a quick blast of micro-fiction last night, for reasons unknown, followed by two songs by wire, maybe by way of apology, as we move towards officially opening this site on saturday (gonna make the general layout a little easier to read, and probably a little less busy in terms of the color scheme). some brief thoughts on the research and rationale behind the piece:
it should probably come as no surprise that I’m a follower of the british band wire, which has endured as an institution off and on since 1976. themselves a bit older than the punk movement (bruce gilbert was old enough to probably be closer to german experimental than any other “movement”), they’re now largely thought of as “post-punk” if only because they outlived the movement in which they grew up.
very short fiction (“micro-fiction” or “sudden fiction” or whatever) is often described as swatches of color, offering just enough to set a tone, maybe identify a single action. but you shouldn’t have to paint in broad strokes to get your point across. there’s ample proof that this isn’t true, and even in the “swatch” mode of writing micro-fiction you can get a lot across just by setting the stage. (sam over at fifty words here on tumblr does excellent work with this.)
I’m interested by how the punk movement in england died out - though please kill me by legs mcneil dealt with its american beginnings in rollicking oral-history fashion, our band could be your life by michael azerrad chronicles the american response long after the scene had closed, & rip it up and start again is not a very good look at what it means to be “post-punk,” the death of the movement has never been pinpointed or written about more seriously, in large part because the term has endured even when its original progenators, like wire, wanted nothing more to do with it.
to that end I wanted to write something very short that could tell a story of the decay of an amorphous movement that’d been co-opted by far-left and far-right alike and was already very much “dead” but still omnipresent without necessarily resorting to merely describing one given scene, place, time, or person. lydia davis’s varieties of disturbance is great for its… err… varieties of very short fiction, so she’s a big inspiration.
looking at the piece again this afternoon after hawking it up at 2 AM last night, I regret most that I didn’t manage to convey the narrator’s interest as anything more than a clinical detachment. I wanted to convey the flaws of the interlocutor to the reader as well, but it comes off reporterly and cold, another groaning offer of an observational narration at the hemingway altar.
welp, I’ve managed to make a post longer than the original work of fiction now, so I’ll let it go, lest this turn into a maoist self-critique or something.
for your further research:
- sudden fiction (early micro-fiction anthology)
- jim shepard - love and hydrogen (short stories)
- wire - “the 15th” (youtube video)
- ernest hemingway - a moveable feast (sigh)
February 26, 2009, 5:54pm Comments
