to my "Literary Webworks"
Excerpts & Other Work In Progress

Hello...
If you've wandered in here from The Tigers' Lair, you might want to go
straight on to visit my first novel - about "Old Nassau" during the early 1950's.
Tiger! Tiger!  will now be published right here, on line, in full.

And if you're just into browsing, we'll begin with four, as yet unpublished, stories:

• The Last Words Of Albert E.
• Soliloquies of My Old Man and His Book
            (a conversation you never had)
• God gene (of Jean)
• A Rotten Catholic

    Each story has to do with my various perceptions of narrative "style" as it tries to elucidate what we generally otherwise call "reality". You will note in reading them that I permit my "author/narrators" (sometimes myself) to say little on their own account. My view of this is that if you can't get a character to say something, it can't properly be understood as human experience. In other words, we can't really "know" what people feel. We know what they say about it, and then how we or others might interpret it. "She fell in love" is a stupid thing for an author to say because he/she doesn't really know what it means. She may have done many things all right, but she didn't "fall" into any of them. Oh, she may've fallen, yes, doing something, but that's quite a different matter. If she can't talk about it, it didn't really happen. At least that's my "take" on style. See what you think.

    In our first story, The Last Words of Albert E., you encounter monologue within dialogue, that is, a lofting monologue narrated by one of the listeners. It occurs in an anomalous setting, around a campfire, which I like to use as backdrop because it connotes "thought" - the wondrous workings of the human mind under the deep glowing stars of an unknowable heaven. Albert is drawing a fine distinction here between what our senses physically "know" and what our intuition divines; and the story goes on to pose an "oral hypothesis" explaining that continuity between life and death, and between the worlds of matter and spirit, is general. Yes! It's meant to be philosophical.

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