He said that it wasn't fair to ask him to do this.
She continued to ask questions.
I withdrew and walked around, then sat down again, by them. They were talking, she asking questions, he responding.
They finished, I asked her whether the meeting that we had just had was the meeting I had wanted to have. She thought it was. I said that I had had another meeting in mind. He had said to me, I said to her, that he had talked to her in detail about something that interested me and that she had taken notes. I had thought that it would be a good idea for the three of us to together go through the notes she had made. That was the meeting that I had had in mind.
She had to go into a meeting.
He left, an hour early.
Why the title 'Love' here?
To try to get my writing going again, I am planning to go to to a meeting next week of the London Writers Cafe Meetup Group. The organiser is Bohemia. The subject of the meeting will be love. We have been asked to bring along a piece of writing on the theme of love, of five hundred words or more. So I thought that I would call this post 'Love'. Why not? It is everywhere.
I am still some hundreds of words short, however. I think I'll open at random the novel that I began in the bath last night and copy some of it here (two hundred and fifty words will be enough):
" "Shit man, if they hit that bag __"
"Shh. I think we got the wire from the booster magneto." Off in the middle of the cloud can be heard the nagging whicker of an engine refusing to start. Linkage squeaks desperately.
"Oh, fuck!" A muffled scream, far away. The intermittent whining grows fainter until there is silence. Schnorp is lying on his back, slurping pie, laughing bitterly. Half of his inventory's been thrown away, and Slothrop feels a little guilty.
"No, no. Stop worrying. This is like the very earliest days of the mercantile system. We're back to that again. A second chance. Passages are long and hazardous. Loss in transit is a part of life. You have had a glimpse of the Ur-Markt."
When the clouds fall away a few minutes later, they find themselves floating quietly under the sun, shrouds dripping, gasbag still shiny with the moist cloud. No sign at all of Marvy's plane. Schnorp adjusts the flame. They begin to rise.
Towards sundown, Schnorp gets thoughtful. "Look. You can see the edge of it. At this latitude the earth's shadow races across Germany at 650 miles an hour, the speed of a jet aircraft." The cloud-sheet has broken up into little fog-banklets the colour of boiled shrimp. The balloon goes drifting, over countryside"
End of quote. Not the luckiest of dips. That makes four hundred and eighty six words so I am nearly over the five hundred word line set by Bohemia. "Phew!".
The passage above is from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow1.
That's five hundred and eleven, and rising, word by word. I hope that Bohemia will let me read my piece.
P.S. I failed to read the instructions about what we had to write carefully. I've been overdoing it. Bohemia in fact wrote "under 500 WORDS or an extract from something larger". This doesn't strictly qualify anymore, though I could argue on the night, I suppose, splitting hairs, that it is an extract from something larger, my blog or my life.
1. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, New York, London, 1973, Picador, London, 1975, p. 336.
It was great to meet and get to talk to you this evening. I find it really inspiring to talk to other people who also like to write, and I'm looking forward to hearing more of your work at future events!
Best writing wishes,
Tash
Posted by: Tash | February 06, 2007 at 10:53 PM