Ah, those college days, when everything we learned seemed new, I remember that beloved Professor in the survey class, giving us a taste of the periods and genres of literature, the late 19th Century popular paper mags written at the level of proletarian readership willing to relinquish their few coins and pinched pennies for something they could read with unslaked avidity, serials with unending sequels, each ending with a cliff hanger, the authors paid by the word, understanding money, immediately took advantage.

Ten shots rang out!
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Then another three!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
He poked his victim to make sure.
Poke, poke.
Dead?
Dead?
All dead?
Completely dead?
No other possibility but dead?
How transitory is life!
Here today, gone tomorrow!
Or, in this case, gone today!
Just to make sure, he fired twelve more shots…


Not unrelated, from the same class and the same time period, I just can’t help mentioning it now that my memory has been awakened, the Professor, his students riveted, as we watched his mouth savor the words almost dripping off his chin,

“And the weekly periodicals, coming out daily, leaving the readers on the edge of their cliff hanger seats, eagerly thrusting hard-earned money for the next issue to see how the hero gets out of this.

“The author, under the editor’s injunction to “make it really good this time,” “so they gotta buy it to find out how he escapes the impossible,” “we’re printing extra copies, special edition, submit your text by midnight, the presses are ready to roll,” takes his bonus advance, goes to a pub to celebrate, drinks too much, jots down in an alcoholic haze all the impossible-to-get-out-of situations as the cliff hanger of all cliff hangers.

Our hero, shot through the heart, stabbed vitally in the back, his head severed from his body and placed in his lap, is sealed hermetically in an impenetrable capsule, his dismembered body resting on a bed of all things deadly and poisonous to humans, spiders, snakes, caterpillars of death, already injecting, the toothed maw of post-vitiate oblivion already swallowing up the remains of the former present, in a non-atmosphere of no air, oxygen-free and vacuum packed, the capsule lowered to the deepest depths of the deepest ocean, weighted and anchored, the cable released, rocks piled atop, whispered prayers unable to breach the surface…

The author submitted his scrawled copy just before midnight, went home, collapsed on his bed, and allowed himself the oblivion of drunken stupor.

Woke the next morning to the current copy hawked by newsboys, “How can our hero get out of this? Buy now, find out tomorrow!”

The author looks in horror at what he has written. “What have I done? Have I written myself into a corner? Is this at last the end of the long-running series of endless sequels, no way out, the end of my means of living and my literary career?”

But he is a professional.

The next chapter begins, “Our hero, having escaped from his impossible situation, now pursues his nemesis with renewed determination…”