Latest Speccie: Inconsequential
 

No. 2591: Inconsequential
You are invited to submit an extract from either a gripping thriller or a bodice-ripping romance containing half a dozen pieces of inconsequential information (150 words maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2591’ by 9 April or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.

I'm intrigued by this one-- but I don't quite get it. Are you supposed to write your own thriller or romance, or use an already published book? (Stephen King, Barbara Cartland, something of the sort?)

Any thoughts?

No. I think you're supposed to make it up. She's getting at authors who but in nuggets of undigested info just to show that they KNOW, Fleming going on about wines, the divine Donna Leon putting in descriptions of Italian food that the Commissario (is that his rank?) is about to eat, is eating, has just eaten. Though I would argue that the stuff about food is in fact integral to her evoction of Venice. I also think it has to be in prose, since these books are rarely if ever written in verse. I'm going to keep my powder dry until they actually ASK for a verse. Incidentally, the guy who ALWAYS wins didn't win this week, which lmost makes up for the fact that noneof us won either. Personally I thought saucy was just plain filthy, though none the worse for that.

I'm thinking of sending this in;

Inconsequential.

Lucinda awoke. So did Tom and lot of other people who didn’t know her. At the station some trains were on time and a gap-toothed comb lay in the drain outside Mulligans. No one knows how it got there, or what colour it used to be. But Tom knew, and knew why Lucinda sometimes wore outrageous, ladies-day-at-Ascot hats a la Phillip Tracy, or sometimes wore a French beret with a wide circular crown with a band, in a variety of positions on the head and which some people prefer to wear slightly at an angle, although she wasn’t adverse to wearing a snug fitting cap with a full front “bill” which in a baseball cap is referred to as a “visor” and is designed to shade the eyes from the sun and comes in every imaginable material, shape and size of bill. Sometimes they have ear flaps and a wide range of designs from rounded to square.

Amanda pulled a gun and pointed it at my head, which only that morning had been trimmed by Tommy, my barber for the past six years ever since Carlo moved back to Italy. Tommy did a pretty good job. He was a dollar cheaper than Carlo, and almost as skillful, but I missed Carlo's selection of pretty women cut from magazines and scotch-taped to the periphery of his mirror. Tommy had his own pictures, but he favored older models with red hair, while Carlo went for younger blondes. Amanda was wearing a green blouse with yellow buttons. It was Tuesday. The gun clicked as Amanda squeezed the trigger. I could still taste the poppy bagel I had eaten for breakfast one hour earlier, but only because the deli had run out of sesame bagels. The new clerk was apologetic and offered me a free coffee, which I declined because I do not like coffee. But now there was no time to think about such things. A fly crawled along the window sill. Amanda was musing out loud about the possibility of sending a bullet through my head. George Bush was president. It was sixty three degrees outside.

Sighing, I entered the visiting room of the Baltimore Correction Center, a modern facility on Green Mountain Avenue, opened in 1984. They brought the kid out -- clean-cut, wholesome, even in his unattractive orange jumpsuit, labeled number 85324. Fair hair, freckles, the type of pigmentation that cries out for sunblock SPF 45, especially in the brutal summer months, where temperatures are known to reach 99.3 in the shade. Typical college student, majoring in civic engineering, minoring in Romance languages, you know the type. The whole city thought he was guilty of murdering his girlfriend. Hell, despite his right to a presumption of innocence, a concept derived from the Latin legal principle that ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (the burden of proof rests on who asserts, not on who denies), I wasn't sure I believed him, and I was his goddamn lawyer. . .

Marion, I love this, all of it and indeed your ending, being his lawer, which is very funny, but, the ending IS consequential, adding a major dimension to your story, if you put in some other trite element, or even adding some trite comment after the lawyer bit, if you want to keep that, I think it would be inconsequential enough to win.

I think.

Anyway, best of luck.

Jim

Jim,
Yeah, the ending, especially after the presumption of innocence bit, was way too consequential. Any ideas?
Marion

Marion, you could add some immaterial biographical details- about your own graduation or some such, but better, I imagine, to expand boringly, vacuously on the youth.

It was a Tuesday when Christopher Columbus first spotted the New World over the bow of the Santa Maria. It was a Tuesday when Dr. Michael Debakey transplanted the first human heart and watched in awe as it started beating, and a Tuesday when his patient died as his own antibodies attacked the foreign organ. It was a Tuesday, as well, when Ronald Reagan, former screen actor and Governor of California, was first elected president of the United States, and yet another Tuesday when he was re-elected four years later, changing the face of American politics for decades to come. But I don't know what day of the week it was when I first began to suspect that my wife was trying to murder me. I believe it was a Monday, since two empty garbage cans were in front of the house and garbage is collected on Mondays and Thursdays. Perhaps it was a Thursday.

How's this?

Presumed Innocent Until Proven Guilty by a Jury of Ones Peers

by Josh Harming, being an anagram of the author's name since he wouldn't want anyone to associate it with this piece of crap he wrote while sitting on his newly-installed Serif® toilet with the Ingenium flushing system, reading the Speccie, which he always left there in case of difficult bowel movements, which were occurring more and more frequently along with the onset of middle age...


Sighing, I entered the visiting room of the Baltimore Correction Center, a modern facility on Green Mountain Avenue, founded 1984. They brought the kid out -- clean-cut, wholesome, even in his unattractive orange jumpsuit, labeled number 85324. Fair hair, freckles, the type of pigmentation that cries out for sunblock SPF 45, especially in the brutal summer months, where temperatures can reach 99.3 in the shade. Typical college student, majoring in civil engineering, minoring in Romance languages, you know the type. The whole city thought he was guilty of murdering his girlfriend. Hell, despite his right to a presumption of innocence, a concept derived from the Latin legal principle that ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (the burden of proof rests on who asserts, not on who denies), I wasn't sure I believed him, and I was his goddamn lawyer, fifth in my class at Harvard Law School, 1982...

Bob, that's funny! Are all those Tuesdays historically accurate? Your piece hits all too close to home for me-- not the part about murder-- the part about not knowing what day it is! :)

The only ones that I know were Tuesdays were the elections days. The rest I just made up, being too lazy to research. I wonder if it matters?

Thanks for the interesting tidbit on the origin of the presumption of innocence!

Anna tried not to watch while Joe sprinkled cheese on his tagliatelle al caviale. She saw two waiters sniggering in the corner. “Tell me when she comes into the room” she hissed. Her linguine di pappagallo al sugo di razzo was mediocre but tonight she didn’t care. She narrowed her eyes above her glass of over-chilled Lambrusco. Could she be that woman in last year’s Armani? Or the redhead in a Benetton teeshirt and pearls?
Joe said: “You want I should rub her out?” Shit, there he was. There they were! She shrank behind the potted Euphorbia. Her wig and dark glasses now seemed conspicuous. “Both of them” she said. The woman was wearing an identical wig and Ray Bans but her watch was not a Rolex.

Jill was sitting on the window seat of her bay window at 50 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, reading a bodice-ripping romance. The magnolias were blossoming and her cat had died two years earlier. She liked her book well enough, but half-wished it was a gripping thriller instead. College students roller skating outside were wearing shorts and sunglasses. Charlie, the bodice-ripping protagonist of the paperback that Jill had bought at Walgreen’s when she went for her blood-pressure medication, was halfway into another bodice--this time it was Cynthia’s, the poor unsuspecting girl. Charlie and Cynthia were at Big Sur, where the waves were crashing like something out of The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by the Japanese artist Hokusai. Charlie’s red 1970 Malibu convertible was parked atop the cliff that was chiseled like Charlie’s handsome face. Jill had never seen the Hokusai's woodblock print, so she planned to Google it later on.

He’d gone— she knew it the moment she turned the brushed pewter venetian styled doorknob atop the escutcheon designed in early William Morris mortise handleset style. As the two-panel door of Burmese teak with triple glazed glass panels swung silently open on extruded hinges featuring satin-nickel, acorn-shaped finials, she marveled that a fortnightly rubdown with mineral oil purchased from the clinically obese Salvadoran woman at the Thursday afternoon jumble sale, kept the 3x4 hinges as silent as had the mysterious and expensive goo purchased from the young girl whom Scott had brought home, claiming her to be a Swedish refugee from Au-Pairs-Without-Borders. Sure enough, there was no one in the apartment, which, she realized, had technically been a condominium since that 503 to 108 vote last June. She felt the sudden ache one experiences swallowing a very slushy margarita or double dip French vanilla swirl in a sugar cone.

Frank

How many entries are we allowed for each competition? Are we limited to one entry?

As usual she stirred thallium into his tea while he talked contemptuously of Charles Jennens’ Biblical compilation of the libretto of Handel’s “Messiah”. He sipped his tea as he held forth upon Congreve’s patchy “Semele” and contrasted it with Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast”. She poured his second cup and he prattled of Christian Friedrich Henrici, the author of texts for many of Bach's church cantatas. He clutched his stomach but continued talking, talking, talking. She was pleased to notice that his hair was thinning. He asked for aspirin. She gave him two with another cup of tea to wash it down.
“Funny” he said. “I can’t feel the cup”. He said that tax collectors nowadays would benefit from a “Peasant Cantata” like that written for the Leipzig chamberlain Carl Heinrich von Dieskau. He fainted.

Ha! These are delightful.

To add to your Tuesdays... Tuesday is the bad luck day in Greece (as opposed to Friday), because it was a Tuesday in 1204 that Constantinople fell in the Fourth Crusade...

Hey folks,
Check out my revised title for "Presumed Innocent..." I thought it should be in the spirit of the piece. What'd'ya think?

It's a tickle, Marion. I love the toilet.
Here's my own, just for the thread:


...“Forty-three minutes ago you were a beautiful stranger," said Adam. "Now you make the ten trillion cells in my body sing. And I still don’t know your name.”
...“It’s Hortense,” she told him, ”the 377th most popular girl’s name in 1903.”
...“But it’s 2009, and I’d rather call you Eve.” He raised a hand and touched her cheek. “Here on this deserted beach in Sheboygan, where bratwurst is king, it’s as if we’re the first two creatures to walk the earth.”
...“Lucy was first,” she corrected him. “She’s the Australopithecus discovered by Donald Johanson in 1974.”
...“I know you’re intelligent, dear, but who cares about an old monkey?” His fingers strayed to the ruffles of her bodice. “I’d rather know what parachutists say when they bail.”
...She smiled. “Let `er rip!”
.

My nearest and dearest sent this one:
A pickup stylus swished in the runout groove of a shellac disc. Old Main sprawled in an armchair, apparently killed by heart failure as he listened to a historic vocal record from his huge collection. It was reputed to include the only existing disc of the great tenor Jean de Reszke, recorded for Fonotipia in Paris on 22 April 1905. Inspector Gaisberg, who had a modest collection of historic vocal records, stopped Main’s turntable and looked at the record label. It was Enrico Caruso singing No più nobile, which he sang in the world premiere of Adriana Lecouvreur at the Teatro Lirico in Milano on 6 November 1902. Six days later the composer, Francesco Cilea, played the piano for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company recording at the Grand Hotel. Collectors know the recording is correctly pitched at 70 rpm. But Gaisberg saw that someone had unknowingly set the turntable to 78 rpm.

Hats off to Marion for a well merited HM and to Bill Greenwell, natch, for getting in the prize money, actually all the winners were very funny and worthy.

Thanks, Jim. It's kind of funny--not the ha-ha kind of funny, more the peculiar sense of funny-- how naturally being inconsequential seems to come to me. It occurs to me that perhaps this is the way I usually talk, which might account for why I don't do well at job interviews, first dates and parties-- though its hard to tell, since the last party I was invited to was a New Year's Eve party in 1999 to celebrate the Millennium, when we were all so uptight about Y2K, that the world as we know it would come to an end, which it obviously didn't. So maybe inconsequentiality is a God-given talent, although whether talent is innate or not, the nature vs. nurture controversy, is anybody's guess. So, as you see, I could go on like this forever, assuming I were granted immortality, and the Universe continued on infinitely, another topic of controversy among the greatest minds of our times, from Einstein to Stephen Hawking... phew (pause for breathe)

See what I mean?

BTW, did anyone get the anagram of the author's name in my entry?

Congrats to our(!) Bill Greenwell(s) for his winning entry/entries!

--Also, Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans on Tuesday 29th May, 1453.

This thread is delightful.

Anyone remember "Bad Tuesday" in Mary Poppins?