NP - Frank Miller's Charlie Brown

[Tara Brady]

35. Born Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. Living in Bayside, Dublin - the
shabbiest end of a nice address near the sea and a marsh bird santuary.
Neighbourhood populated by an improbable mix of stoners, academics, boat
owners and Poles.I like that the land is reclaimed and would not exist at
all were it not for the unfairly maligned Captain Bligh and his excellent
harbour designs.

I am a film critic. Have been for 12 years. I did used to lecture part time
in Asian cinema but I have five children, several illegal tomato plants, a
cat named Mr. Spock and 2/3 films to attend to each day so I had to let that
slide.

Tara.


2009/3/20 Daniel Julius <daniel.julius at gmail.com>

> A/S/L?
>
> 25 / M / St. Louis, MO
>
> I am a middle school Social Studies teacher
>
> Is someone turning this into an interactive map?
>
>
> --
> Dan
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 12:41 PM, Glenn Scheper <
> glenn_scheper at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>> Second childhood: 57.
>>
>> High SAT is not a predictor of success, at least, not for me.
>>
>> > Coast and mountains. Hard to beat.
>>
>> Yeah, they come into my ToastMasters Tall Tale, to wit:
>>
>>
>>        Xanadu Inspiration
>>
>>
>> I had not yet faced the onerous task,
>> so like homework,
>> of staring at a blank piece of paper
>> to write my tall tale.
>>
>>
>>
>> I found myself out bicycling,
>> and chose not the hard left road up over mountains,
>> but took the right road circling through valleys.
>>
>>
>> That road too, eventually,
>> gradually,
>> rose up over the middle of the mountain range.
>>
>>
>> And I found myself looking down at the sea.
>>
>> I saw a small island,
>> and,
>> beyond a palm tree I thought I made out
>> something I recognized...
>>
>>        the appearance of swim fins.
>>
>>
>> A man was practicing flippering on his
>> own private little one-man island.
>>
>>
>> And further to the left, I saw several more
>> islands, each with a man practicing his art.
>>
>> Excited, as this is my sport, I pedalled down
>> and out on a jetty, to an office, onto a boat.
>>
>>
>> I slid my ten-speed in between the rows of seats
>> on the boat, not the center row leading to the
>> head and the cabin, but another row, and went
>> looking for the captain.
>>
>> I found two men talking, and introduced myself
>> to one who only stared at me blankly, as he was a
>> foreigner.
>>
>> Then up behind him walked the captain,
>> shaking my hand. I wanted to enquire about taking
>> snorkeling lesson. But I perceived the school was
>> only for police officers.
>>
>> So I went back to where I parked my bike, and,
>> you know that feeling, when you know where you
>> left something, and it clearly is not there?
>>
>>        My bicycle had been stolen!
>>
>>
>> I went into the office to report the bike stolen,
>> and before I could get a description out, a deputy
>> really ticked me off, saying, lots of people have
>> golden hair.
>>
>> And then I couldn't be sure that the thief really
>> had golden hair, but I didn't like his attitude.
>>
>>
>> So I went out, and saw him parking MY bike on a rack
>> at the end of a field, and he clamped something onto
>> the top bar, and locked the front wheel to the rack.
>>
>>
>> I went back in to the office, saying I see my bike!
>> And the officer says, Well it might not be your bike.
>>
>> So I go down to the end of the field, and look it over,
>> and it is mine, it has tape in all the same places, and
>> I inspect a water bottle and a lock that the thief added.
>>
>> Both of them have price tags saying the name of the store,
>> "Goof", which was in double quotes, which is the same name
>> of the store co-located with the police station.
>>
>> And I ran back in to tell all these things, and how the
>> things were purchased right there! And again only get
>> a lukewarm reception, hearing, well, maybe if we got the
>> thief on videotape from the store, while the officer
>> detachedly studied the open breech of his revolver.
>>
>> Exasperated, I go to leave, and look out the window,
>> and see the thief has unlocked my bike and is riding it
>> around the track that circles the field where we are.
>>
>> And I turn again to plead for action, and the officer
>> goes in a room and puts out an APB, but his deputy
>> goes immediately outside.
>>
>> And then I run out the other way, and I hear shots fired.
>>
>> I run around the building to see, not a bicycle,
>> but a big horse drawn carriage. The driver gets
>> down and says, is there something wrong officer?
>>
>> He is large, and wearing my green outdoor jacket.
>>
>> The driver is smarmy, and the carriage has an
>> electric quality, the dark effulgence of evil.
>>
>> "What do you have in there?"
>>
>> "DVDs"
>>
>> And I know that he has rather a water bottle
>> and bicycle lock, the implements of his theft.
>>
>> And I woke up, and said,
>> "Yeah Lord, we got him!"
>>
>> And I said, "Thank you, Lord, for supplying
>> dreams and visions on my bed at night!"
>>
>> I paced around, excited, recovering all the
>> parts of the story, and by the time my heavy
>> breathing had abated, I realized, and said,
>> "Thank you, Lord, for my Tall Tale!"
>>
>>
>> Hence the title, Xanadu Inspiration. Xanadu
>> being the magical land of poetic inspiration,
>> such as happened with Coleridge's Kubla Kahn,
>> received all at once in a vision.
>>
>>
>> Yours truly,
>> Glenn Scheper
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Eglenn_scheper/>
>> glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
>> Copyleft(!) Forward freely.
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20090321/396de1fb/attachment-0001.html>