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Show Acting Alone Page 440 truism and pat ending here. Learn from this Parable of the Post-Endtime, son: don't you forget to give us a really ripsnorting climax to your serious psychosex bio. No truism, no smarmy pat ending, if you please - though I know this needn't be said to a person of your tough-minded and unsentimental generation, eh? If it'll help you recreate that all-imporatnt Great Battle scene more effectively and convincingly, I can get you some more videotapes of the whole bloody mess. You be sure and buzz me, any time day or night, if you require them." And, even as he obediently dozed off, only half-hearing those final suggestions, Sam told himself that he was being affected, lulled to semi-hypnogogic states, by the slow rhythms and soft sibilants of the old fart's voice - rather than by the fairly conventional content of the phony parable itself. Even half-asleep he could plainly see that the agent was trying to play on the multiply-rejected author's delicate ego, his writerly insecurities, to cause him to sleep, perchance to dream nightmares of any author's greatest fear: obscurity. The outright gutting and incineration of a Man of Letters' words would be worse even than their being left for transmittal to the generations in the prissy hands of men like the Four Friars in F Major (formerly Bloody Diarrhoea and the Foot Boogers), as Chaucer's words had been left. Because he'd been obliged to spend about eighty-five percent of his time in half-delirium from methamphetamine hydrochloride and controlled peritonitis fever, Sam hadn't caught the gist of many of the dozens of instructions and injunctions that the old man had been giving him ever since that first express elevator ride. Still unclear as to exactly what the old man expected him |
