Home Run: A Video And Story In A Single Sentence
HOME Run is a project.
In this Single Sentence Animation for Electric Literature, Ilana Simons animates Home Run by Steven Millhauser. Voice by Mark Decarlo. Single Sentence Animations are creative collaborations. The writer selects a favourite sentence from his or her work and the animator creates a short animation in response. Except in this case, wherein the entire story is one sentence.
Halimah Marcus has more:
I’m hard-pressed to think of another story without a downside. In literature, if there’s a happy memory it’s framed by death or heartbreak. If there’s a description of natural beauty it’s cut with the viewer’s inability to posses that beauty, to make it last. A home run, on the other hand, is a triumph that can be shared, an unadulterated success that makes us forget ourselves for as long as the ball is in flight.
And yet what “Home Run” celebrates is more than our national pastime—it celebrates language. Fitting for a sport that has spawned dozens of idioms, from bush-league to wheelhouse. The Boston Globe recently called the sport “America’s preferred metaphor,” H.L. Mencken’s The American Language contains an entire section on “Baseball-American,” and there’s even a TED talk (given by my high school English teacher) on replacing baseball as our go-to sexual metaphor.
And thus “Home Run” is written in another language, one that honors an American tradition while dipping playfully into satire.
With nary a punctuation mark other than a comma, Millhauser builds momentum like the titular home run—the linguistic equivalent of bated breath, of rally towels, of screaming from your seat, of going, going, gone.
Talk about a moon shot.
Posted: 8th, November 2013 | In: Sports, The Consumer Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
