Tag Archives: Writing

What I learned this week, June 15, 2012

Posted on by Bill Chance

When I walked around the Chihuly glass exhibit at the Arboretum… here, here, here, here, here, here, and here – I heard one questions several times. People asked, “What happens when it hails.”

This is Texas, and they don’t say “if” it hails, they say, “when.” Even the Arboretum literature addresses that. It said that the glass is tougher than you think, and that Chihuly has capacity standing by to replace anything that breaks. When it hails.

Well, it hailed. It looks like the only damange is to the white blossoms in the Persian garden pool, the ones I saw the second time I visited the exhibition. They said the works will be replaced and the rest of the glass is unscathed.

The Chihuly glass in the Persian Garden Pool that was damaged by hail at the Dallas Arboretum. This photo was taken before the storm.

Hail Damages Chihuly Exhibit at Dallas Arboretum  

For those of you from places where the weather isn’t quite so… Texas-like, here’s some homespun video of what we live with here. All from Thursday afternoon.

 

Nasher architect Renzo Piano pleads for a solution from Museum Tower

From the article:

Piano says that because the Nasher is a privately held collection, it is free to leave its Flora Street museum and go elsewhere — although he noted that this is not something the Nasher family wants to do, that it was the dream of founder Raymond Nasher to put his collection in the Dallas Arts District at that location. Were Nasher alive today, Piano says, he would “mad, mad, mad, mad, mad.”

I agree, I think the Nasher is playing way too nice with this. If it were my collection I would be in talks with, say New York City and see if the colection could be relocated to… maybe a nice site in Central Park. They would leap at the chance. I know the city of Dallas would be hurt by the move, but to make it up they could use the Nasher site for low income housing and maybe a homeless shelter. I’m sure the Museum Tower next door would enjoy that.

The Museum Tower Condominiums tower over Tony Cragg’s “Lost in Thought”

Finally, a Dallas Food Truck Park.   Coming soon. Faster, please.

Debating the Root Cause of Zombie Infrastructure

From the article:

For generations, government policies have been geared toward creating endless landscapes of strip malls like the one Bentivolio looks at with such fondness. In the process we have gutted our traditional downtowns. We have eaten up farmland and forest. We have, …, endangered the lives of our senior citizens. We have engineered a world where children cannot walk or bike to school without risking their lives. We have created countless places devoid of any real social value.

Why You Shouldn’t Be A Writer

An interesting article, but one that, for me at least, is ultimately useless. You might as well send a heroin addict an piece of paper listing the inconvieniences of shooting up.

Thomas Pynchon: Another Author Concedes to Digital

Oh, good! Now I can carry Gravity’s Rainbow around on my Kindle.

Swedish Edition of Gravity’s Rainbow

I’ve discovered that one of my favorite cult bands, My Favorite, is now The Secret History… with the same quirky feel. Good stuff.

A Seven-Song Primer On Michael Grace Jr., New York’s New Wave Cult Hero

What’s going on this weekend?

Well, on Friday, there’s the Arts District Summer Block Party.  These are always a lot of fun. I might do Late Night at the DMA. The Nasher has been showing kid’s movies on an inflatable screen in the garden, but this week it’s 500 Days of Summer. I’m getting a little tired of Zooey Deshanel’s Goofy Quirky Zany Adorkable Hipster Doofus persona… but still…

Then, on Saturday, the Deep Ellum Outdoor Market is growing and ecompassing Filipino Fest – which sounds like fun.

Sunday? Don’t know yet… but I feel like maybe some Oak Cliff…. Maybe some Bar Belmont. Oh, Shakespeare in the Park is starting up with Twelfth Night.

Any other ideas?

It’s been a bad year for great musicians.
RIP Eduard Khil

Sunday Snippet – Benjamin

Posted on by Bill Chance

I’m doing more editing now than writing. The worst part of editing is trying to decide if something you wrote some time ago is worth rescuing… or finishing… or should be plopped in the digital dumper.

Here’s a piece of text that I was enthusiastic about when I wrote it… but now, not so much.

I don’t know, there might be something here or there might not.

Benjamin

With a resigned expression and a clumsy attempt at a dramatic flourish, Beauregard Evans slapped a crisp new bill down on the linoleum table. The small motley group that had gathered around leaned over for a good look. There was a collective sigh followed by a sucking in of breath as the implications began to sink in. Sam pushed between Sally Pumpernickel and Joshua Jones to get a better view of the fat aging hairy hippy, Beauregard, leaning over the table so far his belly pushed out under his dirty tie died T-shirt onto the table, almost touching the bill itself.

“Benjamin,” Sam mumbled to himself.

“A brand spankin’ new one hundred dolla bill,” Beauregard began his spiel, “Raught ‘dere. It goes to the first one to try the thing out. I needs ah test pilot. I need someone with the balls to ride da wild horse. Come on ya pussies! Who’s gonna give ‘er a shot.”

“Man, a hundred dollars won’t buy enough beer to wipe the horror of ridin’ that thing out ‘yer brain, that’s for sure,” said Jimbo. He stood off to the side, smelling of grease and ozone, still wearing his thick leather gloves, his welding helmet tipped up on top of his head, like some sort of degenerate knight, resting after a joust that had gone terrible bad.

Sally Pumpernickel said, “Well a hundred dollars will buy something more powerful than a sinkful of that cheap horse piss you call beer… that’s for sure too.” She blurted out a dizzy giggle at the thought of whatever she could plunk the c-note down on. She wriggled a bit as she imagined it hitting her bloodstream.

Sam broke away from the others as they were beginning to get restless, churning and murmuring, and crossed the room to the open porch, feeling the rough floorboards give with an aching creak as he walked. He looked out over the porch to the slopes beyond. Bits of the morning mist was still tumbling down the mountain, giving the park a surreal, blurred look. But the mist couldn’t hide it – there it was, blue as blue could be… right in front of his nose. The bright artificial blue of fresh paint, still giving off the soybean and solvent smell of drying enamel – the brushes tilted up from drying pools of leftover paint at the bottom of the abandoned open cans.

It was basically a huge iron tube, running down the side of the mountain. A sluice gate had been installed at the top, diverting a strong stream of the ice-cold water from the high spring-fed pool they called “The Dragon’s Cave” into the top of the steep metal pipe.

Sam tried to think it through. Really it was only an enclosed water ride, nothing much more. They had a half dozen just like it already. Jimbo and his crew had taught themselves how to weld the surplus plate steel, boiler iron, and ancient drill pipe they had scrapped and salvaged together into twisting and turning water-courses. The drunk, high, and poverty-stricken customers that on hot summer weekends enjoyed the cut-rate aqueous entertainment the park offered would throw themselves with abandon into the dark sewers – the longer, faster, twistier, scarier… the better.

The most popular enclosed slide was a real piece of work called, “The Devil’s Backbone.” It ended right behind the crude cabin that served as a workshop. The crew liked to hang out on the porch, drink, pass the bong and watch the customers tumble into the pool at the end of the ride. A particularly violent and unexpected isosceles twist right at the end tended to yank suit bottoms down and dislodge all but the most tightly secured bikini tops. It was great. Everybody, even the customers… especially the customers… loved it.

It had taken Jimbo a year to get the proper hang of the welding, and a lot of customers had been sent down the mountain to the emergency room while he was learning. He had been showing signs of mellowing… but now, this.

They had not named the new ride, the one that Sam was staring at, the one they were offering all the cash for the first one stupid and desperate enough to leap into. It was so simple. A simple tube running straight down the mountain at a very steep angle for about three hundred feet. It needed the run, it needed the speed, for at the bottom was a simple, elegant, round loop in the tube, shooting up about thirty feet in the air before looping back down and discharging into a generous pool at the bottom.

“Are you thinking about taking that thing?” asked Joshua Jones. He and Sally had followed Sam out on to the porch and leaned on the railing beside him.

“Yup.”

“You know what happened to the test dummies that the ran down there?”

“Yup.”

Jimbo had gone into Trinidad for a salvage sale at the “Platform Fashion Boutique” bankruptcy and bought their entire stock of realistic mannequins to use in testing out new rides. The water would wash them out of the bottom of the looping tube with their arms and legs detached, their necks bent at unnatural angles.

“Not a good test,” Beauregard Evans had said. “Those dummies don’t have no brains, no muscles, no reflexes. A human bean can wiggle through no problema. We’ll grease ’em up with Crisco to get em over the hump and make sure they keep their arms crossed over their chests.”

Now Sam, Joshua, and Sally leaned on the rail, looked at the tube, and thought of the crisp currency on the table and on the pieces of old mannequin stacked up behind some bushes.

“You still thinkin’?” Joshua asked Sam again.

“Yup.”

“You’ll never ride that thing,” Sally Pumpernickel said. “You don’t have the guts.”

Sam let out a sigh. No use thinking any more; now he had no choice. There was no way he could live the rest of his years… no matter how short, with Sally Pumpernickel thinking and saying he was a chicken. He pushed away from the railing, turned and walked briskly into the maintenance shed. He had to push the crowd aside – but he didn’t have to say anything – just reach out onto the table and snatch up the hundred dollar bill.

The Best American Noir of the Century

Posted on by Bill Chance

The Kindle is like crack. Every day I get an email with the “Deal of the Day,” and every day I need to figure out how I am going to resist. It isn’t the money – these books go from ninety nine cents up to, say four bucks. It isn’t the space, either. My Kindle can hold a small library in its memory and what it won’t hold Amazon will store out in the clouds. It’s simply time. There are too many books and life is too short and time is running out too fast.

Sometimes, though, I can’t resist. I buy and I read.

One temptation given in to was a big book that came in for a one-day sale… I think it was $1.99 or so.

I love big, thick anthologies of short stories. Especially with time so short and life so mixed-up and confusing, the ability to scrape up a few spare minutes and read a whole story – complete in and of itself – no remembering galaxies of characters, confused clusters of settings, and subtle plot threads that weave and waft through the delicate tapestry of a novel… one shot, simple, fast, powerful. Give me a tome with twenty or thirty or more of these miniature jewels and I’m a happy camper.

The buck ninety-nine deal came in over the ether for purchase of the Best American Noir of the Century. Couldn’t resist – hit the “buy with one click” button and it was mine.

Reading it took a little longer. It had 39 stories, so it took a few days to plow through. The stories covered about 83 years and were in chronological order. Noir isn’t really a genre, more like an attitude, and you could feel how the stories changed over time.

The book is 800 pages… which made me glad that it was only some bits stored in the Kindle memory. That’s a lot lighter.

There is a lot of criticism of this anthology… mostly concerning the meaning of the term Noir. A lot of folks take Noir to be a hardboiled detective novel. They are disappointed because, although there are some classics in the collection, it takes a broader view of Noir and includes some stories with supernatural elements and other borderline tales.

That’s fine with me. I was surprised to find that I liked some of the more offbeat, longer, and modern riffs. I recommend the anthology highly… it’s the kind of thing you will like if you like that kind of thing.

Like any group of thirty nine tales, the offerings can be a little uneven. Some folks will like stories I didn’t… but here are a few that stood out in my mind:

Harlan Ellison: 1993: Mefisto in Onyx – Harlan Ellison, not surprisingly, comes up with a loose, weird, caterwauling tale that isn’t what it seems to be and then it turns out not to be that either. Surprising and entertaining.

Ed Gorman: 1995: Out There in the Darkness – Inspired the book and film, “The Poker Club.” The opposite of Mefisto in Onyx… a tale of four ordinary guys, folks you know and love trapped in a cycle of escalating violence.

Elmore Leonard: 2002: When The Women Come Out to Dance – Fantastic tale about a relationship between two women that turns out to be the opposite of what it seems.

Christopher Coake: 2003: All Through the House – One of the best stories I’ve read in a while. A unique structure, told in a series of short, clear scenes in reverse chronological order. Despite it descending into the past, every new section brings an unknown revelation. At the end, you are left devastated by what you know will come to destroy the innocent doomed characters.

Steve Fisher: 1938 You’ll Always Remember Me – Probably my favorite of the older works. A classic Noir.

Joyce Carol Oates: 1997: Faithless – A dark tale that, not surprisingly, reads like the best literature.

Oh, and there is a lot more, famous authors: James M. Cain, Mickey Spillane, Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, James Ellroy, James Lee Burke. Each story is prefaced with a biography of the author – these can be as great a revelation as the fiction.

It makes me want to read more from some of these folks. Thats more like heroin.

Sunday Snippet – The Revenge of the “Blank Claveringi”

Posted on by Bill Chance

Yesterday, I wrote about my quest to find a short story that I remembered from my childhood about a scientist eaten by a giant snail. It turned out to be a story called The Quest for the “Blank Claveringi” by Patricia Highsmith. I found two versions of the story, one, in a 1967 edition of The Saturday Evening Post and another in a plethora of horror short story anthologies.

I could not get the tale out of my noggin’ so I realized that I had no choice for my Sunday Snippet entry other than to write a sequel. So, I give you the first rough draft of the first scene in my homage to Patricia Highsmith and her tale of ravenous snails the size of Volkswagens.

Since I read two versions of the story, I tried to craft my sequel so that it would fit either one – though I had the Saturday Evening Post version in my head. I put in enough backstory that you can read mine without knowing the Highsmith version – though of course, mine will contain many spoilers if you read it first. Sorry. If you want, go to your library and read the Highsmith story first. It’s worth it. You can find it anthologized in a number of books.

I left the story so I can continue on with more if I get the druthers. My idea for the next scene would take place a few years later on the I10 bridge over the Atchafalaya Swamp in Louisiana.

I’ll leave the action there to your imagination.

The Revenge of the “Blank Claveringi”

Doctor William Stead braced himself as he thrust his hands into the thick rubber gauntlets of the glove box. He did not have any dexterity to spare as he used forceps to pull the yielding bodies of six Zebra Snails out of their shells and snip off samples with a tiny pair of scissors. He was seventy five years old, felt even older, and the gloves made his work that much more difficult. Still, his license to work with invasive species carefully stipulated that he work under strict procedures to keep any of his subjects from escaping into the wild.

After collecting enough sample material he transferred the bits of brownish gray tissue into a small mortar, added a few drops of solvent from a pipette and began to grind the sample into a paste. Almost immediately his hands began to cramp and he set his work down and pulled out of the glove box to massage his fingers. He wished he had an assistant to help but he didn’t trust anyone with some of the work he was doing.

Stead was the most celebrated expert in malacology, with his expertise in snails. He had spent a third of his life looking for the giant snails of Kuva Island in the isolated Matusas group west of Hawaii. The natives there told of legends of enormous man-eating mollusks that once lived on Kuva until brave warriors had fought to exterminate them. Decades of futility had made him the laughing stock of the small community of scientists that shared his field of expertise.

Then, suddenly, and unexpectedly, Stead had been vindicated with the discovery of the species Carnivorous Steadi, the giant snail of Kuva. He was filled with pride when the snails were named after him. Two full-grown specimens had been discovered, one alive and one dead, along with a large group of smaller, immature specimens. The snails were monsters, with shells fifteen feet across and bodies twice as long.

The snails were omnivorous. At that size, the natives’ claims that they were man-eaters certainly could be right, although they could not move more than twenty feet in a minute. Doctor Stead was starting to put the plans that he had dreamed of for a quarter century into motion, building a massive, stout crate to bring the giant specimen back to the mainland for study, when the military stepped in and halted his work.

The public story was that the Matusas had been contaminated by a secret, early atomic bomb experiment and that had caused the strange mutations in the snail population. The natives were forcibly relocated and the entire area quarantined.

Stead, of course, knew this to be poppycock, and was quiet only under severe threats from some very powerful people. His research was taken from him and he was dragged back to the mainland. To further insure his silence, he was reimbursed to a generous degree, enough to establish his present laboratory in his original hometown of Kittanning, perched directly on the Allegheny river. He was even given a sizable grant to continue his research into mutations in the snail population. The government was sure he would be quiet and cooperative, laboring away in obscurity during the last few years of his life.

What the military and the government did not know is that Stead had managed in the short time that he was able to study the Carnivorous Steadi, the giant man-eating snails of Kuva, to learn the secrets of the mollusks’ complex and unique reproductive cycle. In addition, he had managed to secret a small vial containing several dozen fertilized eggs, each no bigger than a grain of rice, onto his person and brought them to this very laboratory on the banks of the Allegheny.

Stead had hatched these eggs and was studying the small larval form of the giant snails. These were voracious shell-less tiny forms of the species, able to thrive on land and in fresh water, eat both plant matter and animal flesh, and seemed to be able to reproduce on their own. Stead had always wondered why he had never been able to find any of the giant snails on the small almost featureless Kuva island for decades – then, after he had given up looking for two years, the massive mollusks suddenly made an appearance. There seemed to be a trigger that would cause these small leech-like larvae to suddenly metamorphose into the giant form, growing quickly to a gigantic size in a surprisingly short time.

He wasn’t sure exactly what circumstances would cause this dramatic change, but he was beginning to suspect it was a combination of brackish water and warm temperatures. It was this ability to hide as a tiny form for long periods of time, even decades, and then reappear as the monstrous form that had made survival of the species possible. The natives of the islands had many legends about heroic expeditions to exterminate the snails. That was also how they had managed to elude him for so long.

The doctor turned back to his work, using the thick gloves to apply small patches of the material he had prepared to long strips of electrophoresis gel and then clamp electrodes to the end of each strip. He had begun to suspect that the Carnivorous Steadi were able to interbreed with other local species of snails. Would these hybrids be able to grow under the proper conditions? If so, to what size? Stead knew it was vitally important to find out.

As this stage of his work neared completion, he heard the insistent buzzer at the door. “Just a minute,” he said as he withdrew from the glove box, assuming it was another routine delivery of equipment. He was surprised when he opened the door to see a strong-looking young woman enter the laboratory with long, firm strides.

“Doctor William Stead?” she asked with the attitude of someone that already knew the answer.

“Yes,” said Stead. He was sure he had never met her although something about the structure of her face looked familiar.

“Doctor, my name is Wanda Clavering. I believe you were the last person to see my father, Avery, alive.”

Stead stood in front of the woman stunned, until with a great effort he regained his composure and said simply, “I am so sorry for your loss.”

“You know that he left me and my mother waiting in Hawaii while he went off to visit you and to look for those horrible giant snails don’t you. We were stranded there for months before we were able to find out what had happened. My mother has never recovered from the shock and it has fallen on my shoulders to find out the truth about what happened out there.”

“Well, again I am so sorry. Your father came to see me in the Matusas Islands and I warned him of the expedition to Kuva. I did my best to discourage him from making the trip. He was an inexperienced sailor and must have fallen overboard as his boat was found drifting and abandoned. It was the height of irony when I traveled to Kuva to insure he wasn’t there that I finally discovered the creatures that I had so long sought after.”

“He was looking for them too.”

“Yes, but he was only a neophyte. Again, I feel terrible for your loss, but he was new to the quest, while I had been working for decades.”

The young woman turned away, opened her purse, and seemed to clutch a tiny object in her palm. Her jaw was set and she seemed to be trembling slightly, with rage or sadness… Stead couldn’t tell.

“Doctor Stead, do you know a Lieutenant Barnes?”

Now it was Stead’s turn to seethe. “Yes, I know him. He’s that upstart that the military sent out into the Pacific to take over my studies. He is an usurper.”

“I was able to meet with him and he was able to impart some information to me about my father,” Wanda Clavering said.

“He must have been infatuated with you to give up any information,” Stead replied. “I found him to be very stingy with the facts.”

“I assure you his only motivation was to set the record straight, no matter what you may think.”

“The record?”

“Yes, your story, Doctor Stead, is well known, but Lieutenant Barnes had educated me to the existence of some serious inconsistencies in that tale,” said Wanda.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“First of all, I’m sure you are aware that one of the two giant snails on Kuva was already dead when you and the natives arrived in the catamaran canoe. The natives have testified that it had been done in with a crude wooden spear.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“It means that my father was alive on Kuva when you reached it and you fed him to the snail to take the glory of discovery for yourself. You have said that you had been searching for decades while he was only a mere neophyte. That must have driven you mad.”

“A mollusk with a stick in it does not convict me of that crime, my dear.”

Wanda continued on as if Stead had not spoken. “You know that after a terrible accident that cost the life of three soldiers, eaten in their sleep, that the second snail was put to death.”

“No, I did not know that. It doesn’t surprise me, though, those military buffoons would be ones to be surprised by something as slothful as a snail.”

“After the specimen was dispatched,” Wanda said, “A complete autopsy was done. Inside the snail’s digestive tract… this was found.”

Wanda Clavering extended her palm and exposed the item she had picked out of her purse. It was a simple gold band.

“My father’s wedding ring.”

Doctor William Stead exploded. “Your father was an imbecile. He did not even understand that the snails would eat through the mooring ropes of his sailboat. The minute I saw the boat adrift and examined the ends of the anchor lines I knew they had been chewed through by mollusk teeth – enormous ones. He told me he thought of the snails as Blank Claveringi with his name as the species and an unknown genus. Snail food was too good an end for him, believe me. It was an undeserved honor to be devoured by the glorious  Carnivorous Steadi.”

Wanda Clavering let out a horrendous scream and moved forward as if to strike the frail old man. Stead knew he could not stand up to her youth and fury and turned to flee out the door of the laboratory. As he moved through the opening, he turned and saw Wanda looking about for a weapon. Her eyes fell on a heavy glass cylinder containing a mass of green plant matter with a thick lid clamped shut. Stead recognized this as a container with maybe twenty of the precious immature giant snail larvae within.

He paused in his flight right outside the door, standing on the little strip of concrete that ran along the bank of the river.

“No! Not that!” he shouted to no avail as Wanda Clavering threw the container with all her might and it struck Stead on the head with a sickening thunk. Dazed, he turned and fell to the ground amongst the shattered glass shards of the container, which had fallen and broke open on the concrete after cracking his skull.

Stead could not move, paralyzed by the head wound, but could see the steady stream of blood pouring out onto the ground. Greedily lapping at the blood were the larvae, freed of their glass prison and eager to eat something other than the sprigs and leaves that Stead would drop into the jar.

He realized that his left arm was still moving under his control. In the periphery of his vision he saw that Wanda Clavering had found a heavy shovel leaning against the wall of the laboratory and was quickly walking over with the obvious intent of avenging her father. Stead used his last ounce of strength to sweep as many of the larvae as he could off the grass. Some bit his arm and held on but he saw a few slide down the bank and squirm, flipping into the quickly moving stream of the Allegheny river.

“Swim, swim, my children, swim fast and far, swim to the sea,” Doctor William Stead mumbled as Wanda Clavering brought the blade of the shovel down on the back of his neck.

The Quest for the “Blank Claveringi”

Posted on by Bill Chance

Illustration by Jean L. Huens for the Saturday Evening Post. Done for the short story “The Snails,” by Patricia Highsmith.

A while back, viewing a hyper-realistic sculpture of hundreds of snails climbing a beer stein to their doom jarred loose an ancient flake of memory from the cobwebby and calcified ruins inside my skull. It was a memory of a short story from my childhood. It’s funny how strangely strong, yet distorted, these moth-eaten impressions can be. I remembered a story about a man on an island looking for giant man-eating snails and coming to a bad end.

Little bits, which may or may not be accurate… I remembered reading it in a magazine; I remembered an illustration showing the snail; I remembered a long, slow battle to the death between the man and the snail. Oh, I did remember being shocked at the ending. I think the story was written in the first person and I was confused at the death of the protagonist… who was telling the tale?

Now that the memory was jarred loose, it had to be teased out or it would drive me nuts. So, off to the Internet. It didn’t take too many crude search queries to quickly realize that many people had been looking for this same story. It didn’t take much more work to find the name of the story, “The Quest for the ‘Blank Claveringi.’”

I was surprised to read that the story was by Patricia Highsmith, the Forth-Worth born (though she fled quite effectively to Europe) author of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Strangers on a Train.” The author had a particular affection for snails – from the book Snail, by Peter Williams:

So attached was the author Patricia Highsmith to snails that they became her constant travelling companions. Secreted in a large handbag or, in the case of travel abroad, carefully positioned under each breast, they provided her with comfort and companionship in what she perceived to be a hostile world.

The story was included in an Alfred Hitchcock collection of tales for youngsters, “Alfred Hitchock’s Supernatural Tales of Terror and Suspense.” That must have been where I read it, not in a magazine. The only problem is that the book seems to have first come out in 1973 and I felt like I was younger than that when I read it. But again, memories are funny, I must have got it wrong.

A quick check of the Richardson Library’s website and I found the book. So I went down there, grabbed it off of the shelves (It was odd looking for the book in the children’s section – it was such a horrific story) and I sat down and read it.

That was the story from my childhood. Of course, a lot of it I didn’t remember, but there can’t be too many tales set on an island with a scientist fleeing from a man-eating snail. If you wonder about the title – “The Quest for the ‘Blank Claveringi,’” the protagonist, Avery Clavering, is fantasizing about getting the new species of giant snail, about the size of a Volkswagen, named after him… though he can’t decide on the genus (thus the “Blank”).

I was wrong about the story being in first person. It is told from the protagonist’s point of view and does go inside his head – that must have been what threw me. The horror of the story is real – the snail is slow, of course, but relentless. The hero can walk faster than the snail, but the island is small and the thing will eventually catch up. He has to sleep sometime.

I enjoyed the story and made a note of reading some more Highsmith. Looking in the front of the book, I discovered that the story was part of a collection called, “The Snail-Watcher and other stories.” The library had that one too, and I checked it out. That collection has at least two horrific snail-related tales… I guess the woman did have a thing for slimy mollusks.

In the front of that collection I found another clue – it said, ““The Quest for the ‘Blank Claveringi’” originally appeared in slightly altered form in The Saturday Evening Post, as “The Snails.”

Back to the Internet. A little searching found that the story was in the June 17, 1967 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. I would have been ten years old then… and that felt about right. I checked the library archive, and they had the 1967 ‘Post in bound form in the archives. The woman at the information desk didn’t seem to understand what I wanted (“Yes, we have magazines… 1967?”) but eventually I was able to get her to go back and retrieve the volume for me. I had to sign a form and give up something (my library card) as collateral to get the tome, and I did.

It was really cool to sit down at a library study station and look through a set of forty-five year old magazines. The ads, the photographs, the illustrations…. pretty damn cool.

I found the story, with an excellent illustration by Jean-Louis Huens. In the white space above the title, someone had written in pencil, “This is what I wanted you to read.” So, I am not the only person on a quest for this story, not even the only one to end up in the archives of the Richardson Public Library.

I took a photo of the illustration with my phone and then sat there and read the story again. Since I had cruised through the Alfred Hitchcock version only a few minutes before, I immediately began to notice differences in the text. At first they seemed minor, only polishings, or rearrangements of phrases. But as I neared the end, the story veered and suddenly it was a completely different tale altogether.

This was probably the version I had read as a ten-year-old child. I seemed to remember another person on the island, and that was only true on the Saturday Evening Post Version. Though the only real significant difference between the two is in the last handful of paragraphs, the thrust of the two plots diverged completely. While the Hitchcock version was an existential tale of the futility of man against the inexorable power of nature, the second was a revenge tale of murder and madness.

I really don’t know why the story was rewritten so savagely, though I think I did like the Hitchcock version (which I assume is the revised tale) a tiny bit better.

At any rate, I checked out two of her books of short stories – The Snail-Watcher and other stories, and Little Tales of Misogyny (a slim volume of very short works about very bad people). I really should not read this kind of stuff. What I am reading is a very strong influence on what I am writing and these stories play into my natural tenancies toward repulsive scribbling.

But it is what it is. As a matter of fact… I have to write something tomorrow for my Sunday Snippets…. Maybe something about giant Volkswagen-sized man-eating snails…. maybe a sequel. What would happen if someone brought a snail back to the mainland?

Snails can reproduce frighteningly fast under the right conditions, you know.

Sunday Snippet – The Revenge of the “Blank Claveringi”

What I learned this week, June 1, 2012

Posted on by Bill Chance

I have been wandering around this Wiki site looking for plot ideas. It isn’t just TV.  There is some interesting and useful stuffins here:

TV Tropes

This looks like fun:

Announcing Food Tours in Dallas!

Dallas was voted the worst city for Bicycling in the country. Still, this ride looks like fun:

Group Ride: On the Trail of Lee Harvey Oswald, June 16th History Tour

10 Reasons You Should Skip Traditional Publishers and Self-Publish Ebooks Instead

This cartoon wrote a sweary word on your toilet wall.

Sunday Snippet – Punch Card (How I Met Your Grandmother)

Posted on by Bill Chance

I had a writing teacher once that said that ideas were swimming through the air all around us and if you didn’t catch one as it went by, someone else would.

This morning, I caught an idea for a short story and wrote down an outline before I went out for a bicycle ride. There are four scenes, spread out over, say, forty years. The working title for the story is Punch Card (How I Met Your Grandmother).

Here’s the second scene, which takes place in the past (maybe 1975 or so). I’ll write the other three scenes over the next few days – hopefully to take to my writing group. If you want a copy of the first draft when I finish it, send me an email at bill*chance99@gmail.com – except put a period where the asterisk is and the number 57 where the 99 is (take that spammers).

I hated the punch card machine more than anything I had ever hated before. I was a junior, majoring in comparative literature and since I wasn’t in the computer science department I could only use the computer lab after ten in the evening. The giant computer itself took up half of the bottom floor of the building – but nobody was ever allowed to go or even see in there. The other half was filled with a filthy snack bar, lined with rusty autobots that spat out moldy candy bars and bags of stale off-brand potato chips – and a series of dingy rooms filled with hundreds of punch card machines.

I had taken an elective class in Fortran programming because I thought that computers were the future and I was worried about paying rent after graduation. Writing the assigned programs was easy – find the sides and angles of a right triangle, the day of a date, or draw a series of boxes. I could write the code, but I couldn’t punch the cards.

My homework problems had to be punched onto these beige cards – rectangular with one corner cut off. I had to buy a case of the damn things at the beginning of the semester. I couldn’t imagine using all those cards. I didn’t know. Three months later, I had to buy another half-box from some kid in my dorm. I was always a terrible typist and would get nervous, freeze up and hit the wrong letter.

This was worse than a typewriter. You would load a stack of cards into the machine and then it would warm up and start to hum. The heat would rise and the ozone would burn your nose. The keys were big and yellow and had to be shoved hard before the machine would roar and then… “Blam!” it would whack a little tiny rectangle out of the card. A paper flake would fly through the air to join the thick layer of cardstock confetti coating the floor and, magic, a corresponding hole would appear in the card itself.

With the punchcard machine a mistake was a disaster. I never could see that I’d missed a key. Sure, the code printed out along the top of the card but they never put new ribbons in the machines and it was always too faint for me to read. When I had my stack of cards all finished I’d take them into the computer room, wrap them with a rubber band, and shove them through this little wooden door in the wall where they would fall down a chute. You never could even see what was on the other side.

Then it was time to wait. Wait for hours. I’d spend all night there, waiting for my program to run. Then, my output would drop down another, bigger, chute into a pile. Every time an output would drop, all the kids waiting would run in and see if it was theirs. It was horrible.

You see, if your program ran correctly you’d get a few sheets of paper with the code and the answer printed on it but I never did. I’d find my cards still rubberbanded together and clipped to a huge stack of pinfeed folded green and white striped paper. On the top would be a handwritten note that would say something like, “Core Dump, you loser!”

Whenever you made a mistake, even a tiny one, the core would dump and the computer would print out hundreds of pages of gibberish. You were supposed to carefully peruse the printouts and find your error in there somewhere but nobody had time for that. You’d throw the printout in this huge wooden bin, scratch your head, and start looking for your mistake. I have no idea why they wasted all that paper.

Sometimes it would be a mistake in my work, but usually it was a typo in my card punching. I figured out that the little holes corresponded to letters, numbers, or symbols and I punched out a card with everything on it, in order, and I would have to slide the thing slowly over every card I had punched to try and find the mistake.

It was horrible. I would be so tired, my eyes swimming, sitting at that huge punch machine, trying to type. I’d make a mistake and throw the card onto the overflowing trash bins and start again. Even when I made it through a card, I’d be terrified I had made an unknown error and would generate another core dump. It was killing me… but I had nowhere else to go.

Our instructor was always harping on us to put in comment cards. These were punch cards marked in a certain way that they didn’t make the computer do anything, but simply left comments. You were supposed to leave comments about what your code was supposed to be doing or what your variable represented or why you decided to do something the way you did. It was a pain in the ass and I never did it until the teacher started marking my grade down because I had insufficient comments in my code.

So I started putting the comments in, though I never commented on the code. I figured he didn’t really look through everybody’s work for these things and only took the computer’s count of how many comments were in here. Sometimes I’d just gripe… like, “Fortran really sucks,” or “This is too hard,” or “It’s way too late at night to be doing this.”

This got to be pretty boring pretty fast so I switched to some of my favorite Shakespeare Quotes, “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport” or “There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting,” or “I am not bound to please thee with my answer.” I might make some mistakes punching the comments… but who cared? They would still go through as comments and you could still read them.

Like it was yesterday, I remember the day when I picked up my output and, sure enough, there was the big thick stack of folded paper, another core dump, but instead of a handwritten note, there was a punched card on top of my stack. It was different in that it had been done on a machine that had a fresh ribbon in it and across the top, in crisp, clear, printing, it said, “Funny Comments Ronald. You’re getting close. Ck crd 7 error in do loop – Christine.”

And sure enough, in my seventh card I had hit a capital letter “Z” instead of a number “2.” I never would have seen that.

So I redoubled my efforts at witty, humorous, and obscure quotations for my comment cards. I was reading this huge crazy new book called Gravity’s Rainbow and one day I quoted from it. Stuff like, “You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.” or “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers,” or “Danger’s over, Banana Breakfast is saved.”

My program ran that time and the card on top said, “A screaming comes across the sky – Christine,” which made me so happy I didn’t stop smiling for a day.

The next program, I added a comment card that said, “Christine, I can’t see you – Ronald.”

And it came back with, “I know, but I can see you. I think you’re cute – Christine.”

So I thought about it and worked up my courage. At the end of a program that I larded with my best quotes from the composition book I carried with me and scribbled in all the time… my commonplace book, I finished with a card that said “Christine, I want to meet you – Ronald.”

All that night I was the first to fight their way in to grab any program that slid down the chute, only to be disappointed again and again as other student’s projects ran before mine. Finally, as the sky was beginning to turn a light pink in the west, my program dropped. On top was a card. I ran back to my dorm room to read it, not daring to look at it anywhere in public.

It said, “Love to Ronald. Snarky’s at six, on Thursday. Don’t be late – Christine.”

Snarky’s was a little chain restaurant off campus not far from the computer building. My heart almost beat out of my chest. Thursday was going to take a long time to get there.

I Need a Victory

Posted on by Bill Chance

This is the one year anniversary of me starting up my blog again. I’ve gone one year, posting every day. Actually, according to WordPress, I’ve published 369 posts. It was leap year… I know I published two in one day on one occasion… I wonder what the other extras are?

My first post was on the Monk Parakeets that live in a power yard near my house.

My goal was to go a year publishing every day and now I’ve done it. I think, going forward, I’m going to relax a little and be willing to skip a day if I don’t have anything. I want to go for quality, rather than quantity I want to write more and photograph less. I want to try different things, write out a few more ideas and push it more.

Any comments, opinions, or suggestions would be appreciated.

Pack Straps

My bike with an experimental bag I tried out. The panniers work a lot better.

I carry a notebook (at least one) around with me always, along with a quiver of fountain pens, ready to record any fleeting thoughts that creep into my thick skull, on the off chance one might prove useful someday. Things… things have been tough lately and last Friday I wrote down, “I need a victory.” Then I followed this observation with a short list of attainable goals I’ve been working toward. I perused the list, crossed a few off, then circled the item “Ride my Bike to/from work.”

First, I scribbled through the “to.” I have come across a possibly insurmountable obstacle to riding my bike to work – there is no place to take a shower. I’m working on that, but it will take time, politics, and a budget from somewhere. However, there is no reason I can’t ride home after work.

I have been working on a route to/from my work for a long time now, and have it figured out. The route is important because my goal does not include me being killed and ground beneath the wheels of unstoppable traffic. However, I have found a route made up of paved bicycle trails, wide sidewalks, empty residential streets, quiet alleys (I have to be careful there – cars can back out unexpectedly) and parking lots.

One weekend a while back I did some extra work and was rewarded with a gift card. Looking around, I found a surprisingly inexpensive set of panniers from Wal-Mart and bought the things. They are cheaply made, but well designed and they fit on the rack on my old crappy bombing-around-town bike. I can haul any work I need, plus stuff extra clothes in them.

On Saturday, I decided to test my route. Loading up the panniers with a dummy cargo, I rode from home all the way to my workplace, about 5.2 miles, along my chosen low-danger route. I looped around the parking lot and rode back home. No problema. So I knew I could make the distance.

Candy agreed to drive me to work on Monday morning, with my bike in the back of the car. I set it in the rack (there are about a dozen other folks riding bikes – a pitifully small number) and carried the panniers to my desk. At the end of the day I changed clothes, clipped the panniers back on the bike, and headed out.

My bike needs some adjusting and lubrication, I need to work on the pannier mounting (my heels clip the bags every now and then), and I look like a complete ridiculous idiot… but otherwise I really enjoyed the ride. The bicycling itself is the easiest part – the difficult thing is the logistics of it – what to take, what to pack, getting this here, making sure that is there…. Everything is too complicated.

Once I was on the bike and moving, it felt like freedom.

My goal now is to ride home at least twice a week. On the days I can’t do that I might get up a little early and ride for forty five minutes around the neighborhood at dawn – that would be nice. I can go to the store too, those panniers will work well for groceries.

Sounds like a plan. Sounds like a little victory.

Sunday Snippet – Character Sketches

Posted on by Bill Chance

When my writing group was wandering around the Dallas Arboretum doing our photography thing, I took a step to the side while we were in the Women’s Garden and looked down some steps into a large, rectangular formal garden setting. There, in the center of the garden, sitting on a wooden crate, was an attractive young couple, messing around with something that was wrapped in a complex packaging.

It was obviously a staged engagement. The couple was surrounded by smiling people, friends and relatives, all pointing cameras in their direction. I took a couple shots of the scene and moved on.

Now I have a picture of all these people I don’t know at all. That’s a good way to practice doing character sketches. I take a look at each one and try to make up their story.

I know that’s a nasty thing to do… make up a bunch of stupid lies about a group of complete strangers and then put the thing out on the web. But there is something about expectation of privacy at work here… and if you are going to get yourself engaged in the middle of a formal garden in the Dallas Arboretum on a Saturday Morning… well you can kiss any expectation of privacy goodbye.

So, here, without any further ado… I give you:

The Happy Couple

Roberta Bustamante
Franklin Sellars

They met when stuck next to each other for two hours on the Texas Twister ride at the second-rate amusement park Frontier Daze. The ride was upside down for the entire time with the riders hanging from their safety harnesses and Roberta liked that Franklin had smuggled in a sizable flask in his pant leg. Franklin had chugged a good part of the flask to empty it so Roberta would have a place to pee. She thought that was a chivalrous thing to do; he was impressed by the gymnastics.

The park had been rented out by Franklin’s boss, Tyrone Woodchipper and his company Acrasia Investments as a cheap morale booster. Franklin hated the place but felt he had to attend.

Franklin has never been given a straight answer as to why Roberta was there.

They dated for some time and then moved in with each other a year ago. Roberta had a much larger and more luxurious apartment but she insisted on moving into Franklin’s. He has always wondered how she could have afforded such a nice place and was disappointed they couldn’t move there. Franklin loved the window treatments.

Their long-range plans pretty much peter out at the end of their European honeymoon.

The Parents and entourage

Front to back:

Svetlana Bustamante (Roberta’s young half-sister)
Smithsonian (Smitty) Bustamante (Father)
Georgia Bustamante (Stepmother)
Metal Hurlant (Mrs. Sellars’ personal secretary – barely visible)
Claudia Sellars (Mother)
Freemont Sellars (Father)

Smitty is a widower – his first wife, Roberta’s mother, was killed in a mall parking lot – run down by a shoplifting suspect speeding in a pickup truck, fleeing mall security. Georgia was a mail order bride from the Ukraine. Smitty had never lived on his own and didn’t want to mess around with the dating scene. The little girl, Svetlana, is Georgia’s daughter. She left her behind with relatives and didn’t tell Smitty about her until they had been married a year – he immediately sent for her and loves her like his own.

In the back are Franklin’s parents Freemont and Claudia. He made a fortune off of the chain of furniture rental shops he inherited from his father. He always expected Franklin to follow in his footsteps but was secretly relieved when he went off on his own. Even though he undoubtedly loves his son – the kid always made him uneasy when he was around him too much.

The two, Freemont and Claudia, were high school sweethearts. They watch a lot of television. He collects antique watches, she likes to crochet.

Next to Claudia, barely visible in the photograph, is Claudia’s personal secretary who was originally hired from France as an au pair to help raise their daughter, Penelope. Her name is Metal Hurlant – and is from Marseilles – although Claudia tells everybody she is from Paris. Metal organized and set up the whole engagement extravaganza.

Jimmy Bustamante

Roberta’s little brother. He was an infant when his mother was killed and doesn’t remember her at all.

He has been in a very good mood lately after finding a motherlode of illegal drugs hidden in what used to be Roberta’s underwear drawer. He made the discovery when he finally moved into her bedroom after she became engaged and made it clear she would not be moving home.

The drugs were stashed there in a panic by Joaquin Smirnov – a handsome yet terribly addled fling of Roberta’s. Joaquin panicked and threw the bundle of baggies into the drawer when he heard Franklin, Roberta’s fiancé, coming up the stairs. Joaquin hid under the bed, naked, while Franklin paced around, waiting for Roberta, upset (he suspected something) for over an hour and a half. Roberta, unknown to anyone, had gone downstairs for a glass of ice water and bailed out the back door when Franklin drove up and was hiding, also naked, in a large clump of ornamental grass waiting for him to leave.

Joaquin forgot about the stash due to the strain of hiding under the bed for ninety minutes. The drugs stayed there for Jimmy to find because Roberta never looked in the drawer – she hasn’t worn underwear for a year and a half.

Jimmy is now the most popular kid in General George S. Patton Junior High School. He is taking photos with the new hi-tech Nikon compact camera he bought with sale proceeds.

Wendal Fruitbat

He is Metal Hurlant’s boyfriend, though nobody in the family knows this. She is madly in love with him. Their only discussion of the future has been her telling him that if they ever marry, she will not take his last name. He understands perfectly that she does not want to go by the name Metal Fruitbat.

She hired him for the engagement when he told her he had been his high school yearbook photographer. Metal rented him his equipment. Unfortunately, though Wendal is a good person generally, he is a helpless inveterate liar. He knows nothing about photography and is currently using a terrifically expensive camera without a data card.

Reginald Von Sample.

He is Franklin’s oldest and closest friend. They met by random their freshman year at university when they were put in a room together due to an experimental and controversial software program that analyzed students’ admission essays and placed freshmen that the algorithms deemed compatible. They lived the entire six years of both their undergraduate studies together in the same dormitory room.

Reginald left after graduation for a stint in the Merchant Marine. He said he wanted to see the world. He returned two years early and said there didn’t seem to be much out there worth seeing. He moved back in with Franklin until there was a nasty drunken argument late one night. Reginald suffered a serious cut under one arm that seemed to be inflicted by a Cuisinart Chef’s knife. He declined to press charges but moved out.

There was a distance between Reginald and Franklin after this, but the engagement seems to have brought them close together again.

Deasel Widdershins

Deasel is a private investigator hired by an unknown person (even to herself). She receives her instructions by anonymous email and payment through a mysterious Paypal account. She has been instructed to get to know the family and report on anything untoward.

Her cover story is that she is a scout for an obscure cable channel that is considering a newlywed reality show.

It was made clear that she was selected due to a reputation of absolute trustworthiness. Her honesty is not accompanied by competency, however, and she has not found out anything interesting yet.

Penelope Sellars

Franklin’s little sister. She is at that confusing age… made even more confusing by the sudden appearance of deep feelings for her brother’s fiancé. She has made the decision to simply go with it and see what happens. She doesn’t really have any choice.

Tyrone Woodchipper

He has been the Sugardaddy to the soon-to-be blushing bride for the last three years. He made his fortune through his company, Acrasia Investments, which advertises itself as offering speculation in arbitrage futures, but is in reality a front used by Mexican drug cartels to launder their United States profits.

He met Roberta through his son, Luther, who saw her briefly but passionately after their meeting at a speed-dating event. Roberta had an acrimonious breakup with Luther a month after she started sleeping with his father.

Tyrone has very mixed feelings about his mistress’ upcoming nuptials. He is glad that her husband works for him, which will enable him to keep her around easily, but he feels his manhood threatened in general. He is not getting any younger.

Luther Woodchipper (hiding in bushes)

Luther has never recovered from his breakup with Roberta and desperately manages to keep tabs despite the various court issued restraining orders. He doesn’t know what he will do but knows that whatever it is, it has to be soon.

Sunday Snippet – Night Guitar (opening scene)

Posted on by Bill Chance

This week’s snippet is the first scene from the worst short story I’ve written in the last few years. It’s so bad I should simply delete the files and get on with my life, such as it is, but I haven’t done that yet. The mere existence of that pile of silly randomness bugs me like a hangnail and I can’t help but pick at it. I’ve taken it apart and am editing some of the parts that might work sometime and trying to create a creaking framework to hang everything on.

And because I am just too damn tired to come up with anything worthwhile this evening I give you what I’ve written for a opening scene so I can humiliate myself and you can wallow in some shallow schadenfreude before you click away.

Night Guitar

Copernicus Mayhem was the lead singer and guitar player of the band Sweetmeat Valentine. He made damn sure nobody called him anything else. The name his parents had chosen for him was Doug Chandler. But nobody called him that. Not any more.

“Oh, come on Copernicus, please, pretty please, let’s go. I wanna go,” said Serena Twist. She was his West Coast girlfriend, and that was where they were, so she was his girlfriend.

“Oh, babe, I’m beat. This is the first three days off I’ve had in a month. Let’s stay here, the suite’s big and nice, hit some weed, soak in the tub.”

“Hit some weed and soak in the tub? That’s all you wanna do. I’m bored. I’m bored. Let’s go.” Serena had switched her voice into her high sniveling mode – like fingernails on chalkboard. Copernicus knew that he would be giving in, but he wanted to hold out for a minute or two. Have to keep up appearances. He had a sliver of pride left – or he hoped he did.

“What kind of stupid concert is this anyway?” Copernicus asked without any intention of listening to the answer.

“It’s classy. It’s classical. This composer, Tyrone Page, has done a new symphony. It’s never been performed before. You’ve been invited and I want to go. It’s a humongous honor.”

Copernicus had heard of Tyrone Page though he had never actually heard his work. Page was a mystery, an enigma, nobody knew who or where he was.

The scores of Page’s works arrived on the desks of famous conductors at random intervals. Copernicus wondered why he had never heard anything written by the infamous mystery composer… then he remembered. Page never allowed his stuff to be recorded. It had to be heard live. And though the composer was hidden, his lawyers weren’t. Nobody dared put the sound down on tape, or disk, or anything else.

Copernicus was interested. Now, he actually wanted to go; intrigued. It had been a long time since he had felt intrigued.

“Ok, ok, If you want this thing so much, I’ll go,” Copernicus said. “But I want you to call Skinner and make the transportation arrangements. I want a stretch this time, no van. And I want some weed in the car and a bottle of Maker’s Mark. And plenty of ice.”

“Sure honey, I’ll set it up. Thank you, Thank you.” Serena seemed truly grateful.

“Yeah, you do that. And Serena? I’m gonna be hungry when we get back. I want some good room service this time. Not that usual stale crap. Oh, and please change. If this is a big deal like you say, I want you to wear something… something shiny.”