Shipbilging - Flash Fiction

The shattered jeroboam’s frothy white squirt against the hull’s continental steel. A dwarfed, ignominious marker of diminished imperial puissance. An overdue premature ejaculation, since there aren’t yet engines fitted into the hulking hollow husk. The remaining shard of the cable-hung bottle, bobbing against the receding keel, as if fumbling to pinion the hasp of a broach.

The metallic monolith slithers down wooden logs into the river. Honouring the glacial pace of retooling, unionised fidelity to the ribs of the antediluvian steel womb it was pressed from. Larger scale male encomium to the frugality of the household mangle. Jagged, homespun industrial Victoriana, in an incipient age of laser torches and robot arms. 

As the vessel breasts the water, kissed not by the Asti-Spume-Mante, rather buffed with the stowaway blood of journeymen workers. Siemens’ seamen involuntarily press-ganged between the metal rollers. Riveters’ skin inadvertently welded into the plates of the ship. Caulked snug to seal seaworthiness with worthless toiling lives. Enfolded like ectopic embryos, immured behind birthing canal alloys. The figurehead prow of old, moving aft. Skeletons and calcified limbs disinterred when the ship is broken down for scrap years hence. Blood dried the same colour as rust. 

Performance Anxiety

I scrolled through the Palm Pilot of my mind. Something lurking in the buried recesses there was Paging me, trying to Laser Disk recollection into my Dot Matrix printer of a brain. I had always credited myself with a Betamax eidetic recorder of events and experience; that I simply had to dial-up any prompt and the cursor of recall would locate the exact file in my personal RAM. Then seamlessly download to the soft palate of my glossal floppy disc, having sieved through a developing tray of emotional chemicals and through the formal organisation of word processing, I would be presented with that retrospection I was seeking after accessing. But not today, despite having played it over backward and forwards on my reel to reel of an analytical mind. No flashing of an incandescent lightbulb going off in my head. Rather the grey matter seemed misty and fogged behind smeared carbon papered facsimiles, with Tippexed redactions and gouges of key bytes of data. Eight-tracked white noise seemed to be clogging my synapses, a thumping migraine boomboxed my ears the harder I tried to focus my thoughts. Nope, the reason she had walked out on me was not recoverable. I hoped it wasn't the age difference. I hadn't meant to be so dismissive of her love letter on scented paper. It was the technology I was objecting to, not the content.

Taken from the new flash fiction collection available on Amazon in print or ebook

Ur, Um - Friday Flash

One morning Patient Zero woke up no longer in possession of his mother tongue. He did not discover this immediately on rising, for as he sung into the bathroom mirror while shaving, he fully understood the words, though they did not scan smoothly with the ditty’s established rhythm. It was only on greeting his wife that the disjunction became apparent. 

She couldn’t quite make out his words so asked him to repeat them thinking him to be still half-submerged in sleep. He couldn’t comprehend her request, so accordingly asked her to repeat herself in turn. His words sounded familiar to her, but didn’t quite accord with anything recognisable. She thought he might have suffered a minor stroke that had afflicted his speech. But listening with sharper focus, she educed his words weren’t slurred but enunciated clearly in their own alien right. Their lifelong marital communication was preserved intact, though somewhat adapted, as he read the confusion in her face, while she gleaned the panic etched on his.

She grabbed a notepad and started writing down her queries, but he snatched the pad and creased his brow in utter bewilderment at the symbols scrawled there. He handed her back the pad and shook his head. She immediately made an emergency appointment for him at the doctor’s and accompanied him as his translator, albeit a non-proficient one. 

The doctor confirmed that the words sounded almost conversant yet remained just beyond meaningful reach. He summoned his Asian colleague who attested to a similar linguistic diagnosis, though when the two compared notes they found significant points of difference in what they had imagined they had almost grasped. The colleague asserted that he was actually bilingual and would attempt to receive this strange speech with both his linguistic portals ready to tune in simultaneously. The other doctor thought his peer a show off, but acceded to the suggestion all the same. The medic now nearly assimilated the man’s peregrine diction in two different tongues, causing him considerable discomfort as his mind was assaulted by a divergent assonance. When he recoiled holding his head between his hands, his associate smirked, even as he picked up the phone to dial the hospital.

The speech therapist was stymied, but had the stoke of insight to place a call with the languages department of the university the hospital formed part of. The benighted man was struck dumb as he was metaphorically prodded and pinched by a horde of eager linguists each trying to draw a bead on his babble that matched their own specialism. He defeated them all, though each felt they almost understood his verbiage but fell just short. Then one had a bolt of enlightenment when he proposed that since the man’s speech sounded familiar to each one of their diverse coterie in turn, his language must be related to them all. That is, the man was speaking the primordial human language, the Ur-tongue from which all subsequent languages were descended. That was why each auditor had perceived the foreign tongue to chime with that of their own native one.

The academics were delirious. A fully dead language, that longest extinct one, had miraculously been resurrected. Those of a less spiritual bent sardonically remarked that here finally was the reverse of the Tower of Babel. What better prospect for the world than if every one of its future citizens all spoke the same linga franca? The Esperanto contrivance had failed for a dearth of authority. But here was the wellspring of all human language, what could be more prestigiously legitimate?

There was the tantalising prospect of an end to all misunderstandings brought on by translation glitches. They still might not agree on ideas and devotions, but at least they could all argue using the same vernacular. Who knows, the linguists felt that in time the Ur-language could replace all languages and that could only foster unity in man rather than the divisiveness of different argots.

They sat the man down to start to debrief his knowledge. They asked him to write down his parlance but he just shrugged at their mime acts of writing. One of the philologists explained that axiomatically the Ur-language had to precede any written alphabet or other symbolic system. There could be no transcribing it into school primers and grammars for ease of transmission across the generations. Not to be outdone, another scholiast interjected that the Ur-language would not make for an efficacious tool for describing the modern world. It’s vocabulary would be extremely limited, lacking in any terminology for much of the extant technology. It would inevitably depend upon importation words from the johnny-come-lately lingos.

And with that the major nations furiously debated which words should augment the Ur-language so as best to represent and capture the world. These nations came to blows over their etymological claims and thus was the planet plunged into ever greater division and strife. Each country vied to bring the most words into the sacred vocabulary and to outstrip those of its rivals. And rather than resort to a dictionary of insult and point-scoring, the countries turned to arsenals of weapons for which the Ur-language would never possess terms to define them. So that the very language which had accelerated evolution immeasurably, ended up destroying all communication unutterably. 

From the flash fiction collection "28 Far Cries" available in print or for Amazon Kindle

Love Net - Friday Flash

She hit submit on her phone. Instantly a map came up of the vicinity in which she stood. The map began to seethe and pulsate with pixelated red hearts. A touch presumptuous she thought to herself. The hearts started floating across the grid. It was like a mawkish version of Pacman or something.

Her eyes were swimming as she tried to take it all in. She plumped for fixing on one and following its trajectory. It was about 400 yards distant from her, although moving away. It passed right through another stationary heart and carried on. Of course it would. Both hearts represented men and men would not be interested in other men. Well they might be, but not on this version of the app. She idly speculated whether on that subscription, they were also represented by hearts and if so, whether they were pink or not.

She started walking in the direction of where there seemed the largest cluster of hearts. Most were moving, but a few were static. She wondered if they were sat inside bars, for it was too cold to remain aimlessly outside. She saw that one such motionless heart was, according to the GPS locator, about fifty yards ahead of her. She clicked on the heart and immediately his profile came up. A photo, with the barest of personal data summarising him to her. He looked viable, so she sent him a message. A simple "Hi", confident in such an open prompt that he would accordingly click on her profile behind the message and draw his own conclusions.

She waited. Two hearts were bearing down on her from different directions. Why should she remain faithful to the man she had messaged? She quickly clicked on one of the hearts and saw his profile. Again, more than passable to her tastes. She clicked on the other one, but the bars on her phone signal had weakened. Two men passed her on divergent bearings. Neither looked like the man she had managed to download. One looked fit though, rugged and chiselled, even under his outerwear. They both continued their progress away from her. Mr Chiselled at a fair old lick it had to be said. While the pixels sluggishly took shape, she couldn't reference the blessed map. It was quite possible that neither of them were marked with a heart of course, that they weren't signed up to this love match group. Or what was worse, that they were, had clicked on her profile when they saw she was proximate and just walked on by having not liked what they were confronted with.

The laggardly profile finally loaded up. Curses, it had been Mr Rugged after all! A match made quite possibly in Heaven, stymied by satellite technology and poor reception. Must be the frigid air. Had he been aware of her on his map, or had he been in just too much of a hurry to have downloaded her? Maybe he was heading towards another heart he'd pinpointed further out. Could she catch up with him? She decided not. She acknowledged the instantaneity (signal issues notwithstanding) of this geo-social networking. Unlike dating websites, photos posted here had to be truthful, because you were no further than eight minutes from bumping into them and verifying their likeness. There could be no lies with this app. No blind dating built on any duplicity that accentuated the blind over the dating. No lying, but plenty of cheating she thought to herself sardonically. This app was a boon for the quickie, extra marital fling. Getting your rocks off without even having to stand for a drink on the rocks. The one-night stand by not standing still on this map...

Hey wait a mo, what happened to the stationary guy? She'd almost forgotten about him. She checked back to the map and saw that he was still frozen in the same place. Yet he hadn't responded to her message. That was pretty clear then. He wasn't interested. Bastard. Part of her felt like chasing him down and confronting him as to his lack of chivalry in even responding to her. Making her wait out in the freezing air for the non-forthcoming privilege of his reply.

She started walking again, if only to get the blood recommencing its flow. She pressed reject on rude immovable man and saw his heart image swell and then fragment and die from the screen. It was rather satisfying actually. Reminded her of those online shooting penguin games that she used to while away dead hours in the office with. Until an audit of website URLs tumbled her and saw her lose her job. She was walking past a fast food take-out as a man was emerging through the door. She stopped and consulted her phone. As did he. Sure enough, he was digitised in a heart, suddenly throbbing on its spot on the map. He looked up and smiled at her. In your dreams mate. His expression turned crestfallen as she marched on past the shop. Her heart missed a beat. She was utterly thrilled with the power she had just wielded in cutting him dead.

This was a strange beast indeed. Here she was trawling for men, yet the men threw the net over themselves. They actively scanned for her net, then vaulted into it with alacrity. The fish that catches itself. She caressed the heavy bladed knife beneath her overcoat. The harsh steel stung her chill fingers with its own glacial reassurance. She just knew in her bones she would have no difficulty in locating the man of her dreams. And making his heart fragment and disappear.

Taken from the flash fiction collection available from Amazon Kindle

Vooks Apocalypse

Continuing the theme of the new technology and its integration with traditional print, here is a piece of video literature and discussion.

Watch the 8 minute video, read the transcript below and compare and contrast the efficacy of either media to communicate the same message and if you like, vote on it by leaving a comment.


TRANSCRIPT
Hello gentle readers and welcome to the future of literature. By this I don't inevitably refer to myself, but to this as visual presentation of the written. For gentle reader, we are being constantly told that the 21st Century mind wishes to assimilate its data inputs by means other than the book, ones which incur less time investment. Podcasts, videos and vooks. Ones that leave the hands free to make the devil's work (mis-said on video as "word"). And I would argue, Satan's serpent has indeed come to reclaim the apple of temptation with ruinous, maggoty usury.

One argument the technophiles use to promote the new publishing media, is that is saves on wood pulp. Preserving Nature, how ironic while we consistently wipe out species in the name of progress. 16 a day is the estimate, 35 if you include flora.

If I may be so bold as to employ literary tropes in a visual presentation, here follows a brace of allegories for the prospect we face staving off.

The Guerilla players - that's gu-guerilla, not go-gorilla - the guerilla players present for you some mis en scene. Is the film better than the book? (You can decide by reading the full script on the blog).

Bye bye "thou whoreson Zed, that unnecessary letter" said Shakespeare. And no one's going to miss your passing 'D'eee-light. Gone to the dogs. Throw me a fricking bone here. Okay, but only into the abyss. The animals went out two by two hurrah, hurrah. Say hi to the dodo down there. Where's Wally? (impromptu "Wally the Whale" added in video - filler by the mind when mentally scanning for prompt). Washed up on a dried up estuary probably and suffocated. Don't wail and blubber so my son, this is the will of your parents. The candle wax will come in useful for the power cuts. Perish the Elephant packing her trunk. If we just eviscerate Elly here, aw don't cry little boy. There we go, you can escort the letter 'E' off to the elephants' graveyard. It will have to stand for extinct form now on. Buzz buzz buzz off letter B, we all know your namesake creatures are fast disappearing off this earth. Plant payback for all the stolen honeyed nectar, though it won't do them the slightest bit of good either. The cat has finally used up the last of his nine lives. Off to the great kitty litter in the sky. And trepanning cousin Terry. No more tales of the "Tiger who came to Tea" for you little boy. From now on it will have to be the "Tourniquet Applied to the Tableleg" Mmm, veritably trips off the tongue. Still, some letters will be all right. Though kids will have to adjust to carrion crawlers like cockroach and blowfly. Sweet dreams.


Now a little older and I'd like you to imagine a queue of teenagers all lining up outside a club. Right around the building and circling back on itself. The letter "Q" you see, like I said. The wrinkle through it? The velvet sash behind which the bouncers stand, who can gain entry, who is refused. A metaphor for life itself. Anyway, to while away the wait, said kids are busy on their mobiles (fluffed, restated as "mobile phones"). "I'm in a queue in'it?" Or punching away at their texts, since we are all touch-typists now. All of us committing our thoughts in writing, that has to be a good thing right? Now conceive a shadowy figure - someone in a balaclava maybe, not too inconspicuous with the club wear of choice for these kids - he's moving up and down the line. Inclining his head in towards those phones held out at arms' length.
E’s ? Anyone want some E’s ? Eee-asy ! ‘E’s’ are good ! The best in fact. You E’d up ? Oh, you’re sorted ... Fair enough. How about you ? No ? ... C’mon. I got all your ‘E’ needs covered. I can iterate your pleasures for you. Determine the way you experience things. Contain your inhibitions. Distill wellbeing. Render you lover-lee. Or any other E-motion you care to name. No ? Okay then. What about you? You don't spell it like that! Bloody number racketeers moving in on our turf. Not a patch on us for legibility ... That's it, get shot of the '8', now you need a - yeah that's right mate, you do spell 'deal' with two 'E's' and I got just the ticket for you on that. Uh-oh, here comes that upstart U-pusher (accidentally reversed in the telling). One of the few who've had a renaissance in market share. It's all 'me me me with that U". A distinctly untrustworthy character if ever I met one. Time to up sticks and E is for exit.

So how will our future generations acquire the speech of naming, if all the early words limned with simple, happy, associative charge, the animals, the pretty coloured flowers, the orange sun and the blue sky, are blotted out from our primary copy-books? Our loquacity will be flat and lifeless, shorn of our fabled ability to fabricate literature and dreams. We'll need the virtual interfaces then to preserve our collective memory of these fabled beasts. The new dinosaurs in the virtual Natural history museum.

What will be the point of children learning to become fluent readers, if all future 'books' will read to them in the form of vooks, podcasts and videos? Early on in our flying solo reading career, entering the imaginative world of a book is how we expand our own range of thought and to forge new connections. In short, our thought processes take wing and spread through reading. School expands our (became "their" in performance) conceptual abilities even further, still dominated by the text book or set texts. In our present desire and present is a word that in Shakespeare's time meant 'immediate', a vestigial meaning that still lurks within it depending on the context in which it is used in prose, but one that is very unlikely to come across in a video - in our present desire for instant data, for scanning information, we risk changing our whole evolutionary future by sidelining the deep thought facilitated through books. When you read, your visual cortex has to connect up with your linguistic brain to decipher what is being said by the book. As soon as you put other inundations on the visual brain, such as with vooks and video, as soon as you introduce an audio aspect with podcasts and vocalised reading, the linguistic centres of the brain is no longer the sole focus and some of the layering of the words will inevitably get missed. How much of this have you been able to process first time through? It certainly took me considerably longer to compose than for you to hear it read out aloud. For all the complex demands of sight and sound stimuli, you can still be transported among a blacked out cinema or theatre audience. Not so sat at home sat in front of a monitor or on a train staring into your phone to read an e-book. To quote cognitive psychologist J.Bruner, the creative imagination offered up by the writer allows the reader to "go beyond the information given". To take the time to think. I don't credit that such time is afforded by the new technologies which are all about time saving and convenience. The inputs are regulated for you at a rate determined by pixel rates and data translation speeds. Reading online may give you the meat off the bone, but a book gives you access to the deep lying marrow. I'd say ask the dog which of the two he prefers, except we just consigned all canines (mutated to "him") to extinction.

Alles fuer der kinder not alles fuer der kindle.

Missed prop for the visual gag to end, covered with verbal "thank you")


* VOTE NOW * Place your virtual X/Y/Z in the comment box

X The print version had far more clarity (despite author's best attempts to cut up narrative flow by referencing divergences from the video)

Y The vid's the way to go man. I could still read my e-mails and check out a couple of blogs while I absorbed the message. Safe

Z None of the above/ This guy's as nutty as the Monster Raving Loony Party.