Pseudopod 232: The Song Of Prague

[Bdoomed]

Pseudopod 232: The Song Of Prague

By Shane Jiraiya Cummings

Shane’s E-Books are available at AMAZON.

Read by MarBelle.


“It was the most beautiful song he had ever heard. Haunting, melancholy, but with a magical quality — a soul — infused into each note. The song drew Len to the park, from the very moment he stepped from Vltavska station.”



Listen to this week's Pseudopod.

[KillerWhalen]

Getting back on the Pseudopod track tonight with this one, thought I'd do some expectations/reality before I heard it based on the tease.

“It was the most beautiful song he had ever heard. Haunting, melancholy, but with a magical quality — a soul — infused into each note. The song drew Len to the park, from the very moment he stepped from Vltavska station.”

Expectations

Well I love what seems to be the locale, nothing helps a spooky story better than a good Eastern European (Western? should've paid more attention in Geography) setting. I can't even read "Vltavska station" without pitcturing a lonely, painfully cold train station in the midst of a drab collection of Eastern Bloc (Western Bloc? Was there one?!) egg-crate buildings. As for music (which is the second and only thing I can gather from the teaser) I'm not so sure about that, I got a 53 and 54 respectively in the two years where music class was compulsory so I'm not exactly an expert, but I've got high hopes Comrade! (West Comrade?)

Reality

[Sgarre1]

Expectations versus Reality - sorry, but Prague is a modern city (creepy is probably not the best expectation with this story - this week we overlap Podcastle with a bit of Dark Fantasy, which coincidentally also worked with the Alphabet Quartet stuff)



Vltavska Station

[Scattercat]

This was a good story.  I enjoyed it.  It didn't strike right to the core of my being or anything, but I do like a good Lovecraftian cosmic horror as long as it has the decency to stay offscreen and just be ominous and portentous at people.  About the only thing that could have made this story even better for me would be if there had been a little more ambiguity; that is, if the song had been less of an unequivocal good.  (And also if we hadn't had the Explanation Speech; a reference to the Sleeper would have been fine.  The story had already made it clear that the Song was something that got passed around, so the exposition felt kind of "Yeah, I know," to me.)

My favorite bit was when the gray-suited man looks up and says, "Look, I've got three sides already."  (Or however many sides he had.)  A nice moment of ohzhit there.

[kibitzer]

Reality

Reality? Prague is a lovely, lovely city. Absolutely gorgeous. Some of the outlying suburbs and such are indeed a bit Communist grey (towering housing buildings that all look the same) but the city itself is beautiful.

[ElectricPaladin]

I found this story deeply disappointing in the end, though I will admit that it was quite a ride getting there. Essentially, my problem with this story was the title. I spent half a year in Prague in high school, and while Prague is definitely a modern city, it is a city with a distinct style. There was nothing characteristically "Prague" about this story, just a lot of Praguian (Parugian?) name-dropping. You could have called this story "The Song of New York" or "The Song of Chicago" or "The Song of Vienna" or "The Song of Hell, MI" and it wouldn't have changed a thing, except for stripping off the veneer of European sophistication (which is, I suspect, why Prague was included in the first place).

And if something has no purpose in a story it's a waste of words.

I agree with 'Cat that I could have done without Concluding Explication, or at least without quite as exhaustive an explanation. In fact, I was hoping that the sisters would deem his failure a reason not to tell him anything and leave him to stew in his questions. Forever.

[Actually, I was hoping that for failing to protect the sisters from Toothy McBloodpaws he'd become a Toothy himself, but that just shows how my mind works]

That said, I found a lot of the story very appealing. The idea that the world we all know and love is quite that tenuous, held together by a secret society of lullaby singers who arrange to keep the song sung in cities everywhere so that the sleeper will not awaken is brilliantly creepy. The sleeper's chaos manifesting as complexity of form (building, living things) collapsing into rigid and dead, but geometrically perfect forms was neat, too.

And I also dug the unlikely hero angle. You never know what's in you until suddenly you have to find out.

As the Magic card says: every moment has its own savior.

[Listener]

I actually had to think hard about this story to remember it. It felt to me like the author had an idea to explore, and then needed a narrative hook so included the fight scene.

I didn't dislike the episode, but it won't stick with me.

[Unblinking]

I liked this one well enough.  The core idea reminded me quite a bit of Lovecraft's "The Music of Erich Zann" in which an ordinary man comes across a stranger who is using music to hold off the dissolution of reality as we know it, and in that comparison it's hard to come out ahead.

But I liked it pretty well.  I could root for the protagonist, and I liked the mysterious villain, and the brief explanation of the song of the world.  I agree with Scattercat that it could've done better without the final wrapup explanation, I'd been able to sort it out earlier already.  But that's a small niggle and overall I liked it.

[nem0fazer]

OK so I'm not sure of the etiquette about commenting on Alasdair's (sorry if I spelled it wrong, that's how my brother spells his name) outro but it really touched me. As they often do. So often I'll stick with a story even if I'm not wild about it, just to hear Alasdair's commentary.

Anyhow, his comment about his friend saying we're all heroes, some just haven't had the opportunity to show it really hit home.

Here's a quick, probably horribly self-aggrandising story: I never really got a sensible career off the ground, never made much money. Got married young and divorced at thirty. The rest of my family are pretty high achieving and I was definitely the arty failure of the batch (stick with it, I'll get the the aggrandising part in a moment). Anyhow, a few years ago lightening hit my family twice in 24 hours. My dad finally died of cancer after a pretty horrible few final weeks which was bad enough but early the next day my sister-in-law, and close friend, killed herself in a nasty and violent way. A reaction to an SSRI she'd been on a suicide watch for a while but she realised my brother was distracted by the death of my father and took her opportunity.

So anyhow, horrible story short. I spent the next weeks looking after my brother and his two daughters, went through address books and told many people the awful news, arranged two humanist funerals and wrote and delivered eulogies as both as my mother and brother simply couldn't function. It was a moment I found there was a hero in me. I really wish with all my heart I hadn't found it but there it is Alasdair. I think a lot of people were shocked that the family looser came through. None more than me.

I know its not the same as having the snot beaten out of you in a park.

No, actually, it was way worse.

Sorry to be such a downer. Also so late in posting. I had lots of podcasts to catch up with. Keep up the great work Pseudopod!

[Alasdair5000]

Hi:)

I'm glad, I think, the intro hit home. I'm so, so sorry that you and your family had to go through that. And you're right, it's not the same as having the snot beaten out of you in a park, it's worse. Emotional pain of that sort is something you carry with you, it changes you and whilst you heal you heal different.

But not worse. Just different.

No such thing as the family loser, not if you were strong enough to do that. And strong enough to tell people too. Thank you and like I say, hopefully the outro didn't open any wounds up too wide.

[eytanz]

I agree with the sentiment expressed earlier in this thread - the explanation at the end is a misstep. Not the amount of explanation, necessarily - I don't think it explains too much. It's just that a neatly written card is a bit too *pat* of an explanation. If the world can be explained in a tidy note scrawled on the back of a business card, it's not a very mysterious world after all.

[Hafwit]

The story took place in the old town, Mala Strana. There are definitely parks which look like the one described here. I even think that I have holiday snaps of it. Very nice place.

Ultimalely, I did not like this story. The basdic premise was very good, but the exposition at the end (You fit all that on a business card?) felt very heavy-handed. Also, there was too much description that actually seemed to get in the way of me imagining things. Some verbose descriptions (like Lovecraft's) have an almost hypnotic effect on me, but that wasn't the case here. Describing the same things over and over became slightly annoying. I don't care what the punks look like beyond their first appearance. Focus on what they DO. The many description slowed down a situation which would have been better served by keeping the language terse and the eye on the action.

[justenjoying]

The way this was written is extrodinary. I felt I could almost hear the song. I was enchanted along with the characters and honestly am not sure if I would have acted. I find I'm more the sister in this story than anything. The amount of ambiguity is just enough to keep this story resonant. And there is a hero in all of us, all it takes is the oppertunity.

[liminalmike]

My favorite bit was when the gray-suited man looks up and says, "Look, I've got three sides already."  (Or however many sides he had.)  A nice moment of ohzhit there.

The author has clearly never solved nor taken apart a Rubik's cube, and that element threw me out of the story. Also the line about the six lines of cube pieces arranged on the ground.

There are two solving methods; after solving one side, you either do the opposite side and then the middle layer, or vice versa. If, somehow, you had solved three sides all around a single corner, then all centers and all corners would also be solved, as long with several edge pieces. At most, 3 pieces would be out of place, and I'm not sure that is physically possible, so probably only 2 pieces are out of place. Not what you would look at and say "3 sides".

I tried to include a picture, but I can't. Google 'disassembled Rubik's cube' to see what I mean.