Dreaming Chickens

A couple of days ago mention was made here of a new book recently brought home. In December of last year Houghton Mifflin Harcourt released a small but beautiful book of “stories” by Lou Beach titled 420 Characters: Stories. The catch is, each of the stories in this book of 176 pages is limited to 420 characters, including letters, spaces and punctuation. They were each written as a status update on the author’s Facebook page.

Facebook status updates and numbers aside, the format of 420 Characters is jet fuel to a longtime personal attraction for a couple of reasons. It started with the discovery of an even shorter format in the style of Japanese haiku, a type of poem impressive for its three lines of seventeen syllables sparsely hinting at an unvoiced thought. There always seems to be more to it, that the reader is being encouraged to participate in filling in blanks toward the creation of a bigger picture. And then Nobel Laureate Kawabata Yasunari produced over the years a collection of stories ultimately called Palm of the Hand Stories. Most of those stories are a page long, the longest no more than three, and like the traditional haiku form, emphasize the power of reduced words in calling the reader to greater participation.

Lou Beach is in the same stream of style. Like the haiku poets he gives himself a goal of pitching a tiny story into its greatest arc within the space of 420 characters. Kirkus Reviews described Beach’s stories as: ‘An adroit experiment that marries linguistic restraint to literary cool.’ Within the small space prescribed, Beach writes about criminals, bimbos, animals, small town girls, divorcées, sentient objects and two dozen others acting out their moments in a mini-world that fronts for something much wider, much deeper. The reader jumps from the surreal to the lyrical, to the puzzling and bizarre, and then suddenly back to chickens who smoke cigarettes. Beach has such color and tone in his tiny palette of possibles that the reader is alternately dazzled, bumped, soothed and then slapped in the face by these stories that take up no more than a third of the page.

Lou Beach is an artist/illustrator, and now with the publication of 420 Characters: Stories, a writer. He passed his early years in Rochester, New York until the 60s led him to California where he has lived ever since, happily married to photographer Issa Sharp, with two children, a dog, a cat, a backyard full of cactus and an orange tree. Asked about himself, Beach says…“I was born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, killed me a bear when I was only three. No, wait..I was born in Germany of Polish parents, came to the US when I was only four, spent my youth in Rochester, New York, riding my bike, building snow forts, throwing chestnuts at the kid down the street. I was a fair student, no great shakes, disappointing several teachers by not realizing my “full potential.” Higher education was a two-year community college affair followed by a year of night school at a state university. I did not graduate or learn much (in class).

Below are five of the stories from 420 Characters.

‘The gunnysack hangs from the pommel, full of sparked ore. I let Shorty sip from the stream, long neck arching in the sun. There is a ghost in the cottonwood I sit under to reread your letters. It tries to sniff the pressed flowers you sent from the garden in Boston, but the scent is gone. The petals and paper, envelope, all smell like campfire now.’

•

‘Cheap and gaudy as jellybeans, hard as a jawbreaker. Candy Nelson sat on the bench in front of Jessups Hardware, filing her nails. Discomfited by yet another yeast infection, she crossed and uncrossed her legs, finally just opened them like a book, displaying to the illiterate Luther Choate, driving by, a page from heaven, causing him to lose control of his pickup and run over a red hound that was crossing the road.’

•

‘The nurse left. Ann’s eyes were closed so I dumped her meds into my shirt pocket, snapped it shut. I looked around the room, put her laptop in my backpack. I leaned over to give her a goodbye peck on the forehead. She smelled like her next bath was going to be in the Ganges. Her eyes flew open, she grabbed my wrist and said: “Ronnie, give me a smoke.”’

•

‘FOR-EV-UH. She had it tattooed in a little arc over her left boob, like a military patch. She’d punch me in the arm, punctuate each syllable, leave a blue mark. Told me that’s how long her love would last, shouted it out. After a few months she seemed distant, took off one night for Tulsa with the drummer from a hair band. I went to Skin’N’Ink, asked Mooney if he could make me a tattoo of a bruise, put it up on my arm.’

•

‘“Are you my mommy?” said the little blue egg. “No, dear. You are a plastic trinket full of sweets,” said the brown hen. “My baby is over there,” and she pointed to a pink marshmallow chick being torn apart and devoured by a toddler. The hen screamed and woke up, her pillow wet with sweat, the sheets twisted around her legs. “Christ, I hate that dream.” She reached for a smoke.’

•

420 Characters: Stories is a book that could be on anyone’s ‘Best’ list.

Random Book Babble

Despite the wide open spaces surrounding my four walls here on the edge of America, a familiar closing in kind of mood crept up yesterday, signaling that a few hours escape to Daytona was in order, a drive to help blow away the metaphoric cobwebs. Daily views around home are unfailingly those of distant vistas, panoramic swaths of deep blue and sandy white and people at either at rest or play. Infrequently it’s good to get away from a day of losing oneself in cloud formations and sandy sculptures, to jump into the liveliness of people hustling about their daily work or on errands in crowded shops and streets.

All that is probably just an excuse for me to spend some time in the big Barnes & Noble store in Daytona. I tried a temporary fix the other day by visiting the local Bookland store (a small bookstore owned by Books A Million), but it’s the mini-stop of bookstores and more often than not a waste of time, a useless placebo for book junkies. So it was off to Daytona and the big B&N.

The past two weeks have been a designated re-read period for me, and while keeping up with what’s new on bookstore shelves and in related newsletters, focus has been more on a second look at three books read over the last few years. Not an unusual plan, being one who enjoys returning to a book after a passage of years, this time it was a Julia Glass book from 2002, Three Junes, Haruki Murakami’s novel, Kafka on the Shore (2002) and Edward Rutherfurd’s 2009 historical novel, New York. As it happened, a pre-ordered new release arrived in my mailbox and I squeezed it in between the Murakami and Rutherfurd books; that was Michael Connelly’s latest, The Drop.

Three Junes is a book I would recommend to anyone unreservedly—a fine, fine book. The wonder and skill of Murakami’s latest book 1Q84 is precisely what sent me back to his earlier Kafka on the Shore. Another one to recommend without hesitation. Before the third book on my reread list, I took a couple of days to work my way through the latest Michael Connelly featuring his long established Los Angeles detective, Harry Bosch. Such economic writing from Connelly, not a wasted word or phrase that doesn’t propel his story. Stories about New York, be they old, fictional, historical, contemporary or non-fictional are right down my line. I have always liked the epic books of Edward Rutherfurd and his 2009 book, New York is another historical novel, surpassingly picturesque and studded with fascinating facts concerning the city’s development.

Tuesday in Barnes & Noble was rewarding as usual. There was really only one book on my mind as I entered the store, but you know how that goes. Read the other day on NPR an excerpt of the new Alan Bennett book Smut, and was hoping to lay my hands on that. Took some digging but it was there between two distracting stacks on an out-of-the-way table. On a nearby shelf I came across a book unheard of, unmentioned, or at least in my world; a small 2011 hardback release by Lou Beach titled 420 Characters: Stories. The first thing that caught my eye was a quote from Jonathan Lethem: “Holy sh*t! These are great!” Each of the stories is limited to 420 characters, including letters, spaces and punctuation. Sound familiar? They we're each written as a status update on the author’s Facebook page. One example…

‘The storm came over the ridge, a rocket dropped rain like bees, filled the corral with water and noise. I watched lightning hit the apple trees and thought: “Fritters!” as we packed sandbags against the flood. There was nowhere to go that wasn’t wet, the squall had punched a hole in the cabin roof and the barn was knee-high in mud. We’ll bury Jess later, when the river recedes, before the ground turns hard again.’

That’s it; the end. A haiku-like story that leaves the reader to fill in the blanks.

The last was a totally unexpected find, a new release of Haruki Murakami’s popular 1987 novel, Norwegian Wood. I read this book at the time of it’s first release when I was living in Japan, a time when Murakami was still undiscovered outside of Japan. Since reading 1Q84 I have been thinking again of this and other Murakami books. The new release is in conjunction with the release of a new movie version of the novel. It is a Japanese production, but has been released outside of Japan recently.