Postscripts for September 2023 and October 2023

On the first Monday of each month (more or less), I’m going to post a brief retrospective on the stories published during the previous month. This month’s postscript is a little less brief since it covers the first two months of Hyperjabber. I’m also going to experiment with opening comments for everyone on these posts.

September 2023

I had been planning Hyperjabber, or something like it, for months (years really, but who’s counting). With the children now all off to college, the time seemed ripe, and the stars were aligned, so I jumped in with both feet. I published a handful of posts on the inauguration date so that September would have a full slate of stories.

Welcome to Hyperjabber — I view this essay, along with the About page, as a manifesto on what I’m trying to do with Hyperjabber. I’m one of those overly analytical people who function better when they have a pocketful of words to describe their project and to serve as a kind of road map to their endeavors. Plus, it turns out that trying to explain Hyperjabber, as much to myself as to others, is becoming a prominent theme of Hyperjabber—I have another essay that touches on this coming out sometime in November.

Cities of the Tepuis — This idea has been rattling in my head for years and I needed desperately to exorcise it. The style of this post is vaguely inspired by BLDGBLOG, but I think I’d approach it a little differently now, and I may return to this idea sometime in the future.

The 4th Album — My music reviews are probably a little different than most reviews you’ve read. Sure, I try to translate sound and music into vocabulary, but I also describe what happens in my imagination as I listen to music. In this review, the imaginary Desperate Deuce has its origin in half-remembered scenes from Roadhouse with Patrick Swayze.

Loss of Presence — A short, personal essay about the conflicting emotions I felt as my wife and I became empty nesters.

The Book of Calliope — Jorge Luis Borges is one of my literary idols, and the quote that opens this story is an inspiration not just for this piece but for all of Hyperjabber. However, I have slightly edited the quote, and if you go searching for an edition of Invisible Cities that includes the story of Calliope, you might be disappointed.

October 2023

My wife pointed out that I needed some sort of Halloween story, but looking back now it seems that all of the stories in October had a touch of horror or creepiness, though I hadn’t really planned it that way.

Chatterbox — I love writing about imaginary books, and the novel mentioned in this story, Hyperreal, is just as imaginary as the one(s) in “The Book of Calliope.” You’ll read more of Hyperreal in later stories, but in “Chatterbox,” the novel triggers a momentary existential crisis. Perhaps my little obsession with books, both real and imagined, is becoming apparent by now? I’m curious if I’ll tire of the motif, but I kind of doubt it. I already have a story ready to go for November that’s filled with even more books.

Codex of Dreams — Yes, this is another story about a book, but it’s also about dreams, conspiracies, and guilty pleasures. There’s a little taste of Inception here, and the last sentence hints at an author who is one of my most guilty of pleasures.

Carnival of Infinite Night — I have a soft goal of including one music review each month, and this month I reviewed “L.A. Woman” by the Doors. However, this turned into a more general meditation on the city itself as filtered through the song and two other works that are set in L.A.: David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive and Steve Erickson’s novel Amnesiascope. The surreal, psychedelic aspects of all three of those works co-opted my imagination and blended together into a strange hallucination that floats in the middle of the review.

Lamentations From Carcosa — A story for Halloween that features several books including the “novel that I have yet to write” and the eponymous book written by an enigmatic occultist. While many of you will recognize the Lovecraftian elements in the story, I also sprinkled in references and allusions to Carcosa from the same sources that inspired Lovecraft.

Photo by Stephanie Kenan