Cat People

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Just a short post for the moment… Will post again later today, to tell you about tomorrow’s post.

(For now, let’s just say I’m taking part in Rebecca Ramsey’s “Wonders of the World” blog party. I’ll also be talking about Rebecca’s… interesting Wonders Never Cease blog itself.)

In the meantime, Colleen Lindsay of the Swivet blog recently pointed her readers to a real honest-to-God labor of love — very cool if you’re a cat lover. (If you’re not, eh, no problem; as I said, I’ll be back to post again later today.)

Presenting, of all things, a cat sanctuary, The Cat House on the Kings:

Short Fiction: “The Cabin”

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A few weeks ago, trying to kick-start my creative engine, I set myself a goal. The idea was to write a short story, by September 1, whose first and last sentences were “found,” that is, already written by someone else. For extra credit (don’t you love the way people play these games with themselves?), I said, I’d try to incorporate into the story — somehow — a picture of the two sentences’ author.

If you’d prefer not to know in advance what the two sentences are, and don’t care to see the picture of their author, you can read the first section here. (At the end of that page is a link to a PDF version of the whole story.)

If on the other hand you do want to read the details, the original challenge was here.

And, finally, if you want to read more about my experience of writing a story to these specifications, well, just keep reading below.

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Gene-Mapping Your Work

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'train' c2008 by RAWKU5 at sxc.hu (click for original)Everybody, writers included, likes a list. (As soon as someone starts a sentence with the words, “There are N kinds of [people, whatever] in this world…,” he’s started to construct a list — even if N is only 2.) It’s one of the signs that among other things we are, humans are mathematical creatures. Even writers and other artists, who often profess ignorance about such things, just love to put one thing… after another thing… after another thing… And more, once they’re listed, to ascribe relative value to each item in the list.

Consider a recent post at Shelly Lowenkopf’s Blog, in which he explores the notion of a “dramatic genome.”

You’ve probably heard the term “genome” before. From the Genome News Network:

A genome is all of a living thing’s genetic material. It is the entire set of hereditary instructions for building, running, and maintaining an organism, and passing life on to the next generation. The whole shebang.

In most living things, the genome is made of a chemical called DNA. The genome contains genes, which are packaged in chromosomes and affect specific characteristics of the organism.

…Each one of earth’s species has its own distinctive genome: the dog genome, the wheat genome, the genomes of the cow, cold virus, bok choy, Escherichia coli (a bacterium that lives in the human gut and in animal intestines), and so on.

So genomes belong to species, but they also belong to individuals. Every giraffe on the African savanna has a unique genome, as does every elephant, acacia tree, and ostrich. Unless you are an identical twin, your genome is different from that of every other person on earth—in fact, it is different from that of every other person who has ever lived.

Most often, a genome is represented by a sequence (yeah: a list) of letters indicating the order in which various components of DNA exist in a particular species or individual: A (for adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine),  or T (thymine). If you’re a molecular biologist, a sequence like ACCGTAG means something different than TGGACTA — even though the components (A, C, T, and G) are identical. If you can learn enough to understand what each component represents, then you (presumably) can know how the sequence “AC” will differ, in practice, from the sequence “TG.”

Similarly, Lowenkopf proposes that writers interested in understanding their own work construct a “genome” of those units of drama (meaning fiction in general, not just stage works) which are most important to them. This job is a little harder, though, because Lowenkopf lists not just four components but twenty-nine. In alphabetical order, these are the ones he came up with — plus some others I might add:

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Department of Neighborhood Security (2)

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Last month, I reported on a new initiative which our local neighborhood was undertaking — a neighborhood crime watch. The Missus and I learned of this initiative, as I said, via a letter from our street’s block captain: “As your block captain, I will be asking for you to provide phone numbers, and e-mail addresses, which will allow two-way communication between neighbors and the neighborhood crime watch program.”

Now, you need to understand something about the way our household is organized — or rather, isn’t. We’re very good about hanging on to Important Papers such as bills, insurance records, and so on. We’re equally (and regrettably) good about hanging on to Less Important Papers, such as magazines from 1994 or so. And then there are Truly Unimportant Papers — political-candidate promotional flyers, the bi-weekly mailing from the local swimming-pool company which doesn’t know that our property will never be suitable for a swimming pool, cheap 10-page ads from department stores in the next county, and so on — which go more or less immediately into the recycling bin.

This letter from our block captain fell into a fourth category. It has no formal, capitalized name, this category. It’s a category which might be loosely described as “papers which may at some point turn out to be important, but we really hope they don’t because [fill in reason], but maybe they’ll just disappear on their own accord and thereby relieve us of further responsibility for possessing them.”

And you know what? By golly, such papers eventually do wander off someplace, their tails between their legs. I imagine a whole auditorium of them, somewhere beyond the pale of imagination, eternally whimpering in neglect.

One of the hammer blows which Tropical Storm/Depression Fay landed upon our area was the pair of trees (not just one, as I’d thought earlier) which fell over in a neighbor’s yard. One simply lay the width of the front yard. The other, even bigger, remained propped on a corner of the (remarkably undamaged) house for a few days following the storm’s passing. I told The Missus I couldn’t imagine how the tree could be removed without punching through a wall or the roof. “They’ll have to use a crane,” I said.

In the event, no crane was required.

Three guys drove up in a plain white pickup. In the back of the truck were an assortment of chainsaws, about the length of an arm, and a couple of loooooooong orange-nylon ropes. The latter, they draped over the limbs of a nearby undamaged tree. One end of each was wrapped and tied around the upper end of the tree; the other ends were affixed to the rear of the pickup truck. All they had to do was drive the truck forward, and up would come the tree.

Needless to say, this operation — in a neighborhood so pedestrian that most people are in bed by 9 p.m. — drew a little knot of onlookers. We gathered in the cul-de-sac, discussing theories of geometry and the dynamics of nylon, the concepts of levers and pulleys, as though we actually had any idea how this would actually work. It seemed obvious that as soon as the tree was lifted off the roof, it would swing back and, I don’t know, take out the entire north wall of the second floor.

Into the mini-crowd suddenly wandered the block captain. He didn’t say anything at first, so I rather hoped he was simply assessing the risks and, perhaps, constructing in his head the preferred evacuation route when the guy turned the truck’s ignition key.

Not so. He was just waiting for a break in the conversation.

I felt a timid tap on my shoulder. “John,” he said, “did you ever receive my letter…?”

At that point i knew I was doomed. After all, of course we received his letter. I even remembered receiving it. Between gaps among his words, I even fancied I could hear, in the distance, the bleating of a small lost white sheet of paper.

So anyway, what I told him was that after the tree thing was over, I’d go back home, find (gulp) his letter — which included his email address — and send him my own email address and our phone numbers.

(All of which would have happened, by the way, except that there is no longer such a sheet of paper. So I just typed up the information he wanted, printed it out, stuck it in an envelope, and then put the envelope in his mailbox.)

The conversation turned to other matters, in an attempt to relieve the suspense as we waited for the truck to start moving. Few of us had ever really spent time talking to one another, so naturally one of the first orders of business was: What do you do for a living?

I said, “I’m a computer programmer. A Web developer.” (Both of which are true. I don’t typically just flat-out tell people I’m an aspiring author, or perhaps re-author would be more accurate. Other aspiring authors will understand.)

“Ooooh,” several people said. And before anyone else could jump in, the block captain took advantage of their slow-footedness to buttonhole me himself.

“Maybe you can help me,” he said. “See, I just got a new computer and I’m trying to transfer all my contacts from the old Outlook Express list to the new one and it’s just, not, working…”

I was reminded of this story this afternoon, when I came across a link from the Froogville blog (over there on the right, under “Writers to Be Read”). Froog had included the image at the top of this RAMH post in a post of his own, saying he’d found it at his “new favourite website, FrostFireZoo.” Given the image, and given Froog’s endorsement, naturally I had to visit FrostFireZoo myself.

Which was where I found the image below, and cracked up:

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Hard Questions

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From whiskey river:

The rest I have told you already

The rest I have told you already.
A few years of fluency, and then
the long silence, like the silence in the valley
before the mountains send back
your own voice changed to the voice of nature.
This silence is my companion now.
I ask: of what did my soul die?
and the silence answers

if your soul died, whose life
are you living and
when did you become that person?

(by Louise Glück)

And (not from whiskey river):

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

(by Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

And finally, just for a change, something of an answer:

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate — that’s my philosophy.

(by Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth — one of my all-time favorite plays to read)

How Do You Figure?

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Crazy week upcoming (as if the last one wasn’t crazy enough)… More details on that later, but for now I’ll just say that I’ll have blog posts stacked up in the pipeline and ready to go, starting a week from today [double emphasis added 2008-08-29] and continuing for the next four days. (I know how the Web’s attention wanders if a site goes dark too long.)

The catch?

I hope but can’t promise that I’ll be able to get to a computer to actually post the things. All I’ll need, once the posts are written, is about ten minutes to read, revise as needed, and click the Publish button. But I won’t actually have a computer with me — so will depend on the kindness of strangers or family members or, I don’t know, Internet cafes. Don’t be surprised if you read reports of some guy in Groucho glasses and mustache, stealing laptops in bookstores and then returning them 15 minutes later.

Anyhow, to kick off that series of posts starting which shall start [clarification added 2008-08-29] in a week, let me introduce you to a slender volume (103 pages, with index) called Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase, by Arthur Quinn. (Amazon says the book is 112 pages long, which may be attributable to a later edition; the one I’ve got here is copyright 1982.)

From Quinn’s preface:

Graduate students in literature eagerly buy little dictionaries so that when a monograph intones about later Shakespeare’s penchant for the anthimeria, they will have a place to look it up. So they look it up, while their own prose often becomes more and more like a monograph’s, a groaning misery to read.

…Learning about the figures of speech should be less like learning about the periodic table of elements than like learning how to model clay. To ask a sentence if it has a zeugma is not like asking a rock if it has silicon. In fact, the very phrase “figures of speech” is misleading in its static, passive form. It should be the “figurings of speech” — or, better yet, “figuring speech.”

The figurings of speech reveal to us the apparently limitless plasticity of language itself. We are confronted, inescapably, with the intoxicating possibility that we can make language do for us almost anything we want. Or a least a Shakespeare can. The figures of speech help us to see how he does it, and how we might.

I’ve always been haunted by the possibility that I might be a better writer than storyteller. Discussions about story always have me glancing nervously over my shoulder, as though the ghosts of Homer and Twain and Hemingway are going to materialize and demand my credentials. “Papers, please,” they’ll say. I’ll pat my pockets, frown, slap my forehead, say “Jeez, my other suit–” and while they’re distracted I’ll take off in a broken-field run, heading for the safety of the Prose Mountains.

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Creating in the Margins

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After yesterday’s post about and the tendency of things to break down along edges, I was reminded this morning about the other side of the matter: the tendency of interesting and indeed surprising things, good things, to happen between two adjacent experiences.

A few weeks ago, I set myself a general writing objective (to write a story with a given first and last sentence) and a specific deadline: Labor Day, September 1 (this Monday). I had plenty of other stuff to do in the meantime, but my main motivation was a sort of writer’s guilt. I was bothered, see, that I’d been so distracted by other stuff (marketing Merry-Go-Round, blogging, and then of course I do have a day job, a wife, and books to read!) — so distracted by all that stuff that I hadn’t been able to write something new.

(Well, I did write myself a few sentences into a MGR sequel. But that wasn’t “real” writing.)

The main effect of this objective was, alas, not that I sat down, raised the lid of my inkwell, and began to write. The main effect was to foster a different and somewhat more exquisite sort of writer’s guilt: the guilt of not-writing when you know you quote-unquote “have to.” Especially when under your own deadline (you know you can’t weasel out). Especially when you publicly announced your deadline (you know everyone will know, even if you do try to weasel out).

So this morning I’m lying in bed. The alarm has gone off once, been snoozed, and gone off (and been snoozed) again. I’m kind of semi-conscious. It’s 5 a.m.

Then a picture starts to form behind my eyelids: A man in a cabin, dusting something off, it’s not his cabin but someone else’s… Wait, no, that’s not dust — it’s snow… He picks up a scrap of paper and reads it… He finds another scrap of paper, and reads it, and sometime later he finds an old photograph…

…and so on, to the end.

There, in the crevasse between waking and sleeping (or between pokes at the snooze button, if you will), there I found my story.

I’ve always loved the sensation of falling asleep, even more than I like sleeping itself (which I love quite a bit!). But the transition to wakefulness can bring its own rewards.

Cramming Technologies into an Elevator

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My brother the architect once explained to me the key to building things successfully. By building he meant not just framing, erecting walls and roofs and so on, but everything: flooring, painting, pouring foundations, and so on. All of it, he said, had one critical element: edges. How an architect or builder or home handyman handles edges defines his or her success at it. Buildings fall down; patterned wallpaper fails to match up at the seams; bookshelves wobble, and a marble placed on the floor rolls freely from one corner to another.

This doesn’t apply just to physical structures, to edifices. It applies, I think, to just about everything artificial.

One of Merry-Go-Round‘s underlying themes is the fragility of technology. Any one piece of equipment or software, even two or three, may work just fine after being tested and tested and tested. The word for this is “robustness”: the more robust a system, the closer it is to that magical (and mythical) state commonly known as fail-safe.

Where problems begin to arise is, yes, along the edges: those conceptual little nooks and crannies where the surfaces of multiple technologies come together.

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Will Cuppy

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The most recent category for the links here, all the way at the bottom of the right-hand menu, is labeled “The Pantheon.” These aren’t authors who’ve necessarily influenced my style (although no doubt many of them have); they aren’t all authors who’ve meant a lot to me for my whole life (although some of them have). Instead, they’re authors who at one time or another bowled me over with the unexpected, offering surprising insights into what writing could possibly achieve.

One who didn’t make the cut, although I sure thought about including him, was Will Cuppy.

It was during the summer of 1964 that I first encountered Cuppy’s The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. Earlier that year I’d been introduced to James Thurber, thanks to my 7th-grade English teacher Mr. Krause; I had almost made up my mind that I wanted to grow up to be a Professional Humorist or, failing that, a Professional Teller of Occasional Jokes.

And then I hit Cuppy. (It was almost exactly like that, a collision.)

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Printability!

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A while back, I said I’d be trying to fix things so that printouts of Running After My Hat posts would look more like “real” articles or stories as opposed to Web-based content: omitting the left and right margins, increasing text font sizes, and so on.

Just in time for the ginormous “Fay, Part 2” post, that feature is now working.

I’ll be tinkering with it off and on, no doubt. In the meantime, hope it helps your experience here!

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