When I first got wind of something called 'flash fiction', I had to ask about to find out what it was. The Republic is a backward sort of place when it comes to what is fashionable in New York.
In case my readers are no more trendy than I, let me explain: flash fiction is a new fad designed for the dumb who write with their thumbs. Short, very short, even exiguous 'stories' a few lines long. They've sprouted like weeds, get distributed on the Net and sent to all and sundry like so much literary spam. I have been sent several score in the last week alone.
This would not matter had it not been brought to my attention that our Contributing Editor, James Wood, had written in praise of someone called Lydia Davis. I could not check this out, for I do not subscribe the The New Yorker. I used to, but my copies never arrived. Supposing the report to be true, and knowing James, I have to believe the woman has something going for her. And if she doesn't, it is also true that any critic can have his idiosyncrasies, and if you're as good a reader and as thoughtful a critic as Mr. Wood, so be it. After all, there are people who think Alberto Manguel is Hot Stuff.
Now it turns out that Harper's -- once a solid, even stollid magazine -- has published some FF. I read but one, so banal and inane I had to read its 40 words or so several times to see if it did not contain a coded message of great import. No, it didn't. It was what it appeared to be: boy, girl, two kids and the perfect life.
I think this form has great potentiality for porn. You read it here first. Flash Porn. I offer the first (though not to Harper's):
He didn't know where to put it. He tried a flower poet; it broke. The mare bolted. Then came Amanda.
I particularly like the double entendre in Amanda coming.
As any fifty pieces of this rubbish could be written in an hour and sent --for instance to the once rigorous Farrar, Strauss & Giroux -- let the Creative Imagination flow freely! There's nothing difficult about writing. Or flashing. Whether you open the mental, or the trouser zip.
Oh no! Not you, James!
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Lahti
7 months ago
awe dammit, now I gotta defend The Miniature.
ReplyDeleteI must defend this short form. The task of The Miniature requires the writer to embrace brevity and the sentence as tools for construction while rigorously redefining pacing rules and expectations of the reader. ( Simic can really kill at this form, as can Diane Williams and the aforementioned Lydia Davis.) But, the absolute origin of this short form, the Pensée, allows for major linguistic moves to define and redefine a situation to inspire or bring the reader to an objective correlative. Where poetry requires form, function, sound, and sense, the miniature requires characters, situation, shift and narrative design. The terms: concrete prose, short short, flash, prose poem, condensed sentence fit (fytte), or pensée, allow for critics to kill the idea dead by merely pointing out the difficult assigning of each to its example. To be clear; concrete prose often applies the rules of strunk&white to the utmost, short shorts keep below 500 words, flash fiction resolves quickly, prose poems expose in block form with 'prose', condensed sentence fit (fytte) is something I just made up, and pensées lead one to a thought from a putting down of thoughts, or can lead one to many thoughts from one thought--more often the case in all singular things with us.
Defending The Miniature is admirable, and were I to truly throw myself into a defense I'd need more than a few hundred pages to show how important The MIniature has been in developing and killing and reliving and rebirthing and killing the novel. But, I'd need some sort of advance to keep me at the coffee and apples for a duration. Many, many, many people have failed and published their miniatures in the nation's leading magazines.
I tried.