How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon*
by chuckofish
Due to extended social isolation, many of us have experienced some confusion over time and it seems to be getting worse. On Thursday, I missed one Zoom meeting and apologized for missing another only to discover that the apology was a week early. Will I have to apologize again next week? Anyway, these events got me thinking about time and reminded me of the famous statement, “time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” Often falsely attributed to Albert Einstein, the adage first appeared in 1921, in a story by Ray Cummings.**
A brief Google search revealed that Mr. Cummings (1887-1957) was a prolific author who wrote over 700 stories for pulp science fiction and other genre magazines. Here’s the cover of one such periodical:
This discovery reminded me that during the same era, our own grandfather, ANC JR, wrote a couple of short stories for pulp detective magazines. I have found the cover of one, but have not yet been able to track down his story, “The Man who Cheated the Hot Seat,” published in it.
Despite the lurid cover art, the stories are generally well written. Certainly, they offer much better entertainment than the equivalent today.
If you can’t settle on anything to read and need something more stimulating to occupy your mind than dusting your books or arranging them in alphabetical order, you might try sending a message via book titles:
Unfortunately, I can’t remember where I found this!
Clever as that is, we need not focus all our creative efforts on Covid-19. Why not write a story via email chain? When our children were younger, we used to play story ‘telephone’. That is, one of us would write a paragraph and then pass it along to the next person in the circle, and so on. Today, we are adapting that activity to email. Here’s what I recommend:
- One person, the editor, starts the story and sends it along to the first person in the chain, who then adds to it and sends it back to the editor.
- The editor takes the last sentence or two from the new installment and sends only that much to the third person, who adds to it and sends it back to the editor.
- The editor takes the last sentence or two from the third installment and sends it to person four, and so on.
This method guarantees hilarity, if not literary merit. If you are after the latter, then skip the return to the editor step and just pass the story along.
Finally, I recommend online scrabble, which is addictive and will keep your brain occupied, albeit mostly with three-letter words.
Hang in there and have a great weekend!
* Dr. Seuss
**I found this information here.
dual personalities 
I did not know that about ANC writing pulp fiction. Good grief. I like your idea of writing a group story but my mind is mush these days and I know my limits!
Wait, I really like the idea of organizing books on the shelf to spell out a message. I think I’m going to try that.
I can vouch for the group story idea! It’s really refreshing to have a creative outlet, even if it’s only writing one paragraph with an isolation-scrambled brain.
This post led me down an insomniac rabbit hole about the history of Dragnet Magazine, the life of its publisher Harold Hershey, and the wikipedia page “Western use of the swastika in the early 20th century.” I didn’t realize how just how widespread swastikas were in 20s and 30s advertising or how long into the 30s that fad persisted! (For Dragnet magazine, 1933; for other brands, all the way up to 1938.)
I’m also going to see whether I can request “The Man Who Cheated the Hot Seat” through interlibrary loan. To be continued…
I had not gotten around to asking via ILL. I’ll be very excited if you find the story!