Revise: 1
A fire does not need to be called warm or red. Remove many more adjectives.
The goose is really too silly: take the goose out. It is enough that there is a search for footprints.
The small head will be offensive: remove the small head. (But Eliot loved the small head because it was so true.) The small head is taken out, but a narrow head is put in its place.
When should the large hat appear? The woman, a traveler and teacher of the English language, was mistakenly identified by her hat and arrested for subversive activities. She could wear the large hat immediately or a little later. Should her name be Nina? The large hat is moved from the beginning to the end and then back to the beginning.
Is it fair to say he will never marry? In any case, he does become engaged to his neighbor, just in time, so it must not be said that he will never marry.
Later, Anna falls in love with a man named Hank, but it is remarked that no one would be likely to fall in love with a man named Hank. So now the man is no longer named Hank but Stefan, even though Stefan is a child living on Long Island with a sister named Anna.
Short Conversation (in Airport Departure Lounge)
“Is that a new sweater?” one woman asks another, a stranger, sitting next to her.
The other woman says it’s not.
There is no further conversation.
Revise: 2
Continue with Baby but remove Priorities. Make Priorities Priority. Cut inside Moving Forward. Add to Paradox that the boredom is contained within the interest, while the interest is contained within the boredom. Take that out. Find Time. Continue with Time. Continue with Waiting. Add to Baby that its hand is grasping the foot of a strange frog. Add Priority and Nervous to Revise: 1. Continue Kingston with Family and Supermarkets. Continue with Grouch. Start Kingston with Siberian Tiger.
Left Luggage
The problem is this: she is passing through the city and needs to spend some time in the public library. But the library coat check will not accept her suitcase—she must leave it somewhere else. The answer seems clear: she will go down the street to the railway station and leave her suitcase, and then come back to the library. She walks in the wind and the rain with a small umbrella in one hand and the handle of her rolling suitcase in the other, to the railway station. She walks all over the station looking for the left-luggage office. There are restaurants and shops, a beautiful high ceiling with constellations on it, marble floors and walls, grand staircases and sloping walkways, but there is no left-luggage office. At an information window she asks about left luggage, and the angry employee silently reaches under the counter for a flyer and hands it to her. It is the flyer of a commercial left-luggage establishment that has two addresses, neither of which is in the station. She must go either several blocks uptown or several blocks down.
She walks uptown in the wind and the rain and then several blocks east, in the wrong direction, and then several blocks west, in the right direction, and finds the address, an old, narrow building between a fast-food store and a travel agent. She rides up in the elevator with a couple who are planning to get married in Brazil. They are on their way to a notary public. The woman is explaining to the man that he needs to swear before a notary that he has not been married before. Besides the notary public and the left-luggage office, this building contains a Western Union office where money can be sent or received.
The whole of the small top floor, the sixth, is the left-luggage place—one room on the street side and one in the back. The street-side room is entirely empty and flooded with sunlight. In the back room, a long folding table has been pushed across the doorway, and a man sits at the table beside a large roll of little pale blue tickets, the sort that are given out for rides at a country fair. There are some suitcases grouped against the walls in the room behind him. He smiles and speaks to her with an Eastern European accent. His smile is friendly. Some of his teeth are crooked and some are missing. She pays $10 in advance, gives the man her suitcase, and takes a pale blue ticket. Then she goes back down in the elevator and starts walking in the wind and the rain back towards the public library, thinking about her suitcase. In her haste and confusion, she has not locked it. She hopes her foreign currency won’t be stolen.
She has just flown into the city from another city, in another country. They do it differently there, she thinks: in that place, there was a locker right in the middle of the station, and the locker opened onto a conveyor belt that took all the luggage to some holding area. There, she had deposited her suitcase in the locker, for a fee equivalent to $5, which seemed expensive to a man standing near her, who opened his eyes and his mouth wide and said, “Donnerwetter!!” When she was ready to pick up her suitcase, it was returned to her at the same place, by conveyor belt. She thinks about this as she walks. She will forget about it for a while, in the library, as she works in the quiet, chilly, thinly populated room. But as she walks, she thinks, But I am home now, and this is how we do it, in this city, in our country.
Waiting for Takeoff
We sit in the airplane so long, on the ground, waiting to take off, that one woman declares she will now write her novel, and another in a neighboring seat says she will be happy to edit it. Food is being sold in the aisle, and the passengers, either hungry from waiting or worried that they will not see food again for some time, are eagerly buying it, even food they would not normally eat. For instance, there are candy bars long enough to use as weapons. The steward who is selling the food says he was once attacked by a passenger, though not with a candy bar. Because the plane had been delayed so long, he said, the passenger threw a drink in his face, damaging one eyeball with a piece of ice.
Industry
rant from Flaubert
How nature laughs at us—
And how impassive is the ball at which the trees dance—and the grass, and the waves!
The bell of the steamship from Le Havre rings so furiously I have to stop working.
What a raucous thing a machine is.
What a racket industry makes in the world!
How many foolish professions are born of it!
What a lot of stupidity comes from it!
Humanity is turning into an animal!
To make a single pin requires five or six different specialists.
What can you expect from the people of Manchester—
who spend their lives making pins?!!
The Sky Above Los Angeles
The sky is always above a tract house in Los Angeles. As the day passes, the sun comes in the large window from the east, then the south, then the west. As I look out the window at the sky, I see cumulus clouds pile up suddenly in complex, pastel-colored geometrical shapes and then immediately collapse and dissolve. After this has happened a number of times in succession, at last it seems possible for me to begin painting again.
dream