The tall man & the short man

On disconnection

The world's tallest man, Bao Xishun today shook hands with He Pingping who claims to be Earth's shortest. I think the interesting part is that the men are from the same region of Mongolia.

Eighteen months ago – inspired by Kugler, Khaysevych, Weschler, Hopper and others – I blathered on about confluence and collage. This post will be at least as pretentious as that one.

I wrote then: “Truth is the strange way in which the moments of our life come together.” The origins of the tall man and the short man might be one of those beautiful truths. Lately though I’ve been finding beauty in disconnection and I couldn’t help but think how fantastic it would have been if they had never met. I’m sure the tabloid coverage of the story has led others to the same opinion but my reasoning has nothing to do with that. I just think it would have made for a better story.

At the gym the other day, there was a woman working on a computer with the monitor image enlarged to approximately five times the usual size. It was so large that the image wouldn’t actually fit on the screen. Curious, I asked, “Is something wrong with the computer or is it supposed to be like that?” She explained she had an eye problem and I subsequently evaporated. I spent the next hour working out and replaying this incident in my head again and again. My reaction slowly moved from horror to joy. Now I think everything about the incident is hilarious (except that I accidentally hurt the woman’s feelings). I am the fool in this comedy and in hindsight I can see myself on a totally different level than this woman: I was trying to be cheerful and chatty while she was trying to efficiently do her job. I was ironically oblivious to this at the time.

And so I decided as I left the gym – desperately trying to reframe the incident as less embarrassing for me – that the gee-whiz moments of interconnected life are the aberrations, the freak show moments and cheap entertainments of life. Everyday life is made up of disconnect and so the liveliest moments are those of severe disconnect. (By the way, pfft! I think that was the peak of pretension.)

I’ve been trying and failing to bring this idea into my writing. I’d like to create a story that doesn’t revolve around severe disconnect but that has small moments of disconnection surrounding the plot. I haven’t figured out how to do it yet and if I ever do it will probably occur just after I shift back to pro-interconnectedness. (And won’t that be an amusing moment of severe disconnection.)

It seems that the last couple of Hard Case Crime books I’ve read, have pulled off what I’d like to do. (Of course, it should be clear that I’m haphazardly projecting my ideas onto otherwise innocent books.) In David Goodis’ The Wounded and the Slain, James Bevan makes one mistake after another which leads to an amazing moment where he confesses to a murder that he committed and the police dismiss him as a mental case. In Richard Aleas’ Songs of Innocence, PI John Blake gets farther from the truth with each piece of evidence he uncovers.

In neither of these novels does the totality of disconnection lead to a wonderous moment that gives the reader a better understanding of the beauty of life. The story of the tall man and the short man probably wouldn’t lead to that epiphany either. But at least now I know that if there is a God, we share the same sense of humor.

Stephen King on Harry Potter

Although the only thing we can be sure of is that Deathly Hallows won't end in a 10-second blackout.

-Here

Poison and shade and goodbye

The Javier Marias blog reports (scroll to June 10, 2007) that the third volume of Your Face Tomorrow is finished and will be published in Spanish this October. Past publication schedule suggests English publication will be sometime in 2009.