Readers and writers blog

Steve Karmazenuk, the first author to entrust an entire book to R&W Blog, is looking for readers to check out his latest science fiction novel, The Darkness and the Stars.

Karmazenuk is appealing for ‘beta-readers,’ a computer-literate construct based on the term for the exploratory stage of software in which feedback is not only expected but welcomed.

And by the way, readers, however many of you are still out there, have you read the latest short story in our fiction section, ‘To Remember and To Forget’ by Luke Darbyshire?

Karmazenuk’s latest work, although it stands on its own, is an extension of the story line in the sci-fi novel he allowed us to serialize earlier this year, The Unearthing, also in our fiction section. Both novels originally were conceived under a seven-part outline, but that was a dozen years ago when he was planning a five-year television story arc that he later decided would work better as novels.

Anyway, he says, “I have been working on (The Darkness and the Stars) for five years, counting various abortive starts, revisions, reviews and rewrites . . .. I’ve finally completed what I feel is the ‘ready’ draft of the story. I am looking for people to read it — preferably people who have read Unearthing first — so that I can collect a little reader feedback before declaring it ‘complete’ and shipping it off to the publisher.”

If you can handle some beta-reading, email Karmazenuk at kspace@videotron.ca. And while you’re at it, check out his weblog, Kspace, where he discusses writing, life, politics and other subjects. A resident of Montreal, he also is author of the novel Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind (excerpts available through www.phyte.ca) and is a music journalist for Confront Magazine (http://www.confrontmagazine.com/).

And now, the Darbyshire short story. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re missing what one perceptive reviewer (me) described as “like James Joyce meets Raymond Chandler meets A Clockwork Orange.”

How can you pass that up?

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is an archival photo taken from the website of Frontier College, a Toronto-based organization that runs a variety of literacy programs across Canada. It seemed a fitting image for a blog entry about our Canadian writer friend Steve Karmazenuk.

What a pleasure it can be to read good writing, a pleasure I’ve received a number of times from works contributed to R&W Blog and one I’m glad to share from our latest contributor, a young Englishman named Luke Darbyshire.

It’s like James Joyce meets Raymond Chandler meets A Clockwork Orange.

Really, that’s how Darbyshire’s short story, ‘To Remember and To Forget,’ struck me. His tale of Bobby, a rather idiosyncratic young man, and how he deals with his father’s death, his mother’s toiletries, his friend Jim and their mutual love, Anna, has qualities of the dark poetry of Joyce, the mystery of Chandler and even that dystopian craziness found in the best-known work of Anthony Burgess.

In fact, a game Bobby plays while riding a double-decker bus reminds me of the ‘clockwork’ youth, Alex, in Burgess’ tale.

And consider Bobby’s observations of mourners after his father’s funeral:

He could hear (his mother’s) relatives in the kitchen, attendant at the makeshift counter bar: ‘Yes, I’ll take ice, and he’ll have a Guinness.’ Plastic cups. Paper plates. Sandwich quarters.

‘Never too early, never too late — that’s what I say!’ a rotund red-faced man said, guffawing crumbs and tuna mayonnaise down his black shirt as he struggled with a tumbler of cheap whisky and a plate of sausage rolls and warm quiche that, sat on cold porcelain at 3 a.m. the following morning, even redder in the face from burst blood vessels, spewing a red/brown mixture similar in consistency to poorly made risotto from a torn sphincter, he would dearly regret. ‘You hear that, eh?’

‘Hey, at least maintain we’re here out of respect,’ the red-faced man’s friend responded in a murmur. He glanced back at the bar, eyeing her sister who was stood beside it in determined resolve, focusing her entire essence into emptying each can into its glass and serving each slab of ice with subtlety sufficient to prevent the liquid from rising forth in response and, achieving height greater than that of the sides of the glass it had been placed in, forming alcoholic puddles across the counter. He hesitated for a second, studying her eyes, and continued, ‘Darling, could you give me a top up on this; it’s all head.’ She opened another black-and-white can — choking down a sob, all too noticeably — and tilted her head to inspect her work as she poured. She scanned the room self-aware from under her fringe before handing the glass back. ‘Thanks, dear. We were all so sorry to hear; you must be doing terrible,’ he dissimulated, tilting his head, narrowing his eyes and arching their brows in kind pity, noting who noticed in his peripheral vision. She nodded, and the corners of her mouth crept up her face, but the main stretch of pink tissue held flat, firm against her teeth, ‘Yes,’ and continued to gaze through the strands of her hair cast across her forehead.

Darbyshire currently is on a writing sabbatical after leaving the world of corporate finance and heading for studies at university, probably toward a career as an English teacher.

Finally today, as promised, another new short story from Hugh Yonn entitled ‘Me and the Good Ol’ IRS.’ If you’ve read Yonn’s first two contributions to us, you’ll guess there’s a certain amount of irony in his latest work.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image above is the Knight Bus, a fantasy triple-decker from the movie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

I’m close to surrendering to this blog. I try to escape it, but writers keep sending us their work. And I can’t resist reading it. Now the problem is to format it so that you can read it.

So I’m busy formatting the two latest contributions, both short stories, one by an Englishman named Luke Darbyshire and the other by our old friend Hugh Yonn. Each is intended as the first installment of a longer work.

I should have both up by next Sunday.

‘Short’ is a bit of an understatement for Darbyshire’s story, “To Remember and To Forget,” which runs about 11,000 words. But it’s full of similes and alliteration that I find reminiscent of classic detective stories, and so I’m now deep into it. Darbyshire tells us it’s intended as the first of a five-part collection he’s writing under the working title Short Stories to Read and Repeat.

Yonn’s latest tale, “Me and the Good Ol’ IRS,” involves run-ins with two ‘Mr. Somebodys’ at a local bank and a regional IRS office, none of which goes well. You may remember Yonn as a Florida entrepreneur who at one time was a bigtime marijuana dealer, then a federal prisoner. This latest story is to be continued with an installment called “And That’s How I Got in the Pot Bidness,” or, as Yonn adds, “something like that.”

Although his stories are drawn from personal experience, Yonn tells us they’re fictionalized, and so we’ve switched his first two contributions to us — ‘Going for the Gold’ and ‘Shoulda Robbed a Bank’ — from our nonfiction to our fiction section, which is where the latest also will go.

Meanwhile, as I click through these latest works, forging them into our page style — and ignoring the guitar and music stand that are sitting next to this computer and that I really should get to — I take breaks to ponder the following:

• Why are we getting so much spam lately in our comments section — hundreds per day? Could it be that Jeff Paul — you know, the infomercial guy who sets you up each month with 10 Internet sites that make you money around the clock, even though you barely know how to use email — is suckering in more people now that their personal economy has crashed along with the big one?

Let me tell you, folks, the Internet doesn’t work that way. But your spam is making it more difficult for me to find legitimate comments to our site. No, I’m not interested in nursing jobs in Alabama, medical degree programs in California or porn sites in Russian, especially the latter: Anyone familiar with the Greek alphabet can decipher the first two words in “порно фото: баба ебет мужика.” Yes, “porn photo.” The rest says, “grandma has sex with a guy.” Gimme a break.

• Why are so many Bush supporters angry — no, make that livid — that Barack Obama got elected? He won by eight million votes. An incumbent George W. Bush won in 2004 by only three million — and really only by 120,000 in Ohio, which was the deciding state — and in 2000 actually lost the popular vote by 543,000 before the U.S. Supreme Court in a party-line 5-4 vote made him the winner.

Sure, we moaned and groaned for eight years, and he and his screwups gave us plenty of reason for it. In fact, he’s a major reason Obama got elected. I think most of us just wanted somebody smarter than us to run the country. But none of us rushed to buy guns or make threats against the president’s life, both of which apparently are happening in record numbers now that Obama is our president-elect.

What a country. Not only do we have to worry about the fundamentalists overseas, but they’re threatening to run amok here, too.

Talk to you next week, I guess.

– Sid Leavitt

I might as well call this site the Brokeback Blog because, as much as I try to veer away to other activities, I don’t know how to quit it.¹ We keep getting contributors — the latest, a Texas musician who has a different sense of gospel and a Florida man who got an associate degree in federal prison.

The works by Joel Melton and Hugh Yonn aren’t long ones, which is good because we’re not taking on any new books for a while. And we found their contributions interesting.

Melton, a first-timer at R&W Blog, submitted three essays in OpenOffice text files that each began with the word ‘gospel.’ I usually associate ‘gospel’ with fundamentalist Christians, but reading Melton’s essays reminded me that its Old English root comes from not from ‘God’ but from ‘good,’ as in ‘good news’ or ‘good story.’

Melton’s essays — subtitled ‘Beauty,’ ‘A Lesson’ and ‘Son and Father’ — are drawn from his life growing up in Oklahoma on a farm with a strict mother and a story-telling father. Melton now lives in Austin, Texas, where he’s produced his fifth studio album of songs he’s composed and performed. You can listen to those and other songs at his home page, Joel Melton: Kick Ass Texas Music. He also is a filmmaker.

Yonn, an entrepreneur with various business interests in Florida, is a second-time contributor to R&W Blog. His initial short story, ‘Shoulda Robbed a Bank,’ was based on his experiences some years ago as a big-time marijuana dealer and later a federal prisoner for five years. His latest, ‘Going for the Gold,’ tells of a friend whose attempt at minor glory is literally a flop.

And now I’ve just got to get to all those extra singalongs I’m planning to schedule at area nursing homes and senior residences. We’re still doing the Sunday sessions at the home just around the corner, but I want to add three during the week at other places, several that I’ve played before in the past dozen or so years.

But no, I still haven’t made the phone calls (although the numbers are right here in my notebook). I did make a little progress this week. I transcribed the theme song for the TV cartoon show SpongeBob SquarePants. There’s a kid who comes to our Sunday sessions to visit his grandfather and likes the song, especially the part about “drop on the deck and flop like a fish.”

No, we’re not dealing with Mozart here. But it’s fun.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. For those readers who didn’t see the movie Brokeback Mountain, it’s about two ranch hands who fall in love while herding sheep on a mountain. The exact quote spoken by Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) to Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) is “I wish I knew how to quit you.” Actually, I didn’t see the movie, either. I looked up the quote on Google.

2. The image above is a fractal from the image gallery of the website Creativity Software Inc.

Since I last posted a week ago, I haven’t done a goddamned thing. This election is driving me crazy.

Well, I have done one thing — new poetry from Joel Phipps, our songwriting, guitar-playing, kilt-wearing bard in southwestern Ohio.

But other than getting that new poetry formatted and posted for today, I’ve spent the past week glued to TV and Internet polls, watching the latest predictions from Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, Ohio, even North Carolina and Indiana, from early morning until late at night.

Because I can’t spend another four years like I’ve spent the last eight.

After long days of poll-tending and short nights of fitful sleep, I’m up early to check on the stock market futures. Because they make a difference, too. That’s right. The worse the economy, the better for Democrats. And so I shamefully admit that I hope the stock market stays in the tank — but just for two more days.

I worried about the World Series because Wednesday night’s broadcast of Game 6 would have to be delayed eight minutes by Barack Obama’s half-hour political ad on that network. Would that cost him the votes of some baseball fans? To avoid that, I wanted the series to end at Game 5, long before Wednesday night, no matter who won, Philadelphia or Tampa Bay. And so I was rooting for the Phillies, who were ahead 3-1 in games, when Game 5 began. Turns out, it was delayed two nights by rain and ended up on Wednesday night, anyway.

I mean, these are the things that have possessed me this week. Really, I was supposed to be calling area nursing homes and senior residences to set up the first of three weekday singalongs I’d like to lead as a volunteer each week. I got the phone numbers written down in a notebook. That’s it. And I’m supposed to be practicing the guitar that’s sitting beside this computer. Still sitting there.

Because the polls, the polls are calling.

The George W. Bush years have been worse than even the Richard Nixon years. At least Nixon managed some foreign policy successes with China and the Soviet Union before his creepy domestic activities caught up with him. I liked the elder Bush, George H.W., who I thought was a capable, honorable man. But Junior — lazy, incurious and, frankly, just plain snotty — has made me and a lot of other Americans ashamed of our country.

I’m not much more impressed with the latest Republican ticket, not so much because of John McCain, whom I consider an American hero but, unfortunately, way out of date. I was in the Army during the Vietnam War — I served in the Middle East, which had its own dangers even then, but certainly not like Vietnam — and I think it’s time we get over that war. Hell, I think it’s time we get over the Civil War.

But Sarah Palin. Jesus. Some people thought TV anchorman Charles Gibson was unfair to ask her about the Bush Doctrine. Granted, I may be the only one on my block who understood what he was talking about, but someone who seeks to be our backup president should know he was talking about the U.S. waging preemptive war. And anyone seeking to be vice president should know the constitutional duties of the office, which do not include “running the Senate.”

By the way, when she promised special needs families she’d be their “advocate in the White House,” I wonder what she was thinking. I know, the vice president has an office in the White House, but I wonder if she was under the impression she’d be living there, too. I wonder if she knows the vice president lives at the Naval Observatory.

Choosing her as his running mate was not the act of a steady statesman but that of a risky pilot. And I don’t want to be in his plane.

So let’s vote, already. Let’s get it over. I can’t take this much longer.

This week’s new offerings in Poetry:

• Four poems by Joel Phipps — ‘The Convenience Store,’ ‘Public Service Announcement,’ ‘Writersville, U.S.A.’ and ‘December Rains.’

– Sid Leavitt

p.s. You know, for a guy who’s supposed to be taking a break from blogging, I still seem to be blogging. Go figure.