Sam and I would do all right if thrown in a room together. I read about you on the plane without the paper and my mind went RIGHT to Lodge. How fabulous.
Sorry, I misspoke myself: it was Small World, not Changing Places, that gave us the reprieve by Legionnaire's Disease. An alternative solution to the Failed Paper problem is the Giant Green Spider ploy: in a short story the author and title of which I forget, the intellectually blocked would-be deliverer of a paper with much advance publicity vanishes from sight on the eve of the conference, with all evidence (and the account of one slightly inebriated eyewitness) pointing towards his having been abducted through a skylight by an enormous arachnid with an eerie flourescent glow. The paper never got delivered and the professor was never seen or heard of again.
Sam.
P.S. Bring me fried green tomatoes. If not, at least boiled peanuts. Failing that, spicy cheese straws.
I was going to say something of the sort, Small World being one of the books I used as a basis for my MA thesis, but voila, Sam beat me to it. Hi, Sam!
I love David Lodge. Excellent amusement for those who work in the academic and publish-or-die environment.
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