Tag Archives: Reveries

Beyond the Classroom

    Four brisk entertainments sharing the same theme comprise Reveries.

    Caleb Abercrombie dominates the narratives. An untethered academic, the middle-aged Abercrombie fully enjoys the advantages of being a confident male whose vocation fulfills him.

    Paz Duarte, Abercrombie’s considerably younger foil, sounding board, and for lack of a better term, though nonetheless apt, serves as his fuck-buddy. They also share another calling. A vertical one.

    The excerpt offered by Amazon Kindle dissatisfied me. What the casually curious could’ve read were merely the first pages of the opening story, “Beyond the Classroom.”

    A good start? Yup! The sample gave an interesting taste. Like parfait. But further reading rewards with greater flavor. Why, by the last page of Reveries’ concluding story let’s say a creamy fudge ripple has been whipped up.

    Those who’ve already read it are probably chuckling at the reference. Good. Continue reading Beyond the Classroom

Staged?

 

    The girl who hands over my New York Times is always astounded at its heft. Even on Saturdays. I laugh at her lack of reference. Stacked against almost every other newspaper in America, yes, the Times is plump. But as subscribers of a certain age remember, today’s editions are miserly compared against the fat decks of a decade ago.

    Especially those Sunday sandbags.

    My newsgirl doesn’t read newspapers. At least not intentionally. She’s of that breezily-informed generation which receives its mostly unedited information through bits and bytes. It shows. Their general lack of awareness, the blithe knowledge deficiency, augurs ill for them.

    Fortunately, this group’s esteeming the ephemeral above all immunizes them against everyday worries as well as prospective maladies. Think of it as bliss without the Schedule 1 drugs.

    Even when my age group lived carefree someone older always cautioned “beware!” If recalled correctly, while we proclaimed disregarding those admonishments they nevertheless seeped in to steer us through responsible adulthood.

    My, how mentoring has changed. Etiquette, too. Continue reading Staged?

My Akhmatova


    When first creating this forum I intended flogging my ebooks Reveries and Cool Brass. That, and resume some kind of writing discipline by telling stories. Nearly two decades have passed since I last graced a newsroom, and 10 years from any article bearing my real byline.

    Writing is easy. Self-promotion is craven. Funny thing is while I’m reticent about myself and my product, I could be P.T. Barnum’s spiritual heir if it came to hawking some loser starving for celebrity or another kind of dog food. Continue reading My Akhmatova

Indirect Objects

 

    A feature inside the last 2011 issue of Intervìu by writer Alberto Gayo called to mind comments received about my compilations Reveries and Cool Brass. The latter especially.

    Maybe what Reveries sparked finally ignited in Cool Brass.

    The theme behind Gayo’s article: women taking responsive roles in erotica. A focus: Femme Fatale, a photo compendium by Finn Reka Nyari. Apparently Ms. Nyari’s lens exposed more than female forms offered up as living mannequins awaiting domination or mere male regard.

    You know. The usual. Continue reading Indirect Objects

No Atonement Kabuki


    Oh man! Did I have a great time writing the three stories comprising Cool Brass, or what?

    When I wrote for newspapers my first immediate chief was an editor who loved quoting Red Smith’s dictum. The late Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times sportswriter likened our craft to “opening a vein.”

    Puh-lease. Continue reading No Atonement Kabuki

Perdu Is Lost


(*Names changed in order to speak freely.)

    My colleague *Perdu is the sort of woman who disturbs dreams. Clever, charming, at times nervy. Unlike women who instigate nightmares, one can lust after Perdu without worrying about a future involving boiled bunnies, knives or elaborately devised revenge schemes against friends and family members.

    Nonetheless her adherence to rationality borders on psychosis.

    After five years of serving at Mugwump*, our dying place of employ, Perdu’s just come around to acknowledging the daily waste, absurdity, and futility contained within its walls. Her acceptance of survival cynicism has been exciting to behold.

    For the longest two hurdles kept Perdu from seeing how our enterprise had become an asylum. Continue reading Perdu Is Lost

Marion Says Okay

    A photograph snared me.

    Two weeks ago I started juicing the www.slowboatmedia.com visuals by adding a picture gallery. The first pictures were enlargements of those thumbnails dotting the Slow Boat Media pages. As time progresses there’ll be additions. In our age words are insufficient. Maybe next year I’ll offer a coloring book.

    To gain attention for my site I mailed postcards to a decent range of people. Some were publishing luminaries, others issuers of precious literary journals. You know. The kind subscribed to more for their cachet than content.

    But I also flung my self-promotion around. Since mass market newspapers are retrenching coverage, I bombarded counterculture weeklies. The free ones we browse primarily for club listings and personal ads. Given they’re picking up much of what the daily broadsheets and tabloids dismiss or deem unconscionably mature, therefore unfit for mythic Middle America, I targeted columnists and beat writers whose readerships know the difference between naked and nude. And rarely find either immediately offensive.

    My kind of heathens.

    Away from periodicals, I sprinkled my list with recipients whose curiosity I hoped to pique. These were addressees known for their cinema and broadcast credits. After all domestic viewing audiences can only stand so many insipid sequels or adolescent versions of superior foreign products.

    Time to start adapting American source material again. Start with mine.

    Finally I imposed upon my friends. Except I didn’t inform them beforehand. Surely a few suspect and don’t mind playing along. Others are downright dumbfounded. Good. I seek objective responses, not “attaboys!” Having been a reporter, a thick-skinned one at that, I can absorb as well as inflict.

    The revealing photograph wasn’t first seen by one of my intendeds. Instead, in the best “telephone” fashion a connective friend of ours saw the enlargement. (The precise reason I sent her a card. Word of mouth is the best promotion and she’s always been yappy.) Our friend recognized the woman sitting on the daybed handling the camera, then alerted Marion.

    The woman pictured was “The One” who never should’ve gotten away. After a roundabout fashion, Marion simply pointed me in the right direction.

    After ignoring and running through our respective stop signs at the same intersection, Marion and I narrowly avoided crashing because our relationship was so often out of sync.

    When didn’t we clash? That is outside of brief respites occupied with peace and patience. Sure. We could’ve been a couple. A sparring couple. By the way, this is my first post where I sought and got a subject’s consent. Or put plainer, just needed masking one or two distinguishing features instead of epochs to protect myself.

    Happily time and distance have not softened our singeing bordering on brutal regard for one another. Isn’t that called honesty? There’s so little of it. Wonder why.

    Alerted, Marion visited the Slow Boat Media site. After determining how much I’d changed and what remained fixed, she read my ebook Reveries (http://www.amazon.com/Reveries-ebook/dp/B004H8G1KO/). Right away she picked up how journalism had affected my writing. Less starch, more meat.

    I’m in the alumni directory. Instead of fending comments through Slow Boat portals, she jolted me twice. First by reestablishing communication. Second by discussing my alter ego’s product through me.

    Talk about really talking about yourself in the third person!

    Marion didn’t bother asking whether I had remained careful and incorrigible, and responsible and reprehensible throughout the years. Neither did she mention “the Harem.”

    “The Harem” laid the trail which later wended Marion to Slow Boat and me, as well as granted me “The One.”

    After our 51-49 ardor/anger balance pushed, transforming reciprocal frisson into friction, the connective friend who would eventually inform Marion of Slow Boat’s contents spied me then shepherding three sophomore transfers, all women, from the Student Union across the Mall. Presumably to my room for a thorough hour of repetitive physics exercises.

    That was me conceptualizing as a busybody. She exaggerated. I never took a physics class.

    Unfamiliar with their surroundings, those three newbies had banded. Until reaching individual comfort they traveled as a pack. “The One” was among them. Except it was too early. She became “The One” later.

    I’d been out and about looking to wrangle chicks for a dorm party. By promoting the therapeutic benefits of mixing booze and horny guys, I exceeded my quota. Rocky as that drunken night went, it started the fumbled opportunity who became “The One.”

    Marion did not bring up “The One.” But she did raise Jill. Uncanny how women’s recall works. She read my Jill posts. After three decades she asked whether the Jill referenced was the same woman who clerked at a nearby bakery and waited at one of the city’s better local greasy spoons. Bulls-eye!

    She has yet to point out my own double standard concerning May-December affairs. No doubt that lecture is coming.

    Marion was untroubled by Reveries’ sex, but stated my candid portrayals would offend some readers. Particularly those our age who when younger had gotten around and now regretted the circuit completed. I asked wouldn’t their belated shame make them hypocrites. She said that would make them parents. They’d reinterpret their feckless days. And nights. From fun times into fearful cautions.

    Her biggest criticism was the novella’s length. It was too short. Reveries was intended as a brisk entertainment. No way I’d shoot my whole load first time out.

    These days, Marion, a widow, lives in the Intermountain West void. Visiting Ogden, Boise or Spokane are her ideas of big trips. We last saw another 20 years ago during our 10th Class Reunion. She’d worn glasses when we first met as freshmen. By our reunion she’d switched to contacts. The sight threw me off. In the past, bereft of lenses, it meant we were defenseless and unclothed.

    She’s resumed wearing glasses.

    Until meeting Marion, I’d never skinny-dipped. I gathered immediately she was a frequent practitioner. Her having a favorite spot and carrying blankets in her pickup just for these occasions clarified that.

    At first, there was an illicitness about gazing upon bare flesh baking beneath pure desert sunlight. Shouldn’t this activity have been abnormal? Weren’t our perfections and blemishes meant to be hidden in order to further stoke imagination while fumbling in dim or darkened spaces?

    Our location, a mountain stream bank, drew hikers. Not a steady parade but a dodgy trickle. Too many of whom failed feigning indifference. Seems Marion’s site found favor with plenty of others enjoying the same happy jaybird states, though they mainly congregated under and around the falls 70 or 80 twisty yards above our placid portion.

    With Marion I quickly acclimated to utter openness. I also realized we needn’t rush. She ended my groping furtive teen days.

    Adults, we lazed. We lolled. We also likely luxuriated more than recommended.

    Of course every idyll has its snake. For me it was the water. Winter runoff fed streams are exceptional for chilling beverages, but entering such proved, oh, challenging. Numbed limbs and torso were the least of my problems. That frigid stream nearly turned my gonads into ovaries.

    Marion laughed at my distress then. She chuckles at the memory now.

    If sharing intimacies with a woman unlike any other you’ve met, under conditions formerly considered alien, in part of the country ceded to John Wayne and James Stewart types, somehow produced insufficient reward, then the combination of all those factors adding perception into what had previously been rutting started genuine passage into more estimable comportment and greater awareness. Mine.

    Though some old habits linger.

    Some inconsideration, obviously the writer’s, redefined terms between Marion and me. So much so 10 intervening years hadn’t softened her.

    Skip seething. The Marion of 1991 wanted to launch ICBMs up my rear.

    Her hostility boiled from intemperate remarks I’d brayed back in the earliest 80s. Something about her future husband. I don’t know if Marion deserved better, but she might’ve chosen wiser. Nice enough man as the groom ultimately became, he was 25 years her senior and well on the way to his third chin. Yet with him she wanted to realize her paint by numbers dreams.

    Pleasant though on the plain side, Marion augmented that with a piquant attitude. Had she been vain and pampered herself ridiculously maybe she could’ve developed into one of those women whose looks latches men’s eyes, whose beauty remains so memorable that when she’s glimpsed again after decades the extent of her decline pains past male admirers. If Marion made suitors ache, any throbs came from her core and not through slavish treatments and dieting.

    Lifestyle kept her naturally slender. Today, her family’s former homestead exists within city limits. Back then it occupied unincorporated scrubland. Pavement ran quickly into crushed gravel and that didn’t extend far before the track became dirt. Canvas or open-sided shoes marked greenhorns like myself. Boots were necessities because of snakes or scorpions.

    I didn’t tarry long after the obligatory desert orientation/survival session ended before buying my first pair of coyote skin “kicks.”

    Marion’s father worked in the mines. Before the vocation became derided, her mother was a housewife. Parents and siblings stabled and rode horses out there as well as bred and matched gamecocks. Until civilization encroached and overwhelmed them, nobody regarded bloodsport as nothing more than a primitive, potentially lucrative pastime.

    That Marion was direct. At least more direct than any other woman I’d met until then. Subterfuge and scheming were alien notions to her. Initially I saw this new woman as refreshing but soon realized such unsheathed honesty needed equaling. Or else be rightly seen as less a man.

    She commuted to campus in an old drab Ford pickup. So old young Edsel Ford himself might’ve driven it off the assembly line. Perfect for that terrain, it was a tank. Gunned hard enough, her wheels kicked up beautiful dust plumes.

    When parked on campus, Marion stored her rifle and shotgun in a locked compartment beneath the cab’s bench seat. Otherwise heavy metal slatted the gun racks and advertised willing deterrence. Hers were the first weapons I ever fired.

    Aside from rare celebrations demanding elegance, and dependent on the season, Marion’s daily ensembles consisted of either sun dresses or blouses and jeans. With the former, she gave her boots a break and wore Candies. It’s not strange I remember that. Wedges lent her calves nice definition.

    Uncommon activities kept Marion lean better than any workout regimen. Saddling and unsaddling, grooming the horses, mucking out the stable, training cocks with her brothers and sisters, helping her mother in the garden, kitchen, canning, all those built muscle and sharpened senses.

    Refusing to join Farah’s feathered hair mania, Marion clipped her brown strands pixie short. Labor as she did blunted any extravagant nails. Despite gloves and lotions which moisturized the rest of her skin, her palms were tough for a woman’s.

    Marion zoomed me before I noticed her. Back in the late 70s the Southwest amazed this newcomer. Thirty-plus years on it still does. While the sere scene dazzled me, she calmly took my measure. She compared this stranger against her “shitkicker boyfriends.” Tired of the usual jerky, Marion decided gambling on new beef.

    The only way she could’ve been more condescending was to have called me a “dude.”

    Marion considered me a “specimen.” Hers was a fairly homogenous environment. I was the first Easterner, forget New Yorker, she’d met. I wasn’t a “dese ‘n’ dose” guy either. While local TV seldom ran cowboy movies, there was no shortage of Bowery Boys features. Slip Mahoney and Satch seen from outside their Lower East Side should‘ve created a whole new branch of anthropology. It would’ve given “Routine 7” another meaning.

    We first became acquainted as university freshmen in an American history class. It surveyed the Gilded Age. Having read Reveries, Marion was curious whether certain titles mentioned within referenced us. I wish. Clever obscurity was my intent. I mean, who reads William Dean Howells and Frank Norris nowadays?

    She and I bonded over ridiculing our TA, a stunning blonde of Hungarian heritage, one having the course’s professor wrapped around whatever she wanted. She had tresses instead of long hair and it cascaded. Now that woman was vain. And distant. And gorgeous. Absolutely.

    Superior as we believed ourselves, supercilious as we were, Marion and I rewarded her the honorific “Sister Magyar.” She got away partially concealing her foxy features behind a peek-a-boo hairstyle. Another woman attempting this might’ve been nicknamed Cousin Itt.

    Her body was voluptuous on the way to luxurious and her wardrobe emphasized these curves. I doubt her male charges heard much of those lessons but we surely paid rapt attention. Not that our focus attracted her. Sister Magyar succumbed entirely to our campus’ petrodollar contingent.

    Before the Iranians shattered diplomatic decorum and Western illusions in 1979, they, Saudis, Iraqis, and other Middle Easterners whose sand boxes sat above huge pools of black gold crowded our university. Ostensibly they attended the engineering school, though they kept better attendance at local clubs and appeared quite attentive to women mesmerized by such close proximity to casual, careless and carefree wads of money.

    Sister Magyar was one of the more accessible two-legged party favors. If you were male, swarthy, Sunni, recklessly drove an American muscle car, and substituted nightly shots and chasers at the club, er, excuse me, disco, for daily prayers towards Mecca, Sister Magyar became your girl. And she greeted you with wide open legs.

    Marion and I are in our 50s and childless. Me from strict dependence on latex; Marion because she and her husband never created the right alchemy. Their significant age difference hindered the process. Him. Poor fellow’s sperm had the motility of frozen lard. Science caught up to their desire too late. Luckily they had love.

    She asked about the next “Rex Merritt” effort. And who the hell was “Marianne Messing”? (Damn! She had read the book!) Was Marianne based on a real German?

    Good questions! I suggested Marion reread some of my oldest posts. In them I must’ve thrown around the words “amalgamation,” “embellishment,” and “invention.” If didn’t, I sure should’ve. Besides, I’m still thinking about what comes next.

    I expect to provide answers by November. Just in time for our 30th reunion.

www.slowboatmedia.com

 http://www.amazon.com/Reveries-ebook/dp/B004H8G1KO/

Graphic Thrills

 

 

    More than an “s” differentiates the Boris Vian novella I Spit on Your Graves from both schlock movie versions of I Spit on Your Grave. Nor does the former serve as source material for the latter pair.

    Book and movies arrive from distinct places.

    Vian’s 1946 tale is an oozing helping of exported Americana strained through culture, news, music, and propaganda into France. While the United States and Soviet Union won World War II, it would take Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s admissions of the deceased commissar’s criminal excesses before the workers’ paradise gleam assumed a rightfully heavy tarnish.

    Until that happy day America alone occupied the whole ambivalence spectrum.

    Each movie follows one simple arc. A damsel in distress turns tables on her tormentors and becomes Ellie Mae Clampett on meth. It’s carnage deluxe. Continue reading Graphic Thrills

Roll Over Gutenberg and Tell Your Printers Devil the News!

    Tough about Borders Books, eh. Guess they never should’ve swallowed Brentano’s. That’s a specific New York reference for New Yorkers of certain ages.

    We readers should mourn Borders diminishment. Coupled with vanishing independent bookstores, fewer national outlets will limit variety. Less shelf space means filling what remains with more common titles and crowding out the new, experimental or just plain weird.

    Might Borders’ survival mean selling Glenn Beck coloring books? Given the addled masses lapping up his daily misinformation, and a struggling book chain looking to turn quick, immense, tidy profits, how soon until corporate interests begin offering brain-dead America’s favorite savant’s wigwams and drawings for his audience’s pleasure?

    Naturally with Beck scribbling inside the lines isn’t as important as smoking peyote-infused crayons. Continue reading Roll Over Gutenberg and Tell Your Printers Devil the News!

Yield From Effort

    
    The template to “Ricky,” someone referenced in my ebook Reveries (http://www.amazon.com/Reveries-ebook/dp/B004H8G1KO/), recently left me a message. Between work, launching my writing, and living, we haven’t socialized much lately. My hours are allocated. His remain formless. 

    Decades ago I may’ve been a “Ricky.” Young American males commonly pattern themselves after him. Generally “Ricky” wallows and indulges in women and beer. I’ll proudly cop to that much! Exuding confidence, he’s the sort who attracts women and appeals to men.

    Both want to orbit him. Women because his proximity raises their value, while men wish to share his esteem, if not appropriate a measure of same.

    Of course being “Ricky” has a shelf life. Around 30 nature usually diminishes the dazzle. If “Ricky” is lucky, and hasn’t been struck blind by too much self-adulation, he understands how he must transition into a more substantial adult. Continue reading Yield From Effort