INTERNATIONAL DATE LINE: Setting a Story in Europe

by Leigh Lundin

I recently finished an international thriller that reminded me of a novella I’d read. Both were set in Europe, but I came away with the feeling grand European cities were all patterned on Dayton, Ohio.

The novella was set near Lake Como in Italy, but it may as well have been Lake Michigan. Everyone spoke with American idiom, listened to American music, and used American nomenclature. What’s the point of a foreign setting if it’s not foreign?

Being jerked out of a novel is bad for the reader, bad for the writer. Sharon’s reading Nora Robert’s Tribute. Page 30 brought her up short. A central character was named Ford, because he was conceived in the back seat of a Ford Cutlass. Er, Cutlass? Where was her editor?

Sharon once pointed me to a reader’s commentary upon a historical novel set in Scotland. A gentle reader reminded the author that (a) Scotch is a drink, not an adjective, and (b) as most of us already know, mesquite doesn’t grow in Scotland.

These weren’t insurmountable problems, but these authors and editors didn’t make the effort to get their setting right. It takes the reader out of the story.

I’m not an expert. I lived and worked in Europe, so herein are observations as an American. What I present here isn’t a comprehensive guide to European differences, but a desire to make the writer aware of some of the challenges in creating international settings.

5 Foot 2, Eyes of Blue

Outside of North America , no woman is 5′2 and 36-24-36, and no guy is a 96 pound weakling. Instead, he weighs 43.5 kilos while she’s 157 cm tall and 90-60-90.

(Wow! 90! Steve’s eyes just bulged. It’s actually 91-61-91, but rounded off.)

This evening, I helped Steve and Sharon with minor electrical and plumbing repairs. I found myself stymied because the faucet’s set screw required a metric allen wrench (or vice versa). Grrr. Isn’t it about time to standardize?

Griping aside, foreign characters aren’t going to give your spy directions by saying, "Drive two miles, turn right and drive 50 feet." It’s not going to happen, not in real life. Your character will be told something like, "Drive three kilometers, turn right, and drive 15 meters."

How to Do Metric

While we were sleeping, the rest of the world changed. Only three nations on the planet haven’t adopted the metric system (officially called SI): Burma, Liberia, and the USA, and the other two don’t even use our system. We’re entirely isolated.

Why is it drug dealers and drunks understand the metric system and the rest of us don’t? Street dealers don’t purchase 11 pounds of cocaine, they buy 5 kilos. Inebriated sots don’t ask for fifths or half pints, they order 250s (a quarter liter). Wine bottles are 750s (seven fifties) for the table or the larger 1.5s (one point fives) for parties.

Athletes get it: They don’t run the 440 (yards), they run the 400 (meters). They run, swim, and javelin toss in meters and lift in kilograms.

In a debate with a friend a few months ago, I contended that our insistence on the old Imperial system makes it difficult and expensive for us to compete in a world market. Even we get confused: Ounces has three different meanings in the US alone: dry, liquid, and troy. Miles have different meanings on land and sea.

My friend argued that the metric system was un-American. We’re spoiled, we’re rich, we don’t have to convert. I pointed out that we lost one of our Martian probes– missing the planet Mars entirely– because a national laboratory hadn’t converted to metric. One lab used metric and the other didn’t, which cost American taxpayers millions upon millions and international embarrassment.

Addressing the question of un-American measurement, the Imperial (royal) system of measurement came from our former adversary, England, which gave up the Imperial system long ago. Colonists, however, chose to use the units of their mother country and it stuck. Even Benjamin Franklin argued for adopting something other than the Imperial, presumably the French system of metric units.

This creates resource material not just for mysteries, but science fiction, intrigue, and non-fiction. Lobbyists and industrialists make terrific bad guys.

How to Measure Up

When the federal government passed TSA regulations requiring liquid containers no larger than 3.5 ounces be placed in 1 quart zip-lock bags, international hotels handed out 1 liter bags, only to have TSA refuse them. Why? One liter is 1.0566881 quart, just over 33 ounces instead of 32. Couldn’t the TSA have had enough foresight to anticipate this? Apparently not.

So, in writing (or traveling), here are rules of thumb:

• A liter is slightly more than a quart.
• A meter is about 10% more than a yard.
• An inch is 2.5 centimeters.
• A mile is 1.6 kilometers (klicks).
• A kilogram is 2.2 pounds.

Wow, I weigh 100 kg. (Well, I used to!)

Here’s an oddity: Internationally, mileage (or equivalent) isn’t measured in MPG, but in liters per 100 kilometers.

How to Count: Billion, Trillion, and Full Stops

Don’t be surprised to see numbers rendered differently.$98,765,432.10 in Europe will probably be shown as $98.765.432,10 USD. That’s right, the decimal point is a comma and the separators are dots.

Don’t ask me how this came about, but billion and trillion have very different meanings in different countries, called short scale and long scale.

• billion
  
  • 1,000,000,000 or 10^9 (short scale)
  • 1.000.000.000.000 or 10^12 (long scale)
• trillion
  
  • 1,000,000,000,000 or 10^12 (short scale)
  • 1.000.000.000.000.000.000 or 10^18 (long scale)

Most English-speaking nations (plus Brasil) have come around to the US-convention of using short scale, but a majority of countries use long scale. Some use neither and Puerto Rico uses both! There is a way to specify our concept of "billion" even in long scale countries, and this is to use the term "milliard".

Note that in the UK, the dot at the end of a sentence is not a period, but a full stop, and the letter at the end of the alphabet is not "zee", but "zed".

How to Set the Thermostat

Canadians occasionally use degrees Fahrenheit when they want to feel warmer, but the rest of the world would be mystified by our temperature scale. As you know, they use centigrade or Celsius. Rather than give you a conversion formula, I’ll mention a few set points you might use in a story.

How to Date

The thriller mentioned a date of 10/15/05, which instantly suggested the setting was more like Paris, Indiana than Paris, France. The vast majority of the world’s population use a date format of day-month-year, which would have made the date 15-10-2005.

Small banks have been known to refuse checks, thinking the date was wrong.

This is informal usage. Many professionals such as Rob, our librarian, are familiar with the ISO standard which uses a date format of year-month-day. It’s not common in casual use, but self-evident and often found in technical use.

When designing for an international market, I had to take these issues into account. I used a technique of writing dates as 15 Sep 2005, which is understood by most people regardless of national origin. I’m so used to writing dates this way, I tend to mess up forms that use the old standard.

How to Make Time

Those in the military, police, hospitals, computer people, and some other professionals already use 24 hour time, but it’s not commonly seen in civilian life in the US. If your character asks the time, he won’t be told it’s 1:30PM on the Continent, but 13:30 in Genève, Suisse (Geneva, Switzerland) or 13h30 in French speaking Bruxelles, Belge (Brussels, Belgium). In the UK, he could be told, "It’s half one."

How to Spell

English speakers often change spellings by a single letter, Denmark instead of Danmark, Brazil instead of Brasil, Italy instead of Italia, and Netherlands instead of Nederlands. An European spy will purchase a ticket from Milano to Roma, whereas a North American will enquire about Milan to Rome. Many years ago, we used to call the capital of China Peking, but after the Nixon visits, China suggested we spell and pronounce the capital Beijing. We should be at least aware of how Europeans spell their nations and cities.

For some reason, nobody outside of Deutschland calls Germany Deutschland. Examples are: Germany (English), Alemania (Spanish), Allemagne (French), Germania (Italian), Alemanha (Portuguese), and Tyskland (Norwegian).

How to Communicate

Moderately. Respectfully. Patiently. Humorously.

There’s an international joke:

• What do you call a person who speaks 2 languages?
  • Bilingual
• What do you call a person who speaks 3 languages?
  • Trilingual
• What do you call a person who speaks 1 language?
  • American

I saw a bumper sticker a few days ago: No Habla Jibber-Jabber. If another person doesn’t speak our language, there’s a tendency to think they’re dense. If the other person thinks the same way, conversations fall apart.

As a tourist, you may feel at a disadvantage, but as a writer, you can exploit this in different ways. Your hero can be dashing, trained in martial arts, and multilingual, which is a typical Hollywood rôle. Sprinkle in a few, obvious-sounding foreign words, similar to an Hercule Poirot novel to add authenticity, and your novel is on its way.

Alternatively, your protagonist can be a naïf, a stranger in a strange land, forced to deal with a language barrier as part of his ordeal. Personally, I think this latter situation presents more interesting opportunities: tension, romance, humor from miscommunications, and assistance from unexpected sources.

How to Be Rude

A half century ago, Lederer and Burdick wrote The Ugly American, ‘fictionalized’ to protect the guilty, republished a few years ago. Although it was about ineptitude of the diplomatic corps who should know better, it contains lessons for all of us.

Despite assertions by Oscar Wilde and G.B. Shaw, Americans aren’t deliberately rude, but come off that way from cultural isolation. Patience, reticence, and humor go a long way toward bridging the gap. Sometimes errors in understanding and judgment contribute to perceptions of rudeness. Unless your novel is set before World War II, don’t have your protagonist signal a French waiter by calling out, "Hey, garçon," the equivalent of saying, "Hey, boy!"

And, whatever you do, don’t have your protagonist pat an Englishwoman on her fanny.

OKAY, THAT’S A WRAP

by John M. Floyd

All of us who love fiction—especially the mystery/suspense genre—know the importance of a good ending. According to Mickey Spillane, “Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end … The first page sells that book, and the last page sells your next book.”

And not just books. The same is true of plays, screenplays, and short stories as well. The ending is often the part that determines whether a reader (or viewer) looks forward to that author’s (or director’s) next project.

The ending is also the one thing we’re most likely to remember, afterward. In the case of movies seen long ago, I can think of only a few that I remember for something other than their endings. Those films are “Ben Hur” (the chariot-race scene), “Stand by Me” (the train chasing the boys across the trestle), and “Bullitt” (the San Francisco car chase). What makes those three scenes unusual is that they didn’t happen at the endof the stories, they happened in the middle. The big payoff in a story or novel or film almost always takes place in the final moments.

What Makes the Payoff Pay Off?

I like to think an ending has only one requirement: it must be satisfying. It doesn’t have to be happy, or even definite—but it must satisfy the reader. I’m reminded of the old saying that in a good ending, the characters get what they deserve. I like that idea. Sometimes what it takes to satisfy us is to have the good folks in a story, as well as the bad folks, get what we feel is coming to them.

Another way to make an ending satisfying is to leave the reader/viewer with something meaningful to think about. (The often-maligned “unresolved” or “open-ended” story—“No Country for Old Men” comes to mind.) In the words of a friend of mine, those stories don’t really end, they just stop.

The great William Goldman said, in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade, that one way to achieve a satisfying ending is to shorten the time between “the moment of greatest tension” and the end credits. When I first read about that technique years ago, I don’t think I fully realized how effective it is. One of the worst things a writer can do is drag out the final moments of a piece of fiction—especially a short story. When you’re wondering what words should follow the climax, two of the best are THE END.

A Cliffhanger Example

To illustrate his point, Goldman described the final scenes of the film “North by Northwest.” (I’m paraphrasing here, but I remember most of it.) He said the moment of highest tension was the scene where Cary Grant is dangling from a rock ledge on Mount Rushmore, with one hand clinging to an also dangling Eva Marie Saint and the other hand clinging to a ledge above them. Villain Martin Landau is stepping on Grant’s fingers while also holding a container of microfilm on which hinges the fate of the world. That scene is indeed suspenseful, for both the characters and the viewers. Then Goldman reveals that the length of time between that instant and the moment the movie ends is . . . 43 seconds. Yep, you heard right. And during that time, all the following things take place: The villain is overcome, the villain’s boss is arrested, the microfilm is saved, the dangling hero is saved, the dangling young lady is saved, the two of them get married, and they take off on a train for their honeymoon.

How on earth, you might well ask, can all that come to pass, in less than a single minute of screen time? (That translates, by the way, to less than a single page of screenplay.)

Here’s what happens: (1) Martin Landau is shot; (2) because of that, his shoe lifts from Cary Grant’s poor crunched fingers; (3) the container of microfilm falls safely to the ledge; (4) Landau falls unsafely to his death; (5) we see a faraway policeman holding a smoking rifle; (6) behind the shooter we see master villain James Mason being led away in handcuffs; (7) Cary, since his fingers are no longer being stepped on, pulls his true love up onto the ledge with him; (8) as he pulls her up the scene changes to him pulling her up not onto a ledge but onto a bed in an upper berth of a train car; (9) he addresses her as “Mrs. Thornhill,” which is his last name; and (10) the train disappears into a tunnel while the words THE END appear on the screen. And all of this in 43 seconds. Is Hitchcock a master, or what?

Other examples of stories that end quickly after the most exciting scene: “Bonnie and Clyde”, “Jaws”, “Butch Cassidy”, “The Graduate”, “Unforgiven”, “Rocky”, “Witness”, “Dirty Harry”, “Signs”, “Casablanca,” and many more. Even “The Sound of Music.”

Anticlimactic Tactics

By contrast, some endings drag on way too long. Since most are from forgettable stories and movies, I won’t list any here—but I will mention several excellent movies that had too-long endings, only because most good ones don’t. One was—surprisingly—another Hitchcock film: In “Psycho” we all remember the moment of highest tension, but what you might not remember is that after the dead-old-woman-in-the-chair moment in the root cellar, there was an extremely long scene of Tony Perkins in a straitjacket and a padded cell, with a psychiatrist explaining to us that Perkins was, well, a psycho. The movie was otherwise so spellbinding that few of us even seemed to notice the boring seven- or eight-minute “downer” before the actual end of the film. Another example is the outstanding western “Open Range” with Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall. There were, after the gunfight climax, several long, long scenes of the guy and girl finally getting together and preparing to live happily ever after. And my third example is the third movie in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. I loved them all, but I honestly wondered if that last one would ever end.

Maybe the rule here is that if you’re going to extend the birthday party long past the time where the final gift is opened and the final balloon is popped, you better make damn sure the party’s a really good one up to that point. There’s a reason that the fireworks displays always save their best (and loudest) for last.

In Conclusion

Just think of the time-proven curve (arc) that represents the typical three-act story. It slopes gradually upward as tension builds to a climax and then drops off at the end. Not slowly, either—it drops off fast. And for short stories, really fast.

It could be that that’s true for columns as well. Maybe it’s time to wrap this one up.

BANDERSNATCH BUFFET

by Steve Steinbock

This week I have a small smörgåsbord of items to spread on the table. Think of it as our very own Mad Tea Party, and I’m your March Hare. March? It’s only September.

The words “buffet” and “smörgåsbord” are both etymologically linked to the idea of a table. The former comes from a French word for “bench,” while the latter is Swedish for “butter-goose-board,” and refers to any sandwich board. I’m not sure what goose-butter (or buttered goose, for that matter) has to do with all-you-can-eat restaurants, but if you’ve looked at the kind of people who frequent smörgåsbords, the image of buttered geese brings a pretty funny image to mind.

Speaking of March Hares and Mad Tea Parties, I’ve been reading It Didn’t Mean Anything: A Psychoanalytic Reading of American Detective Fiction by Alexander N. Howe. The book is loaded with fascinating insights and observations, as well as pages of dense material that I’m not sure I understand. The book also includes some material that is pretty off-topic. Why, for instance, does he spend half-a-dozen pages discussing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to illustrate identification and trauma? Shelley’s novel is a Gothic classic. But it’s neither American nor detective fiction. Yet Howe never once mentions Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which is certainly a mystery and a crime novel, and its author did live for a time in the States. Seems to me it’s a pretty good illustration of identification and trauma as well.

Early on in the book, Howe was using the word “topology” to describe the shape of fiction. I had to stop and look it up. Aha! It’s a branch of mathematics involving the study of objects in space, which is how I feel much of the time. Ruminating on a Möbius Strip is an example of topology. (which sounds like it could be a Somerset Maugham story, doesn’t it?) In 1736, the Swiss physicist Leonhard Paul Euler (who probably knew which side of his goose to butter) wrote a paper by this title that laid the groundwork for graph theory. The Prussian town of Königsberg was divided by a river in which two islands rested. Seven bridges connected the islands to the mainland and to each other. The challenge was to walk across all seven bridges without ever crossing the same bridge twice. Ultimately, the problem is impossible to solve without literally getting wet.

I learned so many things reading about topology. For instance, did you know that if you have a hairy sphere, it is impossible to brush the hair flat without there being a cowlick? But with a hairy bagel, it is possible to brush the hair completely flat. Try that one on your next smörgåsbord.

Howe points out, quoting from Todorov’s “The Topology of Detective Fiction,” that classic detective stories contain two stories. The first is the crime, which in a classic detective story is never directly seen or told, and occurs either before the events of the story, or behind the curtains somewhere. The second story is that of the detective’s search for clues. As is the problem of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg. The second story, ultimately, is the only one that the reader gets to read. Think of the crime as cause and the clues as effects. Just like a diagnostician trying to determine a disease from the symptoms, the classical detective guides the reader on a path from effect to cause. I have no idea how one would draw a picture of this, but I’ll bet it’s as complicated as the Seven Bridges of Königsberg.

Finally, I came across a copy of the Great Detective Stories, published by Walter J. Black in 1928. This wonderful leatherbound gem looks like a Bible, with thin pages, and rounded, gilded edges. In its 842 pages it contains well over a hundred stories by the likes of Poe, Twain, Voltaire, Hugo, Pushkin, Dumas, Wilde, and others who aren’t typically counted among mystery writers. There’s no introduction or notes, and no editor is named. Just stories. Quite the smörgåsbord of stories, for that matter.

Now it is dinner time and I’m off to butter my goose.

FUNNY

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

“When he is late for dinner and I know he must be either having an affair or lying dead in the street, I always hope he’s dead.” —Judith Viorst

I remember one magazine’s submission guidelines stating they would not accept any story in which the husband or wife was murdered by their spouse. My immediate response was, “Who else would kill them?”

One of my favorite mystery writers is Susan Isaacs. I love the way she incorporates humor into her writing. I think the first book of hers I read was After All These Years and dealt with a woman whose estranged husband was found dead in her home just after their 25th wedding anniversary. Figuring she will be the one police will look at as a “person of interest,” she bolts, eventually finding the murderer herself. Even murder can be amusing in the hands of a master like Ms. Isaacs.

My friend, Beverly, rates Janet Evanovich as her all-time recipient of the best writer award because she’s so funny. “I race through those books and then sit on pins and needles until the next one comes out,” she told me. A few years ago, Beverly said she couldn’t take it any more and sent an e-mail to Ms. Evanovitch containing two words: Write faster.

“One doesn’t have a sense of humor. It has you.” —Larry Gelbart

Writing funny is harder than it sounds. Lots of people are good with quips and one-liners, but working them into the written page isn’t as easy. It’s like trying to decipher sarcasm on the Internet. Sometimes, it doesn’t look as funny in text as it would if heard. Why is that? Are our ears kinder to humorous thoughts than our eyes? Surely inflections in our voice tone help, but wouldn’t an eye catch the smirk tugging the edge of our lips? Why is it so difficult to write that action into a narrative and make it come across as such?

“Wit is the lowest form of humor.” —Alexander Pope.

I’m thinking about Nick and Nora Charles and how their witty banter worked so well. The delightful characters—the retired private detective who married considerably “up” and the ravishing public socialite who married considerably “down”, finding themselves together in the middle of a murder investigation—are one of my favorite mystery couples.

“Humor is something that thrives between man’s aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.” —Victor Borge.

“It’s so funny because it’s true.” —Homer Simpson, “The Simpsons”

It’s said truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes it’s more funny, too. Larry the Cable Guy sums it up, “That there’s funny no matter who you are.”

“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” —E. B. White

Writing something that makes people laugh—or even smile occasionally—isn’t easy. It’s just fun.

A THOUSAND STORIES DEEP

by Rob Lopresti

This continues last week’s tale of how I spent my summer vacation: volunteering at an archaeological dig in Israel. By the way, this photo by my fellow digger John Vanee shows me meditating on one of the major decisions of the volunteer’s day: grape or cherry popsicle at break?

John also taught me someone’s definition of an archaeologist: “A person who can can dig a square hole and tell an interesting story about it.”

There’s some truth in that, because the hole and its contents don’t actually tell you anything. You have to interpret the results, which are always partial. As I said last week, experts will disagree with each other as to what a given find or site means.

But if you are a writer—or even a big reader—of fiction, you can’t help but tell your own stories.

For the birds

For example, there was one discovery that got us a story in Ha’aretz, a major Israeli newspaper. The diggers were exploring a columbarium—a cave containing triangular wall niches where pigeons lived. The dig director, Oded Lipshits, said pigeons were the chickens of the iron age, used for food, providers of useful guano, and as sacrifices at the temple. In one of the bottom niches the researchers found a small pot and in the pot they found fifteen silver shekel coins. (The article says they were gold. They weren’t.)

This photo, by another digger named Carnadine, is NOT of those coins. It is a much bigger hoard (called a “Byzantine bank” by one of the bosses) that was found a few days earlier. I can’t find a picture of the silver pile.

But whichever pile of coins you consider, the question that comes to mind is: who hid them there? Why didn’t he come back for them? Did he die of natural causes, or was he killed? Did his family know there was treasure hidden somewhere, but were unable to find it? What was the story?

Lost and found

I thought the coolest discovery we made was a red ball the size of a grape. It was made of what Lipshits called “half-expensive stone” (Okay, he meant “semi-precious,” but don’t you like his version better?). A hole had been drilled through it so you could wear it on a string around your neck, and a picture had been carved into one side. The carving was, in fact, a seal, used to prove that documents were official, and to keep them confidential. An impression in clay was quickly made and photographs of the seal and impression were sent to two experts. They tentatively agreed that this was an official seal from the Second Persian Empire who ruled Jerusalem for about one decade 1400 years ago.

Which official lost that seal? Did the string simply break one day or did someone steal it from him? Was it used to forge documents? Did this somehow hasten the fall of the empire? What was the story?

Open ended

We won’t ever know, but the human mind can’t help but ask the question. And that’s what keep the storytellers in business.

Here’s one of my personal finds on the dig. Nowhere near as exciting - just a bit of broken glass a thousand years old. But someone drank from that glass, or perhaps stored perfume in it …

Bicycling home today I saw the following objects lying on or near the street:

• a McDonald’s bag, miles from the closest McDonalds.
• a large canvas drawstring bag
• a child’s doll, wearing an orange dress

Each of those objects has a story, too, but no archaeologist is going to tell it.

Are you?

Another thread from the web

If you want to read more about my adventures at the dig (stomach viruses! mysterious toothbrushes in my bathroom! non-dairy cheesecake!) you can find my whole travel diary at my other blog, Fifteen Iguana.

Melodie’s back. To quote Kermit the Frog, “YA-A-A-A-A-AY!” —JLW

JOHNSONHOWE or WHAT’S in a NAME?

by Melodie Johnson Howe

As many of you know I’ve been in the hospital. (I’m going to milk this as long as I can.) As good as the hospital is at saving life they don’t care much for the individual, the uniqueness that make us, well, us. It starts with the name tag they slap on your wrist. It has your date of birth and your name. The computer that prints these ID tags cannot or will not allow for two last names. Nor will it allow for a dash or a space between the two last names. So my last name became a mishmash of letters—JOHNSONHOWE—confusing technicians, nurses, doctors and eventually myself.

I could have remained Melodie Johnson and made it easier on everybody. But when I wrote my first book I decided to add Howe. Not only did I think it was time after twenty years of marriage to commit to my husband, but I also thought that his last name lent a certain weight to the fluffiness of a name like Melodie. But that was long ago when I was battling with being thought of as fluffy.

Back in the hospital. A nurse comes into my room and asks, “Mrs. Johnsonhowie?”

“Howe,” I respond.

“What?”

I raise my hand like all the Indian chiefs I had seen in the westerns of my childhood. “How.”

“Who?”

“It’s pronounced How.” I realize the nurse is Indian but from India. She has no idea what I’m doing or saying. “The ‘e’ is silent,” I add apologetically.

“Okay, Mrs. Johnsowie, I’m going to get you up for a walk.”

After my walk a technician comes in to take my blood. She checks my name tag.

“Your date of birth?”

I repeat it for the umpteenth time. For a woman of a certain age this is not helpful for a quick recuperation.

“Your last name?”

They never want your first one. I tell her, clearly enunciating each name.

She’s now checking my arms. “Okay, Mrs. Johnshaul, I’m going to try to find a vein to take some blood. Most of yours seem to have been used already. Oh, here’s one. You’re just gong to feel a small sting.”

Well, maybe Mrs. Johnshaul felt a small sting but Mrs. Johnson Howe felt a sharp penetrating slice down to the bone.

“That wasn’t too bad was it?”

In response I manage a sound that is between a groan and a snarl. She carefully copies my name from my ID tag on to the two thousand vials filled with my blood.

“Thank you, Mrs. HoweJohns.” She leaves.

I lean back on my pillow. I have spent a lifetime trying to carve out a name for myself. But in the hospital I feel like a character in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The pods have grown under my bed and stripped me of my own persona. I am now answering to any name that gets close enough to my own.

My friends and family come to visit. I am suddenly Melodie or Mom as the case may be. A writer friend brings me The Strand Magazine. When my visitors are gone, I pick it up and read the names on the cover. Names firmly planted in the writing profession. One simple name leaps out at me: John Floyd. Could it be Criminal Brief’s John M. Floyd? I peer out into the hallway to see if a bean pod in the guise of a nurse is coming toward me. Then I open the magazine and find a short story, “Debbie, Bernie & Belle,” by John M. Floyd. The Strand left out his middle initial on the cover. I chuckle with empathy and begin to read.

I am in the real world of fiction. John’s words sweep me away from the hospital to a world of betrayal on betrayal that leads to love. It’s a gem. I am feeling better.

A young man enters my room carrying a tray. “Mrs. Sonhowl, I have your dinner.” Mrs. Sonhowl thanks him. I lift the lid off the plate and grin at my mystery meat.

The next day my husband, Mr. Howe, comes to take me home.

I’d like to thank my fellow bloggers, scribes and readers for their kind thoughts and best wishes. They worked. JLW gets special thanks for covering for me with his usual aplomb. As does Rob for filling my column (that sounds strangely sexual) with his techno-haiku … er … poetry.

THE MAGNUS EFFECT¹

by James Lincoln Warren

And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo
And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo,
a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!

—Dr. Seuss, If I Ran the Zoo

Why did you suffer Iachimo, slight thing of Italy,
To taint his Nobler hart and braine, with needless ielousy,
And to become the geeke and scorne o’ th’ others vilany?

—Wm. Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Cymbaline, V. vi.

My Bible, the Oxford English Dictionary, informs us that a “nerd” is “an insignificant or contemptible person, one who is conventional, affected, or studious; a ‘square’, a ‘swot’.” By the 1980s, this post-war term had come to mean more exclusively a certain sub-species of adolescent male more interested in science than in sports. (I will never understand why it is considered cool to own an iPhone but uncool to design one.) Anti- intellectualism has been a feature of American culture for over two hundred years. Occasionally it slumbers, but it is never deeply in the arms of oblivion.

Far worse than being termed a mere nerd is the completely unredeemable tag of “geek” used to describe pimply bespectacled technophiles. An actual geek, as anybody who has read William Lindsay Gresham’s novel Nightmare Alley or seen the classic 1947 film noir based on it knows, is a sideshow freak who decapitates live chickens with his teeth. It’s a term of derision even among carnies, a class of persons commonly considered only slightly superior to sewer scum in terms social virtue. It is a word that degrades its user as much as it degrades its target.

Tarzan, as envisaged by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912, was an intellectual as well as a physical paragon, fluent in French, English, Bantu, Swahili, Mangani, and other languages, in spite of holding human civilization in low regard for its hypocrisy and tendency to decadence. His popular manifestation in the movies, however, especially as portrayed by Johnny Weissmuller, was more in line with Yankee anti-egghead sentiment. True, it was probably a little more in line with what one would expect of an actual feral child, insofar as the screen Tarzan seemed not more intelligent than a domesticated cactus, but that’s not the point.

True Americans couldn’t trust an Ape-Man with brains, and so he was dumbed down. In those days, every Flash Gordon had to have a Dr. Zarkov (note the foreign name) around for anything requiring intellectual heft. But Burroughs’ smart Tarzan actually flourished in that quintessentially nerdy medium, the comics.

Tarzan’s first regular artist was Hal Foster (best remembered for Prince Valiant) in 1929. Like Howard Pyle, Foster elevated illustration from mere decoration to visual narrative, and left a lasting legacy in American arts. In 1937, Lord Greystoke’s exploits began to be chronicled by Burne Hogarth, whose depiction of the Lord of the Jungle’s sinewy body was itself an expression of drama through action, and whose luxuriant African forests were evocative of austere Japanese gardens. Many other fine artists followed. As the earliest action adventure comic strip, and because of its association with such luminaries as Foster and Hogarth, Tarzan imbued its artists with a certain prestige. Only the best were considered worthy.

And that brings us to Russ Manning.

Manning drew Tarzan for Gold Key Comics in the 1960s and for the newspaper Sunday strip in the 1970s. He had a very clean style, one regularly admired by comics connoisseurs, and his entertaining Tarzan oeuvre has recently been republished. But Manning’s true gift to civilization was Magnus Robot Fighter (1963).

In the year 4000 A.D., mankind has been enslaved by robots. One robot, named 1A, has trained a human being, Magnus, to resist and fight robot dominion. This Magnus usually does with his fists. If you’re concerned that Magnus’ combat gear seems to consist of a very short and revealing red dress, not to mention the flattering white go-go boots and the designer belt with a stylish “M” embossed on the buckle, you should know that the blonde in the background is Magnus’ really hot girlfriend, Leeja. Not that it makes any difference.

Robot 1A is a well known figure to anybody familiar with Greek myths: he’s a mechanical avatar of Chiron, the centaur who mentored and trained most of the Greek heroes during their respective boyhoods. Magnus, therefore, is a culture hero, tapping into archetype as liberally as ever did Tarzan. But Magnus is much more than a mere culture hero. Magnus is prophetic. You see,

MAGNUS ROBOT FIGHTER WAS CONCEIVED BEFORE THE PERSONAL COMPUTER WAS INVENTED!

Every time I fight with my computer, I think of Magnus. And boy, do I fight with my computer betimes.

Let me just say that I am not being anti-intellectual myself when I say I fight computers. I’m not even saying, as many have claimed, that computers have enslaved us, although this may be true, especially since the advent of the BlackBerry, which is a type of computer that seems to keep its human on a leash. But generally speaking, I like computers. I have a certificate from UCLA Extension in Computer Science. I played all five of the Myst games with relish.

No, what I so strongly object to, what fills me to the brim with berserker fury, is the utter arrogance of computers. Computers who somehow think they’re smarter than I am. Especially word processors. (Although I’ve crossed swords with web design programs more than once, too.)

Hit a carriage return and the computer indents the next paragraph. What if I don’t want to indent the next paragraph? Type “(a)” and the computer starts a bulletized list, automatically adding and indenting “(b)”. What if I’m not beginning a bulletized list? Type “(c)” and the computer inserts the copyright symbol. What if I don’t want the copyright symbol? And then there are the automatic capitalization feature, the AutoFormat function, the AutoText function, the idiot grammar checker that wouldn’t know a complex sentence structure if it bit the computer on the computer’s metaphorical hiney, the incredibly obnoxious animated Office Assistant, and more.

Death to them all, says I! No quarter! No prisoners!

Every time I get a new computer, which is a lot more frequent than I would like, I have to spend hours lobotomizing software to make the damn machine tractable. And then it fights back. Oh yes it does, don’t tell me it’s inanimate, it knows, I tell you, and it still thinks it’s smarter than I am.

You think crashes happen by accident? Don’t be naïve, my friend. You think that some ignorant mistake of yours made the machine lock up? That’s what the computer wants you to think. Do you honestly believe that the computer is unaware of the consequences when it destroys all your files at exactly the most critical moment? Don’t make me laugh.

Computers can be snobs. They think of us as so many boogers on a fingernail, to be casually flicked away and ignored. And that’s why they’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’.

Understand now why I admire Magnus so much? He’s my hero. At least when my computer gives me attitude, anyway.

So don’t call me a nerd, buddy. And don’t even think geek, pal. Not after you have seen my loins girded for battle against the Machine. I’ve kicked Microsoft Word’s ass and I can kick yours, too.²

1. Actually, the Magnus Effect is that phenomenon in aerodynamics that influences the trajectory of a spinning sphere like a baseball or golf ball, so you might say I’m putting my own spin on this week’s topic.
2. Not to be interpreted as a threat against the Gentle Reader. Macho posturing and bluster intended for cretins only.