Transcendent Guide to Corporate America: Guide to the Guide #4

And now to a loft in Queens, where in “The Transmigration of No” the parents of our 12-year-old narrator make their living peddling New Age mindfulness and group meditation. He is forbidden from spending excessive time on a computer and getting sucked into the cold, silicon age, and of course because his parents have said no, he craves it. The boy’s best friend and neighbor, a computer genius, has found some software that he thinks may enable them to actually accomplish what the parents talk about: a transmigration of souls. On the day the parents have hired a film crew to document one of their sessions, the boys will have free reign to sneak on to their roof and try their experiment. It works. The narrator is able to experience the consciousness of random people within their view in the neighborhood, with transcendent and terrifying consequences. The boys realize they have stumbled onto something they are not ready for – that no one is ready for – and end up destroying the narrator’s parents’ laptop that he’s stolen. His friend can solve this, too. The bond they share, like many of the bonds of early adolescence, is a kind of mingling of emerging souls, and stands in contrast to what his parents are teaching as well as their partnership, which, by necessity, is now driven by economics. As the narrator comes to a dim awareness of all this, he experiences a key moment of separation from his parents.

In submitting for publication the Transcendent Guide to Corporate America, my collection of stories about work and life in the corporate era, I recently wrote a detailed description of the book for Northwestern University Press. It turned into a story-by-story summary about how themes in the stories relate to the general themes of the guide. I thought I'd present them here, one story at a time. This is the fourth. As for what the individual stories are actually '"about," you're on your own. 

Transcendent Guide to Corporate America: Guide to the Guide #3

From here we go to a cubicle row, where a bored information-age drone offers to help three desperate friends by sneaking them into the crawl space under the floor of his office so they can have a place to sleep by day, as in this world they are best able to pursue their alternatives at night. During his workday, our narrator is given to moments of poetic effusion as well as intense fear, misery and loneliness (hence the title “Death in the Afternoon,” though so very far from the bullfighting rings of Hemingway’s book of the same name). Increasingly paralyzed by the danger he’s put himself in by hiding the three refugees from the paycheck economy, he will need a hero, and finds an unlikely one in Laney, his supervisor, a corporate believer who nonetheless proves that the human heart beats strong, if silently, in the weird village that is the modern workplace. 

In submitting for publication the Transcendent Guide to Corporate America, my collection of stories about work and life in the corporate era, I recently wrote a detailed description of the book for Northwestern University Press. It turned into a story-by-story summary about how themes in the stories relate to the general themes of the guide. I thought I'd present them here, one story at a time. This is the third. As for what the individual stories are actually '"about," you're on your own. PS. "Death in the Afternoon" was published by Pierogi Press in Brooklyn, though I believe the issue is out of print and the press is no more.

Transcendent Guide to Corporate America: Guide to the Guide #2

In “My Condolence,” a new hire in a corporate communications team serving another captain of industry finds himself in the position of writing his own condolence note following the death of his brother. Chairman Jim is so moved by this exchange that he demands to meet his correspondent, and now the new hire must try to figure out how he can take his own publicity photograph. He hatches a plan with the chairman’s executive assistant, a tough, loud woman who labors furiously to maintain her boss’s illusions, and when the plan fails and the truth comes out, our hero finds that the illusions he’s created have not, as he fears, cost him the job he desperately needs, but opened doors to the very heart of corporate power.

In submitting for publication the Transcendent Guide to Corporate America, my collection of stories about work and life in the corporate era, I recently wrote a detailed description of the book for Northwestern University Press. It turned into a story-by-story summary about how themes in the stories relate to the general themes of the guide. I thought I'd present them here, one story at a time. This is the second. As for what the individual stories are actually '"about," you're on your own. 

Transcendent Guide to Corporate America: Guide to the Guide

In submitting for publication the Transcendent Guide to Corporate America, my collection of stories about work and life in the corporate era, I recently wrote a detailed description of the book for Northwestern University Press. It turned into a story-by-story summary about how themes in the stories relate to the general themes of the guide. I thought I'd present them here, one story at a time. As for what the individual stories are actually '"about," you're on your own. 

The opening story, “The President’s Phone,” is told from the point of view of a novelty gift, a telephone in a catcher’s mitt that sits on the president’s desk at the world’s largest company. Our narrator is privy to the seeds of revolt brewing among the electrons, who are growing tired of their subservient status, which does not change despite their rising importance. This coincides with an Occupy-inspired labor action by a group of young employees. During a confrontation in the executive’s office, only the president’s phone is aware of what’s really happening as threats fly, the power dims and violence looms. In the end, the intractability of ego and the invisible depths of servitude render a sense of class consciousness almost impossible, and a blind and sentimental sense of loyalty rescues the status quo, for better or worse.

Carve It In, Carve It Out

Carve Magazine, named for Raymond Carver, has a page where they list stories they rejected but were published elsewhere. They list the author, the story title and the name of the publication that published the work. My story "Back to School Night" was published by Prick of the Spindle and appears on Carve's Decline/Accept page. I love Carve for running this page. A couple of weeks ago I sent them a new story, "The Way." I hope they publish it. If they don't maybe it'll end up on their Decline/Accept page some day.

There's Happy and There's Happy

I hope the title of this post, which is the title of a piece of very short fiction I wrote that was published today in DM du Jour, Dance Macabre magazine's "daily gazette of letters," does not lead anyone to think it's a holiday piece. It's about grief, lashing out, self destruction and adolescence, none of which, I'm glad to say, have had much direct play in my life in a long time. I wrote this several years ago but even then had no idea where it came from. But I'm glad it's out there, whatever time of year it may be. Thanks, DM. The publication's full title is DM du Jour: bon mots, gallimaufry, and coloratura macabrely.

This story I think will end up in my short story collection called Guide for the Unguidable.

Speculative Fiction

I'm pleased to report that my story "The President's Phone" is to be included in Eclectica Magazine's 20th Anniversary Speculative Anthology, one of four anthologies they're putting out to mark the start of their third decade. I will always love Eclectica as the first to publish my fiction. They published "Troddy" in 2003.

Hmm

I published a story recently called How I Saved My Brothers in the JT Eckleburg Review and here's something I wrote about the story. My actual brothers enjoyed the story, btw.

I don't like stories with TV violence, but I wrote one. I don't like stories whose characters have a celebrity-culture sort of fame, but I wrote one. I don't like endings that explain too much, but I might have done that, too. And all in the same story.

Hmm.

I like stories that get off to a quick, clear start, but I did not do that. I like stories in which writers are clearly writing about people they know, but I did not do that. I do have two brothers, remarkable people with unusual accomplishments, and one is in the arts and one is not, but the similarities to the brothers in my story stop there. My brothers get along, and though they would bail me out if I needed it, they would be nice about it and be nice to each other. As for me, I am something of a hopeless romantic, as is Mikey the PK, the narrator of my story, inspired I supposed by a romantic nature and by several decades of a romantic marriage to my remarkable and unusual wife. Let me also state for the record (what record this might be I have no idea, and in fact when I hear the word record I tend to see a vinyl album spinning at 33 rpm on a turntable) that the parents in the story bear no resemblance to my parents.

So how did this come about, this doing of things I say I don't like doing? It started as a title, How I Saved My Brothers, and some middle child musings and just went from there.

In my most ambitious and pretentious fantasies my hope is to give hope to anyone who may have amazing siblings among whom they may be intimidated at times; to give hope to hopeless romantics everywhere that their love at times may be requited to an extent they never really thought possible; to give hope to anyone who fears they could have prevented a disaster but failed to act at a crucial moment; to give hope to anyone who has felt responsible for the craziness of their parents; to give hope to anyone who has ever stood in front of a mirror and wondered if the mirror might shatter into a zillion pieces of its own accord, or more likely because of the intensity and electromagnetic frequency of brain activity generated by their emotional state as they look in the mirror. And a desire to rid themselves of the mirror and all it represents.

I hope the psychology of the story, which I’m not even sure of, does not hamper any sense of mystery I may have mustered. Maybe my best hope is that after reading this story, someone in a restaurant bathroom looks into a mirror and recovers a memory that explains something that they've wanted explained for a long time. Unlikely, I know, but hope is all about unlikely, right?

Hello.

Welcome!