I've been thinking about this post a lot since I first read it yesterday. I believe Victoria may have planted herself firmly on the horns of the dilemma on which I have been riding for quite some time now...
Victoria Steele wrote:I had a recent pleasant conversation with a person who has been following the story as it has been presented and he sort of shocked me when he expressed something close to dismay over this last chapter!
Gee, it took him 64 chapters to reach "dismay" ? I think he should consider himself fortunate (as I consider myself grateful for his perseverance...)
I am not entirely sure why but it had something to do with the so called " experts" that were suddenly calling Dr. Browns development nothing but hot air". He was concerned because he told me " Now I don't know what to believe."
I'd like to know what exactly he believed before he got to that point.
And I realized with a start that some of your readers Paul might just take this " shot of expert opinion "....( you KNOW what I think of EXPERTS) quite seriously and start doubting, like HShort, whether anything out there is useful and based on something valid, or just a bunch of hot air. They take the critical review to heart without seeing what was actually happening. He shook his head ..." well they were University people, they must know what they were talking about." Reaction to that censored.
Gee, did it start with an "F" ?
Now I have been following this story closely so I am firm in my understanding of the kind of man that Dr. Brown was and the technology that he was trying to explain
Actually, by 1951-52, it's the technology that he was NOT "trying to explain"...
but suddenly you have all of these " experts" saying that it is nothing special (just ion wind ) and all of that. And I can see where this new reader would get confused
I certainly hope nobody is STARTING with chapter 64. That WOULD be confusing!
and maybe not see what was actually happening. And that Dr. Brown was actually leading the wave on this upsurge of critical review on his work. And for a very good reason.
That view could get lost though Paul, if you are not careful, just as it apparently was lost on this man who said he was really QUITE disappointed in the chapter. Unsettled by it. Of course I think that maybe thats a good place to be.
That's first part of this post that gets my attention, because it implies that I did not really do a very good job of whatever it was I was actually trying to do in this chapter. I think what I was trying to do was suggest that everything that is 'public' about Townsend Brown -- i.e. the whole "lifter" business that he first started demonstrating in Los Angeles in 1951 and 52 -- was a smokescreen. If your reader didn't get that, than I'd have to say this chapter has failed and I will need to spend a fair amount of time in the re-write when I get to this part.
On the other hand, it's also easy to sympathize with the reader who is confused because, frankly, it is confusing. It's confusing because we don't REALLY know so many things. Like, was there something else demonstrated at Pearl Harbor? Is that what the "mole" witnessed? Or, as somebody here first suggested -- and I tried to say in the chapter -- was the whole PH demo a 'sting' operation, intended to draw out the spy with something other than the really cool new technology?
You wrap all those questions up in a context where some "expert" is calling everything he's seen "hot air" and it's easy to see why a reader would get confused and maybe a tad discouraged at the way things are going.
Paul, Maybe I am just a worry wart but it might be that this last chapter ( maybe because it is long and complicated) might lose some of your readers to the thread of what you are trying to say and maybe they will only notice what is on the surface. Which is, I have to agree .... very discouraging. Just a point to ponder from an outside viewpoint. I worry about readers not really " getting" what is happening as my gentleman friend obviously didn't.
Actually, that's just the half of it, Victoria. Unfortunately, you have aimed your flashlight in the right direction, and the light is shining, but whatever it's pointed at... is still dark. It's like we're looking for a black hole in space -- an object so dense that not even light can escape it. And therein lies the conundrum that faces the remainder of this entire undertaking.
It dawned on me yesterday, after reading this message from Victoria, that I may have reached a point where there is not a whole lot else to say. From here out, I really have little more to relate than the day to day, week to week, year to year movements of Doctor Brown and his family as they go back and forth across the country, holding seemingly meaningless demonstrations for everybody from Edward Teller to Jim Lee. He is demonstrating a technology we pretty well know NOT to be particularly exciting, but the real story behind the curtain remains no more evident than it was in Los Angeles in 1952, or Pearl Harbor in 1950. Not a dead end, maybe, but pretty much a scenic cul-de-sac.
So, I can sympathize with your friend. Even if he missed some of the nuance, it seems to me that he's read just enough between some of the lines to arrive the same conclusion that I am now wrestling with. Whether we continue from 1953 or 1966, the "rest of the story" is just making excuses for "we really don't know..." That, or another 100 pages of 'weasel words.'
Anybody else feel that way? Anybody else believing that Dr. Brown was actually the failure that all of Zanesville apparently thought he was? Anybody else out there missing what Paul was actually saying?
I too would like to hear the answer to that question. Was there any doubt from reading Chapter 64 that it was all a masquerade?
Or maybe it's just -- like I was feeling yesterday -- that we've reached some point of exhaustion. Who really wants to read a mystery once they've arrived at the realization that the mystery is never really going to be solved?
--PS