The Small and the Brief

There is not enough praise for smallness in this world, for brevity.

We tend to think bigger is better. Baby grand vs. spinet. Four-bedroom vs. cottage. Ford F150 vs. Toyota Tacoma. Supersize vs. small fries. 

Whatever happened to less is more? The spinet requires less dusting and space; the four-bedroom, more maintenance (and dusting!); the Tacoma is easier to park and the Supersize? Well. We all know what happened to the Supersize.

As we began our teacher inservices last week, I received some praise. More than one person mentioned they liked the way I'm so vocally time-conscious at faculty and IEP meetings; I keep everyone on track, so our meetings are short. You know when comic strip characters feel proud, little rays emanate off of them in arced lines, sometimes tipped in stars? That's what I looked like walking around all afternoon. Beaming. 

As I drove home from work, anticipating the students' return to school (a Thursday start, those two days so brief and breezy), I admired the fuel efficiency of my compact Versa and thought it was time to [concisely] list some little things I love. 

Smaller everything.

Bichon Frises (I used to want a Lab). 

2nd graders (I used to like high-schoolers) (That's a bald-faced lie - I've always preferred non-hormonal people who are shorter than me).

My temper (no, wait, I don't mean it's shorter - that would be scary - but I don't lose it as often, which is some kind of shrinking, right?).

A novella by Julian Barnes (163 pages) (read in an afternoon). Compare this to an 849-page novel by an author I won't embarrass by naming (I'm speaking of you, "Richard Bachman") (in three weeks of my life that I wouldn't mind having back).

My flash drive. To store anything approaching 4gb in 1988, you needed a whole refrigerated room full of disks the size  of car wheels.

The size of your thumb.

14 " (and about 10 lbs).

The distance across the state in which I live (SC: 273 miles; TX: 821 miles). (What makes that special? Mountains to the sea in 3 hours or less!)

My cellphone's better than Gordon Gekko's.

The time it takes the USPS to get a letter from South Carolina to Colorado: 1,800 miles in 2 days.

and…

Postcards. 

Duh.

(I really, really like the word "duh.")

Sweet Brevity in 11/22/63

I just finished reading 11/22/63. Back in the day, I was a Kingophile, one of those read-everything-by-him devotees, but that was ages ago. This massive tome was my first in a very long time by the master of the macabre. 


So long, I can't quite remember why I gave him up. Something to do with It, I think, and a general distaste for violent clowns. Oh, and that overindulgent length thing, let's not forget that.


I liked 11/22/63 for the first 500 pages or so, but once the narrator got to Texas the whole thing started to piss me off. I don't read Stephen King for romance, and damn if he didn't turn the whole time travel thing into a love story. 


What's worse is that after several hundred pages of star-crossed lovers dancing the lindy-hop, he spent only ten paragraphs summarizing the results of the narrator's mucking about with Lee Oswald and JFK. Which I thought had been the whole point of the book anyway, not the ill-fated romance. Dude, this creepy, apocalyptic stuff? This is what you're good at! Why devote so few pages to your actual talent?


My review doesn't end there, no it doesn't. Just when I thought I would slam down this brick of a book with a disgusted harumph, he won me back. He brought me to tears, Stephen King did.


"She is the dream, and so am I. Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief . . . but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it? Yes, I think so. Because when the time is gone, you can never get it back."


Beautifully worded... but if you get the whole brevity thing, Steve-oh, then why can't you figure out how to write a book under 800 pages?


Might I recommend mailing out a few postcards, to give yourself some practice in getting more quickly to the point?