Fiction: Old New York

I ground my teeth as Susannah scrupulously flicked the hazard lights on, and began coasting slowly to a stop at the side of the highway, exactly abreast with the giant warning signs around the perimiter of Old New York. We'd not seen another car moving for hours before, but there were ones regularly abandoned on the road, carefully parked, or shoved to the side of the road by another vehicle later on.

She pulled obligingly into the right, and we studied the warning signs and fences. Twenty years ago the army had erected chain link fences all the way round the old city, and unsung heroines in the highway department had struggled to find simple glyphs in red circles which would accurately convey "Warning: unimaginable horrors from another dimension. Turn around now." I imagined the poor planners scrambling to have the signs ready, hoping they'd never be used anywhere else in the country-- but being ready for it.

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Umberto Eco: Name of the Rose

I recently reread Name of the Rose again. It's a LOT easier to read when you already know the plot. Indeed, I've come to the conclusion that the basic story, while excellent, isn't THAT hard to read, rather a very large proportion of the difficulty comes specifically from the many points where the book drops into weird visions, or pan-european polyglot, or obscure sermons, or latin, for several pages. But the point is, while actually understanding those is important to understand the book, you will actually follow 95% of everything is you simply skim them, and say "obscure vision" rather than spending two pages being confused at the way the action slips from reality into surrealism, and then having it explained afterwards.

If you found a piece of paper in your lover's pocket with a phone number on, would you ring it?

This question wasn't one of the "writer's block" prompts on LJ, but it might as well have been. But it completely baffled me. I understand what it's TRYING to say, but I don't think it IS saying what it's trying to say. The suggested answers were "ring the number", "confront your partner", "trust your partner", and "respect your partner's privacy".

I think there's a cultural stereotype of someone arranging a clandestine romantic reception with someone, and scribbling down a phone number to do so. And that if you ARE, for whatever reason, suspicious that your partner is betraying your trust in some way, you have to know how to deal with that. Whether to automatically respect their privacy? And/or trust they are NOT betraying your trust? And/or talk to them about it, because whether the lack of trust is your fault or theirs, it should be resolved, not buried? Or to surreptitiously lay your fears to rest without bringing them up. Unsurprisingly I'm a big believer in (a) privacy and (b) communication.

Firstly, I'm so used to a mixed-sex social group that, even though I know some friends have relationships where it's understood neither have private meetings with mutually attractive members of the opposite sex, it's just normal for everyone I know, so there isn't a leap from "coffee" to "aha! must be infidelity".

Secondly, the thing that most boggles me is the leap from "phone number" to "clandestine meeting". I have LOTS of phone numbers on bits of paper, but they're all for things like plumbers, and job applications, and people I might want to call in an emergency if my phone runs out of battery while I'm abroad. I'm failing to make the leap from "spoke to another human being remotely" to "illicit sex".

Further, even if my lover or I DID meet up with someone for an unspecified reason, the overwhelming liklihood is that it's not private, we just didn't have anything interesting to say about it. It's healthy to have some privacy in a relationship, but there's generally some sort of cue as to when someone would LIKE something to be private and "spoke to them on a phone" is normal to wonder who it was, rather than assume it's a dark secret.

I understand where the question writer was coming from: they were trying to say, are you used to the sort of casual relationship where suspicion is normal and/or justified, or not, and laudably trying to promulgate trust and boundaries in relationships. But they just seemed to completely miss anything where that would apply to me.

Jack's Life Advice: If someone makes a comment about a Haiku, it's probably in Haiku

If you write a Haiku, and someone comments on it, count the number of syllables in their reply. Probably it's a Haiku, and if you don't notice, you'll look very silly.

[I stress again, SOME of the advice is gleaned from personal experience, and SOME is not, but instead gained from common sense and forethought. For whatever reason, I do not typically clearly indicate which is which :)]