“Taylor and Boyfriend Go Incognito”

NEW FICTION

(image c/o usatoday)

a short story by K. Wenclas

“ARE YOU SURE people won’t recognize us?” Taylor’s boyfriend– nicknamed Big T– said to her in whispered tones as they sat in a McDonald’s chowing down on Big Macs and vanilla shakes.

Neither had actually sat inside a Mickey D’s in over a decade. Even drive-thru orders were scary, especially for Taylor, who’d be mobbed by hordes of fans within minutes of word getting out that her customized Mercedes Viano MPV or her Ferrari 458 Italia V10 was in line.

Today they were both dressed in shabby plaid green-and-blue lumberjack shirts with grimy jeans, with gray woolen caps on their heads, and for some crazy reason, large sunglasses with white frames, Audrey Hepburn style.

Rather than incognito, they looked more like circus clowns. With backs turned, however, they were off-putting, especially Big T because of his size. 

Big T had an order of seven Big Macs and three large milk shakes in front of him. Making up for lost time.

Meanwhile, cashiers and workers behind the Mickey D counter whispered among themselves.

“That couldn’t possibly be. Could it be?”

“No way. Those two are bums.”

“I think that’s them,” a third worker said. “I’m texting my frens.” 

Big T was telling Taylor his frustrations at Too Much Fame.

“Too much publicity!” he said, his voice rising, Taylor beneath her giant sunglasses looking concerned. “And none of it for me! My play on the field in fact has gone to shit this season. I’m stumbling around because I’m getting no sleep, reporters and podcasters are everywhere and I can’t think of anything, babe, but YOU. On stage. Getting all the attention while we lose games, Kermit’s getting fat and all my hopes of being a first ballot Hall of Fame player have gone down the toilet. My play has become CRAP!”

With that he pounded the table they sat at, hard, milk shakes and hamburgers flying, three sleeping homeless people in the restaurant jolted awake.

Simultaneously a crowd gathered outside the McDonald’s, faces gaping at the window. “Is that Taylor? We want Taylor!”

Soon a chant began.

“WE WANT TAYLOR! WE WANT TAYLOR!!”

“Call the bodyguards!” Big T said, reaching in his pocket for his own phone which fell on the floor and slid away from him like a fumbled football, Taylor calmly touching buttons on her own.

“GOT IT!” Big T yelled, sprawling across the hard tiled floor while a phalanx of husky black-clad bodyguards in sunglasses charged toward the restaurant entrance from a waiting limousine, which hundreds of crazed fans had got hold of and began rocking side-to-side as if to overturn it.

While the McDonald’s employees paused what they were doing to watch, the first break they’d had in their slave wage assembly line job for hours.

-Karl Wenclas

“The Day of Her Burial” by Peter Mladinic

NEW POETRY

(image c/o ncronline)

A man at the diner
made the server cry.
The cops weren’t called.
He wasn’t even asked
to leave. The manager
came. The man’s yelling
rattled us diners, his loud
early morning swearing
at the end of the twentieth
century—five hours later,
an ice cold day,
my mother was buried—
is what I mostly recall.
He paid his bill
but didn’t tip
or invite anyone
to see his side.
Around his greasy hair
florescent light
signaled nothing’s
going right.

Peter Mladinic’s most recent book, The Whitestone Bridge, is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.

“lungs” by Ken Kakareka

NEW POETRY

(image c/o swegonairacademy)

the sky
breaks open
with such
breadth
at 6 am
when you
have
a chance
to watch it
instead of
driving
on the
freeway
w/ 1700 other
angry ppl
pushing towards
a meaningless
job.
i watch it
break
wide open
like a pair
of lungs
filling
with air –
i can breathe
knowing that
the demands
of life
can’t
suffocate me
today.

Ken Kakareka is an American writer of works of fiction and nonfiction, such as BULLSHIT (Anxiety Press, 2024) and Summer of Irresponsibility (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). His novella PARIS IN ALL ITS GLORY is on its way with Anxiety Press. Ken’s work has appeared or is on its way in numerous rags including Gargoyle Magazine, The Disappointed Housewife, and Foofaraw. He has been nominated twice for a Best of the Net. A list of selected publications can be found at kenkakareka.com.

Nature and Art

TWO MIDCENTURY DIMITRI TIOMKIN MOVIES

I call them Dimitri Tiomkin movies, because in both instances the movies are made by their impressionistic musical scores, as well as their natural settings.

The first of the two films is a 1958 version of Ernest Hemingway’s short novel The Old Man and the Sea, directed by John Sturges and starring Spencer Tracy. It’s a movie that sneaks up on you, in that at first you might be cynical about Spencer Tracy in the role, the voice-over narration and the film seeming to take the book too literally. Then the drama of the story kicks in, one man against a very large fish and against the elements, accompanied by wide-screen color cinematography. The story itself gives it depth and impact. But that evening so did something else. I watched it with NPL Contributing Editor Kathleen Crane amid a hostile early winter where we live. After being bombarded by the elements. After I’d been outside shoveling too-soon late-November snow. The images of weather on the screen had greater impact for me because of this. Funny how aesthetic elements and events outside the artwork impact one’s experience of it.

Impactful as well was the Dimitri Tiomkin score, which suggested the moving sea the movie’s character battled through. Impressionistic music has always been to me (think Debussey’s La Mer) the most naturalistic, in tune with nature, of all musical genres. Tiomkin won an Oscar for his score– which maybe that year should’ve gone to populist American composer Jerome Moross’s score for The Big Country. Tiomkin is my favorite all-time movie composer. I’ve long felt he deserves ranking with giants like Miklos Rozsa, Bernard Herrmann, John Williams, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and whoever else.

ANOTHER FLICK

Not long after, we watched The Guns of Navarone. Having seen the restored version of the 1961 adventure film on the big screen in Philadelphia in the 2000’s, I was well familiar with Tiomkin’s score for that movie. The Question: Would the viewing experience of this film also be enhanced by the tumultuous weather raging outside our creaky house?

The Guns of Navarone is a work immersed in nature and weather, with the feel of a contemporary Greek myth to it. Dimitri Tiomkin’s score serves, along with the film’s images, as a key into the subconscious. Watching it is like experiencing a dream. The narrative throws a series of elements at the viewer, a parade of obstacles, including a raging storm, a 400-foot cliff that needs to be climbed, and a pair of giant German cannons which have to be taken out by a commando team someway, somehow. It’s all heroic, and Homeric. At the end, remaining members of the team are thrown back into the sea from whence they came. And yes, the natural elements we’d been experiencing, of cold, wind and snow, enhanced our experience of the film.

Art interests me aesthetically far more than intellectually. It’s what happens beneath and beyond the conscious intellect that strikes the deepest chords within us, is most moving. A phenomenon which established critics, for whom all is intellect, never seem to get.

-K.W.

Christmas Reading!

LAST-MINUTE CHRISTMAS GIFT IDEAS

CREATIVITY IS EVERYWHERE!

Including in small communities downriver from Detroit. A resident of one of them, Martin Bertera, has penned an atmospheric Christmas tale– Mistletoe — set in the mid-19th Century, in the tradition of Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky. We don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but it’s about a general store, an urchin child, the homeless, train-and-boat journeys from New York City to the Great Lakes, a farm, Christmas Eve, and– well, you have to read it. Most of all, it’s a story with heart, antithesis to today’s AI-generated robotic age. It’d make a perfect little Christmas gift for brothers and sisters, cousins, grandparents, friends or acquaintances, co-workers or the boss, nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts: all those for whom you’d like to buy something but aren’t sure exactly what.

Or purchase it for yourself to read on Christmas Eve– a perfect read for a perfect Santa-filled night.

You can buy it NOW right here.

A Short Excerpt from “Quest of the Globules” by John Haymaker

NEW POP FICTION!

The Globules pinpointed the sound’s source as a jumble of radio signals emanating from planet Earth, and they thereupon commenced to traverse the broad expanse of space-time in microseconds toward the sound. On the way, they binge-watched Netflix, Prime, YouTube and learned our languages, even dead ones, consuming all knowledge thus far attained on earth.

They grew keen on pop culture and acculturated to Earth’s vibe well before landing. They devoured social media, discovered Twitter, enjoyed absolutely everything posted on Facebook – sucking it up, clicking virtual Likes with licks of their millions of tongues. 

On Earth, a din of radio static grew loud as an echo chamber. Scientists anticipated something colossal targeted earth. They theorized meteors or comets – and issued warnings. Then the tweets commenced from @intergalactic, Nimble’s Twitter handle: We’re coming from Globiliad @earth #peace #friendship – followed by an array of pics of their dazzling celestial procession. On Monday, Likes on Facebook grew exponentially. By Tuesday, sociologists gave up providing explanations. By Wednesday, theoretical physicists weighed in with a theory of a dark matter effect – maybe even an effect of dark energy, for all they knew.

(WHAT?!!) COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

Watching Aida

LESSONS FOR WRITERS?

RECENTLY, my co-editor Kathleen and I watched a DVD recording of the Verdi opera Aida. A performance at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera from 1988, starring Aprile Millo and Placido Domingo. We were reminded how great opera, especially grand opera, can be at its best.

We’d seen the opera before, live, twelve or so years ago when we both worked at the Detroit Opera House. We’d heard the amazing voices carrying through the building from the rehearsal hall in the days leading up to the start of the run. It was a wonderful production in its own right, care of artistic director David Dichiera, albeit scaled down from what audiences saw at the Met. But it was live!

Live opera is not only ten times better than any recorded version, it’s likely– when at its best– the greatest of all art forms, because it encompasses so many arts and crafts in a single production. Music, staging, singing, story, acting, costumes, lighting, sets and set design. Often, dancing.

The Met production we watched had all of this and more. Including giant statues. Including horses pulling chariots. (Alas, no elephants!) It also had drama, magnificent voices, and large amounts of emotion. The first two acts are the high points: the aria “Celeste Aida” then the invocation of the gods in Act One, transporting the viewer back to an ancient, mystical-spiritual world via some of the most beautiful music ever composed. Act Two is power and spectacle, the gathering of the Egyptian army accompanied by rousing gigantic voices meshing together in a way seldom, if ever, experienced. All while the plot’s traumatic, anguished triangle is on display for all to see. The curtain comes down.

The final two acts are quieter, more personal and emotional– or melodramatic– one taking place along the Nile, under the stars; the universe. The other, in a dungeon.

Then it’s over. A full, cathartic artistic experience.

This was as fine a production as could be mounted, absent real pyramids and actual elephants. The acting of course was stagey, at times drifting into WWE-style dramatics, especially in the performance of Dolora Zajick as bad-girl princess Amneris.

LESSONS

What are the lessons from Aida for writers, particularly novelists?

That literary works need far more scope than they have now, and more humanity. In response to AI-generated botbooks, human writers need to express more passion, more tangible emotion. Enough of vague, cautious subtleties! Instead: pure drama. Characters need to pour out their pain, love and grief– to explode out of today’s technocratic aesthetic box turning all of us into sociopathic robots. Literature needs to lead us out of that box. Out of all restrictive, constipated boxes. Then it will become once again relevant. Once again vital to the culture. To all of us.

-KW

“Super Bowl, 2025” by James Croal Jackson

NEW POETRY

we wore our best hunter-green waited patiently

as men took a different kind of field we craved

sustenance a resurrection a flight a waiting

by window in the purple light under wrong

tin roof what we tossed into sky we threw

away our wing-missiles pigskins of self

talons landing burrowing deep out of view

what craft drunk disturbance in the flapping

february frigidity that beat against our jackets

yours the bird slick knit on surface mine

a thready childhood blanket to keep no one

and nothing not the least of heat my heart 

drinks beside you as it waits for the game

to be good but it never does and always was.

James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet working in film production. His latest chapbook is A God You Believed In (Pinhole Poetry, 2023). Recent poems are in ITERANT, Stirring, and The Indianapolis Review. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Nashville, Tennessee. (jamescroaljackson.com)

They’re Going Down with the Ship!

AN ANALYSIS

(engraving by Willy Stower)

THE MOST TELLING aspect of today’s literary scene is even the most loyal servants to the status quo system are barely making it. Having to edit, and struggle to promote, their generic Substacks while paying outrageous rents in the Imperial City of New York.

Yet they refuse to leave the ship’s bridge! Rigidly adhering to their obsolete “high modern” standards though the ship of Literature lists at an ever sharper angle, waiting to slide beneath the waves, into the depths.

(image c/o matskodotcom)

“Oh Captain My Captain,” they recite. But who is the captain? Has he already left?

Is it establishment attack dog Gerald Howard, who recently proclaimed in the New York Times that literary fiction is not dead? Or has snarky Gerry already hopped into a lifeboat, wearing a dress?

Some remaining crew still believe they can make it in academia care of doctoral certificates and question-nothing mindsets. Yet Humanities positions dwindle, staffs shrink, lofty Ivy-covered towers themselves begin to sink. Who’ll be added to the growing casualty list? Do we add now the Ryan Ruby Fifty– those “golden age” critics who by following the rules were supposed to rescue the art? Will any escape?

What course to follow for other writers?

The smart ones are already in lifeboats labelled “New Ideas” and “New Styles,” rowing through raging waters toward smaller but safer ships. NOT top-heavy unwieldy overloaded vessels, but of a kind able to maneuver toward more stable-but-enticing shores: the new literary world ahead.

-K.W.