PotD: Passages from The City Builder

The prose George-Konrád's The City Builder is piled heavily upon itself, less like rows of bricks than like the buildings of new Troy built upon the layered ruins of earlier Troys.

The narrator, a city planner in an unnamed European town, has lived through both World War II and the communist takeover. His musings and observations are at times journalistic, and other times dream-like. The book compares favorable to noticing attitudes of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and to the associative imagination of Finnegans Wake.

The following selection is characteristic, and appears on pages 22-24 of the Dalkey Archive edition, published in 2007, translated by Ivan Sanders:

For me, this city is a challenge, a parable, an interrogation frozen in space, the messages of my fellow citizens dead and alive, a system of disappearing and regenerating worlds to come, the horizontal delineation of societies replacing one another by sperm, gunfire, senility; a fossilized tug of war, an Eastern European showcase of devastation and reconstruction . . . Because by virtue of my practiced clichés I have become one of its shareholders; though beyond the tenuous links of my existence and surroundings, beyond my father's overdecorated gravestone and the haunting shadow of a cremated woman, beyond my hardened and irremediable blueprints, my myopic utopias, and the procession of figures out of an ever-darkening past, I could well ask: what have I to do with this East-Central European city whose every shame I know so well. A city situated between the middle and the end of most scales, its reality far too real—the victim of partitionings, bankruptcies, punitive campaigns, extortions, bombings, burnings; a buffer city, a shelter-belt city, a protective-zone city. It can welcome the enemy with salt and bread, and, having taken crash courses in the art of survival, it can change its greeting signs, statues, scapegoats—its history. 

A tent city on the ruins of a Roman circus; ancient cats, crows, lizards scurry over the cracked skulls of legionnaires killed in rear-guard actions. For centuries a sun-faced god on a winged horse led his arrow-shooting nomads and their half-tamed studs from barren plains to vast forests, in search of grass and water, and at last reached this dead city of abandoned Roman watchtowers and water mains, where in the felt tents of their winter quarters they bowed their long, brown heads before the Prince Jesus and built a cathedral for Him from the stones of the old circus. In the undamaged crypts embalmed kings smile with curled-up gums; before their metal caskets tourist-wives stand in awe as flash guns pop and the guide tells them the sad tale of the Tartar invasion. They came from all directions with their battering rams and catapults, their poisoned spears, long, bone-tipped arrows, goatskin tubes, and scaling ladders; their root-eating horses, their cattle trained to screech, their straw dummies strapped to riderless horses and prisoners pulled on chains. They came on windswept, fear-soaked roads aswarm with terrible news. Pouring across the wooden barricades, they slashed the throats of kneeling supplicants. Smoke from scorched villages, burning churches, and the smell of dead bodies floating in the water and blooming in the rye fields trailed intheir wake. Up ahead a wall of arrow-absorbing prisoners subsist on sheep guts. A castellan is stretched out between two planks, and on the planks horses pass. Town elders are roasted alive like pigs; citizens are impaled or tied to the wheel, or become lamenting targets in the entryways of their houses. The cathedral, packed with preachers and feuding worshipers, is going up in flames; a rainstorm and human fat put out the glowing embers. But the hordes are already on their war, tracking down the survivors in tree hollows, empty riverbeds, swamps. The murderer cannot rest; whomever he spares will kill him. The city disappears under a sea of weeds, though a few starvelings are already searching under the blackened stones for buried meats and gold coins.

The Prose of the Day series, curated by editors, contributors, and supporters of Decameron journal, showcases examples of particularly excellent prose. To suggest an entry, email the excerpt and your reasons for calling it excellent to decameron@penandanvil.com.

PotD: Passages from Balthazar

Adapted from WP: "Balthazar, published in 1958, is the second volume in The Alexandria Quartet series by Lawrence Durrell. Set in Alexandria, Egypt around WWII, the four novels tell essentially the same story from different points of view." The excerpt we've chosen to share with you comes from the opening of Chapter 12, the beginning of Part Four:

Despite the season the seafront of the city was gay with light - the long sloping lines of the Grande Corniche curving away to a low horizon; a thousand lighted panels of glass in which, like glorious tropical fish, the inhabitants of the European city sat at glittering tables stocked with glasses of mastic, aniseed or brandy. Watching them (I had eaten little lunch) my hunger overcame me, and as there was some time in hand before my meeting with Justine, I turned into the glittering doors of the Diamond Sutra and ordered a ham sandwich and a glass of whisky. Once again, as always when the drama of external events altered the emotional pattern of things, I began to see the city through new eyes - to examine the shapes and contours made by human beings with the detachment of an entomologist studying a hitherto unknown species of insect. Here it was, the race, each member of it absorbed in the solution of individual preoccupations, loves, hates and fears. A woman counting money on to a glass table, an old man feeding a dog, an Arab in a red flowerpot drawing a curtain. 

Aromatic smoke poured from the small sailor taverns along the seafront where the iron spits loaded with a freight of entrails and spices turned monotonously back and forth, or bellied from under the lids of shining copper cauldrons, giving off hot gusts of squid, cuttlefish and pigeon. Here one drank from the blue cans and ate with one's fingers as they do in the Cyclades even today. 

I picked up a decrepit horse-cab and jogged along by die sighing sea towards the Aurore, drinking in the lighted darkness with regrets and fears so fugitive as to be beyond analysis; but underneath (like a toad under a cool stone, the surface airs of night) I still felt the stirrings of horror at the thought that Justine herself might be endangered by the love which ‘we bore one another'. I turned the thought this way and that in my mind, like a prisoner pressing with all his weight upon doors which denied him an exit from an intolerable bondage, trying to devise an issue from a situation which, it seemed, might as well end in her death as in mine. 

The great car was waiting, drawn up off the road in the darkness under the pepper-trees. She opened the door for me silently and I got in, spellbound by my fears.

The Prose of the Day series, curated by editors, contributors, and supporters of Decameron journal, showcases examples of particularly excellent prose. To suggest an entry, email the excerpt and your reasons for calling it excellent to decameron@penandanvil.com.

PotD: "The Colonel"

In the audio recording of "The Colonel" on the Poetry Foundation website, Carolyn Forché identifies her piece as a"documentary poem"; we think it is just as accurate to refer to it as a piece of documentary fiction, or a prose poem of discomforting truth. From The Country Between Us, published in 1981:

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried
a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went
out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over
the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On
the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had
dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of
bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief
commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot
said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed
himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As
for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-
selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last
of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some
of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the
ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
                                                                                     May 1978

The Prose of the Day series, curated by editors, contributors, and supporters of Decameron journal, showcases examples of particularly excellent prose. To suggest an entry, email the excerpt and your reasons for calling it excellent to decameron@penandanvil.com.

PotD: "A making day? A mending day?"

From The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss, published in 2014:

Laying in the dark, she wondered what the day would bring. Some days were trumpet-proud. They heralded like thunder. Some were courteous, careful as a lettered card upon a silver plate.

But some days were shy. They did not name themselves. They waited for a careful girl to find them.

This was such a day. A day too shy to knock upon her door. Was it a calling day? A sending day? A making day? A mending day?

She could not tell. 

The Prose of the Day series, curated by editors, contributors, and supporters of Decameron journal, showcases examples of particularly excellent prose. To suggest an entry, email the excerpt and your reasons for calling it excellent to decameron@penandanvil.com.

PotD: "He lurks by turns in the garret..."

From The Cares of a Family Man by Franz Kafka, written between 1914 and 1917, and appearing first in the collection A Country Doctor in 1919:

At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs. 

One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinary nimble and can never be laid hold of. 

He lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall. Often for months on end he is not to be seen; then he has presumably moved into other houses; but he always comes faithfully back to our house again. Many a time when you go out of the door and he happens just to be leaning directly beneath you against the banisters you feel inclines to speak to him. Of course, you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him--he is so diminutive that you cannot help it--rather like a child. "well, what's your name?" you ask him. "Odradek," he says. "And where do you live?" "No fixed abode," he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves. And that is usually the end of the conversation. Even these answers are not always forthcoming; often he stays mute for a long time, as wooden as his appearance. 

I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children's children? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.

The Prose of the Day series, curated by editors, contributors, and supporters of Decameron journal, showcases examples of particularly excellent prose. To suggest an entry, email the excerpt and your reasons for calling it excellent to decameron@penandanvil.com.

More recommendations for quite short fiction

Following-up on our previous post listing magazines and sites devoted to publishing flash-, micro-, or quite-short-fiction, here is another batch of outlets you might want to check out:

• Wigleaf is an award-winning magazine which features stories under 1000 words.
• The Molotov Cocktail is "a projectile for incendiary flash fiction," run by "purveyors of the dark and offbeat" and curated by Josh Goller.
• 1000words project was begun in 2012 to celebrate the first-ever National Flash-Fiction Day.
• This past fall, Redivider launched an annual fiction contest for flash stories that are short, smart, and significant. Follow the mag on Twitter, or check their website or Submittable portal, for news about the next announcement for submissions.

From our own side of things, we're glad to report that the long-awaited first edition of Decameron is with our printer. We'll be mailing copies to contributors, reviewers, and that very special group of people, our subscribers, this month! An excellent way to kick off the new year.

PotD: "... in a litter of pearl and purple..."

From The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891), and as appeared originally in Lippincott's in 1890:

Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own. 

The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had himself known this curious fancy. In the seventh chapter he tells how, crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as Tiberius, in a garden at Capri, reading the shameful books of Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him and the flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as Caligula, had caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables and supped in an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse; and, as Domitian, had wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible taedium vitae, that comes on those to whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear emerald at the red shambles of the circus and then, in a litter of pearl and purple drawn by silver-shod mules, been carried through the Street of Pomegranates to a House of Gold and heard men cry on Nero Caesar as he passed by; and, as Elagabalus, had painted his face with colours, and plied the distaff among the women, and brought the Moon from Carthage and given her in mystic marriage to the Sun. 

Over and over again Dorian used to read this fantastic chapter, and the two chapters immediately following, in which, as in some curious tapestries or cunningly wrought enamels, were pictured the awful and beautiful forms of those whom vice and blood and weariness had made monstrous or mad: Filippo, Duke of Milan, who slew his wife and painted her lips with a scarlet poison that her lover might suck death from the dead thing he fondled; Pietro Barbi, the Venetian, known as Paul the Second, who sought in his vanity to assume the title of Formosus, and whose tiara, valued at two hundred thousand florins, was bought at the price of a terrible sin; Gian Maria Visconti, who used hounds to chase living men and whose murdered body was covered with roses by a harlot who had loved him; the Borgia on his white horse, with Fratricide riding beside him and his mantle stained with the blood of Perotto; Pietro Riario, the young Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, child and minion of Sixtus IV, whose beauty was equalled only by his debauchery, and who received Leonora of Aragon in a pavilion of white and crimson silk, filled with nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy that he might serve at the feast as Ganymede or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood, as other men have for red wine -- the son of the Fiend, as was reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling with him for his own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery took the name of Innocent and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the lover of Isotta and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome as the enemy of God and man, who strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison to Ginevra d'Este in a cup of emerald, and in honour of a shameful passion built a pagan church for Christian worship; Charles VI, who had so wildly adored his brother's wife that a leper had warned him of the insanity that was coming on him, and who, when his brain had sickened and grown strange, could only be soothed by Saracen cards painted with the images of love and death and madness; and, in his trimmed jerkin and jewelled cap and acanthuslike curls, Grifonetto Baglioni, who slew Astorre with his bride, and Simonetto with his page, and whose comeliness was such that, as he lay dying in the yellow piazza of Perugia, those who had hated him could not choose but weep, and Atalanta, who had cursed him, blessed him. 

There was a horrible fascination in them all. He saw them at night, and they troubled his imagination in the day. The Renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning--poisoning by a helmet and a lighted torch, by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain. Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

NB: This extra-long excerpt could not have been further abridged, for the rich texture of Wilde's style corresponds, in a way which must be noted if we are to feel proper appreciation, to the extension over time and across the page of his piling-up phrases. 

The Prose of the Day series, curated by editors, contributors, and supporters of Decameron journal, showcases examples of particularly excellent prose. To suggest an entry, email the excerpt and your reasons for calling it excellent to decameron@penandanvil.com.

PotD: "Rothschild's Fiddle"

From Rothschild’s Fiddle by Anton Chekhov, 1894:

The town was small, worse than a village, and in it lived almost none but old people, who died so rarely it was even annoying. And in the hospital and jail there was very little demand for coffins. In short, business was bad. If Yakov Ivanov had been a coffin-maker in the provincial capital, he would most likely have had a house of his own and been called Yakov Matveich; but in this wretched little town he was simply called Yakov, his street nickname for some reason was “Bronzy,” and he lived a poor life, like a simple peasant, in a little old cottage with only one room, and that room housed himself, Marfa, the stove, the double bed, the coffins, the workbench, and all his chattels. 

Yakov made good, sturdy coffins. For peasants and tradesmen he made them his own size and was never once mistaken, because no one anywhere, not even in the jail, was taller or stronger than he, though he was now seventy years old. For gentlefolk and women he worked to measure, and for that he used an iron ruler. He accepted orders for children’s coffins very reluctantly, and made them straight off without measurements, scornfully, and, taking the money for his work, would say each time: 

“I confess, I don’t like messing with trifles.” 

Besides his craft, he also earned a little money playing the fiddle.

The Prose of the Day series, curated by editors, contributors, and supporters of Decameron journal, showcases examples of particularly excellent prose. To suggest an entry, email the excerpt and your reasons for calling it excellent to decameron@penandanvil.com.

PotD: "As I was in no hurry"

From Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, 1921:

As I was in no hurry to arrive at the Guermantes Reception to which I wasn’t certain I had been invited, I hung about outside; but the summer day seemed to be in no greater haste to stir. Although it was after nine o’clock, it was still the daylight that was giving the Luxor obelisk on the Place de la Concorde the appearance of pink nougat. Then it diluted the tint and changed the surface to a metallic substance, so that the obelisk not only became more precious but seemed more slender and almost flexible. One felt that one might have been able to twist this jewel, that one had perhaps already slightly bent it. The moon was now in the sky like a segment of an orange delicately peeled although nibbled at. But a few hours later it was to be fashioned of the most enduring gold. Nestling alone behind it, a poor little star was to serve as sole companion to the lonely moon, while the latter, keeping its friend protected but striding ahead more boldly, would brandish like an irresistible weapon, like an oriental symbol, its broad, magnificent golden crescent.

The Prose of the Day series, curated by editors, contributors, and supporters of Decameron journal, showcases examples of particularly excellent prose. To suggest an entry, email the excerpt and your reasons for calling it excellent to decameron@penandanvil.com.

Reading recommendations for quite short fiction

In view of the long-awaited release of Decameron, our journal of "quite short" fiction, we would be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that the world of micro-fiction is large and diverse (as well as, yes, small to the point of being micro-). We recommend the following peer publications and projects to our readers interested in the history and state-of-the-art of the short-short form:

• NANO FICTION is a non-profit journal founded that seeks to cultivate the genre of flash fiction by creating opportunities for emerging writers to achieve national recognition through our website, print publication, and educational events.
  
• 55 Word Stories is an online story series run by Rosemary Mosco, creator of Bird and Moon.
  
• For more than a decade, Brevity has published well-known and emerging writers working in the extremely brief (750 words or less) essay form, along with craft essays and book reviews.
  
• Booktrust has been promoting books, reading and writing for more than 90 years. On the Short Stories section of their website, readers can find an archive of free short stories from acclaimed and award-winning authors; a list of magazines and websites that accept short story submissions; a listing of short story competitions; and recent reviews of short story collections and anthologies.