Lou Beach, 420 Characters, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
"Alternately surreal, funny, ominous, and lyrical, Lou Beach's "420 Characters" offers an experience as dazzling as any in contemporary fiction. Revealing worlds of meaning in single paragraphs, these crystalline miniature stories began as Facebook status updates, and mark a new turn in an acclaimed artist and illustrator's career. "420 Characters" features original collages by the author."
"Lou Beach uses words with no sympathy for the reader. He beats us senseless with his brilliance." - Terry Gilliam
"Lou Beach is full of wit, mirth and intelligence.” Gary Panter
"By turns cheeky and cherubic, these 420-character shorts from the author’s Facebook page encapsulate in pithy form entire plotlines or character studies. Beach injects these tidy depictions with a similar boundless, mischievous imagination. Sly, surprising, playful, puzzling-and great fun." - Publishers Weekly
"Celebrated illustrator Beach…turns his uncommon sensibilities to the written word, composing a small fortune in vignettes that originally appeared as Facebook updates. An adroit experiment that marries linguistic restraint to literary cool." - Kirkus Reviews
"[It] takes the reader only a few pages to realize that Beach’s book is more than simple experimentation. The language is sharp and driven by a droll wit that attracts and repels, with results both endearing and estranging. Given Beach’s background as an illustrator, it should come as no surprise that many of these pieces have an almost cinematic immediacy to them, and the unexpected, almost surrealistic twists make this a sharp and wonderfully funny debut. Readers of short fiction will love this one." - Library Journal
“It says ‘shit,’” observes my six-year-old, spotting Jonathan Lethem’s cover blurb: “Holy sh*t! These are great!” And they are. Rendered as Facebook updates in 420 characters or less, these thought-provoking vignettes from illustrator Lou Beach are funny, poetic, touching, sexy, twisted-scene-and-character sketches replete with bumpkins, criminals, angry teens, truckers, boozers, bimbos, animals, and sentient objects. Best savored one or two a day, like a New Yorker cartoon calendar." - Mother Jones
"Lou Beach writes short stories in 420 characters, and they are bizarre and awesome. Beach’s site includes audio of his stories being read by Dave Alvin (yes!), Ian McShane, and Jeff Bridges (thus marking the first time the Big Lebowski star has been involved with anything called “420″)." - Bookslut
"Edgy and funny, smart, dark and thought-provoking. Beach’s short-short stories reveal worlds of meaning in single paragraphs. While perhaps not for everyone, they are definitely an entertaining read and are accompanied by collages by the author." - Bookweb
"The collection covers storms, cowboys, hound dogs, small town girls, wet hammers, stolen Buicks, and much more. This is one of the most entertaining books to read aloud that I’ve encountered in some time. Beach is a wonderful and evocative word smith." - LibraryThing
"There’s a new collection of short stories — extremely short stories, just 420 characters long (including spaces). They feature western gunslingers, couples in crisis, dogs and talking chickens. The author, Lou Beach, has managed to pack each tiny tale with vivid descriptions and narratives that are at once funny, sad, and bracing.
Beach is first and foremost an illustrator and collage artist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and on dozens of album covers. After joining Facebook, he decided people weren’t being creative enough with their 420-character status updates. Instead of chronicling his children or coffee dates, “I thought I would inject some fantasy.” (He initially set up a website for the stories.)
Beach reveled in the constraints. “It was a very good exercise,” he tells Kurt Andersen. “I just got rid of a lot of junk and went for the heart of the narrative. But that’s the same thing as making art, as well. You pile a lot of stuff on there and you take it out until you’ve got the essence.” - Studio 360
"The old adage that a book shouldn’t be judged by its cover doesn’t hold true for 420 Characters. As a formal experiment, its packaging helps define how it should be perceived. Lou Beach wrote more than a hundred 420-character stories using Facebook’s status-message constraints, and collected them for publication. This could easily be viewed as a collection of jokes, but the slim, classy red binding says otherwise, as does its elegant layout. There’s nothing wrong with books of formally limited jokes, but 420 Characters aims to be more.
420 Characters derives strength from its ability to evoke other stories and archetypes. In a single quick scene, its best stories imply a past and a future: “He walked everywhere until he was given a bicycle as a graduation gift, pedaled out of town on Saturday, told his mother he was going bowling,” concludes a story about an odd, bullied kid. That ending line offers enough details that readers can fill in the gaps.
The Facebook-imposed limit of 420 characters ends up being ideal for these vignettes. The stories are just long enough to form the vision of a scene from a movie, of the moment when it’s clear a tale is worth being told. If it fit Twitter’s 140-character limit, there wouldn’t be room for embellishment, and if it were longer, it would demand more satisfaction. It’s an elevator pitch, somewhere between a TV Guide blurb and a short story. As it is, the length of each story helps 420 Characters demonstrate repeatedly just how much most storytelling relies on archetypes and consistent motifs.
That’s a neat trick, but more than 150 different stories using it clarifies that it isn’t much more than a trick. The same manipulations 420 Characters uses to point at bigger issues in narrative also prevent it from being satisfying. That might not be an expectation for a formal experiment like this one, but the relative success of the comedic pages makes it easy to think that 420 Characters would have been better if it had been geared toward jokes. But as inescapable as its central gimmick is, there’s still some surprising beauty to be found." - Rowan Kaiser
"Short stories are mightily resilient little creatures — like those bacteria they keep discovering in the hearts of volcanoes or at the bottoms of oceans. You can bury them in the dense, lifeless-looking pages of college literary magazines, and they keep flourishing. Or you can fill them with pulpish aliens and gun-toting molls, and they happily motor on, outlasting all those snobbish Pulitzer winners who once sneered at them (not to mention their rarefied panels of judges). That’s because stories don’t need much to survive, just a situation worth pursuing, a character worthy of pursuing it and three magical Aristotelian ingredients: beginning, middle and end. Suddenly, you’ve got a perfectly formed, self-determining little beast on your hands. It breathes. It breeds.
If Lou Beach’s first collection, “420 Characters,” is any indication, short stories may even be adaptive and wily enough to survive Facebook — or, more accurately, Facebook’s formerly limited-to-420-characters status-update section, where these several-score pieces originated. But they are minimalist in word count only, since Beach’s imagination ranges as widely as his protagonists. Take, for example, Zuma Pedley, formerly of Lubbock, who “came to L.A. in ’02 with his guitar, some songs and an ugly dog.” Or Vera (Wooly) Lamb, who “dressed like a man, and could outcuss, outshoot and outdrink anyone in pants, Little Rock, 1922.” Then there are the many lone roamers of bars and strip malls, or the guy who “subcontracted to paint a suspension bridge that spanned the M’pozo River in Congo,” or that other adventurous guy who launches himself in a spaceship to Deep Colony 7, where he’s been told “things work, it is clean” and, thank goodness, he can still smoke his Marlboros. Just because a story is short, even really, really short, doesn’t mean it can’t contain multitudes. (Or span them.)
Beach’s stories are as husky and rough as bark, even when he writes in a variety of reinvented styles. There’s the Elmore Leonard/Jim Thompson-type story, in which you might encounter some nameless goon worrying about spinach manicotti in his teeth while trying not to look at a body someone has deposited in his back seat. Or the kooky collagist, Terry Gilliam-type story (by the way, Beach’s own collages adorn museums, album covers and many pages of this collagelike book), where a cargo ship might settle down on a nice city block and become Ikea, or a man wears a secret, preening finch under his hat. But Beach’s best stories occur in the even darker, funnier and far more surreal zone that divides men from women — sort of Larry Brown on the rocks with a Richard Ford chaser. Some of these are almost perfectly formed tales of what happens when men actually sense that elusive sense of an ending, too late to do anything about it:
“After she fled he became his own wife, ironing in his underwear, dusting the shelves, moving the figurines to the dining room table then replacing them carefully when he’d finished waxing the cabinet. Wearing her apron, he often made casseroles. Sometimes he’d sit on her closet floor and move his face through her dresses, like a dog searching in a field of high grass.”
“420 Characters” is an enjoyable, if distracting, book to read in one or two sittings — but the cumulative effect is one of gravity, humor and conviction. It’s a big world, this conglomerate world of tiny stories, a concerted series of experiments in miniaturization. Some of the experiments produce surprising and beautiful results (like the above story, quoted in its entirety), while others produce oddly jumbled monstrosities that resemble the sad demise of Andre Delambre in the 1958 film “The Fly.” In the end, though, it’s not only Beach but the short story itself that emerges triumphant from these pages. Because, let’s face it, there’s simply nothing you can’t do to the little rascal — chop it, compress it, digitize it, Osterize it, Oulipo-ize it, even Martinize or social network-ize it — it’s alive!" - Scott Bradfield
Social media sites are often blithely derided as vehicles for narcissism, allowing people to broadcast insignificant, quotidian events - what people had for breakfast seems to be the go-to example - as if they were big news. Lou Beach, an illustrator whose collage-style work has appeared in The New Yorker and on the cover of a Blink-182 album, wanted to use his Facebook status updates for something more. What he decided to do was to write tiny tales, compact little worlds that his friends and followers could enjoy. As for the length of his stories, Beach had no choice. Facebook limited these posts to 420 characters, a constraint that he embraced and took as the title of his collection of 169 very short stories.
Despite the social-media novelty of “420 Characters,’’ this style of micro, or flash, fiction is nothing new. Franz Kafka’s “The Trees’’ is only 230 characters, while the six-word “Baby Shoes,’’ apocryphally attributed to Ernest Hemingway, achieves sublime devastation in only 33. The only difference between traditional flash fiction and “420 Characters’’ is that the length was decided by Mark Zuckerberg and not the author.
Many of Beach’s untitled stories are lyrical and poetic, managing to create a feeling of resolution despite their brevity, with dashes of warm sentiment and humor. In one, a skydiver shares a tender moment with a pigeon entangled in his gear as they plummet to the ground together, hearts racing in unison. “Shot by a monkey,’’ begins another, irresistibly. Dogs appear frequently, perhaps because when your stories are restricted to 420 characters, a three-letter protagonist is a major asset. Drawing on his background as a visual artist, Beach dreams up brilliant textures and surreal imagery. “I live in the pocket of a bright paisley shirt,’’ he writes, “and when the light is just so, I’m in my own private cathedral.’’
Most, however, feel like writing prompts or ambitious introductory paragraphs for stories yet to be written. Effective flash fiction should not leave readers wanting more, because there’s never going to be any more. Encountering a promising, potentially exciting fictive world and then seeing it abandoned without any sense of closure is deeply frustrating. Beach gives the impression that these stories were taken directly from his Facebook account, without revisions, and there is definitely a hurried, off-the-cuff tone to them.
Curiously, “420 Characters’’ doesn’t take advantage of Facebook’s most prominent feature - its social element. In the acknowledgements, Beach thanks the fans and supporters who followed his updates as he posted them, and it seems safe to assume that many of them left comments that may have influenced subsequent entries or otherwise added to the experience. It would have been nice to have seen the effect that instant feedback and a direct relationship between author and audience can have on the creative process. There’s no noticeable trace of the social network’s influence on any of these stories beyond their length.
This past September, Facebook increased the character limit for status updates to 5,000, affording users a larger canvas on which to experiment. It seems like only a matter of time before the first Facebook novel appears. One can only hope that it leverages the unique strengths of the medium, rather than relying on its limitations." - Michael Patrick Brady
"Lou Beach's 420 Characters is the perfect book for today's multi-tasking, time- and attention-challenged, media-gorging, art and literature lover (like me). Limited to 420 characters (including punctuation), each of Beach's very short stories started life as a Facebook status update. Vividly distilling experience into a haiku-like framework, Beach's stories are narrative gems -- evocative, surreal and dreamlike -- the opening scene of a movie by your favorite director as you sink into your seat in the darkened theater:
"We were on a tour boat in Boston Harbor. A candy wrapper escaped from some kid's hand, scuttled our way across the deck. Russell pinned it with his boot, bent over, picked it up. A gust of wind snatched it from him, sent it out over the water. An old woman said: 'Shame on you, littering.' My brother's neck went red. He got that look that could clear a barroom in Quincy. He sighed, winked at me. 'Yes, ma'am,' he said."
Infused with atmospheric depth and populated with myriad characters, Beach's stories range from comedy to irony, tragedy and surreal montage:
"Shot by a monkey, Elsa leaned against the banyan, held a bandage to the wound. They'd entered camp just before dawn, made off with a pistol, some candy bars, and a Desmond Morris book. We counted as six shots rang out, one of them finding poor Elsa's arm. Relived that the simian was out of ammunition, we packed up. On the way out of camp we noticed a monkey on the riverbank, hammering at a snake with the gun."
The handsome hardcover book is in and of itself a small treasure. Designed after a vintage volume in Beach's personal collection, the red cover is embossed with a gold leaf monogram, the stories printed on heavy paper and illustrated with surreal collages by Beach, also a well known artist and illustrator."- Jane Chafin
"It’s rare to find a work as seamless and fascinating as Lou Beach’s 420 Characters . The book is itself a little piece of art, a pocket-sized illustrated volume with a sturdy red cover and the number 420 embossed in gold on the front. Each ultra-short story within is told in 420 characters or less, the limit Facebook set on its status updates when Beach first started posting his stories to the site in 2009. (Facebook has since increased the character limit to 5,000.) When he began receiving positive feedback, Beach decided to compose a story every day, later converting the project into a constantly updated Facebook page, Twitter feed, web site, and, eventually, printed book. In any form, his stories retain at their core a deep understanding of how to tell a tale.
Beach has enjoyed a long career as an illustrator, for publications including Wired, The New York Times, Time magazine, and (once, in 2004) City Paper, and he’s designed album covers for the likes of Blink 182, the Carpenters, and the Police, among many others. The 420 project is his first foray into writing, an adventure he hopes will lead to short stories of a more traditional length and, eventually, a novel—“if I’ve got one in me,” he says in a recent phone interview with City Paper.
“I’m going to be 65 in a couple months, and I’ve been making art for a long, long time,” Beach continues. “But the urge to create narratives comes from the same place for both. The pictures that I make hopefully tell a story, and there’s characters and a scene whether it’s an editorial illustration or my own personal work, which I show in galleries. They spring from the same need or urge to tell a story.”
The written pieces in 420 are reminiscent of Stephen Crane poems, tight little masterpieces toeing the line between poetry and prose while telling a complete story, often possessing a kicker that changes everything in a phrase or even a word. One such piece, in its entirety, reads:
I looked down at the spots on the pavement, where kids waiting for the bus had dropped wads of gum for years. The sun had seared them black, fried them flat. This concrete constellation held a secret that I knew could be unlocked. I went home and returned with a jar of paint and brush, connected the dots. A pattern emerged. I will share it with you. Be on the #12 bus at midnight, corner of Wrigley & HubbaBubba.
Beach’s book also includes illustrations, standalone pictures that are a world unto themselves. Complex and disjointed, they are heavily populated surreal scenes in which one might see a man with too many eyes dotting his face or an image of a dog filling the outlined body of a bird. At first glance, they’re striking; upon further study, stories start to build themselves. Why did someone black out those letters? Who interrupted this strange celebration, and what were they celebrating?
420 can be gobbled up all at once or enjoyed slowly, one nibble at a time. But what makes it doubly fun is that his process is accessible on so many levels. His stories are posted to Facebook and Twitter every few days with little editing, opening them up to comment and criticism from his readers at the very stage his writing is at its most vulnerable. He’s not a writer handing down his words from tablets on high; he’s an artist exploring new ground and asking audiences to come along.
“I tend to write them in the kind of limbo space between waking and dreaming,” Beach says, “and then I get up and type them out and edit them quickly and just throw them up. There’s an improvisational quality to it, a bit of a performance in a way, you know, because there’s an audience: ‘Hello everybody on Facebook! Here’s a story for you.’”
The 420 project may carry extra meaning for those bibliophiles who fear all things digital. Beach’s stories originate online, and they can be appreciated there in full. But they may drive Facebook diehards and tweeps to Beach’s web sites, where both online stories and selections from the book can be read page by page, superimposed on a scanned 1890 copy of Glaucus, or, The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley (who, appropriately enough, was one of the earliest proponents of evolution, though not the digital sort). Once there, readers may appreciate the look of an old printed book so much that they’d like to feel one in their hands, and mosey over to Amazon or their favorite bookstore to purchase a hard copy, a physical piece of beauty possessing unique stories that can’t be found anywhere on the 420 web site. And those that start with the printed book may begin to follow Beach on Twitter, or like his Facebook page. All of these elements together create a beautifully unique sum that’s equally as enjoyable as its individual parts." - Laura Dattaro
"This is one of those books that I’ll be re-reading for a long time to come (this means I’m in love, folks). I might even get creepy and start memorizing some of the stories (I may or may not be infatuated). 420 Characters is a great collection of supershort stories (420 characters each—and that’s including punctuation and spaces) and a few accompanying collages by Lou Beach. The series of short stories actually started out as a set of status updates on Facebook (and you know how we love the Z-berg), which apparently have a length restriction of 420 characters (#themoreyouknow). So here we are.
I love this book. I love pretty much everything about it—the striking hardcover, the weirdly gorgeous and thought-provoking collages/illustrations, and of course, the miniature short stories themselves. Because Lou Beach limited each story to a scant 420 characters, every word is deftly deployed to render as much specific detail as possible. Lou Beach creates whole worlds and populates them with wistful cowboys, hopeful teens, and whole bunches of other carefully crafted people, all in stories of just 420 characters apiece.
Most of the characters don’t have names, but they’re distinct, and when a few of them reappear in other stories, you recognize them immediately. Some of the stories span years and lifetimes, and some take place in nanoseconds (like one that’s a guy’s fantasy of being a war hero, which happens in the space between jumping off the diving board and hitting the water). All the stories are engaging, beautifully crafted, and carry a sense of character, setting, and tone that is much larger than their 420 characters. And they run the gamut of topics—there are funny ones, melancholy ones, sweet ones, and ruthless ones—the list goes on and on. This book is like what you always pray a box of chocolates/short story collection will be like (you know, a wide variety of stuff that’s all delicious and doesn’t have that weird one that isn’t on the guide and has unidentifiable crunchy stuff in it).
In each of the stories, you can sort of taste the kind of air that the character is breathing—the language is specific enough that you get a sense of knowing exactly where you are without being told a single unnecessary thing. These miniature stories are part of a larger vision of the universe and we only get glimpses—there are spaces and ambiguities (like the pauses in really good, old-school jazz) that allow us to determine what the stories mean for us, and where the drama and conflict lives. Lou (can I call you Lou? …* cue crickets* Lou it is, then) uses his words as an ultra-fine mesh net to try and capture the shape and feeling of the world. There’s something zen and haiku-esque about Lou’s use of the language—sparse but colorful, somewhat detached (acknowledging the lense), and starkly, cleanly beautiful.
Man, I love these stories.
And I realize that I keep harping on the fact that Lou does all this in each story using only 420 characters. Which, let’s be real, is remarkable. But please don’t think that I keep saying it because the stories are great … for someone only using 420 characters. The stories are wonderful slices of fiction for any category, period.
In honor of Mr. Beach’s commitment to short fiction, I’ll wrap this up quickly: I love this book. The stories are beautiful, detailed, specific, and often humorous. You should find this book and hold onto it forever.
Obsessed? Me? I don’t know what you’re talking about." - Borah Coburn
"Ernest Hemingway famously wrote a complete short story in only six words (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) However, it’s unlikely he would’ve been inclined to replicate this feat enough to fill up an entire book. Lou Beach’s detail-rich stories contain slightly more than six words, but while they were initially compressed into Facebook statuses, they’ve now been gathered together in the single volume, 420 Characters.
These stories take a Dogme 95-like approach of finding creative freedom through self-imposed restrictions. Unsurprisingly, he arrived at the 420-character spatial limitation through a social media experiment. Lou Beach logged on to Facebook in 2009, out of basic curiosity--just to dip a toe into the zeitgeist and take its temperature. It wasn’t long, however, before the illustrator became bored with the rather mundane status updates he would see--not only other people’s, but his own too.
“You know, my life isn’t all that exciting,” Beach says. “So I just invested the little space there with some fantasy. I always wanted to be a writer--that was a fantasy of mine as well. I just thought, what a great exercise to fill that space. I thought 420 characters would force me to edit and just get down to the basis of a narrative, and I guess it did.”
“Her mouth is a hammer. I kiss it and fall, pummeled, to the floor, crawl to my corner and rest. She summons me later to mix a drink, plait her hair, massage her feet. I am clumsy - she cuts my cheek with a toenail, presses her big toes into my eye sockets. I lie there shamed, foot-faced and humbled, her all-natural organic toy, and wait.”
As an illustrator, Beach found he was capable of more than just one mode of storytelling. Once it became clear that the status update stories were adding up to a larger work, he decided to expand the project, using his visual vocabulary to construct narratives as well. He included 10 images along with the text for the book. These are stories too, just in a different form. They are designed to have their own narrative, defined by the viewer. “I try not to explain anything regarding what the images are about,” Beach says. “Let the viewer imagine what they will.”
Working on the pieces in 420 Characters was an entirely different process than what Beach was used to in his career as a freelancer, working at the whim of an editor. “In an editorial situation, I have a story or a point of view that I have to make manifest,” he says. “Here, I’m sort of working blind.” He started off each piece by sitting at a large worktable, looking through boxes filled with idea-scraps--previously unused illustrations and images--and sifting through them until something struck a chord. Eventually he would find enough details that also captured his fancy, and then he would whip out the glue. “It’s kind of a magical process, and it happens to a great degree by chance,” he says.
Whether writing stories or conjuring them from a graphical palette, the material all comes from the same part of Beach’s imagination. “It’s a dreamlike sort of state where I lose myself in the story--whether it’s words or pictures,” he says. “When I put these stories together, they sort of form themselves. I arrange them until they lock into place and make some internal sense to me.”
The results of this method speak for themselves, and that is by necessity--in 420 Characters there’s no room for explanation. See the images for yourself in the gallery above." - Joe Berkowitz
“Hello! I must be dying.”
In Lou Beach’s debut collection of minuscule flash fiction, 420 Characters, the title gives away the gimmick at a glance, and the Author’s Note follows up: “The stories you are about to encounter were written as status updates on a large social networking site.” A quick Google produces a 420 character limit for Facebook and in that instant the reader knows just exactly what they hold in their hands, a book full of Lou Beach’s Facebook updates; a dreary and somewhat frustrating realization, no matter how beautifully bound the pages are (and they are quite nicely packaged). But the most delightful conundrum of the entire project is the fact that they are not really updates at all, at least not in the “Hey world! Look at me, I’m lonely and depressed and sitting on the crapper bored!” sense and rather, surprising, perfectly crafted, delicious little fictional morsels of sadness, regret, life, self-doubt, drunkenness, murder, mystery, Wild West aesthetic, noir, rednecks, death and, though somewhat less apparent and sprinkled slightly in between all the rest, joy and happiness. It’s odd that the social networking site or the number of characters is even mentioned, because these flash fictions stand on their own and need no such scaffolding to gird their heights. Open to any page, and there is guaranteed a smile, or sigh, or at the very least, a thought.
The entries aren’t titled, and as nearly as one can see, there is no discernable progression or order, or even overarching theme for that matter, but these facts to not detract. Each carefully crafted tiny tale stands apart, an obelisk on the stark white page, and each one has a life of its own and an entire universe of possibility attending it. Each page feels like the opening line to an epic tale, but all we are given is the first salvo; each page is a door that holds worlds beyond its threshold. Observe these three tales as a core sampling of the bedrock of 420:
A man and a woman sit in a café and brood: “You know Vivian, you should get a website and sell those things you make. I bet there’s a market for them.” The woman puts out her smoke with anger and replies: “Maurice, you are such an idiot.”
A hospital patient sees the dull pity on a nurse’s face: “[The look] should have told me to stay put, but I was determined to march out of the ward and into the street and back to Flaherty’s.” And he does, his bare ass hanging off the back of a barstool.
A man watches a woman dying in the hospital and deciding there is nothing left for him to do, or left to do for her, he steals her laptop, her medications, and makes for the door. She grabs his arm before he can go: “Ronnie, give me a smoke.”
The effect of these tiny vignettes is invigorating. Beach, whose main gig is as an artist (there are also a handful of original paintings, reproduced in the book- Beach’s art is like a cross between Matisse and Warhol and doesn’t disappoint- a nice touch and worth a look), is able to capture the essence of a terrible situation in just a few words, and then leave the reader wishing for just a few more sentences. Who are these people? What has driven them to such desperate measures?
The conceptual variants of the experiment are startling in their juxtaposition. Let’s play along: each flash fiction in 420 was written first as a Facebook update, a social information site that caters to a specific set of instant gratification micro-content consumers who need the whole story at a glance- what is Aunt Mildred cleaning now? How many beers did Pauly D. drink last night? – but Beach’s platform specific flash fiction don’t give the whole story, and instead leave the reader chomping at the bit for the rest of the tale. (In the words of the words of the Irish saint Jim Joyce in his most unabridged work- 420 is a “hearasay in Paradox Lust.” )
Beach has performed a literary striptease, one which very well may infuriate the average consumer of instant news and instant updates on the lives of the ones they love, but others may realize that perhaps there is more to each story, that if we read it again, and again, and even a fourth time, we may discover something new behind the words.
420 is a quick read, and one seems to be at the end of it before it has even began, but it bares a few more glances and even opening to any page, at random will reward. Beach has given us a pesky little paradox in a binding- he pleases the instant consumer with length, but not content, and the result is fantastic. His unique take on the everyday and the more than everyday will outlast any social networking site that seeks to connect us while only putting an even greater distance between us. Beach describes the headache this distance induces, and in a fell swoop closes the gap, reminding us that our reality cannot always be captured in an update:
“Anchored at my eyebrows it spreads back like the tentacles of a jellyfish to sting an poison my brain. It hurts to see, everything the color of smoker’s teeth…My Fingers are lead soldiers, stripped of paint, heavy and dull. Hello! I must be dying. My chin is a stump.” - Robert Tumas
I KEEP MY FRIENDS IN A BOX under the bed, categorized and separated, secured by blue rubber bands that originally held broccoli. One day I removed the lid and saw that they had all turned into little bones. I strung them together into a long strand that I looped around and around my neck.
TURNS OUT she wasn’t really pregnant, just doing a number, needing someone to hold onto. Hell, I’ve been married four times, I sussed it out. Anyways, I cut her loose in Bismarck and got a job on a road crew. Saw a big gray wolf deep in a field of snow. He sniffed the air and was gone.
THERE IS A PLACE I visit, where no one else goes. The rocks are slippery and sharp, the drop to the dark sea below makes me dizzy. The sun never muscles its way through the gang of clouds that hover overhead shedding a mist that plasters my thin hair to my head, makes me turn up my collar. No, you can’t go with me, I don’t want a sandwich to take, thermos of hot chocolate, though your asking may keep me home.
THE FLOOR MANAGER cued him for the break. “When we return—a report on elder abuse.” He stood and stretched, sat back down when the stylist came to fix his makeup, adjust his hair. “You’re so handsome,” she whispered as she dropped two pills into his waiting hand. “You’re killing me,” he said and put his hand on her ass.
I DON’T KNOW HOW she tracked me from Bismarck. Maybe she followed my scent. Anyway I was working in Waukesha putting up vinyl siding and I look down and there she is, looking up at me with a hand on the ladder. “Hey.” “Hey.” I was still a little pissed at that pregnancy bullshit she tried to pull, but there was something about the curve of her neck and that dumbass gap-toothed grin …
I WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL WITH THE KING. Well, actually he was a grade ahead, but I’d see him in the halls surrounded by his bodyguards disguised as varsity football players, as if no one knew who he was, for crissakes. He always arrived late and left early, sat alone in the cafeteria. I felt sorry for him and one time approached him at lunch, offered him my sweet roll. He said something in French, then closed his eyes.
I WET my lips with the tip of my tongue, leave it protruding for a beat, reel it back in. Is she watching? She must know I do it for her. Is she watching? I sit up straight, order whiskey, no rocks. Is she watching? I laugh, make a joke. Is she watching? I walk to the men’s room, saunter. Is she watching? I return, swing my leg over the back of the chair, knock over a bottle of beer. Damn, is she watching? Is she watching?
SHE WAS BEAUTIFUL, fragile, and afraid, a peacock in a hailstorm. We sat together on the couch, waiting for the car horn. It sounded at last and I held her hand as we pushed through the snow in the driveway. I turned away after I buckled her into the back seat. Don wouldn’t look at me, but reached back, touched her knee. I watched them drive off, then walked back to the house, careful not to step into her footprints.
AFTER SHE FLED he became his own wife, ironing in his underwear, dusting the shelves, moving the figurines to the dining-room table then replacing them carefully when he’d finished waxing the cabinet. Wearing her apron he often made casseroles. Sometimes he’d sit on her closet floor and move his face through her dresses, like a dog searching in a field of high grass.
Read it here
Beach's web page
Lou Beach, Cut it Out, Last Gasp, 2006.
"A delightful overview of this award-winning illustrator’s art. Over the last 30 years his work has been featured in major magazines as well as on countless record and cd packages, book covers and advertisements. A much-admired pop icon of Los Angeles’s wild era of illustration in the 1970s and 80s, Lou Beach has remained a vital force in today’s competitive world of popular art, creating imagery for clients as diverse as WSJ, NYT, The Utne Reader, MCA Records, Random House, McGraw-Hill and Houghton-Mifflin among others. A tour of this self-taught collagist’s mind reveals a delight in visual puns and a direct link to such greats of the medium as Hannah Hoch, George Heartfield, Max Ernst, Romare Beardon and Tadanori Yokoo as well as influences from popular culture. His collages have also landed on record covers for Weather Report [Grammy nomination],The Carpenters, The Neville Brothers, Dave Alvin, Dr. John, Ethel Merman and Blink 182."
Read it at Google Books
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.