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Today at , Kathy Fish[1] talks to Susan Tepper[2] about her story WREATH from Tepper’s flash novella “From The Umberplatzen��. This is the most beautiful conversation on some of the most important topics drawing on the immense experience of these short form masters. I particularly appreciated the comments on dialogue, punctuation (or lack thereof) and channeling. All of what Susan says is commensurable with what I’ve heard other writers say when they were in the grip of birthing something beyond rational planning. It seems to me that the short form is well-suited to this manner of writing. Only the other day I found out that even the mystery novels of Raymond Chandler were composed as a sequence of flash pieces[3]. And I believe that Robert Graves said similar things about the White Goddess, an altogether completely different work[4]. ��The story dictated the style�� is memorable: the metaphorical place of the Umberplatzen and the two central characters seem too act as the three corners of a God triangle driving the story. It makes me think of my own and others�� seemingly desperate attempts to impose plot on a story, even though the plot is the pinnacle of junk writing: I’m saying this respectfully as someone who is largely plotless but who secretly tries to learn the art of the plot from hack Bibles like Plotto[5].

Notes: [1] Kathy Fish’s short fiction collection   is forthcoming in September from The Lit Pub. Her collection  is available from Matter Press.  [2]  Susan Tepper’s  last book is “��  from Wilderness House Press.  [3] see the excellent new biography of Chandler by Tom Williams,  .  [4]  The eminent British poet and novelist Robert Graves claimed that  he had channeled , a mysterious work of poetic genius, which every lover of language ought to check out.  I found that the book itself put me in the kind of trance that I presume it was created in. [5] “�� could also be called “the monster book of all plots��. It’s a repository of 1,492 plots organized by character, conflict and plot types, written in 1928 by prolific hack writer William Wallace Cook and reissued this year by Tinhouse. I do indeed read this book furtively, almost under the covers, in the small hours, and I’m enjoying the hell out of it. I believe it even helps me…��

Woke up this morning imagining that there were no more animals in the world. No natural animals anyway: rather, they had all been replaced by mechanical devices, which worked devilishly better than nature’s invention. At least this is what everyone thought at first. But the absence of animals and their replacement by machines soon made itself felt in an unexpected way: suddenly there was nothing to aspire to anymore. To be top dog there had to be a real dog. An automatic puppy that only rolls around, does what you say no matter what you ask and guesses what you might’ve wanted to say in a inbuilt desire to satisfy all your needs, won’t do. You can’t come clean unless someone else is dirtier than you. I was amazed to find out how many aspects of human life are so tied to the animal condition that they disappeared when the animal disappeared. And I don’t mean food here. Steaks, chicken nuggets, and pork chops had all been replaced by things that tasted better, looked better and kept almost forever. I mean epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. We lost our taste for knowledge, our ability to distinguish between what was real and what was not, and the difference between good and bad. Death was dealt by philosophy. But one discipline saved the world from destruction: aesthetics. Since all experimentation and risk had long been banned from the arts, here was the space into which the artificial animals could expand and thereby provide us with the competition that our nature needed. In the time that followed the insight that we required an animal kingdom to rule over as emperors, man-made mammals, birds, fishes and insects created art of a beauty never seen before. Curiously enough, the classes of animals divided the arts up among themselves: mammals specialized in writing, birds in painting, fishes focused on music, and insects threw themselves into sculpture.

There were plenty of transgressions, like the whale who insisted on singing, and transmutations, like the swallow whose paintings consisted of air column density changes made visible only fleetingly by the flutter of wings. Humans could not follow many of these endeavors, let alone surpass them, but the examples bravely set by the beasts, rejuvenated our creativity. Animals and men began to work side-by-side. Eventually, it became clear that our only hope to reach Parnassus was to also rid ourselves of flesh and feelings. So we followed the animal and became androids. And I don’t believe any of us will ever look back.

I’ve got a long-standing infatuation with androids. Over and over again I’ve approached the subject. Finally, this morning, I thought I’d found the solution, even though when I read through it myself now, it seems a tad complicated. But then, when you talk about unhappened futures, there always is an air of the absurd. See also my recent collection of “Android Clippings�� in the July issue of .

Vaughan Simons: phoning in.

My own experience with editing and online literary magazine is limited to a stunt of several months with the then fairly new e-zine Metazen[], founded by Frank Hinton. Under the nom de plume Finnegan Flawnt[], whom I had fully made up, with his Celtic lineage, a Welsh lisp and an Irish limp. Finnegan had emerged straight from The Wake. He was Flann O’Brien’s younger brother, he looked like a disheveled Benjamin Franklin[], and the murkiness of his descent undoubtedly predestined him for a career in editing. However, what Finnegan hated more than anything, was to have to read other writers�� stories. If he were still around to ask, he would probably admit that one reason was his own insecurity as a writer, and his absolute ambition, which made it difficult for him to look at anybody else’s work with the cool eye that an editor must possess. This is how I imagine the ideal editor[]:

“I looked at the man by the workbench now. He was short and thick-bodied with strong shoulders. He had a cool face and cool dark eyes. He wore a belted brown suede raincoat that was heavily spotted with rain. His brown hat was tilted rakishly. He leaned his back against the workbench and looked me over without haste, without interest, as if he was looking at a slab of cold meat. Perhaps he thought of people that way.��

“Where The Sea Gives Up Its Dead��

But this blog post is not about the anonymous non-Irish non existing Flawnt or about his indeed lovely co-editors Hinton, Allen, Innis. It is about another mysterious man, a real editor, Vaughan Simons, who ran the online literary magazine > kill author[] for the past three years anonymously projecting himself onto a team of editors that we all could imagine very well: the less we know, the more we make up. With everyone of the 20 issues named after a dead author, >ka affectionately paraded the open coffins of both forgotten and remembered writers of the past. Though the submission guidelines says otherwise, I always felt the signature of these writers as strongly as if they had been figureheads riding ahead of a ship filled with ink stained pirates.

Vaughan Simons: undercover editor.

Besides placing 3 pieces of flash fiction in the magazine, , and , I was thrilled to serve as one of the , too. This was a new experience for me, both daunting and humbling, with the result that I have not been asked to do anything like this ever since. Good riddance! I told you at the start that I wasn’t cut out to be an editor: some people won’t learn the trade, and I’d rather write.

I could go on now and talk about a bunch of other online publishing innovations that came with the magazine but what I will remember most is the superb quality and professionalism that accompanied every issue no matter how experimental content or attitude and that made me want to read it �� in multiple formats �� also because it was beautiful (which makes me realize how rarely this is so online) �� or listen to it.

In my short history of publishing experiences, Vaughan’s magazine stands out as one of the most personal and most delightful. Having been accepted by > kill author has made me proud and was a very important validation of my writing. I am terribly, passionately grateful for that.

Swedes building the first IKEA megastore

It suddenly makes logical sense that Simons achieved this by remaining anonymous. Nobody would respect the Nobel Prize if it was given away by Carl Löfgren, Agneta Svensson and Erik Ikea[]. Soon, academics will seek Vaughan out to gain a better understanding of the impact of a perfect editorial disguise on the weather in London, the Olympic prospects of British athletes and the results of suppressing a successful online identity, Pessoa-style.

Dear Vaughan, toodle-oo till the next venture from one of your over 400 very satisfied customers. There’s no reason why the next thing, literary or not, that you decide to do, shouldn’t also be a complete global blast, thanks for the ride!

[1] is an online literary magazine, still going strong. Its founder, , currently cycles somewhere in Bavaria and . Co-editor must be off and soon has a new book out. Former co-editor Julie Innis .

[2] was a pseudonym of mine. While he’s not been seen alive since 16 June 2010, his continues to flash.

[3] Who said famously: «Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.» Not Flawnt, Franklin did.

[4]  I am reading a lot of  Chandler lately. The quote is from Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939).

[5] > kill author is an online literary magazine that ceased publication with issue 20 and was edited by Vaughan Simons (), who is on and .

[6] No similarity with any living persons bearing these names is intended. IKEA isn’t actually a Swedish surname. I apologize to my many Swedish pals, friends and relatives.

I’ve only just heard about the (self-) . It is, from the point of view of a German speaker and teacher, unfortunately that his surname in German means ��teacher��. Though it may be meaningful, since he obviously had to teach us something, something many of us already knew: namely that even in the metaverse original content has a special value. Since the metaverse is supposed to be a mind space beyond the known universe that includes the latter, it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that the extra space consists of rehashed, or (as calls it) ‘repurposed�� content (what a terrible word!). Of course, this isn’t true. There is plenty of original thought and creativity to be found on the Internet. But there’s also a small group of profiteers, who probably like to think of themselves as ‘intellectual entrepreneurs��, who are lacking the basic respect of other people’s word work (plagiarism) and the reader’s justified expectation that anything announced as original is actually original (self-plagiarism—Lehrer was found ). This respect is basic, because it has formed the basis of creative communication since the beginning, and it is probably not too far-fetched to call it a cornerstone of humanity.

Upholding civilization one word at a time

In Germany, we’ve had two widely published scandals involving plagiarizing politicians in the past year. The name of one of these, (without the undeserved academic title and without the inherited aristocratic title), has become synonymous with plagiarism over here. My students will assure me “we are not pulling a Guttenberg,�� meaning that they’ll be extra careful accounting for references and sources. Incidents like the Lehrer scandal undermine recent developments towards , which involves laying one’s ideas and research directly and openly to everyone not just in principle (as it’s been done since 1600) but already in early stages of the work, on the Internet. Guttenberg, Lehrer et al confirm the view mentioned above that the Internet is mindless and somehow unworthy of serious consideration. The view is extended to online publication, blogs, and other virtual community work. It’s potentially damaging especially because the word is the elementary particle of the web, not the image and not the sound. If like me you enjoy online communication and online publishing, and if you also have high hopes that this online world may grow and improve, as we improve, and as we improve our ways of dealing with it and living in it, then you may share my views on plagiarism and self plagiarism scandals.

About once a week someone asks me if I’m not worried others might steal my ideas, words, stories, titles etc. because I put them out so freely and openly. I’m not worried, because I have too many ideas as it is, and I probably write too much as well�� The scandals show that those who built a reputation, careers or even temporary advancement on the sweat of others cannot succeed in the end.

Generation Z: mixing or stealing?

That’s enough for me, despite the case of German writer Helene Hegemann, whose book “Axolotl Roadkill�� shot to fame in 2010 even though it quickly became known that  the work of at least two bloggers without attributing them. Little wonder that the then 17 years old author expressed no apology for appropriating other people’s thoughts (NYT: “��): and a substantial part of the German literary establishment supported her case, perhaps influenced by the commercial success of the book. Once everyone talked about it, it became more difficult for the publishers and the critics to distance themselves: they’d been hungry for new trendy talent and had to feed.

Difficult for me to understand: of the English translation, which is available since January this year does not in any way mention the history and debate around the German publication. As I understand it, later editions of the German original contain apology and corrections, though :

“There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.��

Cute, but not good enough.

Things we do with words: fly!

Even though it’s topologically hard to imagine, we all stand on each other’s shoulders: we constantly imitate and copy one another. When this copying is done by the unconscious, later, sometimes much later, to be turned into something idiosyncratic and original, or when it is consciously taken and openly worked into an original work of meta-art, then I’m happy. Because that’s the way I work, too. I hardly think there are other ways. But that’s different from stealing “in cold blood,�� as it were. Perhaps doesn’t like to distinguish between “mixing�� and “stealing��, or perhaps they really don’t get the difference, but I think that the price of dropping the difference, especially of dropping it unconsciously, may be devaluation of the word and, consequently, devaluation of all the wonderful things that we can do with words when we’re serious about them. What do you think?

I spent all day reading Raymond Chandler as a matter of researching a new project (easy to guess: a detective story). In my teens I was a huge fan of the California type mystery novel noir and read everything I could find by Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald. Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade and Lew Archer, in this order, were for some time best friends. It wasn’t hard to maintain their swagger and shady ambivalence towards life, especially sex, money and fame, because I didn’t have any and neither did they. Or if they did, it was always somehow existentially spoiled—and how acutely did I feel that despoilment, too. Though these were hard-boiled detectives, and I oftentimes still felt like a gooey kid not in control of any of my limbs, we had something in common: we felt suspicious of the world, without being able to give any particular reason. Instead, reality constantly unraveled in every scene and had to be put together again like a senseless sculpture, but without tools, and with hands that were aching with every touch. Nobody captured my sense of forlornness better than Marlowe, who wasn’t just a chess figure in somebody else’s game (though he often enough felt just like that), but a real hero without attitude, a sculptor of scenes, a meaning maker and a natural analyst of his own afflictions:

“I went to bed full of whiskey and frustration and dreamed about a man in a bloody Chinese coat who chased a naked girl with long jade earrings while I ran after them and tried to take a photograph with an empty camera.��

When I meet Marlowe now, it hurts to see how much of that good insecurity I’ve lost since. Fortunately not so much that he won’t talk to me. Alas, we won’t share a smoke, because I’ve given up cigarettes and he’s still at it, wouldn’t be the same without the booze and the fag somehow dangling from his mouth like an overripe thought the staid compliment for one of the many women Marlowe meets and describes, too harshly perhaps in the deeply orange Southern Californian light:

“She was sitting very straight, with her hands on the arms of the chair, her knees close together, her body stiffly erect in the pose of an Egyptian goddess, her chin level, her small bright teeth shining between her parted lips. Her eyes were wide open. The dark slate color of the iris had devoured the pupil. They were mad eyes. She seemed to be unconscious, but she didn’t have the pose of unconsciousness. She looked as if, in her mind, she was doing something very important and making a fine job of it.��

Click image for full quote

But before I get way too lyrical for this time, age and then you, let me recommend Chandler’s 1950 essay ‘�� (also the title of a collection of short stories), which I read this afternoon for the first time. A fine piece of literary criticism that’s much more than that. You will find Chandler now among my quotable writer heroes and heroines; I’ll spend the next weeks trying to get behind Chandler’s secrets. Those he didn’t talk about.

Photo: Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe in ; quotes from: , Chandler’s first novel, written in his late 40s.

I spent all day reading Raymond Chandler as a matter of researching a new project (easy to guess: a detective story). In my teens I was a huge fan of the California type mystery novel noir and read everything I could find by Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald. Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade and Lew Archer, in this order, were for some time best friends. It wasn’t hard to maintain their swagger and shady ambivalence towards life, especially sex, money and fame, because I didn’t have any and neither did they. Or if they did, it was always somehow existentially spoiled—and how acutely did I feel that despoilment, too. Though these were hard-boiled detectives, and I oftentimes still felt like a gooey kid not in control of any of my limbs, we had something in common: we felt suspicious of the world, without being able to give any particular reason. Instead, reality constantly unraveled in every scene and had to be put together again like a senseless sculpture, but without tools, and with hands that were aching with every touch. Nobody captured my sense of forlornness better than Marlowe, who wasn’t just a chess figure in somebody else’s game (though he often enough felt just like that), but a real hero without attitude, a sculptor of scenes, a meaning maker and a natural analyst of his own afflictions:

“I went to bed full of whiskey and frustration and dreamed about a man in a bloody Chinese coat who chased a naked girl with long jade earrings while I ran after them and tried to take a photograph with an empty camera.��

When I meet Marlowe now, it hurts to see how much of that good insecurity I’ve lost since. Fortunately not so much that he won’t talk to me. Alas, we won’t share a smoke, because I’ve given up cigarettes and he’s still at it, wouldn’t be the same without the booze and the fag somehow dangling from his mouth like an overripe thought the staid compliment for one of the many women Marlowe meets and describes, too harshly perhaps in the deeply orange Southern Californian light:

“She was sitting very straight, with her hands on the arms of the chair, her knees close together, her body stiffly erect in the pose of an Egyptian goddess, her chin level, her small bright teeth shining between her parted lips. Her eyes were wide open. The dark slate color of the iris had devoured the pupil. They were mad eyes. She seemed to be unconscious, but she didn’t have the pose of unconsciousness. She looked as if, in her mind, she was doing something very important and making a fine job of it.��

Click image for full quote

But before I get way too lyrical for this time, age and then you, let me recommend Chandler’s 1950 essay ‘�� (also the title of a collection of short stories), which I read this afternoon for the first time. A fine piece of literary criticism that’s much more than that. You will find Chandler now among my dead quotable writer heroes and heroines, and you are right to imagine me using the next weeks to try and get behind Chandler’s secrets. Those he didn’t talk about.

Photo: Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe in ; quotes from: , Chandler’s first novel, written when he was 50 years old.

Picked up a few ��new poems�� by Bukowski, left in his will to be published after his death. After reading ��nothing but a scarf��, a sniping song of war against society animal Truman Capote, ��this ice-skater-of-a-writer��, and other poems like it, I understand why. I never knew how little B. thought of his fellow poets and the whole scene alien to him until it absorbed him, I presume, as all alternatives are absorbed into the great literary nexus. Oddly enough, I’d picked up Capote’s «Breakfast at Tiffany’s» (slim, thin stuff says B.) up one day earlier at the same book shop. Now they both sat on my couch at home: Bukowski was farting melodiously, his mean shadow towered over the slight frame of Capote who indeed looked like an ��old frog�� and was whistling an old Cole Porter song. Both were looking for approval from me, it seemed, and I, of course, was looking for approval from them. C. pulled his scarf closer around his neck, B. scratched his fat neck. I moved my hands in an apologetic gesture that I had see Woody Allen perform in «Scoop». Nobody spoke. Nobody spoke for a hundred seconds which seemed like a hundred years. Well, said Bukowski, are you going to offer us a drink or not? �� I was thinking the same thing, said Capote. Their eyes met as they licked their lips. I got up, put their books on the shelf and they disappeared unapologetically. There’re only very few writers who maintain a constant presence in our living room even without their work laying about.  Most of them continue their bickering and biting in silence on the shelves.

[] Photos: C Bukowski (left); T Capote (right).

A few years ago, in the Hamburg harbour, they were building many expensive, large apartments for the rich right on the waterfront, after kicking out the poor and the homeless who had made this hitherto destitute area theirs. What the executors of this plan did not consider however is that the animals had no concept of a schedule, so that when after a while no humans came to live in the new apartment blocks, because the estate agents were still busy driving the prices skyward, the spiders moved in. Not just a few spiders, but millions of them, legions of spiders, the effect being that when the wealthy clients of the greedy developers came to look at the apartments they could often not even enter because the entire space was taken up by spider webs. The situation made the spiders very happy indeed. They felt giddy at the prospect of having all that weather protected area for themselves and their large families. Among the spiders, coalitions were forming to request reconsideration of their relationship, as a species, with the humans. One very prominent spider politician said: if the humans provide us with this much opportunity free of charge, we must return the favour. Perhaps we must do more than thank them in our hearts (he was speaking figuratively). We could tell them the secret of how to build a bridge between two continents. We could teach them how to sling yourself by a single thread alone all the way to the moon. We could help them establish contact with the colonies of underground spiders who possess the secret of eternal energy. While debate raged among the arachnids, the humans had prepared a major operation to clear the precious waterfront property of spiders. And because social intercourse between us and them was limited to behavioural therapy for unfortunate arachnophobes, nothing happened except that the apartments were occupied by the prosperous purchasers, the spiders were turned out, floors were disinfected, and everything continued as planned only slightly behind schedule.

The to this tale of two species is true: in 2008, spiders took over luxury houses in the new Hafen-City of Hamburg and it proved very difficult to drive them away. Photo: © All Rights reserved by  via Flickr.

A certain Herr G. who lives in Berlin, Germany, in a building called a ‘‘ on Leipziger Straße, collects very short stories at random. He’s content, this Herr G., more or less, his moods are changing with the weather, which is a good thing really because the weather is mostly grim. One of the salient points of any city is the constancy of the weather conditions as far as humanly possible. The city is a controlled environment, and within the city the Plattenbau is its most controlled, regular, clearly structured part. Socialist governments embraced the Plattenbau as a sign of equality and prosperity. But equality when administered architecturally smacks of an anthill. And prosperity is always only as good as the next pauper. But Herr G., though he knows that he’s been bamboozled by the bigwigs, prefers to adopt a postmodern view of the Plattenbau monstrosities. Together with others, who cannot afford to leave the neighborhood, he has written to the mayor requesting the installation of a badge. He’s not particular about the message written on the badge, but he and his fellow conspirators are adamant that the message should leave no doubt that it is an honor, both historically and politically, for any citizen to live here. Just in case the mayor’s office should not follow their suggestion, Herr G. has prepared a blog that he also calls “Plattenbau��. If all else fails, it will prove that it is possible to live in one of these and still be cool.  When his sister Marguerite, who married a Spanish painter and lives on a sunny island in the Mediterranean, raises her Paloma-Picasso-like eyebrows at his relentless attempts to justify his remaining in this “socialist realist museum��, he makes a fist under the table. In the center of the city, he says, they’ve moved the statues of Marx and Engels so that, when the reconstruction of the city palace will be finished years from now, the founding fathers will have to look at the resurrection of Royalism. Perched on Herr G.’s tiny balcony, they proceed to speak about the weather, always the place where contradictory minds meet best. They agree that there’s never been a better time to survey the future than now. And Marguerite, looking around, enjoying the high views, concedes that the builders of this place were probably trying to do their best.

The immediate background for this posting is the end of the “�� project, which I started at the end of 2010. Why does this seem such a long time ago? In any case, while the Penguins seem to have run their course (perhaps they were rescued from the island where they’d been shipwrecked), there’s now a new name for the blog that they started: “��. This little story contains some of the background for this odd title. The moving of the statues of Marx and Engels as well as their relative position to a (so far only planned) reconstruction of King Frederick’s city Palace, are both true (the on the location is out of date). How Marx and Engels and Frederick feel about all this, I do not know. But the new place for the statues is in fact a better place for them: a little out-of-the-way, with less responsibility for the course of history.

The aftermath of reading Carson McCuller’s “The Ballad Of the Sad Café�� (my dictation software transcribes her name as ‘cosmic colors��) is filled with strange sensations, partly because I had my ear wax removed for the first time in 15 years (wife: “why have you got so much wax in your ears?�� Me: “what?��), which led me into a world of forgotten sounds, beginning with the creaking of the wood panels under my bare feet in the morning and making me curse the construction worker who rides his road building machine past our apartment every morning, generating noise that my brain had learned to subtract from the scaffold of sounds around me, but is helpless to do so now, it’s protective layer of wax gone, removed by a very friendly, very chatty nurse (though, owing to the rinsing procedure, I am unable to repeat the content of her chattiness). Every loss leads to a gain, I think, as the silence resonates within the hollow cavern of my auricle. I’ll play it by ear now.

© Friedrich Seidenstücker: Die Zwillinge / Berlinische Galerie

The aftermath of reading Carson McCuller’s “The Ballad Of the Sad Café�� is filled with strange stories that beleaguer me while I’m still lying in bed. The strangest one among them is the story of twins, trained snipers, who lost their minds in one of the wars of the American Empire. Upon coming home to their little southern town, they lock themselves in a water tower from where they pick out strangers and shoot them. Despite the inconvenience brought to the townsmen from these two, nobody betrays them: the Law has no reach in this town. The drama of the homecoming heroes ends when Hungarian twins, who shoot absurdly well, come to town, nobody knows where from. They get the respect of the town when they shoot the rifles out of the hands of the two homecoming heroes up on the tower. Subsequently, the mysterious European beauties fall in love with the blood-thirsty American twins, they get married and have quadruplets, two boys and two girls, who resemble their parents like clones, and who speak Hungarian and English perfectly from birth. In the end, and this is markedly different from the melancholy stories of McCullers, everyone is healed, insanely happy, and the dangerous concept of strangeness has given way to tolerance and togetherness.

I told you it was strange.