The Coin Toss — another scene from Unluck

Jonathan Silber — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 00:55:24 +0000

“One flip,” Donnovan said. He laid his palm on the table, pulled it away — revealing an old, shiny quarter.
Rammy agreed behind him, the humming wordless way he used to agree with Donnovan — “hmahm”.
“If it’s a head you go back to your cell no fuss, that’s it, and we say goodbye and we part ways, adios.” “hmahah,” said Rammy. “If it’s not we look away for a couple of minutes with the door open and your handcuffs — oops! Gone”.
“One flip,” said the prisoner, whose name they now knew was Johnson. His hands were handcuffed to the chair behind him, and he looked chained and broken, like on some scene from a hardcore porno movie. His hair was disheveled, like his shirt, and he was talking to them through it. “Let’s make it interesting, ha? Boss? Kinda boring like you said it”.

Donnovan looked at Rammy and Rammy looked at Donnovan. “Interesting,” the prisoner said. “More risky. Like,” he said, gaining pace, like he was feeling that he was losing them, “like you flip it and don’t catch it, it lands on the table. And, and if it’s heads I lose and if it’s tails I lose also”. He smiled to himself in satisfaction, the smile of a showman finally hooking his audience. They were looking now — Donnovan worried, Rammy blankly puzzled.
“But if it rolls off the table you take me with you. Past all the guards and the border patrols. I wanna be in Iowa too. Good, solid table, not much chance of that coin rolling off it, Boss? What do you say?”
Donnovan looked at the good, solid table. It’s been a long while since he and Rammy lost a coin toss. Are the new rules Johnson proposed still covered by that inexplicable good fortune they were enjoying? Like his prisoner said, it was more interesting. And like Rammy said, in those few times Rammy spoke — one way to find out.
Donnavan picked up his coin with his fingernails. He held it up, looked at the chained prisoner through it. “Okay,” he said. He gave his coin a flick and it arched beautifully in the air between them — ascended, turned, reached its zenith leaning on one side, graciously dived towards the table — all in a familiar, predictable motion. Heads, said Donnovan to himself. No, tails, he could hear Rammy thinking. The coin danced for a moment and fell flat in the middle of the table. It was heads.
The prisoner leaned back, then kicked hard with both his feet. The table rose, flew at them, hit Donnovan straight in the nose, then fell. They could all hear the happy ringing of the coin hitting the floor.
Rammy said nothing. They sat looking at each other across the upturned table. The prisoner, barely holding his head, smiled in triumph. Donnvan felt his nose bleeding.
“How did we not think about it?” he said.
“hmamahm,” said Rammy.

Memories Of 38-Iron

Jonathan Silber — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:50:41 +0000

Does what you’re writing on change the things you’re writing? If I’ll transfer this first sentence from WordPress to my MS-Word, will the second sentence be different? What if I change the size of the window? Will a story written in a tiny space be smaller, will it feel claustrophobic to read? What if I write on paper? How much can you fine-tune it? Can we discern in the text, like the very of finest wine tasters, the version of Word the author used?

A lot of writers seem to think like that. It’s the central theme in book about typewriters, which I’ll buy as soon as I remember its title. The century or so of typewriters has certainly changed literature, but was it the typewriter or the pulp magazine that changed it? The descent of the pen or the rise of the short story? Many writers felt that the machine is dragging the story out of them, that the clicking and chiming of their typewriters lulls them into a daze from which their stories emerge. The clicking keys, the breaks from the story you have to make to put a new page in — they set a rhythm and a pattern. Does it color in some way the music of your sentences?

And computers: now most of us write prose in a desktop publishing software such as Word, and that means that every once in a while we can stop writing to play with typefaces and colors and the margin size. That has certainly changed writing for bad writers: like that god-awful fantasy novel where the bad guys and the demigods all have their own font. Does the fact our writing platform also plays songs and surfs the Internet and every once in a while interrupts to ask if it can start the anti-virus search, and starts it even when we click no, changes our writing? It must; there’s so much it does to the rhythm around you when you do. If you are the very finest of writing-tasters, you may have noticed in this last paragraph I changed applications again.

And copying and pasting and deleting sentences: for the first time in hundreds of years, we have complete control of the page. I can take this sentence and put it in another paragraph and change around some words so it would fit there, and you will never know. Or will you? Is great writing the product of having to conform to limitations? Is my new power over the page ruining my poetry?

I thought about it for a long while and then J. J. Abahrms solved it for me. In a talk about his movies and that Lost thing he pointed at his Apple iMac and said, “every time I sit to write at this thing I think, what can I write that’s worthy of a Mac?”

He got it. Writing is so hypothetical and lonely — you’re not telling jokes to an audience that can laugh or not laugh, you’re not feeling the canvas with your brush. So your something tangible is the page and the quill in your hand, the new 1954 Remington you just bought, your shining new Mac. It changes the way you write because writing is relating, and your pen pal in this case is your pen.

Quotendquote » Writing

The Coin Toss — another scene from Unluck

Memories Of 38-Iron