A template for fictional characters proposed by my son John in an iChat discussion about "Flight of the Conchords":
When I first saw the show, I felt like, "well, I'm not that interested in the two main characters, so I probably won't like the show very much."... It's weird for those 2 characters to be so central, yet I see almost no differentiation between them. In any given episode, Brett might be acting differently from Jemaine. But it doesn't seem to be part of any larger character trait — "oh, that's so Brett!"
I said: "sometimes having a bland center works as a plot device. i learned that when I studied 'tom jones' in high school." John said:
[Brett and Jemaine are] kind of like Jim and Pam on The Office. And Michael Scott is like Murray. And Mel is a lot like Dwight. Those 4 fit the same basic template.
So there's the more general idea of the dull central character (or characters) and the more specific idea of 2 bland central characters with 2 livelier characters, one of whom is the foolish leader and the other who's some kind of weird suck-up. Examples?
Let's go to the blog archives. It's nice to have a "plagiarism" tag that lets me pull out so many old conversations about plagiarism that were prompted by various things over the years. (The links are on the numbers.)
1. "The internet is changing the way students think about plagiarism... or — I would add — they way they lie about it."
2. "Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength; if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information."
3. "The real fault is not making it a point always to write sharp, distinctive prose. Prose like the stuff [Maureen] Dowd lifted called out for rewriting. She might not have known to think I can't use that because I didn't write it. But she should at least have thought I can't use that because it's dull."
4. "'[T]here is a big difference between being a plagiarist — at bottom, lazy or sloppy — and being a fabulist.' It's tougher to make things up than to copy, and yet it's Lehrer who's screwed himself more deeply."
5. "'To coin a phrase, in the spirit of the vice president-elect, you can't always get what you want, but you get what you need,' Alito said, an imperfect rendering of a Rolling Stones lyric. Then, he added, 'Did someone say that before?'"
6."My dear, it's called an allusion. The error isn't stealing, it's assuming people get it."
7. "Jerry Seinfeld's late-night rant about his wife's cookbook rival was no joke to the author's family."
8. "When you are discovered, I want you to claim — really sincerely — that you actually mistakenly believed that you remembered the incident as if it had happened to you. You can be all: 'I am chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me.'"
9. "How is it possible for someone in [Fareed Zakaria's] position to make a mistake of that kind? The risk far outweighs any convenience in copying material like this. It can't be deliberate."
10. "Once you’ve been busted for making stuff up, you need to be sure that what you publish is reasonably accurate... though I suppose that passing on other people’s fabrications is arguably a modest improvement over creating his own."
11. "Should Coldplay be able to force Hoepfner to take down his accusatory video and apologize, or do we think it's a nice resolution of the controversy for Coldplay to escape unsued and for Hoepfner to have his viral video to leverage his band to whatever degree of fame it can get out of this amusing little artistic squabble?"
12. "'I think that’s the way Bob Dylan has always written songs.... It’s part of the folk process, even if you look from his first album until now.' Well, theft itself is a traditional 'process,' but it would still piss me off if someone robbed me, either with a six gun or a fountain pen. At least Dylan called an album 'Love and Theft,' and he's repeatedly presented himself as a thief in various lyrics. To have Bob Dylan steal some of your phrases and the Dylan fanatics ferret out the connection he declined to tell us about is to get publicity you never would have gotten otherwise."
13. "When you accuse a 6-year-old of plagiarism in an art contest, you'd better be ready to make a decision to disqualify her and stick to it. You've besmirched her, and you can't unbesmirch her. Oh, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service! You idiots!"
14. Rush Limbaugh appropriates my question, without attribution.
15. "And if our good opinion of him is based mainly on his speeches, then we have reason to examine why we're supporting him. But politics is full of stock phrases, contagious memes, and brainstormed messages."
16. "Obama defends his use of a couple lines given him by his associate Duval Patrick. 'This is where we start getting into the silly season in politics.'"
"According to a 2001 Institute of Medicine report, 600 mg of caffeine (or six cups of coffee) will bring on negative cognitive effects, otherwise known as the jitters, in most people — including Kramer from Seinfeld. And some people are so sensitive to caffeine that one cup will bring on nervousness and irritability, rather than the alertness that most of us feel. 'We also know that caffeine is bad for people with anxiety — for them, it's likely to hurt productivity... But for people on the more depressive end, caffeine would improve productivity. The effect of the drug really depends on the brain into which it's being infused.'"
Not to be confused with: "What's the show about?"/"It's about nothing." The "Seinfeld" episode "The Pitch" was originally broadcast in September 1992. Over 20 years ago. I know, old. But the film clip above, is from 1966. The movie is "After the Fox" (or "Caccia alla volpe"), with Peter Sellers as The Fox, a master of crime and disguise, who is pretending to be the film director Federico Fabrizi (presumably Federico Fellini). That's Victor Mature as the Marcello Mastroianni-type actor. The director is Vittorio De Sica, oddly enough, and Neil Simon wrote the screenplay.
I was really looking for another clip from "After the Fox," where Sellers is directing Mature in another scene in the criminal scheme he's convinced everyone is a real movie. It's a dream sequence, and Sellers is importuning Mature — in an Italian accent — with "You are running... running!"
I was thinking of that line because "You are running... running!" is my title for this little movie I just made. Check it out:
"... for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets."
Tears coursed. The subject and the predicate are right up there at the outset. No teasing about where the foundation of this sentence is. Course is a strange verb for ran. There are reasons to choose the odder word. Course, for example, is more woody, less tinny than ran. The tears coursed, but not freely, because they got stuck on the woman's mascaraed eyelashes. It's thickly applied black mascara. We know it's thickly applied, because it's the excess blobs of mascara that give the impression of beads, and inky means black. So the tears got stuck on the blobs and became a coagulated black liquid, slowed down, but still, on each cheek, a little river, a rivulet. Is rivulet a strange word? Classical Latin had the word rīvulus and there's rivoletto in Italian. John Milton used rivulet, in 1667, in "Paradise Lost," one of the books my readers urge upon me as they imagine they see the light at the end of the "Gatsby" tunnel. "As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight...," I found the rivulet sentence in "Paradise Lost":
In Bowre and Field he sought, where any tuft Of Grove or Garden-Plot more pleasant lay, Thir tendance or Plantation for delight, By Fountain or by shadie Rivulet He sought them both, but wish'd his hap might find EVE separate, he wish'd, but not with hope Of what so seldom chanc'd, when to his wish, Beyond his hope, EVE separate he spies, Veild in a Cloud of Fragrance, where she stood, Half spi'd, so thick the Roses bushing round About her glowd, oft stooping to support Each Flour of slender stalk, whose head though gay Carnation, Purple, Azure, or spect with Gold, Hung drooping unsustaind, them she upstaies Gently with Mirtle band, mindless the while, Her self, though fairest unsupported Flour, From her best prop so farr, and storn so nigh.
Oh, come on now! That sentence is absurdly long! And the spelling is so perverse — Bowre and Flour for bower and flower. I like the Roses bushing round as the Snake finds EVE alone. The gay flowers — flours — drooping... interestingly vulnerable. But storn... what is it? Storn! I know it's woody.
No, no, no! I'm too smart to succumb to that temptation. I am not a stooping, drooping blogger. I'm shrinking back into my "Gatsby" tunnel. Tomorrow is Groundhog Day, but I've seen my shadie shadow this evening. I'm frightened, terrified. The unfree tears course down my cheeks, slowed by the speed bumps of inky mascara.
Yesterday, I was asking: Why was that prop so important to David Gregory? If possession of that high-capacity magazine was a crime, and the NBC folk knew it and had even contacted the police and thus even knew they'd created rock-hard evidence that they knew it, why did they go ahead and have Gregory flaunt that illegal possession on television? They had to have thought it was a devastatingly powerful prop. My first guess was that they imagined that viewers — some viewers, at least — would find the object itself scary.
Now, I've got to show you another one of Chip Ahoy's little riffs, because it's what jogged my thinking on the subject for some reason. Here's Chip in the comments thread to that other post, the one where I showed those David Gregory masks (designed by Chip). This is a little dialogue:
"No. It doesn't look that threatening to me. If that's what you were thinking. No. It just doesn't."
"What do you mean? Are you insane? This magazine holds thirty rounds."
"So."
"So? So? So? Is that all you got? It holds thirty!"
"So. It's small. Looks like a PEZ dispenser to me."
"WHAT? So, this is amusing to you? You find this amusing."
Caption: "It holds 30." I'm not sure exactly why that jogged my thinking, but suddenly I understand the drama Gregory (and his people) were trying to enact. It's a deep psychic memory of childhood. Gregory sought dominance over his interlocutor, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, and the idea — in the act of picking up that magazine and beginning an interrogation about it — was that Gregory would become (subliminally) a parent figure who would push LaPierre into the subordinate role of the little boy, the cowering child confronted with undeniable evidence of his wrongdoing. What's THIS I found in your room?
The plan was for LaPierre to babble lamely, scrambling to explain it away, like the kid trying to concoct some cockamamie reason why that (whatever) got into his room. He'd look foolish and guilty, as Dad continues to hold up the item which the kid knows will be the defeat of every idea that flashes through his stupid, stupid brain.
The scenario didn't play out as scripted. LaPierre is a stolid veteran of many a confrontational interview. He's not going to let the interviewer get the upper hand that easily. Somebody needs to tell Gregory: We all want the hand. Hand is tough to get.
