X-Treme Weather

I know I'm late to the party here, but perhaps this blog should be renamed Extreme Crenellated Flotsam, just to show I'm aware of current culture. Most things successful are now extreme, and nothing save for the branded detergent is still called Ultra.

I actually preferred everything being ultra, primarily because that's not a word.

But that's not the point.

I was right yesterday about the rain. I turned on the Weather Channel to see what's up and to be lulled by its hypnotic qualities only to learn from another source that Los Angeles had experienced a couple tornadoes. Yes, this isn't Kansas or Oklahoma, but there was a tornado touching down in Ladera Hills, about a five minute drive from this house. I believe it was a F0.0036.

Which reminds me. I grew up with slide rules and may still have one laying around here somewhere (a metal Pickett). I hadn't realized the changes the HP25 would bring to the world, but wish I'd kept one of those [Enter]>[=] T-shirts. That isn't the point, either, but I was recently mourning the loss of the phrase "slide rule accuracy." I was talking to someone, it came up, and I realized that once again computers permit us to do much more than we need to. As I frequently said at my last job, "Just because you can do something doesn't make it a good idea."

How accurate do the pumps at gas stations need to be? They used to have rolling drums, much like slot machines, for measuring. Now I can tell how much gas I get to the thousandth of a gallon! I have no idea how much liquid a thousandth of a gallon is and even less of an idea of why I'd need to know it I'd received seven rather than eight of them.

Oh, that's right: we can.

I have a fantasy that the major engineering projects of the world, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, the building I'm sitting in now, were all built to "slide rule accuracy," and I find that reassuring.

Oh, yeah. The other thing I used to say at work is "Yes you can, but you may not."

In the "more" section I delve into the threatening area of Literary Fiction


Susan Sontag died yesterday. Her obit referred to her as an "intellectual," but they replayed an old interview with her on the News Hour and I was struck by her closing remarks about fiction. I wasn't paying close attention but got the impression she was done with writing essays and found pleasure in fiction.

So, what is literary fiction, anyway? The short answer: I don't know. I've been surprised when people tell me my work falls into that category, but I can see how it isn't mainstream. I think the last mainstream novel I read was Airframe, which I'd bought for an unexpected plane trip. It did nothing to satisfy my intellect or emotions and served the same useful purpose as empty calories.

For publishers (I believe) the distinction being that a work of literary fiction won't sell much. The emphasis, generally, is more on character than plot, relies heavily on usage and phrasing, and the beauty is in how the story's told more than the story itself.

I love to read something that makes me pause because it's so beautifully written. I still feel I read carefully, a habit from my youth, and a well-turned phrase can still make me smile. It needn't be what I call purple prose with an abundance of adjectives, just a good, sharp line that says everything.

It's been said that good writing makes the old new and the new old. If a work does that and doesn't fit in a genre, it's lit fic.