death and syntaxes

the last week has not been a total waste of time even though it was spent in a stupor of unambition, induced by the flu and that extra something brought on by the changing of anti-dep dosage. stunned with the ponderous illumination of mundane activities and their consequences, i retreated into bed and pulled on the covers. and read four books very different from each other.

deciding to switch between milan kundera and stephen king or the story of sybil dorsett and e.l.doctorow was not so much a result of voracious appetites. these are all books i had struggled with for a while and if i hoped to finish them at all, i needed to work with the determination of a miser at a buffet. pleasure had nothing to do with it.

stephen king disappointed with needful things and he took 700 pages over it. but sk and me always make up and this mammoth bore does nothing to put me off his other cheap, efficiently delivered thrills. no, the heartbreak of the week was e.l. doctorow's the waterworks. having read and loved ragtime, i dove into this story with nary a fear. and nothing happened to change my mind for the first couple of chapters. then the ellipses started.

i have no strong feelings toward punctuation and no particular attachment toward any of them. but there occurs one exception to my attitude of grammatical tolerance and this is triggered by excessive use of those three little dots indicating pause.

now excessive exclamation marks - i.e. more than one or more than once - can also make your eyes water but i've never had to endure them in the books i read, 'cept for mad. ellipses are different, and in the waterworks, they are profuse. they start off in a trickle about the third chapter, and by the fifth they're multiplying like so many diseased cells.

the effect is to make the prose scattered and torn like a static-riddled song. no matter how hard i tried to keep right on and ignore these detested entirely unnecessary entities, i could not. as soon as i started to read a sentence, as my eye travelled stringing words in peace, the damn things would descend on the path like three buzzing flies. then again further along the sentence. then again toward its close. somtimes with only four words in between two incidences. it was maddening in a way that punctuation has never been in my life before.

i kept wanting to shake the book by its spine and shed those pestilent ellipses. was there a salvagable story somewhere there? yes, there was, i'm sure. but it was like tatters on a clothesline. a gather of red here, a streaming of blue there, but all in all, insufficient against the reams and reams of twanging nothing.

i should have stopped reading the damn book but couldn't. i felt compelled by some strange and heretofore rare impulse to finish it. to let the author have his say even though he was making such a royal pain of himself. i'm here to tell the world there is no nobility in this. life is too short to have it needlessly prolonged like this.