colorful litmags

An Excerpt from “Of Music and Men” by Jeff Nazzaro

NEW FICTION

Crowded. I move across the car and stand in the doorway. It’s the rear of the front end of a double car. Just before the train leaves the station, a tall, thin man hurries on and thumps down into the empty aisle seat by the door across from me. He looks up at me. Then he looks again. He keeps doing it. I take my book, an Alice Munro collection, out of my bag, open it to the next story, “Free Radicals.” Then I realize I’m standing in the doorway on the side of the train on which at each stop the doors will open, so I gather up my bag and slide across the aisle to stand in the opposite doorway. Two seconds later, the man who had repeatedly looked at me jumps up out of his seat and stands right beside me. 

He stands very close to me, looking straight ahead. But whatever. It’s a free train. I take my book out, open it back up. “Free Radicals,” here we go. As I read the opening lines, the man standing next to me takes out his phone and with it plays some hip-hop at top volume. I stand there. I’ll admit I had wanted to move when the man first jumped up and stood next to me, because there seemed to be no good reason for him to have done it, but I thought it wouldn’t be polite to move. I still have those thoughts sometimes, even after years of this commute. Now I know he’s fucking with me and has been ever since he hopped on the train just before the doors closed. Is it the jacket? The tie? I don’t know. My face?

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

The Frankfurt School: Lost in America

A RANT

(Image c/o wikiwand. Early Brutalism?)

THE PROBLEM with our intellectual class is how easily impressed they are with the facade of intellectualism, especially when presented in a university setting.

THE CLASSIC example of such is the so-called Frankfurt School of German Marxist intellectuals who set up shop in the United States (at Columbia University in New York) when the Austrian paper hanger and his crew of violent misfits took power in Germany in 1933.

New York academics were of course happy to have such distinguished names operating on their turf. Horkheimer! Marcuse! Adorno! Fromm! “The Frankfurt School”– in America!

Unfortunately, the great minds transplanted across an ocean were disconnected from their roots, in the sense that America was not Europe. Due to the circumstances of its founding and settling, America had become a unique culture: mostly lower-class Scotch-Irish, African, Native American, Irish, Jewish, Italian, and other influences mixed together in a blender. Best evidenced by the rise of rock n’ roll in the early-to-mid 1950’s, with origins tracing back to the 1800’s.

Rock n’ roll? Chuck Berry? Bill Haley? Little Richard?? Elvis Presley??! Our well-schooled recently arrived Frankfurt visitors couldn’t comprehend it. A barrage of chaotic energy blasting from 45 rpm vinyl disks on turntables. “What is this?” they asked. To them it sounded like pulsating screeches from an alien planet. They scrambled for an explanation. As the musical contagion– sprung from black churches, Appalachian porches, and Memphis/New Orleans/Chicago/New Jersey streetcorners– quickly became commercialized via low-rent hustlers Leonard Chess, Alan Freed, Sam Phillips, Dick Clark, Berry Gordy Jr. and others, the Frankfurt Boys and their gullible follow-the-rules students came up with inapplicable theories of top-down “masscult” and other status quo reactionary rationalizations, not realizing that at the core of the rock n’ roll explosion sat a simple truth: this was American DIY up-from-below folk music. Something Marxists should’ve been able to appreciate.

But the German professional intellectuals were already committed to austerely elitist varieties of classical music and other difficult or inscrutable art forms, and Marxism had by then already lost whatever populist views it’d once held, had become a thoroughly institutionalized Ivory Tower philosophy. As the clueless buttoned-down expats from Europe well represented.

-Karl Wenclas

“Wild” by Hal Wright

NEW POETRY

(painting by Frederic Remington)

We came to this place,
crowded with stingers and rattles and fangs,
because we too had chaos in us
That miffed chainsaw buzz
booming in our brains

Let me tell you what it was like:
the discontented, the outcast, the felon, the dreamer
discordant with society
living by our own hands, and just barely.

A fist in the jaw hello,
A tenth whisky goodnight.
Gunshots pop down Main like little shouts of joy
Hell, why didn’t everybody go West?

The Tetons stand on the cloud’s shoulders
If you chew a scoop of earth, you’ll chip a tooth on gold.
If this wasn’t Shangri-La,
Surely it was the next hamlet over.

But who needs Big Rock Candy
When we got this sunset?
And when the horizon gulps the glow—
Jesus! Ain’t we got stars!

***

Hal Wright (he/him) is a queer writer whose work has been published in Ninth Letter, The Hunger, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere.

An Excerpt from “The Museum of Jeremy’s Summer” by Andrea Donderi

NEW FICTION

Christabel is fairly sure she’s the wrong person for this particular job. They’ve hired her too early in the game to put her expertise to best use, and she’s a beginner at the kind of trustee-wrangling and civic politics that are currently underway. But thanks to common sense, an unusual accent, some acting experience, and decent clothes, she’s getting by. The trustees have abandoned the hare-brained idea of locating the museum up here at the house; they’re working out a deal with the people restoring a big old brick building in the middle of the city. People appear to be taking her seriously.

“You’ll be fine,” her mentor Peg in San Francisco had told her. “Mostly they need an authority to quote, so they can feel okay about their decisions. And face it, you need the dough, and you could use a summer away.”

All true enough. Adrian had just abandoned a book of his own, was going through what he gruffly called a “rough patch,” and had lately been leaking equanimity-threatening volumes of vitriol. A stretch apart might give them both a chance to catch their breath.

(Troubling that Peg had noticed, though. Had it been so obvious? Christabel hadn’t said a word.)

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

“The Little Mermaid Turned Forty” by Alice Kinerk

NEW FICTION

(c/o Disney)

And decided she’d been wrong to give up life underwater for some rando prince and a pair of legs. However she no longer cared about having no voice, because nowadays people just text. 

Well she divorced the dude, and moved out the next day. She packed her bags, rented a U-Haul, and paid first, last and a damage deposit on a one-bedroom oceanside condo about forty minutes outside the city. 

All of which, up to this point, sounds great. Very radical, very female empowerment or whatever. Except that part of the reason she hated her legs is because they’d developed cellulite. And her feet were now crisscrossed with blue veins. And her toenails, underneath the polish, were thick and yellowed.

Also, no one ever said being a middle-aged divorced former mermaid is easy. Like so many of us, she’s struggling. We’re talking about a woman who holed up in the palace playing sexdoll to the prince for decades. She has no GED, no work history, and very few marketable skills. Personal references are out of date and extremely difficult for potential employers to contact. Not to mention, despite the prevalence of texting, sometimes humans really do need old school verbal communication skills.  

And it’s not like the palace pays alimony. Ha ha. Yeah right. As if.

So, with federal minimum wage a miserly seven point two five bucks per hour, with the price of oceanfront condos upward of three grand a month, with grocery store sticker shock… You get it.  

These days, ironically, she plays a mermaid downtown, in the central tank at the aquarium, which helps. Government assistance covers the rest. But she’s struggling.

The truth is, I need to stop clicking on little human interest stories such as this. Because when I find a story I loved so much as a kid turned out not so happily-ever-after in the long run, I start dwelling on it. Then I get sad.

Alice Kinerk spends her free time attempting to make complicated desserts, most of which are tasty failures, such as the time she tried to make a croquembouche.  She’s published dozens of stories. Read more at alicekinerk.com.

Human Innovation

Our assistant editor and style consultant, Kathleen M. Crane, to me as we watched the original 1968 Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway version of “The Thomas Crown Affair”:

“This reminds me of The Loud Boys.”

Near the beginning of the film, plot events happen simultaneously. The movie uses extreme split-screen techniques of the kind first shown at the 1967 Montreal Worlds Fair. No doubt it works best on giant movie screens. The film– influenced by the French New Wave and by neo-noir films like “Point Blank”– was trying to be the epitome of editing, design, and style. A worthy objective.

IS THAT our objective at New Pop Lit?

WHY INNOVATE?

In this mad accelerated world with everything in a state of flux, literature has no choice but to innovate, or become little more than a handful of arrogant monks in a remote monastery on the edge of civilization– a few last holdouts– while what remains of the publishing world is a trash mountain of generic, AI-generated bot books pushed out by the mirror-imaged “Big Five,” which based on how closely they resemble one another in structure, mentality, staffs and output is really a Big One.

(image c/o The New Yorker.)

Never have more choices been offered, with every choice exactly the same.

The only real choice in 2025?

To stand out!

Which we’ve begun doing using multidimensional writing combined with a hyper-pop vibe, as demonstrated in the novella, The Loud Boys. Available here.

-Karl Wenclas

Gamblers In Life and Art

THE ELON MUSK SYSTEM

CASINO CAPITALISM

I’ve followed Elon Musk‘s career for more than six years, have read at least five books about him and his companies. I’ve also known a few big-time gamblers and investors, have done some gambling and investing myself, some time ago. The mindset– the strategy– behind Musk’s success is easy to spot: an extreme example of the tech bros mantra, “Move fast and break things.” The idea being to jump ahead of the crowd by thinking farther out, whether hyping rocket ships to Mars, electric vehicles, or cars that drive themselves.

An example of this is Elon’s approach to competition in the AI realm: move faster, build bigger, as outlined in this article.

Elon Musk is the consummate gambler, engaging in huge bet after huge bet– and to date, getting away with it, because of the hype and risk involved; his companies valued in the markets far higher than they’re actually worth, based solely on their future prospects. He has millions of true believers, and keeps adding more of them.

(Donald Trump, by contrast is following a different strategy: Chaos Theory, as exemplified in the January 6th, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Encourage or spark a chaotic situation then sit back and hope to profit by it.)

For Elon Musk, his approach is a reflection of his personality and whatever substances he’s using or abusing. Others throughout history have had similar personalities. For instance, George Armstrong Custer, who built a reputation during the Civil War due to his fearless cavalry charges; his eagerness to attack. It was the only way he knew how to fight: ride fast and hard and watch your opponents fall before you. He used the same tactic at the Little Big Horn in Montana in 1876. On this occasion the “Move fast and break things” plan didn’t work.

There’ve been others. Napoleon, for the most part, who eventually met his, er, Waterloo. Or that particular German dictator over a hundred years later, who like Custer took on more opponents than he could possibly handle.

Will the same thing happen to Musk?

It seems to me that even the luckiest, loudest gambler, winning gamble after gamble, bet after bet, accumulating an enormous pile of poker chips– in Elon’s case, becoming the richest man on the planet– eventually runs out of luck.

VISIONS

INITIATING CHANGE is what we’re attempting to do with the New Pop Lit project, with new ideas of multidimensional thinking and writing. Or: like the tech guys, we have a vision, but it encompasses more than Mars colonies or electronic brain implants.

Our vision consists of a more grounded world, smaller scale and less stressful, less sinister, more humane, led by an explosion of better literature and art– of new human creativity.

-Karl Wenclas