incognito, USA
was ‘incognito’ an x-man? I think he was.
I’m writing this on a Greyhound racing south through, actually I’ve been sending emails so I’m not sure where exactly I am at the moment, probably Pennsylvania on route to Washington DC. DC stands for Drive Carefully, if you’ve ever wondered what it stood for. Kid will believe anything. The first thing you notice about this bus is that it’s massive! It’s got six wheels, plug sockets for each passenger, a bathroom and, at an estimate, three hundred seats1. The driver seems like a nice fellow too, he told us not to smoke or use ‘megaphones’ on the bus and that we weren’t allowed to play in the aisle. I wanted to start an illegal game of ten pin bowling but the girls won’t let me2.
The weather? Fair. The mood? High spirited. Burlington! - we just passed a sign post, we’re on the Burlington Turnpike which looks like a freeway. We left Manhattan behind via the Lincoln tunnel, built single handedly by Abraham Lincoln himself in a week, for New Jersey - I always thing about New Jersey as if it were wrapped in a damp towel, protecting itself from the rest of the world. I don’t know why, I just do. On the New Jersey Turnpike you get lifted a couple of hundred feet above the river and you can see the sprawling industrial mess that the human race has made of this once beautiful landscape. I guess that it’s still beautiful in a way, but in a dirty, smokey, rusty way. Just passed a truck driver singing to himself. No doubt it was country music.
I’m reading The Boys of Summer at the moment, I started it on the plane and the author, Rodger Kahn, talks about his time working for the AP3. He says that you had to be able to write a completed article for press no later than fifteen minutes after a sports game had finished, the clipping only had to be around 150 words but the tricky part was that when it was reprinted by different editors in other papers - AP sell their stories to just about everyone across the globe - you never new where they would cut it, for example a story might be 200 words long but a paper in New York might print just fifty words of it, another in Chicago might print 125, a review in Baltimore might print the whole thing4 so you had to craft it with this in mind. I’m just thinking about how fast I can put together a post of 500 words and how it never makes sense!
Hopefully I’ll get the internet on my phone fixed at the weekend and so posts should come fairly regularly, depending less on how much bandwidth I can find and more on how much effort I’m likely to put into writing them. Remember, I’m living in the woods for a few months and it’s up to all of us to keep the site churning along. Send me anything and we’ll put it up5.
Incognito was a series written about the x-men, according to Wikipedia. I think he should have been one, he could have blended into any background, less like a chameleon and more like an extra in one of the three terrible films I watched on the plane. Actually only one of them was really terrible.
- Ben
- maybe a couple less [↩]
- and I don’t like bowling [↩]
- associated press [↩]
- they clearly don’t read newspapers west of Chicago in this analogy [↩]
- no racial hatred, that’s where I draw a big, black line [↩]
