase my book The Madness of Art: Short Stories, available on Amazon in paperback and as an ebook.
http://www.amazon.com/Madness-Art-Sho...
If you'd like to read more of The Shopper Awakes for free, check back in tomorrow.
Also, please check out my new public Facebook page
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Corey-P...
Part 2
The Third World War... The subject is rather dear to me, and has been exhaustively and astutely chronicled by others, so let’s just say the Third World War came and went and is mostly incidental to our tale, only mentioned here because of its role in Rita’s gradual reawakening after she was presumed dead or on vacation for many years. It was shortly after the war that the bereaved and grieving public, looking for someone or something to blame, turned their firebrands and tossed their bricks on museums, art-house theaters, and libraries. It was the biggest bonfire since Alexandria smoldered, except this purge was perpetrated with a wonderful sense of cheery benevolence, and it’s said the ashes of books and paintings and so on were properly mulched, the earth being a popular cause at the time. Purportedly, camp fire songs were sung.
It was in the heaps of rubble that Rita was found, but she looked so comfortable in her coma that she earned the crowd’s sympathy and was left in a state of sublime slumber, and when, in short time, a mini-mall was constructed over the ruins of the former culture, the foremen were kind enough to build around her and pave over her. The mini-mall was built complete with a multiplex, but mankind learned from its apparent mistake, and made certain the films were of the most derivative and shallow quality, certain not to place an idea in the viewer’s mind that was not already there. Authors were prescribed the same aesthetic, and so began the era of Innocuous Realism.
Luckily for our heroine, the mini-mall was as well composed as the chintzy and flashy goods it hawked, and wasn’t built to last or even sustain human life for more than a few seasons, but was surprisingly accommodating to the comatose. The floor collapsed like the end of an empire and history was put into a rare state of flux. In the gathering dust and confusion, as a dozen broken bottles of perfume wafted into the air, Rita was stirred awake from her hundred-year catnap feeling nothing worse than an ice-cream headache.
“I don’t think I’ve been in this store before,” she said as she stood up on wobbly pins and dusted herself off. Surveying the absurd scene, she caught sight of a group of people milling about the store in different stages of undress, and not the sexy or marketable stages either. They wore tattered and stained jeans that weren’t fashionably tattered or stained by the factory. They wore crummy flannel and not the chic variety of crummy flannel. Worse, their shoes didn’t match the outfits, but then, steel toed hiking boots didn’t match much of anything. One man was in a shaggy bath robe standing beside an infant in nothing but a diaper held together by painter’s tape and safety pins, waddling about, blissfully ignorant of his own fashion faux pas. The shelves and glass display cases were cluttered with bric-a-brac, aged appliances, dusty books, and the clothes on the racks were as offensive to her senses as what the customers had on. “What is this,” she gasped in fright, “an outlet store?”
A thin woman in oversized maternity pajamas stared at Rita a moment before hollering to her husband in the robe, “Dear, if you are going to invite company over, at least exercise discretion in mentioning it to me so I may prepare appetizers and aperitifs. I swear, my love, you sometimes exhibit the mental acuity of a child first introduced to Hegel’s phenomenological musings.”
Rita stared, alternating between states of awe and blankness, as if she were hearing another language for the first time. The future, for her, was byzantine.
“Oh come now, Martha,” he replied, shrugging. “You and I both know I caused such a controversy by dismissing Hegel on the grounds that he overlooked the central tenets of cultural relativity in his critique of history. I objected to how he contrived an idea of progress appealing to men of his social set, but not applying to the heterogeneous forms of mankind.”
“Dada,” the infant gurgled in a cute high voice as it tried to stand up, “I thought we satisfactorily concluded your refusal of Hegel part and parcel was, how shall I put this? Passé, rooted inextricably in your salad days as a glossy-eyed secular humanist.”
“Junior!” His mother scolded him.
“Besides,” the father said, “I didn’t invite her. The floor gave in and out popped this waifish girl, sleep in her eyes, like a regular Rip Van Winkle.”
The woman replied in Rita’s defense, “Just because she’s dressed so old-fashioned doesn’t mean you must compare her to Rip. Women don’t like being compared to grizzled and bearded men in trousers. Call her, umm, Sleeping Beauty.”
“My name,” she blurted, “is Rita.”
“Or Rita Van Winkle.”
“Junior!”
Before they had the chance to sauté the salmon they set aside for special occasions, Rita bolted out the automatic sliding doors, barefoot in stockings, holding her pastel heels behind her like dim children.
If you would like to own The Shopper Awakes and read 7 other tales by me, please purchase my book The Madness of Art: Short Stories, available on Amazon in paperback and as an ebook.
http://www.amazon.com/Madness-Art-Sho...
If you'd like to read more of The Shopper Awakes for free, check back in tomorrow.
Also, please check out my new public Facebook page
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Corey-P...
March 25, 2012
Read The Shopper Awakes For Free Online, Part 1
To stir up interest in my book The Madness of Art: Short Stories, I've decided to go ahead and let people read one of the short stories for free online. The story I chose is The Shopper Awakes, a time-travel yarn about a fashionista who inexplicably wakes up at a future time when it's no longer fashionable to be fashionable. Each day I'll upload the next section of the story until it's complete. *Note: although I'm allowing people to read this for free, normal copyright laws still apply. Please don't make me regret this...
The Shopper Awakes
Rita supposed she had every right to glibly blame her father for her death, but since she was reborn, she decided it best not to hold it against him.
The vile mess all began because Daddy insisted she should devote herself to intelligent and ambitious men, not the ‘magnificent dregs’ as he summarily dismissed her past intrigues as. Up until that proclamation, her criteria for romance revolved around Attitude, Body and Cleanliness, although why that was separate from Body, this humble chronicler doesn’t pretend to know. The 21st century had its eccentricities, and we can leave it at that.
It was her misfortune that if Intellect was suddenly the deciding factor, her other hopes would have to be jettisoned, meaning she would have to settle for substandard material if she was to keep her charge cards and servants. The man she reluctantly settled on was no great catch—nothing to text her friends about—but he did speak in polysyllables rather than grunts and said he once spent a summer in Paris, and not just the Paris of the South, and so he was very different from her last boyfriend Clem.
His name was Richard, or Richie, or Dickie, or some such twee Anglo-name, and he liked to consider himself a ‘cineaste.’ She didn’t really know what a ‘cineaste’ was, or if it were his hobby or his profession, but she did recognize it sounded civilized and intelligent (rather than pretentiously Gallic) and that it had something to do with movies. She was mad about movies. Right away, for their first date, he invited her to a movie at a run-down downtown Portland theater she wouldn’t otherwise glance at twice. What he called a date, she considered a trial run, with Daddy not far from her thoughts.
When he asked her to spot him the cash for the tickets, she should have guessed this would not end nicely.
The film, she discovered belatedly, was a black-and-white picture called Things To Come. She told him in the opening credits it wasn’t what she hoped for; black-and-white films, she said, always had a deadening effect on her, and she couldn’t sit comfortably without a feeling akin to rigor mortis setting in. “Oh calm down,” he said abrasively, “it won’t kill you.”
She explained to him she enjoyed films featuring Hollywood heartthrobs, wall-to-wall pop songs, couture fashion and cutting edge special effects. “The s-f-x,” he started to say before she cut him off by gasping “—Let’s not!” Flustered, he resumed, “The special effects in this movie were cutting edge for their time...” She hastily replied, “That’s not the same.”
It wasn’t the same. The movie was the most trenchant and leaden thing she had ever seen, with long scenes of soldiers shooting each other on ugly war-torn battlefields. It was psychotic, she thought, positively psychotic to think a lot about the past when the present was so much more pleasant. The plot of the ‘psychotic’ film, cooked up by the ‘psychotic’ mind of H.G. Wells, was something about a poor schlub who conks out during a fierce battle, only to wake up in a ‘dystopian’ future, whatever that was. She didn’t really know because she texted and called her friends throughout the introductory scenes and the rising action, stopping periodically to ask her date what was going on, much to his mounting irritation.
Finally, when he felt the eyes of the audience swaying between his date and the movie screen with the unsubtle malice of the sword of Damocles, he said sneeringly, “You wouldn’t understand because you’re a cinephile and not a cineaste! There’s a difference.” Actually the semantic difference was slight. “All it takes to say you love movies is money and free time.”
“You forgot to say patience!”
Rita had infinite patience for the new but expended none on the old. Her ‘intelligent’ (now highly suspect) date for the evening was shockingly old, moldy and deathlike when she really looked at him, or perhaps his youth was wholly deprived in her critical gaze. Youth, after all, was the ultimate prerequisite, and without it, he was nothing.
She steadfastly pivoted on her stiletto heels and began to storm out of the theater, click-clacking all the way. She escaped the screening room with her dignity intact but didn’t make it out of the lobby, and this chronicler is afraid to say I mean that literally.
While storming through a poorly lit and dingy hallway in search of the restrooms, things took a turn for the worse when she mistakenly opened a door thinking it to be a bathroom only to then fall down a flight of steps to the basement and to her apparent death.
But to save this chronicle from becoming a cruel and tawdry parable about the harrowing dangers of talking during a movie, let’s skip ahead to the part where Rita’s life truly becomes of interest to us. Because, as those raving mystics of the past used to say, Death is not the End.
If you'd like to own this story and several more not quite like it, check out my book The Madness of Art: Short Stories. The Madness of Art: Short Stories
To read more of The Shopper Awakes, check back soon.
The Shopper Awakes
Rita supposed she had every right to glibly blame her father for her death, but since she was reborn, she decided it best not to hold it against him.
The vile mess all began because Daddy insisted she should devote herself to intelligent and ambitious men, not the ‘magnificent dregs’ as he summarily dismissed her past intrigues as. Up until that proclamation, her criteria for romance revolved around Attitude, Body and Cleanliness, although why that was separate from Body, this humble chronicler doesn’t pretend to know. The 21st century had its eccentricities, and we can leave it at that.
It was her misfortune that if Intellect was suddenly the deciding factor, her other hopes would have to be jettisoned, meaning she would have to settle for substandard material if she was to keep her charge cards and servants. The man she reluctantly settled on was no great catch—nothing to text her friends about—but he did speak in polysyllables rather than grunts and said he once spent a summer in Paris, and not just the Paris of the South, and so he was very different from her last boyfriend Clem.
His name was Richard, or Richie, or Dickie, or some such twee Anglo-name, and he liked to consider himself a ‘cineaste.’ She didn’t really know what a ‘cineaste’ was, or if it were his hobby or his profession, but she did recognize it sounded civilized and intelligent (rather than pretentiously Gallic) and that it had something to do with movies. She was mad about movies. Right away, for their first date, he invited her to a movie at a run-down downtown Portland theater she wouldn’t otherwise glance at twice. What he called a date, she considered a trial run, with Daddy not far from her thoughts.
When he asked her to spot him the cash for the tickets, she should have guessed this would not end nicely.
The film, she discovered belatedly, was a black-and-white picture called Things To Come. She told him in the opening credits it wasn’t what she hoped for; black-and-white films, she said, always had a deadening effect on her, and she couldn’t sit comfortably without a feeling akin to rigor mortis setting in. “Oh calm down,” he said abrasively, “it won’t kill you.”
She explained to him she enjoyed films featuring Hollywood heartthrobs, wall-to-wall pop songs, couture fashion and cutting edge special effects. “The s-f-x,” he started to say before she cut him off by gasping “—Let’s not!” Flustered, he resumed, “The special effects in this movie were cutting edge for their time...” She hastily replied, “That’s not the same.”
It wasn’t the same. The movie was the most trenchant and leaden thing she had ever seen, with long scenes of soldiers shooting each other on ugly war-torn battlefields. It was psychotic, she thought, positively psychotic to think a lot about the past when the present was so much more pleasant. The plot of the ‘psychotic’ film, cooked up by the ‘psychotic’ mind of H.G. Wells, was something about a poor schlub who conks out during a fierce battle, only to wake up in a ‘dystopian’ future, whatever that was. She didn’t really know because she texted and called her friends throughout the introductory scenes and the rising action, stopping periodically to ask her date what was going on, much to his mounting irritation.
Finally, when he felt the eyes of the audience swaying between his date and the movie screen with the unsubtle malice of the sword of Damocles, he said sneeringly, “You wouldn’t understand because you’re a cinephile and not a cineaste! There’s a difference.” Actually the semantic difference was slight. “All it takes to say you love movies is money and free time.”
“You forgot to say patience!”
Rita had infinite patience for the new but expended none on the old. Her ‘intelligent’ (now highly suspect) date for the evening was shockingly old, moldy and deathlike when she really looked at him, or perhaps his youth was wholly deprived in her critical gaze. Youth, after all, was the ultimate prerequisite, and without it, he was nothing.
She steadfastly pivoted on her stiletto heels and began to storm out of the theater, click-clacking all the way. She escaped the screening room with her dignity intact but didn’t make it out of the lobby, and this chronicler is afraid to say I mean that literally.
While storming through a poorly lit and dingy hallway in search of the restrooms, things took a turn for the worse when she mistakenly opened a door thinking it to be a bathroom only to then fall down a flight of steps to the basement and to her apparent death.
But to save this chronicle from becoming a cruel and tawdry parable about the harrowing dangers of talking during a movie, let’s skip ahead to the part where Rita’s life truly becomes of interest to us. Because, as those raving mystics of the past used to say, Death is not the End.
If you'd like to own this story and several more not quite like it, check out my book The Madness of Art: Short Stories. The Madness of Art: Short Stories
To read more of The Shopper Awakes, check back soon.
