Real-Life Dialogue (EDT Edition)

by 12 Comments

[The scene: a suburban home situated somewhere in the (US) Eastern time zone. It is a mild, sunny Sunday afternoon in mid-March, and He and She are seated at their respective computers on opposite sides of a low wall, enjoying the sunshine when they remember to look out a window.]

She: [From her side of wall.] John?

He: Hmm?

She: What do you think about dinner tonight? Feel like grilling something?

He: Hmm? Oh, sure, yeah. What you have in mind?

She: I don’t know. Let me think about it.

He: Okay, let me know. I’ve gotta return the movies and pick up some other groceries, so I can grab something to grill, too.

[Time passes.]

She: What time is it?

[He consults his watch.]

He: A little before 2.

She: But… Oh, that’s right — I must’ve never adjusted this clock over here the last time we changed. Did you remember to change your alarm clock last night?

He: Yeah.

She: Good.

[Time passes. At various times, one or the other of them goes downstairs, heats up water for another cup of coffee or tea, messes with dog for a few minutes, and returns to his or her computer. Silence for a while, and then…:]

She: Omigod, look at the time! Weren’t you going to go to the store?

He: C’mon for crissake, will you relax, it’s only quarter to five!

She: Then how come my computer’s time says quarter to six?!?

He: [Frowning and rolling eyes, safely on his side of the wall.] Oh, for… don’t you see? It’s stupid damn Windows! If you’d let me switch you to Linux like I—

[Momentary silence.]

She: Well, what?

He: Crap crap crap. My computer’s clock says quarter to six, too.

She: But I thought you said—

He: Yeah, I set the alarm right. But I never adjusted my damn watch.

[Muffled explosions of breath from far side of wall.]

She: So now it’s too late to grill, isn’t it?

He: Uh, yeah, I guess so. Yeah… sorry.

She: So what are we gonna do about dinner?

He: I don’t know. Let me think about it.

Share

Margaret Atwood, in a Nutshell

by 12 Comments

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.

[Read more…]

Share

Paying Attention to the Magical

by 11 Comments

“Ambivalence” doesn’t even come close to capturing my schizoid views about magic (or magical) realism.

The term has been around since the early part of the twentieth century, and for most of its life has been associated especially with the work of certain Latin American authors. Here’s part of the definition from A Glossary of Literary Terms (6th edition, 1993), which I found here:

The term magic realism, originally applied in the 1920s to a school of painters, is used to describe the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, as well as the work of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany, and John Fowles in England.  These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements…  These novels violate, in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic — and sometimes highly effective — experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic.

Nicely placed editorial “sometimes” there, huh? But in the hands of, well, a true magician, magic realism just slays me: beneath the gray, mundane surfaces of everyday life writhe fantastically colored creatures of plot, setting, and character — a reality behind the reality — and I find it difficult not to be hypnotized when I discover good examples of it. (I linked to one such story in yesterday’s whiskey river-inspired Friday post.)

(Note, by the way, that “magic realism” isn’t synonymous with “fantasy.” Fantasy takes place in unreal worlds, unrecognizable worlds, while the action in works of magic realism is grounded on good old terra firma. Soil is soil. There’s only one sun in the sky, and only one moon. Country roads are paved with asphalt or gravel, not with yellow bricks.)

But wow, is the technique subject to abuse, or what? A lazy author can find it all too tempting to reach for the supernatural to explain something otherwise inexplicable; if anyone challenges a sudden rainfall of fiery goldfish in the used-car lot (or whatever), the writer can just stare, goggle-eyed, at the the ignorant questioner before replying, “It’s magic realism, you jerk!”

[Read more…]

Share

Perfect Moments: The Boy, the Wintry Day, the Film, the Flash of Panic

by 11 Comments

On a recent wintry day, The Boy (Who Was No Longer a Boy) and The Missus decided to go to a movie.

Now, because the day was in fact wintry, and because “wintry” seldom applied to weather conditions where The Boy and The Missus lived, they needed to undertake certain careful preparations in advance. Warm clothing needed to be retrieved from dusty closet recesses. Human bodies needed to be tanked up with caffeine and/or cocoa.

And then there was the matter of The Boy’s hands.

Especially in chilly, dry conditions, the skin of The Boy’s hands — more precisely, his fingers — tended to dry and chap and split rather painfully. Depending on his mood and energy level and the available time, he might choose to ignore the problem; to “lotion up”; or to go the whole hog — applying ointment and BandAid(s) to the affected digit(s). On the afternoon in question, The Boy decided to go the whole hog. Indeed, not only did he swath his index finger in two BandAids, he actually sealed the edges and the fingertip with waterproof tape: the finger wasn’t merely bandaged, it was sheathed in what the Crayola people used to call (in benighted non-PC days of yore) “flesh-colored” plastic.

And then he and The Missus embarked.

[Read more…]

Share

What’s in a Song: Cry Me a River (1)

by 16 Comments

[Another in a series of occasional posts about popular American songs with long histories. And if you are seeking information on the Justin Timberlake song by the same name, believe me, you are 100% in the wrong place.]

On paper, it doesn’t appear to be a “big” song. Nearly always, the arrangement features a single vocalist and one or two background instruments. The lyrics aren’t even all that special, in one respect: very simple words (with one exception), in a more or less conventional order. At that, the title itself appears six times over the course of the three stanzas, and a slight variation of it thrice more.

But given the right singer, oh, how loudly this song speaks…

(Who’s “the right singer”? Hard to say. Wikipedia lists a sample of about 150 of them. Amazon’s MP3 download store includes over 600 hits — many duplicates, of course, but still… And if you go rummaging around on iTunes and elsewhere on the Web, you can quickly fill your hard drive with unique versions.)

Here’s the story:

[Read more…]

Share

Stuck-in-the-Mud

by 16 Comments

I like to think of myself as a flexible guy — able to roll with the punches, able to work around problems, able to, y’know, cope. It’s amazing how quickly and how profoundly that self-image can be shaken simply by adding an extra person to the household.

Recently fallen on some sudden, transitory, but inarguably hard times, The Stepson will be staying with us for a while. Whatever other effects this has wrought and will continue to wreak on the delicate ballet of The Missus’s and my everyday life, it has revealed in me — to myself — a deep attachment to Keeping Trivial Things Unchanged.

Case in point: tableware. It really doesn’t matter that The Missus and I (mostly I, probably) have always kept the matched flatware in the drawer in the plastic bin with the variously sized and shaped little niches: one each for big knives, butter knives, dinner forks, teaspoons, tablespoons, and dessert forks. It doesn’t really matter that the various mismatched flatware (teaspoons, mostly) is just sort of tumbled together at the front of the drawer, where it can be easily retrieved without having to root around. It doesn’t really matter that we use the mismatched teaspoons just for dishing out canned pet food.

And, especially, it doesn’t really matter that all these neat little anal-retentive/obsessive-compulsive categories of household objects and their uses are suddenly blurring around the edges.

So if all that doesn’t really matter, whence the pursed-lips exasperation I suddenly find on my face when I go to feed the dog or cat and can’t find any mismatched teaspoons, but plenty of the matched sort? or when I pull open the drawer and find dessert forks and dinner forks shamelessly copulating in each others’ apartments?

What’s wrong with me?

I know: nothing is wrong with me. Everybody has his or her little “things” (or so goes the palliative advice which I can even now hear myself offering someone else in similar straits). Crotchets, right?

And yet, dang, I’m disappointed in myself. None of it is worth making an issue over, all of it could be corrected simply by putting a bug (or series of bugs) in The Stepson’s ear — or The Missus’s, come to that. But nope. Me, I’d apparently prefer to pout.

Share

Things Which Seem Otherwise

by 11 Comments

From whiskey river:

Let me make this perfectly clear.
I have never written anything because it is a Poem.
This is a mistake you always make about me,
A dangerous mistake. I promise you
I am not writing this because it is a Poem.

You suspect this is a posture or an act
I am sorry to tell you it is not an act.

You actually think I care if this
Poem gets off the ground or not. Well
I don’t care if this poem gets off the ground or not
And neither should you.
All I have ever cared about
And all you should ever care about
Is what happens when you lift your eyes from this page.

Do not think for one minute it is the Poem that matters.
It is not the Poem that matters.
You can shove the Poem.
What matters is what is out there in the large dark
and in the long light,
Breathing.

(Gwendolyn MacEwen, “Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear,” Afterworlds)

…and:

Then there is the BIG PROBLEM — who are you? There is an endemic human tendency for self-deception. We all think we’re one kind of person when we’re somewhat different (especially viewed by others) than we imagine we are. You — the reader — no doubt feel you’re an exception.

(Alan Fletcher)

…and:

Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Can’t you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—

(G.K. Chesterton, from The Man Who Was Thursday [source])

[Read more…]

Share

Losing Our Heads Over Modest Gods

by 12 Comments

[Above, a set of miniature Egyptian canopic jars depicting, according to the retailer, “Anubis, Horus, Monkey God, Prince.”* Click image for original.]

From whiskey river (which this week celebrated eight years of bringing to the Web wisdom about things we generally know, but generally do not speak of):

Shinto

When sorrow lays us low
for a second we are saved
by humble windfalls
of the mindfulness or memory:
the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,
that face given back to us by a dream,
the first jasmine of November,
the endless yearning of the compass,
a book we thought was lost,
the throb of a hexameter,
the slight key that opens a house to us,
the smell of a library, or of sandalwood,
the former name of a street,
the colors of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date we were looking for,
the twelve dark bell-strokes, tolling as we count,
a sudden physical pain.

Eight million Shinto deities **
travel secretly throughout the earth.
Those modest gods touch us —
touch us and move on.

(Jorge Luis Borges)

[Read more…]

Share

All Good Stories Start Small

by 7 Comments

A couple of stray tidbits for your daily (weekly, hourly, etc.) writerly use…

—-

First: You may have noticed agent Nathan Bransford’s recent contest, for which he invited readers to submit as contest entries the first paragraphs of their own works-in-progress. (He announced the winners yesterday.)

Regular RAMH commenter Froog has been observing Nathan’s contest as well. But Froog goes on to wonder if the contest winners would have been his own choices. He goes yet further, to solicit input from the aether: what examples can you offer of good first paragraphs from already published works?

Note that this informal survey (as Froog concedes) will not yield objective results. It’s more: what do readers (and writers) like?

I’ll drop a favorite from one book or another over there later today, when I’m closer to books I might quote from. In the meantime, if you’ve got a candidate, please do visit Froog’s “Good Beginnings” post and offer yours.

—-

Second: The Missus and I are doing some rearrangement of things around the house to prepare for *shudder* a garage sale. This involves a lot of unshelving of some things, and shelving of others in their place. The latter, in turn, requires that things potentially shelvable be examined. Many of these things have not been examined in, like, whole freaking years. Decades, even.

I came across such an object the other day: a small gray steel box with a flip-open lid. Dimensions: just about right for, oh, say, a few hundred 3×5 index cards. Guess what I found inside?

Clever, very clever, and right you are: a few hundred 3×5 index cards.

The majority of these, blank front and back, promptly found themselves being shredded. The others — all in my handwriting — recorded two sorts of information:

  1. Bibliographic information for a book which I apparently once considered writing. I haven’t looked closely at these, because I was so distracted by #…
  2. Notes about confidence games, gypsies, rigged carnival games, and so on. In this stack appear quotations from a strange assortment of sources — nursery rhymes, a letter from Lord Chesterfield to his son, Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, an essay by a La Rochefoucauld (presumably this one), physicist Freeman Dyson‘s autobiographical Disturbing the Universe, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Butler…

I couldn’t quite make sense of the quotations, that is, why they’re clipped together with the con-game (etc.) notes. The best theory I’ve come up with so far says that they may be possible epigraphs, maybe even for the con-game (etc.) book — although (again) the connection really isn’t clear.

But once I thought of them as epigraphs, I started to think of other books or stories which they might inspire. So let’s consider them as found epigraphs, then: writing prompts, if you want to call them that. Story starters. Kicks in a procrastinating seat of the pants.

I’ll post one here every now and then. Beginning with this one, at the top of the stack:

The Derby Ram (nursery rhyme)

The man that killed the ram, sir,
Was up to his knees in blood.
And the boy that held the pail, sir,
Was carried away in the flood.

Thoughts? Suppose you were working on a story which didn’t depict these events literally, but still used this epigraph; what might that story be like?

Share

The Ick Factor

by 12 Comments

The Missus and I saw District 9 on Saturday. I’m tempted to review it in full, but fear I’d reveal too much of its plot. So I’ll just say that District 9 is one of the, I don’t know… two or three best movies I’ve seen for the last 10 or 15 years — in any genre. It raises important questions about what it means to be human, and it leaves them dangling in the air, just daring the audience to answer them. And it does so in the context of a science-fiction, summer-blockbuster, mock-documentary-cum-action film which should be a natural draw for audiences across the board.

Which may sound like a recommendation. You need to see it if you haven’t already, right? But, uh, well… No.

Why not? Because of the ick factor: surgical close-ups; exploding bodies; individual and societal violence (and threat of same)… Some people might even be put off just by the, well, icky appearance of the aliens, who look like viscous love children of THE alien from the Aliens films and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.

[Read more…]

Share
Verified by MonsterInsights