Two New York Times Scoops In One Article: 1, Autumn Is Coming, and 2, Frustrated Wannabe Novelists Will Often Try Debuting Their Schtick In Alternate Venues

Via @bdomenech, a prose poem to rival Rick Klein's.

Autumn begins in the night.

As they say, the first sentence of any novel has to be its strongest.

This is also a fine example of "plonking" (see next post for examples of "plonking").

Anyway, let's continue with the NYT:

With summer on the wane, the Mister Softee depot in East New York, Brooklyn, fills up by 10 p.m. In the high season, Mister Softee plies his wares as late as midnight.

Novelistic detail-- the small detail that suggests others. Except here it really doesn't. Nice try though.

Now the days, often as not, are still summery, if more bearably so. The midday sun is not perceptibly lower in the sky.

Someone's been reading P.G. Wodehouse and thinking "I can do that!"

But the sun has, somehow, gotten faster. And with night settling in at dinner time and burrowing deeper, it is in the hours of darkness that summer literally runs out of time.

It's like poetry, except dumb.

In the cocoon of the home, in the unaccustomed silence lately filled by the air-conditioner, the air flowing in feels, smells, tastes different — not just because it is cooler, but also because it is different air, hailing from a different part of the planet.

And also, no pollen. But that's not poetical.

Sultry summer nights are made of stiflingly hot air from Southwestern deserts simmered with emanations from the Gulf of Mexico into a thick gumbo. But now the jet stream, the ever-flowing border zone between hot and cold air masses, is making its tentative, give-and-take pilgrimage southward, and on cool nights, the air is fresh from the pine forests of Canada.

That feeling you feel, said Mark Wysocki, the state climatologist in the New York State Climate Office, “is the jet stream trying to go home for the winter.”

Le sigh. I'll just let that hang there, in embarrassment and defeat, like a flaccid weiner at a vagina party.

I've got a scoop for you fellers: At around 7:14 tonight, you're going to experience something called "nightfall." It's going to get dark. If you can imagine shadows, this is going to be shadows but without any source of light casting them.

Trippy, huh?

It will also grow colder. Or, as the expert on nightfall poetically said (after I suggested to him, "Could you please say this faux-poetic sentence so I can 'quote you' saying it?"), "Night... is like the sweater-season of the diurnal clock."

posted by Ace at 04:53 PM

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