Private Writing vs. Public Having-Written

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It’s twenty-five(ish) years ago. Lunchtime on a workday. Walking the landscaped grounds of a building especially constructed for the two to three thousand programmers, managers, and support staff — and giant mainframe computers, hard drives, and other hardware — in the service of what, for now, is still the world’s largest telephone company.

I’ve got two buddies with me, let’s call them JB and JDS (not not *cough* their real initials). All three of us have talked, sometimes, of Going Outside for a living. JB aspires to make and sell software and training for programmers to use while they themselves work to make software. JDS seems to like the ideas JB has, and has even offered to help — although he also seems more clearly destined to manage people like JB and me. (He’s so level-headed; the other two of us never have more than one foot planted firmly on the ground.)

Me? I’ve been telling them about the second annual week-long vacation from which I just returned: a vacation during which I went nowhere and did “nothing” except write stories, in longhand, stories which I then type up and file away. I tell them: I might try doing something like this fulltime someday. (The “someday,” back then, is still four or five years in the future.)

JDS is talking with me about practical matters — what would I live on, and where, like that — but JB has stopped in his tracks. JDS and I have actually gone a few steps further (the momentum of dreams, y’know) and have to turn around and go back for him.

JB’s got a faint smile on his face. He looks at me.

“What do you do?” he says to me.

“You mean—?”

“When you’re writing. What do you do?”

“Uh…” I still don’t know what he’s talking about.

“You just sit there in a chair,” he says, “and you pick up a pencil, and some paper—”

“Well, yeah—”

“…and then you… you just write?”

“Sure, yeah—”

But he’s not listening to me. He’s laughing, softly. JB has two sorts of laughter: rarely, a short bark of derision when he’s feeling cynical; more often, when delighted beyond speech, a soft heh-heh-hff sound. Today, at the thought of someone sitting at a table while fiction pours from the point of a pencil, today he is laughing the good way.

—

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Real-Life [Movie] Dialogue

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[Above still depicts the Martian “war machines” devastating the California countryside. In the foreground lies a small propeller-driven spotter plane of terrestrial origin, which has crash-landed — as they are wont to do at the peak of military operations against aliens.]

So last night we’re watching the 1953 Hollywood version of The War of the Worlds, starring Gene Barry and directed by George Pal. First time I’d seen it in a long time — and, more importantly for me, the first time I’d seen it with closed captioning.

The first scene I’ll highlight occurs early in the film. Somewhere in the hills outside Los Angeles, a “meteor” has crashed to the Earth. Fearful for some reason (this is around the time we sat down to watch it, so their motivation isn’t clear), the people of the nearest town have picked three men from among them to stand guard around the thing.

(Obviously they’re not that fearful, since all the rest of them then adjourn to a barn dance.)

The three men engage in some conversation which pegs them as, like, not scientists. The “meteor” starts to make a pinging sound, like a sonar device, and one of them draws the obvious conclusion:

That’s not a meteor — it’s a bomb!

At this point they notice something strange about the “bomb”: it has something on the top which looks like a hatch or manhole cover. As they watch, this hatch cover begins to turn… slowly…

[Following dialogue is all by one speaker.]

That’s no bomb. Bombs don’t unscrew!

[Hatch cover continues to turn… and turn…]

It’s the darnedest thing. It keeps unscrewing!

Eventually, of course, the hatch opens and a colored, three-lensed “eye” comes out on a long stalk. So now they know they’re dealing with something pretty seriously odd — probably, well, Men From Mars. They determine to approach the meteor bomb extraterrestrial vessel on foot, with white flags, because “everybody knows” a white flag means the bearer intends no harm. But they still have a problem. Luckily, one of them has an immediate solution:

Guy #1: What do we say to them?

Guy : “Welcome to California.”

So things go rapidly to hell from that point forward, as you can imagine even if you haven’t read the book or seen the film. But the US military, with help from their counterparts elsewhere, notices that the big levitating “Martian war machines” behave similarly wherever they land. They always come down in threes, for instance, and then there are those artificial eyes with three lenses — modeled on the Martians’ own three-eyed selves. Perhaps the people of Earth can use these observations to combat the aliens… if only they could figure out some of the remaining mysteries…

Military officer: Pattern-wise, one lands, then two, making groups of threes joined magnetically. Is that possible?

Scientist (Gene Barry): If they do it, it is.

Eventually, the government and military decide to use the “atom bomb” (which presumably isn’t unscrewing) against the aliens. Everyone in the (surviving) central cast and a bunch of other people (who are a little dumber and hence don’t take cover behind walls and such, and come to be tossed around like rag dolls in the shock wave) don radiation-proof suits and goggles so they can observe the explosion. As they watch, a PA system’s loudspeaker counts down the minutes and seconds:

Four minutes to bomb time…

Indeed.

Thinking Good

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[Caption: “I want you to start thinking good thoughts about someone new at our house. I want you to start thinking good thoughts about a pussy cat.” Cartoon by George Booth, from his 1975 collection, Think Good Thoughts About a Pussy Cat.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Sojourns in the Parallel World

We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension — though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal — then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
— but we have changed, a little.

(Denise Levertov [source])

…and:

Things to Think

Think in ways you’ve never thought before
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

(Robert Bly [source])

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“It’s True: It Does Make You Crazy”

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The Missus and I watched a PBS American Masters show last night on Dalton Trumbo, the novelist and Hollywood screenwriter who (with several others) was jailed and blacklisted from working on films for refusing to answer questions about the alleged Communist affiliations of himself and his friends.

The show — 90 minutes — was terrific. No qualification necessary; it was so good I couldn’t believe it was airing for the first time in early September, rather than at the height of the viewing season. If you get a chance, and are at all interested in the history of Hollywood, free speech and other First Amendment issues, screenwriting, and/or the political atmosphere in the US in the 1950s*, I hope you too get a chance to see it.

The main technique the documentary’s makers used was to have Trumbo’s words read straight to the camera by various actors (Donald Sutherland, Brian Dennehy, Joan Allen, Michael Douglas, Liam Neeson, David Straithairn, and others), intercut with memories by his family and friends and with archival video and audio clips of the man himself. This technique highlighted something about Trumbo which I’d never known before: he was one damned good writer of letters.**

One letter in particular stood out. It was a letter to his son, enclosed with two books which Trumbo was sending to him at college. I’d hoped to find the text online for this post. But, even better, someone’s already put it up on YouTube. (Transcript here.) The letter is read by Nathan Lane; it’s hilarious, at moments moving, stylistically over-the-top, and also rather risque. Please don’t play it if you’re squeamish about s*x, particularly the variety which requires only one participant.

But I’ll tell you one thing: whatever the subject, that sonofabitch could write — even if his son (as he says in the video) had to read the letter with a dictionary close by. (I almost said “with a dictionary in one hand” but realized the racy implication.) (Noticed it and let it stop me at first, anyway, though obviously my resolve weakened in the parenthesis.)

_______________________

* Among the news to me was this tidbit: that the internment camps for Japanese-American citizens, vacated after World War II, were at one time being re-tooled as internment camps for “radicals,” i.e., people opposed to the activities of the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC). Egad.

** I knew about his writing in general; check out this list of his works if he’s knew to you.

The House in Your Head

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Like many people, for a couple of years I met regularly with a therapist to help me work through some confusing, troubling issues. Not all of that work was especially “heavy,” though, and some of my favorite memories of my sessions with Steve center around accounts of dreams I’d had — and figuring out what they might “mean.”

Now, as a rule, Steve stayed away from heavy-handed direction (“This is what’s wrong and this is how to fix it”). Rather, he came up with various clever ways of turning my questions back to me, of insisting “Well, what do you think?” without ever saying quite that.

But on the occasion which inspired this post, he volunteered something, a perspective so fresh and unexpected that it’s never left me. It involved a dream. I don’t remember the dream fully, but it went something like this:

I’m walking along the branches of a tree and I come to a treehouse. It’s sort of a ramshackle structure, apparently thrown together without plan. But it also appears to be strong, in no danger of falling apart or of falling from the tree.

I enter the treehouse. Inside, cardboard boxes and wooden crates lie about the floor and teeter in stacks here and there, especially in the corners. Many of these boxes are dusty, as though they haven’t been opened in a long time. A cat rests atop one of these stacks, watching me calmly, blinking slowly.

A sense of dread pervades the atmosphere inside the treehouse. Something unpleasant seems about to happen. I leave through a back door, which opens onto a different branch of the tree; a few feet further along, I turn and look back, still worried. That’s when I see the shelf. It’s a shelf over the door through which I just exited, and on the shelf rests a different cat. This cat, Cheshire-like, grins toothily at me. And for some reason, I am no longer worried. This cat reassures me. This cat has taken care of anything I might have needed to worry about.

(It was something like that, anyhow.)

Steve told me that when you dream of a building, especially one which you enter and move about in, it’s often useful to think of the building as a representation of your self — at least, your self-of-the-moment. A physical manifestation of your state of mind.

This made me think back to a dream I’d already reported to him, a dream which I’d had a year or so earlier, a time when I really was feeling in a state of crisis. In that dream:

I run from the nighttime street into a church — a big old Gothic cathedral, really, built of carved stone, the kind of cathedral with shadowy corners and dark recesses in high arched ceilings, its interior lit only by candles and lanterns and dim light filtering through the stained-glass windows. I’ve run into the church for sanctuary (outside, it is raining cars — which sounds ridiculous at one level, but completely terrifying at another). Panic-stricken, I am. Surely I’ll be safe inside the church. But then I realize that outside the windows, flashing lights announce some sort of police/fire emergency. I look up at one of the domed ceilings and there, hanging by a noose, is a nun…

(I’m not Catholic, by the way. As though that helps make any better sense of this dream!)

Have you had striking dreams of buildings that you remember? If not, given your state of mind at the moment, what sort of building would you dream of?

Update (Weds., 2009-09-02 12:20pm): When I wrote the above, I thought the question was about the sorts of places people haunt in their dreams. Based on the comments so far, though, it seems fair to say that the places haunt the people, not the other way around!

____________________

PS: The image at the top of this post is of the Treehouse at Alnwick Garden, in northern England, about halfway between Newcastle and Edinburgh. (Click the photo for more info.) It doesn’t look very much like the treehouse in my dream — it’s waaay bigger, and more obviously designed with intention. It just looks very cool.

#wordsfail

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Somewhere, in the so-far unseen pages of your work in progress — or the pages of WIPs gone by — somewhere lurks a phrase so graceless, a metaphor so aluminum-foil-on-dental-fillings, a sentence so raggedy-ass, a title so forgettable or a character’s name so laughable, something that made you realize you may be a writer but you’re also a doofus. Come on. You know it’s there. Maybe you’ve got to rummage through old rough drafts, crusty short stories and anguished poems from high-school or college days. Or maybe you found it in a paragraph you wrote just the other day but didn’t find until revising this morning (and, when you came to, immediately hacked out with scissors or carving knife).

‘Fess up — in the comments here, or on Twitter with the #wordsfail hashtag.

Groans encouraged — groans of empathy, damn it. Because if you’ve written nothing like this, it’s only because you’ve forgotten the key word: yet.

To kick things off, here’s one from me. This excerpt comes from close to 30 years ago, a faux-Irish-brogue poem called “Sodden, Betrodden, and Noddin’.”

I was leanin’, it seems, besides on me dreams,
Rather close to the fellow next to me.
Full six foot he sat (when not wearin’ his hat),
And his face it was tired and gloomy.

Note especially the way you need to read the second line to force the rhyme with the fourth: next TO me. Alas, at that point in the stanza you don’t even know line 4 is coming up. So you’ve gotta get to the last line, realize your mistake, and back up.

Hauntings

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From whiskey river (first stanza):

Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course
Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripèd bag,
or a jack-knife,
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.

And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,
And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion
With fleas that one never knew were there,
Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,
Trekking off into the living world.
You fetch a shoe-box, but it’s much too small, because she won’t
curl up now:
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.

But you do not wake up a month from then, two months,
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh,
God! Oh, God!
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters, —
mothers and fathers don’t die.

And if you have said, “For heaven’s sake, must you always be
kissing a person?”
Or, “I do wish to gracious you’d stop tapping on the window
with your thimble!”
Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you’re busy
having fun,
Is plenty of time to say, “I’m sorry, mother.”

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,
who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.

Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries;
they are not tempted.
Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly
That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;
They are not taken in.
Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and shake
them and yell at them;
They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide
back into their chairs.

Your tea is cold now.
You drink it standing up,
And leave the house.

(Edna St. Vincent Millay)

…and:

How I Became a Ghost

It was all about objects, their objections
expressed through a certain solidity.

My house for example still moves
through me, moves me.
When I tried to reverse the process
I kept dropping things, kept finding myself
in the basement.

Windows became more than
usually problematic.
I wanted to break them
which didn’t work, though for awhile

I had more success with the lake.

The phone worked for a long time
though when I answered
often nobody was there.

Bats crashed into me at night,
but then didn’t anymore.

The rings vanished from my hand,
the pond.

I stopped feeling the wind.

One day the closets were empty.

Another day the mirrors were.

(Leslie Harrison [source])

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Do Not Distract the Artist

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Single-minded in pursuit of your ideals, are you? Think you’re putting a lot of time into your writing, your painting, your kids, your life? You call yourself dedicated?

Ha!

Or so I thought when I saw the video below. The maker claims to have spent 1500 hours on this not-quite-four-minute project, an estimate which I see no reason to doubt. But think about that 1500 hours… all those minutes and hours of mapping out every frame, shifting the (many) Lego bricks a little in one direction or another, shooting a frame or two per position… over… and over… (Let alone the time spent at the outset, encasing the human being in Legos.)

Granted, this rymdreglage person may not have a steady job, or kids, or… or… or… Still: sheesh.

I think the video can probably be appreciated even by people who don’t know anything about the eight-bit console games (original Nintendo Entertainment System, etc.) to which this an homage. Some advice before playing it back, though: turn the volume down a bit, and bump it upwards only if you really want. The music stops just short of inducing seizures in small children and animals.

[Hat tip to Lifting Fog (slogan: “visibility is improving”), which I’d read even if I weren’t related to one of its co-authors.]

Gratuitous Disingenuousness

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[The post below uses the words author and artist more or less interchangeably. Apologies to those in either camp who might dispute the lumping-together.]

A long-time friend and I have kidded each other for years about being disingenuous. This started, as I recall, when I once teased her in terms like, “You’re even more disingenuous than you think you are” or maybe, contrariwise, “Don’t look at me like that. You’re not all that disingenuous.”

(Oh, stop. Like you don’t have any weird in-jokes with your friends.)

Exactly how it all started doesn’t really matter. The point of the running joke is that the word disingenuous seems (at least to my friend and me) to mean, sounds like it means, sort of the opposite of what it actually does mean.

(Embedding it in some kind of complicated syntax, as in either of the two possible statements above, makes the meaning even more slippery.)

The word gratuitous is like disingenuous: it seems to mean something convenient, so people grab for it even when it’s not really the right word… or when it’s the right word, but for the wrong reasons.

All of which (whew) has been triggered by a post over at the writing in the water blog, where the pseudonymous “mapelba” (who is both an artist and a writer) has asked some unnerving questions. Questions like these:

Can art or story be too pretty to be any good?… What are your expectations when you walk into a museum or open a new book? What expectations do you have for your own work?

Well, they unnerved me, anyhow. I tried twice to answer them in a comment but both times broke down and deleted what I’d typed. Part of my difficulty (as I’ve said before) is that I tend to focus on “writing pretty” first, and worry about “writing story” later.

And part of my difficulty lies in that word “expectations.” There’s a big rub there, no? To wit: The expectations of the work’s creator and those of its audience cannot be assumed to match.

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Sleeping, Waking, and Grimmer Things

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From whiskey river:

Waking at 3 a.m.

Even in the cave of the night when you
wake and are free and lonely,
neglected by others, discarded, loved only
by what doesn’t matter — even in that
big room no one can see,
you push with your eyes till forever
comes in its twisted figure eight
and lies down in your head.

You think water in the river;
you think slower than the tide in
the grain of the wood; you become
a secret storehouse that saves the country,
so open and foolish and empty.

You look over all that the darkness
ripples across. More than has ever
been found comforts you. You open your
eyes in a vault that unlocks as fast
and as far as your thought can run.
A great snug wall goes around everything,
has always been there, will always
remain. It is a good world to be
lost in. It comforts you. It is
all right. And you sleep.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

And if awakening is also already present, inescapably and everywhere present from the beginning, how can the emotions not be part of that singing life of grasses and fish and oil tankers and subways and cats in heat who wake us, furious and smiling, in the middle of the brief summer night?

(Jane Hirshfield)

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