This isn’t new or anything, but I thought I would share it with you guys. Now let’s see if I get this YouTube thing right.
john ain’t got no office job
Soup Boy Ain’t Got No Office Job
5
A Tough Old Bird
This morning I heard the rap-tap-tapping, but I did not realize it was at my door. It was a little more tentative than the average door-knock. Then my phone rang. The gang was gathered on my landing, collecting me for our big meeting with the landlord. The purpose of this meeting: getting some paperwork signed that is a step toward solidifying my legal status on the continent.
There is a lot of fear running around the ex-pat community right now, as Europe tightens its immigration rules and steps up enforcement. Neither Soup Boy nor I are particularly worried about that, but we each have our reasons for wanting to be more compliant. I want to cross borders without worry, and he wants to be able to work for bigger clients who are more of a stickler for paperwork. Soup Boy found a guy who helps people in our situation for a very reasonable fee, but he had one sticking point. He needed a business address. Strangely, this was difficult for him to come by, but when he realized that I would soon be in the same boat, we worked out that we could both use my address. The only catch: the building owner has to sign a document. I didn’t anticipate that my landlord, Otakar Ptáček (rhymes with little bird), would have a problem with that.
MaK made the calls and we set up a meeting. It turns out that Otakar has transferred ownership to his daughter, so it is lucky indeed that she is visiting from the Unites States right now. Papers in hand we trooped into the landlord’s home, directly below mine.
Otakar did not get up to greet us. He sat in his favorite chair, a tissue pressed up against his nose. He had a nosebleed. Not just a little thing, but a big ol’ nosebleed that had been going on for two hours. His medication had changed recently, which may or may not have been a contributor. Still, we forged ahead with the meeting, making our way through documents that, while simple, carried just enough ambiguity to cause errors. As with every czech transaction, there must first come a lengthy discussion of the task and it’s reflection on the world as a whole.
Then Otakar started hacking and spitting blood. There was talk of an ambulance and hospital, but Otakar insisted that if he was going to see the doctor he would drive. His coughing subsided and some semblance of normalcy prevailed. We continued to wrestle with the documents.
Finally we were as done as we were going to get (there was a search for an ID number that had Otakar up and moving furniture), and it was time to go. Otakar was back in his chair, looking small, a new tissue over his nose.
I later met with the Visa consultant, and because Soup Boy managed to put together a group, we got a pretty deep discount. Not only that, but much of the haze of confusion about the whole process has been lifted. It almost seems possible, now.
It Goes Without Saying
Last night I set up the new home for the novel It Goes Without Saying, the latest masterpiece by promising young author Edgar Pildrot. What? You’ve never heard of him? Not a surprise, I suppose, as his epic has not been published yet. It hasn’t even been written, in fact. That’s where you come in. That’s right, dear reader, you can be Edgar Pildrot — or at least a part of him. Chapter 5 is under way, Damien and Alice are on the run from mysterious people dressed all in black, and the only thing that’s missing is what happens next. It could be anything, but it will likely be a bit odd.
If you would like to have a hand in determining the fate of our heroes, pop on over and sign up! (Or, just ask me nicely and I’ll create your account.) Once I’ve given you book-authoring powers, you will be able to add your own two cents to the embryonic novel. There are only two rules: Never use the word ‘said’ and every alternative may only be used once.
Of course, even if you don’t want to participate directly, you are welcome to hang out, read along and heckle comment. Take a look!
The Bubbles! The Bubbles!
Yesterday was That Girl’s birthday, and although we are far apart I thought I would mark the day. I was at the Little Café Near Home and had the brilliant idea to order a bottle of bubbly. That Girl likes her bubbly.
Today I’m thinking that may not have been such a good idea. I awoke to that not-so-fresh feeling. OK, I feel lousy. Furry in head and tongue. This boy needs cheesy home fries!
He Remonstrated, She Demurred, and a Project was Born
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she prevaricated.
“Yes you do,” he blaxtophosed.
As I was writing that last episode, I got an idea. Ideas come in a wide range of flavors, and many of them are undercooked. I’m counting on you guys to make this idea fully-baked. I think there are enough regulars now to make something like this work. Group fiction. Silly group fiction, anchored on a bit of patently bad advice every writer hears at one point or another.
I propose two chapters of a novel, chapters five and ten. The writing should be reasonable but for one rule: no word for verbal utterance can be used more than once. By chapter five our otherwise-talented author, Edgar Pildrot, will be scraping the bottom of the barrel. By chapter ten he’ll be reduced to wild invention to paraphrase ‘said’. Wild invention, I think, is something this crowd could do well. Perhaps also we should include a rule that no character can be described the same way twice. Forget names, they would have been used up in chapter one. Just a thought.
I imagine this would be a perfect application of some sort of wiki thing. I’ll try to figure out how to host one of them (I welcome any guidance), but there’s also the question of the story. What do you guys think? Would you play? How much structure should be there at the start? An outline of the novel with a little more detail for the relevant chapters, or is that too much? There must be some structure; I wouldn’t want a bunch of fun sentences that didn’t follow. Or is continuity part of the challenge? I wouldn’t want to stifle you guys too much. Where’s the balance? I’m figuring the group would write chapter five first, then chapter 10. Kind of a vegetables-before-desert thing, only in this case the veggies are tasty, too.
We also need a good name for the project. My first instinct was Outrageous Dialog Project, but that misses the import of the dialog markers.
So four (wait, five) questions:
Do you want to join us and write silly dialog?
Do you have any idea how to make the project work?
How much of the story should be predefined?
What should the project be called?
Something else?
Please give your two cents in the comments below. I will interpret the sound of crickets chirping as an indication that the rest of you have actual “lives” and stuff, and don’t have time for such silliness. I’m not really sure how many participants it would take to hit that critical mass of fun.
He said, “said.”
Every once in a while you see advice for writers to lay off using the word “said” so much. When you read work by people who take this advice seriously, it shows. Characters who “exclaim” and “counter” and “blurt” when really all they’re doing is saying something is the mark of a writer who has forgotten their own experience reading. “The masters don’t use ‘said’ all the time,” I have heard people say.
Yes, they do. All the time. You just don’t see it. Good writers use those alternatives the way that quiet people use profanity. They are words for when you want to be noticed.
When I write (notice how by inference I am defining myself as a good writer — pretty sly, huh?), I use ‘said’ to resolve ambiguity about the speaker and to provide phrasing clues, to put in a narrative pause where the speaker is taking a breath. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that ‘said’ is not a word, but punctuation. I postulate here that in the cognition of written language, that ‘said’ is managed by some sort of pre-processor, an arrow pointing to the character speaking, and by the time the text reaches the active story-enjoyment centers of the brain, the word is gone, in its place is an understanding of the voice of the speaker. The times I most notice ‘said’ is when it’s missing and I’ve lost track of who is speaking.
Still, I often find myself using a similar crutch. I will supply business to change the reader’s focus to the correct speaker:
Beth fiddled with her glasses. “That’s weird.”
Joe nodded. “Yeah.
Ed picked his nose. “You guys are just paranoid.”
Business can be useful, if it enhances characterization. If it’s just to replace “said”, it’s just a bad as
“That’s weird,” Beth mumbled.
“Yeah,” Joe agreed.
“You guys are just paranoid,” Ed whined.
A special subset of the ‘don’t use said’ crowd is the ‘never use the same word for a verbal utterance twice’ bunch. This can lead to some truly comic writing. (In fact, that gives me an idea… stay tuned. You and we and all of us, we have a project.) Generally I use the “business trick” when I want to name the reader before the spoken words, which can be helpful. For some reason I resist the form “Beth said, ‘That’s weird.'” and so forth. Part of my prejudice I’ll defend on timing grounds; I generally use the device when I want to slow the pace of the conversation. Still, there’s a limit, so the advice here about the invisibility of ‘said’ is directed toward myself as much as toward anyone else.
Meanwhile, what a great sentence: “‘Yeah,’ Joe agreed.” As if ‘yeah’ could have any other meaning. What the heck, why stop there?
Joe nodded. “Yeah,” he concurred agreeably.
So what can we conclude? Ed will be second or third to fall to the Kabin Killer, allowing him screen time enough to really annoy us before we cheer his downfall. Beth will last a little longer; she will almost escape but will lose her glasses at the critical moment, the only point in the film where there is any doubt about the outcome. Finally Joe will be the one to discover the killer’s weakness but too late to save himself. His demise will be heroic, as he leaves the critical clue for the others to find. He will be the last male to die. That’s what a few well-placed nuances in the dialog will do for you.
Heisenberg’s Daughter
Actually, it was not my intention to go into Heisenberg and the Human Condition, but one of the things about an exercise like this is that I let ideas come. There was quite a bit more particle physics in the result, but it was ruining the original mood I was shooting for, so I pared it down. Mood, after all, is what a quick little blurb like this is all about. (Although on that scale this piece still isn’t that consistent.) Anyway, here it’s:
Heisesnberg’s Daughter
She may still be out there somewhere. I hear rumors now and then. Moscow, or Cape Town, or Jackson Hole. She’s the kind of person who could be in any of those places. She could be anywhere. Her potential is everywhere; I feel it every time I walk into a room. Maybe this will be the time I see her again. Until I scan the room, listen for her laugh, there is a very real part of her there with me. But she is never there; where I am is the only place in the world she’s not. Then I will hear someone mention they saw her at a bar in the Frankfurt airport, a flash of light and laughter, a drink and a smoke and a story, and for one brief moment she will have a location, before leaving to catch a flight to no specific place, just out there somewhere. It must be lonely to be a wave when the rest of us all act like particles.
Or, she may be dead. Perhaps it is Schroedinger I should be invoking. That’s my girl; both dead and alive, and everywhere all at once. Everywhere, of course, except here. I expect I’ll never see her again. I’ve told that to the police, but they’re not yet convinced.
“How can she just leave you after all that?” one detective asked me. I didn’t bother to answer. If he ever meets her he’ll undestand. She left the same way she arrived; without warning she appeared out of nowhere, then just as abruptly she was gone, leaving my little apartment quieter than it ever had been before — if you don’t count the explosion and the nearly-incessant visits by various sorts of law enforcement officers, and other, less savory inquisitors. The explosion was minor; it’s the police that are the most annoying. I tell them all the same thing. She’s gone. All she left behind was a faint scent of exotic perfume, a t-shirt that says “Bite Me – please”, and a single red Chuck Taylor low-top. I never saw her wearing the shoes, I suspect she had already left the other somewhere in her wake. The cops carefully bagged the shirt and the shoe, and took my trash with them for good measure. My favorite carving knife is missing, but I don’t think the police took it. Perhaps the shoe was meant as an exchange.
I didn’t tell them about the sunglasses. Cheap Ray-Ban ripoffs with tooth marks on the earpieces. She used them while driving, but she spent more time with them hanging out of her mouth than wearing them normally. There’s nothing special about the shades, no reason to withhold them except that they were mine before they were hers. The lenses are a bit scratched up, but I still wear them sometimes. When I do, I feel like a gangster.
The Blahs
It’s been going on for a while now. We all have our ups and downs. As emotional cycles go, mine tend to linger more in “up” territory, and the amplitude of my mood wave is fairly small. I’m a pretty steady guy. When I am feeling a little low, I’ll even nurse it, gravitating toward melancholy reading and letting it show in my writing. This last low spot has been, for whatever reason, different. The words, they have not come.
Saturday was a productive day, however, and I thought I was back on the upswing. Maybe I was. I could contemplate all the stuff I need to get done and decided that Sunday I’d hit the ground running and and least shift part of the mountain. I even wrote a bit of doggerel about it.
Nope. Sunday, the very giganticness of everything I needed to do lay on top of me like a ton of paper (heavier than a ton of lead), making it impossible to even sit up. (When I get the jers software hut email working again, it will be hours of work going through it all. And that’s just one fairly minor chore.) Complete paralysis. Knowing that I was failing in my resolve, that Jer’s Software Hut could be going down the toilet and I wouldn’t even know it, that I was missing deadlines, and so forth just added to the weight.
This is not like me. I blame global warming.
Today’s a little better, perhaps because I had to leave the house to eat. (Sunday’s fare: two slices of cheese and a can of pineapple slices. I should probably unplug the refrigerator.) I got a bit of writing done, the intro to a story I think I’ll post here so I don’t have to finish the story. I really do have a lot of better things to spend my writing time on.
Tomorrow
Here it comes…
I woke up this morning wondering just how many days has passed under the banner of February. Quite a few, I was certain. But fourteen? I hoped not.
The prospect of Valentines Day looms. That Girl assures me that for her That Day is not a perilous journey into the valley of despair in which man in certain of only one thing: It was not enough. It’s a holiday in which a guy could hire the Rolling Stones to play just for her in the corner of the four-star restaurant, and she would say, “I wanted the original drummer.” I don’t have any figures to back this up, but I’ll bet dollars to donuts that more couples break up on valentines day than any other day.
Once Jesse told me about a buddy of his that routinely broke up with his girlfriend before the day of horror, and reconnect after. I laughed at the time, but later I realized that the trauma of the disconnect-reconnect was miniscule compared to the failure on the big day.
Womenfolk out there, I can hear you now: “That’s not me.” Based on a fairly large sample, I regret to inform you that YES IT IS YOU. Ask yourself honestly, what would you say if your boyfriend/husband/other said, “Let’s not do valentines this year.” Wait, let me rephrase that. You would say “oh, that’s fine. I don’t like the whole obligatory show of affection anyway.” Then the day comes around and you discover to your horror that he meant it. “Not even a card? No flowers?” Valentines Day is a big, fat, hairy deal, and I hate it.
From a guy point of view, it’s a cynical chance to go nuts and hope to overcome all the little failures from the previous year. It’s like going to church only at Easter. Keeping the faith is an every-day thing. Observing the annual rites doesn’t make you a true believer.
Dudes, you want to be a good valentine? Give her love 368 days a year. That means love her every day, and go double (no big deal) on her birthday, valentines day, and one other day when she least suspects it. In fact, don’t hesitate to spontanify a few more of those special, unscheduled days. Those are the ones that will live forever in her heart. And screw those guys with their mass-market holidays. After a couple of years she’ll forgive your inferior valentines performance, and appreciate the other 364 days of the year.
Of course, this gives you the chance, around your 17th Valentines, to really blow her socks off. Oh, yeah, baby. Been setting it up all along.
Dead Girls
… if stories about technologically-altered humans can be considered old-fashioned. And if it was actually good.
This review kind of got away from me. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, you should at least check out the excerpts. I highlighted them to make them easier to find.
I wanted to like this book. I really did. I pulled it off of the shelf at John’s house (and, um, accidentally stole it), and the blurb on the back hooked me. It seems that at some point in the future, the art of doll-making has become a science, and the science of nanotechnology has become an art, and it’s pretty tough to tell dolls from people, sometimes.
The story opens with a guy on the run, a desperate dash for freedom, to be caught is to die. Ahead is the Mekong river, on the other side possible salvation. His pursuit, identical-twin killer hottie robots, are closing in. You can feel the tension, feel the fear. He’s almost home free, and then… he’s caught, agrees to go back, they don’t kill him, and the whole episode is filed under “always start your story with action.”
In this world, the greatest doll-maker of all time reaches so deeply into the esoteric world of quantum uncertainty that the result is more than human — and dangerous. Into this doll is built her creator’s deepest neuroses about the fairer sex. His creation has a few unexpected habits, like the desire to drink blood. In the process the doll passes nanomachines into the bitten one, and the victim’s female offspring will be rebuilt by the nanomachines until she herself is a doll, and no trace of humanity is left. They become Dead Girls
The dolls are a venereal disease. Parasites. When mankind is extinguished, the dolls will also die out. This turns the tale from a “man replaces himself” story to a “man finds an especially poetic way to exterminate himself” story. That’s a plus. The fleeting rise and fall of this other species, the dolls, adds to the poignancy. Intellectually the dolls know they should leave a few people uninfected. Unfortunately, even though their brains are machines, The dolls are a pretty emotional bunch.
With all that going for it, I wanted to like Dead Girls. It gets mired, at times, belaboring the fact that the dolls and their progeny are not truly alive, they are automata of incredible sophistication but in the end just machines. Most of them seem to accept this, and aren’t terribly bothered by dying. There are, however, exceptions, and one of those is Primavera. A question knocked about beneath the surface of the story is just what “alive” means, thought it is not addressed directly. But if the sincere wish not to die is a measure of sentient life, then Primavera (who has little regard for anyone else’s life) is most certainly alive herself.
Still, the book has its share of problems. For the first time ever while reading, I thought “Wow, I’ve got to remember this page for the review.” That’s not a good sign. Near the start I just had no idea what the hell was going on, and after a while the author cut me some slack and provided a badly contrived vehicle for filling in backstory. Dialog at the start is trying very hard to straddle the divide between speech by people who know full well what’s going on, but will be read by people with no idea. It’s not easy to do, and in Dead Girls, the writer doesn’t do a very good job of it.
The story is told in the first person by Primavera’s sidekick, himself not a terribly well-adjusted lad, the only (living) man infected by Primavera. Perhaps, in fact, it is he that makes Primavera unique; he has loved her since before her transformation, before the nanobots restructured her molecules. It is agreed by all that she is not able to love him back, but maybe… The narrative style can be over the top, but generally that’s OK if the story is written with an atmosphere of recollection, words carefully considered over time.
Then, suddenly, the story abruptly shifts to another point of view, also told in the first person. Umm… wha? This is all the more confusing because the voice doesn’t change. This isn’t narrator A faithfully recording what narrator B told him; there’s no sense of oral storytelling at all. It’s more like narrator B borrowed narrator A’s diary and wrote in the chapter. They have the same voice, like the two narrators are machines created in the same factory. Bugged the hell out of me.
The shift happened on page 111, a page that included this gem: “Each morning that summer the sun effervesced into my room like a champagne of lemonades.” No, context doesn’t make it better. He (not the usual ‘he’ but the suddenly-substituted ‘he’ of narrator B) was having a good summer. I’ll admit that if you ignore all meaning and just look at the sentence as a pile of pleasant words, that a certain glow is conveyed. But still…
It remains to be seen whether page 111 has taken me over a threshold, and changed the way I read. Will I now habitually note pages with especially outlandish language? Is that a bad thing?
Next on my memorized list of page numbers is 145, a page I fell asleep to twice (more due to circumstance, but still not a good sign), when our protagonists (including Primavera) are trapped inside Primavera’s mind. (Suddenly the doll’s cognitive ability can include multiple human minds as a subset. So much for assertions that the robot mind is inferior or fundamentally incompatible.) The dialog for the whole sequence is a series of quips and bon mots, but then there’s this:
This was dollspace. Machine consciousness. Impure, like all thought, but more massive than the consciousness of mankind, its constituents were psychons of iron, glass and steel, a neon-bright vortex of complex simplicity from which rose the aleatory music that so bewitched the world. Music that was solid, dimensional; music that was sinew, muscle, physique.
Actually, I’d like the last sentence in that excerpt, if it was referring to, say, Beethoven. It’s not, of course, and after the neon-bright vortex it was too late to rescue this paragraph. This was not the only mention of “complex simplicity”, an interesting idea lost in this simple complexity.
Finally, there was page 167, when Kito, herself a low-budget knockoff doll who seems uniquely imbued with a sense of self-preservation, has got the drop on people who are currently trying to zap her with energy weapons. Quips Kito in her pidgin English, “I wake up first. Take Duracell from gun.”…”Bad day for you when Smith and Wesson merge with Mattel…” That line right there almost redeemed the whole damn book. Almost. Someday I’m going to write a Dirty Harry across the 21st century movie and make Clint Eastwood say that line.
The book takes place in Southeast Asia, and it’s obvious the author knows the area well. (Well enough to convince me, anyway.) At the end there is death, and life, and a personal decision that may doom humanity. Good stuff. Then, right there at the bottom of this first-person narrative, the story closes with a tagline: “Nongkhai, 1991.” 1991? I thought the story was in the future… Oooohhh, that’s the real author breaking character, stepping out of voice just to tell us, “I was there, you know.” It’s a silly thing to do, but especially distracting in a first-person narrative when I imagine I’m reading someone’s diary or a personal account, which the narrator felt compelled to authenticate with a date. When the last two words of the story broke voice it was one last jab at my already-annoyed story-loving self.
I did not read the teaser for the sequel, Dead Boys.
Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle
I’m Still Here
So, while nobody’s actually come out and said “Hey! Blog, dammit!” I’ve had a few gentle prods lately reminding me that the blogosphere has been under-rambled lately. Sorry about that. The Media Empire is crumbling, and I am playing kazoo while MySpace clamors at the gates. (‘Clamors’ carefully chosen; I like to tell myself that the signal-to-noise ratio here, while dismal, is better than elsewhere. I am fighting a trend that finds signal to be a quaint ideal. Long live noise.)
Here’s the thing: I haven’t been saying much because I don’t have that much to say. While I was hanging with That Girl plenty of things happened, but they fell under the unbrella of None of Your Damn Business. [Type retained. Unbrella is a word that deserves to live.] Now I’m back in Prague, doing the same shit I’ve been doing for years now, and really if you want to know what I’m up to, the archives are there for you.
There have been a couple of developments worth noting, however.
My most rejected story has added to its legacy. Truly the Lou Gherig of rejection, this story is not finished yet.
That Girl sent me an email today that helped me up when I was down. I intend to reply to it before she reads this. Just so I can tell her personally first.
It’s still February, and I’ve already picked up the Most Awesome Birthday Present Ever. I intend to send a thank-you before the generous giver reads about it here. He gave me a vote, in a place that really matters, and made it clear that he thought I deserved that vote. Dang, that feels good.
Meanwhile, I’ve still been wrestling with the screenplay format. The biggest problem: No Rambling! I’ve been trying to pack my story into the required package and it’s been driving me crazy. Every time I want to tear my hair out and shout “It’s Impossible!” I think of The Usual Suspects. That’s a lot of story in the confined realm of the screenplay. How do they do it? A magnificent cast to turn a few words into an epic doesn’t hurt. Extensive voiceover by one of the best actors of our age doesn’t hurt. Then I realized… voiceover, quick-sliced action… the whole damn movie is a montage! (Any time you want a lot to happen in a little time, use a montage!)
Last year fuego and I got word through Charles 1th that there was a guy out in LA who had cash and wanted to make a movie. He was looking for a low-budget Usual Suspects. There are, as I write this, a thousand people trying to write the next Usual Suspects. Minimum. Suspects had some locations (burning freighters and stuff) but spent its main capital on director and cast. Still, it was the writing that brought all those people together. The stars bought into the script. kevin Spacey is brilliant, but the words come from somewhere else. It started with a script, and the entire industry is looking for the second coming.
So I look at that flick, and I wonder why I can’t achieve the same story density. It looks so easy there on the screen. What fuego and I did write was completely different, but actually rather good, and made to fly on a low budget. What if the mysterious powers that toss you around like a plaything are acting in your best interest? Makes you wish you’d payed more attention to the crazy lady next door, before she died on your sofa.
In the end, all my work with Dark War (with the help of fuego’s story-tellin’ flair) makes it more cinematic, more divorced from paper, and more trusting of skilled actors. But it’s still too damn long.
So, there’s that. Writing to constraints. It’s uncomfortable sometimes. Although that’s the biggest part of this post, it’s not the biggest contributor to my current state of mind. It’s just the one I’m most able to discuss. The rest of it — I’m not really sure.
Funding for NASA
If private industry could sponsor NASA projects for the naming rights, I bet the space boys could make some pretty good money. Candy companies would make particularly good candidates for sponsorship, what with Mars and Milky Way and so forth. The one I want to see? That’s right, you guessed it… the Double Bubble Hubble Space Telescope.
In Cold Blood
A rural Kansas family’s home is invaded. They are neatly tied up and then brutally executed with a shotgun. Police are stumped. There are few clues, and no apparent motive. Among the most baffling, and most difficult questions that everyone asks is, “What kind of person could do such a thing?”
In Cold Blood
This is not a whodunnit; in the first pages we learn the identities of the killers and we learn that they will be executed before it’s all over. The narrative starts with the last day the Clutter family is alive, and we quickly learn to like these people. Capote interviewed friends and witnesses extensively and we can feel the genuine affection the people had for the doomed family. Next, we meet the killers, two men who, at first glance, seem like normal, even likable guys. Not the kind of men who would shoot a teenage girl in the face with a shotgun. But that’s what they did, later that night.
Through the course of the investigation and the eventual trial, we learn more about these men, and about the men charged with tracking them down and later trying them. We learn about the town as well, and about the more intangible harm done to an entire community.
In the end, there’s no definitive answer to the fundamental question, no answer to what kind of people do things like this, just a recognition that those people exist. In the end the killers seemed to value their own lives as lightly as those of their victims. When Dick and Perry are hanged, there is no sense of catharsis, no sense of justice served. They may be gone, but the people who were affected by them will never be the same. They will never be able to forget that “people like that” exist.
I picked up the book mainly on the strength of the author’s name; Truman Capote is one of those I feel I should be familiar with as an American writer. His writing is clean and inconspicuous; he never uses fancy prose that might upstage his subjects. His conversational tone fits well with the straightforward speech of the people he is portraying. Based on this offering I can certainly agree that Capote was a good writer, but I didn’t see anything here that bumped him up to great. Maybe I’ll try Breakfast at Tiffany’s next.
Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle
A Bit of a Close One
As I approached the line to check in to my Aer Lingus scoot across the Atlantic, a petite asian woman in a blue uniform asked, rather loudly, “Anyone check bags?” I thought it an odd question, as I was joining a line of people hauling huge suitcases. She gestured in the direction of the express line, and my first thought was that she really meant “Anyone NOT checking bags?” Then I noticed the two small bags sitting untended at the entrance to the express lane. The woman hustled off to notify security.
OK, I knew that the bags were just the property of some doofus who had ignored the constant droning of the “don’t leave your bags unattended” messages, and had left their personal belongings lying around in Los Angeles. Still, as no one arrived to claim the bags, I couldn’t help but worry. Just how big a doofus was this? Did the doofus seriously expect to find his (or her, judging by the pink striped bag) belongings still there after ten minutes and more?
A security guy arrived, circled the bags at a distance like a shark assessing prey, then backed off and talked into his radio. Then nothing happened, followed by more nothing. Finally the guard approached again, closer this time, looking for a name tag on the bags. Then he backed away again, regarding them with some reluctance (“why do these things always happen on my shift?”). More time, another pass by the bags, closer, inspecting them longer.
So, I’m expecting someone to arrive with some sort of steel bin on wheels. In go the bags, and there’s nothing to see here, move along.
Nope. No other security personnel arrive, there is no other response. The security man on the scene went to a nearby information desk and there might have been an announcement over the PA about the luggage. (“Your attention please. mfflmfllffmflllf.”) Still no owner.
Finally, the doofus shows up. The security guy doesn’t even notice him for a time, until doofus stoops to put a name tag on one of the bags. Security guy talks to the doofus for a moment, and the guy is allowed to carry on with his carry-on luggage. Happily, not on my flight.
Note to people considering leaving bombs in airports. At LAX you have about half an hour to get away while the security people are paralyzed, unable to perform the very simple procedures explained over the PA every five minutes.
Finally, it was my turn to check in.
“When are you coming back?” the airline baggage-taking girl asked me, after typing in my passport number.
“I’m not sure,” I answered.
“You don’t have an itinerary or anything that shows when you’re leaving again?”
“Umm… no.”
“Are you staying more than three months?”
“No.” When she asked the question, that answer became the truth, providing I don’t have my visa by then.
She tapped some more keys, but didn’t look optimistic. “I’ll have to check,” she said, and took my passport and disappeared into the mysterious bowels of the Airport Beast. I waited, aware of the people in line behind me and mentally making contingency plans. It was early yet; I could buy a ticket to Croatia or back to the US and then check in. Airline Baggage-Taking Girl returned. “You’re all right,” she said. “But the immigration official might want to see proof that you can afford a return ticket.”
Man, I sure hope she’s right. By the time I’m able to post this I’ll have the answer.
Or not! Free WiFi in LAX! We already knew that Albuquerque was so civilized, but this is a pleasant surprise.
Or not not! RSS feeds work, but not http requests. eMail is right out. By the time you learn about my close call, the situation will be resolved.
***
In Dublin now – the passport guy didn’t run my passport through the computer at all. Maybe they’ll do that in Prague. Meanwhile it’s 10:00 and I’m enjoying a nice pint of Kilkenny. Yum!