"Di./um's Lost Cover," image by Irene Koronas and Daniel Y. Harris
NOVEL(LA)S
Richard
Kostelanetz
5,000
words
In
memory
of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375)
MEASURE
Any story
that doubles back into itself before moving forward, even if only slightly,
must be classified as a novel(la).
MATURING
Overjoyed
I was to discover that, after years of effort, my influence had finally prompted
my innately wayward stepdaughter to discipline her life.
BETTERMENT
A virgin
at twenty, she was a snob at thirty and a spinster at forty only to discover in
her fifties her love for women.
INSPIRED
Struck by
lightning, with my feet in water, I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote until words
no longer came.
APEXEPA
In the
story a that is palindrome is that a story the inn.
DREDGING
In a thousand
pages of disgressive narrative were buried a plentitude of novel(la)s.
INFIDELITIES
By marrying,
separating, remarrying, separating, remarrying, and husband-swapping some lived
and, relieved, relived.
PEXEPATION
Consider
me a man inhabiting a woman inside a man inside a woman all desperately wanting
to get out.
DIE KUNST DER FUGUE
Alone in
his lover’s house he spent a full week listening in sequence to all the
versions she owned of J. S. Bach's Die
Kunst der Fugue, crying every time the last triple fugue ended in
mid-phrase, signaling the composer's death.
REVELATION
The
greatest story never told is really an optimal subject of a novel(la).
CHAIN
A loved B
who loved C who was loved by D, in love with E, enraptured with F, who loved G,
who eloped with H, in spite his loving I, who was in love with J, herself in
love with K, beholden by L, who loved M, who was infatuated with N herself
smitten with O, who expressed his love to P, herself in love with Q, who loved
R, who fell for S, who felt enslaved by T, himself enslaved by U, who loved V,
who loved W, who was loved by X, himself loved by Y, who was loved by Z, who
loved A. . . .
ETHEREAL
Better to
make us performers seem ethereal, the master director filmed only the
reflections made by our movements on water.
SNOBBERY
An
attractive young woman betrays her family’s haughty claims to superior
character with elaborate ruses designed to woo her older sister’s fiancé.
GENERATIONS
A family
tree with many lines is a novel; with only one line, a story; with two or three
lines, a novel(la), maybe.
PLEDGE
Disgusted
by his disagreeable relatives, he lets them know that he has no wish to speak
with them again, and to the end of his life nothing done by anyone ever persuades
him to break that pledge.
DISAPPOINTMENT
He
published many books that received many awards and expected to continue scoring
successes had not the stream of recognitions dried up along with his desire to
write more.
GHOST SCRIBBLERS
Many texts
publicly attributed to “Richard Kostelanetz” are actually written by a team of prisoners
on death row while certain others must be dismissed as fakes, produced by Lord
knows whom.
JUGGLING
Renegotiating
with one’s mistresses requires not only lawyers but psychiatric staff.
ENCOMIA
At
the memorial service for a geezer who never remarried, each of a dozen
mistresses from times past insisted upon publicly remembering her relationship
with him, all of them telling stories so different that his friends couldn’t
believe that they were talking about the same man.
WANTED
Outside
his windowless concrete bunker were posted over a dozen warrants for his arrest
for a variety of trivial, victimless crimes.
NOVEL(LA)S
Any writer
favoring them concedes that longer narratives are beyond his imagination.
A LIFE
Childhood,
adolescence, adulthood, maturity, and senility.
GERIATRIC
LOVE
When I saw
my grandfather and his girl friend both naked, my imagination felt stroked by
erotic images of what they’d done and would be doing--I felt good.
BLOW DOWN
No one
challenged his intelligence until the secret of his vulnerability became public
knowledge and he then for journalists became a kind of dart board.
DISCOVERY
Two
children residing miles apart attend the same school where they discover after
many lunches together that they share the same father.
WORKING UP
He wrote
letters upon letters, both long and short, mostly to himself, until he discovered,
to his surprise, that he wrote enough to make an epistolary novel.
HERESY
Punishments
for heresy a radical writer could accept again and again only as long as his
ideas continued to have influence.
A CAREER SINGING
Though
haughty opera-house diva in her prime, she spent her remaining years singing in
ever smaller halls until she ended her days croaking in her own soundproofed
corner room in a nursing home.
FREED
How
surprised I was to feel my brother-in-law release my ear to concentrate upon
chewing something else.
WASHED
AWAY
Bit by bit
the old bridge split apart, even after traffic across it was blocked, until in
the wake of a rain storm it collapsed completely
into the river below.
REDEATH
Poverty, efforts,
prosperity, speculations, and poverty.
SWAPPING
A group of
older widows and widowers vacationing at a sunny resort and scarcely shy about
making love in the daytime gleefully exchange sexual partners as frequently as
college kids reportedly do.
NUDGE
He was another compulsive debater who, once he got your ear near his lips,
would deprecate you while asserting his own importance, never letting go until
summoned by Nature’s call.
ALPHABETS.
An exotic
alphabet simply reversed is a story; with its letters shuffled, definitely and
definitively a novel(la).
PISSED
He peed
and peed and peed and peed until he could pee no more.
ASSISTANTS
To the
endless succession of willing young women he assigns tasks that, were they not
so available, he could just as well do himself and, as he aged, eventually did.
LAST LOVE
Soon after
he announced himself gay, my father had the good fortune of meeting the one and
only man with whom he would reside for the rest of his life.
LOST
LOVE
My
ex-husband changed his home address so often that I no longer know where he is,
or was; nor do I care about not caring.
THERAPY
Thinking
she could cure every philanderer of infidelity, she made more misjudgments than
she would care to remember because she couldn't forgive herself for being
wrong, ever, never.
PERFECTION?
I write a
sentence and rewrite it, and then rewrite it again and sometimes yet again,
until I realize a string of words as unquestionably unrevisable and thus perfect
as the one you're now reading.
CONCLUSION
Definition,
reconsideration, confusion, advice, and resolution.
SPORTS
If one
baseball game is a story and a season, a novel, then mustn’t all in between a
novel(la)?
BANKRUPT
Thanks to
a series of initially thoughtful speculations initiated over a decade they lost
everything.
OLYMPIAN
So high she
jumped that she never touched any terra firma again.
RECUPERATION
Injury, diagnosis,
surgery, recuperation, and activity.
RECEDING
Even as
the pace of his feet increased, the road on which he traveled continuously
receded precipitously before him.
LOCATION
After
making many calculations that he recorded on a map in his hand, he stood
securely on a spot from which everything important to him on earth was equidistant.
DEFEATED
Raising
the bar yet higher and higher, he could no longer push himself over it.
SCHEMING
As long as
he made it his principal interpersonal strategy to tell his superiors whatever
it was they wanted to hear, he would never emerge from behind their shadow,
disqualifying himself from ever becoming a leader.
A FAVORITE
SIGN
He could
tell from how she clasped her arms across her chest, moving them up and down as
she was talking to me, that she must be taking an interest, a serious interest,
if not an erotic interest, in him.
DUMMY
The life
savings of all his wife’s relatives he had seriously mis-invested.
SURRENDER
If they number
one million and we are only three, how can anyone expect us to win a fight?
CREDIBILITY
With so
many children by so many women I wasn’t sure whether a young man claiming to be
my son was telling the truth.
BIOGRAPHY
Never
knowing what to do with the years of life bestowed upon her, she succumbed to
paralysis.
IN-LAWS
On the
same day that he married his ex-wife's daughter by a later marriage, his
ex-wife married his son from his first marriage, all of them becoming each
others’ in-laws.
IMITATION
He lied
because his colleagues lied, he cheated because they cheated, and he stole
because he could see everyone around him successfully getting away with theft.
SECURITY
She wired
the fence around her house to shock not only animals and burglars but relatives
who calculated that, once they reminded her of their presence, they would not
be forgotten in her will.
REYOUTH
Returning
home for the first time in two decades, she was continually surprised to
discover that most of the people she heard on the streets were speaking the
exotic language of her dreams.
Individual
entries on RICHARD KOSTELANETZ appear in Contemporary Poets,
Contemporary
Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians,
A
Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia
of Literature, Webster’s Dictionary of American Authors, and Britannica.com,
among other selective directories.
