Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Monday, December 08, 2003 The Pitch: It's like The Prophecies of Nostradamus meets American Beauty! I just started reading Delillo's Players, which so far is haunting in what can only be considered an entirely accidental way. In the first chapter of the book, seven or so people on a jet sit around a piano bar and watch the movie showing in the next cabin. The piano music becomes an accompaniment to the action on screen. The action on screen shows a bunch of golfers being ambushed and attacked by terrorists. In the next chapter (and almost the very next scene), a woman, Pammy, bumps into an old friend on a lobby--of the World Trade Center. The two discuss the problem using the elevators in the WTC, the difficutly getting from one place to another.The woman, Pammy, works in an office in the WTC called the Grief Management Council. "Grief was not the founder's name; it referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like.[...] It was her original view that the World Trade Center was an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief?[...] To Pammy the towers didn't seem permanent. They ramined concepts, no less transient for all their bluk than some routine distortion of light. [and then a mention of how the office space is contantly being reapportioned] [...] It was as though they'd been directed to adjust the amount of furniture to levels of national grief." Players is copyrighted 1977, and it's no wonder people on the East Coast started mumbling about Delillo in the days after the 9/11. The mood here is perfect for the ominousness with which we look back at those days. And yet it was written twenty some-odd years earlier. That blows my mind. As if some medium had told Delillo in 1976 or so, in a showboaty wavering voice: I see people on a plane...terrorists...then people in the World Trade Center...they're concerned about the difficulty getting in and out of the building...there's a tremendous amount of grief centered in this building...levels of national grief." And this is what Delillo went out and wrote as a result. Of course, there's the age-old problem of false positives--I threw out all the other stuff that didn't fit in. The piano bar? The golfers? A man standing outside Federal Hill holding a sign. Pammy's other half, Lyle, is first seen (before Pammy and the WTC) standing at the door of a restaurant "cleaning his fingernails with the toothpick he'd lifted from the little bowl when he paid the check." There's also a great bit about turning channels and watching public access porn, and frankly, I'm only on page 16. God only knows where it's going to go from there. Maybe it'll return to terrorism and the WTC, maybe it won't. Ugh, I had all this other stuff I wanted to say about my writing, but too late for that now. It's a super-zoo here at work so (maybe) more later. posted by Jeff Lester | 12:47 PM | |
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