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I’ve Been Robbed!, Part II

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I went to bed shortly after the police left and didn’t sleep all night. Every creak in the house, ding of a nut on the fire escape—those sounds made me sure the thief was returning. As I tossed and turned, I thought about the last time I was robbed when living in Austin, Texas. We lived in a house at the end of a dead-end street (prime territory for a thief to hit, the police later told us), and it was about the same time of year, I think. The first time the thieves robbed us there, they took my computer and a few CDs. A week later, they came back and cleaned out everything valuable. To add insult to injury, they piled all of our possessions in our roll-away trash can and used that as their get-away vehicle. We were scared after two robberies in a row and got an alarm system for the house that the cats were particularly adept at setting off. That didn’t stop the thieves, though. Periodically we would return to that house and find that the front porch light had been unscrewed and that they had tried to jimmy open a window. They never got back in after the second robbery, but they sure as hell tried. With so many tries, the terror level dialed down, and the robbery attempts just became a nuisance, like gnats. Now, with the new robbery in New York, I’m beginning to believe there’s something in my star chart about this. Something with my Saturn?

The next morning I was up early, early, early, having given up on sleep at about seven, and a good thing, too, since the NYPD’s Evidence Collection Team showed up at eight. These were two young ladies with tightly braided hair. I showed them my desk where everything had been taken out of my computer, but they said these were poor surfaces for fingerprinting. They finally decided to check the front door for prints, and I tried to do some editing while they worked. I couldn’t concentrate. I kept drifting to their conversation, where they gossiped about people at work. After they finished with that, I had to be fingerprinted so they could eliminate my prints. We did this at my now-empty desk, and my cat Ellie (who usually hates women and hisses at them uncontrollably) came right up to this lady with a gun and head butted her, wanting pets. She probably did this to the thief, too.

My door after the NYPD Evidence Collection Team lifted prints off it.

Kristi was up by now, and we took a short walk up to Cortelyou Road, a block from our house, meaning to get coffee, and I noticed the sad-face looks we were getting from our neighbors that we happened to run into. Word spreads quickly when you’ve been visited by the police during the night (or during the day, for that matter). I waited for the detective impatiently (I had to pick up a friend at the airport that day), and when he finally came, he gave the lock on my door an appraising glance, then told me how easy it was to pop open with a piece of paper or credit card. He recommended that we have a deadbolt installed, as the ladies of the Evidence Collection Team had done a few hours earlier. He asked about what types of work I did and if I had been working on a particularly newsworthy piece of investigative journalism or something like that. I had to snort at that—unless Alison Bechdel’s next possible graphic memoir counts, well, no. He had me call the building super so he could talk to him about the security cameras in our building and then went through our stairwell, knocking on all apartment doors and questioning our neighbors. I was impressed. We sure didn’t get this kind of service when we lived in Austin.

Friends and family were sweet, calling, texting, and e-mailing to see if there was anything they could do, offering to lend us things that had been stolen or a safe place to stay until we felt more secure in our apartment. One person who was not sweet was our building manager or landlord. I shouldn’t have expected anything different. I have never experienced anything but corruption from the New York City landlords I’ve had to deal with in the ten years I’ve lived here; they come from a long history of this I’ve learned from lectures and tours at the Tenement Museum.

My sister called our building’s management company to report the crime and tell them that the police would be collecting the security camera footage from when the robbery happened. She was passed from person to person and said the guy she was finally patched into must have had a phone that only gets the shit calls, because he was a hard-ass from the start. She asked about the cameras, and he said that they hadn’t been working for three months because somebody had stolen the recording equipment that was in a room in our apartment building. So the security features that the building manager had been touting when we moved into the building were essentially decoys. Kristi asked about getting a deadbolt installed and reported that most of the apartments in our stairwell were equipped with one. He said that we were welcome to have one installed at our expense, but that we must use a licensed locksmith. Kristi brought up the yearly rent increase that we had just been hit with for “luxury items” in our building and said that a deadbolt surely qualified as such. He blathered on about how if she tried to find a comparable apartment in our neighborhood, she would see that our rent was really quite reasonable and even below market value. Kristi was spitting mad by then and hung up with, “So sorry to have interrupted your day.”

So I had our deadbolt installed today by a very understanding locksmith from M&D Locks and Keys, and we had to pay for it out of our pocket. He said he’d just installed another deadbolt in an apartment in our building just the other day. For free, he will come back and take out the deadbolt when we move. That makes me happy; I don’t want our landlord getting anything free off of us. My next-door neighbor told me that they had a similar robbery just last year and only his son’s laptop was taken. So I guess we’re living in a building that’s popular with thieves.

Locksmith from M&D Locks and Keys showing off my new deadbolt.

I still miss my computer, especially the collection of heavy metal videos that I had amassed. I really hope those thieves are enjoying my copy of Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law.”

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For a Wicked Good Time, Go to Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House

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I spent Sunday with nervousness in the pit of my stomach, that psychic sense of unease that comes up when I have to speak in front of an audience or I have a job interview. The reason for it on Sunday was for something completely different, though, something quite preventable, and something I paid thirty dollars for—Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House. My sister Kristi found out about this serial killer-themed haunted house in September, and as horror aficionados (knowing more than our fair share about serial killers) and after coming off of my accidental haunted house experience last year, I was ready to go. Funny how that went away the day of the experience.

The half hour Kristi, Sarah, and I spent walking to the haunted house after our last supper of hot dogs, fries, and Diet Coke was almost completely silent. I don’t know about Kristi and Sarah, but I was spending that half hour completely freaking out—would I have a panic attack while inside? Even worse, what if I peed myself? I was wearing black pants and had a relatively empty bladder, so I thought I would be okay on that count.

We had a mix-up with the tickets and had to get to the haunted house early to get everything fixed, but the staff was very gracious and accommodating toward us, even though it was my error. There was a good-sized crowd, and we were herded into a labyrinth-like line similar to what you wait in while at an airport check-in counter. The staff pushed us in tight and close, starting with the horrific, claustrophobic feeling early before we even entered the haunted house.

While in the pens, two members of the haunted house staff walked the periphery, trying to scare the audience. One wore a multicolored clown wig and plastic mask like the killer in Alice Sweet Alice and would stand silently next to members of the audience while rubbing together a thumb and forefinger that were tacky with a bloodlike substance. This character wasn’t so much scary as awkward, making me think, Go away already. The other guy wore a long blond ponytail and lab coat; he went around asking audience members, “Do you want to play?” Kristi and Sarah signed up for this right away. When the man asked me, I frowned, which I guess he took as assent and painted a line on my cheek. The fake blood felt cold and weird so I drew away and let him go paint other members of the audience.

Kristi and Sarah with their X’s at Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House.

 

As we got nearer to the door, I overheard the guard of the haunted house giving the group in front of us the rules for the tour. Number one: Don’t touch the actors. Number two: If you are painted with a red X, that means you’re allowing the actors to touch you. I started cowering. I couldn’t have anybody touch me, or I would freak out for sure. Sarah dug in her purse and found a balled-up Kleenex so I could wipe off my half-assed X. We were in position to be the next group to enter the haunted house, and the staff found a lovely, well-dressed couple to go with us so we were a nice even six. We were warned, “If you can’t go on, say, ‘I need to leave,’ and somebody will escort you out of the haunted house. If you think this is going to be a problem, do it earlier rather than later. The further you go, the scarier it gets.” The guard asked if there were any questions. I asked how long it lasted and was told twenty-five to thirty minutes. Surely I could make it that long. With that, the door opened, and I pushed my friends ahead of me while clinging to one. I sure as hell wasn’t going to go in first.

In the first room, we were subjected to a searchlight in our faces, and various members of our party were called out, told to come to the middle under the light or to face the wall. Sarah was wearing slippers and showing some skin, and her leg ended up getting snuffled by our first serial killer. (She was the one most often called out when we went into the different rooms, but she was also the lippy one in our group.)

Jeffrey Dahmer at Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House.

 

Each room of the haunted house is themed for a different serial killer. Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, Lizzie Borden, H. H. Holmes, Elizabeth Bathory, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and Jack the Ripper all make an appearance, along with others, and in each room, there is an out-of-nowhere surprise. I was menaced with sniffing, balloons, open wounds, an ax, and a chainsaw. I screamed and grabbed onto every member of our party (including those who I didn’t know), crying, “You go first,” “Don’t leave me here,” or “No touching” (this to the actors). And it was cathartic and a lot of fun. The staff of Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House are an enthusiastic bunch, and they do their very best to give you a scary good time.

H. H. Holmes and a victim at Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House.

 

Families of some of the serial killers’ victims were quite upset to hear that serial killers would be glorified in this exhibit. The architects of the haunted house were sensitive to these remarks and included an exhibit that focused on a parent’s grief and the victims of the various serial killers who are featured in this haunted house. That was the one nonscary room of Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House; for the rest—well, gird yourselves!

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Drag Me to Hell by Sam Raimi

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In Sam Raimi’s return to B horror, Drag Me to Hell, I’m happy to find good old gross-out horror combined with some more subtle elements, conflicts of the human condition, that were absent in his earlier Evil Dead trilogy. Alison Lohman (White Oleander, Beowulf) stars as Christine Brown, a kindhearted farm girl from the Midwest who’s trying to make it in the city. She works as a loan officer at a bank and has her eye on a promotion, but Christine has to deal with old-fashioned sexism (a scene that played awkwardly for me, where she is persuaded to go out and get the fellas lunch–if she’s going out herself, that is). She’s told that she’s not aggressive enough when it comes to her work, and so when Christine gets an older woman at her desk, begging for help so she can keep her house, the decision is left to Christine whether to help or not. Viewing the old gypsy woman’s disgusting hygiene habits from afar, Christine goes into bitch mode and makes the customer her first sacrifice to ambition. This turns out not to be a good move.

Later, Christine is cornered in the parking garage, wearing her armor of heels and business suit, where she is terrorized by the old woman she denied help to. The woman lays a gypsy curse on Christine, where demons are allowed to torture her for three days before dragging her to hell. I’m sure lots of people would love to see this happen to the bankers and Madoffs who have tangled all of us in such a financial mess, but the curse is heavy compared to what Christine has actually done, which was legal.

Though Christine’s punishment seems harsh, I enjoyed how unladylike some of her torments are and their effects on the people around her. There’s the nursery rhyme “There was an old woman who swallowed a fly …,” and I remember being creeped out by this, imagining the sensation of a live fly winging around in the stomach. Well, this young lady swallows a fly, which causes some of the worst tummy gurgles ever, right when she’s meeting her boyfriend’s uptight parents. Other social taboos inflicted on Christine include a never-ending nosebleed and uncontrollable vomiting.

Drag Me to Hell touches on the catastrophic terrors of old age, poor hygiene, and embarrassment of one’s true self. These terrors are usually kept hidden, but they are brought out in sharp relief in Drag Me to Hell with the edges buffered by humor. The best part is that the heroine Christine is not passive as she faces these demons; she fights like hell.

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Alexei Ratmansky’s On the Dnieper

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The first time I saw Alexei Ratmansky’s work was at New York City Ballet when he did Russian Seasons for NYCB’s Diamond Project. I was blown away by his choreography and felt true excitement in the audience after seeing the premiere; we all knew we had witnessed something quite special and different.

I was so excited when Ratmansky joined American Ballet Theatre and wrote an article for Dance International magazine about the event: http://www.danceinternational.org/webexclusive.html. As a reward, I bought tickets for me and my sister to the premiere of On the Dnieper, Ratmansky’s first ballet for ABT, and miracle of miracles, we ended up in row B, second from the stage. I’ve never been so close that I could see the dancers’ expressions and sweat, hear their toe shoes against the stage.

The program had been switched around so Balanchine’s Prodigal Son came first and Ratmansky’s world premiere of On the Dnieper played last. This is a smart choice, I think, emphasizing the transition between Russian choreographers.

On the Dnieper takes place in the Ukraine along the banks of the Dnieper River and the set is a rickrack of fences and cherry trees that shifted off and on the stage, not to mention loads of flower petals. Ratmansky is a native of Ukraine and the choice seems appropriate for a Russian stuck in New York.

The ballet is a story of star-crossed lovers. The soldier Sergei (danced by Marcelo Gomes on Monday evening) comes back to his village to be reunited with his love Natalia (Veronika Part), but he finds himself attracted to another woman, Olga (Paloma Herrera), who is herself betrothed to someone else (David Hallberg).

Kristi and I are fans of Gomes and Herrera and their competitive partnering. Watching them perform their solos, I always get a sense of “Anything you can do, I can do better.” We even have nicknames for the two, calling Gomes “Rock-Star Ballerina” (because of the arrogant poses he strikes) and Herrera “Catherine Zeta-Jones Ballerina” (because, well, she looks like Catherine Zeta-Jones). I did not like Gomes and Herrera so much in this ballet, though, and I think that’s because I didn’t care for their characters.

My heart lay with the two spurned lovers. I found Natalia’s movements sincere but tragic as she danced off-center, leaning one way and then another, trying to shepherd her lover back to her arms. Equally impressive is Olga’s fiance. The only time I found the flower petals effective was with Hallberg’s stormy solo, where he moves like a knife, slicing through the petals onstage. The rest of the time I found the petals and sometimes the dancing overripe. There is a dance-off between Gomes and Hallberg that I would have liked to have seen more clearly. The movement is tightly confined in the center of the stage, and I couldn’t really see the action going on behind the circling villagers. When the ladies compete against one another, however, there are no distractions. All eyes are on them.

At the end of the ballet, Ratmansky was given a standing ovation, but I think this is too soon. There are moments of brilliance in On the Dnieper, but I expect much better to come.

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Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

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Growing older is something that everybody–if they’re lucky–has to cope with. The condition differs, though, between the sexes. My sister has a police officer’s book of crime photographs from the turn of the last century, and I like to take it down every once in a while and torment myself by looking at the photos.

There’s a section of suicide photos and most of them are of old men, who have taken a shotgun to themselves. The impression I get from their blank, staring eyes is that they were all used up and had nothing left to give. With women, though, growing older is tied in with beauty and the diminishment of such. I can think of two examples in literature: a chapter in Little Women called “On the Shelf,” where the eldest March sister believes she is unlovely and dull after marrying and having a baby, driving her husband away. Another is Barbara Vine’s King Solomon’s Carpet, where Cecilia, the grandmother character, feels invisible, that nobody notices her, after she has passed a certain age.

Joan Didion’s book dwells on this issue with a story set in Hollywood, a place where one believes, after reading this story, that beauty is the only commodity a woman possesses, and once she no longer has that, she is worthless.

Maria, the main character of Play It As It Lays, has starred in two movies. One that she doesn’t like where her husband followed her around, shooting her daily routine, and then spliced the footage together, and one where she played a woman who is gang-raped by a group of bikers. Now Maria is having a difficult time getting film work and her estranged husband has eclipsed her as a director, glomming on instead to his current leading lady and flattering her.

Maria isn’t innocent. She’s had countless affairs while married to Carter, the husband she is in the process of divorcing in the story. And she becomes pregnant from one of these affairs, a pregnancy she’s pressured to end. Her first child Kate is rotten fruit and now hospitalized for an unknown condition. Maria tries to see her daughter often but is strongly discouraged from doing so.

After the illegal abortion (the book is set in the late 1960s), Maria goes off the rails. She becomes obsessive about driving on the California freeway, having to arrive at a certain time of day and only feeling complete when driving, traveling. She becomes frightened of pipes and plumbing and starts sleeping in hotels away from home or beside the swimming pool at night. As Maria becomes undone, her friend BZ also faces problems, but he is unable to cope, to play it as it lays.


Though the book was published in 1970, the issues are still applicable today. The things I overhear on the subway–sometimes, it seems, not much progress has been made. A group of Wall Street men in their mid- to late-twenties talking about women at bars once they turn thirty and are “hitting the wall.” According to this group of men, a woman becomes desperate at that age and is anxious to latch onto a man. They were all in agreement that such females should be avoided.

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Jenifer by Dario Argento

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Jenifer is a blend of old and new Dario Argento, and I’m still undecided about how I like the combination. The last Argento film I saw was on the big screen–The Card Player at the Pioneer–and in fact, that is the only Argento film I’ve seen in the theater. It was a taut thirller, but the production values were grimy. Nothing like Argento’s cinematic splashes of red, his giallo style that he’s know for, with crazy wizard rock music serving as the backbeat during murders, of which there are many.

Jenifer starts out with the ho-hum production values of a cop drama, but much more low-key than an episode of Law & Order. Two cops sit in a car, piggishly poking through Chinese food while on break. They appear to be on the edge of a park, some type of wooded area, when their dinnertime is interrupted by piercing screams, the backside of a beautiful woman, and a fat, course man pursuing her with a butcher knife. The cops give chase, and one corners the man who has the woman bent over for the kill, a sacrificial virgin in a see-through dress, while his butcher knife arcs down.
The cop kills the man, who mutters something incomprehensible in an asthmatic wheeze, and from that point on, he inherits Jenifer.

From the back, Jenifer is seductive, a graceful, shapely body and long flowing blonde hair, but when she’s turned around, that beauty is canceled out by her face. Jenifer is horribly disfigured with rictus lips exposing gums and teeth, looking like she’s been turned inside-out. On top of that she’s mentally disabled. The cop learns she’ll be institutionalized for the rest of her life and takes pity on her, knowing what the state care system is like.

He brings Jenifer home to his family and puts this full-grown woman in a room suited for a small girl. Soon the cop learns that Jenifer’s appetites aren’t normal when she disposes of the family pet–a full disclosure in old Argento style complete with wriggling viscera.

The cop loses his family and finds himself drifting from place to place while bonded to Jenifer–a union that takes place in his car with unflattering lighting and a repulsive Beauty and the Beast moment all rolled up in one package.

Jenifer is a shocking and disturbing horror short, but I do feel it has something to say about love and jealousy, pity, and being taken for the fool. It’s not just gratuitous violence. After watching, I learned that Jenifer was filmed for a series called Masters of Horros, and Argento’s short was the only one that had to be censored. Horror has always been closely associated with sex, but apparently Argento crossed the line in Jenifer.

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The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

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I first truly started reading John Steinbeck in high school. In middle school, I read the dreaded Red Pony, one of those unit assignments that seemed to go on for months, and the story of a boy and his horse paled in comparison to the jealous gods and goddesses I had studied in the previous Greek and Roman mythology unit. I picked up Cannery Row my junior year of high school, and from there went on to Of Mice and Men, which inspired me to create a lost wax sculpture of a hippy rabbit in tribute to Lenny. I hadn’t read Steinbeck in years and picked up The Grapes of Wrath from the bookshelf, thinking it would be a good companion read to the troubled times we are in now.

When I opened the book, I saw an inscription in what was my rounded, naive high school script: “To K.S. from S.F.” and the year the book had been given. It had probably been a Christmas present from my high school friend while I was in the grips of my Steinbeck phase. I had to put the book away for a few weeks while I was in the middle of a difficult freelance assignment, but once I picked it back up again, I gobbled the story and the pages flew by in hours.

“Okies,” a disparaging term that is probably the equivalent of “redneck” today, definitely brings a stereotype to my mind, making me think that fun is going to be poked at illiteracy, barefoot and pregnant women, and so on. These subjects are not avoided–they are confronted head-on–but the humanity that Steinbeck treats his cast of characters with, it transcends the stereotypes, works with them, and brings to light admirable qualities in people most often derided. The toughness of Ma Joad as she spoons around the dead body of Grandpa, pretending she is alive to the authorities, in order to get her family to where they need to go. That’s grit, a part of the American character that seems lacking today.

There is sexism–many scenes are described where the women are part of the background with the children as the men hunker down near their jalopies making the decisions that will affect the whole family unit. Gradually, though, and in a method that I don’t believe to be accidental, the men become peripheral as they face situations, problems that they can’t solve, and it is the women who keep everybody going. Ma Joad doing her best to erect a hearth in whatever desperate living situation the Joads find themselves in, providing a center, a nucleus, for the family. Rose of Sharon acting as savior for the poor after she loses her chance at starting her own family.

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Watchmen

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I was excited to see this movie and purposely did not reread the graphic novel before going due to past experiences when my moviegoing experience was interrupted by niggling thoughts of What about … ?” The long title sequence involved beautifully lit tableaux giving the backstory of the Watchmen, and I hunkered down in my seat for what I was sure was going to be two and a half hours of satisfaction. Not to be. I was bored to death. I wasn’t the only one, either, judging from the phosphorescent white screens I saw flashing in the audience as people checked the time on their cell phones and Blackberries.

There were some gory bits of violence that were cringe-worthy, but most of the movie was accurate re-creations of frames from Alan Moore’s Watchmen with no life in between the frames. I always thought comic books were a perfect launching pad for movies because a director already has the story all laid out. All he or she would have to do is find the meat for the vision. I think of Alfred Hitchcock who storyboarded every minute of his films and, according to most biographies I’ve read, napped through most of the filming of his movies because he knew exactly how they were going to look.

I suppose there are a few other elements to getting a comic book movie right–the costumes and the music. The costumes were gorgeous and really gave flesh to the ink raiments shown in The Watchmen graphic novel, but watching pretty clothes gets tiresome with no substance. The song choices were bizarre. The music often took me right out of the movie, reminding me of a Vietnam film. Parts of the Watchmen do involve the war, but why be so obvious?

My favorite character from the graphic novel has always been Rorschach, and I thought the actor who portrayed him (Jackie Earle Haley) did a great job with the material he was given, but when Rorschach wasn’t on the screen, I found my mind wandering and couldn’t even interest myself in the set design or other background details. It was all so obvious. I guess that sums up my dissatisfaction with the film. It lacked subtlety. I wanted to make some connections myself but that was taken away from me.

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Dead Like Me

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My friend Sarah introduced me to this series, showing me the pilot when I visited, and I put the first season on hold at the library and racked up a four-dollar fine so Kristi and I could watch all of the episodes.

Dead Like Me centers around a small unit of grim reapers who pluck the souls of those who suffer “accidental deaths.” Georgia Lass (Ellen Muth) is the newest addition to the team, having died at the age of eighteen after being taken out by space garbage.

A few of the dead are chosen for the task of grim reaper, “popping” souls out of bodies and then leading them to the great beyond, where they are not allowed to enter. The grim reapers have no idea how long they have to serve, and to make things harder, they are given earthly bodies and must find ways to provide for themselves during their term of service. Often, this means stealing from the still-warm bodies of the souls that they collect.

The leader of the group is Rube (Mandy Patinkin), a man fixated on food and described as a middle management reaper by Georgia. Many parallels are drawn between cubicle culture and the business of life and death. Each episode contains at least one scene of the team at a table in Der Waffle Haus, the breakfast joint they frequent, where assignments are given out on Post-it notes with names, addresses, and ETDs (Estimated Times of Death).

Georgia works part-time at a staffing agency to support herself, and I think my favorite episode has to be when Georgia takes the crew to her office after hours to update their filing/paperwork system with the modern wonders of the Excel spreadsheet. I heart this marriage of the mundane with the otherworldly.

I guess this series was canceled after only two seasons, but a movie is in the works. What I’m going to love seeing explained is why Georgia ages. The reapers are supposed to remain the exact age as when they died, and Ellen Muth cannot stay fresh faced forever, not to mention the rest of the crew in their various stages of life. Maybe that’s the reason the series was canceled–after setting up that rule, the writers weren’t able to find a way to dig themselves out.

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The Door to December by Dean Koontz

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I’m not really a Dean Koontz fan–I think I’ve only read two of his books, including this one–but I picked up The Door to December based on nostalgia. Can you call it nostalgia if it is an unpleasant memory, a jarring one? I was thirteen and babysitting two kids overnight for a couple I didn’t know, and the evening ended in a domestic abuse situation, where the husband threatened his wife, who told me to call the police. Before things went sour, I put the kids to bed and found myself with spare hours on hand. I found The Door to December in the kitchen and spent the rest of the night reading it.

Recently I found the book for a dollar in a thrift store and was surprised to find that Dean Koontz had written it. He wasn’t popular or well known then. I had been rereading Grapes of Wrath, but I found its dialogue too abrasive while between two copyediting projects. I have to pick my reading material carefully while copyediting because I get into the mode where I’m analyzing every piece of text I come across, even tampon directions. I need something bland while copyediting and The Door to December fit the bill.

But then while in that analyzing mode, I came across a scene where a murder victim’s VHS tapes are cataloged and one of the titles is Mrs. Doubtfire, which didn’t come out until years after I first read The Door to December. I checked the copyright page, and sure enough, a revision had been done in 1994 updating pop culture references, a practice I abhor. Rereading the book, I found more movie title and computer updates, as well as pontifications about technology in our world. Of course, the computer jargon is already dated and anybody trying to keep on top of that in revision is taking on a Sisyphean task.

I think of pop culture references as part of setting, and when you start monkeying around with that in revisions–something that is part of the foundation of your story–you jeopardize the whole. And what’s the point really? I don’t see how a title change from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to The Matrix is going to make a story stronger. Or updating candy from Junior Mints to Sour Patch Kids. I suppose it allows publishers a chance to repackage books and try to sell more of them. I wonder what made the author decide to do this?