Read-Think-b4-u-Write

I dropped Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno in my carry-on bag—it’s a pirate story about a slave revolt that could be labeled narrative nonfiction. For some reason, it reminded me of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen . Obviously, there’s Watchmen ’s comic-within-comic pirate story, “The Black Freighter” where the stranded protagonist falls prey to insanity causing him to become as corrupt as the pirates he has escaped. But more than that, Cereno ’s final section entitled “From a Narrative of Voyages and Travels . . .” is filled with pseudo documents, such as legal transcripts, depositions, and diary entries. The Watchmen is interspersed with bogus documents from fictional crime reports and psychological files to a celebrity autobiography entitled Under the Hood . It’s busy in Denver . . . I only caught a few of titles around me. A teenage boy in a red sweatshirt is devouring The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I thought this so weird (teenagers reading diet books?) t...

A half-dozen riders on a super packed train at 11:30 p.m. and I were perusing the program from Tosca . BTW a great production. Lado Ataneli as the evil, Scarpia, and Adrianne Pieczonka as the pious, Tosca, were fab. The weirdest scene-yup, that's the one. Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey was being read by a post modern Peter Pan in the tightest dark-green Levis ever, and pointy-toed suede Hush Puppies, topped by a rat pack style fedora. A tattered copy of Dreams from My Father by the Pres was being passed back and forth by a couple who got off in Berkeley. BART Transit Connection was being interpreted by a group of teenage Asian tourists who practiced saying, "Excuse me" every 30 seconds or so. BTW, Pleasant Hill and Pleasanton are two different places. And then, of course, the ever present business man with a manila folder propped on his knees reading memos containing columns of numbers. Geez it's midnight on Friday, as Jimmy Cliff would say, ...