L.B.: 7 pages, 6 phone calls

Left Behind, pp. 334-341

Before agreeing to meet the nondescriptly gorgeous woman Buck has brought to his hotel room, Nicolae Carpathia wants to speak to him first, alone:

Here it comes, Buck thought, flashing Hattie an apologetic look and holding up a finger to indicate he would not be long. Carpathia's gonna have my neck for wasting his time.

He found Nicolae standing a few feet in front of the TV, watching CNN. His arms were crossed, his chin in his hand. He glanced Buck's way and waved him in. Buck shut the door behind him, feeling as if he had been sent to the principal's office.

This isn't all bad. The blocking is decent, and the image of the principal's office is apt, if not terribly original. But the scene falls apart as soon as Nicolae starts talking.

"Have you seen this business in Jerusalem?" he said. Buck said he had. "Strangest thing I have even seen."

"Not me," Buck said.

"No?"

"I was in Tel Aviv when Russia attacked."

Earlier Buck said he was in Haifa during the attack, an hour or so north of Tel Aviv. But the bigger problem here, again, is that as inexplicable and astonishing as that experience might have been, it is only the second strangest thing Buck has ever seen. The world-altering strangeness of The Event was, and remains, more inexplicable and astonishing than the Ruso-Ethiopian carnage he witnessed that day in Tel Aviv and/or Haifa. Yet now, scarcely a week after that Event, the authors are intent on portraying everyone from Nicolae to Buck's co-workers as utterly fascinated by the captivating spectacle of the trip-and-fall guys in Jerusalem. Even the parents of the missing children, apparently, are raptly watching CNN's obsessive coverage, intrigued by this new mystery with a curiosity they never displayed about the disappearance of their own loved ones.

Carpathia kept his eyes on the screen as CNN played over and over the attack on the preachers and the collapsing of the would-be assassins. "Yes," he mumbled. "That would have been something akin to this. Something unexplainable. Heart attacks, they say."

"Pardon?"

"The attackers are dead of heart attacks."

"I hadn't heard that."

"Yes. And the Uzi did not jam. It is in perfect working order.

Nicolae seemed transfixed by the images. He continued to watch as he talked.

"... Look at this. The preachers never touched either of them. What are the odds?"

What could have caused this mysterious, almost miraculous occurrence of spontaneous heart attacks and a malfunctioning trigger mechanism? Perhaps it was the result of:

"... Some confluence of electromagnetism in the atmosphere, combined with an as yet unknown or unexplained atomic ionization from the nuclear power and weaponry throughout the world, [that] could have triggered -- perhaps by a natural cause like lightning ... this instant action."

That was Nicolae's dismissive "explanation" for the disappearance of 2 billion people -- an explanation that was immediately embraced as wholly satisfactory. Thus, in our story, no one any longer seems the least bit troubled or mystified by the Event. It's settled, old news. Time to move on, repaint the kids' room and turn it into a home theater.

This is not good writing, but it's not merely bad writing either. Bad writing can produce characters who seem alien and unbelievable due to their failure to respond to events in any recognizably human way, but LaHaye and Jenkins have produced an entire world of such characters. Bad writing entails a failure to convey or communicate whatever it is that the writer is trying to express. L&J have failed at something prior to and more fundamental than that. They began by portraying one whole world -- the post-Event world following the Rapture, and then they abruptly and completely abandoned it for a different one, a different kind of world, in which the next set of preordained events from their End Times Checklist could be imagined.

I'm trying to think of precedents or examples of this elsewhere -- other books or movies that have so utterly and arbitrarily left behind their original premises -- but I can't think of any. This particular literary sin needs a name.

Nicolae shifts topics to his hiring of Steve Plank as press secretary:

"I hope you know that you've crippled the Weekly."

"Ah! I have strengthened it. What better way to have the person I want at the top?"

Buck shuddered, relieved when Carpathia looked away from the TV at last. "This makes me feel just like Jonathan Stonagal, maneuvering people into positions." He laughed, and Buck was pleased to see that he was kidding.

This was funnier and in better taste than Nicolae's earlier joke about the last thing to go through Alan Tompkins' mind when his police car blew up. Yet whether or not such "kidding" is reassuring depends on what kind of laugh it was, particularly since the next thing they talk about is yet another suspicious death:

"Did you hear what happened to Eric Miller?" Buck asked.

"Your friend from Seaboard Monthly? No. What?"

"Drowned last night."

Carpathia looked shocked. "You do not say! Dreadful!"

Having decided that Nicolae will never use contractions, Jenkins insists on having him say things like "You do not say," even when the normal idiom is "you don't say" and "you do not say" is something you do not say. Still, substituting a verbal tic for actual characterization is more than we get for most of the characters in this book.

We're not told whether or not Buck believes Nicolae's insistence that he is shocked -- shocked! -- by the news of Miller's death. But while Nicolae is introducing himself to Hattie, Rosenzweig tells Buck he has a phone call. It's Marge Potter, calling to tell him to return a call to Miller's widow. Back in their comfort zone of telephonic communications, the authors indulge in a full page of the logistics of this bit of phone tag. We'll glide past that to the latter phone call itself.

Carolyn Miller is upset by her husband's death, but she takes a moment first to remind Buck of when they first met, "on the presidential yacht two summers ago." Buck had forgotten this, but I suppose all these women from presidential yachts and presidential hotel rooms can start to blur together after a while.

She had talked to her husband just before he had gotten on the ferry and he had told her he was "tracking a big story."

"... That was the last conversation I'll ever have with him, and it's driving me crazy. Do you know how cold it was last night?"

"Nippy, as I recall," Buck said, puzzled be her abrupt change of subject.

"Cold, sir. Too cold to be standing outside on the ferry, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"And even if he was, he's a good swimmer. He was a champion in high school ..."

"What are you saying, Mrs. Miller?"

"I don't know!" she shouted, crying. "I just wondered if you could shed any light. I mean, he fell off the ferry and drowned? It doesn't make any sense!"

"It doesn't to me either, ma'am, and I wish I could help. But I can't."

Jenkins clearly understands the cliches of the reporter who dies under suspicious circumstances while tracking a big story. What he doesn't understand is how to have Buck respond to all of this without coming across like a callous and incurious jerk. After telling the Widow Miller that "I'll be thinking of you," he hangs up.

He decides to track down the phone number on the business card Nicolae gave Hattie, but instead of just dialing the number himself:

He called a friend at the telephone company. "Alex! Do me a favor. Can you still tell me who's listed if I give you a number?"

"Long as you don't tall anybody I'm doin' it."

"You know me, man."

Yeah, man, we know you would never betray your top-secret insider source when he risks his job to perform the ultra-complex reverse directory. The number, Alex says before disappearing from the story as suddenly as he arrived, is for an unlisted private line at the secretary-general's office of the United Nations.

Buck was lost. He couldn't make any of this compute. ... Buck turned back to the phones.

Just to be clear, that's a direct quote from the book itself: "Buck turned back to the phones." This time he calls Steve Plank, the sixth person he's talked to on the phone in seven pages. We're back on track.

"Steve," he said quickly, "your boy just made his first mistake."

"What're you talking about, Buck?"

"Is your first job going to be announcing Carpathia as the new secretary-general?"

I guess Buck could make this compute after all. It's important to read this in context. In Left Behind the secretary-general is not a beleaguered diplomat who shuttles around the globe hat in hand. He is, rather, the King of Kings -- the leader of a global federation who "outranks" the American president in the same way that the president outranks state governors here. This is also how the authors think the real U.N. works. In their minds, Carpathia is about to become ruler of the world.

After making Buck promise to keep this off the record until it becomes official the following day, Steve explains:

"The Kalahari Desert makes up much of Botswana where Secretary-General Ngumo is from. He returns there tomorrow a hero, having become the first leader to gain access to the Israeli fertilizer formula."

"... And he cannot be expected to handle the duties of both the U.N. and Botswana during this strategic moment in Botswana history, right, Steve?"

"And why should he, when someone is so perfectly suited to step right in?"

With this political masterstroke, Nicolae Carpathia has completed the most astonishing rise to power since Boutros-Boutros Ghali. True to form, ace reporter Buck Williams has scooped all of his rivals and learned the truth before any of them. And true to form, Buck has agreed not to report the story until long after everyone else has.

Buck has one last question for his friend:

"What did Eric Miller get too close to? What lead was he tracking?"

Steve's voice became hollow, his tone flat. "All I know about Eric Miller," he said, "is that he got too close to the railing on the Staten Island Ferry."

Steve's a quick study. One day on the job and already he's helping his new boss cover up a murder. As ominous as his tone seems to be, though, I'm sure he's not worried. Buck may have a long history of discovering shadowy conspiracies, but he never reports on it.

Comments

[Jon]

Imagine if, in the first issue of Spider Man, Peter Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider but later, on page twenty, he tells someone that it was a genetically engineered spider.
That's exactly the kind of disregard for what's come before that I'm talking about with "contiwhatity?" It isn't simple retconning, it's just not caring about the overall story and just focusing on your ultimate goal for the story.
Much like L & J don't care about the implications and consequences of the events on their PMD End of the World Checklist so long as they're able to check them off.

[Josh D]

"This particular literary sin needs a name."

I sort of like Wachowski Syndrome. I felt sort of the same way with the Matrix movies, although I have to admit that it was nothing compared to LB. I'd rather watch the whole Matrix trilogy with my eyelids glued to my forehead for the rest of eternity than have to read LB.

My suggestion is that it should be called Wizard of Oz syndrome (or "The Literary Tornado", or "Dorothy Syndrome" or "Deus Ex Machina"). Although, like Rozzen noted above with the Simpsons, the change from Kansas to Oz is a deliberate device, not unintentional bad storytelling.

Still, I think the phrase, "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore" could be perfect to sum up how I feel about LB.
"Toto, I think we're in a Pre-Millenial Dispensationalist Rapture Novel. There's no place like home."

This particular literary sin needs a name.

Behinditis?

[Brandi]

The Devil must be either a contortionist or Stretch Armstrong, because I can either fold my arms across my chest, or place one elbow in one hand and put my chin in my other free hand.

I suspect the pose they are trying to describe (*very* poorly) resembles this one, except that the elbow of the arm supporting the chin is not resting on a table, and the hand of the other arm is in the crook of the chin-supporting-arm's elbow, not under it.

It's a slightly odd posture but not that difficult.

[Brandi]

(Whoops, forgot to close links.)

And, of course, a few pages further along in the Google image search I find the pose I had in mind.

[cjmr]

Brandi, that's certainly what pose I thought of when I read the passage.

[Hasimir Fenring]

he did say that he didn't expect the UN would be the actual WG; it was just the closest approximation that existed today.

Right, except it's not. It's not an approximation at all. It isn't even structured as one, to say nothing of its practical ability to behave as one. It's structured as exactly what it is, a worldwide diplomatic forum, plus a few agencies to distribute aid. Really, the closest entity we have to a one world government is, um, the United States...

But I mean, according to PMDs, the Antichrist doesn't pretend to be Christlike while attempting to take over the Middle East and dominate the world, putting all people under his thumb under the guise of making the world safe and peaceful, and mouth platitudes about serving God while undermining everything about the Christian message and indulging in gluttony, greed, pride, sloth, and wrath like the American president, right?

Right?

Apparently they recut the film, got rid of the aliens, and generally tried to make something watchable out of it.

There's no way they could make anything watchable out of it, even if they did cut out Zeist. Can they re-tool Michael Ironside's utter ripoff of Jack Nicholson's performance as the Joker? (Ironside is a fine character actor, so I have no doubt he was following bad direction to do this.) Can they jigger out the retarded 'science' of a global shield that blocks out the sun and so 1) makes the planet hot year-round and 2) makes the planet wet year-round while 3) not killing every living thing on the planet? Can they fix MacLeod being an old man when the movie begins until he starts fighting Katana's henchmen, whereupon he calls out to James Bond's ghost and inexplicably transforms into normal-Christopher-Lambert-aged again?

I ask you.

Ironically enough, L&J attempted to sue the movie people for screwing up their book...

Well, how would you like to slave for 21 torturous days to turn out a trashy hack novel only to be forced to stand by and watch a bunch of slightly competent creative people turn it into something almost decent? Man, and I thought poor Peter Benchley was embarrassed by Jaws.

[Robb]

Well, how would you like to slave for 21 torturous days to turn out a trashy hack novel only to be forced to stand by and watch a bunch of slightly competent creative people turn it into something almost decent?

Almost is the key phrase here - have you seen the LB movie? It's indescribably terrible. Well, not quite - this reiview does a pretty good job of summing it up: http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment020601b.shtml

I just love that line: "It’s like The Day of the Jackal as conceived by Ned Flanders, and produced by the film and video department of a rural Bible college." Mostly because I was the film and video department of a rural Bible college back in the day.

[Vermic]

I submit the term Lostitis for LB's brand of literary sin. No one but the writers of Lost are as adept at disregarding older plot developments and mysteries in favor of shiny new plot developments and mysteries. Hey, remember the four-toed statue? Walt's superpowers? Locke's weird backgammon allegory? We sure don't!

[Geds]

Hey, remember the four-toed statue?

That makes me soooooo mad. The whole four-toed statue thing was just downright creepy and yet it seems like it's just kind of going to hang out there as a loose end...

[mmack]

Just think: if a significant number of Bell/AT&T/etc. employees had been real true Christians, this book could not have happened.

Ian, further proof "Ma Bell" was staffed with the spawn of Satan.

"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company"

[Geds]

Well, how would you like to slave for 21 torturous days to turn out a trashy hack novel only to be forced to stand by and watch a bunch of slightly competent creative people turn it into something almost decent?

Oh, wait, apparently LaHaye sued because he was promised a "blockbuster" with a "$40m budget" and the production company failed to deliver on either count. It had nothing to do with money on LaHaye's end. At least, according to a Christianity Today article. He just wanted to movie rights back to, y'know, make sure any following films were properly Christian blockbuster-y...

Christian "culture" is a horrible, horrible thing...

[Robb]

Hey, remember the four-toed statue? Walt's superpowers? Locke's weird backgammon allegory? We sure don't!

Ugh. . . you just reminded me of one of the few things I was interested in about Lost. Yeah, they'll probably screw it all up just like they did with Alias. In the season finale, when I saw Malcom David Kelly's (the actor who plays Walt) name in the credits, I got a surge of excitement - with everything the Lost crew had done to that point, I could easily imagine them having shot footage of him during the first season that would later be worked in. Instead, they show the same actor who's clearly been/going through puberty, and with that, they totally lost me as a fan.

I'll probably still watch, just to see where they go (and because Elizabeth Mitchell is H-A-W-T, just don't tell my wife that), but I don't expect to be intrigued anymore.

The difference, though, is that the Lost writers had me, then they lost me. L&J never had me, and never could.

Just think: if a significant number of Bell/AT&T/etc. employees had been real true Christians, this book could not have happened.

I dowork for them, but what with all the Catholic masses & Anglican liturgical services I've been to, and with me being ambivalent to abortion & gay rights but militant about the environment, I wouldn't count as an RTC in their eyes.

[Keith]

Everything on Lost is a loose end. I stopped watching after season 2 because I realized there was no way they could ever tie everything together convincingly without an awl full lot of hand waving and/or magic green rocks being involved. but from what I've read they haven't even tried to answer nay of the questions brought up since day one? Magic Polar Bear? Black cloud monster? Numbers? Way too much coincidence? Meh. Let's just keep going forward and if we add enough random weird stuff to this island, no one will notice that none of it makes sense.

Left Behind and Lost suffer in different ways from the same problem: the writers started out with a checklist of things to write about and set out to include all of them, whether they fit the dramatic structure of basic story telling rules or not. Polar Bears on a tropical island and street preachers that everyone pays attention to in spite of more interesting things happening are just manifestations of the same sloppy attention to detail.

[Spalanzani]

"He couldn't make any of this compute"

Error! Does not compute! Does not compute!

You know, this whole book would make a whole lot more sense if it turned out at the end that all the characters were really robots. Kinda like a cross between Planet of the Apes and The Sixth Sense . And Children of Man , for good measure

Left Behind is really set in a not-so-distant future were humans have been entirely replaced by robot duplicates. Years before, humanity had mysterious become sterile. As the population slowly dwindled over time, life-like androids were produced for manual labor and to ultimately serve as a replacement for humanity after it perished completely. Eventually all the real humans died, leaving the world inhabited solely by androids. Years later, in a desperate attempt to give meaning to their existence (and partially out of boredom), a few androids decide to act out the Rapture. They make an android God and Satan, along with an android Christ and Anti-Christ (since the androids have computer-like minds, their prime amusement is to listen to random facts be recited, so they make their Anti-Christ capable of charming them in this way). They build a transporter to take the randomly selected RTC androids away to android heaven, and the book begins.

These androids are all pretty much the same as regular people, but their human creators were too bereaved at the thought of their eminent extinction to do a really top-notch job. Their speech is just a mixture of old clichés and garbled folk expression, and their syntax is slightly off. Most of them look really generic and have no distinguishing characteristics, so they all quickly forgot how to pay attention to each other’s appearance. This is why the narrator never describes anyone, since the book is written more or less from the androids’ perspective.

The androids can’t feel human emotions, but they were programmed to act as if they could in order to get along with their creators. Even after the death of the last humans, they androids still continue to mime emotions to each other out of habit. However, they only keep up a specific emotion a certain amount of time before moving onto the next one, kinda like a CD player. This is why they don’t stay upset for very long when all their android children disappear (the androids were designed to be born and grow up in a similar way to humans).

The androids’ minds are all linked up to a central database, and everything known by one android becomes known to all. This is why Buck never writes anything: anything he learns instantly becomes common knowledge to everyone. This is also why characters frequently seem to have read the back cover and to otherwise know things they shouldn’t. For one-to-one communication, they prefer to communicate by phone. This is because they were all originally developed from cell phone technology, so they consider talking by phone to be natural.

See? Doesn’t everything make sense now?

[Jos]

Let's just keep going forward and if we add enough random weird stuff to this island, no one will notice that none of it makes sense.

I've never watched Lost, just heard a lot about it on the Intertubes, but... just how big is that island anyway? Shouldn't it be Madagascar-sized by now?

[Robb]

Polar Bears on a tropical island and street preachers that everyone pays attention to in spite of more interesting things happening are just manifestations of the same sloppy attention to detail.

I think I disagree - the Lost writers have gotten sloppy about the overall picture, but their attention to detail in the individual scripts is exactly why the show is so frustrating: there's lots to analyze & process, but it doesn't lead anywhere. L&J are doing almost exactly the opposite - they expect that the big picture is enough to gloss over their shoddy representation (if that) of the details. But again, the Lost writers/producers made something that was, for a while at least, very intriguing. And even their sloppy management of the overall plot is absolutely masterful compared to L&J's botched retelling of a half-assed prophecy plot.

[Hasimir Fenring]

I've seen it, but I've also read the book. I think considering the source material and the financial resources the filmmakers had, the movie exceeds expectations. It's certainly not good or even fair, but it is an improvement over the book in almost every way, primarily because (as Fred noted in an earlier post) the actors make the characters more believable than Jerry Jenkins could ever hope to (though I'm still grading on a curve, here). The film also avoids some of the pitfalls of the book. Instead of having Rayford exposit to us how bad his relationships with his wife and daughter were before Teh Rapture, the film gives us a scene of the Steele family to paint in this background information with something that might be called the second cousin of subtlety if you hold your head sideways and squint real, real hard. (Still closer to subtle than anything in the book.)

One good link deserves another, so may I humbly recommend this site, which specialises in criticism of films based on other works (usually books, occasionally other films): I can’t imagine anyone watching [Left Behind] and being inspired to the Christian faith, unless they have a strong need in their lives for bland homilies and track lighting.

[Robb]

You know, this whole book would make a whole lot more sense if it turned out at the end that all the characters were really robots.

Spalanzani, you need to write that screen play - that's a gold mine of a plot. Semi-human robots seeking their metaphysical selves attempt to enact all sorts of religious eschatological events.

That's so brilliant.

[aunursa]

Having decided that Nicolae will never use contractions

Nicolae must be an android. Doesn't use contractions (like Data) but he has the evil chip implant (like Lore). Hmmmmm...

Geds,

"The following employees will be fired:
"Plank, Steve.
"That is all."

If Nicky were of German descent, it would have been "in alphabetical order."

[cjmr's husband]

"No silicon heaven? But... but... where would all the calculators go?"

[Hasimir Fenring]

LaHaye sued because he was promised a "blockbuster" with a "$40m budget"

Oh come on. Why would you need $40 million to make a movie out of this book? The movie they actually made was cheap, and virtually its entire effects budget went into a sequence that doesn't even happen during the book! (the Israel-gets-nuked thing) I don't see anything in the book that would require funds like that. What would you spend it on? Portraying realistic chaos after the Rapture? The book doesn't do that! Hiring A-list talent to bring the characters to life? Even the best actors can't turn cardboard to flesh. (Imagine Kevin Spacey as Rayford or Helena Bonham Carter as Hattie...ack!) Hiring a real writer to whip the story into shape? HAHAHAHA...oh, you were serious about hiring an actual writer to work on a big-budget movie? (Is $40 million even 'big-budget' anymore?)

The only way you could get a 'blockbuster' out of this would be to hire Charlie Kaufman to write about his futile attempts to adapt an unadaptable book to the screen. And since he's already made that movie, LeJenkins are out of luck.

[aunursa]

Ursela L.,
he's just the president of Romania, and shouldn't have the resources to be hiring off of the top of the NYC income bracket, and also probably should be hiring, well, Romanians for his advisers.

According to the storyline he's backed by very wealthy financiers.

[Lax Tool]

The only way you could get a 'blockbuster' out of this would be to hire Charlie Kaufman to write about his futile attempts to adapt an unadaptable book to the screen.

I bet Donald Kaufman could get a bang up script out of it.

[Blackadder]

I've seen the recut Highlander 2 and it is better than the original version, although that statement is the very definition of "damning with faint praise."

[aunursa]

Tonio,
More evidence, obviously, that LH&J really believe that non-Real True Christians are callously indifferent about their children.

No, it's that Jerry Jenkins is a very bad writer. Occum's Razor.

[Lax Tool]

According to the storyline he's backed by very wealthy financiers.

I'm sure George Soros and Rupert Murdoch spend hours every day plotting their takeover of the United Nations. And Pop Warner football.

[Redem]

Might be a dumb question but what's so special about the rise of Boutros-Boutros Ghali? (or maybe I just don't get the joke)

[aunursa]

Paul
Actually as a native Staten Islander, I can tell you that, especially in the timeframe that the novels were written, there were several models to the Staten Island Ferry.

While the book was written in 1995, L&J have indicated that the timeline is supposed to be sometime during the first half of this century.

[Ursula L]

While the book was written in 1995, L&J have indicated that the timeline is supposed to be sometime during the first half of this century.

True, but it the only technological improvement that half-century saw was Israeli fertilizer. The ferries would be the same models used at the time of the writing.

[aunursa]

The technology angle is bizarre. In spite of the plethora of phone calls, there are no cell phones in LB -- they don't appear until one of the sequels. Yet in the prequels the characters do have cell phones.

Similar to the discrepancy among the various Star Trek series.

[aunursa]

I got it -- they must have been RTC cell phones -- they were raptured!

[Geds]

If Nicky were of German descent, it would have been "in alphabetical order."

It's nice to see that reference didn't go unnoticed...

[sievetronix]

I think Buck saying he was in Tel Aviv is the same thing as most people from south Jersey saying they are from Philadelphia. Not a huge crime by the standards of these books.

[Tonio]

"No, it's that Jerry Jenkins is a very bad writer. Occum's Razor."

Valid point. I doubt that either LaHaye or Jenkins deliberately tailored their treatment of the Event to reflect his specific belief about non-RTCs. I think this was largely unintentional - they're not nearly competent enough to keep such beliefs from showing through in the work. Part of that incompetence is being obsessed with fulfilling their PMD timetable, not caring about such trivial things as realistic characterization.

[twig]

I bet Donald Kaufman could get a bang up script out of it.

"I'm putting in a chase sequence. So Nicolae flees on horseback with Hattie, Buck's after them on a motorcycle and it's like a battle between motors and horses, like technology vs. horse."

"And they're still all one person, right?"

[Hasimir Fenring]

I've seen the recut Highlander 2 and it is better than the original version, although that statement is the very definition of "damning with faint praise."

Ah, but did you vanquish the Nibble-pibblies?

[car]

Geds: "Ironically enough, L&J attempted to sue the movie people for screwing up their book...

They can't even get litigation right."

I had an image of Tim & J as the trip and fall guys in a court room!

[pepperjackcandy]

Isn't Melanie Griffith standing on an outside part of the Staten Island Ferry here?

[aunursa]

Tel Aviv or Haifa? According to the prequels:

In the end, the writing assignment went to Buck. He had, after all, done the story when Rosenzweig had won the Nobel Prize. During their interview in Haifa

Buck Williams had enjoyed a leisurely late evening meal with Chaim Rosenzweig a mile from the kibbutz and from the nearby military compound where Buck would stay before his dawn flight back to the States.

[Salamanda]

Spalanzani--
See? Doesn’t everything make sense now?

Actually, it does. That's pretty good stuff there!

car--
I had an image of Tim & J as the trip and fall guys in a court room!

*snrrrk!* XD
Magnetism, damn you! Nuclear...radiospastic...magnetism that, um, caused heart attacks! Yeah!

[LL]

Damn, this book sucks. Does anything actually interesting ever happen or is it all just phone calls and boring speeches?

I like "Leaving Behind your own story" as the name for this particular literary sin.

And I guess that UN thing reflects the fact that no one on earth, not even people who work for the UN, are as fixated on the UN as Christian fundamentalists. They are convinced that one day not long from now the UN will rule us all. The UN has proven to be mostly ineffectual through most of its history, but these people act as if the UN is the Empire and the rest of the world the scrappy rebels in Star Wars.

And I still like Lost.

[Spalanzani]

Salamanda: "Magnetism, damn you! Nuclear...radiospastic...magnetism that, um, caused heart attacks! Yeah!"

Not just any magnetism, mind you! ELECTRO -magnetism! That's like, ten times as magical as regular magnatism.

[Salamanda]

From the excerpt aunursa linked:
Nicolae Carpathia had morphed into the consummate politician, diplomat, statesman, and international gadfly. He found reasons to travel, establishing alliances with heads of state who would not have thought to grant an audience to someone from the Romanian lower house, except that he was so persuasive. And he had become known as the most popular man in his home country, admired, respected, lauded by even his opponents.

He was a man of peace. A dove. Into disarmament. That tickled the ears of his colleagues in Europe and most of the world.

My God. This is why I'm afraid to even TRY writing, even for my own good pleasure. Even though I can recognize, from the first damn sentence, "OMG, SHOW, NOT TELL", I'm afraid that I'd fall into the same hackish trap. Or if I try to avoid it, I'll muck it up so bad it'll end up sounding no better than this anyway.

*sigh* LaJenkins: my de-inspiration.

By the way, that little "tickling the ears" bit at the end was absolutely intentional.

[Tonio]

Spalanzani, if LH&J had blamed the heart attacks on Magneto, the novel would actually have been more realistic.

[the opoponax]

"Isn't Melanie Griffith standing on an outside part of the Staten Island Ferry here?"

Yes, in like 1982.

I've only been on the ferry since 2000.

Also, I realized earlier that you could theoretically be in an "outside" part of the ccurrent ferry. But either way, it'd be so hard to fall off, that just about anyone doing that sets of major red flags.

[Salamanda]

Spalanzani--
ELECTRO magnetism! That's like, ten times as magical as regular magnatism.

Right you are! And when drenched in butter, it's magically delicious!

[the opoponax]

oh, and in movies they don't always use the real ferry, aanyway.

if some producer decides he wants there do be an outside, Dammit! then they will rent some other random ferry from somewhere else.

[Geds]

Spalanzani:

Want to drink the Right Behind Kool-Aid?

Join us...

[Salamanda]

Ooo! Ooo! Everyone go take the Bible Apostasy Quiz!