David Wallace - Broom of the System

LENORE: Pretty keen perception. If there’s nothing about me but what can be said about me, what separates me from this lady in this story Rick got who eats junk food and gains weight and squashes her child in her sleep? She’s exactly what’s said about her, right? Nothing more at all. And same with me, seems like. Gramma says she’s going to show me how a life is words and nothing else. Gramma says words can kill and create. Everything.

JAY: Sounds like Gramma is maybe half a bubble off plumb, to me. LENORE: Well, just no. She’s not crazy and she’s sure not stupid. You should know that. And see, the thing is, if she can do all this to me with words, if she can make me feel this way, and perceive my life as screwed way up and not hung together, and question whether I’m really even me, if there is a me, crazy as that sounds, if she can do all that just by talking to me, with just words, then what does that say about words?

JAY: “… she said, using words.”

LENORE: Well exactly. There it is. Lenore would totally agree. Which is why it sometimes just drives me nuts that Rick wants to talk all the time. Talk talk talk. Tell tell tell. At least when he tells me stories, it’s up-front and clear what’s story and what isn‘t, right?

JAY: I’m getting a scent.

LENORE: I don’t think the armpit theory should be rejected out of hand.

JAY: Why is a story more up-front than a life?

LENORE: It just seems more honest, somehow.

JAY: Honest meaning closer to the truth?

LENORE: I smell trap.

JAY: I smell breakthrough. The truth is that there’s no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn’t more?

LENORE: I would kill for a shower.

JAY: What have I said? What have I said? I’ve said that hygiene anxiety is what?

LENORE: According to whom?

JAY: Ejection remains an option. Don’t misdirect so transparently. According to me and to my truly great teacher, Olaf Blentner, the pioneer of hygiene anxiety research….

LENORE: Hygiene anxiety is identity anxiety.

JAY: I am gagging on the stench of breakthrough.

LENORE: I’ve been having digestive trouble, too, really, so don’t…. JAY: Shut up. So comparisons between real life and story make you feel hygiene anxiety, a.k.a. identity anxiety. Plus the fact that delightfully nice and helpful Lenore Senior, whose temporary little junket I must say does not exactly fill me with grief, indoctrinates you on the subject of words and their extra-linguistic efficacy. Do some math for me, here, Lenore.

LENORE: Wrongo. First of all, Gramma’s whole thing is that there’s no such thing as extra-linguistic efficacy, extra-linguistic anything. And also, what’s with this throwing around words like “indoctrinates” and “efficacy”? Which Rick uses on me all the time, too? How come you and Rick not only always say the same things to me, but the same words? Are you a team? Do you fill him in on this stuff? Is this why he’s so completely uncharacteristically cool about not asking me what goes on in here? Are you an unethical psychologist? Do you tell?

JAY: Listen to this will you. Aside from the me-being-terribly-hurt issue, why this obsession with whether people are telling all the time? Why is telling robbing control?

LENORE: I don’t know. What time is it?

JAY: Don’t you feel a difference between your life and a telling? LENORE: Maybe just a little water out of that pitcher, there, in either armpit….

JAY: Well?

LENORE: No, I guess not really.

JAY: How come? How come?

Lenore Beadsman pauses.

JAY: How come?

LENORE: What would the difference be?

JAY: Speak up, please.

LENORE: What would the difference be?

JAY: What?

LENORE: What would the difference be?

JAY: I don’t believe this. Blentner would twirl. You don’t feel a difference?

LENORE: OK, exactly, but what’s “feeling,” then?

JAY: The smell is overpowering. I can’t stand it. Just let me tie this hankie over my nose, here.

LENORE: Flake.

JAY: (muffled) Who cares about defining it? Can’t you feel it? You can feel the way your life is; who can feel the life of the junk-food lady in Rick’s story?

LENORE: She can! She can!

JAY: Are you nuts?

LENORE: She can if it’s in the story that she can. Right? It says she feels such incredible grief over squashing her baby that she lapses into a coma, so she does and does.

JAY: But that’s not real.

LENORE: It seems to be exactly as real as it’s said to be.

JAY: Maybe it is your armpit, after all.

LENORE: I’m outta here.

JAY: Wait.

LENORE: Hit the chair-start button, Dr. Jay.

JAY: Jesus.

LENORE: The lady’s life is the story, and if the story says, “The fat pretty woman was convinced her life was real,” then she is. Except what she doesn’t know is that her life isn’t hers. It’s there for a reason. To make a point or give a smile, whatever. She’s not even produced, she’s educed. She’s there for a reason.

JAY: Whose reasons? Reason as in a person’s reason? She owes her existence to whoever tells?

LENORE: But not necessarily even a person, is the thing. The telling makes its own reasons. Gramma says any telling automatically becomes a kind of system, that controls everybody involved.

JAY: And how is that?

LENORE: By simple definition. Every telling creates and limits and defines.

JAY: Bullshit has its own unique scent, have you noticed?

LENORE: The fat lady’s not really real, and to the extent that she’s real she’s just used, and if she thinks she’s real and not being used, it’s only because the system that educes her and uses her makes her by definition feel real and non-educed and non-used.

JAY: And you’re telling me that’s the way you feel?

LENORE: You’re dumb. Is that really a Harvard diploma? I have to leave. Let me leave, please. I have to go to the ladies’ room.

JAY: Come see me tomorrow.

LENORE: I don’t have any money left.

JAY: Come see me the minute you have money. I’m here for you. Get Rick to give you money.

LENORE: Set my chair in motion, please.

JAY: We’ve made enormous strides, today.

LENORE: In your ear.

/b/

26 August

Monroe Fieldbinder Collection: “Fire.”

Monroe Fieldbinder drew his white fedora over his eyes and grinned wryly at the scene of chaos all around him.

Monroe Fieldbinder drew his fedora over his eyes and grinned wryly at the chaos that surrounded him. The flames of the burning house leaped into the night air and cast long, spindly shadows of Fieldbinder and the firemen and the gawkers down the rough new concrete suburban street. Undulating shrouds of sparks whirled and glowed in the spring wind. As he stood on the running board of a fire engine, yelling instructions to his men, the fire chief spotted Fieldbinder.

“Thought you’d be here, Fieldbinder,” said the chief, a grizzled old white-haired man with a rubicund face. “What took you so long?”

“Traffic.” Fieldbinder grinned wryly at the chief. “Looks like a bit of a mess, here, Chief”

/c/

A Phase III Centrex 28 console with a number 5 Crossbar has features which greatly aid the console operator in the efficient performance of his or her duties. Six receiving trunks correspond to six Source Receiving Call lamps, which flash at 60 Illuminations Per Minute for Out-House calls and 120 Illuminations Per Minute for In-House calls, and which emit at 60 Signals Per Minute a pleasant yet attention-getting tone. Calls can be transferred in-house via the Start In button, the individual extension code, and the Release Destination button, with the Ready lamp and an audible “access-established” dial tone assisting the operator in a smooth transfer. A completed transfer circuit will occupy a trunk until one or both parties terminate the circuit. As in all fixed-loop operations, the Source- and Destination lamps will remain lit until appropriate parties disconnect. As in all fixed-loop operations, simultaneous occupation of all six trunks will result in an All Paths Busy signal and a 120 IPM flash in the console’s Position Release button. The Position Release button allows the operator to exit all completed transfer circuits, and to abort any transfer circuit not yet completed. Other features include a HOLD option to be used when service-area conditions render its use appropriate, and a Position Busy button, an automatic all-trunk feed-lock that renders the console inaccessible from standard trunk circuits, and allows the operator to attend to urgent extra-console business when such arises.