Spencer Dew was gracious enough to grant me permission to reprint this piece from his new collection, Songs of Insurgency. I chose it because of its blog-length brevity and
because, for me, it achieves what Edgar Allen Poe called "unity of effect." That sort of thing is subjective, of course. You can read my brief review of the entire collection after the jump.
Songs of Insurgency [Amazon]
Vagabond Press, 2008
Find Spencer Dew online at www.spencerdew.com.
The Sea Beneath first appeared in thieves jargon.
Read my review...
The Sea Beneath
By Spencer Dew
An engine gives out above what were once the oceans of Kansas, what once swarmed with plesiosaurs and serpentine proto-alligators, what were once thick with fish the size of trailer homes, seas of several million giant teeth.
You try to explain all this to the stewardess, but you are, to begin with, a little drunk, plus the scene has its own quality of chaos. You are up high, and the seatbelt, she reminds you, is more than a pure formality.
Smoke occludes the starboard side. It is like a storm rolling through you, the whole tube of the airplane threatening to burst, to snap and split and spill you all out over the dry flatland, the extinct sea bottom, over all that space once crawling with trilobites, their sectioned armor rippling, all that empty distance once shimmering with rainbow-tone, warm-water coral.
The passengers groan and weep, pray, vomit into waxed paper bags. Someone faints and someone else starts screaming, something rather simplistically phrased, an expression of desire not to die.
Say you were an expert on ancient worms and a few other varieties of colonial organisms that once clustered around thermal vents along the cracks in the planet's crust, underwater, millennia ago. This was your identity, to a large degree, studying the tracks and tunnels, mostly microscopic, in stone, stone that was, in turn, once, long ago, near cracks in the ocean crust, fathoms deep. Say this was you, in a flipbook of instant retrospection, a slideshow of memories.
Here you are, examining fossilized colonies from former thermal pockets, rock which, then, lived, thriving and competing, breeding and feeding, growing, dying, and being devoured...
Now here you are, again, still now, yourself, in one such similar tunnel, spiraling in an uneasy slope of descent, at too fast a speed, toward Kansas, far below...
You try to tell the stewardess that you just can't tell if it's ironic or not, but something has hit her on the back of the head and she flops down, all bones and connective tissue.
Something smells like urine, very close.
You think about time, its mechanics, how it moves, how instants accumulate. Under pressure, they turn to something solid, compacted and reduced, an idea. Or, in the same way, they crush to powder, erasing under their own weight.
Some moments you do not remember your name, and it makes no difference. The screaming fades out, fades back in again.
Always, the ground of Kansas has waited.
Maybe you think like this, backward, to long before the draining, before the dry times, before the lumbering land beasts or men in hunting packs, before the native rhinoceros or the double-wide prefab homes, before the strip malls and titty bars and pickup trucks or sheriff's department prowl cars that pause and pull over on the gravel shoulder of an industrial access road to look up in wonder at what must be an angel, streaking, white-hot and radiant, across the sky, to arrow into the earth.
Songs of Insurgency [Amazon]Vagabond Press, 2008
Find Spencer Dew online at www.spencerdew.com.
The Sea Beneath first appeared in thieves jargon.
Read my review...
I don't much like recent political fiction. It tends towards the obvious: I,
the author, think this, and my characters and the situations in which
they find themselves will express this thinking, wa-hah! All delivered with a wink and a nod towards the receptive choir which makes up the author's presumed audience.
When I read the quote by Kathy Acker that Spencer Dew chose to front his short story collection, Songs of Insurgency, my heart and mind sank. The words described the United States as a "giant baby," one which regards the world as "an extension of his or her own identity."
Which may or not be true, but Dew chose to moderate this with his subsequent, more hopeful quotation of Hart Crane, speaking of the future of America: "...I feel persuaded that here are destined to be discovered certain as yet undefined spiritual quantities, perhaps a new hierarchy of faith not to be developed so completely elsewhere."
With that, Dew has deliberately separated himself from the black and white political orthodoxy which infects so much of the creative class in the post 9-11 American sphere. Instead, his tales describe individual human responses to the world in which we live, through straightforward storytelling and in flights of morbid fancy. All of the stories are thematically unified, even the first tale, which details the narrator's experience when he briefly connects with the actual human being on the other end of a phone sex line.
These small dramas depict individuals as they move through the current political and martial milieu. When the narratives take flight into the speculative, the subject matter remains: people living in a realm of absurdity, arrived at via fictional extrapolation. The Exit Colony, in particular, is a macabre vision of a nihilistic near-future in which suicide has become an art, with attendant critiques of style that are studied by hopeful practitioners.
It is the quality and craft of Dew's language which has overridden my usual prejudice against modern political fiction...which is saying a lot. I tend to react vehemently against any fiction which attempts to teach me a lesson in a clumsy fashion, whether I agree with that lesson or not. Spencer Dew has lessons to teach, no doubt, but he conveys them within the multiple contexts of characters, situations, and language which allow the reader to reach his or her own conclusions.
To me, that reflects a measure of confidence in his own moral principles and invites honest debate. Songs of Insurgency is a significant contribution to the literature of post 9-11 America, and I suggest that you add it to your ever-growing stack of things to read.
When I read the quote by Kathy Acker that Spencer Dew chose to front his short story collection, Songs of Insurgency, my heart and mind sank. The words described the United States as a "giant baby," one which regards the world as "an extension of his or her own identity."
Which may or not be true, but Dew chose to moderate this with his subsequent, more hopeful quotation of Hart Crane, speaking of the future of America: "...I feel persuaded that here are destined to be discovered certain as yet undefined spiritual quantities, perhaps a new hierarchy of faith not to be developed so completely elsewhere."
With that, Dew has deliberately separated himself from the black and white political orthodoxy which infects so much of the creative class in the post 9-11 American sphere. Instead, his tales describe individual human responses to the world in which we live, through straightforward storytelling and in flights of morbid fancy. All of the stories are thematically unified, even the first tale, which details the narrator's experience when he briefly connects with the actual human being on the other end of a phone sex line.
These small dramas depict individuals as they move through the current political and martial milieu. When the narratives take flight into the speculative, the subject matter remains: people living in a realm of absurdity, arrived at via fictional extrapolation. The Exit Colony, in particular, is a macabre vision of a nihilistic near-future in which suicide has become an art, with attendant critiques of style that are studied by hopeful practitioners.
It is the quality and craft of Dew's language which has overridden my usual prejudice against modern political fiction...which is saying a lot. I tend to react vehemently against any fiction which attempts to teach me a lesson in a clumsy fashion, whether I agree with that lesson or not. Spencer Dew has lessons to teach, no doubt, but he conveys them within the multiple contexts of characters, situations, and language which allow the reader to reach his or her own conclusions.
To me, that reflects a measure of confidence in his own moral principles and invites honest debate. Songs of Insurgency is a significant contribution to the literature of post 9-11 America, and I suggest that you add it to your ever-growing stack of things to read.
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