There's A Brand New Dance But I Don't Know Its Name

Oh, I totally forgot to tell you: one of the stories in Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad is written in PowerPoint, the first such short story I've seen. You can "read" it (or, you know, click-through) on Egan's website. I think it's really well-done, although it carries more weight if you've read the rest of the book leading up to it (as this is, I believe, the second-to-last chapter), even though its link to the other chapter/stories in the book is slight. (This is the aftermath, in a sense, of the life of an important Goon Squad character, and so it kind of backwards-informs -- or absence-informs, if you follow from the previous post -- the previous chapter/stories.) The PowerPoint worked particularly well, I thought, on the Kindle, where it was in black and white and sometimes hard to read, but somehow justly so. When I looked at the website version, I was surprised by the garish colors, though I suppose it could be read in a way that made those just as apt as the fuzzy and washed-out version I "read" on my Kindle. (And read it I did. It may seem weird to "read" a PowerPoint presentation, but I think I'm done putting problem-quotes on the word "read" to denote that. Hard to stop, actually.)

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Don't let the appearance of a stylized guitar on the cover of Egan's book mislead you. Fiction about bands or musicians are almost always bad -- I 've never read a good one and now avoid them, to the extent that I've never even attempted reading the about-a-band books of Don DeLillo or Salman Rushdie or Jonathan Lethem. There are musicians in here but Egan gets around the can't-hear-'em problem, or the dancing-about-architecture problem, by largely ignoring the music. In one story, a character tries to describe a particular piece of music to a chapter/story's narrator, and the narrator finds the description inscrutable. So in a way, A Visit From The Goon Squad kind of takes on, thematically, the inability to put creative music into words.

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Here's a little glimpse into my working life:

-----Original Message-----

From: XXXXXXXXX
Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2011 2:38 PM
To: TOWNBLOG
Subject: appointment

mr. TOWNBLOG,

my name is XXXXXXXXX, and i believe i have a scheduled appointment with you this afternoon, and i will be unable to attend. i apologize for the short notice, something came up. when would be a good time to re schedule if possible? sorry again for any inconvenience.

XXXXXXXXX

Dear XXXXXXXX:

Your e-mail arrived 38 minutes after your appointment was scheduled to begin, so your notice was not so much "short" as it was "late." This is particularly notable in that we were to meet to discuss your academic probation, particularly with regard to time management and your commitment to a college-level education.

I'm sorry to hear that your something came up -- I know how difficult somethings can be, always coming up when you least expect it, and when you have all these other plans that need to be dropped immediately so as to devote all of your attention to the something.

Please call us at ______ to re-schedule just as soon as your something goes down again. Or, if you donut have time, don't worry about it -- what's the worst that could happen?

Best Regards,

TOWNBLOG
Super-Advisor