Greenville's free alternative weekly

One Day in the Life of a Noodle Factory

One Day in the Life of a Noodle Factory

by Jaroslav Dampfstain

Writing a column ain’t as easy as it looks. But just you try writing a column while your mouth is filled with Novocain, such that your formerly prehensile lips can’t wrap themselves around a cigarette or even a two-finger glass of Johnny Walker on ice—not to mention your new metal filling seems to be picking up the broadcast of an international Jai-Alai match in Manila, and you just discovered that the crawl space of your humble, split-level ranch abode has become a convalescence center for a warren of rabid skunks.

Good writing doesn’t grow out of the ground. But tobacco and barley does! And just like William Faulkner proved, you can’t have one without the others.

How many words is that? 117. Damn. 883 to go.

Writer’s block is a literary copout that befalls people who pretend to be writers but who really just enjoy mimicking an authorial lifestyle. Odds are such a person has never been published, couldn’t tell a typewriter from the Vittorio Emanuele Monument in Rome (it actually does look a lot like an old Smith Premier), nor has been sufficiently crushed by the world to give readers anything worth pausing to consider.

Writers worth their salt are never at a loss for words. However, nailing a worthy subject is another matter altogether. While I have plenty of words and witticisms to hurl, you’ll have to pardon me, for my subject tray is a little empty at the moment. I’ve spent far too much time this week mourning the death of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. (More on this in a bit.)

At such times, a columnist searches the headlines for fodder: the War in Iraq; Obama vs. Hillary; March Madness. Gag. Instead, how about a brief tour on how a column is made?

If you are of proper age, you may recall the cute “how this is made” segments on Sesame Street. I fondly remember the vignette on Asian noodles: vats of dough being mixed and stretched and sliced and baked by an assortment of assembly line machines until eventually a batch of noodles finds its way into a little Chinese boy’s bowl.

You probably realize where I was about to go with this: I was going to make an obvious connection between the machination of dough and thoughts, such that you, dear reader, would apprehend that you are the little Chinese boy with the bowl of noodles, reading my finished product.

What you are unaware of is that I was considering making a similar, yet slightly more surreal, analogy with Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book In the Night Kitchen. However, using the Sendak story would have forced me to work in a joke about the little naked boy Mickey swimming in a 20-foot bottle of milk. And I really don’t think it’s appropriate, or even accurate, for readers to imagine that naked boys doing the breaststroke in cow juice is an essential part of my writing process; or, more poetically, my muse.

497 words. And just like that, we are halfway to the end!

Every column starts with an idea. (The only exception is a political column penned by a Neocon, which starts with the death of a 12-year-old sweatshop seamstress in Taipei City.) Any thought will do; in truth, the simpler the better. Previous columns of mine have been inspired by an action as uninspiring as a masseuse wiping green algae cream on a client’s back.

This week two ideas presented themselves as column worthy. The first was a jarred memory: I recalled that as a youth I thought a serial killer was someone who had it out for Tony the Tiger and Snap, Crackle & Pop. The linguistic possibilities seem endless, and it will be easy enough to write 1,000 words on a subject that ceaselessly fascinates the reading public (Ted Bundy, not General Mills). But this idea needs to foment for a week while I spend time researching psychopaths—which may involve rereading my high school diary and exhuming those dog bones in my parent’s backyard.

The second idea wasn’t an idea so much as an epiphany, albeit of a lower order. I recently watched someone ask a group of people to walk to a random spot in a room. The people positioned themselves such that every person was precisely equidistant to the adjacent person—in other words, aligning themselves in anything but a random fashion. My mind’s eye told me this exercise in proxemics is related to ethnic cleansing. But I’m still trying to figure out the connection. So we’ll have to wait and see.

Okay, 250 words left. This is the column home stretch, where the columnist spends several days revisiting the previous 750 words and hopes to God he can somehow make sense of all the gobbledygook which proceeded.

Buy, hey, these are post-postmodern times! And given the recent death of Jean Baudrillard, I can pretty much summarize this column any way I damn well please. For instance, I could suggest that this wasn’t even a column at all. You have merely become privy to the dustbin of my mind.

Or I might argue that I have created a hypertext map of a column, leading the reader to believe that I have written an article about writing a column, when in reality I simply couldn’t find anything profitable to write about, such that in writing about a column I was simply able to bullshit my way to precisely 1,000 words.

That puts me smack dab at 911 words—not that this number has any significance to life in the year 2007. Wink: So perhaps I have actually spent months writing this column, and in so doing have created a deliberate cabala which the careful reader may now deconstruct in order to ascertain an esoteric meaning, perhaps that—

Well, with 32 words remaining, I’m certainly not going to reveal the meaning of life, now am I? Not for free at any rate.

Just 8 words to go. Three. Two. One.

Mr. Dampfstain is filling in for columnist Harry S. Iarch, who is on assignment this week on an invisible Möbius Strip high above the city of Columbia, just because.