WoTized Classics, Third Edition
by Dylanfanatic
Some of you will remember at least one of these two, but for a new generation of WoTHeads, I proudly present to you some timeless/modern classics that have been WoTized a bit. Enjoy:
The Catcher in the Rye:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Age of Holden by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind was broken in a boarding school. The wind breaking was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
But if you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is why I broke that wind. Well, like my birth, my parents, and everything else, it's just David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. I'm stuck here in this room, breaking wind all the damn long day. This stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages each apiece if I told jacksquat about anything. They're too busy picking out a yellow summer dress for my mom, sequined with pearls and slashed with red silk at the bottom for the company picnic. But they get quite touchy about anything like that, especially my mother. They're nice and all - I'm not saying that, but they're also touchy as hell. You drop a morsel or if a belch escapes, they start sniffing at you. Damn if my father doesn't tug on his beard at me as well. Just as well that I'm here in school, hours away from them.
Run, Spot, Run:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Age of Spot by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in a meadow. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
Born among the meadows and fields that covered much of the land, the apple trees in planned rows, the ordered vines leafless till spring, the cold wind blew west, picking up the scent of a three days dead vole as it blew across the prosperous farms dotting the land between the hills and the hollows. The land lay fallow still, waiting for the first warm breath of spring to awaken it to splendor. The men and women were already busy readying for the bounty to come, tilling and sowing as they went. They paid little mind to a seven year old boy with blue silk tights slashed with cream, with a little doublet made of otter skin draped around his left shoulder as if he were a matador in Barcelona. This fair-skinned, red-haired boy, named Johnny by some and the Bullroarer Reborn by others, was the source of many dire prophecies. The Prophecies of the Bullroarer Reborn hinted that in the meadow of Tarmon Gladdens, an event would take place that would rock the world to its very foundations.
That time had now come. His tavern skills had helped him elude the grasp of his enemies, who sought in their nefarious plots, controlled by the one known as the No Bliss, to prevent Johnny, the Bullroarer Reborn, from shattering the bonds of illiteracy for children around the globe. Their efforts had failed and finally, standing at the edge of the Bight, Johnny smelled the foul wind and cried out to his canine companion, Spot:
"Run, Spot, Run!"
And Spot ran like a deer pursued by wolves. As he ran, Johnny's simple words, which had cascaded out of his mouth like the silibent croonings of a siren, were overheard by a Eel hunter, named Jain, who wrote them down in a curious construction of papyrus called, oddly enough, paper. And the legend of Spot and Bullroarer Reborn spread from land to land, until history became legend, legend became myth, and myth became totally forgotten until some other wind arose in a mysterious locale to mark yet another beginning....
The Old Man and the Sea:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Age of Hemingway by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose along the shore. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
Jain Fishstrider was an old man who fished alone in a skiff off Windbiter's Finger, the very phallic-looking projection into the sea, and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. IN the first forty days a young Taraboner boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first w eek. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sailed was patched with flour sacks and slashed with blue cream and white silk and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent Tarabon defeat.
The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown, almost Sea Folk-like, blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. There were as old as erosions in the fishless Aiel desert.
In Cold Blood:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Age of Capote by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in a village. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
The village of Whitebridge stands on the high wheat plains of western Andor, a lonesome area that other Andorans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Manetheren border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a grolm-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers slashed with red silk, Stetson Taraboner hats, and the high-heeled Andoran boots with point toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, and white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Murandian temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.
Whitebridge, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there is much to ssee - simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Andoran Cattleroad, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Manetheran (pronounced "Man-eth-uh-run") River, on the north by a dirt path, the old Manetheran Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure the roof of which supports an old painted sign of a gleeman saying this - DANCE - but the dancing has ceased and the pub has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building with an irrelevant sign, this one of a woman leading a nine horse hitch in flaking gold on a dirty window - WHITEBRIDGE INN. The inn closed in 999 NE, and its former whoring rooms have been converted into apartments. It is one of the town's two "Dragon Reborn houses," the second being a ramshackle mansion known, because of good part of the local Darkfriend population lived there, as the Coven. But the majority of Whitebridge's homes are one-story frame affairs, with front porches filled with women in skirts and braided hair, sniffing and braid-tugging at the men who walked past.
Slaughter-House Five:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Age of Vonnegut by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose outside Shienar. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyways, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was sniffed at in Shienar for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired Trollocs after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names.
I really did go back to Shienar with Manetheren money (Creator love it) in 1020 NE. It looked a lot like Cairhien, Cairhien, more open spaces than Cairhien has. There must be tons of human and Trolloc bone meal in the ground.
I went back there with an old war buddy, Mat V. al'Vere, and we made friends with a horsecab driver, who took us to the Trolloc slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war. His name was Domanic Domani. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Darkfriends for a while. We asked him it was to live under Trollocism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing and sometimes the sniffing women were taken to be cooked in the Trolloc cookpots. But things were much better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education along with a great deal on cream-slashed blue silk dresses. His mother was incinerated in the Rand al'Thor fire-storm. So it goes.
David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Age of NPR by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose outside Cairhien. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
The wind blew briskly across the face of the narrator, who then began to speak:
One of the drawbacks to living in Cairhien is that people often refer to you as an expatriate, occasionally shortening the word to an even more irritating "ex-pat." It is implied that anything might take you to Illian or Tear, but if you live in Cairhien, it must be because you hate Andor. What can I say? There may be bands of turncoats secretly plotting to overthrow their former government, but I certainly haven't run across them. I guess we don't shop at the same boutiques. The Andorans I've befriended don't hate Andor, they simply prefer Cairhien for one reason or another. Some of them married Cairhien people or came here for work, but none of them viewed the move as a political act.
Like me, my Andoran friends are sometimes called upon to defend their country, usually at dinner parties where everyone's had a bit too much to drink. Andor will have done something the Cairhien don't like, and people will behave as though it's all my fault. I'm always taken off guard when a hostess accuses me of unfairly taxing her beef. Wait a minute, I think. Did I do that? Whenever my government refuse to sign a treaty or decides to throw its weight around in the Randland Treaty Organization, I beccome not an Andoran citizen but, rather, Andor itself, all of the provinces and Mantheren sitting at the ttable with gravy on my chin.
During Queen Elayne's impeachment hearing, my French teacher would often single me out, saying, "You Andorans, you're all such puritans, especially with those square-cut dresses that don't accentuate the cream-slashed V-neck designed to enhance the cleavage."
There, more for ya. Enjoy? Citizens of Illian and Tear, my fellow class members would agree with her, while I'd wonder, Are we? I'm sure the reputation isn't entirely undeserved, but how prudish can we be when almost everyone I know has engaged in a three-way?
I'd never though much about how Andorans were viewed elsewhere until I came to Cairhien and was expected to look and behave in a certain way. "You're not supposed to be smoking tabac," my classmates would tell me. "You're from Andor." Cairhiens expected me to regularly wash my hands with prepackaged towelettes and to automatically reject all unpasteurized dairy products. If I was thin, it must be because I'd recently lose tht extra fifty pounds traditionally cushioning the standard Andoran ass. If I was pushy, it was typical; and if I wasn't, it was probably due to the Two Rivers Leaf.
Where did people get these ideas, and how valid are they? I asked myself these questions when, after spending nine months in Cairhien, I returned to Andor for a five-week trip to twenty villages for a gleeman tour. The stagecoach hadn't even left Cairhien when the Caemlyner seated beside me turned to ask how much I'd paid for my ticket. Andorans are famous for talking about money, and I do everyuthing possible to keep our reputation alive. "Guess how much I spent on your birthday present?" I ask. "Tell me, how much rent do you pay?" "What did it cost you to have that lung removed by an Aes Sedai?" I horrify the Cairhien every time I open my mouth. They seem to view such questions as prying or boastful, but to me they're perfectly normal. You have to talk about something, and money seems to have filled the conversational niche made available when people stopped discussing the Elayne Pleasure Rod Scandal of 1000 NE.
During my five weeks in Andor, I spend a lot of time on stagecoachs and waiting around in inns, where the image of Andorans as hard workers was clearly up for grabs. Most passengers were in favor of the stereotype, while the majority of stagecoach employees seemed dead set against it. Stnading in lone line,s I could easily see how we earned our reputation as a friendly and talkative people. Conversations tended to revolve around the incompetence of the person standing behind the tavern bar or grill, but even when pressed for time, I found most travelers to be tolerant and good-natured, much more willing to laugh thatn to cause a stink. People expressed the hope that they might catch their stagecoach, they they might leave on time, and that their smuggled oosquai might eventually join them once they reached their destination. Once considered relentlessly positive, we seem to have substantially lowered our expectations.
Traveling across Andor, it's easy to see why Andorans are often thought of as stupid. At the Whitebridge Zoo, right near the grolm habitats, there's a display feature half a dozen life-size grolm made out of bronze. Posted nearby is a sign reading CAUTION: GROLM STATUES MAY BE HOT. Everywhere you turn, the obvious is being stated. FIRESTICK MAY BE LOUD. AES SEDAI GATEWAY ABOUT TO CLOSE. To people who don't run around suing one another, such signs suggest a crippling lack of intelligence. Place bronze statues beneath the southern Andoran sun, and of course they're going to get hot. Firesticks are supposed to be loud, that's their claim to fame, and - like or not - the Aes Sedai gateway is bound to end sooner or later. It's hard trying to explain a country whose motto has become "You can't claim I didn't warn you." What can you say about the family who is suing the stagecoach company after their drunk son was killed jumping in front of the horses? Horses don't normally sneak up on people, not even the legendary Bela could manage that without a whinny. Unless they've broken free of Whitecloak control, you pretty much know where to find them. The young man wasn't deaf and blind. No one had tied him to the road, so what's there to sue about?
While at a loss to explain some things, I take great joy in explaining others. After returning from my trip, I went to my regular place to have my hair cut. They'd given me a shampoo and I was sitting with a towel on my head when Pascal, the shop owner, handed me a popular Cairhien gossip magazine featuring a story on Queen Elayne and her new baby. Pacal, who speaks the Common Tongue, is "aped over Queen Elayne" and owns all her homemade porn videos shot with her newlywed husband, Rand al'Thor, who apparently earned the nickname "The Dragon Reborn" for more than one reason. His dream is to frost her tips while asking behind-the-scenes questions about the Pleasure Rod Scandal.
"I've been looking at this one illustration," he said, "but there is something here that I am not making out."
He pointed to a picture of the queen walking down an Illian beach with an unidentified friend who held the baby against her chest. A large dog ran just ahead of the women and splashed in the surf.
"I can see that Queen Elayne is holding in one hand a leash," Pascal said. "But what is it she is carrying in the other hand? I have asked many people, but nobody knows for sure."
I brought the magazine close to my face and studied it for a moment. "Well," I said, "she appears to be carrying a bag of dog shIt."
"God out of here, you nut." He seemed almost angry. "Queen Elayne is the beggest royal figure. SHe won the Randland Award two times, so why would she like to carry a bag that is full of shit? Nobody would do that but a crazy person." He called to his four employees. "Get over here and listen to what he's saying, the crazy nut."
In trying to communicate why a Randland Award-winning Queen might walk down the beach carrying a bag full of dog feces, I got the sort of lump in my throat that other people might get while singing their national anthem. It was the pride one can fell only when, far from home and surrounded by a captive audience, you are called upon to explain what is undoubtedly the single greatest thing about your country.
"Well," I said, "it goes like this..."