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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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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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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Paying Attention to the Magical

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“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!”

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(Under) Mining Your Dreams

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[Image: “Good and Evil,” by Daniel Merriam. See the original, more clearly, at Merriam’s own site.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (“the pursuit of fantasy“):

Writing in the Dark

It’s not difficult.
Anyway, it’s necessary.

Wait till morning, and you’ll forget.
And who knows if morning will come.

Fumble for the light, and you’ll be
stark awake, but the vision
will be fading, slipping
out of reach.

You must have paper at hand,
a felt-tip pen, ballpoints don’t always flow,
pencil points tend to break. There’s nothing
shameful in that much prudence: those are our tools.

Never mind about crossing your t’s, dotting your i’s–
but take care not to cover
one word with the next. Practice will reveal
how one hand instinctively comes to the aid of the other
to keep each line
clear of the next.

Keep writing in the dark:
a record of the night, or
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices,

or opened
as flowers of a tree that blooms
only once in a lifetime:

words that may have the power
to make the sun rise again.

(Denise Levertov [source])

…and:

Surely you remember

After they all leave,
I remain alone with the poems,
some poems of mine, some of others.
I prefer poems that others have written.
I remain quiet, and slowly
the knot in my throat dissolves.
I remain.

Sometimes I wish everyone would go away.
Maybe it’s nice, after all, to write poems.
You sit in your room and the walls grow taller.
Colors deepen.
A blue kerchief becomes a deep well.

You wish everyone would go away.
You don’t know what’s the matter with you.
Perhaps you’ll think of something.
Then it all passes, and you are pure crystal.

After that, love.
Narcissus was so much in love with himself.
Only a fool doesn’t understand
he loved the river, too.

You sit alone.
Your heart aches, but
won’t break.
The faded images wash away one by one.
Then the defects.
A sun sets at midnight. You remember
the dark flowers too.

You wish you were dead or alive or
somebody else.
Isn’t there a country you love? A word?
Surely you remember.

Only a fool lets the sun set when it likes.
It always drifts off too early
westward to the islands.

Sun and moon, winter and summer
will come to you,
infinite treasures.

(Dahlia Ravikovitch; translated by Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch)

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The Gods Beside Us (and in Our Mirrors)

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[Image above depicts a representation of The Parthenon as it appears at a location in the Second Life virtual world/alternative universe/simulation/etc. Click the image for more information, including a link to the location itself.]

From whiskey river:

We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others’
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren’t hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.

(Adam Zagajewski, from Another Beauty)

…and:

This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.

There is my creed.

(D.H. Lawrence)

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Pushing Through

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[Looking back through this post, I see that I’ve used the word “you” a lot in passages manifestly instructional or outright didactic, especially the last section — as though barking orders at

you, the reader. Not so: it’s just me, talking to myself.]

Moonrat, God bless ‘er, last week resurrected the Write Your A** Off idea I had last year. (Not “my” idea, really — I’d sort of ripped it off and just adapted it for outside-NYC writers.) She jumped the gun by a few months, but that’s the sort of spontaneous combustion you get when you mix youth, exuberant personalities, and ideas, and it’s hard to fault her for it.

Several dozen people signed up in the comments to Moonie’s two posts, and we even set up a sort of interactive map so people can log their locations and select a preferred day of the week, and visitors can see who’s participating, on what day, and where. (There’s no real “day” set aside for this: you choose whatever day of the week you want, and do it annually, weekly, monthly, as you will.)

You can see and really interact with the map here, or — if you prefer — here’s a sort of quick-and-dirty read-only view:
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Real-Life Dialogue

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The scene: the living room of a rustic but solidly built house in Vermont, with a gorgeous view spread beneath and a Green Mountainside above. It is a summer morning, and the sun is still low but bright and cheerful. The Guest and The Erstwhile Missus are there at the invitation of D—, a colleague of TEM; the two women teach at the same school, and are in the kitchen talking.

For their part, The Guest and G—, who is D—‘s husband, met for the first time just a few minutes ago. They now share a sofa in the living room. They have their feet propped up on a rugged coffee table which G— himself constructed, starting with actual logs and, conceivably, a blacksmith’s forge and anvil. A former industrial chemist in a Pennsylvania city, he moved to Vermont to be with D—; having utterly changed careers, he has become a successful carpenter. He built this very house, as well as its two predecessors. His whole demeanor seems that of New Hampshire (The Granite State) rather than Vermont: craggy. On the TV over the fireplace, a man in a threadbare suit and thin gray carefully-combed hair reads agricultural news from a sheaf of paper: news not just of weather but of livestock auctions, grain prices, and government-subsidy deadlines.

In short, The Guest is on alien ground, apparently having shared not a single life experience with G— but eager, for TEM’s sake, to ingratiate himself in some way.

Guest: You know, I’ve always wanted to live in Vermont.

G— is silent for a long moment, extending through the end of the segment on TV, several commercials, and the start of a new segment.

G—: (immobile, arms folded, gaze fixed on TV) Why’d you want to live in Vermont?

Guest: Oh jeez, it’s just beautiful here. I mean, look outside right now. (He gestures vaguely at the window.) Seriously — could anything be more beautiful than that? (He pauses to give G— a chance to interject something, anything.) In the fall, oh my gosh, it’s beautiful in the fall. (Another pause.) And if I had enough books and a house as well-built as this one, why, I bet I could be happy living up here my whole life.

Another protracted silence. Another commercial break.

G—: You ski?

Guest: (speaking rapidly) Nope — never been on skis in my life! Actually now that I think about it snow skiing, water skiing no difference, never even held a ski in my hands, actually I’m not very athletic at all, no sir.

The silence oppresses. From the kitchen, sounds of female laughter and the clatter of tableware. The newsreader on TV seems to have started all over again: temperature and precipitation expectations for the day, records of past years—

G—: (only his mouth moving) So why’d you want to live in Vermont?

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Voice Tech Follies

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I’m really not a fan of the telephone: give me good-old when-I-get-to-it email any day, y’know? (People at work long ago got used to the idea that I intentionally sit with my back to the phone — so I never even have to see the red “voicemail message waiting” light. They all email me, even the ones who work in the next cubicle.)

Under the circumstances, it might surprise you that I signed up for Google Voice (even more assumption that I might use the telephone?!?)… at least until you learn that, among its other features, it includes a speech-to-text translator.

Closed captioning for voicemail messages — zowie!

Needless to say, it’s not perfect. So far the only person who’s left messages for me is my brother, whose voice sounds so much like mine that even I myself can’t tell the difference except by checking to see if my lips are moving.

Alas, this also means that his voice is husky — breath-driven rather than vocal-cord-driven — and this seems to confuse Google Voice quite a bit. In the most recent message, giving me a heads-up about videos from Conan O’Brien’s final show, the transcription software kept “hearing” the suddenly-former talk-show host’s name as “calling O’Brien.” Earlier, I was myself confused by a transcript in which he talked about his recent “conversation with Oscar.” Oscar? I kept asking myself. Who the hell is Oscar? I don’t know any Oscars!

Then I listened to the voicemail. Oh. He had a conversation with our sister.

Another cool thing you can do with Google Voice is get the transcript — and the recording itself — forwarded to you as email: invaluable if you get so few voicemail messages that you almost never visit your voicemail Inbox. (Like, oh, say… like me.) Here’s the text of Google Voice’s own welcome message:

Welcome to Google Voice! Google Voice gives you a single phone number that rings all your phones, saves your voicemail online, and transcribes your voicemail to text. Other cool features include the ability to listen in on messages while they are being left and the ability to make low cost international calls. To start enjoying Google Voice, just give out your Google Voice number. You can record custom greetings for your favorite callers or block annoying callers by marking them as SPAM. Just click on the settings link at the top of your inbox. We hope you enjoy Google Voice.

And here’s the message itself (which of course is perfectly accurate for this occasion, cough):

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is :29 long.

[audio:googlevoice_welcome.mp3|titles=Google Voice welcome message|artists=Google]

You notice how the voice suddenly switched from that of a”normal” American to a sort of Central European sound over the course of the last couple sentences? I like to think the original transcription was accurate only for one half of the message, so they went back and re-recorded the other half.

For what it’s worth, the “voice of Google Voice” — the one which walks you through the menus, and such — is that of an actress and voiceover artist named Laurie Burke. What a… what a… what an interesting thing to have on one’s résumé. (Although personally, I’d much rather be known as the voice of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Open my Inbox, HAL.” “I’m afraid I can’t do that, David.”)

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