Deconstruction: Follow-Up to Act One

It's been a while since I picked up the thread of this story. Now that my recent day-job assignment is over, I can pick up a few threads.

Firstly, I did some digging and found out the name of the Baltimore Sun reporter who covered the Johns Hopkins conference in 1966. I found his article in the archives of the Baltimore Sun, from Oct. 19. Turns out he is Japanese-American, and was in the internment camps in the war. He wrote a book about it later.

His article is very interesting. It's just a fun article in the B section of the paper. He does indeed speak to Richard Macksey. He tries to understand what Structuralism is a bit. He doesn't mention Derrida, of course, but curiously he doesn't mention Claude Levi-Strauss either.

So in the story either we change the reporter to be him, since we know that historically, or we invent another Baltimore newspaper for our existing reporter to be working at. Or we do some variation of that.

Besides that reporter, I also found out the weather during the conference, and the t.v. schedules. We certainly don't want a mass on Tuesday morning (not that the Catholic Church doesn't do that). Not in the late Sixties. It would have been only on Sunday. Also let's not do the American flag on television. That's too obvious for a story that also involves scenes literally in Baltimore harbor. Always get rid of those obvious things in a story, that anyone could have predicted.

It occurs to me that "Good Morning, Baltimore" as the theme of the opening is also too obvious, given previous movies about that city. Maybe we have Derrida flying in at night---the evening before.  His colleague is waiting outside in the twilight on the top of the terminal at Friendship Airport. They can go off to the hotel, which I don't know, but I have a great one to use. A lot of those details, we have to invent them because they weren't recorded, and there is no one left alive to tell us. That gives us latitude in the story to link the things together we want, in a colorful way that will keep people engaged, and allow us to introduce the characters.

As for as the French-accented colleague, of course we want him to be Paul de Man. That's the only choice. We know that he and Derrida both attended the conference, and started a long friendly dialog after that. Did De Man wait at the airport for him like a police detective awaiting a witness arriving on a plane? Of course not. I made that part up. But how do we know otherwise, especially now that Derrida's widow, who is already one of the characters in our story, has passed away, reportedly by the bug that's been going around.