Posts
Tuesday 18 March 2008 American Midwest time,
Wednesday 19 March 2008 Sri Lanka time:
Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died at age 90 in Sri Lanka, where he's lived since the 1950s.
I have an 8X10 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY poster hanging above my desk. It is framed because it is signed by Sir Arthur in white/silver ink.
My friend Dan gave it to me as a gift.
Clarke was my favorite sf writer in large part because his work is concise as well as smart. It wastes neither time nor intellect.
I hope the mention he'll receive in media from his death encourages people to read his work more widely.
Economy of thought and word requires understanding. Clarke grasped his work fully before writing. He could present complex ideas simply and spell out mind-boggling implications directly.
Many found his work unemotional. It was, instead, visionary. His emotion was invested in lifting us up into bigger, better worlds.
He was visionary not only technologically. His work often held a touch of mysticism. Childhood’s End is literally and metaphorically transcendent. One of Clarke’s comments in 1965 about the movie/novel he was then working on with Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, was, "MGM doesn't know it yet, but they've footed the bill for the first six-million-dollar religious film."
Characterization was not considered his forté but HAL, from that novel/movie, is perhaps as vivid and well known a character as science fiction has produced.
He detailed communication satellites in stationary or geosynchronous orbit in a technical paper in 1945. After WWII he got degrees in Maths and Physics. He was a genuine scientist yet lent his name and attention to ARTHUR C. CLARK’S MYSTERIOUS WORLD and ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S WORLD OF STRANGE POWERS, both dedicated to examining fringe or Fortean topics with an open mind. In one notable episode he caught the semi-amusing James Randi cheating in his analysis of a dowsing experiment and stiffly corrected the math, and conclusions, in his summation.
In his novel Imperial Earth he introduced a gay character, marking a shy literary coming out Clarke later embraced openly on his own terms.
Clarke supported Humanism. He worried that religion was the one meme mankind might not survive yet retained faith in the fact of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. While he lived an enviable life of the mind, including a long debate in letters over technology with C. S. Lewis, he was also an avid SCUBA diver most of his life and argued for the preservation and exploration of the world’s Oceans.
The City and the Stars was an early favorite of mine but I’m not sure today which version I read as a kid. There are two, one the original, the second a rewritten version that improved scenes and changed some specifics.
Childhood’s End staggered me. I had never read anything so simultaneously shattering and uplifting, and the African scenes drew me with a visceral vividness.
Another fond memory is curling up on my mother’s rocking chair in the living room, under a quilt my great grandmother had made, reading Clarke’s short stories, savoring each and thinking about it for a few minutes after finishing, until I could no longer resist reading the next. The motion of the rocker helped evoke weightlessness, lower gravities, and the endless fall of a spaceship.
In this way I read through the early Ballantine collections Expedition to Earth, Reach for Tomorrow, Tales of the White Hart, The Other Side of the Sky, The Wind From the Sun, and the Nine Billion Names of God, the latter named for perhaps Clarke’s most famous short story. In it, monks have purchased a supercomputer to help them name the nine-billion names of God more efficiently. They believe that, once this is done, this cycle of reality will end and, as the technicians who installed the computer are descending the mountain from the monastery dusk falls and, one by one, the stars blink out. It is an elegant, chilling, and inspiring story, and quite brief. That Zen concision again.
The Sands of Mars, with its urgent message not of ecology but of terraforming, has enthralled me with desert visions as compelling as Frank Herbert’s Dune or the movie LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, but with science replacing the espionage and realpolitik. Earthlight drew me to imagine colonizing Luna and living in new ways. This novel’s espionage and politics were the opposite of indoctrination for me. His stories got me ready to forge new traditions and experience different loyalties. Upward was outward, and freedom meant embracing the universal rather than the parochial.
It goes without saying, perhaps, that 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is my favorite movie. I would probably say favorite science fiction movie these days to make room for favorites in other categories but I would be hard pressed to name a film of any type I admire as much. I saw it on the big screen and people cried when the lights came up; I sat stunned, unable to absorb how layered and amazing it had been for me. To this day the film mesmerizes me. If it is on cable as I scan through channels, I’ll stick on it and watch again, instantly enthralled.
I wore out a copy of The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 by Jerome Agel. A compendium of facts, interviews, and backstories about the movie, the book was also crammed with pictures, each image evoking a thousand others in my mind. Could there have been a denser message delivered than 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY? Enticement balances warning; technophila vies with technophobia; man and machine negate each other, yet both triumph; there is space travel and earthbound politics; there is conspiracy and revelation; the ancient past, implicit in archaeology, uncovers a future both unimaginably far off yet here, now; there is loss and transcendence yet again; evolution is made vivid and taken beyond comprehension; the aliens are genuinely incomprehensible; every instant of the film is laden with rich signal, some still being decoded 40 years later.
Clarke’s body has died, the inevitable result of not switching to Machine/Digital Intelligence soon enough but his memes, in large part his mind, the best parts of it, live on for any and all of us to discover anew.
Go read some Arthur C. Clarke and celebrate an astounding personal human odyssey.
/// /// ///
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Thursday, March 13, 2008
My Guitars
I saved for my first guitar for a long time. I was 13 and had to rely on random jobs like lawn mowing. Then I had to find a guitar for sale by an individual because the ones in the stores were way too much.
My aunt Nancy, who is only a few years older, told me a friend of hers might sell her guitar to me so the next time we visited my maternal grandparents I took what money I had saved.
The friend, Paula Winogle, met my aunt Nancy and me on the cul-de-sac where they both lived. I really liked the tone of the guitar. “How much do you want for it?” I asked, and she said, “$15.”
All I had was $14 but I told her I could owe her one dollar and pay her in a week or so.
She said, “Don’t worry about it.”
The guitar is a Regal, a no-name but very sturdy and with excellent action despite a tailpiece bridge that is mounted askew.
I got a lesson book soon after and tried to learn on my own but then my mother heard that a college student was giving lessons at the local music shop, in a basement room entered from the back of the store. It was $5 a lesson, once a week, and we really couldn’t afford it but my mother found the money for a few weeks. This was over summer.
One day on the way home I was attacked by a large collie. I was backed against a car until finally a toddler, naked but for a diaper, came out of a house and shouted, “Tarkas, no,” saving me. I did not take another lesson.
A few years later Aunt Nancy fled from an abusive husband, all the way from Japan to Pennsylvania where we lived, and she brought a Yamaha guitar -- which she gave me. My first and only real guitar all these years, a dreadnought style basic Yamaha with poor action due to a bent neck.
My only other guitar is a Stella Harmony half size, found at an estate sale. It's so old it's discolored but it plays fine. Should use it more, it's so portable, but I don't usually bother. I usually pick up the Yamaha, now that I've had the neck straightened and the machine heads fixed, and play along with iTunes, ad libbing fills and working out key changes so I can play with melodies and chord structures.
Is it any wonder I don’t play like anyone else I’ve ever seen or heard?
/// /// ///
My aunt Nancy, who is only a few years older, told me a friend of hers might sell her guitar to me so the next time we visited my maternal grandparents I took what money I had saved.
The friend, Paula Winogle, met my aunt Nancy and me on the cul-de-sac where they both lived. I really liked the tone of the guitar. “How much do you want for it?” I asked, and she said, “$15.”
All I had was $14 but I told her I could owe her one dollar and pay her in a week or so.
She said, “Don’t worry about it.”
The guitar is a Regal, a no-name but very sturdy and with excellent action despite a tailpiece bridge that is mounted askew.
I got a lesson book soon after and tried to learn on my own but then my mother heard that a college student was giving lessons at the local music shop, in a basement room entered from the back of the store. It was $5 a lesson, once a week, and we really couldn’t afford it but my mother found the money for a few weeks. This was over summer.
One day on the way home I was attacked by a large collie. I was backed against a car until finally a toddler, naked but for a diaper, came out of a house and shouted, “Tarkas, no,” saving me. I did not take another lesson.
A few years later Aunt Nancy fled from an abusive husband, all the way from Japan to Pennsylvania where we lived, and she brought a Yamaha guitar -- which she gave me. My first and only real guitar all these years, a dreadnought style basic Yamaha with poor action due to a bent neck.
My only other guitar is a Stella Harmony half size, found at an estate sale. It's so old it's discolored but it plays fine. Should use it more, it's so portable, but I don't usually bother. I usually pick up the Yamaha, now that I've had the neck straightened and the machine heads fixed, and play along with iTunes, ad libbing fills and working out key changes so I can play with melodies and chord structures.
Is it any wonder I don’t play like anyone else I’ve ever seen or heard?
/// /// ///
Saturday, January 5, 2008
What Do I Write?
Publishers want marketable traits, preferably one per writer. Variety confuses things and versatility in a writer is a curse for sales.
Knowing this, I wondered what I write.
What fix do you come to Gene Stewart for?
My wife once suggested I call myself the Paladin Prince of Paranoia. She swears she wasn’t joking.
My general topics usually include the unseen, the covert, and the occult. My work reveals what’s hidden and explores behind the scenes. Much of it deals with espionage in some way, usually indirectly. Gothic Realism is one of the terms I’ve coined, but that is inadequate to cover all my work. I rarely write straight genre, but Slipstream is too vague. The New Weird isn’t even a hint fateful enough. Yes I can be transgressive, but only in flashes. I am a mainstream monster, a literary lark, a genre jerk, yet ineluctable. Call me TETAR: The Exception To All Rules.
Bodes ill for a career, such blurring.
‘Jack Ketchum’ has that problem. He writes superbly, but if you like one of his books, you may not automatically like another. They vary that much.
On the other hand, Dean Koontz’s books vary, too, yet he has something consistent running through all of them that brings readers back. A voice, a tone, or perhaps just an outlook or viewpoint. I think it’s optimism.
In theory, the use of different by-lines solves this problem. Different kinds of books can be sold under different names. Try telling an agent that, though. Or you could pull a Graham Greene and label some works Entertainments, thereby implying the others are Serious. You have to be a writer of status before you can do that with a straight face.
One friend suggested a label for my work: The Bitter Truth Will Set You Free. Much of it is about discovering and facing up to the cold, hard truth, after all. It’s an odd quality for fiction with so many imaginary and speculative aspects, but it rings true for the most part.
But who wants the truth? Who can handle it besides Jack Nicholson? Don’t most of us spend most of our free time avoiding the truth like roaches dodging light?
Escapism’s what sells. Whether it’s labeled sf, fantasy, horror, mystery, or romance, or even politics, Fortean, or fringe, it takes people away from their everyday concerns for awhile.
If most readers want escapism, fine, but this writer wants more. I want my work to matter.
Translation: I’m too fucking serious. I need to lighten up, but can't.
Is this a legacy from having begun in mainstream / literary fiction, early in both my reading and writing?
I was born on Dickens’s birthday and he is my favorite writer, so maybe I got it from his work, all that social conscience.
I once read an encomium from Norman Spinrad, I think it was, about PKD. It said, "He wrote serious fiction in popular form; what higher praise can there be?" And that's been my ambition. Well, it describes what comes out of me, anyway, I should say it that way. It's not as if I sit and plan to be overbearingly serious.
To me, fiction matters, so I want mine to matter, too. In order to matter it has to address truth, no matter how bitter, inconvenient, or uncomfortable.
Make sense?
And escapism evades truth. It ducks the heavy and goes wide around what’s prickly.
I am not referring to factuality. Facts are for nonfiction and the nerdiest hard sf.
Truth is more elusive. It lives, and hides, in stories. Only fiction can reveal truth in its fullest form, by touching upon the ineffable.
To matter, fiction must deal in truth.
I wrote an essay called Happy Endings: More Than A Cancer? addressing this very thing. It concluded that happy endings don't like the truth much. They prefer easy lies. They prefer delusions, propaganda, and nonsense to anything like real, pointed truths.
Next time you're confronted with a happy ending, ask yourself why you're not angry about being treated with such contempt? Are you a child who needs protected from anything harsh or upsetting? Must you be lied to in order to be seduced, enticed, or otherwise strung along?
But escapism relaxes us, you cry. It lets us rest from all the important stuff. It offers breathing space.
All true, which is why entertainment is the first principle of all good fiction. Beyond that, though, lies what matters. It is possible to entertain and tell the truth at the same time. In fact, writing that seeks to enlighten without entertaining does neither, as someone once wrote.
In jazz, the best don’t play trumpet, sax, piano, or drums, they play “the truth”.
You know it when you hear it. If you have to ask, you’ll never know.
William S. Burroughs said, “I write reports.” He was not kidding. He reported in from where ever his head took him, and did the best he could with difficult material.
What do I write? The truth as I see it. Come to me and I’ll tell you bluntly what I see.
If I’m not the type to lie about everything working out okay, what else can I do?
/// /// ///
Knowing this, I wondered what I write.
What fix do you come to Gene Stewart for?
My wife once suggested I call myself the Paladin Prince of Paranoia. She swears she wasn’t joking.
My general topics usually include the unseen, the covert, and the occult. My work reveals what’s hidden and explores behind the scenes. Much of it deals with espionage in some way, usually indirectly. Gothic Realism is one of the terms I’ve coined, but that is inadequate to cover all my work. I rarely write straight genre, but Slipstream is too vague. The New Weird isn’t even a hint fateful enough. Yes I can be transgressive, but only in flashes. I am a mainstream monster, a literary lark, a genre jerk, yet ineluctable. Call me TETAR: The Exception To All Rules.
Bodes ill for a career, such blurring.
‘Jack Ketchum’ has that problem. He writes superbly, but if you like one of his books, you may not automatically like another. They vary that much.
On the other hand, Dean Koontz’s books vary, too, yet he has something consistent running through all of them that brings readers back. A voice, a tone, or perhaps just an outlook or viewpoint. I think it’s optimism.
In theory, the use of different by-lines solves this problem. Different kinds of books can be sold under different names. Try telling an agent that, though. Or you could pull a Graham Greene and label some works Entertainments, thereby implying the others are Serious. You have to be a writer of status before you can do that with a straight face.
One friend suggested a label for my work: The Bitter Truth Will Set You Free. Much of it is about discovering and facing up to the cold, hard truth, after all. It’s an odd quality for fiction with so many imaginary and speculative aspects, but it rings true for the most part.
But who wants the truth? Who can handle it besides Jack Nicholson? Don’t most of us spend most of our free time avoiding the truth like roaches dodging light?
Escapism’s what sells. Whether it’s labeled sf, fantasy, horror, mystery, or romance, or even politics, Fortean, or fringe, it takes people away from their everyday concerns for awhile.
If most readers want escapism, fine, but this writer wants more. I want my work to matter.
Translation: I’m too fucking serious. I need to lighten up, but can't.
Is this a legacy from having begun in mainstream / literary fiction, early in both my reading and writing?
I was born on Dickens’s birthday and he is my favorite writer, so maybe I got it from his work, all that social conscience.
I once read an encomium from Norman Spinrad, I think it was, about PKD. It said, "He wrote serious fiction in popular form; what higher praise can there be?" And that's been my ambition. Well, it describes what comes out of me, anyway, I should say it that way. It's not as if I sit and plan to be overbearingly serious.
To me, fiction matters, so I want mine to matter, too. In order to matter it has to address truth, no matter how bitter, inconvenient, or uncomfortable.
Make sense?
And escapism evades truth. It ducks the heavy and goes wide around what’s prickly.
I am not referring to factuality. Facts are for nonfiction and the nerdiest hard sf.
Truth is more elusive. It lives, and hides, in stories. Only fiction can reveal truth in its fullest form, by touching upon the ineffable.
To matter, fiction must deal in truth.
I wrote an essay called Happy Endings: More Than A Cancer? addressing this very thing. It concluded that happy endings don't like the truth much. They prefer easy lies. They prefer delusions, propaganda, and nonsense to anything like real, pointed truths.
Next time you're confronted with a happy ending, ask yourself why you're not angry about being treated with such contempt? Are you a child who needs protected from anything harsh or upsetting? Must you be lied to in order to be seduced, enticed, or otherwise strung along?
But escapism relaxes us, you cry. It lets us rest from all the important stuff. It offers breathing space.
All true, which is why entertainment is the first principle of all good fiction. Beyond that, though, lies what matters. It is possible to entertain and tell the truth at the same time. In fact, writing that seeks to enlighten without entertaining does neither, as someone once wrote.
In jazz, the best don’t play trumpet, sax, piano, or drums, they play “the truth”.
You know it when you hear it. If you have to ask, you’ll never know.
William S. Burroughs said, “I write reports.” He was not kidding. He reported in from where ever his head took him, and did the best he could with difficult material.
What do I write? The truth as I see it. Come to me and I’ll tell you bluntly what I see.
If I’m not the type to lie about everything working out okay, what else can I do?
/// /// ///
Friday, December 14, 2007
A True Man
So last evening my wife walked in from picking up one of my sons at the public library and handed me Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote.
http://www.amazon.com/Portraits-Observations-Essays-Truman-Capote/dp/1400066611/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197666545&sr=1-1
I fell into it and have only just surfaced. Read it all, or all that I'd not already read or want to read just now. Reminds me how good he could be: "Handcarved Coffins" is riveting, for instance.
"You trying to kill me or get me killed?" I asked my wife once when I glanced up. "You know this will just quicken my ambitions."
On the back of the book is quoted an excerpt from the Preface for "Music For Chameleons". It says in part, famously, "...Writers...who take genuine risks... bite the bullet and walk the plank..."
He is comparing writers who go for broke to professional gamblers but he misses the mark. It's an act of redemption and you risk trading your soul for your art. As he so notoriously did with In Cold Blood and as he so vividly understood.
There is an interesting passage in this book during which he discusses having published two chapters from his work-in-progress Answered Prayers. These famously caused backlash from rich friends who felt he'd betrayed them. In this passage he says no, he merely used his material, as all writers must, and then goes on to say, much more interestingly -- because their reaction is inconsequential to him compared to what he discovered -- that after the chapters had appeared he reassessed all his published writing, and found all of it wanting, and, worse, knew why. He says he had systematically tried to conquer all forms of writing, some with great success, others with little. He says the failing he spotted was built in to each form; by following the techniques of a given form, he was forced to leave out abilities and effects he may have mastered from other forms. Thus he conceived the ambition to bring all of it to bear at one time -- everything he'd learned from novels, short stories, poetry, screenplays, stage plays, essays, reporting, and so on.
He claims this is the style one sees in the book Music For Chameleons and perhaps most effectively in "Handcarved Coffins".
I chose to read this book as a collection of high spots. Many reviewers scrambled to sneer at its lesser pieces, such as a portrait of Liz Taylor. Their loss.
There is a remarkable interview with Bobby Beusoleil, one of the Manson Family, that reveals several aspects Bugliosi's lies about helter skelter cannot cover up forever, and there are any number of amazing passages and entire pieces that sustain a focus and balance that was, and is, remarkable. He is shown to have been nothing like the effete, lisping femme of his image, but a very tough-minded, agile-minded, single-minded writer who gave everything to his art and who looked deeper and less blinkingly into evil than many a seemingly tougher guy. Maybe than any of us.
He concluded the one unforgivable thing was deliberate cruelty.
Funny how that is what so many offer his memory now.
/// /// ///
http://www.amazon.com/Portraits-Observations-Essays-Truman-Capote/dp/1400066611/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197666545&sr=1-1
I fell into it and have only just surfaced. Read it all, or all that I'd not already read or want to read just now. Reminds me how good he could be: "Handcarved Coffins" is riveting, for instance.
"You trying to kill me or get me killed?" I asked my wife once when I glanced up. "You know this will just quicken my ambitions."
On the back of the book is quoted an excerpt from the Preface for "Music For Chameleons". It says in part, famously, "...Writers...who take genuine risks... bite the bullet and walk the plank..."
He is comparing writers who go for broke to professional gamblers but he misses the mark. It's an act of redemption and you risk trading your soul for your art. As he so notoriously did with In Cold Blood and as he so vividly understood.
There is an interesting passage in this book during which he discusses having published two chapters from his work-in-progress Answered Prayers. These famously caused backlash from rich friends who felt he'd betrayed them. In this passage he says no, he merely used his material, as all writers must, and then goes on to say, much more interestingly -- because their reaction is inconsequential to him compared to what he discovered -- that after the chapters had appeared he reassessed all his published writing, and found all of it wanting, and, worse, knew why. He says he had systematically tried to conquer all forms of writing, some with great success, others with little. He says the failing he spotted was built in to each form; by following the techniques of a given form, he was forced to leave out abilities and effects he may have mastered from other forms. Thus he conceived the ambition to bring all of it to bear at one time -- everything he'd learned from novels, short stories, poetry, screenplays, stage plays, essays, reporting, and so on.
He claims this is the style one sees in the book Music For Chameleons and perhaps most effectively in "Handcarved Coffins".
I chose to read this book as a collection of high spots. Many reviewers scrambled to sneer at its lesser pieces, such as a portrait of Liz Taylor. Their loss.
There is a remarkable interview with Bobby Beusoleil, one of the Manson Family, that reveals several aspects Bugliosi's lies about helter skelter cannot cover up forever, and there are any number of amazing passages and entire pieces that sustain a focus and balance that was, and is, remarkable. He is shown to have been nothing like the effete, lisping femme of his image, but a very tough-minded, agile-minded, single-minded writer who gave everything to his art and who looked deeper and less blinkingly into evil than many a seemingly tougher guy. Maybe than any of us.
He concluded the one unforgivable thing was deliberate cruelty.
Funny how that is what so many offer his memory now.
/// /// ///
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Apocalyptic Calypso
I woke up from my second day in a row of dreaming about total destruction. Yesterday's dream has faded but involved running through a landscape of bombed-out buildings, smoldering craters, and a panicked, dangerous populace.
In this one, first I was a kid in a school for fascists, taught to fear brutal trained chimps and baboons that would come into one's room to search out disloyal books and so on. At one point we were encouraged utterly to destroy our rooms and all our possessions in a frenzy of state loyalty simply to prove we gladly followed any and all directions; it felt so awful.
And then I was adult me, in my old home town of Ebensburg, PA, as the fascists soldiers came with demolition in mind, literally to raze the town with the people still in it. If we ran, they killed us. If we hid, they knocked the buildings down on us. I kept having to duck, and watch above me. I-beams fell on people, little three-legged robots rushed soldiers around to shoot stragglers, and tremendous sheets of glass fell and shattered. Flying shards cut us; my hand caught one as I blocked my face. I saw them using small squibs to knock out supports so the buildings would just collapse sideways and take out whole streets. I saw them torching what ever burned. I saw them driving trucks over people and swinging wrecking balls at windows full of screaming people. Everything was falling and crushed us, and there was nothing stable underfoot as debris shifted. You had to run on half-crushed people, some grabbing your ankles for help. There was nowhere to go, and as you ran from soldiers you had to try to avoid cul-de-sacs and dead-ends. There was literally no refuge, either. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. It was terrifying, and it ended with me and some kid standing in a field surrounded by the debris of a housing development -- I'd somehow gotten out of downtown proper. We stood panting and jittery, responding to every sound, and then there was a huge, deep rumble and we looked over and saw the courthouse going down in a huge plume of smoke, and in the distance we could hear more of that low sound and I thought, Ah, Johnstown's going down. A cat came by, walking arrogantly the way cats do, and the kid said, without moving, "We could eat that; wh didn't we kill it?", and I said, "We didn't kill the cat because then we'd be like them. We can scrounge, though. Canned goods and stuff. Trouble is, winter's coming, and our fires will give us away. Unless we live in the burning rubble. Maybe then they won't bother looking."
Really bleak.
And just as I woke I thought, "Uh-uh; you'd have no meds. You'd croak from the effort of scrambling for survival."
Another day in Paradise, eh? LOL Whoa.
///
Vast is the Earth, yet so is it small. To a demon, Earth is a bauble. To one lost in a desert, it is a solid echo of the sky.
Between those truths we live our mad scramble lives from dark to dark.
Balanced on a grain of sand called love, those truths keep each other at bay. Size and its lack encompass us. Micro and macro swing us in their arms.
And so we sleep.
--From the Liturgy at Hessia Abbey
///
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
-- Bertrand Russell
///
May I humbly suggest "Never Tear Us Apart" by INXS as theme music for this Apocalyptic Calypso dream? Made me cry right after I wrote down the dream; elegiac defiance. J. S. Bach’s “Air On a G String” provides a nice cool-down, then, followed by "Don't Cry" by Guns & Roses for a stirring bounce-back.
///
Story is the song, writing is the singer.
--W B Kek, informal talk
In this one, first I was a kid in a school for fascists, taught to fear brutal trained chimps and baboons that would come into one's room to search out disloyal books and so on. At one point we were encouraged utterly to destroy our rooms and all our possessions in a frenzy of state loyalty simply to prove we gladly followed any and all directions; it felt so awful.
And then I was adult me, in my old home town of Ebensburg, PA, as the fascists soldiers came with demolition in mind, literally to raze the town with the people still in it. If we ran, they killed us. If we hid, they knocked the buildings down on us. I kept having to duck, and watch above me. I-beams fell on people, little three-legged robots rushed soldiers around to shoot stragglers, and tremendous sheets of glass fell and shattered. Flying shards cut us; my hand caught one as I blocked my face. I saw them using small squibs to knock out supports so the buildings would just collapse sideways and take out whole streets. I saw them torching what ever burned. I saw them driving trucks over people and swinging wrecking balls at windows full of screaming people. Everything was falling and crushed us, and there was nothing stable underfoot as debris shifted. You had to run on half-crushed people, some grabbing your ankles for help. There was nowhere to go, and as you ran from soldiers you had to try to avoid cul-de-sacs and dead-ends. There was literally no refuge, either. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. It was terrifying, and it ended with me and some kid standing in a field surrounded by the debris of a housing development -- I'd somehow gotten out of downtown proper. We stood panting and jittery, responding to every sound, and then there was a huge, deep rumble and we looked over and saw the courthouse going down in a huge plume of smoke, and in the distance we could hear more of that low sound and I thought, Ah, Johnstown's going down. A cat came by, walking arrogantly the way cats do, and the kid said, without moving, "We could eat that; wh didn't we kill it?", and I said, "We didn't kill the cat because then we'd be like them. We can scrounge, though. Canned goods and stuff. Trouble is, winter's coming, and our fires will give us away. Unless we live in the burning rubble. Maybe then they won't bother looking."
Really bleak.
And just as I woke I thought, "Uh-uh; you'd have no meds. You'd croak from the effort of scrambling for survival."
Another day in Paradise, eh? LOL Whoa.
///
Vast is the Earth, yet so is it small. To a demon, Earth is a bauble. To one lost in a desert, it is a solid echo of the sky.
Between those truths we live our mad scramble lives from dark to dark.
Balanced on a grain of sand called love, those truths keep each other at bay. Size and its lack encompass us. Micro and macro swing us in their arms.
And so we sleep.
--From the Liturgy at Hessia Abbey
///
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
-- Bertrand Russell
///
May I humbly suggest "Never Tear Us Apart" by INXS as theme music for this Apocalyptic Calypso dream? Made me cry right after I wrote down the dream; elegiac defiance. J. S. Bach’s “Air On a G String” provides a nice cool-down, then, followed by "Don't Cry" by Guns & Roses for a stirring bounce-back.
///
Story is the song, writing is the singer.
--W B Kek, informal talk
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Cutting Remarks
I had a story I wanted to send to SYBIL’S GARAGE. It was 6300 words and their limit is 5000, so I clipped off the first five pages of the story, then read through them. When a necessary bit of information came up, I rephrased it as concisely as possible and put it back into the story. By doing this I got it painlessly down to 5000 words.
Well, almost painlessly: It surprised me, and hurt my feelings a little, to notice how many empty words I had used. There was a lot of hemming and hawing going on at the start of my story, before I got down to telling the reader what was going on and why it mattered and to whom.
I am glad I compressed my story.
This is how to compress; you focus on story points, which means information needed by a reader. Ignore the writing. Pretty phrases, detailed descriptions, and soaring metaphors do not matter to the story, nor to the reader. Nor should they matter to the storyteller.
Present story points as efficiently and elegantly as possible. Doing this allows you to retain a satisfying story while avoiding wordiness.
If in doubt whether a given item is a story point, leave it out. Does the story still make sense? If so, keep it out. If not, put it back in, as concisely as you can.
Hemingway was a master of what to leave out. One of his basic methods was to present events without mentioning their context. Instead, he implied it.
This led to powerful impressions and removed the events from specific dates and places. It lent a universal quality to the people and actions he told of.
Hemingway was also celebrated for his style. Some call it blunt, others terse. Short declarative sentences built of plain nouns and basic verbs allowed his style to paint pictures, and offer impressions, stroke by stroke. He once said he wanted to write the way Cezanne painted. This is what he meant by that.
His effect was cumulative, but notice something. Much of his celebrated style is nothing more or less than newspaper writing. It is factual and direct. He offers story points as efficiently as possible. His style came from his blunt manner of including story points. The opening of The Old Man and the Sea shows this.
Hemingway wrote many more pages than he ever published. All writers do. This points to another of his methods, which was to write everything he could think about about a scene, then cut it later. He removed all the bullshit, as he called it. He wanted to leave only what was true.
True, not factual: His goal was to write one true sentence, then another, and keep going until his story was told.
You can see how this worked if you take a story you have already had rejected a few times and look it over. First, list its story points. Once you have this list, look how they are presented.
Can you state them for the reader in a better way? More efficiently? More elegantly?
Is every sentence true?
Rewriting a story that has been rejected many times is a good way to learn how to write a better story in the first place. Go over it sentence by sentence, and take out the crap. Anything not needed by the reader to understand the story must go.
Some will wonder about descriptions.
Curious George had adventures with the man in the Yellow Hat. In those stories, the color of the man’s hat mattered. Was it a Stetson, a Bowler, or a Beret?
Did that matter?
Was it too tight for him, or did it fall over his eyes?
Did that matter?
Write as if telling a joke. Every detail should set up the punch line in a joke. No detail that does not help the punch line should be included. Extra details will only blur the joke and lessen the punch.
It is the same with fiction. If a detail matters, keep it. Otherwise, get rid of it. Descriptions should be concise if needed, avoided if not needed.
If it matters what kind of car, state it simply. If it matters what color a house is, or what the bar looked like, let the reader know. Otherwise, cut it.
A man walked into a bar.
That is a classic opening for a joke. The humor often relies on details revealed as the joke continues. Listeners perk up at each detail, imagining how it might end up being funny.
Any detail that is not funny at the punch line will puzzle the listener, and lessen the laughter. Each detail must be relevant to the punch line, or it does not belong.
It works the same with all fiction.
A short story needs a point, and anything not helping to make that point is not only a burden, but a potential sabotage. Look at your rejected story. Are there details leading nowhere? Why are they there?
Edgar Allan Poe, one of the inventors of modern short story form, advised that, in a short story, one thing happens. All supports that one thing. Every word should be chosen with an eye toward how it helps the one thing happen.
Story points let you X-ray your fiction for dead spots. Cut them out and your writing can thrive.
/// /// ///
Well, almost painlessly: It surprised me, and hurt my feelings a little, to notice how many empty words I had used. There was a lot of hemming and hawing going on at the start of my story, before I got down to telling the reader what was going on and why it mattered and to whom.
I am glad I compressed my story.
This is how to compress; you focus on story points, which means information needed by a reader. Ignore the writing. Pretty phrases, detailed descriptions, and soaring metaphors do not matter to the story, nor to the reader. Nor should they matter to the storyteller.
Present story points as efficiently and elegantly as possible. Doing this allows you to retain a satisfying story while avoiding wordiness.
If in doubt whether a given item is a story point, leave it out. Does the story still make sense? If so, keep it out. If not, put it back in, as concisely as you can.
Hemingway was a master of what to leave out. One of his basic methods was to present events without mentioning their context. Instead, he implied it.
This led to powerful impressions and removed the events from specific dates and places. It lent a universal quality to the people and actions he told of.
Hemingway was also celebrated for his style. Some call it blunt, others terse. Short declarative sentences built of plain nouns and basic verbs allowed his style to paint pictures, and offer impressions, stroke by stroke. He once said he wanted to write the way Cezanne painted. This is what he meant by that.
His effect was cumulative, but notice something. Much of his celebrated style is nothing more or less than newspaper writing. It is factual and direct. He offers story points as efficiently as possible. His style came from his blunt manner of including story points. The opening of The Old Man and the Sea shows this.
Hemingway wrote many more pages than he ever published. All writers do. This points to another of his methods, which was to write everything he could think about about a scene, then cut it later. He removed all the bullshit, as he called it. He wanted to leave only what was true.
True, not factual: His goal was to write one true sentence, then another, and keep going until his story was told.
You can see how this worked if you take a story you have already had rejected a few times and look it over. First, list its story points. Once you have this list, look how they are presented.
Can you state them for the reader in a better way? More efficiently? More elegantly?
Is every sentence true?
Rewriting a story that has been rejected many times is a good way to learn how to write a better story in the first place. Go over it sentence by sentence, and take out the crap. Anything not needed by the reader to understand the story must go.
Some will wonder about descriptions.
Curious George had adventures with the man in the Yellow Hat. In those stories, the color of the man’s hat mattered. Was it a Stetson, a Bowler, or a Beret?
Did that matter?
Was it too tight for him, or did it fall over his eyes?
Did that matter?
Write as if telling a joke. Every detail should set up the punch line in a joke. No detail that does not help the punch line should be included. Extra details will only blur the joke and lessen the punch.
It is the same with fiction. If a detail matters, keep it. Otherwise, get rid of it. Descriptions should be concise if needed, avoided if not needed.
If it matters what kind of car, state it simply. If it matters what color a house is, or what the bar looked like, let the reader know. Otherwise, cut it.
A man walked into a bar.
That is a classic opening for a joke. The humor often relies on details revealed as the joke continues. Listeners perk up at each detail, imagining how it might end up being funny.
Any detail that is not funny at the punch line will puzzle the listener, and lessen the laughter. Each detail must be relevant to the punch line, or it does not belong.
It works the same with all fiction.
A short story needs a point, and anything not helping to make that point is not only a burden, but a potential sabotage. Look at your rejected story. Are there details leading nowhere? Why are they there?
Edgar Allan Poe, one of the inventors of modern short story form, advised that, in a short story, one thing happens. All supports that one thing. Every word should be chosen with an eye toward how it helps the one thing happen.
Story points let you X-ray your fiction for dead spots. Cut them out and your writing can thrive.
/// /// ///
Thursday, August 16, 2007
How to Take Control
If you want to take control, use fear as leverage and ruthless action to nail it down. Fear is the key, as Alistair MacLean once wrote.
Fear? Easy. Plant doubts, water them with possibilities, and feed them with hints and allegations. Soon you’ll have suspicion, dread, and fear; a garden you can harvest at will.
People don’t know much. They are not confident in what they know. They will listen to confident assertions. They will consider suggestions that sound reasonable. They will blame scapegoats rather than examine their own faults.
Interpreting things according to prior vague threats is easy. Bad things happen all the time. Cite them and offer reminders of previous warnings. Vague warnings work better but specific warnings can be changed in retrospect. The key thing is to hook emotion to event.
Do this and thought is short circuited. Fan panic’s flames. Shout fire in all theaters.
Once they stand, make them run. Worsen all stampedes. Increase chaos and decrease reliable information. Question real sources and point at false ones.
To think, people must be informed. Keep them not uninformed but misinformed. Half-truths work better with whole lies. Contradict yourself continually, especially in your emotional tone. Alternate panic and confidence, desperation and cockiness. Cower as you strut. Preen as you dissemble.
Confusion maintains anxiety. The unsure are more easily led. Offer false hopes and yank them away erratically. Make impossible promises and grandiose claims. Salt them with bizarre and scary details.
We’ve watched Cheney’s chaingang and Bush’s pushers use these methods to great effect. Neo con scum steal elections and laugh at even the idea of honest recounts. Nazism is back with a vengeance. Fascism dominates media distractions, corporate looting of tax coffers, and kangaroo courts of no appeal. Sadists high and low rejoice as rendition feeds torture’s sausage grinder. Color pictures of the fun go straight to the top and same-sex sex slaves are sneaked in after hours to enhance the enjoyment.
They don’t care if we know. Arrogance is part of taking control. Did Al Capone back down when tax law loopholes tangled him in jail time? Did Mussolini lower his chin when the meat-hooks came out? Did Hitler leave witnesses when he dodged the Russians near the bunker? Did Stalin stop murdering rivals, enemies, and suspected conspirators when his statues fell?
Never show even a blink of self-doubt. Never apologize, backtrack, or rescind. Do not admit error, ever. Do not allow investigation of your biggest crimes, even as you ignore charges of smaller crimes.
Use your position for self-gain and self-protection. Shield cohorts until you can eliminate them permanently. Reward loyalty above all else, and punish disloyalty in draconian ways that go well beyond sanity.
Embrace terror. It is your plinth, your foundation, your keystone. It is your blunt instrument, too. Hammer with it and resort to it continually.
Total information awareness is vital. Spy and reward informants. Punish squealers and whistle blower beyond all reason. Make entire families suffer for one person’s transgression against you.
Be bold in your statements and ignore facts. Attack reason and logic as quibblers’ games. Refute science with faith and belief. Strike poses instead of taking stances. Undermine and undercut anything that benefits others, in any way possible.
Choose corruption over competence. The corrupt can be controlled. Make fellow criminals your partners and avoid the honest and the fair as if they are fallen, sparking high-voltage lines. Anyone you can’t bribe, coerce, or blackmail is of no use to you. They are, in fact, threats. Eliminate them when you find them, these so-called honorable, honest people.
Once you have power, abuse it egregiously. Take it further than anyone dares believe possible. If observers gasp, do more. If they rebel, crush them.
In fact, crush them anyway, just because you can. Unexercised power is power lost.
And remember, any slice of pie you let others grab is one less for you. Grab the whole pie. Grab the bakery. Grab the mills, farms, and land. Grab the air. Grab it all, and keep grabbing more.
More is all you ever want. More should be all you ever take. And what you give is demands. Always more demands.
These simple principles will allow anyone to take control. Not everyone can implement them, or get away with them, but anyone is free to try. Isn’t that the glory of Rule By Fear?
And if you can bully someone, what good are you, really?
/// /// ///
Fear? Easy. Plant doubts, water them with possibilities, and feed them with hints and allegations. Soon you’ll have suspicion, dread, and fear; a garden you can harvest at will.
People don’t know much. They are not confident in what they know. They will listen to confident assertions. They will consider suggestions that sound reasonable. They will blame scapegoats rather than examine their own faults.
Interpreting things according to prior vague threats is easy. Bad things happen all the time. Cite them and offer reminders of previous warnings. Vague warnings work better but specific warnings can be changed in retrospect. The key thing is to hook emotion to event.
Do this and thought is short circuited. Fan panic’s flames. Shout fire in all theaters.
Once they stand, make them run. Worsen all stampedes. Increase chaos and decrease reliable information. Question real sources and point at false ones.
To think, people must be informed. Keep them not uninformed but misinformed. Half-truths work better with whole lies. Contradict yourself continually, especially in your emotional tone. Alternate panic and confidence, desperation and cockiness. Cower as you strut. Preen as you dissemble.
Confusion maintains anxiety. The unsure are more easily led. Offer false hopes and yank them away erratically. Make impossible promises and grandiose claims. Salt them with bizarre and scary details.
We’ve watched Cheney’s chaingang and Bush’s pushers use these methods to great effect. Neo con scum steal elections and laugh at even the idea of honest recounts. Nazism is back with a vengeance. Fascism dominates media distractions, corporate looting of tax coffers, and kangaroo courts of no appeal. Sadists high and low rejoice as rendition feeds torture’s sausage grinder. Color pictures of the fun go straight to the top and same-sex sex slaves are sneaked in after hours to enhance the enjoyment.
They don’t care if we know. Arrogance is part of taking control. Did Al Capone back down when tax law loopholes tangled him in jail time? Did Mussolini lower his chin when the meat-hooks came out? Did Hitler leave witnesses when he dodged the Russians near the bunker? Did Stalin stop murdering rivals, enemies, and suspected conspirators when his statues fell?
Never show even a blink of self-doubt. Never apologize, backtrack, or rescind. Do not admit error, ever. Do not allow investigation of your biggest crimes, even as you ignore charges of smaller crimes.
Use your position for self-gain and self-protection. Shield cohorts until you can eliminate them permanently. Reward loyalty above all else, and punish disloyalty in draconian ways that go well beyond sanity.
Embrace terror. It is your plinth, your foundation, your keystone. It is your blunt instrument, too. Hammer with it and resort to it continually.
Total information awareness is vital. Spy and reward informants. Punish squealers and whistle blower beyond all reason. Make entire families suffer for one person’s transgression against you.
Be bold in your statements and ignore facts. Attack reason and logic as quibblers’ games. Refute science with faith and belief. Strike poses instead of taking stances. Undermine and undercut anything that benefits others, in any way possible.
Choose corruption over competence. The corrupt can be controlled. Make fellow criminals your partners and avoid the honest and the fair as if they are fallen, sparking high-voltage lines. Anyone you can’t bribe, coerce, or blackmail is of no use to you. They are, in fact, threats. Eliminate them when you find them, these so-called honorable, honest people.
Once you have power, abuse it egregiously. Take it further than anyone dares believe possible. If observers gasp, do more. If they rebel, crush them.
In fact, crush them anyway, just because you can. Unexercised power is power lost.
And remember, any slice of pie you let others grab is one less for you. Grab the whole pie. Grab the bakery. Grab the mills, farms, and land. Grab the air. Grab it all, and keep grabbing more.
More is all you ever want. More should be all you ever take. And what you give is demands. Always more demands.
These simple principles will allow anyone to take control. Not everyone can implement them, or get away with them, but anyone is free to try. Isn’t that the glory of Rule By Fear?
And if you can bully someone, what good are you, really?
/// /// ///
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
