Lies, Blessed Lies

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[Image: Forked Tongue at Window Rock, one of  a series of “Arizona Postcards” by Scottish artist James “Jimmy” Cosgrove. To view the entire collection, see this page.]

A science-fiction story I read long ago tells of a visitor from another planet who simply cannot understand why human beings lie. I don’t remember much about the story — no author, title, catchphrase, so I can’t even Google it easily — but I seem to remember that it went one level further: Once it had received (and reluctantly accepted) the explanations (to gain an advantage over someone else, to inflate one’s self-image, etc.), the alien asked, So then why do you write fiction, which serves none of those purposes?

I have no idea how I’d answer an alien with a question like that (or with any others, for that matter). In general, though, one simple answer is: We write fiction in the expectation that someone will read it. Even if only the story’s author will ever read it, without at least one reader I myself can’t see the point, either.

But still that ducks the question, which is really: Why do people read fiction?

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“I Can’t Market My Art!”
Oh, Yes You Can

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In a recent blog post, loyal friend of RAMH Froog dredged up a name I hadn’t seen or heard for years: “cartoonist” Hugh MacLeod.*

I no longer have any idea where I first encountered MacLeod and his interesting work. At the time, though, he was struggling to forge some sort of business from his creative output while still suffocating in a day job. He’d started up an e-newsletter, and in each issue he included — free of charge — a sample of one of his special projects. That special project was the creation of drawings (“cartoons”? eeehhhh… maybe) which he’d doodled on the backs of business cards. Some of the drawings were quite dark in tone; some were laugh-out-loud funny; some just made me uncomfortable with how much they made me think.

Ultimately, I unsubscribed from the Gaping Void newsletter, as MacLeod called it. Not because it had ceased to be interesting, even valuable or important. No, simply because I was saving every single issue, with all the others, in a separate GapingVoid email folder. The computer I had at the time had begun to wheeze with overload and I started to throw things overboard: MP3s, images, software… Gaping Void.

And then I forgot all about it. Until yesterday, when I read Froog’s post, and shortly learned that MacLeod is making  a living doing what he wants to do. Crazy, huh?

If you want, feel free (of course!) to explore what is now MacLeod’s Gaping Void blog. But by all means (as Froog suggested) do stop over at the Lateral Action site for a terrific brief interview with MacLeod, in part on the topic of getting your art — dare I say writing? — in front of people who will want it for themselves.

Excerpt:

“Artists cannot market” is complete crap. Warhol was GREAT at marketing. As was Picasso and countless other “Blue Chips”. Of course, they’d often take the “anti-marketing” stance as a form of marketing themselves. And their patrons lapped it up.

The way artists market themselves is by having a great story, by having a “Myth”. Telling anecdotal stories about Warhol, Pollack, Basquiat, Van Gogh is both (A) fun and (B) has a mythical dimension… if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have had movies made about them. The art feeds the myth. The myth feeds the art.

The worst thing an artist can do is see marketing as “The Other”, i.e. something outside of themselves. It’s not.

So: what’s your myth — your “great story” about your story?
_______________________

* The “cartoonist” is MacLeod’s preferred term, rather than “artist.”

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Uncomfortable Numbers

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From whiskey river:

A Word on Statistics

Out of every hundred people,

those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.

Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four — well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.

Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.

Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.

Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.

Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).

Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.

Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.

But if it takes effort to understand:
three.

Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.

Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred —
a figure that has never varied yet.

(Wislawa Szymborska; translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak [source])

…and:

One Hundred and Eighty Degrees

Have you considered the possibility
that everything you believe is wrong,
not merely off a bit, but totally wrong,
nothing like things as they really are?

If you’ve done this, you know how durably fragile
those phantoms we hold in our heads are,
those wisps of thought that people die and kill for,
betray lovers for, give up lifelong friendships for.

If you’ve not done this, you probably don’t understand this poem,
or think it’s not even a poem, but a bit of opaque nonsense,
occupying too much of your day’s time,
so you probably should stop reading it here, now.

But if you’ve arrived at this line,
maybe, just maybe, you’re open to that possibility,
the possibility of being absolutely completely wrong,
about everything that matters.

How different the world seems then:
everyone who was your enemy is your friend,
everything you hated, you now love,
and everything you love slips through your fingers like sand.

(Federico Moramarco)

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What’s in a Song: Fever (1)

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[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part 2 will appear in a few days is here.]

As a kid, I once read a “funny” comic-book episode in which aliens landed in mid-20th-century America and reported back to their home planet about all the strange things the natives did. The one which struck me the most was this: the lunatic creatures leave the comfort of their homes; climb into sheet-metal boxes each weighing several tons; move the metal boxes out amongst hundreds, thousands of others; and play a game whose object is to accelerate your metal box to screaming speed, aim it at all the others, and come as close as possible to all of them without actually hitting a single one — all without dying in the process.

Ha ha, I know: comic books. Can’t take ’em seriously. For in the real world, of course, the aliens are reporting back about the truly strange Earthling behavior: our fascination with sex.

We construct elaborate religious frameworks of abstention and lifelong celibacy, and equally elaborate ones of fetishism and promiscuity — and everything between. Both as societies and as individuals, we underwrite costly technological improvements to its experience. We try to cure ourselves of the obsession; we throw ourselves into it. We have ecstatic dreams about it and hair-raising nightmares. We write about it, and we write about everything but (in the process, creating a gigantic sex-shaped vacuum that’s awfully damned hard to ignore). We celebrate the level-headed old-timers who seem to do just fine without it… and cheer the friskier ones still nuts about it.

And oh boy, do we ever compose music about it — music explicit and implicit. (Some of this music doesn’t even have words.) We pay performers to entertain us with this music, to mime their having sex with us — even to mime the act with their voices, while their bodies barely move onstage.

Somewhere out there, a civilization of little green men and women is scratching their little green noggins about all this. Procreation, they concede: yes, very important. But truly civilized creatures of the universe, they will insist, focus their creative energies on the practice of xormling. You know, where you get either five or fourteen— Oh, never mind.

So we come to the song. Nearly every pop singer tries her hand with it at some point. You can pretty much count on at least one American Idol contestant each season, using it to establish his credentials as a bona-fide heartthrob. (God help us all if Robert Pattinson ever records it: the thud of all those bodies simultaneously swooning to the floor could set off shock waves around the world.)

Enter “Fever.”

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Awards Season

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Golden Globes: ha!

Tonys, Academy Awards: don’t make me laugh!

The People’s Choice: huh? wasn’t that a 1950s sitcom featuring Jackie Cooper and a talking Basset hound named Cleo?

Hint: yes.

You can have all of them. Roz Morris, of the imperatively named Nail Your Novel blog, has offered Running After My Hat not one but two awards. I accept them happily, on the blog’s behalf. (It couldn’t be here tonight itself.) Here are the trophies:

Spiffy, eh?

Of course, with great rewards come great responsibilities. And because this actually combines two awards into one, it comes with a double burden treat:

  1. pass the Sunshine Award on to 12 other deserving folks; and
  2. for the Fabulous Sugar Doll Blogger Award, tell your readers 10 interesting things about myself.

I’ll follow Roz’s lead and hook the two awards together. My Sunshine-Award notes will follow my ten-interesting-things list, with the caveat that one man’s interesting is another woman’s bemusing (a caveat particularly useful in our household).

In no particular order:

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Head Waters

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From whiskey river:

Have you been to the source of a river? It’s a very mystic place. You get dizzy when you stay for a while. An especially big river has several sources, and the real source, the farthest point which turns to the major stream, is moist and misty, with some kind of ancient smell, and you feel cold.

You feel, “This isn’t the place to go in.” There is no springing water, so you don’t know where the source is. Actually, such a place exists in everyone; the center of us is like that. From such a place, the ancient call appears, “Why don’t you know me? Living so many years with me, why can’t you call my real name?”

The more your understanding of life becomes clearer and more exact and painfully joyful, the more you feel, “I’m so bad.” The one that appears and says, “No, you are not bad at all,” that is the way to go, that is your teacher.

Don’t misunderstand, this teacher is not always a person. It can embrace you like morning dew in a field, and you get a strange feeling, “Oh, this is it, my teacher is this field.”

(Kobun Chino)

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Margaret Atwood, in a Nutshell

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Last night, The Missus and I attended a combined reading-talk-Q&A session with Margaret Atwood. (For the curious, if you’re ever in this neck of the woods in (mostly) February, do check out this arts festival.)

The bandwagon of people who believe that those of diminutive physical stature tend to compensate with outsized personalities and ambitions is one crowded bandwagon; it’s safe to say Atwood belongs in the stockpile of evidence. Atwood is a pixie, a sharp pixie: polite, well-spoken (well, duh), and good-humored but assertive. Questioners who hoped to throw her a curveball were likely to find themselves swinging and missing.

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Canine Savagery

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They say we shouldn’t anthropomorphize animals. We shouldn’t project onto their behaviors human motivations, so goes the advice; maybe we could develop a Maslow’s pyramid for them without stretching too much, but it’d be a mistake to give them them an upper level labeled “self-actualization.”

Still, you know, it’s hard — almost impossible — not to at least ask questions about mysterious animal behavior. Why are they doing X?, What’s the survival or evolutionary value of Y?, and so on.

Given a red-rubber toy like the one shown here, and little crunchy treats wedged into the opening, a dog (they say) will of course attempt to get the treats out. The act of figuring it out, and then executing it, can occupy (they say) a dog’s mind for long blocks of time.

All this theory seems to work just fine with The Pooch in our household. What we can’t figure out is what, exactly, was the… hmm… the decision-making process which led to her particular solution. The solution goes something like this:

  • Bark madly in anticipation while toy and treat are being merged by human’s clever forepaws.
  • When toy is tossed onto the floor, launch yourself in its pursuit.
  • Attack toy by, uh, barking madly as you push at it with the side of your head.
  • Occasionally switch to dental-attack mode, until human expresses interest in toy.
  • When hapless human expresses interest, get toy immediately out of human reach.
  • Carry off toy’s lifeless (or at least deafened) corpse to somewhere safe, where it and the treat may be successfully taken apart.
  • Continue barking intermittently, apparently just out of the sheer joy of unchained doggishness.

Now, unlike the stereotypical small dog, The Pooch — a Yorkshire terrier weighing less than five pounds — is not generally a yapper. But give her one of these toys and she loses all mooring in common sense.

Exhibit A, my first YouTube upload ever:

Frightening, eh wot?

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Blurring Around the Edges

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[Note to regular readers: You may have noticed a change in my online tempo in the last week — I sure have: my visits to your blogs are a little more erratic, my postings here a little less… I don’t know… “focused,” maybe?

Partly, true, my spotty attendance is because the pace of my 9-to-5 workdays has gone up. But mostly, it’s because the parts of my mind shared between the online world and the fictional are starting, once again, to be given over to early-morning and (on Saturdays) all-morning writing sessions. I’ve been so distracted by other stuff since November, in short, that I haven’t worked much on the novel. That’s changing — for good, I hope, at least until this draft is done.

In the meantime, you’ll probably continue to find me fading into and out of view.]

The prospect of having a stroke has always terrified me, even more than the prospect of Alzheimer’s; at least to my way of thinking, the gradual dissolution of the self in the latter case is a kindness (surely the only one) compared to the sudden wham! of the former: the blow to some faculties while leaving others intact.

And because I’m someone who lives with words so much, not surprisingly, the most terrifying of all faculties to lose would be verbal ones. What (I wonder) would I do if I could never talk again — and knew it? What if I not only couldn’t talk, but couldn’t even within my own head any longer form a particular word when I needed it? How would I cope with losses like these? Could I cope with them?

Such questions drove the opening of the excerpt, below, from the current chapter-in-progress. This chapter takes place (if anywhere) inside the head of a main character. By this point in the story, the reader, like some of Al’s friends, has seen Al topple suddenly to his driveway on a Sunday morning, and has seen him in the hospital, alive but inert.

All the usual disclaimers about first-draft work apply. :)

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