I’ve taken the plunge. At 74, it seems unlikely I’ll suddenly be discovered as a New Thing by the dwindling number of established publishers, book or periodical, who handle short fiction. Accordingly, although many publishers avoid works that are “already published,” I’ve decided to post all my (readable) stories online, for anyone to read. I’m probably shooting myself in the foot by doing that, and it’s no way to make money, but who’s making money writing short stories, anyway? A couple of dozen full-time authors, almost all of whom write novels, too. Agents and publishers just don’t expect any profit from selling one author’s story collections — especially if there aren’t some novels to fill out the product line. Well, my stories weren’t written as a product line, although there’s a PayPal contribution button on the new site, so it’s always possible some generous and appreciative reader might send money for no tangible reason. And of course some of the fiction editors of the great periodicals and anthologies might stumble onto the site and become sudden fans. Yeah, right.
So there you have it. If you’re interested in short stories, of high diversity in subject and style, check out Cave-Paintings.com. Nearly all the stories are also narrated, in case you don’t feel like reading. Or if you want to listen in your car, there’s a download button on the MP3 player under each recorded story. Eventually there will be some essays, too, visual art, sound compositions, and videos.
Finally, the obvious boomer.
I’ve always been annoyed when people younger than I identify “the sixties” with the stupid memes of Nehru jackets and bell-bottom jeans, etc. What I remember was that Time, Inc., coined the terms “hippies” and “flower children” to fabricate News out of them, as if they were real movements on a demographically significant scale. These times were meaningful to us boomers — because we lived them, not because of the labels and marketing BS. Remember movies like “The Trip” and “Beach Blanket Bingo”? This crap was exploitation of us, not something we created, and most of us found it repulsive. Sure, “Easy Rider” was reflective of the age, but Peter Fonda wasn’t a boomer (1940).
So, finally, someone has pointed out the obvious: young people don’t create the society they’re living in — they consume and respond to the world they grow up in. So the sixties, revolutions and tacky “modernism” and all, was mainly the product of the 20’s and 30’s (and some 40’s). In other words the “establishment” that a few of us were trying to get away from.
New Yorker Article
The subtler values of the sixties, represented by a very tiny percentage of us, are of course quite real, and are probably not very different than the visionary values of any generation. Laudable and insightful and cosmic, perhaps, but it doesn’t look like many of these dreams became real in the next generations. Some progress seems to have been made, but the orange idiot is himself a baby boomer (1946) bent on undoing as much as possible, right back to the 50’s, before our generation fades into oblivion and facile stereotypes.