fast pop lit

An Excerpt from “On the Dance Floor” by Leah Browning

NEW FICTION

That night in bed, when she placed one leg over his and began sliding her palm over his chest, he put his hand over hers and rose a little, giving her a decisive peck on the cheek before turning over with his back to her and making a big show of arranging his pillows just so. 

He heard her sigh and turn over. Good. The next day, he would start looking at rentals. He couldn’t face another six months of couch-surfing, as he’d done after the breakup with his previous girlfriend. He’d worn out his welcome with various friends and their girlfriends, not to mention that they’d worn out their welcome with him. They were all so deferential, with their bran flakes for breakfast and their “Emily wouldn’t like that”-type comments. What were they doing with their lives? It was sickening, if you asked him.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

On Difficult Writing

AN ANALYSIS

ONE THING I’VE NEVER UNDERSTOOD

is why some writers praise difficult writing. “Let’s get inaccessible!”

What’s the rationale? The reason– if there is a reason? The logic? “Well, team, we have these much-lauded many-layered canonical books by our favorite snobby novelists, they’re very difficult— a slog really, like swimming through mud– but that’s the point! No one can get through them. Only us! Which makes us special. A breed apart. Class distinctions and all that.”

The literary mandarins congratulate themselves in an upper room of the moldy, falling apart literary tower. A high-up, far removed room which is actually a closet. A well-furnished closet, mind you, with imported French wine with subtle bouquets, delicate-tasting English pastries, and crackers with brie. Anything an out-of-touch snob set could need. No windows in the room– it’s airless and stuffy– but they don’t want windows anyway. No windows! They don’t care to know what’s happening . . . out there.

Mad leaders open-air prisons wars mobs refugee removals ruthless tech moguls pushing insane AI gadgets as populations potential audiences become angrily detached and illiterate. Increasing levels of gloom. Stray assassinations and nascent revolutions. Not their concern!

As long as the pastries arrive on time and they’re able to take a few sips of overpriced wine while they cling to the overlong overwrought volumes of overdone writing constructed via endless sentences and paragraphs so that no one other than they, them— the last literary aristocrats, cultural dinosaurs– can appreciate them.

–Karl Wenclas

“Blue in Green” by Ben Macnair

NEW POETRY

c/o coloredvinylrecordsdotcom

It is 3am in the morning,
in a student house.
Someone is playing an old Jazz LP,
but it means nothing to them.
They are just playing it,
because they think they have to.
The students are out reading poetry.
They talk about their journey,
and their voice,
and how 40 year old poetry is really, really,like cool,
but Shakespeare is nothing to them,
because they forgot about him when they left school.

Miles played Blue in Green,
in the 1950’s, but it still speaks to me.
More than the students whose voices are new,
digging away at the same old ground.
For all of their talk of breaking boundaries,
they are getting headaches from banging
their young heads against old walls,
and in a few years, when new students come,
and talk about their journey, and their voice,
Miles will still talk to me,
because there is something to be said
for keeping it simple.

Ben Macnair is an award winning poet and play-wright from Staffordshire in the United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter @benmacnair.

“Tupac Shares Nachos, Tells a Fable in Denver Terminal TGI Friday’s” by Sarp Sozdinler

NEW FICTION!

(photo by Perry C. Riddle/LAT)

The terminal was too bright for that hour of the morning, fluorescent lights pulsing in sync with the hum of a thousand tired travelers who hadn’t learned how to sleep upright. Tupac, sitting at the counter of TGI Friday’s like he owned the joint, looked out of place in the best way. A neon green cap on his head, a hoodie that said The Future is Ours in cracked white print, and a plate of nachos that seemed too perfect, too symmetrical for such a place.

I was just getting off a plane that was delayed for two hours, staring at my phone like it would tell me some kind of truth. I could hear Tupac’s voice, low, as if he was talking to himself. I didn’t know if he was even supposed to be there, but there he was. He was eating the nachos, passing them around to the three strangers sitting next to him, and then he was telling a story. Something about wolves.

I looked around to figure out if I was the only person seeing this. No one was laughing.

“You see,” Tupac said, handing the last tortilla chip to a guy in a business suit, “a wolf doesn’t fear the night. It understands that the darkness isn’t an enemy, it’s the space where life belongs.”

I wasn’t sure if he was talking about his life or life in general or just trying to make sense of something else. Maybe he was just sharing, like he always did, even when he wasn’t singing. The people around him were laughing now, like they finally got it. Or at least that they wanted to. A woman in a red scarf nodded, her fingers tracing the rim of her coffee cup, like maybe she was going to say something too. But she didn’t.

Tupac took a breath, almost like he was deciding whether to keep going. “See, what I’m trying to say is, you don’t run from things just because they’re scary. You run toward them, Martha. Even when you’re hungry. Even when they’ve already eaten you.”

I didn’t get the analogy. But maybe I wasn’t supposed to. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten nachos at 4 a.m. in an airport, or why it felt like I had. Or why Tupac was here, talking about wolves and nachos, as if it all made sense. But it did, somehow. That was the thing. It made more sense than anything else. At 4 a.m. Inside the Concourse B of the Denver International Airport.

The waitress came by, filling my coffee cup without asking, and Tupac, now sitting back, eyes closed like he was just waiting for the next flight to land, smiled. 

“You lost?” he asked, stealing a nacho from the hand of a man in three-piece suit.

I didn’t know what to say. I watched the steam curl from my coffee like it might spell something out on my behalf.

“Yeah, no,” I finally muttered, then gave a half-shrug. “I’m just going home.”

Tupac nodded, as if he had heard enough. “That’s what all we do, man. We all have places to be.”

And then the terminal felt quieter. Like the night had finally caught up with the lights.

Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Vestal Review, Fractured Lit, HAD, Hobart, JMWW, Trampset, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected or nominated for such anthologies as the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He is currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.

A New Pop Lit Story Makes Good!

NEWS!

Yes: An entertaining short story we ran at our main site a few summers ago, “We Love You, Ringo,“ about a Beatles cover band, has been included in a short story collection by its author, M.C. Schmidt, the book published by Anxiety Press. One of the best short story writers out there? We think so!

The book is available at Amazon– here— and at other outlets.

The Pop-Lit Vision

WHERE WE’RE GOING

WHY have we been emphasizing at New Pop Lit— at the center of our plan– creating an all-new kind of short story?

This has been the project’s focus from the beginning, based on a recognition that once, briefly, from 1900 into the 1930’s, the short story was the popular American art form, epitomized first by O. Henry’s work, then by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, among others regularly writing pop short stories for Saturday Evening Post (peak weekly readership of six million) and other large-circulation publications. At the depth of the Great Depression, Fitzgerald was earning the equivalent of one million dollars per year, almost completely from his fun and/or romantic short stories. (His peak Post fee of $4,000 per story in 1929, before the stock market crash, would be like being paid $76,000 per story today.)

ANOTHER historical example we focus on is the explosive popularity of rock n’ roll 45 rpm singles– generally two to three minutes in length– from 1955 to 1970. A colorful pop vibe captured in this museum exhibit in Liverpool, UK:

The motivating idea:

EXCITEMENT!

A sense of excitement within the artwork, but also excitement created about the art form.

The short story is the ideal literary form with which to make this happen. But the form first needs to be taken to another level– and the way it’s promoted needs to be taken to another level.

-Karl Wenclas

“Neon” by Ken Kakareka

NEW POETRY

image c/o amazon.com

at
the end
you
can say
you
showed up
every day.
whether
beaten,
fatigued,
hungover,
uninspired,
or rejected –
you
didn’t let
any
of it
get
to you.
you were
unrelenting
when
so many
big
neon signs
flashed
RELENT.
and that
is how
you won.

Ken Kakareka has appeared numerous times at Fast Pop Lit.

His publication, Bullshit, is available at Amazon.

An Excerpt from “On the Killing of Brian Thompson and the Coronation of Luigi Mangione” by Bud Sturguess

UPCOMING POETRY

I passed Elevator A

A squad of uniformed inspectors

wearing aviator shades in all colors and tints

were struggling, rather comically,

to fit a guillotine (labelled “Exhibit B” – evidence)

The implement of hell was due

for a photo shoot with Court TV at 3 o’clock

I gathered from their angry chatter

about this uncooperative chopping block.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

Counter Culture Madness!

FRIGHTY #2 IS OUT!

EVENTUALLY the internet will become unusable, buried under ads, pop-ups, paywalls, tests to prove you’re human or maybe that you’re not, and other security and-or moneymaking techniques. When that happens there will need to be escape routes back to sanity and reality– back to the groundedness once provided by Do-It-Yourself print zines.

As usual, Wred Fright is ahead of the curve in such matters, the first escape routes already provided c/o his new Frighty series. #2 has arrived, full of the kind of human writing that will never be offered by robotic machines. In fact, the authentic kind of zine writing offered would cause AI devices and robots of all kinds to blow fuses– “This does not compute!”– because it breaks the refined “rules” of what writing is supposed to look like.

ON TOP of all else, Dr. Fright is offering it to the public FREE. Print it out– here!

“Just download it, print it doublesided (flip on short edge), fold, and maybe bind/staple it, and it is good to go!”

(BONUS: It includes a short rant by myself.) 

-Karl Wenclas for Fast Pop Lit 

“Ubi Est?” by John Zedolik

NEW POETRY!

(photo by RiddiMRyder)

The town’s pizza joint that once held primacy of place
moved long ago and now rules across the road and down aways,
and if you didn’t grow up here, you wouldn’t sense a trace

of the hearty business that used to flourish in this space,
now a blocky cipher that dreams in its latter days
among the dark hemlocks in this bypassed place,

whose needles weave stark shadows, and the walls enlace,
perhaps a proper end in which the elder can laze,
and the long course of its catastrophe, trace

as eighth-century monks might ponder the disgrace
of men in God’s crimson eye as the Norsemen raze
their chapels, bell towers, and every holy place,

why the clanking ovens no longer grace
its innards with a comforting blaze
and the aroma of dough has vanished without a trace,

but perhaps it’s better not to keep apace
of these migrations, no need to craze
the benign, brooding senior in his place,
hiding on a street, both long faded to just a trace.

(photo by MJ Barnes)

John Zedolik an adjunct English professor at Chatham University and Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and has published poems in many journals– including previously at our main site, here.