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Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Infamous Liar Kaufman Proven Truthiful! Story at 10.
Scott Eric Kaufman boards a flight to Houston, TX. He stumbles into his aisle seat and opens his backpack. He pulls a stack of papers from it. Because he needs new glasses, the name “McCann” is emblazoned in 14 point font across the top of first page. Across the aisle sits a svelte young man clad all in black reading a Vintage International paperback. He glances at Scott, then at the stack, then returns to his book. The plane taxies down the runway and takes off.
Svelte Young Man: (leans into the aisle) What are you reading?
Scott: An essay a friend of mine sent me.
Svelte Young Man: What’s it about?
Scott: Getrude Stein, mostly, but it has a bit about evolutionary theory in it.
Svelte Young Man: ‘Cause I noticed it said “McCann” on it. Is it by Sean McCann?
Scott: Actually, it is.
Svelte Young Man: One of my professors told me to check out his work. Smart stuff. Did you know he writes for this online thing?
Scott: Actually…
Svelte Young Man: It’s called “The Valve.” Smart stuff. I can give you the address. You should really look it up.
Scott: Actually, I write for the Valve too. My name’s Scott Kaufman. (offers hand)
Svelte Young Man: (stares blankly)
Scott: I’ve been writing there a while. Sean and I are friends.
Svelte Young Man: (continues to stare blankly)
Scott: (feeling like a busted liar) No, really, I do. Did you read the text adventure parody?
Svelte Young Man: Uh, no.
Scott: Any of the stuff about Darwin?
Svelte Young Man: (visibly uncomfortable) Not that I remember.
Scott: (feeling increasingly busted) I post there all the time.
Svelte Young Man: Well, I don’t read the comments...
It’s all downhill from there. Scott slowly withdraws his long outstretched hand. He never manages to get the guy’s name, but he does learn (albeit indirectly) that the recommendation to track Sean down came, in all likelihood, from Mark McGurl. He posts this in the hope that the anonymous guy who thinks Scott a liar will read this. Because really, I mean, most of y’all complain he posts too much, no?
Comments
You realize that the Svelte Young Man was lying about reading the Valve, right? While you were ‘feeling like a busted liar’ he was the busted liar.
Hah. Now if I meet you on a plane I’ll be suitably impressed. This cracked me up!
But how can you prove that the guy on the plane and the guy who posted this are the same guy?
He was trying to come up with a polite way of saying, “Oh, right—that guy who forces me to scroll so much to get to the good stuff.”
That was me. I was just very disappointed you weren’t John Holbo.
If you’d said ‘my name’s Adam ...’ he’d have been three times as likely to say ‘Hey, no, I do recognise that name from the comments-threads ...’
Except that he claimed not to read the comments-threads, I know, I know.
Incidentally, thi is some excellent dialogue. If I got this from one of my CW students I’d praise him/her and do so with genuine-osity. Nicely paced, and a natural-feel rhythm, and good use of repetition with eg ‘smart stuff’. And lest that come over as too too patronising of me, I should add that the “It’s all downhill from there“ is too anticlimactic, and doesn’t pay the piece off sufficiently.
noname, I thought that at first, but then why even bring it up? Nevermind, I’ll answer my own question: because it’s a conversation starter; I just blew my end of the conversation with my rank prevarication.
ben, how would I know to post what happened to the guy on the plane, and how would I know some of his verbal tics ("smart stuff, smart stuff") if it weren’t me? Plus, like every good teacher of journalism (and, probably, journalist), I constantly take notes. I’m always writing down the way people talk, how this person phrases this, how that person phrases that. I’m a dialogue fiend, what can I say? In short, then, I could scan the notes I took on Sean’s essay. (Just as I could scan the notes I took on the ridiculous commencement speech in the margins of Will in the World.
blah, you only missed him by about a month.
Adam, in retrospect, the “it’s all downhill from there” is a little too anticlimatic. When I turn all my blather into a book of some sort, I’ll be sure to edit it out. And thanks for the kind words. As noted above, I try frickin’ hard to replicate dialogue, to capture the essence of how people speak without repeating them verbatim. For example, he actually said “smart stuff” about fifteen more times up there, but I could communicate the nervousness better by repeating it only twice and spacing it out.
Who knows, maybe someday someone will pay me to write.
I have a whole army of svelte young men out there. I breed them on my clone planet and pay them in Vintage paperbacks. This is the first time they’ve generated any results, though.
"For example, he actually said “smart stuff” about fifteen more times up there, but I could communicate the nervousness better by repeating it only twice and spacing it out.”
Just to microcriticize for a mo (ignore me, please); does the double repetition of ‘smart stuff’ say ‘nervousness’ to you? To me, coupled with the characters sveltdness, or sveltdidity, it very nicely characterised him as possessing a kind of complacency, an intellectual limitation. Which is what I assumed you were going for. Fifteen repetitions would have been too much, yes, although fifteen would have conveyed nervousness more. Nervousness, or amphetemines.
Still, really excellent dialogue.