Dopecentury XLVI --- Dialog
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: "the monotony rarely becomes tedious.") My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these "Dopecentury" entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
The kid gripped a small light in his teeth and aimed it up under the van on the lift above his head; he squinted at a spot in the engine, then looked down and kicked an oil pan into place with his feet; he reached up and guided the wrench in his hand to the oil drain bolt with the bare greased-black finger pads of the other hand.
The old man sitting on the chair in the corner watched the kid work 'How long is that gonna take ya?'
The kid snapped the flashlight off and put it and the wrench in the pocket on the front of his apron "Fifteen minutes" the oil drain plug hit the oil pan below with a plink and a thick stream of oil poured down after it "drop the oil, change the filter, pour new oil in, effin easy".
'You young guys work too effin fast; my day we took our time, did the job right'.
"In my day, we do the job right without padding the hours all effin day and bilkin our effin customers" the kid spat and watched the oil drain.
'All I'm sayin is whats the effin rush'.
A boxy old mid-century boat pulled in front of the open garage door; a dead author of some regard rolled down the window —Say, would it be possible to get my car looked at today?
The kid looked at the hood of the boxy mid-century car "What's wrong with it?"
—Can you not hear that knocking? Asked the dead author of some regard.
"I hear it; I just figured that's what an old boxy land-yacht like that sounds like".
'Ya dumb pree-sumchious kid; just cuz its old doesn't mean it would just naturally sound and run like sheet; why that ol' classic could-should be running like melting butter'.
—That's right; and I do care for it; I have put quite the pretty penny into it over the years. Said the dead author.
'Wait a sec,' said the old man, holding up a palm, 'let me ask you this: why do you sound so funny?'
—Why, because I speak with an emdash.
'What the eff is an emdash?'
—An emdash: a typographical mark equivalent to the width of a printed lowercase 'm'; as opposed to an endash or a hyphen.
'Why the eff would you do that though?'
"Peoples got a right to speak the way they want".
—I do not disagree, but there's more to it than that. Really, I just do not see why we should adhere so rigidly to arbitrary rules of printing, grammar, spelling, or speech; there may be better ways to express the words of characters, possibly ways that better capture the feeling of who the characters are, or even of human speech in general.
"Seems like it would make it difficult to know where a bit of dialog ends though".
—For a great writer, like myself, the dialog ends where the words make it feel like it ends. In almost all instances, you can figure out what is dialog and what is attribution or continuing action or description just by the context of the writing. Said the dead author, who had in the meantime stepped from his car; he now reached back in through the open window to retrieve a pack of cigarettes from between the seats, knocked one from the pack, gripped it between his lips, and lit it.
'That's effin sheet! Why make it more work for a reader? Hard enough to get dumb-sheet people to read these days as it is without confusin em with ambiguous passages of dialog. In my day, we used single-quotes most of the time, and it served us just fine.'
"Pfft. Cept when your damn single-quote got mixed up with a plural possessive."
—My point is that it doesn't really matter. It's not that much more work for the reader, I think virtually anyone is capable of following my writing. Do we have to make all things as simple as possible?
'Well, there's maybe something to that; I'm always sayin as that people these days are wanting comfort too much, want things to be too easy, makes em soft is what Sitting Bull said. Other hand: why risk breaking something that works?'
"Why ever change anything at all, then?" put in the kid, "maybe all dialog should be rendered in single quotes, like yours old man".
'Damn effin straight!'
"Incremental change is what I'm pushing though, convention led us toward using double quotes to help distinguish from other punctuation and give us an easy way to offset dialog-within-dialog: it's a good functional system that's been working well for a long time now."
—Sure, for a certain kind of book or article. My concern is that if we leave ourselves trapped by convention, we might be cutting out potential new aesthetics.
'Says the man who was writing 50 books years ago, and has been dead for some decades now…'
—Just because my style did not overthrow the convention or catch on doesn't mean it's worthless.
A stylish woman stepped from behind the garage; in her hand is a bathroom key affixed to a splintering paint stirrer. —I could not help but hear your conversation gentlemen, and I must insist that dead author has a point. But I would also like to suggest that if he broke the rules of stylistic convention, it may be incumbent on literary culture to push forward from where he left off: for instance, what if we set off dialog between emdashes?— she said while waving the paint stirrer around in the air like a baton.
—That feels to me like you are offering unnecessary comfort to the reader again.
—I am merely suggesting that there may be a middle ground between clarity and your aesthetic experimentation. What if it's possible to have clarity and the dialog looks and feels different on the page?—
'Why even stop there? What if every author picked their own effin typographical style?'
—Why not?
"That's ridiculous, it's simply unnecessary; the aesthetics of a work come from the language, not the glyphs used to set off dialog or any other punctuation.
A young girl's head popped from the rear window of a parked car that almost certainly belonged to the stylish woman. ~I would offset my dialog with tildes if I had my own say in the matter; I like the way they squiggle.~
—An interesting proposition, particularly since the tilde arrives in such a wide variety of styles depending on the typeface used. In some cases it would strongly resemble a double-quote.
'And in other typefaces it would looks foolishly effin stupid.'
—Watch your language around my daughter!—