A Moral Abyss

The main character (the synopsis on the website calls him Charlie, but nowhere in the film do we find out his name) of "The Black Hole" is presented with an amazing gift, one it seems tailor-made for the criminally minded, which he just so happens to be. The copy machine at work seems to be malfunctioning, spitting out the same page, blank but for a large black dot on it.  He puts his cup of water on the paper with the black dot and it falls through it.  He tries sticking his hand in, and it goes through as well.  He figures out that the black dot is more of a black hole, one that dematerializes whatever is directly under it. 

In quick order, Charlie goes from using the dot to steal a candy bar out of the snack machine to taping it to the side of a safe to steal the money out of it.  The only problem is that Charlie gets a little too greedy and climbs all the way inside the safe, after which, the paper with the black dot, peels off of the front of the safe, leaving Charlie trapped inside.

It's clearly a morality play.  Don't be greedy, don't take more than you need, etc.  But I can't help wondering what else this black dot would be good for.  Maybe you can help me.  What "good" could someone readily do with something like that.  Like I said before, it is a criminal's wildest dream-come-true.  It makes me think of the saying, "locks are for keeping out the honest people." What if you had something that rendered all locks pointless?  How strong would the temptation be to use it?

The Facts in the Case of Mister Hollow

This highly stylized short film is a bit of an enigma to me, but it's fun to watch, if just for the inventiveness of it.  It has a strong, Sherlock Holmes / Bram Stoker / Robert Louis Stevenson feel to it.  It must have been both very simple and very complex to make. The film takes place in the 1930s, if the film can be said to "take place" at all.  It's essentially one still image, a photograph that's being combed over, presumably, by a detective in a macabre murder case.  The photograph, which actually seems to be a collage of things that happened in one place, but at different times, is looked at with a magnifying glass.  Someone with a keener eye than mine, or with more time, might be able to figure out the mystery, but I've watched the film twice and still haven't figured it out. 

There seems to be some kind of conspiracy or cult or secret society involved, as all the men in the photo have the same tattoo on their wrists. Also, it could be that they are all the same man. (Are they Mr. Hollow? Who is Mr. Hollow!?) The woman in the center of the photo may or may not also be the woman who is dead inside the car.  During the credits there is a newspaper clipping about child kidnappings, and the woman in the photo is holding a child, so I'm inclined to think that she is the murder victim, and that she's been killed for her child.  However, the word "Keres" appears at the beginning, during the credits, as well.  I looked it up and Keres is a Greek mythological character, one who is associated with darkness and death.  So maybe the woman in the photo is a kind of Keres, one who has a thing for other people's children.  Anyway, it's a mystery, and I have not solved it.  Maybe you will...

Thumb Snatchers from the Moon Cocoon

Here's a link to the film:
http://vimeo.com/34316926 

"Death, they say it can kill a man."
-Sheriff Huckiss.

"Thumb Snatchers from the Moon Cocoon" is a stop-motion animation film that is an homage to the b-movie scifi-genre.  In part it is reminiscent of the type of film you might find on the now defunct Mystery Science Theater 3000.  I feel it rounds out nicely our viewing assignments for the week.  "Natives" was a very serious gender/race/sex study where everybody was wrong, so no one was right.  "Anti-Social Network" cleverly warns of the threat of unchecked disengagement that things like Facebook can cause, and "Sniffer" shows us a surreal world (perhaps the future) where there is no gravity and everyone seems to be obsessed with hygiene.  These threes short films are serious, either in tone or subject matter.

While there are some "message" moments in "Thumb Snatchers," it is mostly all about outrageous fun.  One can't help but make some connections between immigration issues in the USA and the "space aliens coming to Earth (Texas)" theme in the film, but it isn't explicitly stated.

These aliens come to Earth (aliens always seem to come to the USA) with the intention of taking our thumbs away as punishment for humanity's brutality and destructive ways.  One alien ship lands in a cow pasture in Texas where they find Sheriff Huckiss exploding a cow into a stack of hamburgers using a hand grenade. The aliens offer him "a long and patronizing origin story," after which Huckiss promptly dispatches them as only a Texas sheriff can.  What follows is a montage of massacre.  Aliens descend on Earth and commence to taking thumbs.  But the bigger part of the massacre is Huckiss on the aliens.  These aliens are no match for him and the short film ends in an outrageously funny testament to the power and force of the good old US of A, and specifically Texas, the details of which I will not give away, but let's just say Sheriff Huckiss (and Texas) comes out on top.  Think Walker, Texas Ranger vs. Space Aliens, animated and profoundly over the top.

"Bigfoot Stole My Wife" by Ron Carlson

Ron Carlson, you are very funny.  You remind me of Barry Hannah--a little bit--and that's a good thing...to remind someone of Barry Hannah. I make this comparison because you write interesting sentences, and are one of the best first-person writers I think I've ever read.  This particular story is a kind of tall tale, right?  Bigfoot's in it, so it can't be true.  The guy's wife left him.  Bigfoot, who does not exist, didn't take her.  She took the dog and the Toyota Celica and split, was tired of being married to a guy who earns his living at the tracks.  The narrator is telling himself an elaborate lie, because he cannot bare the truth of his situation.  He believes it.  He has "gotta believe it."  But, I gotta say, this story is almost too long to be a short-short story, isn't it?  Almost six pages.  I know that there's no limit or mandatory length, or whatever, but the story does seem to strain against the limits of the form.  But, the subject is Bigfoot, so maybe that has something to do with it.

Here's to You, Mrs. Oates

Joyce Carol Oates' "The Boy" is not The Graduate. 

 It is, as a matter of fact, a flash fiction piece consisting of one very long, rambling sentence, and the narrator is, frankly, a child molester, who is also a tired, desolate part-time teacher, who has given up, and who takes a boy who has been flirting with her at school to a hotel, and tries to give him what she thinks he wants, and she gets really into it, and really wants it, and kind of surprises herself, but he turns out not to want it, because he is just a kid, maybe fourteen, or maybe seventeen, and he is probably scared, and has probably never even seen a woman naked before, and once he sees her up-close maybe he thinks she's ugly, because she has bags under her eyes and is actually kind of old and tired looking, and she can't get him interested now that it comes down to it, and he starts to cry and she is worried the beer is getting warm, and the story ends with her cursing "you bastards," whoever they are, and you kind of think she means men, in general, but maybe not.

"Blackberries," by Leslie Norris

 Norris's very affecting short-short story is the first one I read out of the Sudden Fiction collection.  I have to admit, outside of the odd short-short, here and there, I'd not read much of the stuff, because of an uneasy feeling about them and their apparent "slickness," for lack of a better word.  Often times, they seem long on cleverness and short on heart.  But "Blackberries" is fantastic.  It's a story with a lot of heart, real depth, and it "feels" as complete as a full short story. 

Like all good writing, "Blackberries" is about many things.  It's a story about first experiences, about a boy navigating his way through an "adult" world, and, most poignantly, a child's becoming aware of himself as a person separate from his parents. This awareness is handled deftly in the stories last line:

"And the child began to understand that they were different people; his father, his mother, himself, and that he must learn sometimes to be alone."

This story is also about legacy.  In the story there is the transmission of a certain sensibility and a connection to geography through three generations of melancholic working-class males. 
  
"On Sunday," says the boy's father, "we'll go for a walk.  Just you and I.  We'll be men together." They go berry picking, and they bring home more than blackberries.  A small gesture of kindness backfires and underscores the underlying disappointment and resentment in their home, and the story ends with the boy's first disillusionment.

Flash Fiction, or Whatever You Wanna Call It.

While doing research (and just bumping around on the Webbernet) for this post, I found a very compelling essay by Jason Sanford, the former editor of storySouth, a very good e-journal.  I know it's not exactly what we were assigned to write about, but after reading it, it was all I could think about, and so I wrote a post about it.  I'll add a link to the entire thing, but here are a few excerpts  (it was written in 2004, but I don't find it to be dated):

"Here's a simple fact: no matter how excellent and mind-blowing a regular-size short story might be, it still takes an author several days to write it. In this same time an author can write any number of mediocre short shorts."

Days!!!  More like weeks and months in my experience.  I can count on one hand how many stories I've written in just days.  But, anyway, I get the point.  It is easier, at least initially, to write a story no longer than 1,000 words than one that is, say, 4,000 words.


"The popular take on short shorts is that they are a reflection of our fast-paced modern lives. This is, to put it politely, bullshit. Yes, 21st century Americans may act like none of us have any time left in life, what with our cell phones ringing while we're using our beepers to download e-mails from the web. But America's quickie culture is merely a rationalization for the booming popularity of short shorts."

Charles Baxter makes this claim in the intro to Sudden Fiction.  I think there's something to it, frankly.  But I take issue with Sanford's calling it a "rationalization." 

And speaking of quick:

"A main reason short shorts are all the rage is that they are a quick road to publication. After all, why write a 6,000-word short story when you can write ten 600-word pieces in the same time?"

I'll have to side with Sanford on this one.  Getting published is not the same thing as writing a successful piece of writing. If you want to get published you can get published. It's much harder writing a good story than it is publishing a bad one.

And, finally:

"When you read a book with a distinct voice (such as that of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying), it can sometimes take pages and pages to get into the author's rhythm. No one first reads As I Lay Dying without some momentary discomfort at the constant switching between different voices and points of views....The problem with most short shorts is not the genre—it is that they are being written by writers who are not committed to the true exploration of voice that's at the heart of great literature."

Is his view a bit alarmist?  Perhaps.  There will always be mediocre writing being celebrated for professional or political reasons.  The trick is identifying quality when you come across it, and emulating that.  In fact, I'd say that's one of the essential parts of writing: learning to identify quality when you see it. 

Here's the link, but be warned, there's a lot of anti-MFA (and Anti-Hempel) sentiment in it:
http://www.storysouth.com/fall2004/shortshorts.html