A scientist named Klausner invents a machine that lets you hear sounds usually outside the range of human hearing.

(from McSweeney’s 45)

A flower probably didn’t feel pain. It felt something else which we didn’t know about — something called toin or spurl or plinuckment, or anything you like.

Things this hilarious, strange little story brought to mind:

1. A book Art Bell would occasionally pretend he bought into called The Secret Life of Plants. It was written by researchers who hooked plants up to polygraphs and found them to be somehow sentient. The plants were fearful of being cut and such. Needless to say, most scientists have a problem with the methodology, findings, etc. (P.S. There was a film version; Stevie Wonder did the soundtrack.)

2. Kurt Vonnegut’s short story called “Confido,” about a guy who invents a machine that tells you what you want to hear.

3. But moreso, Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Thanasphere,” in which the first astronaut to leave Earth finds out space is the full of the disembodied souls of the dead, who keep talking to him over the radio.

4. That line from The Simpsons: “I’m a level five vegan. I won’t eat anything that casts a shadow.” Klausner, after hearing flowers shriek upon being nipped by shears, theorizes that he’d never enjoy bread again if he used his machine while a wheat field was being harvested. Happily, he figures that apples are probably okay, since they fall off the tree naturally.

5. How there’s probably so much more Roald Dahl out there I haven’t gotten to yet. I’ve read all the kid stuff, but not nearly enough of his even-darker “Switch Bitch” adult material. I read “The Sound Machine” — first printed in the New Yorker in 1949 — in the Hitchcock and Bradbury Fistfight in Heaven McSweeney’s compilation issue, but you can find it a bunch of places (like here). Several filmmakers have made adaptations of it, by the way.

6. How brilliant inventors in certain kinds of stories are always fatally or near-fatally eccentric. This dude’s “sound machine” (respect to Gloria Estefan) would be a huuuge deal. Total game-changer. Once humanity finds out that broccoli whimpers and trees scream, it’s gonna have a lot to think about. But Klausner’s such a pale, awkward spaz, he can barely express himself to his neighbors or the doctor he tries to demonstrate the machine to. Today’s productive geeks and nerds seem better able to express themselves.

7. The way Dahl builds tension. As soon as we hear what the machine is supposed to do, well, we knows it’s going to work. So, dammit, let’s turn the thing on! But no, first we gotta read about Klausner lugging the thing up the stairs, and trying to open the door without putting it down. Purposefully, slyly maddening. Sometimes you want to punch an author because the writing’s that good.

A scientist tries to guarantee the survival of classical music by inventing a machine that turns sheet music into animals.

(from Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1953)

For a moment we saw nothing. Then a bush moved, and for the first time we made out its form. It must have been standing there watching us all the time. The creature was immense, thin and extended, with bright, intense eyes. To me, it looked something like a coyote, but much heavier. Its coat was matted and thick, its muzzle hung partly open as it gazed at us silently, studying us as if astonished to find us there.

“The Wagner animal,” Labyrinth said thickly. “But it’s changed. It’s changed. I hardly recognize it.”

The creature sniffed the air, its hackles up. Suddenly it moved hack, into the shadows, and a moment later it was gone.

We stood for a while, not saying anything. At last Labyrinth stirred. “So, that’s what it was,” he said. “I can hardly believe it. But why? What-”

“Adaptation,” I said. “When you toss an ordinary house cat out it becomes wild. Or a dog.”

“Yes.” He nodded. “A dog becomes a wolf again, to stay alive. The law of the forest. I should have expected it. It happens to everything.”

This is a slightly silly but enthralling little parable about creations getting away from their creators. Aspects of it reminded me of Jurassic Park, though “life uh finds a way” means that Doc Labyrinth’s little Bach bugs and Mozart birds evolve in unexpected ways. (Unlike Crichton’s dinosaurs, their designed inability to reproduce seems to be holding firm.) “The Preserving Machine” also brought to mind a recent episode of 99% Invisible called “Ten Thousand Years” which included a story about “ray cats” which were designed to change color when they were near radiation. Actually, I don’t think the cats were ever created or we’d all have them as pets by now. 

Hey check out this album by Argentinian composer Lanark, each track inspired by an animal from “The Preservation Machine.” Also, you can read the story here.

I found out about the Philip K. Dick short story while reading Jonathan Lethem’s NYT write-up on Roberto Bolaño’s magnificent 2666, which I just got finished reading and carrying around. It’s immense, and unforgettable, and ultimately satisfying, though trying at times, too. After closing the book, I wandered around Rittenhouse Square, then Barnes & Noble, but I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. A good book can do that, but it’s a momentary hopelessness and I don’t enjoy it much. I’ll probably read more Bolaño soon. I also plan on posting here more regularly. I’ve said this and seen this before, a peculiar enthusiasm for short stories stirred up by a behemoth novel.

Darlene Tate is newly married and newly pregnant, but a psychic has predicted that her fetus will expire at any moment. 

(from The Apple’s Bruise)

Now that I’m twenty-nine I’m becoming a new kind of woman, the kind who gets married to the guy who gets her pregnant, not the kind who keeps the pregnancy a secret and ends one when she discovers her boyfriend is cheating, and ends another when the gray-eyed tourist goes back to his home in Mexico, and ends the third when her boyfriend of nine weeks goes on a fishing trip with his buddies.

I read this story pretty soon after Glatt’s collection was published in 2005. I remember being impressed by these stories, not so much for the writing, but for their content. Glatt writes about women who get abortions and keep secrets from their husbands, women who manipulate others to get what they want. She writes about women who don’t want to be called “good girls,” all of which impressed me terribly at the time because I wasn’t finding stories like them. Coming back to this collection years later, however, leave me a little…what’s the right word? I guess I feel like they rely too heavily on these things. The writing doesn’t quite hold up for me in the same way.

Anyhow, I like this story pretty well. The beginning is especially nice, when Darlene asks her new husband, Jimmy, to make a list of all the things he doesn’t like about her. After some prodding, he does, and then he doesn’t want to stop. Darlene says, “Let me make a list for you,” to which Jimmy replies, “I don’t want a list.”

Worth reading, but there are so many women now writing these stories in much more thought-provoking and interesting ways. Check out some of it here.

Dudley Durden, aged 50, and his boss, Lombard Cuff III, go on a stakeout.

(from Your Body Is Changing)

Dud was sitting in his house, thinking about how embarrassing it would be to die there. He imagined some ambulance driver carefully picking his way through the squalor so as not to contract tetanus and saying something like, “Pee-yew! No wonder he died! What a dump!” and so on. Ambulance drivers and others acquainted with death on a daily basis were known to make just such sarcastic quips on supposedly solemn occasions.

I smiled the whole way through this story, a long story, on my couch alone. I kind of know Jack Pendarvis (mostly on Twitter) and he’s funny as shit so I pictured him as Dudley Durden even though he’s clearly not Dudley Durden, who is constantly thinking about The New Yorker and how they must look at some guy from Alabama–’Oh wait, this guy’s from Alabama. No way we’re cutting HIM a break. What does some JERK from Alabama know about MIMES? Only us sophisticated so-called New Yorkers are sophisticated enough to understand MIMES.’ These few instances do not do the story justice, though. In any way. They seem sad taken out of context, really, like I am fucking with the world of Dudley Durden.

Check out Jack’s blog and follow him on Twitter because he will crack you up and you will thank me. Do you have McSweeney’s 20? The real pretty one sitting on your bookshelf? It’s in there.

Ben and his buddies Roland, Alex, and Sam all sleep with Kendra, but “sleep isn’t the right word.”

(from What’s Important Is Feeling)

The garage door opened to the street. We sat in lawn chairs, studied the drip of spring rain like we were in a diorama looking out. Across the cul-de-sac, lights lit empty rooms. Alex fell asleep, snored. His head hung limply, chin to chest. Sam sipped, surveyed. Roland spat. Some CD hummed: a chortling bass, the low rumble of tom drums. In the distance I heard thunder, way off to the west.

I loved this story, which is the first that appears in Wilson’s collection, What’s Important Is Feeling, out on February 25th from Harper Perennial. The story encompasses a large chunk of time and covers a lot of ground, too much to describe in a few paragraphs, though it centers around these boys and their feelings for a girl named Kendra, a skinny, punk-rock clarinet player from Hungary. (“I’m Hungarian,” she said. “Of course I play the clarinet.”)

Ben’s sister has recently returned from college. Though she’s not central to the story, her scenes have stuck with me since my initial reading weeks ago: “The lights were on when I got home, but only my sister was up. She was in her room with the door closed, the soft strum of girl folk seeping out through the crack. Trish had recently returned from freshman year of college, ten pounds overweight and in a state of psychological distress. She’d woken one morning to her boyfriend’s boning moans from the other side of the room, and an offer from her roommate to loosen up and join the party. Now she spent her days here: eating ice cream, holding forth to my mother on the failings of my gender.” As a girl who also returned home from college fatter and depressed, I can relate to poor Trish holed up in her room.

I’m not crazy about the final three paragraphs, which take us a few years into the future. I guess I’d rather be left guessing, hoping.

Here’s Adam’s website. You can buy an ebook of the story for .99 here. Kirkus says this about the collection: “Bleak First-World angst, delivered with style,” which basically describes my aesthetic exactly.

Jim Scott returns home from Iraq to find his dog in bad shape and the termite-eaten stump where he left it.

(from Best New American Voices 2009, edited by Mary Gaitskill)

Jim had been safe, perhaps overly cautious, his whole time in Iraq. When on patrol, he ached for his wife, deeply in the pit of his stomach, so that he had only one goal: staying alive long enough to see Andrea again. To feel him pressed against her. Jim wouldn’t have made it out of the desert if it wasn’t for the promise of touching his wife. He believed that.

The writing in “Welcome Home” is nuanced and careful. The characters are well drawn. The dialogue is good. Despite these things, I feel slightly annoyed by this story. Perhaps I’ve just read too many like it.

Wheeler’s bio says nothing about being a veteran (so I assume he isn’t). A part of me thinks that non-veterans shouldn’t bother writing stories like this when there are so many veterans around to do it. What do we need the perspective of a civilian for? Why trust someone who has read and studied and watched footage when I could hear it from someone who’s actually been there? But maybe he has, and, anyhow, this should be beside the point. I guess my main criticism is that it simply feels too much like too many of the other stories I’ve read about men returning home from war. At this point, I need some real surprises.

Read my favorite soldier-returning-home-from-war story here.

It’s the future so it’s no big deal when a 187-year-old Don marries underwater man-turned-serpent-lady Dora. Marriage, of course, is a data-sharing transaction.

(from Science Fiction: The Future)

How angrily you recoil from the page! You say, who the hell wants to read about a pair of queers? Calm yourself. Here are no hot-breathing secrets of perversion for the coterie trade. In fact, if you were to see this girl you would not guess that she was in any sense a boy. Breasts, two; reproductive organs, female. Hips, callipygean; face hairless, supra-orbital lobes non-existent. You would term her female on sight, although it is true that you might wonder just what species she was a female of, being confused by the tail, the silky pelt and the gill slits behind each ear.

Now you recoil again. Cripes, man, take my word for it. This is a sweet kid, and if you, as a normal male, spent as much as an hour in a room with her you would bend heaven and Earth to get her in the sack. Dora (We will call her that; her “name” was omicron-Dibase seven-group-totter-oot S Doradus 5314, the last part of which is a colour specification corresponding to a shade of green)–Dora, I say, was feminine, charming and cute. I admit she doesn’t sound that way. She was, as you might put it, a dancer. Her art involved qualities of intellection and expertise of a very high order, requiring both tremendous natural capacities and endless, practice; it was performed in null-gravity and I can best describe it by saying that it was something like the performance of a contortionist and something like classical baflel; maybe resembling Danilova’s dying swan. It was also pretty damned sexy. In a symbolic way, to be sure; but face it, most of the things we call “sexy” are symbolic, you know, except perhaps an exhibitionist’s open clothing. On Day Million when Dora danced, the people who saw her panted, and you would too.

This “instant classic” is from 1966, but it escaped my attention till today, when I found it in this sharp-looking anthology from 1971 which I picked up for a buck from a local book shop getting ready to go under. How awesome is that cover? Mr. Pohl, I’m sorry to learn, just passed away in September. Surely this wild tale of “modern” love between a spaceman and a transgender waterwoman was fairly progressive when it was written, and it still feels that way today. The humorous narration and fanciful presentation remind me of certain old Loony Tunes cartoons, though I can’t think of any one in particular. Maybe the shorts I’m thinking of were themselves parodies of those “kitchen of the future” type stories (with Rube Goldbergian appliances)? I don’t know. This story is short, funny and all around awesome. You should read it.

You can read it here. You can watch a film adaptation here.

In “Miss Nyberg and I,” a gardener of interesting plants finds a little imp creature. In “Rebecka,” a survivor of a horrible assault wonders why God took so long to intervene and won’t let her die. (P.S. God is back around.)

(from Jagannath)

During winter he hibernated in the flower pot.

This collection is rocking my world. By which I mean I’m really digging it. The stories are short, weird, elegant, cockeyed versions of reality and set my curiosity motoring. I don’t know if there’s a real “Miss Nyberg,” or why the story’s called that, or whether the meaning of the last line was lost when the story was translated from Swedish (it seems… odd somehow). But I love this story. It’s like a classic fable turned modern and moral-free.

“People who hurt others are the ones with the best imagination,” Rebecka said.

“Rebecka” is darker and deeper, set in a time where God, after a long absence, has returned to prove his own existence and intervene in the affairs of people. But still, bad things happen and he still moves in mysterious ways not everybody’s happy about. This story’s too short to give anything away. I read it three times.

Nal’s older brother is dating his crush, but the kid knows where the seagulls hide their secret stash.

(from Vampires in the Lemon Grove)

The gulls landed in Athertown on July 11, 1979. Clouds of them, in numbers unseen since the ornithologists began keeping records of such things. Scientists all over the country hypothesized about erratic weather patterns and redirected migratory routes. At first sullen Nal barely noticed them. Lost in his thoughts, he dribbled his basketball up the boardwalk, right past the hundreds of gulls on Strong Beach, gulls grouped so thickly that from a distance they looked like snowbanks. Their bodies capped the dunes.

I wanted this story to go on. It wasn’t a tightly spooled story like Russell so often delivers, not that she likes to wrap everything up nice and neat. But it was looser and stranger. I would have liked to spend more time in this small, cold beach town, with these rudderless kids. None of which is to say that its lovely, joyous final moments weren’t a fine place to end it. Anyway, read this story and try to tell me there aren’t times when stealing feels like exactly what the universe wants you to do.

For some reason you can read the story here.

Franz falls in love with an airship named Beatrice. Anna falls in love with a steam engine named Hercules.

(from Jagannath)

Franz Hiller, a physician, fell in love with an airship. He was visiting a fair in Berlin to see the wonders of the modern age that were on display: automobiles, propeller planes, mechanical servants, difference engines, and other things that would accompany man into the future.

I forget what I read that made me want to pick up this collection by this Swedish author Id never read before, but I remember being promised weirdness and that’s what I got. I had a feeling that the humans at the center of “Beatrice” would not find contentment in their infatuations with their barely animate objects. After all, how will you know if an airship loves you back. How can you tell if a steam engine feels what you feel?

And the fact that these two aloof objects of affection are obsolete by modern standards — is that a sign their love is doomed? There’s a lot to think about and a lot left to the imagination in this very short story. should Franz have known better? Should Anna? Are they to blame how it all turns out?

“Beatrice” was turned into a piece of puppet theater, which sounds pretty awesome. You can read this story here, as part of a steampunk anthology. That makes some sense to me.