Short stories over time [ 4 ]

         This is turning out to be quite an insight into the evolution of Aust short storytelling, but surely the editor had more stuff to choose from in the pre-1970 years? Could she only find 28 of merit in the first six decades? Or was she looking for specific styles to emphasise the changes? But couldn't find them? Hard to say, and you'll have to make up your own mind on this. It's a fairly lumpy publication, but worth tracking down a copy if the short format is your preference.

1950 to 1959

        There's on 3 in this group, one of which was so twinky-twee it could've been written by a love-struck 12 year old, one trying to nail "clever" subject matter, which was a bit boring, but the third was pretty good, about a son looking back on his Jewish refugee family - especially his mother and her reactions - who arrived here in the post war immigration boom.

        I start to wonder if the lack of publishing outlets had something to do with all this. In the 50's the main ones were the two high circulation women's magazines (who, as I remember them, went for bland and popular and housewifey) because the old stalwart of the 20s and 30s, The Bulletin, was on the decline, and a clutch of others which were a bit "literary", and self-consciously so (looking back from today). So maybe there just wasn't the incentives.

1960 to 1969

        There are 5 in this decade, only one of which (being about a rather stuffy woman's reaction to a piece of Buddhist art) drew me in, which is the best gauge of how you feel about a story, and the rest already forgotten.

        Looking forward to the 1970s and a bit of "internalising" and experimentation and angst and all that wonderful stuff (ah, I remember it well!)

            Cheers....

                    Trev

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Short stories over time [ 3 ]

        Back to this very rewarding exercise.....

1940 to 1949

        Again, not sure if it was the criteria the editor used in her selections, but suddenly the whole tone and style changes in this decade, like they all jumped forward into another Age. There's seven stories in this group, and six of them are absolutely great, each make me want to dig up some more of the writer's work.

        A word on the lesser one before I rabbit on - it was well written and thoughtful and all that, but it just didn't move me. It surprised me though, as it was a "gay" story, a woman musing very longingly about another woman, but it wasn't that per se, it was the fact that it was published in Australia in the 1940s when we were all still a pretty conservative lot.

        The others six? - they have a fresh zippy style that would not look any way out of place today, and over a range of subjects and settings - a married woman having an affair - an aboriginal story (my fav) - the interaction between a couple of kids - tough labouring working men dealing with life on the wharves - an Italian POW sorting out a bone lazy small-block farmer - and a tongue-in-cheek study of 3 mates stirring each other up in the pub. Loved them all.

        An extract from the workingman one, a young bloke's description of his much older mate, such a refreshing change from the "old" overwritten literary styles that were fashionable before this -

            "... a hard doer and a bit of a Pagan, that's all. Three convictions, one for stealing firewood during the Depression, one for punching a policeman during the '28 strike, and one for travelling on an expired railway ticket - also during the Depression. Across one cheek the scar of a wound received at Gallipoli. A limp in his right leg from an old waterfront accident. Screwy arms and shoulders from too much freezer work in the days when every possible job had to be stood up for...."

    - and the old bloke is right there, on the page. Love it. Looking forward to the 1950s.

            Cheers.....

                    T.R.E.

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Disappointed by ....

 "M FOR MAMMY" - Eleanor O'Reilly (2019 UK/Ire)

        Normally I don't put up anything that I couldn't get into, but there's some important lessons in this one (as always - in my opinion) that need to be said.

        It's a debut novel from this Irish author (born Arklow Ireland 1972), well written and interesting subject matter - a struggling Irish urban family - but I found it just too long, too over-written.

        It's about 130k words, and yes I know that "fat" novels are all the rage, but she and her editors and publishers have wasted a possibly great read by including too much. It could've been culled to certainly no more than 100k words - preferably about 85k - without losing any of the spirit of the story. And okay, I've done it myself, got way too involved in the drafting process and thought every word just had to be kept because they were so great.

        In my case I realised that nothing is that great and it was way too big and I cut it from about 135K to 100k words and it was the better for it. I got half way with "M FOR MAMMY" and lost interest simply because it became a bit - sort of - repetitive. In my opinion. I put it down thinking - "Geez what a waste."

        T.R.E.

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Having a break with...

"QUOTE...UNQUOTE" - Nigel Rees (UK 1978)

        I found this one ... yep, you're right - on the chuckout bench of our favourite Charity Shop. and a small collection of these sort of thigs is handy for a quick break. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that (which is actually from Chaucer in about 1386, but I didn't find that one in here).

        Did you know that the great Humphry Bogart's first dramatic acting words  were the memorable lines - "Tennis anyone?" (I mean, we all have to start somewhere!).  And what about the also great Clark Gable's very first words on screen - "Water? Do I need it? I had to shoot my horse!" Not exactly 'Gone With The Wind' or 'The Misfits', but a quid is a quid, the rent had to be paid.

        Okay, what can I say - a not bad scavenging of quotes, squelches, asides, comebacks, rebuttals and rejoinders, worth a browse if you see a copy on the chuckout bench of your local.

        Cheers....

                T.R.E.

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Paradise lost

         I've always liked music - as a teen in the mid 50's it was Big Band Swing, Dixieland, Rock'n'roll - but in the 1970s I fell into the 1970s and a whole other world opened up - the world of Folk / Rock  / Country, and I never really left. It was rich and varied, but best of all I loved the ballads, the stories so many songs of the time told, their narrative, their images, their stories of life and discovery.

        But this guy had one story that was a close parallel to one of my own, of total loss to "Progress" of the landscape of his childhood memories. But he was a singer / songwriter I seemed to miss at the time. Or so I thought.

        About a week ago I overheard someone say "When I was a child..." and they dived into a bit of nostalgia (I love nostalgia!), but it switched on an old memory of a simple 3-chord song I used to do, but obviously had long forgotten. And it mulled around and around and bit by bit some scraps put themselves together and I found "...my family would travel, down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born...", but couldn't remember the singer or the title. So I started Googling - as ya do.

        John Prine (1946 - 2020), was something of an inner circle "icon" member of the US music scene in the day, but I never fell over him till now. Except for this one song. More digging and I found that John's ballad is of the loss of his parent's home town of Paradise (you wouldn't be game to make up a name like that!) in Western Kentucky, the place that held treasured childhood memories for John when he visited his grandparents.

        I loved this journey through John's life and childhood. I hope each of these tags (YouTube and Wiki) will give you  - as a writer and reader of stories - something as well.

THE TRIBUTE

PARADISE

JOHN PRINE

PARADISE LOST

        Cheers...

                 Trev

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Quick check on the past...

         As a quick break from fiction I took this Xmas gift down and had a leaf through. Okay, technically I was born in 1938 but only just, but this one is my first full year on Earth. Which I don't remember a whole lot about, so worth a look.

        It's one from an Aust series of "Born in ..... ?" and mainly uses newspaper content of the day, this one mostly from UK and Aust, and just about all concerning the hot topic of the time - WW2, will there even BE a WW2, and preparing for WW2.

        We (Mum, Dad, elder brother, and me) were living in a country town way out in the bush all year, but interesting to get a blow by blow of events big and small (I never knew that the primitive beginnings of the breathalyser was back in 1931), and both domestic and international, with so many ordinary people trying to come to terms with something that was about to change their lives.

        It must've been a strange time to live through, with so much political back and forth as Hitler relentlessly took over his neighbours. And our long time Prime Minister dying on the job in April added to the turmoil of trying to cobble together an Army just in case - it makes for disconcerting reading. (And did you know that as early as 1939 it was being proposed to confiscate the cars of drunken drivers? Nup, me neither, thought it was a recent thing.)

        The book has a pretty gloomy ending, but at least the Letters To The Editor still contained such as a complaint about players who chatted during a game of Bridge! I mean, deary me.

        Upshot anyway has been for me to get my priorities sorted and drag out my WIP novel and get stuck in. Before the next 1939 comes around. (But a music discovery also added impetus.) More on this project shortly....

        Cheers....

                T.R.E.

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Short stories over time [2]

         This is turning into quite a decent exercise, watching the evolving styles in short story writing over 100 years, but just as fascinating is the subject matter.

        I skimmed the Introduction by the editor, but can't see a lot of explanation for her choices, other than looking for the best quality of the day, (not always finding it?). The thing is, there's a really heavy bias towards the last two decades, suggesting she couldn't find a lot of "high quality" in the older stuff? Like, nothing in the 1910s, but 32 in the 1980s, and another 32 in the 1990s. And check below...

1920 to 1929

        A whole TWO stories (both from 1928), and like most of the prior ones, each in a rural setting, albeit now more on the fringes of urbanisation, felt like at the edges of larger country towns. But both were at the Good level, easy to read, very little "dated" language, wouldn't have been particularly out of place in the 1970s.

        But why only two? Surely there have been plenty more.

1930 to 1939

        There's four in this decade, two of them Good, two of them a lot less than. One of the Good ones was set, in my guess, back in the mid 1800s, about white colonial settlers out in the pastoral frontier, trying to wrestle the land from the native population. All very confronting and uncomfortable and extremely non-PC. Which is probably why it was included.

        The other Good one is set in an (underground) mining community, which - in Aus - was always a thousand miles from anywhere. But at least it does reflect the increasing consciousness of mining Company liability for its workers.

        The other two stories - one by a "name" - were set in suburbia but were pretty nothing. In my opinion. I'm bloody sure there were better ones in the day

        I'll give it a rest for a while before I dive into the seven from the 1940s and the three from the 1950s. But so far have to say I'm disappointed by the selection process.

            Cheers....

                    T.R.E.

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Short stories over time [1]

        First up, if you love creative writing, get a copy of this and put it on that shelf in your study, no matter where you're from, as it's a rich source of the human experience over time.

       I have to say that it's hard to work out how the editor went about this massive exercise, of picking 100 Australian short stories, from 1900 to 1999, from Federation to Millennium. Maybe I should read the Foreword and/or the (damn long) Introduction. But I don't tend to. Always too impatient to get into the meat of it.

       I thought about that whole alpha By Author construction again, and decided no way I was going to let that put me off this great opportunity, to wallow in story evolution. So I did what they should've done, laboriously pencilled in the page number of each story against the chronological list (which has no page numbers! - I mean, f'godsake people!) and launched into it.

        Upshot is, as 100 short stories are going to take quite a bit of wallowing time, I decided to do it in order, in decade bites, starting with.....

1900 - 1909

        Only five stories made it, 2 of them Good, 1 Unreadable, 2 Great. All are set in the day or the recent past, of colonial Aus struggling to grow up just after Federating the States into a new Commonwealth, but four of them are set in the bush, well sprinkled with bush "characters", as was the way of a great deal of Aus Lit back then.

        The Unreadable is set in Melbourne, a dry, looong-paragraphed, overwritten account of some new arrivals. It got less than a minute. One of the Greats is the classic Henry Lawson's "Loaded Dog", which I've read at least five times over the last 60 years, each time finding a dry laconic Aussie laugh in every line. The other Great was one of Tom Collins's (set in a scrappy gold mining area), and one of the other two was an extract from the Steele Rudd material of the day, looking back - tongue in cheek - at life on a new "Selection" block on the outskirts.

        So, all about what I expected.

1910 - 1919

        Nothing made it apparently. I would've expected to see at least one from WWI, or of its aftermath. Very disappointing. I must go looking for one.

        Stay tuned for the Twenties.....

            Trev

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What to read next?

        After all those Peculiar Children, I needed to get back to the basics of creative writing (and my favoutite genre)  - the short story.

        I ratted my "Waiting To Be Read" shelf, took down a small 1959 English collection designed for schools that I found in the chuckout tray at the OpShop. At the time I thought at that price it was worth a look, especially as the five pieces in it were from heavyweights of their day - Joseph Conrad (a story published in 1909), D H Lawrence (1909), Saki (1914), Katherine Mansfield (1921), E M Forster (1928), and Graham Greene (1954).

        I guess it was designed to shape the literary minds of older English school pupils in the 1950s, but geez I struggled with each of them, as they were all too long, too dated, too many big paragraphs, too dry, spent much too much verbiage describing things oh-so cleverly in unnecessary detail. But it was the way of the day.

        Consigned it to the Re-donate pile, pulled down "The Penguin Century of Australian Stories", a collection of 100 short stories, from 1902 to 1999, by Australian writers, mostly of some note. Look forward to getting stuck in. But the very first thing that struck me, was that it's arranged in alpha order by author, when I totally expected to find it chronological - y'know, a study in the changing styles and themes over 100 years. But no, once again it's being said that the author is more important (okay, my interpretation) than the content.

        Stay tuned....

                T.R.E.

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A good (peculiar) read, but....

         Just finished this, a sort of a journey through Time and Imagination, a Mystery / Adventure / Horror story for 13 to 18 year olds, a bit like Harry Potter meets Alien meets The Terminator, just enough of everything to get any teen reader percolating, and as I said before, probably designed for the TV market, with an ending left hanging ready for the sequel, or a whole series.

        One reaction was that it was like watching a literary idea evolve - well, a storytelling idea, as this novel is more about getting the action down than being about good writing. But don't let that put you off, if you'd like a bit of Hunger Games type genre, give it a shot. And don't let the 2016 movie and its mixed reviews put you off. I was told by a table of close relatives who have read/seen both, that the book is better.

        There's an interesting interview with Ransom Riggs at the end, opening with the totally predictable - "Did the photos or the story idea come first?" Answer is (as I suspected) the photos, collected up by Riggs and some geeky mates from Op Shops, Markets, and rubbish bins(!) over a period, and as Riggs went through the slowly increasing horde (he claims about 100,000 passed through his hands), the odd ones of children stirred his imagination and he started sketching out story ideas that fitted, and this book is the outcome.

        I was marvelling at the whole unique idea this morning, and it occurred to me that it was a very similar thing back in 2008 when I did that Explorer Bear picture book epic for Smudge, when she was 7. Maybe Riggs saw that online? Gave him the idea? (Yeah - right!!) Ah, ya never know.

        Cheers....

                    T.R.E.

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