David Thayer

Booksquare has a story about a lady who paid six thousand dollars at auction to have her name be a character’s name in Michael Chabon’s forthcoming novel. A Florida woman paid 25,000 dollars to be in the next Stephen King, hopefully not a rewrite of Carrie. For that kind of money she should be depicted as a combination of Helen of Troy and Mother Teresa, violent but spiritual, lovely but compassionate, a friend to manatees, hobos, toothless ex-hockey players, revered by entire coastal townships. Let’s hope she doesn’t hobble a writer, lash him to a mattress, and force him to write happy endings. She certainly should not be incarcerated, awaiting execution, with swarms of bees flying out of her mouth. Maybe Michael Chabon was a safer bet, a superior investment, even though that lady has foresworn bathroom remodeling in exchange for literary immortality.

One of the characters in my novel, An Aztec in Central Park, not available in stores due to a vast conspiracy, is named Tubby Ingram. If your name is Tubby Ingram, Tubby, or Ingram, go ahead and send me money. That way when editorial changes come down the pike, as they might, you can rest assured that Tubby won’t be shit canned in a flurry of last minute changes. Your name here.
Think about it.

Previously on One More Bite of the Apple: a ramble in the Bramble. Gaius and Woody, fearing discovery, flee on foot across Central Park West, pausing as they enter Strawberry Fields to smell the flora. The sounds of close pursuit alert them to the need for haste, and soon they find themselves on the Bow Bridge marveling at the structure’s perfect symmetry, the way it frames the soft harmony of the lake, the gentle caresses of water on the raucous shore. Refreshed, they flee, not pell mell, but at a swift jog, between the pale fists of rock, the heather landscape…

Cut. Okay, look, this is an action sequence, right? All the crap about the bridge, the symmetry, the water, what’s that? Pale fists of rock? Let’s take it again from the moment the two guys run across CPW; I want Woody to roll up onto the hood of a taxi…we see the driver’s eyes, his silent scream, lips parted as though offering a prayer to an Unseen Deity. In the Squad Room, Lt. Maris Polo, her obsidian eyes flashing with rage, takes command of the chase. She leaps from the still moving squad car, into Strawberry Fields, pausing for just a short beat to tenderly regard the season’s burgeoning glory…

Okay, you’re fired.

No wait, she steps on the plant right after gazing at it. Her boot twists the stalk…

Okay, you’re hired again.

These categories into which the blog is divided, these chains, these closely related yet dissonant thematically questionable little jeopardy cascades have me worried. The software, the hidden engine under the hood, stands ready to accept more categories, countless in their variety, infinite in scope, limited by the meager ability of this blogger to think up any more of them and then find jeopardy answers to be posited in the form of questions. Where’s the drama, where is the moment of truth, when the contestant on the far right smiles and blurts out “the colossus at Rhodes”?

I turn in my hour of Geraldo laden internal repartee, thinking headlines, oozing with ink. Except they don’t ooze anymore; they used to, I can assure you of that. Get a story, a juicy one, scandal, storm, drug addled super model, enchantment, lost horizons, deadlines and yes, oozing was all part of the experience, fingers darkened by printers ink so fresh as to be transferable to the sticky fingers of the reading public, the anxious fresh faces throwing their coins at the swarthy guy from somewhere else, note his sublime indifference to the fuss and bother, provided, of course, you have exact change.
And with exact change, armed with it, because the super model crisis waits for no one, you leave your place of residence, the rezidentura, with the precise amount of coinage necessary to read all about it.

There’s no oozing here. No rush to the corner where the five star edition, hurled from a passing truck, has yet to be unbound by the swarthy guy from somewhere else, yet to spill free from the brutal constraints of barbed wire, trapped and crushed, front to back, while he dawdles the supermodel situation is getting out of hand, the story growing, you have exact change, he can’t find his wire cutters, and the entire enterprise shudders to a halt while he rummages around? Where’s the drama?

There are issues that matter to each of us in a way that is unique, even peculiar to the individual. Booksquare seethes when female porn is discussed, ie, that romance novels appeal only to the prurient side of a reader’s imagination. I don’t blame her. Calling romance porn is the sort of ankle biting approach the president and his cronies employ. Remember global warming? The Kyoto Accords? Warmer oceans, bigger, faster, meaner hurricanes? Okay we’re approaching one of my hot buttons: demonizing ideas, emotions, human nature in this game of moral superiority for purposes of acrruing power. What really pisses me off is that it works. It works so well that President Bush fell asleep for Katrina, thinking a pious homily on the nature of sin would probably fill the need for comment in the aftermath. Nawlins feels the wrath of God. Turns out that God wears a windbreaker and a FEMA ballcap and creates rules for refugees involving two forms of picture ID.

Weak thinking eg female porn goes unchallenged. It is cumulative, like arsenic in the bloodstream. From stem cell research to respecting individual boundaries there is an institutional disregard for the fruits of thought, research, argument, logic, and reason. Into the void comes the canned heat of telegenic spin, bread and circuses, unenforceable laws, fear, guns, broken levvies, and a social contract ankle biters are rewriting just as fast as they can.