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Show Acting Alone Page 4 23 notebook like this one here and they see all the trillions of scratchings-out and scribblings-in and they say. 'Oh, look at how the poor son-of-a-bitch tortured over these pages. Look at the self-deprivation he must've gone through.' Not me." Sam paused for effect and scanned the meager skyline at their feet as though intensely. "I see evidence of an orgy: cum - er, winestains all over the wallpaper; personal linen discarded cavalierly and dangling from the crystal chandelier, and so on." Yes, it had been a writerly thing to say; and the admiring way she looked at him almost made him feel that he would one day again be able to throw together a subordinate clause, or a prepositional phrase at least, and get it onto a piece of paper. For, ever since being engaged here in the Holly Sugar Building (the bored, bitchy housewives are right after all: there is a sugar company conspiracy to deplete the best energies of this nation!) the only thing he had been able to think of was the perverting disinformation he'd deliberately fed his comp classes back in the days when he'd been irresponsible and immature and primarily interested not in writing itself, but in quelling any future literary competition that might come his way in his capacity as Guardian of Literacy in Kansas. There had been simple punctuational disinformation: its and it's are interchangeable, depending upon current fads; "quote marks" are sprinkled around fun words or cute words for sheepishly humorous effects; semicolons are colons and colons are merit badges, the more the merrier, to be used liberally in announcing sentence fragments. Sam had also dispensed certain calculated bits of orthographic disinformation, of both the passive and active varieties: passively not correcting favorite teen words like complection |
