Like alcohol, Wired.com is the cause of and solution to all blogging problems. Yesterday I came across this, a feature based on what Hemingway regarded as his best short story. It is six words long, 'For sale: baby shoes, never worn.' Wired asked sci-fi, fantasy and horror writers to come up with their own six-worders. The results were pretty dismal, my least favourite being Margaret Atwood's 'Longed for him. Got him. Shit.' Naturally, I began to consider my own entry, realising after an hour or two that Hemingway had all but perfected the form. But then Wired came to the rescue. Prosopagnosia is a condition in which sufferers see familiar faces but don't recognise them. The scientific implication of this is that 'the brain may actually be a grouping of stand-alone computational machines that are wired together.' Far more important, however, is the literary implication. I had my killer six-worder.
'' And you are?' said my mother.'
Read it and weep, Ernie, though doubtless my erudite gang of commenters can do better.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
'Let there be light', said Dawkins.
ReplyDeleteBomb who? When? Might as well.
ReplyDelete"The people have spoken," said Bush.
ReplyDeleteBulls, balls, blood, gin: Hemingway.
ReplyDeleteTolkein already did it for Lord of the Rings, didn't he?
ReplyDelete"There and back again". (sums up the whole thing in 4 words).
I liked yours, Bryan, and your erudite commenters'.
Yours is a nice variant on the old tale of the Victorian aristocrat inviting his extended family for jollifications and saying to one little lad "Whose little boy are you?". "Yours, Father" he weeps. I heard it about Lord Salisbury but doubtless there are variant attributions.
ReplyDeleteYes. No. Maybe? What's the point?
ReplyDeleteI like that aphorism of Nietzsche's, that goes something like: "I did that, says my memory. I can't have done that, says my pride. At last, memory yields." We're all familiar with this trick. Could it be further evidence in support of the theory?
ReplyDeleteRe Dearieme's quote - I heard the 'Whose little boy are you?' attributed to the Rev Sabine Baring-Gould, the prolific - in every way - Victorian churchman, polymath, hymn writer, folklorist, hack, poet, family man, etc.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, here's Jeffrey's six-worder, to save him the trouble...
'Jeffrey Archer writes another masterpece.'
See, he doesn't even need all six words. Hats off!
Jeffrey Archer writes? There is no God.
ReplyDeleteYour story? Really not that good.
ReplyDelete