Airport Drama

From the LA Times this morning:

“British novelist Tony Parsons is gearing up to tell tales from the terminal, as he assumes the role of writer-in-residence at London’s Heathrow Airport.  (He) will spend a week roaming the terminals in search of inspiration for his first collection of short stories… (and) hopes “Departures:  Seven Stories From Heathrow” will revive the airport fiction genre.”

I guess my life has taken a turn for the pedestrian in recent years, because when I think of airports, the following comes to mind:  stale air, indigestion, cranky children, shoulder pain from heavy bags, too much air conditioning, jarring noise, etc., etc.  Certainly not things anybody would want to read about.

I wasn’t aware that there was a genre for airport fiction, although I can think of some recent attempts to explore the theme.  In the 2009 movie Up in the Air George Clooney used airports and travel to escape forging any type of real life.  Jonathan Miles’s wildly inventive novel Dear American Airlines was written in the form of a letter from a traveler who’s been stranded, yes, in an airport.  Of course, many movies have pivotal airport scenes.  My personal favorite is from Moonstruck:  “I put a curse on that plane!”  Check out “The 25 Most Awesome Airport Scenes in Film” here.

Airports can, in fact, spur creativity.  Here’s a video made earlier this summer by two guys stuck at DFW.

But back to writing about airports.  I suppose my own short story collection would look something like this:

1. Woman is unable to get toddler to eat bagged snack prior to boarding.  Toddler then throws hysterical, hunger-induced fit once plane begins ascent.
2. Woman misjudges boarding time and cannot get a Chai Tea Latte.  Full of spite and regret, she can hardly swallow the Earl Gray the flight attendant has provided.
3. Bag tips over in bathroom stall, requiring woman to kneel and reach into adjacent stall for stray lipstick, hairbrush.  She wonders about the choices she’s made in her life.
4. Computer decides to conduct 57 updates when woman really only wanted to quickly check email before her flight.  She has also forgotten her stack of magazines.  Why can’t things ever go right for her?

You get the picture.  Parsons described airports as “places of extreme emotion,” and in my younger years, I suppose I had some of those moments.  I’ll be interested to see what he comes up with.  Nothing, however, will ever trump this moment.  I challenge him to try.

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Your Song

Wishing that life were like this sometimes, vividly colored in reds, all plush decor and glimmering city, and people bursting into song when words aren't enough.  Wouldn't hurt to look like Nicole, either :-).

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Hotel Thoughts

I am standing at the window and the glass is very heavy, cold on my forehead with a hint of moisture, a suggestion of the atmosphere, the rain-flecked wind, the salty sea.  Imagining other lives in other rooms, the quiet desperation or the buoyant completeness.  Wondering about the completeness, if it exists, and whether it shouldn't be called delusion.  In the endless equation of space, there are finite possibilities.  So that these thoughts, so unique to me (this life)—the smell of wet grass, summer sun on brown shoulders, the starchy dress with sleeves too tight and belt too high, dusty green tennis balls like buried treasure after a climb to the roof, flowers in a closed room, crystalline nights of promise and smoke, the spikes of betrayal, ornate brick buildings brimming with ideas, the gray, gray city with its flashes of light, musical bodies floating and dipping like birds, the soft down of tiny heads, the quick breaths and sweaty faces, the tangled vine, brambles and light, strain and might, leading to a world of make-believe, the rush of endorphins, the illusion of acceptance, flashes of nectar joy, the crush of this life-long burden—all of it duplicated at some point in the endless space.  All of it not-so-unique.  Which brings me back to this window, this room, and all of its comforts.

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Crisis Resolution

I went looking this week for the “traditional structure” of a novel, having been told at one point that mine didn’t have it.  I found a nifty graph and spent some time looking at it.  The effect?  Mostly a general buzzing, an expanse of emptiness in my brain.  I don't get it.  Do the crises get resolved as you go along, then?  Who brought math into it, with the X and the Y?  Can we really measure time?

Of course I know about the three act structure of a play; certainly I remember the terms crisis, denouement and resolution.  As well as I remember obtuse triangles, genetic probability and lots of other things that didn’t follow me far past high school.  When I finally got to college, I studied literature.  Lots of it.  At two schools, through two degrees.  That is not to brag, only to explain that I studied many, many, many books.  And I don’t recall ever dissecting any writing in terms of its adherence to a traditional structure.  Instead, we talked about themes and historical context, style and character.  The beauty of the language, the clarity of inspiration.  For me, novels have always been about people and ideas and I actually like when these things remain somewhat unresolved as people and ideas often are. 

It’s hard for me to write with structure in mind when I don’t read that way.

I think about a few of my favorite books, and I can’t seem to fit them into this graph, no matter how hard I try.  In fact, it makes my brain hurt.  Maybe I should have learned a bit more about triangles; maybe I shouldn’t have dropped that Statistics class after the first week.  Science was just never my thing. 

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Sparkles

Woke this morning to a sparkly kitchen.  Our mischievous puppies, shown above laughing at me, had jumped onto the table during the night and chewed open a small plastic container of silver glitter.  Bright sparkles were on the table and floor, on their black snouts.  Soon and despite my early efforts at containment, human and canine feet carried the glitter into other rooms.  Within an hour, I found a glimmering piece on a couch, several pieces in my hair and a trail of silver on the porch outside.  Two hours later, the glitter has made it upstairs in random, taunting sparks.

As I cleaned in my pre-tea haze, I found myself thinking all types of deep thoughts, about human migration across the continents, about the spread of viruses, about the vitality of an original thought and how it spreads and sometimes, dilutes.  Husband entered the kitchen and noticed the remaining flashes on the tile, mostly in the lines of grout.  “That looks cool,” he said.

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