Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Review: Enlightenment, by Maureen Freely

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My review of this novel is now online, over at The Book Book blog.

I don’t normally write reviews of books which I don’t recommend. I don’t even like to. It’s possible to have fun with a writing a bad review, yes, a sort of malicious glee. But the fun is diminished — especially in reviewing a debut novel, like Enlightenment — by knowing what the author often had to go through for his or her book to see the light of day. So many good books await our attention, after all: why beat up on one that didn’t succeed for me?

Enlightenment was a special case. I began it with — and was for a while sustained by — high hopes. The exotic, almost completely unfamiliar setting (contemporary Turkey); the tangled web of international relationships both during the Cold War and post-9/11; the jacket copy description; even the cover — it all said that the book would appeal to me, a thought-provoking relief from my usual fare.

But wow, I didn’t like Enlightenment much at all.

And I was disturbed that I didn’t like it. When I finished it I checked up on the bona fides of the jacket blurbs — maybe they’d just been highly selective, y’know? Not only did it receive high critical praise, but reviewers often praised it for elements which I thought to be missing, or at best unconvincing.

So I don’t know. Maybe I was just in a weird psychological place for the first quarter of the year. Whatever the reason, frankly, I’m not even convinced by my own review — so do read it skeptically.

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“Ye Gods — Not That Again…!”

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I‘m going to start this post with some music which did not bore me at all.

On Saturday nights, our local public-radio station broadcasts a program originating in Chicago, called Midnight Special, whose slogan, per the program’s Web site, is “folk music with a sense of humor.” And the other night I just happened to catch a song called “Don’t Make Me Sing,” by an artist named Greg Greenway.

Now, Greenway — check his Web site — is a serious guy: not a “comic” performer, as a rule, although he obviously has a good sense of humor. But he’s been singing in small venues long enough to have seen a wide range of audience response… not all of it applause. “Don’t Make Me Sing” adopts the point of view of an audience member with things on his mind other than the person onstage.

I’ve transcribed the lyrics below the audio-player widget (please let me know of any mistakes); as you will see, this live performance comes with a certain amount of… well, let’s say it departs from what seem to be the “official” words. (In a performance captured via YouTube, Greenway manages to get through the song with somewhat less, er, distraction. Once he gets started, that is.)

 

Lyrics:

Don’t Make Me Sing
(by Greg Greenway)

I ate at the bar
I surveyed the space
Two tables from the stage front
My favorite place

I was bursting with pride
I was flushed with success
I’d had to ask her out six times
Before she’d finally said…
…Okay.

Then this guy started singing
It was a pretty good show
Then that telltale expression
Don’t even go there — oooh nooo…

refrain 1:
Don’t make me sing
That’s why I paid to see you
It’s a show business trick,
Singer/Songwriter shtick
Why don’t you write something new?

refrain 2:
Don’t make me sing
Don’t even act like I should
Give me a break, I’m on a first date
Why don’t you write something good?

We gave it our best shot
We gave him a chance
Until he turned into Barney
In combat boots and black pants

[refrain 1]

Everybody!

[refrain 2]

I gave into peer pressure
I sang with all that I’ve got
She used to be smiling
Now she’s checking her watch

[refrain 1]

Don’t make me sing
They hit me up at the door
I did my job all day
Why should I have to pay
To help you do yours?

Don’t make me sing
Why don’t you try something else?
If I had a good voice
I’d be up there myself

[refrain 1]

[refrain 2]

I’ve been thinking about the song quite a bit since Saturday. Aside from enjoying the rhyme and melody (and of course laughing at the sense), I’ve also tried (and failed) to come up with analogy, for writers and readers, to the live singer/audience dynamic which Greenway depicts so wryly.

At first I tried to think of readings I’d attended — what do writers ask of their audiences on such occasions, which audiences might be unwilling to grant?

But the real analogy, I believe, isn’t in the live performance of a written work. It’s in the general unspoken contract between writer and reader. This is the contract which takes effect when you sit down in your favorite reading chair, open a new book, and begin to read.

What little gimmicks do writers rely on which drive you crazy, make you twitch, maybe make you wish you had picked up that other book instead? For example: cliffhanger chapter endings, maybe? gratuitous insertion of untranslated foreign words and phrases? picaresque plotlines? (Note: this is a question about writers in general, or writers in a particular genre, not about a specific writer’s tics and foibles.)

And if you’re a writer, have you — in horror, no doubt — ever found evidence in your own writing of something which drives you crazy in others’? If so, what (if anything!) did you do about it?

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The Face of the Writer

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Just found this at Jesse Kornbluth’s Head Butler site.

The subject of the post was James Frey, author of the Million Little Pieces bogus memoir of a few years ago; I liked what it said about writers and writing, and liked the Orwell quote very much:

Contrary to what Frey, his publisher, Larry King and Oprah believe, writing is not a career. For some writers  — for the writers who, I like to think, will endure — it’s a calling. Those who write especially well are like priests. It follows that books are sacred texts, and that the best ones — even the best novels — faithfully deliver what the writer believes is the truth.

That is why we have favorite writers, just as we have favorite musicians; their works “speak” to us. And it is why we have very definite ideas who they are. George Orwell ends his essay on Charles Dickens by addressing this:

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

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Look Up! Look Up! (Or Is It Down?)

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[Image: “Looking Up the Yosemite Valley,” by Alfred Bierstadt.
For more information, see the Haggin Museum site.]

Note: Here for Poetry Friday (hosted today at the impossibly appealing Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast)? Never before been here on a Friday? Just plain confused by what’s going on in this post? You might want to read about my “whiskey river Fridays” series, at its own “About” page.

From whiskey river:

Thursday

I have had my dream — like others —
and it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
with feet planted on the ground
and look up at the sky —
feeling my clothes about me,
the weight of my body in my shoes,
the rim of my hat, air passing in and out
at my nose — and decide to dream no more.

(William Carlos Williams [source])

…and, likewise (although whiskey river omits the first stanza):

A Blessing of Angels

May the Angels in their beauty bless you.
May they turn toward you streams of blessing.

May the Angel of Awakening stir your heart
to come alive to the eternal within you,
to all the invitations that quietly surround you.

May the Angel of Healing turn your wounds
into sources of refreshment.

May the Angel of Imagination enable you
to stand on the true thresholds,
at ease with your ambivalence
and drawn in new directions
through the glow of your contradictions.

May the Angel of Compassion open your eyes
to the unseen suffering around you.

May the Angel of Wildness disturb the places
where your life is domesticated and safe,
take you to the territories of true otherness
where all that is awkward in you
can fall into its own rhythm.

May the Angel of Eros introduce you
to the beauty of your senses
to celebrate your inheritance
as a temple of the holy spirit.

May the Angel of Justice disturb you
to take the side of the poor and the wronged.

May the Angel of Encouragement confirm you
in worth and self-respect,
that you may live with the dignity
that presides in your soul.

May the Angel of Death arrive only
when your life is complete
and you have brought every given gift
to the threshold where its infinity can shine.

May all the Angels be your sheltering
and joyful guardians.

(John O’Donohue [source])

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Across

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[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 Sound

I 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.)

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Beating Yourself to Death?

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[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!)

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Laughing All the Way

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[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)

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Unfinished Business

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From whiskey river:

A Way to Look at Things

We have not yet made shoes that fit like sand
Nor clothes that fit like water
Nor thoughts that fit like air.
There is much to be done —
Works of nature are abstract.
They do not lean on other things for meanings.
The sea-gull is not like the sea
Nor the sun like the moon.
The sun draws water from the sea.
The clouds are not like either one —
They do not keep one form forever.
That the mountainside looks like a face is accidental.

(Arthur Dove [source])

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When Staying Put Just Won’t Do

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[Photo above, “Standing Still,” is by Beth Dickman. Click to see the larger original.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Moment

In the Romanesque church round stones
that ground down so many prayers and generations
kept humble silence and shadows slept in the apse
like bats in winter furs.

We went out. The pale sun shone,
tinny music tinkled softly
from a car, two jays
studied us, humans,
threads of longing dangled in the air.

The present moment is shameless,
taking its foolish liberties
beside the wall of this tired old shrine,

awaiting the millions of years to come,
future wars, geologic eras,
cease-fires, treaties, changes in climate —
this moment — what is it — just

a mosquito, a fly, a speck, a scrap of breath,
and yet it’s taken over everywhere,
entering the timid grass,
inhabiting stems and genes,
the pupils of our eyes.

This moment, mortal as you or I,
was full of boundless, senseless,
silly joy, as if it knew
something we didn’t.

(Adam Zagajewski, from Mysticism for Beginners [source])

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