Posted by malthus on August 28, 2004, at 13:13:26
In reply to fiction ... Hungry Pavement, Part 3, posted by Atticus on August 28, 2004, at 7:51:11
This was truly worth waiting for and I am so relieved your computer is working so you could post this.
I relished every part of this but especially...
"Four months later. I was making out with my new girlfriend, Zoey, an art director at the ad agency, along a shadow-strewn section of Bleeker Street. And then an all-too-familiar shiver, the faintest of vibrations, traveled upward through the leather soles of my shoes."
You go from what appears to be the climax of the story to the making out part, (usually it's the other way around in real life~ha ha) which for some reason made me laugh out loud and then right back to the climax. (Brilliant!)
After I read this piece (twice) I started thinking about the book "Thinner" by Richard Bach, AKA Steven King ("The Stand" is also wildly crafted like your piece)~~ hope you don't mind being compared to Steven King--I realize he is main-stream but I enjoy him nonetheless. (Please Dr.Bob,it was deliberate not using the double double quotes; when I tried to all this unrelated stuff came up at the bottom of the screen.)
As you said, it would be difficult to adapt it to a play, but I can see it as a "short" film. Here in Philadelphia there is an excellent "Film Festival" and the shorts are always my favorites because succintness seems much more difficult to achieve in film, but much more satisfying (I particularly dislike long "action movies"--they jangle the one nerve I have left sometimes but I can feel this being surreal action, much more inviting.)
The overall intensity of the action in this piece coupled with the comic relief is tremendous. In the part about Zoey I thought about how young girls were sacrificed by the Aztecs, taking them by canoes to the fabled spot of a whirlpool in a nearby lake. They slit their throats so blood flowed into the water. Then they were cast in; and the whirlpool swallowed their bodies to feed the deities. Was this an intentional parallel?
:>)
malthus
poster:malthus
thread:383249
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20040828/msgs/383337.html