"The Ashtray"

I can say with a bare minimum of hemming and hawing that "The Ashtray" by Anton Chekhov is, for me, the most influential piece of short fiction that has never been written. That's right: as the story goes, one Vladimir Korolenko, a fellow Russian, fellow writer, and fellow for fun, once asked Chekhov how he wrote his stories. Whereupon the writer of slightly more stature picked up an ashtray that happened to be lying about and proclaimed he would write a story about it by the next morning. To the best of my knowledge he never did.

Much pleasure can be derived merely from speculation on what this story could have been like. Chekhov was a true master who was capable of writing just about anything, from the aptly-named "Misery", to numerous humorous short stories, to love stories like "The Lady and the Little Dog". In what direction would he have taken this tale of such humble beginnings? What part would that ashtray play? (Somehow I imagine it being smashed against a wall or against a head -- then I remember the 5-pound alabaster ashtray that used to sit on our old front porch...) Would an ashtray -- I dare to say -- make any appearance at all? (Yes, definitely. The progenitor of the literary technique today known as "Chekhov's gun" would never needlessly obscure such an object.)

But also "The Ashtray" story -- or, rather the story of the story -- can serve as inspiration. Chekhov throughout his life produced hundreds of these little nuggets of fiction, these compact yet remarkably complete short stories. And, he would have us to believe, he did so hurriedly, perhaps with as much effort as was required to pick up that ashtray. Surviving manuscripts do paint a different picture -- one of a cash-strapped young man who nevertheless put great care and spit and polish and elbow grease into his work -- but I suppose the author's mere perception will do...

I assure you: though I have posted nothing on this blog for weeks, I have been endeavoring to add my own cocktail of industrious fluids to a series of short stories:

"The Acrobat" -- You've met him before, but I assure you he has changed. He is out of infancy, of course, and long past toddlerhood. Indeed, now he is in his awkward and pimply years -- if I had my druthers such people would not be allowed into polite society until (hopefully) past their affliction.

"Step on a Crack..." -- In the fine tradition of creating stories based on small aspects of folk culture, I have endeavored here to create a story about the old phrase "Step on a crack, break your mother's back". I have created a kind of idyllic 1950s town, wherein a group of three siblings will accidentally discover that the old ditty has some weight to it. Expect a trip to the hospital in a visit to dear old mother; expect a line of groaning moms, all suffering from the same mysterious affliction; expect the formation of a kind of "mothers league" who plan to combat the new plague by filling in all the cracks in the pavement of their town. I imagine it in the gentle, playful style of Roald Dahl's children's fiction.

"Foundling Father" -- Another cute-ish story, this one about a wheelchair-bound old man who is abandoned in front of an orphanage during the night while he sleeps. The orphanage takes him in and he finds a new and better life. I am not one for inspirational, but this will certainly be lighthearted...

"The Death March of Middleburg Heights" -- A semi-autobiographical piece that will detail a bizarre and furious argument I had with my sister, which spanned hours and a large chunk of our suburban neighborhood. I added "Middleburg Heights" to the title with the idea of creating a series of stories detailing the odder sides of suburbia. The name is both an in-joke -- Middleburg Heights is an actual place, near where we live -- and an appropriate moniker for a typical "Every town" of the Midwestern United States.

"Henrietta" -- This is another in the bizarre suburbia vein... detailing the fixation of one odd, reclusive old man on a certain blond-haired young girl. This one stresses the semi in semi-autobiographical -- though the truth is bizarre enough as it is...

So there you have it...

On the reading front, I am currently working through The Best American Humorous Short Stories: 43 Stories by 31 Authors. I just finished "Pigs is Pigs" by Ellis Parker Butler, a silly story about just how much it should cost to ship a pair of guinea pigs by train. Flannery, the agent at the local station, wants to charge the fee for livestock -- "pigs is pigs" after all. The owner of said pigs is pissed; so ensues a torrent of letter-writing and a lot of bureaucratic nonsense. Meanwhile, the animals do what they do best, and soon Flannery has thousands of "pigs" on his hands. An amusing story, it has elements of the playful mayhem brought on by seemingly innocuous events, found in stories like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and Too Many Mice. Disney even made a cartoon based on the story.

I hope to read a bunch of these short story collections, to expose myself to a variety of styles moods -- especially those that are not old and/or Russian...

The Acrobat (Part 1), by Abe Kurp

Note: Below I present to you approximately a thousand words, the beginnings of a short story I've been meaning to write since April. I have written little more than what you see below and I am not sure where this tale is going, but I have a good feeling about this. I'll keep chipping at it and hopefully end with David or something... Either way, I plan to play a little game: finish "The Acrobat" then read Lolita, then rewrite my story, hopefully with a whole new view on creepy.

About an hour has passed since first I took my seat. The clowns amused me with their antics, the juggler brought me to silence with his death-defying throwing of knives, and the elephants charged the crowd to roaring. But the roaring has died; now there are only a handful of conversations, scattered about the crowd like tiny pebbles on an old gravel road. Some of the torches at the perimeter have been extinguished, the tent is subdued and dark. The three rings at the center of the crowd are empty. Children seated near the entryways are peering over the railings, hoping to be the first to catch sight of the next act. I am quiet and content. I sit, amusing myself with contemplation of the various acts, amusing myself with speculation of what is to come next. The show, the pamphlet assures me, is approximately three hours long.

"Have you seen the popcorn vendor?" the man to my left asks suddenly. "I could really go for some popcorn but the damn vendor has gone and run off, it seems." I look at him silently: a fat pig of a man, red faced and sweating profusely, squeezed into his chair and his clothes in turn. He is my brother, Rudolph. "If you see him you will let me know of course; Arnie?"

"Yes, of course." My answer brings him a kind of satisfaction. He readjusts himself in his seat and continues talking with the man to his left. I return to amusing myself. After a few, tentative “ahs” and “ums” his monologue continues:

“To fly... It is the thing that people want more than anything else – even more than money.” There is a woman in the front row, far in front of us, wearing a purple pillbox hat and a white dress with purple polka dots. “Money can buy trampolines, flying machines, and paper wings, but even a billionaire is not a bird; even he cannot flit and flutter about like the commonest of sparrows.” A little girl in orange sits next to her. She has been making a nuisance of herself during the entirety of the show. “This does not keep him from trying. The man who owns this circus, for example, must desperately yearn for the sky.” During the juggling she was evidently bored; she was running about the section, grabbing and pulling at whatever she could find. An usher was forced to crawl under some bleachers to get at her, then escort her back to her seat. “Why else are they leaping, jumping, twirling – 10, 15, 20 feet off the ground?” This same usher – shortish, youngish, plumpish – is now standing and sweating in a corner near the door.

I look over at my brother. He is working himself into it now, adding gesticulation and flourish to his words. “Those lithe little creatures, in their little black and gold costumes; they jumped, leaped, soared – up, up, up – but always they came back – down, down, down." With each "up" he pushes his right hand higher into the air; with each "down" he throws it down, closer to the head of the man in front of him. His high and strained voice, made worse by his excitement, carries its notes to the entire section, but no one makes an open protest; everyone tries to ignore him. This approach has already failed them. “Flying... It is useless, really – not even worth the effort...”

He suddenly becomes subdued. His hands fidget for a time, then flutter abruptly downward and come to rest on his gut. There is silence in our section. Rudolph has seemingly run out of things to say – he has finished his spiel in an abrupt and uncharacteristic way. Now, like a cat who is caught falling on its ass, he postures and primps in an effort to look cool, calm, collected. I can hear the gears – he's trying with all his might to pull forth a new topic for discussion. The man on his left – never much of a talker, a major draw for Rudolph – is staring downward, at the golden hair of the woman directly in front of him.

The crowd around us is quiet, like little squirrels in a big, big forest, afraid of disturbing the ogre. Some minutes pass. I can hear his breathing soften, deepen – his inner state has calmed to the state of his outer appearance. I wish I knew what he was thinking: I have a feeling it would make me laugh. He scratches his head incessantly – an itch has been bothering him for over a week, which he has never failed to mention. He bites at his already apple red lips. He favors the bottom lip; it looks several weeks riper than the top one.

A middle-aged couple – man and wife, apparently – have bravely struck up a conversation two rows in front of ours. I smile when I look at them. They are middle aged, neither more than fifty, with full heads of mostly-brown hair. They are not so old, yet it seems like they have been married forever – they even resemble each other. They amuse me, too, because they are brave. This old married couple – cute, short, and presumably kind – have accomplished what I have never had the courage to do.

Their talking opens the flood gates: soon there are two conversations in our section, then three, then six, and so on. It happens so quickly, Rudolph is bewildered and further stunned into silence. I watch him with the corner of my eye. He is bewildered – now fidgeting with his belt buckle, now looking anxiously over at the man on his left, now returning to his imaginary itch.

“Aha! The acrobats!” He practically shouts these words, excited, and anxious to halt the flow. He succeeds only in frightening a little girl in front of me, who had just begun to speak. “The acrobats were beautiful... But still, I wonder, what will come next?” The man on his left says nothing. “I wonder... when they will be ready. Isn't it getting awfully late, indeed?” He looks down at his wrist, before realizing he has misplaced his watch.

“Say, Arnie.” I am his last resort for a conversation partner. “Have you seen that vendor yet?” I open my mouth as if to speak, but he keeps talking. “Of course; you haven't.” I have. "I haven't either, and, as you know, I have these wonderful super hero eyes. Like Superman.” He laughs: “Ha. Ha.” two short, moderately loud bursts.

The sound of trumpets is blasted about the air; Rudolph's mirthless monosyllable still jingle in my ears. Everyone is brought to silence. There is some commotion at the entrance on the other end of the tent, directly across from us. Five or six employees mill about the entrance; the crowd is a buzzing blanket of whispers, punctuated here and there by a shout.

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
From the author's note to the second edition:

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great importance. For them Hazel Motes' integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to.

You can run but you can't hide. Lord knows, Hazel Motes tried. Haze came from a long line of southern preachers, and he had, it seems, every intention of falling in line. But something between boyhood and the place where we first meet him -- on a green plush train seat headed home from the war -- he lost his faith. That's an oversimplification; he lost his belief in redemption -- in the need for it. So, it simply follows, that he lost his faith in Christ.

That is a lie. Hazel Motes, to the day he died, never stopped believing in Christ. He runs from the "ragged figure who moves from tree to tree" -- this is a book about that running -- but, in an ironic twist that only God could cook up, his efforts to push away only bring him closer. He goes to see a prostitute and she mistakes him for a preacher -- a common occurrence throughout. He forces himself to seduce a 15-year-old girl, Sabbath Lily Hawks -- one day he says something to the effect of "Gee, I really ought to seduce that girl" and writes her a crude note -- but her vigorous affirmative response throws him off. Whereas he is forcing himself into sin, to prove a theological point, she seems to revel in sin for sins' own sake. Nevertheless, he goes through with his plans of "seduction" and his ultimate redemption comes rather dramatically: he blinds himself with quicklime.

This book is preoccupied with the sensation of sight. Why, even the name, "Hazel Motes"..."mote", literally a speck or particle, is familiar through Mathew 7:3 "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" And the character is sometimes called Haze, which is both an Army-like nickname for concealing the girlish "Hazel" and a synonym for fog. Then there is Sabbath's father...we learn through a newspaper clipping that he tried to blind himself in the name of the Lord, as a public spectacle. A second article proclaims that he chickened out.

From a relatively simplistic perspective, Wise Blood can be seen as one in a line of novels in the Southern Gothic style -- that peculiarly American branch of the Gothic novel that used the grotesque, ironic, and odd to explore deep issues of politics, society, and *surprise* religion. At the fore of this view is the character Enoch Emery (there are some great names in this book), whose ridiculous adventures replicate -- in a grotesque, minstrel show way -- the inner struggles of Hazel. He dresses in bright, day-glow suits; he steals a primitive human mummy from a museum, perhaps perceiving it to be the "new Christ"; and finally, he overtakes a man in a gorilla costume and takes his place. Enoch is the leader of a parade of ridiculous characters, who all jump into Haze's life and quickly jump out again. There is Sabbath and her father (reminiscent of Paper Moon); there is the prostitute; there is a con artist who hijacks Haze's soapbox preaching for a money-making scheme; there is the doppelgänger Hazel that the conman uses in Haze's places (Hazel later kills him with his car); there is the cop who pushes Haze's car off a cliff, smiling; there is even the car, the Essex. Haze and his Essex go through a lot -- it is his home, his soapbox, even his murder weapon; a number of essays have been written about their relationship.

Is this a book of despair? In my mind, not at all. Why, it ends how you would expect any good Christian work to end: with the man finally meeting his maker. Seeing the way so many Christians act towards death, one may be lead to believe it's a bad thing. Life may be absurd, and death even moreso, but please don't despair. This is not a book about, in, or on despair...At times it seems even comical: it brings to my mind a particular type of cheesy religious illustration, depicting ordinary people at their lives while Jesus looks on helpfully. Well, Hazel simply never bothered to turn his head -- in fact, he obstinately refused. There is a kind of pitiful irony to the fact that the only character who claims to reject Christ is the only one who truly believes.

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Comics: Are You WEIRD too?

I suppose I could have chosen any number of comic strips I actually like for this post, but that's not the kinda guy I am. No, I'm the type of guy who stumbles onto some random piece of junk and then can't get it out of his mind. I mean, just look at it (click on the image to the left to enlarge it). WEIRD? Well, are ya? Ya know, we're all a little wacky. We're all really original. Just like snow flakes, finger prints and the shoes we wear. Here's an idea: let's chalk up relatively minor variation to some deep and powerful uniqueness...that we all share.

"There are people who cry when they hear folk music, no matter what."
"There are people who talk to themselves and learn a lot from the conversation."
"There are people who enjoy peanut butter banana bacon sandwiches and always will."
There are people who like to be strangled while dressed in zebra costumes. There are people who get off from the smell of farts. There are people who think they're dogs. Weird? You could be weirder. Get to it!

*pause for laughter*

Aside from the little foray above, my experience with comics lately has been a very positive, reassuring one. There is just so much good shit out there -- I try to sample a bit of everything. Since reading my first graphic novel in late 2008, I have only read a bit over fifty of 'em, but things have started to pick up lately. I published "A Trio of Graphic Novel Reviews" last month and it looks like I could use another in the same vein very soon.

Most eye-opening has been the experience of reading the Best American Comics series -- specifically the installments for 2007, 2008, and (working on) 2009. An excerpt from my review of a similar collection, Flight, sums up this series admirably: "No doubt these authors are... the up-and-coming stars of "underground comics" (that are not especially underground), mixed in with some chaff for good measure." You know the drill: wade through a few comics about the author's cat or that wacky girl he just met; wade through the half-baked stuff that passes for art, next to the half-baked stuff that passes for writing. You will find some gems.

Case in point: Kaz's Underworld. The strip follows characters like "Creep Rat" and "Sam Snuff" and appears regularly in alternative weeklies about the US -- it's the kind of strip that has a "hate mail" section on its website. And it beats the pants off of Derf's The City (though Derf wins in the pseudonym department). I hesitate to place a sampling here on account of imposing legalese, but you can see a few dozen strips in the site's "archive section". It has quickly found itself a place in my heart next to xkcd and Calvin and Hobbes.

Also....I have long understood the magic of both piracy and comics. But, boy, imagine what happens when you put them together! The '00s have seen the emergence of legitimate online comics, from the small-time webcomic operations of the hopeful dreamers, to the larger undertakings of the big boys in the comics world. And with the rise of the legitimate...

Today --right now-- you can find just about any comic you're looking for, online. Now, I'm not the one to rampantly steal; I live by the maxim that stealing sparingly is okay. If want to read The Walking Dead -- the break-out zombie series with a soul -- and no issues have crossed my path; if the library is all out of copies of Ghost World; heck, if I have a sudden urge to read Conan or something similar, the Internet welcomes me with open arms. I'd love to take a closer look at the books on lists like the CBR's top 100 of 2009, or else more general lists like the A.V. Club's best of the '00s. Then...well, I suppose I can investigate some legitimate, public domain stuff from sites like Golden Age Comics.

Also...I must relate the story of Erik Martin, a 13-year-old kid with liver cancer who "always wanted to be a super hero." Well, since he's dying and all, the Make a Wish foundation decided to make it happen. So, they hired a bunch of surely under-worked actors to pose as 1) Spider-Man 2) "Dr. Dark" 3) "Blackout Boy". Turns out the Seattle Sounders, the local soccer team, got themselves locked in their locker room. It was all up to "Electron Boy" to drive to the stadium -- in a Dolorean! -- wave his hands and make it all right... The Seattle Times covered the event, and there's also a short clip from CNN on Youtube. Watch the clip. Honestly, watching a bewildered, speechless, spandex-clad kid get dragged around by over-enthusiastic adults is a wee bit depressing. But-- his genuinely enthusiastic response at the very end of the clip made the whole thing seem worthwhile.

(Before I go I have to mention "Child Bankrupts Make-A-Wish Foundation With Wish". I thought it was genuine for longer than I care to admit -- then I found it hilarious.)