I WOKE WITH a crick in my neck and a mouth as dry as laundry lint. The TV screen was frozen to the menu of a DVD. The tinkling piano so often associated with silent film played the same refrain over and over until I had no choice but to flap my hand around, grasp the remote and hit mute. Then I sat in the silence and let the world creep across my consciousness, the way sound and booze had crept across Keaton’s in the 1930s, the way the cop’s flashlight beam had crept across Paul Reubens in the adult theatre. Outside it was still the late summer of 2012 – noise, speed, the adulation of money and power. Outside, linked together like boxcars and stretched from coast to coast, were endless classrooms of bored teenagers holding gadgets of ineffective distraction in their hands. Outside, Keaton
