CarrollBlog

On my Twitter account (jscarroll) I get lots of feedback from people who either do or don't like my comments and the links I post there. Most of their remarks are either nice or entirely reasonable, but there's one guy in particular who has begun to fascinate me. For no apparent reason he sends almost daily YouTube clips of stuff that is absolutely irrelevant to me, my work, what I have posted, whatever. Things like clips from old Russian movies of the 1950's, a performance by a Hungarian violinist, a grainy documentary about the Cinecitta movie studio in Italy.etc. At first I thought the guy was just nuts and quickly erased whatever he sent after a cursory look and a mental "Uh oh, here he goes again" when I saw what he decided to send today. But then his selections became so odd, like a 1970's Swedish advertisement for chewing gum (and a boring one to boot), that I started looking more closely at them, trying to figure out why he might have thought this was something he should send me.

In Egyptian times, high priests used something called haruspication, which was the reading of the guts of dead animals to predict the future. Sort of like today's teacup readers, but back then the priests believed there was a cosmic order to *everything* and if we were just smart enough to figure out that order, we'd have no trouble seeing what was coming next in life. I'm no high priest but I thought about haruspication today when yet another weird link came in from my special "fan." I thought if I can just figure out why he sent this, maybe, just maybe, the answer to it all would be just a breath-- or another strange YouTube clip-- away.
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"If I start out by thinking about the plot, things don't go well. Small points, such as my impression of what is likely to occur, do come to mind, but I let the rest of the story take its own course. I don't want to spend as long as two years writing a story whose plot I already know."
Haruki Murakami