Foot Notes
I remember hearing a Roger Daltry interview in which he enunciated the term “ar-ty far-ty” in the usual derisive tone. I definitely didn’t expect him to humbly say about his career, that he felt lucky to have been able to make so much “noise.” On a couple of occasions, I have asked painters and metal artists “What are you trying to express?” The question seemed to bother. People ask me “What are you writing about?” The question bothers. I guess I look like somebody who might know.
What am I trying to express at joecsmolen.com? Say you just finished reading a story; maybe for you there is a definite take-away. You feed that back to the writer of the story, but just like Bob Dylan has done, they say, “I never thought that?”
It’s easiest for me to say what I’m not trying to express – what I rarely connect with: a long time ago, I was told that a story should be “timely.” I was awfully young, but I never could understand the value of “timely.” Why would I want to read a maudlin version of the news?
You may have noticed that I have already let two uber-talents speak for me here. On the point of what joecsmolen.com is trying to express, here also – and saying it beatifically for me even though this site is all short-fiction - is Anne Lamott:
“Novels ought to have hope; at least American novels ought to have hope. French novels don’t need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them…In general, though, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels…What’s important is the kinds of men and women we are.”
Today, “love” is on bumpers, bill boards, web-sites, protest signs and spray-painted down in the garbage-heap gloom under bridges. In book clubs, over wine, people talk abstractly about love and then break down and tearily confess that they have “filed for divorce.”
You’re putting up with this essay pretty well. You’re wondering what I’m saying. Text books always use examples. Here’re a few illustrative example stories that appear at joecsmolen.com:
Bob and Dylan
I knew Bob briefly. We e-mail dialogued. He spitted his hatred of the old U.S.A., but about the Marine Corps, he told me, “I’d do it all over again.” What that man had been ordered to do, I can’t imagine. I admired him. I wrote this story because I wanted Bob to have his say. Where is the hope? What Bob had been ordered to do, he lived with for the rest of his life and felt in his heart. There us nothing machine-like about a Marine.
A Real Guy
I am that man in the yellow, diesel truck. Peen was exactly as described – a sandy-haired young triple-amputee, but in no way disabled. When I handed him that ten-spot, I knew I was in the presence of quite a guy. I wanted to show Peen as the hero that young guy on his skate board was for me, even though El Brazo propelled the story alone.
Sentimental Journeys Home
To actually love everyone you meet is an over-the-top, outlandish, bizarre self-expectation, but before you instead turn yourself into nothing but a Pot-Calling-The- Kettle-Black sort of person, dare to look – really look – into his eyes.
Flying Dreams
I paid a guy twenty bucks for this story idea. He was obviously living on the road and had nothing – not even any teeth in his smile, but he made a cardboard sign that said “SMILE ANYHOW” and he was waving it at traffic speeding by at the feed end of a long, two-lane bridge. He knew there was nowhere for them to stop and “tithe” him – unless they turned around and came back.
Flying Dreams is just my heart breaking. Only a motorcycle cop could know Seattle’s blood stains in that personal way.
Deep Thoughts
I don’t think I have any of these. In the thirty-two short fictions appearing by this time at joecsmolen.com, there are no hidden meanings or abstruse allusions to obscure but famous writings or pretzel philosophies or psychotic sect. There are just people who come at me out of the mist of sudden experience and who remain on my mind until I try to explain them to myself - until, using the formats of fiction, I somehow try to pass on the high-resolution vision of life that they gave me so – and I entirely believe this – intentionally.