"Whales," by Sergey Ryzhov

A Twentieth-Century prose writer prancing about in Twenty-First Century hyperspace

By Alan Cheuse

I grew up as a reader—and writer— long lines, on the Homeric epics, and long stories, in Chaucer, Boccacio, and the English and Spanish and French and Italian and Russian and American novels… But with many— or most? You tell me— heads atwitter with short takes, Twittering, emailing, sounding brief bursts of language that say something about the subject at hand but only barely…Not the way a haiku speaks of a minute object in nature… — who knows how long it will be for readers such as yours truly, and his cohort, will find ourselves outpaced in the long run by tiny joggers of the momentary…

Though when rereading some early American writers I find that they made the short burst part of national literary repertoire… Emerson certainly did, with his epigrammatic sentences, in which a world is born and burst in each line… and in Melville, whose great triumph is making in his masterpiece Moby Dick a long book out of a hundred and thirty five short chapters— some even by today’s standards deserving to be called short story— we see an American genius— and readers who tie-in to his genius— who works in the short-haul to create a long-haul masterpiece…

Culture moves ahead not simply by moving forward… Writers look back to the tradition. Rereading Moby-Dick in this cold season I find it a heady work, with its short chapters made up of language and images so intoxicating I can only sip it rather than gulp it down… I am rereading it, because I want to make a new short story based one of its elements…
Pray for me, pray for the future…

A Dinosaur in Electroland

The Green Parakeet’s Tale