Dear Internet,
Sorry I’ve been so… so… casual about our relationship over the last few days.
Already Elsewhere
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
Echoing Light
When I was beginning to read I imagined
that bridges had something to do with birds
and with what seemed to be cages but I knew
that they were not cages it must have been autumn
with the dusty light flashing from the streetcar wires
and those orange places on fire in the pictures
and now indeed it is autumn the clear
days not far from the sea with a small wind nosing
over dry grass that yesterday was green
the empty corn standing trembling and a down
of ghost flowers veiling the ignored fields
and everywhere the colors I cannot take
my eyes from all of them red even the wide streams
red it is the season of migrants
flying at night feeling the turning earth
beneath them and I woke in the city hearing
the call notes of the plover then again and
again before I slept and here far downriver
flocking together echoing close to the shore
the longest bridges have opened their slender wings
(W. S. Merwin [source])
…and:
After yesterday’s storm I had expected to find the landscape a desert of sodden heathery bogs and swollen reedy lochans; and so it mostly was, but over all its vast extent the light was so radiant that I felt I could see not just for great distances but into time itself. The ruins of crofts, a mile away, seemed so close in that enchanted air that I saw not only the nettles of ragwort round the doors, but the people coming out for the last time: I could even see the grief on their faces. No wonder, I thought, this was the land of second sight. If I stayed here I would be a seer as well as a poet.
((John) Robin Jenkins, Fergus Lamont)
Not Quite Chinglish, Not Quite a Pun
From his vantage point of working with the English language behind the Bamboo Firewall, friend of RAMH Froog wages what must at times feel like a lonely battle against Chinglish. (For the uninitiated, this is the generally mangled result of applying Chinese grammatical rules, pronunciations, and mindset to ideas expressed in “English.”)
I have no wish to steal her punchline, so I will just point you to The Intern’s recent post. It’s an exquisite example (even if just a joke, or a PhotoShopped image*) of a related but different phenomenon: a phrase in “Chinese” which sounds as if it means something wildly (in)appropriate in English.
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* Not a joke, apparently: Someone on a snopes.com forum has tracked it down. It’s currently listed (about halfway down this page) as a retailer of books for Oxford University Press (China).
Lies, Blessed Lies
[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?
Across
[Image: “Waiting for the Ferryman,” by Jack R. Johanson (click for original). The photographer describes the location, along the Norwegian river Glomma, as “a fine place to wait for the ferryman to take you to the other side.”]
Oddly, whiskey river was very prose-y in the last week. Think I’ll duck down into the archives there, a/k/a whiskey river’s commonplace book, for a poetry selection…
Letter Written on a Ferry
While Crossing Long Island SoundI am surprised to see
that the ocean is still going on.
Now I am going back
and I have ripped my hand
from your hand as I said I would
and I have made it this far
as I said I would
and I am on the top deck now
holding my wallet, my cigarettes
and my car keys
at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday
in August of 1960.Dearest,
although everything has happened,
nothing has happened.
The sea is very old.
The sea is the face of Mary,
without miracles or rage
or unusual hope,
grown rough and wrinkled
with incurable age.Still,
I have eyes.
These are my eyes:
the orange letters that spell
ORIENT on the life preserver
that hangs by my knees;
the cement lifeboat that wears
its dirty canvas coat;
the faded sign that sits on its shelf
saying KEEP OFF.
Oh, all right, I say,
I’ll save myself.Over my right shoulder
I see four nuns
who sit like a bridge club,
their faces poked out
from under their habits,
as good as good babies who
have sunk into their carriages.
Without discrimination
the wind pulls the skirts
of their arms.
Almost undressed,
I see what remains:
that holy wrist,
that ankle,
that chain.
(Anne Sexton; whiskey river includes only the first four stanzas, above, but I think you’ll want to read the whole thing, which you can do here and elsewhere.)
Worth a Thousand Words (Plus the Speed of Light in Parsecs per Month, Times Pi, Divided by Planck’s Constant, to the ith Power…)
Per Tim O’Reilly, on Twitter… To quote the site where he found it:
To all of you nerds and geeks who — like me — have been unfairly and inaccurately labeled “dorks,” only to then exhaustively explain the differences among the three to a more-than-skeptical offender, I say: You’re welcome.
The simple eloquence of colored circles…
Beating Yourself to Death?
[Image above: Peter Kubik’s UFO shaped electronic drums, as featured at the Yanko Design site. The Yanko site says, “This electronic drum produces lighted impressions of your hand in psychedelic colors as it strikes the surface.”]
When it comes to storytelling, are you a mechanic or a gardener? A little of both? Or something else entirely? Does it depend, for you, whether the story in question is a first draft or not? Do you draft the thing in a huge undisciplined rush, and go back over it with a scalpel and yardstick? Or vice-versa?All these questions beset me now that I’ve read Roz Morris’s latest post at her Nail Your Novel blog. In it, she shows an example of a technique she’s described before, something called a “beat sheet” — applied to the first four chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosophers [USA: Sorcerer’s] Stone:
I’ve had a number of requests for close-up examples of a beat sheet — my method for assessing an entire manuscript in summarised form to analyse its strengths and weaknesses, and make a detailed plan for revising — and you can find full instructions here and here.
In rough outline, I’d describe a beat sheet as a page or more of highly condensed, color-coded annotations on the structure and rhythms of your novel’s scenes. As such, it’s not a tool for mapping out a story before you start it (although, hmm, I guess it might be…?). It’s a retrospective tool: something like one of those ultra-photogenic blacklights used in CSI-style television shows — when you flick the switch, the signs of life in your story will either glow noticeably or, well, not. (Only here, of course, that’s a good thing!)
Laughing All the Way
[Classic moment from Young Frankenstein]
From whiskey river:
Hiding in a Drop of Water
It is early morning, and death has forgotten us for
a while. Darkness owns the house, but I am alive.
I am ready to praise all the great musicians.
Whatever happens to me will also happen to you.
Surely you must have realized this from hearing
the way the strings cry out no matter who hits them.
From the great oak trees in the yard in October,
leaves fall for hours each day. Every night
a thousand wrinkled faces look up at the stars.
Still we know that at any second the soul can stand
up and start across the desert, as when Rabia ended up
riding on a resurrected donkey toward the Meeting.
It is this reaching toward the Kaaba that keeps us glad.
It is this way of hiding inside a drop of water
that lets the hidden face become visible to everyone.
Gautama said that when the Great Ferris Wheel
stops turning, you will still be way up
there, swinging in your seat and laughing.
(Robert Bly, from My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems)
…and:
It is a serious thing to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
(C.S. Lewis)
Apostrophizing the Enemy
[Image at right from the Celestial
Heavens/Might and Magic site]
In a comment the other day over at the Querulous Squirrel’s treetop lair, I ad-libbed a suggestion for people facing what are commonly called “nervous breakdowns”: name them. Please forgive the self-citation (which feels to me like a breach of Interweb etiquette):
Every “nervous breakdown” should have its own term, because every one is different from every other — and its, um, its significance is too great to let it go unnamed.
Somewhere, no doubt, someone has collected the names of all the demons and imps of Hell. Maybe every one of us who’s had a “nervous breakdown” should consider assigning it the name of a demon…
I did some looking around and found just such a (brief) collection. It’s here. As I described it in the rest of that comment:
…names and descriptions to fit many moods and ways of regarding a breakdown, from the scary to the wry. There’s even a Leonard. “When I first met Leonard, he scared the living crap out of me. Now I know he’s just the biggest jerk I ever met.”
Then today I encountered, at Colleen Wainwright’s communicatrix blog, a post about (in part) remembering trying times gone by. In that post, Colleen referred to someone she called “The Resistor.” As you can see for yourself in her post, The Resistor is/was not one of her best friends. His or her story — what The Resistor had done to Colleen in the past — just sounded too interesting to ignore. I had to learn about that “that rat bastard” for myself, so followed the link she’d conveniently provided… and discovered that The Resistor wasn’t a person. The Resistor was (is?) a feature of Colleen’s own internal landscape.
I’ll turn the mike over to her for a moment:
The Resistor needs no one and nothing — except something to push against, and everyone else does a damned fine job of providing fodder. The Resistor is very well developed, very smart and very, very strong…
It is indifferent to pain, although it seems to find it interesting or even amusing. But it doesn’t derive pleasure from causing pain. Far from it. It enjoys pushing back, period. Hence, the Resistor’s particular gift at shape-shifting (and, perhaps, a wee bit of pride in its highly refined abilities in this area.)
…[My hypnotherapist] tried every way he knew of to bring the Resistor to the side of Light, much to the amusement of the Resistor, who patiently, if a little condescendingly, kept insisting that was not a possibility.
Can I possibly tell you how much I love this picture of The Resistor?
(While you’re there, by the way, be sure to visit via her generous linkage her posts on the other denizens of her self, as revealed through hypnotherapy: Monkey Brain, The Edge, and the rest.)
LitFic: Online Resources
The other day, Moonrat replied to a question about the acceptability of collections of “linked” short stories: stories united by a common theme, cast of characters, whatever. Along the way, she wondered what the state of short fiction in general might be, in these days when writers seem so focused on books.*
(The comments surprised her, and me too, by implying there are a lot of short-story readers out there. On the other hand, the readers tend to be writers of short stories, too — which implies a certain… goal orientation, let’s say.)
One gauge of continued interest in short stories (and poetry, and “creative non-fiction” as they call essays these days) is the health of the literary-fiction markets. Eileen, a/k/a Speak Coffee to Me, points us to a post at the Third Coast** blog — a “linkbucket” of online resources:
There’s much more to revolution and innovation in literature than the Kindle. To find some, all you have to do is open your browser.
I knew of the DuoTrope directory of magazines (both print and online); it’s been linked to for months over at the right, in the the “Writer’s Biz Resources” category. (I didn’t know, though, about its submission-tracking feature.) And including general links to Twitter and Facebook — not to specific resources there, just to the services’ home pages — seems, er, a little… obvious?
But whether you’re a writer or reader of literary fiction, you could build a pretty respectable list of browser bookmarks from nosing around the links the post provides: consider it a “Start Here” post on the subject.
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* Hey, you can be a writer of short stories, but we all want to be authors — which means books, right?
** If you’re imagining the “Third Coast” to be along the Gulf of Mexico, er, not. Try the Great Lakes.
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