Drunken Divination

by Brian Cartwright
Unwrite.Com


I've always been a sucker for stories about drunk assholes. I've even written a few myself. Drunken Divination is such a story, this one about a conversation between the narrator and a girl he's sweet on. It begins with the two drinkers spouting out absurb hypotheticals, playing them for humor. I can relate. My attention is seized.

Cartwight's storyteller thinks harshly of himself, and his internal monologue manages to pull off scathing and funny at the same time. Try this out:

"I think Patrick Stewart is sexy. I thought they didn't wear jumpsuits on that one though." She rolled onto her side and looked me in the eyes. The bag of wine lay in the grass abandoned and she was pouring herself a glass of scotch. I had brought the Kalhua out for nothing.

"They did for the first two seasons." Jesus, I sounded like a fucking idiot. My best material was to be a stickler for Patrick Stewart's 17-year-old nut hugging jammies.

As he gets drunker, he lets his frustration get the best of him, and he becomes hostile and cruel. I really like that, because many stories will spend time demonstrating motivation, trying to elicit sympathy for the emotionally tortured narrator before displaying his faulty behavior. Not here. There's some bare minimum background on his secret crush, but no wailing and crying. Thankfully.

Instead, the ugly outbursts are simply laid out. The conversation happens, but it's never softened by mealy-mouthed whining. It's pure raging angst with no apology, and offers no catharsis for the reader or the characters.

The story is biting and mean. I appreciate that. The tone is a far cry from the vague spiritual mumbling and incidental soul searching in the last story I read, Weightlifting For Catholics, in the 2005 Atlantic Fiction Issue.

It's a shame that in-your-face stories like this get so little attention in literary journals. I find that loud bright stories with high levels of kinetic energy are generally ignored in favor of stories revolving around philisophical contemplations, chanted elegies, and pseudo-European sophistication. You can write about the weather in Vienna all day long. Go for it. I'll take the story that makes me cry and bleed. This one does.

It's online. Go read it!

The Southern Review

Volume 41, Number 3
Summer 2005
Published at Louisiana State University Baton Rouge

The Touchstone
By Jay Rogoff



An excerpt:
“In Balachine’s ultramodern ‘leotard ballets,’ like The Four Temperaments (1946) or Agon (1957), dancers flex their feet at right angles instead of pointing them.”

Holy shit kids, I’m in over my head. To drowning depth, for sure. My only skirmishes with ballet were two: I was pen pals with a ballet girl in Bellevue, WA when I was thirteen, and I borrowed some terms from an online ballet dictionary for a story in which I engaged in an orgy with flying spiders.

Suffice to say I haven’t a clue what I just read. Apparently this Balanchine fellow was audaciously radical when it came to ankle flanking. Wait, there’s more:

“Nothing so blatant occurs in Symphony In C, but some events come close: in that second movement, after carrying the ballerina in long lifts across the stage- ‘like the moon going across the sky,’ Balanchine prescribed- the cavalier attends her as she pursues a series of dangerous-looking falls off pointe into his waiting arms, and then supports her on pointe in arabesque.”

Hmmm...So... Let me see if I understand the thesis. Balanchine was a mischievous sheperd, a choreographer of human marionettes, cackling as he subversively interspersed epileptic disjoints among the elegant sweeps of pink clad feet, defying the audience's expectations, thereby upending the accepted conventions of symphonic ballet performance. A real sly bastard.

I admit I read less than half of this piece. Without a Masters in the fine arts (am I supposed to capitalize some of that?) I’m just a country rube with empty eyes trying to quell my nausea as the words in Rogoff's apparently sophisticated essay on fancy prancy dance scramble my poor little brain like a rodent in a wheat thresher.

I wonder if the editor published this piece under a shroud of confusion much like mine, including it as a means of dignifying the volume with a touch of class otherwise absent. Actually, I doubt that. I spoke with him on the telephone when I ordered this, and he seemed like a straight shooter. I shouldn’t project my ignorance upon the editor. Sorry, Bret.

Somewhere lost in this essay are the words “la travestie.” (The italics caught my eye.) I’ll take the English equivalent, travesty, thank you kindly.

The rest of this handsomely packaged literary journal is excellent. (Hell, the piece I reviewed might be half decent, too, I have no way of knowing.)

Billy Solitario’s paintings of the Gulf Coast are wonderful. Many portray nature scenes now swept under by recent weather channel terrorism. Billy gives good cloud. Here's a gallery.

Robin Hemley’s story “Local Time” was a highlight, telling of the downward spiral of a married man trying to sell apples in bulk in the Phillipines. So many whorehouses, so little time. Great, great story.

Elyse Fields’ essay on earning respect as a female park ranger is also worth your time, as is “Good Girl”, the story of a man dealing with his wife’s death, his no-good rapist son, newcomers to town, and the necessity to put down his dog after it bites a young girl. All at once.

There are assloads of poems in here, too. I read some of them, but I can’t seem to decipher the intended rhythm and take in the imagery simultaneously. That goes for all poetry. Set it to music and I gobble it up like candy, print it on a page, and I can’t hang. So I offer no opinion on the poems, just the information that they’re present.

I liked The Southern Review, even when it made me feel dumb. I haven’t decided whether to subscribe yet. (Those decisions will come after I’ve read a lot more journals and have learned my taste.)

Presently In Ruins

by Gregory Blake Smith
From StoryQuarterly 40, 2004


I like this melanchony story. With an air of nostalgic reflection and dry blackness, it tells the story of a son trying to decide whether to help his diseased elderly father commit suicide. Our narrator’s voice recites the Hemlock Society’s suicide instruction manual with no hint of distaste. I was morbidly fascinated.

I also enjoyed the point of view of the son, particularly his matter of fact pragmatic approach to death. Sometimes I found this funny, though I probably wasn’t supposed to.

The story’s climax left me unsettled. The old father exits with “It’s not my fault. It was all forced on me.” The explanation for these words does not appear to lie within the story, yet the narrator seems to accept them with resignation and no puzzlement. The question hangs.

Despite this fractured conclusion, the story works. It paints its characters well with evocative detail, dropping tidbits about the father's navy days in the Korean War and World War II. In another instance the narrator types names from the past into Google, trying to form a grip on the long gone past. Also, I’m a sucker for stories about quiet fathers who build model train layouts. (That’s my dad.)

Themes and symbolism? I suppose you could see the trains that show up in a flashback scene as symbolic of the inescapable passage of time, especially because the father builds and stares at a railroad layout model of their hometown built to look exactly like the place did in 1926. None of that is obtrusive, fortunately, it’s just present if you look for it. No heavy-handed thematic gesticulating here.

This story is a morbid somber little song. Check it out.

A selection:

“Yes,” the son intoned gently. One of his legs-how strange!- was quivering inside his pant leg. “But there’s a way.” And he detailed the Hemlock Society’s method: Seconal to calm you, plastic bag held on by rubber bands or pantyhose, a painter’s mask to keep the plastic from being sucked into the mouth and nostrils, a baseball cap to keep it off your face. He had practiced saying this, ran through it now like he were back in law school, in moot court, where he’d always had his arguments memorized.

“A painter’s mask,” his father was repeating. His face registered the ingenuity of it. “That might work.”

Opening Salvo

"Shoot straight you bastards, and don't make a mess of it!"
-Breaker Morant, facing execution in 1902.

"I despise allegory, in all its forms."
-J.R.R. Tolkien

"Avoid bullshit."
-Stephen King

I love stories. I started with the Hardy Boys in elementary school and I've never stopped reading. Fast forward to present, now in my mid-twenties, and I'm still devouring books and magazines. On this page I will review short stories and perhaps the occasional book. I like stories that are written primarily to entertain. Sure, there's room for themes, symbolism, and morals in fiction, but I believe they should be secondary to the narrative.

As an aspiring writer, I'm currently delving into the academic world of literary magazines. I'm traveling the autodidact's route, learning all I can without the benefit of a structured education. As a high school dropout, I never had the privilege of absorbing formal training about the fancier elements of English composition. Therefore I come to a story looking to have fun, not to deconstruct, reconstruct, or otherwise apply my energy to subtexts and riddles.

Many of the stories published in the highbrow literary magazines fail to entertain because they're parables and allegories, the stories mere disguises for a hidden message, puzzles to be deciphered as opposed to enjoyed. I prefer straightforward entertainment. No highbrow here. In fact, if I manage to publish a few more stories of my own, you'll discover that I'm one mean lowbrow son of a bitch.

On this page I'll review short fiction published in literary and genre magazines. My stated goal is this:

I will review each story with one criterion: Did I enjoy reading this?