The Laurentians or meetings

I've written extensively about meetings before. However, I have a memory like a cheese cloth (no earthly clue what a cheese cloth is or its relative permeability) so here we go again.

Meeting Begins:

Time it takes for me to realize that I'm staring at the moderator without hearing a single word he's saying. The whole thing might as well be in Japanese.

1

After my initial failing I tune back in to the meeting. I look at the handouts and nod.

I raise my hand:

M: These handouts are beige.

Moderator: Thank you, that's very perceptive.

M: I'm just saying.

After everyone has agreed that the handouts are indeed beige we moved back into the meeting. At this point I remembered this old Chris Tucker interview when he talked about working on Rush Hour 2 with Jackie Chan and doing countless interviews in China. Anyhow the gist is that he claimed that he actually mastered the art of falling asleep with his eyes open while all of these people spoke a language he didn't know. Ever since then I've used meetings to try and master this useful art.

At some point during every meeting, likely around the time when its scheduled to have ended someone starts asking questions. Usually, if I'm not sleeping with my eyes open, I start to come up with violent ways of ending their existence. Meanwhile, in reality world, that person usually laughs at the answers the moderator gives and may even ask some follow up questions and just generally show in both voice and posture that they are really satisfied with the presentation as a whole and could go on chatting about the minutia well into the evening while I imagine breaking their fingers with some sort of large to moderately sized piece of granite. I joke though. I joke of course. Meetings are great.

The other big news of the day, (news enough for both NPR and the New Yorker) was the I write like application that appeared on facebook today. Well, maybe it wasn't all the rage for everyone, but I have an MFA in creative writing, so, yeah I know people who raged about it. Naturally when I dutifully put in my short story and came up with the answer of you write like: David Foster Wallace I was pretty excited. What are the chances that this machine would recognize the genius in my own writing as well? About one in five, I think. As the only other options were Joyce, Dan Brown and Kurt Vonnegut. Thus, my excitement was already dimmed when I entered a second short story and the Iwrite like application came up with Dan Brown. Note: My two short stories weren't that widely variant at all. So how could the machine mix up these two writers. Easy, look below.

Dan Brown

Death, in this forsaken place, could come in countless forms. Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him.

DFW

It's obvious someone else had a hand in the screenplay, but Mario did the choreography and most of the puppet-work personally — his little S-shaped arms and falcate digits are perfect for the forward curve from body to snout of a standard big-headed political puppet — and it was, without question, Mario's little square Hush Puppies on the H^4's operant foot-treadle, the Bolex itself mounted on one of the tunnel's locked lab's Husky-VI TL tripods across the over lit closet, mops and dull-gray janitorial buckets carefully moved out past the frame's borders on either side of the little velvet stage.

It's pretty much the same sentence. Here is a link that is well worth reading if you enjoy or don't enjoy DFW. Just read the damn hyperlink. If you read the hyperlink, feel free to grow your own sentence and include it at the bottom of the page. Read the hyperlink if you've ever read this blog!

Okay, I hear what you're saying. You're saying, Andrew, those two sentences could actually be mistaken for one another. We want more proof that these two authors write different sentences.


Dan Brown from The Da Vinci Code

He could taste the familiar tang of museum air - an arid, deionized essence that carried a faint hint of carbon - the product of industrial, coal-filter dehumidifiers that ran around the clock to counteract the corrosive carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors.

(Ah, that familiar tang of deionised essence)

DFW from Good Old Neon
"This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person's life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn't even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second's flash of thoughts and connections, etc. -- and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we're thinking and to find out what they're thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it's a charade and they're just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny part of it at any given instant."

So, yeah. One of these is not like the other you stupid app. You know who I write like. Me. Andrew Bertaina. Only I am me, which brings with it a whole load of preconceptions and words and memories and language usage memories that are mine and mine alone. Good or bad. So, I write like me.

The meeting concluded, and I think it was agreed upon by everyone that we all had a really productive time. Here are my notes:

The word RSS is being used frequently. What does RSS mean? Can I ask? Does everyone else here know and is it going to make me look stupid?

Am I the only one who didn't know that intranet meant only for local users?

I wonder if these people enjoy flying kites? Maybe putting together a picnic lunch in a basket bought from a garage sale, but not one of those crappy baskets, I mean, a real nice basket, with some substance and one of those white and red checkered blankets that are standard on every picnic that takes place in the television of my youth. And then maybe after the sandwiches letting some kites loose to hang in the blue sky all afternoon, and maybe even their children could have a turn, if we invited them, though they'd probably screw it up, or cry or something. Maybe the kids are uninvited now. Anyhow, I really hope they like flying kites because I think flying kites is the stupidest thing in the world, and I can just sleep in this comfy chair in the middle of the meeting we're supposed to be having if they weren't all off flying stupid kites.