Seven Imaginary Feasts by Lynette Dray

Posted with permission from Lynette Dray’s blog because it is so awesome I want the Weird Pudding members to read it.

The First Feast

The feast is held in a nautically-themed basement, somewhere in a distant and unedifying part of town. A reproduction of the last feast on the Titanic is served by a host of waiters in Pierre et Gilles sailor-boy costumes. As soon as the doors are closed, the noise of a tremendous rainstorm can be heard. A drip develops in the centre of the table. The first few courses are accompanied by the sounds of water trickling under the door.

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Tenth anniversary gifts

for Donna, of course

Ten seconds — a kiss.
Ten minutes — hands clasped tight.
Ten hours — warmth of our bodies nestled together.
Ten days — a watch to count the seconds when we must be apart.
Ten weeks — a secret joke only we two share.
Ten months — salt tears for the first grief we share.
Ten years — tin for a roof, and the rain tapping out I love you, I love you, I love you.
Ten thousand years  — a prayer for still more time with you.

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Peter Beagle Critique at BayCon 2010, Side A

“…a couple of good teachers in college who were able to affect my work, were able to make suggestions, were able to tell me ‘you really ought to abandon this one… it’s not salvageable,’ were somehow able to do it without ripping my guts out. They were brilliant at it. I still have every paper I wrote. This is the mid 1950s we’re talking about. I still have every paper I wrote for one particular teacher, not for what I wrote, but for his comments, and when he retired from the University of Pittsburg, some years ago, and I was asked to speak at his retirement ceremony, I figured, ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll bring some of those papers I wrote for Monty, and I’ll read the notes he wrote on them just in different places to give some example of what sort of teacher he was. And I’ll be the only one doing this. Well, there were three speakers ahead of me, all of them now professors themselves, and every one of them did the same thing. Every one of them had saved Monty’s notes, not for the things they’d written at 17 and 18, but for the way he criticized them. I don’t even pretend to be in that league. I’ll do the best I can.

But there is one thing that I want to state, and that’s… How many of you know an essay of Ursula LeGuin’s called “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”? It’s a paradoxically brilliant and undoubtedly cruel piece of writing because she was talking about the necessity of making your story feel as though it really is happening in another world of some sort, whether it’s a matter of time, space, or anything in between. She didn’t mean that everything has to sound like [inaudible] by Thomas Mallory. You don’t have to be “forsoothing” it all the time. But it should sound as though it’s happening somewhere else, somewhere the reader can follow. And she took dialogue – I won’t mention the writer – she took dialogue from one particular well-known writer that was supposed to be spoken by Tolkienesque elf-lords and put the dialogue into the mouths of a bunch of Congressmen coming down the Capital steps, and you couldn’t tell the difference. You couldn’t tell what it had been written for.

My particular pet peeve – that’s why I want to state it in advance – is dialogue that really does sound as though you can hear it on any street corner. Which is fine if you’re writing about the street corner, but not if you’re writing about someplace, as they used to say, someplace where people write with a feather. There was a movie theater years ago, I think in Nevada, where they always had Westerns – they liked Westerns, they expected the new Westerns double bill every Friday night. United Artists, a new distributor, for some reason began sending them great costume dramas. Great, sweeping MGM-style big-budget Virginia Mayo costume dramas until finally the manager of that one local theater wrote, “Dear Sir, Please do not send us no more movies where they write with a feather!”

If you want to evoke that kind of world, then it’s really sabotaging yourself not to pay attention to dialogue that should sound, that should echo, that should evoke, somehow, another place. Another world. I spend more time on that, probably, than anything else. I don’t want my characters saying “Zounds!” all the time, or “Forsooth,” or “God’s death!” or what the hell, but all the same I really spend time keeping them from sounding like those damn Congressmen coming down the steps on a bright, sunny Washington D.C. day. And in the entries here, the effect varies. Most of them – it’s interesting – even stories I don’t particularly like in this group, that I don’t think work, have a good central idea. All of them do, to one degree or another, whether it’s executed properly or not. There’s a story – I’m not sure how to do this; I’ll mention the story titles without going into the authors’ names.

There’s a story, “Lily by the Bay,” which has a great deal to do with – it takes place in California, and you’re not entirely clear which California it is. But let’s assume it’s a contemporary California. Its concern, more than anything else, is ecological. It begins with a prologue of hundreds of years earlier, which involves the Spaniards and the Indians that they have subdued and also diminished – or at least they think they have – and much of the following chapters take place in and around Palo Alto, which I used to know very well. The description of people concerned with ecology, with reclaiming the land from what it’s been used for and protecting it from being paved over is very real and in its own terms, very believable. It has to do with reclaiming a creek bed and its surroundings by itself it’s particularly interesting – I know people do this – but… and the dialogue can certainly be contemporary because it’s a contemporary story… but after reading these early chapters, I’m not sure exactly where it’s all going. There’s magic in it, and references to magic, and mysterious forces are in play. The Spanish priest plans to locate a mission in what will later become the city of Palo Alto.

Looking at the summary, it’s clearly a fantasy; it’s also a romance, and it’s meant to be actually the third book of a trilogy. I don’t blame Tolkien for this sudden explosion of trilogies in the last forty years except to say that he never intended The Lord of the Rings to be a trilogy, never thought of it as one, it was one large book divided into three for economic reasons by his English publisher. In any case, I’m flying blind without looking at the first two books. And it’s not that I don’t like it. It’s more that I haven’t a clue where I am, beyond Palo Alto, and what exactly is going on, other than the serious ecological concerns.

When I faked my way into my first screen-writing job… and I mean that literally. Or at least I tried to… thank goodness, [I] ran into a young story editor who must have figured in two minutes I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. He would take me out and give me crash courses in screenwriting over hamburgers. One of most important things he told me is that moving pictures are supposed to move. He told me that you don’t get to deliver exposition in a movie and you can’t afford to have your characters deliver it too much. Movies are shorthand. You have to make your camera the narrator because you don’t get to do that. And you have 90 minutes. He always felt that any good movie should be able to do what it has to do in 90 minutes. You have 90 minutes to keep from losing your customers, your audience. You have to drag them along with you and set the pace, stick to it, heighten it, but mainly keep them interested in your characters. And that’s tricky. You’re trying to keep a story going the same way you’re trying to make your characters believable.

It’s not that I’m uninterested in the characters here, this particular “Lily by the Bay.” But barring the lead character, Lily, I can’t always tell other characters from each other. This is also important. My stories always start with characters. They’ve always started with voices in my head. Because I’m officially a writer, I don’t get locked up for hearing voices in my head, but I really do. The characters, as I say, here, have a tendency to blur into each other. The concern is real, but I can’t find the shape of the story. Granted, I haven’t seen the first two lines of this trilogy. I don’t know whether it should be a trilogy or not. I don’t know how big a story it is to warrant a trilogy. I think the writing is intelligent and purposeful, but I can’t make out what the purpose is. That doesn’t mean that I need to know everything the author has in mind. But your reader signs up for a ride, essentially for a magical mystery tour, when he or she opens the book. And they can always close it. I usually figure 49 out of 50 times, if the reader closes the book, it’s probably my fault. I lost them some way. The 50th time, I probably couldn’t have done anything about that anyway. But as I say, it’s not bad, but it needs shape, it needs distinction between the characters, particularly.

I never think I see particularly well. I don’t think I’m terribly observant. If you see a passage of physical description of a passage or a room or an outdoor scene in my stories, believe me, I’ve worked on it and gone over it and over it. Dialogue and characterization seems to come comparatively easily. I try to keep my people, even though they’re high school kids, from talking too much like each other. Everybody has a particular speech rhythm. It’s not so much the words. It’s the way people put sentences together. When I was in college, my first roommate my freshman year was a black senior. A history major. And his friends would come over in the evening to visit, a lot of them. This was 1955. A lot of them were Korean War veterans. And I would simply sit and listen to their different speech rhythms because, in spite of what movies tend to show you, all black people do not sound alike. Some are from Pennsylvania, some from the South, some from New England. And I would try to get down that – the way they said things, not the words, but the flow and the emphasis – almost literally like copying music. I remember badgering my roommate, “Okay, I know you’re studying, I’m sorry, I’m not gonna bother you after this, but could you look at this, does this sound anything like the way Charlie talks?” And Ben would very patiently look at it and I remember him saying, “Uh… you’re getting’ there… it’s Negroid.”

I do that constantly, sometimes without even knowing I’m doing it. My advice to the author here is to remember especially if your readers have come along with you through two volumes, by now the story should know where it’s going. I can’t tell that yet. And the characters should be more marked. More marked out in terms of who they are and how they say what they say. The writing itself is not bad. But the writing isn’t all of it; sometimes the writing is practically the least of it. I can think of writers who were really terrible at handling the English language, and yet for some reason, whether it was the pacing or the characterization, they dragged you along. One of them I can think of, Theodore Dreiser, [whom] my father mysteriously liked, won the Nobel Prize. He would pound you over the head with detail, characterization, pace, over and over and over until you finally just gave in. He finally beat you into submission. I would never recommend him as a way to learn style. But observation and pace, yeah. Even now I read Dreiser, mumbling to myself.

The next is a story called “The Timewalkers.” And I don’t know where this is going, but I really do want to know. This has to do with a contemporary San Franciscan who gets involved with a time traveler, a woman. The time traveler comes from – she herself denies it, but – whether it’s a race or a group of wild talents, from people who can go in and out of time. Who can physically disappear because they’ve moved on to another dimension of time, another time period. The reason I know this is the opening paragraph of the synopsis [which] does catch one’s attention:

“Mild-mannered underachiever Peter Chang lives in San Francisco. His dull brokerage job is enlivened only by the mystery of the door hidden behind a panel in his boss’s office. Then one night, time-traveler Nikki Varian pops out through the door and changes his life forever. Hopelessly infatuated, Peter finds himself fleeing with her, through various timelines, from a psychotic telepath, a beautiful assassin, and a horde of brain-sucking immortals who are hunting Nikki to extract the secret of time-travel from her skull. If he is to help her protect herself and her surviving family, Peter must travel back to Chinatown before the 1906 earthquake to discover his own mysterious connection to the Timewalkers.”

…Okay. That’s — all by itself, I can’t help it, that is fascinating. I don’t know where the hell this is going, but yes, that’s an idea. That’s what they would call in movies, “high concept.” As opposed to “low concept”, which may amount to great literature, which may describe great literature, but which cannot be described in twenty-five words or less. Or, in this case, one paragraph. I like the writing, I like the notion that Nikki at this moment in her life has been involved with the 19th, early 20th century painter Edvard Munch, best known to us as the painter of “The Scream.” Actually distressed at their break-up. Given who she is, she’s incapable of forming what you might call really lasting relationships. I don’t know what this is, this is going somewhere. It may ramble, from what I’ve seen.

One thing I envy, very simply, is that the author does have a sense of place. The opening sequences with Nikki take place in Munch’s Paris. I’ve lived in Paris and attempted to set a novel in Paris, long ago, and whoever this is does it better than I did because there is a sense of Paris as a real place, which I never really got. I was much younger then. I could do better now.

But again, at the very beginning of the story when a character warns a Chinese family, takes a Chinese child under his wing – he’s a Timewalker himself and recognized as such by an old Chinese woman – warns them to be inside a particular building on the morning of the 1906 earthquake, and affects their lives because that’s one the few buildings that wasn’t knocked down. That’s one of the few major buildings, the old Palazzo, where if you took shelter, you’d be safe, and it’s important to keep this particular child safe. So I’m really curious about this one. I do want to know where it’s going.

At the same time, and this is something I’ll tell everybody, don’t write the third draft while you’re writing the first. That’s something I used to fall into a lot and I’m still likely to. Whatever I say, or anyone else tells you, get the thing finished. I have a friend, my oldest writer friend in California, whom I envy because he will charge straight through a first draft without looking back. He won’t try to rewrite, he won’t try to pretty it up, not until he gets to the end. Then he’ll go back. But his theory is that writing fiction is like a coiled spring. The story is a coiled spring. If you mess with it too much or talk about it too much or try to fix it up while you’re doing it, you’re wasting the energy of that spring. I think he’s right. I don’t do – well I used to do nearly as much as I did. And I speak of The Last Unicorn here, which took as long as it did, was as maddening as was because I’d stop and go back and try to fix this and fix that. Which is especially a mistake when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing and are making the story up as you’re going along. Which I was doing. I didn’t know where the hell the unicorns were, for God’s sake. I was just hoping King Haggard would tell me.

But yeah, I do like this one. Even if I don’t know where it’s going. What a writer has to do is establish trust in the reader. No, I don’t know where this is going, this is really crazy. But for some reason, I trust the writer. And it’s a great danger and a pity to betray a reader’s trust by copping out or by the classic one of saying that he woke up and it was all a dream. You’d be amazed that one still circulates. Once you have a hook in the reader, and established that trust, whether they call it the suspension of disbelief or anything else, it’s very important not to betray that trust. If you do that, you’ll never get them back. This one has me really curious.

Now this [next] one definitely takes place in – it’s “Honor Among Thieves” – takes place in a futuristic world primarily aboard what seems to be a space station and I’m irritated because there’s something potential in here but I can’t get at it. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m not really sure why the heroine is on the run as she is. I’m not clear where I am in time. This is another case… okay, this is the future, it’s not the far future, not as far forward as my favorite of the Star Trek spinoffs, Deep Space Nine, not nearly that far forward. More like essentially [inaudible]. But for all that, there’s no change in language. This happens almost overnight. And there’s in this world and the language is exactly contemporary except for one odd word or another. This particularly perturbed me because it’s my thing about a sense of place. Just where the hell are we? I know this is something like a space station or a space frontier town. The heroine is being pursued by men intent on rape and probably murder, but I’m not sure where she is, and she just… keeps on. She should have put some distance between herself and her pursuers and then suddenly they’re closer than they should be.

I’m not sure that the author knows much more about this world than I do. This is another thing. You can create a fantastic world, a historical world, but again it’s a question about the reader’s trust. The best science fiction writers can take you all over the place, and if they’ve established the world clearly enough really early on, you have at least some kind of sense of where you are. Here in particular – there are other stories like this – I feel as though I’ve been thrown into the middle of an ongoing story, an ongoing history. Sometimes that works but when it doesn’t, your reader’s at sea, just floundering. I found myself floundering during most of the story.

There is a pace here, especially because there’s a really interesting notion here. That the heroine, like certain other people, has been modified. I’m not clear on how – genetically? Surgically modified? So that she can slip what feels like a floppy disk or some future equivalent, into a slot in her neck and shoulder and see what she needs to see on the screen, as it were, behind her eyes, on her own retinas. An intriguing idea, and a little creepy. But that’s all right. That by itself is all right. There are references to people who have been modified like this. There are also references to lobotomies once or twice. But nothing is explained, and unlike the previous one where I don’t know where I’m going but I’m willing to trust that the author does, here I’m not sure that the author does.

As somebody who has failed at certain stories because I was making them up as I went along – I did not plan properly, outline properly – I sympathize. The Last Unicorn took longer than it should because I didn’t know what I was doing, hadn’t outlined at all, and blundered through it. That particular time, I got away with it. But the novel I tried after that, I didn’t get away with it. It took 18 years and four drafts before the book was finally published and it’s still not right. One day I’d like to go back over it and try it again. By the same token, my favorite of my own books, The Innkeeper’s Song, was ongoing. And there were so many characters in different parts of the story that I remember sitting up in bed during siesta time in India, where siesta is a very practical thing, up to two hours, with a yellow legal pad, drawing a line drawn down the center and putting events on one side, and what voice is telling them on the other. I still have that pad. If you looked, you’d recognize it – a lot of things changed because that’s what happens in the creative process – but you would recognize that particular book. I don’t always do that right. It’s still half-alien to me to outline because something in me doesn’t want to make up stories, it wants to let the story tell itself. Even after all these years of doing it, I still recommend against it.”

[END OF SIDE A]

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Lithography

After the tenth time of running the simulator, of tracing the paths of transistors plotted onto paper that fills the conference walls, I call my engineers and tell them to burn to metal. Only twelve nanometers now. The warren has gone so deep, so much farther than I could have imagined when I was cutting my own masks with a razor and sheets of acetate.

Twelve nanometers and it won’t be enough. We’ve dragged physics along with us, finding ever innovative ways of corralling the unruly electrons flooding our designs and it isn’t enough.

#

“Where do we go when we hit the UV wall? I have no doubt we can push optical a long way,” he says, his voice clouding the air in our tent. “But at some point we lose and physics wins.”

I pull the sleeping bag around me, unsure how he can take the cold when he’s covered in sweat.

“X-rays,” I say. “Or self assembling structures.” We’re avoiding something very large. Like the engineers we are, it’s easy to lose the elephant by examining the tail. But even I can’t bring myself to think of this as smalltalk. He turns to me when I groan in the dark.

“Did I miss a stone?”

“No, it’s nothing. Just making bad puns in my head.”

I couldn’t stop myself from saying it, but I immediately regret it.

“It can’t be too bad to share. Come on!”

He makes moves for my ribs. Reflexively I punch him. Right in the nose.

“Oh shit! I’m so sorry! Let me see it,” I reach over to my backpack and fumble for the travel towel. In the dark his blood looks like ink cascading down his face. “I had this really annoying uncle. I can’t stand to be tickled. You had no way of knowing. I’m so sorry.”

But he isn’t saying anything. He takes the towel from me and holds it to his face. There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s over now, that elephant unnamed.

#

After the bunnysuits and the packaging, the chemicals so toxic that the Nazis decided not to use them, a young employee brings me the chip. It’s unremarkable, of course. Just another CPU, just another step closer to the grave. Our architecture can’t pull the weight anymore. Corporate will take my design and file it away then go with something from the Israeli plant, or Argentina. Perhaps one of my colleagues in India will win the lottery this time. They’ve been doing very smart things with predictive apportionment. I can’t help feeling that what we really need is a shakeup, begin to really explore Chua’s theory and build GP devices exploring the underused side of his equations. Maybe something from the fertile ground of plasmon research. But I’m tied to the helm of this ship and we don’t get to set the course.

#

Two days later and he speaks.

“You could have warned me.”

I stop and lean on my walking stick. Shasta looms behind him like a chalkboard full of unreadable equations. The wind rushes all around us, hushing through dense pine forest and tall grass.

“By the way,” I say at last. “I don’t like to be tickled.”

His sigh is lost to the wind. In the bright morning sun I begin to suspect his nose is broken. The wave of shame I feel makes me want to sit down on the path and stop walking.

He looks at me and I cannot read his face. “Ehh. I’ll be alright.”

I look down at my hiking boots and force myself to go on.

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Miss Marple, Psychic Detective

            Miss Marple, psychic detective, looked over the scene in silence.  A body was splayed across the red velvet blanket of a four-poster bed. 

            “The murder victim was found wearing a tutu and tricornered hat,” she said.  “Some people might find that strange, but in fact that was what Mr. Bogdanovich wore every day.  The murderer would have been counting on that.  But what he didn’t know is the dead man possessed the largest collection of decorative soaps shaped like fruit in the world.” 

            Yes, the man had been fond of his soaps.  She could still hear him saying, “Don’t use those, Jane, those are for guests.” 

            “But I am a guest, Peter,” Miss Marple replied. 

            “I mean important guests: the Dalai Lama, the Aga Khan, the Spice Girls.” 

            Peter Bogdanovich had been a famous film-maker, but he hadn’t released a film in two decades.  Now his soaps were all he had left.  “The Tao Te Ching speaks of an afterlife that is exactly like one’s own life,” he said, “where the dead don’t know they’re dead, a purgatory of exquisite torment.  Have we in fact entered this twilight world?” 

            Miss Marple’s consciousness returned to the present with a jolt, as she took a sip of the highly caffeinated beverage Jolt.  “It was known only to two people in the world that Mr. Bogdanovich didn’t own his tutus—he rented them,” she said.  “Recently a third person discovered this fact.  That means the murderer must have been. . . Jim!”  She pointed to one of the uniformed police officers standing along the wall. 

            “But that’s crazy,” Jim said.  “I was the one who responded to his 911 call.” 

            “That’s right,” said the old spinster, “and when you arrived you took the opportunity to kill both Mr. Bogdanovich and his amanuensis, a dwarf whose body has not yet been found, probably because he was so small.  Officers, I am confident a thorough search of the room will reveal the body of one Israel Zangwill, strangled in the act of singing “Embraceable You” to Mr. Bogdanovich, a ritual the pair had practiced many times.” 

            “This is insane,” Jim said.  “I didn’t do it, I tell you!” 

            “Take him away, boys.”  As the other officers handcuffed and carted off the turncoat policeman, Miss Marple reflected on the complex chain of events that had led to this moment. Her years as madam of a swanky Hong Kong brothel.  Her acquisition of psychic powers as a result of touching the hem of Justin Timberlake’s robe during a mass wedding at Lourdes.  And the day she joined the constabulary of St. Mary Mead, a space station in L-5 geosynchronous orbit. 

            “You think you have what it takes?” the department chief asked. 

            “I won’t let you down, dearie.  And I believe this is yours,” Miss Marple said, using sleight of hand to apparently withdraw a revolver from behind the chief’s ear. 

            “So that’s where that went,” the chief exclaimed.  “I’ve been looking for that forever!”

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Remembrance of Time Defeated

The Hadronic Empress is startled awake by the sound of bleating klaxons. When she opens her eyes the flashing lights stab her vision, and she throws an arm, thin and wobbly like a chicken wing, across her face.  She tries to uncoil herself from her gilded Throne of a Million Triumphs, but her left leg is asleep, tingling with a thousand needles as if the client of one of her journeyman torturers.

The word of command rises slowly, like cold tar, in her throat. “Wa.. Wa… Wan!”

In an instant he is by her side, a curled up stick of a man. She can smell the perfume he wears, floral and bitter like medicine. “Yes, thou Exquisite Grace?”  Despite his formal address there is something familiar and contemptuous in his tones.

“Where are… ” She hesitates, afraid to reveal the gray fuzziness in her mind, then clears her throat. “Have we arrived? The alarms woke me.”

Wan’s mouth is thin and papery, but it crinkles up at the edges. He seems to be trying to smile. “Yes, thou Exquisite Grace. We are in orbit around Chthon.” He starts to shuffle away, on those ridiculous curled slippers beneath his long metallic robes, but pauses and turns back. “I took the liberty of ordering the baryon cannons to be instantiated. The choristers have chanted the hymn of execution, and the weaponeers only await the final syllable of destruction from thy lips.”

“And then…”  Her mind is still empty, a cavern. What is their purpose here? But she is afraid to ask, lest Wan challenge her authority.

The mouth opens slightly, the lips sodden pulp. “And the Republic of Time will be no more.”

She cannot help herself. A sigh slides out of her lungs and through her nose. “And then it will be at an end,” she murmurs.

“No, thou Exquisite Grace,” Wan says, correcting her with force. He bends his narrow face closer to her. “There will be no more ends, no more beginning. That is why we wage this war against the Republic.” He leans back, his yellow eyes bemused. “Dost thou not remember?”

She starts to protest, to say, Of course I don’t remember, I’m too old, but then she does. She does remember. She had been dreaming it.

She remembers a little hovel beneath a blue sky. The smell of earth and old wood and smoke. And she remembers the scratch of her father’s beard against her cheek when he kissed her goodnight, and the smell of oil and sweat on his skin. And she remembers the rise and fall of her mother crying, after the news of her father’s death, over and over again, repeating like a nightingale’s song. And the emptiness in her belly like a inverted stone, and how she walked up and down the streets with her mother begging for food until their feet bled. And how her mother knocked on a door and and a woman in fancy clothes answered and her mother offered to do things, anything, as long as they received food. The woman in fancy clothes shook her head, then pointed down at her and said, Her now, we could use a one such as her.

The Empress closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to remember any more.

“No ends and no beginings. That’s what thou promised, so many years ago,” Wan reminds her. “Thou promised to shatter the years, the centuries, the eons.”

“So I did,” she says, her voice a little tattered thread coming unraveled. “So I did.”

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Towel Theory

In honor of Towel Day (okay, it was yesterday), please try this simple exercise. If you know enough about a character to write him or her convincingly, you can answer the question posed by Douglas Adams: Does he know where his towel is?

Examples:

Peter does not know where his towel is.
Nikki tries to pretend she does not need a towel.
Siegfried wants Nikki’s towel.
Benedict keeps track of his towels, but never reveals their location.
Mr. X is going mad because he knows the location of every towel in the world.
Ms. Y knows where YOUR towel is.
Jun Dong (Peter’s birth mother) knows the location of every towel in her family, unto the third generation. 

Lady Varian has people to keep track of her towel.

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Notes Toward a Dissertation on Books that End in Mid-sentence

What can we learn from books that end in mid-sentence?  Perhaps that periods, question marks, and exclamation marks ought to get down off their high horse. 

            By books that end in mid-sentence we mean of course only those that deliberately end thus, excluding those abrupt endings due to authorial demise like “The Last Tycoon” or historical corruption like the “Satyricon” or because the author got caught in a time loop and is re-living the same day for all eternity like Italo Calvino. 

            A book that ends in mid-sentence defies the “squares.”  In certain cultures they have been worshipped as relics of the Godhead.  Legend has it a copy of Plato’s “Critias” was once used to prop up a wobbling table leg in Bertrand Russell’s kitchen (the Penguin paperback is now on display at the British Museum). 

            Some books end in mid-sentence because the narrative is circular.  For example, in “Finnegans Wake” by James Joyce a man plans a surprise party for a friend, only to discover he is himself the friend he is throwing the party for, and also that he is lactose intolerant.  In Samuel Delany’s “Dhalgren,” a failed haberdasher is afflicted with alopecia, then travels back in time to murder his father before his own birth.  It’s way intense. 

            In “The Iron Heel” by Jack London the mid-sentence ending indicates the death of the protagonist, killed while attempting a stunt on a “Jackass”-style reality television program.  In “The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.” by George Steiner the sudden end represents language blasted into silence by unspeakable ontological horrors.  That sensation was later adapted for television as the popular series “Dancing With the Stars.” 

             Books that end in mid-sentence have made many contributions to society.  Here are just a few of the things they have given us, without which our lives would be immeasurably poorer: the cocktail umbrella, HP Sauce, Betamax, corneal pachymetry, the tube top, phrenology, and the phrase “trouble in paradise.”  Imagine how different the world would be without them! 

             Truly, books that end in mid-sentence have much to teac

Next Ish: “Dead Souls” by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, “Eaters of the Dead” by Michael Crichton, and “Tintin and Alph-Art” by Hergé.  Their shocking secrets will be revealed. . . or else!

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I, Roe-Bot

This was inspired by Cory Doctorow’s “I, Robot” and “I, Rowboat” and originally appeared online as part of International Pixel-Stained TechnoPeasant Day.

I, Roe-Bot
by Sharon Mock

The salmon are spawning again.

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Funeral Suppers

Of course you don’t remember Jeremy, my dear; you weren’t born yet, so you didn’t get any of him, Read more »

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