Desert Island Christmas Dinner

I considered, pondered, and debated myself for a while on whether or not I should post viable fiction on here. At length I decided that I would toss up a story or three that I might otherwise shop around. Sharing the weirdness is worth something.

As it turned out, this was my last assignment at Columbia College.


~•~
(2nd Draft)


FICTION II
5/4/08

Desert Island Christmas Dinner


Day 10:

I'm an American, damnit! That God-damn tour ship! This isn't supposed to happened to me! Damn Southern Hemisphere--Spring in November!--fucked up weather, ass-backward-seasons, and lame-ass tour boats that capsize in small storms. Now we're stranded on this desert island!? How much stupider can this get? Tropical desert island! If we were gonna be trapped in a --what's that word--klee-shay--why couldn't it at least have been the one where we get shipwrecked with the Swedish Bikini Team or something? But no...we had to be stuck in the klee-shay of having our companions on this remote-forsaken island to be a bunch of people who don't even speak English. Some Orientals who chatter on and on in their high speed way and look at us as if we're the funny ones. They creep me out. We keep wondering if they're talking about us, but none of us--y'know, the Americans--can make out a word of what they're saying. So we don't really know, but it sure seems like they are. We keep an eye on them, suspicious 'cuz we know they're talking about us.

Day 13:

The others seem to be in two groups. Maybe three. One group is these three guys, I guess they're Chinese or Koreans or some other slantys... Then there's the three French people. I hate French people. Think they're better than the rest of us. But they're French, so what do they know? Then there's this other guy. He's a slanty-eye dude, too, but he doesn't speak to the rest of them--sits apart from 'em and doesn't talk to them when they try to bring him into their chattering talks. He looks at everyone like he's about to kill us. Vicious, but he's a little guy. Then there's us--a couple of Aussies or Kiwis or whatever the fuck they are down here, and this Scottish "bloke" and then me and the three other Americans. We've been talking about what to do. Almost two weeks here. At first we were all out on the beach every night with a big-ass fire. But after five nights of that, the food that washed up with us on the beach was gone and everyone was getting hungry. That's when we started pulling away from each other. Forming these little groups. Not too close to each other, but not too far away neither. Them Orientals didn't seem to have much trouble finding local food. Fruits and roots and leaves, they ate it all. Dumb fuckers. Going out all day and finding food and leaving us sitting here hungry...
We watched 'em eat the next few nights and then, well, they offered us food a couple of times, but of course we aren't going to eat tree bark or whatever. Fuck them and that.

Day 18:

Finally got the French guys to say something in English. I knew they could talk to us but just wouldn't. Too good for speaking English like they should. They came over when we had food and just as clear as English can be, asked us for some. I wanted to tell them "no"--just 'cause they're French--but, well...okay it wasn't our food...if it was, I wouldn't have given them any, but it wasn't mine to keep. It's that one guy's food. That single Oriental dude. Nice guy, though, for being a little vicious foreigner. He killed a boar somehow and dragged it back to the beach where he skinned and quartered it. Even brought some of the meat over to us to share! Cooked it up all tasty and we all had some. Eating with us, he cleared up some things we didn't know. In real good English, too. No accent even. The other Orientals are Chinese, not Korean. He's Cambodian. Like that means anything to us. Says his name's Pray-Cha-Cha, or somethin', but we call him Bruce-Lee. Bruce Lee was cool. The Frenchmen aren't French, they're Belgian. Like there's a difference? Maybe if they had beer with 'em, or something. Belgium has good beer, I guess, for not being American. The Scotsman told us that French fries really came from Belgium, not France. Like we wanna hear about french fries out here on this island where we're starving? Okay, so we haven't starved 'cause this gook-dude--Bruce-Lee-Cha-cha--gave us some pig to eat.

Day 27:

A few nights ago, last week, maybe, when we were eating the last of Bruce-Lee's pig, he made the comment that wild boar was a lot like human flesh. Fuckin' cannibal! is what we all thought right away. But then we got to thinking about it. We've got no food here but there's plenty of people. So we've been talking about this. Seriously. There's some considerations to be made. Like that soccer team in South America back in the 70s or whenever. Gotta do what we can to survive. But none of us are sick or dead. Yet. Are we going to wait forever, or maybe take matters into our own hands? Skinny people are out, they don't have enough meat on 'em. No one here is really fat, so that doesn't matter. We decided that eating more healthy food would probably make someone taste better. No fast food junk in their bodies, and chemicals or whatever. Too bad there's no vegetarians here. Or those other ones...the really annoying hippy freaks. Oh, yeah, vegans.
I bet vegans would be good meat.

Day 32:

Well, it wasn't that bad if ya didn't think about. It does taste a lot like that boar we had a coupla weeks ago. And things are a lot quieter around here. Less chatter. Those French-Belgian fuckers sure aren't talkin' much now, but when they do, they always speak English. They know who's in charge. Bruce-Lee sure can cook anything, just like he said. We'll keep him around to keep makin' meals for us. He speaks English pretty good and tells some funny jokes and can find all the trimmings to make the meat really tasty.
Last night he had Christmas dinner.
We ate Chinese.

· • ·

A Tale of Two Lines

This one came about because I had just discovered the case of (Dr.) Brad Vice and the Flannery O'Connor Award controversy.

It's almost a compulsion with me to incorporate current influences on assignments.


~•~
(1st)


FICTION II
04/07/07
First Lines

A TALE OF TWO LINES
OR: THE FIRST LINE OF PLAGIARISM


First lines. Hookers. The tasty openings of a story or novel that are meant to grab the reader and all-but-force them to read on--the second, third, and all ensuing sentences until they have consumed the whole meal, paragraph by paragraph.

Somewhat recently, I read a short story titled "Tuscaloosa Nights" by Brad Vice. It was in a collection that won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. I was struck by the power of the words, structure, images, and just plain ol' deep dark story in the piece.

Here's the first line (two sentences, actually): "And that’s how it began. Three distant notes, high blasts on a bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long wailing note."

I have rarely been so moved by a story as I was by Brad Vice's. Briefly, it's about a self-admitted Yankee in the Deep South who, one night sitting on the front porch with a couple of others, she asks about the bugle she hears blow those three notes. It's the Ku Klux Klan gathering for a rally in the woods. The young Yankee girl talks the guy she's sweet on to take her out to see the rednecks in their long white sheets burn a cross in the forest. She, of course, gets more than she bargained for.

I looked into Brad Vice and his work and was almost shocked at what I found. I love it when research opens new proverbial cans of worms. This instance of delving into background lead me on a path through the swampy area of literature involving plagiarism and how nasty accusations are sometimes worse than the crime.

"Tuscaloosa Nights" is a short story that opens Brad Vice's collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. The collection was awarded the Flannery O'Connor Prize in 2005, only to have it rescinded a few months later.

This is a tale of two first lines, and the murky area where "fair use" becomes an unforgivable act of "plagiarism".

The first of these opening lines comes from a non-fiction work titled Stars Fell on Alabama which is a collection of real-life (i.e. "factual") instances that were collected and published in 1934. It was written in a style not often used at the time, but which gained mass popularity when, thirty years later, Truman Capote would use the narrative non-fiction style for his book, In Cold Blood.

Carl Carmer was a noted professor at the University of Alabama for a number of years and who fell in love with Southern storytelling. He traveled the state and recorded tales and events he heard and witnessed, various myths, legends, and superstitious of the place he called "Conjure Country". One instance he wrote about was a Ku Klux Klan rally that he witnessed.

In Part I: Tuscaloosa Nights, is the chapter titled "Flaming Cross". This opens with the line: "We heard them coming long before we saw them — three distant high blasts of a bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long wailing note."

70 years later, a student (and native of the town) at the University of Alabama named Brad Vice, wrote his short story called "Tuscaloosa Nights". This was the opening piece in a collection of fictional tales that was to become not only Mr. Vice's doctoral thesis in creative writing, but also The Bear Bryant Funeral Train received the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award.

Dr. Vice's story begins with the line (two sentences): "And that’s how it began. Three distant notes, high blasts on a bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long wailing note."

I had a passing familiarity with Carl Carmer's book. Almost anyone from Alabama who reads history or local superstition literature has at least heard of the work. And for a student at the University of Alabama's creative writing program, it would not be something that could have been ignored.

So, cursing all plagiarists as vile and reprehensible people, I re-read Brad Vice's short story. I was still struck by the use he made of the descriptive sentences of Carl Carmer that Brad Vice used.

Okay, I thought, well how much of that is "plagiarized"?

I found Mr. Carmer's original work and read the chapter.

First line is lifted quite directly and deliberately, that much is certain. A few lines of dialogue in the ensuing scene. The closing of the story is closely mimicked:

"We rode on in silence. The lights of town seemed friendlier than the flames we had left behind on the river bank...." (Carmer)

"They were running toward the river, toward the orange light on the horizon, toward the burning cross, leaving us alone in the terrible silence." (Vice)

I thought, there it is. Plagiarism.

Then I read some essays on what legally defines plagiarism and what ethically constitutes it. Then I read both pieces again.

Nope, I thought, this isn't plagiarism.

Non-fiction work can only be considered legally plagiarized if it has been taken substantially in length without citation. And the events described in a work of non-fiction can be used in fiction without citing the written source. That;s the legalities of it.

Ethically, did Brad Vice steal Carl Carmer's intellectual property?

Dozens of authors copy Arthur Conan Doyle when they write Sherlock Holmes stories. Or Tom Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. And, not to forget the extensive Lovecraftian circle of writers and their shared creations.

A cornerstone of my personal opinion that Brad Vice did not deserve the accusation (and I wondered about a possible personal vendetta in this situation), is that in the collection before it was published by the University of Georgia after winning the Flannery O'Connor Award, there was an opening epigram in the manuscript which quoted Carl Carmer's book, Stars Fell on Alabama. To my personal way of seeing (and I detest plagiarism), this is citing the source work of the single story, and backs up Brad Vice's claim that his short story is an homage to Mr. Carmer. The fact that this epigram was left out of the published book from the University of Georgia is something that goes beyond Dr. Vice's ability as an author to definitively control.

A number of people in the literary community came out cursing Brad Vice and at least one made the statement that his Ph.D should be revoked as well as the O'Connor Prize. But far more in number were those who stood up in defense of Dr. Vice's book. One story out of nine had an accusation made against it. An accusation that falls apart when looking at any of the other versions of the manuscript that have been published in one manner or another (appearance in Five Points magazine, inclusion in his doctoral dissertation), because the cited quote by Carmer is present in those.

A lot of fuss and fallout from what essentially is an admittedly almost-identical opening line in two written works; one non-fiction, and the other, 70 years later, in a short story.

Is this a case of a Harvard student claiming she "internalized" over 90 instances of sentences from numerous other writers in a single book? No. Is it a case of lifting the core elements in a written account of an actual event years later in a fictional story. That's certainly closer to the truth, but I think it overstates a few things.

Carmer's work is a narrative telling of a real event. Brad Vice used that as the setting for a fictional story. The story contains a number of elements, and about four to seven lines that are very similar to the non-fiction account, but there is another level of story being told in Dr. Vice's tale that is not present in Mr. Carmer's work.

What I take from this in application of my own writing are a few key notes to remember.

The Paradox: Never use other people's work--factual accounts or fiction--without making it evident that I am doing so. A line from a famous song or a certain phrase may be used, but make damn sure that it's apparent where they came from. On the other hand, if the story is strong enough as an original piece, I can't be overly concerned with doing such because there has been so much "mash-up" in modern culture that even citing the source of something may be a pitfall of having used something that has been taken from somebody else already. Mark Twain noted, "A bad writer borrows from other writers, a good writer steals." I never took this to mean that it's okay to steal something from someone else. I understand it to be take what you need from where you need it so long as what you use it for is YOUR OWN WORK. That means be original in usage and voice, regardless of using anything from a source not your head.

And since the contents of my head (I can't speak about the contents of someone else's head because I'm not privy to such information unless it's been spilled on a page or photograph or canvas or in a series of musical notes) are a mash-up of everything I see, hear, touch, taste, smell, and think about. Everything.

On the other hand...it's becoming more and more acceptable in publishing to lie, and so without the ethics of attaining your own voice and ideas and work, copping a riff of writing from someone else draws a writer towards the ugly morass of Plagiarism. And that's a death-knell for an artist.

Brad Vice last not only his award, but also his job as an assistant professor at Mississippi State University over the fiasco (he now teaches English at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic). As he quotes about the situation, "Wrote a book. Caused a lota trouble. Stay tuned."

This is what the opening lines of a couple of stories lead me to discover, think about, and articulate in a way I hope says something useful.

I don't know as the line on what exactly is plagiarism can be clearly drawn as Here It Is, No Exceptions, but I certainly know plagiarism when I see it.

If you steal something without altering it significantly, or placing it within a vastly new environment, you've probably plagiarized it. If you haven't ever "borrowed" a bit of this or that from someone else, you probably have never written a single thing.


~•~


WHERE TO FIND THE STORIES:

"Flaming Cross" by Carl Carmer:


"Tuscaloosa Nights" by Brad Vice:


· • ·

Irony Poisoning.

This was the third parody I wrote for Fiction II.

~•~
(draft 1.5 again, and no, I won't acknowledge it as a 2nd draft)


FICTION II
02/25/08
Parody III: The Metamorphosis


Irony Poisoning.


When Merald Kroach woke up at 4:19 on Tuesday morning he was still human. He slept in his own bed in his own room of his own apartment. When he woke up at 4:19, rolled over a little to look at the clock and make a hypnagogic deduction that two hours and some minutes between then and the time the alarm was set for provided plenty more time for sleep, he fell back into his fitful dreams which always seemed to be about things which eluded his conscious mind. But anyway--he reasoned while giving a few moments of thought to it when awake before getting on with important things in his life like crunching numbers at the accounting firm--dreams weren't meant to be understood at all, not by the analytical mind, and so he quickly dismissed whatever he remembered about his restless dreams.

When Merald Kroach woke up at 4:19 in his own bed, covered with green and blue flannel sheets and a thick pleated quilt his grandmother had made which kept him warm on even the coldest of nights, he was still human. The room around him was very much his own, with a few Spartan personal items; bare walls and a closetful of nearly identical suits, a night stand with most un-decorative lamp and simple digital alarm clock with buzzer and radio, simple wooden beige chest of drawers over in the corner held his socks and underwear, and a box set on top with his neatly-arranged tie-tacks and cuff-links. That is also where he placed, at night before going to bed, his wrist watch, cell phone, and PDA.

Everything in the dark quiet hour of 4 a.m. was as if should be in Merald Kroach's room. Ordered and neat and evident.

Nothing about the room or objects in it had changed during the next few hours that Merald Kroach slept. Although he had never done so in his entire life, last night before going to bed, Merald Kroach forgot to set the alarm on his digital clock. At 6:35 a.m. the alarm did, in fact, not go off, and for the first time in his entire life, Merald Kroach overslept.

Ordinarily, the alarm would awake him at 6:35 and he would be out of bed by 6:45 when the coffee machine started brewing a pot; shower and shave, 6:55; toast with butter and two cups of coffee and he was out of the apartment at 7:20 to catch the train into the accounting firm to sit down at his cubical desk at 7:55, where stacks of papers with numerous columns of numbers waited his attention. Numbers didn't leave any room for interpretations and comparisons. Numbers were factual and definite.

Weren't they?

This morning, 6:35 a.m. came and went without a sound, because he had forgotten to set it. It was 8:23 when he opened his eyes to the brightness of a day already several hours old.

Merald Kroach opened his eyes and the clock seemed indistinct and out of focus to him. He tried rubbing his ideas but his thought of doing so slipped into a foggy gray area of his head and he suddenly didn't feel like himself at all.

He felt like...like...like he was a bug, trapped beneath his grandmother's quilt, lying in bed; like he was a prisoner and his bedroom and the apartment and even everything in town was merely a façade meant to give him the false sense of normalcy; like everything was familiar but he was alien and foreign to it; like he was a stranger in a strange land.

Merald Kroach tried to roll over in bed but the best he could do was lie as he was and imagine jelly rolls and drums rolls and rolling, rolling, rolling down the river. His thoughts drifting from an old song to Mark Twain using the Mississippi River as a whatchamacallit for Life. A model or something, Merald thought, but was reaching for another idea.

But he felt helpless as a child; like a fish out of water; flaccid as an overripe cliché.

What was wrong with him? Why couldn't he move?

He tried to roll over again, or at least lift an arm, but found he couldn't exactly feel his body anymore. Maybe he was paralyzed?

Frozen in place like a wet tongue to a metal pole in subzero weather, heavy as a lead elephant. With every thought, his mind would slip away from the subject he tried to focus on, but it would slip away from anything concrete like water glistening off a rainbowed-surface of oil--like three hillbillies in a mud farm trying to catch a greased hog.

The clock showed 8:51, and Merald Kroach still lay like a stump on a log, unable to move beneath his pleated quilt blanket. Usually by this time of the morning at the accounting firm he'd be as busy as a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest.

This was insane! Why couldn't he move? What happened to him?

Even though he felt unable to move, Merald Kroach wasn't in any actual physical pain. Just frustrated by his thoughts not being able to focus clearly on anything, and the growing concern that such abstract mental processes were certainly going to be a hindrance at the accounting firm.

Perhaps this was one of those--what do you call them?--lucid dreams? That's it! He was awake inside a very vivid dream. And that meant he must still be sleeping.

He suddenly felt very reassured. Yes, that was it...this was one of those minute brief dreams he sometimes had between snooze bar hits. The alarm had gone off and he fell back asleep immediately and he was dreaming that it was after 9 a.m. and he had transformed from being a human into being some sort of ghost of Christmas past, shadow of a thought, will-o-wisp of the mind.

Any moment now, the alarm was going to go off again and Merald Kroach was going to get up and get on with his morning as usual--shower and shave his very human face--then head off to work at the accounting firm and crunch the numbers that define finances and business and politics and news and life and important things like that. He had no time for pondering silly ideas and allusions.

Numbers were what mattered. Good, concrete, invariable numbers----like the Square Root of Negative One, Gauss's Constant, Pi, or Zero...?

Merald Kroach's brain itched like a ten-year-old with chicken pox and ants in his pants. He wasn't used to having circular thoughts that slid away from things like snot off a doorknob. Every time he'd think of something, his mind would tangent off into some sort of similar comparison of what he wanted to think of, and wind up wandering a starry desert looking for the trail of where he began. Trapped like a rat in a cage he made and now he'd have to lie in it.

Stop it! he wanted to shout, but the best he could do was briefly form some sort of analogy to what he wanted to think about.

Then the dawning awareness struck him like a ton of gold bricks.

Merald Kroach woke up to find himself transformed into an alliterative metaphor! He'd become some sort of allegory typed into the lines of a structural parody!

The thought was insane, crazy as a loon, mad as a hatter. But what else could it be? His mind raced down a white-water stream of consciousness, flushed into a swirling spiral of similes into the rhetorical murk and muck of anthropomorphic pathos. His proverbial blood froze at the flittering metonymic thought: What if in his being transformed into an allusionary idea in a work of metafiction, the Author-Creator never hit SAVE? What would happen to him?

He had to escape from this pastiche world...break through the Fourth Wall and return to his analytical life. However this happened didn't matter any more than growing a third testicle, but he needed to find a way out from this story before it fell into a mess of plot holes or infinite recursion.

How would McGuyver get out of this? What about James Bond? Indiana Jones escaped dire situations dozens of times, but he had a whip and a hat when he did. And a human body...

Since his thoughts seemed to be his body, maybe he could imagine a place, really see it, then think of some words and they might become the reality of what he imagined they could be. He'd imagine himself out of being a metaphor.

However he was going to do it, he had to make it quick. What if he lay here like unnoticed McGuffin and starved to death? Or worse, what if someone from the firm came over and found him like this? A mere figmentary parable, a rhetorical trope, a literary device...

What were those things called that always seemed to come in and save the day at the end of thriller stories?

The Calvary? No. Superman...? Han Solo? Chechov's gun?

He wasn't sure what Chechov's gun was, but if he had it, he'd be sure to use it!

Enough of this! Merald Kroach imagined he yelled, tasting the bitter irony poisoning of his situation. Then the idea fluttered past him like a drunken butterfly stumbling home from a three-day bender. The way out! He thought of the thing that could get him out of this...this whatchamacallit!

That was it, he finally decided, clutching to the epiphany before it had a chance to slip away like a squiggling fish and turn into something else...

Since he was a metaphor in a short story parody of some Phildickian-Kafkaesque piece of fiction, he was going to need a Deus Ex Machina to get out of this.

English or Latin -- it was all just Greek to him.


· • ·

The Night Auditor.

In Fiction II, parodies are attempted. There's three or four stories you can opt to parody, and as I remember, two or three had to produced. Then one of those was completed by the end of the semester.


~•~


FICTION II
02/18/08
Parody II: Bartleby
(first draft)


The Night Auditor.

I forget his last name now, Tom Bartholomew, maybe, but I can't be sure. TOM B. is what the gold plate name tag showed, and that's how I remember him. We all had name tags, but no one else really went by what they showed. So it's kind of odd that I remember Tom B.'s name tag but everyone else's nicknames. I guess because I knew everyone else so much longer. Tom B. only worked at the hotel for six months. The last six months the hotel was open.

I supervised three other people on the midnight shift. The night auditor, the maintenance man, and the lounge bartender. Once autumn, the night auditor quit and the hotel searched for a new auditor. Turnkey and Nausica, the maintenance man and the bartender, and myself took out guesses at the sort of person would take the job.

He was like none of us expected.

The hotel was a grand display of crimson red carpeting and wooden gold walls. A massive stone hearth stood in the center of the room reaching the three-floors up to the ceiling of the octagonal lobby. The hotel had been around for almost a century before it had electric light. The lobby was lit with light bulbs that look like flames, but they are in wall sconces where torch and oil lamps once were.

I'd been with the L'Éminence Rouge for a seven years before I was given the position of overnight concierge, which I then held for the next ten. Right up to when the hotel closed.

But however long I had been with the L'Éminence Rouge, Turnkey had been there more than a decade longer. Turnkey was good at fixing things for the first half of his shift, but by midnight, Turnkey would take his lunch break--which consisted of propping himself up on the bed in a vacant room with a bottle of bourbon and a pack of cigarettes and watch t.v. until he passed out around 4 a.m. Around 4, Nausica would have closed the lounge and counted out with the auditor and gone off to find where Turnkey had taken lunch, then wake him up, and go on her merry way by 5.

Turnkey pushed the limits of employment and tolerance only because he got the necessary things done in the short amount of time he actually devoted to work, and because he had worked at the hotel for so long, no one could imagine not seeing him chain-smoke an entire pack of cigarettes in the span of an evening.

Nausica worked more than Turnkey, certainly. More than she maybe should have. It became apparent slowly over her time at the hotel that she had another job as well, one which clients showed up for at the bar from time to time. They'd drop by for a quick drink and leave shortly after, a few grams heavier than when they arrived. But, like Turnkey, Nausica kept her job because she was good at what she did, completed it within the alloted timeframe, and didn't crack up always working opposite the sun.

On the midnight shift, each hour has more significance than during the day shift.

Especially for the night auditor. Each hour meant a different set of reports, a different audit to be conducted. The job went something like this: run a series of reports, and while they're printing, start checking over the house and people count. Then a run down of various accounts and expenses, and everything needs to balance, as close to possible to zero. Then, after hours of printing hundreds of pages of reports, the auditor separated them into various piles to send off to the accountant and the sales office and the front desk manager and housekeeping and maintenance and the food and beverage manager, and so forth and so on. The paper-trail that is the foundation of business operations itself.

Tom B. was hired on as the night auditor, responsible for the meticulous and detailed work of printing and checking the hotel reports. When he first started at the hotel, Tom B. was amazingly quick, accurate, and precise. He ran and checked reports in a third less time than his predecessor, and accurately checked them quicker than seemed feasible. His attention to filing was no less incredible. For the first few months no one could have found a bad thing to say about Tom B. He was the best night auditor the L'Éminence Rouge Hotel had ever had.

So it was immediately strange when I noticed the expanding piles of paperwork that had sprung up around the front desk office; unfiled audit reports dating back a full week. Tom B. had simply not been filing any reports for five nights in a row. He ran them and checked their figures with as much skill and detail as he always had, running a long ruler across each row of numbers, but he just didn't file them.

The next week several departments complained about it, asking why he refused to do his work.

Well, refused isn't precisely accurate. Tom B. never actually refused to do his job. He checked and balanced every report, he just wouldn't file the paperwork. The only response anyone would get from him was, "I'm not ready to do that yet."

Each department of the hotel began to print out their own copies of the audited reports, so after the initial drama of it, no one complained very much about not receiving any filed reports. Yet the number and height of the growing stacks of unfiled paperwork was growing. It had filled an office closet already and stood, floor to ceiling, in some dozen or more stacks. And they kept growing.

Tom B. would take his time, sitting in his office chair, going over each line of every single report. But never file the papers when he was done. Every few days someone on the morning shift would ask Tom B. about why he hadn't filed the reports and he would always respond in the same slow tone, "I'm not ready to do that yet."

It was about a week before the fire that we found out he'd been living at the hotel from the very first day he worked there. Tom B. had taken up residence in Room 18 just a few doors down the hall from the front desk. Room 18 was where we put half-broken things. Lamps that flicker when they're on, a t.v. that won't change channels. The hotel didn't like to throw things away. I guess that's why Tom B. was never actually fired for not doing his job. He showed up to work--never really left the hotel--and that was good enough.

That was when I started looking into Tom B,'s background.

I called his former employer and was mildly socked to learn that in his previous job Tom B. filed paperwork for a crematorium. The death certificate, funeral home contacts, the bill for services rendered.

A job like that was bound to change a man. It seemed to be that it was no wonder Tom B. was a bit odd, even considering the sort of people one encounters during the small dark hours.

I looked at the stacks and stacks of unfiled and reports and wondered if maybe Tom B. didn't file them because that might remind him always of death. Perhaps not filing the audit reports was his way of reminding himself he was still alive.

There was one night I was going to asking him directly about that. But that was the night of the fire.

The fire was caused by Turnkey.

Around 4 a.m., April 19th. When Turnkey passed out that night, his bourbon spilled over the bed and the cigarette in his hand when he fell asleep sparked a flame...

Nausica had just begun her Where Has Turnkey Passed Out Tonight? game. She found the fire before it spread from the room, but Turnkey had already become charcoal and the flames were licking at the edges of the room.

Within minutes the entire wing of the hotel was blazing.

As the fire devoured the hotel, I made sure all the guests were out and striding back through the lobby after directing Nausica and the baker-girl, Pumpernickel, out. Turnkey was gone, his burial in a flaming rented bed, but everyone else had gotten out. Everyone except for the night auditor, Tom B.

I found him sitting in his office chair, the fire crawling with branching red fingertips up the floor-to-ceiling columns of unfiled paperwork all around him.

"Tom," I shouted to him above the roar of the flames, "Everyone else is out, come on!"

But he just sat there, holding a ruler to the page of report on the desk in front of him, his head turned to me for almost a full minute before he turned away. I felt my hair singeing in the heat.

I wanted to turn and run out of the burning place, but I couldn't just let him sit there and be roasted in the fire--I was frantic, "Tom, this is crazy. We've got to get out of here!"

Even with my hair sizzling, I was drawn to stand there staring at him. How calm he was, sitting in his office chair. "No," Tom B. said to me, the heat peeling back the upholstery of the chair around him, "I'm not ready to do that yet."

Tom B.'s skin blistered red before cracking, engorged by the flame of his paperwork crematorium.

I ran from the tinderbox lobby and greedily gulped in fresh air when I stood outside far from the fire and smoke. The red-orange glow lit the rest of night, the embers dying only when the sun finally chose to begin the day.

The L'Éminence Rouge Hotel burned to the ground.

It was never rebuilt.


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What is "Good" Writing?

This brief essay is particularly cringe-worthy. Perhaps not objectively, but certainly from this vantage point on the inside looking back in at a piece several years old. Whereas my fiction has involved significantly since 2007-8, it was already "good" and thus, improvement is a small percentile compared to the leap my academic writing has done in the past two years. I thank the challenges set forth by Dr. Boren [English Dept. UNCW] and the memoirist/guest teacher at UNCW last year, Peter Trachtenberg.

The second assignment from Fiction II (taught by the underestimated Jeff Jacobson), was to define what is that ephemeral and very subjective creature called "good writing."

Returning the paper Jeff told me it made him pull out The Big Sleep and read it again. Reference to Chandler tend to do that to some people. :)


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(1st Draft)


FICTION II
2/18/08
Journal II: What is Good Writing?

Ehem, let me get up on my soapbox for a couple minutes about this:

What is Good Writing?

Good Writing is when you can smell the mold growing on the floorboards of the room in the story.

Good Writing is when you forget all sense of self and know nothing more than what is passing through your head and heart via the words printed on a page.

Good Writing asks questions, it doesn't give you answers. If a writer has the answer, they usually end up lecturing you. They should probably skip fiction and go right on to writing religious tracts (Crews).

Good Writing is something that might not be evident upon first read. If the writing calls attention to itself with deliberately pretty words, it's probably veered over into the Bad Writing side of things.

Good Writing doesn't need to call attention to itself--you-as-a-reader are too involved in the story of what the words are telling to notice how pretty they are or how well constructed the sentence is. Which, as course means, that the words used are fitting the story they tell and the sentence is structured well, without grammatical problems.

Sure, cite Shelby all you want in regards to why you shouldn't be constrained to using the commonly accepted rules about punctuation and quotations marks, but chances are great that you don't have as strong of a narrative voice, internal consistency, and as powerful subject matter as Shelby did. Sure, you probably do within the confines of your own genius head of yours, but queers, transsexuals, junkies, and whores was new in literature with Algren, Selby, and Burroughs, and Irving Welsh managed a go of it, but only two of those four ventured very far from the accepted rules of grammar. Unless you can lay down your pedigree as powerfully as they did, you might want to learn the rules before you break them. Find/Replace is a brilliant feature of word processors.

After the grammar-thing, one of the next flashing neon signs advertising a piece as Bad Writing would be the use of adjectives and adverbs. Bad Writing is often carelessly, needlessly, atrociously rife with myriad, horrid, eldritch, and often incomprehensible adverbs and adjectives. If you spot more than a handful per page, you've probably veered off the Good Writing highway into the purplish vistas of pedantic typing. Which doesn't mean don't ever use them, it means ration them. They're powerful things, like compost. A little bit helps make a garden become lush and beautiful. A lot of them together creates a pile of shit. The road to hell is paved with adverbs. [King gets credit for this, but I've seen it written previous to his On Writing. Aw, hell, he can have the credit if you're gonna argue about it.]

I can think of at least one example that violates a lot of guidelines I have for Good Writing, and which I still found it to be one of the most amazing bits of writing I've ever read: Nabokov's Lolita. I don't remember exactly (and don't have the book at hand to check) but there was a passage about the dandelions in the yard turning from suns to moons that just floored me and then continued to kick me with poetic words while I was left drooling in amazement.

That's Good Writing.

One of the most dangerous aspects of writing, and a particular razor's edge between Good|Bad Writing (and one rife with potential for cliché): Metaphors.

Ah, the foetid cliché. A bad cliché sticks out like a sore thumb. A red-headed stepchild in a black family. Clichés are horrible. Their use without precise care is a huge indicator of piss-poor writing. Not unlike showing up at a klan rally in a Boy George outfit (Hicks).

Which brings me back to metaphor. A poorly wrought metaphor usually doesn't travel alone and falls upon the reading psyche like a rapid ton of bricks; knocks the clipper ship of Good Writing right off its hinges. Some Bad Writing not only mixes metaphors, but cross-breeds those suckers. ("Damnit, Jim, I'm a wordsmith not an ontological geneticist!")

On the other side of that, Raymond Chandler spun some of the greatest metaphors in the English language:

"She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight."

"Her voice trailed off into a sort of sad whisper like a mortician asking for a down payment."

"A wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly on the carpet."

One of my favorite things about a story is the opening line. Not every good story has a good opening line, but maybe the great ones do.

"It was Friday the thirteenth and yesterday's snowstorm lingered in the street like a leftover curse." William Hjortsberg, Falling Angel.

"Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phone call from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals." PKD, VALIS.

Perhaps one of the most quoted by the under 30, 40, 60 crowd, "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

One more: "What's the worst thing you've ever done? I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing..." Peter Straub, Ghost Story.

There have been a few books over the years that I read in one sitting because I couldn't pull away from it--in one case staying up all night before having to start a three-day road trip. The first time this happened, I was twelve or so. The culprit was Douglas Adams's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Years later a book I've read more than a few times, including reading it aloud as a serial on two occasions. Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg. Then I picked up Lewis Shiner's Deserted Cities of the Heart. Shiner got me again a couple years later with his next book, Slam.

A book that can hold you in it despite what is going on outside of it is a fine example of Good Writing.

So I guess that's what Good Writing comes down for me.

Story. Storytelling.

Good Writing has nothing to do with good literature. In fact, good literature is sometimes completely at odds with Good Writing.

And Good Writing has everything to do with good storytelling. If your story's good enough, and told well enough, it can break any rule there is and be, not only Good Writing, but Great Writing.

Good Writing is when there's magic in them thar words. Words are magic. Why else d'ya think it's called spelling? (Barrett)

Of course, asking the question, "What is Good Writing?"(a question only slightly more interesting as being asked, "Where do you get your ideas?") has as many different answers as there are people with vantage points atop their proverbial soap boxes.

And it's time I hopped down from mine.


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