Trying to reach out from the place where he was headed, where he had lived most of his life, the strange city of dream-makers, of poverty and test screenings and murder and money - to other places, other nights, other hunting grounds. To other cities, other machines, forests of buildings and rivers of concrete where other men and women missed the stars at night and tended small plants on window sills and kept tiny dogs to take for walks along corridors in the endless procession of boxes and intersections and lights; where they rented space in other people's property so they had somewhere to sleep so they could get up and perform profit-related tasks they neither understood nor cared about, simply so they would be given the tokens of exchange they needed in order to rent the space in which they slept and snarled and watched television until finally some of them slipped out of their windows and ran howling down the dark streets, throwing off a numbness handed down from a society that was itself trapped in fracture and betrayal and despair; the lonely insane in a culture turning into a Christmas bauble, gaudy beauty wrapped around an emptiness which was coalescing faster and faster into parking lots and malls and waiting areas and virtual chatrooms - non-places where nobody knew anything about anybody any more.

Abruptly the whirling stopped.

Und ich merke jetzt erst beim abschreiben, daß der ganze Absatz aus nur drei Sätzen besteht ...

14. Januar 1882

Mother Abigail

die geistige Führerin der Überlebenden der Superflu wird an diesem Tag geboren. Als die Seuche ausbricht, ist sie schon 107 Jahre alt.

(Stephen King, "The Stand", 1989)

Not that signing a book is anything like being kissed (unless of course, you are kissed during a signing), but the Atwood Patented Booksigner seems to make as much sense and promise to be as much fun as a machine that would kiss you on the cheek, thus reproducing a kiss on the cheek from a celebrity you fancy, who's a thousand miles away kissing a screen, which then issues you with a slip of paper informing you that you had just been kissed by the person in question, for, as Ms Atwood puts it, posterity.

I'd rather just not be kissed than walk away with my "You were just AutoKissed by..." slip, just as I'd rather not go on a signing tour than use an Atwood machine. In my opinion it's something that should be personal, intimate, faintly silly and include all the spelling mistakes, the illegible bits and the ink-blots. (Signing that is. Not kissing. Unless you're the sort of kisser who produces ink blots.)

Wenn Autoren zu beschäftigt sind oder sich zu alt fühlen um stundenlang Bücher zu unterschreiben, ist das zwar bedauerlich, aber nicht zu ändern. Unter diesen Umständen möchte ich Margaret Atwood auch nicht zumuten mir ein Buch zu signieren.

NB: Bei Neil Gaiman würde ich übrigens Tintenkleckse beim küssen gerne in Kauf nehmen :-)

7. Januar 1811

Richard Arthur Horatio Hornblower

wird, genau wie seine inzwischen verstorbenen Geschwister Anfang Januar geboren. Da seine Mutter bei der Geburt stirbt und sein Vater als verschollen gilt, nimmt Lady Barbara Wellesley sich seiner an und bringt ihre beiden berühmten Brüder dazu bei der Taufe Pate zu stehen.

(C. S. Forester, "Flying Colours", 1938)

6. Januar 1806

Maria Hornblower

das zweite Kind von Captain Horatio Hornblower wird genau wie ihr älterer Bruder Anfang Januar geboren - an dem Tag, als ihr Vater die Beisetzungsfeierlichkeiten von Admiral Nelson leiten muß.

(C. S. Forester, "Hornblower and the Atropos", 1953)

1. Januar 1804

Horatio Hornblower Jr.

der erste Sohn von Captain Horatio Hornblower wird an diesem Neujahrstag geboren.

(C. S. Forester, "Hornblower and the Hotspur", 1962)