NEW POETRY
(Lincoln’s funeral caisson)
it was
a funeral,
solemn.
everyone
in black
& white.
the person
who died,
a writer.
minorly
famous.
said
to have
worn
his heart
on his page.
how did
he die?
choked on
his words.
Kenneth Kakareka‘s new publication, Bullshit, is now available at Amazon.
NEW FICTION ALERT
The dinner went well enough. The jokes were good. The wines delicious. Gino sprang for the check, to the gracious thanks of Bentley and Wayne. They had outstayed the rest of the clientele. Most of the waitstaff had disappeared. The party rose unsteadily from their table and searched for the alcove where their overcoats were hung hours earlier. Gino quickly counted five dark-grey and black coats but saw nothing butterscotch brown. Bentley’s coat was missing. The sole remaining waiter, young and inexperienced, offered only feeble excuses. Bentley’s satisfied air disappeared, his brow darkened. Gino, doing his best to lighten the mood and save the situation, told him he would look into the matter. “I’ll take care of it.”
Next morning, his car parked in the firm’s lot, seated at his shiny wood and steel firm desk, drinking firm coffee, munching a firm bagel, Gino’s calls to the Firehouse’s floor captain, manager and owner yielded no trace of camelhair or overcoat. Determined Gino was discouraged but not defeated, when Trey Headley stuck his bald pate in his office door: “Gino, we’ve got an angry architect on our hands. He says you and your friends encouraged him to leave his overcoat in an unlocked closet at that ginmill you went to, and it was stolen. He’s not happy.”
COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!
NEW POETRY
(photo c/o ancientpages.com)
The pages of sages
Down through the ages
Are plucked ripe with luck and Logos by mages
Who then hand unfair fistfuls of gifts to readers most unusually unsquare,
Containing uncanny answers for listening listeners who dare:
Answers dressed in pinstriped ribbons and gild-paper wrapping
That (once ripped open) tap into a kind of magical (but muddled) time travel
Full of hap, riddles, and knots to unravel
By those lost in the love of farming
Fresh vines grown from wild languages
Amid all uncertainties, tangles, and anguishes,
Farmed there where the weather marks the least of all changes.
Christopher Landrum’s story “The Age of Insomnia” was featured at our main site. He lives in Austin, Texas and writes about what he reads at Bookbread.com.
NEW FICTION ALERT
Somewhere in the supermarket her daughter has gone to fetch toilet paper. They are supposed to be stocking up on supplies, items Erika has never had before in her life—canned milk, dehydrated meats, freeze-dried vegetables. Astronaut food, as if the whole country were about to shoot off into space.
And perhaps it is. The speaker overhead is playing Dido’s “White Flag”— “I will go down with this ship”—and the glistening floor is lined with social-distance markers. Arrows in each aisle direct customers one way or the other to avoid passing face-to-face. Every customer wears a mask; some of the cashiers wear plexiglas face guards.
Erika might not have come to the supermarket at all, were it not for the city-wide panic, a sudden rush for provisions. The stores were so overwhelmed she’d been unable to get an appointment for food delivery. At any rate, she felt funny about ordering food from home, sending others off to risk themselves on her behalf. Were some lives more expendable than others?
COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!
TWO MOVIE VERSIONS OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S “THE KILLERS”
PREMISE: During and after World War II a technocracy was created in the United States, instituted via a collaboration between large corporations and government agencies which included the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. A 1948 novel which examines the beginnings of this process, set on an Army Air Corps base with glimpses of Washington D.C., is Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens. The novel shows how the growing military juggernaut enlisted outside talent of all kinds. “The Best and Brightest,” to use a term originally applied to John F. Kennedy’s advisors and cabinet when he took office in 1961.
TWO film versions of Hemingway’s classic 1927 short story– the story considered a forerunner of hard-boiled fiction and film noir– illustrate the changing social and cultural landscape. A famed bigger budget version was produced by Mark Hellinger and directed by Robert Siodmak in 1946. The low-budget remake– originally meant as a television movie but rejected by NBC for its violence and released to movie theaters instead– was produced and directed by Don Siegel.
WHAT are the differences between the two films?
THE HIT MEN
In the 1946 version they’re sloppy and inefficient. At the climax, almost inept.
In the 1964 version they’re corporate; in appearance– their walk and expressions– robotic. In action, coldly efficient. The Lee Marvin character, “Charlie,” is as inexorable in carrying out his goal as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in The Terminator. His sarcastic sidekick, “Lee,” played by Clu Gulager, is even more sociopathic.
THE PLOT
In the 1946 version, the backstory to the murder is looked into by an insurance investigator earnestly played by Edmond O’ Brien.
In the 1964 version the investigation, and resulting plot conflict, is handled by the professional killers themselves, within the all-encompassing top-down technocratic system. As if they’re the de facto police department.
STRUCTURE
The 1946 movie has sloppier construction, with eleven flashbacks, which for a 103-minute film might be too many.
The 1964 flick, as with all Don Siegel films, is tighter, at 93 minutes and three flashbacks.
THE BOSS
In the first movie the heist mastermind/boss is played by Albert Dekker. In the remake, by future California governor and U.S. President Ronald Reagan, in his last movie part before entering politics. The role as the story’s villain reflects, perhaps, the real person behind the politicking. Too close of a parallel? Or not.
THE VICTIM
In 1946, Burt Lancaster plays the man gunned down, a former boxer. In 1964 the character– played by John Cassavetes– is a mechanic and race car driver. The difference between a viscerally physical sport with no mediation between contestants, no gadgets, and a sport built on the construction and manipulation of machines. Technology.
THE FEMME FATALE
Ava Gardner in the 1946 version is striking-looking and glamorous– but is she also more vulnerable than the scheming, hard-edged character played by Angie Dickinson in the remake? This might be a draw. Both are dangerous.
SETTINGS
The 1946 film is set in a pre-war world, like the Hemingway short story itself. Dirty, crude, inhabited by seedy diners and older, dilapidated buildings and interiors.
In color, with cleaner post-war sets– as clean as Hemingway’s prose– and better fitting, more precisely-designed clothes, the remake is as modernist as the burgeoning technocracy itself.
A BETTER EXAMPLE of mid-century modern design and thought in film– in every aspect of the work– is the 1967 John Boorman movie “Point Blank,” which also stars Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. This narrative takes the madness a step further. In a hellish, dystopian world, the corporation rules all.
CONCLUSION
TO TRULY UNDERSTAND neo-noir offerings like 1964’s “The Killers” and 1967’s “Point Blank,” one needs to put them into context as part of larger forces: societal, cultural, economic. The two movies reflect changes taking place in America which were intentionally transforming the country into something scarcely recognizable from the populist version which had existed before the war. Top-down institutional changes greatly affected American literature itself, including what kind of writing would become accepted and acceptable– a huge subject to be further explored. Possibly in an e-book?
-Karl Wenclas
A RANT
(photo c/o worldmagzine)
ANOTHER YEAR almost gone, another Nobel literature prize winner nobody’s heard of, who by all accounts writes “poetic prose,” a phrase which seems a nod by commentators toward the literary, to affirm among themselves (they speak for no one else) “she’s one of us.” She’s previously won the Booker Prize and probably other awards within today’s tiny literary world.
Yes, it’s a laudable event, plucking a dedicated writer from general obscurity and giving that person attention– good for the person; the writer– but for what after all is a glorified PR campaign it’s a failure. Part of consistent failure. PR without purpose. Is Han Kang a more compelling winner than last year’s winner? No doubt. That’s not enough.
Literature’s footprint in the culture is not increased a centimeter. Instead it continues to shrink. Relative to all else it shrinks, because the rest of the world’s noise– from politics, podcasts and polemics to Twitter and Tik-Tok, music and sports– speeds ahead like an expanding universe while the literary art stands still. Stuck. Trapped. An art of the imagination, allegedly, yet no one in credentialed levels of the literary realm has imagined a new idea– aesthetically or commercially– in decades. The same-old obsolete layers of overstaffed institutions and hierarchies. Ivy League academies and Big Five-sustained publicists and agents, akin to 19th century Central European bureaucrats receiving chests full of medals for moving stacks of jargon-filled paper around. Awards as tokens of appreciation for existing, while accomplishing nothing.
I’m not sure what the solution is, but it’s not this.
-Karl Wenclas
NEW POETRY
photo c/o dogsaddict
why is that dog biting its owner is it the chains and ropes that pull the shepherd to a suicidal thought or is it the man that harasses his friend to test if he can manipulate the docility of an animal but look the blood is pouring out like droplets of watercolor paints that used to impregnate my xs-sized tee and now it’s there but only darker and sadder i would laugh my stomach out when red pours out because it’s a dumb mistake but now why is the dog so unhesitant and merciless towards its owner the old man that walks it everyday cares for it baths it in the pouring rain despite his asthma and gives it a little bow in its chest is it tamed is it a disguised wolf why is it now lying on the floor growling rolling screaming and the man is running with crimson traces in his route and something in his hand like a folded story he wants no one to know about?
Bach Le is currently living and studying in Hanoi, Vietnam. His poems have previously been in Synchronized Chaos, Haikuniverse, and more. Through poetry, Bach hopes to give voice to different issues in society, as well as showing his attitudes towards life with its various dimensions.
NEW FICTION ALERT
He came because he had a “lump” at the injection site. I finally got him to pull his pants down, after I offered the usual bribe, turkey sandwich and a fruit cup, and I saw it immediately, an arterial pseudoaneurysm as big and red as a fresh plum. He missed the vein and damaged the wall of the artery. I touched it as gently as I could, and felt the blood pulsing through my gloves before he shoved my hand away.
“That fuckin’ hurts, man.”
“Look, Tim,” I said, hoping to scare him just enough to make him take it seriously, “you’ve got a weak spot in the wall of your femoral artery. It could rupture at any moment. If it does you’ll bleed out in a few minutes. I need to get an ultrasound of it and get the vascular surgeons to see you. I think you’re going to need an operation.”
“Just give me something for the fuckin’ pain,” he said, “and I want another san-which.”
I knew I couldn’t give Tim a sandwich. The surgeons were going to be mad enough about the first one, but I knew him well enough to know it wasn’t the time to explain or argue. That could wait until we figured out what to do. But Tim had a new nurse that day, and she didn’t know him, hadn’t learned how to redirect him when he started making demands. So, when he asked for ginger ale and she told him, in a matter-of-fact way, that we didn’t have any, he said “Fuck you, bitch.” He tore off his hospital gown and threw it at her. Then he stormed out of the ER, cursing us all the way to the door.
COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!
NEW POETRY
TO THE EDITOR
who ends a pretty
rejection note
with Please Keep Writing,
I want to tell you
that it is like telling coneflowers
to keep blooming
or the sun to keep burning.
For 4.603 billion years,
the sun’s been clouded,
eclipsed, covered in spots,
called a yellow dwarf,
and still,
it shines on like a Pink Floyd crazy diamond,
heating to nourish,
renewing with fire,
just like my pen.
XXXXXXX
Nancy Byrne Iannucci is a librarian and poet who lives with her two cats: Nash and Emily Dickinson. San Pedro River Review, 34 Orchard, Defenestration, Hobo Camp Review, Bending Genres, The Mantle, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and Glass: a Poetry Journal are some of the places you will find her. She is the author of four chapbooks, Temptation of Wood (Nixes Mate Review, 2018), Goblin Fruit (Impspired, 2021), Primitive Prayer (Plan B Press, fall 2022), and Hummingbirds and Cigarettes (forthcoming via Bottlecap Press). Visit her at www.nancybyrneiannucci.com Instagram: @nancybyrneiannucci
April 6, 8744 BC
Dhakk and his tribe had been tracking a herd of woolly mammoths across the frozen plains and onto a thin muddy strip of land with vast cold ocean on either side.
It was Dhakk’s first hunt. His father had spoken of frozen oceans before, vast snow-covered, just a little too perfectly flat, that you could feel the rise and fall of the water beneath the ice as though it were breathing land.
Those stories never mentioned how muddy the land was.
The hunt was a success until they tried to return west to the Far East.
As the first loaves of bread were being broken with friends, and the virginal soil of other new farms was being broken by farmers in the fertile crescent, and the Jomon were breaking the wilds of Honshu, Dhakk watched as the land bridge from Russia to Alaska was broken into a hundred islands by the warm rising waters.
COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!
