Exercices de Style

It was raining that afternoon when he sat down to reply.

That overcast afternoon, after a long and particularly unrelenting winter, the first spring shower began to pelt gently down on his window sill, and he pulled a clean, glistening page out of a custom-made leather compartment, and seated himself at the desk to start on what would become a long, almost torrential reply.

Rainy spring afternoon
The letter awaits a reply
The pen poised

It is 3 pm when the rain begins to fall and startles him out of a reverie. Moved by this soft reminder of lazy afternoons in his youth, he stops pacing to gaze out the window. Walking over to his desk, he mulls the chaos spread across its surface. One of his better pens, untouched for a while, seems to glint in the shadows. He takes it out of its holder, rolls it around in his fingers, and sits down to scribble a long overdue reply.

"Mr. Perkins."
"Yes?"
"We haven't yet received the payment for your last invoice... Sir."
"Yes."
...
"Sir?"
"Yes?"
"When could we expect to clear the outstanding amount?"
"Yes..."
"Pardon?"
It starts raining.
"Sorry... I've been terribly busy and it slipped my mind entirely. I'll write out a cheque and have it sent over at the soonest possible time."
"Thank you, sir."
"Oh, not at all. Thank you for the reminder. I shall be in touch."
"Of course, sir."
"Goodbye."
Click.
His brow wrinkles.
Walking over to the desk, he pulls out a blank sheet, instead of his cheque book, and begins:
"Dear..."

Afternoon. Rain. In the solitude of a cavernous room, a pen scratches on paper.

spring rain on the lilly pond
ink in the jar
a letter lies unpenned.

Ya, sure, it's the feckin' e-CON-om-ee, but where does that get you?, it's all b.s., economy my dirty flea-bitten ass, out the window the homeless buggers are scampering to find a dry patch in the rain, is what they've got, the ground beneath their soles, last and only claim to property and not even, and passing by those frayed bags of grey stench, splashing them in fact with their aluminium sheen, are the long limos of the oh-how-do-you-do, the economy don't touch those fellers fer sure, oh all right, so they've worked a bit now and then, but how do you get up there so far and so fast and get to keep all of it if it weren't some wheelin-dealin', I ask you, I'm gonna say something about this, I've gotta, it's the only thing left now, goddamnit I'm gonna scream my guts out on this piece of cheap yellowed A4.

"And it's-a cloudy afternoo-ooo-oon
When the rain begins... to... faa-aaaallll
And baby, it makes me - croo-ooo-oon
Thinkinuvya, I start to scra-aaaw-llll..."

It was not, after everything had been considered, that he was unwilling to reply, but rather, in the lassitude that came upon him in the spring afternoon, as the rain swept over the hills like a sudden wash of sadness in the gayest of festivals, that the effort required to form words, to lift the pen, to scratch out words on the surface of the page seemed at this stage to be almost too much, too little worth the energy. And yet, there it was, the letter that insistently awaited a reply.

When the rain began to fall, Lin realized there was no time to waste; they would be here any moment and bring him with them. She gathered up all the papers strewn across the floor, and began to wonder how she might leave a message that he would be sure to see but that would otherwise go unnoticed. On the desk, various folders were still heaped in disarray. She did not need anything in them. Perhaps... yes. Of course. Throwing what she had picked up into a holdall, she scurried over to the desk and, placing just one of the folders right in front of his chair, she jotted down her warning using a phrase whose meaning only he would grasp: "The eggs are in the carton, but you forgot the vegetables."

Huffing and puffing up the stairs, old Mr. Katkowicz finally reaches his door as if having completed a marathon. Fumbling for his inevitably deeply burrowed keys with one hand while balancing his bag of groceries with the other, he notices an unexpected, unmarked envelope left casually at his doorstep. He mulls momentarily whether to put down the bag, find the key, reach for the envelope, open the door, deposit the bag inside, and then unseal the letter, or to simply rest the bag on the doorknob with one hand while stretching for the envelope with the other and opening it before stepping in. He does not take long to decide. Having finally chanced upon the dratted key in his near-bottomless pocket, he opts for the latter. A moment later the sauce bottle cracks open loudly at his doorstep and a couple of tin cans roll out to begin a clattering descent down the stairs. The concierge yells to him from the ground floor to ask if he has broken anything again. And trying to grab the third can before it rolls away too, he accidentally bumps the door open with his rear and tumbles backwards into his apartment, sauce-smeared semi-torn envelope in hand. A half-hour later the mess is nearly cleared up and the concierge has finished with her sermon for the day, and just as he is about to open the windows for some sun and fresh air, a downpour starts. Grumbling, he sits down at the desk, reads the somewhat mysterious letter a second time, and, taking a bite out his tuna-less tuna sandwich, decides to reply.

No. 23: duet for soprano and bass. Tutti.

Soprano:
Will you write it?

Bass:
I will write it.

Soprano:
When will you write it?

Bass:
When will I write it?

Soprano:
Write it?

Bass:
Write it.

Tutti:
He/I will write it.

Bass:
When it stops raining

Soprano
Raining:

Tutti:
He/I will write it when it stops raining.

Something damp-like, swim-sea in post-noon air. Clouds low over butcher shops, grinding of meat-saws a cold rumble, Aeolus to Zeus: heave-ho, the sails.

Click. Clack. Faster now, keys patter. Mon ami étrangère...

Letter of word, of law, the belle-lettrist, letterate, littering, breezing across lands, so much bursting from the air at once: cries, shouts, mumblings, little hidden smiles, soldier to sadfaced sour sweethert swinging in childhood backyard, backforthupdown, like rainsheets on dark streets.

L for letter, the one that's unwritten.
E for expectant, the mood that she's in.
T for tired, the mood that I'm in.
T for typing, since I'll have to begin.
E for effort, with my drafts in the bin.
R for rain, to echo my feelin'.

It had never occurred to him in all of that time to write back; in fact, it appeared to him a preposterous idea, a way to nourish and what's more, prolong indefinitely the fulminations hatching in his mind, and for what? The provocations were at best ignored and a more strategic route, of course, would be inveiglement in person, as if in complete agreement with the debased, no - repulsive - importations contained within the letter. Unless - unless he were to continue the correspondence under the pretence that the letter had not in fact been delivered, and he were labouring on as if no change had occurred. Yes. He would begin "It has been so many weeks since I last heard from you, that I thought to enquire whether or not you had received my last correspondence..." Clever, indeed - with this simple deception the thrust would be deflected, even parlayed and in their befuddlement they would be once again obliged to seek some circumvention, furthering their complicity. As he sat down to inscribe what he had already begun to compose in his mind, it commenced raining. How timely, he commented quietly to himself.

Raining this afternoon. Can't think of anything to say!

Empty room, desk at window, single light in the corner. Enter Omidié.

OMIDIE
What now, friends, what now, what now? What now, indeed.

Sits down at the desk, shuffles stuff around, picks up pen and pretends to think. Starts to rain.

(Cue sound effects.)

OMIDIE
What now, friends, what now, what now? What now, indeed.

Curtain.

"So you mean to say he never left the room?"
"I cross my heart, Madame."
She sat back, unsure of what to make of this new information.
"In fact, at about 3 pm, Mr. Green was right here as it began to rain. And that is when he started on the note so conveniently left around for our discovery."
"But then - in that case - how..."
"You are wondering how the messenger could have entered if Mr. Green never left the room... isn't that so?"
"Yes!" she exclaimed, a tiny layer of moisture building up on her forehead from all the excitement of guesswork. And at this point it was clear the detective, who had been building up to his masterstroke, could no longer disguise his relish at the moment of delivery when the éclat would undoubtedly elicit a gasp of simultaneous shock and admiration:
"Because, Madame, the mistake was to think that Mr. Green and the messenger were two different people."
Even with his many years of experience he had not expected the kind of stunned pallor that now drew across her countenance.
"But... but..."
"There is no mistake Madame. We have the records to prove it."
Silence. A mild return of vitality enabled these words to slither out: "Oh, you Dutch..."
The little detective's face turned a red she could not have seen except in the brightest fabrics imported from the Orient. His nostrils inflamed, he muttered slowly, his voice an exemplar of controlled rage:
"The Flemish, Madam, do not take kindly to being mistaken for the Dutch."
The contempt was sharp enough to snap her out of her haze. Returning to herself, she apologized hastily to the now comically swollen head that was bobbing around above the tight but elegant suit.

The words "rain, key, afternoon" then are no longer mere alliterative effects incorporated into an aesthetic conceit that undergirds and propels the diegetic elements. On the contrary, to say "It was raining that afternoon when he sat down to reply" connotes in the most discreet way an entire tradition of problematization centred on the fundamental discord between quotidian praxis and its inevitable conflicts with a writer's revolt against embedded facticity. In fact, it is no longer enough to say that such phrases are, inter alia, the anchor of a postsynthetic angst pitted against the eventual end of something, a search for the climactic post-climax, as in Lacan - rather, the psychoanalytic is merely subsumed (Fr. subsumée - Tr.) into this inexorable and inextricable structure that, through the resonance of its repetitive incantatory qualities, declaims for once and for all: "the I is not (and never was) the subjective."

Nick sat down at the table by the window and began to write the letter. He wrote the first sentence and then looked at it and decided that it was a good sentence. He wrote another sentence and read it and thought that it was as good or better than the first. Encouraged, he wrote the third sentence and read it through and found that it was decidedly worse than both the first and second. The fourth sentence was total gibberish. Nick pushed his chair back and decided to go out for a snort. When he returned the next morning, he found that he’d left the window open and the letter had been soaked by the rain and the ink had run. He rolled the paper from its edges, dripping grey water, into a ball and tossed it into the wastebasket. Then he left to find Hadley to see if she would spot him for a bottle. He wouldn’t mention the letter.

Chuckles shuffled his enormous red shoes, wet from the rain, over to the table and pulled out a sheet of foolscap. He ran a hasty towel through his rainbow wig and threw his nose onto the dressing table with a gesture of disgust. Still fuming over the review, he had decided that it was high time he let the coulrophobic turd at the Minneapolis Star Tribune "culture" desk have it, so to speak, with both barrels of his satin-flagged pop gun. Reaching hastily into his Bag of Tricks, he made the tragic mistake of pulling out his exploding fountain pen, and what would normally inspire gales of laughter from a tent full of happy children would would prove deadly within the confines of a 16-foot, 28-year-old Airstream trailer....

I get up.
I pick up the paper off the floor.
I go to the kitchen.
I put the water to boil.
I open the jar and scrape a spoonful of coffee.
I mix the coffee into the boiling water.
I watch the foam rise.
I take the cup to the desk.
I open the paper.

Expect Rain All Day

Maybe he'll write.

'Let Rain write my letters, Sire, in filigree hand and big shiny puddles!', screeched Thistleberry excitedly.

Viscount Valmont, still in his silk négligé, decided to sit by the lying form on the bed - it was time, perhaps, to send a reply to the Marquise, and, maybe, scheme some more to win the heart of Madame de Tourvel.
Dipping his quill in Indian ink, he settled himself so as to write his letter on the small of Cécile's back -

'Dear and dearest Marquise de Merteuil...

pfft

Capitulating to unwelcome need, he pried his dampened skin from hers, prolonging the act though she laughed at his reluctance to once again become a distinct entity. That entity almost wholly owned by others blithely carrying his name around with them, calling it their own. He hated that entity and she wanted to shatter it into pieces too small for identification. He opened the french door and stood naked, honest and sane in the only place he could be. It had started raining and neither of them had noticed earlier. She watched his skin catch the drops, thought to rise and offer her skin the same gift but chose to wait. She didn't speak until he'd lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply. She then said, "Thank god it's raining I was so happy when he told me you know there's no one else so it has to be yours and I'm having it are you in because if not I'm afraid I'll have to do something to hurt you very badly and place you in a similar state of distress it's the only way I could live with myself if I knew that you lost something too you've known me long enough to know that I am not threatening you merely being honest about what I won't be able to stop myself from doing I can't bear having my trust broken and I am not built to forgive please say something so I can shut up."

Stunned, he sat abruptly in the nearest chair, unable to reply.

14. Assume for the sake of this problem that the area of the city in question is 2358 sq. km. A man sits down at his desk by the window, where an empty can sits on the sill, and starts to write a letter at approximately 2.45 p.m. when it begins to rain. When he is finished, he notices that the can is almost full, has not overflowed, and that the rain has stopped. The dimensions of the can are 20.1 cm (height) by 9 cm (diameter) and the water has stopped 1 millimeter from the brim. If no wind was blowing and the rate of rainfall is an average 9 m/s, calculate the total volume of rainfall over the city for the time the man was writing the letter. Also estimate, if possible, the amount of time the man spent on the letter. If the data is insufficient, please indicate mathematically how one might reach a solution. (3)

if count (letter) = N
time == 3.05 pm:
rain == false
count (letter) = 0
else:
count = N + 1

Microwafer bonding for reliable processing of touch-screen gestures in the development of electronic paper

Gustavo Pereira & Anjelica Ruiz de Ugarrio y Salvador
Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil

Abstract: In this paper the possibility of applying recent advances in semiconductor manufacturing to the burgeoning field of electronic paper is investigated to minimize the potentially hazardous effects of environmental exposure and its correlated deviations from the sensory information processing programmed into touch screens. It has recently been discovered that usage of intermediate SOG layers allows fabrication of Si/GaAs heterostructures at temperatures lower than 180°C. Pressure variations have been investigated at length, with a casual daytime user exposed to sudden rain as a baseline example...

It is only through one of those rare and remarkable coincidences of historical preservation with contemporary documentation that some eight centuries later we can reconstruct, in a few cases, the daily activities of Becket, almost, in fact, to the hour. Although some regrettable emendations in the Bodleian manuscript (Cs. 204) over the centuries risk throwing certain interpretations into confusion, we can with confidence state that - on account of the largely unaltered manuscript copy from the 1600s to be found in the Abbey of St. Florian library - that it was around 3 p.m. on a rainy afternoon in 1168 when Becket would have sat down to pen, in the purplish acidic iron-gall ink standard for the time, the fateful letter.

Drove kids home from pre-school and put them to bed. How sweet they look curled up: the wee little pink pumpkins. Started on reply to parents. Began to rain at 2.55. I remember because just then I looked at my watch and wondered when Zoya would get back and make me a sandwich, lazy hungry bastard that I am.

OXFORD. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Librarian sitting in Duke Humfrey's. Implacable November weather. So many puddles in the streets as if the Biblical deluge had but lately begun, and it would not be surprising to see a great ship of gopher wood nudging its way between the punts towards Magdalen Bridge. Fumes billowing up from exhaust pipes, making a soft grey mist, with drops of water in it as big as pearls — weeping, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, indistinct in soddenness; bicycles, scarcely better; splashed to their very handlebars. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper.

Rain everywhere. Rain up the river, where it flows among gravel paths and meadows; rain down the river, where it rolls defiled among the boathouses. Rain on Christchurch Meadow, rain on Headington Hill. Rain trickling down the necks of heaving rowers; rain in rivulets down the flagpoles and aerials; rain splashing against the satellite dishes and hoardings. Rain in the eyes and faces of ancient Emeritus Fellows, wheezing by the radiators of their Senior Common Rooms; rain in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the gloomy college gardener, down in his rancid shed; rain cruelly chilling the fingers and noses of the miserable students dodging the buses on the High Street. Chance people peep out of casements running with raindrops into a sky of rain, with rain all round them, as if they were abseiling a cliff face behind a waterfall, gazing out through the dashing torrent.

The wet afternoon is wettest, and the dense rain is densest, and the puddled streets are most puddled near that Latin-scribbled old yard, appropriate ornament for the centre of a Latin-scribbling old university, the Bodleian Quadrangle. And overlooking the Quadrangle, in Duke Humfrey's Library, at the very heart of the rainstorm, sits Bodley's Librarian in his book-lined niche.

“Miss Palimpsest,” says the Librarian, latterly somewhat cowed by the organizing vigour of that efficient lady.

“Sir,” says Miss Palimpsest. Miss Palimpsest knows more of the Bodleian catalogue than anybody. She is famous for it — supposed never to have given time to anything else since leaving library school.

“Have we answered the letter from the Vice Chancellor?”

Rain from a grey sky
soaks the daffodils. I read
your letter again.

While it's true that Messrs. Roche & Lang had been in constant contact with Messrs. White, Bruhn & Lévy (they of the alabaster epidermis, Southern migrations being for the common), informing them at every stage of the proceedings of the contract, he found it odd that neither Bruhn nor Lang had ever been CC'ed on the official correspondence, watermarked with two elephants who could not conceivably be doing anything other than trumpeting while mating, although all members on the board had been apprised of the deal in its larval stage. A plot, perhaps - conspiring to deceive the shareholders, but no, much too ABC - or were they too unaware of the full extent of the wriggling, squirming, burrowing of Machiavellian subterfuges perpetrated under every awning at the corners of 9th Line and 82nd? A ruse - something to crack softly that complacent carapace, a knock on the door, an nth hour deus ex machina that might reveal which side of the plastered fence each pawn fell on. Scanning the rain-splotched headline of the afternoon news, something strikes. He sits down to gently fondle the counterfeit Ferrari da Varese as a contour begins to unfold itself in the mind, coming soon to a paper by him.

That day, that unforgettable day when she had asked him, had been frozen, each hour crystallized as a sheet of celestial ice, the minutes fanning out in feathery shapes of frost, the seconds rising in a cloud of snowflakes blown by a chill wind from the north, but as time passed into weeks and months, the wind swung around to the south, and that morning spread out against the sky had begun to melt, slowly at first, then faster, in a hailstorm of moments; that lunchtime fell in a shower of sleet; and it was raining that afternoon as he sat down to reply.

Through the blinds I could see the rain battering the windows - it was that kind of day, where dark rain was spelling 'trouble'. So many bills littered the desk, so many unfinished cigarette butts and sticky whisky glasses were scattered around, that I doubted I would even try to write and convince my landlord for another rental respite today. A knock on the door made my heart jump - a potential client in need of my investigation skills would be mighty fine, and, as I tried to sort out my crumpled tie, I bellowed:

- Come in!

The dame resolutely entered my office, dressed to kill, her face hidden by a black veil and holding a gun in my direction - this was not looking good. I guessed the rent would have to wait some more.

The Meteorologist's Tennis-party is Rained Off
(short-line triolet)

It rained that afternoon.
He sat down: to reply
was hard, but vital soon.
It rained that afternoon
so much, although late June,
that others asked him why
it rained. That afternoon
he sat down to reply.