Story found via another weblog (why don't I write down the credit along with the link when I make notes to myself?!?!) There's a minor Baker Street Irregulars-ish subculture pertaining to Soames: Teller of Penn and Teller wrote an article about him for The Atlantic, and various bodies have produced appreciations of his work, or at least Web pages professing the existence of appreciations of his work. (Caution: big spoilers in all three, and not the kind of spoilers that don't really spoil the fun of the story)
Thu Jan 09 2003 20:33:
Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties, by Max Beerbohm. A fictional sketch of an utterly forgettable fictional poet, said sketch to contain one (1) supernatural twist. Slow, but witty and with a hilarious unneccessary post-ending.
Before the work began, they stopped re-newing leases, so the number of
stores kept dwindling. It was a ghost mall, with only the movie theatre
open at the end. It had endless parking and you could show up just a few
minutes before the show and if you didn't mind the possibility of being set
upon by refugee Sunglasses Hut employees, it was great.
I was only there once, in my mid-teens, and it was utterly deserted. I remember my sisters and I getting running starts and sliding across the slippery tile floor on our stomachs in a mad act of pointless, consequenceless mall-hogging. It was like the mall in Rock 'n' Roll Rebellion after the humorless owner and his reactionary security guards abandon it to the plucky gang of high-school stereotypes.
Thu Jan 09 2003 20:49:
Greg on my Sherman Oaks despair (qv.):
I lived a half-mile from the site during the work, and they completely
gutted it. Tore out everything, even the walls, and turned it into office
space, mostly. There are a few restaurants and a movie theatre and a record
store there now, but it's unrecognizable.
