[Yes. And?]
[And they will buy more DogThroat! A second dose! In order to have the experience Garagenhauer recommends.]
[Yes! You’ve got it. I was wrong. Happily wrong. You have creative marketing sense! Only…DogThroat? It sounds not mellifluous.]
[You don’t like DogThroat.]
[I like Barker.]
[Barker. Yes. I think I like Barker, too.]
[Barker it is!]
The exclamation is accompanied by a slap to the table from the pink-nailed hand. The impact causes the PillowNest to jump, jarring open the nearer of the dead cure’s eyes.
[Mid-to-late 1990s. 6 minutes, 14 seconds.]
A seminar room. Eleven university students sit along either longer side of a table, writing in notebooks or looking toward the broad-shouldered, thirtysomething teacher, who sits alone at the end of the table, facing the viewer. Behind him stands a movable blackboard on which are chalked the words usage and meaning. “…So my hope for this workshop…” the teacher is saying, and, clenching his jaw and flaring his nostrils, nose-sighs audibly and, momentarily, widens his eyes as if to express that the words he’s just uttered or is about to utter are surprising, suspect, or perhaps even painful. “One hope I have for this workshop,” he continues, “is that by the end of the semester, I’ll not only have accurately described some of my linguistic neuroses to you, but I’ll have infected you with them—I’ll have made you neurotic about language in the way that I am neurotic about language. Or to put it in a more, I don’t know, new-agey light, I guess: I’ll have invited you into the, um, grand tradition of sharing my concerns and sensibilities, and you’ll have gladly taken me up on that invitation. I want you to care about how things are said. I want you to understand that it’s impossible to care about what things are said without thinking about how those things are said. I want, for example, for you to learn how to care about such distinctions as exist between the phrases ‘Dave overloaded’ and ‘Dave went into overload.’ I want you to notice that ‘Dave overloaded’ sounds klutzier than ‘Dave went into overload,’ at least outside the context of whatever utterances would presumably be surrounding either of them in some prose you might be working on, and I want you to wonder why. Probably—this is usually the case—probably it’s because the stressed syllables aren’t properly—which is to say fluidly or powerfully—dispersed across the phrase. Maybe, too, the klutziness has something to do with the v-sounds and/or d-sounds. I want you to develop the urge to control this kind of thing. And I want your impulse to be to wonder at the klutziness and experiment a little in hopes of finding out how to get rid of it. Maybe you start with ‘Dave.’ Does he have to be ‘Dave’? Could the subject instead be ‘David’ or ‘He’? ‘David overloaded.’ ‘He overloaded.’ In terms of aural pleasure, I quite like ‘David overloaded.’ The stresses fall more pleasingly and the relative excess of v- and d-sounds comes across as intentional, but not too intentional. Not overclever. Not cute. The phrase is not unspeakerly. Is ‘David overloaded’ the phrase you choose to go with, then? Have we settled matters? Well, no, not really. Not so fast. Because I don’t just want you to care about the way the sounds feel on your eardrums. I want you to care about the way the feeling of the sounds on your eardrums affects the meaning of the phrase. ‘David overloaded,’ whether in spite or because of its being more active than ‘Dave went into overload’ or, for that matter, ‘David went into overload,’ makes the phenomenon of Dave-slash-David’s overloading sound less elective. Maybe even involuntary. Did Dave-David suddenly find himself overloading, or did Dave-David elect to overload? What does it say about David if he just kind of found himself overloading? What does it say about Dave-David if he elected to go into overload? Outside of some kind of Clockwork Orange–grade behavioral conditioning nightmare scenario, can one ever be said to go into overload without having first elected to do so? Some of you are nodding yes, and some of you are shaking your heads no. Two of you are shrugging. Our film student over there—whose name I’m shamefully blanking on, sorry—is too afraid to nauseate future viewers of Fiction Workshop Day 1: The Reckoning via bouncy camerawork to communicate her stance on the existence of involuntary overload, though I’m sure she has one. A stance. And but so your answer to the question of whether one can overload without having elected to do so—that answer can’t help but speak, subtly or not, to where you, the author, are positioned on any number of worldview-defining continua. Free will on the left and fate on the right. The power of the individual on the left and the power of context on the right. Not to mention how each of those informs subsets of worldview-defining continua-stances: human to the left and robot to the right, or maybe human to the left and sheep to the right, learning here and programming there, environment and genetics, Skinner and Chomsky, Foucault and Chomsky. So forth. More immediately than any of that, however, it speaks to what you believe about overload. It speaks to the meaning of overload. What overload means to you, and what you, by way of the phrase you choose, and in light of how you position your narrator in relation to the reader—what you want it to mean for everybody. What you will, if your work is successful, make it mean for everybody. Overload. And then, on top of all of that, or maybe at the bottom of all of that, the verb overload—when you consider how people use it…its definition’s not exactly precise, is it? I mean, what phenomenon does overload describe? Some people use it to describe the feeling of being driven by the adorability of a Curio to cause that Curio’s deactivation. Others use it to describe acting on that felt drive: overload, to them, is the action of following through on the feeling, of causing a too-adorable Curio to dact. The vast majority of people, I would say, use the word interchangeably, to describe either or both of those phenomena. And usually that’s fine—that is, it’s not usually confusing. Except what if someone experiences the feeling of being driven to cause a Curio to deactivate, but is interrupted and so doesn’t get to cause the Curio to deactivate? Did that person overload or not? Because if we allow overload to be used interchangeably as I just described, then we could say of that person that he overloaded but didn’t overload. Which is a contradiction. Not a paradox, mind you. Nothing that interesting. Now maybe you want to think I’m being nitpicky here, but I assert that it would be dangerous—dangerous, I say, and not just in terms of one’s development as a writer of fiction, but in terms of one’s development as a human being—it would be dangerous, to categorically dismiss as nitpicky the kinds of distinctions I’m making. We live in a time when the most powerful man in the world is said, by some, to have smoked pot even though he didn’t inhale. We live in a time when that same man is said, by other people, to have had oral sex with an intern without having had sex with that intern. I want you to let me—to help me—I want you to let me help you to be infected with my linguistic neuroses. In sum: get neurotic, get evil, or play the sucker. Those are your choices. Option one earns you an A, option two something less, and option three an F.”