"Mom, have you ever been to Chicago?"
"We went there for our honeymoon. It was awful."
"What happened?"
"Before we went, my father said to me 'You go there, you look straight ahead. You don't look at anyone, or they'll stab you'."
"."
"And then we were staying on the nineteenth floor of this hotel and it had a fire."
"."
"That wasn't really so bad. What was bad was the entire time I was there I just kept thinking somebody is going to kill me."
"Well, that was 54 years ago."
"Yes, that was back when there wasn't as much crime."
"If you come visit, I promise you won't get stabbed."
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4 comments:
This "." and this "..." were a commonplace device used in my writing workshops. We all used it, and we all seemed to know what it meant. One day, Nationally-Known-Madison-Based- Writer/Teacher looks at all of us and says, "Will you all please stop putting periods and ellipses in quotation marks? It's empty and sloppy technique." We all stopped, but were secretly bitter.
When I first saw it used, in _Infinite Jest_, I thought it was great because it's efficient and, for someone who used to do conversation analysis, jibes well with how interaction actually works.
Yeah - we were all reasonably certain that was why she forbid it. David Foster Wallace hate runs deep in some circles.
Just keep looking straight ahead and everything will be fine.
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