Dr. Dobb's Journal, February 2006
Interior. Room, no people. A heavily lacquered bar near the back wall. On one end of this, a lightly lacquered bowl of bamboo shoots and mint leaves. Mike, a young man in his late 50s, enters upstage and rubs the bar with a bar rag. He stops. Silence. Harold, a playwright, enters downstage and looks around.
Harold: Slow night.
Mike: I scared away all the writers.
Silence.
Harold: These any good?
Mike: I put rice vinegar on them.
Slight pause.
Harold: I'll risk it.
He eats shoots and leaves. Pause.
Mike: I shouldn't have done it.
Harold: No, they're good with the vinegar. Or anyway, they'd be worse without it.
Mike: I said terrible things about some famous writers. Drove off my customers.
Harold: Oh, I see.
Small silence.
Harold: Terrible things about—playwrights?
Mike: Journalists. Judith Miller and Bob Woodward.
Slight pause.
Mike: But others, too. This place is normally full of journalists, but I chased them all away.
Pause.
Mike: It was its that sent me over the edge.
Harold: Its what?
Mike: Its. Just its. Journalists can't spell "its." Mainstream writers, bloggers, it's all the same. They don't know when it should have an apostrophe.
Harold: You mean when its should have an apostrophe.
Silence, except for sound of chewing.
Harold: I know what you mean. I blame Aristophanes, myself.
Pause.
Harold: Aristophanes more or less invented punctuation, you know. Put raised dots between words to indicate the lengths of pauses. There's this scene in The Frogs that, in the original Greek—Pause pause slight pause silence chewing bar-rubbing silence and pause.
Harold: No original Greek then. Right-o. Anyway nowadays punctuation conveys a lot more. The pacing, yes, but tone and attitude. All the things that you lose when speech gets written down. That's what people are groping for in online writing, after all. The cues that tell the reader how to hear what's written.
Mike: Like Smileys. I hate Smileys. And all that pseudotagging, like flame on, cleverness off, snark alert.
Harold: But those are just a natural extension of what you might call verbal punctuation marks. Phrases that are only there to tell you how to hear the rest. Just kidding, all seriousness aside, nudge nudge wink wink.
Mike: You know what's the worst? Those writers who give direct instructions to the reader, like Pause or Silence.
Silence, followed by long pause and then measured, thoughtful chewing.
Mike: I feel bad about trashing mainstream journalists, though. The Internet has changed their rules on them.
Harold moves downstage center. Lights down, single spot on Harold.
Harold: They had it all worked out, you know. The print journalists, I mean. Broadcast, too. The MSM they call them now. Mainstream media. They had it to themselves. Nobody had their e-mails, you see. The readers didn't cross the line. They stayed over there, the consumers. The media over here, the producers. You got a nice packaged product that way. Neat. All a mess now. No control. Control is the thing. With control you can be the newspaper of record and still get the scoop. You could. Now the bloggers get all the scoops, and the readers Google you and tell you how to spell its.
Long pause. Lights up slowly.
You know what you need to do? You need to get yourself some peanuts.
He leaves.
DDJ