Installment 1: (Jacob Gibson) Peter the OCD Poltergeist organized the silverware alphabetically and then by size. He couldn't help but straighten up after the disgusting college kids whose dorm he was forced to haunt.
Installment 2: (Mike Gordon)
But Peter the OCD Poltergeist didn't know that the silverware was haunted too! Glenda the Ghost moved it all back from whence it came: the girls dorm.
Installment 3: (Madeline Hall)
Long ago where the girls dorm lay was a grand castle. It was filled with riches of all sorts, including the precious silverware that Glenda cared for so much in life.
Installment 4: (Jon Hammond)
Glenda noticed the silverware patterns to be exact replicas of the tattoo on her ankle that she hid beneath her many styles of colored socks.
Installment 5: (Sam Hill)
The spinach was all that was left of the djinn. His laughter
having subsided, the boy picked up the dirty spinach, threw it away, and went
home to bed.
"We've lost him. said the doctor, "He was disconnected too long." His family sobbed. The Twitter outage death toll climbed higher" This is a tiny story from the twitter page Very Short Story. I'm glad that you had us look at this twitter page as the only other tiny story I can think of is Ernest Hemingway's six word short story about the baby shoes for sale.
My only other tiny short story experience was when my older brother showed me a subreddit dedicated to writing two sentence horror stories. We brainstormed a few, becoming more and more impressed with the few that we had already seen posted, our best ideas turning out to be only mildly creepy with a hint of stupid.
The point is, I love telling stories, especially writing them into short stories, novellas, or full-length novels. But the idea of writing a story with a distinct beginning, middle, and end in under thirty words was definitely a challenge. It helped to be able to create images to go along with our stories, since imagery is half the battle. I really struggled with trying to make my installments stand out. I didn't want to just barf out the first story that came to my mind, so I usually tried to find one defining aspect from the installment before mine to really help me come up with ideas.
I will admit that the format of the project was the cause for some difficulty; confusion, problems with messaging through Learningsuite, and mixing up of installments definitely seemed to be a problem. I noticed that some of the installments I worked on had similar characters to other series, and I wondered if in our creative process, we all kind of blended our stories together. An interesting, if perhaps unintended consequence.
With a little tweaking, I think this exercise could be a fantastic group project. Already it was a lot of fun to see what people came up with, and to wonder what came before to cause such interesting story ideas.
In paragraph sixteen of Seeing, an essay by Annie Dillard, she speaks of clouds that are completely invisible when looking in the sky, but are visible when looking in the reflection of the water. Much like those clouds, the world we live in can be invisible in its beauty.
As human beings, we have a desire to build things. To take seemingly random ingredients and assemble them in such a way that is either useful, or beautiful. This process is an undeniably human trait.
While preparing for this assignment, I was building a set of Lord of the Rings LEGOs I had just received in the mail. One of the minifigures that I received for the set was intricately detailed. The print that it had on the back and front of its torso was beautifully done, and I marveled at the quality of workmanship from this minifigure, a workmanship that is now much higher than when I played with LEGOs as a child. But the character also came with a cape, and a long brown beard. Once I had put together the minifigure, I noticed that very little of the detailed printing remained visible.
It amazed me that LEGO even bothered to add that level of detail when it knew that the beard and cape were an integral part of the minifigure, and would not be complete without them. The designer knew that his work would be covered in the end.
The adolescent in me would be very proud of what happened next. In choosing the song for this project, I came across an instrumental song entitled Demian by the Folk Pop band "Hey Marseilles." A morose song filled with low tones from a Cello, lending a heaviness to the piece, juxtaposed with the light high notes of a Piano. In the roughly 2 and a half minute song, we are taken on a journey that reminded me much of our current topic, and the LEGOs I was building.
The song promises a path of darkness and loneliness. One with melancholy and regret. But in between these heavy chords, the sound of a Viola pops through. At exactly two minutes, the tone of the song changes though the atmosphere does not. The Cello goes from the dominant instrument, to one tamed by the gentleness of the Piano.
But still that LEGO minifigure invaded my mind. There are layers in art. A true reflection of life if there ever was one. There is the obvious first glance of a work of art. This is when we notice the glaring details, though we miss the soul of the work. It isn't until later, when we sift past the attention seeking Cellos that the Piano is allowed to ring true. So it is with art, and the LEGO minifigure.
In creating the pieces presented in this blog, I really tried to capture the essence of this idea. That beauty is deeper than first glance, that sometimes it must be reflected in another medium unfamiliar to us. Naturally I chose LEGOs to frame these photos, feeling it appropriate given my thought process.
I used my own home, or campus as a setting for these photos, desiring to use something I was familiar with to add the necessary layers I felt were necessary. Hoping to have the excitement and fantasy of the LEGOs emphasize the beauty that can be had, but so often go unnoticed in settings we often frequent.
I feel it necessary to add that I am not a photographer. I say this not out of a need to forgive my photos (though granted several are of less than savory quality), but I feel the need because at times the camera captured something I did not intend. Like the photo above; I tried desperately to have the foreground and the background in focus, and on my tiny LCD screen on my camera, the background looked like it had been in focus. It wasn't until I was picking which photos would work for this project that I noticed with chagrin that the background was out of focus. But that didn't stop me from trying to find meaning, and I did. This is a view from my bedroom window. It isn't a view that would be featured in a magazine, but for the static nature of my bedroom, it is a beautiful view to be enjoyed. The fact that it is slightly out of focus may be a testament to my lack of talent as a photographer, but I believe it can be interpreted as a reflection of how I feel about my surroundings.
The Cello may be beautiful with its deep tones, but there is so much more than what we see on the surface. Even if what we see is represented in a poor manner (like the photo above). We try and see things for their intent and purpose, looking past weaknesses and ignoring the crumbs on the carpet in need of being vacuumed.
I wish I had manual focus on my camera, but that's okay. I chose the minifigure of Boromir as the subject of these last few photos because of the kind of person he represents in the Lord of the Rings. He may have had the best of intentions, but his single-mindedness was what destroyed him in the end. Seeing is important when viewing art, and when experiencing life. If we don't look past the surface and try to see things for what they really are, we stand to risk missing out on the invisible clouds above us, the subtlety of the Viola, and the details of a LEGO minifigure.
So enjoy this song; listen to it a few times, but really try and let it seep in.
A few years ago I was going through a $5 bin of DVDs at Walmart when I found one of my favorite childhood films, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. I bought it on a whim, excited to watch a movie I hadn't seen in years, hoping that it had retained its watchability, though I wasn't optimistic. Luckily I loved every moment of it. I loved the action, impressed with the men in the costumes skateboarding and fighting believably, and I even loved the campy humor and terrible puns. But the point of this article isn't to justify my almost biannual screening of this movie, it is to talk about the message in this movie that surprised me while watching it for the first time as an adult.
We know that in the mythology of the Ninja Turtles, four baby turtles were exposed to a green ooze that spilled into the sewer, mutating them into half human half turtle organisms. A man nick-named Splinter, was also exposed to the ooze, and he himself was mutated into a huge sewer rat. This is a kid’s movie, and they could have glossed over the details about their creation, but instead the movie makers decide to make their mutated nature the main message of the movie. A cautionary tale about genetic modification.
When I watched Ninja Turtles, I had recently read several fascinating articles about a genetic modification experiment gone wrong. The French call it the “Killer Algae” (Johnson), and the website where I originally found the article calls it “The Mutant Killer Seaweed of Doom” (Solensky). Either way, it is not a B-Movie villain from the 30s, but a genetically modified seaweed developed in Germany. This mutant killer seaweed known as Caulerpa taxifolia. is known for its large green fern like fronds, a toxin it releases that prevents fish from eating it, and it growing an average of three inches per day. It was exactly what the aquarium needed, and was immediately used in all of the tanks. It seemed perfect.
But all that needed to happen to ruin everything, was for a piece of the plant the size of a fingernail getting flushed down the toilet to create the thousands of acres of Caulerpa fields that now exist on the floor of the Mediterranean Ocean (Johnson). It grows so quickly, that before anyone could do anything about it, it had grown over other plants, and had effectively taken over thousands of acres of the ocean. Because of the degrading effect this seaweed has had on tourism through scuba diving, the fishing industry, and natural wildlife in the Mediterranean, when pieces appeared off the San Diego coast the mutant seaweed was met with being covered in tarps and then chlorinated to achieve total destruction. This incident not only proves how little we know about genetic modification, but shows the kind of impact one failure can have on the environment, the kind of failure that results in the destruction of many plants and animals on the seafloor.
With this article fresh on my mind, imagine my surprise at the message this children’s movie told. The movie concentrates on the problems caused by a company called TGRI, or Techno Global Research Industries, and how in an effort to clean up their public image, they are cleaning up the sites where they dumped an ooze known for genetically modifying organisms. The huge corporate disposal attracts the attention of master Splinter who raised the turtles and trained them to be ninjas, but the ooze also attracts their enemies.
In my research for this article, I found an article in an African business magazine where Stuart Price wrote about the dangers of GM crops, in it he writes about the unpredictability of genetic modification. He says that many times, the companies that produce these GM crops make it seem like they know exactly what they are doing, when in reality in the process of genetically modifying an organism, “you get lots of weird and wonderful versions. These are normally just thrown out and ignored” (Price 16).
In the Ninja Turtles, the Shredder (the main bad guy and arch nemesis of the Turtles), uses the mutating ooze to transform a wolf and snapping turtle into huge monsters. His intention is to use these monsters to draw out the Turtles and destroy them. Unfortunately he realizes that the monsters are babies and he wants to toss them aside, thinking them useless, much like many failed genetic modification experiments that Price mentions. It isn't until he sees the destruction they can still cause (witnessing them knock down telephone poles and turn over cars), that he begins to see their value.
Stuart Price explains in the article already referenced, about what the dangers of genetic modification could be, “...GM crops have a much higher probability of containing mutations of the genome....These may have consequences, such as the production of toxins, which could take years to manifest themselves as harmful to consumers” (16). The important thing we need to remember about the introduction of a GM organism into the environment is that there is no going back. Once those genetic properties are outside of the lab, their effects will be felt for generations (16).
My love for the Ninja Turtles has never faltered. I follow the new animated series on Nickelodeon, have and regularly watch several of their movies, and even have a Ninja Turtles LEGO set that I display in my bedroom. For all of the early nineties awesomeness, and awesome terribleness (a brief cameo by Vanilla Ice), this movie and this franchise in general isn’t trying to be anything it’s not; lots of fun and lots of action. But we can learn something from this movie, and should listen to the message it contains, and remember that while the benefits of the genetic modification of organisms are vast (the Ninja Turtles definitely being a value to justice in New York), the side effects which will certainly happen, could undo all of that.
Johnson, Christina S. "KILLER ALGAE FOUND!!" California Sea Grant Home. University of
California, San Diego, 12 May 2002. Web. 30 May 2011.
Solensky, Richard. "Mutant Killer Seaweed of Doom." Damn Interesting. Alan Bellows, 25 Jan.
2008. Web. 25 May 2011.
Stuart Price. "Danger! The hidden perils of GM crops. " African Business, 1 Dec. 2004:
