Sean Lovelace is running right now, far. Other times he teaches at Ball State University. HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS is his flash fiction collection by Rose Metal Press. His works have appeared in Crazyhorse, Diagram, Sonora Review, Willow Springs, and so on.
Teenagers, drunk, disheveled, excited…they ruined our party.
What is the feeling when you’re driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?
Like you haven’t slept in the kitchen.
And now listen now old buck old wild sunombitch don’t you get drunk today.
I’ll walk across the damn prairie by myself.
Always staying late, freeloading, shouting, foolish.
There will be no music, just dancing.
I am hightingled on the beer.
All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.
Disorderly, lost.
Dude, don’t go halfway.
That’s being blackened, from the inside.
You shouldn’t go camping or canoeing on Memorial Day. It’s cliché. So I always go camping or canoeing. Mostly to see the inept, the drunk, the sun-charred, the unclothed, the loud, the wet: Example, White River below:
Jerome Stern said single words can be cliché. Azure or don. He claimed to have never heard these words actually spoken aloud. He also goes after blurt.
I wonder if clichéd phrases change over time, their meaning. Easy as cake. Was it once simpler to bake a cake? I recently made a pie so horrid my own dog refused to take one bite. And I lived in Memphis, TN for years, so never understood something as easy as “a walk in the park.” Walks in the park could be fatal in Memphis.
Stern also says that readers of mainstream/popular fiction don’t mind clichés so much, and that romance writers actually use them as code, as comfortable and familiar and expected (by the reader). This comes across as a bit elitist. But:
Here is a handy cliche finder.
I think in literary fiction, maybe situations are more cliché than words or phrases. The young man goes to the party. The apartment argument. The trip to a foreign land? The country mouse/city mouse disconnect story. Academia. Others?
The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot. Salvador Dali
A bit harsh, me thinks. Clichés are passed along because they are often apt. Their very survival might point to their effectiveness as metaphor, or as mnemonic device. Is it always laziness? I suppose the challenge is to first recognize the thing, then decide to use it, or make it new.
(“make it new” possibly cliché)
Please keep her always drunk.
I don’t do anything, not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more.
I’m through with the whole works.
An unbroken night of sleep is rare.
Oh, misty-minded.
Four be the things I’d have been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.
Sobriety? A basis for jokes.
Ballin in the library.
She’s probably on her way to get a bottle of bad gin.
I’m not down to my last two bits.
A deep human need to complain.
All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.
And down a beer.
It would be convenient to fly. But I can’t fly, so I read drugs and do books and wobble my way along.
Phantoms (Origami Zoo Press) is a drug. It is belly habit/super flu of 9 flash fictions. Chad Simpson ignites them tight.
The book came to me in the mail with my Bodog magazine (this a gambler’s rag with a blacked-out cover so pretty much the mailman thinks I am a pervert) and with two origami rabbits. They were cute. I didn’t know what to do with them, so set them free, atop the roof of my shed. There they crumple now, somewhere in time and space, out of most vision, out of eye, primarily in the mind.
The first flash is “Miracle.” A man is run-down by his own car. Primarily in the mind. Chad Simpson writes, “And I will imagine…I will imagine…I will imagine…” It is a collection/recollection. It ricochets internal monologue off objective scene (often primo way to present drama/calamity; I actually wish more writers would learn that sex/guns/thunk are often best written with a neutral eye). Image to notion, notion to image–dreamlike.
The way I see it, art doesn’t line up so much in a dichotomy between traditional and experimental (especially in a post-common-style era) as in one between reassuring versus destabilizing.
Richard Powers
I was sitting in another bar with the Mexican who spoke English.
The world is deluged with tranquilizers and energy drinks.
Birds, please assemble!
And I was unreal to the others.
To the drinker as well as the drunk.
I found myself spanking a tequila.
But you got it? Yes, I got it.
thhraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggggggggggggggggggggh
Thermodynamic SHOW-Down.
“That’s a problem,” she said.
Things could start crumbling fast now.
Ha Ha.
Ok, George Saunders first published in that little Conde Naste magazine out of New York City. But this was (I think) my first publication. They claim to be “Reviews from Rural America.” The last two pages are poems, and this is where I appear, with a little ditty about squirrel hunting. Mimeographed, 10 pages, 3 staples, out of Healdsburg, CA, a Misty Hill Press production. This was 1996. I can find nothing about the publication now, though I did locate a Misty Hill Press, in another California town.
I was/am happy to begin with a stapled together newsletter. There is a sort of ladder (naturally subjective) to these things, and the process of climbing makes one a more serious/less serious (not a contradiction) and humble writer. Possibly. I certainly look back now at the title and have to give a chuckle. I teach a lot of beginning writers, and many, many of them need to understand it’s a hard row to hoe. Not impossible, just hard. Some of them seem to think the writer’s life is a water slide–just chuck yourself down. Wheeeeeeee. I prefer the image of the dirt field. Here’s your seeds and your gardening tool. Start hoeing and pray for rain.
Where were you first published?
This photo and caption were inside the elevator of my hotel. Affixed to the actual door. This was Dry Ridge, Kentucky. Dry Ridge sucks. Why? Because it’s dry. Why would a state officially blooomed for bourbon want to populate itself with dry counties? It’s like entering a college coffee shop without hearing some kid discussing free speech or Eric B and Rakim. Like logging onto HTML and not finding flames, hijacked theory, gelatinous shreds of Tao Lin…but I do digress.
I’m all for inscrutability but WTF on this ad? “the path less traveled” (no caps–very hip) is two girls in fake wings walking?
The real concern isn’t the advert. (Is it even? What exactly is it selling? Why is it on the elevator door?) The real botheration is the source material. That fucking poem.
Let’s trod on:
3. Helen DeWitt on Sam Lipsyte. Great links within (including: I read Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land during one long, heroic bowel movement.)
1. 
I am often told by people who meet me after reading my books that they are afraid of me.
7. riverbabble wants your work.
2. Have your character do anything but cry. Thanks.