Another policewoman points out the entrance to Pavilion B, housing the Shining Path inmates. I’m signed in a third time, and am being escorted up a staircase when a figure darts forward. Trout-brown eyes, long dark hair parted in the middle, and a muslin scarf draped over her shoulders, embroidered with small flowers. Her face is thinner, more striking than in photographs. She wears loose black trousers and blue high-heeled shoes.

“Maritza?”

She nods, smiles.

Instinctively, I embrace her. –“The Dancer and the Terrorist,” Nicholas Shakespeare, Intelligent Life

There is further misdirection in the invitation to see Ferris’s evasiveness as an achievement. Ferris has mastered a technology newly emergent in the 1980s: the combination of computers, telephones, and digital audio sampling. We see answering machines that Ferris has rigged to play false messages; we see his stereo amplifying digital samples of his coughs and snores to create the illusion that he’s at home in bed. The director Hughes has cleverly divined what this new technology will come to be used for; it is for not being there. A few years after the movie, one imagines, Ferris will start a company that designs phone trees and voicemail systems; he will be a millionaire by 1990. The frustration, the sense of having been hoaxed, that is felt by the dean of students when he realizes that he isn’t really listening to Ferris through the intercom of the Bueller family home but only to a recording of Ferris, delivered to the intercom by a computer—you felt the same frustration yesterday when you dialed your health insurer and were led into a maze of cheerful, obtuse recorded voices that by design denied you an opportunity to say what had made you angry enough to call. –“Totaling the Ferrari: Ferris Bueller Revisited,” Caleb Crain, the Paris Review

Because we’re both writers, a lot of our sex has been textual. That’s why it baffled me, a couple of years into this, when I realized that my email server had an automatic but seemingly very arbitrary spam filter that trapped certain messages with the kinds of dirty words that tend to appear in those random sex-oriented messages we all receive on occasion. I had no idea I had a spam filter. I get plenty of spam, and as you can see, my correspondence is hardly pristine.
–“‘Le Rire de la Meduse’ – an excerpt from The Correspondence Artist,” by Barbara Browning, Fanzine