Crowd Control: Managing Multiple Characters in Short Fiction — Richard Farrell

Jan 252011
 

The issue of “crowd control”—introducing, developing and dramatizing multiple (more than, arbitrairly, 4) characters in a story—is a central one for short story writers.  Crowd control matters no less for novelists, but with greater chunks of time and physical space, a novelist can more evenly pace character density out over the span of several hundred pages.  The story writer, constrained by narrative time and simple page counts, faces different challenges as she introduces a large cast onto a small stage.

In William Maxwell’s “Haller’s Second Home,” (first published in 1941) eight significant characters are portrayed and at least as many minor characters are mentioned within a fourteen page story.  Maxwell uses a variety of techniques to keep this (relatively) large cast of characters distinct and autonomous.

{For simplicity sake, here are the eight principal characters in order of appearance: Haller, a family friend of the Mendelsohns; Mrs. Mendelsohn, the family matriarch; Renee , the family cook; Abbie M., 25 year old daughter; Nathan M., oldest brother; Dr. Mendelsohn , a medical doctor; Leo M., the youngest son; and Francis Whitehead, another family friend, who, like Haller, has an open invitation to the visit the Mendelsohn’s home.}

(Listen to NPR’s Terri Gross interview Maxwell on Fresh Air)

STORY SUMMARY:

The story takes place at the Mendelsohn’s apartment one evening in 1941.  The central dramatic action surrounds Haller’s visit for Abbie’s twenty-fifty birthday, a party that Abbie says she doesn’t want to celebrate. Haller enters the home carrying a gift, two albums of the Finnish composer Sibelius, but the record player is broken. In Abbie’s room, Haller watches her care for a sick kitten. (Kittens, in addition to characters, abound in this story!) Haller discusses travel plans with Nathan, then at dinner, he is forced to listens to Dr. Mendelsohn drone on about a patient.  The mood is subdued and friendly, but hardly celebratory.  “All in the world he (Haller) wanted, behind those big horn-rimmed glasses, was to be loved…”  Haller finds acceptance in this home, but not the love he desires, and certainly not from Abbie who seems to resent his presence. But everything changes when Francis Whitehead bursts in after dinner.  Whitehead, on a 2-day pass from basic training in New Jersey, receives the hero’s welcome that Haller so desperately desires.  The other men in the room seem enraptured by Whitehead’s new-found soldierly aura.  The story ends with Haller quietly and abruptly exiting the party while Whitehead spends the night, finding, ironically, the very love Haller seeks but fails to find in his so-called second home.

TECHNIQUES:

By tightly restricting the setting and narrative time, Maxwell eliminates the reader’s potential confusion, allowing characters to move on and off the page without muddling.  Maxwell creates a large cast, but they are tightly held within a cage of time and space.  This helps.  The reader always knows where and when the story is taking place. Continue reading »

“Behind every silver lining there is a cloud”

Jan 232011
 

Last night I went to see the Canadian documentary Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould which movie you should all see for its demonstration of how an intelligent and passionate artist talks and interacts with the world. Ever since I saw on TV years ago Gould’s performance in the CBC Cities series I’ve been entranced by the speed of his thinking (which, yes, recapitulates the speed of his fingers playing Bach). Also he was hilarious. See the scene in which he sings to the elephants at the Toronto zoo. Or, yes, touring downtown Toronto for the cameras at night, he says this: “I tend to follow a very nocturnal sort of existence mainly because I don’t much care for sunlight. Bright colors of any kind depress me, in fact. And my moods are more or less inversely related to the clarity of the sky, on any given day. A matter of fact, my private motto has always been that behind every silver lining there is a cloud.” Both scenes are in Genius Within. As is a gorgeous story told by Herbert von Karajan of Gould’s great Russian tour, when he was young and no one in Russia knew who he was. The Moscow Conservatory was less than half full when he started the concert. Within minutes people started slipping out to the telephones, calling their friends. You have to get to the Conservatory right now. By the beginning of the second half of the concert, the theatre was packed. Gould had to add to concerts to his tour. At his last performance in Leningrad, they waived the fire regulations and let in 1500 standing room ticket holders. Even the aisles were crowded.

And think about this, from the Glenn Gould Reader:

The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to an obverse, that it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it. And when that happens, when we forget these things, all sorts of mechanical failures begin to disrupt the functions of the human personality. When people who practice an art like music become captives of those positive assumptions of system, when they forget to credit that happening against negation which system is, and when they become disrespectful of the immensity of negation compared to system — then they put themselves out of reach of that replenishment of invention upon which creative ideas depend, because invention is, in fact, a cautious dipping into the negation that lies outside system from a position firmly ensconced in system.

dg

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB76jxBq_gQ]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-KyL2gMxV8]

The Philosophical Novel – NYTimes.com

Jan 222011
 

Patrick Downes alerted me to this provoking article in the NY Times, provoking because like many myopic American critics this person cannot see beyond the shores of the continental U.S. (except for very, very obvious outsiders like Sartre and Murdoch). I can’t start a list, but maybe I will. Broch, Kundera, Musil, Frisch… Anyway, this is a good example of creeping provincialism in the contemporary c(v)ulture industry.

dg

Can a novelist write philosophically? Even those novelists most commonly deemed “philosophical” have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an “austere, unselfish, candid” prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something “mysterious, ambiguous, particular” about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. “If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships,” she said. “And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy.”

via The Philosophical Novel – NYTimes.com.

Nobody pays for porn (or literature) anymore

Jan 222011
 

Prognosticators and pundits always mention the music industry as a harbinger of what’s to come/what’s happening in the publishing industry. But an equally valid parallel might be found in the porn industry.

BTW, dg is having a high-quality full-size heated silicone replica of himself built. It will be marketed under the name NC Seminars—Writing to the Max.

dg

Five hundred years ago, while Martin Luther was using the printing press to disseminate his 95 Theses, Italian author Pietro Aretino was using the new invention to get his “School of Whoredom” on bookshelves. “When new media offer new markets, porn spies them quickly and rushes to fill them, like an amoeba extruding a new pseudopod where its skin is thinnest,” wrote legal scholar Peter Johnson in a mid-1990s essay.

If video sales aren’t going to be the cash cow they once were, a growing number of adult stars are hedging their bets by moving into the piracy-proof realm of sex toys. As one industry insider quipped, “you can’t download a dildo.” Fleshlight, a Texas-based producer of male masturbators has contracted with several adult models to produce silicone replicas of their most intimate parts. Other stars have taken it a step further by sponsoring full-size, heated silicone reproductions. For $7,000, hardcore porn fans can pick up an eerily lifelike Doppelganger of their favourite stars.

Doomsayers continue to herald the end of the adult industry. Lifestyle blog AskMen.com even likened this year’s Adult Entertainment Expo to “one big party on the Titanic.”

via Nobody pays for porn anymore: A tale of a sad-sack expo | Features | National Post.

Further Signs of the Apocalypse? Censorship Lives! by Rich Farrell

Jan 192011
 

 

“For whatever sedates us is shuffling us off towards the greater sleep of death.  Art, on the other hand, is a persistent wake up call, the setting off of a quiet siren in the heart.”  Steven Heighton

In Reynolds Price’s  introduction to James Salter’s novel, A Sport and A Pastime, Price alludes to the famous Grove Press lawsuit against the NYC postmaster.  In 1959, Grove Press re-published unabridged editions of  D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  The  postmaster was confiscating mailed copies of the books.  Grove won the suit, paving the way for a new freedom with respect to sexual content in American publishing.   Price says this:

While slow degrees of freedom had previously been gained in the manner of sexually candid prose, Grove’s early-1960s victory became a significant milepost for serious American writers.  At last we were free to publish what we wished, or needed to write in the description of human desire and its various enactments”

All hail freedom!  I haven’t read Lawrence in a long time, but what I remember of his sexual prose seemed timid compared to Salter.  (Much less to, say, any episode of reality TV shows.  Paris H., you still have my number, right?)  Salter fills his text with  ‘big C’ words (cock, clitoris and cunt, among many others) but his sexual scenes are hardly pornographic.  They are wonderfully written and full of imaginative drama.  Characters are having graphic sex right there on the page in beautiful, literary images.   Thank the muses that we live in an age of such freedom of expression.  We retain unfettered access to language and the expression of…What?  I can’t say what?  Who is this?  I can’t say clitoris?

Court Merrigan recently forwarded this article to NC about the removal of unabridged copies of The Diary of Anne Frank’from libraries in Virginia.  The offending passages come from the ruminations of the teenaged diarist as she tries to understand the anatomy of her genitalia.  The word ‘clitoris’ apparently upset enough parents of Virginia high school students that libraries began removing copies of the offending books.

The saddest part about posting this article on NC is how common such censorship is today.  Listen to Bill Maher’s humorous take about the new publication of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  In the new editions, the clearly offensive but still artist-intended word, ‘nigger’, is removed from Twain’s original text.  Two-hundred and nineteen times.   (Read a longer article here from the University of Virginia newspaper.)  One wonders what other words will eventually be erased from other books, or how such redactions will trickle into the already entertainment-saturated bloodstream of our sedated, consumerist culture.  A cultural sedation, by the way, which Steven Heighton warns us about in his essay “The Admen Move On Lhasa.”  (Quoted above and referenced several times on NC by yours truly, including here.)

Freedom of expression, sadly, remains as tenuous and threatened today as it was fifty years ago.

In a final, hot-off-the-presses example from today’s (Jan 19th) L.A. times, Smithsonian director, Wayne Clough, has come under fire for issues of censorship.  Clough recently pulled a video by artist David Wojnarowicz (see video at bottom of post) from a gay-themed exhibit set to go on display at the National Portraits Gallery.  Clough relented to governmental pressure over a perceived anti-Christian bias in the work: ants can be seen crawling atop a crucifix.

In spite of the progress artists have made over the centuries, censorship continues to plague the free and honest exploration, exchange and expression of ideas.  From Salman Rushdie to, apparently, Anne Frank.   As publishing houses fall and media conglomerates merge (As we speak, NBC and Comcast are being fused)  it’s hard not to wonder what the future holds for works by the likes of Twain, Lawrence, Frank and Salter.  Or perhaps we should all endeavor just to let go and watch American Idol?  Who needs books anyway?

— Richard Farrell

 

Teaching your dog to read

Jan 192011
 

In dg’s spare time, he is reaching beyond Chaser and Rico (see very serious NY Times article below) and teaching Lucy, the wonder dog (the NC blue dog), to read. They’re starting with War and Peace because, as dg told Lucy, it’s meaty. Lucy already has a large vocabulary beginning with words like food, breakfast, dinner, squirrel, walk, frisbee, cookie, dog and outside. She has a working familiarity with the phrase “too much dog.” Occasionally, she understands more difficult concepts such as sit, down, come, stay (rarely, though dg thinks she is playing with him; there is a hint of contempt in her eyes). With the Tolstoy novel, dg is using a reward system (much as he does with his creative writing students). He is familiarizing her with the phrase War and Peace by scraping peanut butter onto the cover. She now can find War and Peace on the book shelf or in a pile of unrelated books. Next he will train her to turn to page 1 using forepaws and nose. —dg

Chaser, a border collie who lives in Spartanburg, S.C., has the largest vocabulary of any known dog. She knows 1,022 nouns, a record that displays unexpected depths of the canine mind and may help explain how children acquire language.

Chaser belongs to John W. Pilley, a psychologist who taught for 30 years at Wofford College, a liberal arts institution in Spartanburg. In 2004, after he had retired, he read a report in Science about Rico, a border collie whose German owners had taught him to recognize 200 items, mostly toys and balls. Dr. Pilley decided to repeat the experiment using a technique he had developed for teaching dogs, and he describes his findings in the current issue of the journal Behavioural Processes.

via Dog Might Provide Clues on How Language Is Acquired – NYTimes.com.

MLK

Jan 182011
 

I look at these videos and I think he really was something else. Listen to the incantatory rhythms of his speeches, the parallel constructions, his ability to weave significant reference (Lincoln, Moses), and the sentences infused with the antique inflections of the KJV which in context seem mysterious and ineffably beautiful.

dg

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0FiCxZKuv8&feature=related]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUP_ISA030c&feature=related]

DG’s Lecture in the History of Western Philosophy in 45 Minutes, the Comic Book Version by Kristi Wipperwurth

Jan 182011
 

This is Kristi Wipperfurth’s (VCFA poetry) reconstruction of dg’s amazing lecture at the Vermont College of Fine Arts residency just completed. Kristi is especially good at recapitulating the “mediation” theme; notice how she has dg mediating between the lamp (the light) and the Self. Really, this tells you everything. And she caught the curious resemblance between dg and Robert Redford exactly.

dg

A little biblical humour, not for the weak in spirit(s)

Jan 162011
 

First thing this lovely sunny morning, my son Jacob sends me this email.

dg

I am listening to a lecture about the historical Jesus right now and the lecturer was talking about St. John the Baptist jumping in his mother’s womb for joy because Mary, pregnant with Jesus, was there. The lecturer called him St. John, The (are you ready for this?) Prophetus!


Don’t forget Kate’s treatment blog: Auntie Cake’s Shop

Jan 132011
 

Don’t forget to check in on Kate’s treatment blog. She is facing down the Other, as we all must. And finding words in the torment.

dg

Jung once said “if people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to learn their fellow men (sic) better”. I know that people do try – because we face down and sometimes embrace those lesser selves – in order to help our friends and family who are sick. Sometimes even for strangers too. The entire oncological world does it everyday. Because of it, a world of love and care, beauty, kindness, and strength has grown constant around me. I in turn, will try to spread it around too. But I battle with my own lesser self – bald, bloated, unable to parse, cranky, sometimes a horror-comic of terrible thoughts. And I am sure we all do when we look and see imperfections, craziness, or lunacy. We try to spread the good stuff around.

via Auntie Cake’s Shop.

Letter from Halifax: Jacob does the Polar Bear in the North Atlantic

Jan 132011
 

Polar Bear Swim, Blackrock Beach, Halifax, January 2011


Last weekend, Jacob and friends from the University of King’s College ran across the city to the ocean and went for a swim. (Yes, Canadians swim in the ocean year-round. It’s a hard country. You find pleasure where you can.) Then they ran miles back. I looked at the photo on the right and complained that there wasn’t any snow. This could be mid-summer! Here’s what he wrote back.

dg

A Letter from Halifax
By Jacob Glover

Dad,

There isn’t any snow because it’s a beach in Halifax. The snow is only the sidewalks and roads… you’re just going to have to trust me because there aren’t any pictures of us running in it. Also, Evey Hornbeck took the pictures. People weren’t really saying anything other than either it was cold or they’d been in colder, so not really interesting things.

This is the picture of me post-polar dip. Twenty of us (3 girls and 17 boys) had run down to Blackrock Beach in Point Pleasant Park near the harbour on January 8th afternoon so that we could strip down and then submerge ourselves into the freezing North Atlantic to embrace more fully our Polar Selves. The run was more a slog than anything else, since in Halifax when it snows any byway paved with cement or asphalt is immediately covered in slush. The air wasn’t that cold, about 32 ̊ F, and the wind calmed slightly to allow us safe passage, it seemed. The run took 25 minutes, but dressed in sweatpants, two fleeces and your green winter coat, I was quite toasty by the time we arrived at the beach.

Before the swim. Jacob is front row right in the green coat.

As soon as we hit sand, people began to strip down to underwear or shorts, baring as much skin as possible. After pulling off all 12 layers of clothes, I walked slowly through the cold sand, so cold in fact that it actually hurt a little, and at the water’s edge, this is the ocean, let me repeat, I put my foot in to test the water which was about 41 ̊ F. To put this temperature in perspective for you, Wikipedia says that someone in 50 ̊ F water will die in an hour. Needless to say at the first touch of the water my whole foot was numb, so I pulled it out and reconsidered my position. It was decided though, by some far off Fate-source, that my destiny was to swim in the ocean that rather bleak day in January. So I took a few steps back and reached out for Fate’s hand in the form of white caps and salty-sea spray, as I berserkered off the edge of the continent.

The water was cold. It was really cold. And after diving under and coming back up I opened my mouth to roar something barbaric and Yawp-like, but the extreme temperature had robbed my lungs of air and movement; the paralytic cold had leeched into my diaphragm and sapped my yawping strength. I fled from this evil violent cold to my towel and dry clothes on the beach. But as I stood toweling off, surfing my eyes over the gray lonely water to McNabs Island in the distance, it occurred to me that, yes, I had just swum in the ocean in January, and, honestly, it had been unbearably cold but  extremely fun.

Love you

Jake

—Jacob Glover. Photos by Evey Hornbeck.

Sunday morning, post-residency reading: Towton, the bloodbath that changed the course of our history | England – Times Online

Jan 092011
 

No brain left, just enough energy to follow the links and track through the web for delightfully uproarious accounts of dreadful things like this one. My idea of a pleasant Sunday morning—no workshop, lectures, readings, introductions, conferences in prospect.

dg

Organised ranks of men standing under an arrow storm can do one of three things. They can take it, the steepling hysteria, the terror, the incessant keening of the goose feathers, the thud and grunt, the screaming and pleading, the smell of shit and vomit and split gut; they can stand with their skin prickling in mortal expectation. Or they can retreat – get out of the rain, give ground, lose form and purpose, and run. Or they can attack – move forward, confront the butcher, the bloody, unmanly, unarmoured, jeering peasant bowmen.

via Towton, the bloodbath that changed the course of our history | England – Times Online.

Was Jane Austen Edited? Does It Matter? : NPR

Jan 072011
 

Russell Working alerted me to this article.

dg

“A storm in a teacup” is the British version of the idiom, and it’s hard to imagine a more apt example than the squall that blew up recently over the claim by Oxford professor Kathryn Sutherland that Jane Austen was actually a sloppy writer. Sutherland was publicizing a new website that has put 1000 pages of Austen’s manuscripts online. According to her, the manuscripts are full of faulty spelling, break every rule of English grammar, and give no sign of the polished punctuation we see in the novels. She concluded that Austen’s prose must have been heavily edited for publication, quite possibly by the querulous critic William Gifford.

It’s a measure of Austen’s rock-star status that those claims got international coverage as a major celebrity scandal. The BBC headed its report “Jane Austen’s Elegant Style may not be Hers.” The French media website Actualité led with “Jane Austen massacred the English language,” and the Italian daily Il Giornale used the headline “Austen Revised and Corrected by a Man!”

via Was Jane Austen Edited? Does It Matter? : NPR.

Conjugate Visits: More Parsing Larsson: Verb Inventory

Dec 302010
 

Steven Axelrod, a former victim, er, I mean student, of the Shredder, sent me this link, no doubt because of my own obsession with listing and counting verbs and the quality of sentences.

dg

More Parsing Larsson: Verb Inventory

After yesterday’s post about Stieg Larsson, I got an itch to compare his verbs to some other writers’. Not that verbs are the biggest problem with Larsson’s writing. Far from it. Still, I was curious. So here is an inventory of verbs from a page of Larsson’s “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” a page of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” and a page of Stephen King’s “Just After Sunset.”

I list these verbs in their base forms — i.e. “had been” and “were” are listed as “be.” Verbs forming independent clauses are in all caps. Verbs forming subordinate clauses are lowercase. Participial modifiers are not counted as verbs.

Larsson, page 414 — 18 sentences:

1. BE

2. BE

3. RECALL, HAVE, be

4. BE

5. UNDERSTAND

6. BE, FIND, find

7. BE, gnaw

8. NOTICE, take, keep

9. BE, BE, summarize

10. HAVE, BE, clear out, throw

11. THROW

12. BE, FIND

13. SEE, remove, deal with

14. SPEND, MISS, COME, HAVE

15. FIND, contain

16. GO, try, find

17. BE

18. DISCOVER, GO, USE

via Conjugate Visits: More Parsing Larsson: Verb Inventory.

The True Story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Dec 222010
 

Someone just sent me a version of this authentic writing story. I checked around online and found various corrections, truer accounts of the true. See below. I grew up with the Gene Autry version of the song (yes, and I once met Roy Rogers and Dale Evans; and Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto, was from the Six Nations Reserve a few miles from our farm).

dg

From childhood, Bob was different and never seemed to fit in. Bob did complete college, married his loving wife and was grateful to get his job as a copywriter at Montgomery Ward during the Great Depression. Then he was blessed with his little girl. But it was all short-lived. Evelyn’s bout with cancer stripped them of all their savings and now Bob and his daughter were forced to live in a two-room apartment in the Chicago slums. Evelyn died just days before Christmas in 1938.

Bob struggled to give hope to his child, for whom he couldn’t even afford to buy a Christmas gift. But if he couldn’t buy a gift, he was determined a make one – a storybook! Bob had created an animal character in his own mind and told the animal’s story to little Barbara to give her comfort and hope.

Again and again Bob told the story, embellishing it more with each telling.

Who was the character? What was the story all about? The story Bob May created was his own autobiography in fable form. The character he created was a misfit outcast like he was. The name of the character? A little reindeer named Rudolph, with a big shiny nose. Bob finished the book just in time to give it to his little girl on Christmas Day. But the story doesn’t end there.

via The True Story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

And here is the Urban Legends account.

James Salter Interview with Charlie Rose

Dec 202010
 

I’ve been reading James Salter’s book of stories Dusk and Other Stories on Mark Anthony Jarman’s recommendation. Gorgeous stories, disturbing stories. “American Express” is about two wealthy American investment bankers or dealers traveling in Italy. They pick up a very young girl and share her. At the end, one of the men gets out of bed and looks down out the hotel window at a young man on a motorbike.

He was part of that great, unchanging order of those who live by wages, whose world is unlit and who do not realize what is above.

Also “Twenty Minutes”—a story about a woman dying after a fall from her horse, being, as the story tells it, visited by the “demonic.” And “Akhnilo” about a man being drawn from his house in the night by some sound/vision, some mythic Other, which, when he returns to his house and wife, he cannot put words to. He had words at the moment, but as he nears home, the words disappear. Reminds me of an E. M. Forster story called “Pan”—humans meeting the old gods and not knowing.

dg

Mario Vargas Llosa – Nobel Lecture

Dec 162010
 

A lovely speech. And Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is still one of dg’s favourite books.

dg

 

I wish my mother were here, a woman who was moved to tears reading the poems of Amado Nervo and Pablo Neruda, and Grandfather Pedro too, with his large nose and gleaming bald head, who celebrated my verses, and Uncle Lucho, who urged me so energetically to throw myself body and soul into writing even though literature, in that time and place, compensated its devotees so badly. Throughout my life I have had people like that at my side, people who loved and encouraged me and infected me with their faith when I had doubts. Thanks to them, and certainly to my obstinacy and some luck, I have been able to devote most of my time to the passion, the vice, the marvel of writing, creating a parallel life where we can take refuge against adversity, one that makes the extraordinary natural and the natural extraordinary, that dissipates chaos, beautifies ugliness, eternalizes the moment, and turns death into a passing spectacle.

Writing stories was not easy. When they were turned into words, projects withered on the paper and ideas and images failed. How to reanimate them? Fortunately, the masters were there, teachers to learn from and examples to follow. Flaubert taught me that talent is unyielding discipline and long patience. Faulkner, that form – writing and structure – elevates or impoverishes subjects. Martorell, Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Conrad, Thomas Mann, that scope and ambition are as important in a novel as stylistic dexterity and narrative strategy. Sartre, that words are acts, that a novel, a play, or an essay, engaged with the present moment and better options, can change the course of history. Camus and Orwell, that a literature stripped of morality is inhuman, and Malraux that heroism and the epic are as possible in the present as is the time of the Argonauts, the Odyssey, and the Iliad.

via Mario Vargas Llosa – Nobel Lecture.

Auntie Cake’s Shop

Dec 072010
 

Kate O’Rourke (“Auntie Cake”) is married to the Canadian writer Michael Bryson, a friend of mine whose story “My Life in Television” was published in Numéro Cinq earlier this year. In September, Kate was diagnosed with cancer. In response, she began this blog. It will break your heart, it will make you stand up and cheer.

dg

Fighting is my job now – I must often retreat to the core of myself to garner what strength is required to regain citizenship in the kingdom of the well. Usually, that means, to bed, or to rest on a soft surface somewhere. Sometimes it means escape in a Swedish series of books about a crazy lady, or writing this blog, lunching with friends, wrapping Christmas presents to Ella’s Swingin’ Christmas at Volume 11. It also means plugging into machines and swallowing poison, assisting with all manner of broken spirit, and crying. A LOT of crying. Fountains and rivers of liquid salt. It is a job you are not prepared for, in fact, dread. Worse than any mundane task or other related duty as assigned. But life, that unbending and strong coursing river, keeps you moving along. Really, there is no choice. Kind of like blood through your veins.

via Auntie Cake’s Shop.

Updike on Nabokov in Guernica

Dec 042010
 

Here’s a formerly unpublished interview with John Updike which circles around through various topics, some not so interesting anymore, but mainly keeps coming back to Nabokov.

dg

John Updike: I first encountered his prose, and I think the stories as they appeared in The New Yorker. Not all of them appeared. But I’d never seen writing quite like this before, writing so precise and witty, and full of little surprises. And it was those surprises that gave me a kind of ecstatic feeling. I think there is a rapture in Nabokov, which you can take to be a love of life, and also a love of consciousness; a love of the motions of the mind as it deals with whatever—chess is an example. He was a contriver of chess puzzles. And that kind of joy and manipulation is there in a lot of the prose. I don’t really feel the darkness, much—it’s true there’s a lot of dying, a lot of death in Nabokov. The end of Lolita, almost every character in it is either dead or going to die. But I take dying to be for a lepidopterist like him a kind of entry into immortality, just the way a butterfly on its pin, becomes deathless, in a sense, and is preserved. There’s a novel I reckon called The Eye, in which he describes the transition from life to death. And it’s a kind of metamorphosis rather than a termination.

via Guernica / Updike Redux.

Man killed in library with crossbow – The Globe and Mail

Dec 022010
 

I can’t possibly make fun of this. I just have to let it stand on its own. But it somehow belongs at NC.

dg

The circumstances of Toronto’s 59th homicide of the year don’t fit the profile of a typical slaying. Not the apparent age of the victim (middle-aged), nor the location (inside a busy public library), or the time of day (late afternoon).

But the strangest detail of all was the weapon used: a crossbow.

via Man killed in library with crossbow – The Globe and Mail.

Getting into trouble, a little advice for aspiring writers, actors, or anyone else who wants to get somewhere

Dec 022010
 

Here’s a snippet from a Q&A Stephen Colbert did on Reddit. The whole interview is here, and it’s generally interesting. But for my purposes, the nub of what he has to say is in these few lines. He’s talking about his early career, how he got started as an actor. Getting into trouble means saying yes to every chance you’re offered to perform or produce, to write or paint or act. Pay or no pay. Just keep getting yourself into situations where you have to produce, situations that make you panic and focus. Panic is always good for a writer.

dg

I mostly just said yes to any opportunity to get on stage. Pay or no pay. Equity, amateur, comedy, avant garde, and improv especially. Chicago has a great improv community, and I could get up on stage a lot after I got to know the other members of the community. I called it getting in trouble. You say yes to something, then you are in trouble. You have to deliver. Each mini-crisis I forced myself into made me work hard.

—Stephen Colbert

The Trolley Problem, Trolleyology, and the Meaning of Wrong

Nov 282010
 

The Trolley Problem was more or less invented by Philippa Foot, a British philosopher who died last month, and whose illustrious career at Oxford was overshadowed in her memorials by this funny little brainteaser that is not complicated, but very deep.

A powerful authority in the postwar upheaval in moral philosophy, Foot distilled her thinking about the principle of double effect (that is, a single action can have simultaneous good and bad outcomes) to the problem of the “trolley,” in which a runaway train is heading for five people working on the track, and you can save them by diverting the train onto a spur where a single man is working, killing him but saving the five.

Should you divert it? Most people say yes, because you do not intend to kill the man. He is just collateral damage to the greater good of saving the five, and his death is morally neutral.

via The National Post

DG came upon this intriguing reference while drinking his Sunday morning coffee, snow and ice everywhere. DG read philosophy at Edinburgh early in the last half of the last century and Philippa Foot was then a name in the air. He read her book on ethics. DG did his dissertation on Kant’s ethics, trying to figure out how Kant thought the ethical impulse arose in people (now, of course, dg doesn’t think it arises anywhere except maybe in his dog). There was an interesting Moral Sense school in Britain at one time, a cross between philosophy and psychology (or what Kant called philosophical anthropology). The idea of a moral sense now seems to have found its way into the school of evolutionary psychology which seeks to reduce human behaviour to genes in one way or another which, as dg sees it, is just another dubious way of reducing us to the animal and eliminating the human spirit (whatever that is, says dg’s dog). Still the Trolley Problem is intriguing as a mind experiment and certainly a better way to waste your time than those insidious mind games you all insist we keep on the blogroll.

You can take Marc Hauser’s MST (Moral Sense Test) here.  Hauser was a Harvard evolutionary psychologist.

Of course, Marc Hauser’s research into the moral sense failed to discover the existence of such in himself—he has been sent away from Harvard for a series of research improprieties. This makes the whole thing very intriging.

dg

Oscar Wilde’s Formalism and Art Criticism in The New Republic

Nov 262010
 

 

What is remarkable about Wilde’s formalism is that it is so absolutely human. This may come as a surprise, because we’re inclined to think of Wilde’s aesthetics as hothouse stuff. Nothing could be farther from the truth. With Wilde, the unto-itselfness of formalism (and, yes, maybe even the hothouse preciosity of some formalism) is a response to a human problem, a response to the slavery of facts, truths, first impressions. This is not a formalism of necessity but a formalism of free choice—born of the desire to be oneself, to turn away from the world not because history has forced you to do so but because you have chosen to.

via Oscar Wilde And Art Criticism | The New Republic.

Yee-Haw, a little poem about being a poet by Mairéad Byrne

Nov 222010
 

From Mairéad Byrne’s blog Heaven. Byrne is an Irish writer who immigrated to the United States in 1994 “for reasons of poetry.”

dg

Yee-haw

I love my frontloading bra because I feel like a gunslinger when I put it on. I feel like a sheriff or a plain clothes tv cop, strapping on his gun in the small hours. I always thought being a single mother was a sort of desperado activity. Especially a single mother in academia. Bo Diddly! Like I’ve always thought being an emigrant was like being Clint Eastwood. That time I was Clint Eastwood. Mamma Mia! Being a poet is a lot like being Clint Eastwood. Yessirree Bob. Being a poet is a lot like being a single mother and an emigrant and a poet combined. Bo diddly mamma mia yessirree bob. At least the sort of poet I am. Yee-haw!

via Heaven.

The Existence Machine: Modernism against Modernity

Nov 202010
 

I am deep in Packet Fever and not likely to say anything sensible, but I can still lob a provocative piece into the NC mix now and then. I follow The Existence Machine because I enjoy its gentle thoughtfulness. Also it takes some of its direction from reading Gabriel Josipovici whose book about the Bible I am reading right now (er, not right now because of those packets). In this snippet of quotation, the speaker is talking about a collection of contemporary European fiction recently edited for Dalkey Archive Press and contrasting those fictions with recent American fiction.

dg

Q. What was the biggest surprise for you, editing the collection?

A. It was less of a surprise than a reminder: how unabashedly comfortable many of the writers are to engage with literary forms that would be perceived as experimental or avant-garde here. In turn, I was reminded how deeply conservative contemporary American literature is in terms of form. And that conservative bent is a recent development, I believe. The European form flexibility is not a consequence of some snotty, elitist aesthetic but rather of the fact that there are many stories to be told and many traditions to draw from.

via The Existence Machine: Modernism against Modernity.

Leitwort, leading word, word repetition as a technique

Nov 192010
 

I was listening to Christine Hayes’ fine lectures on the Hebrew Bible today (you can download them at Open Yale) and she was talking about leitwort, the technique of word repetition that is key device biblical writers used. E.g. She made reference to the seven repetitions of “…it was good.” It turns out Martin Buber coined the term. Here is his definition. It’s crucial, I think, to see that he describes the effect of the repetition in physical terms, as “movement.” This is obviously a very useful device in any kind of writing.

leitwort

dg

A Journey Round My Skull: Settle the basin you bear on your head somewhat righter

Nov 192010
 

A collection of wonderful illustrations of Don Quixote (click on the image) at A Journey Round My Skull, which, despite its oddly anatomical name, is a lovely lit blog. At the bottom of the post, there are links to depictions by even more illustrators. This is a trove.

dg

Illustrations by Jean de Bosschère for The History of Don Quixote of De La Mancha (1922)

via A Journey Round My Skull: Settle the basin you bear on your head somewhat righter.

Just a Thought

Nov 182010
 

 

“I believe that any good and valid poem is an experience of its own, an experience of words and sounds that shake the body and stun the senses, a real experience in the real world.  I believe a poem is this first, no matter how else someone may define or interpret it intellectually.  It has being, a time and a space of its own.  It is not simply about a human experience, it is a human experience.”   -Pattiann Rogers

What a wonderful way to think of a poem (or story, novel, essay).  The quote comes from Rogers’ The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as a Reciprocal Creation.  This book was published as part of The Credo Series from Milkweed press.  From the Series introduction:  “Each volume represents an individual writer’s credo, his or her investigation of what it means to write about the human experience…”  (Series editor is Scott Slovic)

Rogers  intersperses meditations on her work between actual poems, creating a very open, fascinating look into her creative process.  Part of my upcoming graduation lecture (at VCFA) borrows from another of Rogers’ essays.  I haven’t read much of her poetry yet, (I’ve got her collected works on my desk as I type) but I find myself referencing her again and again in my critical writing.  Funny how these voices speak to us from such distant places.

-Rich Farrell

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