Author Topic: PC158: Gone Daddy Gone  (Read 17590 times)

Ocicat

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on: May 24, 2011, 07:53:35 AM
PodCastle 158: Gone Daddy Gone

by Josh Rountree

Read by Dave Thompson


Originally Published in Lone Star Stories. (Read the story here)

He remembers Priscilla in the surf with her sisters.  That image will never leave him no matter how many miles she runs, Prissy wearing not a stitch, gold hair plastered to her back as she paddled the surfboard out far enough to catch the big waves, and then the turn of her head and the silent laugh at something one of her sisters said and Moon Doggie could just make out the silver glint of her eyes and that was it, done deal, he was in love and there was no turning back.

Six leather jackets lay sunning on the rocks.  Moon Doggie braved the crashing waves and found the one he knew was hers. Still couldn’t say how he knew but he knew.  Snatched it up, took it back to his T-Bird.  It smelled like the earth and the sky.  The leather was cracked and ancient.

Moon Doggie watched them throughout the afternoon.  He felt a shiver and a sudden queasiness when they finally started swimming for shore, surfboards abandoned to the sea.  They saw him, all of those silver eyes, but kept their distance.  Wet arms slipped into jacket sleeves.  An eruption of euphoric smiles and then they were airborne, lifted up in a sudden storm of feathers.

Moon Doggie wasn’t the least bit surprised.


Rated R: Contains some funky language, Daddy-O.



RomaLisa

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Reply #1 on: May 24, 2011, 09:41:30 AM
I was still listening to the closing credits of this amazing story while (finally!) signing up for the Forum.  Wow!  Echoes of one of my favorite books, Gaiman's American Gods, but still with its own distinctive voice and characters, Gone Daddy Gone has me longing to hear more about its universe.  Pretty please?  Thanks, Podcastle and the Escape Artists podcasts, for giving me so many wonderful stories!



Josh Rountree

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Reply #2 on: May 24, 2011, 01:09:25 PM
Thanks for the kind words, RomaLisa!  Really glad you dug this story.  Gaiman is a writer I love and definitely an influence.



Scattercat

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Reply #3 on: May 25, 2011, 10:32:44 PM
Awesome story!  <3 a proper miffic tone.  I'm amused that the 1950's are now also up for mythologizing, and the blend of the two was intriguing and rife with possibilities.  (I am reminded of one of the most sadly underutilized characters I know, an offhand joke from a couple of issues of Astro City: the Bouncing Beatnik, a sort of 1950's Spiderman agility-based hero, who appears in like three panels ever.)

At least now I know why my thunderbird-themed story got rejected.  It kind of sucks in comparison.  Ah, well.  We live and learn.



Listener

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Reply #4 on: May 26, 2011, 10:51:16 AM
To me this felt like a pretty standard "journey" story combined with a pretty standard "guy captures a mythological creature" story, except that in the case of the latter she's totally cool with it. Then it was dressed up in what I'm guessing* is Kerouac-ian slang/patois. I enjoyed listening to it, but I didn't think there was anything special about it one way or the other.

* Because I've never read Kerouac, or any of the other beat poets.

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Anarquistador

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Reply #5 on: May 27, 2011, 11:28:10 AM
* Because I've never read Kerouac, or any of the other beat poets.

You're not missing much.

I share your opinion. I'm not a big fan of the Beat era or that whole Southern California 1960's surfer culture, so this really didn't grab my attention. It was a decent reimagined fairy tale, but I just didn't care for the setting.

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kibitzer

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Reply #6 on: May 30, 2011, 08:50:22 AM
Loved the story, it rolled along just fine with itself, just fine, man! I didn't quite understand the need for it but I don't think that was the point and it ended up quite nicely anyway. Actually I didn't find the beatnik stuff overpowering or overdone, more like an appropriate smattering over the whole.

And now, apropos of (almost) nothing, here's a link to The Three Little Bops.
« Last Edit: May 30, 2011, 08:52:29 AM by kibitzer »



Devoted135

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Reply #7 on: May 31, 2011, 01:36:36 PM
Oh, now I get it! This is one of those times when reading the discussion sheds some much needed light on the purpose/plot of the story for me. Seriously, the whole time I was a little bit distracted because the experiment I was working on took 25% of my brain instead of the usual 15% so I kept feeling like I was missing something. But putting it in the context of 1950's beat makes total sense. :)

I liked the concept that time effectively stood still while they were together, but ultimately I don't understand why that was the case? Is that a reference to something from the mythology aspect that I'm just not familiar with?



Scattercat

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Reply #8 on: May 31, 2011, 06:18:51 PM
Well, there's any number of old myths in which the hero stumbles out of Faerie or wherever to discover that what he thought was a day was a hundred years or what he thought was a lifetime was a day, etc.



Spindaddy

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Reply #9 on: June 01, 2011, 09:06:09 PM
I thought it was a fun little romp, but I spent more time trying to figure out which fairy tale it was reskinning. I've been racking my brain over which one it was and for the life of me I have no idea.

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Scattercat

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Reply #10 on: June 02, 2011, 03:17:04 AM
I thought it was a fun little romp, but I spent more time trying to figure out which fairy tale it was reskinning. I've been racking my brain over which one it was and for the life of me I have no idea.

Most of it was referring to the Native American tradition of bird-people (or other animal-people; I've read deer-based versions, too) who remove their animal skins as cloaks in order to bathe, at which point the canny man can snag the cloak and bind the animal-person to him as his wife.  These stories usually end in tears for pretty much everyone involved.



Sgarre1

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Reply #11 on: June 02, 2011, 03:25:56 AM
The Orkney Islands Selkie is a similar myth.



mbrennan

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Reply #12 on: June 03, 2011, 08:21:30 AM
Unfortunately, I've discovered that I am a bad audience for this kind of relationship: the minute he took her jacket, I didn't like him, and her saying later that she would have stayed with him anyway didn't fix it.  (I think I'm too familiar with the source tales, where taking the seal-skin or whatever pretty much means taking away the woman's freedom and agency.)  So I didn't like the protagonist and wasn't invested in the relationship, and then on top of that I just couldn't take the period slang seriously.

Which boils down to: not a bad story, I think, but not one that worked for me, either.



blueeyeddevil

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Reply #13 on: June 03, 2011, 10:58:45 AM
The Orkney Islands Selkie is a similar myth.

Yeah, my synopsis of this story, when asked, was "The Secret of Roan Inish," with Fonzie.



Gamercow

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Reply #14 on: June 04, 2011, 03:31:00 AM
I liked this story when I was listening to it, and was unaware of the source myths, and things make more sense after learning about them, thanks Scattercat!

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InfiniteMonkey

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Reply #15 on: June 04, 2011, 04:33:19 PM
The Orkney Islands Selkie is a similar myth.

Yeah, my synopsis of this story, when asked, was "The Secret of Roan Inish," with Fonzie.

Not exactly. More like Frankie Avalon.   :)



Salul

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Reply #16 on: June 05, 2011, 02:33:05 AM
I'm not too crazy about 1950s surfer culture, nor about the storyline either.

But kudos to Josh, because he did an outstanding storytelling job, and that is what kept me listening to the very end.

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blueeyeddevil

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Reply #17 on: June 07, 2011, 10:50:24 AM
The Orkney Islands Selkie is a similar myth.

Yeah, my synopsis of this story, when asked, was "The Secret of Roan Inish," with Fonzie.

Not exactly. More like Frankie Avalon.   :)

Fair enough.



Corcoran

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Reply #18 on: June 07, 2011, 11:58:43 AM
I worked my way up from story one to 92, about a lot of them I wanted to write, but what sense is there to comment on stories long gone.

So I broke free of listening my way to the newest and listen to this story, hoping to give praise .....
but then this.

A collection of words nothing more , an empty story, a main character I could not understand or feel with, this was one of the most useless
stories. 
But I promised myself to write this time, so here it is.

Maybe it is because this story touches some things that are not fantasy but more american, and if, as a foreigner like me, you dont understand
America than the story has no chance to give me something.



Lionman

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Reply #19 on: June 07, 2011, 03:13:11 PM
I like how the story flowed, though it felt a little nebulous, or far-reaching at times.  Not so much that it turned me off to the story, but kept me asking how much disbelief I was supposed to be suspending.  But, when we get to the beach at the end, I found myself well-pleased with the resolution of the story.

Well, that and my first car was a '78 Thunderbird. :-)

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Scattercat

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Reply #20 on: June 07, 2011, 08:14:53 PM
Maybe it is because this story touches some things that are not fantasy but more american, and if, as a foreigner like me, you dont understand America than the story has no chance to give me something.

It's definitely a story about a particular time and place.  Personally, I think I could get almost equally behind a story about a similarly vivid decade from another country; it's not like I lived through the fifties myself, so I'm functionally a foreigner there, as well.



Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #21 on: June 07, 2011, 08:50:51 PM
Maybe it is because this story touches some things that are not fantasy but more american, and if, as a foreigner like me, you dont understand America than the story has no chance to give me something.

It's definitely a story about a particular time and place.  Personally, I think I could get almost equally behind a story about a similarly vivid decade from another country; it's not like I lived through the fifties myself, so I'm functionally a foreigner there, as well.

Yes, but there's 'foreigner' and then there's foreigner!; because you are only foreign in time, not place (as much), you may not have lived it, but you've seen/read/heard depictions of the time or even satire or parodies of the then-common tropes, and - maybe most importantly - you've absorbed, likely without even being aware of it, the cultural results of that time, the bits that bled into the mainstream with few even noticing. And only a very few of those who do notice are among those who grew up with those bits already there.

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DKT

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Reply #22 on: June 07, 2011, 09:41:48 PM
Maybe it is because this story touches some things that are not fantasy but more american, and if, as a foreigner like me, you dont understand America than the story has no chance to give me something.

It's definitely a story about a particular time and place.  Personally, I think I could get almost equally behind a story about a similarly vivid decade from another country; it's not like I lived through the fifties myself, so I'm functionally a foreigner there, as well.

Yes, but there's 'foreigner' and then there's foreigner!; because you are only foreign in time, not place (as much), you may not have lived it, but you've seen/read/heard depictions of the time or even satire or parodies of the then-common tropes, and - maybe most importantly - you've absorbed, likely without even being aware of it, the cultural results of that time, the bits that bled into the mainstream with few even noticing. And only a very few of those who do notice are among those who grew up with those bits already there.

This week's PodCastle (After October) may prove to be the true test! ;)


jenfullmoon

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Reply #23 on: June 07, 2011, 10:06:01 PM
I'm not normally into the 50's and am clueless on surfer culture and generally find selkie-skin stories sad, but I liked this story. It's sad but it works.



Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #24 on: June 08, 2011, 10:33:02 PM
This may explain why MoonDog Moon Doggie didn't want to leave the 50s...

"People commonly use the word 'procrastination' to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working." - Paul Graham