this post actually wanted to be longer (by TWO more topics).

I was rude today. (I was probably rude on more occasions and levels than I'm aware of but...well I can only wait for someone else to bring those to my attention.) In two retail establishments I was talking on the phone as I spoke with the clerk. Well...I did stand around for about five minutes waiting for an appropriate time to say, "Can you hold on a sec?" at the second place cos I felt bad about the first but it's still the same. I'm telling the clerks that I don't have time to give them my full attention. Or something..it's hard to explain. I don't have any deep investments in my relationship with them and our expectations of one another are QUITE low. But still... I should do them the courtesy of giving them my undivided attention for the forty-five seconds we're interacting. Forty-five seconds isn't long, in the grand scheme of things. It's a long time to hold your breath underwater, sure, and maybe a long time to endure an electric shock but to depart from a non-urgent conversation with a friend..I can do it.

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Earlier today I decided to embark on a challenge to monocommunicatiousness. I need a better word for it. For a week I'm going to restrict myself to ONE real-time conversation at a time. This means no texting during a coffee date, this means no IMing while on the phone, this means great effort will need to be expended to rise to the challenge. WOW. It just means things will happen more slowly. It means being forced to define priorities that I generally think I shouldn't have to define. I like to use up the little pockets of unnoticed time in Interaction A to briefly nudge along Interaction B (essentially so it's still real-time). I think what's happening here is that I am greedy.

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Yesterday I finished a fantastic novel called, Me and Orson Welles. It was turned into a film this year or last but I haven't seen it so I can't say which is better. But you know, even if they're different in those typical ways films based on books are, I bet it's still a smashing flick. Lots of good stuff there. Anyways...I recommend it to everyone in life. Not really. But if your name could be translated "Poisson", I'm probably talking to you.

The rate at which I read increased steadily as I neared the end of the book so that now I feel that small pang of loss I always feel after reading a good book cos there's no exciting narrative to pick up in that moment I want my brain to be tantalized. I can't find out "what happens next" cos I'm already at the ending but I do still ask the question, weirdly...

I'm actually going to try to read "1984" next. I've had it on my shelf for a few years (I actually borrowed it from a friend) and I think I'm finally at the point where I'm willing to put in the effort to understand it. We'll see what happens. It's always hard to go back to The Setting after you've just been at the Denoument.

Let me try to sell you on the book -- or at least regale you.

(1) Something I liked about the book was how things like this simply made sense to me:

From a radio somewhere I could hear Rudy Vallee singing "Have You Met Miss Jones?" I thought: This is the song that's going to pin this day inside me forever.
Up in the third-floor dressing room I did stretching exercises. That dressing room--its stink of cigarettes, its signatures on the wall, its water stains--it was somehow all exactly right. (223-4)

This as well:

She had nothing to say--and even as I'd asked the question, its meaninglessness pained me. (250)

(2) And this; though I've never concretely thought it, this is a perfect cross-section or snapshot of what museums (and art galleries) are:

I sat in a quiet corner eating a bag of peanuts and staring at those fragments of ceramic that once had mattered. I liked the soft sounds of the museum, too: the whispering, the footsteps on the stone stairs, the class trip of seven-year-olds giggling and shrieking somewhere just out of sight." (123)

He had another excerpt later on about how the patrons, standing still for long periods, studying the exhibits were like a part of the museum as well; unmoving and watched by other patrons yet. I didn't write down the page number...and I'm not even sure how I feel about it.


(3) I like the borderline-campy author/narrator awareness that Kaplow exposes in a handful of moments and I like that it reminded me of JM Barrie's Peter Pan -- meaning that I actually retained something from a university English course.
For example:

"If you believe in it, then let's do it!" I said, and I ran under the velvet rope and smacked the envelope against a large Greek vase.
"Hey!" called the voice of a guard.
I laughed, grabbed Gretta's hand, and we ran down a staircase and out the entrance, practically falling down the stone steps, and out into the sunshine.
She looked around and said, "Wouldn't this make a great scene in a story?"

There's an even better example but it's on the last page so I'll not be a spoilsport.


(4) The humor was often dark and in some small way reminded me of Gordon Korman's more sarcastic characters, like this lil doozy:

Welles did "Romans, countrymen, and lovers" at the foot of the downstage platform. I smelled hot oil, and I turned to see Ash pumping an atomizer on a smoke machine. As the smoke drifted out to the stage it caught the beams of light in stark, angular planes of shadow.
"Swell effect!" I whispered to Ash. He was dressed in a black overcoat because he was also an extra in the Cinna scene.
"Orson thought of it a half hour ago," he whispered, shaking his head. "Did you ever try to find a smoke machine in half an hour?" (232)

Darker:

"You romanticize everything," said Sonja. "It's odd being around you. It feels as if you belonged to some earlier, nicer time."
"And what time do you belong to?"
"The thoroughly corrupt right-this-second." (116)

Even darker:

Lloyd watched her. "Oh, sweet Jasper, I want to stick my head under her sweater! I swear to you, I dream about that sweater at night. I'd give ten bucks for just one good photograph of her. I tell you, one good picture with a few well-placed shadows would do wonders to ease my nocturnal burden. Sonja! Slake my urge!" He hobbled about between the seats, pretending to be bent double in sexual frustration.
"She's your kind of girl?" I asked.
"If she said to me: 'Norman, I'll let you make love to me, and I'll completely open myself up to you, and then when we're done I'm going to shoot you in the head with a pistol,' I'd say: 'Here's the pistol, baby--now let's get started 'cause my hearse is double-parked.'" (49)

(5) Didn't fully understand this (in the sense that I coulda said, "Oh yeah...yep," if someone I knew were saying it to me..it's quite new) but who doesn't love a good breakdown of a person and their motives? (I just finished watching two and a half episodes of House M.D. so there must be a kind of trend to what fascinates me..)

"The bone-deep understanding that your life is so utterly without meaning that simply to survive you have to reinvent yourself. Because if people can't find you, they can't dislike you. You see, if I can be Brutus for ninety minutes tonight--I mean, really be him from the inside out--then for ninety minutes I get this miraculous reprieve from being myself. That's what you see in every great actor's eyes, you know. You see someone weeping at the broken thing that he knows himself to be: that every gesture is affectation, that ever stirring of the heart is instantly struck dead into the performance book. And I don't mean to insult you with all this--I just sense it inside you, as it's inside me." (213-4)

If you want to borrow it, holla.

Kaplow, Robert. Me and Orson Welles. San Franciso: MacAdam/Cage, 2003. Print.